After coming back up and taking a long sip from the bottle, George turned to William. “After tonight we’re either going to be best friends or you’ll never talk to us again.”
“My night with The Murphys,” William joked.
“Oh my god! Do you remember? People used to call us that!” Sara cried.
Eventually George began to talk to him about people they’d known in common at school and then people who’d been at Yale. It was like they’d always been friends.
Yale. Despite appearances, Jacob was, slowly, beginning to stew. He expected that William imagined they did this sort of thing every weekend, but this was actually a first for the four of them. And he’d expected to feel triumphant—this, after all, was exactly the type of thing he was always trying to get them all to do. He was their ever-present diversion. Player of panpipes; God of wine; their much-needed anarchic spirit. He was the one who, back in the early years, had always insisted they should do shrooms and consummate the obvious tensions between them in some sort of orgy. They’d laughed, but he’d been perfectly serious. He’d wanted George, and George had wanted Irene, and Irene had been in love with Sara and George too, probably, so why not? Everybody had been in love with everybody—except him.
And now that they were there, sitting in a hot tub on the top floor of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive hotels, he was steadily feeling less and less like a child left home alone without the grown-ups around and more like they were the grown-ups. All that glorious sexual tension had petered out. They sat there as platonically as brothers and sisters sharing a bathtub.
And now George was going to propose? Of course Jacob had known this would happen eventually. It had been coming for years now—the end of all this. No more drinking champagne in hot tubs at three in the morning or joking about fox hunts. The end of the years that they’d spent discovering this city like strangers in a strange land. Now they were just here. Now half of them would be married—hopelessly monogamous. Why would anyone do such a thing? Now they’d be just another lame, sexless couple and he’d be left with Irene.
George was trying to make the story of his commute sound exciting, again, and Irene was telling William and the others about her day—about the car rides with the art. And William was saying how much he really liked some of it—how he’d taken an elective at Yale called “Art After Warhol.”
Jacob found himself laughing uncontrollably. “Art?” he was saying, shouting, spitting. “This crap isn’t art. This is what happens when people who hate art try to make art.”
Irene was nodding.
William felt emboldened. “But what does art even mean today in an age of commercialization—when the drinks we’re having all night are named after poems and poets, just to make a buck?”
Jacob snorted. “The Waste Land is the fucking Waste Land no matter who misnames a drink after it. Fuck it. Two words or one, you can’t cheapen it after the fact.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Sara.
William rose. “Well, that moldy yam in a box makes you ask yourself, what is art really? Ultimately it’s a question that we can never really answer.”
“Sure we can. I’ll answer it right now,” Jacob said.
“But—” Irene began.
“No! No buts!” he was crying, and to illustrate his point, he lifted his great white rear out of the water. “It’s always but, but, but, but, but.”
There were shrieks and groans as Jacob reseized the watery floor.
“Real art obliterates artifice. The Night Watchmen doesn’t jump out at you and say ‘Hey! I’m just a bunch of paint!’ No. It makes you forget that it ever had to be created in the first place. It makes you tremble before it. If anyone’s trembling in front of a yam-in-a-box, it’s because they’re laughing. Or puking.”
Nobody was arguing with Jacob at this point, but he was all revved up and couldn’t stop.
“Art makes you feel things nobody ever taught you to feel before, because you’re feeling what some stranger felt when he, or you’d better bet she, made it. It’s living vicariously. It makes you love from inside someone else’s heart and hate with the acid in someone else’s guts. It’s the only thing on this planet that can make us leave the pathetic smallness of our insignificant speckness and not just connect but become someone else. It’s got to be metamorphic, or it’s just fucking television.”
Then Jacob stood, triumphant, and exposed himself to everyone. The snow swirled around his head as he brought his hand to his lips and cried, “TOOO DOOO! TOOO DOOO!” He saluted George, marched out of the tub, went inside, and passed out facedown on the couch.
“William,” Irene said, “come help me get a towel over him so he doesn’t die of pneumonia or something.”
William looked away until Irene was in her robe, then climbed out to join her. They went inside together, and it was the last that George or Sara saw of either of them until morning.
Alone together at last, George moved around to Sara’s side of the hot tub and put his arms around her. She laid her head against his firm shoulder, and they sat that way, in silence. The sky above was pink-gray and starless, as it always was in the city. They gazed across Lexington at the office windows. Far below were taxi horns and car alarms and the rumble of the M102, going south from Harlem to the East Village. These were the noises of their great, unsleeping city. The familiar creaks and groans of their home.
George hoped he looked calm, even though he was cursing himself for not bringing the ring back outside. He didn’t know where he would have hidden it, exactly, but this seemed like the moment he’d been waiting for. But how to get back inside and come out again? Could he say he had to go to the bathroom? That’d kill the mood.
