You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Both Ernst and his wife died the year Sara and I left for Bar Harbor, within weeks of each other. At the time, dragged down by liver disease, Ernst had been pushing me to leave NYU. You’re gifted, Victor, but you are no good at getting out of a rut. Still to that day, a Saturday morning spent thinking about him and our work together was far more pleasurable than running ten miles around a park.

  But I didn’t have a succinct way to explain all that to Russell.

  While my houseguest got his exercise, I reviewed the updates on a few of our running experiments. But my mind wandered. I’d stop work, and there was Regina amid the CD towers, inside the telephone cradle. While I stared at charts with my glasses perched on my forehead, my mind crafted lists of how remarkable she was, and how I’d let her down.

  How she deserved a man who would take her out, not one she ordered in.

  When my computer crashed, I got up and paced the hall that lapped our rooms. I listened to air conditioners and sizzling fluorescent bulbs, and the chattering of fingers on old keyboards. I stared out a window and thought about driving home and opening Sara’s office again, unlocking the file cabinet, reading those other cards.

  I still couldn’t remember what movie we’d seen the night we met.

  I decided on a drive downtown. I needed new swim goggles anyway.

  The clerk at the sports store was a teenage giant with acne on both cheeks. I took my time testing out different pairs of goggles. I turned away, trying out the darkest lenses, and stared out the front window, and then there was Regina, blue-green Regina through the goggles, walking down the street.

  She was wearing a tank top and black jeans. Her curly hair was held back with two butterfly clips. It was her cheeks that got me—bright, round, and high. Lindsay, the green-haired roommate, hung back a step, saying something loudly with a slanted mouth. They disappeared.

  What would Hercule Poirot do? What would Darwin? I darted out and slipped into the crowd. Regina and the roommate had crossed the street and were going into a coffee shop. I watched them from a restaurant window’s reflection.

  You once had front-row seats, said one voice in a Viennese accent.

  Now you are spying? said another.

  A minute later the girls left the shop carrying iced coffees, and hugged and parted ways: Regina down an alley, the roommate heading straight for my spot.

  I walked into the first open door, a native crafts shop. A woman was buying a poster of a wolf kissing a dolphin in outer space. The roommate walked past outside without seeing me, and after a minute, I jogged down toward the harbor, looking along the side streets. I stopped after three blocks and caught my breath.

  Regina was gone.

  And what I would have done if I’d actually caught up with her, I had no idea! I started laughing. I sat down on a stone wall, outside a video-rental store, and had to cover my mouth with my hand. People were staring. I stood up and faced the shop to avoid attention. A sun-faded cardboard figure was propped up in the window: Bruce Willis from The Fifth Element, with bleached-blond hair, wearing an orange rubber wife-beater, staring down at me.

  I wiped my eyes and caught my breath, and focused on tamping down.

  Be steadfast for once, said Bruce. Act your age.

  Down the road was a drugstore with a working soda fountain. It was where Aunt Betsy would go as a girl, she’d said, to buy watermelon slices or blueberry pie. I sat at the counter, ordered a tuna melt and coffee, and ate lunch over the Bar Harbor Times.

  On the cover, under the headline “Exclusive Investigation,” was a picture of large dredging equipment being installed in Bass Harbor, and an inset picture of Betsy’s famous fashion designer. She’d beaten the press once again. In her honor, I turned to the police report.

  Report: An elderly man in Town Hill called 911 to report the vice president whispering obscenities through his mail slot. Report: A married couple in West Tremont was arrested for selling crystal methamphetamine. Report: In Northeast Harbor, there’d been two driving-while-intoxicated arrests after a fund-raiser for the local repertory theater. Report: A woman in Bernard had been fined for housing exotic animals, specifically a tiger cub, without proper permits.

  I stared at the sandwich in my hand. I couldn’t place the last time I’d ordered a tuna melt. I’d given them up one day after Lucy pointed out how I’d eaten a tuna melt sandwich for lunch every day two seasons running after Sara’s accident.

