Man Walks Into a Room (5 page)

And if Samson, in turn, was drawn to him it was perhaps for this very ambivalence. It was an emotion that in those first remarkable days, returned to his life, Samson understood. For despite the beauty of Anna, the charming photographs, the loveliness of his apartment full of the souvenirs of a life well lived, Samson could dredge up no feeling for his own life but that of vague admiration.

SAMSON WOKE
TO the alarm and felt Anna wake, roll, and climb out of bed. Her bare feet across the wooden floor. A splash of water in the sink, the shower. He lay still under the covers as she dressed, preserving her as one sense, a series of sounds. Then he felt her standing above him, lowering her head toward him. As her lips touched his forehead he opened his eyes, long enough to register her face above him. Then he shut them again and waited for the sound of the dog in the hall, the key in the lock.

He had already been home a month, and he and Anna had improvised a makeshift existence. They avoided subjects they both knew were waiting like fault lines to split the ground beneath them. Instead they talked about things Samson still couldn’t get his head around: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians now being our big friends,
the fact that nobody seemed to be very worried any more about the threat of nuclear war.

When friends called anxious to speak to Samson, Anna briefed him on who they were before he reluctantly took the receiver. Eventually he stopped taking the calls, and listened from the other room as Anna spoke in weary, hushed tones about his condition: the tests showed no signs of the tumor’s regeneration; he was still seeing the doctors; no memories had returned beyond childhood; she was a complete stranger to him; and he himself was different, not the same person at all.

She paced the floor as she spoke and sometimes she wept into the phone.

Sometimes on the street they ran into people he’d once known. Most wore a curious, pained expression, though others made more cheerful jokes or recounted funny things Samson had once done or said, great times they’d had together. As they walked away they promised to call soon, and some of them did and some of them didn’t.

When he finally worked up enough courage to ask Anna what had happened to his mother, she paused and touched his face.

“She had cancer. It was five years ago.”

He didn’t know what he had expected, but when he heard this, his mother’s death finally emerged as a hard, sharp fact. Although he tried to be gracious about all he was being asked to accept, there were moments when that seemed too much to ask. That Soviet Communism had fallen, that Governor Reagan had become President, that John Lennon had been assassinated, were one thing. That his mother, the only immediate family he had, had ceased to exist, was quite another. He broke down, shielding his face with his hands, and then Anna’s body was against his, holding him.

“I know,” she whispered into his hair.

Minutes passed. When he disentangled himself and looked at her, her face was stark and unfamiliar.

“Did I get to say good-bye?”

“Yes. It happened very quickly. But you were there with her. You sat by her bed until the very end.”

It was all he could bear to ask. Soon he began to accept that his
mother was gone, but he found it difficult to get used to the idea that Anna knew things about her that now he didn’t: how she had aged, her last words. The thought of it made him feel guilty, as if he had abandoned his mother, appointing a stranger to remember her.

A few days later, watching as Anna put the leash on the dog to walk him, he asked, “Was she early or late?”

“Hmm? What do you mean?”

“My mother. If you had to describe her habits, was she generally on time or late?”

“Always late. She was like that even when you were a kid, right?”

“What was her favorite color?”

He could hear the coldness in his voice. Anna studied him in silence.

“Is this a test?” She leaned against the door, holding his gaze before she answered. “Blue. She wore it all the time because it matched her eyes. They were blue but sometimes they looked gray, and near the end she couldn’t see very well. She had three different pairs of glasses but she could never find any of them. She was very proud and wouldn’t take anything from anyone. Called you to tell you jokes, but sometimes missed your birthday.”

“Okay. Stop.”

“Your birthday: born prematurely, January 29, 1964.” She was speaking rapidly now, and for the first time Samson noticed a hint of a lisp, something in her speech left over from childhood. “Nobody remembers your first words. The first day of nursery school you climbed onto the rocking horse and screamed when anyone came near you. You wanted to be an astronaut.”

“Okay, Anna. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“How about this: the first time you got a hard-on was just before your twelfth birthday. You went—yes, I remember now, you said you went swimming and then you were lying in the sun in your shorts. The dog was leaning against you.”

He stared at her, horrified. It was like making contact with aliens only to find they’d been watching you for years. His own mind may have been a clean slate, but whatever terrible and shameful things he had done or said and forgotten now, she would remember.

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

“I don’t think so. There’s much more, it goes on and on, see?” She gripped his wrist hard and he winced. “And what do you know about me? You want a test, here’s a test: tell me what the hell you know about me.”

“I don’t know.”

She threw his hand down. “You don’t know.
You don’t know!”
she shouted, her voice breaking. “And the most awful part of it is that
I still love you.
I’ve lost you and yet you’re still here.
To taunt me.
Can you understand? Do you have any empathy at all for what it’s like?”

A sob that seemed to come from someplace animal shook her body. Samson took her hand. He rubbed her knee and patted her back, but it only made her cry harder. He fluttered around her, searching for where to put his arms, placing a hand delicately around her waist, the other on her head, drawing her toward him until somehow he was holding her in his arms. He felt her tears against his neck, but her shaking subsided and her breath became steadier as he rocked her. He was surprised at how easily she fit herself against him, how warm and small her body felt.

“When did I meet you?” he asked quietly.

“It’s been almost ten years.”

“You were only twenty-one?”

“Yes. You were twenty-six.”

