The World Before Mirrors

Joan Connor

On Christmas Eve I am in Vermont on sabbatical from my teaching job in Ohio, and I receive a call from the ghost of romance past, my college boyfriend whom I have not seen for thirty years. He has a multisyllabic name. He makes me laugh. He tells me sad stories.
    One: he moves to Paris, gets married, and becomes a junkie.
    Two: he moves back to New York, wanders homeless and drunk and schizophrenic the streets and shelters, is in and out of Bellevue. He loses his memory.
    I cry for him, and he says, “Do not be sad. I got to realize my goals. I always wanted to be a junkie in Paris, and, to a prep school boy growing up on the Cape, Bellevue always had a gothic romantic allure. I always wanted to go there.”
    This is bad boho poetry. The romance of decadence. The romance of madness. And where was I while he was wandering a lunatic labyrinth of alleys? In Connecticut. A housewife.
    “A Connecticut housewife? You?” he asks me. He weeps for me.
    We have both lost years.

This is how Gregory Harrison Hollander found me.
    In a Brooklyn bookstore stall, he found a copy of a literary journal published twelve years ago. In the journal, he found a story written twenty years ago under my name. In the story, he found a version of his name. Via the Internet and my name and my father’s name, he located me and called me on Christmas Eve. It was the most interesting gift that I received this year. More refracting than the Waterford crystal from my mother, more amusing (although less useful) than the power tool set from my father.

Today is January twelfth, and it is lightly snowing, a careless sift of snow. It has snowed every day since Halloween, my first New England winter since I moved to Ohio in 1995. I am thinking about Gregory and how little I remember about him and how this is the first time that I have ever written an essay about events as they are occurring, a contemporaneous meditation. Present tense, but I think that this essay is about the past, about memory and how it forgets, about love, about loss.
What I remembered about Gregory before he called:
    That his eyes were blue and sparkled with a hint of “I wouldn’t drink the Kool-Aid around here.”
    That he had the posture of a question mark.
    That he wore blue jeans well and denim shirts.
    That he had a blurting laugh, simian manners, and dressed and spoke like a man who had cowboy dreams.
    That we once made love in Clarendon Gorge on a rock as polished and curvaceous as a Henry Moore sculpture.
    That once, after smoking too much pot, we found a plastic bag of something squooshy and scary (intestinal?) in the woods and could not talk about it.
    That a spooky nocturnal named Eugene lived on his dormitory floor and used to tail me at night when I scurried down the hall to use the bathroom, smashing out light bulbs in the ceiling as he followed, panting and laughing.
    That he painted and had painstaking penmanship.
    That he gave me a sterling silver ring shaped like a helmet, which my son covets.

How often have I thought of him over the last three decades? Not at all. Or perhaps only when I wear the silver ring, which is not often, and then I think of him without any detail of recollection. But why am I unwilling to give my son the ring? Because it was a gift?

Memories that I do not have but accept from Gregory now on faith:
    That he and I rolled down the hill in sleeping bags, which made my father hopping mad.
    That I peed in a sink in a men’s room, skirt bunched around thighs, talking speed-of-lightheartedly.
    That I was his first. His first first.
    That we snuggled on my brother’s dormitory floor in Boston.
    That we first met in boarding school when I asked him to find me a chair at a movie. I was a dismissible hallucination, one among many.
    That we went to an ox pull at a county fair.
    That he, that you carved our initials in a heart on a tree in a corner of my father’s meadow, that you carved it with a buck knife, carved it hard, carved it deep, so that it would last, that you believe that you could still find it. And I did not have the heart to tell you that it is likely long gone, cleared to accommodate the pond that my father wanted there. But I cannot tell you how much I love knowing, how much I love remembering what I cannot remember, that once someone, you, loved me enough to carve a heart in bark, that the landscape of your memory is unaltered, that I am flattered and shaken to my leaves to know that I was ever, ever that young, and that I want suddenly and again to roll down a hill in a sleeping bag. I want that more than food and sleep and oxygen, more than coffee.

What I now remember about you that I did not before:
    That your voice is gravelly, that you drawl and stammer.
    That you use words that I have not heard in a long time—pest, adorable.
    That you dumped me, I dimly recall, for a girl. Cathy maybe?
    That you loved a song by Wings, “Bip Bop”?

