The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes by Jerome Gold

Author:Jerome Gold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Heron Press
Published: 2012-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

Constance

We had lunch at The Continental on the Av. I had not been in there since graduate school, since I had lived with Willy and Bruce. Bruce had gotten married, though not to Willy. Willy had gone into archeology and disappeared. But that was another life, only half remembered.

Constance said she’d been in New England. She’d spent three years in a Buddhist monastery, which explained why I hadn’t seen her for so long. Then she came back and a month later had just come out of University Book Store here on the Av—right there where we had run into each other again, by the post office—when she collapsed in the midst of a grand mal. She had never had one before, though she had suffered for years from headaches. When she woke up, she was in a hospital and her hair had been shaved off. A tumor, not malignant, had been removed from her brain. It had grown for twenty years, her doctors estimated, without her knowledge, pressing against her brain until her brain was only one third its previous size. Its removal was, she said, quite a load off her mind.

Dark humor had always been part of her. What was new, what resulted from her surgery, was some loss of memory and the inability to experience some emotions. She could not feel love, though apparently she could experience other emotions. She said she was going to stop confiding in certain people because it upset her to see them cry when she confessed that while she knew they had been close, she just did not love them now. She found it “curious”—that was her word—that people reacted as they did when she told them she no longer loved them, or perhaps did not even remember them. She was comfortable, she said, with the distance she resided at now from old friends and former lovers.

She looked up from her souvlaki. I could feel the question though I avoided looking at her.

“Barely acquainted,” I said.

She laughed, delighted. “Thank you.”

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