Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff

  “Thanks for coming, Rachel.” Bernard stood next to me, straightening his glasses on his nose. “How are you?”

  “Wet and cold and now a little bit sad too, after looking at this photograph, but you’re welcome.” I knew I should be saying something nice about his work, but there was something in me that refused. I didn’t want to repeat something that the gaggle of art-school girls had probably said to him just a few moments ago.

  “It was nice of you to come.” He handed me a plastic cup of white wine. “We’re all out of red.”

  “I’m too cold for white wine. I’d rather go find some hot chocolate.” I took the wine anyway. I was nervous and drank it too quickly.

  “I don’t think I can leave yet.”

  I hadn’t meant to ask Bernard out, and for a moment I was irritated that he took my comment as an invitation, but his obvious discomfort calmed me. I looked around the room. It was a good crowd for such a miserable night. Bernard explained that he was supposed to be interviewed by someone from the Phoenix. The way he told me this sounded both anxious and apologetic.

  “Maybe some other time, then.” I felt foolish for saying it. I was embarrassed that I wanted to spend time with him. I was humiliated for admiring him and I worried that my neediness was written across my face. I was not acting like the person I had worked so hard to become over the past several months. Ferociously self-reliant. That had been my goal.

  “Or you could wait around for a little bit. There’s a café a few doors down if you don’t want to stay here.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  Bernard nodded and gave me a half smile. “Good.”

  “I like your photographs, Bernard.” I hated myself for the bland compliment, so I tried for something more intelligent. “It takes a while to see everything that’s in them.”

  Bernard shrugged his shoulders and straightened his glasses again. I had made us both embarrassed. “Okay, well, I’ll find you in a bit.” Bernard walked away and I turned back to the scolding face of the young woman. I wondered what my own face might reveal if it were caught unprepared.

  It is difficult to date a photographer. Or at least it was difficult for me to date a photographer at that time, particularly one like Bernard, who had this uncanny ability to see secrets in people’s faces. Whenever he raised his camera to snap a shot of me, I brought my hand to my face or to his lens and shooed him away. I certainly didn’t want any of my secrets revealed, but even in those images of me turning away, my hand extended in protest, he caught a piece of me, one of those fleeting thoughts, and I was scared of him a little bit.

  Of course Bernard the person was much easier to deal with than Bernard the photographer. He was about as private and reserved as I was, and it was easy to be silent around him. He never pressed me to offer details about my past or explain my moodiness or occasional bouts of anger. There are days when I still feel guilty for being terribly unkind to him. I tried to make him feel stupid for liking a book I might have found vapid. I canceled plans on him at the last minute, trying to make him feel less important than other parts of my life. And then I would just sit home by myself, order a pizza, and watch made-for-TV movies as punishment. I told him I needed space, then pestered him about his art-school girlfriends. I don’t know why he stayed with me as long as he did.

  He knew about my parents’ death and he knew that I had dated Charlie briefly before he and Claire became a couple. He knew that Charlie and Claire always came first, that they were my family. He knew that I wanted to be a writer more than an editor but that I was becoming a good editor and suddenly making a grown-up salary. I think I tried to embarrass him; I insisted on paying for dinner, or I would show up at his place with a present—a new sweater or some records or tickets to a music show. I pushed and pulled, and still he wouldn’t go away. He told me that I thought about things more than most people he knew. He liked that I wouldn’t let him get away with things, that there was nothing easy about me, that he had to work for a smile and so he knew when to trust it. He told me that mean was better than dishonest. He had to deal with insincere people every day, he said. I was refreshing, he said.

  Both Charlie and Claire loved Bernard, which probably doomed the relationship from the start. Claire was basking in her success; she had finally found me the perfect man, while Charlie had a new cooking mate in the kitchen. I’m sure they were both relieved by the sudden balance in our dynamic. Four is easier than three, and whatever guilt they had been feeling seemed to evaporate with the presence of Bernard. Perhaps I didn’t want to let them off that easy or perhaps I liked the difficulty of three more than the harmony of four or maybe I simply didn’t really love Bernard, even if I loved his photographs and his raffle-ticket habit and easy silences.

  I don’t know if I meant to sabotage our relationship; what I mean is, I don’t really know if I had planned out the destruction or if it had always been there, dormant, throughout the months we were in each other’s company. Eventually I ran into a guy on my way home from work; we had slept together once or twice and I’m embarrassed that I don’t even remember his name. He handed me a cupcake on the T; he had an extra one, he said. It was pink with spicy cinnamon crunchies on the top of it. I bit into the cupcake, and this man licked the frosting off my upper lip. And then I took him home.