He was overcome with a feeling of rightness, as if for once his outside matched his in—and yet he was stuck. To get up would be to ruin it. And as they sat there, the silence lengthened, and he began to worry it had gotten too long, and so he tried to think of something to say—but the only thing he could think of was the accident he’d seen on the way back from Long Island. He didn’t want to think about it, but there it was. A perverse pricking began on his lips. He had to say something, and the only thing he wanted to say would, again, most assuredly ruin everything.
“I saw a dead body today.” God, the relief to say it out loud.
Sara gasped and squirmed around to look him in the eye. “At work?”
George shook his head. “No. On the LIE. That accident I told you about. A guy died.”
He had nearly missed it. He’d been sitting in traffic, thinking about Sara and what he would say to her that night at the party. He’d been watching the snow start to fall and checking the ring in his pocket every few minutes. Then at long last, he’d come to the head of the bottleneck. Having been sitting in the car that whole time absolutely fuming about rubberneckers, he was eager to speed angrily ahead. He wasn’t going to look. He wanted to prove that he was above such petty gawking.
But then he had. At first all he had seen was a green Isuzu with a great big hole in the windshield. He had been taken in by the size of the hole, and then he’d noticed that there was no one in the car. Of course, he’d thought, they’ve gotten him out by now. He’s back by the ambulance getting insurance forms filled out. But then George thought—what if? What if he had sailed through the glass—headfirst—the initial impact almost certainly knocking him out, if not killing him instantly? What if he had gone straight through the glass and been launched into the air (George could see it happening in slow motion, as in a terrible soap opera), and then had landed on the pavement and crumpled—
And then George had seen it. The body. Not his imagination’s pale little TV version but real, there, on the pavement. Right where the horrid calculator in his brain intuited it should be, given the weight of a grown man versus the resistance of a windshield versus the momentum of sixty-five miles per hour rapidly become zero, la
unching him into flight while gravity, that sick constant, pulled him to the pavement. Right there. The man was there and not there at all.
Thank God the man’s face had been turned away; the body was hunched over, head bent to the pavement as if he were merely praying.
All this had happened in just three or four seconds. Soon the honking of the other impatient drivers brought George back to reality, and he’d sped off. But in that brief instant, he’d felt that man’s impact with the glass as if it had been his own. He’d felt his own knees hitting the pavement—his own face coming down, hard.
He had been trying to shake that feeling the whole night, and only now that he’d mentioned it to Sara was the feeling easing. He stroked her neck gently with the side of his hand. It was a moment before he realized that she was looking down. Long, dark tendrils of hair fell around her face.
George could see that she was crying. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it about the accident?”
Sara shook her head.
He began to panic. “Did Jacob say something to you?”
She sobbed. “Irene went back to the doctor.”
George shushed her gently. “It’s going to be nothing. She’s young. She’s practically a vegan. She’s basically Wonder Woman. Don’t worry.”
But Sara would worry; George knew that. In fact he loved it when she worried about things, because it made him confident for the both of them. That was the best part of love, he thought. Better than sex or not waking up alone or cooking without having to halve all the ingredients. Sara made him braver, and George made her calmer. Vicarious. That was what love could do. This was the reason he wished he’d thought of, before.
A few light nudges with his nose made Sara turn up and close her eyes to kiss him. The snow was really picking up now. Sleepily, they watched the flakes dancing down across the street into the rising steam above St. Bartholomew’s and all across Midtown. Down it came, over the Village and the Bronx, blowing across both dark rivers and along the whole of Long Island. Piling high on the steel guardrails and concrete medians, and the roads that ran through the city and out in all directions.
George knew the time had come. Ring or no ring, this was his moment, and it would never be quite like this again. He loved this woman, and he knew he would never stop loving her—first, better, always, most. He could see Sara’s heart pounding. Somehow she always knew what he was about to say.
FIVE IN A MILLION
1
On Tuesday, George Murphy arrived at the office to discover that his star was on the verge of collapse. Perhaps in some metaphorical way, but also actually—237 Lyrae V, a prestellar core in the Ring Nebula that George had been studying for the past four years was experiencing a highly unexpected gravitational collapse. This, at least, according to the note he’d found on his desk that morning from Allen Ling, his cubicle mate at the astrophysics department of Brookhaven University. He had scrawled “She’s gonna blow!” at the top of a spreadsheet whose rows and columns—much to George’s annoyance—did appear to delineate the variations in temperature and density that might characterize the beginning of a collapse.
Not looking up, George said, “You are a delight to work with.”
Allen, who was on the phone with someone at the European Space Agency, paused from speaking rapid-fire Spanish just long enough to flip George the bird and spin toward his computer, where he was seriously bungling a game of Snood.
