by Susan Choi
And by “anyone” Karen knew Sarah meant David, and felt the satisfaction of the night arriving just where she’d intended, like a train pulling in right on time.
“I see David a lot. In fact, we’re working on something together.”
Another of Karen’s observations about people who drink is that their drunkenness doesn’t steadily accumulate like snow building up. It has valleys and peaks, of confusion and relative clearness. Although the confusion gets steadily worse, and the relative clearness gets steadily cloudy, there keep being these moments of reaching a peak, where the drunk person thinks she can see. She feels certain she isn’t that drunk. That’s where Sarah was, as the subject of David came up. Sarah was no longer high-pitched and hyper, she was no longer churning out fake excitement, she was tenderized down to her bones. She must have felt steady and safe in her own fortress walls. If it’s possible to see a person’s self-absorption clash against her curiosity, to see her inwardness and outwardness collide, then I saw it in Sarah. I saw her craving to talk about David meet her craving to learn a new David, from me. Before, she’d forgotten herself. Now, for him, she set herself aside.
“Tell me about him,” she said.
* * *
ONE OF THE challenges I’ve faced in therapy is my total recall. All my life I’ve had a flawless memory. All my life people have noticed, no one more than my mother. When I was very young, my mother paraded my memory. There was the lighthearted way she’d use me grocery shopping instead of a list. Imagine me at four or five years old, Kevin a fat toddler stuck in the shopping-cart seat. Aisle by aisle I’d rattle off our kitchen shortages down to the teaspoon. We were out of milk and bread, we had three eggs, we had a frozen chicken breast in the freezer, the baking soda box was empty, there was only one sleeve of saltines. She’d ask me questions about the sugar bowl’s level or the state of the lettuce when other people were in earshot, always hoping they’d make some comment, and when they did she was off to the races. “Believe me—she also knows how long it’s been since I vacuumed the carpet.” [Appreciative laughter.] “Believe me—it’s no fun when your kid won’t forget that you promised her ice cream—last summer!” [More appreciative laughter.] There was the less lighthearted way she deployed me in wars with my father or, later, her boyfriends. “Are you sure you want to say that to me? Karen’s listening.” “Karen, please remind Paul what he promised to do.” As I got older, though, my mother stopped parading my memory. She stopped bragging about it or hitting her enemies with it. Instead, she started running it down. My memory had been the ultimate proof of any points that she wanted to make, but it strangely disproved any points of my own. I might remember some incident, sure, but I did not understand it. Anybody whose brain was so cluttered with dull trivia like the approximate number of ounces of toothpaste left in the tube didn’t actually know what things meant. My mother first exploited my memory, and then insulted it, but the conclusion I reached didn’t change. My memory was my innermost self and I had to protect it.
Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you’re saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won’t get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother—the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that’s not hers. Was Sarah the same, as I’d always assumed? One thing I’d known about Sarah since high school was that her memory was well below average. She forgot things all the time, in every category. She forgot where she’d placed her bag, her jacket, or her lipstick the instant whatever it was left her hand. She forgot what assignments there were, or whether she’d done them. She forgot why she’d fought with somebody, and what had been said. The result of her forgetfulness—or the reason for it?—might be her “imaginative gift” for rewriting the past, but did this mean she was more, or less, likely to perceive someone else’s emotional truth? If she forgot my emotional truth—assuming she’d ever known it in the first place—was she now all the more on the lookout for it? Or would she just lend me hers, like my mother would do, and ignore a bad fit?
Karen would have thought the latter—or she would have thought that she thought the latter. But as Sarah embarked on her fourth daiquiri, Karen realized that something had changed. It wasn’t just Sarah’s blood alcohol level. Sarah, who had been so obviously shocked and terrified in the bookstore when Karen appeared—who had been, at that moment, and whether accidentally or not, perfectly in touch with the emotional truth of the situation, which was that Karen despised her—had now nestled into a new, fraudulent understanding, of Karen’s creation, with all the unquestioning trust of a baby. That new, fraudulent understanding was that Karen and Sarah had never ruptured. They had always been friends. They had never stopped loving each other, simply drifted apart. And Karen realized that she, Karen, had known all along that Sarah, for all her charisma and beauty and knowingness, which is different from knowing, was fundamentally forgetful, insecure, untrusting of her instincts, and anxious for praise and acceptance. And Karen realized that she had known all along that Sarah, if given the chance, would ignore Karen’s emotional truth if she was offered an emotional falsehood that made her feel better. And Karen realized that this weakness of Sarah’s was something she, Karen, had been counting on. For all her self-deprecating misgivings about having come to Skylight Books without a plan, Karen let herself admit she’d had a plan all along.
