The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  It is dark when she finally rouses herself. She fills the hipbath, lowers herself in, drapes a towel around her bare shoulders, and there in the cramped space hunched over, her knees pressed into her breasts, she struggles. She doesn’t want to think evil of him, she doesn’t want to steep his heart in blackness; it’s a torment to know what to do, but her body hammers home the hard truth: her dreams have crumpled, her memories have changed colour, she is not Ramsay Blake’s beloved.

  In the years to come Zoe held on to those five weeks with Ramsay in New York as her sojourn in Eden. Brief and complete, that time together remained perfect, a snowdome to be taken out when life weighed in with trouble.

  Years of hopes buoyed along by all the music they’d played together had drowned out Ramsay’s lifelong message: he needed only music and any people he permitted into his life were there by virtue of what they contributed to his music. She didn’t know if he was aware of this, but with her hopes now hushed to an embarrassed whisper the message was very clear to her. She had been so stupid: the way in which he had responded to her advances was nothing more than what she deserved. She knew Nina would be horrified, would insist that such violence could never be justified. But even if Nina were still in New York, Zoe would not have told her, would have hidden her physical bruises and silenced the emotional ones, would have kept quiet about the shocking loss of the only future she had ever wanted. After great pain a formal feeling comes –. She read Dickinson’s poem until it was lodged in memory. And then she repeated it like a mantra until her own hour of lead had been transformed by the strange alchemy of pain.

  There will be many who find Zoe’s response incomprehensible. All that can be said is that such people have never loved selflessly – not that there’s anything to recommend selfless love: the lover is left undernourished and the beloved is deluded. But it is bewilderingly common. Zoe, far from being alone in transforming violence perpetrated on her as her own fault, joins a crowd. That she continued to love Ramsay might be difficult to explain, but it’s not all that surprising.

  What Zoe most wanted was to return to Australia, to immerse herself in her familiar job, to be surrounded by her kind, unquestioning friends. And from home she could resume contact with Ramsay from a safe distance. But there were the cockatiels to be looked after, and she had promised Ramsay she would be in New York until George arrived, or for the entire period of his residency if need be. When Ramsay telephoned her three days after the incident (this was how she referred to it on the rare occasions her mind took her there) wondering where she was, she realised that from his point of view nothing had changed.

  The next day, with her body still bearing his fingerprints, she and Ramsay rode their bikes up to the Cloisters. They walked through the buildings together, gazed at the tapestries and other exhibits and afterwards had coffee in the outdoor café. Sitting at the table, her thoughts kept swerving back to the terrible day. She fought the thoughts, wanted to forget, wanted to be in this beautiful garden with the only man she had ever loved. Shut up shut up, she told her mind. But her mind refused to listen.

  And suddenly his hand was upon hers, he was struggling to speak but unable to shape the words. He squeezed her hand and drew it close to his heart, held it there for a long time.

  Back at his apartment – she had wanted to go home but he had insisted – he sat her on the sofa and he played for her, one beautiful, sad piece after another. And every phrase told her he understood he had hurt her and he was sorry. By the time she returned to her own apartment her mind was made up. She was in New York for four more months. She would see Ramsay during that time and support him as promised. She would listen to his music, she would explore the city with him, she would accompany him to concerts and dinners, but she would not play music with him. In fact, she doubted she would ever play with him again. Too dangerous. She would tell him she had found a job, a morning teaching job; the cello he had borrowed for her she would keep at her apartment. She would manage.

  The next day saw the start of her new routine. She rose early, pulled on tracksuit and trainers, slipped water, money, cigarettes and a book into a small back-pack and went for a run in Riverside Park. Then she found a seat facing the Hudson to watch the rising sun light up the buildings across the river. And there she would remain, reading or just gazing into the morning as New York limbered up for the day. Around eight, she would return to the apartment via a different bagel shop from the one she and Ramsay had frequented, eat breakfast, practise for an hour or two and then visit one of the museums. She would meet Ramsay in the early afternoon after he had finished his own practice. She would manage. It was the type of person she was.

