by Aaron Tucker
Still, he kept that state of her, the precocious pleading to swim in freezing waters, next to Donne, all the while considering what s’agite le Démon inside himself, considering that interior devil Baudelaire spoke of and that
Parfois il prend, sachant mon grand amour de l’Art
La forme de la plus séduisante des femmes.
To compare the two women, Jean’s invincibility was not Kitty’s physical corralling, but rather her strength was drawn from a series of successful masks that she expertly rotated through, as actress, as fiancée, as lover, as psychiatrist, as mistress, masks often created in direct reflection of his own desires.
After he and Kitty were married in early winter of 1940 and after he took a leave from Berkeley, and Groves began gathering Los Alamos, his thin body chosen as the tip of that spear, he would shuttle in and out of Jean’s life, certain to keep himself within her orbit, making certain to never pause so long between drinks and walks with her, in public the two striding close together, just enough gap between to continue to accidentally bump against each other. He would come up to her apartment and that distance would dissolve and the two would be linked, by fingers, by hands, by lips, until he had to leave, return to Kitty and the secret lab being constructed. In still and private moments he would ask her, ‘Do you care that I have a child?’ and ‘Do you care that I have a wife?’ her bare apartment filled mostly with the open-spined volumes, Siegfried Bernfeld’s and Carl Jung’s works, and he would ask those questions and he could see the words move tectonic under her face, the continents of her conflicted reactions, her own many versions of herself, pushing together before rippling up under the extreme contact and pressure, surfacing in lips that would twitch, open slightly, pause, twitch, and then pause again. He would ask the questions more to fill the air of her rooms, because he couldn’t actually tell her about Kitty or Peter or his secret job and so needed to pivot the discussion to her, to them, would wait for her answer, cigarette smoke clinging to his skin as he finished one after the other, the light tapping of the package against his palm, loosening each cigarette into his plucking fingers, then mouth. She would answer him and her ‘no’ would set the two of them into frenzied conversation, he would say ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ in urgent whispers as they talked about her work in the children’s ward and the tiny shattered kids that seemed so broken-winged despite all her calm voices, her stories interrupted by sometimes him eviscerating the stupidity of a colleague or a student, and he noticed his own voice gaining the arrogant edge of a man long immersed in his own self-confidence, then, finally, with her straddling him and the two sweating, she would take him into her before leaning forward with her palms and weight on his clavicle, all motion and eye contact. She would run the water into the tub after and he would promise to return as soon as he could.
Jean would explain that she would cycle through her own interior vistas and valleys while he was gone, one day struggling to extract herself from her sheets, the imprint of him still pressed, even after multiple washings, into the bedding; on other days, she caught herself bounding to her breakfast table and extravagantly consuming all the fruit she had in the kitchen, cutting up the bananas and berries and topping them off with a thick cream. She would move constantly or she would be completely at rest, each a state in complete opposition to the other, unpredictable, the details of her future provisional at all times. This became even more so, she explained, when he promised to return but left without saying goodbye, instead vanishing to the plateau and its labs and his urgent war work, leaving her in flux between her two polar states, all the multiple versions of herself simplifying into binary and eradicating any sort of centre. She would lash out at him then, tell him about the men and women she had been with while he was gone, savouring his stung expressions, his reciprocal hurt, before transitioning into solemnly reciting
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
In one direction, she would tell him, she saw him, riding Crisis back toward Perro Caliente, saw what she imagined New Mexico to look like based on his soft tones and his gentiana gaze, but in the other direction, not just the islands or the bay, but the long line of the ocean horizon that projected out from the California coastline.
He thinks through all this, the threat of a knock at his office door looming, and moves to place the envelope in a drawer of his desk but instead looks out the window, sees the transformed mesa and recalls what it was like to return here after visiting with Jean. When he came back to the labs, the mountains and valleys now constantly under the motion of heavy trucks entering or leaving on those skinny roads with supplies, with men and their families, with books and gleaming equipment, he would go first to his home on Bathtub Row. If it was the morning, he would see Peter in Kitty’s arms at their door frame, her fingers drumming along his tiny arm, the toddler bursting and squirming from her toward him, her eyes focused on his rounded gait as he came forward, cataloguing the clothes he wore, the red dirt on the cuffs, what foreign smells he may have been bringing home, unfamiliar soaps or shampoos or perfumes. She had stopped working at the radiation lab and so was home all day, and if it was the afternoon or early evening he was likely to return to Kitty, in semi-obligation, hosting a few of the other wives, a third or fourth drink at a half-arm’s length; she would recount, once Peter had been put to bed, the few glochid conversations she was privy to in his absence, spoke mostly about how the other women bombarded her with requests, hairbrushes and lettuce and pantyhose, and she counted how many chickens, slimy and raw, she was able to haul back when she went down the hill on her trip to Santa Fe, complained about the too-common water shortages and electrical outages, about the diminutive garden she had planted and how the military men followed her everywhere, at all times, how she was certain mail was being opened and phones listened to, even the very conversation pouring from her strained mouth. She relayed the grumblings about the giant stoves in each home, hulking coal and wood contraptions, but mostly she talked about the five horses he had left in her care, and how overgrown and expansive the mountain trails must look, about how cold the nights beside the lakes must be, how they could leave Peter for a weekend and go. Reviving the genus and phylum of her graduate botany training, she would tell him about all the plant life they were missing while they were barricaded under the consistent gaze of uniformed men just outside their doors, on the other side of every wall and telephone exchange. He would acknowledge this with ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ and try to untense each muscle that had contracted while he was thinking about the amount of work he had the next day, tried, often without success, to resist drifting into the remote corners, words, figures, of his mind.
