Memory (Hard Case Crime) (27 page)

He lit her cigarette for her, then held the match up while he got out a cigarette of his own. He lit it, and then abruptly she said, “What do you remember about me?”

He looked at her. She sat hunched forward, her forearms on the table, wrists crossed and hands dangling down out of sight into her lap. She was watching him closely, but trying to look as though the question was a casual one.

Before, back in the coffee shop, he had lied and told her he remembered her vaguely, more out of politeness than for any other reason. Now he tried to decide what answer to give her, and tried also to dredge up some specific memory he could tell her about, but the Edna scene was still circling and circling, breaking into his uneasy concentration, making it difficult for him to think at all, impossible to think about Rita. Finally, he said, “Just what you look like, I guess. I can’t remember anything in particular.”

She thought that over for a while, and he saw her glance toward the bedroom door and then quickly away from it again. She said, “You don’t remember anything—nothing we
did
together? Like, go to the movies or something, I mean.”

He shook his head. “Nothing at all. I’m sorry. I’d lie to you, but you’d catch me at it right away.”

She gave a nervous laugh and said, too brightly, “You don’t even remember kissing me or anything? What a femme fatale, huh?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, thinking,
She’s turning into Edna.
But that wasn’t it; it was just that he couldn’t get Edna out of his head. And why not? There was no emotion involved in the scene grinding and grinding through his head, no love or even fondness, nothing but embarrassment and a depressing feeling of pity. It was a mournful scene to him, neither erotic nor pleasant.

Rita was sipping her coffee again, the too-bright smile gone. She set the cup down and studied him, vertical frown lines appearing between her brows. “I never heard of anything like it,” she said. “I don’t know what the hell to say to you.”

“Maybe you could tell me about myself,” he said. “Or about yourself.”

She got to her feet, as though movement of some kind were absolutely necessary for her now. “If you’re putting me on,” she said, a little wildly, “I’ll slit your throat.”

“I’m not putting you on. I’m telling you the truth.”

“You got any scars?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. It would be on my head someplace.” He rubbed the top of his head, but felt nothing like a scar.

“You know what?” She was pacing back and forth now, away from the table to the middle of the room and back, smoking her cigarette with quick puffs and hugging herself with her right arm. “You know what I feel like right now?” she asked. Her voice was more brittle than before.

He shook his head.

“Every time my father comes down from Rome,” she said. “Two, three times a year, down he comes, and he comes into my apartment and he brings a bottle of bubble bath for my roommate, and I cook him dinner. You know the scene? We got a hundred bottles of bubble bath in the closet, you know? Who the hell uses bubble bath anymore? And we sit around, the three of us, and we talk a lot of crap, and then he takes us to a Broadway musical, and then he goes back to Rome. Two, three times a year. And that’s what I feel like right now, just exactly like the way I feel when my father’s in town.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why did I ever get involved with you? Will you tell me that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Paul, will you
do
something? You sit there like you’re
dead
, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

She came over and stood looking at him, and then, her voice much softer, she said, “It’s real, isn’t it? They scraped you out.”

“It’s supposed to get better. Pretty soon, after I’m here for a while, it’s supposed to get better.”

“You poor bastard. It isn’t your fault, is it? I’m sorry I got mad.”

“I wish I could remember you,” he said, meaning it. But Edna was still there in the middle of his mind.

“I’ve got to use the john,” she said, abruptly, and walked away from him. He sat at the table and finished his coffee and started a new cigarette. He felt weary, and irritated because of the unnecessary memory crowding his head, and impatient because today he had finally been pushed all the way into his old world and he wanted to assimilate it quickly and fully.

What had Rita been to him?

When she came back he said, “I’ve got to ask you a question.”

“You’ve got to ask me a million questions,” she said. Her good humor was back. She was the same now as she’d been in the coffee shop, and on the walk here. She said, “You want more coffee?”

“No. It’s a tough question to ask.”

