by Paul Cody
Are those not good impulses? Good feelings?
I think they are, in some ways, Sam said. Except they’re past. I can’t do anything about that weekend.
But you can understand a little of where Levon’s been.
I’m not sure he wants me to know. I wish he did, sometimes desperately, but he’s got all these walls surrounding him, and I feel shut out, rejected.
Levon?
I like and respect Sam. Isn’t that enough? Why do I need to know everything about her?
Maybe you two should think about that. It seems to me we can only move forward. And maybe we started too fast.
When I read Sam’s Groton piece, Levon said, I was so moved, and there were so many things I felt and wanted to say, I actually called her at night, at like ten thirty. I texted first, to see if I could call, and she said sure. It took me about five minutes to actually send the text. And she texted back and said, Sure. Call.
So I called, and you know what I said. Because I don’t know if I’ve ever called a girl. I said, I read your Groton piece. It was great. I’m glad you’re not dead. Then I hung up.
That’s really thoughtful, I said.
I’m glad you’re not dead, Levon said. That’s the most pathetic piece of praise, of empathy I’ve ever heard, or ever heard of.
I was mortified afterward, he went on. I thought, You bonehead.
What’d you think? I asked Sam.
I thought it was charming. It was brief, it was very much Levon, and I was really touched and grateful, and kind of shocked that he called. And I also thought it was pretty brave of him to call me. I was really moved.
Levon? I asked.
I’m too embarrassed to respond, he said.
This project was supposed to make everything better, but it didn’t. I’m always trying to make everything better. As a shrink once said to me, Meg, why do you think it’s your job to manage everybody’s feelings?
Sam started to pull back, to write this really bitter, spiteful stuff about her life in Chestnut Hill and her mother. She said that while her father worked twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and made millions, her mother, who had an M.B.A. from Harvard, turned into a professional mommy. Only she wasn’t a professional mommy at all because first they had a nurse who lived in one of the two apartments at the back of their huge and tasteful house, and then she had a series of au pairs from either Switzerland or Germany, who were always young and blond and beautiful and spoke nearly flawless English. Plus there was always a black maid, who was from Trinidad or Tobago, and kept everything clean and shiny, and who cooked, and did the laundry, and told stories in heavily accented English about her faraway country where the sun shined all the time and the men fished, and there were palm trees, and the sand was white on the beaches and the sea was very, very blue.
So her mother did what? Was what? She belonged to a country club. She played bridge. She drank cocktails in the afternoon by the pool in the summer, alone, or with her other non-mommy mommy friends, or by the fireplace in the “great room.” (They really called it the “great room” because it was enormous and was at the center of the house and had about six couches, and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig in, and a partially glass ceiling far overhead.) They’d have cocktails by the fireplace, and if it started to snow outside, they could look out the windows, onto the small woods outside, or overhead, and watch the flakes swirl down.
She changed clothes several times a day because she had two immense walk-in closets set next to the giant master suite, and she shopped at least twice a week. Every month or two she’d fly to New York City and stay at the Ritz with one or two of her friends. She’d go to a museum, see a show on Broadway, but mostly she shopped. Shoes, coats, dresses, belts, blouses, silky underthings.
And the house itself. Designed by some famous architect in the 1950s, or by the student of some famous architect in the ’50s. It was glass and concrete and chrome and steel, and made in a series of interconnected pods, like some space station. There were several floors, two or three, but it was hard to tell. You could get lost, because stairways were everywhere, and half stairways, and small rooms, and huge rooms, and long and short hallways, and many windows.
The rest of it was like being smothered, where you had to be careful how you breathed, of what you thought or said. Because this was ten thousand square feet, and was designed by a famous architect, or his student, and cost 2.8 million dollars, or 3.7 mil, or some huge figure. And most people would kill to live here, said Mom.
When we talked about it together, Levon had little to say. He said it was passionate, and said the life sounded pretty meaningless and empty, but it was pretty far from any life he’d ever known.
It sounds pretty soul-killing, I said. But what about your dad?
He worked and worked. But when he was around, it was always easier.
You think your mom was happy?
God, no. I think she hated herself. Even more than I hated myself.
Why would you hate yourself? Levon asked.
Sam looked at him. She looked and looked.
I don’t understand that question, she finally said.
You didn’t do anything wrong, he said.
She stared at him, and finally she looked at me, and then she looked at the floor.
I don’t know what to say, she finally said.
We sat in our Quaker Silence for several minutes. Finally I said, Maybe we should just end here for today. Think about this.
I stood up and said, Let’s bring it in.
Sam said, I don’t feel like bringing much in today.
Levon paused, looked at his shoes a moment.
Well, let’s do it anyway, Levon said.
So we grabbed each other and hugged, and I noticed that Levon had his head leaning against Sam’s head. A good sign?
