She could tell that he was not very adaptable because he worried the issue for almost a minute before offering a grudging, “Fine.”
So it was settled, but then she thought maybe it was better after all for her to be the one to go in first. “If someone asks,” she said, “who do I say invited me to the party?”
“No one will ask,” he said. “Probably a third of the people there will be crashers.”
“Who invited you?” she asked.
“I wasn’t exactly invited,” he said. “My agent suggested I come. You want her name? Her name is Marianna Dodson and she’s also what’s his name’s agent, the guy for whom the party is being made.”
“I know Marianna Dodson,” she said. “We’ve never met but I’ve talked to her on the phone and we’ve had e-mail exchanges.”
“So this is what we’ll do,” he said. “You’ll present yourself to Marianna and when I notice you talking to her I’ll come over and she’ll introduce you to me. And you’ll say we’ve met, but that it was a long time ago and I’ll say I remember but you’ll be skeptical. We can improvise from there. Did I tell you how much I like what you’re wearing?”
She waved him off and went into the building, noticing someone she knew slightly in the group going in ahead of her, a writer who had done a piece for her a while back.
Once she got into the crowded apartment and talked to a few people, some of whom she had met before, and got herself a glass of white wine, she let Jay’s scenario for her slide out of mind, though she looked around for him every once in a while, made uneasy by his absence.
Finally, an hour or so into the party, she spotted him for the first time, standing at the edge of a conversation between two men, neither of whom she knew, and she smiled in his direction but went unnoticed or ignored. She edged her way over, crossing his line of vision, and stood by his side, waiting to be noticed. He continued to ignore here.
“I believe we’ve met,” she said when he turned toward her, smiling without recognition, taken aback by her presence.
“Of course,” he said. “Anyone who’d ever met you before would not forget you.”
“I can see you don’t remember me,” she said, looking around her to see if anyone was listening in. “It was a long time ago. It was in another lifetime really.” Four or five people seemed to be eavesdropping on their conversation.
“Of course I remember you,” he insisted, but she could tell that he was bluffing and she was not inclined to let him get away with it.
“OK,” she said, “What’s my name?”
A woman came over—his agent she assumed—and took Jay by the arm, saying in this annoying way that there was someone she wanted him to meet.
She took his other arm, and said in the mildest of voices, “He’s meeting me at the moment.”
“And you are …?” the agent asked.
“Lois Lane,” she said.
“Of course,” the agent said. “Marianna Dodson. We’ve talked on the phone a number of times. I’m so pleased to meet you in person. You know, I thought I recognized the voice, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.”
“This man and I knew each other twenty-one years ago and haven’t seen each other since,” she said. “I can spare him another twenty minutes.”
Marianna Dodson apologized for intruding and seemed to back away, absorbed by the crowd.
Twenty minutes later when they caught up with each other again their meeting had the aura of fateful good fortune.
What else could they do but leave the party together, their story, or snatches of it, bruited about in the shadowy corners of the room where only the eavesdropping imagination could overhear.
Once they had established a past, there was no point in denying themselves a present. She spent the night in Jay’s apartment and when she left in the early afternoon of the next day it had already been arranged that they would meet for dinner that evening.
Four months later, she sublet her apartment and moved into his place, which was marginally larger, for the short term. After a while, when his place began to seem oppressively small, they sublet a house together in Prospect Heights, a yet-undiscovered Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of gentrification.
Two years later, when they found themselves caught up in an escalating, unacknowledged battle of wills, the word marriage insinuated its way into their dialogue.
NINE
___
In the revisionist version, after sharing an apartment for three years, they agreed in principle to get married, a fight-reconciling decision on a motoring trip through Canada that came hard on the heels of an agreement never to see the other again after they got back to the States.
The decision, a triumph of last ditch desperation, represented a rare unanimity but it was not without attendant issues. As Lois saw it, they needed to decide as quickly as possible whether to have a real wedding (and consequently who to invite and how many) or whether to get married on the road by a justice of the peace. Jay said it was all the same to him while she said that she would abide by his choice.
“I can go either way,” he said.
“I don’t care for big weddings,” she said, “but don’t you think the nature of the ceremony might have something to do ultimately with the quality of the marriage itself? As a case in point, Roger and I knew our marriage was doomed when the minister that married us—and he seemed a serious man at the time—ran off with the daughter of one of his parishioners.”
“I think I like the idea of getting married on the road,” he said.
“Do you really? Why?”
“Well,” he said, “if the minister misbehaves after the fact, we’ll probably never be the wiser.”
What he said made no sense to her though in the spirit of accommodation, she let it pass without comment. “If you want to get married on the road, if that’s what you really want, sweetheart,” she said, “then that’s what we’ll do. Is that what you really want?”
“I want to do whatever pleases you,” he said. “Would you look at the map to see where we might cross over into the U.S.”
