I asked if he had tried to bring me back, while he was stuck.
He hadn’t really thought of it.
That was when I broke up with him.
He had, I discovered, become quite successful while I was away. A critical darling, praised especially for the complexity, the reality, of his female characters.
Speaking of Marah in an interview, he described her as his one lost love. The interviewer found it romantic.
I found the interviewer tiresome. Being lost was not romantic at all.
Parts of me stayed lost, or got covered over by all those other women I had been for him. Sure, they were me, but they were his view of me, exaggerated, slightly shifted, truth told slanted.
I would turn up a song on the radio, then remember that it was Ali who liked gypsy punk. I abandoned my favorite bakery for two weeks when I convinced myself that I had Fiona’s gluten allergy.
For three months, I thought my name was Marah.
During all of this, there were intervals of normalcy. But I still felt the tugs as he borrowed little pieces of me for his fictions. I would lose my favorite perfume, or the memory of the first time I had my heart broken. Tiny bits of myself that would slough away, painlessly. Sometimes they would return when he wrote “The End.” More often, they did not.
I reminded him that he had promised not to write about me anymore. He assured me he hadn’t meant to. It was just bits, here and there. He’d be more careful. And really, I ought to be flattered.
But then a week of my life disappeared. I loved that short story, and Imogen was an amazing character, the kind of woman I wished I was. That wasn’t the point.
The point was, he had stolen me from myself again. I was just gone, and I didn’t know where I went. And there were more things about myself that I had forgotten. Was green really my favorite color?
I flicked on the computer, started typing madly. Everything I could remember about myself. But when I looked over the file, there were gaps that I knew I had once remembered, and duplications of events.
Panting, I stripped off my clothing and stared at myself, hoping that my body was more real than my mind. But was that scar on my knee from falling off my bike when I was twelve, or from a too-sharp rock at the beach when I was seventeen. Was that really how I waved hello? Would I cry at a time like this?
Anyone would, I supposed.
I tried to rewrite myself. I scoured boxes of faded flower petals, crumpled ticket stubs, paged obsessively through old yearbooks. Called friend after friend to play do you remember.
When I remembered enough to ask. To know who my friends were.
It didn’t work. Whatever gift he had or curse that I was under that let him pull me into his stories, it was a magic too arcane for me to duplicate.
And still, the gaps in my life increased. New changes happened. I woke one morning to find my hair was white. Not like an old woman’s, but the platinum white of a rock star or some elven queen.
I didn’t dye it back.
There was a collection published of his short fiction. He appeared on Best Of lists, and was shortlisted for important literary prizes.
I forgot if I took milk in my coffee.
He called, asked to see me. Told me he still loved me, was haunted by memories of my skin, my voice, my scent. I missed, I thought, those things, too. So I told him yes.
It took him a moment to recognize me, he said, when I walked across the bar to meet him. Something was different. I told him I didn’t know what that might be.
He ordered for both of us. I let him. I was sure he knew what I liked.
There was a story, he explained. He thought maybe the best thing he would ever write. He could feel the electricity of it crackle across his skin, feel the words that he would write pound and echo in his brain.
He had an outline that I could look at, see what I thought. He slid a slim folder across the table.
I wondered aloud why, this time, he would ask permission. This one was longer. An epic. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to write it. And after what had happened the last time, when I had…Well. He wanted to ask.
I appreciated the gesture.
I drummed my fingers across the top of the folder, but did not open it.
A waiter discreetly set a martini to the right of my plate. Funny. I had thought that it was Madeleine who drank martinis. But I sipped, and closed my eyes in pleasure at the sharpness of the alcohol.
I said yes.
To one more story, this masterpiece that I could see burning in his eyes. But I had a condition.
Anything, he said. Whatever I needed.
I wanted him to leave me in the story when he was finished.
He told me he had wondered if I might ask for that. I was surprised he hadn’t known. He nodded agreement, and that was settled.
We talked idly through dinner. Occasionally his eyes would unfocus, and I could see the lines of plot being woven together behind them.
I wondered what he would name me this time, almost asked, then realized it didn’t matter. Then realized I wasn’t even sure what my own name was anymore. Grace, maybe? I thought that sounded right. Grace.
He started scribbling on the cover of the folder while we were waiting for the check. I watched him write.
“Rafe fell in love with her voice first, tumbled into it when she introduced herself as…”
LET THE PAST BEGIN
Jonathan Carroll
EAMON REILLY WAS HANDSOME AND SLOPPY. He seemed to know everyone, even waitresses in restaurants. When he walked in the door, they beamed and began seriously flirting the minute he sat down at their table. I saw this happen several times at different places, places none of us had ever been to before. I asked if he knew these women but he always said no.
Eamon wore his heart on his sleeve and it worked. People cared about him even when he was being impossible, which was pretty often. He drove an old, badly neglected Mercedes that was filthy inside and out. Whenever you rode in it, he had to move stuff off the passenger’s seat and throw it in the back. Sometimes you couldn’t believe what was there—a metal dowsing rod; a box of diapers (he was single); a jai alai xistela; or once a very intimately autographed, badly wrinkled photo of a famous movie actress. He wrote everything in block letters so precise that you might have guessed it came from a typewriter. He kept a detailed daily diary but no one ever saw what was in it, although he carried the book around with him everywhere. His love life was a constant disaster and we wondered why no woman ever stayed with him for very long.
He had once been together with my girlfriend Ava for a couple of weeks. But she was no help when I finally got up the nerve to ask why she broke up with him. “We didn’t fit.”