A Traitor to Memory

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.”