  4.

  It was a struggle to drag himself out of bed, but now that Elliot is in Riverside Park jogging through the fresh morning air he is pleased to have made the effort. More particularly, he is pleased with himself: how much easier to have remained at home, nursing his head and regrets. But he is a disciplined person, a man of muscular determination – he may have borrowed that phrase from Virginia Woolf – and being out at dawn running off the excesses of a misspent night is much more the Elliot Eugene Wood he believes himself to be, than a miserable waster curled in a quilt.

  He takes the left-hand path over the pedestrian bridge, conscious of maintaining his pace despite the steep rise. Ten minutes of exercise and he still feels dreadful, but soon he’ll be on the mend. It invariably works: a night’s damage can be offset by a morning run, and with an hour in the gym after his last class he should be fully restored. But now his head is pounding, his mouth is foul, his lungs sodden, his legs leaden, and each step punches his stomach and he wants to be sick. He slows down, takes a swig of water, drains the bottle and refills at a water fountain. When he sets off again he is feeling a little better, and he reminds himself that, therapeutic value aside, he actually enjoys a run at this time of year. There’s a crispness to the air, and the trees so recently wilting in the suffocating New York summer are now brilliant with fall colours, and on the ground swaddling the trunks lies a changing patchwork of russets and coppers and yellows. Of course he’s feeling better.

  The Hudson is a broad strip of steel in the early morning shade, and on the other side of the river much of Brooklyn is still lit up. He never tires of this view, always feeling more firmly rooted in Manhattan when gazing across at Brooklyn. Not that Manhattan isn’t home, but he likes to experience it as home, experience it consciously. He spent his first twenty years in Illinois and the last twelve here, but Manhattan is home in a way Peoria never was. Peoria does what cities are meant to do, its concern is with practicalities not sensibility. It’s where he grew up, where he was educated, where his family still lives. Not a dream-like city in the way of Paris or Prague, its very ordinariness powered his own dreams. He was always going to leave.

  He returns to Peoria for Thanksgiving and birthdays, weddings and other family occasions, stays with his parents and sleeps in his old bedroom, now set up for his sister’s children but retaining vestiges of his own boyhood. While he enjoys these visits, he feels nothing in the way of nostalgia. He used to think he was not the nostalgic type, but give him a book from his childhood and he is rushed with bittersweet yearnings, present him with an old girlfriend with whom he parted amicably and there are the same soft tuggings. He’s just not nostalgic about Peoria. As for his parents and his sister, he loves them but that has never satisfied his hunger for a world beyond their lives.

  Manhattan was that world. He arrived at Columbia for his post-graduate studies and all about him were people he wanted to know: blacks, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Asians, Argentines – girls as well as guys, and within this mix he, a white Protestant American male, experienced a sense of belonging he had not in the Mid-West. As he wandered the streets of New York, as he discussed and argued with his new friends, he felt the contours of himself sharpen. By the end of his first semester he was resolved to make Manhattan his home.

  He has always lived on the Upper West S
ide; this is his New York and he cannot imagine living on the east side or downtown, and with tenure at Columbia he doesn’t have to. Of the two parks that border the district, he has a particular fondness for this one, Riverside, just a slender strip of green tracing the Hudson, a neighbourhood park as opposed to the tourist magnet of Central Park. Even during the rush hour the traffic noise from the Parkway is manageable, and a good thing too, for while his legs have settled into a steady rhythm his head is punished by each step. Another few minutes and he knows the pain will have eased, and again he congratulates himself on getting himself out of the apartment when his body was screaming to be left to rest.

