“Okay. You first.”
The table was littered with crumbs, his and mine. Jake used a plastic knife to scrape the crumbs into a little pile. “There was Betsy Paducah when I was fifteen—her father owned horses in West Virginia, and she was in San Francisco for a summer arts program. Then there was Amanda Chung when I was seventeen, Deb Hipps during my freshman year of college. Janey, forget the last name, the same year, then a serious girlfriend from sophomore year to graduation, Elaine Wayne.” He kept going for a couple of minutes, finishing off the list with Rebecca Walker from a few months before.
“Where did you meet Rebecca?”
“At the high school.”
“Was it a relationship or just a fling?”
“Three months, if you call that a relationship. She’s the only woman I’ve dated since the divorce. Being a single parent doesn’t leave much time for socializing.” He clinked my coffee mug with his own, a toast. “Until you, of course.”
“Who broke up with whom?”
“At the time, I thought it was mutual, but Rebecca kept leaving bitter notes in my box at school for several weeks afterward, so I guess I probably came out as the bad guy.”
“Does she still teach there?”
He nodded. “English lit, conversational French.”
I imagined Jake sitting across the table from Rebecca Walker in the faculty lounge, trying to concentrate on his sandwich—turkey-bacon-Swiss—while she slid a loafer-clad foot toward him under the table, whispering saucy French words.
“Twelve,” I said. “A very reasonable number.”
“You counted?”
“I thought that was the point.”
“Your turn. First to last.”
So I began with Ramon. Ramon who taught me about oral sex and f-stops, simultaneous orgasm and film speed. Ramon who took photographs of me, hundreds of them, which my parents got hold of after he died in the motorcycle accident. “He had a sister who found the photos and my address after he died,” I explained. “She took it upon herself to mail them to my parents.”
“Quite an age difference,” Jake said.
“I know, but it wasn’t like it sounds. He was ready to marry me.”
I told Jake how, on the phone from Mobile to Knoxville during the last month of his life, Ramon had said, “I can’t live without you.” And I had said, “Sure you can. I’m in college, I can’t do this right now.” The last conversation I ever had with him.
“What kind of photographs?” Jake asked.
“You can guess.”
“Creepy.”
“It wasn’t like that. I mean, sure, he was too old for me, but he really was a nice guy.”
“If Emma ever got involved with a guy like that,” Jake said, “I’d have to chase him down with a shotgun.”
I didn’t tell Jake how Ramon used to pose me. How he’d undress me, item by item, in his downtown apartment, bright light flooding through the high windows. How I’d stand naked in the center of the room and after a while the warm floorboards would seem to shift beneath me, and I’d feel dizzy, unbalanced, while Ramon’s camera clicked. There were the close-ups—an elbow, a knee, the white skin of the inner thigh, the arch of the foot, my ears with their twin ruby teardrops, a gift from him. Much later, my mother laid those photographs out on the glass coffee table and said, “And what, pray tell, is this?”
I’d never seen her so angry. She was crying. She really thought I’d gone to the devil. My father couldn’t look at me. He sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the room and stared at the piano, for lack of somewhere else to rest his gaze. The piano had been polished to a yellowish shine. On top of it there was a statuette of a bluebird with a tiny gold crank that made it sing, a row of Russian nesting dolls, and photographs of me and Annabel from when we were much younger, wearing matching gingham outfits my mother had made. And on the coffee table those other photos, my body laid bare, my pleasure so obvious and humiliating.
“It isn’t natural,” my father said.
“Sex is a sacred act between a man and a woman whom God has brought together in marriage,” my mother said, as if quoting from a religious textbook.
My father nodded, rocked back and forth, didn’t look at me. It was the same chair he had used to rock me to sleep in when I was small.
“When you do that with someone, you give them your soul,” my mother said. “Forever after, that disgusting man will own a little piece of you.”
