“She’s a superstar!” Charlie said, with typical hyperbole. And then to me, “Don’t you have Glashow now?”
“It was canceled.”
“I do need to excuse myself, however,” Pope said. “I have the misfortune of having been chosen for a search committee, and so I’m off to spend two hours debating the merits of a candidate we’ve already decided won’t be hired.”
Charlie laughed, and he turned to her.
“Next week, Charlotte?”
He spoke in a different register, a continuation of whatever they’d been talking about before, and it was obvious—not only what Pope was doing, but that my friend was in some way enjoying it. He was brazen enough to touch her, just his fingertips on her elbow. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, but there was an elaborately fluted gold and sapphire ring on the pinky finger of his right hand. He nodded gravely to me, before returning to the dim sanctuary of his office, shutting the door behind him.
“What are you doing here?” Charlie said.
“Waiting for you.” I touched her arm, made my eyes wide. “Charlotte.”
Charlie grinned. “He’s intense—okay? But he’s basically a genius. He actually won a MacArthur genius grant, after his last book was published.”
“What was it about?”
“Pierre Choderlos de Laclos—who wrote Dangerous Liaisons. A biography of an eighteenth-century writer, which makes it even more incredible that people actually read it.”
“Well, but the movies were so popular.”
“But that was years ago. And he’s not writing about the movies—he doesn’t even like them. He writes about Laclos as a feminist, and also really a postmodernist, two hundred years before anyone even used that term.”
“Is that crazy thing his wedding ring?”
“His mother’s engagement ring—isn’t it gorgeous? He told me it’s vintage Boucheron.”
“But he’s not married?”
“No, he is. She’s a professional dancer, or she was. She used to be with Paul Taylor in New York, if you can believe that.”
I didn’t know who Paul Taylor was, a fact I wasn’t about to reveal. “So are you, like, having a liaison?”
Charlie gave me an exasperated look. “Helen, please.”
This conversation happened in the spring of our junior year, before Pope had done anything more than compliment Charlie’s intellect, and keep her in his office longer than their meetings were intended to last. There was a woman who warned Charlie about him, though. She was a senior named Trisha Young, whom Charlie knew from the Black Students Association meetings that she sometimes attended with Kwesi at the Student Center in the quad.
Trisha cornered Charlie in the dining hall at North House, where Kwesi lived, and told her that she should choose a different advisor, because two girls she knew (she wouldn’t name them) had dropped Pope’s seminar after rebuffing his advances. She described exactly how Charlie’s association with Pope would go. The professor would begin with suggestive comments, would gradually start to touch her in a friendly way, would then one day confess his uncontrollable attraction—but only after making himself indispensable to her academic career. You’re his type, Trisha had said.
Charlie related the conversation with Trisha when she got home that night. She told me she’d assured Trisha she could handle Pope, and that she didn’t totally trust the older student, who she thought might have designs on Kwesi.
“You think she was lying about Pope?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“What did she say when you said you were going to apply for the tutorial with him anyway?”
“She said I’d go far.”
We were in the living area of our room in Lowell House, smaller and less comfortable than the one we’d had the previous year but also older in feeling, with its scuffed wooden floor, low ceiling, and mullioned windows, the glass thicker at the bottom than the top. Charlie was on the green futon underneath the buzzing halogen lamp, sitting as she usually did, with her feet tucked under her.
“Was she being sarcastic?”
She got a funny smile on her face. “I don’t think so,” she said.
8.
I’d promised Vincenzo that I would make my last changes to our electroweak paper while I was traveling, but instead I spent my time taking notes for the possible book about kilonovas. Being alone in the modern hotel room in Pöllau, with its sleek wooden furniture and immaculate picture window, made me want to write. My window looked out on some ski slopes; I’d never learned, but I liked watching the old-fashioned double chair creeping up and down the mountain. The schedule for the conference was busy, a relentless series of mandatory lectures and panels, with social events at mealtimes. I rarely sleep much when I travel, and I got up early, even for Central European Time. Each of the three mornings I was there, I lay in bed until 5:30, then gave up and made coffee in the miniature espresso machine the hotel provided. I sat at the desk in front of the window, watching the winter sky lightening over the gingerbread roofs of the old village and the dome of the cathedral. The evergreens were blue under the snow. The sun came up, and the ski lifts jerked into action. The whole valley turned gold. It gave me a burst of confidence, as if for a moment you could see the precious stuff underground, which had been made inside colliding stars.
* * *
—
I got back to Boston a day later than I’d planned, because my connection from Frankfurt had been canceled. There was no snow on the ground when I arrived at Logan, only a cold, driving rain, and it took forever to get a cab. When I walked in the door, my mother and father were lying on the floor. My mother was on her stomach in what I believe is the scorpion pose, wearing a shiny blue unitard with a hood. My father was lying on his back, on the kitchen floor, his body protruding from the under-sink cabinet.
