Meredith shifted on the couch, drawing her feet up under her legs and covering herself with a gray wool blanket I remembered having sent them after a trip I made to Stockholm for a conference last year. It was gratifying to see it was in use and had not been stowed in a cupboard, forgotten, or re-gifted to some less affluent friend. ‘I guess that is kind of strange. Have there been, you know, any other incidents like this?’
‘No, sweetheart, not that I’m aware of, which is why I wanted to talk to you about it. Have you noticed anything? Am I losing it?’
‘No, absolutely not. I haven’t noticed anything like that. Have you, Peter?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Honestly, I swear, Jeremy, your memory is better than mine. I haven’t detected anything strange. I mean, you drive me crazy a lot of the time, but that’s not the same.’ He smiled because it was a teasing, generous thing to say, rather than an expression of real irritation. It was the kind of banter that made me like the kid a little more each time I saw him, and I felt he was gradually relaxing around me, accepting me as part of the family, though I had met his parents only a couple of times and had the sense that Meredith was becoming integrated into Peter’s family more completely than he had become a part of ours, perhaps because there was no ‘ours’; there was now my family, which was Meredith and my mother, and Meredith’s mother, who was really on her own, she has no siblings, her parents are dead, so less scope for Peter to become a part of us in the way that Meredith could become a part of them. I felt this as a loss, it is true, because I knew that to a large degree the dissolution of our family was my fault and not Susan’s, although the decline of any relationship is almost always multilateral, and my ex-wife was not without fault.
They tried to reassure me, Meredith and Peter, and by the time it was two in the morning we were all struggling to stay awake and Meredith went in search of something I could wear to bed, returning after a few minutes with a pair of pajamas that had never been worn, as well as a brand-new bamboo toothbrush, still in its packaging, and a razor.
‘Were you expecting me to stay?’
‘We’re prepared for just about any eventuality. Security to the power of ten.’
‘Or more.’
‘Probably a great deal more.’
I wondered whether the guest bedrooms were always made up, or if Meredith had anticipated there might be last-minute guests and had asked the housekeeper, a Dominican woman, to put on clean sheets and set out fresh towels. There was reassurance in taking off my clothes and putting on new pajamas, particularly ones of such lovely quality—lovely, not very American, it’s true, but I can’t get rid of it, nice tastes like Wonder Bread on my tongue — and then sliding in between those high thread-count sheets and pulling the duvet up around my chin, looking out at the lights across the park and knowing my daughter is in such a position that I need never worry about my own security for the rest of my life. This had happened in a way I could not have predicted and with such speed it sometimes threatened to destabilize my sense of our relationship. She was not yet thirty, hardly out of childhood it seemed, and yet she was also a fully functioning adult with a career, with her own business, and with a husband who is one of the most influential men in America, and all of this at such a young age! Youth has somehow effected a bloodless revolution and it is foolish, I know, to imagine that the young people of America are not ultimately in charge. That night I could go to sleep confident that if I woke the next morning and remembered nothing of the previous days or weeks, or had forgotten the sum total of my adult life, then Meredith and Peter would look after me. I would be shipped off to the top facility on the East Coast and until my death I would be contained and cared for, never having to worry if I might end up wandering the sewers of New York City or sleeping in the Amtrak tunnels in which I remember once seeing informal encampments on the way to visit my mother upstate. Whatever happens, I will not be one of the destitute fated to fall off the grid, no matter how much a part of me might now wish that were possible.
~ ~ ~
The following day, Sunday, we were slow to get up, but when we finally convened, a little after ten that morning, the housekeeper had already made waffles and there was a bowl of fruit salad and hot coffee and The New York Times, satisfyingly thick, all laid out on the white marble kitchen counter. I could see almost at once, however, that Meredith and Peter had been talking and there was something they needed to say, as if they had — this turned out to be the case — made a decision about me in the hours following my confession of the unexplainable lacuna in my memory, or so it then seemed.
They waited until we were alone in the kitchen, in the glassed-in breakfast area overlooking the park. It was not the first time I had stayed with them, but I could see how the longer they lived together they were settling into a pattern of routinized comfort that suggested a pursuit of the ideal, of the best possible way of drinking coffee and eating breakfast and enjoying the beauty of their view, not to mention the beauty of each other. They are, without question, a stunning young couple whose attractiveness is not about youth alone, but about the way they wear that privilege of age without worry, or with worries always mediated by the knowledge that security will, barring a revolution, be permanently theirs.
‘We’ve been talking, and we’d like to arrange for you to see a really great doctor.’
‘My dad has been to see her, Jeremy. She’s one of the top memory specialists in the city.’
‘So you do think there’s a problem with me?’
‘No, Dad, honestly, neither of us has noticed anything. We just think—’
‘Isn’t it better to rule out the possibility of anything actually being wrong, Jeremy? Wouldn’t you rather know, and catch it at an early stage, instead of living with the uncertainty and the worry?’
They both sounded sincere. Sincerity is not one of their failings.
‘Of course you’re right.’
‘Can I make you an appointment for this week? I’m sure we could get you in before Thanksgiving.’
True to his word, Peter arranged an appointment for Monday, when I had no classes and no commitments other than the rescheduled 4pm meeting in my office with Rachel. I was grateful to Peter for leveraging his influence, and I hope, even still, after all that has happened since that week when I first became conscious of the strange changes pressing against the trajectory of my life, that I demonstrated sufficient gratitude for his assistance.
After brunch I went home. Meredith offered to send me in a car and for once I accepted because I was still feeling tired from the late night and I wanted to indulge, if only for another half-hour or so, in the knowledge that someone was looking after me. How different my life would be if I had remained in Britain, if I had not sold that house on Divinity Road but continued to live there in my slightly cramped if comfortable way, making the occasional excursion to some European city and leading what was in many ways a very un-English life, or at least a life not representative of the constricted lives so many people in Britain suffer. Not that I have more space in my NYU apartment, slightly less in fact, and no garden just outside the dining room, but nor do I have the sense of vertiginous insecurity that sometimes came over me in Oxford when I was lying alone in bed and wondering whether the house was locked. In New York, as a white man of a certain age and class, I have tended to feel secure, despite the city’s unpredictability and its problems with police corruption and crime and terror, though Oxford was not immune from terror either, or at least from those who would seek to spread the contagion of terror even to the sleepier corners of the world.