You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “It’ll mess with your head,” she said, laughing, and walked off with her friend. Dumbstruck, I wondered if she was talking about the jacket. The card advertised a “happening” on Waverly Place that Friday evening, Goodnight, Icarus, written and performed by Sara Gardner.

  Later on I learned Sara did this to fill seats—she’d hand out a dozen cards by breakfast—but at the time it seemed like a memo straight from Fate. I couldn’t get her out of my head: the cowgirl at Macy’s with the long black hair. After the performance, a nonsensical monologue performed for an audience of twenty, which I didn’t understand at all, Sara was surrounded by admirers. I followed them to a bar nearby and drank two whiskeys sitting on a barrel, watching her when I felt unobserved. Finally, I got up the courage to buy her a drink.

  “So did you buy the jacket? I mean, I hope not,” she said. “Please say no.”

  Later, I wanted to tell her everything I’d ever known. Everything I’d seen, all the facts I’d memorized in school, all my stories.

  The next morning, I walked more than a hundred blocks back to my apartment. I called her that afternoon. We began spending our nights together, proof that opposites attract. Sara’s world, I would discover, was fantasy like I’d never seen, the city’s floating French Quarter, an inverse New York limited to a dozen fluctuating locations, a map of small box theaters and crowded parties, where the action was in the kitchen, and it was drugs, boxing, and the latest wave of Floradora girls influenced by Italian neorealism; a world of hangers-on and drunks, of sculptors and painters who were union guys by day, revolutionaries at night; of next-morning phone calls for gossip roundabouts followed by three-hour brunches, always in the same SoHo diner, in the same booths; and several times each week—the likes of Twelfth Night, every night—these high-octane, intellectualized, often hair-raising performances with academic mission statements done in old sewing factories in the West Thirties or down near Chinatown in second-floor shops, put on by singers or actors or roughnecks from Oklahoma whom nobody knew, who had just arrived in New York that afternoon, each one falling over himself to impress the next, to one-up whoever had been crowned emperor for the week; and Sara, my Sara, standing slightly apart, sticking with me in the corner, near the fire escape; Sara, their secret Euripides, who dreamed of writing Broadway plays, instead of installing performances off Wall Street, taking notes on a tiny pad she kept in her purse, wearing high heels she’d decorated with glue and costume jewelry.

  Sara was my passkey. She’d found a way to wrench open my cerebral cortex and prop the doors. It was the disturbance of the new. I was shocked by how fragile these artists were behind closed doors and yet so intimidating in public, Sara most of all, Sara whose ego in those days had only sarcasm for scaffolding. We’d stay up late practicing dialogue, and if a section of her latest piece didn’t work, she’d throw the pages in the bathtub and run the water. But after her first real play was produced, in a theater for an audience of twenty-five, with me in the wings in my only suit, bearing lilies, her ego got an enormous boost. The typewriter needed new ribbons, and Sara began to write more often than she talked about writing, and her writing improved. I loved her there: typing at the pygmy desk in the kitchen, her hair tied in knots, jeans rolled up to her knees. She started passing me her drafts for notes, and I’d pore over them devotedly, determined to prove my worth. I couldn’t believe my luck, that she’d picked me.

  Frankly, I didn’t understand why any better than I could predict her mood swings. Sara’s confidence could vanish in an hour. Some mornings she’d wake up feeling too low to get out of bed, moored under the covers, crying over something she’d read in the paper, and she would call me at the lab, begging me to come downtown.

  I waited a year before asking her to marry me. What Sara saw in me I didn’t know, but I was desperate to live up to it. I picked a folk club turned into an Italian restaurant with sawdust on the floor. I managed to wait until after the bread arrived before I went down on one knee, feeling for the puny diamond in my pocket. When Sara refused me, the shock made my leg jump. She was infuriated. Said she belonged to no man, particularly not one so square. After only a year, I wanted to claim her? She marched out. Sawdust stuck to my pant leg when I stood up. Then, a few weeks later, it was Sara who proposed on a crowded subway train. Victor Aaron is the most solid element in my life, she announced.

