The bravest people I know, talk about their own pain. But they also talk about the pain they've caused others. And the way she would tell it, she was only ever on the recieving end.
I was consulting to a small restaurant group in London. They had a cocktail bar down a lane-way in Old Soho. The sorta place that would open at 6pm, but not get interesting till after 11. She'd come in most every night on her way home to her apartment on Dean St. and pull up a seat up at that corner where the bar met the wall. She'd order a bowl of fries, a small salad and throw back a couple of Vespers - on the rocks, with a lemon peel garnish. Always the same order.
I guess you want to know what she looked like. Well, here's thing - I don't really remember. I've tried so hard to forget her that it turns out that I have. I think she had jet black hair - dead straight, but maybe it was curly. Long neck. Or maybe it was short, but it was particularly lean. She would've been slim and on the shorter side.
Look...I'm reaching here. Like I said, I really don't have much of how she looked still in my head.
Except for her lips. I do remember those. Not because of the way she kissed. No, because they were always painted shiny pink and sat puffed up from whatever she did to them. It was so odd - the way they stuck out and commanded attention. I think that was what she was hoping for. She wanted your attention and was always willing to risk your judgement to get it...you see that from time to time.
I'd swing past to check in on the crew down in Old Soho and she would rope me in with some vague chat about the politics of the day. That was meant to set me at ease. Invite me into her closeness and get me in to her rhythms. Then she'd would hit me with the drama of the week. Usually it was a co-worker or a client that was doing her wrong. She was a lawyer working in Family Law, representing those City-Boy types in expensive divorces and messy custody battles. The sort of guys whose total disinterest in keeping the kids was offset by their compulsion to cause pain to their exes.
It was usually some story about another lawyer at the firm who had stolen a client or client who uttered something inappropriate or a managing partner who had torn apart the very fiber of her being.
These things happen. I get it. We have all worked with shitty people who do shitty things. But the way she was so desperate to tell me about it, felt like advertising. Or, to be more precise, bait.
And it was all so unnecessary. I was young, on the road, freshly heartbroken and desperate for any quick bites at distraction. I was up and available for pretty most anything.
I bumped into her in one of those private member clubs late one Saturday night. I was a week or so away from moving back to New York, so we ended up back at her apartment.
The sex was awful. She was looking for someone to remember and I was looking to forget someone I already did. And that's how the sex felt - like two people playing a different tune on the same instrument.
When I left, it was already morning and I grabbed a mini-cab home. I sat in the back trying to keep the sun out of my eyes and the blues off my mind. When you know something is easy to forget, you're never afraid to really look at it. Because if it goes away easy, it ain't no thing to let it come on in first.
And her pain was exactly that - something so obviously performative that it never clung to me. Like I said, it never seemed real. That night, at the club, I looked at her the way she needed me to. Because I knew I would forget her pain soon enough. But when we got back to her apartment, I started remembering someone else and my own pain.
And that's where it went wrong.
I guess what I'm trying to tell you is: just because I find it easy to forget, doesn't mean it's also easy to not remember.
