The Memory Trap

by Andrea Goldsmith

  It had been a perfect day in a week of perfect days, the water calm, the sky a rich African blue, the air sweetly warm. A herd of elephants walked in single file through the shallows on one shore, on the opposite bank gazelles grazed peacefully in the late afternoon sun. He remembers every detail. Zoe leaned against him, her hand clasping his as the boat meandered along. Up ahead in a broad cove a cluster of large smooth stones broke the surface of the water, and as the boat drew closer Zoe had started laughing. ‘Not stones,’ she said, ‘but hippos.’

  They watched the great beasts sink into the water and rise up again, eggcup eyes appearing and disappearing; and when the guide switched off the motor they heard splashing and snorting and a gentle roaring as the huge domed heads broke the surface. One of the creatures opened its marvellous mouth revealing a gigantic cavity with fist-sized teeth, another followed suit and then another. ‘We’re seeing a minuet of hippos,’ Zoe whispered.

  As the boat continued up-river, they saw another family of elephants trekking up the bank, some fully grown, others youth-sized, and two babies nudging the baggy legs of their mothers. Buffaloes were feeding on the lush grass, their massive shoulders bent forward, pale heavy horns outlined against the rich green turf. Fish eagles swooped through the air and dived into the fertile waters, and in the shallows they saw the sculpted hillocks of a crocodile’s back.

  The sun sank lower, yet the sky remained a brilliant blue, the river a deep green, everything intensified by the African light. As the boat sailed on through the tranquil water, he and Zoe settled into the gentle movement. The sky was turning a streaky red and the waterbirds were sounding a noisy chorus when suddenly they were hit by a putrid smell, a rotting flesh smell, and there in the shallows – they both saw it at the same time – lay the bloated body of a dead buffalo. The creature was on its side, its head concealed in the long reeds at the water’s edge; its right fore and hind legs, stiffened by death, poked crazily into the slack warm air. Nearby, perched on the bank, were several vultures; they stood motionless and menacing, watching the dead animal.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ he’d asked the guide. ‘Why are the vultures just standing there? What are they waiting for?’

  ‘The hide of the buffalo is very tough,’ the guide had replied. ‘Too tough for the vultures. So they must wait for the crocodile to come and tear the hide apart. These vultures, they are waiting for the crocodile.’

  He had felt a sinister shadow – not a sense of foreboding about his own life, but something confined to those waiting vultures. It took a couple more years before he saw the personal warning in the benign beast and the patient, cruel vultures, an omen of what would become of his life and his marriage. But in the days of happiness nothing was a warning.

  About twelve months ago he had scanned in the photos from their early years: the African photos, their other travels, and so many pictures from those first wonderful months in New York when he fell in love and he thought she did too. Life before Ramsay, is how he thinks about it, although he knows that for Zoe and by extension for himself, there has never been life before Ramsay: rather it is life before he, Elliot, learned about Ramsay.

  Zoe truly looks happy in the pictures taken in 1990 and 1991, before they returned to Melbourne, before his drinking unravelled. Here she is in their apartment on West End Avenue, here she’s running in Riverside Park, here tobogganing in Central Park, here with her cello. And of course the trip to Paris – no one could refuse Zoe’s ‘We’re on our honeymoon, will you take our picture?’ The best ten days of his life, and twenty-four hours after they returned to New York she saw him drunk for the first time, the first of so many times. And how he wishes he could erase the sore points of a life in the same way you can delete photos or, and he looks at the finished manuscript to his side, polish a life not your own. Yet would it make any difference? There was a weird germ in the mind that drove him to drink, and a thirsting of the heart that drove her to love where no love was returned. Yet he has been sober for a longer period than he drank; she, on the other hand, is still hooked on Ramsay.

