Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

Before placing the ad, she called a few friends on the phone and read them the possibly final draft, writing down the best of the suggestions for improvement, though turning in the notice pretty much as was. As soon as the Personal was out of her hands, as soon as it appeared in the paper, the whole business filled her with revulsion. She vowed to herself not to pursue the matter.

But when a few days passed and an envelope arrived with twenty-seven responses and two days after that, another with nineteen more, making it — addition had never been her strong suit — forty-five or forty-six in all, she piled them on her desk and began to read them like an eavesdropper or, more to the point, like an editor.

Some she discarded after reading a line or two. An ax murderer with a good prose style was preferable in her view to an uninteresting mind. More often she read them from beginning to end and found herself mildly curious as to who the writer might really be behind the calculated disguise of his prose. She warmed to those writers who avoided salesmanship and were just a little self-deprecating. At some point she found herself sorting them into piles.

The discards were filed away under the categories, Bores and Serial Killers, sometimes mutually inclusive. The third category, the survivors, found themselves under the all-purpose rubric: Others. She let a week pass before reassessing the nine surviving respondents.

The first one she read, the one arbitrarily sitting at the top of her “Others” pile, moved her but she couldn’t say why afterward. When you looked at it with a cold eye, it seemed barely a cut above ordinary. She put it aside, then read two others that were much cleverer, and a fourth that had a distinctive if unlikable voice, then returned to the first.

It was not so much the letter itself that needed revisiting as her uncharacteristically sentimental response to it. Its appeal was in the kind of risk the author seemed to take, though the letter was pseudonymous, signed, of all things, “Lonely on Livingston Street.” The second (or was it third?) reading moved her almost as much as, perhaps even more than, the first, and she wrote an e-mail letter in response. She might have phoned — he had also given her his phone number — but it seemed appropriate to take small steps, small sure steps, rather than throw herself headlong into something she might later regret.

Dear Lonely on Livingston Street (she wrote),

I admired the directness and simplicity of your letter, and I was touched despite my native skepticism by your undisguised defenselessness. I will try to offer the same spirit of openness in return. Very few of the men I’ve known would have had the courage to make the kind of admissions you have openly offered in your letter. I know from personal experience how desolating loneliness can be, but it’s also important — I hope you see this as I do — to be independent and self-sufficient. Being with someone in a mutually-fulfilling relationship is desirable, but a relationship should not be used like wallpaper — you see that, don’t you? — over disintegrating walls. I’ve been there too. I’m beginning, I know, to sound a bit psycho-babblish here and I apologize or, to be wholly honest with you, don’t apologize. I am a bookish person who prefers movies to theater, chamber music to opera, conceptual art to traditional painting — I know what I like and my tastes tend to be passionate. Still, I try to be open whenever possible to what I don’t know. I have the capacity to change my mind, though sometimes it takes awhile. People tell me I am an intuitive person and it pleases me to think so. My politics tend to be liberal, but I also tend to vote the person — that’s the intuitive part — over the apparent issues. I come from Baptists on my mother’s side and atheists on my father’s and my own religious leanings lie somewhere in between if such an unlikely territory exists.

If I sound like the kind of person you’d like to meet, I’d appreciate receiving another letter from you.

Yours sincerely,

Caring and Companionable in Chelsea

And those were the first volleys of what turned out to be an extended correspondence between C&C and the man who signed himself Lonely on Livingston, whose name, he eventually confided, was Saul. Two and a half months passed before they made an appointment to meet the following Friday night — it was her idea not his — and she wondered as the time got closer if she had set herself up for disappointment.

They agreed to meet at a café on the outskirts of Soho at 6 o’clock, each to be dressed all in black to facilitate identification. The first plan was to wear yellow carnations in their buttonholes, but the idea was more clichéd than she could bear and since she had just gotten herself a new black sweater, the in-black plan was a last-minute modification. No matter, it was still too “Shop Around the Corner” and therefore a tad embarrassing.

In any event, she wanted to observe Saul first, see what kind of appearance he made no matter the beauty of his spirit, before she presented herself. To this purpose, she arrived ten minutes late and peered warily through the blue-tinted window of the café. A little more than half the tables were occupied, mostly in groups of twos. There were a few single women waiting apparently for dates or husbands, but not an unattended man (dressed in whatever color) waiting for a woman in black. Saul had seemed so eager when she suggested the meeting and yet, unless there had been some mix-up regarding the place, he had seemingly not turned up. More likely, he was just delayed. A meeting postponed as long as theirs was fraught with all kinds of anxiety. Instead of entering the café and taking a table, she decided to walk around — look into shop windows — to give Saul opportunity to arrive at Café Retro before she made her entrance.

She was four blocks away when she hurried back, not wanting to make Saul feel that he had been deserted. Again, she peered through the window to assess the crowd. This time there was a man seated by himself, a man of Saul’s age perhaps, which he said was forty-seven, interestingly ugly if something of a pudge, but he was wearing faded jeans and a dark blue (almost black) turtleneck. He was studying the menu as if he were trying to decipher a coded message.

She entered the restaurant and walked slowly past the man’s table, before seating herself at the vacant one adjacent to his. He had not looked up when she passed him, which meant what? She was in no mood to guess. Which meant most likely that he was not expecting someone. Or, as his correspondence indicated, he was painfully shy.

It was only after the waitress arrived to take his order that he raised his head. She looked over and smiled and the man (Saul?) nodded to her in acknowledgment.

Collecting herself as it were, menu in tow, she edged over to his table, but his head was down again and she had to clear her throat to attract his attention. “May I join you?” she asked, a question he studied a moment without answering. She tried again. “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.

“I’ve been waiting for someone all my life,” he said.

That confused her, but as she was already in the process of joining him, she took a seat. “You’re not dressed in black,” she said.

He gave his clothes a surreptitious glance before answering. “I guess not,” he said.

The waiter was hovering so she ordered a decaf latte and a blueberry-apricot tart while her companion glowered at the menu in apparent disappointment. He eventually settled unhappily on a medium-rare burger and an iced tea. “These places never have what I want,” he said.

“What do you want that they don’t have?” she asked.

“That’s just it,” he said. “I never know what I want until I see it on the menu.”