Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  She was right; I didn’t really want to talk anymore. I was still cross with her for her earlier comments and I was tired and worried that at any moment the conversation might take a nasty turn again. But instead of heading toward the kitchen, I pulled Rachel next to me on the couch and said, “I do want to talk. There’s not much of that going on around here these days.”

  Rachel smiled. “The photo made me mad—isn’t that stupid of me?”

  “The one in your pocket? Whatever for? I remember that being a good day. The Sox beat the Blue Jays, didn’t they? We were stuffed full of hot dogs and beer. Claire had gotten her hat signed by—who was it?—Gedman, the catcher, I think?”

  Rachel laughed. “It was a good day. Of course it was. But I was sulking. Do you remember? Looking back now, it might have all been in my head.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is stupid. This is—what, now, fifteen years ago?”

  “Go on, then.” I tapped Rachel on her knee.

  She rolled her eyes. “I was convinced that Claire had been flirting with Ben—the guy from my class that I had been dating for something like three weeks. I knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, but still, I was furious with her.”

  “Ben! That was his name! I had forgotten. I was trying to remember if it was your classmate we had gone with, or if was that chap from the bar who you used to see from time to time.”

  “Frank? Are you kidding? I never went out in public with that guy!”

  “Surely not. My mistake, Ben it was, then.” We were both laughing now.

  “Ben it was, indeed, Charlie. Anyway, he kept maneuvering closer to Claire every chance he got, and I thought, out of loyalty to me—and to you, for that matter!—she should be moving away, but I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that she was encouraging him.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her. She liked to make us both jealous, I think.” I laughed as I said it, but there was a catch of meanness in my tone. I heard it and Rachel certainly did too. Rachel dropped the back of her hand on my thigh.

  “I guess I wouldn’t either.” Rachel sipped from her mug. She had grown quiet. I had made things awkward again. “I wonder if you should bring it up, Charlie. I tried to at the store, but she had no reaction to his name.”

  So this is what she had been wanting to tell me all along. I was suddenly furious with her all over again. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Rachel.” I pushed her hand away. “I am trying to hold things together here. Can’t you respect that even a little bit? It’s tricky enough as it is. Why should I bring him up? He’s actually had the decency to stay away. Why is it my responsibility? I am taking care of her. I have opened my house—our house—back up to her. I am not asking questions; I am not making accusations; I am not—”

  “Of course you’re not, Charlie! You never do.” Rachel was shouting now. “It’s easier for you this way.”

  “Easier for me? You must be joking.”

  “Yes, easier. This way, everyone looks at you as if you were the saint. Stoic, kind, generous Charlie. How does he do it? Such patience. Such selflessness.”

  “You are not being fair, Rachel.”

  “And all the while, you get to keep holding in this anger, this blame. You keep judging her, and she doesn’t even know anything about it. You keep her in the dark so you can remain good and she can remain bad. She knows you are angry; she’s not stupid, Charlie. But she doesn’t know why. It’s not so different from lying.”

  We looked at each other in surprise. I had lost track of who I was angry with, and I feared Rachel had done the same. She had started to cry. I was unwilling to admit the truth in what she had said.

  “We have never confronted her. Not once over the years.” Rachel directed her words into her own lap. “Why didn’t we ever ask her to explain herself? We never held her accountable for anything. We let her be. I wonder all the time why we always did that.” Rachel put down her mug and stretched her legs out over the edge of the couch. She rested her head on my lap and I didn’t know where to put my hands.

  “It’s a simple answer for me, Rach. You already know it. I am a coward. I was afraid of losing her entirely, so I thought I was willing to pretend. I thought I’d be able to share her, rather than let her go completely. She must have taken me for an idiot. I think back and I wonder if all that time she was just waiting for me to finally stand up to her. But I was a coward. I was going to make her do the leaving—I wasn’t about to do it for her. I couldn’t bear the idea of it.” I paused. “She talked to you about him, of course. About our separate bedrooms. How infrequently she came back home.”

