Shortly after that, or perhaps concurrently, was Josh’s burgeoning failure to come up with words (sometimes names) that had previously been available to him. It was his habit to do the Times crossword puzzle every night before going to sleep. His skill, which he secretly prided himself on, began to fail him, answers he was almost certain he knew refusing to come to hand. And more than once, perhaps even several times he had lost the names of people he knew perfectly well when running into them unexpectedly. If he worked at it, which he did—it was almost all he did beyond staring at unkempt sentences on the computer screen—he knew, or supposed, or was eager to believe, he could defeat the problem.
“I’ll listen to your dream after I have my coffee,” she said.
He followed her into the kitchen impatiently, rehearsing the opening of the dream in his head. They were riding in a rented car, a late model Audi wagon, going to a party at an old, sometime-friend’s house.
“I have a feeling I know how this is going to end up,” she said, sipping her coffee.
“I was uneasy about going,” he said, “because the host was the guy you once had a one night stand with in Seattle. I considered turning back, though for various reasons—there were no exits on this particular highway, the traffic was unimaginably dense—the choice was out of my hands.”
“I never had a one night stand with anyone in Seattle, for God’s sake,” she said. “Who did you have in mind?”
“The trip seemed to go on forever, though it was supposed to be three hours at most. Maybe we should head back, I said, wanting you to want not to go. It’ll be longer going back, you said. Let’s just get there and get it over with, okay? Then suddenly the house appeared—it was as if it were parked in the middle of the road—and we had to pull over to the side not to run into it. Pulling over, we slid into a ditch and you said, I knew this was going to happen. When I promised you I would find a way out, you shook your head with what I took to be contempt and looked out the window. Then we got out of the car and let ourselves into the house without knocking or ringing the bell. We were obviously very late because the party seemed in its last stages, couples lying on the floor, drunk or asleep, a few having sex in what seemed like slow motion. The hostess appeared—the guy’s wife—and she said to make ourselves at home, but that she was sorry to say all the good wine had already been consumed. I had brought a good bottle but it was still in the car and I excused myself to go out and retrieve it. Don’t leave me, you whispered, but I went out anyway, stopping at the door for a moment to embrace the hostess, whose name I had forgotten. And then I was in the car, looking under the seat for the bottle of good wine I had brought as a gift. I came up with a dusty bottle of Pinot Blanc from some fake-sounding chateau, Ryder or Riser—it was not the bottle I remember taking—and handed it to the hostess who was on the floor of the car on her knees next to me. I know this wine, she said to me. It was my absolute favorite before I quit drinking and carousing altogether. I don’t know how to thank you. Will a long lingering kiss do the trick? I didn’t think an answer was appropriate. Then we got out of the car and started back to the house. She took me around the side where there was a picture window and we looked into the master bedroom together, her small breasts pressing against my back. There was a couple on the bed, fooling around, his head under her skirt, and the hostess said, That’s my husband and your wife. It was odd because, though the woman was wearing the clothes you traveled in, her hair was shorter and a different color. I had the idea, which I believed and rejected at the same time, that you were wearing a disguise.”
“Is that it?” she asked.
“There was more, but that was the important part. The point is, it was just like that time at the party in Seattle where the hostess and I found you in the upstairs guest room with her husband. He had been a high school sweetheart or something of the sort.”
“I have no what you’re talking about,” she said. “That never happened. When is this supposed to have happened?”
“The trip, don’t you remember that terrible trip we took—we had picked up your mother’s car in Annapolis—and we were delivering it to them in Seattle. It was around 15 years ago. I never wanted to go. Along the way, we fought over everything. It was a nightmare. You can’t have forgotten.”
“Josh, we haven’t been to Seattle together in 17 years. I know that for a fact.”
“It could have been 17 years ago. You asked my forgiveness, don’t you remember. You gave me your word it would never happen again.”
Genevieve laughed. “You’re out of your mind. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. If anything, Josh, you’re conflating several different events. Yes?”
“No,” he said. “I’m right about this.”
She left the kitchen and after deciding not to, he followed her up the stairs. When he reached her—she was in her study sitting at her computer—he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say.
“I can’t live with your suspicions,” she told him the next day or the day after that.
“This was 15 or 17 years ago,” he said.
“You’re the most ungenerous man I’ve ever known,” she said. “It didn’t even happen.”
He waited until she was sitting at the table to make the point he had been thinking about much of the previous night. He had lost it temporarily but now it was at memory’s fingertips. “If it never happened, why does it disturb you if I mention it.”
She had no answer and then she did. “How would you like it,” she said, “if I constantly reminded you of the time 12 years ago that you hit me.”
“I never,” he said, aggrieved. “I don’t remember ever hitting you.”
“That doesn’t mean it never happened,” she said, “does it? You have a awful temper and you know it.”