I didn’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Twenty
Noah
I guess I was one of the robotics kids, but I didn’t wear tie-dye shirts. I didn’t own one, and I’ve never understood why they always wore them. I was never exactly a cool dresser, but my dad, who was a lawyer, said that there was once a really funny article in his college alumni magazine called something like, “Why Do Scientists Dress So Badly?” There was a picture of a professor lecturing in front of a whiteboard of equations, and he was wearing a checked suit coat, a striped tie, and, he swears, checkered pants that were two inches too short, and he had a sock on only one foot.
My mother said the picture had to be a setup, stage-managed, but Dad said, No, it was true. Scientists, on the whole, were pretty bad dressers.
Looking cool, for them, was a turtleneck with a corduroy blazer. That was styling in the chemistry department, he said.
Anyway, I was having lunch in the cafeteria, which they pretentiously called the “Café,” particularly considering what passed for food in the place. Half an English muffin, covered with ketchup and little sprinkles of American cheese, microwaved for thirty seconds was called “pizza.” “Salad” was a few leaves of wilted lettuce, a cherry tomato, and a few shavings of carrot. I swear, if this were a prison, they’d riot. I usually got a yogurt and an apple or banana because how could you fuck that up?
I usually ate with Avery or Sierra or Anna, sometimes Levon, but that day Sam stopped and said, Mind if I sit with you?
Absolutely, I said. I mean, I absolutely don’t mind. Please.
She smiled that dazzling smile, and sat, and she had—what else?—a banana and yogurt. Maybe she felt sorry for me, sitting alone. Maybe it was just Sam being kind. Who knows why she’d want to sit with the likes of me.
How’s the food today? she said, smiling.
The best, I said. Top of the line.
We started talking about colleges and SATs, because pretty much all the seniors had taken the SATs and were applying to schools. Everyone was hearing back from the November SAT tests and just about everyone had done quite well, which you kind of expected at this school. Anna was relatively
low at just over 2000, and so far Levon—no surprise—was high at 2330, which was kind of ridiculous, and kind of expected.
How’d your SAT go? I asked, and she said, Good.
Can I ask?
2360, she said.
Holy shit, I said. You beat Levon.
He was higher in math, but I was higher in verbal and writing.
My God, you could go to MIT, or Caltech.
Right, she said, laughing.
You know where you’re applying?
I think just Cornell and maybe Swarthmore. I just got here, and I don’t want to leave. How ’bout you?
Oh, mostly smaller places. Williams, Oberlin, Grinnell, Kenyon, Bates. What about Levon?
I think Cornell and Brown.
Hmmm, I said.
Can I ask you something? Sam said, looking down at the table.
Sure. Anything.
What’s up with Levon’s father? What’s the big mystery?
I was kind of taken aback.
I know as little as you do, I said. Just these crazy rumors. That he might have been one of her mom’s study subjects, like some psycho killer back in Chicago, or some mystery man she knew in grad school. Nobody knows. Not even Levon. And no one even knows why Levon doesn’t know except that his mother won’t tell him. Which, of course, makes it all the more mysterious.
She kept looking at the table.
That’s all pretty strange, she said. It would make me crazy.
We were silent awhile.
I had been kind of crushing on Sam since the start of school, but I sort of knew that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, she was taller than me, and for another, while I got the sense that she liked and respected me in our Quest for Justice class, it was like, not like-like. I could feel something between her and Levon. I didn’t know what it was. Like-like. Love-hate. But it was this really strong vibe that was positive and negative, like a magnetic force field.
Avery, who was very sharp about these things, and who had lunch and coffee with both of them, said he could get absolutely nothing directly from either of them. That they locked him completely out. And he said that told him more than anything that something was going on. Not anything romantic, and he was sure there was nothing sexual—yet, he added. He was certain they were both virgins.
But it was something powerful and old and deep, and it had to do with their project with Meg, and how fucked up they had both been. He said they were both so volatile. Especially Levon. Sam was better at hiding it than Levon, and he was sure it wasn’t med changes, or stuff at either of their homes. It was like alchemy, and he was dying to find out.
My lunch with Sam ended with us eating in silence, and when I told Avery about it after school, he grilled me until he had every last detail about Sam’s interest in Levon.
This is my quest, he said. To figure them out. Without intruding, of course. He smiled. That, and NYU.
Then he said, What about you and Anna?
He’d been pushing me to ask Anna out for coffee. He said we were both cool, and she didn’t know me, and if she knew me even a little more, she’d like me a lot more.
We have lunch, I said.
At which you ask a lot of questions, and she rattles on, he said.
He was right.
Honey, he said, and he put his hand on mine. Take it from me. You’re a looker, a catch, and a very interesting young man.
With OCD.
Oh, please. Who gives a shit if you wash your hands a lot, and take too many showers.
Avery.
Noah. My friend. I’m not saying get over it. I’m saying just do it anyway. Courage, as we know, is not the absence of fear, but acting despite the fear.
It’s funny, but as I looked across the table at him, I realized I’d been friends with Avery for more than twelve years. Even though he was funny, and vamped it up, and was the biggest gossip in Ithaca, he was also one of the most thoughtful, decent friends I’d ever had. And he always had been. He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.