  He has no idea what time he arrived home last night. He has a vague notion that Bob saw him to his door, he’ll check later at the faculty meeting. Not that he feels particularly beholden; after all, none of it would have happened if not for Bob’s determination to celebrate his divorce. In fact, before Bob persuaded him to come for a freedom drink, Elliot’s plan had been to stay home for an alcohol-free evening and a new biography of Peggy Guggenheim. But Bob insisted on a celebration and said he couldn’t do it alone. In the end, a group of them had started out from Columbia – he can’t remember who nor the exact time, though it must have been after his five o’clock class. He assumes they worked their way downtown through the bars, they’d done that in the past, and there must have been food at some stage judging by the ketchup on his shirt. He can’t remember any aspect of the night; in fact, as he passes the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at 89th, as he tries to glide rather than jog to spare his head, he realises that not only has last night disappeared but the day before as well.

  It is light now and he pulls his cap lower to shade his eyes and spare his head. The dog-walkers are out, and women pacing in pairs, and plenty of other joggers, too; his head is definitely clearing although his chest still squeals. He pushes himself harder, he knows it will do him good.

  And then he sees her. On a park bench beside the path, about eighty yards away. Later he will wonder how it is possible to see someone, actually select her from the surroundings, how you can know with neither evidence nor other prior warning that this woman is important, that you are, in fact, facing your future. She holds herself like a dancer, straight back, long neck, the figure so slight. She has a book in her lap. There is something about her even at a distance, not just her beauty, it’s the tranquillity of her, this woman reading on a fresh fall morning in Riverside Park. He slows down, his headache forgotten. She is without a Walkman, just her book and the trees and the sound of birds, and utterly rapt in her own thoughts, for as he draws closer he sees her eyes are closed and the book is turned face down. He recognises it as Mary McCarthy’s autobiography, How I Grew, the volume that covers McCarthy’s college years and first marriage. He passes at a walk and stops a couple of yards further on. He cannot help himself, he has to speak to her, at the same time he doesn’t want her to think him a freak or a pervert. He decides on the book.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says.

  Her eyes spring open. They’re blue, swimming-pool blue. He apologises, he hadn’t meant to give her a fright; it was her book that caught his attention, he says. He sees her relax, there’s a delicacy about her, in the white skin, the closely cropped blonde hair, the brilliant eyes. He points to Mary McCarthy’s book and hears himself say: Hannah Arendt.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘not Arendt, but Mary McCarthy.’ Her accent is not American. ‘She died this week. Mary did.’

  Again he apologises and quickly explains his habit of shorthand. ‘I think the first part of a sentence but only utter the latter part. It means I often make no sense at all, or, as in this case, I say entirely the wrong thing.’ He tells her he is writing an article on Hannah Arendt. ‘And of course they – Hannah and Mary – were such close friends.’ The words are cascading out of him. ‘I’m tempted by the story of that friendship, to write a book of it. They left a huge cache of letters. And yes, it’s all past tense now. Both of them gone.’

  There’s something about communication with strangers met on a plane, or a holiday, or by chance in Riverside Park, something that elicits not only blithe confidences, but eye-opening, heart-pounding revelations. After all, you don’t know this person, there’s nothing to be lost. But there was everything to lose, Elliot reminds himself, so better if he holds himself in check.

  The woman observes no such caution.

  ‘I’m reading Mary McCarthy,’ she says, ‘because of the love affairs.’

  ‘Yours or Mary’s?’ The words are uttered before he can stop them. Too direct, he tells himself, and far too personal

  The woman smiles, she’s clearly not affronted. ‘Mary’s. She fell in love regularly, and she fell into bed rather often.’ She turns the book over and flips through the pages, not reading, more a filtering through the life. ‘So many achievements, but it’s love I’m interested in.’ She smiles again. ‘I rather hoped I might learn something.’

  ‘Biography as how-to manual?’

  ‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Only so much scavenging in the lives of real friends and family is acceptable – not that Mary paid much heed to that: she filched whatever she needed for her fiction. But with the dead, and the subjects of most biographies are quite conveniently dead, you can leap into their private life with equanimity, no fear of backlash, no guilt over prying.’ A woman of wit and irony, Elliot is thinking. This woman is perfect. ‘And when there’s a rich written record as well,’ she continues, ‘diaries, letters, and in Mary’s case her life-based fiction, biography’s a rich source of information for life’s amateurs.’

