About a Girl

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Please tell me you are not subsisting entirely on caffeine and charity fast food.”

  “Jack has a garden,” I said, which was not technically a lie. Raoul made a disgusted noise.

  After I had made a number of other conciliatory remarks, and asked after Dorian Gray’s health, and submitted myself to be lambasted by Henri and made the conciliatory remarks a second time, I was allowed to get off the phone with the promise that I would call every day until I returned to New York, that I would put Jack on the phone the second I saw him, and that I would arrange for my return trip the instant I had gotten anything resembling information about Aurora or after another week had passed, whichever came first.

  I meant every one of the promises I made; too bad I forgot them all immediately upon hanging up the receiver.

  * * *

  I had been at Jack’s for about a week before I saw him again; I came in from where I’d been reading in his garden, late one morning, and he was standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee and looking out the window. He turned when he heard me come in. “I was just about to go sailing,” he said. “Would you like to come?”

  “I don’t know anything about boats,” I said, and then amended it. “Very much about boats.” I had read about boats.

  “I do,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Sure,” I said. Now, at last, I could accomplish what I’d come here for. I envisioned the afternoon rolling out neatly before me, like a well-plotted movie. I’d find the perfect way to phrase my question, he’d confess that all week he’d been searching for a way to tell me—though it wasn’t necessary, we might even embrace—and, secure in the knowledge of my paternity, I’d return home to the bosom of my real family, to resume my actual life, patch things up with my errant best friend, make him fall in love with me as he ought, and then go to college. I could write Maddy letters; perhaps she would be interested in a visit to the city. This plan suited me so immensely that I barely paid attention on the drive to the harbor—Jack, like everyone else I’d met so far in this town, had a truck—or as he parked in a gravel lot and pointed me down a ramp to where the boats were parked in neat rows along a floating walkway. It occurred to me that you probably didn’t park a boat. “Slips,” Jack said, when I asked. “The spaces for the boats are slips.”

  Jack’s boat was made of wood, clean-lined and a little weather-beaten but scrupulously tidy; where the vessels to either side were some of them stained with algae, the canvas sail covers spotted with mold or oil, his boat glowed with obvious love and good care. He leaped agilely from the dock to its deck. “Untie that, please,” he said, pointing to a rope looped around a metal bar attached to the dock, and I did. I tossed him the rope, and he looked back to catch my uncertain face—I wasn’t clumsy, exactly, but I did better on solid ground, and the boat kept moving in an alarming sort of way—but I ignored his outstretched hand and grabbed the deck railing and hauled myself aboard, smacking my shin painfully on the side of the boat. Jack was gracious enough not to comment on my ungainly method of entry. I tucked myself out of the way in the bow—obviously I knew the front was called a bow—while he busied himself untying lines and doing a lot of complicated-looking things that I tried to follow but soon lost track of.

  “Do you need help?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “You’d only be in the way,” he said, not unkindly. He dug a blanket out from a storage compartment under one of the seats and tossed it to me. “Gets cold out on the water,” he said.

  He motored us quietly out of the marina, and when we were clear of the rocky jetty he pulled furiously at a set of ropes until the sail unfurled and snapped to life, and he turned off the engine. Once we got away from shore there was a brisk enough wind to send us flying over the water, and I was glad of the blanket. The years seemed to fall away from him; behind the wheel his face was suffused with boyish glee and he looked so at home that he was hardly recognizable as the distant, reserved, and disinterested person I’d met that first day I came to his house.

  “This is a nice boat,” I said, although I would not have been able to tell if it wasn’t. It was the right thing to say.

  “Affair,” he said. “She’s a beauty, all right—hand-built wooden ketch—” He launched into a short but comprehensive monologue detailing the boat’s specifications, which did not seem all that interesting to me but in which he obviously took great pride.

  I had no suitable response to his sailboat’s résumé. “It’s pretty out here,” I said instead when I was sure he was done.

  “Yes,” he said. “Are you having a nice vacation?”

  His face was serene. He couldn’t possibly have forgotten why I’d come here—as far as I could tell, he hadn’t guessed the real reason I’d come looking for him, but I’d told him I wanted to ask him about Aurora, not spend a relaxing week seaside working on my tan. “Yes?” I said, cautiously.

  “What do you do, back in New York?”

  “I just graduated,” I said.

  “College?”

  “High school.” If he was surprised he hid it well. “I’m going to college in the fall.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, physics to start. But I don’t know what I’ll do my doctorate in, yet.”

  At that he did look momentarily startled. “My,” he said. “Ambitious. You want to be a physicist?”

  “No,” I said, “I want to be an astronomer, but physics is the best way to get there. To the kind of astronomy I want to do, anyway.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m not all the way sure yet. I’m only eighteen, you know.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “But I think—there are a lot of different things you can do, you know; if you’re interested in the planets you can do chemistry or meteorology or a whole bunch of other things, or you could even go into astrobiology, which I think is cool, but I’m interested in the really theoretical stuff. Like cosmology, which people used to think was sort of woo-woo, but in the last few decades it’s come into its own as a science—I’m quite interested in the origins of the universe, but there are already so many people tackling that problem, and it might be too overcrowded by the time I’m ready to do my postdoc work.…” I trailed off; Jack was staring at me as though I had started speaking Farsi. “I want to study dark matter,” I said. “Probably. Or dark energy.”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m not entirely sure what that is.”

