But the frozen block of Walter and his physicist cohorts is rather like a library, is it not? Karl Popper’s World 3 out there for all of us. In it we can leap from after to before at will. If I choose, I can remove Plato’s Apology from the shelf or pluck up the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poems, now printed in a beautiful edition, and, if I devise an eccentric system for my library, the two might be neighbors. Socrates explained himself in 399 B.C. and then he killed himself, as everyone knows, but only a very few know even now that the Baroness referred often to suicide in her writings and that she came from a family of suicides and that, tired and poor, she may have killed herself with a newly bought gas stove in her cold Paris flat in 1927. Therefore in my library Plato’s Socrates can kiss the Baroness with the hemlock still on his lips because time is not a problem in the library, despite the fact that the ugly sage preferred boys and would, no doubt, have regarded the Baroness as a monster. Temporal coexistence is true of every single book as well. You can hop to page 137 and then back to page 7 twenty times over, but the story or the argument is fixed, determined from first word to last. And in this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory. Here I am free to dance over decades in the small white space between paragraphs or linger over one bright minute in my life for page after page or toy with tenses that point backward or forward. I am free to follow the earlier self with interruptions from the later self because the old lady has perspective the young person cannot have. I meet myself on the page, then, on the pages she wrote years ago and the ones I am writing now. A young woman sits in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street and raises her eyes from her book when she hears the door open and they fall on a handsome stranger as he walks through the door. My guess is that any onlooker, if she or he had bothered to glance even for an instant at the young woman’s face, would have seen hope in her expression.

  September 10, 1978

  Dear Page,

  Hungarian Pastry Shop today, 4:15: Grinning young man with short, neat beard comes in and gets a coffee. Sits down at table next to me, gives me a significant nod and smile. I feel a constriction in my breathing, that pleasurable tightness of possibility. Good-looking, brown hair, slender, slightly freckled straight nose with delicate nostrils that flare to reveal pale pink interior. Smallest overlap of two front teeth—a fetching flaw. He begins. Names exchanged. Aaron, Aaron Blinderman. My turn. That’s an unusual name, he says. What is it? Norwegian, I say. Oh, Norwegian, he says. Brief explanation by me of immigrant history on both sides out there on the Minnesota prairie. Aaron seems pleased by my Nordic roots and launches into description of his anthropology thesis. Good start. I am interested in everything. Aaron is immersed in the Hua of New Guinea. I know nothing of the Hua and say so. My ignorance pleases him, although I can’t say why. His head bobs. He smiles. I can see his chest expand. Aaron takes some time setting the Melanesian stage—living arrangements, food, and tools. I am bored. I am not entirely ignorant of anthropology. I have read Lévi-Strauss. Then he speaks of something called Nu, a dynamic traveling force among the people, a kind of life principle. This idea enlivens me. I ask questions. He uses his index finger to answer and make his points, shaking it at me. The finger is rarely still. I don’t like the finger. He tells me that in Hua culture, women are pollutants, to which I say, “Oh.” He is lecturing me now, and I notice he cannot keep his eyes on my face, despite the insistent finger. Hua women are semen stealers. They sap men’s strength. With each drop of the precious fluid the women grow stronger, more vital, more dangerous. Hua men strenuously battle the urge for sex because it will drain the life out of them. They have to hoard their goo just to stay alive. Aaron is adamant my breasts should know about this all-important sex-death connection. I begin to say something, but he continues. I think Aaron may want to smother himself to death between my very own tits, which is probably not a Hua practice. I cannot say, Please look up at my face, Aaron. He probably doesn’t even know he is speaking to my boobs. I am patient, but after a bit more of the Hua hooey, I feel pressure in my chest, a suffocating discomfort so strong I have to flee. I tell him I have an appointment and must run. It was so nice talking to you, so interesting, good luck, yada, yada, yada. I begin to stand up, and Aaron reaches across from his table and grabs my wrist. He hisses, “You’re beautiful, do you know that? Really beautiful.”

  I recall that my cheeks felt hot, and I stuttered, but now only a few hours later, I’m not sure what I said to him. He loosened his fingers from my arm, looked up at me with a pleading face, and I felt bad—that little tug beneath my ribs. I thanked him again for the conversation. I smiled. At the door I gave him a wave. I could see the disappointment in his face and it pierced me. I had been kind, but I felt as if I had been mean. I felt bruised—guilty, ashamed, humiliated—as if those various feelings were not distinct as they should have been but had merged into an amorphous blob in my upper gut. I stood on the hot street and wondered if in an hour or so Aaron might not have improved. Maybe it would have been better to listen a little longer to stories about the Hua just for his company. I am pining for a real conversation. And here’s the truth: If he had kept his mouth shut and his eyes straight ahead, I might have jumped in bed with him just because of those adorable teeth.

  The bad feeling stuck inside me, and I decided to walk it off. I went over to Broadway and headed downtown, feeling hungry, not for food, but for something else, someone close, someone I already knew and loved. Aaron and the Hua had made me feel much lonelier, and I recited the poem by the Bad Baroness I had discovered in the archive:

  And God spoke kindly to mine heart—

  So kindly spoke he to mine heart—

  He said: “Thou art allowed to fart!”

