Almost No Memory

WHAT WAS INTERESTING

It is hard for her to write this story, too, or rather she should say it is hard for her to write it well. She has shown it to a friend, and he has said it needs to be more interesting. She is disappointed, even though she knew that only one part of it was interesting. She tries to think why the rest is not.

Maybe there is no way to make it interesting, because it is so simple: a woman, slightly drunk but not too drunk to discuss a plan for the summer, was put into a cab and told to go home by her lover, the man with whom she thought she was going to discuss this plan.

She asks her friend if this, at least, was something that would hurt a woman, or if this was nothing. He thinks it would hurt, and she is right about that much, but it is not very interesting.

He had put her into a cab with two men who were not pleased to be riding with her, as she was not pleased to be riding with them, because of some complicated events that had occurred years before. She was talking politely to them but feeling angry at the man who had done this to her.

It is not entirely clear, in the story, why being put in a cab by this man should cause so much anger in her. Or rather, it is perfectly clear to her, but hard to explain to anyone else, though she knows that anyone else, put in the same cab with the same two men, would be angry.

As soon as she arrived home she telephoned him. She raged at him and he laughed, she raged more and he gave her a slight apology and laughed more and said he was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. She hung up. She went on crying and then began drinking. She was so angry she would have been happy to take her fists to him, but he was not there, he was sleeping and probably smiling in his sleep. As she drank she thought hard, and angrily.

What was he trying to do to her this time? she wondered. She and he did not have many chances to be together, and there they were sitting across from each other at dinner, and they had recently started talking about a plan to go away together in the summer, which they had never done before, or even talked about doing before, and he had even sent her a photograph of the house. They had said that after dinner they would talk about it more, and she was very happy about all this, and felt that at last their love was becoming something solid, something she could count on. And then, when she was prepared to walk off with him down the street, her head pleasantly light, her stomach comfortably full, he had suddenly, without warning, taken her arm and led her up to a taxi just as these two men were getting into it, and because there were other people there they both knew, she couldn’t say anything but had to pretend this was something she did not mind. And what did he mean by it? What was she supposed to think now, and what was she supposed to do?

At a certain point in her angry thinking she decided she had to give up the idea of a summer plan with him. If he had done this now, what would he do to her during the summer, and, even worse, when the summer was over? And now she drank more to give vent to her disappointment.

The fact that they were involved in a love affair ought to have been interesting, because any kind of affair is usually more interesting than no affair, as two people in a story should be more interesting than one, and a difficult love affair should be more interesting than an easy one. As, for example, a happy woman walking arm in arm with her lover after a noisy restaurant dinner with friends, enjoying the fact that he is so tall and the feel of his smooth hair under her palm when she reaches up, walking with him and discussing summer plans, as she had been sure they were going to do, may be less interesting than being put into a cab with embarrassing haste and awkwardness, or finding a pair of keys that have been lost, as she did later, and then certainly the idea of a key is more interesting than the idea of a cab, and the idea of something lost and then found is more interesting than the idea of already knowing where she was, that is, in the cab and then at home, though it was true that in a more general way she certainly did not know where she was with him, what he expected from her and what he expected would happen to them.

The love affair as they conducted it was irregular, intermittent, and painful to her, painful because in the arrangements they made at long intervals, after months had gone by, he always did something she had not known he was going to do and it was often in contradiction to a plan they had made. She would borrow an apartment especially so that they could have a comfortable place to meet, and he would agree to come there late in the evening, and then he would not come, and after calling him where he was, and hearing his sleepy voice, she would pace from room to room in the borrowed apartment wringing her hands. On another occasion he would say firmly that he would not be coming to the borrowed apartment, and then come to her there without warning. Or they would meet for lunch and nothing more, and then he would suddenly propose that they go to a motel. In the motel, to her surprise, he would say he wanted to keep the room and meet there that night, and she would be happy, and all evening, at home, would wait for him to call and say when he could meet her, and then finally she would call him and hear him say he had not kept the room and could not see her.

But if he always did what she did not expect him to do, and if she knew this, why didn’t she think ahead and see that whatever he said he was going to do, he would not do? Though she was not a stupid woman, she did not do this. And what he did that was unexpected was also unkind, almost every time, but perhaps that was more interesting than if he had been kind and reliable, as she wanted him to be, as well as charming and open to her, as he often was: how happy he had looked the last time she had seen him, sitting by her in a bar where they had just met, purely happy in his face, until she said he looked happy and asked why, and he said a few other things and then the truth, that he was happy to see her, after which he looked just slightly less happy.

She was not yet quite finished with crying and raging, but unable to stay there in her apartment, in a place that seemed to contain only her and what had happened and the disappointment of it. She was on her knees on her living-room rug, trying to think where she had put some keys, the keys to a friend’s apartment. She wanted to go to this apartment even though she knew the friend was not home and would not be coming home. She could not have gone to him with her trouble, and she supposed, even through the fog of her drunkenness, that she should not go to his apartment with her trouble either. But she would not be stopped from something she wanted so badly. She needed to let the walls of a different place that belonged to a different time relieve her, a little, of herself and what had just happened.

She took a large, heavy drawer out of her bureau and emptied it on the rug. It was awkward to carry and awkward to turn over. She went through everything in it, not seeing very well, but couldn’t find the keys, and put everything back, and put the drawer back in the bureau. Then she took a shoe box down from a shelf, lighter and easier to carry. She emptied it on the rug, but the keys weren’t there either, so she was still on her knees, crying, and then lying face down on the rug, because she couldn’t find the keys. If she couldn’t find them, she didn’t know what she would do with herself.

She stopped crying, washed and dried her face, and tried to remember where she had last seen them. Then she remembered that they weren’t loose, but sealed in a white envelope, and once she remembered that, she knew where she had seen that crumpled envelope recently, and found it in a wooden tray on her desk. She put the keys in her pocket, called a taxi, left the apartment, rode through the silent streets of several different neighborhoods, past two darkened hospitals, to her friend’s apartment, and once inside fell asleep on his living-room rug, a thicker and more comfortable rug than her own.

* * *

She woke up when the clean light of dawn was coming through his tall windows, and left the apartment soon after, to avoid meeting him. By now she could return to her own apartment, as though she had climbed up to some high, difficult place during the night and climbed down again by morning.

She would never tell her friend she had slept in his apartment. It had been a long time since she had used his keys. His reaction, if he knew, would be interesting. In fact, this friend would possibly have been the most interesting person in the story, if she had put him instead of his apartment into it.

She was sick that day from all she had drunk. It would be more interesting to be well after drinking so much than to be sick, but she preferred being sick to being well that day, as though it were a celebration of the change that had happened, that she would not be sitting out in the Mediterranean sunshine with her lover that summer. After this, she would have almost nothing more to do with him. She would not answer his letters, and would barely speak to him if she chanced to meet him, but this anger of hers, lasting so long, was certainly more interesting to her, because in the end she found it harder to explain, than the fact that she had loved him so long.