You, or the Invention of Memory

ELEVEN

After our fourth and final breakup, six years and nine months pass uneventfully before I run into you again.

During this prolonged separation, I make little or no attempt to get back together with you or even to see you on other terms, or rather whatever limited attempt I make to see you is made without urgency or passion or rather my urgency is worked up, a way of convincing myself of feelings that may no longer exist. The motor of habit ran my train and when it broke down my pursuit of you accordingly stopped in its tracks.

If we are ever to get back together, I tell myself — you see I do occasionally reconsider the unthinkable — it will have to be as if we were both different people. It is not that I woke up one morning no longer in love with you as that I consciously, willfully, put my romantic longings aside and chose to live in the prosaic real world. In the past when we separated it had seemed to me part of some larger unintelligible process working toward some transcendent reconciliation.

My childlike father used to tell me — it was as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having with himself — that maturity meant no more than the ability to accept things as they are. So in order to pass as an adult in the world’s collective imagination, I acknowledge that it is over between us. We are done, burned out, canceled, history, finis, a page irrevocably turned. That’s my passing-for-an-adult mantra.

So, outside of dreams, which I can’t control, you no longer exist for me. (That is, you didn’t exist until I started to write this novel in which you persistently disappear only to reemerge.) There are two ways to look at it. I’m either trying to win you back or to exorcise the tidal pull of my feelings for you forever. I can’t help but wonder — it is an essential part of the game — if you’re reading these words. I imagine that you are, which is next door to, or at least down the street from, to the same thing.

Let’s start this section again.

Four and a half years have passed since our fourth and theoretically final breakup and I am in San Francisco to give a reading — actually a series of readings — from my novel in progress. I go out to dinner with my host and his wife at an old-fashioned plush Victorian-style restaurant, an old standby which has recently come back into favor. During the dessert course, I take a break and visit the men’s room in the hope of recovering sufficient appetite to contend with the tarte tatin awaiting me at my abandoned place.

That’s the setting — plush restaurant in downtown San Francisco — for your next unanticipated appearance in my life. As I step out of the men’s room, focused on my apple tart, a woman who bears you more than a circumstantial resemblance has just emerged from the facing bathroom. It is clearly you — I recognize you from the back of your head, I’d know you anywhere — though of course it can’t really be you. You’re on the East Coast, working as an editor for a trendy monthly journal called The Magazine.

I watch whoever it is return to her table and the profile she shows on sitting — the partial profile — is close enough to yours to produce a disturbing frisson. You are with another woman, someone I’ve never seen before, and I observe the two of you in conversation before returning to my untasted dessert and a brandy my hosts have ordered for me in my absence.

When we exit the restaurant a half hour later, you and your companion have already gone, but then I notice you on the street waiting by yourself for a cab. I make my excuses and separate from my hosts, not sure yet what I intend. Before I can reach you, you give up your vigil and walk off in an abstracted, daydreamy way. The choice makes itself. I decide to follow in your tracks at an unobserved distance.

My discreet pursuit goes on for longer than I had any reason to anticipate and in a direction virtually opposite that of my hotel.

It is as if you can sense my presence. At some point, you stop abruptly and turn toward me.

As I approach, you look around warily to see if anyone else is within call.

“Have you been following me?” you ask, reading my face without recognition in the shadowy light.

“I was planning to say hello,” I say.

You take a wary step closer. “Hello? Why would you say hello to me? Do we know each other?”

For a moment, I’m willing to believe that I’ve made a mistake, but apart from the hair styling, it’s hard to imagine that there is another person on the planet that looks so much like you. “You look almost exactly like someone I know,” I say.

“Uh huh,” you say and we walk along together in your direction. “This isn’t some kind of pick up line you use, is it? Some alternate version of ‘Haven’t I seen you someplace before’?”

“How long have you been living in San Francisco?” I ask.

“Doesn’t matter,” you say. “I promise you I’m not who you think I am.”

