You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “So can we leave yet?”

  “You know that will kill you,” I said quietly, pointing to the cigarette. A few other people had come out to smoke, one man with a calabash pipe.

  “Victor, whatever,” Cornelia said, supporting her elbow on her hip. “Seriously, do they at least serve wine during intermission?”

  I tried to remember what I’d told her about the concert, but my mind was unavailable to external control; it had found a panic loop and was cycling, picking up speed. “You really should give it a chance,” I prattled. “There’s an interesting backstory. Now Time magazine, actually they put Shostakovich on the cover smack-dab in 1942, which of course—”

  “Fine,” she said. “I get it. So you’re staying.”

  “What?” I paused. “What?”

  “No, obviously.” Cornelia turned in a circle on one toe. “You know, you don’t have to wait with me out here.”

  “I want to wait with you,” I said dully. She didn’t respond or look at me. I stood there waiting until she finished, then followed her in, trailing by five feet.

  Regina was nowhere to be seen. Cornelia seemed calmer, though. Perhaps nicotine was good for something. The musicians resumed. Someone, an older woman in a lemon-colored pantsuit, took the aisle seat near the front, where Regina had been sitting. She must have left at the intermission, I thought. Probably she had somewhere to go, someone to see. Performances of her own to enact with gratitude for an audience who met her halfway.

  Looking centered and happy, Lucy was lost in the music, smiling at certain phrases, moving her upper body in time. During the seventh part there were several fast, aggressive sections, and the group attacked them in unison, taking the turns together, as if on the hunt.

  Cornelia bucked in her seat, leaned over, whispered, “Victor, I need to go.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll see you at home.”

  The music entered a gentle passage. Lucy closed her eyes. Cornelia placed her paper crane on the floor and squeezed past my knees. My heart sank. A moment later, quietly as possible, I went after her, seeing in the last row, on the aisle, Regina slightly smiling, noticing us leave, blankly registering us pass, her face otherwise a mask.

  Cornelia was plodding down the sidewalk.

  “Cornelia!”

  She looked back. “You don’t have to come with me.”

  “Really.” I caught up and grabbed her elbow. “What do you call that little performance?”

  “Don’t yell at me, I didn’t ask you to leave.”

  “How in hell did you plan on getting home?”

  “Stop shouting at me!”

  We stopped in place. Cornelia was enraged, huffing and rigid.

  “They have taxis around here, don’t they? I mean, they have Shostakovich.”

  We drove home in silence. I was furious. My mind was divvied up between four horses pulling separate chariots, sprinting to the compass points. Halfway home, Cornelia fiddled with the radio.

  “God, Maine has shit radio.” She said a minute later, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  She sighed. “For leaving?”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  She stared out her window. I felt like booking her on the next flight to New York, Montpelier, wherever she liked. Ten minutes later, we reached the turnoff and Cornelia put her head on my shoulder, her dreadlocks uncoiling like yellow vines into my lap.

  “You’re still mad at me.”

  “Yes, Cornelia—”

  “I’m a brat, I know. I’m sorry. Seriously. You were just trying to show me something new, and I ruined it, didn’t I? I just don’t think when I’m drinking—oh, I’m terrible, say it.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “See? I drank too much and you wanted to stay. But why did you leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s your bad.”

  I sighed. “Fine.”

  “I totally could have gotten a taxi. But you were playing the good godfather, I know, oh you must hate me now.”

  I shrugged her off my shoulder, but not brusquely.

  “I don’t hate you,” I said, and unrolled my window. “I’m sorry I yelled.”

  “You strongly dislike me.”

  “No, Cornelia, but—”

  “You would like to be selling me up the river?”

  I snorted. She’d caught me off guard. Cornelia patted my shoulder and put her cheek down again.

  I returned to regular hours at the lab. I may as well have been on vacation. The big grant we’d received would fund, for the moment, research already under way, so my role was mainly administration and attending status meetings and clearing paperwork, fielding phone calls and avoiding department politics, receiving updates from Lucy, who kept tabs on everyone else. Mostly I looked after my exercise and the garden. I took off two full afternoons to dig boulders out of the ground, rocks that had been undisturbed since the last ice age.