I do not remember loving you. But you told me on the phone that we loved each other. And that was why my father was so angry when we rolled down the hill in sleeping bags—because we were in love and you were fucking his daughter. I have not missed you. But now between calls I do.
    Why did you enter my life now, bringing these memories with you? Memories belong to the past, are the consequence of careful editing. Next week is my birthday; I am nearing fifty. Why all this abrupt youth flittering like parti-colored litter, tattered snapshots into my aging days? Why open now this store of joy, long sealed? IT IS UNBEARABLE.
    You and I agree to meet at a B&B in southern Vermont the day after my birthday. You have little money. I will pay the bill.

This time of year erumpent night arrives before five. Dusk is my temperament. On the phone at 10:00 pm you tell me that I can tell you bedtime stories, that I can tuck you in, that you know how to rub my temples and quiet me so that I can sleep (I so rarely sleep). You tell me that if you play music to a female praying mantis and chuck her under the chin, she will not eat her mate. Droll metaphor, Gregory, but I do not pray, do not prey. We call each other several times a day. We have not seen each other in thirty years. We were a decade younger than that duration when we met. But now I can clearly see the tree, the clean incision in the bark, you laughing but just a little at the corniness. Your cuts were precise. Time’s arrow pierces Cupid’s heart.
How did I forget that tree? Hearts in bark. Why have I never looked for it? I return to Vermont, to that meadow in Vermont every year.
    I do not recall why we lost touch or how.

I have now lived ten years alone. I have dated, but I have not come close to falling in love, to allowing someone into my life, my home, the corners of my days when yellow sunlight spills into the room and I find a hollow, a half hour, an hour to read a magazine. There are reasons for my solitude: Ohio. Two failed marriages. I am raising my son alone. Men terrify me, their needing frenzy. I have habituated to my solitariness. My untenability. I have more faults than California. Too many times to the trough.
    I have always thought that monogamy was a failure of imagination.
    I have not had an exclusive relationship for twenty-eight years.
    At the moment I have more dates than a fruitcake. I recently posted to an online dating site. I am a first-timer. I decided that while on sabbatical I needed to take the initiative, to act, or else I would soon be posting on Geezer.com. In Ohio I spend far too much time staring out of windows. In Vermont, for some reason, I spend time in the evening standing outside my own home, staring at the snug yellow squares of light, the pretty curtains, the chandelier. I mentioned this to a friend. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I think that it is about longing.”
    When I pursue that thought’s arc, it becomes thanatological.

I have to break frame. As I was writing just now, I startled myself. Someone in the room with me. No, I myself reflected in a black, brumal window, in Vermont, on sabbatical, working at my desk. But, yes, someone, someone else. I am wearing a sweater, pale blue, an uncharacteristic color, cashmere, a Christmas gift. The woman in the window distorts in the glass. The person, that one whom Gregory brings back to me? I owned no cashmere sweaters then. I wore Mexican wedding shirts and clunky gobs of turquoise. Now I own enough cashmere to build my own goat, enough leather to build my own cow. Visions and revisions. Versions and reversions.

I am hearing the past in my dreams, voices underwater, drowning in a flooded town. A whole town blooms and rots in the Quabbin reservoir, Dana, Massachusetts. I am swimming in my drowned house. Am I standing outside myself when I peek into my own nighttime windows, the gothic architecture of my old, vaulted mind? Last night I dreamed that someone said to me, “You are very beautiful.” Until I turned my head. Then the voice said, “My mistake. You are not beautiful at all. I did not see your nose.”
    Gregory, I do not see my nose.
    I recall that yours was turtle-like.
    In the world before mirrors, we would not have to shatter such dreams.

Particularly on Sunday afternoons in February, I feel as if I have outlived my time. In two years my son will be in college, and I suspect that I will be ready to check out of Hotel Joan. A good guest always knows when to go. (I think I would like that for my epitaph.) This is not despair but weariness. I am tired. I have had enough. It has been a good show. I have sampled hundreds of men, loved wonderful women, driven recklessly, laughed perversely, traveled enough roads, worn jingly jewelry, danced and sung more than once until dawn, eaten well, drunk way too much, stared at skies, lived mainly in pretty places (except Ohio, where I have lived the longest and which I hate with teeth-grinding clarity). I think that my work is done. I have raised my son, written my books. I have tried to love the men who chose to amble through. There is nothing sad about this feeling. My friends, I am tired. That is all.
    I am especially tired of living in Ohio.
    This week an editor asked me to name my favorite place in Ohio in my bio note. I wrote: the exit ramp. I lacked the temerity, however, to send it.
    Ohio may be my metaphor for mortal claustrophobia.

