by Iris Smyles
I asked him about his girlfriend. He sighed and said he despised cheaters. “And thieves,” I added. “Me too.” We held hands and felt small and lonely in our moral universe. He raised my hand to his face. I said, “Break up with your girlfriend, then call me and ask me for a date.” He said that made sense and opened my palm, which he kissed. “Then it’s settled,” I said, and motioned to the front door.
When it was over, we lay naked in the dark, side by side, staring out the large picture window next to my bed, at the lights of Manhattan glittering across the river. He remarked on the color of the sky, the faint outline of clouds, the spectacular city views as described in his New York Times listing. “Yes, it’s a great view,” I whispered. “Your description really captured it.” Then he said he had to go.
“You’re not staying?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep if I do.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down. “I was kidding when I called you a conqueror.”
“Do you know how beautiful you are?”
“No.”
“I’m sure people tell you you’re beautiful all the time.”
“That wasn’t your question.”
“In this light”—he traced my breasts—“you look magical.”
“You should see me in the kitchen. Also hallway fluorescents do something marvelous to my veins.” I showed him the inside of my wrist. “Look how blue.” Then, “You have a great body,” I lied. He was much thinner than in his Facebook photos.
Lawrence put his pants on, and I walked him to the door, worrying over my tears, hoping he couldn’t see them or if he could, that they looked large and diamond-like, rich.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Will I see you?”
It was a long walk back to the bedroom—the apartment is so large, so many square feet of luxury condo living—where I slept alone in the swirl of his Corcoran Group cologne. The light from the view, too bright without blinds, kept me awake.
I woke a little before noon and lay in bed, staring up at my twelve-foot ceiling. “You look nothing like your Corcoran Group photograph,” I’d said before he left.
I went to the kitchen, to my pristine Kohler appliances, poured myself a fresh glass of water, and checked my phone. I found a text from Lawrence sent just after he’d left. I hadn’t heard it beep all the way in the next room, not over the great steady hum of central air.
“Thank you,” it said, the way it does on receipts.
I went back to bed and curled up on my side.
“A guy has to wonder,” he’d asked from under my desk, “why’s a smart beautiful woman like you still single?”
“It’s my sense of humor. And my vagina.”
“What’s wrong with your vagina?”
“It’s too cheerful. Men prefer one that broods.”
“You’re kidding,” he verified. He stared up into the corner of the desk and twisted a screw. “But don’t you get lonely?”
“Not as lonely as when I’m with someone I don’t love.”
I got dressed. Would it be rude if I didn’t return his text? I imagined him opening his phone and reading “You’re welcome.”
“Manners are important to me,” I had told him at the party. “What kind of world is it where men sit while a woman stands on the subway?”
I picked up my phone and typed: “Never call me again!” I pressed Delete.
I grabbed my keys and went out.
Twenty minutes later, I ate a bagel and drank coffee from a paper cup while sitting on top of my wobbly table. I thought, Why end things now when I could keep him on staff, use him for sex, have him install my shower door?
“Thank you for taking me to the party,” I typed into the phone. “You have a great body,” I added. I smiled and pressed Send. His body was nothing much.
An hour later, the phone beeped and I ran downstairs—a duplex, plenty of room for a home office or second bedroom—to find his message: “It was nice to see you.”
I stared at the words until they became blurry, and then I stared out over the room.
I opened boxes for the rest of the afternoon, the whole time imagining what I’d say if I ever ran into him. “You, you salesman!”
Or would I be nice? Ask him to come over and tighten the screws on my bedside tables—he’d promised to bring me an Allen wrench—and then change my mind once he arrived. Very coolly, I’d say, “What does your girlfriend think of your Allen wrench?”
I opened more boxes, an odd mix of items—hats, books, a clock radio, pillows, and a long, red wool scarf I should have just thrown out.
The boxes were everywhere, crowding my fortress of solitude. “Like my apartment, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude was built by a crystal bestowed on him from his parents, who sent him to Earth just before his home planet was destroyed,” I’d told my friend earlier that week.
“The last of his kind, Superman can hang out there and watch HDTV when he’s feeling sad, which is often, for Superman is alone in the world, will always be alone, which gives him the blues. Though he may possess the strength of ten men and can defeat evildoers with one sizzling look, he can never overcome his loneliness.” Who can?
It was getting dark. The lights from my spectacular view were coming up. The bridge across the way was beginning to twinkle and, sitting there among my boxes, my great wealth, my vast estate, my floor-to-ceiling windows, my high ceilings, my perfect white walls, the central air humming, I used a corner of my red cape—the scarf I should have thrown out—to wipe away a diamond tear. They were much higher-quality tears than I’d cried in the old place, I thought. Things were certainly going to be different.
Taxonomy of Exes
JED’S EX WAS MARLA, a vegetarian, which was something he disliked about her. He told me so after I ordered a steak on our second date. He said, “I like that you ordered steak; Marla never ordered steak.” They dated for ten years. They liked the beat poets and tried swinging with another couple with whom they went to high school in Brooklyn.
