Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“And so there may be nothing that you want,” she said. “Or something so out of the ordinary …” She left the sentence unfinished rather than say something impolite.

After about a half-hour of missed cues and mostly nonsequential conversation, she began to look over her shoulder for the possible emergence of the real Saul. And yet every once in a while, her companion would allude to something that very possibly referred to some matter from their five-month correspondence. It was disconcerting, and she considered asking him directly who he was, but the context, if there was one, restrained her. She liked the way their mutual shyness played off against the other.

“I don’t usually invite myself to other people’s tables,” she said or told friends she said after the event, or non-event, was over.

“I never thought you did,” he said, finishing his hamburger before she finished her tart.

When he got up to leave, he offered his hand to shake, wiping it thoroughly with his napkin before presenting it. The gesture seemed to parody itself, but she played along. At least that’s the way it happened in the story she told to her handful of confidantes.

Saul was silent — no e-mail from him the next day or the day after that, no apology, no explanation — and she assumed (what else?) that this episode in her life was concluded.

She spent a few restless nights concocting scenarios as to why Saul had stood her up, the worst of them infiltrating her dreams, and then she willed herself not to think about him at all.

The following week, out of some impulse she didn’t understand, though perhaps it’s the nature of impulses not to be understood, she revisited the café she had been to the week before. She had hoped to show up at the same time as last week, but the impulse to revisit, which took over at the last possible minute, delayed her arrival.

There were no hesitations, no peering through windows, this time around. She merely entered the café as if she was meeting someone there (well, she was, wasn’t she?) and headed directly toward his table.

She was all but positive that the man sitting alone at the same table with his back to the door was the same man she had joined last week and she took the seat across from him before discovering to her unacknowledged embarrassment that it was someone else altogether.

“How are you doing?” he said as if he knew her.

“Do I know you?” she asked. “You do look familiar.”

“I was wondering the same thing myself,” he said. “Jay.” He offered his hand, but she had already gotten up.

“I thought you were someone else,” she said. “Sorry.”

“I am someone else,” he said, “but you’re welcome to stay. There aren’t any other free tables.”

She hesitated, was about to turn around and check out the room, but that seemed rude and so she slid back into her seat.

It was the same ritual as last week except with a different partner and at the end of the meal, Jay, if that was his real name, insisted on taking her check.

“I’m the intruder,” she said. “I ought to buy you lunch.” She held out her hand, expecting to be rebuffed but instead found herself holding both checks.

“I’ll leave the tip,” he said.

They walked out of the restaurant together and she said goodbye at the door, thanking him in her coolest manner for the pleasure of his company. Nevertheless, he walked along with her to the next corner, oblivious to her well-mannered dismissal of him.

“When will I see you again?” he asked at the corner.

She smiled, less at him than at the opportunity he was offering her. “Never, I hope,” she said, and instead of walking off as she planned, putting as much distance between them as possible, she waited for a response.

He seemed momentarily dismayed, though that may have been an illusion encouraged by expectation. In the next moment, the post-dismayed moment, he put his hand on her shoulder and urged her gently toward him. It all happened so fast or so slowly she didn’t have time to react or then again had too much time. Then he kissed her on the top of the head as if she were his niece for godssake, and moved off.

“Hey,” she called after him.

After a moment’s hesitation, he dutifully turned around and seemed to be returning without actually moving toward her. Then she realized that it was she who was approaching him. “Why did you do that?” she asked, arms crossed in front of her. She took no enduring responsibility for the belligerence in her tone.

He shrugged, then apologized half-heartedly and walked off. If she hadn’t felt compelled to get back to the office, she might have gone after him and given him the shaking he deserved. She hadn’t met a man she disliked so much in the longest time.

Lois developed a theory that Saul 1 and Saul 2 were somehow in cahoots with the probably pseudonymous Jay, who appeared at the same table Saul 2 sat at the week before. No acceptable explanation offered itself. Of course gratuitous nastiness could explain almost anything.

She promised herself that she would not return to the café at the same time the following Thursday, but when the time came she could barely keep herself from turning up. She had lunch in at her desk and read ten pages of a new Nadine Gordimer novel, actually reading five pages twice so as not to lose her way.

When she announced to her therapist that she was proud of her restraint he seemed unimpressed. “If it were me, I would have been curious to find out who was going to show up this time,” he said.

“I don’t like being the butt of someone’s deranged idea of a joke,” she said.

“How can you be sure it’s a joke?” he asked.

“I just know,” she said, regretting what seemed now like a missed opportunity.

The next day she appeared at Café Retro at the usual time — this time she was actually five minutes early — and found her table occupied by three women. There was no one there she recognized; eventually, she took a table by herself in the back.

It was one of those days when nothing on the menu appealed to her so she settled for a Caesar Salad and a Bloody Mary for her lunch, the salad to make herself feel virtuous and the drink as a reward for suffering the constraints of virtue.

If she were a food critic, and she had done some restaurant reviewing in the past, the salad would have gotten a C-plus/B-minus, losing points for the packaged croutons. For a second or two, she harbored the illusion that someone was casting a pall over her salad and eventually she looked up to see a familiar figure hovering alongside her table.

When he took a seat before asking permission and without invitation she realized that what she thought was a second anchovy had only been an aspect of his shadow. “Do you mind?” he said.

And what if she did? “Yes,” she whispered. Though she had not forgotten her instinctive dislike of him, she was also, if unexpectedly, glad to see him.

“I’d all but given up running into you again,” he said.

“This is not my usual place,” she said. And then she told him as economically as possible, the story of the two Sauls, searching his face to see if any of this was news to him.

The story seemed to confuse him and he questioned her on several of the details, seeming to miss the point or make something else, something more elaborate and complicated, out of it altogether.

“I’ll tell you why I don’t believe your story,” he said. “Someone like you would never take out a Personals ad.”

His presumptions knew no bounds, she decided, though perhaps his remark was meant as some kind of oblique compliment. “Why wouldn’t somebody like me take out a Personals ad?” she let herself ask.

If she were pressing for a compliment, if that’s what it was — she had the idea that she was trying to decode him — she should have known in advance, shouldn’t she, that he was hardly the kind of person to honor such unworthy requests. “You just wouldn’t,” he said.