“Umm,” said Norbert, as if distracted.
Norbert drove out of the city along the San Diego Freeway. When a stretch of open road appeared, he stepped hard on the gas pedal. Nachman’s spine pressed against the seat.
“Too fast, don’t you think?” said Nachman.
“Are you serious?” There was contempt in Norbert’s question. He continued, “I do a hundred and fifty in the desert.”
Nachman glanced at the speedometer, saw that it read ninety-five, and then glanced at Norbert. What was he thinking? Norbert sat rigidly, staring down the road as if hypnotized by a point far off in the darkness. He was driving toward that point at greater and greater speed. But he was getting no closer, because the point existed only within Norbert, and they would probably be dead before he reached it. Minutes passed with only the drone of the big engine. The road rushed toward them and was swept under the devouring hood. Nachman watched cars and trucks far ahead loom suddenly and vanish in a blur and whoosh. Lights of oncoming traffic slashed by, going the other way. Slower lights of houses in the distance, along either side of the highway, moved like ships at sea. Norbert was driving well over a hundred miles per hour, speeding deeper into the night. Nachman was terrified, but trying to be a good friend, he said nothing to ruin Norbert’s mood. Norbert needed to drive fast, needed to terrify Nachman. If Nachman demanded to be let out, Norbert would doubtless slow down and apologize. Maybe he was waiting for Nachman to lose his composure. Nachman forced himself to abide silently in terror. He deserved it; he accepted it. Part of him imagined that he wanted it.
Norbert seemed abruptly to soften, to relent. He continued to stare straight ahead and was no less self-absorbed, but he slowed the car, then left the highway and returned to it in the direction of Santa Monica.
“Let’s have a drink,” he said.
With no enthusiasm, Nachman said, “Do you know a place?”
“I know a place.”
Norbert drove into Venice, and then to a bar in the middle of a long, poorly lighted street. It was a dark room with low ceilings and sawdust on the floor. Surfer types were shooting pool in the rear. Their girlfriends, scrawny blond kids who looked much alike, sat on a bench against a wall and smoked. Men in motorcycle leather were drinking beer at one end of the bar. Nachman would never have come to this place alone. But Norbert had a thick neck and broad shoulders. He was also fearless. He descended from Russian peasants. Shrewd, strong, dark, stocky, he had never once been sick, and never had a toothache. He’d played rugby in college, a game where men hurtle against one another, as in American football, but with no girlish helmets or shoulder pads. The atmosphere of the bar, like driving fast at night, suited Norbert’s mood. Nachman didn’t want to stay, but felt he owed his friend company the way convicts owe a debt to society. Norbert said, “I want a vodka martini. You, too?”
Nachman nodded yes, though he would have preferred a Coke. The bartender sneered, “Vodka martini?” as if Norbert had asked him to dance naked on a table. Norbert stared with no expression and said nothing, waiting for the bartender’s next remark. There was none. The bartender made the drinks. Norbert carried them to a booth.
“Here’s to life,” he said, his tone sour.
“Are you troubled about something?” Nachman blurted out the question.
“That’s how I seem to you?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not my problem.”
“Whose, then?”
“A guy in my department. You wouldn’t understand.”
“So it’s an academic problem?”
“The most academic problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard of Plato? The ancient Greeks talked about this problem in their philosophy departments. It’s about epistemology and fucking.”
“Come on, Norbert, spare me the lecture. What about this guy in your department?”
Norbert shook his head, evidently overwhelmed by the prospect of telling Nachman about the guy. Muscles began working in Norbert’s jaw, as if balls of feeling were being chewed. He had too much to say.
Nachman urged gently, “Tell me. What is the guy’s problem?”
“I already told you too much. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You said almost nothing.”
“All right, a student came on to him. That’s the problem. O.K.?”
“Could you say a little more?”
“Forgive me for saying this, but you live a small life. Somebody gives you a pencil and a piece of paper and you are a happy Nachman. Like a kid on a beach. Give him a pail and he is king of the sand, ten billion tons of sand. You follow? The sand is like life, but all you need is a pail.”
“Is this about me?”
“Of course not.”
“But you sound angry. Are you angry?” Nachman asked, risking the worst possible. He couldn’t go on with so much bad feeling suppressed.
“I’m angry at the guy with the problem. What a jerk. Imagine you are in your office, and a beautiful girl in a miniskirt is standing two inches from your nose. She is looking into your eyes and she smells good.”
“Why is she standing two inches from your nose?”
“It isn’t because she is nearsighted. She has no idea that anything she does has consequences. She is a girl.”
“All right, go on.”
“This girl is asking for advice about her major. Naturally, given such a provocative question, blood begins bulging in your manly part.”
“So what did this guy do?”
“He told her to get the hell out of his office and phone in her question.”
“I’m beginning to see the picture.”
“You disapprove? This is a story about nature. To you, maybe, nature is a foreign language.”
“Finish the story. What happened with the girl?”
“This guy kissed her and he put his hand between her legs.”
“Just like that? What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Ohhhhhh.’”
“I see the picture.”
“The guy can’t eat. Can’t sleep. He is crazy with jealousy because she sleeps with other guys. Look, it’s late. Do you want to get out of this dump and go home? You must want to go home. Say the word. Whatever you want.”
