Hanna Barbera couldn't believe it. Her husband who had sat at the dinner table with Joan Perkins, eaten a three course meal, and laughed about the Grand Canyon, could remember neither Joan nor the dinner.
When his wife had reconstructed her friend - her origins, profession, looks, attitude - and Arthur still couldn't remember, she shook her head and said, 'You're impossible'.
Of course he couldn't remember Joan Perkins. Why should he? She was one of a long list of incidental guests invited by his wife to fill Saturday evenings. There were some he remembered for a while - the Barkers, for example, a nasty, dissatisfied couple who picked at each other all evening; Helen Redding, a tarty member of the DAR who kept talking about George Washington; or Martha Overton, a grizzled woman with a barking laugh - but that was only like an irritated stomach lining, reflux at bad moments. As far as the rest who ate his wife's pot roast and flan, nothing.
Hanna on the other hand remembered everyone who had ever crossed her path. 'You remember my second cousin, Rachel...you know, the sister of my Aunt Betty's husband Dick...' and, 'We should go back to Rehoboth, we had such a good time with Bea and Penny...'
She could recall each and everyone of her mother's cousins, what they wore at birthday parties, how stringy the chicken was at Uncle Harold's birthday party, what Granddad had worn with his starched collars and boutonniere - a string of incidental, random memories stored for unknown reasons and recalled for reasons equally unknown.
Arthur Barbera didn't have the heart to tell his wife that the reason he couldn't remember any of these remote relatives or passing acquaintances was because they meant nothing to him. There was nothing about the litany of Alice Lipton recited by his wife that vaguely interested him. Her interest in bears, or her delight at finding spotted spurge on the prairie, or her grandson Dick, the only pharmacist in Lone Lake who compounded drugs.
As for everything else in the human experience there is a spectrum. Some people have a catch-all, indiscriminate memory - everything seems to stay put once archived - and others have a very selective memory. Why clog the pipes with unnecessary drainage?
Vladimir Nabokov called himself a 'memorist'. From a very young age, he had an instinctive sense of the importance of the events he was living, and deliberately, carefully, and painstakingly committed to memory people, places, and events he suspected would be seminal. Summers at the family dacha in Russia or at their villa in Cannes; the dresses his first love Elena wore on Sundays; the color of the water off St. Tropez.
Nabokov never explained in his memoir, Speak, Memory, how he knew what would be important for future recall, but suggested it was a preternatural sense of belonging to a time and place. As child of ten, he could have none of his later philosophical constructions of time ('The present is but a matter of milliseconds, the future only a possibility, but the past, lived, experienced and remembered is the only reality') but he could sense importance like a feral animal.
Most people's memory without the disciplined reconstruction of Nabokov is more fiction than fact. When all the Barbera relatives ate Easter dinner at Aunt Leona's, no one could agree on what Lou Lehman did or didn't do to the Lincoln or why Aunt Tilly ran off, or the color of the Ponte's first house on Whalley Avenue.
Eyewitness accounts never tally. In a recently publicized criminal case three people witnessing a drive-by shooting saw completely different things. The driver was either black or white. The car was either a Ford or a Chrysler. They either wore ghoulish masks or no masks at all.
Robert Browning, Lawrence Durrell, and Akira Kurosawa all wrote about how different people see and remember different things depending on their past, their character, personality, and what they ate for breakfast that day.
So it should not have been surprising to Hanna that Arthur did not remember what she did, but she had the niggling suspicion that his feeble memory had something to do with her. She, despite their long marriage, might have been peripheral to his vision.
She was right, of course. There was no one in the parade of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues invited to 71 Lincoln Street of the slightest interest to her husband. Out of courtesy and respect for longevity, he showed some interest no matter how desultory - a balm, an unguent for suspicion.
Of course she was just as dismissive of his sharp recall as he was of hers. His life was being led abstractly, disinterestedly, hypothetically - what else could his collation of verses from abstruse poetry be? His life was largely fictional, novelistic, impressionistic with no grounding in reality. He was indifferent to things as they were, only interested in how someone else saw them and confected them into poetry or drama.
This 'faulty hinge' as his wife called it was troublesome only once. When he worked at one of Washington's international banks, a woman called him up and wondered if, after so long, he would like to have lunch. He had no recollection whatsoever of ever meeting the woman let alone knowing her, but since her greeting was so warm and familiar, he agreed. Besides, once he saw her in the lobby, he would recognize her and everything would come back.
On the day of the lunch, he waited for her call and took the elevator to the lobby, but he could recognize no one in the group of people milling about. 'Arthur!', an attractive woman in her mid-fifties exclaimed when she saw him, and putting her arms around him and giving him a kiss on both cheeks, said, 'My, but it has been a long time.'
It would come to him, he reasoned, as the lunch went on. He nibbled around the edges, indirect questions about her work, her travels, her colleagues, but nothing conclusive. He was as lost as he was before the lunch.
Their meal was enjoyable, lots of talk about books, movies, and restaurants; and they left promising to 'do this again soon'; but Arthur still had no idea who she was.
What did that mean? he wondered. The other people who passed unnoticed and unremembered in his life were strangers or minor acquaintances. This woman and he had obviously had more than that. How was it that he had not even recorded it at all? All the more perplexing because he actually liked the woman.
'I had lunch with a woman who knew me but whom I couldn't remember', he told his wife.
'Not surprising', his wife replied, an old sore reopened.
Because Nabokov was right - the past is relevant and intimately personal - people are destined to lead separate lives and attempts to coincide will always fail. Communication is based only on the present and the future - plans, programs, anticipations - but can never touch the reaches of the past that are the only levers to open consciousness.
'And don't forget', she concluded, a familiar dig, 'we're having dinner with the Roberts tonight'.
'Who?', he replied.
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