Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  I was terrible to Charlie when he came back from his conference. My body was wracked with cramps and I couldn’t find the energy to leave my bed, and I was terrified that he would be able to read the truth of what I had done in the awkwardness of my movements, in the dark circles under my eyes. I didn’t leave my room much for a week or more, and every time Charlie tapped on the door so very lightly, so very politely, I urged him away. Claire had told him that I had the stomach flu, and when he brought me tea, oversweetened with honey the way I like it, I shooed him away and refused to meet his kiss. I remember him leaning in, telling me he had missed me, and my turning my face away from him so that his lips brushed my ear awkwardly. Later in the week, he brought me the newspaper and began to tell me about the conference and how he had met an editor up in Vermont who was planning on retiring soon and how one day there might be a job in it for him. But I heard few of the details because my insides were screaming and I felt so damn guilty, listening to him chatter away when my silence then, and my silence from that point on, would unspool a continuous lie between us. I knew for the first time with complete clarity that I loved him and I also knew that I had ruined everything. When he sat on the corner of my bed, an electric jolt of pain shot through me, from my pelvis to my brain, and I yelled at him. “Damn it, Charlie,” I think I said, “can’t you see that I just want to be left alone?” I don’t remember exactly what I shouted, but I do remember the hurt in his face as he told me to rest up and said he’d be back to check on me a bit later, but either he didn’t return or I slept right through his visit, and he was careful with me from that point on.

  I avoided him for days. I listened for his voice in the kitchen, calling out a good-bye to Claire and perhaps to the absent me, and then finally I would drag myself out of bed. Claire was good to me. She skipped a few classes or went to campus late so that we could have breakfast together. She didn’t say much, but she would brush out my hair and look over the writing assignments I was trying to keep up with and make me feel as if I wasn’t alone. “I can’t look at him,” I remember telling Claire one of those mornings.

  “It’ll get better.” She smiled at me. She tried very hard to make me feel like myself again. Maybe she was feeling guilty too. I’m sure she hadn’t anticipated my sluggish sadness, my sleeplessness, the anger that was so quick to spill over into our conversations.

  “No. I don’t think it will.” It was hard for me to look at Claire. I suppose it was hard for her to look at me too. She avoided any direct eye contact with me during our halting breakfast conversations. I remember her constant movements, clanging about in the kitchen, offering to make me some eggs or oatmeal, or taking my work and bending over it at the kitchen table, scribbling notes and edits, and avoiding me while simultaneously trying to keep me company, trying to look after me. I knew it wasn’t her fault, all this hurt and anger and fear welling up inside me. I was the one who went to the appointment, folded my clothes into a bundle, and shut my eyes when the doctor and nurse came in, willing time to push forward so that the whole ordeal would already be in the past and I could open my eyes and be a normal person again.

  Because I didn’t let myself talk to Charlie, it was easy for me to turn my anger toward him. I reasoned that if he loved me, he would see how much pain I was in. If he loved me, he would know that something was deeply, deeply wrong. If he loved me, he would have barged into my room and shaken my shoulders and forced me to open my mouth and just tell him what the hell was going on with me. But that wasn’t Charlie. Charlie doesn’t yell and Charlie doesn’t barge in and demand things. Charlie is polite and careful and kind. But Charlie is also weak and easily frightened, which may have been what drew me to him in the first place. It’s funny how the people you think are incapable of hurting anyone can cause the most hurt.

  Eventually, Charlie and I settled into an uneasy peace. I came out of my room and we ate breakfast together and sometimes walked to the T together, shopped for groceries, went to the movies. We did these things sometimes with Claire, sometimes just the two of us. We had never talked about any of it—my shouting at him, my avoiding him for weeks, or the fact that we had stopped holding hands or kissing one another or falling into bed, wine drunk and shy and giddy. Some agreement had been made in our mutual silence. We were finding our way back into a friendship, me subtly apologetic, Charlie slightly befuddled. We smiled at each other and complimented one another on silly things and bought each other small gifts (a scarf from the secondhand store, a used copy of a Wallace Stevens poetry collection, an ugly watercolor of a brook and a bird that reminded us both of East Anglia)—something we had never done before—and grew at the same time more comfortable with one another and more distant.