    I moved to Ohio in 1995. I now know that this was the year that Gregory got well. No longer addicted, drunk, schizophrenic. He told me on the phone that he then had to set about recovering his memory. Now he is my memory. Now he is no longer a memory. Now his memory is finer than mine. Since 1995 I have been trying to club to death as many brain cells as possible with a wine bottle. I have less and less memory and less and less need of it. There is more than one highway out of Ohio.
    It occurs to me that my memory is wandering all over the country, traveling with people I know who carry these repositories of my memory with them. I have forgotten their names.

I fell in love for the last time in 1993, the way a meteorite falls, or mud slides, or hail falls. Disaster. Every time that we fall in love, we alter love’s quality and retroactively qualify all previous loves. The last one? I did not know that I could love anyone that much; it nullified all prior loves. Its heat scorched my past. A charwoman, I swept up the ashes of my past loves, past lives. They no longer pertained. I found myself with no edges, a huge capacity to love, and asking nothing to return in kind.
    I never want to feel that way again.
    I no longer believe in love, or I suspect that it is overrated.
    Love, schmuv.

This morning Gregory wrote me about the plumb line that he tacked to his window. I recall it. It dropped next to his bed. He used it to tell time. He boiled brown rice in a corner of his room. Each memory concatenates a memory. The memories open like Chinese boxes, nested, with delicate springs and tiny hinges. I am remembering too much. I write Gregory and ask him to remember no more, tell me no more. I am living in reverse but aging forward. Frictional motion. Grinding plates.
    In my sleep I grind my teeth. A man whom I did not love and with whom I slept last fall told me that I do this. Gregory told me on the phone that he has trouble sleeping with a partner. My room in Ohio faces east. I have a large pencilpost bed. Sunlight is my partner. I wake facing west.

A year ago I saw Gregory’s name on a movie crawl, a credit line. I was with a date, a man as blustery as the Mayor of Doodyville, so I didn’t have time to give it much thought. How many Gregory Harrison Hollanders could there be? I think that I concluded that someone must have once heard the name and adopted it. A theatrical name. This happened to a former acquaintance of mine: Templeton Peck. My name is too plain for theft. But the credit line was Gregory’s, my Gregory’s, after all.

Gregory is my new editor, forcing me to revise my memory. I threw out his love letters a decade ago when my husband and I split our former household. I thought that I went skinny-dipping for the first time when I was forty with a girlfriend in a lake in Vermont. Stars and fireflies. We were stoned. The water felt like seal skin. I was elated to be naked under the night dome and single again.
But now I think that Gregory and I may have swum naked together that day after making love on the rocks. In one of the troughs of the gorge. The cold water, hard nipples. Your too blue eyes. No, I wore my panties, I think.
    I know why this is hurting. It is the pain of consciousness, of living in time. Our love makes such tiny ripples. I want to be young again. I want to be in love. Oh Gregory, this is such a bad idea. I am out of love and trust. IF I HAD IT TO DO OVER AGAIN, I would not.

I have earned my mistrust of men. I have been raped, beaten, strangled, pushed from a moving car, abandoned on a road at three in the morning, twenty degrees below, with no shoes and a bloody nose. My first sexual relationship was with a man in his sixties. I was three, maybe four. Memory’s imprecision. I have fitted myself into so many shapes—earth mother, professional wife, tart, feeder, tender—that I could be a contortionist. Yes, I am these. But how did they NOT notice that there was someone here who preceded the masque?
    I have been thinking lately that the cause of much harm in my life is the iconicity of male sexuality, what makes a lover of a child, a whore of a housewife, a waif of a woman. It is difficult to locate oneself beneath all of the visual projections. Let me be. Let me BE.

Gregory wrote me that he has incorporated the Bowman Mansion in the novel on which he is working. The mansion is in Cuttingsville, Vermont, a beautiful Victorian mansion. It was a bookstore when he and I were dating. We went there once on a rainy day, so quiet that you could hear book lice munching: eat your words. A man with a disquieting, high voice, pennywhistle pert, oversaw the shelves. When I turned a corner, I screamed. A woman coming at me. Wraith, I thought. I myself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror. I am what I most fear. Like the moment in the glass darkly.
    Am I who I am or who I was? Are they the same?
I no longer wish to be a reflection. Might I vampiric stare into an empty glass? The world before mirrors.

