You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  And the whole time I’m watching, I’m thinking, God, why can’t I write this? I made a note on the back of a dry-cleaning tag: WHY CAN’T I WRITE SOMETHING SO SIMPLE AND SHARP? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything better.

  We have discussed this, Doctor, you and me, the pressure post-Hook-Up for more success. The load I bore alone, partnerless, once Victor decided to ward himself off. The offers afterward, the proposals for collaborations from strangers, rewrites, adaptations of novels I hadn’t read since high school. Money out the wazoo, but for what? A thousand too many options, and all of them spooking away any original ideas, aside from the house.

  So I built a house.

  But, for this afternoon. This moment.

  First time in forever, I’m inspired, I remember what it feels like, and all because of one little movie. Here’s something, I thought, that reminds me I once made somethings, too.

  UPDATE: Victor and I haven’t slept in the same room since that dinner at Toad’s. That was three nights ago. Not that we’ve discussed this as The Deliberate Next Step of Whatever Is Happening. It’s never happened before. The first night, I closed the door when I came home, and Victor slept in the music room. That’s the way it’s been since.

  Both of us suave, sophisticated adults, purposefully avoiding each other in the bathroom. But I’m still too upset to behave differently, and Victor’s on tiptoes. He thinks I’m still upset about the other night. He’s in the business of being unaware, looking to turn a profit. Both inside and out, I’m incredibly fatigued. I act pissed off when I’m not, and then I’m upset all over again, angry again, crying over the laundry.

  Finally, have we put too much distance between us? I don’t know that I want to breach it. I’m haunted by that ringing superior tone in Victor’s voice: the absence of respect.

  Got the Criterion’s manager to play The Perfect Human for me again. Afterward, he burned me a DVD. At least someone understands my mania. He agrees, for its ambitions it’s a flawless film. Like Meet Me in St. Louis. Like Charade. He says he can get me the original poster on eBay. I told him to order two, one for each of us.

  I’ve watched it three times at home, with a notepad.

  And it’s just the littlest film. But you can tell, whatever compels the director inside to create, this is what it looks like exposed to air.

  The Perfect Essence, it should be called.

  What would that look like for me?

  What do I have left in me anyway?

  Here I am, fifty-eight, losing my marriage.

  Here I am, forty-four, thirty-five, losing my parents.

  Here I am, twenty-nine, losing my baby.

  Here I am, seventeen, punching my mother in the mouth.

  A life beholden to insecurity.

  Really I am just tired of all of this.

  UPDATE: Took Victor to see The Perfect Human. Why not? I thought it could help. Perhaps communicate something to him I can’t express. But in conversation afterward, it was clear, no progress made. No connection. He heard all the dialogue, but nothing said.

  What I’ve been thinking all along, I’ve decided to put into action. It’s only now that I can say this: I must go. For how long I don’t know, but for our sake, I should leave.

  Vámonos. Vamoose.

  “Deke telephoned last night. He wanted to know if I wanted to hang out. I said, ‘Hang out’? ‘Play video games,’ he said. Victor, this is an established M.D., forty-four years old, he proposed marriage to me six months ago, now he’s inviting me over to play Mario Kart. When did modern man give up on shame?”

  Lucy was tossing a football she’d picked up somewhere. In a sleeveless shirt, she looked tanner than normal. Darker and also more muscular. I wondered if she’d added weight lifting to her rock-climbing workouts.

  “I explained that I didn’t have time this week to play Nintendo, but now I feel bad about the whole exchange. No man wants to be called an adolescent, he just wants to preserve the right to act like one, am I right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” said Lucy. She held out the football. “Hey, are we at thirty thousand feet?”

  I had already sent a notice about my vacation to the team, but I’d stopped by campus to write some e-mails.

  “What?” I looked up from my computer. “Sorry, Lucy, try me again.”

  “I am posing the question to you: Why men this exact way? You know, I have better things to do.”

  “Are you saying I’m a poor receptor?”