  I think about this awkward courtship back into friendship and I blame a lot of things for the damage done. I blame how young we were, twenty-three and clumsy with our emotions. I blame Charlie for not being braver and I blame myself for agreeing to a silence. It seemed too easy to blame Claire, when really it was me I was most disgusted with. She had been a good friend who had taken my words and transformed them into the advice she thought I needed to hear. Just as she had started to put order into my parents’ house after their death, she had been trying to restore order to my life.

  Weeks went by and eventually we all settled back into the rhythms of our house. As I relaxed, Claire relaxed too, and then came the decision to paint and clean and make the house truly ours. I don’t remember the exact moment I started noticing the changes between Claire and Charlie, when it became the two of them sitting on the couch, entangled, while I sat on my dad’s corduroy recliner, in front of a rented movie, or when they would meet up for a drink after classes while I stayed in the library working on my thesis, or when I would go to sleep, listening to their chatter carrying up from downstairs, a record hissing from the living room. Instead I remember only the ladder and the kiss and the paint-spattered room and all that anger, deep and weeks old, groaning in my body. I hated them both in that instant, but not nearly as much as I hated myself. I have always thought that it was I who let that kiss happen. I hadn’t been strong enough to make my own demands, and it would always be my fault if I ended up alone. More than the kiss or the fact that Claire and Charlie were falling in love with one another, what made me angry was that they were going to leave me. The two people who had become my family, the only two people in the world who I loved and who loved me back, were one day going to leave me behind.

  Of course, that was still a few years away. We would continue living in my parents’ house, we would finish our degrees, and Charlie would find work with the Worcester Telegram and Gazette while Claire covered local stories for the AP, and eventually that editor who had been planning to retire actually retired and remembered Charlie and called him one evening and put him in touch with his managing editor up in Burlington.

  Claire was relentless in her search for a boyfriend for me. “What is with you?” she used to tease me. “I know you have a vagina. I know you have feelings.” It seemed like every weekend Claire would organize some kind of evening for us—some live music at the Paradise followed by cocktails, dinner out in the South End, after-hours “cool tea” in Chinatown, long after the bars had stopped serving. And at each of these outings, a man would show up, saying that Claire had invited him. I don’t know where or how she met so many people. My life, at that time, consisted mainly of showing up at work in Copley Square, sitting in a cubicle for eight hours, editing textbook copy, and then heading home or to some destination Claire had suggested for the evening. I was lucky if I met up for lunch with a cubicle mate or was called into my boss’s office for a planning session. Otherwise it was pretty much me, a stack of papers, worn pencils, and my computer keeping me company throughout the day.

  Claire’s job with the AP sent her all over the city, covering stories as disparate as school zoning and Red Sox recruitment scouting. Wherever she went, she seemed to pick up a new friend, and if that new friend was a guy, she’d invi
te him along to our next outing. If she found him particularly promising, she’d recommend a specific outfit for me to wear. Sometimes she’d tell me to meet her somewhere an hour before she actually arrived, so I’d be forced to chat with David or Henry or Max at a dimly lit bar until she and Charlie showed up. I’m not sure who would be more disappointed in these moments, me for being set up, yet again, with a dude wearing a Celtics T-shirt, or the dude who was hoping to meet another Claire and instead got stuck with me.

  I can admit that I started behaving badly. I drank too much and I flirted with these poor guys even when I wasn’t remotely interested in them or even attracted to them. I let them buy me drinks and then I let them take me home, long after Charlie and Claire had left the bar, and we stumbled into the house, loud and drunk, and were noisy in our clumsy and ugly sex. By the time Charlie and Claire and I were having our morning tea, I had already kicked David or Henry or Max out, and when Claire would ask if I planned to call him later, maybe invite him over to dinner some night later in the week, I’d tell her that I had forgotten to get his number or that he had a girlfriend who was just out of town for the week or that he was a Republican and that it would never work. I figured Claire would eventually get tired of fixing me up on these hopeless not-quite-dates, but she’d always just snort and roll her eyes at me. “You’re terrible, Rach,” she would say to me. Or “Well, there’s always next time.”

