My Name Is Memory (14 page)

Did he want to use that phone? Could he just pick it up and call her? He didn’t know how to call her. Should he ask for her number? Would Claude Valbrun give it to him? And anyway, what was he thinking?

“You are looking for someone,” the guard informed him sympathetically.

Daniel nodded.

“Who?” He wanted to help Daniel along.

Daniel felt like he was in therapy. Should he just tell him? He couldn’t help himself. He was going to call her Sophia before he stopped himself. “Lucy Broward.”

“Oh. Lucy.” He smiled. “With the long hair. Third-floor Lucy. I like that girl.”

Daniel found himself nodding eagerly.

“She gave me chocolates at Christmastime, and a little plant with red flowers for my wife. What was the name of that plant?” He closed one eye to help him think. “My memory is good for some things and not others.” He closed the other eye. “What was the name of it? My wife knew.”

“I don’t know,” Daniel said honestly. “Poinsettia?” He wished they could get on with it.

He opened both eyes. “Hmm. No. It started with a C, I think. Or a G. Just when you leave, I’ll think of it. Anyway, Lucy is gone.”

“She is?” His hopes fell so far and fast he had to realize how high he’d built them. He couldn’t keep the disappointment off his face.

“Sure. Most of ’em are. May fourth was the last day of classes. It’s quiet here until the summer students start showing up after July fourth.”

“She’s gone for the summer? She won’t be back here?” Had he really thought he was going to see her just like that?

“She and that tall friend of hers moved out the end of last week.”

“Marnie?”

“Right. Marnie.”

“I don’t know where she’ll be living next year. Could be here. Could be someplace else.”

Daniel nodded bleakly. Who knew if she’d even come back to this campus? What if she did an exchange program or something? He hadn’t found her at all.

Claude looked genuinely sorry for him as he handed back his driver’s license. So much so that it was embarrassing. “Seems to me the school year ends earlier every year,” Claude said philosophically, shaking his head in a way that gave Daniel a feeling of kinship. Here the man sat watching them go by, year after year, getting younger and further away from him.

Now was the time for Daniel to put his ID back in his wallet and turn around and walk out the door. Now, suddenly, he didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay here with this nice man who liked Sophia. He wanted Claude to go back to trying to remember the name of the flower.

Daniel felt as though he was in a game of warmer-colder. This building wasn’t so hot as he had hoped—it didn’t contain Sophia anymore—but it was a lot warmer than it would be once he got outside, where the trail would be purely cold again.

He put his ID back in his wallet and his wallet back in his pocket, but he didn’t turn to go. “What kinds of things is your memory good for?” he asked, trying to sound conversational and lighthearted.

Claude shrugged. He seemed happy to have company. “Faces. And names.”

THREE BEERS MADE Daniel feel optimistic. Maybe she was staying in Charlottesville for the summer. Maybe she got a job here and moved off campus for a few months. Maybe she was waiting tables or wearing one of those Genius T-shirts, working at the Apple store. Maybe she would walk into this very bar if he sat here long enough.

“Another one,” he said to the bartender, raising his glass. It took him several more tries to get the guy’s attention. The bartender was enough in demand that he’d suddenly gone deaf and lost his peripheral vision at the same time.

“Thanks,” he said when his fourth Bass ale finally arrived, knowing the futility of his maybes. He knew that he could have five or ten or fifty Bass ales and she wouldn’t walk in here. She wasn’t from the kind of family where you rented an apartment and pretended to earn money. She was from the kind of family where you moved home and actually earned money. He’d seen two kids from their high school already, one passing on the sidewalk and another spilling her breasts onto the table in the corner, and they were depressingly not her. None of this was remotely her anymore, and the more he drank, the farther away she seemed.

It was for the better, probably. What good did he bring her? But he just wanted to see her. That would satisfy him. That’s all he’d come for.

He regretted wearing his best shirt, and looking at himself in the mirror that morning with so much pleasure and hope. What was he thinking? He wished he had a different shirt to change into. New bar smells and his new sweat and the perfume emitted by that girl over in the corner would get into the fabric and overwhelm the precious bit of her left in it. He hated that thought.

