You Don't Make Wine Like the Greeks Did Part 3

"Oh, did you cut yourself?" she said, straightening up from the lower shelves of a pine cupboard. "I'm so sorry, but never mind. Here's the squeezer."

The apparent non sequitur, coming in the midst of his thoughts that were already confused, bewildered him for the moment, but he felt it would be more fruitful to get back to the problem at hand and, blotting his seeping blood with a handkerchief, he inquired after her reticent memory.

"Oh, let's mix in the lime juice first. Aren't you at all anxious to see how it will taste? Honestly, men have no curiosity."

Well, as it turned out, it tasted pretty good. At any rate, that was the consensus of opinion, alcoholic as it might have been, as they returned with the pitcher of green martinis to the living room. "The furthest back that I can remember," Mimi said after they had settled themselves on the divan, "the absolutely first thing I can remember is relieving my bladder, if that makes any sense to you."

"As a matter of fact," Victor said, "it makes extremely good sense indeed. If you will pardon me and kindly direct me towards the wash room?"

When he returned after an absence of a few minutes, during which time the muted sound of snoring emanated from the master bedroom into the silence left by his absence, he attempted once again to take up the thread of conversation that had been so abruptly snapped. "You were telling me, I believe, about the first thing you can remember."

"Yes," she said. "Have another martini. Here, I'll pour. I was on a train, you see, at this moment when my memory begins. It was, by the way, eight months ago. As I emerged from the ladies' room I could not remember from which direction I had come. That is, I didn't know in which direction my seat was, if you follow me."

Victor nodded more vigorously than he had intended, and she went on. "I didn't know whether to turn to right or left. That's a frightening feeling to have in a train, not knowing where your seat is, when you're all closed in anyhow and you can feel the floor beneath your feet and the walls and ceiling all rus.h.i.+ng somewhere so terribly fast and carrying you with it and all. I wasn't really _frightened_, you understand, but anyway, as I say, it's a terrible feeling. So I leaned back against the wall and tried to collect my wits. But I couldn't think of anything. That really frightened me. So I said to myself, now just relax and think back to where you're going and when you got on the train and who you're with and everything like that and just relax and you'll remember where your seat is in half a moment. But I didn't. Remember, I mean. And suddenly I realized that I didn't remember where I was going or who I was with or when I had got on the train or anything, anything at all. I simply couldn't remember anything previous to a moment ago. I was scared silly by this time, and that d.a.m.ned train kept on rumbling and shaking and rus.h.i.+ng on into I didn't know what. So I said to myself, now just relax and keep calm. This is all very silly. Now, then, I said after taking two deep breaths and exhaling slowly, my name is ... my name is ... And by G.o.d, I didn't know my own name! It was such a queer feeling I got goose pimples all over, just like that. I mean, I felt as if I knew my name, it was on the tip of my tongue, but I just couldn't say it, I just couldn't remember my own name.

"Then I began to run. I didn't know where I was going but I was scared to h.e.l.l and I just ran. I ran through five or six cars and the panic kept getting worse, and then I turned around and began running back the way I had come, just running as fast as I could and you know what that's like on a train, I kept falling against people and pus.h.i.+ng them off and running and suddenly this man grabbed me and said, 'Mimi, Mimi,' he kept saying that and I guess some more and finally he calmed me down and, of course, it was Donald. He told me I was all right and to be quiet and what the h.e.l.l was the matter with me anyhow. Well, to make a long story short, we got off the train here and stayed in a hotel for a while and then Donald bought this place and here we are. But I don't know if I'm really his wife or not. Did he mention s.e.x to you?"

Victor nodded and she said, "So you know I'm not his wife _that_ way, at least. And I have only his word that we were ever married."

"You don't have a marriage certificate, or pictures?"

"We don't have anything that would prove our existence prior to that date we were on the train. Naturally, he'd have left all that behind when we left wherever we were coming from. Any doc.u.ments at all would ruin his story. For all I know he just picked me up at the train station."

"And you just picked up life here?" Victor asked. "As simple as that!"

"What else could I do? I was terribly frightened, and Donald was so calm and a.s.suring. I didn't really think I had lost my memory, you know. I mean, I _couldn't_ believe it. I didn't seem bewildered or anything, I just could not remember anything. Am I making sense? Anyway, I felt it would all come back to me any moment, and I went on living from one moment to another, and here I am and I still can't remember anything."

"What was Donald's reaction when you told him you didn't know who you were?" Victor asked her.

"As a matter of fact, I didn't tell him right away. I was so afraid, I just went along with him.... Oh, it's so hard to explain."

"He didn't realize that you were acting strange, bewildered?"

"Well, you know," Mimi said, "we're not talking about a normal man, remember. I suppose if I acted sort of, you know, lost, he attributed it to our recent trip through time. _I_ don't know. Anyhow, he seemed to accept me."

"Let's get back to this time-travel bit. When did you realize that he thought you had both come from another time?"

