The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  Sara’s voice was lost in the traffic but the woman’s lips moved a little, and then Sara made a motion with her hand, a sort of “I’ll see you tomorrow” movement, and went down the street, her hips swaying in those dark jeans of hers. Her movement had a kind of certainty to it, like someone jumping out of an airplane, and right then I knew she wasn’t kidding. She meant to get me in there.

  I FOUND THE book about Einstein’s Constant in the comforting odor of a library shelf. How could it be that Einstein had a moment’s doubt? What was he worried about? The universe suddenly changing? Not remaining static anymore, but flying apart? I turned to the shelf, reaching upward, and felt the weight of the book, the tug of gravity in the muscles along my side. But no matter what, scared or not, he had taken action. Wasn’t that the critical thing? Of course, it took a while, after I became an astronomer, but, maybe because of what happened with Sara, I began to understand what Einstein was doing when he made what he called his biggest mistake by adding the Constant. I have often wondered if Einstein knew or suspected that if the universe was expanding, and now, as we know, accelerating, that large parts of the universe would seem to disappear, that they would move beyond the horizon of observation. The disappearance of galaxies, and everything in them, too. This disappearance and the struggle against it, the fear of loss, particularly of love, are how the Constant and Sara are bound together. And maybe the trouble in all this, that dark well, the knife, Sara at the side of that river . . . Well, I was only more afraid than ever of something I cared about simply vanishing. Einstein, of course, was only concerned with math, with physics, with cosmology, but sometimes I wonder if something else wasn’t at work, some darkness he felt when he woke at three in the morning and was unable to sleep.

  Mrs. Kilmer didn’t move as I left, although she said, “See you soon.” It wasn’t cheerful, so much as a challenge: I could bring my stupidity here and try to break it against the igneous stones of physics. That, she seemed to say, would be my punishment. I could try. We would see where it left me. She glanced over at me. Wouldn’t we see how much disappointment I could take, and only she, she seemed to suggest, would know how much I had been hurt? She dropped her head, the movement seeming feral. Her hand went to the first figure in the column of library fines, and on to the next. Her pen, which was the kind with a sharp nib she dipped into ink, cut into her ledger with a scratch, and when she wrote, it was more as though she were giving the paper a tattoo, a mark of an indelible crime. She did this next to the Dell computer with the library software that sat right on the desk, next to that little door like you see in the movies when they show someone going up to the front of a courtroom. Then, after she had cut into the paper, she’d enter the fines and print out the notices and put them in the mail. She was just waiting to send one to my house, but I brought every book back, on time, and put it right next to her. It was like putting a rock in her shoe. Sara, on the other hand, probably owed a couple of thousand dollars, and I am sure that a limit had been established and when that limit was crossed Mrs. Kilmer could turn the “account” over to the DA for prosecution. I am sure that Sara knew, down to the dime, what that limit was.

  I thought of the women in the prison across the street: That scratch, scratch, scratch was probably something they heard in their worst dreams of the inevitable.

  “Yep,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “It’s up to you,” said Mrs. Kilmer. “That slutty girl hangs around all the time. Already walking up and down in front of the prison. Why, I bet she’s already talking to the prisoners, hookers and addicts and the like. Shoplifters, I bet. What do you think she’s doing over there?”

  “Good works?” I said.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” she said. “Good works. That’s rich. She’s probably selling them dope.”

  THE CORNER STORE was down the street from the library. The Russian owner was a fat man with blue eyes, a bald head, and his expression had something of the Tartar, but he suggested by his silence, his brooding, that he had gotten away with a lot, although he wasn’t happy that after his years in, say, the KGB he ended up in a dump like this filled with Mountain Bars, Three Musketeers, Kisses (in their silver foil), Jujubes, and Sock-Os. All I could afford was a box of Junior Mints. The Russian counted the coins as though they were radioactive. Or covered with smallpox germs. Maybe he had worked in the Soviet biological warfare plants rather than for the KGB?

  On the bus, the mints made a small rattle in their box, and I wasn’t sure my father even liked them. Would he eat one after the other night when my mother had told him about the Singapore Sling? Had I ever seen my father eat a Junior Mint? He liked Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the kind that come in little wrappers like cupcakes, but they had cost a quarter more than I had. As I sat there with the small rattle I was pretty sure Mrs. Kilmer liked Junior Mints. She had probably eaten them when she took LSD, before she turned into a woman with her gray hair in a bun who hated the possibilities of youth.

  Opposite the empty field, my father sat on a broken lawn chair. Some of the webbing had worn out. I pulled up a small bench and sat down. The mints rattled in that sea of a barely noticeable buzz.

  “What have you got there?” he said.

  “Junior Mints,” I said.

  The grass had given way to small trees, which had started to grow after the sheep were no longer there.

  “Here,” I said. I opened the end of the box and shook it a little so a couple of mints came out on the little shelf that the end of the box made. “Here.”

  He looked out at the field.

  “I should have got Reese’s,” I said. “But I didn’t have another quarter. Don’t you want one? They’re not as good as a chocolate soufflé. Maybe you’ll teach me how to do that, to make a chocolate soufflé.”

