Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

So, outside of dreams, which I can’t control, you no longer exist for me. (That is, you didn’t exist until I started to write this novel in which you persistently disappear only to reemerge.) There are two ways to look at it. I’m either trying to win you back or to exorcise the tidal pull of my feelings for you forever. I can’t help but wonder — it is an essential part of the game — if you’re reading these words. I imagine that you are, which is next door to, or at least down the street from, to the same thing.

Let’s start this section again.

Four and a half years have passed since our fourth and theoretically final breakup and I am in San Francisco to give a reading — actually a series of readings — from my novel in progress. I go out to dinner with my host and his wife at an old-fashioned plush Victorian-style restaurant, an old standby which has recently come back into favor. During the dessert course, I take a break and visit the men’s room in the hope of recovering sufficient appetite to contend with the tarte tatin awaiting me at my abandoned place.

That’s the setting — plush restaurant in downtown San Francisco — for your next unanticipated appearance in my life. As I step out of the men’s room, focused on my apple tart, a woman who bears you more than a circumstantial resemblance has just emerged from the facing bathroom. It is clearly you — I recognize you from the back of your head, I’d know you anywhere — though of course it can’t really be you. You’re on the East Coast, working as an editor for a trendy monthly journal called The Magazine .

I watch whoever it is return to her table and the profile she shows on sitting — the partial profile — is close enough to yours to produce a disturbing frisson. You are with another woman, someone I’ve never seen before, and I observe the two of you in conversation before returning to my untasted dessert and a brandy my hosts have ordered for me in my absence.

When we exit the restaurant a half hour later, you and your companion have already gone, but then I notice you on the street waiting by yourself for a cab. I make my excuses and separate from my hosts, not sure yet what I intend. Before I can reach you, you give up your vigil and walk off in an abstracted, daydreamy way. The choice makes itself. I decide to follow in your tracks at an unobserved distance.

My discreet pursuit goes on for longer than I had any reason to anticipate and in a direction virtually opposite that of my hotel.

It is as if you can sense my presence. At some point, you stop abruptly and turn toward me.

As I approach, you look around warily to see if anyone else is within call.

“Have you been following me?” you ask, reading my face without recognition in the shadowy light.

“I was planning to say hello,” I say.

You take a wary step closer. “Hello? Why would you say hello to me? Do we know each other?”

For a moment, I’m willing to believe that I’ve made a mistake, but apart from the hair styling, it’s hard to imagine that there is another person on the planet that looks so much like you. “You look almost exactly like someone I know,” I say.

“Uh huh,” you say and we walk along together in your direction. “This isn’t some kind of pick up line you use, is it? Some alternate version of ‘Haven’t I seen you someplace before’?”

“How long have you been living in San Francisco?” I ask.

“Doesn’t matter,” you say. “I promise you I’m not who you think I am.”

“But if you’re not, how do you know who I think you are?”

When we get to Eureka Street, you stop. I hold out my hand, which you ignore. “I’ll say goodbye here,” you say.

“I’d like to see you again,” I say. “Would that be possible?”

You offer a skeptical smile, which I don’t pretend to understand. “I don’t know,” you say.

“Look,” I say, “I’d like to take you to dinner. It would make me happy to take you to dinner.”

The odd smile makes a second appearance. “I don’t know you well enough,” you say, “to be concerned about your happiness one way or another. I don’t mean that to be as harsh as it may sound. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

I tell myself to walk away but obsession takes charge and I say, or rather hear myself say — my intention insofar as I allow myself one not to plead—“Please.”

You turn your back on me. “Sorry,” you say and wait for me to disappear before moving on to your residence, which is in a green frame house on the corner at the far end of the block. For now, it is enough for me to know where you are hiding out.

Early the next morning, I take a cab from my hotel room — I thought of renting a car but street parking is difficult in San Francisco — and get dropped off a block past your street. I don’t want you to think I’m stalking you so I station myself as far from your building as possible while still having an unobstructed view of your front door. At 9:33 you come out of your building — a man and a woman had preceded you — and you start walking almost directly toward me. I have no choice but to duck into an alleyway to avoid being discovered. When I return to the street you are nowhere to be seen. I can see that I’ve managed this badly.

I go into the anteroom of your building and note that there are three apartments. I write down the names, Wooden, Margolis, Titianni — names that mean nothing to me — in a notebook and return to my hotel.

That evening, I give a reading in a hip independent bookstore and in the audience, an almost unacceptable coincidence, is the woman you were with the previous night in the restaurant.

To extend the coincidence, the woman you were with approaches after the reading with a copy of one of my books to be signed. It is almost — take this lightly if you will — as if fate is offering me another opportunity. “Who should I sign the book to?” I ask. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just sign it.” I look up at her as I return the signed book. “You know, I think I’ve seen you before,” I say. “Is that right? Where would that have been?” “You were having dinner at Ernesto’s sometime after nine last night in the company of another woman.” “And you noticed us? I’m flattered or at least I suppose I should be.” There is something edgy about her that doesn’t ingratiate, but I nevertheless invite her for a drink in the high end café next door, an offer she neither accepts nor declines. When, eventually, the line of buyers uses itself up, she is standing by the door in her coat, waiting for me.

In the course of asking your apparent friend about herself, I manage to slip in a few questions concerning her companion, who I continue to assume is you. While A — the initial on the pocket of her blazer — nurses a peach margarita and matches my evasiveness with her own, I drink fizzy water with a slice of desiccated lime attached to the glass like a name tag. There exists what might be called a mutual dis-empathy between us.

“She’s a recent friend,” she says, “though not a close friend, a coworker with whom I share certain sympathies. We’ve only known each other a short time. Our eating together, well it has to do with a bet, the circumstances of which you don’t want to hear about.”

“What is it you both do?” I ask.

“Why is it I have the feeling you have an ulterior agenda?” she says. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want to know and I’ll decide whether I want to give you that information or not. OK?”

I make a quick decision, regretting my lack of discretion even as I confess to A that my interest in her friend, in you, comes from an uncanny resemblance she has to someone I’ve known.