My Name Is Memory (28 page)

“Is that right?” he said distractedly, wanting to be companionable.

“Yes. We have a fine library at the end of our street.”

“Haven’t you read it before?’

“I suppose.” She laughed in a way that was remarkably ditsy, considering she’d lived forever. “I love it.”

He nodded, wiping some sort of sauce from the ceiling. “What became of him?”

“Proust, you mean?”

“Yes. Did he have a memory?” If you caught Ben on a topic that interested him and was irrelevant, you could get odd bits of information to fall out.

She shook her head so her little gold earrings wobbled. “Not a stitch.” She thought for a moment. “He’s a housewife in southern Kentucky. A very competitive bridge player.”

“Not a stitch?” he said, surprised.

“Not a stitch. And Joyce, you know, is gone.”

“He’s gone?’

“He only lived the one life. But he lived it brightly.”

“Huh. No memory there, I guess.”

“No. And Freud, neither. Did you know that?”

“I couldn’t have guessed,” he said.

“But Jung certainly did,” Amita said animatedly. “And so did his mother.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

He wound around to the question he needed to ask. “Does this . . . dangerous friend have a memory?” he asked slowly.

She shrugged in her carefree way, but her eyes shone with a complexity he couldn’t read. “It isn’t just us, you know,” she said a little sadly.

AMITA WANTED HIM to stay the night. She offered him half her bed with a solemn promise not to lay a hand. The lift of her eyebrows made him laugh, which he might have thought was impossible at that moment. But he told her no. He had to get home.

She seemed sad when she hugged him. “You love your memory, but you need to love your girl,” she said by way of parting. “You remember what is lost, and you forget what’s right in front of you.”

He knew what she was trying to say, but he couldn’t be like her. “If I let go, who else is there to remember?” he said with unavoidable melancholy. “It will be gone.”

She sighed. “It is gone.”

DANIEL STOOD IN front of Campbell Hall. He looked at the windows where the lights shone and wondered if she was behind any of them. He’d come to Charlottesville three times in the last ten days, and he hadn’t set eyes on her, but still he felt a sense of comfort. She’d graduated. She could choose to live anywhere in the wide world, yet she’d come back here. He had the address of her apartment on Oak Street, but he hadn’t gone there.

In a few small ways he’d gotten warmer. He’d made friends with the guard who manned the entrance to the architecture studios. He’d spoken with a graduate student named Rose who was acquainted with Lucy and seemed to spend every waking hour in the studio. He’d made it sound to them as though he and Lucy were friends, and he felt a bit guilty for that. He hated to be creepy, and he didn’t want to intrude on her, but his worries had become acute since he’d returned from India. He wouldn’t bother her. He’d just make sure she was all right.

He hung around the entrance until he saw Rose, returning from dinner, he guessed.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

“Good. You waiting for Lucy?”

“Yes, we were supposed to grab a late dinner,” he lied. “You haven’t seen her, have you?”

“No,” Rose said knowledgeably. “She used to be here every night until midnight, but she hasn’t been staying late the last few nights.” She took on a conspiratorial look. “The rumor around the studio is that Lucy has a boyfriend.”

Daniel wondered if Rose had a cruel nature. “Oh, yeah?” he said casually.

“She was all dressed up when she left on Wednesday night. Nobody’s used to seeing her wearing heels and makeup. She made a big impression.”

Daniel found himself hating Rose. “Okay, well. Good for her. I hadn’t heard about that.” He had an uncomfortably fake look stamped on his face, and his only challenge was to keep it there. “I might have forgotten to leave her the message about dinner,” he added lamely. He pictured Rose as a Stasi informant in her previous life.

So Lucy was suddenly a girl with a boyfriend. What a dumb term that was. He tried to remember when, in the history of the language, that had started up. He’d never be her boyfriend. You’d be anything she wanted you to be, a more honest part of himself countered.