  Aunt Betsy and I spoke on the phone occasionally, mostly about a new BBC detective series they were broadcasting on public television. I’d take the phone out into the backyard, hear the birds, and listen while Betsy analyzed plots for inconsistencies. And when we hung up, when the chickadees stopped, when the crickets and tree frogs and dragonflies stopped, and when silence settled in on those evenings, I wished it wasn’t so quiet.

  Cornelia and I were ships in the night. She didn’t have to be at Blue Sea until lunch, but she wouldn’t return home until two in the morning, some nights later. Occasionally, if I’d stayed late at the lab and the timing was right, we’d have a beer together on the back deck. One evening she said she’d seen a deer in the yard and named him Bananas. I said I thought Bananas was a ridiculous name for a deer. A few nights later, I saw a deer skipping along the perimeter of Soborg’s parking lot and wondered if it had been sent by Cornelia to check up on me.

  Then life changed dramatically. Lucy surprised me with a gift, an iPod, her old one, because she’d upgraded to a newer model. I threw it in my briefcase and forgot about it, but curiosity struck when I was home alone one evening. I connected it to my computer, buying five albums to download into its little white stomach. The next morning, gardening with my headphones in, I was transformed. I’d owned portable music players before, but this was different. After lunch I drove to work with my headphones in place. For the entire afternoon, I browsed around the online store and spent seven hundred dollars, half of it on music I’d never heard before. I went for a walk downtown, letting the iPod randomly choose songs, and noticed I wasn’t alone: we were a tribe, the iPod nation, recognized by small white buds we’d pierced through our ears.

  Lucy threatened to get me a BlackBerry next.

  Cornelia had already owned three iPods, she said, because she kept losing them. She caught me shoveling rocks one Saturday morning, trying to build a flower bed and singing along to George Harrison. She said she was proud of me for “dusting myself off.” That afternoon, running errands, I noticed a window display of Hawaiian swim trunks at the sporting goods store, particularly a pair of sky-blue shorts covered in large white flowers. I wore them to Long Pond for a swim that evening. They went past my knees. As I was toweling off near the boat-house, a young couple appeared with a pair of Labrador retrievers, and the boy was wearing the same shorts. He caught my eye, smiling, and chucked his chin.

  A big storm that night knocked out power on half of the island. The next morning, I found a note from Cornelia saying that she had the day off because the restaurant had closed due to the blackout.

  Meet me at seven at Hunter’s. It’s my thank-you present. xxxooo, C.

  Under the note, she’d left an island map with the trailhead for Hunter’s Beach circled in blue ink. Next, I thought, she’ll be taking sailing classes.

  To reach Hunter’s, you parked in a small pull-off above Seal Harbor and hiked down a remote trail
through the woods. Who’d told Cornelia? The beach was a locals’ secret, known for its pink rocks shaped like dinosaur eggs. As I drove there, my hands felt young, taking turns quickly, passing slower cars.

  The first time Sara brought me to Hunter’s, on a vacation one summer when we still lived in New York, she’d walked me down with her hands over my eyes to preserve the secret, to present it like a gift. The next time we visited, after the move, I reminded her of that, her blindfolding me with her hands, and she said, “I did? Are you sure?” “Absolutely,” I said. “I almost broke my ankle, don’t you remember?” She said, “Well, it sounds awfully romantic. Sounds more like how you would have wanted me to do it, know what I mean?”

  Cornelia was standing over a steaming pile of seaweed. Wearing a long skirt and an enormous hooded sweatshirt that flapped in the wind, she resembled an apprentice monk. She stood with her back to me while she fussed with the fire. I sneaked up and pinched her sides, and she screamed.

  “Jesus, what the fuck?”

  “Cornelia, sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, pulling her away from the fire. “It was a joke.”