  The door jangled behind me and a group of retirees walked in wearing stiff new Harley-Davidson vests. I turned back to the crime reports, to the island the tourists didn’t see: a flotilla of abundance and diversity still evolving, of burlesque acts and rare jungle animals. Another part of America where there were crystals to foretell and methamphetamine to forget, and nothing stayed the same for very long. Where ordinary people were trying to get by without superpowered rubber wife-beaters while the White House snooped through their mail.

  I got up and paid the bill. Regina’s green-haired roommate walked in and slipped onto my stool. She glanced at me, then picked up the newspaper, unfolded it, found the Sudoku puzzle inside, and started filling in the numbers.

  “You really have nothing?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, we’re completely booked.”

  “Can I speak to Joel, please,” I said. “This is Victor Aaron calling.”

  “I’m sorry, but Chef is out today.”

  “Will he be in tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” said the hostess, “I don’t think so.”

  Russell wanted to find out who was selling Joel his wine, and said he didn’t mind mixing business with pleasure. I’d been looking forward to seeing Joel, particularly since Aunt Betsy wouldn’t be present.

  Joel and Sara and I had gone out for coffee a few times when he was setting up Blue Sea. He’d been getting sober at the time and had needed company with non-addicts. Sara even went to an AA meeting with him once. After the accident, though, when I started spending my Friday evenings with Betsy, I felt out of place when Joel was around. Previously, we’d talked as equals. We were two small-business owners who’d reached a dependable level of success, and we could commiserate over management headaches or how tough it was to find good people. Labs, restaurants, orchestras, sports teams, they all relied on the transmission of command: a small team focused on seeing a director’s vision tested and checked and retuned prior to display. But with Betsy calling me at work to supply gossip reports or ask about her prescriptions, the kinship between Joel and me was trumped. I couldn’t help seeing him as she would portray us: Joel the outcast prince, and me supplying a surrogate.

  Russell fixed martinis and drank two. He puffed himself up before getting out of the car. The restaurant was jammed. Hovering around the hostess podium were at least ten people hoping to sit down. Russell pinched my elbow. Two places were opening at the bar, and we slid in. The bartender was a college-age kid wearing a black clip-on bow tie. Around his neck was a hemp necklace with a starfish knotted at the bottom.

  “Is Joel in tonight?”

  “Nope. He’s over visiting family on Cranberry.”

  “Hey, that’s your girlfriend, right?” Russell clapped me on the arm and laughed loudly. He was wearing a tight-fitting black sport jacket. A cigar case in his breast pocket was like an organ pressing up through the skin. “Listen,” Russell said to the bartender, “for now, how about we get some glasses and a corkscrew?”

  He poured the wine. “To Maine.”

  “To Maine.”

  “To us.”

  “To us.”

  “To Ben Lemery,” Russell said.

  “What?”

  I left my glass on the bar.

  “What’s the worry?”

  “You’re an asshole,” I said, and got up and went to the bathroom.

  Sara had referred to it on her first index card, the secret I’d divulged the night we met: that a week before he killed himself, Ben had explained to me his plan. He’d shown me the gun, his father’s
.38 Special, and I didn’t tell anyone. Surely another of his stunts, I’d thought at the time. Then, on the appointed night, he called me, asking for help with his homework, and I hung up. Besides Sara, Russell was the only person who knew about Ben’s call.

  “Look, I’m sorry—”

  I sat back down. “How about we drop it.”

  “See, I was thinking, you’re how old now?”

  “Hold on,” I said, and I took his glass out of his hand and clinked it against mine. “Do me a favor. You remove the nine-eleven sticker from your windshield, then we’ll talk.”

  “Hey, fuck you, all right?” A second later he laughed, then stopped short. “Fine, I’ll do it. For you, right when I get back.”

  “Stick it in an envelope. Send it to me.”

  “You’ll let that shit go?”

  “Swear to it?”

