The Memory Artists

  When our evening ended, after JJ dropped in, Noel glanced down & saw JJ & I holding hands. Which JJ does all the time, even with Mrs. B, like a little boy instinctively grabbing his mother’s hand. Still, it was awkward & I felt like taking my hand away. But I didn’t. Maybe because I wanted to get a reaction from Noel. Was there one? No. None whatsoever.

  March 19

  Suddenly I’m quite happy, believe it or not. I’m learning a lot, enjoying my art therapy courses, staying rent-free in a beautiful room with a view of the mountain & cemetery … and I think I’m in love with three men! Has that ever happened in history?

  March 22

  Haven’t seen Noel in days. He’s back to locking himself away downstairs, rarely coming up for air. And with JJ spending more time with Mrs. B, I’m starting to get a bit lonely. I just don’t feel like seeing my loopy friends anymore, my bar-hopping, pillpopping rutting friends in ruts. (The only difference between a rut & a grave, says Norval, is the depth.) God love ‘em, but it’s like I’ve turned the page on all that. I’ve wasted way too much time & money on drugs—& I’m even starting to blame myself for that date-rape attempt. Because when I arrived at the party I was already blitzed on various illegal substances, which left me wide open. Dr. Rhéaume said that line of thinking is “backwards & counterproductive.”

  Took a stab at phoning Norval—had all the numbers punched in but hung up before it rang. Then hit my mom’s speed dial. She seemed happy to hear from me, and even happier to answer questions about recipes from the restaurant. I’m going to see her on the weekend—her suggestion, believe it or not.

  March 24

  Sunday dinner with Mom went fairly well, all things considered. No screaming, at least. We even talked like friends for a change—not exactly like we used to, but it’s a start. On my way out the door, out of the blue, she hit me with an Arab proverb: “Never marry a man who dislikes his mother. He will end up disliking you.”

  April 2

  Got sick today. A groggy kind of nauseous exhaustion. Maybe from school or from something Dr. Vorta gave me for one of his studies … Noel & JJ were darlings the whole time. They both came up with “meals on wheels” & when I started to feel better they read poems or stories to me—Noel off the top of his head (a tale from The Arabian Nights about a sultan & his three sons), and JJ childhood poems from battered old books—nonsense poems which made me laugh, mostly out of seeing him in hysterics, wiping tears from his face.

  April 3.

  JJ is a dream. He just gave me a kit, a get-well present that must have cost a fortune. I was jumping up & down & hugging him in my bedroom when Noel walked by. But before we could show it to him, he ran right down to the basement!

  Anyway, when I offered to pay for it, JJ said Dr. Vorta owed him a favour—and gave it to him for nothing!! It’s called a Neuro-Art Therapy Kit. It comes in a big binder which converts to an easel. Which I just opened up. There’s a 12-pack of pastels & a CD with exercises for Memory & Attention, there’s computer games & therapeutic drawing exercises for improving “traumatic brain injury, stroke, learning problems, sensory integration, Alzheimer’s dementia, memory problems, visual spatial problems and sensory difficulties.” What a sweetheart JJ is! Must remember to ask him to marry me.

  April 4

  JJ says he’s developing a “revolutionary” new kind of cigarette, a healthy replacement for tobacco. But not to tell Noel.

  April 7

  Got a visit today at the lab from … guess who? The alpha male, the über-cool dandy lion of the boulevards, for whom the belles toil—Monsieur Blaquière. Surprise, surprise. He didn’t say anything terribly nasty. In fact, he said he heard I was sick and asked if I was feeling better. I tried to remain as nonchalant as he was, which was hard because my mind was as steady as a drunkard’s piss-line and my heart was doing backward somersaults and I ended up spilling Maxwell House all over my chest. But then, after he left, I was surprised at how I felt—I was actually relieved that he was gone!!

  April 12

  Incredibly, miraculously, Mrs. B seems back to normal! Like the magician’s assistant who enters the casket and comes out the other side, transformed. She’s smiling & joking & her short-term memory is back!! Most of the time, anyway. Everyone has played a role, says Noel, but warns there’s still a long way to go.

