by Miriam Sved
He says, ‘So, I think she wants to, like, present me. To my long-lost grandfather.’
Max unfurls a tiny tendril of weed and angles the nail scissors. ‘Doesn’t the old mathematician live in America?’ he says.
‘But that’s the thing,’ says Josh. ‘He’s coming here. To Sydney. Actually to Sydney Uni. It’s a really big event in the maths world: Kalmar coming out of retirement to do a lecture – not that he ever really retired, not properly. It’s funny because I already knew about this lecture from my course coordinator – that idiot Sol I told you about before? He told me I should go to it to get a lesson in collegiate mathematics, or some shit. Anyway, I probably was going to go to it – Kalmar really is a legend, and he’s supposed to be pretty out there too in terms of his lecture style. And then Nagymama, I mean my grandmother, comes out with all this stuff, completely out of the blue, at my grandfather’s funeral. That’s the weird bit. Like, how suspicious is that? She’s burying the guy she lived with for seventy years and suddenly she’s all interested in this other dude she knew when she was really young, like our age.’
Josh is caught up in the theme now, and Max’s attention seems to be back with him too. ‘But how would that work?’ he says. ‘I mean, I’m not the one who’s good with numbers here, but if this guy’s nearly ninety and your mum’s, what, in her fifties, and your grandma and this dude knew each other when they were in their twenties …?’
Josh sits forward. ‘Yeah, they were friends when they were really young – not just them but this whole group. I don’t know who else was in it except that it was a bunch of other young mathematicians in Budapest. But I googled Kalmar, and the thing is that he and Nagymama got out at almost exactly the same time, in 1938, which was actually really unusual, being able to escape from Europe at that point. And for the next decade or so they sort of shadowed each other. They both went to America to start with, and they both left there after the war. At that point Kalmar started this life where he sort of wandered around the world staying with different people, usually with other mathematicians. He was basically homeless, and apparently he was a terrible house guest, the messiest person in existence, but people always put him up because he was such an amazing mathematician that it was an honour to have him stay and get to work with him.’
‘And, what,’ Max says, ‘you think he came to stay with your grandma in Sydney and …’ clenching his fist and making a slow punching gesture in the air.
Josh laughs uncomfortably. ‘Yeah. But, like, not some meaningless quickie or anything – at least I don’t think so.’ Nagymama had been distinctly weird at the funeral, with all that talk about guilt and atonement. And when she’d told Josh her condition for giving him the money she’d gone shifty-eyed and shy. Not like herself at all.
Max lifts the bong to his lips and emerges from the hit moist-eyed and intense. ‘So you think they were lovers?’ he says seriously. ‘And you really think you could be this guy’s grandson?’
The more Josh thinks about it, the more sense it makes of various things. His own mathematical prowess, obviously. And the inexplicably spiky relationships that, without paying much attention, he has always sensed between the old people in his family. Nagymama and Nagypapa for a start. And Nagypapa and Josh’s mother. There has always been a kind of quadratic uncertainty in the air around them all: some lost, unspoken variable that manifests in silences. Why, for instance, had Josh only just learned of Nagymama’s history with the great mathematician Pali Kalmar? Why are there no family stories about how his grandparents escaped from Europe, so soon before the war? There are very few stories at all, as though time only began when Josh and his sister were born. Now that Josh thinks about it, through the focused diffuseness of his friend’s good drugs, there has always been an air of … embarrassment? No, stronger even: a sense of shame permeating the air around his family. A stilted nervousness when they all sat down to have dinner at the big house. To the extent that Josh ever thought about it before, he’d always put it down to Nagypapa (RIP) being such a prick. Now he thinks again about Nagymama’s strangeness in the stairwell, about how abstracted she seemed, both angry and sad when she talked about Kalmar and her youth in Hungary. I always thought there would be time to atone.
There is a knock at the door of the apartment. Max looks up and begins to corral the loose dregs of weed into the open foil wrapper on the table. ‘That’ll be Jaz and Bethany,’ he says, standing up.
