by Nova Jacobs
“Jane?”
But he knew Jane was gone. Having dropped the twins at school, she was likely on her morning run, a brutal course of murderous inclines that she enjoyed enough to repeat in the evenings.
Philip sat for a moment and closed his eyes. His migraines were mostly on the livable end of the spectrum—essentially, fierce headaches with the occasional flash of light that presaged the pain. Or like today, the creeping sensation of a phantom hemorrhage. At least his brain responded to the triptans his doctor prescribed. He didn’t suffer as his father had—or, worse, his brother. Poor Tom, afflicted with the kind of pain that made you wish you were dead: the hallucinatory, vomiting, nail-gun-to-the-cortex kind, with medicine offering so little relief. A migraine specialist had once confided to Philip, “When it’s really bad, and the treatments don’t take, I’ve had patients try to kill themselves.” It hadn’t come to that for Tom, but it might as well have.
Smoking yesterday had been a mistake. Philip had fallen back on his old ritual of purchasing a shiny red pack of Dunhills. It wasn’t just the Drew episode that had rattled him but the hostility coming from his daughter. His unfortunate comment about Drew’s toy unicorn had later ruptured into a full-blown argument, though it was really a rerun of a quarrel they’d had before. Philip had tried to apologize, but Sybil made clear that she’d had enough of his and the entire family’s superiority. “So it’s a cute little unicorn and not a chemistry set, so what? Not everything has to be supersmart all the time!” she had cried, threatening to stay in Beachwood Canyon for the rest of their trip. Philip sighed. He would have to make things right with her before they left town.
He needed his pills, but the only movement he could manage was to turn off the bedside lamp and lean back against the headboard. He would just rest a minute. In the dark, he could see one of Sybil’s creations on the wall above the bureau: Broken Shoe #1. However much he disliked the piece, however much it conjured up the creaking meat rotisserie of his daughter’s mind, for some reason he couldn’t look away. Philip had little sense of how much time had passed when Jane appeared in the room. He could just make out her disciplined runner’s figure against the light from the hall. She held out a single pill and a glass of water. “How long have you been sitting here?”
He gulped it down. “No idea.”
He put down the glass and pushed his face into her stomach. The thought of pulling down her spandex was less a solid desire than the memory of desire. He was still able to enjoy her beauty and admire her graceful shape, but lately he found it difficult to locate his own lust. He wondered if anything was capable of inspiring strong feelings in him ever again. It was as if his work and sex drive were in collusion.
“Oh, I can’t make your lecture today,” she said, as she moved to the closet. “I promised I’d take Drew to the zoo.”
“You don’t have to come to my lectures, you know.”
“I do like to keep up with what you’re doing,” she said faintly. Philip knew that his wife’s interest in his work had become generalized long ago. She still enjoyed the idea of it, still took pride in informing strangers that her husband was a hotshot string theorist, but she no longer cared about the details. Maybe she sensed there was very little to know these days, because all his work worth knowing about had been completed more than a decade ago. He was now an aging professor whose best ideas were behind him, whose office was being eyed daily by younger and younger theorists.
Intelligence fades. Sex fades. The thrill fades. Where is all the wisdom that is supposed to compensate for the loss? But if his father’s death had taught him anything, it was that there was no real wisdom with age, only forced compliance.
* * *
As Philip strode to the overhead projector to begin his talk on “New Non-Perturbative Results for Non-BPS Black Hole M-Brane Constructions in M-Theory,” he took in the practically empty room. Putting on his best arch smile, he quipped, “I hear John Britton is giving a lecture next door.”
The small audience erupted in laughter, knowing full well that Britton—the closest the world currently had to an Albert Einstein—was ensconced in his turret office somewhere in Princeton. Whenever Philip heard the man’s name (or uttered it himself), he would sink a little. It was hard enough to have an actual father you could let down without also having a string theory father to remind you that you weren’t nearly as brilliant as you thought you were. In addition to Britton, there seemed to be a growing file of these monster minds, all shaking their heads in Philip’s direction. You vere such a clever boy. You vere going to solve the mysteries of the universe, remember?—Was that a German accent? Was his imagination really falling back on Einstein as a taunt? Though it could just as easily have been Erwin Schrödinger or Werner Heisenberg. Maybe this is where he would have his meltdown, at last. Right here at this decrepit overhead projector. You should have seen it! Professor Severy just sort of disintegrated in 151 Sloan.
With the apparition of dead geniuses hovering, he took a deep breath and focused on the black-hole mathematics scribbled in front of him. There was comfort in his black holes. These sinkholes in space-time were plentiful in the observable universe, commonplace even to astronomers. But for string theorists like him, they were precious hives of higher-dimensional objects—branes—that could help solve the quantum mysteries of the cosmos. After ten minutes, he found a comfortable rhythm, glancing up once in a while between equations to catch his colleagues Kuchek and Kato scrunching their brows and taking spasmodic notes. The only person without a pen in hand was Anitka. She wore a tight, fuzzy peach sweater and watched him with a small smile that seemed to say, “Your determination is adorable, but you’re making fatal assumptions. There’s going to be a revolution, you’ll see, and I’ll be leading it.” Maybe she was right, and this was just some giddy mathematical game they’d all agreed to play. Beautiful math signifying nothing.
