For Want of a Memory

by Robert Lubrican

  "Why does everybody have to ask me questions I don't want to answer?" he moaned.

  "I'm not just anybody," she said archly. "I'm the woman who saved your life. You owe me."

  "Just shoot me and get it over with, then," he sighed. "It would be easier than trying to juggle all these questions.

  "What's to juggle?" she said brightly. "We have no secrets. You just tell me what he wanted to know and I'll tell you how much trouble he's in."

  "Why would he be in trouble?" asked Kris.

  "Because I told him to leave you alone," said Lou Anne.

  "He has to do his job," said Kris.

  "He looked much too interested in what you were talking about for it to be anything to do with his job," said Lou Anne. "Was he asking questions about me?"

  "Why would he do that?" asked Kris weakly.

  "Was he?" There was a hint of danger in her voice now.

  "In a roundabout way, I suppose," said Kris. "He heard about the party the other night and he wanted to know about it."

  "That?" She sounded surprised. "Why would he care about that?"

  "Because Jessica reminded me not to tell anybody what I saw. She did it right there in front of him," Kris sighed.

  "She is so witless sometimes," said Lou Anne. "So, did you tell him?" Now there was something in her voice that he couldn't quite identify, but it didn't sound friendly.

  "Of course not," he said. "I promised Jess that I wouldn't."

  "Good boy," she said, reaching out to stroke his chin with two fingers. "There's hope for you yet."

  "He says you like me." It just came out. It might have had something to do with those fingers stroking his chin.

  "Oh really?" Now she sounded ... interested. Kris took a few seconds to catalog those differing sounds in her voice. They'd make for good dialog comments in his book.

  "Um ... yeah. He said something like that you must like me, because you haven't beaten me up ... or something like that."

  She laughed, which he wasn't prepared for. She looked happy about that, for some reason.

  "Let's just say I haven't found any reason not to like you," she said. "Now, where's the story? I want to catch up. Ambrose is asleep, you can check on him while I read."

  He handed her the flash drive. It didn't take long to look in on the little boy, who was sleeping soundly, and she had just found where the new work started when he returned to the living room. The TV was on, so he sat down to watch it.

  He was distracted by the noises she made while she read. Some of them sounded like bits of some melody, from some song he couldn't identify. There was one that was composed of five notes. She repeated them at odd moments, for no apparent reason. Then there were sighs and high pitched single notes that, in a novel, he would have called "squeaks," though only because he couldn't think of any other way to characterize them. She ignored him completely while she read. Then she leaned back.

  "I like what you've done with Lady Tinsley," she said.

  "I was afraid you'd think that was too forceful," he responded.

  "He didn't rape her," said Lou Anne. "He just overcame her resistance. I can understand that. If the right man sucked on my nipples long enough, I'd give up too. And she kissed him back, which suggests her resistance was gone. And he didn't have to drag her to his cabin. I think it's very well done. It makes me wiggly."

  "Really!" He sounded astonished.

  She turned to look at him. "Sometimes a woman likes a forceful man," she said. "If it's the right man," she added.

  "Really!" He sounded like he still didn't believe her.

  She looked at him through the hair that fell over one eye. "Why do you think I didn't beat you up when you smacked my ass?"

  "Really!" he gasped, clearly shocked.

  "Every woman wants a little caveman in her life sometimes. It has to be the right time and the right caveman, but yes ... really."

  "Wow."

  "Now, write some more. Are you really going to have him despoil Lady Tinsley's daughter? He should be a good guy part of the time, you know."

  "Well, that was the idea of making her submit in front of the crew. Her daughter was watching and he knows that. I kind of figured the daughter might ... um ... be interested in some caveman action too."

  "Not if it's not the right man," said Lou Anne. "You know, you could complete Lady Tinsley's submission by having her offer herself to him, if he'll spare her daughter."

  "He already ravished her," pointed out Kris.

  "Yes and with just a little rewriting you can have her respond so vigorously that it excites him, too. He can want a woman more than once, can't he?"

  "Of course. He always wants a woman more than once. Remember, he's trying to return them to safety all pregnant and stuff."

  "And that's another thing," said Lou Anne. "Why does he have to get every woman pregnant? Why can't he be more like a regular man and only go after one or two of them?"

  "You don't know much about regular men, do you," said Kris, grinning.

  "What do you mean?"

  "All regular men want to fertilize as many women as possible. It's in our genes."

  "No it's not!" she objected.

  "Darwin thought so," he said. "So did Freud. They're both pretty smart men."

  "The operative word there is 'men'," she snorted. "A pretty smart man is still likely to be on the stupid side."

