Trust Exercise(51)

Tonight, then—a night in late January, many months before Karen’s reunion with Sarah at the Skylight bookstore—David is seated alone at the bar, in a funk, when Karen enters wearing her jean jacket buttoned all the way up, a tasselled scarf wound several times around her neck, a pair of gloves, and a hat pulled low over her ears. It’s as cold as it gets in their town, which is plenty cold for Karen, who hates to admit that she never got used to the cold in New York, but whimpered beneath its onslaught just like her mother, except without her mother’s ankle-length faux-fur coat. From outside, as she hauls on the frigid door handle, Karen can’t see The Bar’s interior, only the glow of its lights, through the big windows which usually put the people at the bar of The Bar on display to the sidewalk outside, but which this night are frosted with condensation. But Karen isn’t surprised, on entering, to find David immediately inside the door, on the right-most barstool, his usual place. When David isn’t in rehearsal, he sometimes occupies this stool from three or four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. It’s David who takes an extra beat to notice Karen, maybe because of the hat and the scarf. As she pulls these off and steps up to the bar to order a Coke, David sees her. “The fuck,” he says. “I was just thinking of you. Remember Martin?”

Karen finds this an interesting, excellent question. Like all her favorite questions it seems so simple and obvious that for David to have asked her seems idiotic at first. Does she remember Martin? But now the different layers of the question start to peel apart. Remember in what exact way? The dictionary tells us that “remember” means “to call something to mind, recall something forgotten.” Well, Karen has never forgotten Martin, so in this sense she doesn’t remember him. The dictionary also tells us that to remember is to keep something in memory. Without going down the rabbit hole and looking up “memory,” let’s give this one a check mark: yes, she does keep this something in memory. We also have, in this particular definition, “keep somebody in mind”—yes—“give somebody a gift”—you might say so, depending on “gift”—“send somebody greetings”—not lately—“commemorate somebody or something.” Commemorate: remember something ceremonially. This meaning is suddenly very appealing. It sticks in Karen’s mind, the way a lot of things do. David, who has his own share of problems, one of which is being too smart for every situation he puts himself in—he is too smart for his work life, his sex life, and definitely his life as a drunk, which takes up the biggest part of his time—would probably enjoy this little lecture on the meanings of “remember,” but Karen wouldn’t enjoy giving it, so she only says, “Sure, I remember Martin.”

“Check this out,” David says, and lays a news clipping flat on the bar. Bourne Courier-Telegraph, October 4, 1997: “Top Teacher Dismissed Amid Allegations.” Beneath the headline are two short columns of print and one short column of a black-and-white photograph of a man with a narrow ferrety face, light hair fringing over his eyes and his ears, a narrow gap between his teeth, oversize glasses that weren’t fashionable even ten years ago, a jacket and tie that he probably borrowed and that don’t really fit. Even without the benefit of color you can tell that his skin is too white and his teeth are too yellow. The photo looks more out-of-date than it is, the way official photographs—Karen supposes this is the yearbook photo, the “Our Faculty” wall-of-the-main-office photo—never look like the day they were taken but like the day when their dingy backdrop first began to be coated with decades of dust. The man, of course, is the man we’re here calling Martin. He looks just like and not at all like the Martin that Karen remembers. Karen can’t even tell, staring at the dated photograph, whether the Martin it shows is older or younger than the Martin she knew. The Martin of the photo and the Martin Karen “keeps in memory” look exactly the same, and at the same time they look totally different. Now Karen can no longer tell them apart. She wonders whether she does remember Martin at all, or whether she just made him up, looking down sightlessly at the utterly weird, unrecognizable photo that looks exactly like Martin. She’s been staring so long at the photo that when David asks, “Are you done?” she doesn’t realize he means finished reading the words. The words she has not even started.

“I’m done,” she says, meaning something different than what David’s asking. He picks up the clipping and puts it away. His fingers seem to be trembling. He seems to be having difficulty, now that the clipping is safely away, lighting a fresh cigarette. David is completely freaked out, which is the flip side of being a jaded unshockable guy; it’s the soft inner lining his jaded unshockable costume is meant to conceal. Undetected by him, Karen puts on David’s jaded unshockable costume. She’s going to have to get the article at the library: she’s careful to remember, to “keep in memory,” the name Bourne Courier-Telegraph. She’s going to have to pore over the article later, however much she would like to pore over it now. But she doesn’t need to pore over it now to have the basic idea. She has that already.

“Where did you get that?” she asks.

“From Jim,” David says, by which he means Mr. Kingsley. So freaked out is David he doesn’t even remember that this business of calling the person we’re calling Mr. Kingsley a chummy first name, for our purposes “Jim,” is only for the Elite Brotherhood. “But first I got this letter from Martin,” David says. David’s urgently waving the bartender over, he’s so desperate for fortification to get this explained, to the point of not even realizing what’s happened to Karen. He doesn’t notice his jaded unshockable costume slip off Karen, at this mention of getting a letter from Martin. He doesn’t see Karen yank the thing back into place, and so misses the chance to tempt her to confess that when she moved back to town, although she swore to herself not to do it, she finally drove to the house of her childhood and knocked on the door, because some crazy part of herself imagined, a long time after it was expected, a letter from England arriving there for her, but—thankfully no one was home at her childhood home, and she never went back.