That Monday morning in November I was too early to spend half an hour reading magazines in Dr. Sebastian’s waiting room, so I walked down 75th Street past the building where I knew Susan still lived. Knowing she was on sabbatical, and likely at home, I nearly pressed the buzzer, until I thought better of it, certain she would not be in the mood to speak to her ex-husband. In fairness to Susan, we have managed to remain friends since the divorce, and in many ways I feel closer to her than anyone other than Meredith, who has a fairly difficult relationship with her mother. After Meredith graduated from high school and moved to Boston for college, even though I was in Oxford, Susan would phone me to find out how our daughter was doing because at the time the two had still not recovered from several fallings out over high school boyfriends and Meredith’s decision to major in Art History. Susan worried this was an impractical choice and felt there was no need for Meredith to decide even before she had started college what she might want to do. In fact, Susan believed that Meredith should major in Business, and things between them only began to improve when a Masters in Arts Administration eventually capped off that BA in Art History. This suggested to Susan that there was a practical streak in the daughter who seemed so often to live in a world of the imagination. ‘What else would you expect from an economist?’ I once said to Meredith. ‘Your mother thinks in terms of logic and illogic, equations, balances, expectations, futures. Think of it this way: she is only concerned about your future.’ Meredith, I remember, had grimaced: ‘And not about my happiness.’
It was too cold to walk to Riverside Park that morning a few weeks ago, but I went anyway, pulling the coat closer around my neck as I passed the enclosed dog run where I had spent so many early mornings and late evenings while Lotte, our dog, did her business, her habits often forcing me into conversations with people I would not otherwise have met, even on one occasion the actress Kathleen Turner. We dog-run regulars tried to act as if Ms. Turner was no one in particular, to give her space, I suppose, although we all must have felt the frisson of a celebrity in our midst, being able to observe her in ordinary life, a person of more than ordinary presence, walking her dog and being normal in a way that looked like the enactment of a borrowed identity. I could not help thinking of the performance I had seen her give a few years earlier in Indiscretions, based on Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles, in which she played Yvonne, the more-than-half-mad mother to Michel, played in that production by Jude Law, then a virtual unknown who caused a sensation by getting out of a bath in the second act and standing with great naturalness, wet and nude, on the stage. It was a show about different forms of nakedness, most of them psychological and emotional, and Turner, though she remained clothed, was as naked as anyone on that extraordinary set. The pleasure for the audience, even more acutely than with most plays, came from engaging in a communal act of voyeurism, enjoying the spectacle of one family parading its psychic wounds. At the end of the play the set split apart, walls and ceiling flying away from one another, penetrated by a searchingly brilliant light, which struck me then as a symbol or stand-in for the audience’s own collective act of observation: staring with such intensity that by our combined force of scrutiny we tore the characters’ home apart at its seams.
Only a few dog walkers were in the park that morning, most of them elderly women, one with half a dozen Bichons moving like a fog along the pathways arcing down to the river. When the wind whipped up off the Hudson and caught my neck, I decided to turn back. No longer such a young man, I feared a cold would lay me out for a week. As it happened, Dr. Sebastian had no other appointments and directed me into her consulting room almost as soon as I walked in the door. I remember the room being spare, with white walls and modern furniture, a severe space stripped of distractions or anything that might trigger strong associations in the mind.
‘Customarily I take this week off each year, but seeing as you are Peter’s father-in-law I make an exception,’ she said and smiled. She was my age, not a native English speaker, and somehow that made the situation seem even more serious. I realized how worried I had been since the events of Saturday and, perhaps more to the point, since telling Peter and Meredith about my strange confusion. What I had really been hoping for, I understood, was for my daughter and son-in-law to reassure me that there was nothing to worry about, encourage me instead just to get on with life, not to refer me to a memory specialist who might discover something seriously amiss in the workings of my brain. I realized too that ‘memory specialist’ was a euphemism: the woman was nothing less than a neurologist, and that term, more than the other, gave me palpitations. I was seeing a neurologist for the first time in my life because the people closest to me suspected problems with my brain. How could I blame them given the glitch I had revealed? It begins with such blips, failures of ordinary language, searching for common phrases that remain elusive, blacking out an entire recent conversation or correspondence and proceeding as if whatever agreement has been reached, whatever information rehearsed, had never been mooted.
‘I would like you to begin by telling me what you have been detecting,’ Dr. Sebastian said from behind her desk. She used a pen that looked antique, taking notes in a ledger of the kind that might be used for financial accounts, a reckoning of profit and loss.
I told her what I had experienced over the weekend, recounting the confusion about the appointment with Rachel just as I had to Meredith and Peter.
‘And previously? This has occurred other times?’
‘I am not aware of anything like this ever happening in the past.’
Dr. Sebastian nodded, made a few notes, and then took me through a series of questions to ascertain whether I was experiencing any aspects of dementia. She asked me the year and the season, the date and day, she wanted to know where we were, both generally and precisely, she gave me three words to remember and asked me to recall them later in the consultation, wanted me to spell various other words and then to spell them again in reverse, to count backwards from one hundred by a factor of seven, asked me to identify and name a number of everyday objects that she produced from a box, had me repeat particular phrases, write complete sentences, follow written commands, and draw a simple design of geometric shapes. I felt like a child. When it was all over I asked her how I had scored.