Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

  Seated at the bar were two young Singaporean women sucking up noodles from Styrofoam containers. They looked to be in their early twenties and, like most lesbians in Singapore, they conformed to the femme/butch stereotype. One wore makeup, had long hair, and was dressed in a short skirt and stilettos. Her girlfriend wore men’s trousers and a polo shirt, and her hair was cropped close on the back and sides.

  “What would you like to drink?” I asked Jen.

  “Do you think they have champagne?”

  They didn’t have champagne—or wine, or anything other than gin, rum, whiskey, and vodka—so I bought us each a screwdriver. As I reached into my wallet to pay, the butch woman lifted her head up from her noodles.

  “You’re too old to be here. You should try Crocs.”

  “Crocs?” I asked, not quite following.

  “Crocs. It’s a bar for old lesbians.”

  Jen, nine years younger than I am, started to laugh.

  I looked at her. “Is that funny?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very.”

  “Does she think I’m trying to pick someone up? Or does the presence of an older person offend her?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jen said, making no attempt to stifle her laughter.

  I was forty-one and convinced, until that night, that I looked much younger. In my mind, I could pass easily for thirty-one. On a good day, twenty-eight. But living in Singapore as a middle-aged Caucasian woman had taught me to never create the opportunity for a local to guess my age. Given the chance, they would happily stack on an extra ten or twenty years, and that could be hurtful. If I managed to avoid the geriatric classification, there would always be a sting in the tail. “You look younger. It’s because you’re plump.” But at the Alternative Bar, the damage was done. I was humiliated and ready to leave.

  “I can’t win!” I said, as we made our way down the stairs. “I used to get turned away from lesbian bars because I looked straight. Now I get turned away because I’m too old!”

  “Crocs!” Jen said, her laughter morphing into hysteria.

  “I know a place,” I said, dragging her by the arm. “It’s a nice bar up the road with a rooftop terrace that looks over the city, and I’ve never been asked to leave on account of my age. And it serves champagne.”

  I had been in Singapore for about six months when my mother emailed me saying she was planning a trip to New York to visit Laura. My mother and I had hardly spoken since Laura and I had broken up. She planned to spend ten days in a New York hotel, taking Laura out to dinner, the opera, and the theater. On the way home she would break the journey with an overnight stay in Singapore. I hoped she would stay in my spare room, but she had already booked a hotel.

  I took a taxi to the airport to collect my mother, and she spent the next couple of hours telling me how wonderful Laura was, how well she was looking after our breakup, and how much fun they’d had together. Singapore was a letdown after New York, she said, and the heat was oppressive. During dinner she did not ask anything about my job or my life. The entire conversation was devoted to Laura, and as soon as we had finished eating, she asked me to take her back to her hotel. She had jet lag and needed to go to sleep. Early the next morning, I took a taxi to her hotel and then to the airport. We’d spent about two and a half hours together. It was the only time she visited me in the more than eleven years I ended up living abroad.

  Alone in my apartment one afternoon, I sorted through a box of unpacked papers that I’d left in my study. About halfway through, I discovered a copy of the score to Beethoven’s Spring Sonata—one of my favorite pieces of music, and the last piece I had learned to play when I was studying at the Conservatorium High School. Buried at the bottom of the box was a funeral march for piano by Mozart and Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G. I used to play them all. I opened the score to the Spring Sonata and studied the notes, but nothing registered. I could identify the treble clef but that was all. Alarmed, I went into my bedroom and retrieved my violin from its spot inside the wardrobe. My violin had made every move with me since I had left Sydney. Even though one of the strings had snapped, I took it out of its case, held it under my chin, placed my left hand on the fingerboard, and examined the score to the Spring Sonata.

  My fingers stuck to the fingerboard. They were slow and rigid and incapable of doing much at all. That seemed normal enough. It had been more than twenty years since I had last played. I looked at the strings, hoping my brain would tell my fingers what to do. G was the note of the open first string. Then what? I glanced at the score and couldn’t find a G. I had no recollection of what a G looked like in musical notation. Sweat trickled down the sides of my face from my hairline: the first physical sign of panic. I had no idea at all what any of the notes signified or how they might sound. Music, I suddenly realized, made about as much sense to me as Cyrillic.

  The damage to my brain from my accident had left me with a condition known as musical alexia. I had lost the ability to read or play music. People say that reading music is like riding a bicycle, and that once you know how to do it, you will never forget. But I felt like I was a young child seeing a score for the very first time. I sat for a few moments, nursing my violin in my hands, trying to understand what had happened to me. It was yet another loss, and somehow that made me feel more alone than ever. Years after my accident, I was discovering problems I never knew I had. Brain damage was the gift that kept on giving.

  When I had grown comfortable being alone and given up all hope of ever sharing my life with another human being, I met Giulia. We had both signed up to a gay Asian website, looking for friends. Our profiles made it clear that neither of us wanted a partner. Singapore can be a lonely place if you are a single expat, and never more so than if you happen to be a gay woman.

