The Memory Trap
Page 1
Dedication
for
Jacqueline Eve Goldsmith
Epigraph
‘Darkly rises each moment from the life
which has been lived and which does not die,
for each event lives in the heavy head forever,
waiting to renew itself.’
Delmore Schwartz
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2. Mugged by the Past
Chapter 3. The Failure of Dreams
Chapter 4. The Old Prodigy
Chapter 5. Borders of Belief
Chapter 6. The Frailty of Monsters
Chapter 7. New York Snowdome
Chapter 8. Cravings
Chapter 9. Against the Grain
Chapter 10. At the Crossroads
Chapter 11. The Human Touch
Chapter 12. Newly Minted Prospects
Chapter 13. The Hour of Lead
Chapter 14. A Shift in the Centre of Gravity
Chapter 15. Awakenings
Chapter 16. Last of the Hot Days
Chapter 17. Spoils of Memory
About the Author
Praise for Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion
Copyright
Epigraph from ‘The World is a Wedding’ by Delmore Schwartz, from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories. Copyright © Delmore Schwartz 1948. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Excerpt in Chapter 1 from ‘The Public Garden’, from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Poem in Chapter 7 and quotes in Chapter 11 from ‘Just a New York Poem’ by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © Nikki Giovanni 1972. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Quote in Chapter 8 an excerpt from the foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick in Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938 by Mary McCarthy. Foreword copyright © Elizabeth Hardwick 1992. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Quote in Chapter 8 an excerpt from interview with Elizabeth Hardwick in The Paris Review No. 96, Summer, 1985. Reproduced by permission of The Paris Review.
Quote in Chapter 16 from ‘Clear Night’ from Country Music: Selected Early Poems. Copyright © Charles Wright 1982. Reproduced by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Chapter 1.
‘Remember summer? Bubbles filled the
fountain, and we splashed. We drowned
in Eden …’
Robert Lowell
1.
By the time she reached thirty, Nina Jameson had resigned herself to a single life. A series of relationships each of which had reduced her to a simpering, stress-filled sop had shown that while she could be a loyal friend, a loving daughter, a woman passionately engaged in her work, she was a failure at romantic love. Within a short time of meeting an appealing man, her well-oiled antennae would disintegrate and she’d be brought to her knees. The last lover was a disaster of such proportions that she was forced to accept the distressing truth: she lacked the emotional backbone to withstand another catastrophic relationship.
There was nothing in her past to explain it. She’d had a happy childhood in suburban Melbourne, creative and involved parents, a sister with whom she was close, success at school, a wide circle of friends. And while she’d had to contend with the spoiler next door, she rationalised that even in the most contented of childhoods there’s the pervert at the playground, the bully in the schoolyard, the betrayal by a best friend. So rather than being constrained by Ramsay Blake, his living so close contributed to her early departure from home, the choice of an interstate university, overseas travel, work in New York. And when Ramsay himself turned up in New York, this became her catalyst for the move to London and her present career.
Nina is a consultant on memorial projects. She guides planning committees from their initial conception all the way to the unveiling ceremony. She advises on design competitions and fund-raising options; she draws up an estimate of costs; she divulges arcane processes for working with interest groups and not-so-arcane tax breaks to reduce costs. She is an expert in all aspects of monument creation aside from the actual chipping into the stone, or, given the current proclivity for water features, the design of the plumbing.
In the past several years she has worked on projects to commemorate people slaughtered by terrorism and others felled by natural disasters; she’s consulted on monuments to honour famous people and others to mark significant sites. She relishes this career of hers, not simply that each job introduces her to a whole new fascinating area, but there is the excitement, the privilege too, of working with people when their passions are roused.
With work and family, friends and other interests, Nina believed she had more than enough to make a good life. So should she find herself lonely and longing for a partner, she would quickly summon up her track record: with such a mess of failures she’d be a fool not to banish romantic love.
Then Daniel Ryman appeared, divorced father of two, seventeen years her senior, a futurologist to her memory keeper, and her resolutions turned to dust. It shouldn’t have happened, not simply her determination to be sensible and rational, but Daniel was not her type. He was too big for her taste, too muscular, and his jaw too square and the Hollywood-perfect hair not at all to her liking. He looked like a sportsman not a thinker.
‘They’re not mutually exclusive,’ Daniel said later, when she revealed her first impressions.
And neither they were, but her usual type of man was tall on intellect and short on everything else: height, sight, hair, empathy, and consideration for her.
‘Like a balding koala?’ Daniel suggested, with a deliberate nudge at her being Australian.
She nodded. ‘A Jewish balding koala with an excellent vocabulary.’
Daniel, like a number of her previous lovers, was Jewish, although with the exception of a devoted mother and a taste for pickled herring, in Nina’s view he bore little resemblance to the usual stereotype.
‘Now that we’ve left the shtetl and can enjoy all the new world has to offer, we’ve branched out,’ Daniel said with a smile.