  The corners of her mouth trembled.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.” I lowered my voice. “It was just a joke.”

  “Well, it wasn’t funny.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and squeezed her shoulder.

  We had the beach to ourselves. A clambake gave off the smell of an ocean boiling. Cornelia cleared off the top sheaf of seaweed, and a great cloud flew up around her legs. Underneath were three lobsters, still blue, a scattering of clams, and four ears of corn.

  “They need fifteen minutes.”

  “Cornelia,” I said, chuckling, “how long have you lived here?” She smiled finally, biting one of her dreadlocks between her teeth. “Dan and I did one over there,” she said, pointing from inside her sleeve down the rocks. She said abruptly, “He’s a friend from the restaurant. You haven’t met him.”

  I wondered if it was Dan’s sweatshirt she was wearing

  A few minutes later, we toasted our beer bottles to the sunset, to my grant and her new career. Only three weeks in, Cornelia was full of stories about the names of obscure North Atlantic fish, her new French cooking techniques, about the South American line cooks who proposed marriage to her every night. I was reminded of Sara’s initial set visit when The Hook-Up was being shot, when she returned and proudly described to me the set rituals and the crew guys’ gross-out stories, the catering trunk’s menus, and the obscure production terms.

  Cornelia leaned over at one point and wiped her fingers on my khakis. Our hands were covered in lobster. She asked me about Joel and Betsy, and I explained the backstory, in greater detail than she probably was entitled to know, considering that Joel was her boss. But it felt good to talk.

  “So how is he as a boss?”

  “Well, you know,” she said, “he’s tough. He demands a lot. But he lets you know what he’s thinking. I mean, you can tell he cares. He puts way more pressure on himself than anybody else, so you kind of want to live up to that. Like you, you know?”

  “Me?”

  “Or not. Whatever, what are you looking at?”

  The rim of the horizon was black by the time we finished. We walked down the beach. A stream ran out of the forest and Cornelia leaped over to the other side, her skirt getting wet. She said something, but the wind caught it and blew it away. Like that scene in La Dolce Vita. We climbed down, back to our picnic site. Cornelia bagged the trash while I rebuilt the fire, hauling driftwood and dry brush down from the woods. Cornelia sat with her sweatshirt stretched over her knees. She looked like a small blue boulder. I put my jacket around her shoulders and poked the fire.

  What did I want with that big, empty house? A tent, an iPod, a small food supply, a tide pool for a lab—Hunter’s could be all I needed.

  “Your father and I used to sit like this.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “When we were scouts, with the other boys.”

  “That’s so gay.”

  “We went to Alaska once, backpacking for two weeks.”

  Cornelia laughed and looked at me. “Russell? Backpacking?”

  “Actually, he was quite the outdoorsman.”

  She shivered, shaking out her dreadlocks so they fell down around her neck.

  “Hey, I didn’t tell you,” she said, “I took a psychology elective last year, we actually studied a lot of brain stuff. Did you ever hear about that guy, H.M.?”

  “Of course,” I said, “wonderful, what did you think?”

  H.M. was a well-known case study in neuroscience, one frequently taught to undergraduates to whet their interest. As a boy, H.M. had been hit by someone on a bicycle. His head injury led to epilepsy, and he suffered from blackouts and seizures that grew so terrible, the knife was the only option. It was 1953 when a surgeon removed H.M.’s hippocampus and parts of his medial temporal lobe. As a result, remarkably, the seizures went away, and H.M. remained a smart young man, but he lost the ability to form new memories. After a few minutes, any event would be forgotten.

  No one had ever seen anything like him. A person for whom the present existed only in the present, to which we said, then did it exist at all? What value did it hold until we could measure it? Judge it, assign it feelings, assess its worth? Names, faces, tests, H.M. remembered nothing new.

  The scientist who worked with H.M. visited him every month for thirty years, and each time she walked through the door she had to reintroduce herself.

  “Like he’s just stuck in the ‘now,’ right? It was pretty wild.”

