by Lily Tuck
But, by then, Nina has decided that Lorna is the child. A careless, needy child who cannot exist in the actual world or with the people in it.
You don’t understand, Philip says, frowning when, later, she again brings up the dinner with Lorna. Physicists do not have the freedom mathematicians have. Physicists deal with the actual world while mathematicians choose their worlds.
Downstairs, she hears a noise. The house settling or a piece of old furniture? The tall mahogany highboy in the dining room, she guesses. One of the drawers is filled with the Russian niello silver spoons that Philip collects.
Collected.
The spoons are carved with intricate patterns of flowers and leaves; some are even more intricate, with castles, hunting scenes, and—Philip’s favorite—a full-rigged sailing frigate. On special occasions—Christmas, New Year’s, a dinner party—Philip carefully places the spoons on top of the pristine white linen napkins Nina uses to set the table.
For decoration only, he warns the guests. Niello is made from one part silver, two parts copper, and three parts lead. Should you use the spoon to eat your soup you will risk brain damage.
Everyone but Nina laughs.
In spite of herself, she glances at the clock. The luminous dial points to a few minutes past two.
She does not feel tired.
On his mother’s side, Philip’s grandfather was a well-known silversmith. The Revolution in 1917 put an abrupt stop to his work and he left Russia for America. He managed to take some silver with him—spoons, a snuff box, various items he had worked on. When his children got married, he gave them each a piece of silver. His mother, Philip says, got a spoon.
What happened to it? Nina asks.
She may have lost it. Or she sold it.
Next time we visit, you should ask her.
Philip shrugs. She may not remember.
Nina will ask Alice.
Better yet, she decides, she will bring Alice one of Philip’s spoons.
Look, Alice, she will say, Philip found your old silver spoon. The one with the full-rigged sailing frigate carved on the back of the bowl.
Nina’s parents died several years ago. She rarely thinks of them—not, she tells herself, because she did not love them. She did. Retired, they lived in Florida. Her father played a lot of golf; her mother played board games and bridge. They were self-sufficient and uncomplaining. Eventually, they moved to a retirement home where Nina, once or twice a year, dutifully visited them. On the last visit—by then, her father had died of complications from a stroke—she walked on the beach and played Scrabble with her mother. Despite a recent hip replacement, which caused her to tire more easily, her mother won the game handily with the seven-letter triple-word-score xerosis. Challenging her, Nina lost. Xerosis means abnormal dryness of the skin—a condition her mother suffered from.
Downstairs, the noise again. Nina tenses. The front door is not locked. Anyone, she thinks, can walk in. How ironic—if that is the right word?—were a thief or, worse, a murderer to break in. Would he assume that Philip is asleep and shoot him? Kill him twice. As for her, the murderer would first demand money, jewelry, before tying her up and shooting her as well. In the head, quickly, she hopes.
She does not want to think of the alternative.
In town a few years ago, in the spring, a young vagrant knocked on an elderly woman’s door asking for yard work. After pruning her lilac bushes and trimming her hedge, he put the same sharp clippers to her throat and raped and sodomized her. Soon after, the elderly woman died. She never recovered from her torn cervix and rectum or from her shame.
She listens for another sound, a door shutting, footsteps on the stairs, but hears nothing. Getting up and putting her hand against the wall for balance, she walks to the hall and looks over the banister. From where she stands, she can see the front door and, next to it, the large Italian ceramic pot that serves as an umbrella stand.
The pot is from a shop in Pantelleria. Nina has kept the owner’s card. Piero? Pietro? she no longer remembers which. She remembers that he flirted with her a bit.
Ah, signora, he says, holding her hand up to his lips, welcome to my shop.
Are you English? he also asks.
No, Americans, Philip tells him.
Americans. I have shipped to Ohio, to Nuova York, to California. Ah, beautiful California.
Have you been? Nina asks, freeing her hand at last.
Piero or Pietro shakes his head. No, no. My brother, he live in California.