The guy sitting to his right had a double chin and soccer cleats and was getting drunk at a faster rate than he. There was something familiar and unappealing about him, which Daniel wasn’t tempted to pursue.

The fifth Bass arrived around the time the girl from the corner table came over and sat on the stool to his left. He forgot that she might remember him until she remembered him.

“You went to Hopewood, didn’t you?” she asked.

“For a while.” She had very white teeth. People were always having very white teeth these days.

“I remember you. You were—” She had a bursting look, like the vodka was trying to do the talking and she was trying to stop it. “Never mind,” she said mischievously.

He kept his eyes steady to the north of her neck. “Okay,” he said, though she certainly wanted him to cajole her.

“Do you go here?” she asked. She had been on some kind of squad in high school, he recalled. He could picture her in one of those outfits with the very short pleated skirts, constantly being turned upside down.

“To school here? No. Do you?”

“Yes. Soon to be a junior.”

She knew Sophia, no doubt. She started to emit a small glow of Sophia association. He resisted asking.

“Where do you go?”

He took a long swig of beer. “Nowhere. I work.” He didn’t feel like saying anything true.

This dulled the interest in her eyes a little bit. Or at least shifted it.

“Do you still see any Hopewood people?” she asked.

“No.” He took another sip. It was hot in this place. “Do you?”

“Yeah. A lot. Like nine people from our class are here.”

He nodded. Her glow intensified a little. He bought her another vodka tonic on the strength of it.

“Can I tell you something?”

He relented. “All right.”

“We thought you were dead.”

“Oh?”

“Somebody saw you jump off a bridge.”

He tried not to wince visibly. It wasn’t his best memory. “I guess they were mistaken.”

She nodded and sipped her drink. “It’s good that you’re not dead.”

“Hey, thanks.”

She leaned over and kissed him just to the side of his mouth. He felt the slight moisture of spit and sweat that she left on his skin.

“So who do you still see?” he asked.

“From our class?” Her bracelets jingled with every gesture.

“Yeah.”

He waited through the list until she got to Marnie, Lucy’s friend. “I think I remember her.”

“Weird girl. Black-and-blonde hair?”

“She was friends with . . .” He felt stupid pretending to search for the name of the most important person in the world to him.

“Who?” She fixed him with a look that made him feel transparent. “You mean Lucy, right?” Her voice was flat.

Hungry as he was to hear one thing about her—that she was a drug dealer, a cross-dresser, a baton twirler, anything, so long as she was in his world—this was too stupid. He got up. “I have to piss,” he muttered. He slapped down a twenty to cover the rest of his tab.

“I bet you don’t remember my name, do you?”

He kept moving.

“Wait,” she said. She jingled some more as she took hold of his wrist. “What are you doing after this?”

“Leaving. Going back up north.”

“Wait, though,” she said. “There’s a party at the Deke house. Come with me.”

His stupid reptilian mind wondered if Sophia might be there. “No. I hafta go.” He could hear the fifth and sixth beers in his voice. He had to go back to his car and sleep until he wasn’t drunk anymore.

“Are you sure? I’ll order you another beer, and then you can decide.”

He shook his head. If he had another beer, he wouldn’t be able to keep his gaze from dipping into her blouse. And if he had another one after that, he would probably go back to her dorm room and roll onto her twin bed with her and take off her clothes with his eyes shut, because it wouldn’t be her he was picturing. He’d done it before, and he never felt good about it after. She was probably an economics major or maybe a political-science major, and maybe she made great margaritas and loved her father and could hit a mean forehand and who knew what else, but she was also the kind of girl who got called another girl’s name at the important moment.

“It’s Ashley,” she shouted at his back.

He peed a few beers’ worth, and when he came out he noticed his barstool had been taken over by the very drunk guy with the cleats, who was leaning directly into Ashley’s cleavage. Her manner had changed.

“What is your problem?” he overheard her say as the guy leaned so far over his stool it started to go. The guy was holding on to her with both hands when she shoved him off and his stool teetered and crashed to the ground. Ashley stood and backed away.

