The Schrödinger Girl

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The Schrödinger Girl Page 12

by Laurel Brett


  She shrugged. She was angry, but not angry enough to waste a day at Coney Island. We finished off the champagne, had another hot dog because the swimming had really given us a big appetite, and watched the sunset. I saw her back to her place.

  It was late, so I started to go. I was glad I had taken a room. But Caroline put her hand on my arm and asked me to stay. “I don’t want to have sex or anything. But I don’t want you to go.”

  We each took a shower to get rid of all the sand. Her bathroom was so tiny I could stand in the shower and close the bathroom door at the same time. My underwear wasn’t too sandy because I’d spent most of the day in my swimming trunks. I put my T-shirt and boxers back on. Caroline put on a flimsy white nightgown. She had washed her long black hair and it streamed wet over her shoulders.

  We lay down on top of her white bedspread and kept our clothes on. It was too hot for covers anyway. We tried to lie as still as possible so our sunburns wouldn’t hurt. Caroline got up and put on Dylan’s record. We took turns getting up to change the album’s four sides.

  The gibbous moon looked so close that it felt as if I could reach out and touch it like everything in Caroline’s bathroom. I asked her to leave the shutters open so I could watch the shadows fashioned by the moonbeams. We didn’t talk. Instead we listened to Dylan’s tapestry of songs. His “Visions of Johanna” kept us up past the dawn, just as he says in his tune.

  After sunrise I put on the rest of my clothes. I leaned over and kissed Caroline on the top of her head. “Get some sleep,” I said. “Don’t worry about anything. It will be all right.”

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  A day or so later, Galen’s Daphne called from Bronxville. “I’m so sorry, Garrett,” she murmured, obviously embarrassed. “Galen decided at the last minute that he didn’t want to go to the city after all. I tried calling you, but there was no answer.”

  “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I was in the city anyway.” Jeez. I should have told her why I was in the city. Maybe Jerry could explain to me why I needed to keep these girls secret from each other.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t see each other,” she went on. “I was really excited.” I heard something very forlorn in her voice. Maybe being a muse was taking its toll. She probably didn’t have anyone to confide in.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “You sound sad.”

  “I’m all right. I was just worried you’d be upset with me. Things are fine. I hope we can see each other soon.”

  “Me too. I’m here if you ever want to talk. Or if you want to get together, Bronxville isn’t very far from here. I’d be happy to come see you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks. See you, Garrett.” And she hung up.

  I realized she and I were developing a phone-only relationship, and a stilted one at that. I couldn’t get past her new reserve. She seemed animated only when she talked about art, either her classes or Galen’s portraits of her. It was hard to remember that somewhere in there was a developing sixteen-year-old girl.

  Since I’d gone into the study to answer the phone, I walked over to the time line and inspected the picture of her by the swan boats. Daphne was smiling into the camera, yet I saw that there was something shadowed in her eyes, or maybe she was just squinting against the light. Galen must have been taking the picture. I tried to imagine what I’d see if I didn’t know her. I’d see a beautiful auburn-haired girl working to appear older by wearing a chignon and sophisticated clothes. Her smile looked as if she was trying to be brave.

  I glanced over the rest of the time line, just as I had hundreds of times. There was nothing new to glean.

  I had received an invitation from Jane Pinsky that had been buried on my desk. She’d been awarded an honorable mention in her juried show, and now a tiny gallery in Bronxville had agreed to mount a small show for her just before Labor Day when business was slow. It was a formal invitation, but she had scrawled at the bottom, I’m having people over afterward. Please come! The show was just a few days off. I figured I’d see Daphne there, so I resolved to go.

  For the show, Jane had hung paintings like the one I’d seen: representational paintings in primary colors with block lettering. She painted centaurs, lovers, horses, nude warriors, all facing the viewer with a challenge. She had stenciled the name of every canvas as part of its composition, like American Warrior and Love in the Time of War. Taken together, I thought the show was effective, although it was obviously the work of a very young artist. I would have brought Caroline, but I’d decided not to mention it to her since anything having to do with Daphne could potentially start a fight.

  Jane wore a long, flowing skirt and another bandanna, boots, and dangling earrings. She was a picture herself, a portrait of a hippie. She approached me warmly, clasping my hands and giggling. “Isn’t this boss? You just missed Galen and Daphne. It was so great of him to come.”

  So, I had missed her, but Jane’s pleasure made my visit to the gallery worthwhile anyway. I made the best of the little cheese cubes and white wine. Jane gave me directions to her student house.

  Only in Bronxville were the student houses so pristine and well-appointed, much more elegant and luxurious than my own little house in New Paltz. Five students shared this one, each with a bedroom. The large and gracious living room had a fireplace, but today the air-conditioning was more important. My house in New Paltz got really hot, and I didn’t have any air-conditioning. Most houses didn’t.