Despite her look of disapproval, Philip does not bargain and pays for the pot in cash.
You’ll see, he is never going to send it to us, Nina tells him as they get back in the car. I don’t trust him.
You never know, Philip, an optimist, answers.
Months later, the pot arrives, intact. It is packed with newspaper and straw in a large handmade wooden crate.
You have to have more faith in people, Philip tells Nina.
Iris again.
What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer. Or what if Louise, who is helping her sort through Philip’s papers, finds it—a small, 2½-by-2¼ black-and-white photograph.
Look, Mom. Who is this blonde girl standing next to Dad? She looks like Grace Kelly. I love her dress. So fifties. Look at her tiny waist. Dad’s got his arm around her. Is she a relative? There’s something written on the back. It’s hard to make out—”To my darling.” Yes. “To my darling Phil.”
Yes, a relative, Nina tells Louise.
And, no, not Grace Kelly, Nina thinks. Grace Kelly is too sophisticated and well heeled. Iris looks more like Eva Marie Saint—the way Eva Marie Saint looks in the movie On the Waterfront: pretty, naïve, and full of convictions.
Eva Marie: the name of Philip’s best man’s fourteen-year-old daughter who was killed in an avalanche as she skied down the unpatrolled backside of a mountain in Idaho. Getting buried in snow, Nina thinks, must be like drowning.
When Philip is away and she is alone in the house at night, she moves the umbrella stand directly in front of the front door. If an intruder was to come in, he would knock over the umbrella stand and break it. The noise will wake her.
Undecided for a moment, Nina stands in the hall and looks around. The door to Louise’s bedroom, the doors to the guest room and guest bathroom are all shut.
Three doors.
She shakes her head a little, recollecting.
How many times have I tried to explain this to you?
She can hear the bantering and slightly irritated note in Philip’s voice.
You have three doors in the game and behind one door is a car, a diamond ring, or—
How about a new washing machine? Nina interrupts.
Okay, then, there is a new washing machine behind one door and a goat behind each of the two other doors.
One of those expensive German ones. A Bosch.
Are you listening or not? Otherwise, I am not going to try to explain this to you again.
I am listening.
Okay, so you choose a door. The door stays closed but since the game show host knows what is behind each door, he opens one of the two remaining doors—one with a goat behind it. He then asks you if you want to stay with the door you chose or if you want to switch to the last remaining door.
I would stay with the door I chose, Nina says.
Don’t you see, Nina, Philip goes on, raising his voice, once the game show host has opened one of the doors that has one of the goats behind it, he has reduced your chances from 1 in 3 to 2 in 3 to open the door with the washing machine? It’s to your advantage to switch. It’s obvious. I can explain it to you logically. I can explain it to you mathematically.
Still, Nina refuses. I told you, I am not switching doors.
What does he call the problem? A veridical paradox, for although it appears to be absurd it is demonstrably true. And what does he call her?
A stubborn goatherd.
Back in the bedroom, Nina pulls up one of the chairs and places it next to the bed.
Again, she touches Philip’s cold hand.
Philip, she whispers.
He wants to be cremated, he has said so. He also says that he does not want his ashes to be buried but spread in the sea. In the Atlantic, he specifies.
The largest park in Paris. It’s over a hundred acres, Philip informs her, as they stroll through the Père Lachaise cemetery on a sunny spring day soon after they meet.
A veritable history lesson among the seventy thousand graves, he says.
They have taken the métro and walked down the boulevard de Ménilmontant; outside the entrance a woman is selling flowers. Philip stops and buys Nina a bunch of red carnations.
Hand in hand, they walk up and down the avenues of tombs, reading off the names out loud to each other: Marcel Proust, Édith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde …
In front of the elaborately carved mausoleum that houses the remains of Abélard and Héloïse, they pause for a moment. The tomb is surrounded by an iron fence but is littered with flowers and bits of paper that have been thrown inside.