“But if you’re not, how do you know who I think you are?”

When we get to Eureka Street, you stop. I hold out my hand, which you ignore. “I’ll say goodbye here,” you say.

“I’d like to see you again,” I say. “Would that be possible?”

You offer a skeptical smile, which I don’t pretend to understand. “I don’t know,” you say.

“Look,” I say, “I’d like to take you to dinner. It would make me happy to take you to dinner.”

The odd smile makes a second appearance. “I don’t know you well enough,” you say, “to be concerned about your happiness one way or another. I don’t mean that to be as harsh as it may sound. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

I tell myself to walk away but obsession takes charge and I say, or rather hear myself say — my intention insofar as I allow myself one not to plead—“Please.”

You turn your back on me. “Sorry,” you say and wait for me to disappear before moving on to your residence, which is in a green frame house on the corner at the far end of the block. For now, it is enough for me to know where you are hiding out.

Early the next morning, I take a cab from my hotel room — I thought of renting a car but street parking is difficult in San Francisco — and get dropped off a block past your street. I don’t want you to think I’m stalking you so I station myself as far from your building as possible while still having an unobstructed view of your front door. At 9:33 you come out of your building — a man and a woman had preceded you — and you start walking almost directly toward me. I have no choice but to duck into an alleyway to avoid being discovered. When I return to the street you are nowhere to be seen. I can see that I’ve managed this badly.

I go into the anteroom of your building and note that there are three apartments. I write down the names, Wooden, Margolis, Titianni — names that mean nothing to me — in a notebook and return to my hotel.

That evening, I give a reading in a hip independent bookstore and in the audience, an almost unacceptable coincidence, is the woman you were with the previous night in the restaurant.

To extend the coincidence, the woman you were with approaches after the reading with a copy of one of my books to be signed. It is almost — take this lightly if you will — as if fate is offering me another opportunity. “Who should I sign the book to?” I ask. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just sign it.” I look up at her as I return the signed book. “You know, I think I’ve seen you before,” I say. “Is that right? Where would that have been?” “You were having dinner at Ernesto’s sometime after nine last night in the company of another woman.” “And you noticed us? I’m flattered or at least I suppose I should be.” There is something edgy about her that doesn’t ingratiate, but I nevertheless invite her for a drink in the high end café next door, an offer she neither accepts nor declines. When, eventually, the line of buyers uses itself up, she is standing by the door in her coat, waiting for me.

In the course of asking your apparent friend about herself, I manage to slip in a few questions concerning her companion, who I continue to assume is you. While A — the initial on the pocket of her blazer — nurses a peach margarita and matches my evasiveness with her own, I drink fizzy water with a slice of desiccated lime attached to the glass like a name tag. There exists what might be called a mutual dis-empathy between us.

“She’s a recent friend,” she says, “though not a close friend, a coworker with whom I share certain sympathies. We’ve only known each other a short time. Our eating together, well it has to do with a bet, the circumstances of which you don’t want to hear about.”

“What is it you both do?” I ask.

“Why is it I have the feeling you have an ulterior agenda?” she says. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want to know and I’ll decide whether I want to give you that information or not. OK?”

I make a quick decision, regretting my lack of discretion even as I confess to A that my interest in her friend, in you, comes from an uncanny resemblance she has to someone I’ve known.

“And you want to know whether my friend is who you think she is?”

“Will you help me?”

“For one, I don’t know if I can. And for two, I don’t know you well enough to know what you’ll do with the information once you have it.”

“I’m not sure myself what I want,” I say. “I had no interest in seeing her again until, in fact, purely by chance, I saw her again. And now I don’t want to let her out of my sight.”

“What you’re telling me is that you’re behaving compulsively. That’s not the best recommendation to earn my trust. I think I’d better go now.”

“Look, you have my book. I’ve been completely honest about my understanding of what’s going on. So you know something about me. On the other hand, you’ve given me nothing back. If you can assure me that your friend has been out here for more than six years and therefore cannot be the woman I think she is, I promise to walk away.”

