The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

loose ends left untucked. I can certainly ignore my gut feeling here—no matter how loudly it screams that what I saw in my dream is someone’s death as it did, in fact, happen—but I’m still physicist enough to know what makes a good, true solution, and that, Lolly, is elegance; a single inspired maneuver that puts everything into place.
    “I understand,” Lolly sighed, giving me the lamb look. “It’s not only your formulas that work like that.”
    “That could very well be true, but you know what else? Now that you mentioned Goverla, I’m convinced it was a Carpathian forest.”
    I really don’t want to go shower and wash off her smell, even after I eat. “Sloppy McGrimes!” Lolly teases when we eat breakfasttogether: nice natty girl that she is, she won’t take a sip of her coffee until she’s showered and put on her underwear at least—she doesn’t understand what it’s like for me when she’s so squeaky clean.
Stop, right now.
—I’m afraid that is not possible.—
Where’s your willpower?
—Gone, never to be seen again.—
Maniac!
, but raspy, tender already, eyes misty, my sweet girl, white undies slip down like a flag of surrender, and then she whimpers softly like a teddy bear, and it makes everything inside me turn, all over again. “You know,” she said one morning—after we made love like that in the middle of the kitchen and she sat there on her chair so totally, unbearably mine, languorous-luxurious, with her hair wet at the roots, and contemplated her lazily parted thighs—“you know, men are so doglike in their instincts: always in a rush to mark a woman as their territory.” I could only mumble something back at her then, like a happy idiot, and didn’t feel jealous until later, when I could think again, remembered the barn door after the horse bolted, as Granny Lina would put it. Although, really, what’s there to be jealous of? Her memories? Please. Only for some reason, when a woman hears a man say something like “You women are all the same,” she triumphantly interprets it as more proof of her being right—“See! I’m not the only one.”—and a man, by contrast, gets all worked up over the mere possibility of just being one in a lineup of previous offenders.
    But hey, I know my way across this minefield; I’m not one of those morons who ask something like, “How many did you have before me?” I’m not one to ask questions, period. Lolly and I mapped out our sandbox a while ago sharing bit by bit, scoop by scoop, the things that were most important for the other to know; I even shook hands with Sergiy, her ex-husband, once at a large party, and I remember I almost liked the guy—he had an open face and a boyish smile that must still work wonders on women—if not for his handshake: limp like a dead fish, like all the air had been sucked out of him a long time ago and he keeps dragging his shell around because these burdensome social obligations force him to do so. An aging boy, one of many.
    The one thing I really wanted to know I went ahead and asked—“Why did you split up?”—but never got an answer, split up and that’s all, as if that in itself was the answer; it certainly was the only answer
she
needed, and she didn’t feel like coming up with another one just for me. Okay, that’s her right, what can you say? Worse when she lets something slip, a phrase, or a reference, something that sounds sentimental, nostalgic, and when I jump in—sometimes a bit too sharply, I’ll admit—before she goes all doe-eyed reminiscing—sure, that one, the guy that you went to the Baltic sea with, the one who taught you to eat lobster—she’s stunned, every time, “
Did I tell you that?
” She doesn’t remember. Fortunately, the number of love stories in our lives is finite. (And I still don’t know how to eat lobster, pick at it like a retarded monkey, no fun at all, just more trash on my plate.) The number of stories is finite, but the number of memories is infinite, and that’s a big difference—Lolly mentioned that man because she thought of something completely different from what she’d told me about him before, and that’s why she’s always surprised: the lobster had nothing to do with it. She doesn’t remember, but I can see it all perfectly: the broken red shell on a white platter, the plump, juicy half of a lemon with the lobster’s ravished flesh, the ecstatic licking of fingers, the plastic bib the waiter solicitously supplied