Yet her memory is not without its own shortcomings. She cannot remember, for example, Meg Sand’s last name. Sand is just something she’s made up as a placeholder. Whatever the real name is, she thinks, it must be so ordinary, so unremarkable, as to be mind-numbing in the most literal sense. For a while she thought it might have been Whitman, until realizing that that was the name of the CEO who had run unsuccessfully for governor of California. Because she can’t remember Meg Sand’s real name, she hasn’t been able to repeat it to herself and she hasn’t been able to look her up online.
But she doubts that she would ever type Meg’s name into a search box, even if she could. Her curiosity is nil. There’s nothing more she wants to know. For the nearly twenty years that she’s had the video in her possession, not once has she felt the faintest need to watch it again. The first time was enough, and even then she didn’t watch it all the way through. Very clearly she remembers how surprised she was that she could operate the playback function on the camera in the first place. She’d never used the camera before or been interested in how it worked. But there was something about the way it was resting beneath Ezra’s desk, balanced casually on top of the paper shredder, its little screen popped open, that made her stop.
She put down the box she was carrying. Inside, still in its protective wrapping, was a five-piece place setting of the wedding china that Ezra’s aunts had gently insisted they register for. There was no room or use for china in their basement apartment. With ceremonial care she had been stacking the boxes in the corner of the bedroom not already taken up by Ezra’s massive computer. Though he had gallantly carried her over the threshold, marriage had done little to change their abode other than to make it feel smaller and darker. When she put down the china, the last to arrive, her hands were shaking. This is another detail she recalls with perfect clarity: her hands shaking even before she picked up the camera and turned it on.
A bed piled with tasseled pillows; a framed black-and-white poster, only a corner of which appears in the shot; a long white body, naked except for a pair of knee-high gladiator sandals. The soles of the sandals as flat and beige as pancakes.
And then from offscreen his voice, the voice that she had first heard in history class, telling the body what he’d like it to do.
She couldn’t hit the square of the stop button quickly enough. Straightaway she ejected the cassette, which was smaller than a tin of breath mints. She wandered back and forth the length of the apartment, holding it carefully in the palm of her hand. She thought about stuffing it down to the bottom of the garbage can, or wrapping it in layers of newspaper and tossing it in a dumpster, or dropping it down the echoing trash chute at work. She also thought about cracking open the plastic shell and plucking out the two black reels inside and melting them over the stove—then wondered about the strands of videotape she sometimes saw tangled in the branches of the borough’s trees. How did they end up there? Meanwhile, a cold little part of her counseled prudence: keep it safe. At which she recoiled: it would poison her. After several minutes of this, she called Ezra at the gym to say that she was leaving him. The word divorce she avoided, not wanting to sound operatic. By the time he arrived home, she had already changed her mind ten or eleven times as to what she needed to do.
He was breathing very hard. He had run the entire way from the distant subway stop. On his sweating face was the naked look of fear that comes with having loved someone for a long time. “You’re still here,” he panted. The look on his face summoned out of her chaotic feelings the lifelong habit of pragmatism, which caused her to say with formality, “She is not to see or contact us ever again,” a message that she repeated a few days later when Meg Sand called the apartment, and she was startled to hear herself speak not in her lilting telephone voice but in an unfamiliar and shaky middle register that seemed to emanate directly from her chest. She hung up the receiver before the person on the other end could respond. Her mind was still changing rapidly, hourly. The only thing she knew for certain was that the video had become hers in some permanent, irrefutable way. She buried the cassette in the deep pocket of a shearling coat she no longer wore but that still hung thickly at the back of the closet, and so it remained there undisturbed for many years and through several moves, until the technology that it required had all but disappeared.
Could the nature of the video be interpreted in a different way? The therapist at the university health center had asked her this question. Your husband is studying art, she said, double-checking the open folder in her lap. Was there anything—the therapist searched for a word—artistic about what you saw?
Grimly, she said no. They had been over this before. Therapy was turning out to be deserving of the suspicion in which she had always held it, but under her benefits plan the first six sessions were free. The truth is, she was too shy to explain to the therapist why she had instantly recognized the sort of video she was watching. Just as she was too shy to keep her eyes open while making them. Darkness was essential, she couldn’t explain; darkness was key.
The
