A number of images and moments recur in more than one of the twelve chapters that make up this memoir: a film with a scene in which an actress wears yellow stockings, snowflakes on the collar of a violet coat, a tube of red lipstick found in a different coat pocket, a bathroom with a skylight over the tub, an apartment with layers of paint that the author idly picked off. That last image, peeling off chips of paint with a fingernail, getting to what’s underneath, and underneath that, and underneath that, seems tied to what this book is doing more generally: looking at the past, and also looking at what’s under the surface of things. Zarin’s writing, which is graceful, full of commas and long sentences, captures a lot of things extremely well: New York moments (mostly from decades ago: apartments and tailors and furriers and restaurants), scenes from travel (including a trip to a coastal town in Italy and trips to Cape Cod), and (maybe best of all) the way life unfurls, the way we move through it knowing some things about ourselves or where we’re going and missing or misjudging others, and the way we reflect on it all. In the book’s first chapter, Zarin writes: “When we first acquire what will become our memories, we do not recognize them or know how and when we will go back to them or what they will mean” (17). Zarin’s tone reminds me, sometimes, of André Aciman, another writer who I think is brilliant at this kind of exploration of the paths that take us to where we end up, and who I think has a similar way of drawing the reader’s attention to the sameness/difference of a person over time: the writing self, the past self.
Some sentences I really liked:
Each evening as dusk inked in first the lintels of the doorways and then the alleyways between the buildings, the fountain was circled by swallows, who rose like smoke signals over the jet of water that arced from the dragon’s mouth: a dragon who put out his own fire. (28)
I found myself thinking, wildly, for a moment, that we could not get home because we were stuck in time—there was no way to get from the cool glade of that pool, and the waiter and the silver domes, and the toothpicks, to the next place we were meant to be, meeting her brother at a pizza place, in West Harlem, where we live. (123)
A number of years before, a writer affiliated with the magazine had made his way without touching the sidewalk from the office to the Chrysler Building, six blocks away, through a series of catwalks, overpasses, and tunnels: in the lore of the magazine this was viewed as an enviable, even emblematic, achievement, as then a reigning idea behind the magazine itself, implicit in its character, which reflected the life of its editor, was the primacy of secret routes and the power of the inner life, which was viewed as an Escher landscape, with stairways that went nowhere, punctuated by moments of transcendence in which life, usually opaque, opened by means of a hidden switch. (172-173)
And I thought of the story I had read so long ago, in which the story the characters were reading was the story they had asked for, scribbling themselves into a book that they read aloud to themselves as it happened. (219)
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