Y

by Aaron Tucker

  learning; a person acquainted with many fields of studies

  then revisited da Vinci, became aware of how sterile that designation was and instead understood the grace and courtly mannerisms the term implied, and from this understanding created a future version of himself, discussing his father’s van Gogh, Landschaft mit gepflügten, Feldern in French to an elegant woman with a layered dress past her ankle, a thin flute of champagne held semi-careless between his long fingers, asking, ‘C’est un paysage divin, n’est-ce pas? Regardez les minces coups de pinceau précis!’ and the woman would meet his eyes and agree: ‘Oui. C’est magnifique.’

  Polymath: the word structured his polite responses, his expensive gifts, his immediate eye contact, his eyes pale and focused, as much as it drove him to remoteness, to read and reread his Herbert and Proust alongside the physicists Poincaré and Jeans, later Bohr and Heisenberg, until the pages dissolved from the corners inward. When he turned the page to an illustration of ‘The Vitruvian Man,’ Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, he stared into it as into an idyllic mirror, imagining the perfecting proportions not to be merely physical but also mental, the dual arms and legs to be the intellectual movements that kept the physical body, even one as slight as his own, in balance, an idealistic architecture of humanism that built a responsibility into the best of its species to ride along the hardest passes of the highest mountains as well as be able to recite, from memory, passages in the original Greek or Sanskrit and then to translate them for lesser ears.

  His conversations with his friends on those train rides veered far from the science of his studies, into metaphysics and modern philosophy, into sonnets, into descriptions of foreign customs and voices, all overtop the steady rhythmic rolling of the wheels over the sectioned track, the slight sway of the car lulling. He gives himself permission to read every book that even vaguely interests him, to go anywhere, to speak in as many tongues as he can, and therefore, when he is presented with a problem or a formula, he envisions himself as a multi-pronged army attacking from all directions simultaneously, not only taking the obvious approaches but circumventing and squeezing past what initially looks like impossible dead ends.

  As he looks back over the letters he has written that night, he thinks that, to him, a poem is the equivalent of an equation is identical to a chemical reaction, and this equalizing separates him from his classmates, his peers; he believes his mind to be so acrobatic that he takes great delight in generating more obtuse and intensely personal ways of insulting people, often in compact phrases. He knows that both men and women can’t help but watch him impose his intellect and see arrogance. He recalls his first trip to New Mexico, where Katy hosted boys from all over America at Los Pinos. At dinnertime he would navigate the room, the boys gathered around their plates as the sun began setting, clattering in conversation, and he would explain to each some detail of an advanced physics textbook he had read, but in a tone that implied mutual comprehension, and with each person he added a new, minute rotation in the conversation, making a game of how easily he could rotate through complex ideas as measured and precise as perfect pentameter, while still remembering each of their mothers’ and fathers’ names.

  His time at the Ethical Culture Society School in his teenage years only reinforced this distance, even as his classmates called him ‘Booby’ or ‘Bob’ in affection, and he would walk the halls with his off-centre footsteps, under the school’s motto, ‘Deed, not creed,’ and he would stir in his seat and shuffle his eyes over the walls of his math class until his teacher sent him to the library to read on his own, bringing him back to teach what he learned to the other students, rinsing the chalk from his hands in the bathroom afterward as his fellow students rushed outdoors to the benches, shoulder to shoulder, to talk and eat lunch.

  He moves his letters aside and finds the poem he wrote the day before:

  We find ourselves again

  Each in his separate prison

  Ready, hopeless

  For negotiation

  With other men

  The ‘we’ of that poem, he knows now, is the imagined species of young men like him, agile and full of stamina despite their physical builds, who would wield the weapons of charm and cleverness first with fierce intensity, then deliberate gentleness. He understands that he wraps himself in his own intelligence and knows he is slow to emerge, and as he looks backward into his mind, ignoring the sound of voices in the hall outside his dorm, he summons those difficult rides in the desert and the discomfort of the uncaring root in his back mid-sleep, and he discovers the place where his own mind, with its sublime and varied vistas, is best realized, made physical and manifest. New Mexico, at the very least, has eroded the sharp corners from his precociousness, but still when he rereads the Gita in English, he struggles most with Book 4, ‘The Yoga of Wisdom,’ and Krishna’s pleading to renounce the objects and the senses of the world in subjugation, and in that release allow his actions to be guided not by his pride, by the way that ideas mould perfectly together in his mind, by the many tongues he speaks, but rather by self-restraint and unselfish actions and the trust that

  As fuel upon the kindled fire

  To ashes straightway turns,

  All actions, brave Arjun, are turned to ashes

  In wisdom’s refining flames.

  He knows he needs to know the difference between wisdom and knowledge, between a shifting and adaptive system of actions and sturdy facts, verses, theorems. He pictures the flames that Krishna speaks of, a sculpting and intense fire that doesn’t lead to total destruction but rather startles in its beauty as it bellows, in the moment of its ignition and burning, before leaving its silty residues as a reminder of its process and its fuel.