  Zoe and Nina are in the living room. The previous evening the two of them had met up with old friends and Nina stayed overnight. He can hear their voices, the two sisters chatting together in comfortable rushes of familiarity, talking in a way he does not experience with his wife, nor with anyone. Or rather, anyone living. For he knows that hushed closeness with Lizzie Hardwick, and before her Jean Rhys and Djuna and Elizabeth Bishop. Biography, so close and intimate, the ultimate peering through keyholes and rummaging in closets not your own. The ultimate, controllable ‘we’, your subject and yourself, and such a contrast with his life here, his sense of living alone in the house. Even his children have exiled him. When they were young they pulled him into the rhythm of their days, they loved having him around; now all he is good for is as a chauffeur with deep pockets. Zoe has never needed him, although she used to want him. ‘I prefer being with you to anyone else on this planet,’ she once said. Another life. Another self.

  He watches to the end of the slide show, three hundred and ninety-seven photos all of his wife. The happy days are long gone, preserved only in pictures, yet he can never have enough of her; still and always it is Zoe he craves.

  Cravings, his whole life rent by cravings. And if the cravings suddenly stopped, what would be left of him? Was there something about those hard-wired longings that he clung to? Was it the cravings themselves that held him in thrall and not what he craved for? Booze, his wife, the perfect biography – all of them impossibilities, but still the cravings persist. Although not for booze, not any more. For years he craved alcohol, for years after he’d stopped drinking still the craving. You go to the edge time after time, sometimes you slip over and have that one drink because you’re convinced you can control it; then the bottle is empty and soon it’s next week and you have to start all over again. Years of sobriety shot through with craving and then a day comes, or at least it did for him, when he realised the craving was gone. No longer did alcohol fill his mind, no longer did he bargain silently with himself, with the liquor shop, with the pub, with this friend or that (just one drink, a small beer or whisky, a small anything); the cravings for alcohol had gone quiet. He wanted to tell Zoe, he wanted her to know this miraculous happening, but by then their communication had been drained of life and he simply could not risk her looking bored or disinterested. He shared it with his AA group and how supportive they had been, but that didn’t replace the acknowledgment and praise he wanted from his wife. Wanted unreasonably, he suspected. After all, it’s your wife who suffers the greatest when you’re drinking; your not drinking, such an achievement for you, is only what she always deserved.

  The voices from the living room have stopped. There are footsteps in the hall, his wife’s tread. Either she is coming to his study or she will continue past to the laundry. He bargains with himself: she’ll stop, she’ll enter. Let’s go for a walk, she’ll say, let’s go to Paris, let’s shuffle the cards and draw out all aces. The steps draw nearer. The door is slightly ajar, it is never shut. He’s had nothing to hide since the day she packed bags for herself and the children and moved in with her parents.

  ‘Come and get us if you stop drinking,’ she had said.

  IF. YOU. STOP. DRINKING. She carved out each word. ‘Otherwise don’t bother. There’s nothing to discuss. It’s either your family or your alcohol.’

  That night, the night she took the children and left him, he drank. He drank at the pub, he drank at home. He drank beer, he drank rye, and when the rye was finished he moved to vodka. He didn’t remember drinking Zoe’s cooking sherry, but the empty bottle was on the floor when he awoke the next morning. He felt terrible: his head, his mouth, his gut, his miserable life. His wife was gone, his children were gone. Coffined by alcohol, he lacked breath for insight, but somewhere in the dark hole of himself there was some primitive urge for life.

  He rang AA and was told of meetings in his area that evening. No,
no, he said, this afternoon. He travelled to Bentleigh, a suburb he had never been to before. It didn’t matter, he had plenty of time, his wife had left him and he wasn’t drinking. That night he attended a meeting in his own area. The next day he drove to Ivanhoe, in the evening he went local. Time and misery, both of them usually placated by booze, were blocked out now with AA and the complete works of Jane Austen. The days passed, he longed to contact Zoe, he ached for his children, but forbade himself until he was sober for a month. In the past he’d cut down, he’d changed his drinking habits, but never before had he given up alcohol entirely. This time he did, a whole month and not a single slipup. It was hard, at the time he thought it would be the hardest thing he would ever do. But he has since learned that living with a woman you love who does not love you is harder.

