The Unknowns (21 page)

After another hour the shadows of the hills outside begin to spread, and the guests take this as permission to leave. On her way out, Stacey says, “I’ll get your email from your mom and give it to the kids. I’m sure they’d love to know what you’re up to.” Finally Mom and I are alone.

“So that was nice,” she says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t plan better,” I say.

“Oh no, well, no, don’t worry about it,” she says. “I don’t think anyone really likes birthday cake anyway, do they? And this,” touching the brooch, “is really special.”

Soon the central heating shudders on, and we order Domino’s and watch the news: two kids are dead in a house fire in Colorado
Springs, and someone forged the evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger. I try to come up with things to say about the stories, but I keep thinking about my mother sitting here alone, with a frozen dinner instead of a pizza. Tomorrow she will drive me to the airport. I had imagined some kind of dull social calendar revolving around book group and NA meetings, but there is no evidence that any such events have been skipped or rescheduled on account of my visit. The house: I thought it was the right thing but it’s too big, too empty, a consolation prize. Mom watches TV while I stare out at the last traces of light, barely enough to distinguish the hills from the sky.

Maya comes downstairs in her jacket. I am carrying plastic bags containing a six-pack of beer, a loaf of French bread, and two different kinds of cheese. When she appears in the doorway I quash the impulse to pick her up and spin her around because many small people dislike being picked up, even affectionately, and this probably goes double for small people who have been sexually abused. I’ve advised her to snack, since Cynthia has a weird metabolism and no sense of ordinary physical appetites; she once served six people a dinner consisting of nothing but roasted yams. As we walk over there I try to tell Maya about my mom’s birthday party. It’s a delicate task, because I don’t want to pierce the bubble of sadness that’s been sitting on my chest ever since. The cake debacle I omit entirely.

“It’s as if she’s on the moon out there,” I say. “A hundred identical houses, just far enough apart that you never see another human being.”

She stops to push a piece of sidewalk jetsam to the curb with her foot, with a care that seems protective of both the trash and the foot. “That’s not how I think of the moon,” she says.

Cynthia and Maya were introduced at the party, but this is their first meeting with me in common. As they greet each other at the
door, they project the knowingness one uses with friends of friends, to announce
I’ve heard good things about you
. Cynthia leads us up the stairs and into the kitchen, where Sam is sitting at the table, slouched low in her chair. She doesn’t stand when we come in. I recognize her as the sartorially butch/physically femme half of that couple at the party: slight and pretty, with a thin, unformed face and tight black curls. She could almost pass as a boy but for her creamy skin and the platinum stud like a mole in her upper lip. The trend among San Francisco lesbians is to stake out a position on the border between butchdom and transgenderhood, where pronoun choices are fraught and unpredictable. (Cynthia has explained this to me with the earnest pedantry of someone displaying recently acquired knowledge.) For a straight man, lesbianism is like communism: utopian in theory, disappointing in practice. Maya and I sit down and open beers as Cynthia pushes some kale around on the stove.

“So how did you guys meet?” Maya asks Sam.

“Mutual friends,” says Sam with a self-deprecating roll of the eyes, as though this were universally agreed to be the dullest and least promising way to meet.

“And you guys met here!” Cynthia says. “I’m so proud!” She turns and holds out her beer for us to clink. I would toast more enthusiastically were it not for the botched nature of that meeting. It was here that I was introduced to her, fixed her a cocktail, failed to speak to her. This is where the whole thing started, and now it’s where the end is about to begin.

When Cynthia sets down the plates of kale and green beans, I try to catch Maya’s eye so we can share a humorous look, but she’s too polite for that. We start to eat, and there’s a little pause in which we savor our food and wonder what we’re going to talk about. Maya, who is professionally skilled at meeting people, begins questioning Cynthia, starting with her job but probing backward into her childhood and forward into her ambitions. I remember having that
intense, benevolent scrutiny trained on me, and I miss being the object of her curiosity. Maya’s skill at interrogation gets results, as usual: I didn’t know Cynthia was thinking about training to be a nurse practitioner, or that she sometimes considers moving back to Denver. In anticipation of this evening I’ve nurtured a fantasy in which Maya and Cynthia become friends and the three of us form a group with me at the center. In reality, though, their obvious amity threatens to unstop and blend separate vats of emotion in me, a disconcerting prospect. I tear off some French bread and spread a dollop of soft cheese over it.