“I wish I could,” she says. “Believe me, if I could give you that assurance, I would. The problem is, the very real problem is, that I suspect that my friend, as you call her, is probably the person you think she is. I am in no position to say more than that.”

That’s her exit line and I sit inertly by as she leaves the café. When she is gone, I notice that she has dropped or left behind a business card, which I retrieve from under her chair.

The card reads as follows:

ANGELINA WOODEN, PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Sanity is my business.

Group sessions. Alternate Therapies. Private consultations. Insurance accepted.

401-246 1130

I am scheduled to return to New York City the next morning and I call the airline to change my reservation to the following Monday. Later in the day, I call Angelina Wooden at the number on her misplaced card, speak to someone else, a receptionist possibly — the voice oddly familiar — and make an appointment to come in for a consultation at three-fifteen the next day.

I’m acting on the possibly false assumption that the card was left for me intentionally.

If the two of you work together, there’s the chance anyway that I’ll run into you or at least learn more about what’s going on at Angelina’s place of business.

Though I’m open to being surprised, what happens next has little to do with the surprise I allow myself to anticipate.

The receptionist, a young man, keeps me waiting in the impersonal anteroom for no apparent reason — I am on time, I am the only one there — before sending me in to the therapist’s office. The first surprise is that the woman behind the closed door is not the person I had coffee with after my bookstore signing.

The second surprise is that the therapist awaiting my entrance, making notations in a leather-bound appointment book on the desk in front of her — the two surprises are virtually simultaneous — is the woman that resembles you.

I wait in vain for you to recognize me before speaking. “How are you today?” you say, looking directly at me, giving nothing away.

“Are you sitting in for Dr. Wooden today?” I ask.

My question seems to amuse you. “Why would you think that? Who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re whoever you say you are,” I say.

“For both our sakes, I hope so too,” you say. “And what’s your story?”

Unsure of where to take this unacceptable exchange, I answer your question by reciting a version of the plotline of my novel.

“I am a man who is obsessed with a woman who has been in and out of his life in a variety of contexts, a woman he imagines he loves, a woman to whom he is addressing a letter in the form of a novel with some hidden purpose in mind that he has yet to understand and hopes to have revealed to him through the process of the telling.”

“The thing is, with obsessive people,” you say, “while they believe they’re giving away their innermost secrets, they’re really telling you next to nothing about themselves. I think we should pursue this. If you can come in tomorrow at one forty-five, I can give you a full session.” You make a notation in your book as if I had already agreed to your terms.

I try unsuccessfully to see what you have written in the appointment book. “Will you be here tomorrow if I come back?” I ask.

You laugh at that in a way that seems rehearsed. “The only way to find out,” you say, “is to show up.”

There have been times — I admit this freely — when I’ve had difficulty distinguishing between dream reality and whatever else there is. I stay up much of the night trying to piece together into some kind of useable order the events I’ve just described. And the question that I keep coming back to, the inadvertently inescapable question, is what do you think is going on? Just who do you think I am?

The next day I arrive more than an hour early for my appointment and park at a diagonal across the street from your building, hunkered down in my car like a private detective, though with a notable difference. I am hoping to discover something that I don’t know, that I’m not clever enough to know, that I’m looking for. No one enters or leaves the building during this first period of my vigil. The blare of a horn distracts me. A police car is parked alongside me without my being aware of its having arrived. The policewoman sitting next to the driver instructs me through gesture to roll down the window, which I do.

“Good morning, sir,” she says, leaning out her own opened window and waits for me to acknowledge her before getting down to business. “Sir, what are you doing here?”

“Killing time,” I say. “I’m early for an appointment.”

“I have no problem with that,” she says. “Sir, this is a ‘No Standing’ zone so I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”

At that moment, I notice two women exit the building, one of whom might be you. The police car, which obstructs my view, makes the identification uncertain.