  The environment was gracious, but the party was not. Jane was still a kid, and she had the usual college snacks out: pretzels, chips, dip, and brownies. There were a few jugs of really cheap wine and plastic cups. I saw the album cover of the music she was playing on a fancy stereo system, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow. I hadn’t listened to the album, but the strong American sounds matched the Americana theme of her canvases. I drank my wine in the corner, watching the kids. When the album was almost over, and as I was getting ready to leave, Daphne came in by herself, while I heard Grace Slick sing “White Rabbit” for the first time, telling the story of Alice, ending with the resounding chorus, “Feed your head”—a druggie manifesto from the Summer of Love.

  Daphne approached me, still elegant, still subdued. “Garrett,” she almost whispered. We shook hands. Her beautiful eyes shimmered like jade, cool in the summer light. This was surreal. But she was as real standing before me as the girl in the bookstore exploring Schrödinger. As the song finished I thought of the day we’d met and the two little girls sitting on the floor of the bookshop listening to Alice in Wonderland.

  Jane sat cross-legged on the floor. Then four or five other people followed suit, and Daphne sat on the floor too. I’d never been a flexible guy, and my legs complained as I crossed them as the kids were doing. I guessed that a joint was coming. I had never smoked marijuana before. My generation just drank, but I thought, Sure, why not? I’d give it a try.

  I hadn’t considered that this Daphne smoked pot. I thought of her ensconced in Galen’s world with his habits, but she was in college now, after all. She took the joint first, and I watched her hold her breath as she pantomimed what I was supposed to do. I gathered that keeping the smoke in my lungs was the most important part. I didn’t feel anything the first time the joint came around, but by the second hit I began noticing its effects. Someone had walked over to the stereo to play the previous few songs again. The final notes of the last song on the Airplane album lingered and elongated. I started to giggle at the absurdity of everyone sitting on the floor like we were in kindergarten, but in a corner of my mind I was worrying about how I appeared to others by sitting there giggling. I had never smoked cigarettes, and my lungs felt like they would burst at the harshness of the smoke held in my chest.

  I stood up, drifting over to the brownies. Daphne followed. I took three small brownies; she took one, and drew me out into the backyard. They were soooooooo chocolaty. The house had a fancy rich-person garden. Obviously, it hadn’t always been a r
ental. I sat down on a curving stone bench that was next to a small pond that might have once held koi. She sat down next to me.

  “So, Garrett. Your first time stoned?”

  I just nodded. “How about you?”

  “What do you think college kids do in Bronxville? Actually, I got stoned once when I still lived on Long Island.”

  “You did? When I met you you’d already smoked pot?”

  “Sure. Why are you so surprised? We smoked during school, in a ravine near the railroad tracks that ran by. Anyone could. There was someone there almost every period.”

  “Wow. Even when you stood in the bookstore in your rain slicker you were a druggie?” I joked. “I would never have guessed.”

  She was laughing uproariously, and I started to also . . . and something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

  We laughed like that for a while until a wave of sadness washed over me.

  “I’m worried about you. Are you okay?” I knew I was enunciating slowly, with odd emphasis, but the drug was emboldening me to say things I might not have said otherwise.

  Daphne had only taken one drag on the joint, so she was not as high. She said, “I couldn’t be home anymore. And just see where I am. In a beautiful garden with a friend, stoned on some good grass, celebrating a painter friend. Not bad. Do I have to think about anything more than that?”

  “No. You don’t have to think. Where’s Mr. Green?”

  “He’s at home. This obviously isn’t his scene. He’ll pick me up when I call him.”

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You’re super stoned.”

  “We’ll wait a little while then.”

  An hour and three brownies later we were in my car, top down. She told me about the paper she’d written at the end of her last semester and about the art history courses she’d be taking in the fall. “I wrote a paper on odalisques in French art, centering on the Ingres painting.”

  Of course I thought of Caroline and the day I’d called her an odalisque. Isn’t that always the way it is in life? The things we notice and the things we say circle back to us until we have to ask if these repetitions are mere coincidence or evidence of some design.

  * * *

  I was completely sober by the time I met up with Caroline in New York. When I walked into our date at a bar near her place, she was nursing a gin and tonic and softly drumming on the table. Her beauty impressed me as always, enhanced by the black sundress enlivened by a profusion of the tiniest white polka dots. She was wearing a chignon like Daphne’s. Her face had a weariness I hadn’t seen before. She glanced up as I neared, but she seemed too tired to smile.

  “Garrett,” was all she said. Then, after a pause: “What are we doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, please don’t play dumb. I don’t think I can get through this if you do.”

  “Okay. I won’t.” I didn’t want her to hurt, but I honestly didn’t know what I could do about it.

  “We seem to have an insoluble problem.”

  “I think I need a drink before I can begin to deal with problems with no solutions.” When the waiter came I just ordered what she was having.

  She began again without missing a beat, as soon as my drink was served: “I don’t know how much longer we can continue like this.”

  She said this every time we met. Sometimes she got angry when I didn’t seem to react strongly enough to her observation, but I honestly didn’t know what to say, and I was becoming inured to her ambivalence.

  “Look,” I answered, “everything is all right. Really. I am not in a loony bin, I am still earning a living, I have no complaints against me at school, I just have a very unusual hobby—tracking Daphne.” I should have known better than to make a joke.

