Amnesiascope: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

everything .”
    An ashen look comes over his face. “Then we’re fucked,” he says hopelessly. Ventura is so confused about women that when I explain to him my Three Laws of Women, he actually writes them down. “One,” I count off, “they’re different.”
    “One, they’re different,” he repeats, jotting it down in his little notebook. He always carries a little notebook where he jots things down, so he can write about them in his column or tack them up on his wall.
    “Two, they’re crazy.”
    “Two, they’re crazy.” Scribble scribble.
    “Three, they’re funny.”
    “Three, they’re funny.” He reads it over. Ventura is convinced every woman is irresistibly attracted to him. “That woman’s looking at me,” he moans in a restaurant, “I wish she would stop. I have too many women in my life right now.” Every woman in every restaurant, every woman on the street, every woman who exchanges two syllables or a burp with him, wants him. It’s his burden in life to disappoint all of them. The ones he doesn’t disappoint sooner, he’ll have to disappoint later. Those are the ones he becomes involved with, the ones he casts in the movie he thinks he’s living in; like him, they’re larger than life. Each affair is a singular turbulent drama. “You two don’t have a relationship,” Viv said to Ventura one night at Musso and Franks, about one girlfriend or another, “you have a weather report.” Lately I’ve been noticing something. Every woman in Ventura’s life gets larger and more mythic than the last, until the new one is the most remarkable of all, the smartest and most beautiful, the one who in another world was a movie star and is now reincarnated as a Sufi goddess—and then he breaks up with her, as always, for no reason I can fathom. He just broke up with one recently for the simple reason that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her ; she was a woman with no vices whatsoever. “How was I supposed to be involved,” he asks plaintively, “with a woman who has no vices?”
    “You don’t understand,” I tell him. “ You were her vice.”
    “That’s it! That’s it exactly! I was her vice. How was I supposed to be involved with a woman whose only vice was me?” Weeks from now, of course, if not days, he’ll regret it. “I was driving out of the desert,” he’ll explain, pacing his apartment in a frenzy, “when it hit me like a lightning bolt,” and he’ll hit the back of his head, nearly knocking off his hat, to show me what it was like to be struck by this epiphany: “I should have married the Sufi goddess.”
    “Do you know,” I finally confess to him, “that in all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never understood a single thing about any of your relationships with any of your women? That in fact I understand your relationships with women even less than I understand mine? That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Other people’s fucked-up relationships are supposed to be easier to understand than your own. I’ll bet,” I pointed out, “that you think my relationships are easier to understand than yours.”
    “You’re right. I do.”
    “You’re supposed to. Except that, in this case, my relationships really are easier to understand than yours. Even I think my relationships are easier to understand than yours.” I’m not a man of hidden meanings, he once said to me, there are no hidden meanings in my life. “It’s interesting that the only time there are any hidden meanings in your life,” I say, “is in your relationships with women.” When we’re this confused about women, we turn to the only option left us: we write. We write as though we understand everything and it’s up to us to sort out the world. I only write about movies, but Ventura writes about Life. This morning, still contemplating the Queen of Cups, we head down to the newspaper. I drive because he doesn’t want to take his car, an old sixty- or seventy-something Chevy that he