The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Chapter 10. At the Crossroads

  1.

  The heat dragged on. Temperatures had lodged in the high thirties and low forties; the day of George’s funeral had been one of the hottest on record. With unremitting humidity, it was a heat more inclined to the tropics than temperate Melbourne. There was something ominous about it, Nina thought. It threw everything off kilter.

  The school term had begun and Zoe had returned to work, although it was hard to know exactly what Zoe was doing as she rarely answered her phone. According to Hayley, her mother left home around seven – early enough, Nina realised, to stop by Ramsay’s place before work. When Zoe appeared for dinner, again from Hayley’s account, she would dash in with chicken and salad bought from the local rotisserie, pastas and casseroles from the local deli, racks of lamb and roasted vegetables from the local carvery, food as ominous as the weather given Zoe’s pride as a cook. Once the meal was finished she would dash out again and not return until late.

  ‘I hear her come in,’ Hayley said. ‘It’s never before midnight and once it was after two. Two o’clock in the morning!’ Her eyes were glassy and she swiped at them. ‘I can’t believe she’d do this to Dad.’

  Nina couldn’t believe she’d do this to her children.

  ‘And even when she’s home she’s not actually present,’ Hayley continued. ‘I could shave my head and cover my skull in tattoos and she wouldn’t notice. And why? Because of Ramsay Blake. Bloody Ramsay Blake.’ Another swipe at her eyes. ‘I’ve never liked him. He’s always been weird. And I don’t mean cool weird. He’s bad.’

  Elliot, too, had been absent since the funeral, a quick trip to New York, so he said, for some final research on his Elizabeth Hardwick biography. Nina had thought the book was finished and had said as much to him. There was a long pause – he had phoned her before he left – and when he answered his voice was heavy. ‘I need to get away for a while.’

  During the hot, claggy days, Nina passed most of her time alone. All those afternoons spent with Zoe, all the dinners, all the hours of late night talking, these were things of the past. Zoe was consumed by Ramsay, as it seemed she had always been, but now with no obstacle in the way she was indulging her hunger. Nina would have thought her marriage and children constituted obstacles – but clearly Zoe did not. Nor, apparently, did Elliot, whose sudden trip back to the States seemed to be facilitating the passage of his wife into Ramsay’s arms. And before he left he had changed, softened towards Zoe, as if he had given up the battle. Perhaps the marriage had finally broken him, or perhaps he no longer cared.

  Since the second meeting there’d been no contact from the TIF people, nonetheless Nina’s thoughts kept returning to them. They seemed to have latched on to an aspect of her grown slack through lack of exercise. These people, it occurred to her, were out of step with the rest of society; their very goodness struck her as radical, their actions as oddly subversive.

  Her parents had not subscribed to any religious belief, but the school she and Zoe attended for their entire education was a Protestant school. Every morning they recited the Lord’s prayer, they sang a hymn, and there would be a reading from the Bible. Nina grew familiar with most parts of the Bible, core passages she knew by heart. Now she reread the Beatitudes; in fact she read the entire Sermon on the Mount, not with bored schoolgirl eyes, nor with the cynicism of the secular, but as a thoughtful, culturally sophisticated, twenty-first-century woman. The meek and the poor would rise up and inherit the earth: what could be more subversive than that? What could be more radical than loving your enemies? And if you leave out the Kingdom of Heaven, the Beatitudes as a way of being in this life would see the poor and downtrodden, the peacemakers and the persecuted as the most admired members of a community. She reread Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. She had always sided with Eve against God. Without curiosity, without pushing the boundaries of the unknown, we’d still be living in caves. Eve, Nina believed, had received a raw deal.

  She was revisiting books not read for decades and reconnecting with values and ideas that were hers when she was working at the UN, and all because of the TIF people. She didn’t know where this change might lead, nor was she worried it might suddenly stop. Each day was sparked by surprising new thoughts, each day was fuelled by an energy that carried its own momentum. And it occurred to her that it was exactly this vibrancy that Sean was missing. Steeped in sameness, day after dismal day, no wonder he was exhausted.