As he walked away from Campbell Hall, Daniel felt immature and jealous, but he didn’t feel alarmed. That was the one good thing. Lucy got dressed up. She went out with her boyfriend. There was no sign of Joaquim in any of that. It was depressing to think of her having a boyfriend, but he felt sure Joaquim couldn’t get close to her in that way. If Daniel knew anything, Lucy would find Joaquim’s presence deeply discomforting.

He trudged to his car slowly and with a craving he didn’t often feel or, in any case, allow.

Without thinking, he drove north to Fairfax. He followed roads he’d learned as a teenager in the eighties. His mother used to let him borrow her red Toyota Celica, and he’d drive across the Potomac River at night to see the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials glowing white against the dark sky. His father had discouraged it, but Molly almost always said okay.

He had an aching feeling as he drove up to the old house. He didn’t really mean to drive all the way to the house and stop, but now he was here. He hadn’t been here in twenty-two years.

If he could have left the world alone, maybe he’d live around the corner now. He could see Molly and his dad and his brothers all the time. Maybe he’d be married and well employed, using his huge experience for some good. Maybe he’d be a teacher like his parents. He could offer a unique perspective on history, that was for sure. Or maybe he’d just mow his lawn and whack his weeds and try to forget everything but the games on Sunday. Sometimes he felt sure that the key to happiness was a poor memory.

His old parents would be pushing seventy, assuming they were still alive. Did they still live here? He looked up at the front porch and squinted at the flowers. Even in the dark he knew they were dahlias, and that was his answer.

A light was on in the kitchen and a bluish TV light upstairs. He could picture the house as though it were his. It was his, once. Why couldn’t it belong to him anymore? Why couldn’t he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.

He thought of his brothers, the three Robinson boys all cleaned up for church. His mother with her wintergreen Life Savers and stickers and coloring books to keep them quiet. And Daniel never needed them. He was always looking for Sophia. Did that hurt her feelings then?

She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew. She sat on his bed at night and tried to get him to talk to her, thinking she could get closer to whatever faraway thing it was he kept from her. She’d loved him as much as he’d let her. More than he’d let her; you couldn’t control everything.

Then he’d disappeared without a reason, without ever giving her a moment of satisfaction. She didn’t deserve that. There was a hole there still. He knew it if he was honest with himself. It was his as much as hers. He wished he could feel about himself now the way he’d felt then.

And here he was, sitting perfectly well and alive outside her house. But what good did that do her? What good did it do him?

I don’t want to go forward, I want to go back. He didn’t want to go forward, but he always wanted to get another chance. He was all starts and endings, where people like Molly lived in the middle as if it was all they had.

He found himself wishing that Molly would come out of the house. He thought of her crooked front teeth and her freckles and her fuzzy gray hair and he ached with missing her. But she didn’t come out. Why would she? He sat alone in his car.

It wouldn’t have been much different if he was dead. His memory made him invisible over time, even to the people he felt he knew and loved most. Not even they knew him or cared about him anymore. You could pretend you were in control of all the relationships when the people you loved didn’t know you anymore.

He was more like a ghost than a person, watching people, waiting for people. Not to talk to them or hold them or build a life with them but just to remember them.

LUCY GOT A little drunk when she was with Daniel. He took her to nice restaurants, always ordered wine for them, and confidently paid the bill. She eagerly drank whatever it was. She was in a perpetual state of fuzziness with him.

Why do I do that? she wondered. She didn’t do it other times. She liked to keep her wits close by. Why was she so eager to part with them when she was in his company?

Now came the end of dinner, melting chocolate cake somewhat romantically shared for dessert, and the bill was on its way. He must earn a lot of money at his job, she decided.

She looked at him across the table. She could hardly remember the old Daniel, she had worked so hard to conjoin the two faces. She felt a moment of boldness and let her mind wander back to an old conversation they had had.

“You used to call me Sophia,” she said.

“When was that?”

“In high school. At that miserable last party. You can’t have forgotten that.”

He ran his forefinger along the clothed edge of the table. “You used to be Sophia.”

“A long time ago, right?” She was definitely tipsy.

