The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  As Rosenblum said, he was still a young man.

  “Mister. Hey, Mister.”

  But it was nothing, the wind.

  That first night as newlyweds in their first apartment together in Philadelphia, seventeen years ago, a lifetime, Louisa asked him why his mother hadn’t remarried.

  “Really? You want to talk about my mother?” They were in bed, where they’d been all evening, eating fried chicken from a bucket, entirely naked and planning their futures.

  “She’s a nice woman, and she’s good-looking,” Lou said, picking a crispy bit of skin off a drumstick. Andy had never eaten in bed before he met Louisa, never spent entire hours naked (nudity was for showers and medical procedures), never kissed anyone after waking up and before brushing his teeth. Her work hours were odd, staggered—she’d have twelve-hour shifts for three days straight and then a week off—and Andy found himself unable to write his dissertation when she was home (oh, to be naked, eating fried chicken off dirty sheets, Louisa’s tan back) and unable to work when she was away, either—he could only sleep or count the hours until she came home. Now he pressed his thigh against her calf, picked up her arm with the scar along the cephalic vein and kissed her there.

  “No, really, why do you think that is?” she asked. “Has she just not recovered from your father’s death?”

  Andy shrugged. In the years since he’d lost his father, he’d never considered his mother remarrying. They were so much a set, his parents—yin and yang, salt and pepper—that for either of them to make a life with someone else would have felt nonsensical. And as soon as he died, she’d seemed to cut off the part of herself that might share a life with someone else. She’d sold the house in Shaker Heights, moved to a condo in Akron. Sold his father’s car, donated his clothes. “I think she lost the taste for marriage to anyone else,” he said. “A lot of widows do.”

  “But not widowers?”

  “Widowers remarry,” Andy said. “At least that’s what I’m told.”

  “Would you? If I died?”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’d want you to,” she said. She leaned back across the bed, totally naked, smelling like vegetable oil and chicken. “If I die, I want you to remarry. She has to be uglier than me, of course, not as smart or funny or blah blah blah.”

  He was still holding her arm. “A pale imitation.” He sucked on her finger.

  “The palest. But still. You shouldn’t be alone, Andy. It’s not good for a person.”

  “I can’t believe you actually want to talk about this.”

  “Seriously, Andy.”

  Was this a conversation they had really had? In bed, on their first night as a married couple? Or was this a conversation he wanted to remember, especially as the undergraduates were spilling out of their classes and tumbling across the quad, toward the cafeteria or the few shabby eating places on Main Street in Reed Township? He was sitting here by the faculty parking lot, shivering in the cold, because he did not want to see Melissa. He had not seen her or talked to her since the baptism, and almost certainly she’d come looking for him in his office.

  He wanted to think about Louisa, reimagine the things she might have told him.

  “Andy! Is that you? I thought that was you. I was looking for you at your office but you weren’t there.”

  Found, but it was only Linda Schoenmeyer, puffy and out of breath as she walked across campus in the wind. She was wearing one of her huge shawls, and the tassels at the ends fluttered. Her face was pink. “Rosemary said I might be able to find you here. Do you mind if I sit? Tuna, is that what you’re eating? Looks good.”

  Andy gestured for her to take the seat next to him, but she sat down opposite him and crossed her hands on the table. Linda wore rings on every finger: moonstones, topazes.

  “Is something the matter?” Had he forgiven her for her brutality at Marty’s party? He probably had. She couldn’t help her behavior any more than he could help his own.

  “One of your students—you know Lionel Shell, correct?”

  “A bit,” Andy said. “I think he’s a fan of mine.”

  “I should say,” Linda said. “Somehow he’s managed to finagle getting credit two times for your course.”

  “Yes, well—” Andy hedged. How annoying the way Linda always made him feel he’d done something wrong. “He wrote two entirely different term papers, we had two different reading lists—”

  “No, that’s fine. It’s just he’s in my ornithology class this semester and I was wondering if he seemed, I don’t know, all right to you. Mentally.”

  “I don’t—I mean he’s never been the most normal kid, I guess. He’s eccentric.”

  “He’s incredibly depressed, Andy. Or at least that’s what I think is going on. I caught him crying outside my classroom twice, and when he bothers to come at all, he just sits there looking like his best friend died. It’s disturbing. Sometimes he starts to shake. And then sometimes he takes these frantic notes—at least I thought they were notes, but when I asked to see what he was writing he refused to show me.”

  “He shakes?” Andy said.

  “Shakes,” Linda said. She shook her head, cast her eyes toward the picnic table so Andy could see the sparkly blue she wore on her lids. “I called him in for a conference, just to see what was going on. He said you were the only person on campus he felt like he could talk to.”

  “Me?”

  “He also said a few things about existentialism I didn’t really get.” Linda blew out through her mouth. “I’m just wondering if you wanted to talk to the kid, maybe, or if I should get student services involved or what.”

  “His twin sister’s an existentialist,” Andy said. “That’s what he told me.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s very upset about Camus.”

