Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

by Bob Smith

  “No! The Democrats have their share of crooks, but at least their crooks are willing to hand out some money to the poor while taking a bribe. There’s something intrinsically evil about the Republicans’ indifference to suffering; it’s okay to torture foreigners and give tax breaks to billionaires and to have millions of Americans without health insurance, because we can’t afford universal health care, but we can afford a trillion-dollar Iraq War that profits a bunch of crony-owned corporations. Then they won’t shut up about how the gays are immoral, and meanwhile every one of them is cheating on his wife.”

  I could see quite a bit of my mother’s temper in myself, but I didn’t mind. I never wanted Isabella to think that I was apathetic about her future.

  “If you’re the sane opposition, then no wonder I become a Republican.”

  “We’ve been driven insane,” I muttered, before saying to Taylor, “Yeah, and thanks for lying about being a Republican for twenty years!”

  “I didn’t lie,” he said. “I was registered for one year.”

  We would be soon driving over Cattaraugus Creek, and I was tempted to stop at the soon-to-be-discovered old growth forest of Zoar Valley, but we didn’t make a detour. Dick Cheney loomed in my thoughts. I’d just seen a bald middle-aged man driving a Winnebago, and I mistook him for Cheney and almost veered off the road.

  “Why don’t you try to prevent me from becoming a Republican?” Taylor asked.

  “How would I do that? Give you a lobotomy?”

  “No,” Junior said. “That would make him a Republican. How about a heart transplant?”

  “Republicans reject having hearts.”

  “I’m serious,” Taylor said. “How would you prevent that?”

  “You’ve always leaned conservative.”

  Taylor smiled. “Except in bed.”

  “Well, most gay Republicans aren’t conservative in bed,” I said. “Speak softly and carry a big stick has a double meaning for them.”

  “I don’t like either party right now. I criticize both of them. What changes me?”

  I had an answer but didn’t see exactly how we could prevent that from happening.

  “Well, it was 9/11. Before that you called yourself an independent, but after that you became a Republican.”

  “Well, can we prevent 9/11?” Taylor asked.

  After a brief discussion about how we would need to eradicate a clandestine group of Islamic terrorists based in remote countries like Sudan and Afghanistan, we concluded that mission might be a bit too ambitious for the three of us.

  “We should stick to trying to change the histories of two people rather than trying to change the history of an entire planet,” I suggested.

  “Unfortunately,” Taylor said, “sometimes one person changes the history of the planet.”

  “I’ve always thought if only Gore had won the election, then maybe you would have become a conservative Democrat.”

  “Well, could we stop Bush from becoming president?” Taylor asked.

  “What?” I asked. “We’ll go to Midland, Texas, and what? Ruin his political career before it gets started? Get him drunk and fucked up on coke and then videotape him having sex with a hooker? Is that the plan?”

  “If you think that would do it,” Junior replied.

  “Yeah, why not?” Taylor said. “Cheney must be afraid that you’d do just that.”

  These two were serious. Like we could stop Bush from happening. I couldn’t tell whether I’d become cynical or if they were ridiculously idealistic.

  “We don’t have time to do that. We need to save Carol before Cheney finds and kills us or yanks me back to my time.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit,” Junior shouted. “You go around saying the president sucks and all these other people are doing bad things, but you’re too fucking lazy or scared to try to make a difference. We’re the only people who can do this. You fucking say-one-thing-do-nothing fuck!”

  It was disconcerting that he was saying exactly what Cheney had said to me: Get off your ass and do something. And my mother had said we deserved freedom from speeches. Just talking about problems without doing anything about them is the most annoying and debilitating form of apathy.

  Taylor asked softly, “Was I that shitty a boyfriend that you won’t even try to save our relationship?” He paused and then added, “Maybe you’re right and we should break up. I want a boyfriend who would try to keep us together.”

  They both stared at me.

  “Of course, we have problems. All couples do, but the one that shut us down was our political differences.”

  “It’s not fair to let Taylor become Republican. He’s too cute for that.” Junior blushed a little and I felt a twinge of jealousy. But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t decide whom exactly I was jealous of: me, myself, or Taylor.

