Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  “Of course,” I say. “Take as much time as you need.” I smile, and Charlie is relieved. He feels he has done the right thing, bringing me into work, helping me get started up again with my research. Maldives. As he closes the door behind him, all I can think is, Poor Charlie. How much injury do I cause you by no longer fitting into this past of yours? I turn on the computer and type in the country of our honeymoon and start searching for some of my own memories.

  After some time in Charlie’s office, I leave him a note and journey back to the street. There is a café downstairs from Charlie’s office, and it seems like a good spot to stop and sit and read and organize my wandering thoughts while he bustles around a few flights up. Charlie and Rachel are always encouraging me to write, to keep writing. You have so much material, Rachel tells me, you could write a book. I have spent the past weeks copying my notes onto my computer (Charlie has given me a laptop, on loan from his work), and I have been searching for ways to make something whole come out of all these notes. Rachel has been keeping me company, although sometimes she’ll do her own work over at the library, where she is now, and where I imagine she prefers the quiet and lack of distraction.

  There are a few articles here and there within my files, longer feature pieces that have some substance to them—the river protests, the utopian community just outside Pondicherry, the residue of French colonialism in the restaurants of the old quarter—but I don’t know where to start. Even after two hours of work yesterday, there are only three paragraphs littered on my screen.

  In one of my boxes, I found a fragment of a menu that announces bouillabaisse! in bold, black letters alongside a list of familiar Indian curries—vindaloo, chana masala, dal makhani. I brought this scrap with me today, along with some notes about the Mother, a French woman who founded the Pondicherry commune. As I sit outside this café—it is really too chilly to be out here, my fingers are stiff with cold—I can see this town in fragments from the photos I’ve found and the memories I’ve stitched together: the Mother’s devotees dressed all in white, drifting in near stillness through the streets; the pastel-painted houses of the old French Quarter; the smell of croissants newly baked, coming from the shadows of storefronts. And I can picture this restaurant with its whitewashed walls and art deco font le gourmet, and quite unexpectedly I see the outline of a man’s face across from me. He is there in my memory, holding my hand, and a candle’s light flickers shadows onto his face. He is smiling and brushes a stray hair from his forehead. We are on a terrace and the breeze carries the sea toward our table. The waiter, who is dressed in a crisp white uniform, puts down a plate of steaming stew, with rice and naan on the side, and then whispers, “Bon appétit.” He disappears with polite efficiency. And then the man across from me vanishes too, and I look up from my computer. All I can write about are these hazy disappearances. I delete the three paragraphs so Charlie won’t see what I’ve been writing.

  And I think I may in fact be going crazy, because when I glanced up from the screen, I saw the man from the restaurant, the man from my memories. He was looking at me from the window of the bookshop across the street. He held up his hand for a moment, and I wondered if he was waving at me, if he was beckoning me over to him, if he was really there at all. All the remaining warmth of my body traveled up to my head, and the rest of me turned icy. I told myself to calm down, breathe deeply, and focus on something specific in front of me, as the doctors had told me to do. The best way to prevent my seizures, I had learned, was to keep myself from stress, to keep myself from getting too tired, to “turn my brain off” when I started feeling too overwhelmed. And so I stared at my hands and counted to twenty, slowly and deliberately and out loud—I didn’t care if I looked like a mad person—and tried to keep the static in my head at bay. When I looked up, the man was gone from the window. I looked down the street in one direction and then the other, and that’s when I saw him again. He was walking away, but he momentarily turned to me, and in this instant I thought to call out to him to watch where he was going, and it was as if he heard me. He smiled or grimaced, it was hard for me to see, and then turned around and entered the crosswalk and the crowd of people moving on their way.