  “Camus,” Linda said. She allowed herself a small smile, then thought the better of it. “Well, I don’t know much about that,” she said. “Or anything else as far as philosophy goes, but if this student’s going to blow then I think it’s our responsibility to get him the help he needs. And since he said you were his close adviser—”

  “Hardly,” Andy said. “The kid doesn’t even like me, as far as I know. He took my class twice just so he could fight with me about God.”

  “I’m just telling you what he told me, Andy. I asked him if there was anyone he thought he could talk to, and he said you were the only person who might understand.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with him.”

  “You sure?” Linda said. “I could put in a call to student services.” She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, waited for Andy’s nod. “By the way,” here her voice turned coy, “it was very nice to meet your lady friend. I have to say I was surprised. Not at all what I expected. But you’ve been alone long enough.”

  A shot of cold stabbed at Andy’s gut. Linda found out about Melissa?

  “How long have you two been together, anyway?”

  Andy found himself searching for how to phrase it, how to explain himself, not that Linda seemed the least bit mad—only amused. Why was she amused? Wasn’t it actionable behavior to become sexually involved with an undergraduate? And here he’d done it so stupidly, so casually, letting her become part of his life.

  “Oh, don’t tell me it’s over already,” Linda said, trying to gauge Andy’s muttering. “That’s really too bad. We all liked her so much.”

  Sheila. She meant Sheila.

  “Well,” Andy said. “We’re just—” He waited for his tongue to recover his words. “It’s still a casual thing.”

  “I see,” Linda said. “Well, like I said, a very nice lady.” She stood, heavily, hands on her knees. “Anyway, do me a favor and get in touch with Lionel Shell. I don’t want any of our students offing themselves on my watch.” And then she lumbered back toward campus, into the wind, her shawl blowing behind her like a sail.

  DUTIFULLY, ANDY SENT off the e-mail to Lionel before he returned home for the e
vening: Just checking in, wanted to see how you were—which sounded much too chummy for his ears but he wasn’t sure how else to phrase his concern. Then he got back in time for Rachel’s Caesar salad and homework.

  “You know, for a scientist you really don’t know much about geology,” said Belle, who had moved on from volcanoes to a map of the striations of New Jersey bedrock. Her drawings were spread out in front of them on the kitchen table. Behind them, sitting on the counter, Rachel was using his laptop to type away in Google Chat, talking to someone he didn’t know about something his eyes weren’t good enough to catch.

  “I haven’t studied geology since college, Belle,” he said, gently tugging on one of her braids for insubordination.

  “Yeah, but you don’t even know how to spell aeolian. I mean, come on.” She shook her head at him, left for the siren call of the TV.

  “Rachel, what are you writing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did I give you permission to use that program?”

  “I’m in public,” she said. “What’s your problem?”

  Andy sighed, got a glass out of the cabinet. He needed to steal his laptop back momentarily, see if Melissa had written to him, try to figure out what to say back to her. He poured himself some water, wished there was some junk food in the house, something his daughter hadn’t assiduously prepared. Something with nitrates.

  “So who were you writing to, anyway?”

  “Lily Dreisinger,” Rachel said.

  “Why don’t I know this Lily Dreisinger?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “You’ve met her. She was at the father-daughter dance.”

  All those glittery preteens, impossible to tell apart. Andy leaned back against the counter. “You were writing to her quite enthusiastically.”

  “We’re in a fight.”

  “You are? About what?”

  “God,” Rachel said.

  “Seriously?”

  “I told her about Belle’s baptism, about how we believe in God now, and she said that we didn’t believe in the real God because we don’t belong to a church, and how we were probably still going to hell, and I was like, whatever, you’re an idiot, and she was like I shouldn’t pretend to be something I’m not just to fit in. We’ve been kind of fighting about this for a while. She’s sort of really mean when it comes to this stuff.”

  “I see,” Andy said. He sipped his water. His ripple effect.

  “Is that what you think we were doing?” he asked. “Just trying to fit in by going to church?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s what I told Lily, that it’s not like everyone needs to do exactly what she does to be cool, or whatever. But she can be such a bitch.”

  “Rachel—”

  “Sorry,” she said, looking abashed. “I shouldn’t say that.”

  “No,” he said. “You shouldn’t.”

  In the back of a cabinet, he found a small package of Oreos, which had probably been there for months. Did Oreos expire? He shook out several cookies, put them on a plate, sat down at the table across from his daughter. She looked at them for a second, weighing the various chemicals and sugars, and then gave in to being eleven and popped one in her mouth.

  Andy ate one the way he did as a child, twisting off the top, licking off the cream.

  “We need some milk,” Rachel said.

  “True,” Andy said, but neither one got up to get any.

  “So I have a question for you,” Andy said, when they had reduced the number of Oreos on their plate by half. “Why do you think we really went to church? If it wasn’t just because everybody else does?”

  Rachel shook her head, wiped some chocolate crumbs off her mouth. “I think we were trying to be happy,” she said.

  “That’s all?”

  “What do you mean that’s all?” Rachel said. “It’s a big thing.”