She groaned. “You know how I hate reading maps. Isn’t it enough that I agreed to marry you? If I have to look at the map to make that happen, I’d just as well keep things as they are.”
They had had this conversation before or some variant of it and he wondered if whatever fight was in the offing, and he was dying to tangle, might be prevented if he kept his cool in the face of irresistible provocation. For no good reason, he turned left at the next intersection and after several miles of uninhabited desolation turned left again. That they were lost, or so it seemed, and that it was her fault, irritated him to distraction. And then, out of seeming nowhere, a sign appeared: US Border—14 mi.
“You see,” she said, “you can get anywhere you want without my having to look at the map.” Her flickering fondness for him returned in momentary abundance.
During the customs interview, when asked if they had anything to declare, she told the guards that they had crossed the border the other way just a few hours ago and were returning to the States to get married before resuming their trip. Before she could complete her story, the pleasanter of the two officials asked them to pull over to the building on the right. For the next several hours, their car was taken apart and their belongings ransacked.
They sat on a couch in the hut on the side of the road, holding hands during their detainment, glancing through the window behind them from time to time to see what progress was being made. There was an extended period during which nothing happened while the official assigned to taking apart their car took a lunch break.
Jay paced the room, suddenly impatient, feeling claustrophobic.
She got up after a while and walked alongside him. “Are you thinking the same thing I am?” she asked.
He finessed his answer. “It’s not worth it,” he said.
“Coward,” she whispered back.
When they were t
old they could go, she said to the woman official, who had initially seemed sympathetic, “Don’t you people have anything better to do with your time?”
Later, when they were on the road again, she thanked him for protecting her from her worst instincts and he had to turn away from the road, in momentary risk, to see that she meant it.
In some way it changed nothing. In almost every other way, it put a favorable light on all the things that disturbed her about being together. They got married at a justice of the peace in Presque Isle, Maine, the ceremony only unforgettable in its total absence of memorable detail. And then they recrossed the Canadian border to continue on the trip they had planned and unplanned during their carefree, bickering single days.
They both agreed that the ceremony was mercifully unpretentious and that, no doubt, they could have done worse.
They spent a day and an overnight in Montreal and Quebec City en route to Nova Scotia, doing the recommended sights along the way with a kind of bemused, disinterested patience, idiot grins on their faces (grist for unseen photographers) as if they were on a real honeymoon and indeed genuinely absurdly happy.
Two months after their return, the honeymoon glow barely faded, she discovered herself obsessively attached to someone else. This invasive presence in her life was a handyman hanger-on at the gym she went to dutifully on Wednesday nights, and was not like anyone else she had ever liked before. And if that weren’t enough reason to avoid him, the man was either obnoxious to her or showed no apparent interest, which she took as interchangeable provocations. He had a reputation, which she didn’t wholly credit, for groping women indiscriminately. The nasty stories circulating about him in the gym engendered—she despised the women telling the stories—a kind of perverse sympathy.
One night, later than usual, doing her repetitions on the stairmaster, angry at Jay for reasons yet to define themselves, she noticed that the only other person in the gym was the same narcissistic, muscle-bound creep, his name Luther, she had been fantasizing about. Though behind a desk on the far side of the room, a book open in front of him—she imagined the pages blank or a pornographic comic book secreted inside—she had the sense that he was inhaling her every move.
Where had everybody else gone? The important thing was not to show him she was afraid. Fear, she had read somewhere or heard said or instinctively knew, was catnip to the pitiless. She noticed on the wall clock—she must have dozed at some point—that it was 10 minutes short of midnight and the clock seemed hardly to be moving. She toweled off in a kind of slow-motion, though she had long since stopped sweating, put her coat around her shoulders and promised herself to walk past the dragon without so much as glancing at him.
She was already by him when he spoke. “Goodnight sweetcheeks,” he said in a barely audible voice.
Outraged, she spun around to confront him. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she said. “I could report you for that. You know that.”
She imagined him laughing at her but instead he said nothing, his thuggish face in the book he had armed himself with, the title registering subliminally as she left the gym as Persuasion by Jane Austen, one of her favorite novels.
Jay was asleep when she came in at whatever impossibly late hour and she had to wait until morning to answer his prying questions with the partially true, almost convincing story she had over-rehearsed the night before on the slow subway ride home.
“OK,” he said when she had finished with the story and it felt to her like a slap.
“I don’t like you questioning me like that,” she said. “You make me feel like a criminal.”
“No one can make you feel like a criminal,” he said, not quite looking at her, “if you don’t already feel like a criminal.”
She walked away, then came back, came up to him from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. “If you are accusing me of something,” she said, ruing each word, “I think you ought to say right out what it is.”
“You’ve been accusing yourself,” he said, stepping away, willing to let her escape.