  I don’t know if I deliberately didn’t call Bernard to cancel our plans for the evening, if I wanted him to catch me and the cupcake guy when he showed up later to take me to the movies. But when the doorbell rang, the cupcake guy was in the kitchen, barefoot, drinking a beer as if he owned the place, and my hair must have been sticking up and out every which way, and there was Bernard in the doorway, confused and hurt and silent as ever. When he walked away, I realized what a dangerous person I’d become. I made some kind of decision there and then. I kicked the cupcake guy out of the house and took a long shower and I cried a little bit and then I felt calm. Charlie and Claire would be home in a little while and I would tell them that Bernard and I had broken up and we’d all go out for a sloppy, greasy meal at Chef Chang’s and find our way back to the house, sluggish and full bellied. And the next day would start again and we’d find our way back into the rhythm of three.

  How could I not see that one day they would leave? They would move on with their lives and get married, of course they would. And I would be alone with the decisions I had made in that shower. I could have called Bernard and tried to win him back. I could have made all sorts of decisions differently. But I thought that—and I admit that I might have been lying to myself—I’d rather be alone. Perhaps Bernard was right that it’s better to be mean than dishonest.

  And here I was, returning to Claire and Charlie’s house so many years later, still wondering what kind of person I was. Which would win out? My love and loyalty for my best friends or my lingering resentment? I had already unfairly unleashed my venom on poor Charlie earlier that day. I had to work harder to be a kinder person. I wanted to believe I had it in me as I entered their house, long after the sun had set and I had probably begun causing them some worry.

  Claire

  It is true that I’ve been scheming. I’m enlisting Rachel’s help for one of my plans—it is Charlie’s birthday in a few days. The sneakiness around another scheme has been much more covert. No one should be terribly surprised. My confinement within these walls—kitchen, garage, bedroom, study, stairs—and within these woods, where even a short walk requires a chaperone, is making me restless.

  Rachel and Charlie have bundled me up with wool sweaters and scarves and fleece slippers. They tell me that it’s drafty in the house and I have to be wary of catching a cold. But I itch under these layers and overheat, scratching at the surface of my mottled skin. When I’m in my study, I pull off the layers and read my words on the computer screen. I see the pictures and I trace the stories and notes I wrote in Tamil Nadu. The earth is sun scorched there, and the sunlight casts deep shadows onto the landscape. I look out my own window and force myself to beli
eve that I was once so far away. In Tamil Nadu, there was a drought so destructive that people were killing one another for water. Here, outside my window, a dusting of snow coats the dirt road, but I can still hear the current of the nearby stream when I lift the windows. The cold, penetrating air is a relief. It is impossible to trace the distance between where I sit and where I wrote the words illuminated on the screen in front of me. I want to find my way back to the person who traveled freely, who saw a world beyond the confines of this room, this season.

  I want to go back there, to the town where I had been staying in India, an industrial center that, based on my photographs, was dusty and dry and filled with activity. I can hear the noise of this place through my pictures. Salem was my home base when I wasn’t in Mysore or Pondicherry. It gave me good access to the Cauvery River, the Stanley Reservoir, and the politicians in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu who were battling one another over rights to the river’s diminishing resources. I know how selfish this makes me sound. Here I am, overheated in early winter, in a house where I can take all the baths I want, and all I want to do is run away to a home not my own to write notes about others’ struggles with drought and famine. It is an ugliness inside me, but it is what I want.

  I know the desire is also rooted in a larger sense of purpose. Before I got sick, I was investigating drought, waterway disputes, and environmental conflicts around the world. I was supposed to stay in India for only a month, according to my correspondence with my editor, but I had asked for an extension before heading to Pakistan. I don’t know what was keeping me in Tamil Nadu beyond the month. I had already interviewed the family of a man who had thrown himself into the Kabini Reservoir. He had been a farmer who believed his family’s life was in peril if Karnataka continued to release water to Tamil Nadu at such a meager rate. He had drowned in the shallow waters of the reservoir, unable to swim. I had interviewed Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa, who had gone on a three-day fast in protest of Karnataka’s refusal to release more water to her state. The debates were over a hundred years old, and both sides of the state borders were suffering from a dismal monsoon season, perpetual drought, and a failing crop. Everyone was angry. The Water Disputes Tribunal had allocated water distribution at a rate lower than either state had requested, but the farmers on the Tamil Nadu side of the border felt like their land and their livelihood were being threatened by their neighbors to the north. People had taken to the streets on both sides of the debate. A few protesters had been injured; no one seemed to be backing down.

  I study these images and interviews: members of the Handicrafts Manufacturers Association forming human chains along the streets of Mysore toward the Palace and legislative offices; Tamil Nadu farmers shouting slogans at their regional ministers, pushing their children into the faces of the tribunal officials; Karnataka ministers returning, slightly hobbled and stoic, after a long pilgrimage between Bangalore and Mandya in an attempt to placate their constituents. Because I can’t remember, I force myself to imagine the dryness in the air, the relentless heat of the summer months, the slogans shouted from the riverbanks, the shriveled tapioca harvest.