‘What?’ Lost in revelations about his family, it is as though a glass of cold water has been thrown at Josh.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Max is up and moving towards the front hallway, everything moving too fast. ‘Jaz called this morning and asked if she and Bethany could come over after class. She said something about getting a book, but she probably wants to bitch at me some more. Or sponge off my stash.’ Rolling his eyes as he exits the room. Josh sits blinking for a second and then starts running his hands through his hair. There is no mirror in Max’s living room, he hasn’t checked it for escape curls all morning. It has been nine days since he saw Bethany. He has been avoiding the places around campus where he is likely to run into her. There is something that feels like a rampant cowlick on top of his head; he spits on his hand and rakes at it viciously, then snatches a newspaper from the lower shelf of Max’s coffee table. Green Left Weekly. He opens it to a random page and stares at a picture of protesting hippies as if his life depends on it – all dreads and sweaty cheesecloth, the smell of them almost coming through the page.
Max takes a while ushering the women in – Josh can hear the three of them at the front door, his friend’s low, loud voice saying something about a new delivery, the word hydroponic used twice. Max’s voice gets closer, and when Jasmine and Bethany walk into the living room both their heads are turned away from Josh, towards the still-speaking Max, which is lucky as Josh is immediately plunged into a period of slightly overwhelming sensory adjustment. It is unfair that he has to face the two of them together. Bethany, whom, yes, he has thought about quite a lot in the last nine days, and now is experiencing some sweating and tingling sensations towards – sensations not contained to his legitimately involved faculties but acting on other, needier and more compromising parts of himself like his throat and stomach. His hands twitch convulsively at the Green Left Weekly. And also Jasmine, who, even through the unfortunate breakthrough uncoolness about Bethany, deprives him of a bit more motor-neuron control. By the time they are properly in the room he realises that he has forgotten to keep reading his newspaper and is simply gaping. He looks back down and tries to read while Max, who seems to have gone into showman or maybe salesman mode, keeps telling them about the amazing hydroponic weed.
Suddenly Bethany is standing over him. ‘Hi,’ she says. She is wearing boyish dark overall shorts with some kind of paisley shirt underneath: highly Bethany.
‘Oh, hey,’ he says. ‘How are you going?’ He puts the emphasis on the you, which is wrong – meaning to be a mild rebuff (you again?) but coming out sleazy (I’m looking at you).
Jasmine comes over and, in a double act of sabotage, takes the Green Left Weekly off his lap and flops down with it next to him on the bong sofa, an exaggerated flop with long denim legs and bare brown arms proliferating, and the double confusion of Bethany standing over him and Jasmine rocking the loose springs of the sofa beside him proves difficult to work through. You’re obsessed with my best friend, Bethany had said. He does feel a little obsessive at this moment, but the object of his obsession is not quite clear. It is true that, as ever in Jasmine’s presence, he would like to look at her. This is not a problem specific to Josh – he has seen the way Jasmine moves through campus at the centre of a sticky web of gazes, the way men and sometimes women find it insufficient to follow her with their eyes and have to twist, contort, sometimes physically follow for a few steps to keep her in their visual field. Josh is not alone in wanting to look at Jasmine, and really (though he is not sure wh
ether this line would help him in the Bethany situation) his interest in her feels quite forensic. She is all extra effect: there is the dark blonde swaying hair, the high cheekbones and bow lips, the piercingly strange green eyes, but primarily there is something else, an elusive factor, and it is this non-standard variable that he would like to identify and isolate, test its properties and fathom its dimensions. It is the element that makes her magnetic. And while this defensive exegesis about Jasmine is running through his mind (at what speed? he thinks he just glanced quickly in Jasmine’s direction but it occurs to him that his eyes may have lingered longer, perhaps for an unfortunately long time), there is also the uncomfortably unscientific, the really quite embodied and subjective effect that Bethany’s physical presence is having as she stands over him, the bong sofa seeming very low to the ground.
‘I’m going good,’ she says. Is she looking at him strangely? ‘How are you going?’
