“Lillian?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I look forward to seeing you.”
He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Look, I have someone,” he said. “I have someone in my life now. I wanted to say something earlier—”
“I don’t care.” She put her knee up on the arm of the couch and came toward him. “Skootch over.”
He pulled the sheet away from his back and shifted to the edge of the couch, and she tucked herself into the warm space he’d left. She seemed much smaller to him now, as if he could curl up his arm and hold her against his chest like a child. She settled in on her back and reached for his arm and draped it over her belly, then closed her eyes. She smelled of soap. After a couple of minutes, he thought she was going to drift off to sleep, but then she stirred and looked at him.
“Will you take a picture of me?” she said. “You probably don’t have any pictures of me like I am now.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s do that. We’ll do it in the morning.”
“No, let’s do it now. I want you to have a picture of me from right now.”
He shrugged and pulled the sheet back. He was so tired that in the near dark he saw a pale strobing in front of his eyes. He had a 35 mm with a fast film in it in the glove compartment of his car; he could take her in the light from the kitchen. He went out front in his bare feet, where the suffused glow he’d seen from inside resolved into the sharpness of street lamps. There were clouds in front of the moon, and a fog obscured the top of the road where he’d turned off the main street and come down past the cemetery earlier in the day. He got the camera out of his glove compartment and went into the trunk to get the money from the cigar box where he kept it. He put the eight hundred into his pocket and went back in.
Lillian was sitting up in the middle of the couch, her legs tucked under her bottom, her hair twisted down over one shoulder. She looked perfect to him then, as she always had when he caught her in an unguarded moment. He switched on the light in the kitchen, then approached her and turned her a little toward him.
“Don’t pose me,” she said. “Just like this.” She sat straight again, and one side of her face fell into darkness.
He brought the camera up to his eye. “You want me to have half a picture of you?”
“You can come back for the other half if it’s not enough.”
He shot a frame and advanced the film, but she got up. “Just one.” She went toward the door to the basement. “Take one of me with my mother as well.”
“Come on, Lillian.”
She stood at the door and put her hand on the knob. Then smiled and backed away. Where she was, the light from the kitchen had flipped her to shadow. It picked up the texture of the skin on her legs and made the edges of her hair glow in a corona of blue-black light. He wanted to take another picture, and he reached for the camera. This could be the other half, he thought, this shape in front of me. But she saw him pick up the camera and said, “Don’t.”
“I’m sorry, Lillian,” he said.
She folded her arms over her chest. “I guess that’s our night.”
“I guess it is.”
“You know, I don’t usually sleep alone. Did I tell you that?” She lifted her eyes into the light. “I go downstairs, or she comes up here. I told her she should just stay up here with me, but she thinks it’s important that I live like an indepen- dent person. Funny, huh?”
He was looking up toward her and squinting a little. His eyes hurt. “What part?”
“That she thinks if I’m alone up here I’m independent.”
“Maybe she’s just respecting your privacy.”
“I like sleeping with her. Does that sound odd? It’s like this is my last chance to have her to myself, just the way I wanted when I was a kid. I cook for her and make her all the things she used to make me, and at night we talk in bed. She tells me stories about myself when I was a little girl. Apparently, I was a fanciful child.”
“See? You’re not alone at all. I don’t even have that.”
“She sleeps with her back against my chest and I can feel her ribs go up and down against the inside of my arm, and I listen to her breathing.”
“That’s nice. Really, it is.”
“That’s something we could have done for each other, Tom. But I guess that didn’t happen.”
“No.” He thought of the money in his pocket.
“Did you ever cheat on me?”
“Why ask me that now?”
“One of the men in the bank liked me,” she said. “He even told me.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I should have,” she said. “But my optimism made me stupid.”
He turned his mouth toward his shoulder and coughed a little and then smiled at her, to show he wasn’t hurt, but he was surprised how much the comment stung him. It had never occurred to him that their breakup was anything more than the result of cross-purposes. He’d never seen it as a failure of hope. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I’ve always come to see you because I wanted to. Not because I thought I should.”
She laughed her high, abrupt laugh and came over to where he was sitting. She leaned down to kiss him and her hair fell over his face as she touched her mouth to his. She said his name. Then she straightened and gestured to the couch. “That thing pulls out, you know. You don’t have to sleep on it like you’re too drunk to go home.” She pushed a chair back in under the table, passing it on her way back to the basement door. “You don’t come to see me out of guilt, Tom. I know that.”
“I don’t.”
“You do it because you still care about me, and that’s much worse.”
WHEN SHE went downstairs, he took the cushions off the couch, and stared at the skeletal frame. It would be six hours to Toronto, and he couldn’t drive it now. It shook him to realize how much he wanted to see Linda. This kind of attachment, that brought with it the foreignness of longing, had never been in his life before. He moved the camera to a side table, its weight in his hand a familiar gravity. Inside it, the last picture of Lillian lay there like a leaf inside a stone. He’d told her everything he thought he could, although he’d come ready to tell her more. But it turned out he hadn’t had the heart to tell her the rest. He hadn’t, until very recently, he realized, had the heart for much, and the cost of that had been another person’s happiness.