I offer what I hope is an ingratiating smile. “I’ll be gone in a few minutes,” I say.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’ll have to move now,” she says. “As my chief likes to say, ‘The law waits on no man.’ There’s no reason not to tell you this. We’ve had a complaint about you. It’s in your best interest to move along, especially if your reasons for being here are as innocent as you make out.”

“Can you tell me the source of the complaint?” I say.

The head, that had briefly retracted, returns out the window. “Sir, don’t you know when someone is doing you a favor? Get the fuck out of here.”

As soon as I start up the motor, the police car backs up, giving me another open look at the building. A stream of people seem to be exiting, the lunch crowd perhaps.

When I drive off, I pick up the police car in the rearview mirror, moseying along behind me. It may or may not follow me in to the multi-level underground parking garage three blocks away.

I park the car on the cusp between level 8A and 8B — the first available space — and take a crowded elevator up to the street floor, my journey interrupted by multiple stops, the foul air circulated by a small ceiling fan that makes a whining noise with every revolution.

When I arrive at the building on Stetson Street, when I finally get an elevator to take me to the ninth floor and present myself at the Alternate Therapies Office of Angelina Wooden and Associates, I am ten minutes late for my one-forty-five appointment.

The same male receptionist admits me, though seems not to remember me from yesterday. I mention that I am here for an appointment with Dr. Wooden.

“She’s not here,” he says. “Dr. Wooden does not come in on Tuesday afternoons.”

His news is disappointing, though not wholly unexpected. “She told me to come back today at 1:45,” I say, giving him my name, which he insists is not in his book.

I take a seat, suddenly aware of being tired. “I’ll wait,” I say.

“Didn’t I just tell you she won’t be in this afternoon? If you leave your name and phone number, I’ll see that it gets to her.”

I can’t explain why I ignore his request other than it seems important not to give in to him. I pick up a random magazine from the rack to my left and browse through the glossy pages.

I doze off, skip-reading an overheated article in a four-month-old Sports Illustrated about the otherwise unheralded importance of tight ends in the West Coast offense. When I open my eyes there are two cops standing over me, one of whom is the woman that rousted me from my vigil across the street. I look over at the receptionist, who refuses for obvious reasons to meet my glance.

My first impulse is to make a run for it. Instead, I get to my feet and move in virtual slow motion out the door to the elevator stand. The moment I ring for it, an elevator arrives, three people out of the five already ensconced making their unhurried departure. By the time I get inside the elevator, the two cops have also edged their way into the car.

The cop, who hadn’t spoken to me before, who is possibly also a woman — it is not wholly clear — cautions me to stay close when the elevator releases us.

There are five people waiting for us to exit, one of whom, the one in the back behind the hugely tall man, is you.

“They told me you weren’t coming in today,” I say as you stride by without looking in my direction on your way into the elevator.

“Oh hello,” you say, acknowledging me with a perplexed smile.

At the last possible instant, the door in the process of sliding shut, I force my way back into the elevator. (Always elevators in our story.) “Stop him,” a voice calls out, a woman’s voice, though it is possible that these are random sounds that I particularize gratuitously.

So think of us riding up together in this Art Deco elevator, standing side by side, several other passengers who may or may not be aware of our story standing about like extras in a movie to complete the picture.

By the time we reach the ninth floor, we are the only remaining passengers.

“The police are certain to be looking for you here,” she says as the door begins to open. “It would make more sense if you got off at the floor above.”

“You can tell them we have an appointment.”

“Why would I want to tell them that?”

“If I go to the tenth floor, will you come with me?”

“That’s not what I had in mind. I hope you’re not going to force me to do something I don’t want to do.”

That’s the moment it hits me that I’m a character in some collective soap-operatic melodrama, and to the local authorities and whoever else (you of course included), I’m a dangerous person. Since this perception will follow me whatever I do, I see no useful reason to disabuse you of it. “I think you’d better come with me,” I say, holding on to your arm until the elevator is in flight again.

