Stone Arabia (7 page)

These very ordinary memory failings gathered weight and had grown into a quiet but desperate obsession over the last few months. I started to take note of them right after we finally got my mother’s official diagnosis.

The official diagnosis:

Her doctor said she had age-related cognitive decline, also called mild cognitive impairment, very common for a person in her seventies, and that this was no longer called senility, which really just means oldness. Eventually it would probably become mild dementia and then full-blown dementia, which is a kind of scary-sounding word that simply means the mind is going away. So you have to specify age-related dementia instead of, say, drug-induced dementia. My mother exhibited
significant early symptoms of age-related dementia including but not limited to advancing episodic memory impairment and disorientation. Very commonplace, he said, which was supposed to be a comfort. When pressed, he also remarked that her decline was most certainly progressive. But everything was progressive, clearly. Did we actually think our memory had any stasis? That it wasn’t constantly melting away?

After that, I began to find her troubling to be around for all the obvious, emotional reasons. But I also had a growing worry that her lapses were somehow contagious. I had no rational basis for this anxiety—clearly her brain was distinct from my own brain. I also knew I was probably avoiding a more frightening mortal anxiety by substituting a slightly more manageable one. But.

The traffic was gone now. I still had a forty-five-minute commute to work. I didn’t have the heart to listen to the memory book, the self-help book. I pretended I had bought the stupid book to help my mother, but I knew I was really buying it to appease my paranoia about my own mental deterioration. Maybe just owning it would be enough and I wouldn’t actually have to listen to it.

Then, out of nowhere, randomly, I had a memory crisis, a mental meltdown over a seemingly insignificant piece of information that I tried to recall. I don’t know what led me to try and retrieve this particular piece of trivia (because I don’t remember!), but there I was, floundering as I drove, sweating even, chewing hard on a herbal, soon-to-be-flavorless piece of gum. This sort of memory slip was all too typical of my brain these days.

Sometimes basic words of familiar vocabulary hid behind missing letters. I would run through the alphabet, hoping I would get the right sound by process of elimination. More often, a name I knew refused to come to me. I constantly had the sense of information on the verge, precision at the margin, vision just beyond the frame. Not like Mom, not not remembering what I was trying to remember, this was not remembering what I sort of nearly recalled. It was like a glitch, like a scratch on a record. I even hit my head occasionally to get the needle to jump to the next place. I knew, somehow, moving forward was often the best way to remember what came before. Looking at a thing directly didn’t work. I also knew trying so hard just caused surges of stress-induced cortisol to shut down my hippocampus, sealing off access to my long-term memory. Still.

This time I was trying to think of a movie actress’s name. I came up with Mamie Van Doren. And I knew that was not who I was trying to think of. I was trying to think of another blond actress, one much more famous than Mamie Van Doren. I thought about her, this actress with the out-of-reach name, and how she was decapitated in a tragic Cadillac accident. I thought of her famous custom-made heart-shaped swimming pool. Yes, anyone would have it now, but not me. Marilyn Monroe was at the other end of the bombshell spectrum, this actress was ersatz Marilyn, and Mamie Van Doren was ersatz her, ersatz ———. I saw her face, her little nose, her chalky pink lips, her enormous breasts. (Enormous in the old way, fleshy mounds that attached to the whole chest, Anita Ekberg oceanic flesh that might drown a man, instead of the modern-style augmented, separate, too-high globes with the huge lonely
valley between them, carved breasts that seem to exist almost in a different world from the body they are attached to. But how could I assess the pertinent advantages of real versus fake enormous breasts? Maybe men like that hard valley, maybe they like the delineated order of the implanted, artificial breast.) I could not think of her name.