As she fetches a second round of beers, Cynthia announces that armed National Guard troops are posted at either end of the Bay Bridge again. They come and go according to geopolitical weather patterns indecipherable to civilians.

“So now we’re going to invade Iraq,” Sam says. Her tone is jaded, almost bored. At some point an invasion has become inevitable.

“I keep thinking I missed something,” says Cynthia. “Like, didn’t some other people just attack us? And so now we’re going to invade a completely different country, just because they’ve got nuclear weapons? I mean, Canada’s got nuclear weapons, right? Are we going to invade Canada?”

“Yeah, but they don’t have oil,” Sam says. Her arm rests on the back of Cynthia’s chair, and she strokes the back of Cynthia’s neck while she talks.

Maya is knowledgeable and eloquent on the subject of the looming war, and Cynthia and Sam are soon reduced to echoes. I’m the least politically astute person at the table: I’ve just spent two and a half years preoccupied with the challenges of personalized online marketing. I didn’t vote in the 2000 election—Bill and I were too busy to register, and California was a lock anyway, and neither of the candidates seemed especially inspiring or scary. What interested me most was that the election was essentially a tie, and that the balance
was tipped by poor interface design. Bill and I laughed about it for thirty seconds and then went back to work. As the conversation becomes an exercise in emphatic agreement—the invasion is a done deal, an oil grab, a sop to the energy services companies, a fuck-you to international opinion, a narcissistic projection of imperial power, an Oedipal acting-out—I find myself missing Demographic of One. For thirty-five months Bill and I made two dozen decisions every day: which protocols to use, which features to build, what to do first, what to skip. (Bill usually deferred to me on design and won the technical arguments on the merits. I changed his mind exactly twice, and in fifty years I’ll still remember how.) A discussion like this one, that gets its strength from the fact that everyone shares a position, would have been an unthinkable waste of resources. All I wanted during that time was a girlfriend, and now, in a striking proof of the ineradicability of human loneliness, I’ve got this great girlfriend and I miss working sixteen hours a day with Bill Fleig.

“And it’s really
convenient
for them that 9/11 happens right after Bush becomes president,” Sam is saying, with the half-ironic smile of the conspiracy theorist.

“So what about the WMDs?” I say. Sam gives a derisive little snort. I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase
WMDs
before tonight, and it sounds phony and stupid. “Obviously the president is an idiot. But that doesn’t change the fact that maybe they’ve got these weapons.”

Maya is unruffled. “That’s what UN inspections are for,” she says. “Look, this is the same thing the government has always done. They create these villains to scare us, and then they exploit that fear.”

I don’t want to challenge her, but the prevailing and totally unearned confidence sets me on edge. There’s too much we don’t know, and even if we had access to all the classified intelligence, the situation involves too many interdependent variables to allow anyone to predict outcomes with any confidence. “I’m not saying we should
invade,” I say. Cynthia and Sam are shuttling their eyes back and forth. “I just think we need to be wary of getting into a little festival of certainty. Can’t we admit that we don’t really know?”

Maya sets down her knife and fork. “You can reserve judgment as long as you like,” she says. “And, you know, congratulations, you’ve won the gold medal for scrupulous empiricism or whatever. But meanwhile you’re abandoning the battlefield to the other side.”

I give a little nod of concession and get up, shaking with disloyalty, to clear the plates and fetch the ice cream. There’s a silence while the air clears. Political disagreement is rare in San Francisco in 2003: the areas of consensus are just so vast.

“Do you write about this stuff for the paper?” Cynthia asks Maya, bringing the subject into a personal register and thus defusing it.

Maya shifts gears easily. “No, I do local-government stuff,” she says. “Sometimes it feels a little irrelevant, especially these days.”