“I told you what happened,” she said. “I fell asleep. If you can’t trust me, if you’re going to be jealous over every little thing… Sometimes, Jay, you really piss me off, you know?”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, a poor exit line he privately conceded, not at his best when under attack.
They made up in bed that night, or seemed to, each apologizing in turn with exaggerated conviction, their urgent lovemaking like the Hollywood movie of itself.
She went to sleep happy and woke with intimations of despair: her marriage to Jay had nowhere to go but down. And then Jay made it worse, confirmed her in her worst premonitions, by suggesting she give up going to the gym on Wednesday nights.
In fact, she had already decided not to go the following week, but Jay’s bullying demand made it difficult, virtually impossible, to follow through on her decision. Whatever was going to happen, he had, if unwittingly—the evidence filed away for future debate—brought it on himself.
He was awake on her return from the gym the following Wednesday, lazing like a slug on the living room couch, watching a basketball game on television.
“I see that you get your exercise through empathy,” she said, passing him by on the way to the bathroom. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him glancing at his watch. She had made up her mind, no matter what, that she would make no excuses for the lateness of the hour, would make no attempt to account for herself at all.
There was no making it up this time around. He lay with his back to her in bed, his anger like a force field between them, which might have frightened her if it wasn’t so absurd.
She turned on the reading light next to her side of the bed, asking his permission without expecting a reply, and leafed through an old New Yorker lying on her end table. On page seeventy-seven, he got up noisily and disappeared for awhile. She dozed, though kept the light on at the same time, feeling betrayed by his prolonged absence. She thought of calling out to him that she had done nothing that needed apology, but it wasn’t a stance she felt comfortable with at this hour of the night.
For his part, Jay spent the remainder of the night on the couch, wide awake, wondering if the problem, suitably ignored, would go away of its own accord.
The following Wednesday, without making much of it, she decided to forego her weekly gym appointment. She thought she’d surprise Jay, picking up a couple of overpriced steaks from Balducci’s on her way home, and she felt thwarted not to find him where she left him.
She looked around for a note, some explanation as to where he had gone, not expecting to find anything—why hide a note if he wanted her to see it—but carrying out her intention with meticulous concern for detail nevertheless.
She fell asleep before he came home and woke during the night to find him in bed sleeping restively next to her. A mix of anxiety and outrage occupied her for the next couple of hours and she ended up cuddling against his unforgiving back.
In the morning, she made a point of not asking him where he had been—she would not be the one to pry—storing her grievance under a display of uncharacteristic early morning cheerfulness.
He seemed thrown off his game by hers and she could tell he was just dying to market the version he had worked up of where he had been and what he had done. And then she actually kissed him goodbye like some prototypical housewife (except it was she who was going off to work) before leaving him for the day. He clamped her to him and she felt the tweak of his neediness, which brought her more confusion than comfort.
“I love you,” he said rather desperately as they came apart, which was not a usual part of his routine.
When she was away from him, safely out of the house, it amused her to imagine what he made of her performance, though she had only the thinnest notion herself of what (if anything) was going on between them. It was a game of denial, the game itself denied, in which the one who showed the least concern won the as yet undetermined
prize.
She never told him she had come home early that Wednesday—while he never volunteered why he had been out late that night—and the following week as a matter of course she resumed her routine at the gym. Jay was always part of the landscape, sometimes waiting up for her, sometimes dozing on the couch, when she found her way home.
It was six months later, after Luther had broken with her, which brought her a mix of relief and self-doubt, that she turned her attention once again to Jay. One night after lovemaking, perhaps even during the act itself, she found herself longing to confess her brief insignificant affair with Luther, clean the slate as it were, but some wary inner voice wouldn’t allow it.
In the third year of their marriage, it may even have been the fourth, over dinner at the most expensive restaurant they’d been to that wasn’t on someone else’s expense account, Jay confided awkwardly during the appetizer course that he had fallen in love with another.
The news itself was less surprising than the confession and she weighed its implications on the balance beam mediating despair and hope before offering a response.
“Is it anyone I know?” she asked.
“Well,” he said and she out-waited the unnatural silence for him to continue.
“I feel terrible,” he said, which evoked a laugh with claws.
“That’s too bad,” she said. “So who is this person?”
“I’m not planning to leave right away,” he said. “You know that these things happen whether we mean them to or not. This doesn’t have anything to do with you. My feelings toward you haven’t changed.”
“I think I’d be happier if you moved out as soon as possible,” she said.
“I understand your position,” he said, attending to the mostly uneaten food on his plate.
And then, with that out of the way, if not actually settled, she asked again who it was, her next breath contingent on his unwelcome news.
And still he refused to tell her, which was less forgivable, she decided, than the betrayal itself, whatever it might be.
You, or the Invention of Memory Page 13