“Oh, shit.” She plopped down into the chair across from him and said, “Can’t you wait till your memory comes back?”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right.” She sighed, and shook her head. “We did,” she said. “That’s what you want to know, right? So that’s the answer. We did.”

“Here?”

“Why do you
do
this to me?” She was all upset again, but this time stayed in the chair. “Why do you make me feel so goddamn cheap?”

“I want to remember. You’re a beautiful girl. I guess I must have liked you a lot.”

“Don’t, will you? Do you mind just cutting it out?”

“I don’t know what to say. Everything I say is wrong.”

“It’s no good. Give me a light.”

He lit her cigarette for her, and she said, “You just make me too uncomfortable, that’s all. You know what I had in my head? I was going to come home here with you, and take you into bed and we’d make it, and like magic you’d be all better again. Your memory would come back like a light bulb, right in the middle of the whole thing. That’s what I was thinking. Like some crummy one-act play, you know? Or don’t you remember any of that either?”

“Any of what?”

“Class. Acting class. Robin Kirk.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No,” she echoed. “Nothing. It wouldn’t work. We’d fumble around, and you wouldn’t remember a damn thing.”

“Were we going to get married?”

She seemed startled. Wide-eyed, she said, “You never saw me cry in your life, baby, whether you remember or not. You want to make me cry now?”

“You mean we were?”

“No, I do not mean we were. I mean we not were, that’s what I mean.” She got to her feet so abruptly the chair tipped over with a crash. She made a strangled sound of rage and kicked at the chair legs. “You’re like my goddamn
father!
What the hell do you think I am, anyway?”

“Rita. Please...”

“You’re a stranger to me, God damn you! You think I’d go to bed with a complete
stranger
? What do you think I am?”

The record had ended, and suddenly he became aware of it. He got to his feet and went over to change it. A shushing sound was coming from the speaker, and the needle was wavering as the record went around and around, like Edna going around and around in his head. If he could only get that damn session with Edna out of his head, maybe he could say something right to Rita.

He turned the record over, started it playing, and went back to the table. Rita had put the chair back on its legs, and was standing next to it. She said, “I better take off now.” She was much more subdued than at any time before this.

He said, “Couldn’t we have another cup of coffee?”

“What’s the point? You’re not good for me and I’m not good for you. What I wish, I wish you’d waited till you got your memory back before you came around, because this way it’s just all screwed up. I mean completely.”

“It should come back soon,” he said, to reassure her.

But she shook her head. “Forget it, it’s no good. Right now you’re some guy I never saw before in my life. You could come to me tomorrow and say, ‘Look, Ma, I’m cured,’ but it wouldn’t do any good. I’d look at you and I’d see this guy I never saw before that makes me feel so lousy rotten, and I’d just be all turned off. I’m sorry, Paul, I guess it’s selfish and snotnose but I can’t help it.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know you didn’t.” She was evading his eyes. She went around him and over to the basket chair, where she’d tossed her coat. Her back to him, she put the coat on and buttoned it up.

He said, “Can I call you sometime?”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Rita—”

“Just shut up, that’s all.” She moved with choppy strides to the door and went out. She shut the door after her.

He stood looking at the door, and now, when it was too late, the Edna scene began to fade. A heavy depression was oozing in in its place, like a weight on his chest. He went over to the sofa and sat down and stared across the room at the kitchen table where the two of them had tried to talk together. The depression was strong in him, making the room lights seem dimmer, the room seem longer and taller. It was the feeling that came on him every once in a while, like the need to cry, but without tears. The music stated itself with brassy assurance, raucous with optimism.

After a while, when the weight of the depression lessened somewhat, he got to his feet and turned the record player off and went on into the bedroom. He started to undress, but the room seemed wrong to him somehow, and then he remembered the notes. He got them out of the desk drawer and put them all back up again, but when he was finished the room didn’t look as reassuring as it always had before. The notes looked like false courage.

