A Tangled Web (9 page)

“Your wife.” Robert smiled and covered Max's hand with his. “You once told me you would never . . . Ah, but we should not remind ourselves or our friends of rash statements in our past. I am very happy for you, my friend. But she was gravely injured, Max; will she recover?”

“She will, I think, physically. But she has no memory.”

“You mean, of the accident?”

“Of anything except the names of objects. But she's a remarkable woman, very strong; she'll make a new life here, I'm sure of it. In fact, I'm looking forward to it.”

“But you can tell her her past, and the more you tell her, the more likely that she will remember all of it.”

“I don't know it. We were acquainted only a few days before we were married. But she doesn't miss her past, Robert. She has a new life to create, a completely new life; most of us would give everything we have for that chance.”

Robert's eyebrows rose. “Would we? I think, my friend, you'll find that she misses it very much.”

Max shrugged. “She'll do what she has to do. That's true of all of us. Robert, I have another favor to ask. The last one, I hope.”

Robert smiled. “Another rash statement. What can I do?”

“You know I rented an apartment in Aix. It won't do for both of us. I need a house. I want to buy one, and I was thinking of the plateau above Cavaillon.”

“A beautiful spot. You want me to look for one.”

“A private one; you know I don't like being crowded.”

“You mean I must remember that you're in hiding. Well, I'll see what I can do. The father of one of our students sells houses in the Lubéron; I'll ask him. Now I must go; tomorrow morning is our weekly faculty meeting.” He looked closely at Max. “If you need to talk sometime . . .”

“I would not burden our friendship. It's all right, Robert, I've never needed to talk about my problems, or my successes, either. You understand”—he hesitated, a man who had difficulty expressing emotion of any kind—“my friendship with you is the closest I've ever had. I appreciate it.” He stood up, as if he had said too much. “When Sabrina and I are in our own home, you'll dine with us. I want her to meet you.”

“And I want to meet her. May I visit her in the hospital? I would be pleased to.”

“No, I'd rather wait. They've got doctors and psychologists running in and out of her room; she's barely alone and she's exhausted from all of it. You'll come to our home.”

“Fine. But if you change your mind . . . priests are good at hospital visits, you know.”

Max nodded, barely hearing; he was suddenly frantic to get back. He sped through the streets, repeating his words to Robert.
She will, I think, physically. She will, I think, physically.
But he had been away from her for two hours, and in that time . . .

He raced to her room and found her sitting in her chair, talking comfortably to a doctor he did not know. There were always new doctors in her room, sometimes chatting about the weather or sailing in the Mediterranean or dining
at fine restaurants, but most often asking questions, giving Stephanie tests, noting with approval the steady healing of the gash on her head. Much of those conversations she did not remember from day to day, or even hour to hour, but the doctors were patient: they always began again.

“Your amnesia, madame,” said one doctor, “is of two kinds. The anterograde, which causes you to forget what I said this morning, will pass, I can positively assure you. But the other, the retrograde, that is more serious. I cannot make any predictions about how long it will last.”

“No one told me that,” Stephanie said.

“Your first doctor did. You forgot. It happens.”

“We find it puzzling,” said another doctor to Stephanie on a day when Max was there, “that your type of memory loss does not fit the usual pattern of posttraumatic amnesia. We think it possible that you are primarily suffering from psychogenic amnesia—that is, an amnesia that results when a patient attempts to hide from an overwhelming psychic trauma by totally dissociating the self from the environment. In which case your amnesia would have little to do with the accident on the boat.”

Stephanie stared at him. “Are you saying I
want
to forget everything? I'm keeping myself from remembering?”

“You are not consciously preventing yourself from remembering, madame, but it is possible that your unconscious is doing just that. You may have been involved in circumstances that caused you much conflict, that you had not resolved, that, in fact, caused so much pain when you tried to resolve them that it took only a blow on the head to make you cut yourself off from them entirely.”