  We met one Saturday afternoon at three o’clock, at a bar along the river not far from my office. We said goodnight at one a.m., once we’d finished drinks after dinner at a restaurant on the opposite side of the river.

  It was the longest I had spent with anyone since Laura had moved out.

  Giulia was Italian, attractive, humorous, smart, and fifteen years my junior. She had modeled her way through university before finding work in fashion, first in Milan, then Paris, and then Singapore. There was an instant connection between us, and we soon started seeing each other a few times a week for drinks or dinners.

  I refused to touch her for the first six weeks we knew each other. The age gap made me feel creepy and predatory.

  One day, tired of waiting for me, she made the first move.

  “I like older women,” she said. “All of my past girlfriends have been older.”

  I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

  “True,” she said, moving in to kiss me. From that moment on, things happened quickly.

  Giulia was the feistiest woman I had ever known. She was not afraid to challenge me or to stand up to me—and not just on a small number of things, but on virtually everything. She would take no shit. And that could only be a good thing.

  The first time Giulia visited my apartment, she insisted on going through my wardrobe. I watched her toss my clothes over her shoulder, forming a large pile on my king-size bed. By the time she had finished, the pile was the size of a small elephant.

  “Those must go,” she said.

  I laughed.

  “And we will go shopping. I will choose all your clothes from now on. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved. Finally, at the age of forty-two, when I had money to spend on clothes, someone with good taste had come into my life to take charge of my wardrobe.

  A month after our first kiss, Giulia told me that she loved me, and I told her about my accident.

  “But you are fine!” she said. “Look at you! You’re clever! You have a big job! Whatever problems you had have passed.”

  I shrugged.

  There was both good and bad in having an injury, the effects of which weren’t discernible to anyone else. I had done such a tho
rough job of disguising the signs of my brain damage, I had managed to fool the world. That disguise had given me a fellowship, a career, a few friends, and a relationship. The downside was that those closest to me often refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong. My head injury solicited zero sympathy, because no one could see the ways I struggled, the ways I’d changed. It was my word versus their observations.

  I warned Giulia about the depression and the anger. I wanted to make sure I didn’t repeat the same mistakes I had made with Laura. I knew there would be times when I would snap and brain-damaged Sarah would appear. I couldn’t hide that side of me forever, and it was best that Giulia had some warning.

  “I love you,” she said. “I don’t care about those things. We will manage.”

  Happily for me, Giulia was no stranger to anger. In fact, her temper—without any form of brain damage that she admitted to—was almost as bad as mine. My relationship with Laura had helped cement a long-standing theory I had about anger and relationships: if a person was prone to fits of rage, he or she needed a partner who was (a) also prone to fits of rage or (b) comfortable around people who were prone to fits of rage. Only a person with a terrible temper could truly understand and forgive a person with a terrible temper.

  Giulia and I had been together three months when I invited her cat, Filippo, to move in with me. I felt bad that he was spending so much time alone. When I needed to travel, Giulia took him back to her place. My love affair with Filippo began almost immediately. He was a deeply affectionate and generous cat. He scratched me badly, but only once, and that was a mistake. It was a deep gash directly across the veins in my wrist and drew a rush of blood.

  It soon became evident that I had a remarkable way with cats. Filippo adored me. And why would he not? He followed me from room to room, sat on my lap when I read or watched TV, watched me attentively as I worked on my laptop, and shared slices of my sashimi at dinnertime. Inside my apartment, we were never apart. He was a lot like a dog, really, without all the effort a dog required. I wasn’t forced outside in the blazing heat to walk him, nor did I need to worry about his social development. Alone during the day while I was at work, he never once desecrated my kitchen. Filippo’s needs were minimal, and during the six and a half minutes of each day when he wasn’t sleeping, I satisfied them amply.

  My relationship with Filippo was going so well that I decided to invite Giulia to join us. We had known each other for seven months and were spending every night together. I asked Giulia to move in, provided she accepted that Filippo and I had a very special relationship that she wouldn’t be permitted to intrude upon. On the day she moved in, Filippo left a poo for us in our bathtub, signaling, I thought, his unhappiness with the new living arrangements. My anxiety manifested itself in more conventional ways.

  The longer we spent in Singapore, the more we struggled to entertain ourselves. It is a tiny country, only 270 square miles, and there was a limit to what Giulia and I could do there. We dreamed of living in a real city like Hong Kong—a place that would allow us to do wild and crazy things like jaywalk, chew gum, tuck a durian under our arm and board a bus, engage in oral sex as an end in itself, and walk down the street holding hands. When we occasionally threw caution to the wind and held hands on the street in Singapore, elderly, stooped Chinese men would stop us and tell me how lucky I was to have such a beautiful daughter.

  After three long years in Singapore, a headhunter called me about an HR job in Hong Kong, working for a tobacco company. I laughed and declined. I had left my job at the bank and taken a position at a consulting firm—and hated every second of it.