  I got up from the table and left the shop, off to follow this man who I was absolutely convinced I knew. How can I explain my electric and malfunctioning brain? I heard my own voice in my head calling out, Michael! and I could smell the steamy bouillabaisse, and the cobblestoned street underneath my feet now merged with the cobblestoned streets of the old French Quarter of Pondicherry. Michael was wearing a green jacket and brown pants and a tan scarf spun loosely around his neck and he was walking away from me. I followed him down Church Street, and I willed him to stop. I ran after him, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to do these things. I ran and stumbled in my clumsy boots and I searched for him in the swell of people meeting their friends for coffee and ducking in and out of stores. Even as I ran, I knew I had lost him again. He had disappeared into this ceaseless flow of strangers.

  When I walked back to the café, I whispered to myself over and over again: You are not crazy, Claire. He was here; he was across the way in that bookstore and he waved at you. You know this man, and he knows you, and he came to tell you something. I arrived back at my table, and my computer was gone. I had left it there, along with my bag, which was also gone, and my papers and my photographs. I sat down in my chair and I thought about crying. Somewhere in myself, I knew that I was panicking, but I felt completely emptied of feeling. I put my cold hands to my temples and rested my head in my palms. And then I felt a shadow fall across my body. Please, please, please, I whispered into my lap.

  “What is the matter with you, Claire? Have you gone completely mad?”

  I looked up. There was Charlie, my computer in his arms, my bag dangling stupidly from his shoulder. And all I could think, in my typically ungrateful way, was, How can I make you disappear, Charlie?

  Charlie

  Claire and I drove home in silence. I knew why I was furious. I had told her to stay put in my office, that we’d go get a late lunch together. She knew how frightened I’d been after her last excursion alone, so when I found her note in my office, I was already prepared for an argument. But when I saw her abandoned bag and computer, I panicked. It was cold and I had no idea how long she’d been gone. At least she was in a public place, I told myself by way of reassurance, and I was just about to phone Rachel to see if she would help me start searching when Claire returned with that dazed look on her face. She actually seemed annoyed with me for my concern. When I asked her why she had abandoned her things, she merely shrugged and said that something had caught her eye. When I asked her why she’d left my office when we had agreed she would stay put, she didn’t answer me at all. I had no idea why she was so cross with me.

  When we returned to the house, she immediately climbed the stairs to her office and left me to tend to my frustration and confusion alone. This had become typical. Later, when she got sleepy, I’d have a chance to look through her work from the day. This had also become typical. When you’re used to people keeping secrets from you, you become a good spy. However, I am not proud of my snooping.

  Her computer is filled with fragments. I don’t know if they are memories or excerpts from notes and research taken from her boxes or half-formed recollections that have merged with her imagination. She has been searching for information on the Maldives, and for a moment I’m touched by her desire to remember our honeymoon.

  And despite my tendency to wallow in my own frustration with Claire, I’m happy to retreat for a moment into my own memories. I remember the humidity and bright sun, our voices churned by ceiling fans. It had been Claire’s idea to take our honeymoon in the Maldives. She had started gathering brochures and lining her desk with images of white-sand beaches and couples holding hands, facing the camera, their faces distorted by snorkels and overzealous smiles. The sea looked impossibly tranquil; even the reproduced images held a brightness that blinde
d me. I had never been anywhere tropical before. When I was a child, we always took our holidays by the North Sea. The gray ocean and its rocky shore was the antithesis of exotic, I suppose—unless, of course, you consider sunburnt Londoners a particularly unique species that come out of hiding only one fortnight a year.

  Since leaving England, I have been drawn to the mountains and the thick, heavy snows of Vermont. I crave extremes in wintry weather, perhaps from growing up in a persistent, cool drizzle. Ever since I arrived in the States, I’ve wanted to chase blizzards and the steep descent of slopes littered with moguls and mazes of whitewashed evergreens, dipping lazily over pristine whiteness. I suppose there is an overwhelming brightness to winter mountain landscapes too, but the island was altogether different. No matter how much sunblock I applied to my skin, I baked along that sea. In all our pictures from those weeks, my smile looks more like a grimace, my forehead is stretched and leathery, a look of pinched pain in the creases of my mouth. I still blame the unbecoming freckles around my lips on that trip. But Claire is absolutely radiant in our photographs, browned to a sepia glow, sandals dangling from lazy fingers, her hair dripping from the sea.

