by Susan Choi
These conversations about the past always happened at a bar we called The Bar—everyone called it The Bar—although it had a proper name. Our town had plenty of bars, so there wasn’t an obvious reason this comfortable but ordinary bar would be known as The Bar. It wasn’t a place we had gone to in high school, although it had existed then, giving off the same vibe of friendly, predictable after-work watering hole it gave off now, the difference being that then this vibe seemed inappropriately dull and now it seemed appropriately dull. In this one way, at least, David had broken with the past. It was The Bar, not one of the bars he’d drunk at in the past, where he liked to sit around and talk about the past.
Unlike David, I spent very little time at The Bar. To be clear, I spent very little time with David. The volunteer grant-writing, the tax-fiasco fixing, the dropping in once in a while to a gala to not be recognized by Mr. Kingsley, the conversations about my unacknowledged talent at the bar of The Bar, were things that happened maybe every couple months and made up a tiny fraction of my life. Most of my time I spent working for clients who paid me, or working on the house I’d bought. I also went to therapy, and started training as a therapist. I didn’t drink. I’d never drunk much and then there was a time in my life when I eliminated things, some because I couldn’t tolerate them, and some because I didn’t require them, and drinking was a thing that I didn’t require. I called my brother most nights to check in, and often ate my dinner while I listened to him talk. I sometimes watched a movie. I read a lot: History and Self-help are my categories. I’ve always liked being alone.
Some nights, though, I liked the thought of being with people, and then I’d drive to The Bar, usually with a book, although I rarely got to read it, because David was usually there. We almost always had some actual business, some organizational task I was helping him with, that would cause him to turn from whoever he’d been drinking with. David always had someone to drink with, often a small crowd. There was usually a woman riveting her attention to David like she thought there would be a quiz later, there were usually members of the theatre crowd and members of the broader arts crowd and members of the even broader drinking crowd, orbiting David, placing him at the center of things. Even when David was alone at the bar of The Bar, as he sometimes was because he’d gone into a State that held people off just as effectively as if he were swinging a spiked club around, he was still at the center of things. By which I mean that even when he pushed people away they kept their eyes on him, from the far side of the room, anxious to find a way back to his side, to regain his attention. When we were young, David had clumsy charisma; he knew he was attractive, but he didn’t know in what way or why. More than a decade of dedicated self-abuse had ruined his looks and when he was tired or drunk, his face looked like a ball of molding clay that had been thrown against a wall. Yet his charisma, which you could no longer confuse with his looks, was more noticeable. It almost seemed independent of him. The physical David would sit slumped at the bar staring into his glass while his charisma stalked the room, pushing some people away, pulling some people close. Karen was always pulled close, on account of her usefulness to him as a loyal unpaid employee and her status as Link to the Past.
Tonight, then—a night in late January, many months before Karen’s reunion with Sarah at the Skylight bookstore—David is seated alone at the bar, in a funk, when Karen enters wearing her jean jacket buttoned all the way up, a tasselled scarf wound several times around her neck, a pair of gloves, and a hat pulled low over her ears. It’s as cold as it gets in their town, which is plenty cold for Karen, who hates to admit that she never got used to the cold in New York, but whimpered beneath its onslaught just like her mother, except without her mother’s ankle-length faux-fur coat. From outside, as she hauls on the frigid door handle, Karen can’t see The Bar’s interior, only the glow of its lights, through the big windows which usually put the people at the bar of The Bar on display to the sidewalk outside, but which this night are frosted with condensation. But Karen isn’t surprised, on entering, to find David immediately inside the door, on the right-most barstool, his usual place. When David isn’t in rehearsal, he sometimes occupies this stool from three or four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. It’s David who takes an extra beat to notice Karen, maybe because of the hat and the scarf. As she pulls these off and steps up to the bar to order a Coke, David sees her. “The fuck,” he says. “I was just thinking of you. Remember Martin?”
Karen finds this an interesting, excellent question. Like all her favorite questions it seems so simple and obvious that for David to have asked her seems idiotic at first. Does she remember Martin? But now the different layers of the question start to peel apart. Remember in what exact way? The dictionary tells us that “remember” means “to call something to mind, recall something forgotten.” Well, Karen has never forgotten Martin, so in this sense she doesn’t remember him. The dictionary also tells us that to remember is to keep something in memory. Without going down the rabbit hole and looking up “memory,” let’s give this one a check mark: yes, she does keep this something in memory. We also have, in this particular definition, “keep somebody in mind”—yes—“give somebody a gift”—you might say so, depending on “gift”—“send somebody greetings”—not lately—“commemorate somebody or something.” Commemorate: remember something ceremonially. This meaning is suddenly very appealing. It sticks in Karen’s mind, the way a lot of things do. David, who has his own share of problems, one of which is being too smart for every situation he puts himself in—he is too smart for his work life, his sex life, and definitely his life as a drunk, which takes up the biggest part of his time—would probably enjoy this little lecture on the meanings of “remember,” but Karen wouldn’t enjoy giving it, so she only says, “Sure, I remember Martin.”
