You Lost Me There (6 page)

“How do you think? I call the office, your lab manager tells me you’re working at home. I call the house, no one’s there. It’s too late for you to be swimming at the gym. Where else would you be?”

I conceded the point. “But why?”

Betsy stuck out her lips, pulled a lipstick down from the visor, and applied it slowly in practiced loops. Her white hair was pasted flat on her head, with a slight flip at the ends, as though she’d been wearing a swim cap. Her trusty beach hat lay on the passenger seat.

“My boyfriend wants to know why I want to see him. Well, I need assistance.”

“With what?”

“Oh
forget
it, Victor.”

“Now what?”

“Will you buy a lady a drink?”

“How about coffee?”

“I don’t want coffee.”

“Well, all right, then.”

Betsy snapped the top back on her lipstick.

“You’ve stopped drinking beer, prig? But after we finish working, let’s go.”

I was about to ask, and then I noticed the picket signs.

Downtown in Northeast Harbor, along the boardwalk, I insisted on staying in the car. I’d told Betsy before, hers was a solo mission, but I did help set up her station: a card table, a folding chair, and her hand-lettered signs: GEORGE BUSH, AL QAEDA RECRUITER OF THE YEAR and YEE-HA IS NOT FOREIGN POLICY and GUESS I DESERVE WHAT YOU MORONS WANTED. Not that I disagreed with her politics, I just wasn’t the protest type.

Aunt Betsy and Sara used to stay up late discussing the news, Betsy taking the socialist fight to Sara’s gradual, resentful right-leaning (Clinton had ruined her liberal side). When there wasn’t enough gossip to fill the day, Betsy clipped stories from the newspapers and added them to a Bush-Cheney conspiracy map she was building on her dining room wall from Post-it notes. Recently, she’d begun speaking truth to the sidewalk. Her argument, that Northeast Harbor saw more policy makers than K Street on an average summer weekday, wasn’t illogical. Both the Cap Weinberger estate and Senator George Mitchell’s house were down the road, though in opposite directions.

She returned twenty minutes later. “Roll down the window!”

“Do you want a hand?”

“Too late. Nobody’s listening. They think I’m a skinny old joke.” Two hikers walked away, smiling to themselves. “Besides, Bayne says I’m driving away customers, isn’t he smug.”

Bayne Gifford was staring at us from inside his ice cream store, hands in his apron pockets. Betsy stared right back at him. Both were the geologic embodiment of traditional Maine obstinacy, like Sara refusing to wear a seat belt.

“He doesn’t understand we’re at war,” Betsy said. “Sacrifice is expected.”

I suggested we sacrifice my Visa over lunch. Northeast Harbor was a small village with a single main street, where wealthy people went to feel quainter about themselves. Some old folks stopped Betsy on the sidewalk to say hello, twenty-five minutes of hello. We passed a jewelry store, and Betsy admired a necklace in the window made from lacquered coral. An hour later, after lunch at a seafood restaurant, I presented it to her across the table, feeling quite pleased with myself.

From my view of the harbor, it looked like there were only five docks. At that moment, losing my sexual capacity seemed a bailout. Now I could enjoy the simple pleasures in life: work, music, nature, my elderly girlfriend easily and not too expensively satisfied.

“You’re a damn nuisance,” Betsy said, and dropped the necklace on the table. “Oh, Victor. You know, I was thinking about Sara this morning,” she said a moment later. “I had a dream. It was that night she showed up on our doorstep, when she was sixteen.”

“The big fight.”

“Now, it wasn’t the shock you’d figure. Ginnie
always
was drinking, you never knew what would happen next.” Ginnie was Betsy’s sister-in-law, Sara’s mother, who had long since passed away from cancer. “But it was terrible, this plan of Sara’s. Three in the morning, a bus ticket for San Francisco. Sara ringing the doorbell like she’s the one who’s been drinking. She was there to say good-bye, you know. Personally, I felt like I was losing Joel all over again. Good-bye forever, she said. Because she hit poor Ginnie.”

Joel was Betsy’s only child. As a teenager, he’d run away from boarding school and vanished, drifting with druggie friends through California beach towns. Subsequently, though, he’d surprised everyone by becoming an accomplished chef. He now ran a restaurant on the island where I ate frequently, at least when I could afford to.

But something sounded wrong about Betsy’s story. I said, “She was hit, you mean. Ginnie hit Sara. That’s what made Sara want to leave home.”

Betsy put down her coffee. “What are you talking about?”

“Her mother was the one—”

“Ginnie was punched straight in the craw, is what happened. Her mouth, Sara’s fist, and she deserved it. If anyone in our family had had an ounce of nerve, she would’ve been locked up in a drunk tank years earlier. Think of the embarrassment, Victor, being
sick
on the floor at the poor girl’s school play? I don’t blame Sara a smidge.”

“See, I would swear it was the other way around,” I said.

“Well, you swear wrong. Check, please.”

“You don’t want dessert?”

Betsy leveraged herself to a standing position and unwrapped a toothpick, pinpointing me with her stare.

“You need to get yourself a girl, Victor.”

 

 

 

Two months after Sara’s funeral, I was taking the garbage out in the rain when I discovered that someone had left a pile of leaking trash bags in the shed. The place stank. Someone must have unlocked the door and dumped his trash, even made a routine of it, but who would do that?

