A Traitor to Memory (15 page)

Yes.

Why?

It's not that he doesn't want me to be with someone. Why wouldn't he? Family is everything to my father. But family is going to be stopped short if I don't marry someday and have children of my own.

Except there's another child on the way now, isn't there? The family will continue anyway, no matter what you do.

Yes, it will.

So now he can disapprove of every woman in your life without fearing the consequences of your taking that disapproval to heart and never marrying, can't he, Gideon?

No! I will not play this game. This is
not
about my father. If he doesn't like Libby, it's because he's concerned about the impact she could have on my music. And he's well within his rights to be concerned. Libby doesn't know a bow from a kitchen knife.

Does she interrupt your work?

No, she doesn't.

Does she display an indifference to your music?

No.

Does she intrude? Ignore requests for solitude? Make demands upon you that violate the time you've set aside for your music?

Never.

You said she was a philistine. Have you discovered that she clings to her ignorance like a badge of accomplishment?

No. I haven't.

But still your father doesn't like her.

Look, it's for my own good. He's never made a move that wasn't for my good. I'm here with you because of him, Dr. Rose. When he understood what had happened to me in Wigmore Hall, he didn't say “Buck up! Get a grip! You've a God damn audience who've paid to see you!” No. What he said was “He's ill” to Raphael. “Make our excuses,” and he spirited me out of there. He took me home and he put me to bed and he sat next to me all night and he said, “We'll handle this, Gideon. Just sleep for now.”

He instructed Raphael to find help. Raphael knew about your own father's work with blocked artists, Dr. Rose. And I came to you. Because my father wants me to have my music, I came to you.

5 September

No one else knows. Just the three of us: Dad, Raphael, and I. Even my publicist isn't clear what's going on. Under a doctor's care, she's given out, telling the world that it's merely exhaustion.

I assume the interpretation given to that story is one variation or another of The Artist Piqued, and that's fine with me. Better the assumption that I stalked off the platform because I did not like the Hall's lighting than the truth reach public consumption.

Which truth is that? you ask.

Is there more than one? I want to know.

Certainly, you say. There's the truth of what's happened to you and the truth of why. What's happened is called psychogenic amnesia, Gideon. Why it's happened is the reason for our meetings.

Are you saying that until we know
why
I have this … this … what did you call it?

Psychogenic amnesia. It's like hysterical paralysis or blindness: Part of you that's always worked—in this case your musical memory, if you'd like to call it that—simply stops working. Until we know why you're experiencing this trouble, we won't be able to change it.

I'm wondering if you know how I recoil from that information, Dr. Rose. You impart it with perfect sympathy, but still I feel like a freak. And yes,
yes
, I know how that word resonates in my past, so you needn't point that out to me. I still hear Granddad howling it at my father as they drag him away, and I still apply that word to myself every day now. Freak, freak, freak, I call myself. Finish the freak off. Put an end to the freak.

Is that what you are? you ask me.

What else could I be? I never rode a bicycle, played rugby or cricket, hit a tennis ball, or even went to school. I had a grandfather given to fits of psychosis, a mother who would have been happier as a cloistered nun and probably ended up in a convent for all I know, a father who slaved at two jobs till I was established professionally, and a violin instructor who shepherded me from concert tours to recording engagements and otherwise never let me out of his sight. I was coddled, catered to, and worshipped, Dr. Rose. Who would emerge from conditions like that as anything other than a bona fide freak?

Is it any wonder that I'm riddled with ulcers? That I puke my guts out before a performance? That my brain sometimes pounds like a hammer in my skull? That I haven't been able to
be
with a woman in more than six years? That even when I
was
able to take a woman to bed, there was neither closeness, joy, nor passion in the act but merely a need to have done, have it over, have my paltry release, and then have her gone?

And what is the sum of all that, Dr. Rose, if not a sure-fire genuine freak?

7 September

Libby asked this morning if something was wrong. She came upstairs in her usual leisure attire—denim dungarees, a T-shirt, and hiking boots—and she seemed about to head out for a stroll because she was wearing the Walkman she usually takes with her when she's engaging in one of her diet hikes. I was in the window seat, doing my duty with this journal, when she turned and saw me watching her. Up she came.

She's trying a new diet, she told me. The No-White Diet, as she calls it. “I've tried the Mayo diet, the cabbage-soup diet, the Zone diet, the Scarsdale diet, the you-name-it diet. Nothing's worked, so I'm on to this.”
This
, she tells me, consists of eating whatever she wants as long as it isn't white. White foods unnaturally altered with food colouring count as white as well.