Sitting there, I suddenly felt this sharp pang, almost of sweet anguish—that we only had a few more months of our childhood in Ithaca together.
Okay, I said.
Okay what?
I’ll ask Anna for coffee. We’ll get double caps and sit in Triangle Park.
That’s my tiger, he said. That’s my big boy.
Then he smiled and said, So what’s the news. What do you hear? Anything new going on?
I shook my head. You’re relentless, I said.
He looked around the Café. The news never rests, he said.
Twenty-one
Trevor
When I came to the University of Chicago in 1991, I came with the intention of pursuing an advanced degree in mathematics, in number theory, to be more precise. I had received my bachelor’s degree at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and I was very much interested indeed in prime numbers, in pattern recognition, integers, and in the more useless and, if I may say so, elegant and even beautiful work of higher mathematics.
I began to work with Dr. Frank Liu, who was in both higher mathematics and physics, and who at the time was beginning to explore the field of light. Was it a wave or a particle? It is both, of course, but he was applying certain theories of mathematics, of laws of motion and probability distributions and lenses and lasers, and coming up with some startling results.
Light is very strange, and mysterious, and a paradox. Most scientists had believed that light was a simple wave that went from point A to point B. They found that light was made of very tiny waves, very short ultraviolet waves of light to slightly longer waves on the spectrum that were red. But in the early twentieth century physicists began to examine that. In a famous experiment they shined light through two slots in a metal wall, like two doorways. They found that the light passed through the doors as a wave, but it emerged on the other side as a particle. This doesn’t sound like much, but it was an extraordinary revolution in physics. It was essentially the beginning of quantum mechanics, and it has been a paradox and mystery to physicists ever since. How could something like light be both smooth, flowing waves at times, and at other times gritty particles. It was and is something no scientist really, fully understands.
Dr. Liu is a brilliant and charming man, and within one year under his tutelage, I was a graduate student in physics, with a special interest in light.
I am not a normal person and have never been one, since the time of my early childhood. I am physically awkward, have limited social skills, and do not even like to make eye contact with those to whom I am speaking. I test very high in many academic areas and was always a top student, if I was left alone.
What people don’t know is that I grew up as the youngest son of a tenant farmer in a very remote part of East Anglia in England, and that we were desperately poor. I was the youngest of four by some margin; the next oldest was seven years older than I. Everyone worked extremely hard, and we had no electricity, nor did we have indoor plumbing until our family left the farm for factory work in a small town some twenty or thirty kilometers distant. I was alone virtually all of the first seven years of my life.
In fact, I dislike being touched, and I often feel intensely uncomfortable around other people, except in very specific conditions. Which is to say, do not expect me to be like a regular person. I am simply not one.
Which leads me to the point at hand: Susan Grady, who was a graduate student in neurobiology at the same time I was a graduate student in physics at Chicago. We finished the same year. In fact, we had seen each other around the science quads for five years, and I was very much aware of her. Who would not be?
She was five feet ten inches tall, had red-brown hair, which she often wore piled on top of her head, was quite attractive, and also stood and walked with squared shoulders; she did not slouch the way so many tall women do, as though their height was something about which to be embarrassed. She was famous among graduate students in the sciences becau
se she was studying the MAO-A gene, the so-called Psychopath Gene. She was studying PET and CAT scans of the brains of violent criminals, and she was considered a star.
She was also quite friendly, and she always made a point of saying, Hello, Trevor, in a bad English accent, when we passed.
She must have heard a thing or two about me, because I was working with Dr. Liu, and I am not entirely unattractive, despite my considerable social limitations. I am also tall, six foot one and a half, to be precise, and I have a big head of curly dark hair, and my glasses are so old that they probably had begun to come back into fashion. On several occasions she sat down at the table with me while I was having coffee in the basement of the chemistry building, where they had a small cafeteria situated.
She never tried to look me in the eyes, and she asked questions, and I would talk at length about my work. There was no give and take, because I cannot operate that way. I fundamentally do not understand the idea of reciprocity. In theory, of course, I do. But in practice I don’t know when to talk or not talk, and when someone is getting bored with my monologues.
But we had grown, if not friendly, then familiar to each other over the years. She was, I suspect, interested in me as a specimen of mental disorder. As someone who was clearly outside the realm of “normal,” and yet who functioned within the limited scope of academia quite nicely, thank you. I taught my few classes, spent most of my time in the lab with Dr. Liu or in the sciences library, and even, on rare occasions, went out with a few colleagues for a glass of beer.
I did my work efficiently and well.
Very early that spring, some of us were finishing and defending our dissertations, and a number of us had already secured postdoctoral research positions, and a few of us had found tenure-track positions. I found a research position at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which involved very little teaching, which suited me fine. Daniel Schrieber, another of Dr. Liu’s acolytes, was hired by the California Institute of Technology, in a tenure-track position, and Susan Grady was hired, tenure-track, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
All, if I may say, plum positions. Positions of prominence at eminent institutions, with the promise, of course, of advancement, which they have since all taken advantage of.