“I’d have loved to see his face when you showed up at auditions,” Sarah said eagerly. By now she had heard about Martin’s new play—minus Martin’s witch hunt—and David’s production of it—minus David’s crusading—and Karen’s saucy, fun-loving decision to take David up on his bogus invitation to audition for him, if not the form the audition had taken. Karen had made Sarah laugh about David’s shrewd use of his charm as a method of payment. Oh, yes, Sarah remembered this well. David’s gift for making you feel only he saw your gifts. Despite the cool night Sarah was flushed, with alcohol but more substantially this memory of David, and the pleasure of talking about it. Although, in her new happy trust in her friendship with Karen, she didn’t neglect to insist Karen was talented. “I mean, David’s right, you are good,” she said, “but I think you’re right also—that he told you to audition because he loves pretending he’s this great, supportive guy. That’s why I love that you went. So what happened?”
Karen did a look of comical surprise—she hadn’t mentioned already? “I got it.” Sarah shrieked and threw her arms in the air.
“After all that BS about my unacknowledged talent I guess he had to cast me,” Karen said. This was false modesty. Remember that the part—the only female part in the play—was written for a woman who “however long she lives, will never cease to look the waif.” Remember that the character is slight enough to be mistaken for a boy. Karen is petite and in excellent shape but she’s never since she turned ten years old “looked the waif” or been mistaken for a boy. That pretty young actress whose audition Karen wiped from David’s memory—she’d been a waif. But David wound up casting Karen, to his own great surprise, and no more from pity than guilt. Her un-ideal physique was the proof that she had something better. “Didn’t you and Martin have a thing?” David had asked Karen at The Bar, after telling her he’d given her the part to his own great surprise. Karen had lowered her lids at him, as if she hadn’t expected the question—she had—and also found it in very poor taste. “Fine,” David said, “but just do me a favor. Don’t get in touch with him before the first rehearsal. I want to see the look on his face. I bet we’ll be able to use that, for when the Girl first comes into Doc’s bar.”
“So he’s Doc?” Karen confirmed casually.
“Fuck yeah. I told him that I wasn’t going to do it if he didn’t play Doc. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees you.”
“Me too,” Karen said.
&nbs
p; At the open-air Mexican restaurant, Karen didn’t go into these details with Sarah, not even the detail of Martin’s casting. But when Sarah asked, “Do you think there’s any chance Martin might come see it?” Karen said, “David seems sure that he will,” and watched Sarah first withstanding, then submitting to temptation.
“If he can come from England, I can make it from New York. I have to. I’ve never seen a single one of David’s shows.”
“Would you really?” Karen marveled. “We open in less than three weeks.”
“Really,” Sarah said. She glowed like a lantern, as if already absorbing David’s stunned adoration at her unexpectedly attending the play. “Write down the dates on this napkin. I’ll book a flight when I get back to my hotel.”
“But are you serious?” Karen persisted.
“Of course I’m serious! I can’t not. David’s show? That you’re in?”
“Because—if you’re serious—”
“What?”
“No, it’s crazy.”
“Just tell me!”
“I just had this crazy idea—don’t be offended. Just, remember all those times on costume crew? So my character has just one change. It’s not even a quick one.”
Sarah clapped one hand over her mouth, barely muffling a squeal. She had to take the hand away to speak again. “I’ll be your dresser! I’ll dress you!”
