Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

It was six months later, after Luther had broken with her, which brought her a mix of relief and self-doubt, that she turned her attention once again to Jay. One night after lovemaking, perhaps even during the act itself, she found herself longing to confess her brief insignificant affair with Luther, clean the slate as it were, but some wary inner voice wouldn’t allow it.

In the third year of their marriage, it may even have been the fourth, over dinner at the most expensive restaurant they’d been to that wasn’t on someone else’s expense account, Jay confided awkwardly during the appetizer course that he had fallen in love with another.

The news itself was less surprising than the confession and she weighed its implications on the balance beam mediating despair and hope before offering a response.

“Is it anyone I know?” she asked.

“Well,” he said and she out-waited the unnatural silence for him to continue.

“I feel terrible,” he said, which evoked a laugh with claws.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “So who is this person?”

“I’m not planning to leave right away,” he said. “You know that these things happen whether we mean them to or not. This doesn’t have anything to do with you. My feelings toward you haven’t changed.”

“I think I’d be happier if you moved out as soon as possible,” she said.

“I understand your position,” he said, attending to the mostly uneaten food on his plate.

And then, with that out of the way, if not actually settled, she asked again who it was, her next breath contingent on his unwelcome news.

And still he refused to tell her, which was less forgivable, she decided, than the betrayal itself, whatever it might be.

Clearly, it was someone she knew and she made a list at work of possible suspects, the list in order of uncertain priority extending itself to fourteen.

A week passed with no change in the situation — Jay still living in what increasingly she thought of as her place, the issue that occupied their lives barely mentioned since his confession at the restaurant. In fact, they had hardly talked at all since then, each making a point of avoiding the other while having their dinners together at the same kitchen table.

That night when she came to bed, he was already there — his reading light conspicuously on — doing the crossword puzzle. “If I made a guess,” she said, “would you at least tell me if I was right or not?”

He seemed to be considering her question, though what he said next gave no indication of it. “I want you to know that I’ve stopped seeing her,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I can’t promise that I’ll stop thinking about her, but I won’t see her again. I also want to say that I appreciate how patient you’ve been. You’ve been wonderful about everything.”

Was that meant as an apology? she wondered. His presuming on her forgiveness made her want to smash him over the head with the first object that came to hand. “It’s too late for apologies,” she said in a quiet voice. “Your breaking it off or her breaking it off, whatever, doesn’t change the fact that you’re not welcome here.”

He gave her a pained, little boy look. “I want to stay,” he said.

It was hardly the appeal she had hoped for, not the one in the best case infinitely variable scenario she had been carrying around all week in her imagination. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I absolutely want you out of my bed.”

If he was a gentleman, which he clearly wasn’t, he would have taken his sorry ass into the guest room down the hall without a moment’s hesitation. That he hesitated, that he seemed to be considering her non-negotiable demand was more than any reasonable wronged person could bear. “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “if you tell me who it is, I’ll let you stay for the night — I know the guest room is an unholy mess — but tomorrow I want you out of here. All things considered, I think that’s a generous offer.”

“C’mon, you know who it is,” he said without actually moving his lips.

“If it’s who I think it is,” she said, “I’ll never forgive you. That’s a promise.”

He turned on his side away from her, said something she couldn’t decode, which might have been “Of course not” though probably wasn’t.

She aimed a kick at his back, though by the time it landed it barely moved him from his vagrant spot. A second kick was considered, held sway briefly in the platonic realm, but it never quite translated itself from conception to deed. The hand of sleep intervened.

When she woke up, the dusty light of the unborn morning flooded the curtains. It took a moment for her to notice, that moment following the moment she recalled the disturbing interchange that preceded sleep, that the huddled figure on the other side of the bed was missing. She wondered if he was really gone, anxiety rubbing elbows with her brief elation, her feelings on his absence not yet quite in place.

“I continue to love you,” he said rather desperately as they came apart, though this time it was in the interstice between sleep and waking, a wistful echo from a momentarily forgotten dream.

Now that Jay had agreed to the joint session with her therapist, she couldn’t remember why she had favored the idea in the first place. It was one of those things you did, which is what she told Lorrie over the phone, so that afterward you could say you had done everything (or something) to save your dying marriage. She wondered if she had ever loved Jay — that is, she could no longer remember having loved him — but there was something between them, some intricate bond, that seemed resistant to violations no matter how unforgivable.

All she wanted, after all, was to get free of him and then afterward they could salvage or not whatever dregs of their relationship remained.

Jay, on the other hand, said he was willing to change if necessary to save their marriage.

“No one changes after forty-five,” she said.

“Who said?” he said.

“I can’t remember anyone who has,” she said, dipping her toe briefly into the well of memory. “Can you?”

“Maybe what we’re talking about is not the incapacity to change,” he said, “but a failure of memory.”

She hated it, totally despised it, when he pretended to be smart. At the same time or perhaps a moment afterward she had a quiver of recollection — a subliminal flash — of having felt something other than indifference for him.

For their first session, they sat in parallel chairs about twenty feet apart facing the therapist who was in an impressive high-backed armchair in a slightly elevated part of the room.

“Is there some agreement as to who goes first?” Leo asked, looking at neither of them in such a way as to give each the impression of being the one he was urging.

Jay was the first to speak. “I don’t mind if she starts,” he said.

“I’d prefer going second,” she said. “He’s the one who believes in talk.”

“In that case,” Leo said, “that’s the way we’ll do it. So Jay, what’s your view of why your marriage isn’t working?”

“Why does she get to go second?” Jay said. “Is it because she’s a woman?”

“I thought you were both in agreement as to the order here” Leo said. “When you offered her the opportunity to go first, I assumed you took it to be the favored position. If it wasn’t, why did you make it sound as if you were doing her a favor?”

“Because that’s the way he is,” she said.

Leo gestured for her to stop whatever else she was planning to add. “Let’s hear what Jay has to say, shall we?”