The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  And here he is. No classes, no project on the go, no family life, and with all his yearnings in limbo he passes the hours nosing around in a mind released from all restraints. He has driven to the bay, the ocean, the hills, the wine-growing district in the Yarra Valley, the zoo, the sculpture park on the far side of town, returning each evening to the same spot beside the park. He has a sense of himself as thickly varnished – not iced over, not that extreme numbness when the mind is drumming and you’re paralysed, a frightening feeling that seized him when he first realised his wife’s feelings for Ramsay. The varnish feeling actually muffles his internal voices and mutes unwanted emotions, leaving him free to absorb the hush, the gentle tug of the present moment, the houses and streets, pedestrians, other drivers, dogs, the broad sky, the end-of-summer gardens, the bush, gaudy lorikeets, gorgeous magpies.

  On his fourth morning at the local pool he met a man who had made a lifestyle of van living. This man did not have a wife he loved, he’d abandoned his children, and he’d never had a job he found endlessly interesting. Elliot’s situation is vastly different: it’s primarily because he knows his van-time is limited that he’s able to enjoy it. Daily he writes supportive and loving emails to Zoe; he wants her to know he remains steadfast. Sometimes she answers, mostly not. And he ponders his long loyal love for her. He realises that to an outsider it might appear he has loved his wife as fruitlessly as she has loved Ramsay. But that would be wrong: Ramsay is a figment of Zoe’s imagination, a sculpted desire which, if tested – as must be happening now – would be rudely shattered. Like all obsessions hers has been mindless, all-consuming and staggeringly deluded.

  His love, on the other hand, has spared him none of the truth. He knows Zoe’s flaws all too well, her capacity for indifference being the hardest to bear. He knows all about his wife, and a vastly different woman she is from the one who first captured his heart. He doesn’t blame her, nor does he blame himself, after all, how could he know, how can anyone know when they meet and fall in love with a stranger, that this adorable person is their usual self? Who even considers the question? He saw how she fizzed and popped, he saw her leap without a safety net. One night she dragged him to the Greyhound bus station, she wanted to see Niagara Falls at dawn. The experience was like no other, witnessing one of the great wonders of the world with this woman, this wonder, who had streamed into his life.

  She would dance until three in the morning and make love until six and still leap into the new day. She leapt and laughed and he loved her. The beautiful face, the Australian accent, the slender body, a mere touch of her hand would set his own skin dancing. And he married her, this woman he believed to thrive on change and excitement, who lapped up days streaked with passion. He discovered all too soon that far from free, she hefted around a cement wall to which she was firmly chained. And far from relishing change, she wanted things to remain exactly as they were: her music, her job, her home in Australia, Ramsay.

  Zoe, in her own defence, would say she did not realise the man she married was a drunk. But he hasn’t touched alcohol for years, while Zoe continues to squander herself on Ramsay. They might have lived anywhere in the world but she wanted to settle in Melbourne. Ramsay’s home city. She could have played in a trio, a quartet, a chamber group as well as teaching, but she wanted to have free time. For Ramsay. She has neglected him, her husband, because of Ramsay, and she has defaulted on their marriage. Yet he’s always given her another chance, he’s been well stocked in other chances. Only now, and it’s a reluctant thought, Elliot wonders if the supply might ever run short.

  Coming towards him is a couple he has seen before. They are much the same age as he and Zoe, they always walk with their arms linked and they always have plenty to say to each other. Their two old dogs waddle along, stopping to sniff tree trunks and clumps of dry grass; every now and then one or other of the couple calls them to heel. These two people look so comfortable with each other. Both carry a little too much weight, both are dressed in T-shirts and baggy shorts, both wear a wedding band and no other jewellery. This couple looks happy.

  3.

  Zoe has been up since five preparing the day’s lessons. Just before seven, with Callum and Hayley still sleeping, she leaves the house. She’s exhausted, but she’ll collapse only if she stops, and she doesn’t want to stop. So she’ll do her work, she’ll maintain the house, she’ll attend to the kids, and she’ll care for Ramsay.

