The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Nina said that Ramsay could never walk inside another’s heart, nor indeed open the door to his own. Emotions for him existed only in the music. But Nina was wrong. Music and emotions were inextricably bound, that much was true, but music was the only way to Ramsay’s heart.

  ‘I like playing music with you more than anyone else,’ he had said when she was fifteen years old, then eighteen, then twenty and twenty-two. And now here in New York. It was, Zoe believed, an admission of love.

  They were only children when first they performed this piece. It was in front of their families, she remembers the occasion so well, the shock of it, guiding him in with the solo entry from the cello, the ensuing dialogue, the stunning intimacy. And when they were finished and prickling with the certainty of their partnership, she saw in his face the wonder she herself felt.

  ‘Aren’t you both marvellous?’ her mother had said.

  ‘They were made to play together,’ George added.

  And so they did, year after year. And while she felt sorry for Sean, if Ramsay could have only one of them, she wanted it to be her. Joined in the music, that was how it had long been, and now joined in New York. So much music over the years, complex, knotty music, flamboyant pieces, restrained pieces, combative pieces and gentle pieces, together they have cracked the code of human experience. And now as they play their Beethoven in New York, the happy perfection of C major and George half a world away, she revels in the attainable future.

  They reach the end of the sonata, they are holding on to each other, and their gaze is holding on, and still holding when the sound fades to silence. Aren’t we marvellous? She hears the words although neither has spoken. Some musicians speak of telepathy, but it’s not telepathy; what she and Ramsay share is deep knowledge. You see each other, you feel and hear each other, you can’t move without the other. The air you breathe is suffused with your extravagant togetherness.

  Zoe walks into his apartment and within minutes they are settled in their unique and familiar intimacy. They’ve been waiting all their lives for this.

  There are periods in a life when immediate experience becomes your entire world; every one of your actions is full strength, every moment inflamed. Pain can bring on these times, so too can grief, but by far the most tantalising are those threaded by bliss. You don’t follow the news, you don’t notice your neighbours, books remain closed, the TV is turned off. Whether days be hot or cold, whether you’re crushed on the subway or lounging in the park, whether confronted by louts or angels, this time is immune to anything toxic, this time is sublime.

  Zoe Jameson arrived in New York and was living her dreams. She and Ramsay binged on music, on the city, on like-minded people, on each other; they were never really sober, never firm-footed enough to see themselves clearly. For five whole weeks their shared life was the only life. So rich was the present that they were not waiting for something to happen, it was already happening.

  Every morning Zoe would leave Nina’s apartment and walk the dozen blocks to Ramsay’s building. Ramsay would be waiting for her in the lobby with the dog. Together they made their way to the bagel shop where Ramsay would wait in the street while she went inside. Sometimes the queue stretched almost to the door, and there was always someone loitering at the entrance, hand outstretched for small change. Initially she bought just two bagels, still warm in the paper bag, and by the time they arrived back at Ramsay’s apartment the bagels, gorgeously gluey in the mouth, were half eaten. And they would turn to each other, laugh, and go back for more. After the first couple of mornings they bought four bagels.

  ‘Bagels,’ Ramsay said. ‘Edible Bach.’

  ‘Surely not Bach,’ she said with a questioning smile. ‘More like Brahms.’

  ‘Wanna Brahms?’ he’d say when she arrived each morning.

  After breakfast and a morning of music they’d walk down to Riverside Park where Lotte would play with the other dogs. Standing there with other couples, Zoe felt as if they were a family, she and Ramsay with their dog. Then it was back to the apartment to collect the bikes, and off they’d ride, through the noise and bustle of the daytime city into the quieter residential streets; there they’d dismount in order to talk more easily. Most college days she’d accompany him to the campus and practise while he practised or sit in on his classes. And most evenings there was dinner and music with friends.

  Her sister didn’t complain – she had always known how it was between her and Ramsay. And when Nina stopped trying to make arrangements with her, Zoe couldn’t be sorry; she had never known such happiness.

  2.

  Nina gazed out the office window. The flags of the UN member countries tossed and twisted in the wind; down at street level tourists wrapped in coats posed for photos. On First Avenue the traffic surged and lagged, held up by frequent traffic lights and pedestrians of every age, shade and style. So much was happening down here. There were several overseas missions in the area, a bevy of tugs and barges on the East River, an ever-changing theatre on United Nations Plaza, and Zoe, who had been in Manhattan nearly a month, had not found time to make a single visit.

  Zoe was occupied full time with Ramsay.

  Nina had wanted her sister to absorb with her the sheer energy of this amazing city. And she had wanted to bring her here to the UN, show her around, take her into sessions, share her own hopes and optimism about all these nations congregated together. Nina could not have said where she thought she’d be in her early twenties or indeed the work she’d be doing, but never in her wildest dreams did she imagine being in New York and working at the UN. Of course she wanted to share this with her sister.

