* * * * *
I practically ran over to Todd’s apartment. I knew that if anyone could help me find a way out of my mess, it was Todd. And even though his declaration of his feelings had knocked all the stuffing out of our codependent, mildly misguided friendship for a while, I knew we’d eventually get past it, and I needed him right then.
In the movie version of my life, I wouldn’t have even made it all the way to Todd’s before Travis tracked me down—totally out of breath—and declared his love for me.
In the real version of my life, I arrived at Todd’s place, sans any grand gestures along the way, and was greeted by an unshowered Todd, who was not entirely happy to see me.
“Who comes to my lair uninvited?” he called out as he opened the door.
“It’s me,” I said sheepishly.
“Hi, me. To what do I owe this surprise?”
“I need your help,” I said. “I know, I suck. I’m a selfish asshole and I should respect your feelings and leave you alone for now . . .”
“Agreed,” he said and started to shut his door.
But I nudged my way past him. “However . . .” I said as he rolled his eyes, “this whole thing was your idea.”
His mouth popped wide open.
“Well, what if it had been? You’d feel like hell right now, and you’d know how I feel.” His mouth closed. “You’re the only one who can help me. You’re the only one who knows the truth. And the only one I trust.”
He motioned for me to sit on his couch, and after I moved the two empty boxes of cereal and a leaning tower of Adweek magazines, I found a spot. About the fact that he was watching Baywatch in Spanish, I said nada.
“What’s the crisis?” he asked.
I told him the whole long, sordid story about my swamp-beast mother and the lawsuit and the fight between Travis and me and my suspicion that maybe I was being had all along but I hoped in my heart that I hadn’t been because I was feeling so happy with things, which taken together must have sounded like knitting needles to Todd’s ears.
“Yeah,” he said with an exhale so big I caught a whiff of his lunch. McDonald’s, I thought. “You’re in a pickle, all right.”
“I have to fix it.”
“So fix it,” he said flatly. The lack of warmth was to be expected, I suppose, but it still stung.
“I had it all planned out. I thought I would just come clean . . .”
“Good. You should come clean. I hated this idea from the beginning.”
“I know you did,” I said. “I slipped up in front of Cat again—another person I’m betraying.”
“Yeah, Jordan, the whole thing was . . . I don’t even know what the word is. Dishonest comes to mind. Also devious.” He thought for a moment. “And shitty. The fact that you pulled it off even for this length of time is the only impressive thing about it.”
“Okay, I get it. You hate me. But can you table that for five minutes?”
“Tabled,” he said.
“If I come clean that I never had amnesia, then there’s no case and my puppeteer mother watches all the strings get cut out from under her. Plus, I can demonstrate I have all my faculties so she can’t be my guardian anymore.”
“Good. Do it. What do you need me for?”
“Todd, I can’t! I’m supposed to just tell Travis that I didn’t have amnesia and I’ve been faking this whole time? Lying to him? And all the guilt that he’s felt . . . I mean, he’s been feeling really bad about it . . . So I’m supposed to just come clean? And then he’s miraculously going to say, ‘Great! Let’s put that silly amnesia stuff behind us and live happily ever after’? No! He’s going to freak out. And be even more pissed that I lied to him. And probably think that I’m NUTS!”
“Well”—he threw his hands in the air—“you are.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, and unmuted his television.
“I’m not nuts,” I defended. He didn’t even speak Spanish. He’d rather listen to a language he didn’t understand than me—a girl he didn’t understand. On second thought, maybe he knew exactly what he was doing.
“Right,” he said, watching a surprise scene of someone frolicking a little too far from shore. “Sane people fake amnesia every day. Look, Jordy, you know I love you. And I don’t mean that kind of love right now. I mean, you know I care about you . . . with all of your crazy little quirks and harebrained schemes. But this whole amnesia thing was a really crazy stunt.”
“Well, I need your help.”
“You keep saying that, but you haven’t told me what it is that you want me to do.”
“I need to find my memory,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I lost it. Now I need to find it.”
“Okay,” he said and then waved his hands in front of my face. “Poof! You have your memory back. See how easy that was?”
“No, I need to regain it in front of Travis. I can’t just say, ‘Oh God! It was here all along’”—and I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out my glove—“‘right where I left it, see?’ Plus, it’ll be a chance to make him feel better about the whole thing. He was there the first time, he thinks it was his fault; he’s been feeling guilty. This way, he’ll be there when I get it back, so he’s kind of like a witness again, almost a hero, and it’s all come full circle. He won’t feel bad anymore and everything will be better.” Todd looked at me like he was waiting for the rest of the plan. “So I need to get hit in the head.”
“Okay, I’m sold,” he said and he looked around the room. “Do you want to put your head through a wall, or should I grab a vase or something?”
“Pretend hit in the head, like in wrestling on TV.”
“That’s actually quite real,” he insisted. “But what are you brewing up here?”
“We need to stage some kind of fake accident. Like you can throw a flowerpot off a balcony.”
Todd got up off the couch and started pacing manically. “Oh my God. Tell me you didn’t just say that. A flowerpot? Seriously?”