He remembered the car, an oversized Chevrolet that had a habit of stalling at red lights. And so he brought it up to her when they talked again several hours later, reminded her of the car’s various unnerving tics.
“My mother never drove a Chevrolet,” she said.
“If it wasn’t a Chevrolet,” he said, “what was the car we drove across country? It was a blue and white Chevrolet.”
“That was a different time,” she said. “Anyway I never went to high school in Seattle.”
It was possible that the boy he had caught her with in Seattle merely resembled her high school sweetheart. The phone interrupted this thought and he took the occasion to answer it. It was someone from their bank, offering to sell him some pointless new service no one in his right mind could possibly want. It was presented to him as a favor they owed him for being such a good customer. Even after he said no thank you, the voice at the other end continued her rehearsed spiel. “Damn it,” he said. “When I say no I mean no.”
“When you say no, you often change your mind afterward,” she said. This was Genevieve not the woman on the phone whom he had temporarily shut out of his life five minutes earlier.
When he took Magoo, their Golden, out for his evening walk, he tried to conjure up Genevieve’s mother’s errant Chevrolet. No details answered his quest. Maybe it wasn’t a Chevrolet, though unless he had lost his mind altogether there had been a car they had picked up in Annapolis and driven to Seattle.
The next time Josh approached her to make some debater’s point, she could no longer remember the particulars of their long running argument. He caught her at the refrigerator door, struggling against residual vagueness, wondering what urgency had brought her there. “Are you ready to admit that I was right?” she said.
“I didn’t want to make the trip to Seattle,” he said, “because I never enjoyed myself in your mother’s house.”
She peered into the refrigerator, hoping that something in the picture would remind her that she had come on its errand.
“My mother always spoke highly of you,” she said. “That was until she stopped remembering who you were. Just because she lost her memory doesn’t mean… you know what I mean. She actually encouraged
me to marry you, though of course I never did what she wanted and she knew that like the back of her hand.”
“It was your mother,” he said, “who invited that guy, your high school sweetheart, to lunch with us. He was in Seattle on some business trip or he had just moved there and he phoned your mother to find out where you were.”
She took a container of milk from the refrigerator, which seemed as good a choice as any. It might have been that she was planning to make a pot of coffee. “You’re saying he, whoever, called my mother.”
“Yes,” he said, “and she invited him over.”
“She invited him to the house in Seattle? That’s an odd thing for her to do. Where was I?”
“You were there,” he said angrily. “You were already there.”
“Was I? And where were you?”
“On the outside looking in.”
It had been dark for almost two hours and they were still driving around looking for an acceptable place to stop for the night. Genevieve was in one of her moods. None of the motels they passed in the seemingly endless sprawl of the one-street small town impeding their progress appealed to her. “You make the choice, Josh,” she said.
“What about this one?” he said, as they approached a no frills arrangement of boxy cabins. According to the flickering sign, the place was called Dew Drop Inn.
“Oh Josh,” she said, “that’s so depressing. We’ve passed by places that were nicer than this.”
He pulled into the parking space next to the office. “It’s just a bed for the night,” he said.
“I’m not staying here,” she muttered.
He went into the brightly lit office without her and rented 6A with his American Express card, though the blousy woman at the desk warned that a drunk trucker tended to come by around 3 AM and was likely to knock on the door, insisting the place was his. “All you have to do,” the woman said, “is to keep your door locked and pay no attention to him. After a while, he gets discouraged. You’ll be making a big mistake if you answer the door.”
When he returned to the car, already regretting his decision to pay for a room sight unseen, Genevieve was a notable absence. He lounged in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, dozing, waiting with willed indifference for her return, assuming nothing, assuming she had gone off looking for a bathroom or had decided to leave him forever. When he could no longer sit still, he evacuated the car to look for her. Having no idea where to look, he headed toward the diner they had passed a block or so back, his best guess, hurrying, speed-walking, breathing hard, running.
He was so intent on getting there, he nearly ran over her in the dark, as she came slowly toward him. “Is that you, Josh?” she said. “I got us some coffee.”
“Damn you,” he said.
She woke up the next morning remembering how fond she was of Joshua, which was, she suspected, an abrupt change in the weather. For months, perhaps years, she had been nursing the hope that he would silently disappear. As soon as she got into her forest green terry cloth bathrobe, which he had given her last Christmas (there were some things she didn’t forget), she intended to go downstairs—she heard someone banging around in the kitchen—and tell whoever it was (who else could it be?) about her discovery. A detour to the bathroom to pee and to brush her teeth interceded. By the time Genevieve reached the kitchen she could still remember she had something she wanted to tell Joshua, but not what it was.
“I made coffee,” he said when she approached, “but I finished most of it.”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.
He took a coffee mug from the cupboard for her, filling it almost halfway with what remained of the pot he had brewed. He was embarrassed to tell her that there was no longer any milk.
She improvised her news. “I need to know,” she said, “why you leave fingerprints on the bathroom towels.”