  “I mean, you know about baryons, right?”

  “Pretend I’m very, very stupid,” he said. “Pretend I barely even know what the universe is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Well, we have equations that can tell us—you know what an equation is?”

  “Yes,” he said drily, “those I’ve heard of.”

  “You said pretend you didn’t know anything.”

  “My fault. Carry on.”

  “We have equations that can tell us how much matter is supposed to be in the universe. And we have equations that can tell us how much matter is in the universe. Matter we know about. Like gas, or stars, or planets. Tangible stuff. We can tell from the way that galaxies move, from their velocities, that they should have more mass in them than what we can observe. Vera Rubin proved this, from their rotational speed, decades ago. And the thing is, the amount of stuff we know exists is only about four or five percent of the stuff that should exist. So there’s all this other stuff out there, and we have no idea what it is—if it’s particles we haven’t discovered yet, or black holes, or—”

  “Or ghosts,” he said, “or magic.”

  “It’s certainly not ghosts.”

  “You never know.”

  “There is no empirical evidence whatsoever to suggest that ghosts exist.”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth than are—”

  “Thanks, I’ve read Hamlet too.”

  “A scienti
st and a Shakespearean scholar,” he said. “You are a formidable young lady, indeed.”

  “But that’s not even the crazy part,” I said, ignoring him. “Dark matter is weird, but it’s only about thirty percent of the universe. So that’s not even the biggest missing piece; there’s also dark energy, which we think is something like seventy percent of the universe, and we have no idea what it is. You know the universe is expanding, right?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Well, it is. It’s been expanding ever since the beginning—”

  “The Big Bang?”

  “See, you do know something. For a long time we assumed that the expansion of the universe is slowing—that would make sense, because of gravity, right? Eventually all the mass in the universe would counteract the expansion, slowing it down, maybe even causing it to contract. But it isn’t slowing down at all. It’s accelerating. There’s something pushing the universe outward, and we have no idea what it is. It could be a property of space—Einstein predicted that, but we have no way of knowing yet. I want to know. But there are a lot of things I want to know. We’re learning more and more about the beginning of the universe, we have images of light from the earliest moments—not the very beginning, the universe was just opaque plasma at first—but once things cooled down enough for light to escape. But you have to specialize, is the trouble, and I want to do observational astronomy, not necessarily theoretical particle physics—I mean, I don’t want to spend my career underground at CERN. I want to be in front of a telescope. I have a while to decide, I guess.”

  “There are a lot of questions I would ask you,” he said, “but to be honest, I have no idea what you just said.”

  “I’m trying to explain it as simply as I can.”

  “I appreciate that.” His tone and his face were so studiedly neutral that I began to suspect him of mockery.

  “But you shouldn’t feel too bad,” I conceded, and at that a flicker of a smirk did cross his face, which I generously overlooked. “I mean, the calculations involved in the particle stuff are beyond me, even, at this point. It’ll take me a few years of undergrad at least before I have enough physics to tackle them. Which is embarrassing; if I were a real genius, I’d be able to manage it.” This was the closest I had ever come to a confession of weakness, and I was wasting it on a virtual stranger. “Wheeler had a doctorate in quantum physics by the time he was twenty-one. So honestly, I’m pretty far behind.”

  “It must be a bit of a rough road, for women,” he said. “Astronomy, I mean.”

  “There are plenty of women,” I said, “and they do good work, it’s just that usually men take the credit for it. Vera Rubin couldn’t even attend the talk George Gamow gave using her research on the orbital velocities of galaxies, because women weren’t allowed in the lab. Or, like, Kepler. You’ve heard of him, right? Johannes Kepler?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “But not Maria Cunitz, who rewrote all his equations so that they were easier to use, and then wrote a whole book of her own, and had to pay to print it herself—she was the greatest mathematical astronomer of her time, and the only people who have heard of her are a handful of print history nerds who are more excited about her book than they are about her.”

  “I haven’t heard of her, no.”

  “Nobody has. She didn’t even make it into Coming of Age in the Milky Way.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m just saying, it’s not that women aren’t smart enough, it’s that they don’t get credit, or they get written out of the story. These days they end up in some fucking ‘Ten Hottest Astrophysicists’ article in a magazine with nothing at all about their research. Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars when she was a graduate student in the sixties—discovered them, herself—and her professors won the Nobel Prize for it. Her name wasn’t even mentioned. Annie Jump Cannon developed the system we used to classify stars; Henrietta Swan Leavitt catalogued half the known total of variable stars in the late 1800s, single-handedly. Margaret Burbidge figured out how all the elements in nature can be synthesized in nuclear reactions in stars in the 1960s. Beatrice Tinsley took on Allan Sandage when she was just a graduate student, and she was right, too, and he wasn’t, but nobody wanted to talk about it, because he basically invented observational cosmology, and she was just some girl. I could keep going. You get the point.”