  When first she arrived, she had fallen for the city instantly and totally. There was something about the place that enabled her to be as she had always wanted – not that she could have defined what that was exactly, it had taken New York to show her. The city had magically peeled away her outer layers to expose parts never before glimpsed. Felix said her response to New York was nothing other than the common sensibility of the traveller, that away from home and released from the constraints and expectations of family and other familiars, she could slice off huge chunks of her history and replace them with more desirable influences; she could, like all travellers, make herself anew.

  She resented that he would so easily dismiss her passion for New York: the city wasn’t ordinary and neither was her response to it. But as so often happened with Felix, she kept her irritations to herself. Felix Hovnanian was a married man and she was the affair; there was no future to invest in – there was, in fact, no future. Although Felix behaved as if there were. He talked about trips they would make together, not one or two but several; and the previous winter when he’d seen how much she’d enjoyed the Olympics on TV, he promised to take her to the next winter games. In four years’ time. Four years!

  He had wanted Nina to live with him in New York, be his ‘holiday wife’ as Nina herself termed it. And what, she asked, was she expected to do when his permanent wife telephoned from Sydney? And when he talked to his sons? She didn’t want to be skulking in the background, nor did she want to be homeless when his family visited in the school holidays. But mostly she didn’t want to live with him, and certainly not in New York. Felix had no intention of leaving his wife, but even if he were available Nina could not see him in her long-term future. He said she made him feel young, she refrained from telling him he made her feel old. He said he loved her, but Nina was of the opinion that spousal bedrock provided him with the rope he needed for his extra-marital affections to fly loose and free.

  And besides, she had been offered an apartment, a sublet on the Upper West Side at 100th, which came fully furnished with added extras of rent control and two cockatiels. With Felix at E 62nd the location was perfect, and she was amused by the idea of living so far from Australia with two Australian parrots. She was nervous of dogs – Ramsay always had a dog and none was particularly friendly to anyone other than Ramsay – and she was allergic to cats, so the
cockatiels were ideal. She cut short any further discussions with Felix by moving into the sublet.

  While there was a vibrancy throughout Manhattan, and an edge and an insouciance to its inhabitants, these qualities, it seemed to her, were more pronounced on the Upper West Side. Here the shops were always open and the pavements always crowded. There were beggars begging and psychos singing, there were wealthy matrons and lumpy bag ladies, there were blacks and Hispanics, Asians and Jews. Central Park was a few blocks to the east and Riverside a few blocks to the west, and dotted through the area were galleries, bars, concert venues and museums. If she were to inscribe a circle from her apartment with a radius of two kilometres, this small area would supply everything she had ever wanted. And while the apartment itself was tiny, with the parks so close and street-life so plentiful she never felt confined.

  Each morning she travelled from the Upper West Side down to the UN; from neighbourhood to world community was how she experienced it. She believed in the ideals and promises of the United Nations. It didn’t matter to her that there were interest groups jostling and lobbyists lobbying, that there were deals being done every day; it didn’t matter that any achievements came slowly and invariably diluted. She appreciated what the UN stood for. Felix ascribed her idealism to youth, he said she’d grow out of it. She told him she’d prefer to remain an unreconstructed idealist than become a sour old cynic like him.

  ‘Your generation has made such a mess of things,’ she said. ‘And rather than admit it you damn the world and its people as a bad lot. This immature observer thinks you and your contemporaries could benefit from a few youthful ideals.’

  It was a regular argument and not one on which they were ever likely to agree.

  Australia was so far from anywhere, a huge blob of land suspended in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. But here, in the thick of things, in the rush, the passion, the multicultural mix, she was learning what she truly valued. And the New Yorkers themselves with their devil-may-care attitude, their bluntness and confidence, it was how she wanted to be – and would become if she lived here long enough. But the job was finished and although Felix had not accepted it, they were finished too. He wanted her to return home with him; he wanted his mistress, far more portable than his wife, to go wherever he went. He said he would find her a tutoring job at Sydney University while she completed a PhD, he painted what he regarded as a rosy future. Rosy for him but dead-end for her. She would not be going home with him. But now with Ramsay in New York, she didn’t want to stay here either, watching her sister whirling ever closer to the edge of a perilous cliff.

  The fax machine rang. It was a message from Felix’s wife confirming her flights to New York. I’ve missed you so much this time, she wrote. We must never again be apart so long.

  Nina placed the fax in the centre of Felix’s desk. She checked her watch, he would be back from his meeting soon and she didn’t have much time. She took a sheet of UN paper. She would not be returning to Australia with him, she wrote, nor would she be staying in New York. A job in London had come up and she would be leaving for the UK soon. She wished him and his family well. I’d prefer not to see you, she wrote. It’s better this way. She put her note alongside his wife’s fax, collected her few belongings and left the office for the last time.

