‘Answer the question.’
‘I’ll answer it by asking another. Why is it you fail to remember me? Are you sick, do you have early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s, or are you oblivious? Are you just an asshole who doesn’t pay any attention to the people who pass through your life?’
‘I don’t know you. You talk now as if I do. We might have met, one meets lots of people and it’s possible to forget those meetings if they fail to make an impression, but I do not know you, Mr. Ramsey.’
‘Let’s look in the basement. My light is fading.’
He walked back up into the kitchen and though I was deeply unsettled by this exchange I followed him, feeling I could not abandon the conversation until he had made himself clear. His flashlight was flickering and I steered myself down the hallway to a door, watched Ramsey open it, then stepped along behind him as he descended to the basement. This was one of those fully finished cellars with carpeting and 1970s-era fake wood paneling, a utility room with the furnace and hot water heater, another room with the washer and dryer, a bathroom, a kind of craft counter, a shower, a dumpy midcentury sofa. We searched the area around the furnace and water heater and at last found, in the farthest corner of the basement, a gray plastic box mounted on the wall, and when I opened the door I could see in an instant that the main circuit breaker had been thrown. I pushed it back in the other direction, heard it click, and we listened as the furnace began to rumble. The water heater made a hissing, gurgling noise, and upstairs the refrigerator in the kitchen came on, but the rooms were still dark.
Ramsey turned and walked back to the door leading into the utility room, fumbled and flipped a switch at the wall. A single bulb lit up and I could see his face clearly for the first time since we had left my house, at most only half an hour earlier, and yet he seemed transformed into someone quite other than who he had been when he arrived on my doorstep that night.
A student, I thought, Michael Ramsey was one of my students at Columbia, just as Fadia was a student at Oxford. Is it so inconceivable that I would not have remembered him before that moment, or that even then, when he told me I had been his teacher, I could not pull a memory of his face from the back of my head, I had no memories of the previous meetings, I could not imagine him as he would have appeared in his early twenties, nor can I even summon the names of most of the students I taught at Columbia, it was now so long ago and I was a different person with a different brain, one already jostled with too many claims on its finite capacity to remember. Michael Ramsey was a stranger to me, who wished to present himself as a familiar, if not a friend, someone to whom my own life was connected, it would seem, by the chance of him enrolling in courses I once taught, the subsequent chance of him belonging to the same organization — whatever it might have been — as Peter when they were both graduate students at Harvard and my daughter was an undergrad.
I thought then he might be some kind of stalker with a grievance, a hacker who had monitored me after I had spoken too sharply to him in class one day back at the dawn of the millennium.
Looking out on the city as I scratch at these pages, another day ending, lights warming up in the adjacent buildings and Houston Street clogging with traffic, sidewalks fuller than at other times of the day as students released from class hurry to assignations or the banalities of part-time work, I know how profoundly wrong I was about Michael Ramsey. That weekend in Rhinebeck I was thinking in the mode of the campus melodrama, a middle-aged professor targeted for vengeance by a student scorned. That, I now see, was the wrong genre entirely.
What, though, is the right one? Even now I am not entirely certain. Are the events that have reshaped my life, which feel increasingly as though they are demolishing the border that once kept me from wandering outside the territory of sanity, any less realistic in their way than the vagaries of melodrama? Is the mode of paranoia (particularly, perhaps, paranoia confirmed by events or evidence as nothing more fantastic than sensible caution duly justified?) any less a form of social realism than some lyrical testament of love or friendship or loss? My own story, I know, is not only about a state of paranoia at last proved warranted. In the accordion-squeeze recollection of my past, the distant events coming closer during the moments in which I examine them only to recede as the expansive air of inattention pushes them further away again, I sense that in the end the more universal experiences of romance and separation may yet prove my innocence.
Fadia, of course, is the key.
~ ~ ~
When she came to interview at Oxford, Fadia was in her final year of high school or secondary school, in fact I should have no trouble remembering, it was a lycée, because she was at school in Paris and for some reason it had been decided that Oxford would be a better place for her than one of the French universities. Although she spoke with a distinctive French accent, her English was flawless, and she was, from first sight, one of the most striking young women I have ever met. She had thick dark hair worn long, sometimes up in a chignon, other times falling to her waist, held back with that implement that in England they call an ‘Alice band’ after the Tenniel illustration of Lewis Carroll’s heroine, as if all girls who wear such bands are somehow participants in a vast apparatus of Alice-dom, as if even the men who dare to wear Alice bands — and there were quite a few in my early days in England, a footballer having made such gender transgressions possible — were themselves participating in the emulation of that precocious blonde child.
Fadia was tall and slender and gave the impression of being constructed of pure self-assurance, a confidence so bold it blinded her to her own failures and made her irritable with others whose qualities she regarded as shortcomings, even when she found them in figures of authority like teachers or, indeed, university professors interviewing her for a place in their College. If she believed she was right, I could see in that first meeting, it would take very inventive persuasion to make her see she might be wrong, and this fact was, without my realizing it at the time, one of the most attractive aspects of her character. She was not conventionally beautiful, either, for she had a prominent nose with a slight arch, rather closely set dark eyes, and while her height and slenderness suggested a contortionist more than a great beauty, she held herself as if she were nobility dressed in a pants suit, which, on a less confident girl, would have looked like a loan from a corporate mother’s wardrobe. On Fadia it was as natural as her skin, fine and smooth with the red-gold sheen of amber.
In our first meeting at that admissions interview her insights were workmanlike and she was bullish rather than receptive. She seemed too confident, almost arrogant, to be a natural choice for a College like ours — I would have sent her off to St. Hilda’s, or even Christ Church — and yet I remembered Stephen Jahn’s request, and so asked encouraging questions that I hoped would lead Fadia towards answers which would make it easier for me to persuade Bethan we should give her the kind of score — we scored all the candidates and then compared notes with the other interviewing team at the end of two days — that would make her, if not one of the top candidates, someone solidly in the middle of the pack, about whom there could be no doubts. Perhaps it was the nature of that year’s pool of applicants, a trick of dumb chance or mere coincidence, but without having to say anything to anyone, Fadia was offered an unconditional place, although Bethan thought her a potentially ‘difficult’ girl, while Stephen made a point of mentioning the wealth of the family and the prospect of a substantial donation to the College at some future date, the sort of donation that might, in fact, allow for another post in History or the provision of grants for female students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Even less flattering, there was an unspoken understanding that, from a public relations perspective, it would be no bad thing in the wake of the terrorist attacks in London over that summer for the College to demonstrate its commitment to educating Muslim students, as an indication of its longstanding investment in a liberal humanist tradition. At the time I thought no more about it. Fadia was one of a group of young people, no more than that, although I looked forward in a remote way to seeing how she evolved in the coming years, by which I mean my interest was pedagogical and observational rather than emotionally inflected.