Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  I stared at Vincenzo. Clearly I had missed the whole (not very skillfully delivered) point, which wasn’t about cosmology but about me and my age—specifically the idea that I was having hot flashes connected to menopause. Never mind that I’m five to ten years from the average age at which women experience those symptoms; the whole office was now thinking about my menstrual cycle, and if I made more of an issue of it than I already had, it would be seen as evidence of my erratic, moody, essentially female behavior.

  “It’s not about the heat,” I said.

  “Of course not.” Vincenzo expelled a puff of air from his mouth, and regarded me with what he must still consider his arresting black eyes. “And as for me, I’ll simply put on another layer. The last thing I want to do is upset you, Helen.”

  * * *

  —

  It was a relief to walk to Mass Ave. for coffee with someone who wasn’t a part of our group, and I took advantage of it as much as possible. It was also exciting to have an inside track on the events at LIGO, just before their big paper about the detection would be published. Now it wasn’t only other scientists, but journalists and academics from non-science disciplines who were starting to hear about what they’d done. Neel said that a professor at Juilliard wanted to write a chamber piece for strings based on the data, and PBS was planning a documentary. All of this attention would become even more frantic when the chief scientists won the Nobel, a prize for which Neel could justifiably claim some credit. It killed me that he might think my idea for the book on kilonova was another attempt to piggyback on his success.

  One afternoon in late January, because we were finishing a conversation, Neel accompanied me back from Building 22 to my office in Building 6. It had continued to rain instead of snow, and the cold was wet and biting. Neel was talking about gravity. As was typical with him, he wasn’t talking about it in the abstract, but about a specific piece of equipment: a rotor that might be set up in proximity to one of the interferometers. The point would be to measure precisely the effects of gravity at distances we’re familiar with here on Earth: what we call the meter scale. For Neel, LIGO had never been about the big news of a gravitational wave detection. The detection was nice, but his passion had always been the ways we could use—he liked to say “misuse”—these fantastic machines in the future. The rotor experiment was a perfect example. If he could get the money, he wanted to set up two of these rotors—the technical term was “dynamic field generators,” or DFGs—one on either side of the laser. These would be rotating machines of extremely dense metal, like small windmills. They would be out of phase with each other, and would accordingly cancel out each other’s influence on the laser inside the interferometers. Neel stopped, but I understood where he was going, and it was fantastically exciting. The LIGO scientists had always said that the interferometers could go beyond detecting gravitational waves, to probe our fundamental physical laws. If the rotors didn’t cancel—if there was any disruption to the laser—that would change our understanding of the way gravity operates here on Earth. It would be nothing less than a refinement of relativity itself.

  “I can make the rotor,” Neel said. “I can even get the funding. For the rest, I’d need you.” We had reached the plaza in front of the Center for Theoretical Physics, where my office was.

  “I’m really busy these days,” I told him.

  “Too busy for a completely quixotic project that might change the world?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Neel smiled. His hair was hidden underneath a dark red ski cap, and he’d shoved his hands into the pockets of his peacoat—possibly the same peacoat he’d owned in the days when we were meeting daily at the Hong Kong on Mass Ave., to work out the details of the Clapp-Jonnal. Neel liked even the worst Chinese food, and would always try the most unpromising dishes—Three Delights in a Nest, the Pu Pu Platter—just to see if he might discover a hidden treasure.

  “It’s not that quixotic,” I said.

  “Tilting at rotors,” he said.

  “That might be the nerdiest joke you’ve ever made. Is there even a chance we’d actually get permission to set up a rotor anywhere near one of the interferometers?”

  Neel got serious. “It’s a fairly slim chance. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. We might have to set them up in the middle of the night, like those guys with the neutrino detector in Antarctica.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “They got in trouble, but they ended up getting funded in the end. NSF decided that if they wanted it that badly, they must be on to something.”

  “You’re suggesting a midnight heist to revise non-Newtonian gravity?”

  Neel smiled. “Let me just get through February.”

  “February’s a big month for you.” I hoped it sounded as if LIGO’s triumphant announcement and Neel’s wedding were just two events I was observing dispassionately from the outside. He bent down to tie his lace—he was wearing black construction boots, worn out at the toes—and I stopped to wait for him.

  “Why did we break up?” he asked, standing up. “Do you remember?”

  It was very cold, and it was possible that my shortness of breath had more to do with the weather than with the subject we were discussing.

  “I think it had something to do with our disagreement over Einstein’s fondness for Schopenhauer. You can do what you want—”

  “ ‘But not will what you want,’ ” Neel finished. “Ugh. But was it really that, or was it the mind and the brain?”

  “You certainly felt very strongly about that,” I said.

  “I still feel strongly that there’s something we’re talking about when we say ‘human consciousness’ that extends beyond the brain and the nervous system.”

  “And I still feel strongly that there isn’t—but it’s a ridiculous argument. It’s not like we’re going to change each other’s minds.”

  Neel laughed and grabbed my elbow. “Change what?”