I was thinking about the motorcycle, wondering how much Ramon had felt as he slid over the wet road, if there was a lot of pain or just a sudden blankness. At the funeral in September, he had an open casket. I stood there with his sister, whom I’d just met. She looked like him, with olive skin and green eyes, messy eighties hair. “Too much blush,” she said, taking a Kleenex out of her purse to wipe his cheeks. The tissue turned pink. I couldn’t help thinking how unhappy he’d be about wearing makeup.
While my parents lectured, the TV was on low, tuned to CNN, Christiane Amanpour reporting on the situation in Syria. I wanted to be like Christiane, on the other side of the world, doing something that mattered.
I didn’t tell Jake how the guilt washed over me like a wave, how I felt somehow responsible for what had happened to Ramon. Instead I said, “They took me out of school for a whole semester. I had to go to group therapy three times a week with this weird dude named Sam Bungo, who was very fond of slogans.”
“Pretty rough for a seventeen-year-old kid,” he said, and I was grateful to him for not saying anything bad about Ramon. Grateful that he didn’t make me finish the game, that after he’d tallied his partners I didn’t have to tally mine.
Jake looked so wholesome sitting there in his baseball cap, so willing to trust me. “So,” I said, “do you find my past a bit too checkered? It’s not too late to back out.”
“That stuff makes you more interesting. Besides, maybe it will turn out your parents were right and you really are a sex addict, lucky me. Whatever happened to Sam Bungo?”
“Odd story. I met his sister by coincidence about ten years ago. This FBI agent named Sandy Bungo visited my political science class at the University of Tennessee. It’s an unusual last name, and there was definitely a resemblance, so I went up to her after class and asked if she was related to a guy named Sam Bungo. She asked how I knew him, and without thinking I blurted, ‘I used to take these classes he taught.’ She got this funny look on her face and said, ‘Yikes.’ I asked how Sam was doing. Turns out he was serving fifty-six months for some crime she didn’t care to identify. I just stood there looking kind of stunned, then I asked her to tell him hello for me.”
That was the first and last time Jake and I talked about Ramon, or about anyone we used to date. Even the subject of Lisbeth rarely came up. One thing I liked about Jake was that he was content to leave the past in the past; with him, everything felt like forward motion.
42
THE LAST Sunday in November, I spot the orange Chevelle at Ocean Beach. The car is there when I arrive at ten o’clock for my daily vigil. It’s an unusually sunny day, and the fog has already burned off. A sailboat moves slowly across the horizon.
I jot down the license plate, then pull in beside the Chevelle, leaving two parking spaces between us. My hands shake, my heartbeat speeds up, my whole body tenses. The driver is the same man I saw that day, with graying hair and the beginning of a beard. He’s reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. His face is a bit heavier than I remember, and there is no yellow stripe on the side of the car—but other than that, the details add up. A hula girl on the dashboard, the Virgin Mary hanging from the rearview mirror.
I call Detective Sherburne. His voice mail picks up. “He’s here,” I say. “At the beach. The guy in the orange Chevelle.” I recite the license plate number, then call Sherburne’s pager and his home number as well. No answer.
For half an hour I watch the man. He doesn’t skim the paper but really reads it, spending a long time on each spread. At las
t he gets out of his car, goes over to the retaining wall, and stands there looking out at the ocean. I grab my coffee cup, wander over to the wastebasket, and drop it in, lingering just a couple of feet from the man. He’s wearing a pair of very nice shoes, too nice for the beach.
“Pretty day,” he says.
“We’ve been due for one.”
“This is my first year in San Francisco,” he says. “Not exactly what I had in mind when I decided to move to California. During the summer, it got so cold I nearly packed my bags and went home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Nevada. You?”
“Alabama.”
“I used to have one of those,” he says, nodding toward a boy walking a dog down the beach.
“A kid?” I say, startled.
“No, a dog. Chocolate lab.”
“Oh.”
“Frank. Dumbest, sweetest dog I’ve ever known.”
“Where is he now?”