“Check this out,” David says, and lays a news clipping flat on the bar. Bourne Courier-Telegraph, October 4, 1997: “Top Teacher Dismissed Amid Allegations.” Beneath the headline are two short columns of print and one short column of a black-and-white photograph of a man with a narrow ferrety face, light hair fringing over his eyes and his ears, a narrow gap between his teeth, oversize glasses that weren’t fashionable even ten years ago, a jacket and tie that he probably borrowed and that don’t really fit. Even without the benefit of color you can tell that his skin is too white and his teeth are too yellow. The photo looks more out-of-date than it is, the way official photographs—Karen supposes this is the yearbook photo, the “Our Faculty” wall-of-the-main-office photo—never look like the day they were taken but like the day when their dingy backdrop first began to be coated with decades of dust. The man, of course, is the man we’re here calling Martin. He looks just like and not at all like the Martin that Karen remembers. Karen can’t even tell, staring at the dated photograph, whether the Martin it shows is older or younger than the Martin she knew. The Martin of the photo and the Martin Karen “keeps in memory” look exactly the same, and at the same time they look totally different. Now Karen can no longer tell them apart. She wonders whether she does remember Martin at all, or whether she just made him up, looking down sightlessly at the utterly weird, unrecognizable photo that looks exactly like Martin. She’s been staring so long at the photo that when David asks, “Are you done?” she doesn’t realize he means finished reading the words. The words she has not even started.
“I’m done,” she says, meaning something different than what David’s asking. He picks up the clipping and puts it away. His fingers seem to be trembling. He seems to be having difficulty, now that the clipping is safely away, lighting a fresh cigarette. David is completely freaked out, which is the flip side of being a jaded unshockable guy; it’s the soft inner lining his jaded unshockable costume is meant to conceal. Undetected by him, Karen puts on David’s jaded unshockable costume. She’s going to have to get the article at the library: she’s careful to remember, to “keep in memory,” the name Bourne Courier-Telegraph. She’s going to have to pore over t
he article later, however much she would like to pore over it now. But she doesn’t need to pore over it now to have the basic idea. She has that already.
“Where did you get that?” she asks.
“From Jim,” David says, by which he means Mr. Kingsley. So freaked out is David he doesn’t even remember that this business of calling the person we’re calling Mr. Kingsley a chummy first name, for our purposes “Jim,” is only for the Elite Brotherhood. “But first I got this letter from Martin,” David says. David’s urgently waving the bartender over, he’s so desperate for fortification to get this explained, to the point of not even realizing what’s happened to Karen. He doesn’t notice his jaded unshockable costume slip off Karen, at this mention of getting a letter from Martin. He doesn’t see Karen yank the thing back into place, and so misses the chance to tempt her to confess that when she moved back to town, although she swore to herself not to do it, she finally drove to the house of her childhood and knocked on the door, because some crazy part of herself imagined, a long time after it was expected, a letter from England arriving there for her, but—thankfully no one was home at her childhood home, and she never went back.
Unlike Karen, David had never expected to hear from Martin again. David hadn’t spent much time with Martin for those two months, fourteen years ago. They’d never been in touch after Martin and the others had left. But Martin, in his letter, seemed to know all about David’s success. Maybe Martin had actually heard about David somehow, and been reminded he knew him. Or maybe he’d remembered David, and for whatever reason decided to look him up and see if he’d made something of himself. You couldn’t tell from the letter, which he’d sent to the company’s post office box.
“Do you have the letter with you?” Karen asks, interrupting David’s lengthy dissertation on the letter from Martin, in a possibly over-sharp tone. Karen would much rather see this letter herself, hold the thing in her hands, than hear David describe it. But of course David has misplaced the letter already. It doesn’t matter, he reminds Karen in response to her outright annoyance. He remembers its words perfectly. When David and Karen were in high school, David tortured his classmates with recitations of the skits of Monty Python and the songs of Bob Dylan. He’s always had a flawless memory for words that coexists in some way with a totally fragmented grasp of his life. This is a psychological or neurological phenomenon that perhaps has a name Karen might someday know if she goes into clinical practice.
“He congratulated me on everything with the company,” David says. “He was really nice about it. It seems like he’d looked up reviews. And then he said, ‘It’s about bloody time someone shook things up in that starchy little burg you call home. I was sorry that it couldn’t be Candide but I’m delighted it’s you! Give the righteous moralizers a smack—you might knock their eyes open.’ And then he said, ‘Perhaps you’ve heard I have some troubles of my own with the morality crowd. It’s the usual thing—if they can’t find immorality to scold they make it up and it works just as well.’ Then he talked about how he’d finally found the time to finish writing a play, and made arrangements to stage it, both directing and playing a principal role, but then ‘here came this witch hunt in which, most regrettably, I am the witch.’ And then he pretty much asked me if I’d stage his play. The one he’s had to cancel.”
