Till Human Voices Wake Us
Tara Avery
Memory. Never quite as clear as a photograph. Easier to tamper with—the merest suggestion calcifies into false reality; memories of old books or television shows seem to belong to one’s own experience; whispers of do you remember? slide through veins of thought like cancer.
My memory for some things is good: facts, historical dates, birthdays, the minutiae of trivia setting this person apart from that one. I never forget things like Lily’s allergies (mushrooms and kiwi fruit) or how the very thought of ‘light’ beer makes Grace shudder.
I don’t know much about Grace before she came to work for me, for this publishing house. Everything I know has been filtered through her, the way light and chemicals combine under the right circumstances to coalesce into the tremulous, fragile reality of photographs. For the last five years, however, I’ve been present for her stories. I have been a major character in them, even. Andrew Seddon, boss. Andrew Seddon, friend. Andrew Seddon, reluctant rescuer. But that comes later. Not now.
Even more than photographs, stories are deceptive creatures. Stories are slimy, sometimes. They do not sit still; often they are not pretty. They don’t pose well for pictures, and, just when you believe you truly understand one, it’s liable to change on you.
This story is Grace’s. And I think it is also mine. And Nicholas’s. The other thing with stories is the way they bob and dip and intersect each other. They are unpredictable. Difficult. I’m not certain I’d have them any other way.
* * *
If different people look into the same photo album what do they see? Even if they all attended the event—a wedding, perhaps, or Grace’s last birthday party—do they remember the same things?
June 26th. Grace’s twenty-sixth birthday. The golden year, they call it, the year the date and your age match up. I can’t tell you if the myth about it being a great year holds merit—pity those, like me, born in the first week of a month. I was precocious enough to learn to read at the age of three, so perhaps there is some credence after all. Or, perhaps we, with our golden years stolen at so young an age, get two. The double golden year—thirty-three, forty-four, eighty-eight—if this is so, Grace and I have golden years falling in the same calendar year. Then again, what is the meaning of golden, knowing now it was not her much anticipated December wedding, but the event—the terrible event—of the preceding October that would so highlight the year meant to be glowing?
Nevertheless, on Grace’s last birthday, all the stars were aligned. Twenty-six on the twenty-sixth, the date fortunate enough to have fallen on a Saturday. A perfect day for parties and debaucherous drinking without fear of day-after repercussions. I have, in the past, made the mistake of celebrating too heartily a mid-week birthday. My twenty-first is better forgotten, and the less said about last year, the better.
Nicholas answered the door, smiling but a little harried. I work with Grace in a world where deadlines are the norm; I know how dedicated she is when the moment of truth approaches. She has the ability to be singularly focused, to the exclusion of all else. Nicholas bore the same expression Grace’s favorite copyeditor usually wears the day before a manuscript is sent to print.
Grace was not immediately to hand, involved in one of the mysterious preparatory rituals of a woman attempting to look her best. I could smell her perfume in the hallway, a hint of depth under the light and sweet surface.
I don’t remember if Nicholas offered a beer or simply poured one for me; I don’t remember if Lily was the next to arrive, or if it was the couple I’d never met before, friends of Nicholas’s from work.
I do remember the way the peonies, with their cotton-candy heads and sweet smell, looked, perfectly arranged. I remember bowls of floating roses, placed at random next to plates of cookies, bowls of chips and complicated-seeming hors d’oeuvres. When Grace emerged, flushed with embarrassment at not having been prepared to greet her guests, her dress was the pale chiffon equivalent of a peony’s heart, and her appearance at the door was enough to send half a bottle of beer frothing over Nicholas’s hand and onto the floor.
He only ever had eyes for her.
I do remember that.
* * *
I know, because Grace has told me, her parents divorced when she was very young. Neither remarried. This troubles her and yet she does not scorn the institution of marriage. She is an only child and was, I think, always lonely. I know she met Nicholas in her second year of university. They sat next to each other every Tuesday and Thursday for a semester, sharing notes and the occasional wry comment about the professor’s lack of personal hygiene, but their relationship didn’t truly begin until the day of the final exam.
