The Explanation for Everything: A Novel

by Lauren Grodstein

  Nothing? What is nothing, oh atheists of the world? Oh you who think you have thought your way out of God, tell us: what was the nothing that was here before us?

  By the way, haven’t the scientists among you told us there is no such thing as nothing? Haven’t you said there are no vacuums, no great wide emptinesses?

  Thus spake Stephen and Michelle Cling, and here Andy checked out, again, their picture in the back of the book, full-color, against a Sears studio backdrop: Stephen with glasses and strawberry blond hair, Michelle, looking like any fortyish resident of Mount Deborah, same dyed hair, same belted jeans.

  There has always been something in the universe, and that something has always been God. You have never been alone in the world, reader. And those who have loved you love you still.

  Andy put the book down next to his bed. He closed his eyes.

  Lou’s funeral had taken place in a funeral home, without preachers or guides of any sort, because nobody had any ideas about who to call. A few of her friends spoke, her uncle. Her sister sat outside with the girls for a while, then took them to McDonald’s.

  But during the funeral, formless, endless, Andy—desperate for anything to take him out of this place—tried to imagine Louisa in heaven. Because he had never allowed himself the lunacy of heaven (or hell, for that matter; when you were dead you were just that, dead, so relax, everybody, and be nice to one another) he had no idea exactly how to imagine it. Was Lou dressed in a white dress? Sitting on clouds with angels? He was embarrassed at how his imagination took him to such childish places but he didn’t know where else to send it. Lou sitting on a cloud, strumming a lute. Lou looking down on him, telling him it would be okay. Her figure outlined in shimmering vapor.

  Stephen Cling, in his picture, wore a Hawaiian shirt printed with crocodiles. Michelle wore a bright blue polo buttoned to the top. What did these two people know that he didn’t? What weren’t they afraid to imagine?

  Fortunately for him, his girls had never asked if their mommy was in heaven, so he had never had to lie to them. They knew where she was. They had watched him sprinkle her ashes off the dock.

  So to think of that now, that Lou’s body was in the Atlantic but her spirit was waiting for him, cradled by the arm of God, or cradled by clouds, or simply vaporous and translucent but watching him, knowing him—it was such a delicious idea that even to consider it felt sinful, like taking some kind of recreational drug. But God Is a Rainbow was so matter-of-fact about heaven and God and purpose and life. Stephen and Michelle just knew. Lou wasn’t a figment of his imagination smirking in the corner.

  Again, eyes closed, he gave it another shot: really, what would it look like? Lou in a white gown. Her magnificent hair. He saw the white dress she wore to Rachel’s first birthday party. That she would have worn to their fifth anniversary dinner, if they had gotten around to it. (Why hadn’t they gotten around to it? They’d just assumed they’d have more time.)

  “Lou,” he said. He said it out loud. “Lou, are you there? Baby, are you there?” He closed his eyes. He tried to imagine. He pushed out of his mind Stephen and Michelle’s airbrushed grins and instead tried to see Lou in heaven. She wasn’t the ghost who haunted him. She was an angel.

  He tried to believe.

  But after a while he started to feel ridiculous, so he got up, went to the kitchen, brewed some coffee. A little after six he completed the first part of his NSF grant. He clicked “send” and sent it into the system. He’d figure out the rest later; he’d make his experiments work. Then he got back in bed and reread the part of God Is a Rainbow about how he was here for a reason, how everyone is on this earth for a reason, and the reason belonged to God.

  EIGHT

  Because Rachel refused to spend another second in the company of Tiffany Goldsmith, and because Andy was still uncomfortable just handing her a key, he decided to hire Melissa Potter to babysit two afternoons a week. He wondered, briefly, about the ethics of this—was it okay to use undergraduates as domestic labor?—but the truth was she had offered, and he trusted her.

  For her part, Melissa had decided to relax around him the moment he confessed, in office hours, to having read God Is a Rainbow, and to having found something worthwhile in it—which was not to say, he specified, that he thought the whole book was worthwhile, or that he accepted all its arguments, but he did appreciate Stephen and Michelle Cling’s comforting tone, and he could see why they made such good pastors.

