“Sara… ? Oh, God, Sara… !”
My hand, which a moment ago I had withdrawn, still hovered between us. Now he grasped it in both of his.
“What’s happening, Sara? For God’s sake, what’s happening to me?”
George came home two days later. He looked slightly alarming, with a partially shaved head and several iodine-stained stitches
that would have to be removed later. His memory had continued to return in a fragmented way, but he could remember absolutely
nothing of the attack, though he did vaguely recall setting out to have a drink with Lou. According to Lou he had said he
wanted to discuss something, but hadn’t told him on the phone what it was. Now, of course, George had absolutely no idea what
it might have been.
Something else he had no memory of was the painful conversation we’d had the night before I left for Philadelphia. He looked
a little surprised when he found all his things moved into the guest room. I debated whether to tell him it had been his own
idea, but that would have meant reopening the whole issue, and I was far from sure I wanted to do that. I’d spoken to Steve,
and we agreed that a let-sleeping-dogs-lie approach was probably the best way to handle the situation for the time being.
I made some excuse to George about it being better for him to have his own room while he was recuperating. He accepted this,
and I just hoped he would go on doing so until his memory returned so that we wouldn’t have to go through the same awful confrontation
yet again.
However, that wasn’t how things turned out. After a few days he started talking about moving back in with me. When I tried
to avoid the issue, he became suspicious. Finally he became physical: not violent, but insistent. One night he came into my
room just after I’d gone to bed and tried to get in with me. His hands were all over me and he was quite obviously excited.
I pulled away and tried to put him off with more excuses—headache, tired, etc.—but he would have none of it. He kept asking
me what was wrong. Finally I knew I had to face it.
“George, we discussed it all. We agreed.”
“Discussed what? When?”
“Last week, before I left for Philadelphia.”
He looked at me blankly.
“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you really don’t remember?”
He said he had no idea what I was talking about. I wondered what to tell him, where to begin. Then I made one last appeal
to his fundamentally generous, gentle nature. I don’t recall precisely how I put it. I know I acknowledged that, yes, there
was a problem, something we’d had to talk about and deal with. Because of what had happened to him he’d forgotten all about
it. I promised him that we would go over it all again, and soon, but for the moment I begged him to be patient.
His eyes burned into mine, trying to read what lay behind them. Then suddenly he relaxed. It was as though he accepted that
there were things he didn’t know about and perhaps wouldn’t for some time, and that all he could do for the moment was let
them go. I thought back to what the doctor had said about the possibility of his amnesia being psychologically as much as
physically induced. Perhaps somewhere at the back of his subconscious he knew the truth and recalled, however hazily, what
had happened between us that night. I don’t know. I felt only a huge sense of relief that he had chosen to behave so reasonably.
From that night on he accepted the status quo, sleeping alone and asking no questions, concentrating on recovering more of
his still-impaired memory every day.
Rather to my surprise, he was perfectly happy, anxious even, to go out and meet people. He said it could only help all the
pieces to come together. So we went to a couple of dinner parties, a reception or two, an opening at the Met—a social whirl
that he seemed to be enjoying, curiously enough, more than he usually did. Despite the oddness of his appearance (it would
be weeks before his hair grew back and covered the scars), he was poised and pleasant, a good listener, which had always been
his greatest strength in conversation, but it was extraordinary to see how he sometimes totally failed to recognize old friends,
people he’d known for years who had to reintroduce themselves all over again, tell him all about their lives and what they
did and who their kids were, until a glimmer of recollection appeared in his eyes. Sometimes, as I watched him, I got the
impression that he was only pretending to remember, like someone suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s; later on
he might turn to me discreetly for a potted biography of somebody he’d just been chatting with as though he knew them well.
He would listen carefully to the details I filled in for him, nodding thoughtfully as he memorized everything.
It was inevitable at some point that we should run into Steve and Linda.
I
had known that Steve and Linda were going to be at this particular gathering. Steve and I had discussed it beforehand, wondering
whether a casual meeting between the four of us should be avoided in case it triggered George’s recollection of things that
for the time being he had so conveniently forgotten. We decided it would seem strange if we tried to avoid an encounter altogether,
trusting either that George would remember nothing, or that even if he did he would behave as well as he had done the last
time around.
Linda gushed concern over George and the ordeal he’d been through, while Steve and I tried to avoid making eye contact. I
found myself watching George with a closeness bordering on obsession, looking for any hint of recollection that the lives
of these three people around him were entangled with his own in a way that rendered this scene of polite social chitchat so
monumentally absurd. But there was not even a glimmer of such awareness. I caught sight of Steve breathing a discreet sigh
of relief. I did the same myself.
Next day Steve and I talked on the phone and wondered what our next move should be. We could wait till George recovered his
memory fully and deal with his reaction then. Or we could take the chance of forestalling an ill-timed explosion by telling
him the truth now. There was a third possibility—that he might never fully regain his memory at all. In which case we would
go through the whole process of confession and facing the music at some point in the future when Steve and I were not in so
much danger from discovery.
Steve’s main concern was that George would get his memory back at some time when he and I were alone together and react badly,
perhaps even violently. I tried to reassure him that such behavior was simply not in George’s nature, but he was unconvinced.
“In the right circumstances,” he said, “everybody is capable of violence.”
But I wasn’t worried. I knew George. Then, a week or so later, something happened that made me wonder whether I knew him as
well as I thought. For no reason I could see he suddenly got a bee in his bonnet all over again about our sleeping arrangements.
“You promised when I came home that we’d talk about it,” he said. “Well, I’ve been patient, but now I want to talk about it.”
