refugee who looks like Porky Pig no matter what you put him in. I loved doing him.”
That was all I could remember, but at least it was something. I couldn’t come up with any scintillating memory of the other two, though I was 75 percent sure one of them had been a woman.
Nearly a week went by. Even though I went down to the crypt twice more and reread my notes, nothing new occurred to me. On the phone, Nicky told us he’d lost three pounds, hated swimming because the lake was so cold one of the kids had seen actual ice near the raft, and totally loved basketball but needed sneakers. At work, Dani and Javiero got into their bimonthly fight in front of the entire crew. This happened after he said the line “I wouldn’t do that,” and she expelled an angry mouthful of air, then snapped, “I hate to say this, but for God’s sakes, it’s not ‘I wooden.’ You’re supposed to have gone to Eton and Oxford. You should be capable of pronouncing the letter T.” To which Javiero replied, “If I wasn’t a gentleman, I’d punch your fucking teeth down your t’roat.” To which Dani responded, “ ‘Throat,’” and they had to be pulled apart by the boom operator and a production assistant. We lost the day’s shooting when both their managers came to the studio to scream at Oliver and threaten litigation.
One evening I drove up to the zoo to see a four-day-old zebra foal. Adam had his arm around me, and I felt a surge of love for him not only for being tall and having really masculine hands, but because for all his science, he had tears in his eyes over this beautiful striped, leggy baby. The glow remained for a couple of hours over dinner, though it ended when he saw me in a sheer black nightgown and, after an appreciative “Hey,” felt somehow obliged to add, “Just give me a minute to floss.”
It would have been a perfectly normal late June/early July except for my being unable to get Lisa out of my head. My desire to know … no, my need to know whatever she could tell me about why I’d been fired, did not lessen in intensity with each passing day. If anything, it became stronger. Where was she? Why had she disappeared?
I guess I was desperate, because I put so much effort into trying to remember anything more she had said about Manfred Gottesman and the two other East Germans. To add to the problem, Manfred’s name would no longer be Manfred Gottesman. The three of them would have wound up in different cities with different identities, that was standard procedure. But nothing —no name, no place—came to me until I remembered an old trick I’d overheard my mother telling one of her friends years before: “Just imagine putting whatever it is you can’t remember into a car and watching it drive away. Then put it out of your mind. It often comes back when you least expect it.”
I stuck Manfred and the other two Germans into an imaginary BMW and pictured them driving off. The following day, while reading an e-mail about what great fun the Deering School’s twenty-first class reunion had been (“a reprise of our unforgettable twentieth, though sadly with fewer attendees …”), I had a genuine flash: Lisa complaining about Manfred’s insistence on calling his company Queen City Sweets: “Queen City is a nickname for Cincinnati and, okay, sweets are candies, but nobody calls them sweets except someone in England in 1922 and Queen City sounds so gay. It’s like calling it Cincinnati Boy Whores, Incorporated. I told him that straight to his face, and he told me, very, very snottily, like a real stick-up-the-ass German, that his business was none of my business. I mean, we were setting him up in candy distribution to the tune of … I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s costing us.”
After all those endless days of waiting for my cell phone to ring, this was a twinkle of hope. I Googled Queen City Sweets. Yes! It still existed! One thirty-four Corporate Drive. The home page of its Web site
That was all I could remember, but at least it was something. I couldn’t come up with any scintillating memory of the other two, though I was 75 percent sure one of them had been a woman.
Nearly a week went by. Even though I went down to the crypt twice more and reread my notes, nothing new occurred to me. On the phone, Nicky told us he’d lost three pounds, hated swimming because the lake was so cold one of the kids had seen actual ice near the raft, and totally loved basketball but needed sneakers. At work, Dani and Javiero got into their bimonthly fight in front of the entire crew. This happened after he said the line “I wouldn’t do that,” and she expelled an angry mouthful of air, then snapped, “I hate to say this, but for God’s sakes, it’s not ‘I wooden.’ You’re supposed to have gone to Eton and Oxford. You should be capable of pronouncing the letter T.” To which Javiero replied, “If I wasn’t a gentleman, I’d punch your fucking teeth down your t’roat.” To which Dani responded, “ ‘Throat,’” and they had to be pulled apart by the boom operator and a production assistant. We lost the day’s shooting when both their managers came to the studio to scream at Oliver and threaten litigation.
One evening I drove up to the zoo to see a four-day-old zebra foal. Adam had his arm around me, and I felt a surge of love for him not only for being tall and having really masculine hands, but because for all his science, he had tears in his eyes over this beautiful striped, leggy baby. The glow remained for a couple of hours over dinner, though it ended when he saw me in a sheer black nightgown and, after an appreciative “Hey,” felt somehow obliged to add, “Just give me a minute to floss.”
It would have been a perfectly normal late June/early July except for my being unable to get Lisa out of my head. My desire to know … no, my need to know whatever she could tell me about why I’d been fired, did not lessen in intensity with each passing day. If anything, it became stronger. Where was she? Why had she disappeared?
I guess I was desperate, because I put so much effort into trying to remember anything more she had said about Manfred Gottesman and the two other East Germans. To add to the problem, Manfred’s name would no longer be Manfred Gottesman. The three of them would have wound up in different cities with different identities, that was standard procedure. But nothing —no name, no place—came to me until I remembered an old trick I’d overheard my mother telling one of her friends years before: “Just imagine putting whatever it is you can’t remember into a car and watching it drive away. Then put it out of your mind. It often comes back when you least expect it.”
I stuck Manfred and the other two Germans into an imaginary BMW and pictured them driving off. The following day, while reading an e-mail about what great fun the Deering School’s twenty-first class reunion had been (“a reprise of our unforgettable twentieth, though sadly with fewer attendees …”), I had a genuine flash: Lisa complaining about Manfred’s insistence on calling his company Queen City Sweets: “Queen City is a nickname for Cincinnati and, okay, sweets are candies, but nobody calls them sweets except someone in England in 1922 and Queen City sounds so gay. It’s like calling it Cincinnati Boy Whores, Incorporated. I told him that straight to his face, and he told me, very, very snottily, like a real stick-up-the-ass German, that his business was none of my business. I mean, we were setting him up in candy distribution to the tune of … I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s costing us.”
After all those endless days of waiting for my cell phone to ring, this was a twinkle of hope. I Googled Queen City Sweets. Yes! It still existed! One thirty-four Corporate Drive. The home page of its Web site
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