Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

They both agreed that the ceremony was mercifully unpretentious and that, no doubt, they could have done worse.

They spent a day and an overnight in Montreal and Quebec City en route to Nova Scotia, doing the recommended sights along the way with a kind of bemused, disinterested patience, idiot grins on their faces (grist for unseen photographers) as if they were on a real honeymoon and indeed genuinely absurdly happy.

Two months after their return, the honeymoon glow barely faded, she discovered herself obsessively attached to someone else. This invasive presence in her life was a handyman hanger-on at the gym she went to dutifully on Wednesday nights, and was not like anyone else she had ever liked before. And if that weren’t enough reason to avoid him, the man was either obnoxious to her or showed no apparent interest, which she took as interchangeable provocations. He had a reputation, which she didn’t wholly credit, for groping women indiscriminately. The nasty stories circulating about him in the gym engendered — she despised the women telling the stories — a kind of perverse sympathy.

One night, later than usual, doing her repetitions on the stairmaster, angry at Jay for reasons yet to define themselves, she noticed that the only other person in the gym was the same narcissistic, muscle-bound creep, his name Luther, she had been fantasizing about. Though behind a desk on the far side of the room, a book open in front of him — she imagined the pages blank or a pornographic comic book secreted inside — she had the sense that he was inhaling her every move.

Where had everybody else gone? The important thing was not to show him she was afraid. Fear, she had read somewhere or heard said or instinctively knew, was catnip to the pitiless. She noticed on the wall clock — she must have dozed at some point — that it was 10 minutes short of midnight and the clock seemed hardly to be moving. She toweled off in a kind of slow-motion, though she had long since stopped sweating, put her coat around her shoulders and promised herself to walk past the dragon without so much as glancing at him.

She was already by him when he spoke. “Goodnight sweetcheeks,” he said in a barely audible voice.

Outraged, she spun around to confront him. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she said. “I could report you for that. You know that.”

She imagined him laughing at her but instead he said nothing, his thuggish face in the book he had armed himself with, the title registering subliminally as she left the gym as Persuasion by Jane Austen, one of her favorite novels.

Jay was asleep when she came in at whatever impossibly late hour and she had to wait until morning to answer his prying questions with the partially true, almost convincing story she had over-rehearsed the night before on the slow subway ride home.

“OK,” he said when she had finished with the story and it felt to her like a slap.

“I don’t like you questioning me like that,” she said. “You make me feel like a criminal.”

“No one can make you feel like a criminal,” he said, not quite looking at her, “if you don’t already feel like a criminal.”

She walked away, then came back, came up to him from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. “If you are accusing me of something,” she said, ruing each word, “I think you ought to say right out what it is.”

“You’ve been accusing yourself,” he said, stepping away, willing to let her escape.

“I told you what happened,” she said. “I fell asleep. If you can’t trust me, if you’re going to be jealous over every little thing… Sometimes, Jay, you really piss me off, you know?”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, a poor exit line he privately conceded, not at his best when under attack.

They made up in bed that night, or seemed to, each apologizing in turn with exaggerated conviction, their urgent lovemaking like the Hollywood movie of itself.

She went to sleep happy and woke with intimations of despair: her marriage to Jay had nowhere to go but down. And then Jay made it worse, confirmed her in her worst premonitions, by suggesting she give up going to the gym on Wednesday nights.

In fact, she had already decided not to go the following week, but Jay’s bullying demand made it difficult, virtually impossible, to follow through on her decision. Whatever was going to happen, he had, if unwittingly — the evidence filed away for future debate — brought it on himself.

He was awake on her return from the gym the following Wednesday, lazing like a slug on the living room couch, watching a basketball game on television.

“I see that you get your exercise through empathy,” she said, passing him by on the way to the bathroom. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him glancing at his watch. She had made up her mind, no matter what, that she would make no excuses for the lateness of the hour, would make no attempt to account for herself at all.

There was no making it up this time around. He lay with his back to her in bed, his anger like a force field between them, which might have frightened her if it wasn’t so absurd.

She turned on the reading light next to her side of the bed, asking his permission without expecting a reply, and leafed through an old New Yorker lying on her end table. On page seeventy-seven, he got up noisily and disappeared for awhile. She dozed, though kept the light on at the same time, feeling betrayed by his prolonged absence. She thought of calling out to him that she had done nothing that needed apology, but it wasn’t a stance she felt comfortable with at this hour of the night.

For his part, Jay spent the remainder of the night on the couch, wide awake, wondering if the problem, suitably ignored, would go away of its own accord.

The following Wednesday, without making much of it, she decided to forego her weekly gym appointment. She thought she’d surprise Jay, picking up a couple of overpriced steaks from Balducci’s on her way home, and she felt thwarted not to find him where she left him.

She looked around for a note, some explanation as to where he had gone, not expecting to find anything — why hide a note if he wanted her to see it — but carrying out her intention with meticulous concern for detail nevertheless.

She fell asleep before he came home and woke during the night to find him in bed sleeping restively next to her. A mix of anxiety and outrage occupied her for the next couple of hours and she ended up cuddling against his unforgiving back.

In the morning, she made a point of not asking him where he had been — she would not be the one to pry — storing her grievance under a display of uncharacteristic early morning cheerfulness.

He seemed thrown off his game by hers and she could tell he was just dying to market the version he had worked up of where he had been and what he had done. And then she actually kissed him goodbye like some prototypical housewife (except it was she who was going off to work) before leaving him for the day. He clamped her to him and she felt the tweak of his neediness, which brought her more confusion than comfort.

“I love you,” he said rather desperately as they came apart, which was not a usual part of his routine.

When she was away from him, safely out of the house, it amused her to imagine what he made of her performance, though she had only the thinnest notion herself of what (if anything) was going on between them. It was a game of denial, the game itself denied, in which the one who showed the least concern won the as yet undetermined prize.

She never told him she had come home early that Wednesday — while he never volunteered why he had been out late that night — and the following week as a matter of course she resumed her routine at the gym. Jay was always part of the landscape, sometimes waiting up for her, sometimes dozing on the couch, when she found her way home.