  You disarm my mistrust, she said, kneeling on the subway floor.

  She had diamonds on her shoes, from the toes to the heels.

  Decades later, the music room was my only wish when we finally left New York to build our dream house in Maine (our dream everything: my lab at Soborg, Sara’s office with a garden outside the door), and Sony Pictures gave it to me. A fantasy I’d harbored since I was Regina’s age, a room just for listening, equipped with top-of-the-line equipment, a comfortable chair, and my record collection. A room designed for one purpose with nothing rational about it, but everything planned to the centimeter. When construction began, I monopolized the contractor for weeks. I sent away to Thailand for wood samples with different resonances, and I spent thousands of dollars on a stereo and nearly as much on a recliner I’d seen in designer furniture catalogs. Sara probably thought it was frivolous, but she held her tongue when she was well within her rights to complain.

  It was her money, after all.

  Decades after Sara had withdrawn her membership from the avant-garde, a screenplay of hers, The Hook-Up, turned into one of the nineties’ biggest-grossing films. A mega-movie filmed on a minuscule budget, and written by a relative nobody. Now I received residuals for every Saturday-night replay, every DVD sale in Japan.

  And if I’d been asked, when Sara and I first met, based on Goodnight, Icarus, if I could envision her becoming one of Hollywood’s most talked-about names?

  At one point an entertainment magazine wondered whether Sara might be the next Nora Ephron, back when the “little movie that could” was still astonishing the snobs. Sara’s answer, confessed to me in bed one night in New York, was that she wanted to continue writing on an island, just not Manhattan. She was finally ready to return to Mount Desert, to the low-lying coastal Maine mountains she’d fled when she was eighteen. I started looking into ways to move my research, to establish a new beachhead, and fortunately the timing was good: my track record spoke for itself, and soon a generous offer appeared from Soborg. Everything seemed to be falling into place. We moved when construction was three-quarters finished: down 102, over the bridge, and right by the drained swamp to our isolated six acres.

  The town we chose, Somesville, was Mount Desert Island’s first settled community. Fitting, since we were finally settling down. We built our retirement home exactly to Sara’s tastes, except for one room overlooking the woods, perfectly balanced acoustically, where I’d recently taken to sleeping. Or trying to sleep, depending on the night.

  Betsy called at five-thirty in the morning. The French Open was on, and dear Agassi had advanced to round three. “Those boys are teenagers now, Victor, and he’s just ancient. He’s Theseus and he’s killing them. He’s the tour’s Superman!”

  “Aren’t you happy to hear from me, dear?” Betsy added before hanging up.

  I stumbled, trying to stand. My right leg was pins and needles. Paul Simon was singing and Betsy’s voice rebounded inside my head while I focused on my breathing. Old age whistled near my heart.

  I remembered how Sara had once tried to convince a producer friend to cast Bruce Willis for the next Superman sequel. “You’ll have to wait until Christopher Reeve dies,” she said, “but in terms of charisma? Superpowered, but with human weaknesses, who else could pull it off?”

  Regina had brought up Bruce Willis the night we met. It was her way of convincing me to clip my hair down to stubble, in lieu of the wispy laurel I sported at the time.

  “Buzz it down the way Bruce Willis does. It’ll look imposing.”

  When she’d wanted to say “less elderly,” or “not lame.”

&nbs
p; But that’s what age brought, the power to name things properly. I pushed myself up. Lucky me, to live in an era when the superheroes were balding and over thirty, still able to excite multiple generations of women.

  Three days since I’d seen Regina in the parking lot. Seventy-two hours of insecurity, with Regina as an Edmund Leighton portrait hung between my eyes. I tried to maintain my routines. Swimming, work, bad sleep. The clock radio announced a program of “down-east bluegrass,” “down east” being a Maine regionalism referring to our neck of coastline, our wild-rose towns beside the Atlantic fishing routes. I’d always found the phrase a touch too quaint, especially the way “down” was in voked.

  Did our credibility really need defending against the cosmopolitan Bangor hordes?

  Red spruce trees in the yard swung to a northwest wind. The same kinglets and song sparrows I heard every morning chirped from the same boughs. After half an hour, I peered beyond my laptop through my reading glasses.

