Funny What You Forget
by
Meg Waite Clayton

from
South Dakota Review, Summer 1999

Leah heaves open the damask drapes, and sunlight pours through the hotel window. Central Park stretches out like cloud cover below her, green cloud cover edged with the cold stone and glass of high rise buildings which look, she thinks, dull and dirty in the bright light. On the street below, her husband climbs into a black limousine. She waves as the long car pulls out onto the street, though she’s much too high up for Carl to see. And she’s alone then, alone until she meets him for dinner at eight o’clock. She has the entire day free—the first time she’s been in New York since . . . since when? She tries to remember as she makes her way down to the hushed, oriental-carpeted lobby and revolves out into the sounds of horns honking and hooves clacking and the acrid smell of steam rising through grated vents. Since she began her leave from her law firm, she guesses. Was as it really six years ago, now? Chris was six already, so it was more than six. Funny she still thinks of it as a leave.

At the corner, among the collection of people waiting for the light, is an old man—a roundish man with a cabbage head and a sausage neck, sausage fingers. He carries an old-fashioned leather suitcase, a sturdy, squarish thing like the one that sat in her grandfather’s attic back in Ohio. It’s clean and unmarked and the seams are straight and unbroken, but the leather is pale at the corners and along the folds, and it seems to Leah that the suitcase must hold the man’s entire life, all neatly folded into square corners and fitted into its rigid structure.

The light changes, but the man doesn’t move with the crowd. He stands, looking bewildered and perplexed, and quite frail, too. When Leah asks him if he needs help, though, he doesn’t respond. He stands there, looking out past the cross walk and on beyond it, way beyond it, as if he’s looking for the end of a sidewalk that never will end, looking to see where it will take him, how far he has to go to find whatever he hopes will be there.

Leah gently touches the man’s arm, offers help again. His eyes—oddly amber eyes—seem to come back from somewhere and his face takes on a warm expression, not so much a smile as the impression of one, and he speaks to her in a proper voice that has just a hint of foreignness in it.

"Thank you. But I do believe I can manage myself."

And yet, after she crosses the street and walks half the cross-town block, Leah looks back to see him still standing there, the handle of that old leather suitcase firmly grasped in his hand.

* * *

Leah walks on briskly, turning right on Fifth Avenue, weaving through the clusters of people on the sidewalks, all so determined to get somewhere. She stops now and then to gaze at a window or stroll into a shop. This is a simple stroll, a shopping day in New York City. That’s all. Nothing more. Because what would be the point of it, after fifteen years? She’s a different person now than she was when she lived here with Jack that summer in law school, a different person even than when she married Carl.

Anyway, she might not even be able to find the place.

And it isn’t like Jack still lives there. Jack lives in Seattle with his wife, Meredith. He’s probably a different person, too.

Leah buys a street-vendor salted pretzel, which she eats while walking, and, later, a cup of coffee, which she drinks black. She cuts over to The Avenue of the Americas, passes Radio City Music Hall, the back of Rockefeller Center. At the light at 44th, she looks left to see the iron bay windows of the Algonquin, where she sat alone every Tuesday evening the summer she lived here, drinking a single glass a wine (not chardonnay, but simply "white wine") while Jack played softball with a team from his firm. She imagines she can remember the oaky smell of the wine, the cool, smooth feel of the glass stem in her fingers, though perhaps it is another glass, another place, another wine altogether. Still, she does remember how she felt then, sitting there pretending she was Dorothy Parker, or not Dorothy Parker so much as Leah Covington, famous novelist, hanging out with other literary lights, saying witty things that made everyone laugh. And she remembers pulling out her manuscript and working on it right there at the table in the bar, like running stark naked through a public park.

But it’s not even noon now, too early even for wine. And she read somewhere that the Algonquin was closed for renovation, anyway, that the old place was being restored to its historic roots. She ought to be getting back anyway; she ought to cut over to Fifth and head back. But the light changes and she crosses, continues south, her mind still lingering on those writing nights at the Algonquin. Funny, she never told Jack about them, even when he’d found her manuscript stuffed in its drawer. Funny, she’s never said a word about her writing to Carl, though at least a million times she’s thought she should.

* * *

Before Leah knows it, she’s walking through the Village, the west Village where, in the nighttime and on the weekends that summer she lived here, she and Jack used to venture out from their one bedroom apartment—a studio, really—to a world that might easily have existed just for them. They went to the theater on student tickets. They went to jazz clubs. They ate at funky restaurants that served food they’d never heard of in Ann Arbor, where they were going to law school. They danced all night, too, in unmarked dance clubs (Jack saying he couldn’t dance, but dancing). And then slept an hour or two before catching the subway up to the park to walk or run or simply lie in the grass watching break dancers and roller skaters and children with hands tightly gripped by adults. Jack took silly-faced pictures of her by the statues on the mall. They rented rowboats and rowed for hours, talking about the great successes they would become. They said they loved each other, said it all the time. But really it was themselves they loved most, the idea of themselves being in love.

She’d like to share this part of her life with Carl. She’d like to pull out her old photo albums and stay up half the night drinking cheap wine and talking about the girl she’d been back then. She’d like to bring him here to see the apartment where she lived, the old men playing chess in the park like her grandfather used to back in Cleveland, the little Korean grocery where she bought daisies every Friday on her way home, still in her dark blue linen suit, her silly bow snug at her throat.

She can’t, of course. She knows that. She’d been still in love with Jack, or with the idea of him, when she first met Carl. And that initial pseudo-love had left its scar. Carl did not want to hear anything about Jack, anything about that time of Leah’s life which was, somehow, not about Leah herself to him, but only about that relationship.