  Exactly five weeks after Zoe arrived in New York, Nina left for London. In the space of a week, she resigned from a job that was already finished, and left an affair that was already over. She told Zoe the same story she had given to Felix. But there was no job in London and distressingly few contacts – although she would manage, and better than if she stayed in New York. With another four months on the sublet, Zoe would live there and take care of the cockatiels. Nina embraced her sister and in that embrace tried to impart the strength and common sense that romantic love shies away from.

  Zoe was full of elder-sister concern. ‘Write to me as soon as you’re settled,’ she said. ‘And remember, if things don’t work out in London you can always come back here. Though goodness knows where Ramsay and I might be.’

  At the time of her leaving, Nina wanted to believe it was not cowardice that drove her from New York but selflessness. As she boarded the red-eye to London she hoped this was the case. But more than anything, she hoped she was wrong about Ramsay, that Zoe would be the exception in his otherwise narcissistic existence.

  3.

  Nina left for London and Zoe now had her own place. Stretching ahead were four months in New York, just her and Ramsay together. They had already established a routine, one they both relished, but if their relationship was to move forward as it was clearly ready to do, some adjustments needed to be made. Knowing Ramsay as well as she did and her own shyness notwithstanding, Zoe knew it was up to her to guide them into the next phase.

  On the third morning after Nina’s departure, when Zoe met Ramsay in the lobby of his apartment building, she proposed that after they bought the bagels they should walk Lotte in the park and then go back to her place for breakfast.

  ‘I want you to see where I live.’

  ‘And our music?’ he said. ‘What about our music today? And our touring?’

  He had planned a ride up to the Cloisters, and while she assured him there’d be plenty of time later in the day he was clearly uncomfortable with the change. But he did manage it, as she hoped he would; he did it for her.

  They bought their bagels and walked to the dog-run in Riverside Park. Later it occurred to her that Ramsay had deliberately delayed at the park, talking to other dog owners at greater length than usual and letting Lotte play until she did not have a run left in her. And it was a slow walk back to the apartment although, again in retrospect, what she had attributed to Lotte’s being tired may have been Ramsay’s stalling. She showed him round the tiny apartment, white and minimalist and shiny-surfaced modern, except for the cockatiel corner which had been transformed into an Australian diorama. He talked with the birds while she prepared coffee and laid out bagels, butter and jam. He settled the dog on the couch and as soon as the food was on the table he began to eat. She put on the Barenboim–du Pré recording of the Brahms first cello sonata – in lieu of our music, she said – and joined him for breakfast.

  What then followed was her doing, all of it was her doing. They ate their bagels, they listened to the Brahms, and when the music was finished she led him to the bedroom. She undressed him and placed him between the sheets. He lay on his back, he did not watch her remove her own clothes, he did not watch her slip in beside him. He did not speak as she kissed his face, his eyes, his forehead, his cheeks, his lips. Not speaking nor moving as she kisses his neck, the rim of his ear. She runs her mouth over his chest, the flat stomach, her arm brushes his penis, and as her tongue traces the fine hair down to his navel and her lips trace the definition of his ribs she touches him again with a nonchalance that is anything but inadvertent. She kisses the hard smooth skin of his belly, his penis is erect, she’s in no hurry, runs her tongue from hip to hip, and suddenly he’s springing forward, he’s grabbing her under the shoulders, his fingers dig into her armpits, his penis is hard in her gut, he drags her up his body, tosses her to the mattress, leaps on top of her, pins her to the bed, chains her wrists with his hands. Stop, she shouts. Stop. Her legs are thrashing, he shoves his knees into her thighs, her muscles recoil in pain. Stop, she cries, but he’s pumping the air out of her and her voice is only a whimper. It feels like a fist inside her, he’s tearing her apart. And then a single clear moment when she knows that the only way this will stop is when he’s finished, and the end will come sooner if she gives up the struggle. He plunges into her over and over again, she is silently pleading for him to come. But his rhythm doesn’t change, he could pound on for hours. When she can’t stand any more, and with a strength powered by desperation, she rolls them both over and now she’s atop of him, she’s doing the work. It’s like having an out-of-body experience, she’s separate from him, from all that’s happening, up and down a
nd watching his face, the face that tells her everything: Ramsay is utterly absent, his eyes are vacant, she could be anyone, she could be a mechanical device for all it matters to him.

  At last he’s finished. Deep within she’s raw and hurting. She leaves him on the bed and without looking back goes to the bathroom. She leans against the closed door, her wrists are red with his grip, his neat pianist’s nails have left red crescents in her armpits.

  She hears the bed creak and a minute or two later the sound of shoes on the timber floor. The cockatiels whistle, he calls the dog, the footsteps grow fainter, the front door slams. After he has gone she lies on the terrible bed. She listens to the traffic outside, the constant burr broken by the battering of motor bikes. There’s the occasional screech of tyres; people shout. She pulls the quilt over her body. Her skin burns, her vagina feels like it’s been hollowed out with sandpaper. All of her lacerated, her dreams most of all. She lies on the bed. The pain reminds her of all she has lost.