My mother would get that vague, anxious look as she realized she was searching for something that wasn’t there, and then she would forget it, the forgetting, and move on. She just let things go without a fight, and then she was on to the next thing waiting to be forgotten. I could not let go. I started to talk out loud, I shouted,
What the hell is her name?
sending the now flavorless gum flying out of my mouth. I retrieved the gum with a tissue as I tried not to swerve the car. And then I began to recite the outlines of the memory as if I were pleading a case to the dementia police—I can’t be losing my memory because I can think of Mamie Van Doren, I can think of the breasts of this poor unnamed actress, I can think of her method of death, for God’s sake, I can think of a stupid movie she was in with Tom Ewell. I can think of Tom Ewell. I have, clearly, an excellent memory, it was merely a glitch. Then I tried to do some lateral move, to think of something else. But really, moving on when you were more or less still assigning a portion of your brain to this elusive memory task, it fooled no one. Ada would say,
Just look it up, Mom.
But that was easy for her and her young, elastic, fearless brain. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t look it up on the Internet Movie Database or Wikipedia or anywhere else.

Ada doesn’t understand why I need to remember every random piece of nonsense—it is almost as if she believes
the internet will be her memory. I want to warn her: I’ve been through this with photographs, it just isn’t the same as actually remembering. I see her point about cluttering your brain with easily looked-up trivia, but there are other things I need to remember. Things not found on Wikipedia. I want to remember my mother before she was sick. I want to remember what Ada smelled like when she was a baby, and I want to remember when I began to suspect things weren’t okay with Nik. I want some accounting for my own behavior, and I want the future to have some clarity. I need my memory for all of that to occur. That is why incidents like this one were so critical. If I couldn’t think, on my own, of this actress’s name, I had no hope for any of the rest of it. So I used Calm Focus (memory technique #5). I inhaled and exhaled. I was so close, I felt it, it was almost there. It was like a brain orgasm, the anticipatory sensation I was feeling, a kind of building. Then I got Anna Nicole Smith, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her hard little eyes and her little doll nose and the same chalky pink lipstick, but it wasn’t Anna Nicole Smith, of course, and now I was stuck again, the closeness receding. I had a name, Mamie Van Doren, and a face, the pudgy pretty face of Anna Nicole Smith, but I was further than ever from my actress. In fact I had to keep pushing these other people off my mind. The only way out of this very frustrating trap was to look it up. Defeat, yes, but peace. I took another deep breath. Damn it. Okay, one last recap: Tom Ewell. Cadillac, decapitated. Pool, lips, breasts. Then I saw it, the book with the black-and-white photos, yes, the picture of her and her breasts, yes, closer, yes, no Mamie, no Marilyn, no Anna, no, but Man,
yes, yes, Man, Icouldevenseethecoveredstretcherinthephotoas shewastakenfromthesceneof—

Jayne Mansfield! Jayne Mansfield! Jayne goddamn Mansfield!! Yes, yes. Yes.

So there, happy birthday, it was in there somewhere, all of it. Memory of a photo of a woman and, indexed in synapses and dendrites, a name.

The day after birthday night. I spent the evening with my sort-of boyfriend, Jay. He came by after I got home from work, bringing take-out food and a movie. After we ate, he handed me a box neatly wrapped in red paper.

“Gee, what can it be, I wonder?” I said, as I knew what was coming. I unwrapped the package. It was a Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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Lamplight Brooke Music Box. The music box was in the shape of a vaguely nineteenth-century streetlamp. A transparent snowy night scene aglow with a sickening preternatually golden light lined the inside of the glass lamp. I laughed—it was impossible not to.

“It’s hideous, wow,” I said.

