Persistence Of Memory

There must be meetings for this kind of thing. Like the women from that bank robbery all joking and swapping rosaries with the bank robbers, or that little girl in the East Village sprung loose from her pimp by a deranged ex-Marine and sent home to Pittsburgh — former hostages turned advocates for their captors, pitifully fierce women you see on the evening news. Some uniquely female species of lunatic.

One of those things you can’t talk about. It sounds like a made-up story, some tall tale from a wet blanket too timid to back out of a romantic getaway. It sounds like a paranoid delusion, government conspiracies and dead bodies in her living room and the barrel of a gun pressing up against her stomach by a stranger. It sounds like a fantasy, some weird cryptic fantasy from a paperback book — tied up and ravished by a handsome spy, except it happened and there’s still some hurt feelings swimming around, some confused mix of nostalgia and terror. The memory of being tied up still makes her shudder. If it happened again — what then? What if it happened again? With a different man, with a lesser crisis.

Real love ’em and leave ’em type, that Joe Turner. It occurs to her he might be dead.

Imagine going in front of a courtroom and telling them the man with a gun who forced his way into your car off the street didn’t rape you, that he seemed like a real sweetheart actually, that you’d love to get in touch some time. She reads the papers and watches the news, but she doesn’t even know what to look for.

It wasn’t all bad. One last fling before settling down. Three days of nail-biting anxiety before two weeks of fresh air, fresh snow, and intermittent stomachaches, crying jags, grimace-smiles in photographs. Ben thought she might be pregnant; she thought she might be cracking up. Chills, thrills, spills.

It’d be easier if she knew what to call it. A funny thing that happened, a weekday jaunt. It wasn’t bad, but it’s nightmare stuff, the uncertainty of it — three days with an unhinged stranger who shot a man dead in front of her, and what did she do but show him her photographs. Maybe she should’ve cooked him dinner. In the Hitchcock version, they fall in love, elope, go skiing in the Alps for their honeymoon. In this one, she never sees him again, and she’s a basket case.

All the places Joe Turner has been in her apartment — the bathroom, the bed. She let him scavenge through her closets and watch her television. She let a crazy man into her apartment and look what happened. Ben knows something happened, but he doesn’t know what, and he doesn’t ask. He’s cautious with her, he doesn’t reach for her from behind and always phones before showing up at her door. He’ll never measure up to swashbuckling Joe Turner, rogue CIA misfit — plain old Ben, unimaginative, curmudgeonly, practical, who knows there’s another man who’s had his hands on Kathy but is too even-handed to care. This is the man she’s set her heart on seeing. He’ll never look at her that way. Maybe that’s a good thing. He’ll never tie her up to a pipe, either.

It could have been worse. Kathy brushes her hair in the mirror, always looking behind her, always looking back.