I had often been indiscreet with Neel, but I couldn’t tell him why I thought Charlie had been so insistent about him coming up this weekend. She hadn’t wanted to come to Penny’s house alone, but she also didn’t want to spend the weekend talking with me about what had happened.
I glanced at the door, which we’d left open.
“Do you think she’ll come up?” Neel asked.
“No,” I said. “She’s going to give us a lot of time.”
“No faith?”
“She doesn’t think you can close the deal.”
“Why am I the closer?” As he said it, he stepped toward the telescope. There was just about a foot between the two of us, and another between me and the bed. From downstairs I heard Charlie’s voice—I wondered if she had called Kwesi long-distance.
I sometimes think that the words “electric” and “magnetic” have been taken over by their colloquial usage, so that they hardly retain their scientific meanings at all. When Neel kissed me, I felt nothing related to charge or its movement through a field. What I felt was a slow, spreading pleasure. Neel and I had been building to this for three years, and if not perfect—the kiss definitely included some fumbling—it left me short of breath.
Neel stopped. “Did you want this?”
“Doesn’t it seem like I do?”
Neel shook his head. “I mean before—when we were first-years.”
“Did you?”
Neel nodded, acknowledging that this was an interesting question. “Sometimes I did—definitely. But then I made this sort of promise to myself, that I was going to date nonscientists.”
I felt a little hurt. “Why?”
“The lab gets kind of insular, don’t you think? I wanted an outside life, and I thought the most efficient way to do that was to date a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator or something.”
“I’ve never understood what VES actually is.”
Neel shook his head. “Something to do with film? I don’t think they know themselves.”
We started talking about a class—I think it was Georgi’s Lie Algebras—and the people we knew who were also taking it. There was a romantic drama between two of the teaching fellows, and we covered that, too. We were talking a little too loudly, with a little too much animation.
“I liked what you said before.”
“About what?”
“Adopting a kid. If I wanted one, I’d do the same. I bet very few women say that.”
“Men either.”
“Yeah, but guys my age don’t talk about kids.”
“We hardly ever do.”
“You’re reasonable, is all I’m saying.”
“Wow, thanks.”
Neel laughed.
“I was about to compliment you on your organizational skills,” I told him. “But I didn’t want to be too forward.”
“What with your rationality and my systematic thinking, we would probably have amazing sex.”
Of course it’s only when I let go of my rationality and systematic thinking that I can have amazing sex. Neel smelled and tasted like salt, and he really looked at me; he wasn’t one of those people who close their eyes and go somewhere else during sex. He held my arms over my head and said, “Do you like this? And this?” He got up once and found a sheet in the closet, to put over Aunt Penny’s narrow attic bed. He insisted we keep the light on. There was a lot of talking. He said that I seemed younger than other girls he’d been with.
“I’m not talking about your mind,” he added, before I could protest. He ran his hand down my body, admiringly, put his hand between my legs and left it there. “Not your body either, but everything else.”
I didn’t know what he meant—what was there, besides my mind (my brain) and my body?—but I could barely think while he was touching me. He was patient and made me wait a long time. We came together, incredibly, the first time.
Later we crept down the ladder shivering in our T-shirts and underwear. I took the sheet with me, and hoped I would be able to find the washing machine without asking Charlie. The house was quiet, and I assumed she had gone to bed downstairs. We climbed into the bed I was supposed to sleep in—I realized Charlie hadn’t given Neel a room—and got undressed again, but we didn’t touch each other again right away. Instead we talked: first Neel about his parents, who had left their lives and their families in Hyderabad when they were the same age we were, because his father had been accepted to medical school in Chicago. He said that his mother had told him recently that she’d cried every day for the first fifteen months they lived there.
“What happened at fifteen months?”
“She got pregnant with me,” he said.
I told Neel about my parents’ conscientious objection to Vietnam, the fabricated epilepsy diagnosis that kept my father out of the war. I might have overemphasized my parents’ counterculture ideals to make them seem more compelling. I said that they hadn’t been married when they had us.
Neel was interested in that. “Really?”
“They did it later, when we were kids. But it wasn’t any different from marriage, not calling it that.”
Neel nodded. “I guess it’s my Indian heritage showing, but I do want to get married.”
“I think it’s a little soon.”
He smiled at me. His teeth were very clean and white. “I’m thinking I want to marry you the second time around.”
“What?”
“After your adopted waif is out of the way, and we’re established as a theoretical-experimental physics power couple. The Ivies will have to duke it out for us—we’ll demand extremely generous terms, and only go somewhere with great weather.”
“I always liked the idea of MIT.”
“I could do MIT,” Neel conceded. “But the University of Hawaii also has its appeal.”
“Don’t think I’m not insulted.” We were sitting against the headboard of the bed, and I pulled the sheet up over my chest. I was playing, but not entirely. He wanted me to be his second wife? Or was he joking, too?
