turned to once everyone was asleep. It was many years before I even made the connection between my own love of books and my mother’s, since, though there had always been books around the house, I rarely saw my mother reading until she was older and had more time. The only exception was the newspaper, which she scoured from front page to last as if she were searching for news of someone lost to her long ago. When I was in college, I’d sometimes come across my mother reading the semester course offerings at the kitchen table, lips moving soundlessly. She never asked me what I planned to take, or in any way intruded on my independence; when I entered the room, she closed the course book and went back to whatever it was she had been doing. But the night before I left for England, my mother gave me the iridescent green Pelikan fountain pen her uncle Saul had given her as a child after she had won an essay competition in school. I’m ashamed to admit that I never wrote a word with it, not even in a letter to my mother, and that I no longer know its whereabouts.
When my parents called on Sunday afternoons I went on elaborately about the wonderful time I was having. For my father, I made up stories about the debates I’d attended at the Oxford Union and anecdotes about the others on the scholarship—future politicians, law students with sharp elbows, a former speechwriter for Boutros Boutros-Ghali. For my mother, I described Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian where you could order up the original manuscripts of T. S. Eliot or Yeats, and the dinner I’d had at A. L. Plummer’s invitation (before he’d rejected my thesis) at the Christ Church high table. But things were going worse and worse for me. In the state I was in, it was difficult to go out and meet people. Even to open my mouth to order a sandwich at the Tuck Shop required a desperate scavenge for a few grains of assertiveness. Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. I wondered whether what I was experiencing was some sort of psychotic break, the sort that ambushes a person who until then has lived an ordinary life, auguring a new existence full of torment and struggle.
During the first week of November I went to see Tarkovsky’s Mirror at the Phoenix, which has always been one of my favorite films. I continued to sit there after the lights went up, crying or on the verge of crying. At last I gathered my things and got up, and in the lobby I ran into a bright, loudmouthed, gay political science student named Patrick Clifton who was on the same scholarship as I. Flashing his pointy little teeth, he invited me to a party that night. I don’t know why I agreed, since I was hardly in any shape to go. Out of desperation, perhaps, and an instinct for self-preservation. But as soon as I arrived, I regretted it. The party in South Oxford was held in a two-story house whose rooms were bathed in different shades of light, one purple, another green, giving the place a morose feeling, exaggerated by the music which I could only think to describe as Neolithic funereal. People were getting high on the stairs, and in the room where the music was loudest there was a motley collection of swaying bodies that seemed indifferent to one another. In the back was a long galley kitchen with cracked, dirty tiles, and buckets of beer on ice. Twenty minutes after we’d arrived I lost track of Patrick and, not knowing what else to do, went in search of a bathroom. The one I found on the second floor was occupied, so I leaned against the wall to wait. Laughter erupted from inside, belonging to two or even three people. It seemed unlikely that the occupants were going to come out anytime soon, but I continued to stand there. After ten minutes Yoav Weisz materialized in the blue-lit hall. I recognized him immediately, because he looked like no one else. He had thick auburn hair that rose in high waves from his head and fell in a sweep across