An hour later, we are sitting on the third step of the stairwell between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. You continue to insist that you don’t know me, have been aware of my presence only once before when I spoke to you outside of Ernesto’s, and that we did not (and do not) have an appointment for any time this afternoon.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” you say. “This is not meant to be disparaging but your behavior suggests that you’re more or less delusional. I can assure you that whoever you think I am, I am not that person.”

I offer some of the landmarks of our history together, the better times as they seemed to me, in the hope of moving you to some acknowledgment. “I wish I could help you,” you say carefully “but I can’t. Sorry. May I go now?”

As I see it, no one, not me certainly, least of all me, is keeping you from going wherever you want, but I’m not going to encourage you to leave me by informing you of your rights. “I’d prefer you stayed with me,” I say.

Our stalemate continues for awhile (I can’t say exactly how much time passes) and then you say, “What if I said that I did know you once, awhile back; if I did say as much, would you let me leave?”

I tend to be prepared for the unexpected — what else is there? — but it’s what I dare not hope for that generally takes me by surprise. “Well,” I say, “what exactly are you saying?”

“Do we have an agreement?”

“OK,” I say, giving nothing away. “Where were we the first time we met? Can you tell me that?”

You cover your face with your hands as if trying to envision something that refuses to come into focus. “In an elevator,” you say after some hesitation.

I refuse exhilaration, retain an uneasy calm. Possibly something I said gave you the clue you needed. “An elevator in what building? Where were you going at the time?”

“It was a party in New York City,” you say. “I can’t remember now whose party but I believe it was in an Upper West Side apartment. Is that your recollection?”

I may have mentioned in a recent conversation that we had a history of meeting in elevators and you filed the information away. “Is this a party trick you’re doing for my benefit?”

“If it is, I’m unaware of it. My memory has always been hit or miss and it’s gotten worse.”

“Did we talk at all at this party?”

“I don’t remember,” you say. “I don’t think we did.” You glance at me for confirmation.

My own memories are so variable, so undermined by internal contradictions that I find it hard to distinguish between what’s real if any memory is ever real and what’s invented for the sake of a more compelling story. Even so, your version of things is too close to my own story to be wholly trusted. In fact, the second time we met there was no indication that you even remembered that there had been a first.

“What happened in San Remy?” I ask.

The question seems to puzzle you. “What’s Sand Remy?” you ask.

“If you can tell me what happened in San Remy,” I say, “you are free to leave. By the way, it’s ‘San’ not ‘sand.’”

You again bury your face in your hands. “San Remy,” you say, testing the sound. “Could you give me some clues, some context?”

“No clues,” I say.

Several minutes pass or possibly hours, the waiting becoming increasingly burdensome. At some point, I decide to offer you the missing context. “It was at a wedding in Paris that we ran into each other after a long period of separation. I was there alone. You were there with some French guy, I believe. Somehow you had gotten your hands on the key to some cabin in San Remy — you may not have known the name of the town at the time — and after your boyfriend walked out, you invited me to go with you in his place. Do you remember any of this?”

“I ran into you at a wedding in France, is that right, at which my boyfriend and I broke up? And then, after the proceedings, we went together to this town you mention in the south of France.”

“And what happened between us during the two months or so we stayed together in the cabin outside San Remy?”

“I don’t know really. There are some images in my head, but I can’t make much sense of them.”

“Describe the images.”

You turn away, a sly smile on your face. “Did you bully me like this in San Remy?”

On three separate occasions, there is some vaguely threatening activity just outside the stairwell and I expect each time that you will call for help but you make a point of being absolutely silent.

“On the contrary. When we began to get on each other’s nerves, you complained that I was too nice.”

You take me in, your eyes narrowed for just that purpose. “Whatever I might have meant by that,” you say. “It could be that you were trying too hard. Or that there was something about you or something about my feelings toward you that I found disturbing. This is total conjecture, you understand.”

“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.