  "Okay, I get it. You don't want him to be quite such an alley cat."

  "Well, let's just say that when he gets to the woman you model after me, he's going to have to work for it," said Lou Anne.

  "After you?"

  "Sure, you said you were going to make one of these women like me."

  The flashback was so vivid that Kris staggered. His right shoulder hit the wall, which kept him from falling down completely. There was Lola - he saw her now, knew what she looked like. She was telling him how the woman in his book would be modeled on her, and that it would be a best seller. That much was crystal clear, as were her surroundings in the vision. But he still didn't know where she was or what her last name was. She was blonde, in a strident overdone kind of way that suggested the color of her hair came from a bottle rather than nature. He sensed she was his girlfriend, even though he didn't feel like she was his girlfriend.

  "Kris!"

  Lou Anne's voice banished the vision and his eyes cleared to see her face close to his.

  "I'm okay," he said. "I just remembered something."

  "You look like you saw a ghost! I was afraid you were having a stroke or something!"

  "No, I'm okay. I have a girlfriend."

  "You do?" Somehow, she didn't sound happy about that and, somehow, that made him feel good.

  "Well, I saw this woman in my mind. Her name is Lola. I know I've kissed her. She wanted to be in my book, too. But that's all I remember. She was ... acting ... like my girlfriend."

  "Wow," said Lou Anne. "What was she doing in the memory?"

  "She was saying something about how the woman in my book would be modeled on her, and that it would be a best seller. It was kind of like what you were saying. I think that's what brought the memory back."

  "You remembered that you kissed her?"

  "That was another time. I didn't tell you about that. All I remembered then were her lips and I sensed her name, but that was all."

  "What were you doing when you remembered that?" she asked.

  "I was looking at your lips," he said, before he could mediate the comment.

  "Really!" She sounded pleased. "But you didn't kiss me."

  "That's funny," said Kris. "That's one of the things Mitch wanted to know." She raised an eyebrow. "If I had kissed you, I mean."

  "Mitch Connel asked you if you'd ever kissed me?" Her voice went up an octave. She didn't sound at all happy now.

  "Um ... yes," he said weakly. "He wanted to know what the book was about, so I told him, and I said you were kind of helping me write it ... that you were kind of my muse, you know? And he said yo
u liked me and wanted to know if I'd kissed you yet."

  "And what did you tell him?" Her voice was low, almost inaudible.

  "Um ... I told him no, of course."

  "You silly man!" she barked. "Don't you know men are supposed to lie about things like that?"

  "Um ... no," he said, feeling helpless.

  "Don't men brag about their conquests and lie about how far they got with a woman and stuff?"

  "Not after high school," said Kris. "At least I don't think so." He looked confused. "Are you saying I should have lied?"

  "Of course you should have lied!" she yipped. "He was being nosey. You should have filled his head with all kinds of bullshit, so he'd go off on a tangent."

  "I should?" His voice sounded strained. "Wouldn't you have gotten mad if you found out?"

  "I would have acted mad for a while, but I would have been flattered," she said, as if it was the most reasonable response in the world.

  "You want me to kiss you?" His voice sounded whiney.

  "I'm not sure about that yet," she said. "I want you to want to kiss me." Again she acted as if it was a completely reasonable response.

  "None of this seems familiar at all," moaned Kris. "Are you a normal woman?" He felt his face flush. "I mean do all women want that kind of thing?"

  "I don't know about other women," she said simply. "I feel normal."

  "Well I did tell him I slapped your ass," Kris offered. He knew immediately that he'd made a terrible mistake, when she turned on him, anger plainly on her face. "Wait a minute!" he yelped. "I thought I was supposed to say things like that!"

  "That part was true, you simpleton!" she snapped. "You're not supposed to share real intimate details."

  "Oh," he said. "I guess I didn't realize it was that intimate."

  "Well it was," said the unfathomable woman standing in front of him. "Now, sit down and write. I have to think about how I'm going to do damage control. Why nature inflicted men on women, I'll never know."

  * * *

  She didn't speak to him again, or come read over his shoulder, until she appeared in her waitress uniform ready to go. She had Ambrose bundled up and ready to go as well.

  "You have to leave now," she said, her voice neutral.

  "Okay," he said. "Let me finish this last paragraph while it's fresh in my mind. It won't take but twenty seconds."

  "Lock the door on your way out," she said.

  Her car was running when he went outside, but she was standing beside it. He could see Ambrose in his car seat in the back, through the window. She was obviously waiting on him, but he thought it was just to make sure he left the house. He was wrong about that.

  "Kris," she said.

  He went to stand in front of her. He had no idea what she was going to say.