  Junior added, “You’d stop him from stepping on a landmine, so why not try to prevent him from stepping in bullshit.”

  “We have to stop Bush Two from happening,” Taylor urged.

  “I know it sounds selfish, but I care more about saving Carol than I do about saving the country from Bush. I messed things up last time. I didn’t force Carol to stay in rehab. I don’t want to fuck up again. I’m going to finish this. Do you understand?”

  “That was a decision that you made in the middle of a crisis,” Junior said. “Carol’s not in the middle of a crisis now. And whatever happens to you, I’ll still be here. We can do both.”

  Our recent petty sparring made me lose sight of the fact that Junior loved Carol as much as I did. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to fuck up again. I didn’t see how we could prevent Bush and Cheney from becoming our president and vice president, but I began to feel we had to try.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to find George W. Bush in Midland,” I said.

  “You said he’s a nobody now so maybe his phone number’s listed,” Taylor suggested.

  I hadn’t considered that possibility, as I thought it would have to be unlisted since his father was the vice president and they shared the same name. For a moment, I savored being in a time when most Americans had never heard of him.

  “I bet he’s well known in that town,” Taylor said. “We can track him down.”

  Taylor seemed to genuinely want to change not only our nation’s future, but also his and my future. It was unexpectedly heartening and made me feel hopeful about both keeping us together and saving Carol. We began to pass through miles of beautiful farmland along Lake Erie, where the verdant trees and fields pulsed with life like in Charles Burchfield’s watercolors. It brought back memories of the lush summers of my childhood, an annual season of renewed hope, when dark winter gives way to light and life. I felt emboldened.

  “We can only spend a day or two at the most if we try this,” I said. “I won’t spend any more time than that.”

  “Why is everyone else’s happiness more important than yours?” Junior asked.

  It was an unexpected question, and I had to consider my answer before replying.

  “Because my heart gets broken, but it doesn’t stop beating.”

  We drove past a billboard for the Chautauqua Institute, illustrated with a photo of a smiling father, mother, and son and daughter, and I decided to tell Junior something else about his future.

  “John, not everything is negative. You’re going to become a father. Everything about it will be wonderful.”

  Junior’s joy was such a shock that for an instant it seemed indistinguishable from pain.

  “Really?” he said. “For real ?”

  I smiled at his predictable response and said, “Yes, for real.”

  “Should I start calling you ‘Daddy’?” Taylor asked.

  In 1986 it had never occurred to me that I’d ever be a father, and no matter how much I denigrated myself, it would always make me feel proud that two of the smartest women I knew wanted part of me to live on. It also made me understand better the irresistible appeal of heterosexuality
: any time a woman accepts a man’s sperm, it can always be construed as a pat on the back of his penis.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” Junior asked.

  I decided against telling him. I was elated when I first heard my daughter was born, and I already felt like I’d ruined part of the surprise. He and Taylor kept pestering me. “Look. I’m not telling you. Quit asking.”

  They stopped asking, and the next time I looked in the rearview mirror, Junior was smiling.

  11

  EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD DRIVE cross-country at least once,Ejust to see all the amazing places you wouldn’t want to live. You’ll be able to rule out most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, because you won’t care for most of the people, while out west, the clincher will be the decided absence of them. There are sights to see. Passing through Ohio’s Amish country, the billboards touting Amish restaurants and Amish-made furniture made me marvel that in America even a culture that shuns materialism has been effectively turned into a brand name. You’ll learn the skylines of Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis are as hard to distinguish as the cows you’ve passed, and ramshackle farmhouses will scarecrow any fancies you have of moving to the country.

  As we passed through Columbus, Taylor suggested we should stop and visit its historical society.

  “It’s home to my favorite work of American art: a prehistoric Hopewell culture twelve-inch mica open hand.”

  “What’s the Hopewell culture?” Junior asked.

  “The Mound builders,” I said. I knew the answer so it must have been something I learned from Taylor. It made me wistful that if we broke up that would never happen again.

  “It’s a national treasure,” Taylor claimed. “It’s this beautiful, almost modern-looking open palm, cut from a single sheet of mica, an emblematic symbol of our common humanity. Mica’s incredibly fragile, and it survived unbroken for fifteen hundred years. Very few people know about it, but it’s amazing.”