  “The point is—we were absurdly self-important.”

  “We were twenty-two,” Neel said. “And you were going off to Princeton.”

  “You were going to Chicago.”

  Neel released me, and we walked for several moments in silence down Albany Street, past the Pfizer building that was still under construction. In front of us the Kendall cogeneration plant released a sharply delineated white plume against the dingy sky.

  “I’m going to Chicago next week, actually,” Neel said. “Just for two days with my parents. They want to do a party for friends who can’t make it to Mumbai for the wedding—I really can’t spare the time this close to the press conference, but it means so much to my parents.”

  “Will the wedding be traditional?”

  “It’s going to be in Roxy’s aunt’s backyard—so no, not entirely. We are getting a priest, though.”

  “A Parsi or a Hindu priest?”

  “One of each—for good measure. For the Parsi we had to find a sort of renegade. Women aren’t supposed to marry outside the faith, because their children aren’t considered Parsi. I think the rules are less stringent for men.”

  “Surprise.”

  “Yeah, but cut them a little slack. It’s one of the oldest religions in the world—the Parsis have been at monotheism longer than anyone except the Jews. And the ceremonies are very pretty. The priests wear translucent white robes and white hats and they burn incense. And there are a lot of eggs involved—I’m not sure what’s up with that. Roxy says that some of the priests are also magicians. For an extra tip, they’ll do some tricks after the ceremony.”

  “Parsis believe in magic?”

  “I think they just enjoy it. They’re known for being fun-loving—the heaviest drinkers in India.”

  “It sounds like a great wedding.”

  “I wish you were coming.”

  “Me, too—if it wasn�
��t so far. And if I hadn’t just gotten back from Europe.”

  He looked at me in a knowing way, and I was sure he’d figured out the secondary motivation for my trip.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You remember how I asked you to be my second wife?”

  It was a joke he used to make a lot, but it seemed to have acquired an entirely different meaning in the twenty-plus years since we’d been a couple.

  “You’re starting a little late for that, aren’t you?” I said. “I think you should focus on just the one marriage.”

  “Right,” Neel said, but he didn’t take his eyes off mine. “That’s what I’m planning to do.”

  12.

  Neel and I had done our problem sets together for Arty; as undergrads, we’d studied in the Cabot Science Library, and sat around his room at the Grossmans’ arguing and gossiping—but we didn’t actually become a couple until the beginning of our senior year. A brief, depressing relationship of mine had just ended. On our first date, the young man in question confided in me gleefully about a bet he had going with his three roommates—members of the same all-male social club, with weekend binge-drinking habits and investment banking aspirations—about who among them was going to make the first million.

  More significantly, Charlie’s long-term boyfriend, Kwesi, had graduated, won a Rhodes, and gone off to Oxford; she’d been the one to insist that they separate, very much against the advice of her parents. This was while she was still planning to complete her thesis and apply for the Henry Fellowship at Oxford herself, so it was possibly more of a hiatus than a break. Charlie said that she didn’t want Kwesi to feel tied down by an undergraduate girlfriend during his time in England, but I thought she broke things off also because Kwesi was so exactly what her parents had always hoped for her. Like everyone, I liked Kwesi—but I couldn’t help being grateful that Charlie and I were single at the same time.

  Somehow I had put off fulfilling my Moral Reasoning requirement, and was taking Michael Sandel’s blockbuster course, Justice. I found myself debating with freshmen in our TF-led sections questions like, “Is it right to lie, if doing so might save the life of a friend?” and “Is patriotism a form of racism?” The class seemed so easy, compared with the work I was doing for my thesis with Professor Aksoy, on effective field theory calculations of the W and Z masses, that I spent very little time on it, often writing the response papers during the lectures. Charlie and I now lived off campus, and we had plans for after graduation. In addition to the work on my own thesis, I had a job with Arty as a faculty aide and was applying to PhD programs; Charlie was just as busy, writing her thesis on Laclos, rehearsing her role as Mme. de Merteuil, and applying for the Henry.

  By the time I heard about them, that fall of our senior year, Pope’s overtures to Charlie had become impossible for her to ignore. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of their tutorial, say that he couldn’t continue because Charlie’s presence was too distracting. She kept him up at night. Yes, there had been other girls, but he’d never felt anything like this before. He knew she didn’t feel the same way, but he had to be honest with her; he couldn’t pretend their relationship was purely pedagogical anymore. I noticed that she was often sicker than usual on Thursdays, and occasionally spent that day in bed, skipping not only her tutorial but her other classes as well.

  When I asked her what she was going to do about Pope, Charlie usually made a joke and brushed it off. But she did once ask me if I knew what actually happened when students reported a teacher for that type of offense: that they had to testify in front of a board of other students and faculty, who would then hear the tenured professor’s side and make a decision. She said that if she’d learned anything from her mother, it was that there was always more than one solution to any problem. She was a big girl, and she could handle it on her own. Many times I resolved to press her to do something—I fantasized about ways I might help. Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced; I think we believed that what we’d achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it.