“What did you like about me? In the beginning.”

Anna pulled away and looked up at him, surprised. “You were—are—” She stumbled. “No one else was like you.”

Samson was about to ask what he had liked about her, but he stopped himself, realizing how it would sound. He felt the warmth of her against him.

“Was I any good in bed?”

The question surprised him as much as it did Anna. She made a funny smile and lifted her chin. Up close her face lost all focus, and her mouth was warm and tasted of oranges.

Samson lay in bed for a while longer after Anna left for work. The night before, they’d slept together for the third time, and when it was
over an instant coolness had spread through his limbs, and he’d ransacked the dark for his underwear and T-shirt. He had wished to draw a boundary around himself, to make an island of his mortification so that it wouldn’t be sensed by the woman who had just made him groan with pleasure. She had lain still and narrow in the dark, but after a half hour passed in which they said nothing, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from touching her again, easing his fingers across her stomach and up to the swell of her breasts, feeling her body tense and arch beneath his hand.

He got out of bed to go to the bathroom. He could still smell her on his body. Steam hung in the air from her shower, fogging the mirror. He traced his name with his finger then rubbed it out. His face was slowly beginning to cohere, the various features coming together to form a recognizable whole that no longer disturbed him when he saw it flash past in windows and mirrors. Hair was beginning to grow in around the red welt of scar tissue.

He opened the closet and fingered the silk ties hanging neatly on pegs, the pressed linen shirts, the fine wool pants. He chose a gray suit and a yellow tie with a pattern of small birds. It took him a few tries but finally he managed a clumsy knot. He had gained back the weight he’d lost, and the clothes fit him perfectly, but he felt uneasy in them, an imposter. He decided to buy himself new clothes as soon as possible. He put on the Las Vegas baseball hat Anna had brought to the hospital. The scar was hideous, stapled like railroad tracks.

Anna had left the newspaper on the counter. He flipped through it. An article about cloning caught his eye, and he read it in full, mesmerized. They had cloned a sheep, there were two of them now, and the question was, would they soon be able to clone humans?

The dinner dishes were still on the kitchen table, as was the photo album Anna had brought out after dessert. It was open on the page they’d been looking at the night before—photographs of their honeymoon five years ago in Rio—when Samson had abruptly got up.

“Where are you going?” Anna had asked.

“For a walk.”

“Are you all right? Do you want me to come?”

“I just need some air,” he’d said.

Anna nodded. “Take the dog.” Frank was already turning in excited circles at the door. Samson knew she’d said it because she was afraid he’d get lost or mugged.

He didn’t go far; just around and around the block so many times that even Frank got bored. The pictures—dazzled shots on the beach, the two of them locked in embrace after embrace—kept flitting through his mind. For a minute, waiting for the light to change, he thought about not going back. It was a silly thought, but it was thrilling to think it.

When he returned Anna was sitting on the couch watching a late-night talk show. She was smoking a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Once in a while.”

They watched a lithe, giggly, blond movie star joke with the talk show host about her years in high school as a fat slob.

“You used to smoke,” she said, an afterthought.

“I did?”

“You quit when you started teaching. You were very sexy. You would take these deep drags.” She imitated him, pulling hard on the cigarette, squinting, exhaling out of the corner of her mouth. “There was a faded rectangle on the back right pocket of all your jeans.”

Samson imagined himself on a glossy black motorcycle with a teardrop tank, a cigarette dangling between his lips. “Did I ever ride a motorcycle?”

Anna looked at him strangely. “No.”

She held her cigarette limpidly between two fingers. It surprised him how easily she handled things, how fluently she shared her life with the hundreds of objects that passed through her hands.

“How’re you doing, Samson?” She drew her knees up to her chest and laid her head on them, looking at him.

“I’m okay.” He smiled weakly. “How are you?”

“Lonely.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to rub her ankle along the little ridges left by the elastic of her sock.

“You feel so far away.”

Samson nodded.

“Do you feel that way too?” she asked.

“Far? No. I don’t know how to explain it. Like I’m …”

“What?”

“Present. In myself.”

“But you’re not
you.”

“I feel like I am.”

Her face contorted and he thought she might cry.

“Please,”
she whispered, rocking her knees. “It could still come back. It
has
to come back.”

“Anna—”

“No. Don’t say anything.”

He put his hands on her knees and gently held them still.

“You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits,” she said. “The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized.” Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if she were reading subtitles. “I mean that without them we would be unidentifiable. We’d have to reinvent ourselves every minute.” Her voice was soft, and Samson felt she wasn’t speaking to him but to the man in the photographs.

She exhaled and dropped the cigarette into a glass, where it fizzled, and as she got up to brush her teeth she leaned in close and breathy as a nightclub and kissed his neck. The feel of her lips stayed as he watched the blond movie star leap up and show the audience the cheerleading routine she still remembered because though she had been fat she’d still been a cheerleader. The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.

Samson washed the dishes, walked Frank, then headed out to an appointment with Dr. Lavell at eleven. It was half past nine, and though he had time to spare he found himself hustling up Broadway anyway, keeping pace with the crowd. He was drawn to the window displays
but felt it would be awkward to stop and look, to disturb the flow by standing still and forcing people to move around him. He tried to mimic the sense of purpose of these people bound for destinations, who could, at any moment, draw up an itinerary of their futures, who received curt instructions from the tiny telephones they listened to like walkie-talkies.