There were no follow-up questions, and after an uneven round of applause, the hall emptied. Philip left the room, expecting Anitka to jump him when he reached the door, but when he stepped into the hallway, he was greeted instead by a woman balancing on a towering pair of heels and gripping a shiny black case. Clearly not a student, though not faculty, either. She crinkled her eyes in an attempt at a smile.
“I apologize for barging in late like that.”
“Quite all right. I didn’t notice.”
The woman’s dark red hair spiraled to her shoulders, and she wore a slightly militaristic navy suit, the kind that made Philip imagine she had a dozen more like it in her closet at home. He saw that she was attractive in a pointy, secretarial sort of way, but she had blunted any middle-aged prettiness with a large pair of harlequin glasses.
“It’s fascinating, this idea that everything is made up of tiny vibrating strings of energy,” she said, head pitched slightly to one side.
“Well, yes, that’s what we’re hoping to prove.”
“Funny, I didn’t hear you say the word string once in there—just a lot about branes, branes, branes.”
“I’ll try better next time.”
Philip was wondering if he was about to be suckered into explaining his work to an inquisitive dilettante, when she stuck out her hand. “Nellie Stone. I work for Mr. Lyons.”
“Lyons.” Caught off guard, he took her hand. “You work for P. Booth Lyons?”
“That’s right. He sent me to make sure you received his note.”
“Maybe he should have come himself.”
She turned her head so that she eyed him through a single teardrop lens. “Mr. Lyons is very busy.”
“Naturally.”
“And he hates telephones. He prefers in-person introductions.”
“Phone Booth hates phones, huh?” he said, but added quickly, “I didn’t realize I had so little time to respond before he released the hounds.”
“Just one hound.” She attempted a smile again, but it looked like a grimace.
“It’s just that Lyons was very aggressive
in trying to get ahold of my father. And now that my father’s gone, I’m not looking to inherit your employer’s enthusiastic attentions.”
She produced a card from her case. “We’re based back east, but we have feelers out here. I’ve written our California contact on the back—my direct line. Mr. Lyons would like you to join him for lunch on Sunday.”
Philip looked at the card, which featured their logo, the familiar brain-spiral.
“I’m afraid I’m busy.”
“I understand you don’t work Sundays.”
“I’m not a schoolteacher, Ms. Stone.”
“I was only suggesting—”
“—and I don’t plan on meeting your boss for lunch,” he said, handing back the card. “If I did, it would be at my convenience.”
“Keep it,” she insisted. “Do what you like with it.”
Philip slipped the card into his pocket. “Look, I know you’re doing your job, but I’m not all that eager to meet someone who’s looking to profit from my father’s death.”
“So you’re saying there might be something to profit from?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Her face relaxed for a moment, losing some of its sharpness. “I realize your father only just passed away, Mr. Severy, and I apologize for the graceless sense of urgency here, but—”
“Graceless is a good word.”
“—but Mr. Lyons would like to meet you for lunch all the same, after which you may cut off all contact. I should add that he has excellent taste in food. You won’t be disappointed.”
“And can I ask what it is Mr. Lyons does?”
“Government-scholar relations. It’s on the card.”
Philip tried to keep a straight face. “Sounds a bit vague, doesn’t it? Like the Institute for Progress or something.”
“I’m not familiar with that organization, but I’m sure Mr. Lyons can address all your concerns.”
Still wanting a straight answer, Philip said, “He’s a kind of intermediary, then?”
“That’s right.” She gave him a wink and neatly swiveled on one heel. “Hope to hear from you soon, Mr. Severy. Have a good night.”
Philip was too annoyed to respond. It seemed yet another small humiliation that someone had come to his lecture only to seek out some phantom project from his departed father. As he watched her tip-tapping to the exit, he felt an intense craving for a cigarette and a martini. He was just thinking he might indulge in the latter without any serious repercussions, when he turned around and saw Anitka standing there.
* * *
The Hayman Lounge was Philip’s go-to watering hole, which, aside from the game room in the basement, was the only place on campus to get a real drink. The lounge occupied a single room on the Athenaeum Club’s main floor, and was tastefully decorated with framed portraits of Caltech’s Nobel laureates. Philip had long ago picked out the spot on the wall where he decided his own picture would appear—between physicist Richard Feynman and quark pioneer Murray Gell-Mann—and he habitually glanced at the space every time he entered the lounge. But one wins a Nobel Prize for measurable results, not pretty math, and it was going to be some years before a string theorist was invited to dine with the king of Sweden.
The lounge was empty when Philip and Anitka sat down at the bar at six thirty, but within an hour, the surrounding tables had filled with club members and a group of employees from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were loudly discussing a NASA budget crunch. The more Philip drank, the louder the JPL people became.