Her square-fingered hands, which don’t look like a musician’s hands until you see them in motion. The long, dark ropes of her hair – two thick plaits that hang over her shoulders in a style that Josh always thought was old-fashioned and schoolgirlish. Even the noticeable fuzz on her upper lip, which has been more of an issue for Josh than he would admit to anyone. (He is a feminist. He thinks he is a feminist. Of course women should be equal to men. But Jasmine, who also calls herself a feminist, doesn’t seem to have an inch of hair on her body, a seal of a girl whose depilatory regime is hard to imagine; surely she never gets stubble or regrowth.) Bethany is shortish and boxy and there are dimples above her knees. All these elements of her body – her objectively not very good body – are working on Josh in undermining ways. Sure, he has missed her, a bit – surprising air bubbles of longing in his chest – but he is not hung up on her. How long have his eyes been resting on the dimpled skin of her knees?
‘I’m great, thanks, yeah,’ he says, pulling his eyes upwards and wishing he still had the newspaper to focus on.
‘I’m really glad to hear that,’ she says. ‘I was a bit worried after those messages you left me.’
Josh makes a strangled noise, meant to be a dismissive snort signifying his great personal distance from the Josh who left those whiny, wheedling, possibly a bit aggressive messages on Bethany’s phone. The noise comes out so strange and loud that Jasmine, who has been monitoring this exchange from behind her pilfered newspaper, looks up and stares openly at him.
With a gust of relief Josh remembers his phone. He reaches into his bag next to the sofa, the little side pocket that hugs the phone snugly, but then in his relief to have the small smooth thing to focus on he gets the passcode wrong three times in quick succession, locking himself out.
‘I’m sorry about those messages, okay?’ he says, glaring at the locked screen. ‘I shouldn’t have left them. But I’m over it now; you won’t get anything like that from me again.’
Max comes back into the room carrying two bottles of beer in each hand. ‘How was class?’ he says to Jasmine, as if class is some quaint and slightly ludicrous concept.
Jasmine doesn’t answer the sneery question; she says, ‘Could you just give me that book you borrowed so we can get out of here?’ Throwing a meaningful look at Bethany. Was it Bethany, before they came, who introduced the imperative to ‘get out of here’ as quickly as they could? We’ll just get the book and leave, Jasmine would have said, you’ll barely have to talk to him. But Jasmine and Max are fighting too, so maybe she is not speaking for her friend.
‘All right?’ Jasmine says to him suddenly.
Josh realises that his eyes have been doing the thing again, resting too long on Jasmine’s face.
‘Sorry,’ he says, praying he is not blushing. ‘I mean, yeah, all right. Whatever.’
He looks back down at the phone and finds, to his relief, that the thing has recovered from its security scare and he can enter his passcode again. He does it slowly and carefully this time, getting the numbers right, but then the realisation strikes him that Bethany is still watching and may have seen the combination of numbers he typed in, and he is momentarily lost in an echo chamber of mental arguments and counterarguments about whether to say something to her about it, whether to hope she didn’t notice or risk alerting her to the embarrassment by explaining it (it’s important from a security standpoint not to use your own birthday, and hers was only a couple of months ago so the date was fresh in his mind, and he hasn’t gotten around to changing it yet, that’s all).
He is still going back and forth in this dilemma when Jasmine says, ‘I hear you had a little party here Saturday night. I ran into Julie at Manning.’
She is looking intensely at Max, who seems uncharacteristically uncertain where to put himself in the room. He leans on the little keyboard that was set up for the music video they filmed last month, the good days that seem like the distant past.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It was a good night.’ Taking a swig of beer. ‘I got some blow. Julie was in good form.’ Something about the way he says this indicates a close acquaintance with Julie’s form.
Josh watches curiously as Jasmine uncrosses and recrosses her legs. Her face is impassive but something about her perfect posture indicates tense awareness, as if she is about to spring at Max.
‘Yeah?’ she says. ‘Glad to hear you had a good night. Sorry I couldn’t make it; a friend of mine was having a rooftop party. He’s got an amazing apartment overlooking Hyde Park. It was quite a small party, but very eye-opening.’