I read in the guidebook that those pieces of papers are letters to Abélard and Héloïse written by people who want their own love to be requited, Nina tells Philip.
And I read that those are not Abélard and Héloïse’s remains, Philip answers.
Cynic.
And with one sure, swift gesture, Nina tosses the carnations inside the mausoleum. The flowers clear the iron fence and land squarely on top of the carved prone figures of the lovers.
Good throw, Philip says. Then, taking her in his arms, he adds, Your love is requited. Is mine?
I’m hungry, he also says before she can answer. Let’s go and have lunch.
Over the years, they have visited the cemetery several times. Each time, they walk down different avenues, look at different tombs: Colette, Richard Wright, Simone Signoret, Félix Nadar, Max Ernst …
The walks in the cemetery inspire them—perversely perhaps, in the face of so much death—with a kind of childish hilarity. They tell jokes, play games: Which is the most ornate tomb? the most tasteless? their favorite?
Philip’s favorite is the highly polished, black marble tomb shaped like a triangle, of S?deq Hed?yat, a Persian writer who committed suicide.
Nina’s favorite is the tomb of the Armenian general Antranik Ozanian.
He looks like Vittorio De Sica. The mustache.
I thought you didn’t like mustaches, Philip says.
I like the statue of the horse, she says.
Instead of following the others, Philip’s horse puts his head down and resolutely begins to eat the grass. Philip is afraid of horses. And horses sense his fear and take advantage of him.
Pull his head up! Give him a kick! The cowboy leading their group on a trail ride yells at Philip.
Nina has persuaded Philip to spend the week of Louise’s spring break at a dude ranch in Arizona.
Louise wants to go. And it’s a change, she says.
Nina is riding a lively pinto named Apple. Right away, the cowboy notices her seat, her hands.
I see you’ve ridden before, he says.
Louise, also, rides well.
Philip’s horse, a big sorrel gelding, refuses to move and the cowboy trots over on his own horse and, determined, he cracks his whip over the sorrel’s hindquarters. Jerking his head up in surprise, the sorrel bolts forward and Philip loses his balance. To keep from falling off, he grabs at the pommel.
Dad! Louise says, before she starts to laugh.
Turning her head away so that Philip cannot see her, Nina, too, laughs.
Keep him moving, the cowboy tells Philip. Shorten your reins, keep his head up.
Show him who’s boss, Phil, the cowboy adds.
Few people call Philip Phil.
Did Iris? My darling Phil.
Mon petit Philippe—Nina thinks of Tante Thea. Generous and kind, she takes Nina and Philip to the theater, to the ballet, to expensive restaurants. She takes Nina shopping. When Tante Thea dies, she leaves Nina her diamond pin in the shape of a flower.
When did she last wear the pin? Nina tries to recollect. To a black-tie dinner honoring one of Philip’s colleagues, a Nobel laureate in physics.
Tell me again what he won it for, Nina asks as she tries to open the safe.
For the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.
For what? Say that again. And is it three turns to the left to 17? Or three turns to the right to 17? Nina says.
Asymptotic freedom shows that the attraction between quarks grows weaker as the quarks move closer to each other and, conversely, that the attraction grows stronger as the quarks move farther apart. Are you ready, Nina?
Nearly.
The discovery established quantum chromodynamics as the correct theory of the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in Nature.
Didn’t he and his wife write a book together? Philip, I still can’t get this safe open.
Yes—about how scientists arrive at their theories of the universe and why there is something instead of nothing. His wife, too, is a brilliant mathematician. Nina! What are you doing in there? We are going to be late, Philip almost shouts.
Here, let me.
How many times have I showed you? Philip says more quietly, when he has the safe open. It’s so easy.
Easy for you, Nina says, suddenly close to tears.
I just don’t want us to be late, Philip says.
In the car on the way to the dinner, fingering the diamond flower pin to make sure it is securely fastened to her dress, Nina says, Let me tell you about my theory of the universe, Philip.
