The Forgetting Time: A Novel Read online

  She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across her face and the warm body close to hers; this moment, then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.

  And wasn’t this what she’d been after—this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive—something inward, perhaps?—but she didn’t know what it was or how to get there on her own.

  Then the ride was over, and they were standing there awkwardly, outside the hotel. It was late; they were tired. Her hair was coated with grime from the wind. A bumpy moment, and nothing to speed them over it. I should go inside and pack, she thought, but the wedding reception was going on in the banquet hall, and now they could hear the steel pan drums starting up, the sound rippling out across the night, carrying its own distinct, watery beat—drums invented years ago from the discarded cans of the oil companies, music from garbage. Who was she to resist? The humid air cradled her body like a large damp hand. “Want to go for a walk?” They said it both at the same time, as if it was meant to be.

  * * *

  Trouble, trouble, trouble, she said to herself as they walked, but his hand was warm in hers and she thought maybe she’d give herself this. Maybe it was all right. The wife was probably one of those women with hard, perfect faces, blond hair that gleamed around huge diamond studs. She wore short white skirts and flirted with the tennis instructor. So why should Janie care? But, no, that wasn’t right, was it? This man’s eyes were warm, genuine, even, if you can be calculating and genuine at the same time, which maybe you couldn’t be. And he liked her, Janie, with her imperfect face, her pretty blue eyes and slightly hooked nose and curly hair. So probably—probably the wife was lovely. She had long, swinging brown hair and kind eyes. She used to be a teacher but stayed home now, caring for the little ones, patient and gentle and too smart for the brutality of that life, it was sucking the lifeblood out of her and yet feeding her at the same time—she was loving, that’s what it was, this man was well loved (something in the relaxed way he moved, the shine on his face) and right now the wife was sleeping with all of their little ones in their big bed because it was easier that way, and she liked the warmth of their small bodies nestled against her, and she missed him so very much, and maybe she thought that sometimes on those long, long trips he was up to something but she trusted him because she wanted to because he had that boldness in his eyes, that life—

  Why do this to herself? Can’t she let herself have anything?

  He was pointing out the shells scattered across the beach while she was stuck there in her thoughts.

  She nodded absently.

  “No, look,” he said, taking her head in his big warm hands and pointing it toward the shore. “You need to look.”

  The shells were scuttling across the beach to the water, as if the sea was drawing them in with the power of its charm.

  “But—how?”

  “Sand crabs,” he said. His hands were still on her face, so it wasn’t hard for him to turn it toward him and kiss her once, twice, only twice, she was thinking, just a little taste and then they’d turn right back, but then he kissed her a third time and this time she felt all of her hunger rise up like a perfumed plume of smoke from a genie that had been locked in a bottle for a hundred years, encircling this man she barely knew—though her body knew him, it wrapped itself around him fiercely and kissed him as if he was the dearest of the dear. Their defenses fell away, like their clothes. And maybe it was some uncanny combination of chemicals triggering pheromones, and maybe they’d been lovers back among the pharaohs and had just now found each other, and who knew why, really? Who fucking knew?

  “Jee-sus,” he said. He pulled back from her a little, and she was pleased to see that all the confidence was rubbed clean away from his face and he was as stunned by it as she was—by the force of this passion that had no business being there but was there just the same, shocking the bejesus out of both of them, as if some Ouija board hijinks at a slumber party had summoned an actual ghost.

  To have sex on the beach (Wasn’t that a drink? Was this really her life, a cheesy cocktail?) with a man she didn’t know, who fooled around with women, without using a condom, was a very, very, very bad idea. But her body didn’t think so. And she’d never surrendered fully to anything in her life and perhaps it was time. She could hear the steel pan drums ringing like metallic bubbles loop de looping in the air, and the happy shouts of the revelers who were dancing, and the laughter of the bride and groom who were dancing, too, under that high, thatched roof. And she was almost forty and might never marry. And there was that lovely wife sleeping in that big bed with all those rosy-cheeked children and she had no one she was going back to, no house and no children and no husband, there was no one to love her at all except this warm body with its quick steady heartbeats and its burning life force. It was as if the page she’d been living on had been suddenly ripped from the binding, and she was on the loose side now, the torn, free side, fluttering down to the sandy shore, the moon rearing up high overhead.

  When their bodies had had their fill at last they clung to each other on the beach, gasping.

  “You…” He shook his head, smiling wonderingly, those alive and admiring eyes taking in her white, sand-abraded body glowing on the beach. He didn’t finish the thought; he stopped himself before finishing, having had an adult lifetime of just such discipline, and she didn’t know what it was he was going to say about her, though she knew she’d have the rest of her life to consider the possibilities. She had a sudden impulse to tell him something—to tell him everything, all her secrets, quickly, now, before the warmth began to fade, in the hope that there might be something she could continue to hang on to, a connection she might keep—

  Keep? She almost laughed at herself. Even with the present moment grinning in her face, she couldn’t help turning the other way.

