extremes.
They decided it would be a good idea. He was touched that she was agreeable to going. They changed their route.
She was splendid, fundamentally. They were going to the Sun for his sake. There were plenty of reasons she would usually prefer to avoid the Sun, the gauntlet of prostitutes you had to run in order to get in the door being one of them, but that was usually only a nighttime problem. There were the beggars who assumed that everybody leaving the Sun had broken the bank. There were the Boers who had come up for black sex where nobody they knew would see them. But it was the hawkers, the lace sellers, who upset her the most. There was a vendor encampment extending along the road paralleling the Sun’s frontage. The lace sellers dominated the encampment and completely controlled the choice area directly across from the entrance gate. Their lace goods were displayed along fences or on makeshift racks, or carried out into the traffic by the hawkers, hardlooking matrons, and unfurled for pedestrians and slower-moving cars. For occasional shelter from the sun the hawkers would repair to lean-tos crafted from sticks, cardboard, and burlap sacking. The encampment was a hell of dust, shouting, and carbon monoxide pumped out by the idling engines of vehicles pulled up on the shoulder of the road for the purpose of browsing. The ratio of sales to stopped cars was pitifully low.
Iris had a history with these people. She had tried to help them. The bedspreads and tablecloths and mantillas and runners being sold were items that united incredible craftsmanship with appallingly cheap materials. That was the problem. The shawl Iris was wearing constituted a case in point. She was forever fiddling with it, gluing up broken threads, tightening it up in one way or another. Iris had spoken to several of the lace-makers about the mismatch, and they had seemed to understand. As he remembered it, she had gone so far as to locate a source for better linen thread for them, and they had seemed interested. What was the point of constructing these intricate and potentially beautiful objects out of what amounted to packing twine? But there had been no outcome.
It occurred to him that Iris had spoken to the wrong people. There was a hidden government among the hawkers. There always is, he thought. He could delve. There was a top woman, who occupied the prime spot in the encampment and whose lace stand was shaded by golf umbrellas, new ones. She was probably the one to speak to, not that it would do any good. He could find out, if Iris wanted to pursue it. She liked to correct things. She thought the world was more pliable than it is. Every time she saw the cordon of prostitutes around the entrance to the Sun, her mind ran in the direction of what could be done for them. She had a general impulse toward social helpfulness that somehow never resulted in organized action, like working with the gleaners the way Alice Wemberg had, actually getting out of the house and going to the site of the iniquity. He knew what she would say about that. She would say, if they were ever able to discuss it honestly, that he discouraged it, in part because it would raise their profile, which was always to be avoided, and in part because… he needed her so inordinately. For example, he always wanted to know where she was and that wherever she was it was a reasonable place to be, a safe place. Because the fact was that without her the world would be unintelligible to him. That much was true.
“Did I miss anything?” he asked her.
“Oh, only a fascinating dispute between the man who spoke so beautifully, Mister Kerekang, and a man who’s still not your favorite person, I gather.”
“Tell me.”
“Well I didn’t get all of it, remember. Possibly because I had to stop and concentrate on particular things I knew you’d find interesting, like the reasons Davis gave for wanting to be in Africa…”
He felt taut. It appeared that what she had was Morel’s mission statement, or what he was interested in having people think was his mission statement. He was taut because the underlying burning question of what exactly was going on with her over at Morel’s was with him constantly, like indigestion. That question would be coming up and into the light sometime soon, if not tonight. It would happen before she left for the States, that was certain. It could be tonight, depending on what she had to say about Morel in the next segment. Going to the Sun rather than going home was a way of postponing the conversation, for him if not for her. Was she cooperating with his struggle to postpone the Morel question, the full-dress moment? She seemed blithe enough. He was the one with the problem. He was the one with the full plate. They had to be at home when he picked the moment to thrash the thing out, or was it thresh the thing out? For an instant both words seemed equally correct in the phrase, a sign that he was getting old, proof positive.
“Let’s see,” she said. “Let’s see how I do with my memory palace.”
“Your memory palace.”
“You know what that is?”
“I think I do,” he said. Of course he knew. “You mean where you visualize a building you know every detail of by heart and then use different features of it to pigeonhole pieces of information so you can recover them by association.”
“Davis suggested the idea to me. It’s a simple concept. I must’ve heard of it in the past but just never paid attention to it or never thought it was relevant to me. He mentioned it when I was complaining about my short- term memory.”
“You think your short-term memory is worse lately, but it isn’t. You’ve always had an erratic memory.”
“Well, I beg to differ. But it doesn’t matter. It was bothering me, so I included it in my long menu of objections to myself and my body. And Davis made this suggestion, which I’ve been employing for a few weeks and which, well, which I think helps. I could be wrong. Do you notice any improvement?”
“Maybe so. I don’t know. You’re variable.” There was nothing wrong with using memory palaces if you needed to. This device had been covered during training. But he never used it. His memory worked without tricks. When he absorbed a scene or a sequence it was an effortless process. It was a form of becoming the scene, surrendering to it. He was unusual, when it came to memory, it was a gift. In the agency he was regarded as a prodigy, or once had been. He was pleased if using memory palaces was genuinely going to work for her. They would see.
He wondered what template she used for her memory palace. It would be one of the houses she’d lived in when she was growing up, undoubtedly. That was what he’d used when he’d tried the technique out. He was curious to know.
“I’m curious,” he said. “I’m curious to know what edifice you’re using for your memory palace. I don’t mean to be intruding.” He realized that he wanted it to be the house they were living in.
“Oh nononono. There’s nothing secret about this. Please. Actually I have two I use. One as you might expect is our house, going in the front door, to the right and then to the left, room by room, and I can start with the driveway, the yard, to expand it. That’s one memory palace. But I have another one for less complicated sequences.”
He broke in. “Ensembles,” he said. She might as well know the technical term.
“Thank you, ensembles, then. So for less complicated ensembles I have another one that works very well, even better. I use it all the time. It’s dynamite.”
Ray was used to acting as her spare brain, her spare memory. He remembered the titles of books she’d read, and their authors, for example. She had relied on him, deferred to him, when a question of authorship came up, or the question of the title of a movie she could remember the basic plot of, and not much else. He might know who wrote the background music, not that anyone ever plumbed him for that. Amazing things from the tail end of movie credits would stick with him. Directors, he always knew. His remembering one thing or another for her had never been the occasion of any sort of fireworks or notice. It was just that he remembered the passing world better than she did, in more detail than she did, and so what?
He asked, “So what is the other template you use?”
“Hm,” was all she said.
“Oh come on.”
“I’m having second thoughts, I think.”
“Now I’m interested. Come on.”
“Hm,” she said again. She was being coy.
He said, “To my coy mistress, please tell me.”
“Okay,” she said. “I use yow.”
“In what sense?”
“