Do mothers iron anymore? Or should we say, Do people iron anymore? But admit, it was mothers, not people, who ironed. Even Karen’s mother, trailing around in her ruffle-necked robe and her wedge bedroom slippers, had ironed. The ironing board permanently set up on its X-leg, wearing its silvery cover drawn tight by elastic. Lying on the floor under the board, Karen had been reminded by that elastic gathering of her own diapers, which in this memory were in the recent past. Karen must be two or three, lying under the ironing board, gazing up at the puckered elastic that holds the smooth, silvery fabric in place. Kevin must be an infant, kicking in a playpen or napping in his crib. Karen’s father still lives in the house and Karen’s mother is ironing his shirts. She sprays on the shirts from a can, the same way she sprays in a pan right before she cooks dinner, but the smell of the spray starch cooked hot by the iron makes Karen more hungry than does the smell of any actual cooking. The iron, coming down on the patch of damp starch, seems to be eating it, with a crackle and gratified hiss. And her mother, dreaming her way through the menial task as if nothing could be more romantic, is the mother whom Karen expects, the mother she’ll always be trying to find. In the costume shop at CAPA, when Karen rediscovered hot spray starch, the sound and the smell of it kept her content all those shows that she did the costumes, that she dressed someone else for the stage. Hot spray starch sedated her. It recalled the ancient safety of her lost childhood. And it bound her and Sarah together, into a harmony, ironing costumes. Now those afternoons they spent in costume shop that at the time had given Karen nostalgia for being a child are themselves an ancient childhood memory. Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” It comes from the Greek nostos: to return home, and the Greek algos: pain.
* * *
ALL THOSE YEARS after he first arrived, Martin returned. He was picked up at the airport by David, who was hosting Martin in his terrible apartment. Karen knew such arrangements were de rigueur in the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts but she still wondered how much Martin would enjoy David’s sofa bed after Mr. Kingsley’s guest suite. Karen herself, indispensably helpful, hired a cleaning service to fumigate and sanitize David’s apartment before Martin’s arrival, as usual earning David’s abject gratitude. Karen also booked Martin’s travel, filed the paperwork for a visiting-artist grant from the state, drafted the press release announcing the production, and updated the theatre’s website. In connection with none of these tasks did Karen publicize the fact that the Visiting Artist arrived trailing scandal. Among no one in David’s theatre company was the scandal discussed. So far as Karen could tell, apart from David and herself and Mr. Kingsley, no one knew. Martin’s alleged crimes didn’t follow him to this American city where he’d spent time more than ten years before. But they didn’t need to, Karen thought—the author would like to indulge in an adverb and write—serenely. Yes, Karen felt serene thinking of Martin, preparing for his arrival. “Serene” means “calm, untroubled, tranquil” and often refers to conditions at sea. Martin crossed the sea, whether in serene condition or not we have no way of knowing. When met by David at the airport Martin might have been shocked by David’s physical transformation. David at thirty could have been mistaken for a man nearing fifty. David was bald, his brow and jowls and shoulders drooped as if they were subjected to enhanced gravity, he couldn’t clear his face of stubble fast enough, he’d gotten thicker all over and had the pallor of a chain-smoking drinker whose only time outdoors is the time he spends getting into and out of his car. Martin might have felt, seeing David, that the past was further past than he’d thought. Would he feel this way seeing Karen? Would he recognize Karen?
The play was being staged in a former warehouse building which now held a bar in the front half and a “performance space” in the rear half, indicated by poorly built risers and pipes hanging on chains from the faraway ceiling to which were clamped an assortment of secondhand stage lights with frayed wiring and wrinkly gels. Black moth-eaten stage curtains salvaged from some ancient extinct theatre had made the enormous dusty warehouse into a sort of maze of spaces that had to be connected at their edges but you couldn’t tell where. People were always getting lost trying to find the bathroom or trying to find their way back outdoors. People got so tangled up in the black stage curtains that seemed to mark an exit or an entrance but didn’t that sometimes they had to be rescued after crying for help. The bar was a huge plywood horseshoe with almost no seating. For some reason there were only a handful of barstools, each with some hunchbacked uncommunicative drinker permanently attached. Otherwise there were armchairs and sofas, obviously rescued from the garbage, strewn around the concrete floor. The night of the first read-through, the night of Martin’s first full day in town, Karen arrived early and made a circular arrangement of furniture, rounded up some ashtrays, even got the bartender to give her a pitcher of water and glasses. Okay, she was nervous. No longer serene. But it was an expected and manageable nervousness. Its source was clear and its duration would be short. We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match. By contrast with the first time they’d met, when she had felt herself so old but in fact had been so young, Karen now actually was old enough to understand that for Martin, there might have been no story at all. There might have been—for this person who’d not merely touched but deformed her—no sensation of contact at all. He might not recognize her. If he did, he might not recall a single detail of their past relationship. If he did, he might not recall the same details. If he did, he might not recall them in just the same way. But Karen required very little to gauge the disjuncture and make her adjustment.