I was gathering up coffee grounds with a dustpan, angry and wet and late for work, when I realized the culprit was me. I’d canceled the pick-up service. The week after Sara died, I’d been in the kitchen and remembered her saying how we could save money by driving the trash to the dump ourselves. And right away I’d called the garbage company, canceled service, and promptly forgotten about it. For weeks I didn’t notice the trash piling up.

 

 

 

The next morning, I couldn’t picture going to work. Lucy and the rest would take care of themselves. Why else did we have lab managers? The news announcer on the radio said it was the president’s birthday, which reminded me I needed to send Russell a thank-you note for the case of wine. No matter that I’d see him over the weekend. While running for office as greatest American housewife, my mother never let a thank-you note go unwritten.

I was reminded of one of Sara’s jokes about WASPs:

Why don’t WASPs attend orgies?

Too many thank-you notes to write.

My mother never liked Russell. He reminded her of my cousins, the ones who played dice during school. Except Russell was a good math student, a lettered varsity athlete, and a boy scout. Plus, I didn’t have many friends, so she didn’t do more than scold him when he was digging through her refrigerator, or banish him for a week the time he brought over a nudie book. But we’d been joined at the hip. Both the sons of proud and insufferable immigrant tribes, we shared the same dreams: to bat for the Yankees, sleep with Lana Turner, go to Harvard, or at least run away from Long Island, speed as far away as possible in miles and ambition from our thousand respective short-sighted relatives. For college, I went to Chicago, and Russell attended Yale on a wrestling scholarship. But I eventually got to Harvard as a young Ph.D. doing research, and Russell dated a girl who’d once given Don Mattingly a blow job in the Yankees’ parking lot. We decided that we’d done okay.

Russell had been married eight years to a woman named Suzanne until he discovered her sleeping with a Christmas tree farmer, the man who’d sold them the family Christmas tree that year. Now Russell was single in Manhattan, housing Cornelia, his and Suzanne’s daughter, fresh out of college. Cornelia, whom Russell had raised on the Upper West Side, after she refused to live with her stepfather, the tree farmer—“Fucknut,” according to both Cornelia and Russell. Russell adored his daughter, so did everyone. Cornelia was curious, kind-hearted, and vain, a vegan waif spoiled rotten by her father. Sara used to say she was a lot like herself at that age, and she’d said it when Cornelia was five, ten, and fifteen.

I sat at my desk and scribbled a quick note, sealed the envelope, and went looking for my address book, but came up empty. I looked around my office, in the kitchen drawers. It was gone. I must have left it at work. Then I remembered Sara’s Rolodex, that it would have Russell’s address, too.

Only a few times since the accident had I gone into her office. The cleaning lady swept through once a week, but with instructions not to disturb anything. The process had been never-ending, bagging up Sara’s things after she died. I still found old parkas in the attic, moisturizers in baskets in the living room. Small pots of hand cream rolling around the bottom of the sea.

But here were the framed movie posters above her desk. Sara’s lucky black cowboy boots, like two chimneys by the garden door. Walls covered in corkboards and mementos: posters from her performance-art days and theater years, stills from the set of
The Hook-Up
and group pictures with the crew. Opposite the door was a green velvet daybed, a set piece from the movie
.
The director had shipped it to Sara with a matching throw pillow, embroidered, “Write me another.”

I found the Rolodex sitting on her desk. I scribbled down Russell’s address, and closed the door behind me. A moment later, something pulled me back. The book the Rolodex had been sitting on had a few dozen index cards sticking out, covered with Sara’s handwriting. I read the card on top.

I sat down, my shoes glued to the floor.

I was back to the marriage counselor’s office in Bar Harbor. The smell from the forsythia bushes in the parking lot. I held the card up to the light and reread the line about Sara hitting her mother.

How had I gotten that wrong?

If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does it say about their respective minds? But obviously I hadn’t experienced it. Sara had been in high school at the time, fighting with her drunk mother after she threw up at the school play. For Sara, it was a memory. For me, an anecdote.

Dazed, I pulled out the other cards and set them aside. I picked up the book, a Dashiell Hammett novel. The price sticker on the back was from a bookstore in Culver City.

Los Angeles.

In the fall before her accident, Sara had convinced me to attend a marriage-counseling appointment with her therapist, Dr. Carrellas. It did not go well. Like many neuroscientists, I wasn’t a big fan of psychoanalysis. For me, anything occurring in the brain was biological, a case for pathway analysis. Huntington’s and Parkinson’s had their own neighborhoods; someday we’d discover that mental illness did, too. None of us were the product of blockaded mommy dreams.

Carrellas gave us a writing assignment at the end of the appointment for homework: to select five changes of direction in our marriage, and describe each one on an index card. I remembered fighting about it afterward in the parking lot: I was shouting at Sara about why our life together should conform to this schoolmarm’s diagram, some diagnostic manual?

Soon afterward, Sara moved to Los Angeles. A trial separation lasting six weeks, though it never was named as such. Sara simply left. She didn’t call from California, never e-mailed. I thought she was gone forever. I was waiting for divorce papers to arrive. When she returned, she told me about her idea that we’d take a second honeymoon in Italy; then she died in the car accident two weeks later.

One night after the funeral, I wrote out a letter:
Dear Dr. Carrellas, My marriage went in a single direction, and then it stopped.

I wrote it, but I never sent it.

Five changes of direction, five cards. I counted: there were fifty-four cards on Sara’s desk.

Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place.
But what movie? I stood up, scooped up the cards, took them upstairs, dropped them on my bureau, and weighed them down with my keys.