Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“And you want to know whether my friend is who you think she is?”

“Will you help me?”

“For one, I don’t know if I can. And for two, I don’t know you well enough to know what you’ll do with the information once you have it.”

“I’m not sure myself what I want,” I say. “I had no interest in seeing her again until, in fact, purely by chance, I saw her again. And now I don’t want to let her out of my sight.”

“What you’re telling me is that you’re behaving compulsively. That’s not the best recommendation to earn my trust. I think I’d better go now.”

“Look, you have my book. I’ve been completely honest about my understanding of what’s going on. So you know something about me. On the other hand, you’ve given me nothing back. If you can assure me that your friend has been out here for more than six years and therefore cannot be the woman I think she is, I promise to walk away.”

“I wish I could,” she says. “Believe me, if I could give you that assurance, I would. The problem is, the very real problem is, that I suspect that my friend, as you call her, is probably the person you think she is. I am in no position to say more than that.”

That’s her exit line and I sit inertly by as she leaves the café. When she is gone, I notice that she has dropped or left behind a business card, which I retrieve from under her chair.

The card reads as follows:

Sanity is my business .

Group sessions. Alternate Therapies. Private consultations. Insurance accepted.

401-246 1130

I am scheduled to return to New York City the next morning and I call the airline to change my reservation to the following Monday. Later in the day, I call Angelina Wooden at the number on her misplaced card, speak to someone else, a receptionist possibly — the voice oddly familiar — and make an appointment to come in for a consultation at three-fifteen the next day.

I’m acting on the possibly false assumption that the card was left for me intentionally.

If the two of you work together, there’s the chance anyway that I’ll run into you or at least learn more about what’s going on at Angelina’s place of business.

Though I’m open to being surprised, what happens next has little to do with the surprise I allow myself to anticipate.

The receptionist, a young man, keeps me waiting in the impersonal anteroom for no apparent reason — I am on time, I am the only one there — before sending me in to the therapist’s office. The first surprise is that the woman behind the closed door is not the person I had coffee with after my bookstore signing.

The second surprise is that the therapist awaiting my entrance, making notations in a leather-bound appointment book on the desk in front of her — the two surprises are virtually simultaneous — is the woman that resembles you.

I wait in vain for you to recognize me before speaking. “How are you today?” you say, looking directly at me, giving nothing away.

“Are you sitting in for Dr. Wooden today?” I ask.

My question seems to amuse you. “Why would you think that? Who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re whoever you say you are,” I say.

“For both our sakes, I hope so too,” you say. “And what’s your story?”

Unsure of where to take this unacceptable exchange, I answer your question by reciting a version of the plotline of my novel.

“I am a man who is obsessed with a woman who has been in and out of his life in a variety of contexts, a woman he imagines he loves, a woman to whom he is addressing a letter in the form of a novel with some hidden purpose in mind that he has yet to understand and hopes to have revealed to him through the process of the telling.”

“The thing is, with obsessive people,” you say, “while they believe they’re giving away their innermost secrets, they’re really telling you next to nothing about themselves. I think we should pursue this. If you can come in tomorrow at one forty-five, I can give you a full session.” You make a notation in your book as if I had already agreed to your terms.

I try unsuccessfully to see what you have written in the appointment book. “Will you be here tomorrow if I come back?” I ask.

You laugh at that in a way that seems rehearsed. “The only way to find out,” you say, “is to show up.”

There have been times — I admit this freely — when I’ve had difficulty distinguishing between dream reality and whatever else there is. I stay up much of the night trying to piece together into some kind of useable order the events I’ve just described. And the question that I keep coming back to, the inadvertently inescapable question, is what do you think is going on? Just who do you think I am?

The next day I arrive more than an hour early for my appointment and park at a diagonal across the street from your building, hunkered down in my car like a private detective, though with a notable difference. I am hoping to discover something that I don’t know, that I’m not clever enough to know, that I’m looking for. No one enters or leaves the building during this first period of my vigil. The blare of a horn distracts me. A police car is parked alongside me without my being aware of its having arrived. The policewoman sitting next to the driver instructs me through gesture to roll down the window, which I do.

“Good morning, sir,” she says, leaning out her own opened window and waits for me to acknowledge her before getting down to business. “Sir, what are you doing here?”

“Killing time,” I say. “I’m early for an appointment.”

“I have no problem with that,” she says. “Sir, this is a ‘No Standing’ zone so I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”

At that moment, I notice two women exit the building, one of whom might be you. The police car, which obstructs my view, makes the identification uncertain.

I offer what I hope is an ingratiating smile. “I’ll be gone in a few minutes,” I say.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’ll have to move now,” she says. “As my chief likes to say, ‘The law waits on no man.’ There’s no reason not to tell you this. We’ve had a complaint about you. It’s in your best interest to move along, especially if your reasons for being here are as innocent as you make out.”

“Can you tell me the source of the complaint?” I say.

The head, that had briefly retracted, returns out the window. “Sir, don’t you know when someone is doing you a favor? Get the fuck out of here.”

As soon as I start up the motor, the police car backs up, giving me another open look at the building. A stream of people seem to be exiting, the lunch crowd perhaps.

When I drive off, I pick up the police car in the rearview mirror, moseying along behind me. It may or may not follow me in to the multi-level underground parking garage three blocks away.

I park the car on the cusp between level 8A and 8B — the first available space — and take a crowded elevator up to the street floor, my journey interrupted by multiple stops, the foul air circulated by a small ceiling fan that makes a whining noise with every revolution.

When I arrive at the building on Stetson Street, when I finally get an elevator to take me to the ninth floor and present myself at the Alternate Therapies Office of Angelina Wooden and Associates, I am ten minutes late for my one-forty-five appointment.

The same male receptionist admits me, though seems not to remember me from yesterday. I mention that I am here for an appointment with Dr. Wooden.

“She’s not here,” he says. “Dr. Wooden does not come in on Tuesday afternoons.”

His news is disappointing, though not wholly unexpected. “She told me to come back today at 1:45,” I say, giving him my name, which he insists is not in his book.