She liked his humour, within a short time she was drawn to almost everything about him, but at their first meeting, 1997 in Edinburgh, at the close of the first day of a three-day conference on Cultural Time, she was not impressed. A few of the delegates had adjourned to a nearby bar. The place was stuffy with cigarettes and end-of-week revellers. Jackets and ties were removed and Nina noticed Daniel’s muscular physique. She dismissed him on the spot: time spent jogging and pushing weights had always suggested a mind predisposed to mindlessness.
And he was a futurologist, a breed of thinker who aroused her suspicions; some, she believed, were nothing more than articulate charlatans who shared more in common with fortune-tellers than scholars. And while his being a guest at this particular meeting suggested he was one of the more reputable practitioners, she avoided him at the bar, and again in the hotel restaurant the following morning when she came down for breakfast and found him already seated with food and newspaper.
Nina had trained herself to rise early in order to cope with her increasing workload, but constitutionally she was not a morning person. She woke to an alarm clock, showered and dressed in a semi-conscious state and then prepared herself for the day’s demands over a slow breakfast, some serious reading and multiple cups of strong coffee. So when she entered the restaurant just after six and saw the muscle-bound futurologist she was furious. It seemed little enough to want to breakfast undisturbed, to set the day on its rig
ht course, and this man, this populariser-disguised-as-intellectual, had just wrecked it. She marched out of the dining-room – she’d find a solitary breakfast elsewhere – and might have continued across the lobby to the street, when one of those unpremeditated glimpses of the naked and, in this instance, unreasonable self stopped her. Such an extreme reaction to a man eating a bowl of cereal and reading a newspaper. When had she become such a slave to habit? It was a breakfast, she told herself, a single breakfast. And she wasn’t presenting her paper that day, and tomorrow when she was to perform, she would not bother with the restaurant but use the reliably solitary room service instead. Thus she calmed herself and re-entered the room.
The futurologist glanced over the top of his paper and she steeled herself for pre-coffee civilities. But when he sank more deeply into his chair she realised he was as little interested in company as she was. She found a table on the far side of the room, sat with her back to him and selected from the à la carte menu so as to avoid meeting him at the buffet.
And soon he was forgotten as she ate her omelette, drank her way through a large flask of coffee and read her literary review. Coffee and interesting reading matter and she could block out anything – even in a public dining-room. She read an essay on Auden, followed by a long review of a book wanting to confine memory to biochemistry, an approach Nina believed sucked the human out of being a human. She should write her own response to the article, not a letter to the editor but an essay exploring her own approach to memory. She could shape it around some of her recent projects, use the essay to take stock of the rationale and moral stance of memorialising. And so engrossed was she, she did not notice that the futurologist had approached; only when he said her name was she pulled from her thoughts.
He was standing by her table, a questioning smile on his face. ‘It’s clear we both prefer solitude with our breakfast. But might we break the habit for a final coffee?’
A surprising surge of pleasure – the humour? his courtesy? the melodic accent? – and she invited him to join her. She noticed he drank his coffee black as did she, she noticed even though it should not have mattered. Her last lover, the one she counted as her most bruising disaster, took milk with his coffee. She made sure always to have fresh milk available never knowing when he might turn up. For the entire two years of the relationship there would be a line of cartons in the door of the fridge: fresh, nearly fresh, still usable, doubtful, definitely off, disgusting dollops. During those two years she had thrown out far more sour milk than he had ever consumed fresh.
The futurologist passed a few comments about the noisy bar the previous evening: impossible to talk, impossible to do anything but drink, and fortunate for him that the bar had specialised in single malts. He had found one of his favourites: Scapa 16-year-old, sherry cask, one of the Orkney Isle distilleries, he said, not that it, or indeed any Scotch, meant a thing to her.
Nina asked about his accent.
‘French mother, Russian father, born in Argentina, raised in England, career mainly in America. And,’ he added, ‘I speak French, Russian, Spanish and English – all with an accent.’
‘Like Daniel Barenboim,’ she said. Then realising he mightn’t share her knowledge of classical music, added, ‘The conductor and pianist.’
The futurologist smiled. ‘Barenboim speaks five languages, and yes, all with an accent. Five languages for him, four for me, and both of us at home in none.’
During the next hour while other delegates came and went, she and Daniel talked. It was odd how quickly the features she had found so unacceptably chiselled the previous night now relaxed into contours not simply inviting but homely in a familiar rather than unattractive sense. As for his being a charlatan, this man’s grasp of the past, the present and the imagined future was breathtaking. And his memory! In that first hour, he spiked his conversation with quotes from Shakespeare, Heine, the Bible, Lorca, Dickinson and Martin Luther King – and probably a good many other luminaries she failed to recognise. Talking with him was to enter a brilliant piece of theatre in which history’s best thinkers all had bit parts.
For most of the previous fifteen years Daniel had been based in Chicago to be near his former wife and their two sons. By the time he met Nina, both boys were in college, the wife long remarried and Daniel free to roam. A month after the Cultural Time conference he moved back to England, the country of his growing-up; within six months he and Nina were living together in Primrose Hill. On the anniversary of their first meeting they were married.
