Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

After that, we shake hands as if some kind of treaty has been concluded, and go our separate ways. The elevator, I notice, arrives at the behest of a man my father’s age, who holds the door for you as you slip inside, and you are already in flight before I have enough self-possession to toss you the shards of my name.

Anyway, I have the name of your dentist and the time of your next appointment, which opens up another way of getting together circumstantially.

It turns out that I am between dentists at the moment, my most recent guy, Dr. F, having retired abruptly for undisclosed reasons.

I keep your card on my dresser, dental side down, and plan to call you when the week is out — I even make a notation on my desk calendar to phone you three days after your scheduled return — but it doesn’t happen.

I decode my reasons, which are unconvincing even to me, and may be understood as follows. The friend you have been staying with who lives in the same building as my father and apparently on the same floor is, more than likely, more than just a friend. Therefore: what?

I don’t call because I don’t want to trespass on a preexisting relationship and so become the agency of conflict and grief in your life. That can’t be true, but my reading of my resistance to using the number you gave me yields no deeper truth.

Instead of calling you, I turn over your card and make an appointment to see your dentist. On my arrival, I am given a questionnaire to fill out concerning the highlights of my dental history. The last question asks the name of the person whose recommendation has brought me to this office.

What’s it to them? I wonder, though I give them your name in case some free service is offered — a gift filling perhaps — for each new patient brought to their door.

The hygienist is particularly brutal and complains throughout the treatment about the extent of my bleeding as if some failure of character were at issue. Before the dentist is brought in for the heavy lifting, she insists on giving me a lesson on flossing.

“How do you know my sister?” she asks.

I can’t answer of course, can only sit mystified in my supine position in her chair, until she gets her floss and fingers out of my mouth.

“Your sister?” I say. “Why would I know your sister?”

“When you floss,” you say, “it’s good thing to hold a mirror in front of you so you can see yourself flossing. Her name, you wrote her name on your questionnaire as your referral to Dr. Karsik, We’re actually half-sisters.”

At this point, the bespectacled Dr. K, the dentist we now share, makes his first appearance on the scene. While inspecting my mouth, he keeps up a running stream of conversation with the hygienist, a kind of flirtation disguised and enhanced by insult.

In the process, Dr. Karsik discovers two cavities, one barely emerging and the other in the need of immediate attention.

So I make an appointment before leaving to return a different day the following week to have the more desperate of my two cavities attended to before matters get out of hand.

A week or so before my return to your dentist, I actually run into you getting out of a subway train at Columbus Circle. This time we are both getting off at the same stop, though we make our almost simultaneous getaways from different cars of the same train.

You are ahead of me and hurrying somewhere and I try to keep you in sight without giving the unavoidable appearance of running after you.

And then someone else stops me to say hello, a former flame (whose name I can’t quite remember), whom I haven’t seen in what I estimate to be ten years. We exchange phone numbers and highlights of recent history and continue, our interlude concluded, on our separate ways.

Nevertheless the encounter, which takes no more than three minutes, is sufficient for me to lose sight of you as you hurry to keep some unimaginable appointment.

Well, perhaps it is imaginable, your destination. You were hurrying uptown in the direction of — why hasn’t this struck me before? — Lincoln Center. It’s likely that you are going to see a matinee and all I have to do is figure out where you might be going out of a handful of possibilities.

By the time I reach Lincoln Center, my enthusiasm for the game of finding you has lost its edge.

There are only two matinees, as it turns out, and a critics screening for the upcoming film festival. One out of three is better odds than I might have imagined, but on the other hand I have no basis for choice.

Anyway, I have a day pass for the new Rohmer film awaiting me at the press desk, so I pick it up (at first they can’t find it, another delay) and I enter the dark auditorium a few minutes after “The Lady and the Duke” has started.

At some point in the proceedings — there’s the usual elbow-tilting with my neighbor for the armrest — it strikes me that even if you are at the screening it won’t be a walk in the park to find you among the dispersing crowd.

And then I think, the woman next to me on the right, the one with the aggressive elbow, might possibly be you. I like that idea and I hold on to it, imagine my feigned surprise at discovering you next to me.

The movie, like many of Rohmer’s, though uncharacteristically set in the past (during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution), is about noble (and ignoble) self-deceptions.

Before the lights go on, as the credits unroll, I slide out of the aisle and hang out with my back to the wall. You come out of my row — you were in fact the elbow on my right — and I am about to say something when I realize you are with the man trailing you and it is — he is — somebody I know.

You ignore me, but he comes over to say hello and provides, somewhat belatedly, our first third person introduction.

I take my cue from you, that is I pretend we don’t know each other, though it also strikes me that you have not remembered me (the pirate?) as your traveling companion on several elevator rides.

We shake hands in this formal way as if parodying the ritual.

“We’re going for a bite at O’Neil’s,” your companion, my nodding acquaintance, Roger, says. “Why don’t you join us?”

I am already uncomfortable with the situation so I drudge up a pro forma excuse, an apocryphal appointment elsewhere, to avoid further awkwardness.

“Do join us,” you say. “Roger tells me you’re a movie fanatic. I could use some clarity about what we just saw.”

I play hard to get for no more than a few minutes before agreeing to postpone whatever else of worked-up importance I had allegedly committed myself to.

So my first meal with you, our first date so to speak, also includes Roger, who may (or may not) be the mysterious friend you were staying with while your apartment was being renovated.

During our abbreviated first date — I suppose it isn’t really a date if Roger is with us — it is Roger who explains the movie to you, looking over at me from time to time as if anticipating my objection.

“So the more things change, the more they remain the same,” Roger says in conclusion.

“Isn’t that what you think everything’s about?” you say. “I think it’s about their loving each other and not being able to admit it even to themselves.”

“What I said includes what you said,” he says.

“That’s because it’s general enough to include almost everything,” you say.

I say virtually nothing during the meal, listen to your dispute as if I were an invisible eavesdropper.

At some point, Roger reminds me that (in case I’d forgotten) I have a prior appointment to keep and that they would understand my having to, as they say, eat and run.

So what can I do but put on my jacket, say goodbye, throw some money on the table, and walk away, regretting my lies.