“Well . . . yeah . . . ?”
“Okay, Wile E. Coyote, supergenius. Why not just make it an anvil?”
“Meep, meep?” I offered meekly.
“Jesus!” He exhaled.
“I’m serious. Hear me out. You throw the flowerpot. I’ll fall down next to it, pretend it hit my head and black out for a second. And then when I get up, I’ll remember everything. Nobody will ever know the difference.”
“Then we break for a Cap’n Crunch commercial? You really are nuts. I mean it. Don’t you think that’s a little above and beyond? This huge elaborate ruse . . . for what?”
“For me?”
Todd looked at me and squinted a couple times. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Jordy. You’re on your own. I’m out of the fake-amnesia business.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand. I do.”
This moment was punctuated by David Hasselhoff saying, “Adiós, mujer,” to Pamela Anderson in what appeared to be her last episode.
I was on my own. I’d instinctively reached out for the person who’d always been there for me, but I’d overreached with him too many times, and this was just too much of a stretch for him. It somehow never felt like lying—none of it, as bad as it got—if Todd knew. But suddenly I felt very sad and incredibly selfish. I shouldn’t have asked, and Todd was right to reject me. No one was going to help me out of this; I was just going to have to brave it alone.
* * * * *
I mentally prepared myself for the deposition as best I could. Clearly, it would be a simple matter of declaring my self-sufficiency—and doing it in such a way that wouldn’t suggest I was hysterical and crazy. The very phrase “I’m not incompetent” probably suggests just the opposite in certain contexts. Like this one. What’s more, Travis would be waiting for me inside, and with my mom bound to spew her usual venom disguised by sickly sweet helplessness and wonderment at the legal machinery moving forward, there was a good chance that
things weren’t going to go as I’d have liked. Even knowing this, I was still completely undone by the steely-eyed glare Travis focused on me as I walked into the law office conference room.
My mom was already there, hair teased up more than usual, seated at one side of the table, next to a woman whom I recognized from the early barrage of interrogations at the hospital and now assumed to be our lawyer. Travis sat to the far left of her, along with Ben and some other guy, a little older, paunchy, and red faced, with little strands of brown hair sweeping upward to his bald spot, as if worshipping it. He was the first to speak, and after some terse instructions were laid out, I was sworn to the whole truth and nothing but (I set my hand on the Bible gingerly, fearing a terrible shock or searing heat from the fire of eternal perdition), and the thing began.
“I’m Adam Manning, and I represent the defendant,” he said, and I watched as the court reporter sat off to the side taking notes on her little machine.
“Hi,” I said. I looked at Travis, but he wouldn’t look back at me.
“Please state your full name and spell it out for the record,” Adam Manning said.
“Jordan Landau. J-o-r-d-a-n L-a-n-d-a-u.”
He asked me how old I was, where I lived, what I did for work. He asked me a bunch of mundane questions and I answered, looking in Travis’s direction every so often, only to find him squeezing his fist open and closed and staring into his lap.
“Please take me back to the date of the accident,” he said. “What time of day was it?”
“Afternoon.” I knew from watching countless episodes of Law and Order (truly the Three’s Company of today for the sheer impossibility of turning on your TV without landing on one of its reruns) that I was supposed to answer only what was asked.
“Where were you?”
“New York.”
“Where in New York?”
I told him. We established, over the course of the next several minutes, that I’d been riding my bike in the rain.
“Was there traffic around you?” he asked.
“I guess. It is Manhattan.”
“Do you use drugs?” he asked.
“No,” I said, taken aback by the sudden turn in the questioning.
“Were you using drugs the day you drove into my client’s car?”
“Objection,” my lawyer said. “Draws a conclusion based on facts not in evidence here. She didn’t drive into the car. He opened his car door into her.”
“I’ll rephrase. Were you—”
“No, I wasn’t using any drugs,” I said again.
“How much money do you make a year?” he asked me. I didn’t know why it mattered and I was a little—okay, a lot—embarrassed about my salary.
“I make about thirty-five thousand a year. But I just got a promotion and my salary is increasing.”
“Is it true that you’re on the verge of bankruptcy?”
“Bankrup—” I looked at my mother’s lawyer imploringly. But she blinked slowly, as if secretly signaling me to share it all.
Manning resumed, his head cocked far to one side. “Is it true that you have several collection agencies calling you regularly?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say that you have a significant amount of debt?”
“I have some debt.”
“Would you say that you need money?”
“Who doesn’t?” I asked. Ben rolled his eyes and wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it over to Travis. I desperately wanted to know what it said, but I had to pay attention to the guy doing the questioning, whose head was now cocked so far to one side that I was starting to get sympathy pains in my neck. It didn’t help that I found myself tilting my own head slightly just to maintain eye contact with him.
“Is it true that you don’t even have an injury? That you’re here today not because you’re injured but because you need money?”
“No! Absolutely not. I don’t even want to be here.”
“Is it true that you’re aware of Travis’s finances and you’re doing this for the money? That you didn’t start this lawsuit until you knew what he had in his savings for his future business endeavor?”