  I trusted his judgment. For a scientist, Taylor wasn’t all nuts and bolts, and had an artist’s imagination. It was the reason why he could invent a time machine.

  I know I sound like the worst sort of snob, but New Yorkers are egalitarian snobs—at cocktail parties we’re equally impressed by meeting what the Times has declared is “America’s best zither player” as we are meeting this year’s winner of the PEN-Beckett Award for a first novel where not much happens. In some ways New Yorkers are all Mad King Ludvigs who recognize other royal families—protocol requires Londoners and Parisians to be treated as equals—only we ludicrously maintain our sense of grandeur as we give must-be-obeyed Chinese take-out orders from tiny studio or one-bedroom palaces while sneering at commoners in Terre Haute hovelling in their four-bedroom, three-bath Tuscan Chateaus. Any sane New Yorker can have a great weekend in any part of the United States, but our minds inevitably turn to questions about what the hell people do there the other 362 days of the year.

  We took four-hour turns behind the wheel since it would take two long fourteen-hour days of driving to get to Midland. I was a nervous wreck about Cheney showing up again—this time with an army backing him up. At every stop, I mistook every plump, balding, gray-haired man wearing wire-rimmed glasses for the vice president. I’d never realized there are millions of these guys. We almost ran screaming out of a truck stop in Ohio when Taylor thought Cheney was getting a cherry slurpee. Then in the men’s room at a Burger King in Indiana, I almost had a heart attack when Cheney’s dead ringer used the urinal next to mine.

  It was my first cross-country road trip, and I soon gathered that driving across America is like the worst aspects of aging; you forget more of the journey than you remember, and feel crankier, fatter, and more exhausted than you did when you started. For their first shifts, Junior and Taylor bickered about what music to listen to, each of them sharing similarly eclectic tastes but arguing for their different mix tapes. When Junior drove, he ran a program of complementary progression, each song offering a variation on a theme. Doleful but danceable love songs by the Eurythmics were followed by doleful but danceable love songs by the Smiths, which led to doleful but danceable love songs by the Pet Shop Boys. Taylor’s taste was different. He liked every song to whipsaw your emotions and loved hearing the romantic-depressive Psychedelic Furs tune “Love My Way,” followed by Nina Simone’s joyous-furious “Mississippi Goddam,” followed by Petula Clark’s giddily upbeat “Downtown.”

  If you’re fortunate, throughout your life your lovers will infect you with incurable newfound passions. Until I met Taylor I’d always half-listened to music while driving or having sex but had never really heard a song with the same focus I brought to reading a book or watching a movie. It was unfair that I’d branded him the fuddy-duddy, forgetting that he made me understand that Judy Garland wasn’t just a camp icon, Dusty in Memphis is the greatest music album by a woman ever, and you’re never too old to enjoy Icelandic rock bands.

  After Junior played the Eurythmics’ song “Here Comes the Rain Again” with its catchy, imploring refrain, “Talk to me like lovers do!” the vagueness of Annie Lennox’s request made me suggest a few conversational subjects that lovers never tire of discussing: “Do I have to do everything?!” “Why don’t you ever listen to me?” “I’m not in the mood.” I thought my jest might induce Junior and Taylor to offer their own variations on the amusing theme of how lovers’ sweet nothings inevitably become salty and tangible, forgetting that neither of them had ever lived with a boyfriend, and also overlooking that my commentary might not sound as light-hearted as I supposed. They sat there looking like the worst aspects of gay life: self-loathing and a boyfriend who’s pissed.

  “Is that supposed to be a joke about our relationship?” Taylor asked.

  “Do you realize every thing you say sounds bitter?” Junior sighed. “It’s really unattractive.”

  I checked to see whether there were any cars tailing us, then angrily veered sharply to the right, driving the car onto the shoulder of the road with a sudden crunch of gravel before hearing the disturbing sound of glass breaking. Junior and Taylor were wide-eyed when the car stopped moving.

  “I was trying to be silly,” I shouted. “I’m not going to drive cross-country with you two doppelganging up on me. Do you understand?”