  “Done.”

  “Fantastic,” I said wearily, and we both laughed. Already I was wondering if I could put him on a midnight plane. “Tell me more about Cornelia.”

  Russell slugged back his wine. “Well, we have a problem. She’s searching. You’re not going to believe this. Of all things.”

  “What?”

  “She wants to cook.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Russell cupped my neck with his hand, like he was back to wrestling. “Have you ever seen,” he said, leaning in, “what their lives are like? Half ex-cons, the rest are from Guatemala. There’s not a one who’s not on drugs, and this is where my daughter, my only child, Victor, she wants to work like a servant so rich fucks can eat foie gras?”

  His eyes fell to the remaining wine in the bottle.

  “Hey, so The Hook-Up, that’s still paying out?”

  So what was it, I was about to say, about my wife’s proportions?

  “Now, see, that’s where Connie was going for a long time. Screenwriting. Movies somehow. Connie idolized Sara, you know that.”

  What I knew was that I wanted to be home eating a sandwich, watching a DVD of Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock Holmes.

  “You remember that premiere they went to at the Ziegfeld? Connie still talks about it. Best night of her life.” Russell’s hand was on my forearm. His face was flushed. “We miss her, Victor. You know that.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  He shook his head: maybe yes, maybe no. “One time Sara told me this story, three guys in Los Angeles are trying to take a piece off her contract. They ambush her with the news over lunch. All smiles. Apparently, Sara picks up one guy’s Perrier and dumps it in his salad bowl.”

  I laughed. “You’re making that up.”

  “Fuck you. It was that fall, she told me herself.”

  “What fall? What?”

  Russell wasn’t listening anymore. An attractive woman our age had sidled in, wearing a low-cut top. “Great memory, you know,” he continued, eyes glued elsewhere. “That was the thing about Sara. Soup to nuts, she could retell any conversation. Something you said a year earlier, she could still go word for word.”

  “Seriously,” I said, grabbing his elbow. “Which fall are you talking about?”

  “What? In California.”

  “You and Sara talked on the phone?”

  “Jesus.” Russell laughed, and turned back to me. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and folded it along the seam. “She just called, you know. Old friends. One time or something, when she was stuck.”

  “Stuck,” I said. I was going blind.

  “Her writer’s block. What’s the big deal?” He pecked his fork around the plate. “I don’t remember what it was called anyway.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The movie. The Perfect Husband, that’s it. Christ, this bottle’s gone. Outstanding, though, you’ll admit. You want I should order?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. I dumped the wine I hadn’t drunk into Russell’s glass and asked to see a menu.

  The main movie theater in Bar Harbor was called the Criterion, a white flat-top on Cottage Street. Sara and I used to go there twice a week. Competitive research, she called it, when we’d meet after work and sit up in the balcony for the eleven-twenty show and watch whatever had come to town, but it was more than that: we were happy. We were movie people, we’d watch anything, all it took was Junior Mints to set the mood. Outside afterward, we’d listen to the manager in his suspenders talk business, about how surely this would be the year he up and moved to Arizona with his sister. Then we’d go home. And if we still weren’t tired we’d pull a DVD down off the shelf.

  The September before the accident, before California, Sara went four times in one week to see the same film. A festival was in town, and they were screening a movie by some Scandinavian director called The Perfect Human. The print came up twice in the schedule, but Sara got the Criterion’s manager to run it two more times in private. She invited me to join her late one weeknight, a midnight special. It was a weird little movie, without a plot I could put into words—as if one of Sara’s old art buddies had filmed one of his flashbacks. There’s a main character and presumably his girlfriend. Mostly we’re with the guy, always in a white room where our character exhibits his perfection. A voice-over tells us again and again, “This is the perfect human. Look at the perfect human dance. See the perfect human eat.” And he dances, he eats, he goes through daily rituals, but we don’t know why. He wears black tie, but he doesn’t go anywhere. For the most part he’s alone. He lacks everything, but wants for nothing, existing in oblivion. “See the perfect human shave.”