The mirror manifests the divided self, and Lacan theorizes that in that gap language originates. Words are how I construct my self. Without them? Knock knock. Nobody home. Ashes, ashes we all fall down. Selfhood is a knock-knock joke without a punch line. Dr. Caligari’s empty cupboard, Mother Hubbard.
    As I write this I am waiting for his call. I usually try to date people I don’t like. I wouldn’t want to wish myself on someone I actually care for. And it isn’t much fun getting naked any longer, even when I am in shape and down to date weight. The skin looks like a Sharpei’s snout. Gravity is relentless. And love is chancy.
    What is the chance that Gregory would find that magazine at that moment, recognize himself and reenter my life? Is this design or coincidence? It doesn’t matter. Now that it has happened, it is constative.
Recently a prep school boyfriend attended a reading of mine. I did not recognize him until he spoke. His voice was his own. He used to be clean shaven. He wore his hair long, and he had a sleek runner’s body. Round, short-haired, he had become his opposite.
    Will Gregory be foil to himself ?
    Similarly I recently met my former husband in a restaurant in order to pick up my son. I had not seen him in six years. I stared at the strangers, scrutinizing each until I spotted my son. The man next to my son had been my husband for fourteen years. On a street I would push by him without an inkling. My son told me that he is shopping online for a Philippine bride. I know what that means; I was the Philippine bride.
Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it, kids. The real deal. Opening night.
    I sit at a huge banquet table that offers so many groaning pleasures. I want to taste them all. I want to eat it all. I have had difficulty with monogamy because alternate lives have always seemed possible to me. I could be a carpenter’s wife in rural Vermont, or a Go-Little-Vampire-Girl in the Village. Singularity is a limitation of possibility, infinite possibility. This ensures my solitude, and the solitude protects the work.
    But sometimes I think that I should just get married, married to anyone just so that I can stop dating.
What passes for love at this age may be wariness, negotiation. Perhaps we were wiser about love when we were young, ready.
A month ago I posted to an online dating site for the first time. A photo that my son took of me for my next book jacket and two short narratives. It took courage. In the morning I opened the site. Only ten hits. I was disappointed. Then I read them and studied the pictures—all women. Odd. Cause and effect sometimes escape me. For a while I moped about not being able to attract a man. Then, the slow epiphanic march. I had posted as a woman seeking women.
    I reposted as a woman seeking men. In the morning I opened the site. Three thousand hits. That gave me panic attacks. I read a few. Too many Daves and Bills and Carls. Some marriage proposals. One from Germany. One from South Carolina. Some of them I suspect were automatic responses to any newly posted profile. Some lewd. Some totally, full-tilt bonkers. For someone whose approach to dating over the last decade is, “Hello, I must be going,” it was too much.
    Some of my male friends, amused, asked to read my narratives.
    They were:
    Myself—I am a professor with one son about to go to college. I am currently on sabbatical in Vermont. I love to laugh, attend cultural events, cross-country ski and work out daily. I am independent but affectionate and am looking for playmates to laugh with. After my son, my writing matters most to me. I am not seeking anything more than enrichment. Audience, company are everything. I am a kook but essentially harmless. I am quick witted and find that this makes some men uncomfortable. The intellectually timid need not apply.
    My match—No control freaks please. No ax murderers or aliens either. You like intelligent independent women. You know who you are and are seeking enrichment not mollycoddling or support. You have a sense of humor, love to laugh, and want to have a conversation with someone for the rest of your life. You are mature, centered, and patient and understanding, but can be spontaneous. You are as comfortable at the carnival as you are in an art museum. PLEASE no mooches. No children. I am looking for a manly man. Open-minded and openhanded.
    The heading: Writer Seeks Diversion

My male friends’ analysis? Of course you got a gazillion responses. Diversion means sex. Playmate means sex. You ask for no commitment. Do not mention marriage. Want no children, have a son, grown and nearly flown. Clearly work out and are fit, have your own money, go downtown and uptown. You do not mention “soul mate,” “long-term relationship,” or “beaches.” You are smart and witty, and the narratives are simple and direct.

