‘Faultless. You did not miss a solitary one. I would like to refer you for a scan, just to be certain there is nothing irregular internally, to exclude stroke or tumor and suchlike.’
‘Stroke or tumor?’
‘Listen, Professor O’Keefe,’ she said, stretching her hands and bringing the fingertips together into a steeple, ‘it is improbable, but in the absence of any observable memory or cognitive problems, I would like to corroborate there is nothing wrong inside. There is no history of Parkinson’s in your family?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘Alzheimer’s?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘No discussion ever of forgetful family members?’
‘Everyone died of cancer, heart failure, or old age.’
‘Meaning?’
‘They slipped off in their sleep at a very advanced age, so I suppose that was heart failure as well.’
Dr. Sebastian nodded and told me I could get the scan done on Wednesday if I did not mind, and of course that suited me fine. By the end of the appointment I wanted certainty rather than further questions.
‘But what does it mean, if there doesn’t end up being any sign of a neurological problem?’
Twirling her pen between her fingers, she averted her gaze.
‘Then we must consider if there may be some psychological explanation.’
Dr. Sebastian looked over the tops of her glasses in a way that reminded me of a teacher administering a stern lesson or warning. Under other circumstances, in a different context, I would not have thought twice about making my interest in this woman as clear as modesty and respect might allow. She wore no wedding ring, although I knew that this did not necessarily signal availability. There were no photographs on her desk or on the walls of her office, only her degrees, all of them from Harvard, mounted and framed and hung in such an orderly grid I knew professionals must have done it. That precision, as well as the care she took with her grooming and clothes, the black wool slacks and black shoes, the creamy silk blouse, the total absence of jewelry except for a watch, made from a silvery metal, reminded me of the only other woman with whom I had recently been in love — the only woman I had loved in a very long time — and made me wish that Dr. Sebastian and I were not meeting for the first time in this particular situation, that I might have met her when I did not look so undone by the odd experiences of the previous weekend.
‘I take you to mean I might be going crazy.’
She raised her chin so that she could look at me straight through the lenses.
‘No, Professor O’Keefe, I mean there are some number of reasons, or ways, that the mind can blot out certain events.’ What was her nationality, I wondered? German, possibly, in which case we might have had an easier conversation in her mother tongue than in mine. ‘It would be worth speaking to someone. Do you already have a therapist?’
‘I’ve never been in therapy.’
‘Do you know any therapists socially?’
‘Not in New York.’
‘I could make a referral.’
‘I’ll have to think about it.’
I left the appointment wondering what psychological causes could possibly produce such a specific void in my memory. As I walked back to the subway at 72nd Street I tried to think about trauma as the potential cause of that blackout, but could come up with no particular reason why planning to meet Rachel, who strikes me as a solid student unlikely to prompt any variety of strong emotional or psychological response, could have triggered traumatic amnesia. Nor did I know for certain whether this was what Dr. Sebastian meant, or if the mind even acted in this way. Then it occurred to me that perhaps something had happened on Saturday afternoon, some other form of trauma unrelated to Rachel, and the communication with her was swept away with my forgetting whatever that other trauma might have been. Possible though it remained, this hypothesis did not seem convincing.
In those minutes walking through my old neighborhood I thought of the innumerable evenings when, returning from Columbia after a day of teaching, I would stop for groceries at Fairway, for fresh fish or oysters at Citarella, a nice cake for dessert, and then go home to whip up a dinner for my wife and daughter, back when it still seemed — despite the small irritations of an ordinary married life — that I was in a family capable of persisting in one form or another until the day I died. My parents did not divorce and I believed when I married Susan that she and I would be together forever. Her own parents provided a much different model, but I wanted to believe in the permanence of our relationship, in the possibility of finding ways to adjust our behavior as the decades progressed, accommodating ourselves to the shifting needs and desires of the other, that in so doing we would be able to continue returning to the marital bed with a sense of security as well as hope, or if not hope then an ever diminishing mystery, a broadening knowledge of the other person, the idiosyncrasies of her desire, the textures of her body, the way parts expanded and contracted quickly or over longer periods of time. I could not then imagine, not on those nights of impromptu cooking, that Susan had lost interest and that her losing interest would infect my professional life, forcing not only my departure from the home, but from my own country.
In that first, lonely year spent living in College rooms in the front quad overlooking a perfect postage stamp of lawn, woken at odd hours by carousing Oxford students, finding myself sleepless in a twin bed for the first time since I had left college myself, I resented Susan for her failure to remain interested in me, and just when that resentment was about to turn corrosive, at the moment when I became conscious of having drunk a whole bottle of wine each evening for weeks on end and could see myself being looked at by the young students who came to my rooms for tutorials with a mixture of perplexity and vague disgust, I decided that, as Rilke would have insisted, I had to change my life before I, too, became a ruin. I cut back on the drink and started running, despite the English rain, and kept running as a way of reclaiming the man I had been. I was not going to age like most male academics, I decided, and so turned to some of my female colleagues for inspiration. The older they grew, the more carefully they attended to their appearance, so that a woman of sixty who had the rooms next to mine looked scarcely a day over forty-five. I asked her once why she did it, if all the effort was only for herself, or for her partner. ‘The students already think we’re ancient,’ she said. ‘Why give them more ammunition?’
When Rachel knocked on my office door that afternoon, in the townhouse overlooking Washington Square, I was already wondering whether to bring up the confusion about our previous appointment or to pretend nothing had happened. Rachel is one of those graduate students who appears always to be on her way to an interview, usually dressed in a suit, more often — like Dr. Sebastian, who was still much on my mind — in conservative slacks and blouse and stylish black leather boots with a low heel and gently pointed toe that suggested power and professionalism, but without making men like me feel insecure.
I had no sense what Rachel’s background might be, it is often difficult to tell with students just how much money is in the family, but she looked as though she had enjoyed a solid middle-class upbringing, with enough resources to be comfortable. The suit she was wearing that Monday was good quality, it might have been bought by her parents or grandparents, and yet there was a slight edge of professionalism and striving, as though she knew she needed to work to get the kind of coveted tenure-track position that has become ever more difficult to secure because institutions like NYU and Columbia are hiring fewer people for permanent jobs, relying instead on adjuncts with contracts so limited they have little choice but to work at three or four universities just to make ends meet. Rachel had the look of the student who says to herself, ‘That is not going to be me, I’m going to be one of you, Professor O’Keefe, and I want you to know that when it comes to writing a reference next year, I’m the one about whom you will say, you would be fools to hire anyone other than Rachel.’ Among the undergraduate students she was a well-liked TA, which is to say there was a healthy balance of those who complained she was too demanding and those who thought she was a genius, the best teacher they had ever encountered. Because of this response, not to mention the strength of her scholarship, I felt certain I would provide a reference urging hiring committees that Rachel, above all my other doctoral candidates, was the best one for the job. Even still, it was unlikely she would be hired until several more years had passed, and then she might have to spend the first part of her professional life in Louisiana or Utah or Alabama.