We Only Know So Much (8 page)

thirteen

T
oday Vivian has a bridge game with two of her oldest friends, and a fourth who’s eighty-five. They call her The Baby. Vivian, Berenice, and Flora have been friends since college. The Baby is Flora’s cousin. They’re in the middle of a lively discussion about Berenice’s great-granddaughter, who’s expecting and
unmarried
. Berenice is, predictably, all aflutter about it.

Well, it’s just a different time
, Flora says, shaking her head.

Go ahead and assume there’s a lot of head-shaking going on around the table here.

I’ll say
, The Baby says.

Yes, but the poor child!
Berenice says.

No father!
Flora says.

Well, now I hear they live together
, Berenice says.

Oh dear. Oh dear
, The Baby says.

And apparently he’s Catholic
, Berenice adds.

Oh dear. Oh
, The Baby says.

Wears his hair long
,
says Berenice. Long, we should note here, meaning it brushes the top of his shirt collar.

Oh!

Flora, Vivian’s partner, plays her hand.
Oh!
Vivian says, letting out a not-subtle huff of displeasure.
You trumped my trick! Well!
Flora says nothing.

Oh, well, I don’t know if that’s true
, says Berenice.
He may have cut it since I saw him. But it was long then.

Well, it’s just a different time
, Flora says again.

I suppose
, Berenice says.

If you ask me, women’s lib just ruined everything
, Flora says.

Ordinarily, Vivian would relish this conversation. Ordinarily, Vivian would dip into her story bank and pull out the one about the girl she taught at the one-room schoolhouse who’d had an illegal abortion. It’s not one she tells often, she doesn’t like to say the word “abortion,” has actually told it many times without using the word at all, but it’s a good one, always gets rapt, shocked responses from the girls, even though they’ve heard it many times.

But today she’s distracted. Last night there was a lady on
Nancy Grace
who’d swerved to avoid an oncoming car and instead plowed into a homeless man on the sidewalk. Vivian imagines the crunch of every bone, the terrible
mess
; imagines herself in that situation, trying to apologize to police officers, saying she had no idea what happened, truly she didn’t, the car just swerved, it was an accident; imagines them gruffly whisking her off to the slammer, like in the movies; pictures herself in jail, weeping, misunderstood, alone. And so now, in this bridge game, she’s not only missing a terribly juicy story, she’s losing.

Since childhood, Vivian has had a fear of hitting a pedestrian with a car. It’s the reason she doesn’t drive. It’s an event that simply can’t happen, yet it is one she has recurring nightmares about. She’s never been afraid to get into cars as long as someone else is driving; nor is she afraid of crashing into other cars. She would much prefer to crash one car into another car. With two cars, there’s more protection, Vivian thinks, and more places to distribute blame. Hit a pedestrian and you’re a murderer. Her fear is very specific: that she herself will be the driver, the pedestrian-killer. The nightmares and the anxiety are worst just after she’s seen a news report about this type of accident. As far as we know, Vivian has had no similar experience that engendered this fear. It’s a thing that got wedged in her brain when she was a kid and cars were still pretty new, seemed almost as exotic and hard to believe in as rocket ships; in those days stories flew around madly about cars running over people, and it spooked her. She’ll tell you she simply never wanted to drive, that she thought it was the man’s job, but that’s not entirely true. In fact, it’s completely false.

Now and again, Vivian dreams that she’s behind the wheel of a red convertible cruising a winding mountain road, her silver curls blowing in the wind. No one walks in front of her car. On the mornings after Vivian has these dreams, she’s genuinely nice to everyone around her, for about an hour.
What a splendid day it is
, she’ll say.

Vivian
, Berenice says.

Hm?
It takes her a moment to snap out of her mountaintop reverie.

It’s your turn, dear.

Oh!
Vivian looks at her cards, shuffles them around in her hand, embarrassed to have lost her composure.
Oh well yes of course it is. Of course it is. Of course.

fourteen

A
n Internet search of Trudy has yielded Gordon a defunct business profile and a sad—in his opinion—page on a social networking site. First of all, she has twenty-nine friends, which seems like an exceptionally low number, at least compared to the other profiles he looks at. Gordon’s not on any social network, so it hasn’t occurred to him until now that people might use these networks differently. Maybe it was just her very closest friends? Maybe she doesn’t really even use the site? How many good friends does anyone have? Does Gordon have twenty-nine close friends? He doesn’t. Gordon
knows
a lot of people. Some of Trudy’s info is blocked, but there are the requisite sets of photos: tropical vacations with middle-aged girlfriends, holding up speedboat-sized umbrella cocktails; Trudy as one of five identically dressed bridesmaids; adorable, semi-adorable, and less-adorable nieces and nephews; faded, yellow-and-red-tinged scans of old photos, including one from college, a photo of Trudy, him, Phil, and Sheila scrunched together on someone’s top bunk, Sheila half out of the frame, likely because she snapped the photo.

