When I surfaced again with a new identity, new fingerprints, new face, I was a free man until unfortuitous circumstance dumped me in your lap, if indeed you are the same bloody-minded super-secret agency that I worked for in happier times.
73rd Night
They must have believed something I told them. Today Molly, who has been eluding me for the longest time, waltzes into my room. Her appearance, if anything, is an even greater surprise than the visit last week from my dead and cremated parents. Is it a good surprise? Any company in this place, even the company of someone who has lost all her illusions about you, is better than being alone.
“I was hoping to rescue you from your kidnappers,” I say, “but as you can see I got kidnapped myself on the way. They keep pressing me to confess but then they don’t believe what I tell them.”
“Before we go any further,” Molly says, “I need to get this said. Okay? This is not intended as a friendly visit.”
“No?” I say, reaching out an imaginary hand to her (my hands are tied behind my back), which she slaps away, “Anyway, I’m pleased to see you.”
“Every time I see you, I feel angry,” she says. “It makes me angry to feel angry all the time. I know you understand what I’m saying, though I also know you’ll do your best to pretend not to know what I mean… I’ll tell you what I’m here for. I’d like to review our time together so I can internalize the total experience and so, you know, move on. You owe me this, okay?”
“You’ve already moved on,” I say. “You’ve moved on and on and on.”
She cries, a sudden unpredictable change in the weather, a local storm with larger implications. “I can’t do this by myself,” she says. “Will you help me or do I have to go back into therapy with the hormonal Dr. F?”
She puts on her recently removed denim jacket, which resembles — I have been noting this since her arrival — a former jacket of mine.
“You dumped me for greener pastures,” I say.
“Not at all,” she insists. “You may have been my greenest pasture. Anyway, the abominable Dr. F says the process will only work if we start from the beginning. So?”
There is no beginning, I want to say, or this is the beginning. Instead, I apologize for not having lived up to her expectations.
“I told Dr. F that it was a mistake to come here,” she says. “Everything is amusing to you, even pain. You have no capacity for…” She leaves the sentence unfinished. “Did we like each other when we met. I can’t remember. We must have, don’t you think?”
“We met in a supermarket,” I say. “You asked me why I had only one item in my cart. I didn’t think it was any of your business but I was too polite to say so. The next thing I know we were in a motel room together.”
She smiles wistfully through her tears. “We had a catch,” she says, “do you remember, with a balled up pair of socks before we made out.”
“It sounds familiar,” I say, “but I remember it not as socks but as rolled up silk panties. Even in a ball, they were hard to hold on to. They had no weight.”
“It was socks,” she insists. “You were showing off and throwing the ball — the ball of socks — behind your back.”
“It could have been socks,” I allow.
“It was totally socks,” she says. “And how did we get from throwing the socks back and forth into the bed?”
“One of my errant behind the back throws landed on the bed,” I say. “Then we each made a mad dash to the bed, each of us hoping to retrieve the socks before the other.”
“I have this flash image in my mind of you pushing me out of the way,” she says. “You were always so competitive.”
The way I remember it, Molly was the one pushing me out of the way.
“After the pushing, whoever was doing it, there was a readjustment of priorities.
We forgot about the socks and the socks forgot about us.”
“That’s your story,” Molly says. “Even while we were making love, I was thinking that as soon as this is over, I’m going to get my hands on the socks before he does.”
“For me,” I say, “the love-making interlude in a socks-catching game has more enduring interest than the game itself. You know, I don’t remember where we went from there.”
“I went back to graduate school,” Molly says, “and we wrote letters back and forth. That was a time when people still wrote letters. Between the letters, when the socks were still floating in the ether of memory, we each married different people.”
I had forgotten all of this. It’s hard for me to remember anything when my hands are tied behind my back. Still, it’s a relief not to have my arms strung up over my head, which was the former regimen. “Am I right in thinking that the people we married were not the kind to throw smelly balled-up socks back and forth?” I say.
“You were the only one I ever had a socks catch with,” she says. “I lost my socks-catching virginity with you. And then we met again wholly by chance. Is that the way you remember it? We had to have met somewhere or we never would have ended up married to each other. No?”
“It seems to me,” I say, “that we never met again, though managed to get married anyway.”
“That’s why we didn’t last,” Molly says. “We didn’t last because nothing is serious to you.”
“Everything is too serious to take seriously,” I say, feeling misunderstood.
“When we made connection again you were sitting next to me and you were jabbing me with your elbow. You were born with a sense of yourself as someone with a divine right to public armrests.”
Molly sticks her tongue out at me in unspoken dispute. “After the movie,” she says, “the four of us went to a restaurant together. When no one was looking, I stuck a card with my phone number on it in your jacket pocket.”
“So we ended up in a motel room again,” I say, “though this time it was a hotel, wasn’t it? And there was another ball of socks catch.”
“That’s not the way it was,” Molly says. “When I was getting back into my clothes, you threw your balled up socks at me. ‘Think fast,’ you said. There was no back-and-forth, nothing that might be construed as a socks-catching episode. When you hit me in the breast with your socks, it touched me. I knew in that moment that it would take me years to get free of you… Look, I forgot to mention it. They’re recording this conversation. They wouldn’t have let me in unless I agreed.”
I make no complaint.
“Anyway,” she adds, “they say it’s for training purposes only.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ve long since run out of shameful stories to tell them,”
“A few months after your socks touched my heart,” she says, “we were living together. In memory, it seems like the next day, and also as if it never happened.”
“I only threw socks at you for training purposes,” I say.
“Right,” Molly says. “Our life together was for training purposes. We lived together for two years, for more than two years, before we made it official. In all the time we were together, I can’t remember you ever throwing socks at me again.”
Could that be true? “Do you think our marriage an anti-climax, that all the good stuff happened before we were married?”
Molly sits down on the side of the bed next to me and pokes me with her finger. “I could do that all day and you couldn’t hit me back.”
“Forget it,” I say.
“All through our marriage,” she says, “I had this feeling that something was missing. This feeling, this absence, is something I’ve been carrying around with me forever. It was all anti-climax after our first time. Whimsical episodes become mawkish when willfully repeated.”