Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“As Leo would tell you, and as I’m sure you know, that’s exactly what you do want. Denial is a form of admission. What’s Leo’s game in your opinion?”

“I’m here to find out,” he said.

She laughed. “Shouldn’t we tell him things are better?”

“What do you think?”

They entered Leo’s office at the same time, though not quite together, made their appearance in single file, Lois the first to enter.

As they sat down in their respective seats, Leo looked over his glasses from one to the other, then jotted something down in the small notebook he always seemed to have on the table in front of him. “People, I’d like to try something a little different today,” he said. “I’d like to have you switch roles — Lois you take on the role of Jay and Jay you present yourself as Lois — for the next twenty minutes.”

Lois looked skeptical while Jay seemed vaguely amused.

“So Jay, putting yourself in Lois’s shoes, I’d like you to present your grievances toward your husband …”

“She wears a seven-B,” Jay said. “There’s no way I could get my feet in them without cutting off my toes.”

Leo ignored him. “And Lois,” he said, “I’d like you to begin to imagine yourself as Jay. I’ll give you both a few minutes to focus and then Lois — that is, Jay as Lois — will start. Otherwise it will be the same format as last week. Once we start, I’d like you both to stay in character. Any questions?”

“I don’t know, Leo,” Lois said. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Let’s give it a try, OK, and see how it goes,” Leo said.

“I’d prefer standing,” Jay said slyly, getting up then sitting down. “One of the things about Jay that makes my hair curl is that he is incapable of empathy. That’s all I have to say at the moment.”

“Jay,” Leo said, pointing to Lois.

“Lois tends to be a perfectionist,” she said, “and so tends to be what I call hypercritical. The way I see it, there’s nothing I can do to please her no matter how many times I apologize for being oblivious. She has an idea how people should be and if you don’t live up to that idea, you’re in trouble. You never know exactly where you stand with her.”

“Could you give us an example of what you mean?”

“An example? Well, one night after a hard closing, she comes home from work and finds me sprawled out on the couch., watching TV, a basketball game most likely, and she says something like, ‘You’re supposed to be working on your book not watching TV, aren’t you?’ And then it comes out that I’d neglected to do the little bit of shopping she had asked me to do and I get some more grief from her. I don’t answer and then I offer an unfelt apology, but when she keeps at it I put my coat on and go out for a walk. Some hours later when I come back I find her talking on the phone to someone I think I have reason to assume is her lover.”

“How does that make you feel?” Leo asks.

“How does that make me feel? I let her know how angry I am by knocking over a few chairs and then I order her to get off the phone. It’s not the best way to handle it but I have to do something and I haven’t the faintest idea what else to do. I’m bigger than she is and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get my way.”

Jay waited a few minutes before speaking. “Look, I’m not going to let myself be bullied by him in my own house. I have a right to talk to whoever I please. His behaving like a jerk only makes me more determined. His bad behavior, which I may have provoked — you get to know the right buttons — is embarrassing to me. He knows I hate scenes. And so I get off the phone, which makes me hate him even more but not before telling my friend that I’ll call him back.”

“Do you ever after the dust has cleared talk about what went on?” Leo asked Lois.

“Not usually. Mostly we avoid each other. One of us goes in the bedroom and the other stays in the living room.”

“What happens the next morning?” Leo asked Jay.

“I don’t as a rule talk much in the morning and when we do talk we tend to be excruciatingly polite as if one wrong word might cause irreparable damage.”

“Do you have breakfast together?” Leo asked Lois.

“I … excuse me … Lois doesn’t eat breakfast. She has coffee and sometimes a toasted bialy but it’s not a sit down breakfast. On the other hand, I have designer cold cereal in the morning and tend to read the sports page while making music chewing my granola.”

“If you don’t discuss your fights, how do you ever reconcile your differences?” Leo asked Jay.

“Time heals,” Jay said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Lois cut in just as Jay was completing his sentence. “My policy is to ignore problems and hope they go away,” she said.

“When I feel wronged, I can be absolutely unforgiving,” Jay said, “and it’s possible that Jay has been burned too much to be willing to risk making a gesture he knows will be scorned.”

Lois pursed her lips. “I guess when the going’s tough, I don’t have much backbone, do I?”

Jay picked up a flyer that had been lying on the table and folded it into a paper airplane.

Leo’s bearded face showed a minor crack of concern and he suggested after Jay had launched the paper airplane in Lois’s direction and Lois had stared daggers at Jay in return that it might be a good idea to stop the role playing at this point and return to their former selves. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get back into your own heads.”

“This was useful,” Lois said. “When he was going on about me being hypercritical and unforgiving, I got the impression he was really talking about himself. I learned something from that.”

“Hey, weren’t we both talking about ourselves?” Jay said.

“You’re so clever,” she said. “Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?”

“You’re the princess of snide,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry I threw the plane in your direction. It wasn’t really meant to hit you, it was to make you aware there was someone else in the room.”

“You never say anything that means anything,” she said. “Why is that? You are the prince of self-justifying incoherence.”

Jay got out of his chair with apparent difficulty as if fighting some kind of invisible resistance, and retrieved his coat.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Lois said.

Leo turned his head just enough to glance at the clock on the wall. “We still have some time left, people,” he said.

FOURTH SESSION

There is no record of a fourth session.

After our fourth and final breakup, six years and nine months pass uneventfully before I run into you again.

During this prolonged separation, I make little or no attempt to get back together with you or even to see you on other terms, or rather whatever limited attempt I make to see you is made without urgency or passion or rather my urgency is worked up, a way of convincing myself of feelings that may no longer exist. The motor of habit ran my train and when it broke down my pursuit of you accordingly stopped in its tracks.

If we are ever to get back together, I tell myself — you see I do occasionally reconsider the unthinkable — it will have to be as if we were both different people. It is not that I woke up one morning no longer in love with you as that I consciously, willfully, put my romantic longings aside and chose to live in the prosaic real world. In the past when we separated it had seemed to me part of some larger unintelligible process working toward some transcendent reconciliation.

My childlike father used to tell me — it was as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having with himself — that maturity meant no more than the ability to accept things as they are. So in order to pass as an adult in the world’s collective imagination, I acknowledge that it is over between us. We are done, burned out, canceled, history, finis, a page irrevocably turned. That’s my passing-for-an-adult mantra.