Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

When you were no longer in my bed, I felt an unreasonable sense of loss.

My comprehension of the world when I was in my 20’s tended to be self-involved. You wouldn’t have made love to me with such abandon, I told myself (though possibly abandon was the wrong word) if you were in love with Roger. I repeated this willed perception to myself like a mantra until it seemed undeniable.

Unable to hold out, I called you at work the next day, foraging the number from the phone book. When I finally reached you, you sounded skittish, said it wasn’t a good time to talk, that you would get back to me later in the week.

Two days passed without a return call and I called again, suggesting that we meet for a drink after work. “I can’t,” you said, then added, “I don’t want to hurt Roger; can you understand?”

I spent hours replaying your response in my head, analyzing its implications. Your remark about not wanting to hurt Roger meant, as I understood it, that I was the one you really cared about. My confidence rose and fell and rose again like stock market quotes in a shaky season.

I composed a note, which I mailed to you at work, regretting its excesses as soon as the mailbox stole it from my hand.

“…” I wrote, “you remain with me like internal weather. Tell me you feel nothing for me and I won’t bother you again.”

“I can’t tell you that,” you wrote back. And the day after that, I got a note from you saying, “This is hard for me too.”

You come up to me from nowhere as if you had materialized from smoke. “It was good running into you again,” you say, smiling your apologetically ironic smile.

“Oh I thought you had gone,” I say, on the far side of disappointed.

“As you can see, I’m still here,” you say.

“Look,” I say, “why didn’t you call me when you broke up with Roger?”

A rumpled white-haired man appears and you introduce him as your husband, Tom. There is something familiar about him, though I don’t remember the particulars of any previous encounter.

“Are you about ready to go?” Tom asks you. “This seems more like a wake than a party, doesn’t it?”

“About ready,” you say. “Getting there.”

“I’ll get myself a glass of something,” Tom says, and moves off toward the back room where an assistant editor or intern is serving the California champagne.

For a moment, we have nothing to say to each other. “I’m sorry about all the questions,” I say to fill the silence. “When I get obsessive about something, I have difficulty letting it go.”

“If you like, we could meet for lunch some time,” you say. You take a card from your purse and slip it into my jacket pocket like a magician’s trick…“Call me, and we’ll arrange something. Friends tell me I’m hard to reach so don’t get discouraged.”

You had stopped returning my calls and you hadn’t answered the last two of my notes. What could I say or do, or not do, that would get you to see me again? There had to be something and I was mostly confident that eventually I would figure out what that elusive something was.

You were an honorable person, I told myself, or aspired to be (as I was myself, at least in theory), who wouldn’t betray a commitment (a second time) unless you were prepared (as I half-hoped) to break with Roger altogether.

Though full of myself then, I had a way of inventing negative scenarios that protected me from the risk of rejection. What if, I worried, you broke up with Roger over me and you and I got together and, as happens, what seemed like love turned out to be something considerably less enduring. I would feel responsible, I would be responsible, for messing up your life.

Still, said the other side in the in-head debate, if you didn’t love Roger (and I had to believe you didn’t), wouldn’t I be doing you a service by extricating you from a relationship that could only lead to grief?

Desperate to see you again, I finally decided, after rejecting the idea several times, that the only way to make my case effectively was to risk waiting for you after work.

We meet for lunch in an out of the way Vietnamese restaurant in the East Village. You are already there when I arrive, reading a book to pass the time, looking as self-possessed as ever. Before I sit down across from you, we acknowledge the occasion by shaking hands like diplomats from hostile countries.

After we order, you say, “I have a favor to ask of you. Could we not talk about the past?”

What is there between us if not the past? “Why did you suggest we get together for lunch?”

You let my question hang in the air for a while before answering. “Why do you think?” you say.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,” I say. “It must be as obvious to you as it is to me that our lives have gone in very different directions.”

“I don’t agree,” you say. “It means something, it has to, that after all these years we run into each other again.”

“If that means something,” I say, “then what does it mean that we haven’t run into each other before?”

“I’ve spent at least half of the last twenty-five years abroad,” you say, as if that settled the matter.

“Doing what?”

“Never mind,” you say. “I’m a little embarrassed to say what I came here to say because I have no idea how you’re going to take it.”

“Have you been married before?” I ask.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say.

“Everything matters,” I say. “I give you my word that nothing you tell me in confidence will appear in my novel.”

Again silence. “Look, there’s really nothing to tell,” you say. “I do some charity work. I’m on the board of a few cultural organizations and such. I’m one of those people with a bad conscience who does what she can to make herself useful. Since Tom’s job brought us back to the States, I’ve begun painting again, which is important to me. Is that what you want to know? If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to respect that I don’t like to talk about things that no longer matter. Roger, who seems to concern you more than he does me, is very old news, barely a footnote in my life. The only thing that matters, I’ve come to believe, is what happens next. Does that make sense to you?”

It doesn’t, but I’m not prepared to say so. “OK,” I say. “What happens next?”

I waited more than two hours for you in a persistent drizzle to come out of work. In retrospect, an embarrassing admission. It seemed noble somehow — I was hoping to impress you with my steadfastness — not to seek cover. For whatever reason, you didn’t appear. Perhaps you had stayed home from work that day. Perhaps you had seen me from the window and gone out the back way. Anyway, I was soaked and shivering when I got home and I felt foolish and angry and more than a little sorry for myself.

I let a week pass and then wrote you another letter, pleading for five minutes of your company, some kind of closure, not mentioning the fiasco in the rain.

I got no answer. For weeks my obsession with you deformed my life.

I was late for appointments or forgot them altogether, got into a pointless argument with a supervisor at work, broke off with a woman I’d been dating on and off for almost a year. Nevertheless, when anyone asked, I confidently announced that my infatuation with you was a thing of the past.

The first of our illicit encounters is on a Wednesday at the Plaza and we make love rather warily that second first time as if auditioning for roles we hope to be assigned.

This is the start of a series of late afternoon Wednesday liaisons, most of them at the Plaza, all of them at your behest.

One of the conditions for our weekly encounters is that I ask no questions about your life and offer as little information as possible about mine. Nevertheless, on occasion, in the most casual way, almost as if you were talking to yourself, you let slip off-handed news about your husband’s tastes, mention plays the two of you have seen together, refer to movies you deplored that Tom enjoyed.