  The only problem now is … Noel. He looks like he’s been rolling around in a dingy dryer for weeks. His hands and clothes are stained with chemicals and he’s haggard and gaunt, with bags under his eyes like bruises. As far as I can tell, he’s stopped eating, except for soda biscuits—though I once caught him gorging and gobbling everything in the fridge like a famished dog. He’s heading for a major crash, I’m almost sure. What’s strange, eerie, is that with the lost pounds he’s starting to look more and more like. . . Norval.

  April 13

  Noel seems in much better spirits. He’s spending less time in the lab, & going out more. I wonder where? He could be seeing that American girl I saw him talking to at the lab, the synaesthete with the heart-shaped neckline. They laughed like hyenas together. And she kept flipping her hair back & letting her skirt hike up when she sat down. Or maybe he’s out with the Bath Lady. Who the hell cares?

  April 14

  Art therapy classes going well. Getting straight A-minuses. After years of aimlessness, of turnstiling through bars and no-future jobs, I think I’ve finally found something I want to do! Am now using Mrs. B as a guinea pig. She’s done six paintings so far & they’re all superb! She’s really talented & should have her own exhibition one day. If I had any initiative or willpower, which I don’t, I’d try to arrange it. Is it possible that her memory disorder has made her more creative? In a great guest lecture last week, Dr. Vorta mentioned that this kind of thing—creative outbursts—was possible, that FTD (frontotemporal dementia) can have this effect. That damage to one side of the brain (the left) may liberate the other side. Or something like that.

  Speaking of Vorta (who’s getting a tad frisky, shall we say, in our lab sessions), I asked Stella about him, trying to find out if there was any truth to what Norval said, about Vorta having an affair with her, about him causing her husband’s suicide. But she had nothing bad to say about him at all. On the contrary. She said he was a close friend of her husband’s, practically a guardian angel to her son, a brilliant scientist, etc, etc. I should’ve let it go at that. But in my prying way I actually came out & asked her, point blank, if she had an affair with him. She laughed. And then said, with a wink: “Oh, he was after me all right. A very persistent man.” While your husband was alive? I asked. “No, except for a bit of harmless flirting, it started long after that. But he stopped, very suddenly.” Stella stopped here herself, which was probably a cue for me to mind my own business. Why did he stop? I asked. Stella paused, bit her lip. “Well, he came over to the house one evening, on some absurd man-like pretext, & handed me an envelope, which he insisted I open then & there. Which I did, feeling quite anxious, even frightened. Inside was a letter full of stiff, scientific-sounding phrases & a poem he composed himself … It was a love letter. And, well, that was the end of that.” Again Stella gave me a look, a discreet look that said “I’ve gone far enough.” And? I said. Why was that the end of that? Stella again hesitated, looking me in the eye for several seconds, perhaps wondering if she could trust me. “I guess because, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t stop laughing …” 46

  April 16

  Am starting to like the Bath Lady. A lot. Feel terrible for ever wanting to get her fired.

  April 17

  Beautiful sunny day. A real spring day. Sat out front listening to Arcade Fire and The Dears, over and over like a preteen. On Noel’s discman. JJ went back to his place & returned with a bag of equipment: knee pads, elbow pads, helmets. I thought he was going to invite me out but no such luck. He & Stella laughed like maniacs as they put it all on, to the sounds of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” on JJ’s ghetto blaster. Then they went out
blading! I watched them from the living-room window, as they careened madly through puddles & slush holding hands & collapsing into each other’s arms.

  The Bath Lady—Sancha, I should say—arrived as I was watching them & I asked her if she’d seen Noel around. She said no. She then said, out of the blue, that I should marry him (!?)

  April 21

  Semester over. Exams over. Fingers crossed.

  April 22

  Made couscous today—spent all day on it—& ended up eating it alone. JJ & Mrs. B went to a play at the Centaur and Noel, while timing something with a stop-watch downstairs, nerved on coffee & eyes blackly circled, said he wasn’t hungry. “Food dulls the senses,” he mumbled cyborgly, “and slows the mind.”