  “If it is any consolation to you,” he said, “I think people will find it difficult indeed to write you out of any story in which you are a participant.”

  “Things are getting better,” I said, “but there’s a long way to go yet.”

  “So you like mystery,” he said, after a thoughtful silence. “And darkness.”

  “You make it sound like I’m goth or something.”

  At that, he smiled. “I just think it’s interesting, that’s all,” he said, “that someone who is so insistent on the empirical is so invested in the hypothetical. Not to mention Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare doesn’t have anything to do with science.”

  “I don’t know that I’d agree,” he said mildly, “but I’m sure you know better.”

  I did not much like the turn the conversation was taking, and so I subsided into a haughty silence. It was beautiful, anyway; I felt as though I should be memorizing the air out here, the water, the light, to take back to New York with me as a talisman. I loved my home, and I did not wish in any way to relocate to this backwoods pinpoint populated with near-savages and obsequious cretins, but even I had to admit there was a certain advantage to its loveliness that my own best-beloved city, for all its civilized, fast-paced majesty, did not have to offer. Jack was as content to be quiet as I was, and eventually I let go of my sulk enough to let myself enjoy the wind in my hair and the light rise and fall of the boat as we moved across the water.

  “You knew Aurora,” I said. We had not spoken for so long that at first I thought he hadn’t heard me, but as I gathered myself to ask him again, he cleared his throat.

  “I did.”

  “Well?”

  “No.” He was avoiding my eyes. “I only knew her for a summer, years ago. Before I went to Los Angeles.”

  “And became a famous rock star.”

  He laughed; it was a bitter sound that cut across the wind. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “What was she like?”

  “I can’t tell you much.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “How would I know that? Can’t you ask your father?”

  “No,” I said. “I never knew my father.”

  “Neither did I,” he said, with no apparent irony.

  I tried another tack. “Why did you move all the way out here?”

  “To forget,” he said, without hesitation.

  “Forget what?” He did not bother to answer. “Do you practice somewhere else? I never hear you play.” Because you’re never home, I could have added, but elected not to. I had often been told that discretion was the better part of valor, although it was not an approach that I myself employed regularly; but there is no time like the present for frolicking in undiscovered country.

  “I don’t play anymore.”

  I was dumbfounded. “At all?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was…” He trailed off, and something complicated passed across his face; I thought I recognized a hint of the fuzzy confusion that clouded my own thinking out here, the weird blurry wall that made it impossible to remember anything for any length of time, or say out loud the thoughts that scampered fleetingly through my skull and then vanished again. “It brought too many bad things,” he said in a tone that did not encourage further enquiry. The sail snapped in the wind and Jack jumped up to adjust it, and I looked out over the water—black, sharp-beaked birds, diving neatly before the boat as it flew across the water; a tangle of seaweed, which Jack deftly maneuvered past; a slick log bobbing i
n the waves. I pressed one thumb against my shoulder; pale flash, then pink. I was getting a sunburn. Jack sat back down again, the sail safely negotiated, his face serene—we’d been talking about something, something that I felt certain was important, but it had slid out of reach again, and I did not know how to get it back.

  “Everything okay?” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “You know, I don’t know anything about astronomy, but I know most of the constellations. We’ve been navigating at sea more or less the same way since the ancient Greeks. More technology now, obviously, but I like to do it the old way.”

  “Jason was supposed to be the first person who navigated with the constellations.”

  “Jason?” His voice had gone strange.

  “Of Jason and the Argonauts.”

  “I know the one,” he said. Something about his expression made me stop talking at once, and he looked out over the water, refusing to meet my eyes. I had no idea what I’d said to upset him, but we were silent for the rest of the afternoon.

  * * *

  After the day on the boat Jack disappeared again, leaving me to my own devices. I went back to prowling around and pretending I wasn’t lonely. Early one afternoon I came into the cool quiet of the bar to find a slim girl in a black jacket on Maddy’s usual stool, and my heart flip-flopped in my chest like a fish; but she turned at the squeak of the door’s hinges, curious, and I saw at once that she was someone else, less scruffy and with none of Maddy’s fierce, animal shimmer. She had shiny dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail on her head and hammered silver hoops in her ears, and the feet propped on the bar stool’s rung were shod in fashionably battered boots that she had certainly not purchased here. The natives ran toward clogs and rubber-soled sandals with nylon-and-Velcro straps worn with white socks. I did not much myself care about clothes, but that did not mean I did not miss being around people who did. And even I should never have stooped so low as athletic sandals.

  “Hi,” she said; maybe she was from here, then. Nobody else would have been so friendly. The bar was empty, and it seemed unnecessarily rude to stalk off to a spot by myself, so I climbed onto the stool next to her and ducked my head in what I hoped was a convivial manner.