  She groaned, though her mood changed. “Tell me everything you’ve come up with since we talked about this.” I guess for Caroline it was like putting her tongue where her tooth hurt. She couldn’t stop herself from doing it. She had to know every detail of the Daphne saga.

  “I spoke to the guidance counselors from the high schools two of the girls attend. At one high school she was brilliant in a debate, that’s SDS Daphne, and at the other high school my first Daphne sang a solo in a choral concert on the same night. One guidance counselor, Mrs. Winter, told me Daphne’s a soprano, and the other, Mr. Tyler, said Daphne won the debate for them.”

  “Wow. Really?” It seemed as if she’d forgotten to be upset for a moment. “That’s wild. It really is. Is that all?”

  I should have said it was, and I wanted to say that it was, but I must have had the same compulsion she had, to make things hurt. “And I saw her—Galen’s Daphne—today, just before I came to the city. It wasn’t planned. She just walked into a party at Jane’s. I met Jane when she was feeding Daphne and Galen’s cat. I’d tried to visit Daphne that night, but she and Galen were away.” I wasn’t being completely honest because the main reason I’d gone to Jane’s show was to see Daphne.

  “So, you saw her. How was it?”

  “It was fun. We listened to Grace Slick, you know who that is? Jefferson Airplane? Singing ‘White Rabbit.’” Caroline’s tawny eyes remained mild and curious, so I pressed my luck: “Tell me again why my interest in Daphne is so bad. I really don’t see it. I don’t see why you have to be so upset or why our relationship has to change so much and be put in endless limbo.”

  “Because your life isn’t moving forward; because it’s all you really think about. Because you have strange ideas about it. Because she’s a young girl. Excuse me, girls. Because Jerry thinks it’s a bit off. Because you’re not thinking about your work or a promotion or about our future. Just . . . because.”

  “You won’t let me think about our future. But think about all the things I am thinking about that I wasn’t before. Like the war. Like music. Like the nature of reality, for god’s sake.”

  “And those things are going to move your life forward how?” She was almost pleading now, pleading with me to understand. Her dark hair tumbled about her face as she fought for our future.

  The worst thing about our disagreements was the role Caroline got cast in. In trying to save me from an obsession, she was volunteering for the role of bitchy girlfriend. I wished I could have spared her that.

  Although my job was just a thin membrane that separated me from the vagaries of being a guy like my father, someone who just could not grasp onto life, I would not give Daphne up. Until I saw her holding up the Schrödinger book I had concentrated on making my mother happy by not being like my father. The Schrödinger girl had reminded me that it was important to live for myself.

  “How do you know I’m not doing important detective work like Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.

  “Because you don’t have a deerstalker hat,” she answered.

  “I just want to know the truth.”

  “Sherlock, the final evidence is never in. That’s just the way things work.”

  I should have left things like that, and let her have the final word, but I needed her on my side so badly, and she was letting me plead my case. “When Leeuwenhoek first peered at a drop of pond water through his homemade microscope, no one had ever seen those microscopic creatures before. Was he crazy?”

  I watched Caroline’s face become more composed as she realized how important these questions were to me. She answered in a considered tone, “I don’t know if he was crazy or not, and I don’t know if seeing his animalcules made him crazy. I know some people have gone crazy even if what they’ve seen is real. The problem is that it’s not the seventeenth century. People don’t just study things on their own, and you’re not a physicist. You’re not even willing to write up your observations for other scientists to talk about. You won’t tell the whole story, even to Jerry. I don’t think Leeuwenhoek kept secrets. Why don’t you take this to a physicist, or a reporter, and go public in some way?”

  “I feel protective of Daphne. It’s my myster
y to solve.”

  The smoky bar was filling up. The late-August night was so humid that customers were coming in just for the air-conditioning. I saw people eyeing our table, so I motioned to the waiter to order us another drink, but before I could, Caroline said she wanted to call it a night.

  “We’ll see each other properly next week,” she promised. “For dinner.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  But we didn’t have dinner together for a while. Caroline’s boss sent her to troubleshoot at his San Francisco gallery. She was out west when the fall 1967 semester began. Three weeks into the semester, I was teaching Introduction to Psychology in a large hall when I heard a commotion outside the room. Someone was banging on the window very enthusiastically, presumably to get the attention of a friend in the room. I tried to carry on with my lecture, but it was no use. All the kids were distracted and staring out the classroom window to the hallway to identify the disrupter. More than a little peeved, my attention found the large picture window, and my entire body jumped. I glimpsed SDS Daphne in a black dance leotard, jeans, and the side braid she had worn the first time we’d met.

  This Daphne irked me, though I didn’t know why. I asked the class to excuse me and went to the door. “What are you doing here?” I blurted out when I was just one foot out of the classroom.

  “We came to confer with student leaders here at New Paltz about the October 21 demonstration. You’re coming, right?”

  I ignored her question. “You were making a racket.”

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  As soon as she asked this question I realized that I was actually ecstatic to see her. I invited her in to hear the end of my lecture, and then we’d catch up.

  “I can’t. I have to get back to Terry. He’s in a meeting right now. I just wanted to say hi.”

 

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