  She hunched forward, as though schooling a toddler. “Take the neuron.”

  I looked up again from the monitor. “That’s your theory? Men are neurotic?”

  “Know what? Forget it.”

  “No, I’m here, man as neuron. Please continue.”

  “Feign interest, go ahead.”

  “Lucy—”

  “So connections aren’t made aimlessly. We know this.”

  “Between neurons.”

  “Circuits occurring between certain cells and not others. Signals traveling in predictable patterns.”

  “Well, not always.”

  “Not always, there are special cases, yes, and that’s my point.” She pointed one end of the football at my nose. “So what if I’m not seeing the synapses for a ball of string? What if I’m wrong about Deke? What if it wasn’t a conviction about him so much as an uncertainty about me?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Me valuing myself enough as one who could end up with someone like that. Didn’t you see him at the recital?”

  “At your concert?”

  Her eyes were frozen.

  “I did not see him,” I said.

  “Well, I am not unseeing. I didn’t even tell him about it. Yes, I am aware of my tendency to catch and release. What I don’t get is how easy it is for some people, how someone wakes up to the stimuli and says yes, yes, I’ll take that one, I mean, how do they know?”

  “How do they know what?” I snapped. This time I really hadn’t been listening. I was trying to understand an e-mail sent by a colleague about some new federal report. Lucy smashed the football down on my desk. She left it there, her hand pinning it next to my computer.

  “This deafness, Victor? Your blindness to those of us still sticking around?”

  Lucy walked out. I shut down my computer.

  I stood up and gazed at the football.

  I hurried outside, remembering Cornelia sitting in my car.

  Cornelia had never seen Thuya Gardens before, so we drove there first, then hiked to the top of Day Mountain. In the afternoon, I gardened while Cornelia suntanned. With seventy-five dollars and a quick trip to Walmart, she’d equipped my house with wireless Internet access, and was soon able to instant-message outside while Web-surfing while e-mailing while watching a DVD of some TV show she liked okay.

  Around four, I offered to tour Cornelia through my record collection. Part of me didn’t want to play her any music, instead I wanted her to see how merely possessing all those albums was its own satisfaction, to know that they were there. The collector’s joy. There’d been a time when I knew every recording of every piece, the sign of a specialist who understands very little. But now to gaze upon the sleeves, to not play them. To be in awe. I wanted her to use silence to appreciate that, in comparison, the experience of listening was a lot more personal and complicated: how it depended on the day’s mood, the temperature of the air, what clothes you were wearing and how they felt, what you’d eaten for lunch, and then of course the equipment and the tones it produced and at what volume, and every associated emotion and memory brought by the listener. Never mind the music. The experience of music was so different for each individual, it wasn’t even worth discussing. As soon as I pressed PLAY, we may as well have existed in separate dimensions.

  But Cornelia said, “So what have you got?”

  I let her choose at random. She plucked out Sibelius, Barber, Dvořák. I explained, here’s how I thought of Dvořák, particularly th
e violin sonata she’d chosen, because she liked the cover: that this was music Emma Darwin might have enjoyed, if the technology had been available, while composing letters to her husband. The romance matched, but more important, there was wretchedness underneath: Emma’s terror about her husband’s lack of faith, not because an angry God might strike him down but because someday she’d be alone in heaven.

  “You’ve got like a serious boner for Darwin,” said Cornelia.

  “Do you hear the sadness?”

  “I mean, it sounds jaunty to me.”

  I pulled down Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which I figured would appeal to Cornelia’s drum-circle side. It was a trip, she said. Afterward, we went out for a cheap dinner in Bar Harbor and caught a documentary at the Criterion.

  The second day, we hiked around Eagle Lake, where Cornelia said we should take random turns and I was the idiot who agreed. After an hour, my knees ached and my lower back was in knots. It was hot under the dense tree cover and there wasn’t any breeze. We were lost. But Cornelia kept running ahead around the trail’s next bend, her dreadlocks wobbling like a swami’s basket, her wife beater sticking to her ribs. I was stunned when we came out half an hour later at my car. Cornelia gloated that she’d known the way the whole time. She said she’d been there before with Dan, the boy from the restaurant.