“Yes. Very long.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“I just do. Some people remember a long time back.”

“I wish I could remember.”

“It’s not all good,” he said.

“Do you remember Constance?”

The pretty waitress came across the room with the bill. He examined it as he answered her. “Of course.”

“How do you recognize someone? From one life to another? I don’t understand how you do that.”

He signed and stood up. “Let’s go outside, okay?”

He didn’t wait for her to agree, so she just followed him through the gauntlet of the coat check and the valet parking and all the tips she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to pay. She usually tucked a few dollars here and there just in case.

Standing in front of the restaurant, he turned to her and grabbed her in one motion. His lips were on hers before she could equivocate. He always wanted to kiss her and grab her in public places, which was the opposite of what she wanted.

She tried to respond, but her body was shaking, her ribs and her knees and her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering too much to kiss. She pulled away to spare him.

“Will you come home with me?” he asked, putting a couple of fingers under the waistband of her skirt. “Please?”

Would she? She couldn’t. She wanted to drink so much wine that she could, but she hadn’t found that much yet. “I can’t.”

She remembered, with a flush, how eager she’d been to have his knee under her dress in high school, how she’d been kissing him before they’d exchanged ten sentences. She was beginning to wonder how much or little the soul really counted for.

The car arrived via the eager valet before he could get his hands into her tights. He drove a Porsche, which gave him things to say to the valet, and that was a relief.

“Why can’t you?” he asked, sitting her on his lap on the hood of the coveted car after the valet had gone off to park an SUV.

“I have classes tomorrow. I have a studio crit. I’m supposed to finish a model.”

He nodded acceptingly. He didn’t seem to know that three excuses were as good as none. He thrust his hands under her coat and shirt, and burrowed them under her bra. He did know about some things.

His hands were cold on her. That’s why she was still shaking.

“Next time?”

“Next time,” she said. It was a ritual between them. It was always next time.

He lit a cigarette and walked her to her shitty car, which she’d parked at the edge of the lot. She was embarrassed to turn it over to a valet.

“Tell me about Sophia,” she asked, her breath making a cloud. Her cloud was a white puff, and his was a gray twist. She wanted something to hold on to so she could believe in next time.

“Like what?”

“What did she mean to you?”

He drew his hands away. “She was my wife.”

“Was she?”

“Yes.”

“Did you love her?” It was the wine talking. It was next time talking. He wasn’t even touching her and she felt the shaking and the chattering as though she was afraid. I’m not afraid. What do I have to be afraid of?

He looked at her. “Not as well as I should have.”

“HE’S REALLY DIFFERENT NOW.” Lucy was trying to explain her dinner with Daniel to Marnie. She had hoped Marnie would be asleep when she came in, but Marnie had been sitting on the sofa in their miniature living room, alert, with her computer in her lap, when Lucy eased open the door.

“How much difference can a few years make?” Marnie asked. Marnie, typically, was asking the right questions, and Lucy was copping out.

“Well, in his case . . . big.” Lucy guessed they were talking quietly because Leo was asleep. She took a long time about her coat and hat and boots and socks.

“What do you mean?”

Lucy wanted to explain what she really meant, but how could she? Marnie thought she wanted to know, but did she really? She’d caused Marnie plenty of consternation already. Marnie missed the old friendship, when Lucy told her everything; she didn’t understand what had happened to change it. Lucy missed the old friendship, too, but she couldn’t get back to it. Nor could Lucy bring herself to tell Marnie the truth. Because the truth wouldn’t be comforting and wouldn’t bring them closer again.

“Just that . . . it’s hard to explain.” How much do you really want to know? was what she wanted to ask her.

“When are you going to bring him around? Are you hiding him? I want to see.”

Lucy was absolutely hiding him. How could she possibly account for the fact that he bore no physical resemblance to the Daniel she knew? It had been painful enough dismantling the universe to make room for him. She couldn’t bear to force all that on Marnie. “No. No. He’ll be around sometime. He works in D.C. He’s got a real job, and he’s busy.”