  Each morning, before the heat became unbearable, she would walk in the Botanic Gardens. This was her Daniel time, and different from remembering. Before he started writing to her when all she had was memory, a memory sadly polluted by bile and longing, she would recall her marriage piece by piece from the milestones of their thirteen years. And it was as if it had shrunk, become matted and tough like a woollen garment put through the wash. She would hold it up and although it no longer fitted she could not bear to part with it. Memory was a spoiler but until Daniel made contact, it was all she had.

  After his first message he had been sending letter-like emails, written as if he was talking to her. He was desperate to talk to her, but she refused: not simply that she didn’t want him to know she was not in London, she wanted to digest his words at her own pace. She replied to his emails, not immediately and always briefly. And she remained extremely cautious, for it would be so easy to succumb to the Daniel-ness of these long communications.

  The previous evening she’d taken her drink out to the balcony and there she’d stood in the heavy heat of dusk, the traffic noise a constant, the tops of the trees in the Botanic Gardens engraved against the deep blue of the late sky. She had spent the day trying to arrange her thoughts about monuments and their embodiment of abstract qualities like freedom and tolerance. She’d considered the Statue of Liberty, Berlin’s Holocaust Museum, the Arc de Triomphe. And iconic places like Robben Island, a prison that became a monument to the human spirit, and Ground Zero prior to any reconstruction, a sacred place symbolic of courage and freedom as much as tragedy and loss. Memory was involved with all these sites, either personal memory or received memory, but what gave them power was the human ability to imagine and empathise with those who actually experienced the events being memorialised. It occurred to her for the first time – although she expected there was a wealth of literature devoted to it – that memory, far from being a discrete cognitive process, was actually a subset of imagination.

  When she remembered something, like the facets of her life with Daniel, she was actually imagining how things used to be. Imagination, she decided, was essential to remembering – and why memories were so unstable, so slippery. All memory, then, required the imagination, but not all imagining involved memory. And somewhere between memory and the imagination was a cloudy cognitive stretch where memorials found a place.

  It was difficult to pin her thoughts down, and it occurred to her that the person she wanted to talk to about these issues – memory, the imagination, the texture of a marriage, even goodness – was not Daniel but Elliot. She was surprised. Until that day on the beach, never had she felt the desire to draw closer to this man who treated her sister so poorly. But now, with Zoe’s feelings for Ramsay unequivocal, an attraction that poor Elliot must have been aware of throughout his marriage, Nina wondered at his extraordinary loyalty. Elliot had remained with Zoe through years of wreckage – his wreckage but hers as well – and Nina wanted to know how he had managed it. She wanted to talk with Elliot, but Elliot had disappeared.

  2.

  Elliot is becalmed.

  He has set up home in a van, not in New York but in Melbourne, a short fifteen-minute drive from his home. The van is equipped with a bench-bed, a single-burner stove, microwave oven, foldaway table, reading light and kitchen utensils for one. Daily he swims at the council sports centre and uses the facilities there. At night he parks in a street alongside the Merri Creek Trail, a corridor of bush and parkland that follows the main waterways of Melbourne from the outer sub
urbs to the city centre. He has a few companionable books, his laptop for emailing Zoe, his phone to text Callum and Hayley. He also has a sizeable cache of video downloads, but so far he’s had little inclination for them. And with vague thoughts about his next project, he included a few of Arthur Koestler’s novels in e-version, for which he’s felt even less inclination. He sleeps surprisingly well, tranquil, floating, worry-free sleep; the whoosh of passing cars might wake him, or the flurry and squeal of possums, but soon he is asleep again. In the morning he carries cereal and coffee into the park and, seated on a wooden bench, he eats his breakfast.

  He took up his van life a week ago. Each day has been much the same. He’s in the park by seven, the sun high and condensed into blinding rays by the branches of the trees. The grass is sizzled to straw and soon the bushes, spry after the cooler night air, begin to wilt. There’s not been even a wisp of cloud to feed hopes of a cool change – not that it’s bothered him; unlike Zoe, he thrives in the heat.

