Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

She waved him off and went into the building, noticing someone she knew slightly in the group going in ahead of her, a writer who had done a piece for her a while back.

Once she got into the crowded apartment and talked to a few people, some of whom she had met before, and got herself a glass of white wine, she let Jay’s scenario for her slide out of mind, though she looked around for him every once in a while, made uneasy by his absence.

Finally, an hour or so into the party, she spotted him for the first time, standing at the edge of a conversation between two men, neither of whom she knew, and she smiled in his direction but went unnoticed or ignored. She edged her way over, crossing his line of vision, and stood by his side, waiting to be noticed. He continued to ignore here.

“I believe we’ve met,” she said when he turned toward her, smiling without recognition, taken aback by her presence.

“Of course,” he said. “Anyone who’d ever met you before would not forget you.”

“I can see you don’t remember me,” she said, looking around her to see if anyone was listening in. “It was a long time ago. It was in another lifetime really.” Four or five people seemed to be eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Of course I remember you,” he insisted, but she could tell that he was bluffing and she was not inclined to let him get away with it.

“OK,” she said, “What’s my name?”

A woman came over — his agent she assumed — and took Jay by the arm, saying in this annoying way that there was someone she wanted him to meet.

She took his other arm, and said in the mildest of voices, “He’s meeting me at the moment.”

“And you are …?” the agent asked.

“Lois Lane,” she said.

“Of course,” the agent said. “Marianna Dodson. We’ve talked on the phone a number of times. I’m so pleased to meet you in person. You know, I thought I recognized the voice, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.”

“This man and I knew each other twenty-one years ago and haven’t seen each other since,” she said. “I can spare him another twenty minutes.”

Marianna Dodson apologized for intruding and seemed to back away, absorbed by the crowd.

Twenty minutes later when they caught up with each other again their meeting had the aura of fateful good fortune.

What else could they do but leave the party together, their story, or snatches of it, bruited about in the shadowy corners of the room where only the eavesdropping imagination could overhear.

Once they had established a past, there was no point in denying themselves a present. She spent the night in Jay’s apartment and when she left in the early afternoon of the next day it had already been arranged that they would meet for dinner that evening.

Four months later, she sublet her apartment and moved into his place, which was marginally larger, for the short term. After a while, when his place began to seem oppressively small, they sublet a house together in Prospect Heights, a yet-undiscovered Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of gentrification.

Two years later, when they found themselves caught up in an escalating, unacknowledged battle of wills, the word marriage insinuated its way into their dialogue.

In the revisionist version, after sharing an apartment for three years, they agreed in principle to get married, a fight-reconciling decision on a motoring trip through Canada that came hard on the heels of an agreement never to see the other again after they got back to the States.

The decision, a triumph of last ditch desperation, represented a rare unanimity but it was not without attendant issues. As Lois saw it, they needed to decide as quickly as possible whether to have a real wedding (and consequently who to invite and how many) or whether to get married on the road by a justice of the peace. Jay said it was all the same to him while she said that she would abide by his choice.

“I can go either way,” he said.

“I don’t care for big weddings,” she said, “but don’t you think the nature of the ceremony might have something to do ultimately with the quality of the marriage itself? As a case in point, Roger and I knew our marriage was doomed when the minister that married us — and he seemed a serious man at the time — ran off with the daughter of one of his parishioners.”

“I think I like the idea of getting married on the road,” he said.

“Do you really? Why?”

“Well,” he said, “if the minister misbehaves after the fact, we’ll probably never be the wiser.”

What he said made no sense to her though in the spirit of accommodation, she let it pass without comment. “If you want to get married on the road, if that’s what you really want, sweetheart,” she said, “then that’s what we’ll do. Is that what you really want?”

“I want to do whatever pleases you,” he said. “Would you look at the map to see where we might cross over into the U.S.”

She groaned. “You know how I hate reading maps. Isn’t it enough that I agreed to marry you? If I have to look at the map to make that happen, I’d just as well keep things as they are.”

They had had this conversation before or some variant of it and he wondered if whatever fight was in the offing, and he was dying to tangle, might be prevented if he kept his cool in the face of irresistible provocation. For no good reason, he turned left at the next intersection and after several miles of uninhabited desolation turned left again. That they were lost, or so it seemed, and that it was her fault, irritated him to distraction. And then, out of seeming nowhere, a sign appeared: US Border—14 mi.

“You see,” she said, “you can get anywhere you want without my having to look at the map.” Her flickering fondness for him returned in momentary abundance.

During the customs interview, when asked if they had anything to declare, she told the guards that they had crossed the border the other way just a few hours ago and were returning to the States to get married before resuming their trip. Before she could complete her story, the pleasanter of the two officials asked them to pull over to the building on the right. For the next several hours, their car was taken apart and their belongings ransacked.

They sat on a couch in the hut on the side of the road, holding hands during their detainment, glancing through the window behind them from time to time to see what progress was being made. There was an extended period during which nothing happened while the official assigned to taking apart their car took a lunch break.

Jay paced the room, suddenly impatient, feeling claustrophobic.

She got up after a while and walked alongside him. “Are you thinking the same thing I am?” she asked.

He finessed his answer. “It’s not worth it,” he said.

“Coward,” she whispered back.

When they were told they could go, she said to the woman official, who had initially seemed sympathetic, “Don’t you people have anything better to do with your time?”

Later, when they were on the road again, she thanked him for protecting her from her worst instincts and he had to turn away from the road, in momentary risk, to see that she meant it.

In some way it changed nothing. In almost every other way, it put a favorable light on all the things that disturbed her about being together. They got married at a justice of the peace in Presque Isle, Maine, the ceremony only unforgettable in its total absence of memorable detail. And then they recrossed the Canadian border to continue on the trip they had planned and unplanned during their carefree, bickering single days.