The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

shamelessly splattered with juices—to eat a lobster it’s almost a sexual act, if you know how to do it, of course, and I’m not even talking about the smell that lingers above that table—softly salty, so much like the smell of my girl herself, which, naturally, may not be something that occurs to her at that table at all, but most certainly occurs to her companion if they’d spent the previous night together and if he is not a complete idiot...okay now, that’s enough. I’ve no business in
her
memories. Especially since she wasn’t talking about the lobster this time at all, and the number of memories is infinite. Like natural numbers—a countable infinite set. That’s the thing.
    The thing is, toots, you cannot ever tell yourself fully and completely to another person, no matter how close you are, even to theone with whom you mix your breath by night and share the world by day. I don’t know; maybe identical twins can do it, but only for a while, as children.... It’s like finite and infinite sets: regardless of how they depend on each other, the first one will have a limit, and the second one will not. End of story. Instinctively, you try to help things along by adding as many shared experiences as you can; you make the woman you love a constant witness to your life—hoping, vaguely, for a purely arithmetical advantage, for strength in numbers: to have the sum total of hours lived together outweigh that of the time spent without the other. (And why hours? Why not minutes, or seconds, or milliseconds? How long does it take you to experience something, to pick up an impression, a feeling that would morph somewhere in the deep dark mines of your subconscious into a memory I have no hope of accessing, like chlorophyll into coal?) Only it’s all for naught—
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, as Grandpa Shakespeare wrote. (Am I right, Lolly? Do you appreciate my English?)
    The math doesn’t work for the simple reason that even the events we experience together (Remember the time we went to buy our first desk lamp at The Guiding Light, and you were so taken with those tri-jointed arms, playing with lamps all over the store, folding and bending, and I was trying to explain the advantages of halogen bulbs over the incandescent ones, and you listened like a straight-A schoolgirl, so attentive you let your little mouth open a bit? And later, after we left the store with our purchase—not something with a jointed arm, but a totally different, stylish one with a heavy chrome column—you asked just as enthusiastically, on that same brainwave, without even changing your voice, “Didn’t that salesman look like a mole?”—and all I could do was stare like a slow-witted goat, not knowing what to say, because the very fact of that salesman’s existence had escaped me, let alone what he looked like.), all those things we live through together, Lolly, leave each of us with discrete memories, and the number of these is also infinite.
    This, if you think about it good and hard, can drive you nuts. I did go a little crazy with this idea back when I was a student: let’s say we have two infinite sets, say of natural and real numbers—how are we supposed to compare them? Which one is “less” and which one is “greater” if they are both potentially endless? It’s just like that with us—we have two infinite sets: one is the number of all your memories (X) and the other, the number of memories you share with me (Y). Mind you, there’s also the concept of a set’s power, as when every member of Y directly corresponds to a member of X, but not the other way around; this means X is more powerful than Y. Example: I remember that there was a salesman at The Guiding Light—that there had to have been one!—but not whether he looked like a mole, a camel, or an ox. And even if I spend the rest of my life holding your hand—which, of course, would cause certain inconveniences—X would still be more powerful than Y, and no feat of my imagination would help me see the man the way you did. So.
    Eggs, that’s what I want.
    What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but
given
to you anew every minute—all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other’s sentences—“that’s just it, exactly, that’s what