I seemed to be on a different piano every week, and my fingers never felt accustomed to anything anymore. Notes came too fast, or they came too slowly; they were too loud or too soft. Everything felt disrupted and under-rehearsed. I dreamed of being one of those famous pianists who could insist on traveling with his Steinway and a trusty piano tuner. After every concert I would call New York; it always distracted my mother when I read my reviews aloud to her. “That’s so true,” she would say of someone’s praise. “Sometimes people just don’t get it,” she would say of a disparagement, though once or twice she also asked, “Were you feeling tired that night?” Once she said, “Well, you haven’t been practicing Liszt for very long, and you don’t really have a Liszt personality. I’m not sure you should be playing the Liszt in Paris next week.” It was good advice, though I did not always want it; in any case, this subject seemed to draw her from the pondering of her own illness.

I wanted to be in London to be with Bernard and get on with my life, and I lied to my father in order to stay there. I pretended more concerts than I actually had, and said that I had to work with a teacher on the pieces I was to record. “Don’t keep rushing back here,” my mother used to say, but to my father I was one of the luxuries he could provide my mother, and he wanted me to be as full-time as the hospital nurses. He paid uncomplainingly for every ticket, but resented the fact that they were always round-trips. I did want to be in New York for my mother, and I came home at least once every three weeks, but I stayed for only a few days at a time. I was afraid my life in London would dissolve if I left it for too long, that the gloom of our household would swallow me whole. In some sense, and to my surprise, my culture shock seemed to be getting worse and worse. I had somehow lost both the comfort of the familiar and the thrill of the novel; it was like altitude sickness every time, getting off the plane like a rude snatch back from the ecstasy of the deep and into the violence and shock of the appallingly familiar. Those were the heady airplane days. I could have papered the downstairs bathroom with my tickets. I had a favorite seat on each plane and a favorite seat in each departure lounge and a favorite desk at each passport control point and a favorite spot by each baggage-claim carousel. But I no longer had a favorite country. Wherever I was, I felt that I should be elsewhere; I thought of each place as a transit zone from which I would shortly migrate to some farther spot.