“Josh, we haven’t been to Seattle together in 17 years. I know that for a fact.”
“It could have been 17 years ago. You asked my forgiveness, don’t you remember. You gave me your word it would never happen again.”
Genevieve laughed. “You’re out of your mind. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. If anything, Josh, you’re conflating several different events. Yes?”
“No,” he said. “I’m right about this.”
She left the kitchen and after deciding not to, he followed her up the stairs. When he reached her — she was in her study sitting at her computer — he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say.
“I can’t live with your suspicions,” she told him the next day or the day after that.
“This was 15 or 17 years ago,” he said.
“You’re the most ungenerous man I’ve ever known,” she said. “It didn’t even happen.”
He waited until she was sitting at the table to make the point he had been thinking about much of the previous night. He had lost it temporarily but now it was at memory’s fingertips. “If it never happened, why does it disturb you if I mention it.”
She had no answer and then she did. “How would you like it,” she said, “if I constantly reminded you of the time 12 years ago that you hit me.”
“I never,” he said, aggrieved. “I don’t remember ever hitting you.”
“That doesn’t mean it never happened,” she said, “does it? You have a awful temper and you know it.”
He remembered the car, an oversized Chevrolet that had a habit of stalling at red lights. And so he brought it up to her when they talked again several hours later, reminded her of the car’s various unnerving tics.
“My mother never drove a Chevrolet,” she said.
“If it wasn’t a Chevrolet,” he said, “what was the car we drove across country? It was a blue and white Chevrolet.”
“That was a different time,” she said. “Anyway I never went to high school in Seattle.”
It was possible that the boy he had caught her with in Seattle merely resembled her high school sweetheart. The phone interrupted this thought and he took the occasion to answer it. It was someone from their bank, offering to sell him some pointless new service no one in his right mind could possibly want. It was presented to him as a favor they owed him for being such a good customer. Even after he said no thank you, the voice at the other end continued her rehearsed spiel. “Damn it,” he said. “When I say no I mean no.”
“When you say no, you often change your mind afterward,” she said. This was Genevieve not the woman on the phone whom he had temporarily shut out of his life five minutes earlier.
When he took Magoo, their Golden, out for his evening walk, he tried to conjure up Genevieve’s mother’s errant Chevrolet. No details answered his quest. Maybe it wasn’t a Chevrolet, though unless he had lost his mind altogether there had been a car they had picked up in Annapolis and driven to Seattle.
The next time Josh approached her to make some debater’s point, she could no longer remember the particulars of their long running argument. He caught her at the refrigerator door, struggling against residual vagueness, wondering what urgency had brought her there. “Are you ready to admit that I was right?” she said.
“I didn’t want to make the trip to Seattle,” he said, “because I never enjoyed myself in your mother’s house.”
She peered into the refrigerator, hoping that something in the picture would remind her that she had come on its errand.
“My mother always spoke highly of you,” she said. “That was until she stopped remembering who you were. Just because she lost her memory doesn’t mean… you know what I mean. She actually encouraged me to marry you, though of course I never did what she wanted and she knew that like the back of her hand.”
“It was your mother,” he said, “who invited that guy, your high school sweetheart, to lunch with us. He was in Seattle on some business trip or he had just moved there and he phoned your mother to find out where you were.”
She took a container of milk from the refrigerator, which seemed as good a choice as any. It might have been that she was planning to make a pot of coffee. “You’re saying he, whoever, called my mother.”
“Yes,” he said, “and she invited him over.”
“She invited him to the house in Seattle? That’s an odd thing for her to do. Where was I?”
“You were there,” he said angrily. “You were already there.”
“Was I? And where were you?”
“On the outside looking in.”
It had been dark for almost two hours and they were still driving around looking for an acceptable place to stop for the night. Genevieve was in one of her moods. None of the motels they passed in the seemingly endless sprawl of the one-street small town impeding their progress appealed to her. “You make the choice, Josh,” she said.
“What about this one?” he said, as they approached a no frills arrangement of boxy cabins. According to the flickering sign, the place was called Dew Drop Inn.
“Oh Josh,” she said, “that’s so depressing. We’ve passed by places that were nicer than this.”
He pulled into the parking space next to the office. “It’s just a bed for the night,” he said.
“I’m not staying here,” she muttered.
He went into the brightly lit office without her and rented 6A with his American Express card, though the blousy woman at the desk warned that a drunk trucker tended to come by around 3 AM and was likely to knock on the door, insisting the place was his. “All you have to do,” the woman said, “is to keep your door locked and pay no attention to him. After a while, he gets discouraged. You’ll be making a big mistake if you answer the door.”
When he returned to the car, already regretting his decision to pay for a room sight unseen, Genevieve was a notable absence. He lounged in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, dozing, waiting with willed indifference for her return, assuming nothing, assuming she had gone off looking for a bathroom or had decided to leave him forever. When he could no longer sit still, he evacuated the car to look for her. Having no idea where to look, he headed toward the diner they had passed a block or so back, his best guess, hurrying, speed-walking, breathing hard, running.
He was so intent on getting there, he nearly ran over her in the dark, as she came slowly toward him. “Is that you, Josh?” she said. “I got us some coffee.”
“Damn you,” he said.
She woke up the next morning remembering how fond she was of Joshua, which was, she suspected, an abrupt change in the weather. For months, perhaps years, she had been nursing the hope that he would silently disappear. As soon as she got into her forest green terry cloth bathrobe, which he had given her last Christmas (there were some things she didn’t forget), she intended to go downstairs — she heard someone banging around in the kitchen — and tell whoever it was (who else could it be?) about her discovery. A detour to the bathroom to pee and to brush her teeth interceded. By the time Genevieve reached the kitchen she could still remember she had something she wanted to tell Joshua, but not what it was.
“I made coffee,” he said when she approached, “but I finished most of it.”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.
He took a coffee mug from the cupboard for her, filling it almost halfway with what remained of the pot he had brewed. He was embarrassed to tell her that there was no longer any milk.
She improvised her news. “I need to know,” she said, “why you leave fingerprints on the bathroom towels.”
“So we’ll have a subject for conversation,” he said, “other than Seattle, which you won’t discuss.”