Gordon can remember most of this moment—Phil’s holding a bong, and Gordon got high exactly three times in college, so he remembers them all pretty well—but the inclusion of Trudy in this photo mucks it up for him. He thinks it was the time Phil had to talk him down because he was convinced there was PCP in the pot; how else to explain why Sheila’s spider plant had been waving its arms? Phil had tried to reassure him that it was Sheila, not her spider plant, whose arms were waving, and Gordon vaguely remembers this, but Trudy’s presence in the photo only serves to convince him that something is terribly, terribly wrong with his brain. But then he gets an idea: What if it’s brain damage from the pot, or the possible PCP? Or maybe even chemicals in the plastic of the bong? Gordon wonders if there have been any studies on that. Searching “bags, plastic, chemicals,” turns up a wiki that indeed says that toxic chemicals may be released in such circumstances, possibly associated with cancer—but there’s no mention of brain damage. Is this good news? (He also learns that “bong” is an adaptation of the Thai word “
baung
,” meaning a bamboo tube, something to remember for a relevant conversation someday, although ordinarily he would continue to study the history of the bong and gather quite a bit more information than he’s bothering to do today.) He types in “bong, brain damage,” gets a headshoppy site with a lot of info on different types of bongs that says that the paint from an aluminum-can bong can cause brain damage. Shit, did he ever do that? He can’t remember. That can’t be good.

A search on memory loss only concerns him further. Tumors, medication side effects, and depression are known contributors. He already knows quite a bit about the memory loss associated with Parkinson’s. He has listened carefully to every doctor’s report about his father, taken extensive mental notes. He spends any number of hours taking “memory tests,” though the scientific basis for any of them seems dubious at best.

One test gives him pause. The questions:

1. Do you have difficulty remembering people’s names or phone numbers?

Up until Trudy, it’s been a great source of pride for Gordon that he never forgets a name and has recall for a great many phone numbers as well, even though both his office and cell phones have had numbers programmed in for years, he still dials many of them out of habit. So Gordon marks this one
rarely
.

2. How often do you find yourself trying to remember the location of everyday items (keys, glasses, cell phone, etc.)?

That’s a
never
. Gordon has a valet in his bedroom; all these things go there as soon as he comes home. Has always wondered why they only have these for men, when some women and children he knows could make good use of their own.

3. How often do you have to replace passwords because you’ve forgotten the original one?

Also a
never
. Even though he keeps these on a list on a zip drive in his safe-deposit box, Gordon thinks, he’s yet to actually have to use it. Almost a funny question, he thinks.

4. How often do you find yourself asking questions like, What was I about to do next?

Never.

5. How often do you end up double-booking yourself because you forgot you had previous plans?

Never.
People do this?

6. How often do you have difficulty remembering where you parked your car?

Never!

7. How often do you have to ask someone to repeat instructions or a story because you can’t remember what was said the first time around?

And here’s the reason he didn’t get a perfect score on this test: the one
rarely
and the
sometimes
on question seven. This is where Gordon gets a little tripped up; he answers sometimes, because on the occasion that Gordon isn’t the one talking, he’s waiting to talk, and when he’s waiting to talk, he’s just not listening. He thinks he can do both, but as you can imagine, he doesn’t do it well. So his struggle with this is clear: if he acknowledges that he doesn’t always listen, then he’s acknowledging a character flaw, but if he says it’s because he doesn’t remember, then this problem may actually be a problem.

In this moment, though, looking at this quiz, it’s not quite coming to him that that’s the reason. He’s just trying to bring up some instances. He remembers a time, just the other day, when Jean asked him to pick up a few things at the grocery store on his way home and he had to ask her twice. Then again, he’s got this Trudy thing on his mind. Maybe he could round down to a
rarely
on this one. But he’s nothing if not honest, so he marks it
sometimes
and he gets a 93 on the quiz—which, according to the summary at the end, indicates that Gordon has little difficulty with his memory. The summary includes a reminder that fatigue, stress, and poor diet can contribute to the decline of cognitive functions with age. Gordon scribbles these things down, along with suggestions for improving memory: mnemonic devices, visual associations.