  Consultants need excellent interpersonal skills to stroke the egos of their clients, and more than once my boss had kicked me under the table at a client meeting after I had said something to the effect of, “What on earth made you think that was a good idea?” When consultants aren’t groveling to clients, they are whipping up dazzling PowerPoint presentations. Unfortunately, I have the computer skills of a preschooler. The job was a disaster, yet the global financial crisis loomed and companies had stopped hiring. If I left my job I would lose my employment visa and I’d have to leave Singapore. And Giulia. And Filippo.

  The headhunter called again a week later. And a week after that. I assumed that nobody else had been interested. She nearly begged me to agree to an interview, so I ran the idea by Giulia, whose main concern was whether or not I would get free cigarettes. That would be a bonus, as she loved to smoke. She also liked the fact that the job would give us a chance to leave Singapore.

  I spent a few days thinking about what it would be like to work for big tobacco. Could it really be worse than working for a bank that turned its customers out into the streets when they defaulted on their mortgages? The bank had started doing that in the months before I left. Every large corporation seemed to engage in unethical behavior—like a mining company that sends young men down mines, cutting their lives in half; or a company that makes detergents that pollute the environment; or a technology company that builds products that never disintegrate and will poison the earth forever; or KFC, which tortures the world’s chickens.

  I couldn’t help thinking of my grandmother, who died from lung cancer without ever having smoked. Then I thought about one of my friend’s fathers, who was eighty-five, in good health, and had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of his life since he was fifteen. If you search long enough, you will find a justification for anything.

  I moved to Hong Kong to begin my new job with the tobacco company in July 2008. Giulia would join me as soon as she found a job that would give her a work visa. Filippo would move as soon as I found an apartment.

  My love for Hong Kong was instant. The noise and activity made me giddy. There was always something happening, something to observe. The locals were far friendlier and more approachable than the locals I had met in Singapore. Within weeks of arriving in Hong Kong, I knew it would be my home. My new employer paid for me to spend six weeks in a luxurious serviced apartment while I found somewhere to live. I eventually settled on a three-bedroom apartment in Mid-Levels that looked out onto the lush greenery of the Peak. As soon as I moved into the apartment, we made arrangements for Filippo and a second cat named Giorgio—that Giulia had acquired from a pet shop against all my urging—to join me.

  It took the better part of a year before the tobacco company offered Giulia an entry-level job in marketing. I had not asked them to help, and it was a generous offer on their part. My boss at the time worried that I might leave because Giulia and I were unable to live in the same country. For nine months Giulia visited me in Hong Kong every weekend, but the four-hour flight each way was exhausting.

  By the end of my first year in Hong Kong, I shared my apartment with Giulia, Filippo, and Giorgio. A friend in Melbourne had introduced me to two friends of hers who became friends of ours, and we befriended a former colleague from Melbourne and her partner who were living in Hong Kong. Life was good. All that was missing was a dog. We managed to plug that hole quite quickly with a middle-aged dog someone had found near a cargo pier. We named her Sofia.

  I enrolled in a master of fine arts in creative writing. My job had given me the security to dip my toes into writing without making any real sacrifices. Other than my pride. At the urging of a professor, I started to write about my life. In a workshop, a group of eight people who barely knew me learned about my accident and my head injury from an essay I had written. The amount of people who knew about my injury doubled. It felt uncomfortable laying my life bare for strangers to poke through, but writing programs seem to attract more than their share of people with problems, and I was not the only one with a past I had kept hidden from the world.

  Through writing I met two women who soon became my closest friends: a Taiwanese lawyer who had grown up in Montreal named Helena and a French woman named Isabelle. In Hong Kong, I was learning how to balance a normal life again, with friends, study, and a relationship.

  There was only o
ne problem with living in Hong Kong: the pollution had left me with a serious case of asthma. My respiratory physician there told me mine was the worst case he had seen in over a year. That was quite a feat. The only effective treatments were inhaled steroids or a pill called prednisone. Steroids and prednisone wreak havoc on damaged brains, so I would sit at home for a day or two, hooked up to a nebulizer and battling to breathe, and spend the days that followed battling to think.

  I chalked my asthma up to karma for taking a job in big tobacco. But karma wasn’t done with me just yet.

  11

  THE UNRAVELING

  I went to London for a one-day meeting in April 2010 at the global headquarters of the tobacco company that employed me as a senior human resources person in Hong Kong. London is a damp, cold inhospitable place, and one night and one day there was more than enough. After dumping my suitcase in a corner of my hotel room and taking a shower under a trickle of lukewarm water, I climbed into bed.

  Since the accident my fitful sleep was something I had continued to dread, like seeing my mother or getting a pap smear. But I was so tired after my flight I couldn’t fight it off. It had been two years since I’d slept more than four hours on any night. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all; others I was lucky to snatch two hours. When I closed my eyes, I saw hundreds of thousands of little orange lights spotted across a black canvas, like an aerial view of Delhi by night. Jet lag made it worse, and I traveled a lot, not just around Asia, but also back and forth to London. I had seen three doctors about my sleep problems, but no one had been able to help. “A residual effect of your accident,” they said, offering no solution other than sleeping pills.