of his mouth, as if the other stiffly refused to go along with what was being said. And I felt a little flood of love for the way he held his spoon while he ate cereal and read the paper, almost crudely, in opposition to the refined way he did everything else. When he read he curled a lock of hair around his finger. He had a fast metabolism. In order to avoid headaches he had to eat often. Because of this—and because, after his mother died, there was only the food the housekeeper prepared, which wasn’t the same—he had learned at an early age to cook for himself.
When he slept he threw off a heat that alarmed me until I became used to it and was even drawn to it. Once I read about children who lose their mothers and spend hours huddling near a radiator, and one night, drifting off to sleep, an image came to me of those children huddling against Yoav. It’s possible I even dreamed of being such a child myself. But it was Yoav who’d lost his mother, not me. Awake, he was constantly pacing or tapping his foot. He needed to get rid of all of the energy his body produced, but there was something futile about such frenetic activity because as soon as that energy was used up his body would just manufacture more. When I was with him I had the sense that things were constantly in motion, moving toward something, a feeling that after the suffocation of the months before excited me and calmed my nerves at the same time. And if I sensed his sadness, I didn’t yet know where it came from or the depth of it. Don’t look at me like that, he used to say. Like what? I’d ask. Like I’m in the incurable ward. But I’m such a good nurse. How do I know? he asked. Like this, I said. Silence. Don’t stop, he groaned, I only have one more day to live. You said that yesterday. Don’t tell me, he said, on top of everything else I have amnesia, too?
It wasn’t long before I gave up sleeping in my room on Little Clarendon Street and began to spend almost all of my time in London. You could say that I fled there, to Yoav and to his world at whose center was the house in Belsize Park. From the beginning, Yoav must have sensed in me a desperation, a willingness to match his intensity, to put aside everything in order to throw myself entirely into the only sort of relationship he knew how to have, a kind of cabal in which there was no room for anyone else, or anyone but his sister, whom he thought of as part of himself.
Right away, my mental state began to improve. Improve but not altogether return to its former self: a residual fear hung on, fear of myself above all, and of what all this time had lurked within without my knowledge. It was more as if I’d been anesthetized, not cured, of whatever had ailed me. Things were not what they once were, and though I no longer worried that things would end for me in Bellevue, and even felt embarrassed to recall my pathetic behavior during the worst of it, I felt that something in me had been permanently altered, wizened, or even impaired. Some sovereignty over myself had been lost, or perhaps it would be better to say that the very idea of a solid self, never particularly sturdy in me to begin with, had fallen to pieces like a cheap toy. Maybe that’s what made it easy for me to imagine—not right away, but as time passed—that I was, almost, one of them.
THE BEGINNING was different. Everything about the life that went on in the Belsize Park house seemed to me foreign and elusive. Even the most banal things—the closet of expensive dresses Leah never wore, Bogna with her limp who came to clean twice a week, the habit Yoav and Leah had of dropping their coats and bags on the floor when they came in the front door—seemed to me exotic and fascinating. I studied them and tried to understand how things worked. I was aware of a private set of rules and formalities that governed things, but couldn’t say what these were. I knew enough not to ask; I was nothing if not a polite and grateful guest. My mother had