The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

Except that the sun doesn’t really come out at that moment. Memory, it turns out, is unreliable. All on its own, your memory gathers up helpful details that match your recollection of an event, whether or not those details actually existed at the time. But does it matter? For Elfriede, the sun comes out when the Englishman arrives. That’s how she remembers it. Sunshine, and the smell of roses.

So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.

Before me, the martini formed a tranquil circle in its glass, a cool pool. Not a single flaw disturbed its surface. I pondered the chemical properties of liquids, the infinitesimal bonds of electricity that secured them together in such perfect order, the beautiful molecules held flat in my glass by gravity. The great mystery eluded me, as ever.

I might never again have the opportunity to enter this building and see its rooms for myself. Which, in retrospect, is just the sort of logic that lands a girl in trouble, in love affairs as in houses that don’t belong to her.

But here’s the thing. You cannot possibly know somebody you’ve never met. You can observe her in a thousand photographs, a hundred newsreels, and not understand a thing about her. That person on the magazine cover is a character in a play, a character in a book, a character of her own creation and your imagination, and this immaculate namesake bears no more than a passing resemblance to the original. Remember that, please. You don’t know her. You know only the fascinating fiction she’s presented to you.

YOU KNOW, IT’S A FUNNY word, loyalty. Loyalty to what? And why? And especially how, that’s the kicker. It seems to me that loyalty requires a suspension of logic, of truth even. Like faith, like superstition, a thing you cling to in defiance of what lies before you in plain sight. On the other hand—like faith or superstition, like love itself—where’s the comfort in a world without it?

Probably the real history isn’t so simple as that, but human beings love nothing so much as a tale that confirms their particular prejudices, so I’ll let it stand.

But you can’t second-guess yourself, I’ve found. You don’t know what lies in that parallel dimension, you don’t know what fate is contained inside those infinite hypothetical worlds in which you made other choices. Anyway, what can you do about them? They’re like the past itself, they’re gone. You can’t just get on your bicycle and travel there.

It seems to me that this is a moment for fairy tales, for a story that ends well, for a fiction you know is a fiction that comforts you anyway.

I knew better than to say anything. Let her enjoy the exercise of petty power, after all. It cost you nothing and meant the world to her.