  She cannot help herself. It’s the way it has always been with Ramsay – and different from those high-flying women you hear about, a company CEO or a top medical specialist who risks all for a man, usually not her equal, with whom she is reduced to sand and water. Her feeling for Ramsay is not like that – for a start he’s a genius – yet she knows she is fixed on him in a way that is disturbing. Not that she has time to dwell. Ramsay can’t cook or clean, he can’t shop or drive, he can’t wash or iron, he can’t organise appointments or work commitments. And overriding all these practical concerns and despite keeping his feelings to himself, he must be missing George who was, after all, father, companion, manager and friend, the central figure in Ramsay’s life.

  A number of other people have put themselves forward as George substitutes, but Ramsay has been quite clear.

  ‘You know me, Zoe. Not like George knew me, but second to George.’

  And given George is not here any more, she wants to say: I’m the only one to look after you.

  Occasionally she has sounded a warning to herself: remember what happened in New York, remember how it was then. And while she acknowledges it could be like that again, more than twenty years have passed since that terrible mistake, years in which they both have grown in maturity and wisdom.

  As for Elliot, she doesn’t want to think about him. And neither is it so difficult. For most of her marriage, with castiron determination she has hollowed out two separate spaces: her Elliot compartment and her Ramsay compartment. Days, even weeks can pass with her entering one of the spaces and staying there; at other times she’ll swing back and forth in a single day. Now, however, she locks the door on Elliot. It will be opened again: Elliot grounds her, Elliot is home and she can’t imagine life without him. As for Ramsay, such a longtime resident in her heart and mind, she would shut down if he was to disappear from her life.

  A couple of days before George’s death and without any prior warning, Elliot had raised the topic of Ramsay.

  ‘Me and Ramsay,’ he said. ‘In relation to you.’

  For her, both men endured like faith endures; there was nothing to discuss. But Elliot had persisted; he had not forced the issue for years, he said, but now he needed some answers. In particular, he wanted to know why she stayed with him, a man she clearly did not love.

  She insisted she did love him.

  ‘Like you love Ramsay? Is that your idea of love? No sex, no physical contact. Like a nun loves Jesus.’ His laugh was bitter. ‘Only one Jesus in your life and that’s Ramsay Blake. As for me, I’m your wayward priest, your one-time whisky priest. You sleep with me, have occasional sex with me, we have children, a house. You live with me after your fashion.’ He looked simultaneously angry and resigned. ‘But if your definition of love is what you feel for Ramsay, then you clearly don’t love me. So – why do you stay?’

  They were sitting at the table, just the two of them, the remains of dinner in front of them. He picked up a fork and dragged the tines across the table surface, back and forward, repeating the same question: Why do you stay? Why do you stay? But it was the wrong question and she knew this at the time; it was not why she stayed but why he did.

  The conversation was interrupted by the children coming home, but Elliot said he wanted to return to it. And then George died and Ramsay needed her, and Elliot, far from pursuing a conversation she would prefer not to have, became quieter, kinder, more understanding; he let her do as she felt she must. And then he said he needed to fly to New York for some final research on his Elizabeth Hardwick. At first she thought
he really had taken a trip back to the States, not for research for she knew the book was finished, but rather a leave of absence from a painful and complicated situation. But his passport was still in his desk and all his winter clothes were still in the wardrobe. It was clear he needed to get away, in his position she would have done the same. But he has not gone far – he told her this in a recent email; more importantly, he told her he’d be returning.

  For now, she is grateful for his absence. She wouldn’t know how to accommodate him in these days when she hardly knows how to manage herself. How to explain morning departures of seven o’clock and evening homecomings right on dinner time? How to justify twenty-minute meals of takeaway food and then out again till all hours? How to defend an existence stubbornly blind to the future? She couldn’t bear to have him observing her as she dashes here and there, never stopping. And that’s the trick: don’t stop, don’t even pause, and don’t think.

