Bad Memory

I have a bad memory. I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don’t feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

I am remembering walking along Fifty-Ninth Street after work when I saw a tall elderly gentleman in a long black coat, a cape, maybe, leaning on a cane. I stared. There was something about him, as if he had just stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel and was looking around for an orphan to save. As my grandmother might have said, he cut quite a figure. Unfortunately, being a good New Yorker, I couldn’t break stride and so sailed past, but every time I looked over my shoulder at him, he was looking at me. Then he was gone, vanished, I figured, into one of the buses that went wheezing past. I wondered who he might have been. I wondered what his story might be. I was still wondering when I came to the second red light and there he was.

“It’s you,” I said.

“What took you so long?” he asked, as if he had been waiting all his life.

I put my arm through his. He rented a horse-drawn carriage that meandered through Central Park while in the back, under a lap rug, we kissed. I can’t remember what we talked about, or what his life had been, only the kissing, and thinking Oh my god, don’t die, because he was in his late seventies, an age I no longer consider quite so old, coming up on seventy myself. I must have given him my number because we met once or twice more, and then as life would have it, he called too many times and I stopped answering. It was a sad trailing off, and I regretted it. I told my boss.

“You shouldn’t have seen him again,” Cork said. “It was a good story until then.” He had the reputation of being a brilliant editor.

But I have never learned to edit my life while in the process of living it. For me, Cork’s comment is as much a part of the story as the story itself.

But I can’t remember the old man’s name. What was his name?

I call Chuck. “Remember that old guy I went out with for a minute a thousand years ago?” I ask.

“Syl!” he says immediately. “Good old Syl!”

He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It’s too late for either of us to make another old friend.