Standing at the counter I force the scoop into the overfrozen ice cream. Sam mentions an acquaintance who writes a nightlife column for Maya’s paper, and they compare notes. Sam appears to treat the world as a set of interconnected play structures to which she has total access: gender, fashion, clubland. The recovery movement and its therapists and sweaters and self-help workbooks must seem passé to her. A historical shift has taken place while I wasn’t watching, and among young radical women the emphasis has shifted from personal oppression to self-definition. A few years ago, sexual abuse was the only thing on daytime TV. Now it’s anthrax attacks and shoe bombs and chemical weapons. So what happened to the sexual abuse? Maya’s talking now about her editor, her assignments, things I’ve heard before, and I imagine her as a helpless child, her father creeping down the hall to her room. I picture him as the Hooded Claw from the
Perils of Penelope Pitstop
cartoons. I have trouble envisioning the abusive act itself. Although of course it happens. And she’s
never said he was actually inside her. Her memories aren’t clear. This line of thought is about to destroy everything. There are weapons, hidden out in the desert, or else there aren’t. The babies ripped from their incubators a decade ago in Kuwait, left on the cold floor to die, were a fabrication. These blurry sense-memories that vanish and then return, like lost sailors to their families’ doorsteps: him pressing up against her in the night, his hands on her body, his breath on her face. How sure can she be?

WHEN I WAS SEVEN
, Nicky’s mom dropped me off at home and I knew that my parents had been waiting for me, although I’m not sure how I knew this. My mom said, “We’re getting what’s called a divorce.” I knew the word—it had happened to Dennis Yoder’s parents, and everyone was really quiet around him for a few weeks—but I wasn’t sure what it meant in practical terms. My father was teaching evening classes and often came home after I was asleep. I don’t know that I was sure who he was or why he lived with us.

It was explained that Dad was going to move into an apartment in the neighborhood, and I was going to visit him there sometimes. I didn’t understand why I would be visiting him. Would it be like when we visited grown-ups who didn’t have any kids and there weren’t any toys there? I asked about that, and my dad said he’d get some toys. He sounded tired when he said it, and I thought that the toy store must be really far away from his apartment.

And then my mom said, “This doesn’t mean we don’t love you anymore. You understand that, right?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that what they were saying had anything to do with their love for me. They didn’t want to be married to each other, and having been around their marriage I didn’t blame
them. But the idea that they didn’t love me anymore got stuck in my back teeth and I couldn’t get it out with my tongue.

The most painful ideas are the hardest to dislodge.

When we get home from Cynthia’s I pretend to be drunker than I am, gulping down a big glass of water, tossing my jacket onto the couch. I say I’m tired too many times, and then we go to bed and I lie awake for seven hours.

Maya can wake herself at the time of her choice. At six minutes to seven she slips out of bed, fully alert, like someone moving from one scheduled activity to the next. As she dresses I lie still and imitate the even breaths of refreshing stage-four sleep. Her ablutions seem to take an inordinately long time. Finally the apartment door swings shut and I roll onto my back and look up at the ceiling and with no enthusiasm begin to masturbate. I used to masturbate with a dry hand, and then I discovered the advantage gained by lubricating your palm with saliva, and now I can’t remember how I used to do it without chafing. Perhaps I began with delicate little strokes, and for ten years I’ve been incrementally increasing the pressure in the interest of a more stimulating masturbatory experience, and now I flail at myself with vigorous pumps that would have frightened and overwhelmed me a decade ago. When this feeble attempt at self-soothing is finished I shower, make coffee, sit down on the couch, turn on the TV, and look back and forth between CNN and the gray view outside until at last I pick up the laptop from the coffee table.

If you were to make a map of the web pages that turn up when you Google the term
recovered memory
, you’d see two clusters. One represents the recovery movement, which advocates for people who believe they’ve been abused. The other represents the false memory movement, which defends people who claim they’ve been wrongly accused. There are lots of connections within the clusters, but very few between them. Both sides have tragic stories to tell: traumatized children molested by trusted adults, innocent parents caught up in
witch hunts. Some recovered memories have been corroborated; some have been disproved or recanted. Most of the websites are made by amateurs, and their clumsy designs make both sides seem crankish and untrustworthy.