  She turns into Ramsay’s driveway at twenty past seven; with a nine o’clock class she can only stay an hour. She lets herself in with the key he has given her. He’s not in the kitchen, nor the living room; she peers into the bedroom, it is empty and sour smelling – she must remember to change the sheets. The music room door is open and as she approaches she hears him crying. Ramsay didn’t cry in the days after George died, he didn’t cry at the funeral, she’s not seen him cry since then; in fact in all the years she has known him she has never seen him cry. She rushes into the room. He’s still in his pyjamas, unwashed and unshaven. She wraps her arms around him, soothes him as she did the children when they were young. There, there, she says, I know you miss him, I know how terrible this is; but it’ll get better, I promise you, it will get better.’

  ‘I can’t do this.’ The words catch in tears and spluttering.

  ‘You don’t have to. I’m here. I’ll help.’

  ‘But you don’t even know who we use.’

  Suddenly the sobbing eases, his voice clears. ‘Sean! Sean would know. It’s the same piano tuner we’ve always had.’ And now he looks up at Zoe. ‘Ring Sean.’

  The piano needs tuning and Ramsay cannot practise until it’s done. His closest friend and companion, the man who was his entire family has died and Ramsay has not shed a tear; but with the piano out of tune he is inconsolable. Although better now he has the solution: he wants Zoe to ring the brother he long ago rejected, the brother who for all Ramsay knows could be in London, Delhi or Timbuktu. Just ring him, Ramsay says, and find out the piano tuner’s name.

  In some clearer future Zoe might reflect on what manner of man would behave this way; but now all she hears is Ramsay’s distress over the out-of-tune piano. She goes to the kitchen for George’s telephone directory: there’s no one listed under piano tuner. She checks the address book on George’s mobile: again, nothing. In all the urgency, in all Ramsay’s panic, at least she knows she can’t contact Sean.

  ‘If he’s been coming for years,’ she says, ‘surely you know the man’s name.’

  ‘Dinger. His name’s Dinger.’

  ‘His real name?’

  Ramsay shakes his head. ‘Between ourselves, George and me, we only ever called him Dinger.’

  She checks again in George’s telephone directory and his mobile phone. There’s no Dinger.

  ‘Think,’ she says to Ramsay.

  ‘I can’t think.’

  George was an orderly man, an organised man. Zoe goes to his filing cabinet. She riffles through the files in the top drawer, then every file in the second drawer. In the third drawer, in a file marked piano tuning and repairs, she finds what she wants. The piano tuner’s name is Donald Singer.

  She rings him.

  He sounds surprised when she explains the problem. ‘I’m due tomorrow. I come every four weeks. I’ve been coming every four weeks since Ramsay was in short pants. He knows that.’

  Zoe asks him to hold while she tells Ramsay the tuner will be there tomorrow.

  ‘I can’t wait, he has to come today.’

  She returns to the phone. ‘Mr Singer –’ she begins.

  ‘I heard, I’ll be there in an hour.’

  She asks how much it will cost, says she’ll leave a cheque on the piano. ‘And thank you. Thank you very much.’

  Ramsay is now calm. And he’s apologising. He doesn’t know what happens to him. George used to do these things, and without George he just flies into a panic.

  ‘I’m here now,’ she says. ‘And I’ll help you. The piano will be tuned this morning, everything will be fixed. Everything will be all right.’

  They move into the kitchen so she can check the contents of the fridge. It’s a mess in here even though she left it tidy yesterday evening.

  ‘Could I have a hamburger for dinner?’

  She twists around. Ramsay looks like a cast-off engine tossed into this junkyard kitchen. He even smells rusty. Her beautiful man is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘A home-made burger, not those scrawny things in a spongy bun you get from Maccas and Hungry Jacks.’

  She pulls herself together. Ramsay’s bereaved, of course he’s not concerned with his appearance.