The atmosphere in the room is suddenly so thick with hostile subtext, and Josh is so tense, that when Bethany lets out a little giggle his initial thought is that the inappropriate laugh must have come from him. But Max turns to Bethany. ‘Hey, have you heard?’ he says. ‘Our boy here is the descendant of royalty. Maths geek royalty.’
Josh gapes at him, his first impulse to feel betrayed by the breach of confidence and by Max’s snippy tone. But no, the tone is meant for Bethany, or for Jasmine by way of Bethany.
‘Yeah,’ Max goes on. ‘Seems like it might have been a bad time to cut him loose. He’s probably got a juicy bundle coming to him.’
Josh gapes some more, snagged on the cryptic visual of a juicy bundle (it is mangoes he thinks of first; mangoes wrapped in some kind of cloth), until he realises that Max means money. He means that Josh will be rich. Which is true, Josh will be rich, he is sure of it, but not by way of Pali Kalmar, who is notoriously penurious, giving any money he gets from lectures and prizes to charity and to promising maths students and living off the goodwill of his friends and colleagues.
Bethany looks at Josh. ‘What’s he talking about?’
Before Josh can answer Jasmine sighs noisily and rises from the sofa, stretching her long body. ‘Whatever the fuck he’s talking about, you’re probably better off not knowing,’ she says, and walks out of the room towards the front of the apartment. She could be going to the bathroom, but she shoots a look at Max on her way out: a look that’s maybe ninety-five per cent hostility, but with a distinct minor element of something else. Max raises his eyebrows at Josh and follows her out.
‘Those two,’ Bethany says, when they are alone. ‘They should just kill each other and get it over with.’ She sits down next to Josh on the sofa. ‘So what was he talking about, the stuff about maths royalty?’
She is sitting with her legs bent at odd angles towards him on the sofa. It is unsettling to have her so close; Josh feels crowded in by all his yearnings of the last nine days, those messages he left on her phone, a dream he had about her just a couple of nights ago (nothing compromising, he was following her through a series of serpentine corridors, but he woke feeling sweaty and needy and bereft). He takes a swig of beer and holds the talisman of MIT at the centre of his mind. He will be out of here and away from her soon enough, on to greener pastures, longer leaner legs.
‘Do you know of Pali Kalmar?’ he says, trying to sound casu
al.
‘Yes, of course.’ Bethany is a double major in physics and music, both of which have been indirectly influenced by Kalmar’s work.
‘So you probably know he’s giving a lecture at uni this weekend, kind of a retrospective? Well, it turns out my grandmother used to know Kalmar – I think she maybe actually worked with him back in Hungary, before the war. Maybe after the war, too, in America or Australia.’ Speaking slowly, placing his emphasis carefully, foggily aware of trying to impress something important upon Bethany, something about his birthright, his legitimacy, and what she has given up. Also feeling quite stoned and like the act of speaking is a tightrope walk into a dark space.
Bethany says, ‘When was the last time Nagymama saw him?’ Which stops Josh short. For one thing, when was the last time Nagymama saw him? It never occurred to Josh to ask his grandmother this basic question; all the questions that occurred to him were about the past and, implicitly, about him, Josh, and his link to the story. And the other thing: Bethany called his grandmother by the family name, Nagymama (pronounced with more convincingly Hungarian vowels than Josh), which strikes Josh as so typically, archetypally Bethanyish in ways that are difficult for him to consider while Bethany is sitting right there waiting for him to speak: sort of irritating and presumptuous, a bit up herself (she is Welsh on her father’s side and Indian on her mother’s, where does she get off pronouncing Nagymama the proper Hungarian way with all those a’s transmuted to o’s?); and also sort of incredibly touching. Hearing Bethany pronounce Nagymama could, in fact, almost make Josh feel a bit teary, and somewhere deep within himself, behind a shimmery veil of stoner detachment, he senses the potential for a horrible scene, while from the other side of the thin living room wall there comes the unmistakable sounds – high-pitched and low-pitched competing and intertwining – of Max and Jasmine starting to have sex. None of this really seems fair to Josh, who can feel himself turning bright red.