She shook her head, then stopped because it made her headache worse. “What kind of circumstances?”

“I have no way of knowing, madame.”

“Something . . . criminal?”

“It is possible.”

“It is not possible,” Max cut in. “She's not a criminal; she's not capable of criminal acts. I think we've had
enough of this; we won't have any more of these sessions.”

“Why do you think that?” Stephanie asked the doctor. “That I'm repressing the personal parts of my whole life.

He looked at her with interest, noting the level of intelligence that allowed her to reformulate his theory in that way. “Your memory, madame. It is intact regarding language—in fact, we now know that you speak Italian, English and French with equal fluency—and it is intact regarding the names of objects and how to perform many functions. You buttoned your blouse this morning.”

Stephanie looked down at the white buttons on the blue and white striped silk blouse Max had brought her the day before in a large box that also contained a dark blue skirt, underclothes, silk stockings, high-heeled blue shoes. “I didn't realize I was doing it.”

“Precisely; it was automatic. Something you knew from before. But what of the rest of your life, madame? Can you think back to buttoning your blouse at other times, perhaps when you were a child and your mother was helping you? Think about your mother, madame, holding you on her lap—yes?—and showing you how to button your blouse. Or taking you to the store to choose a blouse, or perhaps not a blouse, perhaps a doll or a coloring book. Or anything else. You and your mother shopping together, think about that, madame, you and your mother in a shop, choosing something to buy and take home, can you think about that, can you concentrate on that? Think about your mother, madame, and doing things together, shopping together, going in and out of shops, or it does not have to be shopping, it could be—”

“Laura,” Stephanie said.

“Madame!” Excitedly, he took her hand. “Is that your mother's name? Don't stop, madame, please go on, concentrate: your mother is Laura and your father is . . . Come, madame, tell me the name of your mother and father.”

“I don't know.”

“Come, I will help you. Your name is Sabrina. Your mother's name is Laura. Your father's name is . . .”

“I don't know! I don't know if Laura is my mother's name; I don't even know if Sabrina is really my name. Max says it is, but it doesn't feel like my name—”

“What does feel like your name, madame?”

She shook her head then stopped, as she always did, because the pain became worse when she moved her head in any direction, and then she said no more.

In January, Max took her home. The doctors and nurses said goodbye with affection and regret: they had wanted to help her, no matter how long it took, but she was still locked in her empty space, with no past, and her husband said she would not return to them.

Stephanie looked back at the hospital as they drove away. “Home,” she murmured. It was the only one she knew, the doctors and nurses and other patients her only friends. She clasped her hands in her lap and sat quietly in the velvet interior of a dark blue Renault driven through streets completely strange to her, by a man who said he was her husband, toward a future he had arranged. She wore a country tweed suit he had given her, part of a complete and lavish wardrobe he had brought to the hospital over the past two months, and as she watched him maneuver easily through the traffic of Marseilles and into the rolling countryside, she felt like a child in a small boat carried by the current to a place so distant it could not be guessed at or even imagined.

They did not stop when they reached Cavaillon, but drove through the town and beyond it on a road that climbed to a plateau overlooking the valley. On the plateau, a large plaque, mounted beside stone gates, commemorated the history of the village and the plain. Max turned into the gates and drove past homes spaced widely apart, set back from winding roads amid tall trees and shrubs, each one shielded from its neighbors. Within that small discreet community Robert had found for them the most discreet spot of all, a stone house set within wooded
acres at the end of a road, well hidden behind a high stone wall with a wrought-iron gate.

“Home,” Max said, echoing Stephanie's word of two hours earlier, and opened her door to help her out.