  “Yes, she did.” Rachel wiped at her nose. “I’m sorry. I figured you were too perceptive not to know, so I imagined you had somehow given your okay to the whole thing. I have to say I was a bit furious with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Yes, with you, Charlie.” She reached up to pat my cheek. “I suppose I wanted you to make her suffer, even just a little bit. I wanted her to have to lose you. Maybe I was hoping you’d act out my revenge for me or something. It wasn’t fair, but I wanted you both to hurt, and then maybe there’d be some kind of balance again. It was an awful way to think, I know, Charlie. And I’m sorry for it.”

  “I’m not sure I’m completely following you, Rach. What sort of revenge do you mean?”

  “I know you don’t understand, Charlie. How could you? I’ve been a coward too. I never said a word when you left. We’re all perfect for one another.” Rachel laughed but there was no joy in it. She got up from the couch and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m going to head out for a walk,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be better company when I come back.”

  After her nap and while Rachel was still out for a walk, Claire approached me in my study. She held out a photograph and asked me to look at it. Claire told me she had found it with the pictures from her time in India, amid the articles and notes and crumpled rupees. “It’s the only one of you I could find. Were we there together? How often did you come?”

  Despite my attempts at pleasant conversation on our drive home, I hadn’t done a very good job concealing my frustration. I know it’s not Claire’s fault—rationally I understand this—that she remembers her parents and grandparents more than she seems to remember me, but at my most impatient, I want to accuse her of picking and choosing from among her memories. Selfishly I want to be there in her mind alongside the stories of her mother’s pig. I don’t know if this was Claire’s attempt at assuaging me, this picture from my only visit to India. And after my conversation with Rachel, I wasn’t sure I was willing to have this one. “I came whenever you invited me.” I watched her for a reaction. When she didn’t offer one, I added, “I joined you once.”

  Claire studied the picture. “I’m sure we were both busy with our work. It’s not as if you could leave the office for too long at a time, I imagine. India is a long way away.”

  It had come to this: the two of us talking to one another carefully, as if it were a conversation between a parent and a child. “Yes, Claire, that was part of it, certainly. India is very far away and you were quite busy and never in one place for very long. And like you say, I had the office to run and the local politics to cover and the Take Back Vermont chants to record.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of your work, Charlie.” Claire looked injured.

  “I know you weren’t.” I examined the photo. There was a coastline in the background and a baguette sticking out of Claire’s purse. It was taken during the few days we spent in Pondicherry, a brief respite from the stifling heat and chaos of the inland cities. We had watched with some fascination as foreigners, mostly Europeans and Americans, dressed all in white, marched to and from the ashram of the Mother, an aging French woman, the local guru. There was a commune not too far out of the city, modeled on a local, sustainable agrarian society. Supposedly, there were members from every continent there, tending their own patch of land, sharing their goods with their neighbors. No
money changed hands. Claire wanted to do a story there, but she was coming up against quite a bit of resistance. She was in a grouchy mood because of it. You can see a slight scowl in her expression. Or perhaps she was cross with me. I was rather unhappy too, as I recall, and a few hours before this picture was snapped, we had been discussing whether I’d stay for the full three weeks we had planned for or perhaps head home a week or so early.

  The picture is quite beautiful. Claire is lovely. She is wearing a straw hat, and beads of sunlight are filtering through the hat’s gaps, casting bright speckles across her already freckled face. Her skin is glowing, and all the hiking around in the villages and riverbeds have made her strong and fit. She is wearing a modest sundress that matches the muted pastels of the French colonial buildings behind us. I am looking away from the camera. I am squinting out toward the unswimmable sea and refusing to meet the gaze of the camera. It is a very professional-looking picture, the depth of field elongated to keep us in focus while showing off the UNESCO-protected architecture lining our route. Of course, it is clear who has taken this picture. It is why I won’t meet the viewfinder directly on. I wonder what Claire sees when she looks at this picture and whether she notices that I am looking away, refusing to confront the reality of our situation.