  The end unraveled quickly. She was still processing what had happened, still replaying it in her mind as they walked slowly back to the hotel in silence, side by side, his hand touching her lightly on her back as they walked in a gesture that was part caress and part moving her onward.

  “Guess this is it, then.” He stood outside his door. “It was a real pleasure spending time with you.”

  His face was appropriately tender and somber, but she could feel the wind in him kicking up, this urgency running through him that was the opposite of what was running through her, and knew without saying anything that her desire to entangle and to linger had no chance against his need to get the hell out of the hallway and back on his own again.

  “Should we … exchange e-mail or something? Hey, you ever come to New York on business?” She tried to keep her voice light, but he looked at her sadly.

  She bit her lip.

  “All right, then,” she said. She could do this. She did do this. He leaned down and kissed her, a dry husbandly kiss that still took away a tiny part of her.

  * * *

  She didn’t know his last name. She realized that later. She hadn’t needed to know, the limits of the thing being so clear that they hardly needed to be described. She’d wished, later, though, that she had it—not for the birth certificate, nor through any wish to reach out to him and complicate his life, but simply for the story itself, so that she could say to Noah someday, “One night I met this man, and it was the most beautiful night that ever was. And his name was—”

  Jeff. Jeff Something.

  But maybe she had wanted it that way. Maybe she had planned it
that way. Because there was no finding Jeff Something from Houston, and it had only bound Noah to her more closely, made him even more hers.

  Two

  “But I’m not finished.” These were the words that popped unbidden out of Jerome Anderson’s mouth when the neurologist told him his life was functionally over.

  “Of course not. Mr. Anderson, this is by no means a death sentence.”

  He hadn’t meant his life, though; he’d meant his work. Which was his life, when you got right down to it.

  “It’s Doctor Anderson,” he said. He quieted his panic by watching the neurologist sitting across the table, her elegant hands fumbling as she proceeded to tell him about his illness.

  In the year since his wife had died, every woman he had met was simply Not Sheila, end of story. But suddenly he became aware again of the details that belonged only to living women: the way the doctor’s eyes were moistened slightly in sympathy, the rising and falling of the soft curves he could only barely make out under the white coat as she breathed. He saw the sunlight pooling on her glossy black hair as she sat at her desk, inhaled her smell of antibacterial soap mixed with something light, familiar—the citrusy scent of perfume.

  Something stirred inside of him as he looked at her, as if he was waking up from a long nap. Now? Really? Well, nobody ever said the mind was simple, or the body, either. And together they could certainly get up to some mischief. That was fodder for a study. Do patients facing serious impairment or death find their sexual organs aroused? He should shoot Clark an e-mail about it; he’d been doing some interesting studies on the mind-body connection. They could call it “An Inquiry into Eros/Thanatos.”

  “Dr. Anderson?”

  The desk clock was ticking, and beneath that, he could hear the breathing of the two of them.

  “Dr. Anderson. Do you understand what I’ve been telling you?”

  Breathing, a word that inhaled and exhaled. Lose a word like that, and you lose everything.

  “Dr.—”

  “Do I understand? Yes, I’m not that far gone. Yet. It seems I can still decode basic sentence structures.” He felt his voice beginning to slip from his control, checked it with difficulty.

  “Are you all right?”

  He felt his pulse. Seemed normal, but he didn’t trust it. “May I borrow your stethoscope?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want to check my heart rate. See how I’m really doing.” He smiled, which cost him something, a mustering of flagging resources. “Please. I’ll give it right back.” He winked. What the hell. She was going to call psych on him any minute now. “Promise.”

  She pulled the stethoscope from her long neck and handed it to him. Her eyes were baffled, alert. Did this wracked being still have a spark of mojo left? He glimpsed himself in the reflection of the window behind her, barely visible against the blazing metal of cars in the parking lot: was that hollow-cheeked apparition really his face? He had never cared much about his looks, aside from knowing that they had sometimes helped him with the subjects in his work, yet now he felt the loss with a pang. He still had his hair, though the curls women used to like were long gone.

  The stethoscope smelled faintly like her. He realized why the perfume was familiar to him. It was something Sheila used to wear when they went someplace nice for dinner. Probably he had bought it for her. He had no idea what it was; she’d always written down what she’d wanted and he’d dutifully given it for Christmas and birthdays, never paying attention to the details, his mind on other things.

  Heart rate was a bit high, if not as rapid as he had supposed.

  Sheila would have laughed at him, Come on now, stop examining yourself and just feel it, will you?—the way she’d laughed at him on their wedding night (was it forty-four years ago already?) when he had battered her with questions, midcoitus, “and this feels good, like this? But this, right here, this doesn’t?” in his eagerness to figure out what worked, his curiosity egging him on, as strong as the desire itself. And what was so wrong with that? Sex, like death, was important, and yet why did no one seem to care enough to ask the questions that mattered? Kinsey did, and Kübler-Ross (and he had, too, or had tried), but they were rare and often faced the hostility of a pea-brained, backward-looking scientific establishment … Let it go, Jer, he heard Sheila say. Just let it go.