  We ate alongside the ocean every night. Fresh fish netted from the waters where we took our morning swims. Butterfish and tuna, adrift in butter and garlic and chilies, eyes peering out, surprised to be on our plates. I never got used to the intimacy that came with attacking the whole bodies of our meals, their stunned eyes looking on as we peeled away their exteriors, their scales and gills—it all felt like a science lesson.

  Of course, the meals tasted brilliant. I’ve never again eaten fish that literally melted in my mouth like cotton candy, but it was also traumatic, really. Claire took to preparing my meal for me as if I were a toddler. “I can’t bear the grimace on your face,” she had said, just as she began the ritual of carving and breaking away the meat from the fish bone for me. After a few evenings, her fingers became lined with scratches from the exuberance she put into her dinner work. “Sanath showed me how,” she explained one night as she savored the cheeks of her butterfish. The cheeks! “It’s the best part,” she said sheepishly when she saw my skepticism.

  Claire had befriended a young boy who fished for our hotel. Sanath was a Tamil boy whose mother worked as a maid at the Bayside View, a flashier resort up the coast. Claire followed him around in the early mornings while I slept in or sipped lime juice on our veranda in the shade, preparing for the heat of the day. She took photos of him in his snorkel, throwing his net, displaying his catch. And he taught her how to throw the net, a graceful, arcing motion that almost sent his slim frame flying into the sea.

  Claire got the hang of it after a few tries, and they both beamed back at me as I waved and gave them a thumbs-up. I felt ridiculous up there in my wicker rocker, useless and fussy. Claire and I were the same age—twenty-six at the time—and yet I was always feeling older than she was, less energetic, stodgier. She called my reticence my “lingering Englishness.” But I imagine I would have been the same kind of person even if I had been born in the States. If only this boy could see me on skis, I thought to myself, while I secretly hoped his net might come up empty and give me a respite from fish for at least one night. If there’s no catch, I continued thinking, then Claire might not look at me disapprovingly when I suggest I might just order the spaghetti Bolognese.

  When I think of Claire, upstairs in her study with her fragments, I feel guilty. She had always wanted to go back to the Maldives, but we never did. We took our holidays in closer places because time never quite seemed generous enough to us and because I think Claire knew I was resistant to the idea. She was kind enough to avoid the topic, though I realize now how disappointed she must have felt over the years. I had been an absolute failure at honeymooning. A sunburnt whiner who couldn’t even muster the expertise to eat his dinner without her help. She had sent copies of her photos back to Sanath, but he had never written back to her. She missed him in a way I never quite understood. I think he became a sort of ghost to her, reminding her of all the things we couldn’t get back.

  And suddenly my mind travels back to Florida, to Claire’s body in the hospital. The Keys had reminded me so much of our honeymoon. The heavy, humid air, the taste of salt from sweat and sea air. I think of Claire in her hospital bed. Her eyes are closed and her breathing looks clumsy and difficult. There is a snarl on her lips. I remember wondering if it is possible for people to feel anger when they are in a coma. The doctors have forced her into this state for her own good until they can get a handle on her seizures. They tell me to talk to her, to hold her hand, but when I do, all I can see is that grimace on her face. Who knows if she even wanted me there. It has been so long since we’ve actually had any kind of real communication. I have lost track of who is more angry at who. When she opens her eyes again, I want her to see me here and be glad, be relieved. I want her to know that she is not alone and that she is going to be all right because she is a fighter and she never gives up on things, with the exception perhaps of us.