“Stupid bitch!” the guy called after her, getting up arduously. “Come here. Bring your tits back here.” His words were a slurry of spit and gin.

Daniel strode back to the bar. He stood in front of the man as Ashley collected her stuff. The guy turned to Daniel. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Daniel looked at him, losing what little fun there was to his drunkenness. He looked carefully at the man’s eyes and brows and shoulders and ears and pieced it together. He came up with a face in a bar not unlike this one. But in the winter in . . . someplace. Cold. St. Louis, it must have been. The face had waxy, smeary red lipstick, like girls used to wear back then. A flowery dress with a pair of terrible falsies creeping up out of the neckline. She’d told him she was a model and showed him her picture. It was an ad for a local car dealership. Oldsmobile, maybe. He remembered a lot of ass and leg, and not much face. She was very proud of that picture. She had heard he was interning at his dad’s paper and called him there every day for a month. “I wanna be famous,” she told him.

Don’t say anything, he counseled himself. “I know you,” he said.

“The fuck you do.”

“I do. Ida. I definitely do. You haven’t changed. You drink too much.”

The guy was trying to decide whether to punch him.

“You like posing for pictures. I’m sure you still do. You still like your lingerie and your shoes. Lace and high heels and all. They’re hard to find in your size, though, aren’t they?”

Now the bartender was eavesdropping, and Ashley had floated back toward them to listen.

Had Ida been less drunk, he could have covered his astonishment and his discomfort better. Daniel didn’t feel particularly honored knowing he was right. These were easy things to tell about a person. If you changed gender from one life to the next, it almost always meant you lived in some confusion in the middle. And exhibitionism was the kind of neurotic quirk that dogged a person from life to life.

“The fuck you do,” the guy said again, but he had visibly shriveled.

The bar was quiet as Daniel left. He was ashamed of himself. He was disappointed and tired. He used to do that kind of thing. He’d punish people with the secrets and vulnerabilities they didn’t understand. But he stopped many lives ago. They would forget the punishment, eventually, but he would carry it with him.

In his last life, when he was seven, he’d met a man in his uncle’s office who was tormented by his need to have his healthy leg amputated above the knee. Everyone thought the man was deranged, naturally, including the man himself, and no doctor would perform the surgery. But Daniel remembered him from before, and he understood. Not everything, but just a little bit. He remembered that he’d been a soldier and that he’d lost his leg at the Somme when he was seventeen. Daniel told him everything he remembered. But that wasn’t for punishment or retribution. That was mercy.

LUCY WAS ALONE in her dorm room early on a Friday evening in October when the house phone rang from the lobby.

“Is this Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“Hey. It’s Alexander.”

“Alexander? What are you doing here? Are you downstairs?”

“Yeah. Can I come up?”

“Marnie’s not here. She’s in Blacksburg until tomorrow.”

“Can I come up anyway?”

Lucy glanced up at the clock. She glanced down at her pajamas. She’d been planning an evening in her bed with Emily Brontë, but she couldn’t exactly turn Marnie’s little brother away. “Okay. Give me a couple minutes to get dressed.”

He didn’t give her a couple minutes. He was knocking on the door inside of one minute.

She let him wait. When she opened the door he almost tackled her in a hug.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him again when she got loose of him.

“I’m college visiting.”

“Really? Are you a senior already?”

“Yes, I’m a senior already.” He might have looked hurt if he was capable of it. “I’ll be eighteen in January.”

“Does Marnie know you are here?”

He shrugged. “I might have mentioned it to her. I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Well, that’s funny, because she didn’t mention it to me, and also she went to Blacksburg.”

He shrugged again without looking the least bit rueful. She’d known Alexander since he was a baby, and he was probably the most well-meaning and least conscientious person she knew.

“Can I stay anyway?”

He had an absurdly appealing smile, and he always had.

“Do your parents know you’re here?”

“Sure,” he said, as committally as he said anything.

She laughed in spite of herself. “Okay, I guess you can stay.” She’d barely finished the sentence when he’d thrown his bag on the ground and jumped onto Marnie’s bed and lay back on it.