Her theory of the universe is that there is no theory.
Their last visit to Père Lachaise is on a winter day. The tree limbs are bare; the cypresses loom dark and forbidding. The pots of too-bright artificial flowers placed around the tombs make the sky, by contrast, appear grayer, more somber.
Damp and cold, Nina shivers in her down coat. Don’t you want to be buried next to me? she asks.
They are stopped in front of the tomb of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Putting his arm around her shoulder, Philip says, And don’t forget to throw my ashes to leeward or else they’ll blow back in your face.
Sitting next to the bed, she shuts her eyes for a moment and replays the scene of their meeting in Paris.
Vous permettez?
Je vous en prie.
Ordinary and familiar phrases that give her pleasure.
What is your book about? he also asks her.
Afterward, they walk together along the boulevard Saint-Germain toward the boulevard Saint-Michel. She notices his limp but says nothing. By then, they have established that they are both familiar with the same city back home, the same shops and restaurants, which may be enough reason for them to see each other again. On the way, they stop at a bookstore where she locates the works of Nathalie Sarraute. She pulls Tropismes, the book she is reading, off the shelf for him.
I’ll buy it, Philip says. A promise to her, perhaps, that they will see each other again.
She should reread Tropismes, she thinks, opening her eyes.
She should make a list: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch; all of Dickens, Jane Austen, Trollope …
The novels of Balzac, Zola, Flaubert.
A few days later, they argue.
Did you read it? Nina asks Philip.
They are having dinner together in an inexpensive restaurant in the Latin Quarter, a few blocks from the gallery where she works. It is late and she is tired.
Read what? Philip is looking through the wine list. Is a Côtes du Rhône all right?
The book you bought. Tropismes.
Already, she has decided that she is not going to sleep with Philip. She orders the snails cooked in garlic.
Philip frowns and shakes his head.
I tried, he says.
He orders the soup.
I couldn’t get past the first page.
Really? You couldn’t read it? Nina is offended. Those beautiful interior monologues?
They’re incoherent, Philip answers.
Ils semblaient sourdre de partout, éclos dans la tiédeur un peu moite de l’air—he recites.
And who is this cousin of yours related to her by marriage? She interrupts, changing her tactic. I am not sure I believe you.
I’ll introduce you, he says, smiling.
Many years later, in Boston, Nina goes to hear Nathalie Sarraute read. Old, elegant, and imperious is how she describes her to Philip.
I am not surprised, he says.
Oh, and what about her cousin? You never did introduce me to him, remember? Or did you make him up?
She not he, Philip says. The cousin is a cousine.
Tante Thea’s eighteenth-century yellow stucco country house stands at the end of a long driveway bordered by chestnut trees; her property abuts the forest of Chantilly. Lunch on Sundays tends to be a long and lively affair, with plenty of food, red wine, and, for dessert, a homemade fruit tart topped with heavy cream. Family, friends, neighbors sit crowded together around the mahogany dining room table, everyone talking fast and at once about de Gaulle, the nouveau franc—worth 100 of the old franc and how confusing Tante Thea finds it still—the Algerian crisis and how garbage cans have been placed on the runways at Orly Airport to keep the Algerian rebel paratroopers from landing—and to keep everyone else from landing, one of Tante Thea’s sons points out.
Didier and Arnaud, Tante Thea’s sons, are there for lunch. Both are married, successful, and athletic. Didier especially. He and Nina flirt a little and Anne, his wife, does not seem to mind.
Didier is in love with Nina, she teases.
In spite of herself, Nina is attracted to Didier’s self-assurance, his sturdy good looks, and the way he wears his tailored blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearms.
After lunch, complaining of tennis elbow, Didier persuades Philip to be Anne’s partner in a game of doubles against Arnaud and his wife; upstairs, Tante Thea is taking a nap, and he asks Nina to take a walk in the forest with him—only he doesn’t ask her.