He went to bed, and lay thinking uneasily of Rita for a while, and finally fell into fitful sleep. In his sleep, he dreamed of a square of shiny metal. Edna was on the other side of it, and for some reason it was important that he get to her, but there was no way to do it. Everywhere he turned, the square of shiny metal was in front of him, blocking his way.

When he woke up in the morning, he remembered he’d had bad dreams, but couldn’t remember the details of them.

The days passed glacially, and slowly a routine of living emerged, a pattern of movement and rest within which waiting was bearable, though sometimes he startled himself out of reverie with the realization that he had been forgetting what he was waiting for. Rebirth, it was, nothing less. He thought of himself sometimes as a kind of double image as seen through binoculars, two Paul Coles somewhat overlapping but neither substantial, so that a watcher could see through him. When the binoculars were adjusted, when the two images were brought together and matched, he would be himself again. In the meantime, what else was there to do but wait, and what else could he do while waiting but mark out the perimeter of the small circle he trod?

His day usually began at ten or eleven in the morning, when he awoke and got out of bed and padded to the living room to start the record player; he had grown used to the music without growing to like it, another of the danger signs that preyed on him when he was depressed. With the music playing, he next made the round of his walls, reading all his notes, old and new, sometimes reading them aloud slowly, the better to impress them on his mind. Then he dressed, and made himself breakfast. The living room always seemed unusually large and barren during breakfast, with him sitting hunched alone in a corner of it, mechanically putting bacon and fried egg in his mouth, looking around, half-listening to the strident music. He had his first cup of instant coffee at breakfast, and kept drinking more coffee all day long.

After breakfast, the routine was that he cleaned the apartment, thoroughly, every day. Every day he swept, every day he dusted, every day he polished the furniture and made the bed and cleaned the two sinks and the bathtub and the toilet and washed the windows. He knew that most of this was unnecessary, but what else was there for him to do? An integral part of his plan was that he would keep himself surrounded by reminders of his past, which meant he couldn’t take any non-acting job, so practically all of his time was spent alone here in the apartment, and he had to be able to occupy himself some way. He couldn’t read the books in the bookcase; he’d tried that and he lost the thread of everything, couldn’t stumble through two pages of a book without being baffled by what he was reading. There was no television set, and it wasn’t enough to sit and listen to the record player, it didn’t distract his mind and body sufficiently. Physical labor was what made the time move, the purposeful moving of his arms, his legs, his back muscles. So every day he cleaned the apartment until it shone.

The work in the apartment always reminded him of the job he’d had in that town. Most of that time had faded away now, like the times before it, but bits and pieces still remained. Edna, intact. The name of the family he’d stayed with: Malloy. A name without a face: Black Jack Flynn. A bar run by a bartender with one arm. The job he’d had, in a tannery, loading and unloading freight cars. He could remember the physical feeling of that job much more clearly than any of its details, or the details of the place where the job had been done, and he remembered it as a pleasant physical feeling, the thing he was striving for every day when he cleaned the apartment; the easiness of mind that comes from physical toil.

By the time he was finishing his cleaning, it was always late afternoon, and time for the day’s second meal. He never knew what to call that meal; it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Whatever it was, his work always gave him an appetite for it. TV dinners he had, or cans of beef stew, with a lot of bread and butter and two or three cups of coffee. The emptiness of the living room never bothered him as much at this meal as at breakfast; he ate more rapidly, and with more concentration, and with more pleasure.

In the evenings, he walked. He walked around the Village, looking in shop windows, stopping in coffee shops for fifteen minutes or half an hour, wandering through bookstores looking at the titles of all the books, roaming up and down and back and forth in the area between 14th Street and Canal Street, Hudson Street and Fifth Avenue, like a steel marble in a pinball game, back and forth from border to border, always in motion, never getting anywhere, under glass. He sometimes saw people he recognized—or, more often, who recognized him—but the meetings were usually short, and full of silences, and he was relieved at their termination. Nick came around from time to time, and seemed to make more of an effort than anyone else to relate to this new Paul Cole; Cole liked him, was gladdened by his presence, was pleased that not all his old friends were Bennys.