"The limes really make the drink, don't they?" she asked. "Well, it came out sort of gradually. I'd listen to him really closely whenever he talked about the past, naturally. I was trying to find out about me without telling him, I thought he'd get all excited and all, and of course he did when I finally told him but by then it was all so different and I'm afraid I've gotten confused. Where was I? Oh, you need a refill."

"Thank you," Victor said, "I forget myself exactly where it was you were. Is that right? Where you was it were? No, I'm sure _that's_ wrong.

Where were you it was, I think. Does that sound better to you?"

"Isn't that peculiar?" she answered. "Could it be where I was you weren't? No, now I'm being silly, and I can't for the life of me understand why. After all, this is a serious affair. Or at least I wish it were. Was."

"What?"

"I remember, d.a.m.n it," she said. "We were talking about _Don_ald again.

Well, he kept making these remarks about coming through time and of course I didn't understand what the h.e.l.l he was talking about but I thought because of my not remembering anything and all that I better just not say anything so I didn't, but he kept on and little by little I got the idea, the general idea anyhow, but what on earth could I do about it? And then he started talking about it was time to go back and all that, and I _cer_tainly wasn't going to go floating off in any old _time_ machine whether he was nuts or not, so I just kept putting him off the best I could but he started getting so impatient that finally--what was that? I think there's something wrong."

They both sat suddenly quite still and listened, but they heard nothing.

"I hear nothing," Victor said.

"That's it," Mimi hissed. "He's not snoring anymore. He'll be here any minute. Act natural. Have another martini."

"Thank you, perhaps just one more," Victor said as Donald Fairfield came into the room.

He strode across the room crossing in front of them without turning his head or acknowledging their presence and made straight for the buffet in the opposite corner. He bent over and extracted a thick black cigar, struck a match, lit the cigar, puffed several times, dropped the match into a gigantic ashtray made of marble, or something that looked like marble, puffed several more times, finally inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly before he turned and nodded at his two spectators. "You make better cigars than we do, I'll say that for the twentieth century," he complimented Victor in the manner of all tourists, as if Victor himself were the cause and not the product of his age. "One of the mysteries of history," he continued, "how a simple technique, like making a good cigar or a good mummy, can be lost once it's been perfected. Always seems to be though. Each age has its secrets. You can't make wine now like the ancient Greeks did."

"As," Mimi interpolated. "As the Greeks did."

"I hate to be bombastic," Donald answered her, "not to say dogmatic or pedagogical, or impecunious too, for that matter, at least in this particular day and age, but I believe my original adjectival usage to be the correct one."

"If your thought had called for an adjective," Mimi countered, "but properly, according to the accepted grammar of the present day, that is, you should have used an adverb."

"Whatchamacallit tastes good _like_ a dum-dum cigarette should," Victor put in, in an attempt to settle the subject.

"That's ridiculous," Donald answered, "it's completely wrong."

"I _know_ it's wrong," Victor cried, "that's the point, _every_body knows it's--"

"Of course it is," Mimi agreed. "Why on earth _should_ a cigarette taste good? Who says it should? If one wants to taste something good, why then one takes a bite of cake, or a smidgin of candy, or a plate of cold borscht. If one cares for borscht. But you certainly don't smoke a cigarette to taste something good, they all taste horrible. Horribly? Oh d.a.m.n, look what you started, Donald. Now I can't think straight.

Anyhow, people smoke because of the phallic symbolism, right, Victor?"

Donald looked with distaste from Mimi to the big black cigar he was holding in his right hand, and thence to Victor for a denial. Victor, however, shrugged his shoulders, and murmured something to the effect that this consideration might possibly have some bearing on the subject, that it was really a matter of interest more to the applied psychologists and advertising men than to the pure scientist or doctor, and that even so it didn't necessarily follow that--

"You're hedging," Mimi said. "All you have to do is watch a woman smoke and then watch a man and--"

"I thought we were talking about wine," Donald interrupted, crus.h.i.+ng out his cigar in the oversize marble, or nearly so, ashtray. "What were we saying about it?"

"You were commenting on the relative excellence of our wines and those of the Greeks," Victor told him. "I was wondering if perhaps you've visited them too?"

Donald Fairfield did not answer the query. He stared at Victor contemplatively, drew in a deep lungful of acrid smoke-filled air from above the smoldering ashtray, and let it out again. "This is not going to be as simple an affair as it should be," he said finally. "I can see that now, but I suppose there's nothing to be done but to see it through. I take it you've settled everything between the two of you while I've been gone?"

"Oh my," Mimi e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "I've got to see about dinner. See if you two can find something to talk about while I'm gone." She hurried out of the room, one hand already reaching for the ap.r.o.n of the modernistic design as she pa.s.sed through the swinging door into the kitchen.

"Well," Donald began, "what did you discover from my little wife?"

"To begin with," Victor answered him, "she seems to have lost her memory. Everything previous to an experience on the train some eight months ago is a total blank. Were you aware of this?"