Anitka suggested they move to the quieter end of the bar. Philip agreed, though he tried not to look too disturbed with the intimacy of their new spot. He had spent the last hour trying to talk Anitka out of her anti-string crusade, warning her that she was on her way to career suicide with zero hope of a postdoc if she insisted on following her own underdeveloped theories instead of the one she had been trained to explore.
“Keats was not a physicist, Philip,” she responded, using Philip’s given name for the first time since he’d known her. “Beauty does not equal truth. And if we continue to operate in this mystical fairyland, we might as well jump right into bed with those intelligent-design crazies, where they’ll turn to us with their idiot grins and say, ‘See, told you it was magic.’ ”
Philip smiled, marveling at her certainty. “If you don’t look at subatomic particles and see at least some magic—at least a sense of wonder—then what are you doing here?”
“Magic? Next, you’ll be using the term God particle. How many years have passed now with no real results? Just a bunch of nerds going on about elegance? If string theorists continue to fail at producing experimentally measurable results, while at the same time discouraging rival theories, they’ll soon be unworthy of the name scientist.”
Philip had heard all this before, of course. He didn’t tell her that he’d been following an online forum devoted to discussion of her phony paper. “Where are your predictions? Where are your verifiable results?” she had asked in one of the forum’s threads. The replies were sneering:
“For a start, Ms. Durov, string theorists have already predicted something called gravity. So, um, there you go.”
To which she responded: “Oh, really, and what are you going to predict next? Heliocentrism? That the sun will rise at dawn? Next time, you might try predicting something we haven’t all agreed upon in advance.”
By his second martini, Anitka was still ranting. “Sometimes I think high-energy physics exists only to provide artists with existential metaphors, as if we’re all here just to make a few shitty playwrights feel smart.”
Philip wondered if she really was as reactionary and unromantic as she wanted everyone to believe. “You know what your thing is, Anitka?”
She was leaning forward in such a way that told him they were both well on their way to getting drunk.
“You lack the imagination for this stuff.”
“Oh, is that what I’m lacking?”
“Okay, so your snow job with that journal showed a hell of a lot of imagination, but the hours you put into that silly paper could have been channeled into real mathematics.”
Her face seemed to be getting closer by the minute.
He looked down at his near-empty glass and signaled the bartender for another. “I’ll say one last thing. You could be a great scientist if you would stop throwing rotten fruit at the rest of us and take an honest look at your own work.”
His third martini appeared, and after a couple of swallows, something very strange happened, something he instantly wished hadn’t: Anitka blossomed right in front of him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her beauty before—Anitka’s good looks were not purely a result of gin and vermouth—it was just that he had never bothered to look at her long enough to take her in. She’s a departmental irritant, remember? A pest! She also tended to downplay her appearance by dressing in accordance with the sartorial rule of academia: the more subjective the discipline, the better the fashion sense; or to put it another way, the more poorly one dressed, the closer one was to the Mathematics Department.
But tonight, with the peach sweater against her skin and her hair pulled from her face, she was indisputably radiant. Those smooth Slavic cheeks and large, languid eyes—and that Russian accent. A flower in the Siberian tundra. Seriously, Philip, what is wrong with you?
As he strived to keep his eyes from straying below her neck, he had a sudden insane thought, one that hadn’t crossed his mind in thirty years of marriage: I could start a love affair right here and now. I could reignite my passion for life and beauty and science. And why not? Because something has to change. Something has to restart this broken-down machine.
He longed to ask her, “How does someone so beautiful get into theoretical physics?” But Philip wasn’t impaired enough to start asking such clumsy questions, and besides, he could guess the answer. Anitka had grown up in the Ukrainian countryside, where beautiful girls were everywhere, six-foot goddesses h
atching out of the ground like white turnips. And they weren’t suffocated with praise as they are in the States; they weren’t told from the age of five how lovely they were, because beauty had little value in a country where one was just trying to survive to the next week.
“Isn’t your wife expecting you for dinner?”
He cleared his throat. “She doesn’t really wait anymore.” He didn’t mean for it to sound so pathetic.
“I would wait.”
Philip responded by folding a napkin into increasingly small triangles. Anitka alleviated the silence by opening the cocktail menu. “I want my next drink to be exotic. Should I get a Heisenberg Highball?”
“Hmm. Uncertain.”
She hid her smile in the menu. “That is terrible. How about an Oppenheimer’s Manhattan?”
“I’ve had that one. It’s quite good.”
“No way! They make an Einstein on the Beach!”
As she rattled off a few more punny cocktails, Philip started to build a case in his mind for infidelity. There was, after all, a long history of scientific breakthroughs fueled by the intense combustion of this or that love affair. There was Robert Oppenheimer stealing away to see his lover Jean Tatlock one last time before leaving with his family for New Mexico to begin work on the atomic bomb, and Soviet physicist Lev Landau’s steady extramarital activity as he labored on his theory of quantum liquids. Einstein’s infidelities, of course, were lifelong and thoroughly documented, boring even in their transparency.