  How old would Agassi be when he retired?

  What about Bruce Willis?

  I had no desire to review spreadsheets I knew by heart, none to imagine the remaining years of my career. Retirement felt impossible, but what kind of work was I doing anymore, really? One odd thing about AD, we couldn’t yet diagnose a patient conclusively, not until after death. Most of us believed we knew what caused Alzheimer’s—plaques in the brain that caused diminished function—but it took an autopsy to find them. Plaques, cloaks, caulking. There were evaluations available to people who went in for a workup. One was a test in which a person would receive four words, each belonging to a different set. For “sweater,” the category could be clothing; for “dog,” animal. A few minutes later, the examiner would repeat the category name, and the patient would need to remember the related word; people with dementia or Alzheimer’s often got stuck trying to relate one to the other.

  So what did it say of me that when I thought of science, of my passion for research, I no longer saw a connection to what remained of my career?

  Between seventh and eighth grade I grew seven inches. That rapid development led to painful knee problems, which caused my doctor to ban me from gym class. So I sought competition in academics, validation in my teachers’ esteem, though in college I discovered swimming, and took to it as a meditation, a way to wring out stress. These days I did my laps mainly with a kickboard, but when it was warm enough I skipped the Soborg gym for the island’s ponds and lakes, sometimes even the ocean.

  I grabbed a dry pair of swim trunks and started the car.

  How comforting it could be, being alone. It prevented the scenery from blending in. The drive to Little Long Pond was a winding road by the sea. The ocean charging in over the rocks was blue paisley. The pond was deserted. I did laps back and forth, setting a goal for twenty, and focused on listening to my lungs, trying to feel my muscles warm up and relax.

  But there was Regina, throwing her barrettes at the wall.

  At least complain about someone. You never talk.

  You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?

  So did Regina want us to become some conventional twosome? Dinner and a movie, and afterward, banana splits? But it was true, recently I’d noticed her withdrawing more into herself: moodier in bed, more sarcastic on the telephone. Fewer Fridays where she’d prepared a routine.

  But maybe something else was upsetting her, I wondered. Maybe there was someone else.

  After half an hour, I toweled off and drove up the road to the beach in Seal Harbor. The view there included a small bay, some bobbing sailboats, and a swimming dock. Fog clung to the water. An older couple was walking the beach, collecting litter in a child’s sand pail. Once, when we took coffee and newspapers to the beach, Sara found a used condom wedged under a pile of rocks. Some gay teenagers had buried it as a cairn for their love, she said. Another morning, Sara called me out to the backyard. A condor was trapped in a tree, its wingspan snared by the branches. Sara was crying, and I remembered trying to hug her, when she snapped, “Oh, get away, it’s just a bird, this is the fucking menopause talking.”

  But when I reminded her of that morning a few months later, her line about the menopause, which I’d found quite funny, Sara insisted she never said it. That I had it wrong. She’d been worried about the condor was all, that’s what had made her cry, and wasn’t it typical both of me and men that I should misattribute emotion to menopause.

  I swore, though, I remembered it correctly. In any case, we called the fire rescue squad, they extracted the vulture, and it clapped away. So maybe Sara had it wrong, I thought. About the condor and the condom. Maybe some kid spent a quarter in a gas station bathroom, then hid the rubber out of shame. It was just one clue. A buried condom, a stained wife-beater: What would the great detective Hercule Poirot do with such clues except laugh?

  How about: Poirot and the Case of the Vanishing Erections.

  A green Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera drove into the parking lot and rammed my bumper at five miles an hour. The doors sported fluorescent orange racing stripes. Betsy had painted them on herself, to make the car easier to identify in parking lots.

  “You idiot,” she shouted hoarsely, “no one swims until August. You’ll catch pneumonia!”

  Betsy grasped my wrist through the window and snapped her cigarette into the rushes.

  I said, “You’re going to set this island on fire. Again.”

  In the 1940s, most of Bar Harbor had burned down, cause unknown.

  “Oh, go to hell.”