He was forty-eight and she was thirty-one. Seventeen years separated them, a prime number and therefore lucky, Nina thought. Although the sour-milk lover, three prime years her senior, had brought nothing in the way of luck – the primes had let her down there. And not just the three-year age difference: he was born on the twenty-third day of the eleventh month, Ramsay Blake’s birthday, and not even the charm of primes could erase that uneasy coincidence.
From the very beginning with Daniel, theirs was such an easy fit, so much so that her past failures quickly slipped into the shadows. Even the issue of children was quickly resolved. Daniel, with two grown-up sons, preferred no more children, although he was prepared to change his mind should Nina want them. But his preference helped settle her own. While not entirely devoid of the biological urge to bear children and the maternal instinct to raise them, both drives were, Nina realised, so weak in her character as to make childlessness a viable option.
They both travelled for work, she more than Daniel, but when home together in London they lived closely. ‘We’re like the melodic lines of a fugue,’ she once said to him. Of course there were differences. She would never come to appreciate whisky as he did, although she was drawn to the histories of the distilling families, and the distilleries themselves with their proud and often quaint traditions. And the whisky locations, bleak, wild, chilly places in the far reaches of Scotland where for hours at a time she would tramp the peaty ground while Daniel talked and tasted with the whisky makers. The Orkneys in particular came to represent an idea of civilisation to her, a precarious balance between the natural world, traditional customs and selective borrowings from the twenty-first century. It was as if these islands monumentalised a specific type of existence too often shunted to the very edges of human progress. And, in fact, it was during one of their visits to the Orkneys that it first occurred to her that all landscapes were potential monuments, an idea that later played into an idiosyncratic book.
And Daniel would never share her attachment to music. He would accompany her to concerts, particularly if the orchestra was huge and the conductor a star from a BBC TV series. But he failed to understand how anyone could sit at home listening to a Mahler symphony or a Shostakovich quartet, just sit there without a book or email, no bill-paying, no browsing the web, just listening. And she would never understand Daniel’s penchant for physical fitness. ‘What sort of Jew are you?’ Nina asked recently when he took a shine to yet another sport – a form of skateboarding that used an articulated device called a ripstick. He was aiming for an entry in that very slender volume The Jewish Book of Sport, he said with a laugh.
There was his tidiness and her mess; her flamboyance and his reserve; his chess and her Scrabble; his e-books and her real books; her work focused on the past, his on the future. And holding all the differences together was their love of reading and ideas, travel, food and cooking, their daily rituals and routines, and as the years passed, their common history.
2.
‘There’s not a single aspect of my life I’d change,’ Nina said to Daniel, as she drove them down to Hampshire one stormy June evening. ‘Besides having my family in the same country, and some Australian bush in easy reach of London.’
This was a celebratory weekend, their twelfth wedding anniversary and a lucky prime thirteen years together. They could have taken the Eurostar to Paris, they could have flown to Edinburgh, the place of their first meeting, but weather notwithstanding, they had chosen to s
tay at their cottage on the edge of the New Forest. A storm had been forecast all week and the skies were threatening when they left Primrose Hill. But early summer storms were quick boisterous affairs, and once this one had blown through, Hampshire would be green and tranquil. They could take their usual walks, perhaps even celebrate their anniversary with a picnic in the forest.
Nina’s gift to Daniel was wedged safely in a corner of the car boot, its glitter wrapping concealed under an old blanket. After much thought in which she had considered and dismissed a pair of beautiful lapis lazuli cuff-links (he might find them showy), a jumper (too early in the season for good value), opera for the uninitiated (this was a perennial threat), she settled on a half yard of small whiskies, all single malts, each containing two shots and purchased from the Royal Mile in Bloomsbury, a shop Daniel described as whisky heaven. She had packed a hamper containing cheeses, smoked fish, pepperonata, dolmades, olives – all their favourite foods, while Daniel had taken charge of the drinks, including, he said, a limited-edition cider. Cider was their summer drink, and this bottle would be the first of the season.
The clouds were massing dark and low, Turneresque, Daniel quipped, as they set off. Aesthetically pleasing they might be, but poor visibility was bringing out the dare-devil in a surprising number of drivers: it was chaos on the roads and the exit from the city maddeningly slow. But once they entered the M3, Nina felt, as she always did at this point, that their holiday had begun. Whoever was the least tired would drive, although Nina always chose the music – rhythm and blues, the only site in music’s universe where their tastes were aligned.
It had been a busy week for them both. Nina was in the middle of a project designed to honour the third wave of feminism. The consultations had been strenuous and cooperative endeavour as taxing as apparently it had been in the 1970s. It was, in short, a job she would be happy to see finished. Daniel was hard at work on his new book, The Future of Originality in an Age of Timelessness. He was, he said, writing with a head of steam.