He could see Kitty reduced in those moments, penned in by the monumental work he was undertaking and the isolation of Los Alamos, and knew still that he needed her, as a wife and mother, as a stabilizing force, as a figure that balanced him, and, more than anything, as a woman who believed in him and fed him the encouragement to continue his work. This is why he ignored the whispers about Kitty as he went around to T-Division and X-Division, would dismiss the stories about her lack of interest in the social construction of the mountain compound, how she cut down three different women in succession, each attack meaner, about her proclamations of boredom mixed in with the refrain ‘Je l’aime, tout simplement,’ whenever someone went on too long about her husband. He would straighten to his full height and accept each of these comments with the same expression of neutrality, smirking only at an especially clever insult she constructed; he knew her intelligence was largely being wasted on her domestic duties, on being the Director’s wife and Peter’s mother, and he found himself growing all the more protective and loving of her, especially when she would overdrink and talk about the fringes of France, the early days of the Spanish Civil War, before her second marriage to Harrison, her first husband, Commissar Joe Dallet, and sh
e would talk about her early days printing and distributing Communist leaflets, the press leaving dark smudges along the undersides of her forearms, and she would talk about pleading to go to Spain from France to help, only to be turned away (‘No wives’), instead left alone with what the doctors said was appendicitis just after Joe was sent to the Spanish front lines, the sharpening pain that intensified as it moved down her abdomen and the fever that ruptured across her forehead. The doctors found over a dozen cysts that needed to be burned out of her ovaries; Joe’s letter in response told her that he was writing under the warped shadows of olive trees by way of a flickering and waxy flame, that ‘it’s all quite picturesque,’ and she should heal so she could finally come to the front. One month later, mid-October 1937, he would wave off medics and die stranded not far from his own trench, ribboned by machine guns.
When Kitty let Joe back into mind, her eyes would look to the corner of the room and her hands would stay confined to her lap, her drink forgotten, and there he saw himself and Kitty in understanding of each other, Joe furcating across the many forms of her memory, still present despite his own very real stature in the same bed. He would never ask her how often she returned to him, did not want to put her through the splicing required to separate himself from Joe’s phantoms, and accepted that he would remain impossibly imbricated with him.
Kitty and then Jean and then Kitty and then Jean. He wonders how much of this should be traced backwards to his university years at Cambridge, where he struggled desperately with women of all kinds. Perhaps it truly began in the spring of 1926 with Inez Pollak, a former classmate. He had walked her through his routine in Cambridge, and the two linked hands and strolled through the streets together, both looking at the sidewalk or past the other but never into each other’s faces, the relationship climaxing in one cold night in bed, both unable to move closer to the other, for heat, for comfort, the space between them on the bed cooling as the temperature kept dropping, the blankets feeling thinner, until Inez began crying. Her tears fell off her, droplets wetting her side of the bed, and when he saw the arrangements they made, like stars, like flowers, like chemical reactions in the spreading and morphing, he began to cry as well, and the two, without touching, cried next to each other.
He explained all this to Jean as she lay in the bath one night, but had never brought himself to fully confess to Kitty. Jean demanded more details, what were her fingernails like (jagged, bitten), her hair (midnight), her voice (he couldn’t quite remember clearly), as she partially emptied and refilled the tub. Getting up from the tub she flatly stated, ‘We are exactly too alike.’ The room got slightly colder then and he plucked his book from its resting near the sink and read to himself.
Her words to him reverberate as he takes the letter then and places it in his desk drawer, resolving to never open it, to stop responding to her missives, no matter how desperate or frequent they become. In the final glance before he slides the drawer shut, he sees the stamp, the silhouette profile of a horn player, and is reminded of Jean with her violin, her jaw forcing the instrument tightly against her shoulder as she drew the bow across the strings in alternating choppy slices, playing through the parts of The Four Seasons that she could manage, her music hesitant and uneven after having put the violin aside for years, right before she left for Vassar, she told him, a path that pulled her away from being the actress she always imagined she would become. Still, she would insist to him as she lowered herself into the tub
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
her flourish on the exclamation point spraying water onto his ankles. The street light from just beyond the window was the lone dim source and she would plunge her head beneath before emerging, blinking and combing her hair back with her fingers, and he would comb back a dark strand and they would kiss, him pulling her as close to him as was possible and think of Jean and Kitty and himself and the concentric circles that formed on the bathwater surface around the droplets descending from her outstretched legs, expanding outward from their cores.