  So kindly spoke he to mine heart.

  And I smiled and walked and talked to myself: The Narration of Perambulation. (I thought of that as a title for something.) Words and phrases surfaced and retreated, and within a block or two I was telling Kari all about Blinderman and making him funnier than he was for her, and then thoughts of my mother arrived, no, not thoughts. I felt her hand on my shoulder and the sympathetic pat of her hand. The words “Mama, I’m afraid” rose up, and I shook them off. But my fellow pedestrians began to undulate in liquid, and I decided not to go back to the apartment. I knew my head would explode if I read more today. To hell with Husserl! I decided I would not go back to the apartment and read, and I would not sit in another café and read, and as I walked fast and kept time with the hard, even beat of my feet on the cement, I realized my thoughts had hovered onto Lucy Brite and from Lucy Brite to Lindy’s fall and Lindy’s death, to that fragment of a story I had heard through the wall. I tried to supplant Lucy and Lindy with Ian and Isadora, but it didn’t work and instead I saw a window and a man push a girl out of it, and I watched her fall to the ground and land in an empty space between two buildings—a no-man’s-land with a few weeds on the parched, untended ground struggling feebly upward in the direction of the thin sunlight—and the more I walked, the more I saw, and time moved backward so the story could begin earlier.

  For some reason, the room where the terrible thing takes place is bare. It has no furniture. A tall man with thinning dark hair and a flushed angry face shoves a small girl in overalls against the wall. She cries out and another girl, somewhat older—she has long braids—comes running, and she throws her arms around the man’s waist to pull him away from the younger girl, and there is a struggle. The girl in braids bites the man’s arm and leaves vivid teeth marks, after which his blood begins to run from each sharp indentation on his skin and down his hand in brilliant red lines. The children are screaming. The man picks up the younger girl to restrain her, but she escapes his grip, runs to the window, and he pushes her out. Her body lies two floors beneath them. One of her arms is twisted in the wrong direction and her thin legs in the striped overalls are splayed out. The sight made me wince as I walked, but I kept walking and, as I kept walking, I understood that I had imagined the murder in the front room of my apartment, the one with no furniture, and that I had seen the little girl’s body lying in the small, ugly patch of land between my building and the one next door. I tried to expel the fantasy.

  If I hadn’t found the Thalia movie theater, everything would have been different, but when I hit Ninety-Fifth Street, I saw its marquee and the name of an old movie, Cluny Brown, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and I went in and bought a ticket, and the movie took me right up and out of myself and away from the sadness and the terrible merged feelings and from Aaron Blinderman and Lucy Brite and the dead Lindy, who seemed to have become Lucy’s sister. I sat next to an older woman with an enormous plastic shopping bag on her lap. When we walked out of the theater, I noticed her hard red curls had white roots and she was dressed entirely in purple. She even wore a watch with a violet band. A real character, Aunt Irma would have said. But while we sat there together watching the immense people on the screen, we laughed at the same time and we were quiet at the same time, and I felt that the purple lady and I were friends in the near dark of the cinema. I smiled at her afterward but she gave me a hard, unfriendly look in return. For an instant, I felt pained, but that twinge had no more resonance than a single guitar string after it has been plucked. I left the theater and trotted home reinvigorated for my on-my-own-all-alone battle, and I made myself chicken livers with onions for protein, 39 cents a pound, and I drank two big glasses of milk. I am now writing to you about my strange day with cotton balls in my ears, but I can still hear you-know-who through the wall, and I’m still titillated and disturbed, and I hope she doesn’t chant too loudly or scream in the middle of the night.

  Good night, my dear P. Libellus.

  S.

  I only vaguely remember Blinderman. I certainly couldn’t describe him from memory, and I couldn’t have reported on his wagging finger or his lecture on the Hua’s misogyny. I trust the notebook for those details. What I have not forgotten about that day are the distress and confusion I experienced after I left the anthropology student, my tormented walk down Broadway, and the movie I saw at the Thalia that made me feel much better. I also remember the purple woman vividly, although I have no explanation for why she made a lasting impression. The unappetizing dinner I seemed to enjoy of chicken livers and a quart of milk has gone the way of Wanda. But I can say this: Although I don’t remember young Aaron Blinderman with any precision, he was one of many, and the many have been conflated in my mind to become one, one sort of man I encountered again and again, a man, younger or older, whose eyes continually strayed from my face to parts below, a man who talked and talked and talked and asked me no questions, a helpful, smiling, knowing man who for reasons that baffled me seemed to believe I was incompetent in all matters large and small, a man who, by the end of the evening, when I had risked dinner in my irrepressible hope for company and perhaps love, was all hands and saliva and urgent needs and who now and again had to be forcibly pushed away. He, that reduction of many men into one man, inevitably looked betrayed and puzzled or betrayed and miffed as he stood on the street or outside the door to my apartment, or sat beside me in a taxi, or had squeezed against me in a corner of a nightclub as the strobe lights flashed above us.