Odd. And the responses? Not one conformed to the description.
    In the midst of this e-mail blizzard, Gregory called on Christmas Eve. I did not receive one dating inquiry from a Gregory. Not one. Gregory called this morning. He did not call yesterday because a friend from Maine showed up in New York, took him out for steaks, bought him a stack of CDs, and corralled him into a strip club.
    I tried to explain why all this remembering hurt me—as if time were a caliper and the past and present were squeezing me between their legs.
    Gregory tells me that I have misremembered our breakup. Actually I precipitated it by doing something “gross.” I ask him not to tell me what happened. I prefer not to remember. I know enough about myself already to cringe. I am a cosmic apology for my own existence.
    Gregory owns a turtle named Monk, whom he found in the streets. Monk can build stairs and pyramids out of books. He can flip a heating pad onto his back. I cannot build pyramids, Monk. But memory is my carapace, the shell forming around what I need to hold onto, defining its small self by what it is infinitely excluding.
    Gregory never invites anyone into his Brooklyn apartment because he only has one chair and a bed, not really even a bed. He sleeps on the floor. A friend gave him a bed, but he got rid of it. He preferred the floor. His life sounds simpler than mine.
    His French girlfriend slept in a bed. The wealthy have nice beds. The French girlfriend comes with her own adjectives like a Barbie doll with her accessories— rich, artistic, French, famous. Every time that he mentions her, the same linkage of adjectives. I ask him how he recovered his memory. He demurs, defers.

Ralph Somersault was forty-two years old when he died. Gregory and I have already outlived him by several years. A nimble jester, his acrobatics landed him on his feet and in the favor of Henry VIII. He tumbled in the court and endeared himself to Anne Boleyn and she to him. But the King’s love was fading. The bloom was off the rose; the head was off the queen. Poor Ralph somersaulted no more except for headlong drunken lurches into the hearth. The King dismissed him, and the besotted, sodden, untumbling fool careened from county fair to county fair, cutting his dismal jigs for pennies.
    I want to roll as Ralph once did but down a hill in a sleeping bag, dizzy with love, sky, grass, sky, grass, sky . . . without the sad ending.

Gregory tells me on the phone that he knows of a place where we can stay in Paris. It has no heat, and you have to haul up cold water in buckets. “No,” I say. No to cold water, no to sleeping on floors.
    He chuckles. A nasty right-before-I-spring-the-practical-joke chuckle. “I am presentable,” he says. “I have a two-thousand-dollar suit and four-hundreddollar shoes, a clotheshorse.”
    “Neigh,” I say.
How Gregory recovered his memory, the no longer deferred story:
    He had forgotten how to read. He decided that if he reread all of his own books, he would begin to recover what he had forgotten. He started teaching himself to read with some Reader’s Digest condensed novel. Not only did he realize that he could read, he realized that the book that he was reading was lousy, so he started reading better books. And as he read them, he remembered them.
    He then set about restoring his personal memory. He stared at his hands and tried to remember where he had gotten a particular scar, how he had broken his thumb. From his injuries he reconstructed a body of memory.
    The doctors had advised against this undertaking. It worked.
    I have a paper cut on my upper lip from an envelope I licked to seal an angry love letter. A scar on my brow where my glasses cut me later that night when I slipped, drunken, from my tub. I do not want to read any more books in that library. I keep the covers closed, the books on shelves.
    Memory may be a form of repression; the blackout may be a blessing. I prefer not to remember what it hurts to remember. I remember what I need, sometimes not even that. Memories displace each other. The teacup can only hold so much tisane.
We had a spat. I have offended Gregory. Too much of me. I don’t blame him. I feel the same way about myself. He says that his mother told him never to look into a lady’s handbag, and that he doesn’t. He says that I am the sort who dumps the whole handbag into his lap. He is correct.
    He says that I stir up passional valences. I have no idea what that means, so I must write it down. I still have no idea what it means. This essay is a lady’s handbag. Yes, I dump it in your lap. No, I will not apologize.
    Like Monk I am building my essay in steps, but my pyramids are jerry-rigged, tilt like Caligari’s set, career down cubist corridors of time.

Gregory does not use emoticons in his e-mail; this pleases me. I find the ideogrammatic shorthand to represent emotional complexity disturbing. A smiley face, a frowny face. These do not suffice to establish tone. They are cynical representations. And what emoticon could accompany these sentences—I have five thousand dollars left. My plan had been to write until it was all gone, then kill myself.
    Gregory, I do not think that I can bear that much responsibility.
    The suit was a gift from the rich, French, artistic, former girlfriend.

