You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  I said, “I haven’t been myself in a long time.”

  “Since before we met.”

  “Probably.”

  She nodded, staring out. “Part of me knew all along.”

  “Regina, I didn’t realize.”

  “I happen to really hate dishonesty, you know? What a waste, when the other person is lying. What a waste for them.”

  “When I said I cared about you, I wasn’t lying.”

  She looked up at me. “Why say that?”

  “What?”

  “Will you listen to yourself? It’s, like, Alzheimer’s of the emotions. You know what, forget this.”

  Regina got in the car. I followed.

  “I think studies find that people, in general, are naturally suggestible,” she said. “You know, at work, in court. All it takes is a leading question from the opposition, suddenly they’re astray. We’re so busy searching, we don’t stop and see.”

  I said a moment later, “I think you’re right.”

  She laughed under her breath. “See, with you I was so busy trying to analyze what we were, I never actually looked. It’s like, bodies are complicated, not people. We get brain scans, we go to therapists, we try to pin things down. But finally, when we come up for air? We forget the water was only two inches deep.”

  “You’re saying we’re superficial.”

  Regina stared at me. One of her hands was on the emergency brake. “Your wife died. With me, you got easy sex cheap. When I started wanting more, you panicked. The end. My bad.”

  “You know, Lindsay had you pegged exactly right,” Regina said, shifting into reverse, “you’re just this little boy.”

  We drove back to Northeast Harbor. Traffic accumulated by the mile, first one car in front of us and another, then two behind us, until we were a wagon train of sedans going west at twenty miles an hour.

  “Regina,” I blurted out, “I did care about you. I still do.”

  “Oh my God, just stop.”

  The light before the harbor was notoriously slow to change. Regina stared up through the windshield. I clasped my hands and pushed my toes against the floor, thrusting myself back hard against the seat.

  Regina reached around, grabbed a book, and dropped it in my lap.

  “You don’t call me,” she said. “I won’t call you.”

  When the light turned green, she drove down to the ferry and out the loop for exiting cars.

  After a fashion, I was back to my old ways: I worked morning, noon, and night documenting Betsy’s life. Cognitive-functionally, I clocked maybe a seven out of ten. One afternoon, Joel came down the basement stairs. He was sweating, pink from too much sun, growing a beard and gaining weight. He smelled like booze. He asked what I was doing. I played him some of what I’d recorded that morning with Betsy, her describing how the admiral had moved the family to Hawaii for two years. Joel walked away, saying I was wasting my time.

  “Worse than that, you’ll give her a bigger head.”

  Joel and Betsy now began most days with a dignified European lunch featuring wine. By dusk, fights broke out, screamers mainly consisting of amnesiacs’ roulette, blame games fought to exhaustion.

  “Liberal attitudes never start at home.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “If you’re such a humanitarian about towel-heads, why ship off your own kid?”

  “Oh, so you think we had an easy decision?”

  “Hilarious. Yes, I do.”

  “Well, your father believed in tradition. His father went to St. Luke’s, Bill had a lovely time there, why wouldn’t you, unless you deliberately fought against it? The grounds were beautiful, terrific sports teams, a good choir.”

  “Honestly, Mother, you know I saw kids get their heads slammed against a wall.”

  “Now you’re exaggerating.”

  “My Latin teacher? He broke my index finger with a fucking Bible.”

  “Well, had we known, Joel, your father never would have stood for such malfeasance.”

  “Of course he knew.”

  “You told him?”

  “He wanted me down there getting my ass whipped, that’s obvious. It was the same headmaster in place as when he was there. How many times did I ask to come home?”

  “You’ll remember, if you didn’t remain through graduation, then how would you have gotten into Yale?”

  “Well, that worked.”

  “Not our fault, dear. We didn’t light the school on fire.”

  “Dad didn’t want me around. The serving utensils were more useful. Not like you ever stood up to him anyway.”