“Wait, play the music,” Jay said. I turned it over and wound the key. The music started, and the snowy scene was further illuminated from a bulb within. The music, I realized, was “What the World Needs Now.” Of course. This music lamp was not the first Kinkade item Jay had given me. We had been seeing each other only a few months, and I think he had already given me six Kinkade pieces: the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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Hideaway Coffee Mugs (Hideaway being one of the collections—it referred, apparently, to the fatly pastoral cottage engraved into
the porcelain), the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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Holiday Lights Animal Holiday Village, the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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Lighthouse Light, several limited-edition picture plates, and one print “painting,” also limited edition, that featured golden highlights actually painted on the print (not, I would guess, by Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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himself, but by little indentured gnomes and elves). Jay gave me the first one about a week after our first date. He just gave me the package with no explanation. I unwrapped it and opened the box to reveal this deeply hideous object. He didn’t laugh at all. He pointed out the Certificate of Authenticity. For some reason I loved it. I don’t even particularly like kitschy stuff. Having grown up in a dilapidated house in Hollywood, I liked actual solidly beautiful things. But Jay taught art history at Wake School, an ultra-elite private arts high school in Westwood. And Jay was British. So somehow he became obsessed with Kinkade. When I asked him why Thomas Kinkade, he just said, “Well, he is America’s most successful artist. And a native Californian as well.” Or he would say, “His name has a trademark—see?” and he would point to the subscript that appeared after his name. He was a brand, Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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. And I remembered how Nik would always carefully draw his copyright symbol on the hand-made labels of his records. Whatever publishing company name he had for that group and that record would never fail to have that rights-designation insignia. Jay’s arbitrary fixation amused me, and his focus and repetition impressed me. Even the stupidest joke can become funny with enough pointed repetition. Even the most pointless obsession can yield a certain kind of depth if it is pursued unfailingly. Jay was unrelenting in his obsession.
He didn’t veer off subject and suddenly start collecting Ronald Reagan Lobby Cards or vintage Mammy Salt Shakers or mint-in-box Dawn Dolls. He brought only Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
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, and it wasn’t entirely a joke, he really was fascinated by these objects. It actually isn’t arbitrary, is it, a true obsession, although it may appear that way to an outsider. It may even be mysterious to the obsessed person why something grips him so, and that mystery must feed the obsession, increase the profound hold. (Ask someone who is truly obsessed
why
they feel that way. They will sputter, they will feel you are interrogating their private world, they may spout a list of reasons, but ultimately they can’t fully explain it. Obsession has an irrational or subrational heart. It is a bit like falling in love, I imagine.) And I believe few things are as despicable and dishonest as faking an obsession. The world is full of the lightly obsessed, the faintly committed, the inch-deep dilettantes. All those contrived and affected and presented passions. Jay was authentic; Jay had depth.

I am drawn to obsessives. I’m not one myself, so I can only guess about this stuff—okay, maybe I have obsessions, but mine are useless, neurotic obsessions. I am talking about aesthetic-driven, artistic obsessives. I sure am surrounded by them: Jay, Nik, even Ada in her way.

Jay slept over, which he did now once every week or so. It had become a regular thing, not increasing or decreasing in intensity or frequency. It held. We had slow, easy sex that had a low-volume erotic tone. We weren’t in love—even the idea of that made us both skittish and nervous—but the physical pleasure was real and steady and welcome.

Knowing I would see Jay once a week also helped me keep
some minimum level of grooming: I shaved my legs, I did my nails, and nearly regularly did my pilates DVD. I first met him at the Farmers Market on Fairfax, which is near where I work as a secretary for Greer Properties. I mean office manager. I mean personal assistant.

It was at Du-par’s, an old coffee shop where I eat lunch a couple of times a week. I used to occasionally see Jay there, reading. One day, on my way out, he asked if he could have lunch with me the following day. Jay wasn’t a good-looking guy. He was in his mid-fifties, balding, and he wore sweaters that were too big for him and created an off-putting, almost creepy diminutive effect. Nevertheless, he did have a faded British accent. I said yes.

We agreed to meet at the same place. As soon as I sat down with him, I regretted it. The whole thing felt so awkward, and now this coffee shop would be forever poisoned with failure. I’d have to eat somewhere else. We ordered and then sat in forced smiles and silence. I became very conscious of how often I seemed to blink. I drank too much coffee and then I began to talk, and talk, filling the empty air.

“Have you been following the severe acute respiratory syndrome global pandemic? You know, SARS? Well, you remember how at the beginning of the year it was constantly in the news? Every time you turned on the news they were talking about it. All winter long we heard about where it was and what could be causing it. We saw people in hospital beds on respirators next to photos of them healthy and smiling at a barbecue. Interviews with family members and CDC officials. Remember? Well, then SARS just stopped for no reason.
Do you know there were over seven thousand cases?” I said, leaning in.