The first emoticon was the wink, invented by Friedrich von Wink, an ambassador to King George III’s court, who blinked an eye to signal a witticism or an irony. Beau Brummel derided it for its indecorousness. I simply think it facile; let the words speak for themselves.
    The emoticon is the postmodernist proof of emotional impoverishment. Passional valances, window dressing.

An engram is a postulated change in neural tissue meant to explain the persistence of memory. Perhaps I cannot remember loving Gregory because I lack engrams? Can one lack a presence that is hypothetical? Yes, I suppose, because in 1993 I fell deeply in love, but the relationship was largely theoretical. He and I saw each other only once a year. And I suffered more over his inability to love me back, love me actively, not as a state of being, than I have suffered at any other time in my life. Love is like seeing quarks. The invisible, the postulate that makes the universe happen.

My memory, unlike Gregory’s, lacks detail. My memories are more like impressions, ambient memories. I retain only some aura of the era. Balming air. Gardenias. Crisp shadows shivering on the lawn.
    My detailed memories are not memories at all but photographs. A memory of me and Gregory on a rock outcropping. His cheeks are ruddy, and he is wearing a red shirt. I am in profile, staring at some point beyond the range of the photograph, wearing a gingham dress, blue and white. I found the photograph in my mother’s album. Gregory is smiling; the smile is soft. I do not know what I am staring at or what became of that beautiful Dorothy in Oz dress.

It is fifteen degrees below this morning. On the phone Gregory asks me if he needs to bring a coat when we meet next week. When we were together he wore a hooded, red sweatshirt, sometimes with a denim jacket over it. I have emotional, temporal whiplash.
    In “The Nothingness of Personality,” Borges writes, “There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any distance along the inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us in order to feel like outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days.”
    I am flustered, not naively.

If life were a line graph, a continuum of contingencies, what would it mean to reverse the line, follow time’s arrow back to the instant before Gregory and I separated? Had we remained together, how would our lives have been different? His life—no France, no junk? My life—no beatings, no . . . , but my son. Irreversible. Him I cannot unthink. I own my time.

The day after my forty-ninth birthday: Gregory is not foil to himself. He is as I remember him. His eyes are pellucid blue. He slouches. He is wiry and strong.
    What is new? His hands and feet are tough. Less hair. His upper body cartoons itself with tattoos. Buffalo. Cat. Heart. Without his shirt he is a bad actor, so bad an actor that he cannot disguise that he is boyish and kind. I tell him that I am not allowing my son to get piercings or tattoos until he is out of our home. Nothing irreversible. In retrospect tattoos usually seem like a bad idea.
    “Oh, I’ve had worse,” Gregory says.

How we spend time? Talking, laughing, pounding down coffee, poking around bookstores, eating, watching a movie, sharing the Jacuzzi.     What is it like being in bed with someone after thirty years, knowing that you were his first? I do not sleep the first night. At all. I am anxious, but I cannot identify the source. I rise and read in the great room of the coach house where we are staying.
    But I read and do not read. I have physical memory, my head on Gregory’s chest. His body is an eighteen-year-old’s, a time machine, only parti-colored now. I return to bed.

I do not know what Gregory and I are doing. I do know that I love him. Although I have lost the capacity to fall in love anew, I have noted that I can resume loving those whom I have loved. My image of someone whom I have loved arrests with the first glimpse. He ages, but the image does not. I adjust the present to the recollection. Gregory was right; I did love him once. I love him again. But love knows many qualities.
    We do not make love to each other. I do not know what that means. But we touch and kiss and talk. We are dancing lightly on some finely honed fulcrum of time. I press my head to his decorated chest. I know the attitude of his heartbeat. I know that he talks in dreams and says, “Collapsing glass takes up more space than itself.” He calls out, “Mother Goose,” but she does not come. Unless I am she lying still like a patch torn out of the night, curled beside this man whom I barely remember and whom I no longer need to. He is here.