Martin’s ex was Meghan, whose father was a writer who’d won the Pulitzer. We ran into her after a weeklong drive from San Francisco to LA. We argued the whole drive down the Pacific Coast Highway and stopped only briefly after he saw her outside a restaurant called Brooklyn Diner. She’d gone out there to act, she said. We all ordered pastrami.
Jess’s ex was Lauren. They lived together two years, but he wasn’t ready to marry. He left her and is not over her and doesn’t know yet if he ever will be, which is why he wasn’t ready for a relationship, but thought I should sleep over anyway.
Jack had been married; his ex left him for her graduate school professor, and his eyes become glassy at the mention of “wine and cheese.”
Max’s ex was Linda. They dated for two years. He told me one day he just knew; they were floating side by side in the Atlantic, looking at their feet sticking out of the gray-green brine, and he just knew that she was the one.
Philip’s ex was Katherine. They were together for ten years, married for two, and separated for one and a half, but he was over her. In bed one night, after we’d had sex—after we’d broken up and got back together and broke up and got back together—Philip told me he’d had a breakthrough in therapy earlier that day. “I’m still in love with Katherine.”
Glen’s ex was Heide. She was from Poland and needed a green card. Glen sometimes thinks he should have married Heide, even though he didn’t want to and unquestionably did the right thing by not. He wonders what she’s doing now. If she had to return to Poland or if she married someone else.
Billy’s ex was Lindsey. He got her pregnant and took her to a clinic for the procedure.
Kevin’s ex was Lara, an artist in upstate New York. Her last project involved a personal ad inviting men to be photographed next to her on her couch. They dated long-distance for a full year, and when they broke up, she attempted suicide. She called him from the sanatorium where they were holding her and a
sked what she should say to get the doctors to release her; Kevin is an emergency room psychiatrist, so she knew he’d know. He kissed me and told me it was the least he could do.
Brillig
1
YESTERDAY WHEN SAM KISSED ME, I remembered where I left my keys. They’d been missing a few days—I’d had to call a locksmith—when, with Sam’s lips touching mine, I had a revelation and cried out, “Eureka!”
I don’t know where I got the word “eureka” from. I’d never said “eureka” before, but there it tumbled out, as if it were the most natural thing. Sam thought I was calling him “Eureka” and said he preferred some of the names I’d given him previously. “I like ‘Conan the Librarian’ better,” he said, before kissing me again.
I’m absent-minded and more than once have tried to fit a metro card in the front door, swiped my lip gloss at the subway turnstile, and brought keys to my lips when looking in the bathroom mirror, which is, I guess, how they ended up in the medicine cabinet. But who knows? I’ve a terrible memory. Just like my dad.
“I remember what’s-his-name” is the setup of my dad’s favorite joke. He’ll say the line as if about to begin a story and then stop; the setup is also the punch line. He repeats this joke fairly often, every time as if it were the first time, and I laugh every time, too, though sometimes I can’t remember why it’s funny.
If I can’t remember some things, others I can’t forget: Running on the beach with my father when I was six. We were going so fast; I was afraid my legs weren’t long or quick enough, that I’d fall, and I remember looking up at him, as he laughed and pulled my hand and said faster and we were flying and my feet, I swear, were barely touching the ground.
I also forget words. Last summer I was helping my father in the garden, and I wanted to say, “Hand me the hose,” but couldn’t remember the word for “hose,” so I stood there stammering, until finally I gave up and pointed toward “the snake that spits water.”
He immediately understood, as we share the same affliction. He’s asked me numerous times for a “writing stick” when he wanted a pencil and sometimes asks for “brown champagne” when the Coca-Cola is on the other end of a lunch table. People, places, and things—it’s nouns that give us the most trouble. Grasping at metaphors when our memories fail, sometimes our conversations become inadvertently poetic: “Dad,” I’ll say entering the living room where he’s watching CNN, “Mom says ‘the night fuel’ is ready.”
My mother, forgetful in her own way, replaces most of her nouns with the phrase “the thing.” “Pass me the thing.” Or, “We’re going to the thing.” Recently she advanced to replacing verbs as well, so that sometimes whole sentences will consist of nothing but “the thing.” “The thing the thing in the thing,” she’ll say to my father, who will know exactly what she means: “Bring the groceries in from the garage.” Forty years of marriage is its own language.
Ironically, my mother is named Calliope, after the muse that inspired Homer. Each of the nine muses was assigned to a different art, and my mother’s namesake worked with words. “Sing in me, Muse,” Homer says at the beginning of The Odyssey, for the Greeks believed inspiration was mostly listening. The writer, a conduit, did not invent but record whatever the muse told him. To imagine, in ancient Greece, was really to recall.
In fact, memory gave birth to imagination rather literally, as the muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, whose name was also given to a river in Hades—Lethe’s rumored counterpart. While dead souls drank from Lethe to forget their lives, one might alternately drink from Mnemosyne and remember everything.
In Greek, the word lethe means “forgetfulness.” It is the root word of aletheia, meaning “truth,” which translates to “unforgetfulness,” suggesting that knowledge, even self-knowledge, exists someplace outside of oneself, and so could be misplaced, like keys. Thus, the common phrase “finding oneself” tells of a deep, perhaps unconscious belief that we do not become but uncover who we are, that the future is pursued nostalgically.
