Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

Right after Lorrie found out about us and stopped talking to me (except those times when she absolutely couldn’t avoid it), Jay and I had a series of fights leading to a period of estrangement — a kind of irrevocable breakup — that lasted eight days by my count and nine by his.

We broke up again a few months later — this time for two weeks, a period in which we both dated other people — and after that we talked about moving in together.

There was a lot of possibly unfounded distrust going on between us, often taking the form of jealousy, and for our first six months together we kept looking for evidence (and finding it) of betrayal and bad faith. One thing I had come to know about myself was that if I didn’t even the score with someone who had done me wrong (the melodramatic phrase says it all) I would be unforgivingly unhappy with us both.

It was an intuitive thing. I lived my life as if reprisal, or the threat thereof, was a necessary deterrent to betrayal.

An example: When Jay told me some old flame of his has invited him to lunch to ask his advice about some live-in boyfriend who no longer lived-in. I said it would make me unhappy if he went to this lunch.

“I’m not going to break this appointment because you’re unreasonably jealous,” he said. “I promise you it’s just advice she wants from me.”

“You don’t have to go,” I said. “You can’t be the only source of wisdom in her life.”

“I can’t not go just because you don’t want me to,” he said.

I didn’t understand why not and remain to this day thoroughly puzzled by his explanation.

So when he went to lunch with Francesca — I believe that was her name — I called Bill Worth at his unlisted number and teased another invitation from him to his apartment. After soliciting the invitation, I couldn’t in clear conscience turn him down a second time, could I?

Some time later, wanting to heal the rift I confessed the Bill Worth episode. “I did it because you went to lunch with thing,” I said.

We were walking in the street at the time, going to a dinner party at our friends, the Powers, and Jay turned his back on me and crossed the street. I crossed over, and when I caught up, put my arm around his shoulder, regretting everything particularly my confession. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but you know it didn’t matter.”

“I didn’t sleep with Francesca,” he said.

“But you might have,” I said. “She probably wanted you to. You probably wanted to yourself.”

He pulled away and stomped on ahead and I trailed behind as if we were attached by invisible wires.

We rode different elevators up to the party, or Jay walked up — I forget (I forget a lot of things) — the point being that we didn’t talk all night. Or the next day either.

While I was at work, I called him at the place we shared, not to check up on him — that was not my intent the first time around — and got no answer. I called at a time he was almost always at his desk, writing — it was his habit, his willed commitment, to sit in front of his word processor for four hours every morning — so his not being there had its ominous aspect. I waited an hour, though it was a closing day on The Magazine and I didn’t have time for craziness, and then tried to reach him a second time, and a third, and a fourth. So he was out and about, getting back at me. It wasn’t so much that I was furious at him, which I suppose I was, as I was mortally disappointed. I mean, this is a man who has his hero say in a novel, “Everything is forgivable.” On the other hand, I tended to believe that what isn’t tolerable isn’t forgivable.

I didn’t ask him where he had been. I saw no point in inviting further deception. Instead, I only pretended to leave for work in the morning and instead hung out at the subway station — anyway, I had some manuscripts to read — and sure enough at a few minutes after eleven o’clock he appeared. Jay rarely noticed his surroundings and this morning he was even more preoccupied than usual so I had no problem following him without his being aware of my shadowing presence.

I was planning just to note the station he exited and then go on to work, but I had come this far so I got off the train — I had been in the car behind his — to see where the trail led. I had barely taken a step when he turned suddenly in my direction and came toward me, unaware of me until we were barely a foot apart. He seemed pleased to see me and we hugged before negotiating the issue of what each of us was doing there. My story was that I was meeting a writer but that I had confused the time. He offered no explanation, suggested we go somewhere for coffee.

We walked with our arms around each other and I forgot, let myself forget, the reason for my being here. After coffee, we hugged as though we were separating after an illicit meeting, a desperate extended hug, and, in love, I went off to work at The Magazine and he went … wherever he went.

And when we came back together at home at the end of the day, I asked him in an unguarded moment, a teasing smile on my face, if he had been meeting another woman when we ran into each other.

He said, “Of course not,” and I wanted to believe him, I would have believed him, I almost believed him.

“Then what were you doing on Chambers Street?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“It matters if you refuse to tell me,” I said. All this was going on in a bantering, friendly way, though making me extremely anxious at the same time.

“Maybe you’ll just have to trust me,” he said.

“Or not,” I said. “What would you have said if I had said the same thing to you?”

The conversation ended, as so many of them did the first year we lived together, when one or the other of us walked into the next room. It eased the tensions and made it possible for us to go on together.

I told Leo of the difficulties Jay and I were experiencing and he asked — Leo had also been Jay’s therapist for a while — if I thought a joint session might be useful. I said it wasn’t something I was interested in pursuing right now.

“Why is that?” he wanted to know.

I had my reasons but I was not ready to share them with Leo, whose natural sympathies were with the male figure in the relationship.

I bring this up now because Leo figures more importantly later in the story.

So we had no family counseling from Leo and we failed to talk through our problems, but after the first year, after my sister forgave me and Roger came back into the fold as a friend, we settled into a routine of comforting conflict. Leo would say in later years that we swept our problems under the rug, but for a while there it seemed as if the metaphorical rug had kind of lifted off the ground on its own.

Anyway, that’s my version of the story of how we got together.

This was the first (and she hoped, last) ad she took out in the Personals section of a magazine and she wanted to put her best foot forward without setting up her respondents for disappointment. This was the second draft: “40ish woman, sometimes thought beautiful, creative, cunning, quirky, with advanced degree in English literature, wants to meet intelligent man between 30 and 50, who listens more than he talks.” In the third draft, she dropped “sometimes,” replaced “cunning” and “quirky” with “original” and added “feeling” between “intelligent” and “man.” She also added, “Right wing zealots need not apply,” but then decided “intelligent” and “feeling”—maybe change feeling to humane — would obviate against closed-mindedness. Still, she barely recognized herself in the description she was issuing, which concerned her only for the limited time she thought about it.