  He should have been embarrassed—his bride laughing at him on his wedding night, the stuff of comedy—but it merely confirmed to him the wisdom of the choice he’d made. She laughed because she understood what kind of animal he was, she accepted his need to know along with the rest of him, that whole human fleshsack of quirks and failings.

  “Dr. Anderson.” The doctor had come around the desk, placed her hand on his arm. That was something he’d never thought of, years ago, when he’d been a resident delivering bad news: the power of touch. He could feel the faint pressure of her nails through the cotton of his shirt. He began to sweat at the thought that she was going to take her hand off, so he pulled his arm away roughly, noting the startled instinctive frown as she processed the rejection. She retreated behind her desk, her diplomas on either side of her: staunch little soldiers in their Latin uniforms. “Are you all right? Can I answer any questions?”

  He forced his mind back to what she had been telling him. Back to the moment when she had said that word: aphasia. A word like a pretty girl in a summer dress wielding a dagger aimed at his heart.

  Aphasia, from the Greek word Aphatos, meaning: speechless.

  “The prognosis is definite?’

  A cart rolled through the hallway outside the room, liquids in glasses tinkling.

  “The prognosis is definite.”

  Surely there were other questions.

  “I’m not sure I understand. I didn’t have brain trauma, or a stroke.”

  “This is a rarer form of aphasia. Primary progressive aphasia is a progressive type of dementia affecting the brain’s language center.”

  Dementia. Now that was a word he would happily lose.

  “Like—” He forced himself to say it. “Alzheimer’s?” Did he study this in med school? Was it significant that he didn’t remember?

  “PPA is a language disorder, but yes. You might say they were cousins.”

  “What a family.” He laughed.

  “Dr. Anderson?” The neurologist was looking at him as if he was unhinged.

  “Relax, Dr. Rothenberg. I’m fine. Just—processing, as they say. My life, after all…” He sighed. “Such as it was. ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause.’” He smiled at her, but her expression was unchanged. “Oh, good grief, woman, don’t look so alarmed—don’t they teach Shakespeare at Yale anymore?”

  He yanked off the stethoscope, handing it to her. You see what I have to lose? He raged inwardly. Things I never thought I’d lose. Is there life after Shakespeare? Now that is a question worth asking.

  Is there life after work?

  But he wasn’t finished.

  “Perhaps you’d like to talk to someone—there’s a social worker—or, if you prefer, a psychiatrist—”

  “I am a psychiatrist.”

  “Dr. Anderson. Listen to me.” He noted, but could not feel, the concern in her eyes. “Many people with primary progressive aphasia continue to take care of themselves for six or seven years. More, in some cases. And yours is in the very early stages.”

  “So I’ll be able to feed myself and—wipe myself and all of that? For years to come?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Just not be able to talk. Or read. Or communicate in any way with the rest of mankind.”

  “The disease is progressive, as I’ve indicated. Eventually, yes, verbal and written communication will become extremely difficult. But cases vary widely. In many instances, the impairments progress quite gradually.”

  “Until?”

  “Parkinson’s-like symptoms can develop, along with decline in memory,
judgment, mobility, et cetera.” She paused. “This can often impact life expectancy.”

  “Time frame?” The two words were all he could manage.

  “The conventional wisdom is seven to ten years from diagnosis to death. But there are some recent studies that—”

  “And the treatment?”

  She paused again.

  “There is no treatment for PPA at this point in time.”

  “Ah. I understand. Well, thank God it isn’t a death sentence.”

  So this is what it felt like. He’d always wondered; he knew what it was like to be on the other side of the desk. So many years ago now, those months they made the psych residents give out the most severe diagnoses, said it was “practice,” though sadism was more like it. He remembered the hand-trembling anxiety of entering that room where the patient waited (hands in your pockets, that was his mantra back then: hands in your pockets, voice calm, a mask of professionalism that fooled nobody); then the wild relief when it was done. They’d kept a bottle of vodka under the sink in the psych bathroom for such occasions.

  This doctor now, this cutting-edge neurologist they’d sent him to (coiffed, polished—her makeup itself a kind of bravado) must’ve delivered a good dozen of these a month (it was one of her specialties, after all) and still looked peaked around the edges. He hoped there was a bottle of something for her somewhere, when this was done.

  “Dr. Anderson—”

  “Jerry.”

  “Is there anyone we can call for you? A child, perhaps? A sibling? Or—a wife?”

  He met her gaze. “I’m alone.”

  “Oh.” The sympathy in her eyes was unbearable.

  He took it all in and rejected it at the same time. He wasn’t finished. He would not let himself be finished. It was still possible to get the book done. He would write quickly; that’s all he’d do. He could finish in a year or two, before simple nouns and then language itself became alien to him.