George felt it all slipping fast away. All throughout his two-hour commute on the icy LIE, he’d been thinking of exactly how to tell his coworkers that he had finally proposed to Sara. Fatherly Dr. Cokonis had certainly been asking long enough when he would finally “make an honest woman out of her” or, as Allen preferred, “put some bling on that shit.” But now this would be the main business of the day—hell, if not the month. George’s doctoral and now postdoctoral research centered on what were called prestellar cores, essentially huge clusters of cosmic gases that sometimes collapsed into young protostars. Allen had been predicting this fate for 237 Lyrae V all year, despite George’s lovingly constructed models that suggested the contrary.
Privately, George imagined himself as a sort of astronomical Darwin, creating algorithms that could hypothetically be used to better predict the stellar landscape millennia from now. The earliest results had led him to identify dozens of cores that were on the verge of becoming stars—but discouragingly, none of them yet had. His formulas had also revealed several highly stable cores, like 237 Lyrae V, in the Ring Nebula, which were statistically unlikely to ever reach T Tauri status, with orbiting planetary bodies and asteroid belts and all the rest. It was these predictions on which his entire project was based, but if Allen was right, it was all about to be disproven on a grand scale.
It took George a half hour to confirm Allen’s data, and another hour to rerun the numbers through a series of algorithms on the computer, which spat out even more numbers, which then had to be rechecked. None of them looked hopeful. George simply willed it not to be true, and after another hour he could think of nothing to do but call Sara. As he dialed, he anticipated the relief he’d feel in complaining about this devastating development—but as her phone rang, he hesitated. He didn’t particularly relish the idea of Allen overhearing such a breakdown, and he didn’t see how he could ruin Sara’s day with worrying. She’d been so excited to tell everyone at the Journal about the proposal—
“Hey, you!” her voice came on the line.
“Hey, yourself,” George said, more smoothly and cheerily than he felt by a mile.
In the background he could hear the busy hum of Bistro 19, one of their group’s go-to spots. Sara was cutting out of work early to have lunch with Irene to keep her mind off the fact that the doctor might call with the biopsy results. According to Irene, they had said they’d know something “later next week,” which made George think there’d be no word until Thursday or Friday, or else they’d have said We’ll call first thing. But he knew it was important to Sara, even if not to Irene, to be the sort of friend who insisted on having lunch with you when the doctor was probably not going to call.
George cleared his throat. “So, some stuff came up over the weekend. I’ll have to stay late tonight to get it straightened out.”
He could hear her disappointment as she said, “But Irene got us all tickets to see The Death of Eurydice tonight.”
“Oh, right. Well, the thing is that one of the most important prestellar cores in my research is undergoing some pretty surprising shifts.”
“Sweetie, your star will still be shifting tomorrow. It’s not like you can stop it.”
George wanted to argue, but at the same time he realized that she was right—if the prestellar core really was collapsing, that really meant it had already collapsed, more than two thousand years ago, because all the information they were collecting right now had actually been traveling at light speed across space for two millennia, and so whatever was happening was all over and done already, one way or the other . . . but that didn’t change the fact that his research, here and now, might all be a complete and total waste of time. Four years of his life shot—a blink in the existence of 237 Lyrae V, but a long time to him, especially at the start of his career—
Sara broke in on his long silence. “Fine, I’ll see if William can take your ticket then.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“Good. And see if you can find out what happened with him and Irene on Friday.”
“I can’t ask him that.” A pause and then, “Though I might ask her if she ever shows up.”
“There you go. You’re a reporter. Do some digging!”
“I’m an editor. I edit other people’s reporting. If you can call it that.”
“Just a joke,” he said. There was a long sigh. “Everyone’s really excite
d about our big news,” George lied, his voice low so Allen wouldn’t hear.
Then a happy noise. “Here too! I’m already making up a guest list. You should get the home addresses of anyone you want to invite from the department.”
“Let’s invite everyone but Allen,” George said, louder now, earning another middle finger from his office mate.
“Good luck with your star. There’s an after-party thing. Meet us there, okay?”
He released a long sigh. “Just text me the address?”
“It’s in Greenpoint.”
Long sigh, redux.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
He got off the phone. He didn’t know what to do next. He closed his eyes. How could this be happening? He had to remind himself that Allen wasn’t capable of collapsing a giant molecular cloud of gas, a hundred times larger than their solar system. But that didn’t stop him from resenting his colleague, who had been ascending with Machiavellian precision through the department by subtly undermining the research of others.
George had fallen in love, thirteen years ago, with the dream of all the infinite things in the universe still to be discovered, of theories to be pieced together and daring connections made. The Allens of the world, however, seemed to outnumber him at every turn . . . researchers who didn’t look out into the universe, pondering, but instead busied themselves attending conferences and reading abstracts, looking for flawed research to tease apart or supposed discoveries to disprove. George knew, in theory, that the world—the universe—needed these doubting Allens to check the ideas of the dreamers, but he wished they didn’t enjoy it quite so much.
George called Jacob, whom he could usually count on for sympathy in these matters, but his friend didn’t answer. If he was up at the asylum, he couldn’t usually pick up.
Why We Came to the City Page 4