She is, I have learned, obsessed with her weight, and this is a mystery to me. She isn't fat, as far as I can tell, which admittedly isn't very far since she's always garbed either in her leathers for the courier service or in her dungarees. She doesn't appear to have any other clothes. But even if she
does
look slightly podgy to some people—and mind you, I'm not saying that she looks slightly podgy to me—it's probably owing to the fact that her face is round. Don't round faces make one look plump? I tell her this, but it's no consolation. “We live in skeletal times,” she says. “You're lucky to be naturally skinny.”

I've never told her the cost of this emaciation that she seems to admire. Instead, I've said, “Women are too obsessed with their weight. You look perfectly fine.”

On one occasion when I say this, she responds with “So if I look so perfectly fine, take me on a date, why don't you?”

And this is how we begin to see each other. What an odd expression that is, “to see each other,” as if we're incapable of seeing another person until we're socially involved. I don't much like it—“seeing each other”—because it smacks of a euphemism where one isn't needed. Dating, on the other hand, sounds so adolescent. And even if that weren't the case, I wouldn't call what we're doing dating.

So what are you doing with Liberty Neale? you want to know.

And you mean, Are you sleeping with her, Gideon? Is she the woman who's managed to melt the ice that's been in your veins these last years?

I suppose that depends on what you mean by sleeping with her, Dr. Rose. And there's another euphemism for you. Why do we use a term like
sleeping
when sleeping is the last thing we intend to do when we climb into bed with the opposite sex?

But yes, we are sleeping together. Now and again. But by sleeping, I mean sleeping, not shagging. We're neither of us ready for anything else.

How did this come about? you want to know.

It was a natural progression. One night she made a meal for me at the end of a particularly exhausting day of rehearsals for a concert at the Barbican. I fell asleep on her bed where we'd been sitting, listening to a recording. She covered me with a blanket and joined me under it, and there we remained till morning. Now and again we sleep together still. I suppose we both find it comforting in some way.

Nurturing, you say.

In that it feels good to have her there, yes. Then it's nurturing as well.

Something that was missing during your childhood, Gideon, you point out. If everyone's concentration was on your growth and performance as an artist, it wouldn't be unusual for other more essential needs to have gone both unrecognised and unfulfilled.

Dr. Rose, I insist upon your accepting what I say: I had good parents. As I've said, my father worked endlessly just to make ends meet. Once it became clear that I had the potential, the talent, and the desire to be … let's call it who I am today, my mother went out and found a job as well to help cover all the expenses incurred. And if I didn't see my parents as often as I might have done because of this, I had Raphael with me for hours each day and when he wasn't there, I had Sarah-Jane.

Who was she? you ask.

She was Sarah-Jane Beckett. I don't quite know what to call her, actually.
Governess
is too anachronistic a term and Sarah-Jane would have sorted you out in fairly short order had you ever called her a governess. So I suppose we'd have to call her my teacher. As I noted earlier, I never attended school once it became apparent that the violin would be my life because regular school hours conflicted with my schedule of lessons. So Sarah-Jane was employed as my teacher. When I wasn't working with Raphael, I was working with her. And because we fitted in lessons where and as we could, she lived with us. In fact, she lived with us for years. She must have arrived when I was five or six—once my parents saw how impossible it was going to be for me to be educated in a traditional fashion—and she stayed until I was sixteen, at which time my education was complete and my schedule of concerts, recordings, rehearsals, and practise periods precluded any further courses of study. But until that point, I had daily lessons with Sarah-Jane.

Was she a surrogate mother? you want to know.

Always,
always
it comes back to my mother. Are you looking for Oedipal connections, Doctor? How about an unresolved Oedipal complex? Mother trots off to work when son is five, leaving him incapable of laying to rest his unconscious desire to jump her? Then Mother disappears when son is eight or nine or ten or however old he was because I do
not
remember nor do I care to, and she is never heard from again.

I remember, though, her silence. Odd. It's just come to me now. My mother's silence. And I remember waking up one night while she was still with us and finding her lying in bed with me. She's holding me and it's very difficult to breathe
because
of the way she's holding me. It's difficult because her arms are round me and she's got my head somehow…. Never mind. I don't remember.

How is she holding you, Gideon?

I don't remember. Just that I can't breathe very well but I can feel her breathing and it's very hot.

Her breath is hot?

No. Just the feeling. Where I am. I want to escape.

From her?

No. Just escape. Run, actually. Of course, this could all be a dream. It was so long ago.