  "I want to try something," she said.

  "Okay," he agreed, instinctively.

  The kiss surprised him. Her hands came up to grasp his face on each side and she leaned up as she pulled his face down. Her actions, unannounced like they were, were the surprise. What staggered him was the kind of kiss she gave him. Her lips were warm and soft, and there was a hungry quality to the kiss, as she opened her lips and used them to nip at his. His automatic response was to open his own lips, even as he was overwhelmed by the passion she was communicating to him. Her tongue flicked out once, very briefly, to touch his inside his lips. Then it was over as quickly as it had begun.

  "See what that makes you remember," she said softly.

  He was still standing there, feeling weak in the knees, as she drove away down the street.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kris wrote three more chapters at work that night. He took Lulu's idea about Lady Tinsley and had her offer to do anything Sir Quigley liked, if he would leave her daughter alone and ensure that no one else molested her either.

  "She's of marriageable age," snorted Sir Quigley.

  "And it is of great importance to me that she be marriageable, upon our return," pled the matron.

  "You would debase yourself on her account?" asked the gentleman pirate.

  "I would do ... anything ... if only she remains pure."

  "An admirable quality in a mother, I must admit," said Sir Quigley. He bowed. "I accede to your request, Madame Tinsley. If you please me, I will attempt to make your trials bearable."

  Then he filled page after page describing how Judith Tinsley used imagination she wasn't aware she'd had up to that point, and found great, if secret, joy in attempting to please the pirate, as she insisted upon being ravished over and over again.

  What she didn't know was that her daughter was in the locker nearby, bound and gagged, but able to see what was going on through the slats in the door. From Quigley's perspective, it was only fair that she be able to see what her mother was willing to suffer for her sake.

  * * *

  When he went off shift, he wasn't sure whether it was wise to go to The Early Girl again for breakfast or not. The kiss had done wonders for the steaminess of his writing ... but he hadn't remembered anything. That kiss convinced him, however, that she wasn't really angry with him, so he went.

  "So," she greeted him, looking at him through lowered lashes. "Did you remember anything?"

  "Um ... not exactly," he said.

  "Not exactly," she said as she showed him to "his" booth.

  "I wrote some things ... and they kind of came out of the blue, so I sort of figure I must have done some of them sometime in my past."

  "I see," she said. "I'll be back," she said, looking through the window into the parking lot.

  He watched as she went to the door and met Jessica. They put their heads together for what seemed like a long discussion. Then Jessica came straight to his booth and sat down across from him.

  "You can tell Mitch about what you saw at the party," she said, without prelude.

  "I can?"

  "Yes, but you can't tell him I gave you permission," she said. "That part has to stay a secret."

  "Okay," he said, uncertainly. "I don't understand."

  "You don't need to understand," she said. "You can tell him, but he has to think you're breaking your promise to me. Can you do that?"

  "I don't want to break my promise to you," he said.

  "You won't be," she smiled. "I gave you permission."

  "But Mitch will think I'm breaking my promise," Kris pointed out.

  "That's fine," said Jessica, as if that made sense. "And don't tell him what you told Lulu."

  "What's that?" asked Kris.

  "That you thought it would look better on her."

  "Oh," he said, flushing.

  "It's okay," said Jessica. "You're not supposed to lust after me."

  "I wish I understood what was going on," moaned Kris.

  "You will someday. Just remember what I said. You can do it. I have faith in you."

  Then she got up and left.

  * * *

  Harper got out of the car and went into the apartment building. It was a strange time of day for a burglary in progress to have been reported, but the responding patrol said it was obviously a break-in and they had a perp in custody. He decided to talk to the witness first. She'd been identified by the 911 operator, but hadn't been interviewed yet.

  Half an hour later, Harper once more thanked the powers that be for nosy neighbors. Janet Grimsley, a seventy-two year old woman, had a son, who had worried about her being alone back home in Oklahoma, where there were tornados and thunderstorms and all manner of dangerous natural situations. So he'd brought her to New York City, where there were muggers and rapists and all manner of dangerous human situations. He was an investment banker, so Harper figured he wasn't expected to have a lot of common sense.

  She'd brought her sensibilities with her, though, and with nothing else to do all day, she sat and watched people through the window. It was while she was doing that that she saw the cat burglar, as she called him, climb up a fire escape, break a window, and enter one of the apartments acro
ss the alley from her son's building. She called 911 and the rest was history. Or would be once he interrogated the subject, collected the evidence, filed a report and the courts decided what, if anything, to do. Mrs. Grimsley had even served him tea and cookies, which, even after twenty years on the force, was a first for Jim Harper.