  So after a few riveting games of solitaire, I took Mrs. B’s bicycle out & rode blindly round the neighbourhood like a backward six-year-old, arriving home in darkness, my clothes soaked in sweat.

  April 23

  Pelting rain outside, the wind playing some old instrument, like a crumhorn or sackbut or something, on the loose drainpipes. Shakespeare’s birthday today, maybe that’s why. I was going to ask Noel out to celebrate, but he zipped past me on his way out to his sacred “matinée” with Nor. (Naturally, he would never think of inviting me.) He mumbled something about “finding out Nor’s secret”, whatever that means.

  While JJ & Stella were downstairs, roller-blading up & down the halls to Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride,” I was lying on Noel’s bed—don’t ask me why—when I got a flash, a memory flash! About what happened that night I was slipped the GHB. I was at a party all right, but not when I woke up. I was in a lab (!?!)

  Chapter 17

  Noel & Norval (II)

  After King Lear, at a bistro across from the theatre, Noel sat at a table heaped with skeletal remains: chicken bones and mussel shells, potato skins and baguette heels, on and off the plate, a-swim in beer, wine, coffee, ketchup. On a saucer a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself. As he was sheepishly trying to draw the waitress’s attention to all this, someone approached the table. A busboy? No, a nondescript man with a laptop, who seemed to know Dr. Vorta. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he knew all about Noel’s coloured hearing, repeating things twice and three times. His pansy-purple voice stretched and unstretched like a trampoline, sprinkling gunpowder green on the higher notes.

  After two or three minutes of one-way conversation, Noel spotted Norval coming out of the men’s room. From the opposite direction came a large man in Stygian black leather, who planted himself in Norval’s path. He had a spindly ponytail, unibrows, and a drooping moustache like a seal. An angry seal.

  “You’re not going to move, I take it,” he heard Norval say.

  “I never make way for assholes,” said the man in slithery squid-brown tentacles.

  “No? I always do,” said Norval, stepping aside, allowing the man to pass.

  The gentleman with the laptop, when he saw Norval heading his way, gathered up his things and fled, as if Vikings had landed.

  Norval watched the man turn tail. “Who is that guy, anyway? That ponce with the laptop and billowy trousers. Of the kind worn by pantalooned palace eunuchs. He’s been pestering me for weeks.” After a quick glance at the table, he summoned a waitress twenty yards away with a kingly head-jerk.

  “He’s a … ghostwriter, an as-told-to-ist. His name’s Geoff something. He’s doing something for Memento Vivere.”

  “Volta’s vanity press? What’s he doing? A hagiography for its editorin-chief?”

  As the unsmiling waitress cleared the table, deftly emptying things into a bucket, Noel glanced at the gentleman in question. He was sitting at a table half-hidden by a pillar, pushing buttons on a tiny machine. “He … well, he asked me to keep it quiet.”

  “He’s not doing that product-placement novel is he? For Vorta? In which everyone sits around drinking Maxwell House coffee?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Vorta’s memoirs?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Memoirs,” said Norval, shaking his head. “The favourite genre of people who never had a memorable thought.”

  “Come on, Nor. There are lots of—”

  “Has-beens with imaginations so barren they can’t write fiction. And memories so barren they can’t write the truth.

  Noel again glanced over his shoulder. And got a better look at the machine the man was fiddling with: a mini-CD-R recorder.

  “His fees must be as paltry as his writing skills,” said Norval, “if he’s working for that dwarfish quack.”47

  “Why has he been ‘pestering’ you?”

  “He wants permission, for some reason, to publish a chapter of my novel. Which he’ll never get. He was also harassing Sam last week. I think he’s in love with her.”

  Noel furrowed his brow. “It was JJ who got him the job. After Vorta fired two other writers.”

  “For telling the truth? So this hack hiding behind the pillar is a last resort?”48

  Here a woman, an underdressed platinum-haired woman with breasts padded to videogame dimensions, stopped at the table. When Norval rose, as if to embrace her, she began poking a finger into his chest, her voice rising from twenty to seventy decibels. As her anger grew her words became less and less comprehensible, almost a foreign tongue. She began to sob and moan as her body heaved. Norval observed her, with shocking unflappability. “Be back in a second,” he said as he escorted the hysterical woman outside.