  “Who asked you to become my matchmaker?” I asked her more than once. Or if I was feeling more mean spirited, I’d accuse her of being conservative and judgmental. “Not every date has to lead to another one,” I’d say.

  “No. That’s true. But maybe one date could.”

  “That never used to be your attitude.”

  “Fine. Forget it. You’re on your own,” she’d threaten, but then the next weekend would come around and there would be Jonathan sitting at the table.

  Charlie usually kept his mouth shut during these interactions. Whether he was amused or embarrassed, it was impossible to say. Sometimes he’d just offer some innocuous comment like, “I thought Max was a nice bloke. Maybe I’ll call him some time if you don’t.”

  And then I would sigh and pour myself a drink. I’m embarrassed, thinking back on this time. I was young and didn’t realize how angry I was. I had just lost my parents and I was terrified I was losing my best friends too. I was trying on a version of meanness I had never embraced, and thought it was making me tough and resilient and independent, but in the end I think it was just turning me into an ass.

  On one of these nights, I met Bernard. His name was so old-fashioned sounding that I was ready to write him off immediately. Bernard in his self-consciously unhip James Joyce glasses, his sagging brown corduroys, his curly hair, which would spike up in certain spots, coiled and unpredictable. Bernard, to use Charlie’s phrase, was “a lovely bloke.” He was smart and funny, and he would dance if he had enough beers in him, and he liked to cook adventurous foods and surprise us with unexpected plans. Bernard was an obsessive contest enterer. He insisted that if you make a point of entering drawings in supermarkets, buying raffle tickets from the local Boy Scouts, purchasing an occasional lottery ticket, chances were you’d win something great every once in a while. Claire teased him, called him a gambler, but she didn’t really mean it. In the end we had to agree that Bernard was right. Because of him we ate a lovely meal at the top of the Hancock Tower; we got free admission to Canobie Lake Park, where we got sick on fried dough and roller coasters; we won a shopping spree—everything you can throw in your shopping cart in 4½ minutes!!!—at the local Market Basket.

  Bernard lived in a tiny studio in Allston, so we stored most of his winnings at our house: In the living room, an antique poster for Broken Blossoms that featured Lillian Gish eyeing a crystal ball. In the guest room, a replica of the fortune-telling machine from the movie Big that made us all a little nervous. On our bookshelves, commemorative snow globes for every month of the year. Until Bernard won this dubious prize from a local antique store, we had all thought snow globes contained only winter scenes. How wrong we were. Instead of snow, July rained butterflies, September rained orange and yellow leaves, April rained rain.

  Bernard was a photographer Claire had worked with on a story. They met on a ferry that was taking them to the Boston Harbor Islands for some investigation of a former mental institution that had been built out there a century ago, on one of the spits of land jutting out into the bay. “He’s shy,” Claire had whispered to me that first time, when we all met at an oyster bar after the shoot. “It took a lot of persuading to get him to come out tonight, so be nice to him.” It wasn’t hard to be nice to Bernard. He was sweet and quietly sarcastic and easily embarrassed. He had grown up in Maine in a family of boys, who had always teased him for being arty and sensitive when most of them chose to head toward the ocean and work on fishing boats.

  I think what I appreciated about him the most that night, though, was that he watched Claire with a bemused expression much like the one I had tried to master over the past months. He gave her the space to tell her stories of the day. They had arrived on Long Island, one of the harbor islands, early in the morning, the fog still layered over the landscape. It was misty and cold, and little drops of moisture hung from the trees and the abandoned buildings. They visited a shelter on the island where homeless people, picked up in the South End mostly, were transported each evening to a warmish bed and some hot food, much of which was grown at an organic farm neighboring the shelter. “It’s a weirdly self-sufficient community out there,” Claire explained while Charlie replaced her empty Guinness with another. I had been noticing the way Charlie always had his hand on Claire, a gentle but persistent presence. He might graze her shoulder on the way to the bar or touch her forearm as he replaced her drink. I suppose it was his way of telling Claire that he was listening, that he was always near, but without making any kind of fuss. They had entered an easy sort of rhythm over the past months, and as I listened to Claire’s recap of the day, I was taken aback all over again by their—at least it felt this way to me—sudden intimacy.

