That was May 19, 1998, around 3 P.M. A bad day.
The relationship didn’t last. None of them do. Could you imagine trying to argue with someone who could actually remember who said what when? Or who could always remember, perhaps even especially remember, all the hard things we say on the hateful fly?
There’s no forgiveness without forgetting, trust me.
The fact is, the longer I know someone, the more difficult I find it to talk to them. Part of it has to do with distraction: it’s bloody hard to juggle a conversation with a thousand pellets of memory.
I much prefer the company of strangers.
Or the dead, like Jennifer. “How would you characterize your relationship?”
“What do you mean?” Amanda had asked. I could see now that this was simply a bid for time to formulate a response.
“Your relationship with Jennifer. Was it loving or, ah… troubled?”
“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” Jon Bonjour said to his wife. This time around I clearly heard a Remember- what-we-d,iscussed tone. And just like that, I realized how anxious he was to police his wife’s responses.
“Troubled,” Amanda said. “Troubled. ”
“Not abusive,” Jon Bonjour interjected. “There’s troubled and then there- ”
“I’m sure Mr. Manning re- ”
I paused, trying to get a fix on her expression. It would be wrong to think of these rehearsals like video replays, because they aren’t. In fact, they’re almost impossible to describe. It’s not like there’s a little me reviewing it all in a little theatre in my head-how could there be when I’m both the screen and the audience? I mean, the memories are imagistic in a sense, a very fleeting sense-but they’re more like a kind of raw knowledge, things I just know.
The voices, though, they almost seem like sounds.
“I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea!”
“And what idea would that be, Mr. Bonjour?”
“Jon slapped her,” Amanda Bonjour said in a tone meant either to demonstrate or to humiliate. “The last… fight we had. Jon slapped… her. “
Her husband snuffled. “I… ah… I… I don’t know what to say…”
My mind always plays this trick when I recollect emotionally intense moments. A reptilian coldness soaks the scene, a kind of psychic air conditioning, one that makes me think of museums for some reason. I’ve never quite figured out why.
“Jonny blames himself,”Amanda said blankly. “He thinks all of this is his fault. “ I had no doubt that she believed what she was saying. As far as she was concerned, nothing mattered except finding her daughter. The question was whether her husband believed what she was saying. Where her agenda came across as arrow-straight and unrelenting, his seemed decidedly bushy.
“I appreciate your honesty,” I said. Though I rarely gain any self-insight from these sessions, I am often nagged by a sense of foolishness, like hearing your voice on someone else’s answering machine. I’ve learned that no matter how thoroughly you think you’ve mastered the moment, everything is naivete in retrospect. Everything. “Mostpeople try to doctor the story, believing they’re better served ifthey come out looking like angels. But the only thing that serves in these situations, the only thing, is the truth. “ I had leaned forward, placed my elbows against the desktop. “You do understand that?”
A twitch across the fat of his face. Anger, deep enough to rattle the hustings. “Of course,”he said. What was this? Pride? Was he simply the kind of man who resented others for witnessing his weakness? Or was there something more?
“I have one last question, for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour. Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not?”
“I’m not sure I understand. ”I had registered his shock the first time, the squint as he tried to remember whether he had told me he was a lawyer. What I had missed was the hunted look in his eye-the apprehension. He had come to me thinking I was a nickle-and-dime hack, that much was clear. But this… this made me think he needed me to be a fool.
“Stuff like this… personal stuff with consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine… such stuff requires rust. Why wouldn’t you go to people you know?”
“This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. The fact that she was the Prime Mover would have been significant if women weren’t so often the motivating force behind these visits. Men tended to bring the same macho reluctance to my office as they did to marriage counsellors. Hunting was a man’s job. Avenging even more so.
“Even still…”
Mr. Bonjour intervened-once again to explain himself. “No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather…jaded… “ The irony was just as thick the second time. Rich.
“And?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience. ” And what kind of experience would that be? Bonjour had the pudgy look of a divorce lawyer-a soft-skinned shark. Criminal attorneys tend to have more leather in their mien. They like to lean forward when they talk. Not Bonjour. He was a slumper: I suppose sucking mortgage payments out of broken marriages could do that.
“But it’s not just that,” Amanda added nervously. “You see… Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are… well, more like you.”Why did this bug me so much, the fact that he had already pissed in the investigatory soup? You’d think I’d be used to cleaning up behind amateurs.
“Like me?”As was so often the case during these rehearsals, I felt my face take on my past expression: a rueful smile. Apparently this was what had sparked the several complaints Michelle had received over the years: a crazy man making faces at his coffee cup. “You mean socio-economically disadvantaged.”
“We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language. ”
This struck me as a solid enough rationale, but there was something that nagged me-something too pat. It was as crisp as a legal brief. Even the delivery struck me as premeditated-I could almost see Bonjour coaching his wife as they circled the block looking for a place to park.
“Remember, if he asks…
“You don’t know these people like I…
“You have to manage them, Mandy. Jesus! Stop being so fucking naive!
“Do you want to find Jennifer? Huh?
“Do you want to find our girl or not? Our baby girl.!” See, for you it’s all a mush, the past. It all fades into soup. This is why you wake up every morning feeling renewed. Not me, ever. Waking up is more like a clerical exercise. This is why other people come to you as a haze of implicit associations, some good, some bad-we humans tend to be a mixed bag. For me, others arrive like half-unravelled balls of chronological yarn. People are never simply… themselves.
Either that or they’re more themselves than they know.
If I knew you well, I quite literally would know you better than you know yourself. I could go on for days telling you stuff that you had forgotten about yourself. And I could make you cry with my observations.
And this is the thing: where you see acts, I see repetitions, and where you see people-yourself included-I see repeaters. You really have no idea how much we repeat. Even when we manage to defy expectations, we’re like children: unpredictable in unsurprising ways. Those repetitions you’re aware of you call habits or routines, very human-sounding terms, connoting warmth and security, and in no way, shape, or form contradicting agency, the possibility of breaking free. But this is simply a trick of your limited perspective. Everything looks like insects if you pan back far enough-people included.
And you wonder why I’m cynical. I’ve literally “seen it all before.” The truth is we all have, every single one of us past the age of, say, twenty-five. The only difference is that I remember.