  “Oh, allow me to confide in you, Joel, I am terribly sorry, but you’ll find, perhaps I didn’t want to confront him on this topic. This will not be comfortable to hear, but I did not adore being a mother. It wasn’t my strong suit. Would you believe, could you imagine I had aspirations of my own? Do you fancy it was easy then for a woman to want something more for herself than darning onesies?”

  “You know what? Both of you were lousy parents.”

  “And you, you were an ungrateful child.”

  “What was I supposed to be grateful for?”

  “Don’t interrupt me. Your generation, you were good for what? Escape, excess, and misanthropy. You were an advertising campaign. What would you know about duty? About adversity? Responsibility?”

  “Well, I’m not the one who abandoned my kid to pederasts.”

  The house was quiet. I worked undisturbed for ten minutes. Then I heard ice cubes being broken out of a tray and thrown in a glass. Joel came downstairs with a big gin and tonic.

  “Okay, what have you got on me?”

  “Some stories from your mother, that’s all,” I said. I opened a folding chair next to the desk. “You’re welcome to correct them.”

  “How about I give you the original version. We’ll go old-school, straight from the source.”

  For three hours he recounted his life story, filling up his cup twice, watching me take down the outline as though I were some antique automaton he’d found in the basement.

  His patient chronicler, neither judge nor jury.

  “Victor, you need to know something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know how to say this. I’ve begun looking around to move.”

  “To move? To move work?”

  “I’m just putting out feelers,” Lucy said. “You know, maybe bio-tech. I don’t know where it sits with me. The timing feels right.”

  I was crushed. “No, of course, it’s a good idea.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Well, it’s sudden.”

  Lucy laughed darkly. “Try having your research partner go AWOL.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s not because of you, Victor. Not completely.” She sighed. “Deke is moving. To California. He’s taking a position at UCSF.”

  “But that’s wonderful. I mean, if you’re going with him.”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “I just assumed.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know.”

  “Lucy,” I said, “I’m happy for you. I already miss you as it is.”

  “Yeah,” she said after a second. “You, too.”

  With Betsy’s and Joel’s entries finished, I left the Gardner book alone for a week. Only Sara’s and Miriam’s entries remained to be included. People had suggested occasionally that I write a book about Alzheimer’s disease for the lay reader, a look at current research from the inside perspective. Now was the first time I’d seriously considered it. I began swimming again. Some days I lay in the hammock and read an old mystery. I got a haircut, I gardened, I drove the golf cart to pick up groceries. There were moments when I thought I’d never leave, that here was paradise. Twice I had dinner with Ken and his wife, Dot, who looked just like Pat Nixon.

  One Thursday, a foggy morning with an overcast sky, Joel found Betsy dead when he went in to help her into the shower. Joel stumbled downstairs.
He was wearing a T-shirt and boxers. He ran outside.

  Betsy was crumpled on the floor in a nightgown by the curtains, her eyes wide open, her glasses knocked off a few feet away.

  The fog had settled in the grass. Joel went past me into the kitchen and poured out two full glasses of gin. He laid his arms on either side of my neck. His face was flushed underneath his beard. He would see to the coroner, he said, I was to call the lawyer, the family, and arrange the funeral, whatever his mother said she’d wanted. We embraced, then we toasted with our juice glasses. Joel poured himself more, became sullen, and fell into an easy chair.

  I walked around through the fog to shake off the alcohol. My knees creaked, my back ached, my mind wouldn’t go one stop past the obvious: dead, gone, cold. I refused to accept any of it. I walked to the ferry dock and sat down on one of the benches. People would appear from the fog, then fade away. There were watchers in the trees, all eyes on me.

  One gull, guarding a pyramid of lobster traps, wouldn’t stop screeching.

  Who’s to say the whole island couldn’t sink in the fog? And if it did, who would mourn us? Fifty years down the road, who remaining would remember us and what we’d done?