  “So what’s this Dan like?”

  “What?” Cornelia looked up from her cell phone and pulled her feet down from the window. “Oh, he’s cool. I mean, there’s lots of kids working here for the summer, in the restaurants. The bartenders know us, so they comp us drinks.”

  “How does Dan know the island so well?”

  “He likes the woods. It’s a mind-set.”

  “A mind-set,” I repeated.

  There were several messages on the answering machine when we got home. “Hi, Victor, this is Dr. Carrellas again, I just wanted to touch base and see—” I pressed DELETE. The phone rang.

  “Victor, it’s Betsy.”

  “Oh—”

  “Why haven’t you returned my messages?”

  “We’ve been out.”

  “You and Trixie. Well, should I stop by Pepcin’s or not? They had terrific cod last week, they give me a good deal, you know.”

  “Do we have a dinner scheduled?”

  “Victor, what good is an answering machine if you don’t use it?!” Cornelia turned at the noise. “I said, I’ve come over to Southwest for the afternoon, and it would be nice to meet the little courtesan. You don’t have plans tonight, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Is that Aunt Betsy?” Cornelia was sitting on a stool, kicking her legs.

  “So how’s six? Pepcin’s got the best, I don’t know why you don’t shop there.”

  “Fine, dinner, bring the fish.”

  “Lovely,” Betsy chirped. “Ta, dear.”

  Tar, de-ah.

  Cornelia and I cleaned up the living room. I was pouring myself a glass of white wine when Cornelia came downstairs wearing a floral skirt and a plain white T-shirt and actual shoes, her hair tied back in a ponytail. I was thinking up a compliment when we heard the sound of gravel being kicked up in the driveway.

  Betsy remained in the driver’s seat, smoking. She was wearing a showy necklace for the occasion, a diamond pendant worth thousands.

  “Well, aren’t you sparkling,” I said.

  “Aren’t you desperate, dear,” she replied, grasping my hand through the window with no intention of getting out, pretending no one was standing there beside me.

  “That’s a beautiful necklace, Aunt Betsy,” Cornelia said.

  I thought I saw a deer near the woodpile, but it was only the wind blowing leaves around. We moved slowly to the porch as a threesome: me with groceries, Cornelia politely asking after Betsy’s health, and Betsy, deaf to inquiry, telling me about running into one of the Rockefeller boys at Pepcin’s, so she wasn’t too sure anymore about the fish if they let just anyone shop there.

  Cornelia fixed drinks while I went inside to prepare dinner. Cornelia had suggested I cook “so we ladies can have girl talk.” When I came back out, Cornelia was lighting a cigarette, hunched forward in a chair opposite Betsy’s.

  “Ah, Victor. She smokes, then?”

  Betsy herself had a cigarette in one hand, ashing on the armrest.

  “It hasn’t killed me yet,” said Cornelia.

  “But it will, dear. You must know that. When I was a girl, why, everyone smoked, at least all the men, and any girls who had guts. Now we were raised believing it was healthy, but you, dear, I’d think anyone your age who started smoking would be a nincompoop.”

  “Betsy, can I get you a glass of water?”

  “I’m trying to quit,” Cornelia said. “I started when I was thirteen.”

  “No, thank you, Victor,” said Betsy. “Dear, what was your name again?”

  “Cornelia Caratti.”

  “How about we call you Connie? Victor tells me you’re working with my son, is that right?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Gardner, Joel is awesome. You must be so proud of him. He’s totally become my inspiration.”

  Betsy scoffed. “Well, I didn’t raise him to cook, so much good it did. I can’t cook in the slightest, that was always Bill’s métier. They say a lot of drugs float around restaurants. Now, when Victor told me about your career, I must say we never thought our struggle as feminists all those years would end up putting women back into the kitchen.”