  “Why did I choose India?” she asked me. “Was I there long?”

  “Off and on for two years. You had done some pieces for the Globe on ecological sustainability, overpopulation, land rights. You had been down to Ecuador a few times, and Brazil. The science editor from the Times liked what you were doing. He got the travel editor on board; they thought you could tackle two birds with one stone. ‘Thirty-Six Hours in Chennai.’ ‘The Cauvery River Shrinks.’ ‘Shantytowns and Nightclubs in Bangalore.’ They hired you on a freelance basis, but you always seemed to have work. We were very proud of you.”

  “Did you think about coming with me?” Claire was still eyeing the picture skeptically. “Did I like the food there? I’m annoyed the doctors won’t let me eat spicy foods these days.”

  This was how our conversations had been going lately. Claire would ask me something seemingly (at least to me) quite important, but then she would shift to some mundane question about food or her medications or why we never had a dog, and I would lose my focus too. “Which question do you want an answer to first?” I asked. I have always thought of myself as a patient person, but I was failing miserably at keeping my composure during these wandering chats. At this point I wanted to shake her and shout: Think! What is it that you really want to know? Do you really not remember?

  She sensed I was getting exasperated. “Whichever one you want. I’ve forgotten where I started. Remind me.” Claire walked into the kitchen, leaving me with the photo in my hands. She called to me from the stove: “Should I make some tea? Or we still have that hot chocolate that Nancy gave us.”

  “Whatever you like, Claire. I’m happy with either,” I shouted back. This was also something Claire continued to do. If she sensed a conversation growing difficult between us, she’d simply move away. To the kitchen. To the garage. To the computer to look over her ever-increasing folders of notes and pictures. I brought a scanner home from work a week ago, and now I had begun to regret it. The hard drive was getting overloaded with all of Claire’s archives of the past. I was going to need to buy us—me—a new laptop. I could no longer even find most of my work on the old computer. And here I went again, finding ways to be annoyed that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. What did our computer have to do with Claire’s work in India, her increasing distance and time away from home? Her new group of friends, expats and foreign correspondents and NGO workers and local activists and the photographer?

  I walked into the kitchen. “The doctors won’t let you eat spicy food because of your throat spasms. They expect all of that to improve once they get the seizures under control and your coordination starts to get better. And yes, you loved the food in India, though it often made you sick as a dog. You insisted on eating all the street foods—the sugarcane juice and the fried lentil patties, the rotis and the horrendous sweets. You’d send me e-mails whose entire subject was the food you had discovered that particular week. You were lucky I visited only once. I tried one street samosa, and I was laid out for two days.”

  Claire grinned. “Maybe we should try to make some version of all those things here. We could make them milder. Maybe eating something from the past could jog my memories from that time. The doctors say that sensory stimuli are sometimes the best way to access memories—smell, in particular, I think it was they said. Or taste? I can’t remember. Anyway, it might be worth a try.” Claire handed me a cup of steaming chocolate. It seemed she was going to ignore my last comments.

  I couldn’t shake Rachel’s voice from my head, her accusations about my silences, my confessions of cowardice. Was this a moment in which I should confront Claire with the past? Should I mention the photographer’s name, explain whose eyes were gazing at the two of us through the viewfinder? Should I describe my sense of embarrassment, shame even, at letting him look at me, at the two of us together, and click the shutter in his own version of judgment? What could I say? What would I ask? How could you have put me through that, Claire? Instead I said, “You didn’t want me to come with you, Claire. Or rather, you knew I wouldn’t come: I hate the heat, I hate crowds, I hate untidiness and unpleasant smells. I would have ruined India for you. We both knew that.”

  Claire sniffed and scratched at the nape of her neck, where her hair was slowly returning.