His textbooks are ringed around his desk, and he is in the centre, attempting to make sense of this foreign country and university, his own anxieties, his destructive actions, trying to pull himself from the spiralling descending momentum he feels trapped within. Opje is alone, as he often is, and the finger-stab punches of the keys printing ink onto the paper and the drag of the platen gives rhythm to his empty room. He is writing to his childhood friend Fergusson about Katy, royalty of the mountains, and Los Pinos Ranch, the Sangre de Cristos, the slices of the mountains against the unrestrained sky still imprinted over his imagination, as he describes a planned trip to the Selkirks in British Columbia, a trip in counterbalance to New Mexico, those Canadian mountains more jagged and dramatic, the snow more permanent, even near its feet where the Kootenay River weaves through; he is structuring this letter operatically, as atto secondo, atto terzo, atto quarto, and carves the missives in with Baudelaire, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère.
Despite his inner crisis, he admires his own wide-ranging brilliance in these letters and he greedily pushes his mind, and in the same letter he writes of the fascinating and deeply unique microscopic bondings of chemistry (gravimetric and volumetric), abstracted mathematics that shove numbers across the lobes of his brain in fresh languages, physics that wrangle those kinetic numbers back into phenomena, the objects and gases and temperatures that structure the world around him, structure his desk and typewriter and his pants neatly pressed in drawers and the half-finished glass of water, small bubbles formed from inactivity, to his left. He was younger once, he thinks as he pauses at the typewriter, but his memory of himself as an earlier student and his manoeuvrings through that time are constructed by further refractions inward; he recalls his first New Mexico ride under the night with Katy and the other boys, the warming constraint of the sleeping bag and the root underneath the ground that protruded just enough to work into the muscles of his back, this image vivid, this specific place in his mind as he writes to Fergusson after that trip, this specific letter about that specific trip in his mind.
He reasons to himself that being away from Los Pinos is part of what is causing his crisis, his inability to breathe during his semesters, that it is the constant need to be in motion that is upsetting, from the wild veins of his early obsessions with minerals populated by hunks of pegmatite or gneiss or siltstone, onward to French poetry and Russian short stories, to chemistry, the first firings of mystery and exciting blank spaces in his knowledge that he fills and augments with his voracious devouring of physics texts, his puzzling of elastic smoke rings dissipating with height and the vibrations of the air. All semester long, he thinks, he is one of two places: he leans over the small desks in the corner of the library or he sits, as he is now, writing letters returning him to the Southwest, the quiet cocooning him.. And as he sits, he envisions that a person looking through that window would see him in much the same way a visitor sees an artist in her studio, a novelist at his desk, and he seeks out actions and moments in the gaps of loneliness brought on by studying, imagines himself as that watched writer, projecting his experiences onto the young men of the zeitgeist with the hinge of an astounding verb or the turn of a rotating syntax fulcrumed by a conjunction.
The closest he had felt to his horseback self was the year before, undergraduate, when he and his friends would make a routine of going to North Station and, without glancing at the schedule or route, board and fill the train car with the noises of barely filtered young men, joking and quoting each other, their professors. They would ride until one of them suggested they get off, and they would stretch their arms through their heavy coat sleeves and exit out into the gnaw of winter and return toward campus. He remembers one specific night when, in a silent dare, all three refused to hint that they should head back; when one of them finally broke, they were in W
orcester, and they hiked all the way back, cratering the new-fallen snow with their boots and voices over those twenty miles, gathering stray dogs as they went, until there were over half a dozen bounding through the snow ahead of them, glancing back before rushing forward, the dogs thin and dark-haired and barking at them en masse when their conversation got too loud, the young men laughing harder each time another dog joined the ranks, a fresh howl in the chorus. Back on the early-morning campus, as he scrounged leftovers and milk enough to feed as many of the dogs as he could, the sun still hours away from glazing the towers and halls, he imagined himself as Ulysses returning home, the dogs his startled soldiers braying of their conquests, sounding for a home, and himself as the centre of a heroic and timeless couplet.
As he writes his letters, he returns to himself, troubling through the sense of seclusion that settles over him, even as he recalls his most powerful selves. He thinks that perhaps it is simple: his unique and massive intelligence quarantines him. When he was in his mid-teens, he recalls, he had come across the word polymath in a book about Leonardo da Vinci, an unfamiliar word that seemed too literal on its surface, and drove him to the gigantic multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary in his school’s library
Ancient Greek πολυμαϑής – A person of great or varied