  He imagines this blaze as he signs his letter to Fergusson, noting how over the years that signature has morphed from ‘Bob’ to ‘Robert’ to ‘R,’ growing more refined with each externalization of his bounding mind. The letters he has just finished traverse Middlemarch and his family’s vacation home in Province-town, return back to Pecos and Los Pinos Ranch, always eventually back to New Mexico; he sees this clearly and he reads the passage that closes his letter, he craves the landscape that would ‘make me notice how blue and sunny the sky is, and what an exquisite filigree the chrome and coral leaves make against it.’ He puts those words aside and, taking a new piece of paper, begins writing to his parents. In contrast, his recountings to them are brief, mostly outlining the mechanics of the school and his studies, the schedule of courses he has piled on his scrawny shoulders. He finishes, and as he signs his name, he anticipates his mother, Ella, placing his letter on the kitchen table in their apartment overlooking the Hudson River and waiting for his father, Julius, to get home from the New York docks or the storefront where he sells the suits that come in, always carrying the business’s import papers, his face framed by a crisply ironed shirt collar. His mother and father would open the letter together after dinner, the tailing sunlight covering the fine curves of the furniture’s woodwork, the crafted chairs and couches selected by Ella, the paintings on the walls, a Picasso, a Rembrandt etching, a Cézanne, a sculpture of Despiau, chosen by Julius. They would sit together, Ella reading aloud, and his father murmuring along, sometimes repeating phrases; he had taught himself English when he came from Germany to work with his brother Emil in the late nineteenth century and still halted on some of the more poetic ripples of language that leaked into the letters despite his son’s best efforts to contain them. His mother would pause and yip at the stress and loneliness she could intuit, would ask Julius if he thought Robert was eating enough, sleeping enough, and Julius would respond that he would make sure at the next holiday homecoming to pull him aside and tell him about his mother’s worrying.

  It is that anxiety that he remembers first about Ella, especially when he was young: his brother Lewis died as an infant, and his mother would tell him of the microscopic germs that grew on every surface, their tiny hairs clinging to skin and burrowing u
nderneath, and so she steered him away from the dripping sausages sold just outside the entrance to Central Park, that park he loved so much, where they would run around the fields or near the mallards, whose proud green rounded heads reflected in the surface of the water, until he complained too loudly of hunger and they had to leave, back home to their own kitchen. He tried to walk on her left side as often as he could so that, when he grabbed her hand, he could feel her warm palm in comfort; his mother was born without her right hand and wore a spring-aided prosthesis that she hid under a constant glove, further covered by her long-sleeved dresses, and she would tense when he worked his own fingers against the silk of that glove to feel the mechanism, crude and under tension, that helped her grip.

  However, when she painted, which they often did together, there was no such hesitation, and she would slowly settle her canvas with even-pressured brush strokes, the small jar next to her holding the brushes bristles up, the palette of thickening paint to her left, then to her right, and she dodged around her studio, staring at the budding picture from all the angles the room allowed. He knew that the French that came into the house could be traced back to a trip to Paris she took while in her twenties, where she studied early Impressionism, Manet and Renoir, especially Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, the bread spilling onto the grass and clothing while the young naked woman stared back with no shame. He would parrot back her French with improving pronunciation, watching the way she shifted a pencil or brush from her left to right hand, the slight separation she created between her false forefinger and thumb by leveraging her left hand between the two, a fluid motion, ambidextrous.

  The piano she stationed off to the side of the sitting room and forced him to practise on repelled him: he would move his small hands over the keys, the movements and themes already in his memory. He would feel the resistance to his firm pressing and wait for the sound to resonate more fully within him, for the notes on the sheets to coalesce in the same way the geometric patterns of the crystals within his scant mineral collection did. Later, he would watch Jean bow her violin or, listening, cycle through the instruments of a symphony with a lolling pleasure, but it wasn’t until he read Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ that he recognized himself alongside the narrator, amidst Chopin and the windings of the violins/And the ariettas/Of cracked cornets, external but internal,

  Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

  Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

  Capricious monotone

  That is at least one definite ‘false note’

  and that the music he did produce, could produce, would always be strained and unformed. Like Eliot’s narrator, for him, playing music carried none of the necessary compassion for others, and he was unable to communicate by bleeding his feelings or thoughts back out through an instrument. He and his mother reached a compromise that allowed him to quit his piano lessons: Ella would hire someone to come to their apartment and cut his hair and he would sit in their kitchen under the afternoon sunlight while they listened to sonata after sonata, would feel the snipping breath of the scissors around his ears, the curved shards of hair falling from his chest to his lap, his mother sweeping it all off the floor, son and mother in aural overlap.

  He and Julius were most alike on the water, where he could match his father’s boisterousness, his father who would sing loudly at the dinner table and yell over Ella’s too-tight smile and the others’ conversations. When Opje sailed, usually at Bayshore, Great South Bay, on the family boat, Lorelei, he would steer into waves and search out horizons for shadowy cloudings, turn his nose to the iron smell of incoming rain and arc the boat in that direction. When he was sixteen, his father bought Frank and him a schooner they named Trimethy (trimethylamine, C3H9N), and he would pilot the boat day after day, returning only near dusk, his books crusted with sea spray, emerging repeatedly from the churning breakers and tides, bursting back from the mouths of inlets with his gawky frame against the dimming evening.