  If she wasn’t going to say anything, I figured I’d just follow her lead, though I could feel my stomach shriveling up inside me. I had been angry for so long that I didn’t know how to start talking about any of this. “It was clear that you had made up your mind, and we both used my work as the reason for my not coming. My job wouldn’t be waiting for me upon my return after two years away. I had worked too long and too hard to just give it up. We both agreed.” I looked up at Claire, who was gazing at the floor. “It was a convenient lie for both of us.”

  “Do you still blame me for going away?” Claire kicked at the bottom of the cupboards. She smiled at me. “I mean, it’s obvious that you’re still angry.”

  “I’m beginning to understand my own complicity in all of it, Claire. I never asked you to stay.”

  “That’s not entirely answering the question, Charlie.” Claire approached me and rested her elbow on my shoulder. “Why are you so angry with me?”

  I pinched the end of her index finger. “It wasn’t the first time you had gone away. You had already rented your flat in Boston, and then you had moved on to New York. First we would take turns on the train, you traveling north, me traveling south, but then you started coming here less and less, and I thought I could match your stubbornness, so I stopped taking the trains too. You barely seemed to notice. You had already left; India was just a bit farther away. I knew things wouldn’t change much.”

  “I didn’t like it here.” Claire flicked my finger away.

  Her words struck me, and anger must have flashed across my face.

  “I’m sorry; I meant it as a question, Charlie. Why didn’t I like it here?”

  “How am I to say, Claire, for God’s sake? Only you can know that. You pretended to like it here, but I always thought you found it provincial and claustrophobic. You complained that there were no good pubs and the place was overrun with students. It was cold all the time, and then suddenly too hot with too many mosquitoes. The only time you could bear it was during the autumn. You were restless; you took long walks by yourself. You tell me, Claire—why didn’t you like it here?”

  “I’m sorry.” Claire offered me a sad smile.

  I really couldn’t stomach her feeling sorry for me. I wanted to push her elbow away, do something dramatic like throw my mug against the wall, and shout, Why would you make hot chocolate, when after all these years you should know I prefer tea? Really what I wanted to do was simply push her, p
ush her away from my chest, out the front door, hand her my car keys, and keep pushing. Instead I pushed her the only way I knew how these days, by tapping ever so slightly at her guilt and her faulty brain. “How can you be sorry for things you don’t even remember? You can’t apologize without knowing what you’re apologizing for.”

  Claire took my head in her hands. “I’m sorry I can’t answer your questions, Charlie. I would tell you why I didn’t like it here if I could.” She tugged on my ears, just like she used to, and pulled me to her. “I like it now. It’s peaceful.” She pressed her nose against my neck. “And you smell good, always like the outside.” And then she kissed me in our kitchen, our hips leaning against the stove, a simple kiss, as if she were testing how it might feel to her. We stared at each other, her thumbs tucked into my belt, kissing with our eyes open. We were watching each other for a reaction, neither of us pulling away.

  Rachel

  While I’m out for my walk and debating whether I even want to return to Charlie and Claire’s house, I think how easy it is, how easy it’s always been, to simply blame Claire for my losing Charlie. It is true that I had to sit back and watch them fall in love—watch her drape her legs over his lap as we watched movies in the living room, and ask him his advice on her latest story (he was always a sucker for flattery)—and once everything started, I of course had to watch them exchange quick kisses in the kitchen over tea before they both headed out to start their day. Perhaps that was the hardest thing—to see their easy familiarity with one another, as if this part of their relationship had been there all along. All those weeks of Charlie in my bed, passing me the newspaper and asking me if he should bring home dinner or if we were planning to cook at home, had just been a placeholder for him and Claire. It was impossible to deny that there was an easiness between them that had never been there between Charlie and me. We had always been rather careful with one another, asking before doing, watchful of the other’s expression. Or perhaps I should speak only for myself. I was always watching Charlie for signs of really being in love with me, and it’s true that I was never certain how he felt about me, which made my decision slightly easier when Claire helped me make it. I certainly wasn’t going to make Charlie love me because of a child.