I imagine him standing outside, hands shoved deep into his pockets, longish hair in his eyes. I imagine Grace, gaze focused on her feet (she does this when she’s thinking) shuffling toward an exam she’s convinced she’ll fail, even though she’s never failed anything in her life. He calls her name gently—too gently, she’s in her head and cannot hear him. She’s running the last few lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in her head, certain she’ll be able to use them. She’s thinking till human voices wake us, and instead of letting her walk past him he says, “Grace!” loudly. She looks up. Wakes. Does not drown.
His cheeks are flushed with cold and emotion; hers with exertion. “Hi,” she says, startled, unused to seeing him out of the context of their little classroom, their one-note interactions.
I know his words then were, “Can I take you out for exam after the coffee?” because Grace remembers them exactly. She laughs when she tells the story; it is one of her favorites. His adorable eccentricity. The charming slip of his tongue. This, the blistering moment when fate became something tangible, something real. Or, at the least, this is how it seems later, when a small moment is the focal point of great life change. The implosion of a black hole. The choice of a different English class, another professor, another desk in another room, could change the course of personal history.
Instead of laughing at him, Grace says, “Of course. But it’ll have to be tea—I’m no coffee drinker.”
I don’t actually know most of these details. I don’t know if Nicholas wore the blue jacket I imagine him wearing, or if Grace’s hair was longer or shorter than it is now. Still, I know Grace and I know Nicholas, and this cold weather scene is one I can imagine happening. In time, perhaps I will remember details as though I always knew them, as though Grace told me herself. This is the faultiness of memory.
I know, the way one can sometimes tell a pair of secret lovers in a photograph not by the way they lean too close, but by the way the tilt of head is careful never to draw too near, Grace probably fell in love with Nicholas the moment he cared enough to call her name twice, and I know he probably loved her the first time she offered an impish grin and wondered aloud at the soaring prices of body wash.
And all of this is how I know, oh I know, the moment I’m told Nicholas has been involved—fatally—in a car accident just a month and a half before the wedding Grace has been pouring herself into for a year—body, mind, soul—things are about to go terribly wrong. This is, after all, the end of a different Eliot poem. One from which there is no waking. This one ends not with a bang but a whimper. But it ends. Oh, it ends.
* * *
In the weeks and months after her fiancé’s death, the Grace I knew—laughing Grace, peony Grace, the Grace of weddings and wit and weekend wine—all but disappears. She sleepwalks through her life, and all who know her, all who love her, watch in silence, afraid of what her waking will bring.
I force her to have dinners with me because she cannot hide the way her body is shrinking. Over half-eaten entrées, I talk so she won’t have to. When I ask questions—what are you reading? where do you shop?—it is to remember the sound of her voice. Even these innocent remarks cut her to the bone. She walks through the world bleeding, going through the motions of living because it hasn’t occurred to her to do otherwise. A shadow. A ghost. Almost.
She is Lizzy all over again.
Worse.
She is me, after what Lizzy did.
* * *
When Grace asks about my own sadness and I tell her about poor, dead Lizzy, I tell her about recovery. I tell her about hope. I tell her the little white lies everyone wants to hear when they are grieving.
There are things I do not tell Grace.
I don’t tell her how blue Lizzy’s eyes were when she cried—how I both loved and hated that particular shade. I don’t tell her how, for at least half an hour, I sat on the wet floor of the bathroom, holding Lizzy’s cold hand, her damp face in my lap. How it felt to walk in that door and know, know something was terribly wrong. The loud silence of it. How I knew from the moment I opened the front door there would be no frantic phone call, no beating of still chest or weak attempt at CPR. How I knew it was already too late, how I convinced myself, later, I felt her die while I sat at the pub drinking my third pint. In those days I never drank more than two. That day I stayed for five. The barman took the piss; actually said the words, “Fight with the missus, then?” as he filled glass number four. How my stomach began to ache—the quantity of beer, perhaps, but the timing is right. Lizzy bled out while I gazed into the blurry reflection in the pit of my pint glass.