“Is that Helen?” My father’s voice was muffled. “I’m rerouting your disposal pipe. I can’t believe it’s lasted this long.”
“I’m so sorry about the flight being canceled. I couldn’t believe it when I got to the airport.”
“That kind of thing’s happening more and more,” my father said.
My mother took a deep, whistling breath. “He has a problem with catastrophic thinking—everything and the kitchen sink.” I looked at my father, whose head was indeed hidden in that very spot. “This is especially good before or after a long flight, Helen. You should join me.”
Most physicists have strange parents. The parents of future physicists must avoid imparting certain basic facts about the world, such as the fact that a person gifted in abstract numerical thinking might make a fortune in any number of financial jobs; the fact that most people are happier with money than without; and in some cases, the fact that women are vastly underrepresented in the field. When people ask what my parents did to encourage me toward a distinguished scientific career, I say that they simply didn’t know any better. It’s a joke, but with a lot of truth in it.
“Where’s Jack?” I asked them.
“Downstairs, with your friends.”
Andrea and I had made all the arrangements for the handoff of the apartment to Terrence before I left, but the full reality of their arrival this weekend had escaped me during the last twenty-four hours of travel. It was a relief not being immediately responsible for Jack’s needs. I took my suitcase upstairs, dropped it in the bedroom, and washed my face. I’d developed a chest cold on the plane, and more than anything I wanted to lie down on the bed, take advantage of the fact that there were other adults who could be trusted to keep our small household running. A part of me wanted to ask my parents to stay even longer; my canceled flight had made them miss theirs, but I think they would have postponed it again, if I had asked. It wasn’t only pride that kept me from doing so. I’d resolved when Jack was born that I would manage on my own. I had the idea that child
-rearing, done in this intentionally challenging way, might be more interesting, less likely to fall into conventional patterns. I can see flaws in that theory now, but I wasn’t ready to go back on it. And so I forced myself to go downstairs, where I found both my parents upright again, my father putting away his tools.
“You brought those with you, from L.A.?”
“Just the portable kit.”
“I have tools, Dad.”
My father ignored this statement. “I wouldn’t have known the gasket needed replacing if there hadn’t been a clog.”
“Why was there a clog?”
My father glanced at my mother, who was now sitting in lotus position, her palms uplifted on her knees, her thumbs and first fingers forming little holes in space.
“Artichoke leaves,” my father whispered.
My mother opened her eyes. “Now I eat an artichoke every day for lunch.”
“Just an artichoke?”
“With Greek yogurt, cumin, and salt. I’ve been doing it for three weeks, and I can’t tell you how different I feel. I’ve been trying to convince your father to try it.”
My mother went back to college when Amy and I were in high school; when we were in college, she was getting her master’s, and she eventually became a reading specialist for elementary school children. If there’s one quality everyone in my family shares, it’s a dogged persistence and a need to keep busy. Amy and I have discussed our mother’s embrace of various wellness trends, and the possibility that she may have retired too soon.
“Artichokes,” my father said. “So much mess, so little reward.”
“Well, thanks,” I told them both. “I would’ve missed the conference without you. Can you stay for dinner?”
“The flight’s in four hours,” my father said. “We want to leave in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll go down then and get Jack.”
“He offered to have Jack stay with them yesterday,” my mother said, standing up. “Your father didn’t want to do it.”
“We hardly knew Terrence before,” my father said.
I was surprised. “Did you spend a lot of time with him?”
“Well, not exactly,” my mother said. “But since the children were constantly together—”
“They were?”
My father made an irritated sound. He likes to arrive at the airport at least three hours in advance, even for a domestic flight.
“Oh yes,” my mother said, ignoring him. “Poor little thing. And she’s so pretty.”
I thought this was something I might not have noticed, if I hadn’t been friends with Charlie—the way that white people would compliment her in a manner that was designed to demonstrate their own aesthetic broad-mindedness. That color looks great on you. I could never pull that off. I love your hair! Charlie would dismiss people like that—“absurd”—I would agree, and in this way neither of us would have to think about whether or not I might have made similar comments if she hadn’t been always subtly correcting me in advance.
“We weren’t quite sure what to make of him.”
“Terrence?”
“He’s a little sullen, no?”
“Well, his wife just died.”
“I meant his attitude,” my mother said. “In general.”
“I loved Charlie,” my father said, with genuine feeling. Charlie, on the one spring break when she’d come out to visit me in L.A., had developed a teasing rapport with my father that had seemed to draw him out of the interior world where he lived most of his life.
“What does Terrence do for a living?” my mother asked.
“He and his brother have a business making wooden surfboards.”
My father was interested. “They actually make them? You mean, by hand?”
I told him that they did, although I was pretty sure it was Ray who was the craftsman.