  At home he always reads over breakfast, but here in the park he leaves his book in the van and instead watches the birds: rainbow lorikeets darting in the trees, red-rumped parrots pecking the dry ground before the heat drives them away, and magpies – such glamorous creatures – just a metre from where he sits, waiting for crumbs. He’s fascinated by birds, always has been. Zoe’s indifferent to them, always has been. Perhaps this should have been a warning back in those heady days of New York, together with all the other warnings. He remembers talking to her about birds: they were walking in Riverside Park a week or two after they met, the air was brittle, sparrows were rummaging for food in the icy earth. Birds, he said, are the most splendid of all species. He talked about their colour and design, their staggering variety. ‘And perched at the pinnacle of the bird kingdom are parrots. And –’ he was triumphant, ‘Australia has more types of parrots than any place on earth.’

  He remembers it still, how at that moment he saw himself in Australia, watching parrots in their natural habitat with this woman who had miraculously entered his life. But Zoe fails to notice birds.

  The parrots are lively in the early morning, and the cavalcade of dogs too; their owners, in contrast, move slowly through the hot damp air. He knows it is a cliché that owners resemble their dogs, but it’s true. Pale reddish humans tend towards pale reddish dogs; humans with dark curls have dark curly-coated dogs; there’s a Labrador-type of person and a small-white-dog type who is often very large. He is missing his own Adelaide, but how to collect her and install her in the van when he is supposed to be in New York? And suddenly, on the seventh morning, the whole ruse seems pointless. What does it matter if he’s in New York or here in Melbourne? His leaving so suddenly following George’s death and Zoe’s mercy dash to Ramsay is unambiguous. He decides to forgo the charade. He’ll email Zoe and text the children; he’ll let them know he’s not gone far, that he’ll be home soon, but for the moment he needs some time to himself. And he’ll fetch his dog.

  He resumes his breakfast. He might feel nicely cocooned but he is not invisible. He sees furtive glances cast in his direction and no one lingers in his vicinity. He’s a middle-aged man living in a van on an inner-suburban street – not the sort of behaviour to instil ease and comfort in passersby. Yet he has seldom felt so relaxed. His oddity protects him, or what would be perceived as oddity. And he’s reminded of a long-ago incident, his early days in New York, a small-town guy alone in the world’s most exciting city, and a particular evening in Central Park when he wandered away from the main paths, away from the running tracks and the tennis courts and became lost in the rough undergrowth of the North Woods. He’d been told about the gangs that lurked in this area, and it was growing dark – how could he have been so stupid? The more nervous he was the more disoriented he became: even if he could see the lights of buildings he wouldn’t know if he was looking north, south, east or west. He seemed to be walking in circles, kept finding himself in the Ravine. It was darker down there, frightening, and he would scramble up again, only to find himself a few minutes later in what appeared to be the same area. Where to hide if he needed to hide? He wished he was taller, stronger, he wished he was armed. He wished he was one of those crazy people he’d seen on the New York streets that everyone gave a wide berth. And suddenly he had his solution. He started to sing, he sang the only songs he could remember in his fear, hymns from years of family church attendance. He waved his arms wildly, fanning the music; he was running and singing boisterously, keeping to the high ground as he galloped towards the lights. And if anyone was lurking in the brush they left him alone; no one wants to mess with a madman.

  And that’s how he feels with his van life: insulated by what others would regard as crazy behaviour. It makes waiting for Zoe bearable; so, too, the separation from his children. The miniature home with everything in reach seems to have muffled his body’s cravings, and after a few days they’ve disappeared. The truth is he has always enjoyed being alone.

  When Diana Trilling published her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, the book that chronicled her childhood and the first half of her marriage to Lionel, Elliot had been horrified to learn of her terror of being alone. The neurosis (that was her terminology) eventually passed, but until her middle years she could not bear to be solitary – a fatal liability for a writer and perhaps the reason she came to her work rather later than most. In the early years of her marriage, when Lionel was supporting them both as well as his parents on an instructor’s salary at Columbia and articles published in various low-paying periodicals, he contrived to be with her as much as possible. Lionel was working flat out, he was exhausted, he would write while she was sleeping, he would come home to be with her when he had obligations out in the world. And what was she doing? Nothing much. In the end she hired a companion – she’d come into some money by then – which lightened Lionel’s load.

