False Memory

Susan shrugged. “Maybe I was too ashamed.”

“Ashamed? What would you have to be ashamed about?”

“Oh, I don’t know….” She looked puzzled and finally said, “Why would I feel ashamed?”

To Martie it appeared, amazingly, as though Susan were thinking this through for the first time, right here, right now.

“Well…I guess maybe because…because I wasn’t enough for him, not good enough in bed for him.”

Martie gaped at her. “Who am I talking to? You’re gorgeous, Sooz, you’re erotic, you have a healthy sex drive—”

“Or maybe I wasn’t there for him emotionally, wasn’t supportive enough?”

Pushing the cards aside without totaling the points, Martie said, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“I’m not perfect, Martie. Far from it.” A sorrow, quiet but as heavy and gray as lead, pressed her voice thin. She lowered her eyes, as though embarrassed. “I failed him somehow.”

Her contrition seemed profoundly inappropriate, and her words angered Martie. “You give him everything — your body, your mind, your heart, your life — and you give it in that totally over-the-top, all-or-nothing, passionate Susan Jagger trademark style. Then he cheats on you, and you blame yourself?”

Frowning, turning an empty beer bottle around and around in her slender hands, gazing at it as though it were a talisman that might, with sufficient handling, magically provide full understanding, Susan said, “Maybe you’ve just put your finger on it, Martie. Maybe the trademark Susan Jagger style just…smothered him.”

“Smothered him? Give me a break.”

“No, maybe it did. Maybe—”

“What’s with all these maybes?” Martie asked. “Why are you inventing a series of excuses for the pig? What was his excuse?”

Hard shatters of rain made tuneless music against the windowpanes, and from a distance came the ominous, rhythmic booming of storm waves hammering the shore.

“What was his excuse?” Martie pressed.

Susan turned the beer bottle more slowly than before, and now slower still, and when at last she stopped turning it altogether, she was frowning in evident confusion.

Martie said, “Susan? What was his excuse?”

Putting the bottle aside, gazing at her hands as she folded them on the table, Susan said, “His excuse? Well…I don’t know.”

“We’re all the way down the rabbit hole and at the tea party,” Martie declared, exasperated. “What do you mean you don’t know? Honey, you catch him having an affair, and you don’t want to know why?”

Susan shifted uneasily in her chair. “We didn’t talk about it much.”

“Are you serious? That isn’t you, girlfriend. You’re no milquetoast.”

Susan spoke more slowly than usual, with a thickness of tone like that in the voice of a freshly roused sleeper who was not yet fully awake: “Well, we talked about it a little, you know, and this could be the cause of my agoraphobia, but we didn’t talk the dirty details.”

This conversation had grown so deeply strange that Martie sensed a hidden and perilous truth in it, an elusive insight that would suddenly explain all of this troubled woman’s problems, if only she could grasp it.

Susan’s statements were simultaneously outrageous and vague. Disturbingly vague.

“What was this woman’s name?” Martie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Good God. Eric didn’t tell you?”

Finally Susan raised her head. Her eyes were unfocused, as though she were staring at someone other than Martie, in another place and time. “Eric?”

Susan had spoken the name with such puzzlement that Martie turned in her chair to survey the room behind her, expecting to find that Eric had silently entered. He wasn’t there.

“Yeah, Sooz, remember old Eric? Hubby. Adulterer. Swine.”

“I didn’t…”

“What?”

Now Susan’s voice faded to a whisper, and her face was eerily devoid of expression, as inanimate as the face of a doll. “I didn’t learn about this from Eric.”

“Then who told you?”

No reply.

The wind dropped, not shrieking anymore. But its cold whispering and sly cooing knotted the nerves more effectively than had its voice at full bleat.

“Sooz? Who told you Eric was screwing around?”

Susan’s flawless skin was no longer the color of peaches and cream, but as pale and translucent as skimmed milk. A single drop of perspiration appeared at her hairline.

Reaching across the table, Martie held one hand in front of her friend’s face.

Susan apparently didn’t see it. She stared through the hand.

“Who?” Martie gently insisted.

Suddenly, numerous beads of sweat were strung across Susan’s brow. Her hands had been folded on the table, but now they were fiercely clenched, the skin stretched tight and white across the knuckles, the fingernails of her right hand digging hard into the flesh of her left.

Ghost spiders crawled along the back of Martie’s neck and crept down the staircase of her spine.

“Who told you Eric was screwing around?”

Still staring at some specter, Susan tried to speak but could not get a word out. Her mouth turned soft, trembled, as though she were about to break into tears.

Susan seemed to have been silenced by a phantom hand. The sense of another presence in the room was so powerful that Martie wanted to turn again and look behind her; but no one would be there.

Her hand was still raised in front of Susan. She snapped her fingers.

Susan twitched, blinked. She looked at the cards that Martie had pushed aside, and incredibly she smiled. “Whipped my ass good. You want another beer?”

Her demeanor had changed in an instant.

Martie said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Who told you Eric was screwing around?”

“Oh, Martie, this is too boring.”

“I don’t find it boring. You—”

“I won’t talk about this,” Susan said with airy dismissiveness, rather than with anger or embarrassment, either of which would have seemed more appropriate. She waved one hand as if she were chasing off a bothersome fly. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Good grief, Sooz, you can’t drop a bombshell like that and then just—”

“I’m in a good mood. I don’t want to spoil it. Let’s talk Martha Stewart crap or gossip, or something frivolous.” She sprang up from her chair almost girlishly. On the way into the kitchen, she said, “What was your decision on that beer?”

This was one of those days when being sober didn’t have a lot of appeal, but Martie declined a second Tsingtao anyway.

In the kitchen, Susan began singing “New Attitude,” Patti LaBelle’s classic tune. Her voice was good, and she sang with buoyant conviction, especially when the lyrics claimed I’m in control, my worries are few.

Even if Martie had known nothing about Susan Jagger, she was sure that nevertheless she would have detected a note of falseness in this apparently cheerful singing. When she thought of how Susan had looked only minutes ago — in that trancelike state, unable to speak, skin as pale as a death mask, brow beaded with sweat, eyes focused on a distant time or place, hands clawing at each other — this abrupt transition from catatonia to exuberance was eerie.