Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

It seems to me for a while at least that I am the more secretive one. I never mention that I am also married, though living apart, separated but not quite divorced.

I am not sure what to make of our two hour a week routine. It seems an interlude, pleasurable certainly, not something I would want to give up, that exists outside my real life. I see it as a consolation for what we didn’t have twenty-seven years ago when something real may have been at stake.

Then one afternoon, an hour or so before our standing appointment, you call me at work to say you can’t make it today, no explanation offered, barely an apology. It is the first call I have gotten from you since the surprise of your invitation to lunch.

Whatever my public story, I had difficulty accepting that your resolve not to see me was unalterable. For a long time, I continued to fantasize about you, imagined you calling to say you had broken with Roger, imagined us running toward each other on a crowded street, knocking people out of the way though never quite connecting. In one of my private scenarios, you would invite me over to your place (Roger mysteriously away), but then we would sit in silence, sometimes across from one another, sometimes side by side, tongue-tied with astonishment.

When I couldn’t imagine you back into my bed, I started dating again — a married woman (unhappily married, she said without saying) — and I gradually stopped obsessing about what I might have done, and didn’t, to get you back.

It isn’t that you’re the only woman in my life or that I’m smitten with you, or that our Wednesday afternoon fucking is indispensable to my wellbeing. At least, that’s my understanding of the situation until the moment after your first cancellation. It is human nature no doubt that when something (or someone) becomes unavailable its value becomes immediately enhanced. So my disappointment at not seeing you this Wednesday is not to be made too much of. The odd thing is that I have been aware of resenting that you made all the arrangements (mostly all) for our assignations, assuming that I would go along with your plans. Recently, I’ve even imagined a scenario where I decided at the last minute not to show up.

Instead, you are the first to cancel, and when it happens it takes me a fretful hour or two to figure out what else I might do with my unsubscribed evening. I choose a movie at the Angelica to fill this hole in my day — something much admired which I haven’t gotten around to yet — but I walk out before it’s over, impatient with what seems to me its basic dishonesty.

In bed that night, out of favor with the gods of sleep, I rehearse in my head an inconclusive conversation we had the week before, you asking what our once a week lovemaking means to me, insisting you want an honest reply.

“I like being with you,” I hear myself say.

“Yes?”

“And you?” I ask out of a sense of the obligation to reciprocate, not really wanting an answer.

“It’s something I need to do for myself,” you say.

“What is it that you need to do for yourself?” I ask. “Have illicit sex or have illicit sex with me?”

The next week when we get together, I ask you how you spent your time without me.

“My husband was sick,” you say. “He asked me to stay with him.”

I let the news sink in, wondering if I feel jealous of the husband whose name I somehow think of as Roger.

After the lost week, it is as if our bodies need to get acquainted with each other all over again. When you are dressing in your dreamy, painstaking way as prelude to going home, you say, “I can sense that you’re beginning to get tired of me. We need to find another hotel or someone’s empty apartment. A change of scenery. What do you think?”

“Last week, when you told me you weren’t coming,” I say, “my life felt empty. I felt unbearably deprived.”

You turn your face away in what I take to be a gesture of contempt.

“Do you know,” you say, “that’s the first affectionate thing you’ve said to me.” Tears rain down your face in profusion as they had when you stood next to me at Joshua and Genevieve’s wedding.

I say your name as if I were an amnesiac recovering a lost fragment of memory.

Lying under the covers, I watch you as if you were a character in a movie, as you open the door in your purposeful way to leave me for wherever it is you go when you disappear. You turn to glance at me as an afterthought. “Will you choose the place for next week?” you ask.

I imagine I answer you, but in fact I say nothing, watching the door close between us. “I stood two hours in the rain for you,” I say to the closed door, then I get out of bed and into my clothes, making sure ten minutes had elapsed (we are careful not to leave at the same time) before I exit the hotel and return by subway to my apartment.

To some degree, I’ve had to take on faith that you were the same woman I met at Joshua and Genevieve’s wedding twenty-seven years ago. Of course there are certain similarities, but I read them as merely circumstantial. It’s the crying for no apparent reason — the only flaw in what I think of as your perfect cool — that alters my perspective. It is as though a spell had been cast that turned you into an unrecognizable older woman and now the spell has been broken. You are once again the princess-stranger I imagined I couldn’t live without almost half a lifetime ago.

I am not without resources of self-protection. I know that to fall in love with you is a sure way to lose you and I make an effort to seem as self-possessed and untouched as performance allows.

One evening you announce in bed that you are going to Prague for two weeks with Tom. “Will you miss me?” you ask as if the question amuses you.

“Why do you have to go?” I say.

“Don’t you think we could do with a break?” you say, getting out of bed. “Anyway, Tom asked me to go with him and it’s a chance to see a place I’ve never been to before. So.”

I come up behind you as you are putting your sweater on over your head. “A hug for the road,” I say. “Something to last me for two weeks.”

You move out of my grasp before I am ready to give you up.

“It makes my jumpy when you’re affectionate,” you say. “I feel you take our Wednesday afternoon love nest pretty much for granted. I suspect while I’m away, you’ll wonder from time to time what whatshername is doing whereversheis. You’re a nice man, at least I think you are, but living in New York all these years has made you jaded.”

“Has it?”

“I like that about you,” you say. “I really do.” You blow me a kiss at the door and then hesitate as if waiting for me to say something.

Afraid that I’ll never see you again, an odd, wholly impractical idea comes to mind. “What if …,” I start to say. What if I followed you to Prague and …

I know that you return on Sunday and wonder, expecting nothing, if you’ll find some way to get in touch. Two days pass without word and then you leave a cryptic message on my home phone about calling you after ten the following morning.

I finally reach you at noon moments before you have to leave on some unexplained errand. “We need to talk,” you say.

You make arrangements to meet me for lunch the next day at the same Vietnamese restaurant we dined at when you suggested the affair.

The portents are not difficult to read. We could have had the same talk at our hotel room at the Plaza before or after making love if something else wasn’t in the wind. Choosing the Vietnamese place provides a kind of symmetry. Only a fool wouldn’t recognize that this is your way of calling an end to whatever it is that’s been going on between us. My first impulse is to preempt your move by striking first, but it seems a childish gesture despite its obvious satisfactions.