“I’m really sorry if it sounded that way,” Tom said. “Forget it, okay?”
“Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive or projecting my own view of myself on to you.”
“Let it go,” Tom whispered.
“I accept your version of it,” Terman said in a voice that engendered irony in his own ear.
“You may have been right about my tone,” confided the shadow. “I have a hard time — other people have told me this — letting people be the way they are. My mother says I disapprove of everything.”
“Does she?”
“Hey, who’s being ironic now?” He laughed goodnaturedly. “Anyway she didn’t really say that. I like to attribute my own perceptions to others. It gives them the voice of authority.”
Again Terman held his hand out in ambiguous demand. “I think it would be a good idea, Tom, if you gave me back the gun.”
“You don’t have to keep after me about it,” said the shadow. “Anyway, there are a few things I want to get off my chest first.’”
“Do you want to tell me for the hundredth time that I’m a disappointment to you?” The subject was sore to him, a perpetually reopened wound, and he regretted advancing it. What was this conversation about anyway?
“You could at least hear me out,” the shadow said harshly, “before you tell me I’ve nothing to say to you.”
“It’s no pleasure to me to be told once again that I’ve disappointed you. If you have something else to say, something that adds to the store of knowledge between us, I’ll listen to that.”
The shadow laughed, then lapsed into silence. He stammered something.
“What?”
“It wasn’t your pleasure I was thinking of,” he said. “It’s my recollection, okay? that I never told you what was really getting to me. I never told you because I was afraid to. Even now in the dark where we can’t even see each other’s face, I can’t get a fucking word out.” The news Terman awaited was like a delayed time bomb. His only escape was to run from the house and keep running.
Tom seemed on the verge of speaking, but nothing was said.
“Would it satisfy you if I apologized in advance?” Terman asked. “I’m terribly sorry I’ve failed you.” He stood up as if the couch had suddenly released him. “What the hell do you want from me?” Tom said nothing. Terman said he was sorry he had shouted and sat down.
“I hear you want me to go back to New York,” Tom said after a prolonged silence.
Terman resisted inquiring into the source of Tom’s information, though couldn’t imagine how the news had come to him indirectly. “That was one of the things I wanted to say to you,” he said. “The reason is self-evident.”
“Yeah,” he said, the word barely leaving his mouth. “I remember a time in California when I was supposed to stay with you for three weeks and, for some reason never explained to me, I was sent home in disgrace after five days. I remembered that for a long time.”
“I don’t remember it at all,” Terman said. “This happened in California? Are you sure it was California?”
The recollection came supported by a wealth of corroborating detail. The color and texture of a couch in the living room of a rented cottage. The insufficient room in the back where he was made to stay, a place with grease-stained yellow walls and infested spider webs, the floor made of dirt. Lizards darted across the ceiling at night like dismembered fingers. A blond girl in braids named Alma who liked to sunbathe nude on the terrace stayed with them.
“What did I do that you had to send me away?” Tom asked.
“I never lived with a woman named Alma,” Terman said.
“I remember the two of you talking about me one night after I was supposed to be asleep,” Tom said. “You were both complaining at how I made things difficult for you, was always underfoot or something. ‘Snooping’ was the word Alma used. The kid is always snooping around, she said, and you did nothing to dissuade her of the notion that I was this mutt you had taken in off the street that had shat on the rug without permission.”
“You’re making that up,” Terman said, smiling in the dark despite the tightening in his chest the conversation had caused him.
“I stayed awake the whole night,” said the shadow, “unable to get out of my head the creepy picture of myself the two of you had given me. I remember, though I was totally depressed, that I didn’t cry. I realized, you know, that I didn’t need to cry, that I used to do it to attract sympathy and I was beyond that. I didn’t want to trivialize my pain by making a public demonstration of it. A couple of days after that you told me I was flying back the next morning, that you had called my mother and that she would be at the airport to pick me up.”
False memories, like happy marriages, are all alike, he was tempted to say. Instead, he offered an alternative version of the event as a gesture of melioration. “What I think may have happened,” he said, “is that, feeling rejected, you asked to go home and then when I acquiesced to your wishes, you made it out that I was the one sending you away.”
“I don’t think so, I really don’t, but it comes to the same thing. Why did I feel I had done something wrong?”
The period in California seemed more like a movie he had slept through and reinvented than something real in his life. A small time producer named Godowitz had flown him out to do a screenplay of his second novel, Out of Itself, and he stayed on in the sun, chasing elusive gold for almost two years, one aborted project leading to another. He made some money and lost some time, picked up a screen credit for what turned out to be a single surviving line of dialogue. Tom and Kate’s visits during this period were as shadowy to him as the rest of the experience. The odd thing was, the oddest thing, was that he had no recollection of ever having lived with a woman named Alma. “Are you positive the woman’s name was Alma?” he asked. His memory never used to be so poor.
“I have the idea she was astoundingly young,” said Tom. “Like sixteen. And she never wore shoes. She had this pair of orange sneakers that she wore around her neck with the laces tied together.”
“Not possible,” he said. If there was someone like that, some barefooted sixteen year old hippie who in some moment of distraction he had allowed to move in with him, her name at least was something else. He closed his eyes, worked at recovering the forgotten name of a woman he couldn’t believe he had ever known.
“When the fog lifted which was like once a week,” the shadow said, “you could see the water from the window of my room. Each time it appeared it was like some kind of miracle. Alma used to come in, I remember this very clearly, and stare at the ocean from my window. She said she was a water sign which meant looking into the water was like looking into herself.”
“There never was an Alma in my life,” Terman said.
The shadow across from him let out its breath in a staccato of disappointments.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Terman said. “It may be that your memory of that period is more accurate than mine. I concede that much.”
“Do you?” he asked. “What if there were a gun to your head, what would you say?”
“Whose gun are you thinking of putting to my head?”
“It was just a figure of speech, for God’s sake. You don’t have to be so literal about it.”
“It’s only a figure of speech when you don’t have a gun in your possession. I’ll ask you to give it back to me one last time.”
“Or what?”
“Is that the way you want it?” Terman asked.
“It’s the way you want it.” The voice childish, pained.
He thought to ask again for the return of the gun, but decided that further reiteration would only weaken the impact of his request. He was on the verge of saying something unforgivable. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” he said. Abruptly it came to him, the recollection interrupting the flow of his anger. “The girl’s name was Opal, the one with the braids around her head. She was very odd, had been living in an abandoned car on the beach before moving in with me. She was beautiful and profoundly remote. I took her vagueness for some kind of mystery.”