Long Division
“No natural notion of infinity is compatible with the laws of arithmetic.”
—TIMOTHY GOWERS,
Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction
CATHERINE NILSON WAITED OUTSIDE OF ROOM 23, BESIDE THE mural of Canadian Sports Heroes, on the second floor of Harrison Road Public School. This was where her only child, an eight-year-old son, attended his advanced classes, and where she meant to intercept him before he went into math, a subject taught by a round man about her age named Mr. Melvin. He’d noted her idling outside his classroom at five minutes to one, just as lunch was ending. He’d never met her before (her husband, Andy, had come to meetings at the school, averring that he was the parent more involved in Daniel’s education), and so he passed her a curious look, but said nothing before entering his class.
All around her, the post-lunch crowd was reassembling beside the double row of lockers. The looks of the third and fourth graders unnerved Catherine. It had been almost thirty years since she’d been subject to the laws of that society, and the way these small men and women registered her presence made her think of her own early education, in which she’d run the gamut of cat-eyed eight-year-olds with their withering murmurs and their scorekeeping. In the short time she’d been waiting, she’d become aware that she was the only subject of conversation in the second-floor hallway. There was no whispering or pointing, however: the subculture of prepubescent children was like heart cells in a petri dish. Connected by a matrix of unseen fibers, they tended to beat in unison.
Daniel’s classmates began arriving, but he was not yet among them. It trouble
d her to see what they had traded up for when Daniel had been put into this accelerated group. These too-intelligent kids, already cut free from the moorings of what was popular, had the look about them of an underclass. Their rucksacks lacked logos, their clothing and haircuts were plain. They shuffled into Mr. Melvin’s classroom to have this advanced math pounded into them, and in this fashion they were just so much clay, no different from the rest of their schoolmates. But the rest of their schoolmates had been deemed average, and so got to have fun and trade hockey cards and get co-opted by soft drink companies and running-shoe brands. Daniel’s friends were to be molded by higher learning, but molded no less. She’d had this disagreement, complete with her own italics, many times with Andy, and he’d always trumped her with what he called her pretensions to commonness. They had a special child, he’d say, and she seemed ashamed of that. She would throw in the towel at this point, because going any farther would mean trying to explain that she was not ashamed of Daniel, but rather she wished she could see more of herself in him. A little of her commonness, she thought, could see him through a great deal of trouble.
So here she was, having taken the afternoon off from her firm, on this Wednesday in the late fall, to try to pull Daniel down a little from the ether of his education and back into the oxygen of normality. She was here with her husband’s blessing, having convinced him that the corrective she intended to deliver was essential to the boy’s growth. She was here to make Daniel own up to a lie. The fact that she had caught him in one was pure luck, but it had enlivened her hopes that he was not so unique that he did not need to conceal a weakness, occasionally. She longed for him to have weaknesses, to try something and fail. It was a strange way to express her love, to want him to taste the poison of disappointment. She thought if he did, though, he might develop its antibodies: humility, humor, resilience.
As she waited outside Mr. Melvin’s room Catherine kept her gaze away from the students, uncomfortable with their eyes on her. It was as if they already knew she was here to betray one of their own.
IT HAD taken to grade three before Daniel’s teachers figured out what she and Andy already knew. His mental capacity did not indicate a talent for mere retention; he synthesized. That was the educational word for it. It meant that given A and B, Daniel could therefore C. This was not as simple an ability as recognizing that fire and paper were things that became smoke and ash. Daniel’s mind could work deductively, too, tracing back from ash to smoke to paper and then to an unlit match.
Catherine never thought of herself as particularly intelligent, although no one would have called her slow. She had never much valued the more abstract arts of mind. A head for figures was the kind of thing people back where she was from would have said euphemistically, meaning a person was useless for outdoor work, or was dreamy. But it wasn’t as if she’d grown up without books or math. Just that it was deemed somewhat perverse to focus on either, and so it had always seemed very odd to her to have ended up with a child who did.
At first, she would have said Daniel was unlike Andy, too. When they’d first met, twelve years earlier, they were a young couple finishing off their master’s degrees at the University of Toronto, she in psychology, he in social work. They met on a rainy night, at a party in an apartment overlooking Bathurst; Andy had opened the door and passed Catherine a glass of red wine, as if he’d decided he was going to seduce the next person who came in. Everyone was crammed into the kitchen, and the two of them spent the next hour draining bottles of wine he kept setting aside for their personal use. When the party thinned out, they went and faced each other, leaning against a wall in what some nineteenth-century family would have properly used as a dining room, but that was now crowded with LP-filled milk crates and bookshelves made out of bricks and wooden planks.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, looking back and forth between his eyes and his mouth. He’d touched her long black hair, hair he didn’t yet know made her look like her mother when she’d been Catherine’s age, jet-black Nana Mouskouri hair. Catherine usually kept it tied up in a scrunchy that came loose once or twice an hour, allowing her to sweep it forward and tidy it back into the plush elastic. “You think you’re going to kiss me?”
“I’m drunk. I’m trying my luck.”