  The week after the funeral, I stuck it out on Cranberry alone, rarely leaving the house. Joel moved back in with his girlfriend, Jill, in Man-set, then was kicked out again, and then I didn’t know where he was. He disappeared. His cell phone went straight to voice mail.

  I called Lucy, but the lab told me she and a friend had taken a last-minute vacation to Tortola. I left a message. I sought occupation at all costs. I swept the floors, vacuumed bedrooms, mowed the lawn, cleaned out the shed. Ken and Dorothy brought over a big pan of lasagna, and I stored it in the basement freezer, which I’d just emptied out and defrosted.

  Joel showed up unannounced one chilly, cloudless night with tidings of September. He had a twelve-pack of beer and a bag of cheeseburgers. We sat in lawn chairs in the backyard and looked out over the water, listening to the frogs and bugs. I had to go in for jackets, bringing out some of Bill’s, two old flannel work shirts. The lights of Bar Harbor were clumped together in the distance, as though the town were a far-away cruise ship.

  Joel threw one of his cheeseburgers into the ocean. “Honestly, I can’t feel any worse. My tongue is like fucking a layer of fertilizer.”

  “That’s the McDonald’s.”

  “I don’t mean the food.”

  “Joel, it takes time.”

  “Well, great.” He tipped a beer my way. “Thanks for the expertise.”

  “Hey, screw you.”

  I got up and walked down to the water.

  “You think I don’t have regrets?” he shouted. “I fucking wake up, I’ve got a dozen things I wish I’d said, then the next morning, they’re still there, plus I’ve come up with two more my old scoutmaster confessed to me in a dream while he’s driving around in a clown car. How do you get rid of fucking that?”

  “Quit drinking. You should get back to work.”

  “Yeah, well screw you, too, Dr. Disappear-O. Work cures all, my ass.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “She collected bums to feel better about herself. Me, my dad the drunk, now you.” Joel laughed. “Hey, no disrespect, but who’s more fucked-up than He Who Pisses Naked While Trespassing?”

  I went inside and searched, found it, then returned with a notebook I’d discovered in Betsy’s desk while I was cleaning house: a collection of all the reviews Joel had ever received, clipped and glued in chronological order.

  He paged through slowly. Half he hadn’t seen before, he said. He cried like a baby.

  We must have fallen asleep outside because I woke up at five in the morning, still in the same chair. Joel was gone. Someone had spread a blanket over my legs.

  I read Regina’s poetry book several times: in bed at night, outside at lunch, first thing in the morning before work. I understood her poems better each time, and that perhaps they didn’t need to be understood through logic so much as felt, like music.

  And I worked. I wrote about Sara’s life, a skeletal outline. It went badly.

  Betsy’s lawyer flew up from Boston about a week after Joel’s nighttime visit. We met one afternoon in the dining room at Blue Sea: the lawyer in his suit, me in my gardening clothes, Joel in his baseball cap and chef’s uniform. At least his eyes looked clear. The room was busy with cooks draping long sheets of pasta over the dining tables. I noticed Cornelia was absent. She hadn’t been at the funeral, either, though I’d invited her. Dan the boyfriend was polishing wineglasses. He avoided looking at me and stayed behind the bar. I considered shouting out that I’d thrown away his necklace.

  The lawyer explained the terms. A third of the savings would be split between Miriam and the few relatives I’d met at the funeral, another third would go to an Acadia preservation group. The remainder and all of Betsy’s assets and possessions—the bonds and life insurance, the house, the car, the cottage on Cranberry—were Joel’s. I was left a painting I’d always liked.

  “You’re welcome to come back,” I said to Joel when the lawyer was gone.

  “Well, it’s my house now, isn’t it?” he said. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry. I’m stressed, I quit smoking again. Tell you what, I’d appreciate it if you continued living out there for a bit.”

  Then he noticed something, spun around, and screamed at a young woman preparing ravioli. Apparently she wasn’t cutting consistent shapes.

  There was a message on the answering machine from Cornelia when I got back to the cottage, her voice hemming and hawing.