  Elliot did not care for Mrs Trilling and it was her own account that prejudiced him. This neurosis of hers was a fate not to be endured, and anyone with more than a kilo of intellectual weight would make sure to be rid of it – unless of course the neurosis was a contrivance to avoid serious work. Sartre often left Elliot cold, but his play Huis Clos, with its famous pronouncement that hell is other people, had always spoken very clearly to him. Diana Trilling’s neurosis condemned her as selfish, lazy, undeserving of respect, the sort of person he abhorred.

  He is well aware that other people don’t have such strong reactions to characters in novels or subjects of biographies and autobiographies, but for him, the people he finds in books are as real, as complex, as confusing and as beguiling as his own wife. And if they are more reliable and more predictable, it is only because he has read to the end of their story. Although Zoe’s future is not entirely unknown. He’s in no doubt that George’s death and the hiatus it has left spell the end of Zoe’s devotion to Ramsay – he is loath to call it love. He has always believed that if he can only wait it out, Zoe will not only return to him, she will embrace their marriage and embrace him in a way she has never done before.

  Zoe has been gripped by Ramsay, or rather her idea of Ramsay, ever since childhood. Blind to the gaping tears in his human fabric, she might well dive in to fill the void left by George, but George, having no needs of his own, could devote himself fully to Ramsay. In contrast, Zoe’s love (there, he has used the word) is a needy beast. Desperate, hopeful, pumped up by years of dreaming, she’ll charge in and run smack into Ramsay’s disinterest in everything not Ramsay. She’ll take another run-up, and another, but it won’t be too long before she sees how things are, how they’ve always been. Crippling disappointment? Elliot cannot predict. Relief? He hopes so. But the spell will be broken. How could it not with someone who away from the piano is a miserable runt of a man?

  Someone in the future will write Ramsay Blake’s biography, someone who admires the musician sufficiently to put up with the disappointing man, and Zoe will warrant at most a couple of paragraphs. Elliot knows what drives the
biographer. With his own big women he can’t know too much about their passions – the people they adored, the work that claimed them; but the hangers-on and the lovesick fans, they don’t interest him and they don’t make good copy.

  Each of his women has become as familiar as a lover, and in many respects far more satisfying. Biographical subjects never demand that you change, adapt, open old wounds and then close them up again. In fact, during the biographical process your own life’s failings and disappointments are hushed as you find another cache of letters, conduct your interviews, travel to places your subject visited, the very same hotels, the same houses and apartments; you cannot acquire too much of their life.

  He owes so much to biography, the single reliable pleasure of his adult years. With one’s own life so much is forgotten or deliberately repressed or, for smoother passage through the days, actually redrawn. But with biography there’s the unequalled satisfaction of knowing an entire life: its obstacles and setbacks, mistakes and injustices, as well as the achievements. His big women, how they’ve sustained him. Lizzie Hardwick, Djuna, Elizabeth Bishop and the only non-American, Jean Rhys, all of them except Hardwick as much in thrall to alcohol as they were to literature, and all demonstrating a perfect pitch – an innate, indestructible talent that he adores.

  It is possible his work might have traversed another path if his marriage had been different, not just male subjects but maybe biography itself may have been less compelling. Although he doesn’t think so: he can’t imagine any work he would prefer to biography.

  With his Lizzie Hardwick now with the publisher, he is already considering his next subject – Cynthia Koestler, a wife not a writer. But it’s early days, more nudging interest than full-blown affair, and his time would have been spent waiting for Zoe to come to her senses if he had not sought refuge in the van. Although initially he thought he could wait it out, be patient with her, try to be kind. But she was hardly ever home and when she was she looked as if she might break. He did his best not to aggravate, not to niggle, but it was unbearable to watch her self-destruct. So he invented some additional research on Hardwick – Zoe didn’t know the biography was finished – packed a bag and left.