Another myth, not exclusively Greek, offers that every child upon his birth holds within him all the wisdom of the world, until an angel visits and, pressing a finger to the child’s lips, impels him to keep it all secret. “Shhhhh,” the angel says, and like that the child forgets. That place in the middle of our upper lip that dips down is the scar and symbol of what we’ve forgotten, reminding us that wisdom is not acquired but recalled.
The Greeks felt that spot, the philtrum, to be the body’s most erogenous zone, so they called it philein, meaning “to love.” In countless stories since, love and truth are thus entwined. Only a kiss can restore the frog to his true form of prince. Forget the eyes, forget the soul; the lips are the door to memory, which can be unlocked or sealed, as they say, with a kiss.
2
In De Oratore, Cicero describes a mnemonic device called “the Memory Palace,” which requires you to imagine a physical space, a great house with many rooms, in which each of your memories can be stored. To retrieve a particular memory, you’ve only to enter that room and go to that place where you’ve left it.
This device, used by memory champions, is a bulwark against a basic tenet of physics, which states that entropy is ever increasing. Our minds, like our homes, become messy over time; the Memory Palace untended becomes a house filled with lost things.
If you stay up late, you’ll see plenty of infomercials selling kits to improve your memory. My father, plagued by insomnia, is a connoisseur of self-improvement. Having already purchased Teach Yourself Greek!, Tony Robbins’s Unleash the Power Within, and a Total Gym that folds away to fit neatly under the bed—where it stays—he’s bought a few memory kits, too. Unfortunately, he forgets to use them; the trap of the bad memory is forgetting one’s mission to ameliorate it.
The trouble with all of these systems is that they can only improve one’s deliberate memory, so that you have first to say to yourself, “I want to remember this,” and then perform the suggested exercise upon the thing you want to remember. This method won’t help with remembering things already forgotten or remembering things one isn’t anticipating forgetting. The exercises must be employed preemptively, so that one must begin by remembering not to forget. They do nothing to solve the real problem, which is forgetting to remember in the first place.
The trickiest thing about a bad memory is that one doesn’t remember forgetting. To even know one’s forgotten requires first remembering what’s forgotten. And how can you know you’ve forgotten anything until by some accident you’re reminded? Until a person from out of your past appears before you at a party, on the sidewalk, at a restaurant, in the elevator at your new office, and says, “You look familiar,” and cocks his head and asks where you’re from, then squints and says, “Eureka!” Until he reminds you that you were inseparable in second grade—“Don’t you remember?”—and goes on reminding you of a field trip your class took on a fishing boat off Sheepshead Bay, how the two of you got in trouble with the teacher, “Mrs. What’s-her-name, remember her?” for spitting over the side.
And you don’t remember, but then you start to. “Oh, yes,” you say, after more details jog your memory. “My god, what are the chances?” And then, looking around you on the street later that day, at the faces of so many strangers, you wonder again what are the chances and are struck by an uncanny feeling—every person you see looks suddenly familiar, as if at some time long ago forgotten, you might have known them all.
Each of my dad’s mnemonic kits offers variations on a few classic memory exercises. The basic strategy is to strengthen memories through association. If you meet someone at a cocktail party, for example, and you want to remember his name, try to pick out one specific thing about him. If he is wearing a red tie, say to yourself, red tie—Donald, red tie—Donald, red tie—Donald . . .
In college, I had a big crush on a Donald whose memory was great. We were in the dining hall when I confessed mine wasn’t. He insisted my memory could be
great, too; it was only a matter of strategy. Eager to prove his point, he climbed on top of his chair and instructed me to memorize what he was about to say. The unusual circumstances under which I was receiving the information, he explained after, would make a lasting impression, making it impossible to forget.
When he quizzed me after ten minutes, however, I remembered nothing of what he’d said, only the way he looked when he said it—towering over me, his brown hair flopping into his eyes. I wonder if he remembers that?
3
Emerging from a café following a warm spring rain, I inhale deeply, and all at once recall a similar day three years earlier; the air now is as it was then when I fled Central Park, soaking wet, having been caught in a sudden downpour. I was on a bicycle pedaling after Philip, who was up ahead, leaning into a left turn. Philip, whom I haven’t thought of in over a year. Philip, who was once so unforgettable. How could I have forgotten what’s-his-name?
A person’s memory is a complex web of associations. Mothballs remind us of grandmothers, popular songs cue up old heartbreaks, places are haunted by people we once knew, the utterance of a name can open on to a feeling, while a feeling can open backward onto a name.
But then names change, which can confuse things. For example, a person you once called your “boyfriend” becomes your “ex-boyfriend,” and then there is your new boyfriend, who after a year also becomes your “ex-boyfriend,” requiring the previous “ex-boyfriend” to shift down a spot and be renamed your “ex-ex-boyfriend” or your “old ex-boyfriend” or your “former ex-boyfriend,” in order to distinguish him from your “most recent ex-boyfriend.” It can get rather complicated, which is perhaps why it’s best not to use names at all.
