Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“And what might you have done in such a situation, feeling as you did?”

“What would I have done? What do you mean by that? I don’t know what you mean. This is all theoretical, isn’t that right? … I would have, I don’t know, tried to get rid of you.”

“Get rid of me?”

“I’m impulsive. When I feel oppressed, I strike out. I would have, I don’t know, tried to get you out of my hair. I don’t remember any of this.”

“What would you have done to get rid of me?”

“I don’t remember any of this. It might have been you after all who left me. Or maybe I discovered that you were planning to leave. It’s painful to be left. And being excessively nice while being repellingly oppressive is a basic form of passive-aggressive hostility. At the very least, it asks for mistreatment in return. My feelings have always confused me as if they were in some language that seemed familiar but were in the most important ways untranslatable. I wanted you out of my life.”

“And?”

“It was you who ran away from me. Perhaps I did something that provoked you to leave.”

I get up from the step, my back stiff from the awkwardness of the position. “You’re free to go,” I say. “I’m satisfied.”

You continue to sit scrunched down on your step. “Are you sure?”

“This is the way it ends,” I say.

“With my going?”

“Yes.”

“And what if, for the sake of argument, I refuse to go? What if I decided to stay here with you or go back to New York with you and resume whatever it is we left unfinished? What if I said I loved you? Does that change everything?”

“What are you proposing?”

“Nothing real,” you say. “This is all conjecture.”

“This is all conjecture” is the last line of my novel. Now you are free to close the book and put it down on the end table next to your bed or slip it into the bookcase in the appropriate alphabetical spot. Even so, I’d be pleased, grateful really, if you held on to it a moment longer so even as we separate, the book, which is my other self, remains close to you, its final page unturned.

Photo by David Baumbach

Born in Brooklyn, Jonathan Baumbach, the son of a painter and father of a filmmaker, is the author of sixteen much-heralded books, including the much-heralded B, On the Way to My Father’s Funeral, D-Tours, Separate Hours, Reruns, Babble, The Life and Times of Major Fiction, A Man to Conjure With, and Dreams of Molly . His short stories have been widely anthologized, including O.Henry Prize Stories, All Our Secrets are the Same , and Best American Short Stories . He has written extensively on film and is a former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. In 1973, Baumbach co-founded (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collection, the first national fiction writers cooperative in America (later reinvented as FC2). He has had cameo roles in all of his son Noah’s films.