“So we’ll have a subject for conversation,” he said, “other than Seattle, which you won’t discuss.”
“Do you expect the fingerprints to go on forever?” she asked.
“Not forever,” he said. “If he wasn’t your high school sweetheart, who was the man in the bedroom with you in Seattle?”
She left the room abruptly, having no interest in the turn the conversation had taken, but then returned momentarily with an appropriate response. “Whoever he was, he didn’t leave fingerprints on clean towels,” she said.
“If he was such a paragon, why didn’t you run off with him when you had the chance?”
She was on to him now. “You brought him around, didn’t you, so you would have an excuse to get rid of me. That’s so like you.”
“It was your mother not me who bought him into the house.”
“So you say,” she said, “but it could have been you who told her to invite him over… This happened where?”
“It was in Seattle.”
“No way.”
“I know it was Seattle. That was where your mother was living at the time.”
“I’ll tell you why you’re wrong,” she said. My mother never would have allowed it, never in a million years. You know what I think. I think the person in the bedroom with me was you.”
He left an unfinished sentence on his computer to ask Genevieve if she would like to go for a walk.
“Do I like taking walks?” she asked.
He couldn’t remember the last time they had walked together, but he wouldn’t have asked if there was no chance that she would accept. Rejection had never been high on his list of priorities. “It’s your call,” he said.
“My call?” she mused. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk with you if you promise not to tell me your dream.” She took his arm, then gave it back to him. “Let’s not walk too far, all right?” Then she left him on a quest that lost itself somewhere along the way. Then she remembered that she was looking for her coat. Her searches always took longer than anticipated. She hated to feel cold when everyone else seemed not to mind.
When she returned she asked him if she knew why she had her coat on.
“We’re going for a walk if I make a certain promise,” he said.
“Did you really think I didn’t know we were going for a walk? What promise were you going to make?”
“I’m not making any promises,” he said.
“You make too many promises as it is,” she said, which offended him momentarily and then amused him no end. It seemed to him the wittiest thing she had said to him in ages.
His extended amusement, which bent him over, disconcerted her. She wondered if she had meant what she said, whatever it was, as a joke all along. She laughed in echo, not wanting to seem out of it.
He was still smiling at her remark as they started their walk hand in hand in the general direction of their local park.
They had barely stepped outside when she asked how much further they had to go.
“We haven’t gone anywhere, sweetheart,” he said. “Do you want to go back. We don’t have to take a walk.”
“I don’t want to do anything that makes you angry,” she said, “though I think everything I do makes you angry.”
“Then let’s go back,” he said in a tone so reasonable he could hardly recognize the voice as his own.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Do you even know the way back? You’re always getting us lost. You know that’s true.”
“Of course I know the way,” he said. “And when did I ever get you lost?”
A much younger couple with a baby in a stroller excused themselves to edge their way by. “Do you know where the park is?” Genevieve asked the woman.
“It’s where we’re going,” the woman said. “You can follow us.”
Genevieve admired the baby and thanked the couple.
“I know where the park is,” Josh said when they were alone. “You didn’t have to ask anyone.”
After awhile they came to the corner of their extended block and Josh saw or thought he saw the park in the distance,
the couple with the stroller framed in the entrance, which confirmed him in his controversial view of himself as someone of more than ordinary competence. He had a reputation even in better days for having an unreliable sense of direction. It was strictly the judgment of others. In so far as he could remember, he had almost always, at least eventually, gotten where he was going.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Genevieve asked.
“We’re just taking a walk,” he said.
“I suppose that’s all right,” she said.
Eventually, the park moved toward them in its leisurely pace. It was late afternoon and the trees seemed backlit, suffused with light.
“Do I like the park?” she asked.
He didn’t want to lie to her, though God knows there had been lies between them before. “Almost everyone likes the park,” he said.
“I was here as a child,” she said. “Every afternoon, rain or shine, we used to go to the park.”
He was thinking that it was time to turn back, but he let the thought, with its disquieting urgencies, dissolve. They were getting along so well, he didn’t want to disturb the rhythm that had brought them to this place.
They took the center path, but after awhile it seemed more rewarding to take a right turn on a narrower path dotted at uncertain intervals with stone benches.
“Is this my warmest coat?” she asked him.
He took his coat off and put it around her shoulders. “Would you like to sit for a while?”
“If you do,” she said. “I always ruin things for you.”
“Isn’t that the nature of marriage,” he said.
They were between benches and he chose for their resting place the one they had already passed, shortening if not by much the distance necessary for return. As she eased herself on to the bench, Genevieve gave up a sigh, leaning into Josh to exclude the darkness.
“I know what you’re saying,” she said. “You think I’m getting like my mother. It so happens I remember that we met in a park very much like this one. I was with another boy at the time, someone from my school who was in the class ahead of me. He wanted me to go somewhere with him. He had something he wanted to show me.”
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