Gordon takes several more tests, one involving a series of words he has to remember, another involving photographs. He passes all of these tests with almost perfect scores, but this does nothing to reassure him that there isn’t some diagnosis, some obscure condition he hasn’t heard of, that is causing his past to tumble out of his mind, one ex-girlfriend at a time.

fifteen

J
ean goes to the first grief support group she finds a listing for online. As support groups go, there aren’t a lot of surprises here. Everyone is sad. Everyone wants to know why. Why these good people, why now, why cancer, why. Good question. Some of them talk about angels—how their loved ones are angels now, or with the angels. Jean would like to believe such a thing, but would have preferred one fewer angel and one more living lover. Plus she’s not sure how to talk about her grief without naming her lover, without giving herself away. So she straight-up lies. When her turn comes to talk, she says
My husband killed himself.
There are minuscule gasps from the others. It’s an unspoken thing that loud reactions are best kept to a minimum. But Jean hears the gasps and finds herself oddly energized. None of these people know her; does it matter? Sometimes she wishes it were true. She doesn’t wish Gordon ill, doesn’t wish the father of her children to be taken away, but of the two? Why James? Doesn’t the world need art more than it needs
effective point-of-purchase representation
and other bombastic nonsense coming out the ass? Jean is almost entirely unaware that the thoughts in her head carry any ire; she thinks of herself as a nice person, she
is
a nice person, all she’s thinking is that they’re true, that she’s never known truth like she knows it now. Maybe for a fragment of a second she’ll become aware that she’s got some anger or something, but she believes it’s entirely justified, and then the next random thought comes and takes over any deeper consideration about it.

The fantasy is an easy one for her to construct. Just a few tweaks to the details, a slight merging of elements of her two relationships in order to best keep it straight. In this fantasy, James is named Jake, and Jean and Jake were married for the same length of time as she and Gordon have been. They have two children, Priscilla and Otis. There’s no Gordon in this scenario, never was. In this scenario, Jean met Jake in graduate school; he was getting his MFA in printmaking, she was getting a masters in books. Wait, what? Education. They married in their backyard, just family. She wore a knee-length yellow shift. Jean taught first grade. Jake was a professor. They were a loving, tight-knit family, excited to sit down for meals together, to play games, take family trips together. Jake was an attentive father and husband. He listened to Jean. She listened to him! He complimented her all the time, said her beauty was
astonishing
, that she was his
beacon, his lighthouse
. James had actually said those things and more.
My love bee
, he called her. He brought her gifts, books he thought she’d like (based on conversations they’d had or other books he knew she’d liked, as opposed to books he thought she should read, like someone else who’d given her books on occasion), made art for her. True as well. Nothing was wrong, everything was right. But.

Here Jean takes a pause. The real story contained in that “but” is one Jean will probably never know. She only knows how it ends.

He shot himself in the head.

Wow, did she really just say that? She did.

Yes, he shot himself in the head and I found him, there he was in his office at school, backward on the floor, flopped half on, half off his desk chair, blood and brains splattered on the window, blood, beginning in a pool, funneling into a line across the floor from one end of the room to the other, which had a slant to it, toward the door.

It’s hard to say who’s more shocked by this part of the story, Jean or the support group. Heads shake. A mouth or two remain open. Tears fall. The group abandons its effort to conceal its gasps. Jean takes their reactions in. She wishes she could say the real truth, that he’d hanged himself, that she’d seen his beautiful eyes half-open with no life in them, couldn’t say that the image of James suspended from the crossbar might as well have been branded onto the backs of her eyelids, such was the likelihood that she’d ever unsee it. She thought it best to create a whole new grisly scenario. The group is silent. Jean is the winner. She hadn’t wanted this victory, but finds herself leaning back in her chair to accept. The people here have lost: parents, beloved aunts, grandparents. Those people died naturally. Those people are supposed to die. Well, aren’t they? If there was someone in the group who’d lost a kid, well, that would be another story. Jean hasn’t lost her ability to empathize with other mothers. But no one here has lost a lover. Isn’t all grief the same? No. It’s not the same, not at all. Hers is the worst.