* * *

She passes the subway station, where she used to get the E train every morning. The E train, like an E ticket ride at Disneyland. The E or the F, either one was fine. She slows, not realizing she is slowing. She approaches her old street cautiously, a sapper approaching a bomb. No, someone with less expertise. Someone who has no idea what a bomb looks like, much less how to defuse one. Someone likely to detonate the thing.

The corner looks familiar. That iron-gated park across the street. The cross street angling from the corner so that the next block is just a bit shorter than this, her block. Hers and Jack’s, Carl would think if he were here, if she were saying to him, "This is my old block."

Around the corner, the red brick buildings bunch together like books on a shelf. Leah stands there on the sidewalk, her back to the street. They do look familiar, she guesses. She glances toward the corner, double-checks the street sign. This was her block. But she’s not even sure which building was hers. It was the end row house, wasn’t it? The one next to that big industrial thing on the corner. That one doesn’t have a step-down to the entrance, though. They’d had a step-down, hadn’t they? So it must be the second from the end. And they were . . . where? The second floor? Not the ground floor—she climbed those stairs with the groceries, dropped the eggs that once. And not the top floor either; there was that hard-heeled neighbor above. Could have been the third floor, though she didn’t make a turn on the stairs, did she?

She stands there, looking, unaware of the old lady shuffling by, the sounds of faint music, raised voices, the low rumble of a subway car underground. But she just can’t remember which window it was. The apartment on the inside—yes. Minimalist, wood and white furniture. Pre-Crate and Barrel. The couch not a futon couch, but that type of thing. Small dining table where she kept a white ceramic cup filled with the Korean market daisies. Narrow kitchen at the front. Bedroom at the back, separated from the living space by a wooden divider, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Box spring and mattress on the floor, where she read the Sunday Travel Section, the Book Review, while Jack read Business and Sports.

It had been a stranger’s place, a summer sublet complete with someone else’s photographs on the walls, on the shelves. That had been so uncomfortable back then, using someone else’s choice of silver, keeping her toothpaste in a medicine cabinet that belonged to someone she’d never even met.

But it was a nice place. Fresh. On the inside, fresh.

And despite all the things that have been forgotten, all the things that have changed, Leah imagines the white cotton sheets still rumpled on the bed on the floor. She imagines the daisies on the dining table, surviving all those years in that ceramic coffee cup.

Though she’s not even sure it’s the right building, much less the right window. Funny, that. Funny what you remember, what you forget.

* * *

At dinner that night, Leah orders a veal chop, medium-rare. She’s in the mood for Thai food, but this isn’t a Thai restaurant, or even French-Thai. This is a veal chop kind of place, Carl’s kind of place.

She likes the assortment of people at the table, though. Jenn DuChene, who was Jennifer Belt when she and Leah lived together in law school. She’s representing Carl in a real estate transaction here. Married. Her husband sitting next to Carl, laughing. And a banker with whom they are working, and the banker’s wife, who is an artist, or says she is.

They’re not talking business, which Leah wearied of even before she quit practicing law, so that’s fine with her. And not about their kids either, which she gets enough of in the car pool line at school. They’re talking about philosophy and art and the meaning of life, things she doesn’t think she’s talked about since she was handed her diploma. And every once in a while Jenn says, "Remember when . . .?" and they all laugh at something Leah and Jenn did together when they were young, some embarrassing thing Leah has tried to forget. Like taking those pictures of themselves skinny-dipping in Mexico spring break of second year. They went with a group of their women friends from the law school. They called them girlfriends then, but Jenn calls them women friends now.

Jenn’s not reminiscing, though, only telling anecdotes that are relevant to the conversation. And Carl is laughing as if he’s surprised by the stories, as if he can’t believe this is his own wife Jenn is talking about, as if it’s all too preposterous, and yet so exactly how he should have imagined Leah to have been.

And Leah is laughing, too, laughing so much that she has to pace her bites so they don’t come spraying out of her mouth when she laughs. She’s already inhaled one sip of wine, come up sputtering, everyone asking if she’s okay.

Which she is. She feels good tonight. She doesn’t even mind the watered-down jazz playing in the background, the too-mellow version of something Coltrane would do well. But then she always feels good with Jenn, who’s known her forever. Knows her better than anyone else does. Maybe better than Leah knows herself, even now, even though they see each other only once or twice a year anymore, even though when they talk on the phone it’s with Leah’s children fussing in the background, Jenn’s clients waiting in a conference room upstairs.

The six of them pass on dessert, but order another bottle of wine. And then coffee. And then they change their minds and have dessert, after all. No one seems to want the evening to end. And when it finally does, they stand outside the restaurant, lingering even after the cabs come. Carl holds the door handle and Jenn continues the conversation, though she has already slid in next to her husband, though the taxi driver keeps cranking his head around, shooting them looks.

It’s the driver who finally breaks it up, asking Carl if he and Leah are staying or going.

"We can drop you at the hotel," Jenn offers.

"Thanks," Carl says, "but it’s just around the corner, we’ll enjoy the walk."

And Leah imagines walking and talking until the sun tints the sky again, telling Carl about the first time she tried to use the subway, about the first novel she wrote, when she was twelve. She imagines them sharing a bottle of champagne at the Algonquin or just watching the sunrise together, though where they would go to do that in New York she doesn’t know.

As they walk, Carl resting a hand lightly on Leah’s shoulder, he asks how her day was. "What did you do?" he says.

And she wants to tell him she walked all the way to the Village to find the place she lived when she lived here, and wasn’t it funny that she could remember so much about the place, but she couldn’t tell which one it was? What she talks about instead, though, is the man standing at the corner, the one with the suitcase. She says she offered him help but he wouldn’t take it.

"He wanted to stand there," she says, "holding tightly to that worn leather suitcase, not admitting he was lost."