She put a hand on his chest and pushed him away. “I’m a game of skill,” she said. His jaw slackened in erotic paralysis, but she kept her face still, determined not to show him that she was also having trouble mastering herself. Just an hour earlier, she hadn’t even known that this man existed. And now she was tipping forward into a future—however limited it may turn out to be—with him.
(Sometimes, Catherine imagines that she’s gone back to this same moment, knowing what she knows now. But she doesn’t know if she would tell herself what awaited them. What kind of life would have ensued if she had leaned into him and said, We will have a strange child and never quite know how to feel about him, and it will make it hard to love each other?)
“You’re beautiful,” he said, and she turned her back to the wall and let him carry on. She could feel a strange mound against her lower spine. “When you came through the door,” he said, “I thought I’d punch anyone who tried to talk to you. Even a girl.”
“How hard?”
“Really hard,” he said, and she laughed and crooked her forefinger into the top of his pants and pulled him to her. She had one hand on the back of his neck and she could feel the muscles there straining as she pushed her mouth against his. He tasted like sour blackberries. She’d figured out the bump against her lower back was a patch of spackle the size of a platter; she relaxed against it, taking more of the pressure from Andy’s body until finally she felt the wall give way, and the huge bolus of plaster went clattering down to the basement inside the walls.
She was going to be a passionate woman. She was figuring this out.
They never married. They were joined by flesh, as Andy sometimes put it, the body of their son a bridge between them. She stood with Andy over the crib, looking down, the baby’s lips moving thickly over an invisible nipple, the nub of his tongue pulsating at the opening. Some days she would think, is this my life? and other days, this is my life. Fear and awe in a cycle. She loved Daniel. She’d bury her mouth in his hot neck and suck and he’d squirm in delight. And those legs—like pizza dough sold in bulging plastic bags, dimpled dough legs so fat they rippled when he laughed. It’s so easy to love a baby.
Then his abilities appeared. They looked in the books for the stages he was supposed to be going through, but he didn’t go through them the way the books promised. He was supposed to like faces, but he didn’t like them as much as he seemed to examine them. Held up, Daniel would stare at some facial feature: an eye, or the whorl of an ear. Before he was one, he’d touch his mother’s nose and then his own. When he was supposed to be sucking on his toys and hurling them to the floor, he instead used them as tools. The chunky plastic blocks other children would stack into saliva-glazed towers, he’d use to make straight lines across the living room floor, neatly bisecting it into triangles or rectangles. They watched him as if he were something that had crashed through their skylight one evening. An alien houseplant, an unknown species. Andy got used to it though. His experience allowed him to accommodate a strange new mind. This is what Catherine told herself: her lack of experience meant that what seemed marvelous to Andy would, for some time, seem abnormal to her. It was a matter of catching up.
Daniel muddled through the boredom of early school, but his pent-up intelligence burst its confines in grade three, and in early September of that year, he’d stood up in Mrs. Renald’s class and declaimed passionately on the beauty and mystery of math. This had come just as his homeroom was to tackle double-digit addition, and Mrs. Renald had written 14 + 37 = on the blackboard. She was going to demonstrate the power of vertical formulation, but the vision of the numbers with their operators had caused Daniel’s fervor to coalesce.
“The equals s
ign is like a magic trick,” he’d said, standing and speaking as if he were merely a conduit for a voice from another place. “Before it, numbers gather and decide to do things together. Fourteen, thirty-seven . . . they want to be something else. This is why they come. Sometimes they join together, or one takes itself away, like it’s digging a hole in the other number. Or one number will come together with another number as many times as that other number is. Or it will take itself out of that number as many times as it can, until there’s nothing left. That’s called division.” He’d been gesturing with his hands about the room, as if the figures he was speaking of had taken form in the air around him. Then he lowered his eyes again to his bewildered classmates. “But this isn’t the best thing about numbers,” he said. “What’s really neat is that everything is math. Like, if you add time and pressure to coal, that equals diamonds.” (He’d considered going to the front of the room and taking up some chalk to write C + (T x P) = D, but he did not want to confuse them.) “Or this:” he continued. “Water, divided by heat, equals steam. The whole world is like this.”
Mrs. Renald had smiled and nodded, and some of his classmates were staring at him with revulsion. Perhaps they were going to have to learn this, too?
It was not his fault that the connections between things filled his mind: he could see the webbing under the skin of the world. The next day, after the visit to the principal, he was placed in another class.
LONG BEFORE this moment, Andy had decided to feed this wondrous little brain. He glued pictures of animals and vehicles and vegetables to the ceiling above the crib. He lay on the floor with a long pointer and touched the objects, saying their names, so that Catherine imagined her son’s dreams were like a murmuring dictionary: tractor, platypus, tree frog, eggplant—all these words that Daniel was too young to understand. She worried his mind was being dragged away from the dreams of color and faces and sounds she thought all infants needed. But Andy insisted they had to give this bright infant information. He was a bigger sponge than most babies. Catherine had to admit that in Red Deer they didn’t see very much of this, and if they had, maybe they wouldn’t have known what to do. It was entirely possible that Andy’s approach was the right one.
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