“No, we’re not,” I said. “You’re great, and I’m great.”
“Not you and me, dummy,” she said, “me and George.”
What I did next was, I took up tennis as seriously as I could. I found I remembered the nice contact the ball made with the strings—a kind of exponential action, with the ball plus the strings multiplying to more force than I could have hoped to exert on my own. It was partly an aesthetic choice, looking back; I suppose I liked the way it felt when I hit a ball well, but I can further see that something else must also have been at work, some unkind fascination with the strangeness of George, with the fact that he had begun to fail in this very obvious fashion while I had, so far, not. With my summer ID card I could use the courts behind the recreation building. I signed up on the bulletin board and ended up playing with a set of people who were variously serious about the game—a doctor from Ghana who wore blinding whites; a janitor who owned the most expensive racket I had ever seen, a Mark-8 Wonder, which produced a faint supernatural whistling noise like a hunting owl; a homeschooled sixteen-year-old boy named Elliott who had no offensive instincts whatsoever but who could return nearly anything I sent his way, so he beat me consistently—and so on. I was not exactly serious about the tennis itself, but about the project of self-definition, as I see it now, because this was something very straightforward that I could be, or at least do. Nora’s lacrosse friends would not recognize me in the fall, and neither would Matt Grange—or better yet, they would recognize that they had never really seen the true me. And it was not just that I was not failing as George was. I think this summer was also the period when I first struck on the idea of ambition, that I could be something in particular, rather than just myself in general.
Nora went back and forth to Vancouver by herself a few times that summer and fall, but it wasn’t until Thanksgiving that I went north with her again. By this time George had been living at home for some months. Mrs. Vardon greeted us at the bus station, wearing a white sweater and a puffy white parka, her black eyes and round cheeks seeming, in the cold morning light, like something arctic, adapted for long darkness. “Orlando,” she said, taking my arm. “Now, you know about George. You know he’s a little different than when you last saw him.”
It was a Saturday, so Mr. Vardon was home too. He was in the dining room, reading a newspaper. “Hello, Orlando,” said Mr. Vardon. “Welcome again.”
“Hello. Thank you.”
Together Nora and I went upstairs. George’s white door was closed. No sound came from it. Nora knocked. “Come in,” he said.
In some ways her brother looked the same. A smoky, sweaty, outdoor odor had filled the room, not unpleasantly; a window was open, and the room was cool, almost cold. He wore a T-shirt and was skinnier than he was the last time I’d seen him. His expression was different, less fierce, more uncertain. “Hey,” he noted, “it’s the boyfriend.”
“Hi,” I said.
Nora said, “You look good, Georgie.”
“Yeah, bullshit,” he said.
“It’s cold in here,” said Nora.
“I still get hot,” he said. “It’s something to do with the pills.” Addressing me, he gestured languidly toward the dresser, where five brown plastic bottles stood. “Screws up your thermostat.”
She said, “You should comb your hair.”
“Sure, but if I started now it’d look suspicious.”
“Oh, it would not.”
“The other thing is,” said George, but only to me, “you know how I was hearing voices. Well, it’s still happening. But now it’s like in the background. Like the radio. But I can’t even listen to the radio anymore. It’s just too much blabber. Music’s okay. But even then, they talk through the music, it’s like annoying, it’s like they have a plan to talk during the good parts.” He shrugged. “Whatever. You know.”
Sensing that Nora and George wanted to be alone, I left them and went downstairs into the hallway. Mr. Vardon had gone off somewhere. I could hear Mrs. Vardon knocking around in the kitchen, making breakfast. I didn’t know what to do with myself. What could I say to anyone that wouldn’t sound hollow and ridiculous? I had had such a featureless life to that point, so free of pain, I thought, that I had no training in delivering sympathy. I didn’t know how to do it. And Nora did, or was quickly figuring it out. I stood alone in the front hall, feeling stupid and useless.
After a few minutes Nora came back down. “I got cold,” she said.
“Listen,” I said.
“He’s better than he was,” she said.
“Listen, when we were here in the spring,” I said, “George said something to me, and I know it maybe doesn’t matter, but I just wanted to tell you. He said he had malaria. After we played tennis. I feel like I should have told someone. Like maybe it was a warning sign.”
“Oh,” she said, distantly, “don’t worry about it.”
“But I do.” I took her in my new strong arms. “I worry about it.”
“Please don’t,” she insisted.
“Maybe I should have said something earlier.”
“But sweetheart,” she said, looking up at me, “you realize we couldn’t have done anything.”
“But I just thought maybe we could have.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed, sinking against me in quiet disappointment, “this has nothing to do with you.” George had left his door open, and it was becoming cold in the downstairs hallway, and then we were shivering there next to the banister, in our light traveling clothes.
Poor George lived on, and lives on still, as far as I know, sick and probably messed up in the predictable ways. He was important to me in the way such people can be, surprisingly, really out of proportion to their actual size in your life. I remember, for example, thinking about him some years later, one Seattle winter, a long time after Nora and I had gone our separate ways. I had come down with the flu and was deep under the covers at home, my wife off at work and me alone in the bedroom in the strange empty middle of the day. The peculiar quiet that entered my sickroom—the heated stillness—the dense damp packing of my chest—the fluid limpness that had overtaken me—and the individual details of the wallpaper, which my wife and I had newly hung, with its tiny red strawberries, and the imagined vastness of my old city beyond the windows—all the city’s long streets and silent windowed towers, and above it a complex geography of clouds and sky—all of it combined in some alchemy of illness so that I seemed, momentarily, to be inhabiting a continent of wildness, of strangeness. In the manner of men getting older I sometimes ended up thinking sort of longingly about the past whenever my current life was slow, or whenever I felt I deserved better, which meant that over the years I had on and off thought of Nora and her air of restrained tragedy, and her poor brother George. But this new fevered condition felt like a different world, one that I occupied for only a few hours, where love meant nothing and where you could see, delirious, through walls—where you knew everything, and where no one would ever ask anything of you. That’s not quite it, but it was something like that. I was pretty sick, and it was a terrible afternoon, during which I felt a hideous estrangement from the plain objects of everyday life. The trees and empty cars I could see from my pillow seemed filled with a brooding, unaccommodating presence—a malingering spirit—and a peculiar half-light, like that of an eclipse, seemed to enter the room through the venetian blinds. I shivered because I felt, as I had never felt in my life, alone in the world—not only alone but as though I were the only human left around. But then after a while I returned to my senses. I was only sick, after all, and it was only a passing feeling, and slowly things resolved themselves into their familiar places, and I went on, after a day or so, pretty much the way I had before.