Not understanding what “morality troubles” and “witch hunt” might mean, David had, first, forgotten about the letter for a few days while he dealt with his own theatre projects and created and recovered from hangovers. Then he saw Mr. Kingsley at a meeting or somewhere and asked him what he knew these days about Martin. Mr. Kingsley made a face—the sort of face a nun makes when the doings of the wicked are too regrettable to even discuss. Sitting at The Bar with Karen, his palm lying on top of the envelope in which he’s put the article that Karen wants to keep looking at but will not admit wanting to look at, David makes his version of the face, which reminds Karen that David didn’t fail at acting because he didn’t know how. At least he can put on a face. Drunk as he is—or maybe because he’s so drunk—he does a very good nun. A face hung on a hook and dragged low by a weight—the weight of wickedness that’s too regrettable to even discuss. Mr. Kingsley had declined to discuss it. He’d made the face, and a couple days later—today—he’d dropped the news clipping by David’s office. But who are the wicked Mr. Kingsley declined to discuss? Are they Martin, or Martin’s accusers?
Although she’s not known for promiscuity or a sense of humor—in fact, people probably think she’s both celibate and unfunny—Karen often points out in certain public situations that she has never slept with David. Let’s say Karen happens to be at The Bar the same night as some person from David’s broadest circle, aka his drinking circle, whom she has never met and doesn’t want to meet because she and this person have nothing in common. In such situations David without fail will insist upon introducing Karen to this random drunkard of his vaguest acquaintance. David without fail will describe Karen using such hyperbolic phrases as “one of my oldest friends in the world” or “goes back further than anyone” or “knows where all my skeletons are buried.” Karen without fail will quip, “I’m the only woman in this bar who hasn’t slept with him,” or, “I’m the only woman he’s ever known for more than a week who hasn’t slept with him,” or, most impactfully, “I’m the only woman in this town/county/greater metropolitan region who hasn’t slept with him.” David without fail winces visibly when she says this. It’s as if his reputation as a guy who’s irresistible to women—except Karen—is somehow undeserved, or unpleasant to him. Karen has never understood David’s relationship to his sexuality, which like his charisma seems to stalk the world independent of David’s intentions, doing whatever it wants. And Karen herself, whenever she makes the comment, without fail also winces, but on the inside, because the comment is compulsive and she never means to make it and wishes she didn’t. It possibly suggests sour grapes, as if she wants to sleep with David, when she doesn’t. Or it possibly seems mean-spirited or superior toward other women. And however it seems, it is unnecessary. Yet she always says it, always wincing; and David always gives her the opportunity to say it, always wincing. Why? What compels them?
Until the night David showed her the clipping, Karen would have said that David always introduced her because of his obsession with his past. And she would have said that she always made the comment because she was annoyed by his obsession with his past. But on the night of the newspaper clipping, Karen wondered whether the whole thing had to do not with the past, the thing David always brought up, but with sex, the thing Karen always brought up. Maybe Karen’s insistence that she had nothing to do with David’s sex life meant that Karen, in fact, had some ax to grind about David’s sex life, its epic quality discussed by everyone, as if David were the star of some hit TV show that Karen had been watching for decades with no option of turning it off.
That night at The Bar, as they began to talk about the “witch hunt” against Martin, it didn’t take long for Karen to suspect that David wasn’t shaken by the thought of Martin being a predator. Rather David seemed shaken by the thought of women lying about Martin, a person whom David, all these years later, viewed as a role model and sort of spiritual colleague, an example of how David thought a working theatre artist should be. In the fourteen years since David and Karen had seen him, Martin had remained teaching at the same school. He’d remained that irreverent, exemplary teacher, always winning the awards and always almost getting fired. He’d remained the guy students called “the biggest influence on my life” or “the only person at that school who connected with kids” or other such hyperbole. He’d taken his students not just to CAPA that long-ago time, but all over the world, offered them opportunities they’d never imagined, broadened their horizons, taught them to believe in themselves, and so on. All this information came out of the article, which David seemed to view not as one possible version of a possibly unknowable reality but as a simple window onto the life of s
omeone David barely knew, whose past magically touched upon his—in other words, a sacred person. Karen knew David had always viewed the cancellation of Candide as proof of the hypocrisy—or, to use Martin’s word, “starchiness”—of this “little burg” David and Karen call home. Karen further guessed the cancellation of Candide had played its role, alongside Beckett and Northwestern, in the way David viewed himself now: theatre rebel, proud discomfiter of paying audiences. Martin having paved the way, the article must seem to David like evidence of a world gone mad, in which the vengefully lying were rewarded and the truth-telling teacher and artist destroyed.