  The total running time was about fifteen minutes. To Sara it may as well have been Casablanca.

  “Because it’s a perfect movie,” Sara explained afterward, at home in the kitchen. Her voice was young with excitement. “The only perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d found it pompous and silly, but didn’t want to say so. I said I wouldn’t have predicted her liking it. That perhaps it was a little pretentious.

  “No, you’re not seeing it,” she said. “The thing is, it’s anti-pretentious. Because it’s so clear. There’s nothing to ‘understand.’ ”

  “Now you sound pretentious,” I joked, but it didn’t reach her. Sara was looking out the window over the sink. I was reminded of Sara back in her early days, transfixed by some idea she’d overheard at a party. But this was different. I couldn’t help sensing that she was deceiving me for some reason.

  “The director is putting everything on the line,” she said to herself. “He’s saying there’s no one you can pin down. Even the perfect ones we can’t know completely.”

  “Well, it was way over my head, obviously,” I said.

  Due to a recent incident at a party where I’d embarrassed her, we hadn’t spoken in several days, and this was our first attempt at extended conversation. We’d been sleeping apart, a first for us, and I was loath to upset her. Part of me, though, was annoyed. Confused at the very least. I didn’t see where all the pain on her part came from.

  Maybe Sara thought I was pandering.

  She dropped her head. She looked exhausted.

  “What is it?”

  “I want that faith.”

  “You want what?”

  Her voice was the flattest plane: “Whatever is inside him. Whatever makes him create films, Victor, this is what it looks like. That movie. What permits him to work.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “No,” she said, “I know.” She finally turned around. “So I was coming out of yoga this afternoon, I thought, perhaps I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of things. Maybe Dr. Carrellas has it wrong.”

  Sara had been seeing Carrellas since the previous year, when she couldn’t work. Couldn’t write. For her follow-up to the blockbuster, she’d caught a writer’s block she couldn’t break through.

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t see her anymore.”

  “See, you don’t even hear what I’m saying.” Sara was looking at me so hard no
w I glanced away. “It’s like as soon as we begin talking, we’re standing in separate rooms.”

  Dumbly, I looked around. Everything about the house was new. I hated new things. I preferred to buy my clothing at secondhand shops, at least when Sara wasn’t looking. In the new house, all of our old furniture seemed out of place, and the new chairs and tables we’d bought felt like loaners, waiting to be returned.

  I was staring at one of them. “You know how sorry I am.”

  “Yes, you’ve said.”

  Sara left for California two days later, for six weeks without contact. I didn’t know when she was coming back, if she was coming back. I bought a ticket to Los Angeles but never used it. I worked and swam my laps. At night, in the house my wife had built, I dreamed about divorce papers fluttering around the hallways like trapped birds.

  I wondered, wasn’t the house enough to call her back?

  Wasn’t I?

  Russell sat beside me in the Criterion in the dark. We watched a new action movie and digested our dinners. At home, Russell went right to sleep, bear-hugging me on the way to brush his teeth.

  So she’d been writing, I thought. I remembered how, a week after the funeral, Sara’s agent, Mark, had called, asking if I knew anything about a new script. He thought maybe she’d begun one in California, but he hadn’t been informed, barely a word those six weeks.

  “Could you look around?” he asked. “Check her laptop, it’s probably in a folder somewhere.”

  Problem was, I didn’t know the password to her computer. As far as I knew, Sara never wrote it down. The tech guys at Soborg said the best they could do was reinstall the system software, but probably that would erase the hard drive. I stalled. The next time Mark called, I told him the IT department had gone through her computer with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing found.

  The next morning we drove to the airport in silence, except for the sounds of Russell checking his BlackBerry. Under the land bridge, low tide made the channel into a mud flat drying in the sun, an airstrip for piping plovers.

  We said quick good-byes in the parking lot, promising to see each other when I came to New York.