  “You could meet them!” Melissa said, unable to contain herself. “I could bring you to church! Oh, they would love to hear that you liked their book!”

  “I’m not going to go to church with you, Melissa,” he said. “I’m just saying I thought their book seemed, in its own way—wise.”

  Her smile refused to dim. “They’re going to be so flattered.”

  “Well—”

  “Really,” she said. “It’ll be the best news of their day.”

  She had become like that, more and more—unable to contain herself. And how terrific she was with Rachel and Belle! Helping Belle build a dollhouse out of shoe boxes, making endless rounds of spaghetti pomodoro with Rachel, and doing everything with good cheer and a willingness to listen to whatever was on the girls’ minds. More than once, toward the end of the fall semester, Andy had come home from work to find Rachel and Melissa on the couch, head to head, talking about something serious—boys maybe, but could Rachel already be worrying about boys?—both of them refusing to let on to whatever it was they’d been discussing.

  She wallpapered Belle’s dollhouse with scraps from magazines.

  She made Rachel a mix CD with—Andy checked—no Christian rock whatsoever.

  “Does she ever talk to you about Jesus?” Andy asked on Friday afternoon, having given Melissa her twenty dollars and sent her back to her dorm.

  “Jesus?” Belle looked confused. “Why would she do that?”

  “I think she just really likes us, Dad,” said Rachel. “It’s not like she’s trying to save our souls.”

  In fact, the only soul she seemed even vaguely interested in was Andy’s, and this interest stemmed from her independent study as much as it did from any need to proselytize that burned in her heart. At first, she saved much of her debating for his office (where he really had no time or inclination for student visits and yet—how he brightened when he saw her!). But soon enough, she began gently teasing him at his house, his own turf, while wiping out an omelet pan or reheating macaroni and cheese for the girls—“Did I just hear you say, ‘Oh my God,’ Dr. Waite? Whose God are you talking to, exactly? Because I didn’t know you had a particular God.”

  “Give me a break, Melissa. And call me Andy.”

  She shook her head, smiling to herself, stirring macaroni. “I can’t. I was raised to respect the student-teacher relationship.”

  What surprised him too was how Melissa seemed to have grown into herself over these past few weeks—or how she seemed to grow more at ease in front of other people. She no longer walked into his office half hunched over, holding a notebook to herself like armor. Instead, she stood straight, looked directly into his eyes. She was prone to the occasional touch of a shoulder, which gave Andy, he couldn’t help it, a tiny shiver. A young woman touching him! He was such a sucker. Invisible Lou, standing in the corner, would roll her invisible eyes.

  Melissa was still awkwardly built, of course, tall, thick, and broad—had she been born a boy she might have been a linebacker—but, in the way of certain homely girls, she had a smile that lit up her entire face. She still wore her gold cross sometimes but she no longer sucked on it.

  “You know you don’t even have to pay me,” she said, sticking his money in her back pocket one Friday afternoon. “I’d do this for free. Your girls are great.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You earned it.”

  “But just so you know, I mean it, I’d come for free.” Then she grinned at him, flounced her hips a little as she walked out the door. Or did he
imagine that? When he woke up at four in the morning, why did he calm his frantic heart with the memory of her smile?

  ALTHOUGH ANDY USUALLY only required Melissa’s services during the afternoons or early evenings, when teaching or meetings kept him on campus late, toward the end of the semester he reserved her (insisting he would pay her, pay her overtime, even) for the second Saturday night in December. It was Marty Reuben’s annual biology department holiday party, which Andy anticipated and loathed in equal measure. “I know you have finals,” he said. “It’s fine if you don’t want—”

  “No, no,” she said. She was in his office, pointing out a particular passage in Dawkins which gave her offense. “I’d love to. I had nothing else Saturday night anyway.”