The four other actors arrived first and chatted awkwardly with Karen. All were under twenty-five and nervous of Karen, whose position in the acting pecking order they did not understand. Karen could not have cared less to explain. Karen could have chatted with them in her sleep. To her as to this story and the play they were completely peripheral. They intrude on this paragraph only because David was late; David had asked them to come at seven thirty while he and Martin, David had told Karen, were coming at seven, because David was eager for an unimpeded observation of Martin and Karen’s reunion. But David was late without realizing, as always. He came into the vast black dusty space with his self-conscious saunter which always advertised, even through a twilight murk, his awareness of his role as impresario, his keen pleasure and anxiety in making things happen—in this case, the reunion between Martin and Karen. The result might be discomfort or delight but either way he’d made it happen and he’d plow it into the play and make more happen. This was David’s typically
self-centered and not totally wrong point of view, that the moment was all about him. His point of view suited Karen. It kept her invisible.
“Hey hey hey, look who’s back in the U S of A,” David said as Martin, strangely small, hands crammed in pockets, shoulders overly shrugged, kept pace, a triangular smirk on his face in the corner of which drooped a cigarette. David saw the actors. “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”
“You told them seven thirty. It’s a quarter to eight,” Karen said.
“Is that Karen?” Martin exclaimed with the extreme emphasis of delight. He snatched the cigarette out of his mouth. He stopped dead in his tracks but the rest of him seemed to lean toward her, his grin most of all. However, his eyes contradicted. There had been flash and flutter in there. Panicked survey of options, swift choice of Enthusiasm. David, his glance bouncing back from the actors, entirely missed it.
“It is,” Karen smiled.
“Aren’t you looking fucking fantastic!” Martin said.
“Thank you.” Karen accepted this tribute with the extremely dignified truncated condescension she’d once observed in an actress playing a member of the British royal family in some Masterpiece Theatre thing. Karen’s mother had adored Masterpiece Theatre with the slavish adoration of somebody who thinks she’s cultured but in reality is turned on by the clothes. For years Karen had scorned her mother’s slavish adoration and yet kept on watching the shows, her mother in her gut like a worm. Then one night she saw an episode with an actress playing a member of the British royal family who looked down her nose at some man and said her stingy “Thank you” in response to whatever his compliment was. She said it as if she were holding her nose and also as if she were giving the man a great gift and was going to be embarrassed if he showed gratitude. There was such a complicated tender hatefulness in the way that she said it, and Karen, who was probably in college at the time, had thought of Martin, yes indeed she had. She’d thought of his British Difference and wondered whether there had been codes she had not understood. And now here she was actually saying the prim little “Thank you” to him and watching for a response. What did she see? His gaze was flying around like a game of Ping-Pong. He seemed to know that the exits weren’t easy to find. Karen’s nervousness changed from something boiling and popping its bubbles to something cool, stiff, and glossy. You might call the new thing confidence, from the Latin confidere, “have full trust,” and who among us hasn’t noticed that people with confidence tend to inspire it. Martin’s gaze was ping-ponging; he had every reason to be on his guard—after all, he had come Trailing Scandal. But he also had every reason to crush his own instincts and to seize grounds for confidence where he could find them. Of course Martin wanted to normalize. What criminal doesn’t. And Karen’s dazzling little “Thank you” was so full of knowing contempt it seemed somehow flirtatious, and you could see she was smiling. Karen watched Martin get it together and give her his weasel/rake smirk in response. Even David, tuning in a beat late, thought there was a frisson between them and was happy. Frisson is a French word meaning “shiver or thrill,” and it wasn’t much used in this country until the late 1960s. Then, once the sexual revolution came, people needed it or wanted to need it. Karen’s mother, of the negligee as daywear, adored the word frisson.