I don’t tell her the truth. That there was a time, yes, when I thought I loved Lizzy as much as any man ever loved a woman. More. That I’d have taken every sadness into my own heart to spare her. That I spent many a dark night of the soul railing at absent gods so cruel as to give Lizzy—give anyone—too much pain for them to bear. How, instead of letting me ride with her on that last, pointless hospital drive, the police took me in to the station to dry out. They probably didn’t need to do it. I’d had too many pints, sure, but I’ve seen drunker lads stumbling home past closing. At the time I was incensed. Now, when I think on it, I realize it was a small kindness they did me, sparing a scene at the hospital and the indignity of being sent home to my empty flat and its bloody bathroom. The angry night I spent answering half-hearted questions and drinking cup after cup of strong tea saved me from something terrible, removed the immediacy, gave me breathing room and the time to let reality sink in on neutral territory.
One old chap—old to me at 22, though really only in his forties or fifties, likely—kept me company most of the night. His was the hand pouring the tea. I wouldn’t swear to it, but the pot seemed laced with brandy. After a few questions about my whereabouts on the day and relationship with Lizzy, he started asking different questions, kinder ones. He recognized my accent—was I from Cambridge? Had some family up there himself, he did; daughter married a professor few years back. I knew the professor, as it turned out, and the daughter. They’d been invited round to one of my father’s faculty dinner parties. We talked of my father, my studies, the work I was doing, my plans for the future. When I grew silent, he spoke of himself but, mostly, he let me talk. Other than the obligatory opening questions, he didn’t ask about Lizzy. I spoke of her, but he didn’t push.
When his shift ended, he offered me a ride back to my flat.
I don’t tell Grace I asked him instead to drive me to the nearest hotel, or that I bought a new shirt in the hotel store. I called a maid service, the landlord, a moving outfit and an estate agent, one right after the other.
I don’t tell Grace I never set foot in the place again. I want her to know there is life after death, life after sadness.
Her loss and mine are not the same, after all.
* * *
Why is it I can remember the exact shade of Lizzy’s hair in the sunlight, but not what I had for dinner three days ago? It was probably a fine meal. This is another trick the memory plays on us. How quickly it can all change. “I’ll talk to you later,” may be the last words ever spoken to a loved one. We may, in a terrible twist of irony, be able to recall every meal in the past week, but not the tone of a voice, the color of an eye, the certain peculiar turn of countenance once meaning more than the rise and set of the sun. Memory steals conversations from us; it steals entireties, leaving behind images, snapshots, moments in time. Sometimes it leaves pictures without context; sometimes context without the pictures we so long for.
What is lost, I think, is not only the person, not only the promise of future hopes and dreams. People lose the way they were before. Perhaps this is true of all ended relationships. Who we are changes constantly, a rippling fabric where one pulled thread changes the weave forever. But Grace’s Nicholas—my Lizzy—these are gaping holes. No patches exist strong enough to mend them, no other thread matches quite well enough to replace them. No mere snag, easy to repair. And still we pull and pull, struggling to make it right again, make the pattern fit, make sense. We pull until the hole is all we see, until all the other threads, no matter how lovely, cease to matter.
This is grief. It cannot be healed with metaphors.
I think I know Grace as well as anyone can claim to know Grace. I knew Nicholas—beers at the summer staff picnic; a shared laugh over some antic of Grace’s; mutual love of British football and dislike of American. Mostly, though, what I know of Nicholas comes to me filtered through Grace, revealed in Friday Happy Hours and over anything-but-business-please-God lunches.
What grows dim, besides the contents of those lunches or varietals of those wines, is the memory of Grace’s happiness. The careless way of it, as though happiness must be infinite, and therefore more consumable, as easily forgotten as the choice between hamburger and souvlaki. The insidious, precious way her happiness infected others. And the terrible, terrible cruelty of sadness is how it renders happiness somehow less happy. Memory becomes tainted—there is nowhere to retreat to.
But this is the gift of the outsider. They act as the photograph. They are the image one may look at, the voice one may listen to, when it feels as though no memory can be trusted, no happiness regained.
I am Grace’s outsider. When she asks—and she will, one day, perhaps one day soon—I will reveal the memories I’ve kept for her, I will retell her stories without sadness, I will show the photographs with as much impartiality as I can muster. This is my gift to her.
Sometimes this is all we have.