  She twisted off the lid of an Oreo, mimicking Andy. “We were trying to be happy,” she said again. “And I think we were.”

  SEVENTEEN

  When he finally saw Melissa again three days later, she was the apologetic one. “Studying for finals,” she said, throwing an arm around his neck, even though they were practically in public, in his office. “What a drag.” Then she kissed him, and he almost gave himself whiplash twisting away. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re in my office,” he said.

  “So?” She moved some papers off his chair, sat down on it, slung a leg over the arm like she was posing for a men’s magazine. Had he ever seen her sit like this, her legs splayed apart?

  “Melissa,” he said, gesturing with a hand to get her to sit up straight, but she didn’t seem to understand. How would he feel if Rachel came into her professor’s office (Rachel, only seven and a half years from college, ten years younger than Melissa) and sat right down and spread her legs like this? He would kill her, that’s what he would do. He would ground her until the end of time.

  “What, are you sick of me?” She batted her eyes at him the way she sometimes did, as though he should find her irresistible.

  Andy grinned through his embarrassment, shook his head.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  He sat down on his desk near her, and after a moment’s thought took her warm pudgy hand. He had to do this. Did he have to do it here? Probably, unfortunately.

  But before he could speak: “So I have the rest of my paper,” she said.

  “Your paper?”

  “Jeez, fuzzy-head,” she said, taking her hand away so she could smack him, playfully. “My independent study. You know, the reason I met you in the first place.”

  They were still doing her independent study? Suddenly the whole of the past nine months seemed to tunnel away from him. There had been moments he could remember—his trip to Florida, the baptism—but the day-to-day stuff, the research, the grades, the showering, the commuting, the soccer practices: had any of this even happened? He ran a hand through his hair to make sure it was still there.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I just—I’ve been sort of out of it lately,” he said. Maybe he was wrong about Melissa. Maybe she really could understand him. This was how he felt after Lou died: unsure about everything, about who he was supposed to be and what he knew. Melissa was looking at him, concerned. “I’ve been having a hard time with my focus,” he said.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Because my uncle, for a long time, he had all these problems focusing and concentrating and then it turned out he had Lou Gehrig’s disease.” She smiled, abashed. “Not that I think you have Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  “Melissa, look, I’m not sure we should keep doing whatever we’ve been doing,” he said, but she wasn’t listening, or if she was she was going to pretend she wasn’t. She was riffling through her backpack, retrieving a large white binder. Written on the cover, in marker: The Proof of God’s Hand, an Independent Study, Written in Conjunction with Andrew Waite, PhD, by Melissa Anne Potter, April 15, 2012.

  “Your independent study,” he said, weakly.

  “Do you like the title?”

  He took it in his hands. It was heavy: the expensive brand of binder. He flipped it open, thirty pages, with a table of contents listing things like “The Human Eye” and “The Paradox of Nothing.”

  “But did we ever really work on intelligent design together?” he said. “I mean, did we really write this in conjunction?”

  “Well, I guess we didn’t really write it together,” she said. She looked guilty. “I could change that title if you want. Maybe just ‘written under the auspices’ or something like that.”

  “No,” Andy said. He put the binder down. “What I mean is that I can’t remember us ever really talking about intelligent design together. I don’t remember ever going through the facts of intelligent design, trying to pin them down and prove them.”

  “Are you serious?” Melissa said. “We talked about God forever. We went to church togethe
r!”

  “Yes, but I don’t think I—did you ever explain it to me?”

  She looked at him, blank and worried.

  “I just don’t think I did a very good job of challenging you,” he said.

  “That’s because you didn’t want to challenge me. I convinced you of God’s design,” she said. “Or my books did. Or Pastor Cling. I shouldn’t really take the credit,” she said. “But we came to an understanding of what God’s design is. We both did. You read the books!”

  She was a wide girl with a wide-open face, open gray eyes framed in thin lashes. Her bushy hair in a ponytail, her cross resting comfortably beneath her clavicle. She had brought her legs back together and was now sitting primly, her hands nervously clenched on her lap. She was a good person, a sweet person, and he had failed her in more ways than he could count.

  “I just don’t even know if we ever properly defined intelligent design,” Andy said.

  “It’s all here,” she said. “In my paper. I defined my terms, of course I did.” The space between her eyes wrinkled. “I don’t understand what the problem is, Andy. We talked through all this stuff. Remember? We talked about images of God, and about the way God has a design for each of us, and we talked about vindictiveness and justice—”

  That old decrepit testament.

  “We talked about the way God is watching over each of us.”

  “Right, but in terms of the design of human beings—I just don’t remember doing any adequate research into that with you. I don’t remember doing any interrogation. If we had—if we had I don’t think I’d be able to sign off on this paper, Melissa.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry. But nothing we talked about convinced me that God, or an Intelligent Designer, specifically planned out the biological function of each living thing.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. She sat back in her chair. “Where is this coming from? Are you mad because I bought your daughters those clothes?”

  “What proof did you use? What scientific proof?”

  “Are you mad about something else?”