  Claire was planning to return to the Maldives before she got sick. I found notes from travel agents and hotel rate quotes in her inbox when I was called to the hospital and ended up staying in her hotel room. I wondered who she was planning to go with—the rates were for double rooms. This was when my snooping started. It was a relief, even a revenge of sorts, to click on each and every one of those messages. Delete. Delete. Delete. I certainly haven’t mentioned any of this to Claire, and I haven’t even brought it up with Rachel. Claire would feel betrayed and Rachel would be disappointed. Whereas I make excuses for myself. I wouldn’t have to snoop if Claire didn’t have so many secrets. Originally I had been trying to help the doctors locate some information that might help with their diagnosis. I was trying to help us make a fresh start, all the while failing miserably, of course.

  When I feel that seething, relentless anger growing in my gut, I try to remember our courtship, if one can even call it that. I force myself back to a time when we were happy in each other’s company. When we first moved to this house, for example, Claire brushed her hand across every surface. She told me she wanted her fingerprints to start marking the house as ours. I want to fill it with our smells, Charlie, she said. The house creaked with her every footstep and I felt so incredibly lucky to be making the house groan with our shared company.

  She chose the paints just as she had at Rachel’s house, and soon our downstairs burst with vibrant greens and blues and yellows. Claire was never one for subtlety, and even then she was insistent on turning the old, muted house into something fresh and vital. She unpacked our pots and pans with a clanking intensity while I moved the larger furniture into the bedrooms, kitchen, and study with the help of our neighbors’ teenage sons. Our things were shabby back then, everything a hand-me-down or something purchased on a whim from the Goodwill. Our closets were half-empty and we didn’t even have a television. We spent the evenings picnicking on the living room floor, a blanket spread out, illuminated with candles. We drank wine and played Scrabble and made love right there on the floor. Afterward she would laze about, naked, in front of the fireplace and tease me for scrambling back into my trousers. “Such a prude,” she taunted. “When will the rugged Vermonter replace the modest Englishman?” Perhaps even then I was starting to disappoint her.

  She seemed truly happy when we were first settling in. Though it was my job that had brought us up to Burlington, she was able to work from home for the most part. She had access to the university library and she would phone in for editorial chats with her boss in Boston and later New York. She had started doing freelance long-form journalism, which allowed her to be home for long stretches in between assignments, researching and editing and scribbling out plans for a new story. She would go away on occasional assignments that took her far from Burlington—an investigation into the toll quinoa demand was taking on local communities in Bolivia, a piece on the abandoned military bases of Micronesia, the environmental thr
eat damaging the preservation efforts of the “floating gardens” of Xochimilco, Mexico—but she would always come back after a few weeks, refreshed and reinvigorated, and it never occurred to me that she could be or was unhappy here.

  Upon her return she was always eager to get back to her rhythms of “rural life,” as she called it. She would insist on taking a hike up Camel’s Hump or going to UVM’s dairy farm for an ice cream sampler or riding our bikes across the Lake Champlain Islands, our passports tucked away just in case we wanted to cross the border into Quebec. It was often hard for me to get away from work; I was in a new job and the reporting and editorial staff was small and we all worked long hours. Even as I cling to the happier memories of bike rides and autumn strolls, I wonder if Claire, even then, saw our life—my life—as too small. I really don’t recall the moment when her assignments started taking her away for longer stretches of time or when she started making excuses for stopovers in Boston or New York rather than traveling “all the way” up north. By that time, most of our relationship was happening over the static connections of long-distance phone calls. Perhaps if I had made more time away from work. Perhaps if I hadn’t grown defensive when she mocked me about what was keeping me so late at the office—another article about a hunting accident or perhaps the annual festival of trees, she’d tease. Perhaps if I had seen that the silence of our little forest didn’t charm her as much as it charmed me. Perhaps then we wouldn’t be in this stifling predicament where Claire is upstairs and I am downstairs and one of us, at any given moment, is uncertain about why the other seems so full of anger and impatience and disappointment.