  “I can recommend some good books if you’re interested.”

  “Victor, I’m kind of freezing. Can we go home?”

  Maybe you shouldn’t have worn flip-flops, I thought.

  “You don’t want to stay?”

  She looked at me sideways. “Uncle Victor, my lips are blue.”

  Sara and I used to swim at Hunter’s before work. We’d wade out nude, two soapstone figurines, and when it was deep enough we’d push off and zoom out into the water. One time, Sara exited earlier than me, bundled up, and sat on the rocks to read the newspaper. Then a biology class appeared and I had to remain in the water while they collected samples. Sara almost choked laughing. Meanwhile I nearly caught hypothermia.

  Back in the parking lot, I noticed the BMW wasn’t there.

  “Dan dropped me off,” Cornelia said, her teeth chattering.

  I turned on the stereo in the car. Cornelia dialed up her seat heater.

  “Victor, I’ve been thinking, maybe you need some time off.”

  “Because?”

  “When was the last time you took a vacation?”

  I couldn’t remember. “Not in some time,” I said.

  “And didn’t you just win that grant? Why don’t you take off a week?”

  “What do I tell people?”

  Cornelia scoffed. “Um, that you have a guest? You tell them it’s for courtesy’s sake. Plus it’s true, Joel pushed me to part-time for a week, I’m in need of hosting. It’s simple. We’ll go hiking, you show me the island, the rest of the time you garden.” She looked at me and looked back out the window. “Seriously, you are, like, way tense.”

  “Interesting,” I said a moment later.

  The house seemed darker that evening, as though the forest had gotten inside. I parked and we listened to the engine hum.

  “I could always check my e-mail at night,” I said.

  “See? You already sound better.”

  There was a single message waiting on the answering machine inside: “Dr. Aaron, Victor, hi, this is Sylvia, Dr. Carrellas. I’m sorry I’m only now getting back to you, my husband and I just returned from vacation. I would be happy to see you if you’d like to call and set up—”

  “So I don’t sound well,” I said, erasing the message. “I seem impaired.” Cornelia didn’t respond. “Tell you what,” I said, “this
is a terrific idea.”

  “Yeah!”

  Cornelia made me give her a high five.

  “How about we start tonight,” I said. “I’ll grab some wine from the basement and we’ll watch your movie.”

  She tucked in her jaw. “What’s my movie?”

  “Singin’ in the Rain.”

  “Oh, please,” Cornelia said, laughing, kicking off her flip-flops. “You used to make me and Sara watch it, and we were both, like, uh, can we go to bed now?”

  Cornelia ran up the stairs two at a time.

  And she was right, I realized. I’d been the one who had arranged that night at the Criterion all those years ago. It had been my idea, my initiative.

  But then, what was wrong with me? What senescent state had I entered? Of course I’d been the one who asked the manager to open the candy counter. Of course I remembered writing the check out to the Criterion, the manager joking I was welcome to rent it anytime.

  Of course I remembered how both Sara and Cornelia had thought the whole idea was corny, a night at the movies with Gene Kelly, but they played along, humoring me, as though I wouldn’t notice.

  The phone rang at midnight but I didn’t answer. I was awake, apraxic, unable to doze off or even move from my position, performing every mental exercise I could remember to fall asleep. No messages when I checked forty minutes later. I passed Cornelia’s room. She was snoring loudly. We’d split a bottle of wine and watched Die Hard 2. It was the one with the catchphrase “Die Harder,” which Sara used to whisper if we passed old men on the street.

  It seemed that if the house were not a living thing, then someone had walked through touching the pottery, making everything quiver. Perhaps I was drunk. I closed up the music room and walked around shutting doors and double-checking window locks. I went into Sara’s office and opened her filing cabinet, pulled out her laptop, and set it on her desk.

  I left it alone and instead read through the final batch of index cards, the fourth set. Apparently she never got around to number five.

  How disappointed Dr. Carrellas must have been.

  I fed them, all of them, into the shredder next to Sara’s desk.