  Marty Reuben lived about an hour from Andy in Lace Point, a Philly suburb Marty despised for its muted anti-Semitism, but which he found himself unable to quit because the schools were so good and the village was so picturesque. So Marty stayed and feuded with his neighbors, stealing the signs supporting Republican candidates off their lawns. His wife, Jane, cooked beautiful dinners and shook her head at her husband’s eccentricity.

  “It’s just inertia,” Marty would say, when pressed (not that anybody pressed him, really) to defend his decade-long residence in Lace Point. “It’s hard, isn’t it? You got the house, you got the kid in school, you got your bank and your barber, you know. And selling a house is a pain in the ass. In this market? You gotta be crazy, really. So Lace Point it is, at least while the kid’s at home.” Here, the dissolute sigh. “And me, I always thought I was gonna live in Shanghai.”

  And oh, how Andy resented the way he enjoyed nights in Marty’s fine house, eating his fine food, listening to funny tales of his fine travels (boating the canals of eastern France, climbing Guatemalan ruins). Why did Marty Reuben live in a beautiful house in a beautiful village with a gourmet wife and a lively daughter, why was his biggest problem the ongoing feud with his neighbors about Mitt Romney? Why was his life so privileged that he thought American politics were his biggest problem? And Nina Graff who brought her ridiculous vegan casserole even though the party was not a potluck, it was never a potluck, and Linda Schoenmeyer, the chair, who seemed to be getting fatter every year, with her doggedly devoted husband, and George Hayad with his silent wife who seemed doggedly devoted too, in her enormous bangles—why were all these people so blissful? All of them, two by two, eating hors d’oeuvres in Marty’s living room, admiring Jane’s kitschy antiques, sitting next to one another at the table, living their gloriously becoupled lives. Meanwhile, who did he have for a companion? Most years, nobody. This year, because he could not stand one more year of sitting solo at the end of the table, he’d asked Sheila.

  “Really?” They’d stood in front of her house the previous afternoon—Andy had just dropped off the girls at their dance lessons, and Sheila had been pulling into her driveway, looking miserable, since she had just dropped Jeremy off with his dad, and would spend the weekend alone. Andy knew how lonely she was, and felt that he should do something nice for her. He hadn’t been particularly nice to her, he knew that.

  Still, he hedged. “I’m not promising it will be fun.”

  “A dinner party in Lace Point sounds like fun,” Sheila said.

  “But it’s full of biologists.”

  “So? I like biology,” she said. “What little I know about it.” He tried not to notice how pleased she seemed, how she smiled like a prize winner. He tried to force the memory of her wide pale body from his mind. “What should I wear?” she asked.

  “Nothing special,” he thought, but then worried that Sheila would take him seriously, dress in one of her pocketed sweatshirts. “Business casual.”

  “So I’ll wear my scrubs?”

  “Right,” Andy said, trying out a chuckle. “Scrubs.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Instead of wearing scrubs or a sweatshirt (or overdressing, which would have been worse) Sheila wore a navy blue dress, simple, the sort of thing you could wear comfortably to a funeral or a job interview or a faculty dinner. She had put in her contacts, let her bangs fall to the side of her face instead of straitjacketing them in that horrible barrette, and when Andy told her she looked very nice, he meant it.

  “I got some wine,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to,” he said, although he was glad she did, because he’d forgotten to bring some, and it was the usual thing to bring wine to Marty’s boozy dinners, but then he felt shame that the alcoholic had to remember the wine, that the alcoholic felt so obligated by this social occasion that she would walk into a liquor store to satisfy the obligations. “You really didn’t have to.”

  “I thought it would be a good thing to do. I was actually going to bring flowers but the only thing they had at ShopRite were poinsettias, which are so Christmassy, I don’t know.”

  “No, wine is nice. Is it hard for you to go into liquor stores?”

  “Oh man, you have no idea, I just go crazy! I just rip corks out with my teeth and smash bottles in the aisles!” She laughed, she was being sarcastic. “You can say it’s from you,” she said, sliding into his car, giving Andy pause. Did she bring it because she knew he’d forget? Did she really know him that well?