  Surely, if that plural man remembers me at all, he remembers as I remember, not me but my type, a tall blonde whose face he can no longer decipher. And if he remembers a person, it is unlikely he will recall what attracted him to me beyond my type. I, too, have become an absence or a blur in the mind of that multiple man—one of many comely young women who shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  Sometimes memory is a knife.

  As I read through the pages of my old notebook in the guest room of the retirement complex after a day of garbage bags and boxes and the screech of packing tape and chortling with Kari over our early drawings we scrutinized for identifying characteristics—“it’s yours, I know it’s yours. I never drew dog noses like that”—there were moments when I had to place the notebook facedown on the night table beside me and stare at the dresser with its paneled veneer that had been made to look like oak but wasn’t oak and at the wax apples in a bowl that sat on top of it to collect myself. When I reached the words “Aaron reaches across from his table and grabs my wrist,” I began to tremble. I do not mean this figuratively. My hands shook as I read. What made that asshole think he had the right to seize my wrist? And I, or she (easier to say she), why did she protect the oh-so-delicate feelings of someone whose hectoring ways and pointed descriptions of the practices of that New Guinea tribe already counted as hostile acts? Rather than yank her wrist away from that pompous nincompoop and bark at him, she runs out the door and, once on the street, cannot comprehend why she feels wounded.

  Nudge it—

  Kick it—

  Prod it—

  Push it—

  The Baroness wrote those lines in a poem called “A Dozen Cocktails, Please.” And as I lay there in the guest room of the retirement center, I nudged, kicked, prodded, and pushed Aaron Blinderman into the back wall of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and I waggled my finger at him and stuck out my tongue and farted for good measure and roared into his amazed face that he should keep his goddamned hands off me without my express permission, and the rebellious fantasy relieved me. We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable. I know I never backed young Blinderman against the wall, but I also know I have countless memories that must be wrong, memories I have dressed up with wishes. Kari remembers differently from me or she remembers and I forget or I remember and she forgets. She is certain she saved our turtle, Dinky, from the jaws of the Harringtons’ sheepdog, Laurence, and I am certain I held the dog’s mouth as he slavered over my hands and I plucked Dinky from his jaws. It is indisputably true that although each of us wished to have been the agent of that daring exploit, only one of us was the hero, and in the annals of our childhood, it is also true that the hero was usually Kari, not me.

  * * *

  Lucy didn’t stop talking. I bought a radio for music, but when she began her “I’m sads,” I turned it off, and I listened. I had mentioned my tender feeling for the stethoscope in a letter to my parents, and my mother sent it to me in a small package with a note:

  My Dearest Darling,

  I am glad you are doing so well. Your father smiled when he read about the stethoscope. We still have tomatoes and squash, and I am picking the late raspberries. Yesterday I had coffee with Rosemary Petersen, who sends her best to you. Ellen is in law school. When I took my walk yesterday, I felt the change in the air, the fall snap. The season changes so fast these days—winter will be here in a blink. I brought home a bouquet of long grasses and arranged them in one of Lila Hernke’s ceramic pots. They look lovely.

  Be careful. I love you. Mama

  The stethoscope amplified every sound. It was as if I were a blind woman inside Lucy Brite’s apartment. I heard my neighbor breathe and sigh and walk across the room. I listened to her whistling, her brief ejaculations, her monologues, and sometimes to her TV when she watched it, reruns of Kojak mostly. I would settle myself on the floor with a pillow for my head, a blanket underneath me to cushion the oak, and the stethoscope plugged into my ears. I had both my notebook and Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, the novel I was reading in the evening for entertainment and inspiration, but when Lucy began to speak, I would fling Pickle to the side and plant the chest piece against the wall with an eagerness that embarrassed me. If someone had seen what I was doing, I would have been more than embarrassed, I would have been ashamed, but my secret act of auditory spying—an oxymoron that nevertheless fits the behavior—brought me a voluptuous pleasure I had never known before and which I have never forgotten. Over the years, I have tried to pick apart my motives and analyze the almost erotic feeling that accompanied my eavesdropping (a word from the Old Norse, ups for “eaves” and dropi for “drop.” Water drips from the eaves of a house, and over time transmutes into words picked up by a clandestine listener.) My neighbor dribbled drops of a larger story, a frightening story I wanted to know, but more than that, on hindsight I believe my listening had an aggressive quality I failed to understand at the time. I crossed a threshold and entered Lucy Brite’s rooms by ear alone, and this unseemly invasion excited me.

  Sometimes Lucy spoke directly to a “you.” He had a name, Ted. He was the one who had felt he had the right to treat her badly—“your bitch to kick”—and sometimes she moaned or gasped out little fragments of her past or what I guessed were childhood stories. But sometimes her “you” was herself, it seemed. She also changed her voice. It fell deep and rose high, as if she were embodying different people as they spoke. I recorded all of them to the best of my ability, but I wished I knew shorthand, the mysterious dashes and squiggles I had seen Mrs. Stydnicki use in my father’s office. I devised my own system of abbreviation so I could write fast. I left out articles and prepositions and filled them in later. My handwriting was slovenly. When her voice fell so low that I couldn’t hear her, I used ellipses. Years after the notebook disappeared, I began to long to see those entries again. Although I remembered their gist, I had lost memory of their exact content.