  Although does he still love her? He has the habit of loving her, of adoring her, and he has the habit of craving her love. At the same time he’s desperate to be free of this implacable longing. Yet still there’s that leap of the heart as she knocks on the door. Quickly he shuts his laptop and obliterates all those lovely images of her; the door swings open and she steps into the room. His heart rate has increased. It’s this thirst for her still. The rough edge of wanting what you can’t have.

  Zoe says Nina’s off to her apartment to do some work before meeting Sean, and she’s about to leave too. He doesn’t ask where she is going. He’s sure it wouldn’t concern Ramsay, not on a weekday morning, but still he suffers the cut of this possibility. The knife sharpens his own reply, excises all warmth and love, leaving only the stockpile of disappointment and longing.

  ‘Why bother to tell me? You’ll do as you like. You always do.’ Cold and corrosive, he barricades his need. He hates what he has become with her.

  She says she is going shopping and then to June’s place to cook a few meals. With June back in hospital, she continues, Edward doesn’t have time to cook. (June? Edward? More of Zoe’s lame ducks, he supposes. Perhaps if he was ill she’d care for him too.) She explains that if she cooks at June’s place she can look after the children or at least be available should they want to talk. She does not smile. She certainly does not touch him. They will never again go to Paris.

  She leaves his study. He hears the front door shut, he hears the car start up, he does not move. The house is still. He forbids thoughts of his wife, he forbids criticism of his own coldness. This sense of being an automaton is a familiar state these days: flick a switch and he doesn’t feel anything; pull down the blinds and life on its knees slips into the darkness.

  He reaches for his manuscript of Lizzie Hardwick, the fourth of his big women and the one he loves best. In her foreword to Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs, Elizabeth Hardwick mentions the drinking of the 1930s. ‘The cocktail age, how menacing and beguiling to the sweet tooth, a sort of liquid mugger.’ It was insights like this, soaring on breath-catching imagery, that made Elizabeth so wonderful. (Drink was everywhere in those days. When Mary McCarthy won the English Horizon Prize for her novel The Oasis, Horizon’s editor Cyril Connolly, author of Enemies of Promise, whose own promise was swamped by food and fine wine together with a surfeit of sloth and self-pity, added a dozen bottles of dry sherry to the £200 prize.) But it was not just Hardwick’s language and insights that attracted him, it was also her love for Cal, her husband, the poet Robert Lowell. She loved him through their difficult marriage and afterwards when he married someone else. She loved him when he came back to her in the last year of his life. Lizzie said he was the only genius she had ever known, and she was in a strong position to judge given that she mixed with New York’s intelligentsia. Robert Lowell – Cal – was of course impossible in his madness but, as far as Hardwick was concerned, he was a genius mad or sane.

  As for his own work, Elliot hopes she would approve. She was dismissive of biographers. ‘Biography,’ she said to Darryl Pinckney in a 1984 Paris Review interview, ‘is a scrofulous cottage industry, done mostly by academics who get grants and have a good time going all over the place interviewing.’ Yes, he is an academic. Yes, he wins grants, and yes, he enjoys the travel and the interviewing. But biography for him is so much more: not simply a job in the way that teaching is a job, but something he is driven to do. He adores his big women, he hungers to know everything about them, and curiosity when given plenty of space to spread its tentacles is brilliantly liberating. Curiosity allows him to lose himself, lose that irritating demanding ‘I’.

  He wonders how different his marriage might have been or how different a husband he might have been if he had not involved himself with these other women. He’s passionate about his work, a passion as intense as any libidinal urge, and more reliably satisfying too. Life without his big women? He expects he’ll never know.

  E.M. Forster once considered what happens ‘when death becomes a gesture’. But what, Elliot wonders, if life becomes a gesture? Every day the same hopes, the same losses, the same resentments, the same silences. This was not the way of his big women; never for them the ruts of habit. Mountains and chasms, clouds and ice floes, his women tried them all – and always with courage. He suspects he lacks courage, that other men would have left Zoe years ago. Perhaps courage is his by proxy, via his big women.