  I was actually very pleased to see her. “How did you find me?”

  “How do you think? I call the office, your lab manager tells me you’re working at home. I call the house, no one’s there. It’s too late for you to be swimming at the gym. Where else would you be?”

  I conceded the point. “But why?”

  Betsy stuck out her lips, pulled a lipstick down from the visor, and applied it slowly in practiced loops. Her white hair was pasted flat on her head, with a slight flip at the ends, as though she’d been wearing a swim cap. Her trusty beach hat lay on the passenger seat.

  “My boyfriend wants to know why I want to see him. Well, I need assistance.”

  “With what?”

  “Oh forget it, Victor.”

  “Now what?”

  “Will you buy a lady a drink?”

  “How about coffee?”

  “I don’t want coffee.”

  “Well, all right, then.”

  Betsy snapped the top back on her lipstick.

  “You’ve stopped drinking beer, prig? But after we finish working, let’s go.”

  I was about to ask, and then I noticed the picket signs.

  Downtown in Northeast Harbor, along the boardwalk, I insisted on staying in the car. I’d told Betsy before, hers was a solo mission, but I did help set up her station: a card table, a folding chair, and her hand-lettered signs: GEORGE BUSH, AL QAEDA RECRUITER OF THE YEAR and YEE-HA IS NOT FOREIGN POLICY and GUESS I DESERVE WHAT YOU MORONS WANTED. Not that I disagreed with her politics, I just wasn’t the protest type.

  Aunt Betsy and Sara used to stay up late discussing the news, Betsy taking the socialist fight to Sara’s gradual, resentful right-leaning (Clinton had ruined her liberal side). When there wasn’t enough gossip to fill the day, Betsy clipped stories from the newspapers and added them to a Bush-Cheney conspiracy map she was building on her dining room wall from Post-it notes. Recently, she’d begun speaking truth to the sidewalk. Her argument, that Northeast Harbor saw more policy makers than K Street on an average summer weekday, wasn’t illogical. Both the Cap Weinberger estate and Senator George Mitchell’s house were down the road, though in opposite directions.

  She returned twenty minutes later. “Roll down the window!”

  “Do you want a hand?”

  “Too late. Nobody’s listening. They think I’m a skinny old joke.” Two hikers walked away, smiling to themselves. “Besides, Bayne says I’m driving away customers, isn’t he smu
g.”

  Bayne Gifford was staring at us from inside his ice cream store, hands in his apron pockets. Betsy stared right back at him. Both were the geologic embodiment of traditional Maine obstinacy, like Sara refusing to wear a seat belt.

  “He doesn’t understand we’re at war,” Betsy said. “Sacrifice is expected.”

  I suggested we sacrifice my Visa over lunch. Northeast Harbor was a small village with a single main street, where wealthy people went to feel quainter about themselves. Some old folks stopped Betsy on the sidewalk to say hello, twenty-five minutes of hello. We passed a jewelry store, and Betsy admired a necklace in the window made from lacquered coral. An hour later, after lunch at a seafood restaurant, I presented it to her across the table, feeling quite pleased with myself.

  From my view of the harbor, it looked like there were only five docks. At that moment, losing my sexual capacity seemed a bailout. Now I could enjoy the simple pleasures in life: work, music, nature, my elderly girlfriend easily and not too expensively satisfied.

  “You’re a damn nuisance,” Betsy said, and dropped the necklace on the table. “Oh, Victor. You know, I was thinking about Sara this morning,” she said a moment later. “I had a dream. It was that night she showed up on our doorstep, when she was sixteen.”

  “The big fight.”

  “Now, it wasn’t the shock you’d figure. Ginnie always was drinking, you never knew what would happen next.” Ginnie was Betsy’s sister-in-law, Sara’s mother, who had long since passed away from cancer. “But it was terrible, this plan of Sara’s. Three in the morning, a bus ticket for San Francisco. Sara ringing the doorbell like she’s the one who’s been drinking. She was there to say good-bye, you know. Personally, I felt like I was losing Joel all over again. Good-bye forever, she said. Because she hit poor Ginnie.”