“No,” I said, on the verge of tears.
“Please tell me when you lost your memory.”
“After the accident.”
“But you remember the car door opening in front of you. You want us to believe that you lost all your memory for events that happened before the accident but you remember the accident?”
“I remember the accident,” I replied, now so thoroughly confused that if my opportunity to establish my competency had landed in my lap, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“Did you remember that you owed a lot of money?”
Had Travis put him up to this? Ben? I felt like I was going to throw up. “No,” I said.
We took a short break so they could put in a new tape, and when we resumed it was Travis getting deposed.
“Please state your name and spell it for the record,” our lawyer said. Then she started inching through his personal history, and I was bored by it but incensed enough not to be able to tear myself away.
“Have you ever been involved in a car accident before?” our lawyer asked.
“Object to the form,” Manning said. “You may answer.”
“Once, when I was seventeen,” Travis said.
“Have you ever been sued before?”
“No,” Travis said.
“Where do you live?”
“East Seventeenth Street.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes,” Travis answered.
“Are you married?” our lawyer asked.
“Objection,” Ben spoke up, and Manning gave him a sidelong look. “Relevancy.”
“I’m just establishing living situation,” our lawyer responded. “It’s a deposition, Ben. You can have it stricken if the objection is borne out, but this is just background stuff.”
Ben looked at Travis.
“Are you married?” our lawyer repeated.
“Yes,” Travis said.
24.
the best laid plans
and all that . . .
Take all of the hypothetical, overimaginative, nonsensical possible outcomes to the deposition, multiply them by sixteen, and then add in about five thousand other scenarios—nowhere in that vast panorama did I envision the prospect that the major finding would be a wife. For the defendant.
I was stunned, repulsed, saddened, infuriated. They say grief progresses through phases of shock, denial, anger, and acceptance. I’m not sure of the estimated arrival and departure times for each jaunt, but in this case, I tore through the entire itinerary, leaped clean over acceptance and made it back to shock before the court reporter’s fluid fingers had hit the keys on yes. And that revelation was compounded by the fact that when Travis revealed the unthinkable, he looked at me and I’m pretty sure he smiled, a kind of flat smile, like he was introducing her to me. Some introduction.
I was upset before, understandably. He didn’t seem to have enough faith in me to believe that I had nothing to do with filing the lawsuit. That was one thing. But I figured we’d work that out. That was a hiccup. A glitch. A silly misunderstanding.
This—this was another story. One that seemed to be jumping straight to “the end.” Married? How in the world was that possible? What loving God would allow that to be true? And in the tiny fissures opening between the shock and anger and denial, why hadn’t I had even the slightest inkling that it was coming?
Then it hit me. Karma. I was being punished for my experiment. I’d taken to calling it an experiment because it seemed somehow less offensive. But not to whomever called the shots in the realm of Karmic Retribution, apparently. There, high on the mountain, it was known by a term as old as the human ability to give voice to thought. Lying. My pants off. Had I done this to myself? I wondered.
My mother took that shocking admission as her cue to push her chair back from the table at an a
ngle and disengage from the deposition. Which was good, because this little movement distracted me from the certainty that I was about to pass out. If there were an audible sound that went along with a heart breaking it would have drowned out all the lawyer-speak that went on as we gathered our things and left the conference room. In one instant I saw my future with Travis disappear. In this model it was his fault, but in another it could have easily been mine. He could have found out I was faking and told me to make like my memory and get lost. But then I’d have had the opportunity to beg his forgiveness. To explain and grovel and . . . something. But this took it out of my hands completely. There was nothing I could say to explain his wife away. No amount of pleading or good deeds could reverse it.
His wife. I hated those words. Hated the pictures, too, that sprung into being—wedding, moving in together, laundry mingled in one hamper, groggy searches for toothbrushes on brittle mornings, warm embraces. The phone answering machine message:
SHE: Hi, this is Moojie Moo—
HE: And Travis . . .
SHE: We’re not home right now . . .
HE: But leave a message . . .
SHE: And sure as the sunrise, we’ll get back to you soon!
BOTH: Tee-hee!
ME: *Barf*.
How could he have forgotten to mention that one crucial detail? I couldn’t help wondering what she was like. How’d they meet? Were they happy? They couldn’t be. He had his own apartment. Or did he? Was he separated? Did they have kids? Was there life insurance with mutual beneficiary agreements involved? The questions raced through my mind at a dizzying pace. Just how dumb had I been?
* * * * *
Outside, I could barely breathe. Partially because it was so cold that the air stung with every inhalation but mostly because of the gut punch. My mom had offered to take me home, but I shooed her away, not wanting to be anywhere near her. It was one of those times that a girl really wants her mom too. I just didn’t want the one I had.
Cold as it was, I was in no hurry to get home. I walked from the business district through various neighborhoods, finally winding up in the West Village watching some kids playing ball across the street, shouting, chasing, celebrating the mindless abandon of being kids. How lucky they were, to have no idea of the bullshit they had in front of them. Life was hard.
Forget About It Page 25