“Wish I knew.”
The guy has an air of loneliness about him, like he’s been by himself for a long time. I’m trying to think of the right question, the proper approach. “What brought you to San Francisco?”
“That story could take a while.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “Tell you what. I’ll give you the ten-minute version over a cup of coffee at Louis’s.”
I tell myself to be calm, sound natural. “It’s a deal.”
We lock our cars, then walk the paved path up toward the diner. We sit at a table by the window with a view out to the ocean. A young couple is picking their way over the concrete ruins of the Sutro Baths.
“I never got your name,” he says, stirring cream into his coffee.
“Dana.” The lie rolls easily off my tongue. “Yours?”
“Carl Renfroe.”
Down below, the young couple finds a pocket of space hidden from the surrounding paths. Down there, with the sea battering the ruins it’s easy to think you’re alone. I’m trying to think of some way to extract information from Carl without alerting him to my motives, when the girl lifts her skirt, squats, and pees.
“Ringside seats,” Carl says.
The girl is oblivious, taking her time. The boy lifts his hand to his eyes and looks in the direction of the restaurant. He says something to the girl, who quickly pulls up her underwear, flattens her skirt over her thighs, and stands up.
“We get this once a week or so,” our waitress says. “People got no clue we’re up here.”
A family walks in and sits in the booth behind Carl, talking quietly. The parents don’t look old enough to have such a big family—a teenage son, a toddler, and a baby with an oddly shaped head. The father sinks into the seat, white baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, and tells his kids to settle down. “They can hear you all the way back in Iowa,” he says to his wife, who’s marveling at the prices on the menu.
“You were going to tell me how you ended up here,” I say to Carl.
“My wife died two years ago. Bus accident in Guatemala.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She was only forty-three. Down there working on a documentary. A few months later, my son left for college.” He opens a packet of Sweet ’n’ Low and pours it into his coffee. “There was nothing to keep me in Nevada.”
I briefly consider the possibility that he knows exactly who I am. Maybe he remembers my face clearly from that day at the beach. Maybe he’s returning to the scene of the crime. But all of this, I know, is false. Another dead end, another possibility to be crossed off the dwindling list. This man is not a kidnapper, child molester, or murderer. I’m not sure how I know this, I just do. Some people you can live with for years and never understand their true nature; others are easy reads, like a book with all the important passages underlined.
Our food arrives. Carl sprinkles salt and pepper on his omelet. “Alabama. You’re a long way from home. But I guess San Francisco’s an easy place to love.”
“Used to be.”
“Sounds like a mystery.”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Yeah?”
“A little girl. She disappeared from this beach in July.”
His face changes—recognition, pity. “I heard about that, big news for a few weeks.” He frowns. “Emily was her name?”
“Emma. Is her name.”
“I’m sorry. It must be horrible. I can’t imagine.”
“You were here.”
“Pardon?”
“On the day she disappeared. You were here, in the parking lot. I remember your car. Your headlights were on. I considered telling you to turn them off, but then I didn’t. You looked absorbed in your paper.”
He puts his coffee down, stares at me, suddenly understanding. “You thought—”
I shift in my seat. “You were alone. We walked right past you.”
“You’ve been waiting for me to come back?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It’s not you. But I had to be sure.”
“For what it’s worth, I’d be doing the same thing.”
“Do you remember anything?” I ask. “Did you see anything—anyone—suspicious?”
“I can’t remember. It’s been a bad year, it all runs together.”
“Think. Anything. It was Saturday, July 22nd. Ten-thirty in the morning. A cold day, really foggy.”
He concentrates, shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Please.” My voice is too loud, too desperate. The dad from Georgia is staring. His teenage son is buttering the toddler’s toast, while the mother stuffs packets of sugar and nondairy creamer into her purse. I lower my voice. “Something. You must remember something.”