  The drought in Tamil Nadu had entered its eighth month when I arrived there. I followed the depleted river south and east until it trickled into the Bay of Bengal. The Cauvery used to pour out into the ocean in southeast Tamil Nadu, but it doesn’t make its way to the coast anymore. Women wash their clothes in the salty ocean water because there is so little fresh water.

  I study my notes. Mass migration, malnourishment, and dengue fever carried by the mosquitoes in the still waters were threatening the population of farmers all along the river’s path. I think about those mosquitoes now and wonder where, along that route, I received my near-deadly bite. I was closing in on the end of my story. I was planning to take a break and head back to the States for a while, perhaps to rest and take long, decadent showers without guilt. And now, here I am, desperate to get back there.

  When I start to feel guilty for my imagined escape plans, I think of my other scheme. Charlie and Rachel are downstairs, and they are my home again. At least I can make some kind of attempt to brighten all our moods. Planning a little party must be easier than traveling across several oceans. I can enlist Rachel’s help, and together perhaps we can wash away at least a little of Charlie’s bitterness.

  Charlie

  The three of us here gathered around the kitchen table, sprawled out in the living room, taking trips into town, has got me dwelling on the Orphanage. Neither Rachel nor I challenged the name of our home once Claire had decided on it. Claire buoyed us up with promises of adventure and freedom and fresh starts in a genuine attempt to ease Rachel’s loss and my everyday discombobulation. I suppose neither of us wondered about Claire’s own needs to be cheery in the face of loss, to erase bad memories with newer, happier ones.

  Claire had lost her parents early, and obviously Rachel suffered her loss soon after we first met, but I chose to lose my parents. This minor detail never fazed Claire or Rachel when they took me into their home and accepted me as another orphan. Perhaps it should have bothered me more than it did, but I was charmed by the idea of reinvention and clean slates and a past made up of little more than blurry memories. I already had a good deal of practice at trying on new selves. In the end I was probably better equipped for it than Rachel, whose memories were happier ones than mine.

  My parents are still alive and as well as they can be, tucked into a little cottage in Eriswell between Cambridge and Norwich in Norfolk. They haven’t always lived there. When I was born, we lived in London. My father was a lecturer at King’s College and my mother worked for a lawyer who had become famous for advising several members of Parliament. We lived on a busy street and my parents left in a hurry each morning, entrusting me to the care of a nanny who insisted on fresh air every day even when it was drizzly and severe outside. These are some of my earliest memories, being pushed around in a pram through various parks, my wool blanket growing damp and smelly. My nanny had soft folds in her skin and carried her weight around with a sense of dignity. “C’mon, little man,” I think she used to say. “If I’m not cold, you’re not cold.”

  But we were forced to leave the city after some sort of scandal involving my father. It may have been an affair with a colleague or a student. It may have been stolen grant money. My parents never talked about it. It’s amazing how private people can be, even those you should know best. I’ve never gotten very far with my own research into the past, into whatever it was that forced my parents out of their London life, and for all intents and purposes out of their marriage, and certainly out of love with one another. They stayed together because, I suppose, that was what was expected of them. And they had lost almost everyone else in their lives. My father’s family kept a cold distance, getting in touch every now and then with a postcard announcing a death in the family, though my father never seemed to hear when there was a birth. As far as I know, the cards were merely sent to inform, never to invite. And because my mother carried my father’s shame on her shoulders, she distanced herself from everyone she had once cared about too. I’ve never been able to make it all out with her, whether it’s a sense of pride or stubbornness or denial that has kept her with my dad all these years, but they seemed to enter into some sort of agreement that the past would never be discussed and that an agreed-upon silence would fill their days.

  My father spent his time in his “library,” which was really just a small room filled with piles of books. Our house was small and this room should have been my bedroom, but instead I slept on a foldaway bed separated from the rest of the living room with a lacquer partition that matched nothing else in that house. My father claimed to be doing research on his book projects, which had suddenly shifted to Norse legends and fairytales. When he had been a lecturer, he had focused on the modernists. He had published pretty successfully on Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and he had stacks of old journals gathering dust on his floor. After his dismissal, he sp
ent his time drifting further and further into a past that had no obvious connection to him. Perhaps he believed he could be swallowed up by a Norse god who might direct him toward a life that was very different from the one he presently suffered through. He grew a long beard and took to wearing spectacles at the end of his nose. If he went out, he took the bus to Cambridge or Norwich, where I imagined him trolling the antiquarian bookstores, having an anonymous cup of tea, and then returning to his study.

  My mother continued to work because someone had to. She bustled about the house in the mornings, fixed her hair in the mirror, and shouted out that there were muffins warming in the oven and some tea on the stove and that she’d be home before six. She worked as a legal assistant in a dreary little town called Thetford, commuting every morning with a neighbor named Mrs. Crawford, who announced herself with a beep from the car’s horn and, as far as I can remember, never set foot in our house. I never knew if my mother became friends with this woman or if my mother was even capable of being friends with anyone anymore. She protected her privacy and her solitude like no one I’ve ever known.