  “So, hey, Uncle Victor, hey, so I actually decided not to take the job with Joel. But please don’t be mad, I’m irresponsible, I know. And you did so much to help me, I totally realize that. So I’m calling from Logan, I bought a ticket last night online. I just don’t know if I want to cook for a living, you know? Except I totally fell in love with wine at Blue Sea, there’s so much you can learn, so I think I’m going to try working for my dad. See if I like it, you know, the business from the other side. Anyway. But please don’t worry, I’ll mail you the keys tomorrow, I took a taxi to the airport and the car’s in the driveway. And with everything that happened, I still totally loved this summer. I just don’t think I’m an island person. Oh, and I broke up with Dan, in case you see him. He was a pothead anyway, plus he was like sleeping with this waitress, can you believe that? Anyway, rambling, I know. Okay. Bye.”

  A week later, Joel called. He told me his plan was to move into Cape Near sometime in September, and that he wouldn’t be doing anything on Cranberry for at least a year. He said, would you consider closing up the camp, or just staying there through October?

  “It would be a privilege,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you back in AA yet?”

  “What, for dates? Honestly, half the reason people go to meetings is to meet somebody as screwed up as they are.”

  He laughed and hung up.

  I did an inventory of Betsy’s possessions. I went to church when no one was around, and I found no company there, but I utilized the quiet. I caught up on my reading. I was dying to get back to work. Forestalling the obligation to write a short history of Sara’s life, I asked Miriam about hers over the phone. Pleasant childhood, pleasant college experience, unpleasant early divorce, a second marriage that lasted two decades and bore two lovely children, then the husband died from cancer, later she met Gary. “I really think I’ve done all right,” she said, laughing cheerfully. “You know, it matters that you say it when it’s true, Victor. You’ve done all right.”

  I planned trips to visit Ken and Dorothy in New Hampshire come fall. I puttered around the island, trying to fix the exact date in mind when I’d stage my Soborg comeback. The Little Cranberry people had ceased taking notice of me, and they accepted me at their town socials. People paid me compliments about Betsy, even Sara: anecdotes about my wife, reminiscences, questions about The Hook-Up. One a
fternoon, I was cleaning out the attic and I noticed a yellow Post-it note stuck to my shoe.

  “Rumsfeld knew Saddam???” it said in Betsy’s handwriting.

  One night, Mark called, Sara’s former agent.

  “How are you. Look, let’s talk. The Perfect Husband.”

  I sat down at Betsy’s desk. “What did you think?”

  “Victor, first, Sara meant the world to me, you know that. I miss her. I miss her all the time.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And nobody wants the long-lost script to appear more than me. But okay, this is business. What are we looking at, really?”

  “I think it’s a rough draft.”

  “Well, it’s a first draft. And truthfully, that’s the problem. I mean, it’s barely readable. The main character’s a walking cliché.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling hot, “I thought it was true to life.”

  “Yeah, okay, there are some decent lines. But true to life doesn’t put people in theaters. I read a hundred scripts a week. Why do people go to the movies? Because they’re not real. They’re so not real, they’re super-real, they’re Frankensteins without the stitches. But the stitches here are obvious. I’m not saying there’s no gold in the premise. Look, I like the local color, I buy the whole serial-killer-as-disease-specialist thing. And if anyone could mine her own material, it was Sara. End of the day, though, what we lack fundamentally is Sara’s vision. If she were alive, she’d write forty more drafts before she was satisfied. You and me, this isn’t what we do. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “me neither.”

  Mark sighed. “Look, never say never. Maybe there’s some way to get this touched up. I’ll think on it, yeah? I’ll let you go. Call me next time you’re in L.A., okay? All right?”

  One night after a bottle of wine, I almost phoned Regina. Instead, I called her the next morning, when I was sober and aware of my motivation. I wanted to call and wish her good luck in her graduate program, and to wish her well, that was it.