Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

Once your name is in the air between us, I remember with a kind of total recall our first meeting. It was at a wedding of mutual friends that we met for the first time and it was true, as you claimed, that I had told you — I had been very young, young for my age, when I made the pronouncement — that I would never forget you.

Joshua and Genevieve had written their own vows and Josh, wearing glasses I’d never seen on him before, read his statement from note cards. We had been friends since high school and much of the substance of his statement I had heard before. “When Genevieve and I broke up for the third time,” he confided to his wedding guests, “I was absolutely sure it was over. In fact, it was a year after our third agreement to call it quits before we even talked to each other again. One of us called — it was me, I have to say — to break the silence. And the other, which would have to be Genevieve, said, ‘You don’t know how much I was hoping you’d call,’ and then I said, ‘Not half as much as I was hoping you’d say that.’”

I noticed out of the side of my eye that the woman standing to my right had a storm of tears streaming down her face.

Not knowing what else to say, I asked (a little foolishly, I admit) if you were all right.

Even as the tears continued to fall, you put a finger over your lips to silence me.

Annoyed at your rebuke, distracted from the ceremony, I turned away, but then I found myself glancing at you again. You had the kind of charismatic presence certain film actors have only in front of the camera. For the moment, I was your camera and I was so entranced by your charm I didn’t hear a word of Genevieve’s statement. Even when I looked elsewhere, anywhere else, you were there, your shimmering aura in my mind’s eye.

“I’m in love,” I remember saying to myself, a joke really because I would not allow myself to believe it, exorcising the demon before it took hold. The translation of my feelings seemed to pass through three or four obscure languages. “I want to be with her” was the only message I allowed myself.

“She’s taken,” I was later told by Josh’s mother who had come up to me after the ceremony. “She’s living with someone, a man named Roger, I’m told.”

And I had not even asked at that point. Was there something in my face that conveyed the question?

That they all seemed to know I was pursuing you made it somehow easier as if it wasn’t my choice to behave badly, merely the nature of the character I had been assigned to play.

“You nearly drowned us all in there,” I said to you, looking for something to say.

You laughed, which was a generous response to an awkward remark, and it gave me a rush of pleasure. “Don’t you know when a woman cries at a wedding, you’re supposed to look the other way,” you said. “I have this way of identifying with all the participants at these affairs — bride, groom, maid of honor, caterers, mothers, former lovers.”

“Hey, and there I was identifying with you when you were crying,” I said.

You squeezed my arm, our first intimacy. “You weren’t really, were you?” you said. “You weren’t … If you were, you wouldn’t have asked if I was all right.”

I managed by switching the table cards to sit next to you during the dinner, and we hung out together, even danced a couple of times at the reception that followed.

Afterwards, expecting to be turned down, I invited you as casually as fear of rejection allowed to go out with me for a nightcap. You looked behind you to see who might be listening before saying, “Sounds good,” punctuated by a sassy laugh. The fact of the live-in boyfriend had come up earlier, reference to his being in Chicago on business, though no mention had been made of him since that initial establishing of your unavailability.

A rapport had been struck between us, a kind of misleading ease, and I remember the flickering self-protective thought that this was just an idle flirtation, that in all likelihood nothing was going to happen between us.

“You look very much the same,” you say

“Why don’t we go some place we can talk,” I say. “There’s a Starbucks around the corner, I believe.”

“There’s a Starbucks around every corner,” you say. “Anyway, my husband will be here in about five minutes to pick me up.”

“Is the husband you’re meeting the guy, what’s his name, Roger, the guy you were with when we met?”

“My husband’s name is Tom,” you say.

“Whatever happened to what’s his name … Roger?”

“Whatever happened happened. Obviously we moved out of each others’ lives. That was twenty-seven years ago. I have trouble remembering what happened last week.”

“Hey, I hung out by the phone for months, gave up eating and sleeping, hoping to hear you had broken with Roger.”

“Hey yourself,” you say. “You didn’t. You know you didn’t. I suppose I assumed you had also moved on. Or maybe there was something about you that scared me.”

At that point, my agent, Marianna Dodson, intrudes, appropriates my arm, announcing that there is someone interesting she wants me to meet.

“I’m meeting someone interesting now,” I say, introducing you, though it appears you already know each other.

“We can talk later,” you say.

I let myself be led away, and in another room I am introduced to an editor who has just been rewarded with her own imprint and is looking, so Marianna whispers in my ear, for something important to launch her list.

“I really liked your early stuff,” the editor tells me. “The book you wrote about the First World War, what was the name of it again, it stayed with me for the longest time. If you have something like that on the way, I’d love to have the opportunity to look at it.”

I am working on a novel that I still don’t understand about the lost memory of an event that may or may not have ever taken place, and it seems somewhere between a year and forever away from completion. So as not to embarrass Marianna, I thank the editor for her interest and promise to think of her when the book is ready to show.

All of that takes ten minutes and I move on under the guise of getting myself another glass of champagne, retracing my steps to see if you are still around. You are not where you were.

I escape from another conversation, discard the champagne I hadn’t really wanted and I wander through the adjoining two rooms, assuming with more annoyance than regret that the husband I continue to think of as Roger has come for you and you have returned to the life you have been living for almost thirty years without me.

I make an effort to talk to other people while glancing around whatever room I am in in the vain hope that you will mysteriously reappear.

The Village bar I took you to was predictably noisy and I suggested we move on to my apartment which was only a few blocks away. When we got to the door of my building — we had been holding hands as we walked — you stopped me and said, “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

“What do you suggest?” I remember myself saying, resigned to the evening’s uneventful conclusion.

“I should get home,” you said. “Well, since we’re here, I’ll have one last drink for the road, then catch a cab.”

As soon as we stepped inside my apartment, you leaned into me and we kissed fiercely, rattling against the door which had not yet fully closed.

It embarrassed me that my bed was unmade, but you didn’t seem to mind and afterward when you did bring it up it became an edgy joke between us.

We were both besotted, as I remember it, and our lovemaking was oddly dreamlike as if we were watching two other people go at it with a kind of desperation offering itself as passion.