We were going up to Eastways at the weekend and I suggested we leave the matter till then. To be perfectly frank, my main
reason for this was that the crucial vote on Steve’s candidacy was to take place on Friday, after which we would be clear
of the worst of the potential storm clouds that had been hanging over us.
But George would have none of it. He insisted the whole issue be thrashed out there and then. It was early Wednesday evening.
George had been out all day. He didn’t say where he’d been or what he’d been doing, but he was in a foul mood. He may have
been drinking, though he certainly wasn’t drunk.
“Look,” I said, “I can’t talk now. I have to be somewhere.”
“You mean some damn art charity committee is more important than—”
“George, I’m not talking to you about anything while you’re like this.”
“Like what? What am I like? What is your problem?”
Suddenly I said it. I hadn’t meant to, but he’d made me angry and it just came out.
“This memory loss thing. I think you’re doing it on purpose.”
“I got hit on the head, for God’s sake!”
I told him what his doctor had said, even throwing in a suggestion that the scratches on his hands and knees could be interpreted
as proof that his injuries were self-inflicted. I knew that I was going dangerously far there, and for a terrible moment I
thought he was going to hit me. But he got his temper under control and simply dismissed the idea with contempt.
Then I tried another approach. “You need help, George,” I said. “You’re not well. You’re not yourself.”
For some reason the suggestion of therapy made him back off altogether. He held up his hands in surrender. “All right, maybe
you’re right, I’m nuts. I cracked my own skull open because I
wanted
to lose my memory. But if I
am
going to get any help, I’d like it to come from you.”
“This weekend,” I repeated. “We’ll talk at the weekend.”
He decided that he would go up to the house a couple of days early. He needed some time to himself, he said, and I encouraged
him to take it. I knew he would be well looked after by Martha and Joe, who were very fond of him. And I promised that I would
go up on Friday evening to join him, and we would talk about things then.
My sense of relief when Steve called to say that the vote had gone through without a hitch was indescribable. Only then did
I realize quite how much I had been on tenterhooks. I said I was leaving for the Berkshires right away, but he asked me to
wait; he said he would be with me in half an hour and insisted on coming along. I tried to protest, but truthfully I was glad
to have him. There was still too much about George’s state of mind that I didn’t understand and that made me nervous.
We got up there just after 7:30 in the evening. I hadn’t said anything to George about Steve being with me. We agreed that
Steve would wait in the car while I went in and spoke with George alone. Once I’d broken the ice, and depending on how things
were going, I might call Steve in to join us.
George’s first reaction when I walked in was surprise that I had called Martha and told her not to prepare dinner. “Are we
going out?” he asked. “With people? Who? Where?”
“George,” I began hesitantly, “there’s still something we have to talk about. You remember what you said the other night.”
“We agreed we’d talk, I know. But we’ve got the whole weekend. Come on, relax, let me pour you a drink.”
“No thank you. I don’t want anything. We have to talk now, George. Not later. Now.”
He looked at me, shrugged, and said, “Okay—go ahead.”
I felt rather like a teacher with a backward pupil who had forgotten everything he had ever learned. As I talked about Steve
I watched him closely, waiting for some response, perhaps even a sudden recollection of everything that had until now been
hidden behind the curtain of his amnesia. But I saw nothing. He listened with a blankness that was almost unnatural, and into
which I read successively shock, anger, disbelief, and heartbreak. In reality he showed none of those emotions. His coldness
was the most shocking thing about the whole encounter. He didn’t look at me apart from a swift glance as I began. After that
he could have been listening closely or thinking about something else entirely; it was impossible to tell. I felt I didn’t
know him any longer. It was a strange and worrying sensation that made me wonder how much we’d ever really known about each
other. Here was a man I’d spent seven years of my life with, and suddenly we were strangers.
When I’d finished he didn’t respond at all for several moments. Then he looked at me in an odd, sidelong way.
“The night before you went to Philadelphia? That was when you claim you told me all this?”
“Yes.”
He was silent for a moment, then gave a short bark of laughter, as though there was something bitterly ironic in what I had
just said.
“What?” I asked him. “Why d’you laugh like that?”
“Because it’s something of a coincidence,” he said, then gave another sharp, dry laugh. “In fact it’s quite a coincidence.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said, looking at me sharply and, though he tried to hide it, with such a flash of rage that
I took an involuntary step away from him.
“George, tell me,” I said. “Why is it a coincidence?”
“Forget it.”
“Please. I want to know.”
“I said drop it, didn’t I? Christ!”
He was angry suddenly, shouting. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he picked up a vase and flung it across
the room, shattering it against the wall. He had never behaved like that before. I suppose, considering the circumstances,
it was no great surprise that he should choose this as the first time. All the same, it was so out of character, so strange
to see that rage in his eyes, to hear him speak in that tone of voice, that a deep shiver of fear ran through me.
“George,” I started to say, stumbling over my words, “I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that you’ll
get help. I’m going to call one of the doctors who examined you in the hospital, because he can suggest somebody you could
talk—”
He cut me off by grabbing my wrist and starting to pull me across the room. “Forget it,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I pulled back, but he was too strong for me and I was dragged after him, protesting.
“Let go of my wrist. George, you’re hurting me—let go!”
“I’ll let go when we get to where we’re going.”
I struggled, but his grip tightened. He was beginning to really scare me now.
“Stop it! Stop it, George!”
He turned back to say something, then froze, looking over my shoulder. I felt his grip on my wrist slacken, and I looked back.
Steve was standing in the door.
Steve was a big man and he’d been an athlete in college, and he was still in shape. George was no weakling, but he would certainly
think twice before picking a fight with Steve.
“Okay, I see—so that’s how it is,” George said with a sneer in his voice, looking from one of us to the other. “You two lovebirds
are figuring on taking the master bedroom and putting me in the spare room again—right?”