  “They’re nice for special occasions,” he said.

  “Like when a lonely girl shows up?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  His hands trembled, but he reached over and took a mint and put it in his mouth.

  “They’re not so bad,” he said. He ate it slowly so he could taste the chocolate, as though I had made him a soufflé. “You get over things.”

  I took one, too.

  “You want another?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll have another. But maybe I’ll have to wait for a minute, OK?”

  My father slept on the sofa now with a glass of water and a box of Kleenex on the table next to him, and he silently turned the pages of the studies that he brought home from his work as a wildlife biologist for the state of New York. The yellow cone from the floor lamp fell on him in a golden pool. When I got up to get a glass of milk, he glanced up at me and smiled, or at least tried to smile, and went back to turning those pages.

  “It’s best right now, Jake,” he said. “Your mother’s upset. I’m betting it will be all right.”

  “So, it’s a kind of bet,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes you have to take a bet.”

  “Even if it might turn out differently than you thought?”

  “That’s the nature of a bet, Jake,” said my father. “Have you got the guts to stand up to it, or don’t you?”

  MRS. KILMER SCRATCHED in her book, her pen cutting into the paper when I came in the door.

  “She’s up there already.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “That little pot smoker. How much do you want to bet she gets into trouble? Huh?”

  Sara sat with a book of photographs of distant galaxies and nebulae, their colors like those of the northern lights. Sara ran her finger over them, as though she could get something more from touching the slick pages. Glowing mantles of gas that rose in powerful clouds, or spumes, and behind them the stars made silver crosses, like an illustration of a mathematical principle. Then, beyond it all, was the darkness of the universe, although you could see more clouds, more glowing gas if you were careful. More than ever like her skin beneath that pink underwear
she wore and which she almost got out of with me. Sometimes this distant light looked like the whorl of a fingerprint.

  “Pretty nice atoms in a void,” I said.

  “I think the back way in is going to be it,” she said. “I’ll throw another joint up there and a note. Won’t be long.”

  “Look,” I said.

  “Tell me you don’t want to do it,” she said. “I dare you to . . . ”

  “But why don’t you just admit you care?” I said.

  “It’s all bullshit. Don’t you see? We’re going to prove it. You want to be Mr. Junior Astronomer, don’t you? Don’t you believe in science? And aren’t you honorable?”

  “What’s honorable about taking advantage of a bunch of locked-up women?”

  “Oh, with ideas like that, you don’t need to be awkward and dumb. You’ll never get laid all by yourself.”

  So she went at it. I read books on Einstein, then started the calculus series (and saw what a lousy job they had done with this at the school I went to), and once, when I was having trouble with it, Sara said, “The exponent becomes the thing that multiples. See?” Then she went back to looking out the window and going into the street, throwing up a joint, and now a note, and then another. And now, too, other women stood in the small place at the end of the cell block, each one with that same distinct longing. One of them pointed to the back of the prison. Was it the laundry chute back there or the garbage?

  “I’m making progress,” said Sara. “They really want it.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “And I asked them. I described you.” She turned her head toward me. “Why, you’re blushing. Wait until I tell them about that.”

  “What did you say?”

  “About you?” she said.

  She put her fingers on my arm.

  “I told them you had freckles, were blond, and had great arms. How about that? I won’t tell you what they said about what they were going to do to you.”

  So we sat side by side. Every now and then Sara put her hands on mine when I came to a picture of a nebula, those clouds of glowing gas that seemed as though the godhead was somehow appearing from the cracks out there. Her fingers trembled when she touched me. Even then, I knew that this business with the prison, with getting me in there, was a substitute for us, for the fact that we couldn’t or didn’t seem to be able to just go to the movies or for me to put my nose into her hair, my lips against her neck. Somehow all that had become too embarrassing.

  Romance, she said, was dead, and when I said, “No, no, that’s all we’ve got,” she looked at me with an air of disdain, perfectly imbued with hostility. “Romance is for saps. It’s all a trap. It’s a way of making you feel something that isn’t there, or that doesn’t last, like perfume. The next thing you know you wake up next to some guy you hate and you start looking in the yellow pages for a divorce lawyer. See? It’s all prenups, community property, lawyers, or guns. It’s reality. See? Hard-edge, hard-hitting. I don’t want anything getting in my way. No letters from my mother. She can’t even write to me. That’s what romance did for her.”

  “Maybe I could help you,” I said. “Maybe we could be a team.”

  “Atoms in a void, Jake,” she said. “You got to face facts.”