  “How about we play nice,” I called over from the grill.

  “I don’t know that that’s true,” Cornelia said. “I don’t think it’s really a struggle anymore.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, dear.”

  “I’m doing what I want, I made that choice. I’m paid, aren’t I?”

  Betsy scrunched her nose.

  I went inside and brought out a bowl of tomatoes Cornelia had roasted the day before. “Betsy,” I said, holding them out, “wouldn’t you like a snack before dinner? Cornelia made these yesterday—”

  “No, thank you, too rich for me. But aren’t they scrumptious. So, Connie, you just graduated from college. Cornell, was it?”

  Cornelia nodded.

  “Cornelia Caratti, Cornell graduate. Marvelously alliterative. Now, I want to know, do the news reports have it right, your ‘hooking up’? Truly, I wish you to be honest with us, help us old people understand, was a lot of hooking up done while you were in school?”

  “I think I’m going to go get some wine,” Cornelia said.

  When she’d gone inside, Betsy hoarsely whispered, “Why, she’s wonderful, Victor. You found yourself a partner in prudery.”

  “Maybe the elderly shouldn’t drink at breakfast,” I said. I closed the top of the grill and stood in front of her.

  “I may be tipsy,” Betsy said, “but the girl still needs a shampoo.”

  I took her wine and her cigarettes. I began sliding the cigarettes out, one by one, and snapping them in half.

  “Well, aren’t you man of the house.”

  “It’s a mind-set,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I’m about to drive you home.”

  “Well, I don’t know that I’ve seen you so resolute before. Why the urgency, I wonder? Now, give me those back.”

  “First you play nice.”

  Betsy struggled to get up, but the chair was too deep. Her hair flopped down into her glasses and the veins bulged in her arms. “Quit playing dirty. Oh, fine, fine, you win, now give me those back!”

  I threw the pack in her lap and put the wineglass on the ground, six inches from her reach. Maybe it was the heat from the grill, but my shirt was spotted with sweat marks. The sun had disappeared below the treetops. When Cornelia slid open the door, Betsy was back to smiling, a cigarette in her lips, once again reclined.

  “Cornelia,” I said, “did you know that Aunt Betsy—”

  “Dear, I apologize if in any way I offended you earlier,” Be
tsy said. “Now, do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Or a girlfriend? It’s all right, darling, I know how the world works, I think it’s wonderful. Victor, look at her, signs of love are palpable.”

  Cornelia mooned at me for a moment and laughed.

  “See? Obviously she has someone special, don’t you, dear?”

  “I wouldn’t say I have him,” she said.

  “Deductive reasoning, you see.”

  “I didn’t know you were dating anyone,” I said.

  “Why, how mossy of you, Victor. So how did you two meet?”

  “He works at the restaurant. But it’s not like we’re, whatever, dating.”

  “Ah, he’s one of Joel’s. Well, hooking up, would you say?”

  “So what was it like when you were young?” asked Cornelia. “It’s not like we’re discussing anything revolutionary.”

  “Oh, but the world was different, you know. It was very important to maintain appearances. No, of course, there were cars to drive in, movies to see. If there weren’t chaperones, you could explore the rumble seat afterward.”

  “Did kids have sex when you were in high school?”

  Betsy didn’t blink an eye.

  “No, dear, no,” she said, adjusting her glasses with both hands. “Well, I’m sure some did, but it wouldn’t be something you’d hear about, unless a girl went away for a short time. But there were ways, ways if a boy liked you—”

  “So did you go all the way? I mean, before you were married?”

  They both laughed and Betsy shook her head. “Now, not that I’m necessarily proud about that. In those days one saved oneself, you see. What a funny thing to say now. For what, one wonders. Not that I wasn’t tempted, mind you. We had dances in the summers, you’d curl your hair. But you wanted to maintain dignity, always dignity. Remember, darling,” Betsy said, whispering and leaning forward, “there’s still a lot of ground to cover when you’re running around the bases.”