“It was months ago. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
Instead of using the paved path back to the parking lot, we take off our shoes and walk on the beach. The water swirls around our ankles, ice cold. On Seal Rocks, the seals are barking. “I have this place in Stockton,” Carl says. “A one-bedroom with a view of the bay. The first night I was there, I heard this racket coming from the pier, couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. Sounded like a pack of dogs. Finally figured out it was the seals. Couldn’t sleep for weeks, thought I’d made a mistake coming here. But after a while I stopped noticing it. Now, when I go visit my son at school, I can’t get a wink of sleep; the silence drives me nuts.”
“I guess you can get used to anything over time,” I say.
A Russian woman is sitting on a blanket by the water, talking on her cell phone. She watches as her husband dips a naked, laughing baby in and out of the water.
“Do you still see Emma’s face?” Carl asks. “Is it clear?”
“Yes.”
“My wife’s is getting blurry. When I close my eyes, I can visualize her hairstyle, the color of her eyes, her earrings. But I can’t remember the actual shape of her face. Then I rush to the dresser and pick up her photograph, and it all comes back to me—but a day later, she starts to fade again. And her voice, I can’t hear it at all anymore.”
“Maybe forgetting is a subconscious act of self-preservation,” I say. “Maybe, over time, if we can’t see or hear them clearly, their absence is less painful.”
“There’s a line from a Tom Petty song,” Carl says, kicking a broken sand dollar into the surf. He clears his throat, sings, “I remember the good times were just a little bit more in focus.”
I recognize the song, “Here Comes My Girl.” Though I remember only the lyrics and not the tune itself, I’m still aware, somehow, that he’s slightly off-key.
43
NELL’S BOOKS are piled high on my bedside table. At night, unable to sleep, I pore through them, making notes, searching for a way to jog my memory.
In 477 B.C., the Greek poet Simonides fathered the art of memory. Simonides discovered his calling by chance when he was invited to a banquet by a wealthy nobleman named Scopas. At the ba
nquet, Simonides recited a long lyric poem, part of which celebrated Scopas, and part of which was devoted to the gods Castor and Pollux. The nobleman, angered at having to share glory with the gods, refused to pay Simonides his full fee.
Later, the poet was summoned out of the banquet by two young men. Simonides would eventually learn that the young men were Castor and Pollux themselves, who called him away in order to save his life. While Simonides was outside, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed. The carnage was so great that the relatives of Scopas and his guests could not identify the corpses for burial. Simonides, however, was able to identify the bodies by recalling where each guest had been sitting at the table. It was from this incident that Simonides formulated the method of loci.
The method is simple: imagine some real or imaginary place—a house or a church, for example, complete with furniture and multiple rooms—and mentally place the things you want to remember in a sequential order within this environment. Then walk through the assigned space, picking up items as you go.
During the Renaissance, Giulio Camillo of Bologna took the process one step further by building a wooden memory theater as a gift for the king of France. The theater contained markings, little boxes, ornaments, and figurines. Camillo believed that, by walking through this theater and attaching images and words to the physical things ensconced there, a man could remember anything he desired. According to Camillo, anyone who spent two hours in his memory theater would emerge with the ability to discuss any topic with the expertise of Cicero.
S., the man who could not forget, had never heard of Simonides or the method of loci. Yet, given a list of things or passages to remember by his doctor, S. would take a mental walk down Gorky Street in Moscow. In his mind, as he walked, he would place words and images at specific points along the street: in store windows, at monuments, in front of gates. Recalling the memorized passages was simply a matter of imagining the mental walk, picking up sentences at each location. Unfortunately for S., the one thing he wanted to remember was simply how to forget.
One night, after reading the passage about Camillo’s memory theater, I have a dream in which I approach, at night, a vast building in an empty field. The building is white and windowless, with a large, arched doorway at its center. Upon entering, I find myself in a complex maze of rooms, each crowded with ornamental items: vases and ceramic figures, heavy draperies, boxes of varying sizes made of wood and silver and jade.
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