  Noel watched the two through the window, as in a pantomime, as Norval evidently sorted things out. The woman was no longer crying; she was kissing his fingers. Noel shook his head. If she knew what acts those hands had committed, she might think twice before lifting them to her lips. She was now walking away—calmly, even contentedly by the way she glanced back at him. Why do women bother? Surely it’s not a turn-on, surely the truism is not true: that women, and beautiful women in particular, are drawn to men who remain aloof from them, or wipe their shoes on them …

  Norval returned to the table with a dangling cigarette in his mouth and two drinks in one hand. “There should be a pound where you can leave people like that. With anaesthetists. And cages.”

  Noel wasn’t listening. He was brooding over the same things he was brooding over when he arrived at the bar. Samira. Her love for Norval. Her attempts to understand him. Norval’s feelings for her. Norval’s capacity for love. He described the sentiment in his novel, realistically, poignantly. And Dowson’s “Cynara,” he had confessed, was on his Top Ten list. But how to approach all this? He took a sip of the beer that Norval had placed in front of him.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said finally.

  “In general, or with reference to some particular?”

  “When you say you’ve never been in love.”

  Norval took a gulp of his Irish whiskey. “Which word escapes your understanding?”

  “I don’t understand the concept. I’m convinced you’re lying. Are you?”

  “Never felt less inclined to. Love exists for only one reason—to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. It may boil down to a chemical called oxytocin. Do you know it?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “I am thus unable to love one woman. But quite able—compelled, in fact—to love hundreds.”

  “When you say ‘love,’ you mean ‘have sex with.’ But why hundreds? Why so many?”

  “Because the best moments of a relationship occur at the beginning, when you’re deluded by infinite possibilities. The middle and end is a lemming-walk.”

  “But have you ever even reached the middle?”

  Norval waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. “And because there comes a time in everyone’s life when some serious arithmetic has to be done—comparing the sum of pleasures life has left to offer versus the sum of pain. And this comparison leads, at a certain age, for those that have the guts, to suicide. So before I get there I’ll do t
he one thing that gives pleasure, while I still can.”

  Noel shook his head. He’d heard this sophistry before. “But it must be so … unsatisfying. Not to get to that final stage. To commitment, marriage, a happy ending …”

  “Happy ending? Have you been paying attention? It’s happy for me when the beginning and end are rolled up in the first encounter.”

  “… and the whole thrilling process of falling in love. Which is the closest most of us will come to glimpsing utopia.”

  “Oh, please. Sex and drugs give much better glimpses. Noel, you’re a spectacularly easy faller-in-love, and what good has it done you? Let’s put this romantic crap to bed. The world is not like Romeo and Juliet, with random arrows flung by Cupid. Romantic love is a Darwinian trick that blinds us to each other’s flaws. Falling in love. Falling implies that you were once at a stable position, at a higher point than before. I prefer the stabler, higher position.”

  “But didn’t you say—at JJ’s party—that you enjoyed falling? ‘Savouring the aesthetics of descent’ and all that?”

  Norval arched an eyebrow while tapping redundantly on his cigarette. He was unused to logical ambush and surprised by its incidence. “I was … we’re talking about two different metaphors.”

  Noel smiled. “Maybe you’ve just been unlucky, Nor, the right dart hasn’t hit you. Cupid shoots darts of lead and gold, remember, for false and true love. You’ve been getting lead, that’s all. Don’t give up hope.”

  Norval rolled his eyes. “Another hope fiend. The hope of true love is haunted by mortality.”

  “Children help you get around that.”

  “Children? Children are instruments of torture. I share Byron’s view: ‘No virtue yet, except starvation, could stop that worst of vices— propagation.’”

  Noel had tuned out completely; he was thinking of Samira, of what it would be like to have a child with her …

  “Have you flown recently?” Norval continued. “Babies should not be allowed on board. Can’t they be Fed-Exed? Or doped and put in cages with the pets? Noel? Are you with me?”