“Well, he’s certainly handsome,” my mother said. “I’ll give him that.”
* * *
—
When I went downstairs, I found Terrence and the children sitting at a glass coffee table playing Yahtzee. The table had an open, aluminum-alloy base, and Simmi had filled it with a miniature assemblage: key chains, a collection of molded plastic animals, tiny rubber erasers shaped like pieces of food, coloring books, markers, a puzzle featuring Noah’s ark, a Slinky. Of Terrence’s possessions, the only evidence was a pair of kettlebells, sitting in the empty brick fireplace, and a framed poster (“San Diego Surf Film Festival 2003”) propped against one wall.
Jack ran to me. I took him in my arms, trying not to breathe on him too much—when both of us got sick, that was the worst. But he didn’t let me hold him for long. He wiggled away after a moment, accusing me with his eyes.
“Why weren’t you home yesterday?”
“My flight was canceled. Grandma must’ve told you.”
“It didn’t snow,” Jack said, as if this was also my fault. “I told them it would.”
“Last winter was brutal,” I said. “This one’s wimpy.”
Terrence blew out his lips and gave a dramatic pretend shiver. It was rare to see him do anything silly, and Simmi laughed delightedly.
“We played fifty-eight games of Yahtzee,” she told me.
“Not today?”
Terrence smiled. “Since we got here, she means.”
“I didn’t mean for you to have to…”
“It’s fine,” Terrence said. “We invited him.” He’d been sitting cross-legged with the children, but now he jumped up lightly and went to check something on the stove.
“Grandpa just wanted to read to me.” Jack experimented with a sort of adolescent tone. “It was so boring.”
“You love reading.”
“Their food is terrible.”
“I like the green goddess dressing,” Simmi put in.
Jack made a face.
“Well, we’re getting pizza tonight,” I told him. I looked at Terrence. “If you want—”
“We’re already cooking. Vegan chili—you’re welcome to join us.”
“I love vegan chili!”
“Do you even know what vegan is?” I asked Jack.
“Chili from the planet Vega,” Terrence said. “Taste it if you dare.”
Vega is an AOV main sequence star in the constellation Lyra, but it seemed pedantic to point that out.
“I think we should give you guys a little peace. It sounds like Jack was down here all the time.”
“He’s cool,” Terrence said.
Jack looked at Terrence as if he’d just offered a trip to Disney World, or maybe as if Terrence were Disney World. Then he turned to me:
“See? They love me.”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“Still,” I said. “We’re going to have to say goodbye. Just temporarily.”
“After this game.”
“Your grandparents are leaving in a half hour,” I told him. “They want to see you before they go.”
“That doesn’t take a half hour.”
“Jack!”
I’d been back for five minutes, and I was already scolding him.
“We’ll finish later, little man,” Terrence said.
Because Terrence had insisted, Jack followed me out of the apartment in a disgruntled way. On the carpeted stairs in between the two apartments, he started to cry.
“You never let me do anything fun. We always have to leave everything early, because of your stupid work!”
This was fairly standard, as a response to an out-of-town trip, and I wouldn’t have minded if my parents and Terrence hadn’t been within earshot. When I opened the door to our apartment, they were standing just behind it, fully dressed in their outerwear and peering at a printout of their reservation. They pretended not to notice Jack’s expression.
“It says we arrive in Terminal Five,” my father said. “But we left from Three.”
“Why would that make a difference?”
“Five is under construction.”
“Maybe it’s only the departures that are under construction?”
“We’ll need to ask while we’re still on the ground,” my father said. “We should have left earlier.”
“It’ll be fine,” my mother said. Then she turned to Jack: “What was the score this time?”
“Her dad had one thirty-two and we had seventy-six. But then we had to stop.”
“He doesn’t let you win,” my father said approvingly.
“Come here and give me a hug,” my mother said. “How much does Grandma love you?”
“So much,” Jack mumbled into her coat.
My father looked back at the printout and shook his head. “They charge you three hundred dollars to change the tickets now—even though we explained the situation.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll pay for it.”
My father shrugged. “It’s not your fault. Nothing is predictable anymore.”
My mother raised her eyebrows at me, and mouthed: “Catastrophic thinking.”
My father hugged Jack the way he hugged everyone, as if he had made a careful study of the gesture and was attempting to reproduce it.
“Planning anything is ludicrous,” he said.
9.
We ended up back downstairs for dinner. Jack wanted to help with the chili, but Simmi declined, and so she and I were left in the living room together.
Simmi looked at me for a moment, then casually extended one leg up above her head, cupping the arch of her foot in her hand.
“Wow.”
“That’s just a warm-up,” she said. “I go to a gym here now.”
“That’s good.”
“She can do everything!” Jack called from the kitchen. “Show her the back walkover.”
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