  He changes his big women every few years, his wife in contrast endures. Perhaps he should write a biography of Zoe, alter the facts, make her love him best. If he could contain her in words, in a form solid and concrete, he might be able to move forward. A type of memorialising, it occurs to him, and – might all biographies be monuments of sorts? He is infatuated with each of his subjects when he begins – could he still be in the infatuation stage with his wife? – and as he breaks through their crust and works deeper into their life he comes to love them. But by the end there is always a curl of dissatisfaction that propels him to the next subject. No dissatisfaction with Lizzie yet, but it will come.

  Dissatisfaction has great energy and it has moved his work along. His marriage has been drowning in dissatisfaction yet nothing has changed: he still loves his wife, while Zoe is still besotted with Ramsay. Dissatisfaction, which promises a future that is an advance on the past, has had no such effect on his marriage.

  2.

  ‘I don’t understand, Sean. What about South America? You spent months there last year. For the book, you said, the book at last. Those were your very words. And now you say you want to go to Cuba.’

  Nina stopped in the bustle of Brunswick Street, she caught Sean’s arm, forced him to face her. ‘What about your book on South America?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve missed the boat. South America’s old hat.’

  He knew he sounded pathetic, he was pathetic. But rather than see him as such, Nina simply looked concerned. Her voice was low when next she spoke, and gentle like a mother with her child.

  ‘One day you’ll have to stop moving, Sean. One day you’ll need to stay at your desk until the work’s done.’ In the pause that followed he saw her deliberating whether to continue. ‘That’s if you truly want to write a book.’ She put her arm around him and bent her head close to his. ‘Sometimes the message to be taken from not doing something is that you never really wanted to do it in the first place.’

  She was being kind in her plain speaking, but all he could think was he should have kept his new plans to himself. Though perhaps he wanted to be challenged, perhaps a deep, out-of-reach part of himself wanted someone – not him – to produce an argument that might convince him to change his life.

  Nina’s arm was still around him. ‘Let’s get out of this heat and find a café with air-conditioning. We’ve a lot to discuss.’

  Did he want to talk? Had he left himself any choice? And what sort of man was he that he could walk through toxic wastelands alone, trek mountains by himself, explore Naples’ back alleys with enough swagger to keep danger at bay, yet he lacked the courage to stay in Melbourne for longer than a couple of months with his partner of many years, working on the book he had always in
tended to write? He was exhausted from endless movement, and knocked about by the lurching dissatisfactions; he wanted to drop to the pavement right here in one of Melbourne’s busiest streets and sleep. Or cry. But Nina was steering him into a café and sitting him at a table. She seemed determined that he have the conversation he had avoided for years.

  She waved aside his request for wine. ‘I want you on the ball,’ she said. ‘No escapes, no excuses.’ And went to the counter to order coffee.

  That morning he had booked a flight to Cuba. Rather than the South American project that had occupied him these past twelve months, he had decided instead to write about twenty-first-century communism, a book shaped around Cuba, China, North Korea and a few of those former Soviet states that had ditched the democratic promise. The airfare was a special fare; it needed to be paid in full within twenty-four hours of booking. He’d be leaving Australia in a month.

  There was a queue of people at the counter. Nina would be a while, but she kept her gaze on him, holding him in his seat as if she knew that given the slightest opportunity he’d escape. He turned away and stared out the window at the passing parade. It was a mid-week afternoon but Brunswick Street was buzzing. This strip never closed. Food, drink, books, records, weird gifts and weirder homewares, hats, jewellery, vintage clothing, bondage gear, high-end guitars and exotic flowers: everything you needed for an edgy, cool existence could be found in these couple of blocks.

  People had shed their clothes in the stifling heat. There were swathes of toned skin in singlets and shorts, sundresses no bigger than scarves, and a Yakuza’s delight of tattoos. These people hanging out in Brunswick Street on a Tuesday were laughing and talking and seemingly without a care. And with money to burn if their shopping bags were any indication.