  I liked that Bernard interjected, quietly, when he felt Claire had gotten a detail wrong. When she complained that the shelter smelled of urine and was an oppressive place, he suggested that it was actually pretty humane, comparatively speaking. He turned to me at one point and explained that the food co-op was run like a kibbutz, that the volunteers lived out there all year round, gardening and canning and maintaining a greenhouse. It was an extraordinary little world, he said. And then Claire explained how she had talked Bernard into climbing into an old, abandoned building that had once been some sort of hotel and an almshouse and a dormitory for wayward boys. “And then he just disappeared, chasing photographs, and left me in an old kitchen.” Claire took a sip of her beer and paused. “It’s a place where you can hear the past,” she said, and Bernard smirked at me across the table. He was amused by Claire but wasn’t completely charmed by her, and I found myself drawn to him and his skepticism.

  Bernard wasn’t much of a drinker, and my boozy antics and aggressive flirtations hadn’t seemed to affect him much, so I was a little surprised that he mustered the energy to ask me out. He had just graduated from MassArt and invited me to the opening of a show of some of his recent work. We were just saying good night, so I suggested he might as well come home with us, but instead he wrote the name of the gallery and the address on a napkin, underlined “Thursday” three times, and gave it to me without even a kiss on the cheek or a quick hug. He shook Charlie’s hand and told Claire he’d send her some of the extra prints that didn’t get used in the story, and then he strolled out of the restaurant. He had a bounce to his gait, a tendency to walk on his toes, that I found a little silly. I certainly had no initial plans to go to his show, but when Thursday rolled around, I headed out alone to the gallery, leaving Claire and Charlie on the couch in front of an old Polanski movie that I had picked out much to Claire’s dismay. Not another Polans
ki, she had whined earlier. I had been finding small ways of punishing her.

  The gallery was in the South End, and it had started snowing by the time I got there. My feet were wet and cold and I can only imagine the scowl I was wearing as I entered the room. Bernard was standing toward the back of the space, surrounded by a few friends, mostly women. I wasn’t quite sure if I was jealous, but I certainly wasn’t going to approach him. I slowly meandered around the exhibit, refusing to make eye contact with Bernard. If he wanted to talk to me, he could come up to me, thank me for coming out on this stupid, wintery night.

  I had to admit that his work was good. He shot in black and white, focusing on the meeting of light and shadows. His subject was the city itself, anonymous blocks that suddenly made Boston seem strange and unfamiliar to me. I’m not sure how he managed it, but he seemed to snatch portraits accidently, the shutter pausing just long enough to catch the eye of a woman burdened by grocery bags or a garbage collector caught in the act of window shopping. I remember thinking that Bernard would make a great spy. All his subjects seemed oblivious to his presence, and yet his camera caught them in these intimate acts, their expressions revealing their fatigue, their desires, the transitory thoughts that were marked, so very briefly, on their faces.

  The images were lonely and lovely and I think I was a little angry with him for being talented and for capturing my interest. I didn’t want him to have the upper hand, and at the same time I suddenly very much wanted him to like me. I had been keeping my eye on him surreptitiously. He had moved to the corner of the room, sipping his wine, looking a bit uncomfortable. Eventually I raised my hand to him and he nodded and smiled and took a sip of wine. I was afraid he wasn’t going to come over to me and I was too stubborn to go to him, so I turned back to a photo of a young woman who was crouched on the sidewalk, tying the shoe of a toddler with tears streaming down his face. She looked too young to be the child’s mother, but the way he rested his hand on her shoulder suggested that she probably was. Perhaps she had sensed Bernard, because she had looked up from her task, her expression accusatory. She had a small scar running down the side of her cheek, and a rhinestone earring had caught the light, shimmering in the late-afternoon sun. It was the only bright thing about the picture, and its sparkle made the rest of the scene sink into even greater shadow. The photo made you want to apologize for looking.