Neel tugged gently at the sheet.
“Please don’t cover those up,” he said. “They’re perfect.”
I could tell I was blushing, and I was glad the room was dim. The only light came from a small bedside lamp, with a low-wattage, flame-shaped bulb.
“Don’t you think the really happy old people you meet are the ones who haven’t been together that long?”
“Your parents aren’t happy?”
“Who knows? They would never split up, though.”
“How come?”
“It’s not part of their culture—all that. But also because they did this huge thing together. Immigration was the great experience of their lives.”
Our legs were touching under the quilt, but we weren’t looking at each other directly. I could see a shadowy version of him in the mosaic-tiled mirror on the wall next to Aunt Penny’s armoire. He tended to gesture when he talked.
“They have a whole Indian community in Chicago now—all these couples came here around the same time, but I think each experience was very individual. Only the two of them really know what theirs was like. I don’t think they’d feel at home with anyone else.”
“Mine, too, for more banal reasons, I think. They’re just set in their ways.”
“But there’s not a lot of romance,” Neel suggested, turning to look at me directly. His mouth was beautiful, too, the generous lower lip. Between the sex and the talking, we stayed awake most of the night. We agreed that we should have as much sex as possible now, since that wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to improve by the time we were ready for our second marriages.
16.
When we went downstairs late the next morning, Charlie was already up. She had made coffee, and there was even a Globe and a bag of fresh doughnuts on t
he counter.
“Gloucester has the best powdered-sugar doughnuts on the planet,” she said. “Little-known fact.”
She didn’t tease us or make a big deal out of what had clearly happened, for which I was grateful. Because of her long relationship with Kwesi, there had been a lot of mornings when I was the third wheel; being a part of every aspect of each other’s lives felt natural to us then.
Sun streamed into the kitchen, but frigid air seeped in around the kitchen door. A thermometer mounted on the window frame outside read seventeen degrees. We sat at Aunt Penny’s kitchen table, where a wooden boat held a stack of paper napkins folded to form a sail.
“Penny loves all this kitschy stuff,” Charlie said, moving the boat to the counter to make room for our mugs of coffee and the paper.
“I used to be so embarrassed about my mom’s things,” Neel said. “She loved stuff like that boat, but she also had a lot of religious knickknacks. She used to have a shrine in the corner of their bedroom, when I was little: just a framed poster with a brass bell and a couple of candles. Sometimes she would put flowers in front of it, or a rice ball or some ghee. I always used to close the door before my brother and I had playdates—I was worried our friends would see it.”
“Does she still have it?”
“No,” Neel said. “And I kind of miss it. I get the feeling the temple is more of a social thing for them now.”
“It’s the same with my parents,” Charlie said.
“They had a shrine to the goddess Lakshmi in the bedroom?”
Charlie giggled. “I mean with church. Except my dad was the one who started out more religious.”
I liked the way they were joking together. In my mind I’d already moved ahead to the stage in which Neel spent enough time in our apartment that Charlie would feel comfortable wearing her pajamas in front of him. That morning she was fully dressed in a sweater and jeans, and even wearing a little makeup. It was her public self she was presenting; at first I thought that was only because she and Neel didn’t yet know each other well.
Charlie cupped her hands around her mug, warming them, and leaned forward in a conspiratorial way.
“I have an announcement to make.”
“Uh oh,” I said. I thought she was still joking.
“I’m giving up my thesis.”
“Charlie!”
“No, listen. I thought about it a ton last night. I’m totally decided.”
“What were you writing about?” Neel asked.
“Choderlos de Laclos.”
“He wrote Dangerous Liaisons,” I told him, but Neel wasn’t familiar even with the movie.
“See?” Charlie said. “Laclos is totally irrelevant.”
“I wouldn’t go by me,” Neel said, and for a moment I was distracted by the way he looked that morning, his hair still wild from the salt water and the night we’d just spent, the line of his jaw, his pale fingernails—all these parts of him were suddenly known to me in a way they hadn’t been before.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Charlie said. “Ask anyone in L.A. how a twenty-one-year-old Harvard student should spend her last year of absolute freedom—finishing an undergraduate-level paper about an eighteenth-century French novelist, or writing a spec script for Law & Order—and I know what they’d tell you.”
“Do you want to act, or write?” Neel asked.
“Both, I hope.” Charlie pulled her bare feet up to the seat of Aunt Penny’s Shaker chair, and looked suddenly younger than usual. “I don’t really know. But you’re supposed to go out there with something finished.”
“Maybe you should go ‘out there’ for a little longer than a spring break, before you up and move,” I said.
“I loved L.A. even before I visited you there,” Charlie said. “Maybe because it seems like the total opposite of Boston. In any case, it has to be better than clawing my way up in academia, toward the aspirational goal of a living wage.”