  ‘A hamburger with the lot: egg, cheese, cooked onions, beetroot, lettuce, lots of tomato sauce – it has to be Rosella brand – all on a proper toasted hamburger roll.’ He walks towards her and for a moment she thinks he’s going to embrace her. ‘Will you do that for me?’

  Of course, she says, and at the same time she’ll prepare extra for Hayley and Callum – they’ll be thrilled, she would never usually cook such food. She tells him to expect her around five, although she’ll ring at lunchtime just to check he is all right.

  Through the open window of her car she reminds him the piano tuner will be there within the hour so he needs to shower and dress. He laughs, does a little bow on the front porch and skips off inside as she reverses into the street.

  Ramsay re-enters the house and the laughter stops. All of him stops. He leans against the wall and slowly sinks to the carpet. He draws up his knees, rests his head against them and shuts his eyes. Horo nuzzles against him and he wraps an arm around the dog. He could stay like this all day, has spent days in the one spot, unaware of the drifting hours, ignoring hunger and thirst, only moving when his bladder is full. And after he relieves himself he returns to his possie to wait through the next few hours. He has no idea how to occupy himself.

  The piano has deserted him.

  He can still play, his technique is not the problem, and he knows how the mood should sound and can replicate it; but he feels like a foreman rather than a pianist. It is truly awful, and so upsetting he’d prefer not to play.

  Music has abandoned him.

  Once before this happened, only fifteen years old at the time, and he truly believed he was done for. George saved him then, George guided him back to music, and any hostility towards the man who had married his mother and replaced his father disappeared. But who will save him now when the cause of the trouble, George’s death, thwarts its solution? That other time there had been no clear cause, the rupture was sudden, a haemorrhage in the piano-playing part of himself. One week his life was running normally – early breakfast, practice, school, more practice, dinner, TV, bed – and the next week he never wanted to play the piano again. What had been natural became a penance.

  And now again. Ramsay Blake, defined by music even before he could walk. Ramsay Blake, the person who sits hour after hour, month after month, year after year at the piano. Most people are an alphabet of qualities – Australian, bike-rider, clown, dishwasher, energetic, flat-footed and so on down to x-ray vision, yachtsman and Zen – but he can be summed up almost entirely by ‘p’ for pianist and ‘m’ for musical. Any place he finds himself, any time, any crowd, it is music that defines and protects him.

  And he doesn’t have it any more. His music’s soul has shrivelled; playing Bach is no different from playing scales. And in the hard chill of that sad space he realises that rather than the soul feeding his music, mu
sic has filled every nook and cranny of his soul. Suddenly he is no different from a boot or a ball or a piece of paper wafting in the wind. He may as well be dead.

  No one must know, he keeps telling himself. No one must know, he told himself that other time. But George knew, George saw what was happening. George was kind, he was understanding, he stepped in and guided him back to music. George believed in him, and his music returned.

  There’s no one to save him now.

  He has retrieved the arsenic buried in the bag of blood and bone. On one of his teaching days at the university he took a small sample to the chemistry department to be assayed. He told them he had a rat problem, that the arsenic had sat for years in the shed; he wanted to know if it was still effective. The results confirmed it was arsenic, but it was well past its use-by date; he’d need barrels of the stuff, they said, to get rid of his rats. Still he brought it inside and stored it at the back of the laundry cupboard: science had been wrong before and it gave him a sense of comfort knowing it was close at hand.

  He has nothing to show for these days without music. He knows it is time to get up when Zoe arrives; he knows it is nearly dinner time when she returns in the afternoon; he knows it is Monday because Mrs Monday turns up, and Wednesday because he is at the university teaching. He exists in a cloud, he moves in a cloud. He wants George back.

  He checks his watch. He doesn’t want to move, but Dinger will be here shortly. George always said that Dinger was the best in the trade. Can Dinger tell if a piano has not been played? Will Dinger guess what’s happened to him? The old terror returns, it has money to burn, and there’s no one to save him now.