  They stared at me as if I were turning into a werewolf. I couldn’t tell whether it was fear of me at that moment or they were afraid of the prospect of spending their futures with this screaming lunatic. After pulling onto the road again, I calmed down and noticed the car was listing toward the driver’s side.

  “Did we drive over something?” I asked.

  “I think we have a flat,” Taylor responded.

  We pulled over again and discovered that I’d driven directly over two beer bottles. The right rear tire was deflated. Junior and I had no idea how to fix a flat, but of course Taylor did. We discovered there was a spare in the trunk but no jack or wrenches. Junior and Taylor stared dumbly at me as if this were another failing that I should have rectified. We were in the middle of a forest in Indiana, near the Illinois border, and the last town had been miles back. I now redirected my anger toward myself. I was still a loser who couldn’t accomplish a goal. Cheney would find us and Carol would die.

  “And we have no fucking cell phone service!”

  I felt transported back to the isolation of the pretelegraph era and went off on a rant: “Everyone will complain about how intrusive cell phones are—you’ll live to see a world where people loudly negotiate divorce settlements on the street or vividly describe colonoscopies in an airplane before take off; but I can assure you—in the twenty-first century, the inhabitants of the earth will stand united for one shared value: they’d rather lose a kidney than give up their cells.”

  Junior and Taylor gaped at me and I calmed down. I volunteered to walk to get help, and then Junior smiled. “Do you remember the time in P-town when Gavin and I hitchhiked to Boston and I told him to take off his shirt?” he asked. Gavin Dudek had been our
first boyfriend. We were college students in Buffalo. During the summer, Gavin worked as a lifeguard at a country club and his hard body and soft lips had me priapic for the year we dated. For the first time for either of us, we went to Provincetown for a vacation. We had no money and ate at cheap restaurants and stayed at the Fore and Aft, a one-star gay guesthouse owned by a gracious old queen who tried to fluff up the dowdy furnishings by assuming an air of five-star grandeur. He took leering pity on two cute twenty-year-olds and gave us a private honeymoon suite for a rate we could afford. We soon figured out something that travel guides never mention: having fantastic sex multiple times each day is an inexpensive way to entertain yourself. I’d forgotten how my gay version of Claudette Colbert flashing a shapely gam to land a ride in It Happened One Night had worked. Gavin had reluctantly removed his T-shirt and stuck out his thumb, and his buff torso literally stopped traffic. The next car to pass pulled over, and a middle-aged gay guy offered to give us a lift to Logan to catch our plane.

  “Why don’t we see if we can flag someone down?” Junior suggested.

  “That worked in P-town. This is Indiana. I don’t know if many of the gays are driving this route.”

  Junior quickly wrote out “HELP! FLAT TIRE” on a sheet of a notebook paper, ripped it out, and held it up to the oncoming traffic. I started walking ahead and hadn’t gotten far when I heard voices shouting my name and a car horn honking. I turned around and saw a black pickup had pulled over. By the time I walked back, a blonde-haired young woman named Jen, who said she grew up on a dairy farm five miles away, was telling Junior about her plans to produce and sell organic ice cream—as Taylor raised the car with her jack.

  “Would you hand me the wrench?” Taylor asked me.

  When I did, a lug nut slipped from his hand and fell to the ground.

  “Fuck! Can’t anything go fucking right? Jesus Christ, I’m going to fucking kill myself.”

  Taylor readily pardoned our dog when he pissed in the kitchen or pooped in the hallway, but couldn’t forgive himself when he dropped a multivitamin. His rage against himself mystified and saddened me. I couldn’t understand why he regarded his every human failing as unpardonable when I found it easy to give a blanket amnesty to all my shortcomings. Unfortunately, every New Yorker is an armchair Freud, and I tried to find psychological explanations for Taylor’s behavior. Was the cause his difficult childhood? Or was it his parents’ nasty divorce? He’d told me they were verbally abusive. (We did chuckle after Taylor shared that his mother had once called him a little cocksucker when he was eight years old.) His parents were now elderly and frail, beset by infirmities, reaffirming my belief that growing old is sufficient punishment for most of life’s transgressions.