  Remembering this, he connects that body at sea to his desert body and its hidden lakes and waves of mountain ranges; a coastline has the same excessive expansiveness, each body tiny and equal despite the seeming contradiction between the sweat of riding and the cling of a marina’s moistness. In recalling, that body on the ocean has the crackle of youth and, refining further, points him toward what Krishna explains as freedom, the ones not reborn but instead guided by

  Fire, light, day, the moon’s brightness,

  the six months of the north turning sun,

  the people, one-pointed, who focus on Krishna in love and detach from the sensual objects of the physical realm, and in doing so become multitudes of beings, in an endless beginningless cycle, and upon their death, exist in a primal existence that is not destroyed when all things dissolve, and instead pass into the supreme, primordial place. That body at sea does not dissolve, instead is one of the most sturdy, and one that often intersects in his memory with his other states, primordial in how so many of his other memories, his bodies, evolved from that version of himself, those future states with lengthened limbs and smoother locomotion but always genetically descended from that body at the helm.

  He emerges from this thought to the starkness of his room, the papers now spread over the entire surface of his desk. It makes sense to him then that his misery stems in no small part from his struggles to return to either that body at sea or that desert body, an urgency that only expands the longer he stays in school, at Cambridge. On tests and more formal documents, when he is asked to write his full name, his signature changes again to include a truncated and simple ‘J’ at its beginning, the J of his birth certificate, Julius Robert Oppenheimer; though everyone calls him by that second name, his father had put his own name before it. However, when his friends ask what that J abbreviates, he answers that it stands for nothing, and that it simply makes his name appear more formal, more important; he speaks these sentences in full and ornamented vocabulary, in echo of Ella, and winds his hands around the words as they emerge from his delicate lips, as if corralling smoke, the mist of his words already slipped beyond him as soon as they exit.

  There is a slight chill coming off the window, he notices now, and looks at the weather outside, the snow lining the sill and cloaking the trees, the branches weighted with white and the sparse light that glints from the few street lights off the flakes. The cold, he thinks, was one of the first things to grind him down, to isolate him into his room, into his own mind, that mind brimming but incredibly solitary, projecting himself away and into his letters, writing of his time on the East Coast, the warm sandhills, swimming in the ocean water, perching in the lea of lighthouses. He writes this with his door closed, all the while translating the ideal landscape of his memories and fantasies that are beyond the room, ending each missive by beginning another. Though he believes himself to be a swelling presence, his intellect ballooning and entering every room before him in announcement, he is only one half of da Vinci’s sketch, and he knows he hasn’t learned how to corral the extremes of his high-boned facial structure or the contrast between his dark hair and his smooth and light doll skin, hasn’t mastered how to put those features in combination with his mental powers, his charismatically personal overfocus.

  Now, surrounded by books and writing, he steps away from his thin bed, reconstructs his last few months, a constant teetering, and, most maddeningly, his non-existent relationships with women. He is embarrassed to remember confessing in letters to friends about his affections for ‘a ravishing creature who brings food and writes scenarios and verses’ that led nowhere beyond initial conversations while she crossed her notebook across her chest, and how his presence in the library was distracted by ‘the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza,’ as she was darkened by the half-lit spaces she chose to settle into, her body wedged into the corner of a chair and desk, her body knit perfectly into the furniture, into her work, Spinoza and his balance between God and logical demonstra
tions and proofs echoing Herbert’s poetry. He would translate portions from the Latin and mull over the logical progressions, propositions and proofs and corollaries, returning now only in fragments. Prop. IX: ‘The more reality or being a thing has, the more attributes will it have.’ Corollary to Prop. XIII: ‘Hence it follows that man consists of mind and body, and that the human body exists according as we feel it.’ He watched this woman but never approached her, read Spinoza again but never discussed it with her, and instead wrote a poem to her that he never shared with anyone,

  You must come I say, and see the seagulls,

  Gold in the late sun;

  You must come and talk to me and tell me why,

  his repeated ‘must’ straddling demand and begging. He stopped going to that part of the library, regretting telling others about these humiliations and rooting himself more and more often in his room.

  He is alone and, one after another, his friends are pairing off with women; he envisions their hands, the same hands that work beside him in the labs, running underneath the clothes of these women. He saw a psychiatrist, first at Harvard, then later, at his mother’s insistence, a French psychotherapist, and the two men would discuss, in translation, his emotional reactions and the various states within him forming and circling. After a month, the psychotherapist confided frankly to Ella and Julius that he was very sad, that he thought Opje was having ‘une crise morale,’ that he was no different than the other young men but that his intelligence forced him inward and, with a slight laugh, recommended his prescription: ‘une femme.’

  His memories return to his walks home through the deep snow and the trail of dogs that would follow them, and he remembers that fleet of animals, and considers authority, wonders whether being in charge of other men would bring him any closer to his own Penelope, feels in himself a stirring of ambition in the notion that perhaps once he learns to harness his intelligence and translate it into charm, he might find a woman just off the shoreline waiting for him to sail back toward her.