little secrets, innumerable men and women starting up from their beds, getting on with the day. The joke, when I was in high school—or maybe it was really a joke from
The Breakfast Club
, I don’t remember—was that if you didn’t actually have a girlfriend, you said you had a Canadian girlfriend, someone who was off somewhere out of sight, immune to judgment. But here I was with the Canadian girlfriend on my shoulder, for real. It was true now, and different from what I thought it would be, easier, less contentious, more like real life than I had imagined.
Nora and I stayed in Eugene that summer, working, and over the weeks that followed Nora got mostly bad news from home. George had gone back to work, then quit again. Then it turned out he’d actually been fired after he started a fire in the grease trap, which closed the restaurant for two days, after which he moved back home, into his old bedroom. Then he stopped coming out of his room. It sounded ominous to me, as though he was seriously off-track, but Nora never thought of it that way until George was arrested naked, in the summer rain, in the middle of the high school athletic fields, turning in circles and talking to himself. After this his parents kept him at home for a while, watching him, and there were long conversations back and forth, which I basically got the gist of, they were obviously worried about his mind, and eventually (after what seemed a long delay) they took him in to see a doctor, and he was medicated, which seemed to help. The Vardon family history had found another occasion to express itself, evidently. I never told Nora about his malaria comment, though I felt uneasy about it—I saw it now for what it seemed to be, an early indication of some delusion.
“He says he’s hearing voices,” Nora told me. “But
everybody
hears voices.
I
hear voices. Everybody does. I hear my name in the cafeteria, I always think somebody’s calling me, it’s this
voice
, but it’s not—it doesn’t have any
qualities
. It’s not masculine, it’s not feminine, it’s just a voice, it’s like the
idea
of a voice. It’s like telepathy.”
I regarded the pretty curve of her shoulders. The easy warmth of an Oregon July filtered around the edges of the window frame. I put my hand on the small of her back. I whispered: “
Nora
.”
“
Don’t
.” She swatted at me.
“But sweetheart,” I said, “you’d know if you were crazy.”
“But I probably
wouldn’t
. Don’t you see? That’s sort of the definition of crazy.” She fixed me with a hard, calculating stare. She had her own opinions, and I didn’t then know how to talk her out of them, or that I was supposed to simply listen to her; I was too young to know what to say or do, I had so little experience with things and with women in particular, and I believed a kind of frictionless amiability was what would serve my interests. So when she said things like this, I mostly just discounted them, thinking that would help. She said, finally, “We’re sort of a pathetic couple, when you think about it.”
“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
The Breakfast Club
, I don’t remember—was that if you didn’t actually have a girlfriend, you said you had a Canadian girlfriend, someone who was off somewhere out of sight, immune to judgment. But here I was with the Canadian girlfriend on my shoulder, for real. It was true now, and different from what I thought it would be, easier, less contentious, more like real life than I had imagined.
Nora and I stayed in Eugene that summer, working, and over the weeks that followed Nora got mostly bad news from home. George had gone back to work, then quit again. Then it turned out he’d actually been fired after he started a fire in the grease trap, which closed the restaurant for two days, after which he moved back home, into his old bedroom. Then he stopped coming out of his room. It sounded ominous to me, as though he was seriously off-track, but Nora never thought of it that way until George was arrested naked, in the summer rain, in the middle of the high school athletic fields, turning in circles and talking to himself. After this his parents kept him at home for a while, watching him, and there were long conversations back and forth, which I basically got the gist of, they were obviously worried about his mind, and eventually (after what seemed a long delay) they took him in to see a doctor, and he was medicated, which seemed to help. The Vardon family history had found another occasion to express itself, evidently. I never told Nora about his malaria comment, though I felt uneasy about it—I saw it now for what it seemed to be, an early indication of some delusion.
“He says he’s hearing voices,” Nora told me. “But
everybody
hears voices.
I
hear voices. Everybody does. I hear my name in the cafeteria, I always think somebody’s calling me, it’s this
voice
, but it’s not—it doesn’t have any
qualities
. It’s not masculine, it’s not feminine, it’s just a voice, it’s like the
idea
of a voice. It’s like telepathy.”
I regarded the pretty curve of her shoulders. The easy warmth of an Oregon July filtered around the edges of the window frame. I put my hand on the small of her back. I whispered: “
Nora
.”
“
Don’t
.” She swatted at me.
“But sweetheart,” I said, “you’d know if you were crazy.”
“But I probably
wouldn’t
. Don’t you see? That’s sort of the definition of crazy.” She fixed me with a hard, calculating stare. She had her own opinions, and I didn’t then know how to talk her out of them, or that I was supposed to simply listen to her; I was too young to know what to say or do, I had so little experience with things and with women in particular, and I believed a kind of frictionless amiability was what would serve my interests. So when she said things like this, I mostly just discounted them, thinking that would help. She said, finally, “We’re sort of a pathetic couple, when you think about it.”
“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
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