  The ride to Marty’s was pleasant—they talked about their kids, Rachel’s latest culinary inquisitions, Jeremy’s karate. Sheila said she liked to go to the Lace Point crafts fair every November, and that she’d sometimes take a walk around the various neighborhoods, peering into the oversized Tudors and colonials. “Once I broke in.”

  “You what?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly criminal.” She smiled, looked out the car window into the endless, impenetrable pines. “The house had a FOR SALE sign, so I thought I might just try the door. It was this mansion, Andy, the sort of thing I used to think I’d live in when I was a little girl. I couldn’t help it, I just had to see—and so I did, and it was open, and the house was, I don’t know. It was empty, the owners had clearly already left, but even so the place felt like Cinderella’s castle or something. There was a pond in the backyard with swans.”

  “Did you stay?”

  “All afternoon,” she said. “I kept trying to leave, but I just wasn’t able to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Real-estate dreams,” she said. “The dreams of a different life. I kept decorating the rooms in my head. Picking out furniture I remembered from catalogs, a Pottery Barn sofa. All the family pictures were mine, though. The ones I imagined hanging on the walls.”

  “Real-estate dreams, huh?”

  “Houses are symbols, aren’t they?” she said, philosophizing. “You look at a house—or at least I look at a house—and if it’s nice then I imagine the family who lives there is also very nice, very responsible. Earned that house somehow. Unless it’s big and tacky, in which case I imagine the people who live in it are just horrible.” She laughed. “I remember when we bought our house, I wondered what people would think, if they would think I was nice and responsible or just tacky. It’s such a big house! But I loved it. I wanted to live in it forever. I remember driving past it when I was a kid and thinking someday I’ll live there. I couldn’t believe it when we moved in.”

  She sighed, looked at her hands. It was dark like midnight outside, only the occasional streetlight puncturing the black. “It’s a good thing I didn’t grow up in Lace Point, otherwise who knows what I would have dreamed of.”

  “So when did you finally leave?”

  “I had to pick up Jeremy,” she said. “And I remember thinking, I’ll pick him up and I’ll bring him right back here, we’ll feed the swans, we’ll hang up our pictures on the wall, we’ll make this ours.” She laughed. “Desire can make you a little crazy.”

  She looked at him as if she wanted to say something, but then changed her mind. “Is your colleague’s house like that?”

  “What, like a castle?” Andy said. “No,” he said
, remembering what he could of his colleague’s home. “It’s nice, but you’ll be able to leave.”

  Still, Sheila seemed to grow more abashed as they traversed Marty’s flagstone pathway. Marty’s wife, Jane, came from wealth, and the house exuded quiet but smug good taste. Three stories, brick. A slate roof with copper gutters. Attractive outdoor landscaping, attractively lit, and a circular drive crowded with his colleagues’ cars. Automatic lights beamed on them as they parked, illuminating some Japanese plantings to the side of the house, stunted trees and a miniature pagoda.

  “You said this wasn’t too fancy?”

  “Just relax,” Andy said, holding Sheila’s wine.

  They were welcomed in enthusiastically, the last to arrive, and the women in the department told Sheila how happy they were Andy had finally brought someone while Marty offered Andy a scotch. Andy rarely drank—it was a way to keep his discomfort with drinking at bay, simply never to do it—but he found that not drinking at Marty’s made him more uncomfortable than accepting what was poured, so he took the scotch, sniffed it, made some idle chitchat from the comfort of one of Marty’s leather club chairs, near the warmth of the roaring fire, while Sheila was fussed over in the kitchen.

  “So, how’s your semester been?” asked George Hayad, the department’s polyester-clad microbiologist. “Still teaching your God class?”

  “Just finished up.”

  “Decent students?” George asked, then coughed up something thick and wiped it into a handkerchief. “You get any loonies this time?”

  “Not really,” Andy said, thinking of Melissa, of Lionel Shell. “Mostly nice kids. Open-minded.”

  “Open-minded or just uninvested?” Marty asked. “I don’t know which is worse, actually—kids who disagree with evolution or kids who just don’t care.”

  “They care,” Andy said. “But they care about a lot of other things too. They’re busy kids.”