  ‘And you? Are you an amateur in love?’

  She glances up at him with those extraordinary blue eyes and then looks away. He hears a derisory little snort, sees the faint shake of her head. ‘I hardly qualify as a novice.’

  Elliot finds this hard to believe. With looks and clearly brains as well, this woman could have any man she wanted.

  She’s standing up, she’s about to walk away. He has to stop her. ‘Are you English?’ Not the most original of lines.

  Not English but Australian, she says. A couple more questions and she is sitting down again and he joins her on the bench. He discovers she is in New York visiting her sister who unexpectedly was called away to London. She’ll be here alone for several months. He cannot believe his luck. Her name is Zoe Jameson. She’s a teacher and a musician, beautiful in that fine-carved, boyish style that has always appealed to him, an excellent conversationalist, a reader, obviously a traveller and, like him, a poetry lover.

  ‘It’s the meeting place of language and music,’ she says. ‘Poetry is lyrical language.’

  ‘So poets could save opera from extinction?’

  She laughs, her whole face laughs. ‘I rather think composers would disagree.’

  There follows a delighted swapping of their favourite poets. There’s some overlap – Auden, Plath, Dickinson – but most of her favourites – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Larkin, Emily Brontë, Judith Wright, Bruce Beaver reflect her Australian schooling, while his – Bishop, Wallace Stevens, O’Hara, Whitman – are firmly rooted in America.

  They’re sharing their love of poetry and then in a pause she is standing again.

  ‘I really must go.’

  He plunges in – no time for hesitation, no time to rehearse options – and invites her for dinner that night. To his surprise she accepts.

  During the next eight hours, in between classes and student appointments, Elliot made Zoe Jameson a book: Poetry for Zoe. He selected poems about New York from Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Sara Teasdale, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and a smattering of Ginsberg. He photocopied each poem onto heavy white paper and bound the sheets into a cardboard folder decorated with sepia-toned pictures of old New York. The hours sped by, Zoe’s book grew. He only had two classes, but never had he taught so well. And his memory had returned, for he found himself e
laborating his lectures from a cache of quotes suddenly in easy reach. He had known this woman since the morning, a mere handful of hours, yet he felt as he had when he first arrived in New York, with energy so abundant he might never stop.

  He left his office at five-thirty and walked the few blocks home. He showered and dressed, took a small beer from the fridge and leafed through Poetry for Zoe. Would she think his gift foolish? Might she think he was foolish? Or perhaps she’d think the book inappropriate, too much too soon? Although if she had been able to track his mind today she would have discovered far more flamboyant gifts, including a weekend in Paris, a city she said she longed to visit. And beyond gifts, she would have discovered his plans for an entire future together. So pre-occupied had he been he had forgotten about the faculty meeting and he hadn’t asked Bob about last night. Not that Bob’s account mattered any more, he was finished with bar crawls. Zoe was in New York for the next few months and he wanted to spend every night with her.

  It had been Zoe’s suggestion they meet at Ivy’s Bookshop. ‘I’m never late,’ she said. ‘So if we meet in a bookshop it won’t matter if you are.’ He didn’t bother to say there was absolutely no chance of his being late, instead he told her he made exactly the same arrangement when he was meeting someone. ‘Thank God for bookshops,’ he said.

  ‘So you think God’s a bibliophile?’

  ‘Without a doubt – if, that is, he were to exist.’

  The entire day had been full of her, it was only now, as he was preparing for their first evening together, that it occurred to him she might not show up. These things happen: a casual meeting, a close connection, and then you never see the person again. In fact the closeness is possible because you’ll never see them again. He quickly finished his beer, slipped the poetry folder into a carry bag, checked his wallet, and headed off down Broadway. It was only a dozen blocks and he practically ran all the way. He arrived at the shop with fifteen minutes to spare.