“Best case,” Neel agreed. “Not that you’d be doing it for the money.”
I felt suddenly annoyed. “Her tutor thinks her thesis is the best one he’s advised in years,” I told him.
Charlie gave me a look. “For what that’s worth.”
“You’ll graduate without honors if you don’t turn in the thesis.”
Charlie put on an expression of mock horror. “I didn’t think of that—how am I going to survive out there in the real world without two or three Latin words on my diploma?” She turned to Neel, as if she expected him to be more sensible. “I even talked to Penny about it last night. My parents are going to flip, but she’ll support me. And I know it’s the right decision.”
This must happen to everyone who loses someone too early: sentences stand out with sudden clarity, take on retrospective meaning. There are turning points that might have been taken, but weren’t. Of course there was no guarantee that an Oxford fellowship would have led to an academic career—Charlie could just as easily have ended up in the cutthroat world of London or New York theater. And it was only magical thinking to imagine that her disease would have manifested itself differently in a different life. But I can’t help picturing her now in a book-lined university office somewhere on the East Coast, where the sun shines at a safe, wintry distance for many months of the year, cloistered with her poetry and plays—insulated, underpaid—alive.
I couldn’t have had any of those thoughts then. Maybe my feeling of foreboding was due to the idea that we would be separated, that I wouldn’t be there to look out for her, or her for me.
“You should still think about it a little,” I said. “Don’t do anything right away.”
But it was Charlie’s style to do things right away, to completion, with very little looking back.
UNCERTAINTY
1.
A few days after Neel had walked me back to my office, talking about the rotor experiment and his wedding plans, I got a call from a Chicago number. This was in the dreary middle of January, when everyone was harried because of the resumption of classes. My sabbatical had started, but I was in the office anyway, reading Jim’s thesis on magnetic fields in the early universe, and how they might have influenced the ultraviolet Lyman-alpha radiation our satellites observe today. I knew Neel was in Chicago for his parents’ party; when the phone rang from that area code, I thought for a moment it might be him.
Instead it was a woman’s voice. She gave me her name, said I didn’t know her, but that she was class of ’92, and she’d been asked to write an article for Harvard Magazine about my friend Charlotte Boyce. Her name—Patricia Young—sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it at first.
“The magazine ran an obituary when it happened. This is different—more of a profile.” The woman sounded tentative. “I should talk to her family as well.”
“I can connect you.”
“That would be great. Or, you know, ‘great.’ I think I’m the last person she would have wanted. I told them they should look for someone out in L.A., but they said they needed it right away. Do you know Kwesi? He suggested me.”
“I’m sure she’d be glad you were doing it.”
“Really?”
I googled Patricia while we were talking: she was a professor in the History Department at U of C.
I told her the kind of things I thought might be appropriate for an article in a university magazine: about the show Charlie wanted to create, and her frustrations with the diversity-staffing programs in Hollywood. I told her what Charlie had said about having more women in positions of power.
Patricia sighed. “That’s right—that’s what I tell my students, too. Maybe you do the same thing in your field. But then, do you ever feel like you’re selling them a bill of goods?”
“Sometimes.”
“I want them to be ambitious. But then you get here—the University of Chicago, Berkeley
, or MIT, or wherever—and you’re the go-to person. An accomplished black woman has died? I write about her. Someone needs to speak to lawyers, or bankers, or tech company executives about the history of affirmative action? That’s me. You should see the shelf of awards I’ve collected. And then there’s this low-level resentment from my colleagues, right? Who also, by the way, want to co-create courses with me, because there are a lot of popular courses these days that need a black faculty member in order to have any kind of credibility. I’m the only black woman with tenure in this department.”
“We have three tenured women in my department, total.”
“Any black women?”
“No—two are white and one’s Indian.”
“Black men?”
“One. He’s in the ‘career development’ program, with the five nontenured women.”
Patricia laughed. “Right. And you know how many recommendation letters I’m supposed to be writing right now? Eighteen. I’m doing mine, and the letters for one of my colleagues—I insisted on doing hers, because she’s on bed rest for anxiety and exhaustion. We actually do have a lot of young black women who want to go to graduate school in this field—which is terrific. I’ve got to do a great job on those letters for them, because the only answer is more of us. But the question is, what am I signing them up for?”
That was when I remembered: “You’re Trisha Young.”
“Oh—yeah. I went by Trisha then.”
“You were friends with Kwesi, and you knew Charlie from the BSA.”
She laughed. “You just remembered me.”
“It took me a minute.” I hesitated. “Charlie told me you warned her about—” I used his real name.
Patricia got serious. “Oh god, yes,” she said. “He’s not still around?”
“Not teaching,” I said. “But he still has his office. Did you have problems with him, too?”
“No,” Patricia said. “No, but I didn’t look like Charlie, either. I had friends, though. And then later I heard those younger girls were trying to get him out.”
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