I cut his ragged fingernail. I heat his coffee. I feed him mints. I pick a white hair off his black sweater.
    From our bed, through the window, I see a blue bluebird house against the snow. Vivid. It is twenty below. Dawn. A melony pink suffuses the crest of the hill. How can any place that abandoned look so cheerful? Beside me, Gregory snores. He told me that he doesn’t snore. He told me that pillows hurt him.
    Lying beside him I want to speak to his dreams, tell him that I love him. Is this truth or fatigue? Why am I able to imagine him coming to my home in Ohio, taking up space there, improving my conversations with the hassock. I can imagine him there, but that does not place him there, nor does it make it a good idea. Still.
    We drive to our old school. It is smaller than either of us recalls. This slide from past to present to past makes me queasy. Carnivalesque. But we do not wear masks. For some reason when Gregory and I converse now, truth is imperative. We need to understand everything. Neither of us is coy.
    On the second night I sleep. The room’s walls are lavender; I dream that I am in Provence.
    I tell Gregory about meeting his father, his dog, his brothers, his stepmother. He remembers none of this. He took me to his home in Orléans, and we ambled the long sandy beaches. His father liked me. Gregory resembled him in temperament. Piney, salty, we were in love. I have a photo of him on the beach in an album in my home back in Ohio. On sabbatical in Vermont, I remember the photo, reconstruct it.
    More scenes release in me. Is love a trigger, a spring unlatching? I offer memories to Gregory in nested boxes nestled in the open palms of my hands. I know from the crease over his left brow that he struggles with this remembering also. We are both inhabiting pasts that are alienating and familiar. Gregory says, “Now I have to rethink my understanding of the past fifty years. I made a mistake.”
    I made several. Half a century of them. Almost. Gregory has a year and half on me.
    Gregory asks me to write his memoir. “Think about it, Joan,” he says. “You know how at the nuclear plants there are always two guys. We could be the two guys. Two guys with keys and guns just so that one guy can’t knock down a door and take over the world. Right? Right, Joan? You and me. The guys in hazard suits, writing my memoir.”
    “Let me think about it,” I say.
    “I see,” he says. “You are going to be the stable, sensible one in this collaboration.”
    If I am the stable, sensible one, we are doomed.

And yet and yet. Writing someone else’s memoir has a certain postmodernist appeal, and Gregory’s story is partly mine also. I make cameo appearances. I am the first woman to whom he makes love, the woman whom he rediscovers thirty years later, the scene arranged by an invisible hand, as Gregory maintains. I could write myself large in his memoir, larger than his screen credit, larger than the mountains in Mexico where he ran drugs, larger than the Parisian junkie wife. I could redeem him. I could make myself pertain. I could be a heroine as I never could be in my own memoir.

The past is paludal, ferny, overgrown. What have we both forgotten? I do not know about futures. Gregory has a tattoo on his arm that he can use to divine, but he did not bring a deck of cards with him to the inn. The present is very clear. We are eating frittata in the Meadowlark Inn. Gregory will leave in an hour.
    Before he leaves he says, “You are a problem.” “You are a challenge,” he emends. “You are an opportunity,” he concludes. An emotional declension. The way that memory moves, slides like a blue shadow over snow, slides like a plumb line dividing time on a dazzling cold white crust.

I stand on the train tracks. I cry. Strafing wind.

I do not know how to end this essay. I cannot find the exit ramp. Could it reach a degree of contemporaneity such that I would find myself writing about the instant of writing about the instant of writing? Merge. Merge. All endings are leave-takings perhaps. Not a disruption but a discontinuity. Temporary.
    Today the wind is speaking in tongues and raises a corresponding whirlwind in me. I am trying to find the stillness inside it. The trees rattle. Weather copes with itself.
    Somewhere in Manhattan Gregory flaps down a street in a brown canvas coat and a black skullcap in the danse vivante not macabre. He is going to meet a friend to attend a reading. He is meeting a friend to eat his words. He carries my memories. He carries a recent memory of me—perhaps in my white coat approaching the train station, perhaps in my SWAT cap chatting up the bookstore manager about Tiny Tim? In Manhattan he perambulates on encouraging shoes. Here in Vermont, far from him, I try to write myself out of time into the world before mirrors. Tenderness may be lying sleepless inside the words of another’s waking dream. Collapsing glass. Gregory nudges a dog’s muzzle on a ridged sand dune in 1973. The entire world is possible. Nothing is withheld. Nothing is contingent.
    Blue bluebird house in snow. Untenanted. Bluebird. Blue house. Bluebird . . .

Joan Connor is associate professor in fiction writing at Ohio University and a faculty member at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her third collection of short stories, History Lessons, won the 2002 AWP Award. Her previous collections are Here on Old Route 7 and We Who Live Apart. Her work has appeared in a host of literary journals, including Chelsea, Glimmer Train, the Journal, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review. She is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the winner of the John Gilgun Award and the Ohio Writer Award in fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and Belmont, Vermont, with her son, Kerry.

“The World Before Mirrors” appears in our Spring 2005 issue.