And then, almost without effort, she was living there. Madame Besset, the housekeeper, unpacked and put away her clothes; the gardeners touched their caps and one of them gave her a bronze chrysanthemum from the greenhouse. The maintenance man pulled a chaise to a protected corner of the terrace where she could look down upon the town with its orange tile roofs crammed together between narrow, angled streets and bustling squares, its slender church steeples silhouetted against the fields beyond. The terrace was made of white stones, pale beneath the winter sun and the deep blue sky; behind Stephanie the stones of the house were smooth and warm; below, a cliff fell away in huge rock outcroppings surrounded by dense shrubs and pines that clung tenaciously to the steep slope.

I could jump, Stephanie thought the first time Max settled her in the chaise and she gazed over the low wall bordering the terrace. I could just float off the wall and disappear. No one would miss me because they wouldn't know I'd died.

She shivered in the pale rays of the January sun.
No one who ever knew me knows where I am.

Each day she lay on the terrace and listened to Madame Besset's purposeful clattering in the kitchen, the low rumble of Max's voice on the telephone in his office, the gardener pushing a wheelbarrow to and from the greenhouse, the maintenance man whistling as he repaired some broken tiles on the roof. Those were the only people she had heard since she arrived in Cavaillon. No one came to see them; they did not go out. “We will when you're strong,” Max said. “There's no hurry, and in the meantime this is hardly an unpleasant place to be.”

It was a beautiful place, the stone house bleached white by the sun, with bright blue shutters, red and pink geraniums on the windowsills, and strings of garlic and dried
herbs hanging in the kitchen. Stephanie's bedroom was on the ground floor, a small room with a high four-poster bed, a painted dresser, and fresh flowers brought every day by Madame Besset to her bedside table. Max had taken her to the room when they arrived. “While you recover,” he said.

And so she divided her time between her bedroom and the terrace with its sheltered corner and its view of the roofs of Cavaillon, listening to the sounds from the house and the garden. She lay on the chaise, and the sun settled deep within her, easing the last, lingering pain from surgery. She wore a hat to keep the sun from making her headache worse and to protect the sensitive skin grafts on her face, and the days merged into each other as she lay motionless for hours at a time, listening to the silver trills of the birds and the snapping of clippers as the gardener trimmed the holly hedge, and smelling saffron and garlic in the bouillabaisse Madame Besset was preparing, and the fragrance of the red rose Max had brought her that afternoon.

She took the rose from its vase and held it to her nose, breathing deeply of the heady fragrance.
Roses. I've cut roses . . . with a scissors, a silver scissors, and put them in a vase, a tall vase with a design . . . some kind of design . . .
But Max's voice from the study grew louder, repeating something to make a point, and she lost the thought.

His voice wove through her days. Every morning and afternoon he was in his study, on the telephone. But he joined her at lunch and dinner and after dinner, when they sat on the couch in the living room, finishing their wine while Max talked. He told her about his travels, his acquaintances on four continents, his art collection, his childhood in Holland, Belgium and Germany. “I was always a loner; I never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends.”

“I moved around, too,” Stephanie said.

“Where?” he asked quickly.

“I don't know.” She looked at him with puzzled eyes. “I don't know.”

They were sitting at either end of the long couch, and all the living room lights but one had been turned off. The room was large and high-ceilinged, with a floor of square white stone tiles and scattered Bessarabian rugs patterned in bold flowers in oranges and greens and browns. Hand-hewn beams ran the length of the ceiling, the slipcovered furniture was deep and soft, and paintings of the lavender fields and vineyards of Provence hung on the walls. One large painting, a wild scene of the Alpilles range signed with the bold signature of Léon Dumas, stood in the most prominent place, on an easel near the fireplace. It was almost midnight and the house was quiet, the housekeeper and gardener gone, the birds still.

“What did I wear?” Stephanie asked abruptly. “When you met me, what was I wearing?”

“A long skirt and a blouse, off the shoulders, I think.”

“What color were they?”

“I don't remember. I don't notice that much about clothes.”

“That's not true. You've bought everything I have and it's all the right size and the styles are right for me and so are the colors. Max, please, what colors was I wearing? What was the skirt made of? And the blouse?”