  Then why, I thought, did I get sort of light-headed when I was near her, and when she let me put my arm against hers I thought I was running into her, simply dissolving, and not only that, this dissolving felt wonderful, as though I were somehow escaping from the worst of what I thought I was? I knew better than to say a word. This is what men are up against. But I still felt it, and she knew it. And, I think, she felt it, too, but she had read too much and had heard too much to let herself go. Sex was fine. After all, atoms in the void could be desire, and that was OK, but she couldn’t just take me behind the stacks and give me a blow job. Too tawdry for what she really felt. Why? Because, of course, she was kidding herself. She felt something, too, and while it might have been desire, it was something else, too. The prison was a sort of substitute. Let the women there do it, let them convince me, by sheer variety, by intensity of having been denied something basic, like the need to eat or to touch, that I was just another sap. Then I’d know what was what. I’d be as cynical as Sara wanted to be. And how did cynicism ever manage to masquerade as wisdom? And wouldn’t that make everything as easy as pie? Maybe she could use it to accuse me or to find a way to stop caring? I wonder what she thought it would be like to meet me in the morning after I had spent the night in the women’s jail.

  Sara said, “I’ll throw them a note. We’ve got to get the schedules for garbage, for laundry, for the times when those gates at the back are open.”

  She wrote a note to Dori, the woman with the blond hair at the end of the hall of the cell block, and then she folded it into a shape she found in a book of origami: She folded the paper into a little triangle that, while small, was still heavy. I stood at the window when Sara was in the street, her head back as she whistled, as she flicked a joint up to that sill in front of the bars and then the small note, too. It was something for all of them to do. Dori’s fingers reached from between the bars with that little clip, like hope emerging from the fence of a graveyard.

  I had one of those goofy haircuts when I was in my teens—you know, one that looked like a mistake or that the barber had been taking DMT or some mushrooms or something. I left magazines around that were filled with designs for tattoos and that had advertisements for piercings. But that was just to fake my mother out. She still slept alone, although at night she got up and stood in the hall by the living room, where my father slept with the light on.

  At the library it became more obvious that sometimes Sara just reached out for my hand without even thinking about it, and this only made her more insistent about the bet, and maybe that’s why it went wrong. She was pushing too hard, and, of course, that caused other problems, too.

  “Haven’t you been listening in Modern Relationships at school?” she said to me when we sat on a pile of books in the library.

  “You mean where they put a condom on a banana?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I haven’t got a banana,” I said.

  “Well, Jake, you must have got in the wrong line or something because my friend Marie Clariton slept with that football player, Sam Harding, and she said he had one and that it had brown spots on it, just like before the supermarket throws them in the Dumpster.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “Then how come you aren’t laughing?” she said. “It’s because you don’t listen. It’s all testosterone and estrogen and stuff like that, and so how can we give a shit about each other? All atoms in a void, Jake. It’s a trap. That’s what we know.”

  “I like to hold your hand,” I said.

  “Well, listen,” she said. “You wouldn’t be the same anymore when I’m done with you. And you can take that to the bank.”

  “Don’t you feel it?” I said.

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. We’ll talk after you’ve spent a night in the prison, being passed from cell to cell. What do you think those women are going to do to you?”

  MY FATHER STILL slept on the sofa, but sometimes in the morning, my mother read to him about automobile accidents, in which she gave the make, model, injuries, and estimated damage. My father said, “Too bad. But I guess the insurance will cover it.” And my mother said, “Yes, honey, I guess that’s right,” but my father didn’t respond to that. He kept his mouth shut, which he often said was the best thing to do sometimes. He just put sugar on his oatmeal or drank his orange juice and looked at the papers, the studies of the pH of the water he looked after, and then got up and went out the door. Soon, though, on one occasion, he thanked my mother for breakfast. Still, they were trying to live with something, and I knew it was related to that prison, to what I felt for Sara, and how, I was afraid, she could be right. Just think of the things that had been done in the na
me of love. Almost as bad as religion.

  I found some new books of photographs and Sara sat with me, as though she could feel what tugged on us more safely if we just touched while we looked at those glowing clouds, the stars piercing them so keenly as to feel it in your heart, but at the same time, as though to compensate, Sara whispered about what those women would do to me, her hair just touching my face, her hip against me, the vulgarity of what she said (“going to rub your thing raw, Jake, going to suck you dry”) serving as a kind of license, I guess, to feel, at least secretly (since she was advocating against it so fiercely), something tender and sweet and innocent, all of which things had been banished from the age and which she must have felt ashamed for having. I had these sweet desires for her, too, but now I just kept my mouth shut and watched her go to work on that inverse prison break.

  “It’s all set,” she said. “They are going to have the gate open at the back of the prison when the laundry goes out on Saturday evening. But I told them I’d let them see you first. So come on.”

  The traffic in the street had that sad commercial quality, vans and trucks that were driven by bored men and women, and then the odd car here or there that left a trail of smoke like a flag of desperation. Sara and I stood on the sidewalk, at the end of the prison, and behind the bars, one story up, women moved in the shadows, the weak light showing only the highlights in their hair, or what I thought were highlights, and the whites of their eyes.

  This, of course, is where I failed, and I spent a lot time trying to make up for it. Or, at least, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I should have put my lips against her ear and said, “I love you.” But she would have gone nuclear, just turned her back on me altogether, as though I weren’t listening to her at all. She was already making this bet, but maybe she’d think it was better to clear out altogether. But that was a chance I should have taken. Or maybe she would have dismissed me by saying that I was just poisoned with testosterone. I may have felt desire, but it was never because of a poison. How could I have stopped her?