  One Friday night I had planned to get Chinese food with Charlie after her rehearsal. I was taking a shortcut diagonally through the Yard after a lecture entitled, “Is Torture Always Wrong?,” heading home, when I ran into Neel. As always happened when another romance ended, we’d been spending more time together, and I was glad to hear him calling my name. He told me he’d spent most of the day at the college observatory on Garden Street, and was meeting some mutual friends for a beer. Did I want to come?

  I don’t think I worried about alerting Charlie to my change of plans. “The problem with you,” she once told me, “is that you go out with the people who ask you; you never take the initiative with anyone you like.” Now the person I liked had asked, and I knew she would want me to go. Anyway, it was early.

  Neel and I passed through the wrought-iron gate and started down the brick sidewalk, under the double-globe streetlamps. I asked him about the observatory, and we talked about the program he was organizing for at-risk teenagers to visit at night and view the comet, Swift-Tuttle.

  “My parents were confused—my father asked me what risk I meant. He didn’t understand that the program was for poor kids, and I realized it was because I hadn’t made it clear. Because I was uncomfortable saying it. What is it about Americans that makes it so hard for us to say what we mean?”

  We developed a theory about our national addiction to euphemism as we walked to the bar: we also disliked “hooked up” and “passed away.” Our friends Chris and Vlatko were already there when we arrived, along with Vlatko’s girlfriend, a computer science concentrator whose name I can’t remember now. We finished two pitchers talking about people we knew in common, and when I said that I had to go home because I had a research fellowship application to finish, Neel offered to walk me.

  Up until that point, the evening had been like any other, but the offer to walk me home felt like a romantic gesture, and both of us became unusually quiet as we got closer to the house on Brewer Street, where Charlie and I rented an apartment on the second floor. What was so exciting for me was the feeling of being with someone—not smarter, necessarily, because I knew I was better than Neel at grasping an abstract idea and proving it mathematically—but so committed to the precise articulation of ideas. It wasn’t true what Charlie said about me, or not entirely: I might have tended to allow other people to choose me, but once I was in a relationship, I was usually the one in control. My conversations with Neel, on the other hand, felt more equal, or even as if I were going to have to prove myself, if I wanted to hold his attention. I wanted to prolong the potential of a real relationship as long as possible, not take any step that would propel Neel and me in one direction or the other. I couldn’t imagine anything better than imagining myself with Neel.

  We stopped just outside the light from the fixture over the porch. I was shivering in a dark green cashmere coat that I’d bought with Charlie at a thrift store in Porter Square, more for style than for warmth. Neel was looking at me with his unique brand of curious detachment.

  “So see you,” I said.

  He kept his hands in his pockets. “Is that a euphemism?”

  “We deplore euphemism,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Too bad for me, then,” he said. He lingered for a second—I thought he was going to kiss me—but only squeezed my hand, before he turned and went. I watched him go, thinking how strange it was that the buoyant feeling in my chest could be produced from so little.

  The people who lived below Charlie and me in that apartment house on Brewer Street had a small child, and seemed often to be screaming at each other; that night the commotion struck me as somehow touching, part of what my Justice professor had just referred to as the “rich pageant of human experience.” I ran up the stairs, eager to tell Charlie about my spontaneous date
with Neel.

  But the apartment was dark. I turned on the lights, threw my stuff on the couch. Then I went into the kitchen to look for something I could eat—our refrigerator was almost always empty. I was rooting around in the cabinet for my Pringles, or even Charlie’s Smartfood, when I heard a sound from her room.

  “Charlie?”

  Her door was half-open, but because the lights were off and she hadn’t said anything, I’d assumed the room was empty.

  “I thought you weren’t here!” I said.

  She was lying in her bed, the covers pulled up to her chin.

  “Are you okay?”

  I turned on the light. The magazines that were always lying around her room had gone from a mess to something more alarming. They covered the floor like a carpet: Vogue and Elle, Essence and Vibe, as well as Daily Variety and Vanity Fair. Charlie didn’t drink more than the average Harvard student, and she didn’t like weed. Her drugs of choice were ibuprofen and caffeine; when she had a migraine, she went to the campus health center for something stronger. The night table was crowded with empty plastic bottles of Diet Coke—I could smell the saccharine sludge at the bottom—and there was an economy-sized bottle of Advil on the base of the lamp, from which she would take five or six tablets at a time. I’m embarrassed to think I once suggested she try to wean herself off it.

  “He was here,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Pope. I left our door unlocked, but I still don’t know how he got in downstairs.” She was wearing plaid pajama pants and a worn gray T-shirt that said Choate Lacrosse in yellow.

  “Pope followed you home?”

  “No—he was watching rehearsal again. He found me afterward, and said he wanted to apologize for being ‘badly behaved.’ I said I was meeting you at home, and I had to go, but he said it would just take a minute. I said we could talk at the theater, but he said we couldn’t. He asked if he could walk me home.”