Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

Itend to feel claustrophobic in elevators even when I’m the only passenger, especially so when I’m imprisoned by myself. My imagination tends to betray me. I anticipate getting stuck somewhere between floors, trapped in an airless space for an extended, open-ended piece of time. So meeting you or anyone in an elevator is an unlikely circumstance for someone who rides only when there is no other choice. The rickety elevator in this old Upper West Side building — my friends the Powers live on the fourteenth floor (there is no thirteenth, its own example of omen-phobia) — does not inspire confidence.

So I am prepared to trudge down twelve flights when I notice you waiting, sparks of impatience floating around your head like an aura, for the ancient elevator to hurtle noisily upward in its death-defying slow-motion to take you down, and I make a rapid reassessment of my options. You ignore my presence and continue to stare determinedly at the elevator doors.

“Waiting long?” I ask.

“Forever,” you say, barely glancing at me as if the elevator’s arrival depended on your impatient vigil.

When it arrives, I casually follow you in just as the doors begin to close.

Not wanting to intrude, I stand at least three feet away, waiting with disguised anxiety in my own separate but unequal universe for the elevator to release us again into the world.

During our endless (or so it seems) plummet to earth, I rehearse silently in almost infinite variation an invitation to you to go off with me for a drink.

The performance, though rehearsed to a fault, never gets to play before its intended audience.

We each in turn refuse to violate the silence.

When we separate you say, “Nice to have met you,” though in fact we have never met, have never been introduced, have only exchanged glances across a crowded room.

I call out my name to your back as you dash off, and as you wave to a taxi that actually stops at your signal.

The next time we get together it is in another elevator in a building no more than seven blocks from the first for another party, this time ascending. You seem less preoccupied, less unhappy, and you introduce yourself as if we had never seen each other before.

“Weren’t you at the Powers a few weeks ago?” I say.

“Oh were you there too?” you say, studying my face. “Yes, I believe I remember seeing you. You have the face of a pirate.”

“A pirate? What do you mean, a pirate?”

“That was the thing that struck me about you,” you say. “It’s a good look really. I wouldn’t let it worry you.”

This is a much quicker elevator than the one in the Powers’ building and we are at our floor before I can come up with an appropriate response.

At the party itself, you wink at me the few times I catch your eye, but we never actually get to talk.

I leave early, having somewhere else to go, carrying with me (what else is there to do with it?) your incomprehensible pirate remark. No one has ever told me that I look like a pirate before. That night, I study my face in the bathroom mirror, looking for clues to what you think you see.

This is what I discover. I discover that I like the idea that you imagine I look like a pirate because even after my extended acquaintance with my reflection, I see none of it. Well, maybe something of it — the bags under the eyes, the sour turn of the mouth, the all-day 4 o’clock shadow. Is that the way a pirate looks? I don’t know if I’ve ever knowingly seen a pirate outside of the movies.

I become counter-phobic about elevators, riding them at every opportunity, an imaginary pirate-like bravado driving me, hoping to run into you again in our favored place of encounter.

If it happens, or rather when it happens, I will say that you look like a princess that any self-respecting pirate would like to ride off with in his pirate ship. Of course that can’t be said without embarrassing us both. Something will come to mind I tell myself.

I am riding up in an elevator to see my father, who lives on the fifth floor of a twelve-floor building, and when the elevator opens to let me out (it hesitates just enough to give a seasoned pirate pause), you are there waiting to enter.

“Hello,” I say, and again you don’t seem to recognize me.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” you say. “I know we have. It wasn’t at college, was it?”

I hold the door for you as you enter and in turn, you hold it for me as I take your place on the other side, the door sliding shut between us.

“You said I looked like a pirate,” I shout impulsively at the closed door just as the elevator begins its descent. I imagine I hear the echo of your laugh, or someone’s laugh, and I consider for an abortive moment running down the steps to meet you as you land.

Once I’ve pursued you in conjectured scenario, the pursuit itself, the flight down the stairs, seems anticlimactic. So I don’t get off the mark, regretting in advance the missed opportunity.

As a rule, after my visit with my father, needing to reclaim my separateness, I walk down the four flights to the street. On this occasion, however, I ride the elevator, braving the danger, in the unadmitted hope of another chance encounter.

In my experience, anticipation inevitably denies possibility. When the elevator arrives to pick me up, there is no other passenger, not you, not anyone like you, inside waiting to get out.

So I have my head down, am without expectation, when the elevator deposits me on the first floor. A man with a large black dog takes my place in the elevator and I make my way to the outside door, nodding to the security guy as I pass his post, trying to visualize where exactly I parked my car.

“Hello there,” someone says to me, the almost familiar voice intruding on my private despair.

When I look up, you are standing to my right, carrying a bag of groceries, waiting for me to acknowledge you.

It takes me a moment to pull myself free from the quicksand of distraction. I nod gravely, acknowledging your fortuitous presence as if it were some kind of divine omen. And this time it is you who announce that we’ve met before, the details (a few of them) unexpected news.

And for a moment, awaking from my own self-involved scenario, I find myself lost in yours. “So you live in this building,” I say.

“Oh no,” you say, put off apparently by my preferring the obvious conclusion to the unimaginable. “I’m staying with a friend while my place is being renovated.”

While assessing the implications of your information, I make some awkward consoling remark about knowing from personal experience the trials of dislocation.

“Did I ever tell you,” you say, politely ignoring my banalities, “that you look like a pirate?”

We are now perhaps for the first time on the same page, but I pretend never to have heard this inexplicable perception from you before. “A pirate?” I say.

You reassess me, squinting your eyes to get an unambiguous view. “I said this to you before, didn’t I?” you say.

I want to ask, but don’t, whether it’s acceptable or not to resemble a pirate or even what it might mean in the general scheme of things. “Does that mean you are afraid of me?” I ask.

You smile, barely, shift your feet, seem prepared to face dangers far more threatening than any I may represent. “I really have to get these groceries upstairs. It was nice seeing you again.”

“Would you like me to help you with the bag,” I say.

“Thank you for the offer,” you say, “but I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I’ll be back in my own place by next Friday unless the job takes longer than they say. I suppose everything does, right?” You take a small card from your purse — a reminder card for a dental appointment — and write down a phone number on the back.