“If it helps you to talk, Norbert, I’ll listen all night. But there is something I must tell you.”
“You needn’t bother. I know you feel compromised. Adele told me about the mustache. She told me everything. It’s not your fault that you saw her on Fairfax Avenue.”
“So you’re angry at Adele?”
“I love Adele. Who wouldn’t love her? I asked her why is the mustache so important? Why do you need him? She says she doesn’t know why. Nachman, you live with numbers. One plus one is two. It was always two, and it will always be two. For you there are problems, but no mysteries. The solutions exist, so take a vacation.”
“Don’t say another word. A vision is coming. I see a man who looks like me walking on an empty beach. He is on vacation. I know this because he is barefoot, collecting seashells. Now he is holding a shell to his ear, listening to the ocean, the chaos in which this shell was born. He knows that it was shaped according to a law which is expressed in the ratio of the rings on the shell. My God, he realizes the shell can be described mathematically. The shell is a resolution of chaos, a mathematical entity. Do you understand?”
“Yes. You are constitutionally incapable of taking a vacation.”
“What’s real is numbers. When I solve a problem, I collect a piece of the real. Other men collect paintings, cars, Hawaiian shirts. They even collect women. So I’m a little different. You’re angry at Adele, but why at me?”
“You need to believe I’m angry at you?”
Norbert was clearly angry at Nachman. The feeling was mixed, but anger was there. He was angry because he had felt obliged, as a matter of pride, to confess the affair with the student. His confession sounded like boasting. It was forc
ed, somehow unconvincing. Nachman understood that Norbert was embarrassed as well as angry, and he was concerned to protect his wife.
“Does Adele know about the guy who kissed the girl?” asked Nachman.
“A man is a man.”
“He doesn’t have to account for himself?”
“There is always something for which there is no accounting. Take, for example, the whole world.”
“This is between you and me, not you and the whole world. If you’re angry at me, you should tell me why.”
“Let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”
Norbert got up and strode to the bar. He reached into his pants pockets, fingers scrabbling along his thighs, searching for money to tip the bartender. There had been ugly tension between them when he ordered. The gesture meant Norbert was leaving with no hard feelings. It also meant that Norbert had forgiven Nachman.
They drove in silence to Nachman’s house. As Nachman got out of the car, Norbert said, “Come to dinner this Friday. Adele told me to invite you.” Norbert’s expression, in the glow of the dashboard, was unreadable. His big head and the wide slope of his shoulders resembled a pit bull’s. The shape was very familiar to Nachman. Even if he saw only Norbert’s head, at a distance, in a crowded street among a hundred moving heads, it would be enough to recognize his old friend. Nachman said, “I’ll look forward to dinner.”
Later that night, as always before going to sleep, he sat in bed reading. The book was called Die Innenwelt der Mathematiker. Nachman read German slowly and with difficulty, struggling with the sentences, consulting a dictionary every few minutes. Five pages took him nearly an hour, but he persisted. The book examined the question of whether mathematics is a social creation or a mysterious gift offered to certain individuals. Nachman didn’t see how it could be a social creation. Mathematicians collaborated sometimes, but he had never heard anyone say, “We solved the problem.” Nachman had never even met a mathematician who could tell you how a solution came to him or her. It just came or it didn’t. The great genius Ramanujan said the goddess of Namakkal came to him in his dreams bearing formulas. Well, no goddess had ever come to Nachman. But he did occasionally awake at night and stumble from his bed to a nearby table where he kept a pencil and paper. In the morning, when he discovered that he had scribbled the solution to a problem, he didn’t always remember having done so. What could be less social? It couldn’t even be said Nachman socialized with himself. In truth, he didn’t really know what “social” meant. He and Norbert were the closest of friends, but were they social? Norbert was Norbert. In his pit-bull head, he dreamed of cars. Nachman was Nachman. He dreamed of numbers.
With the Innenwelt book open in his lap, Nachman fell asleep and had a vivid, frightening dream. He saw Adele kissing the mustache man. Nachman ran desperately toward them to pull her away. “No!” he cried, and he found himself awake, crying, “No, no, no!” his feet churning beneath the blanket, running nowhere.
Shaken by the dream, Nachman turned off the lamp and lay staring into the darkness. He didn’t know what, if anything, his dream had revealed to him. He was aware only of a certain tumultuous feeling. He’d been aware of it before, when Adele had asked if he was in love with her. He saw the silent question in her green eyes, and he heard her cigarette voice say, “I thought we were friends.” Nachman suddenly felt very lonely, lying in the darkness, wondering if he was in love with Adele.
Cryptology
NACHMAN HAD ARRIVED IN NEW YORK the previous evening, and was walking along Fifth Avenue when she came up behind him, calling, “Nachman, Nachman, is that you?” He looked back and saw a woman shining with happiness, for which he, apparently, was responsible. His mere existence had turned on her lights. Nachman kissed her on both cheeks, and then they stood chatting at the corner of Forty-second Street, the millions passing with the minutes. When Nachman parted from her, he was holding her business card and the key to her apartment in Chelsea, having promised to join her and her husband for dinner that evening.
“If you arrive before us, just wait in the apartment,” she had said. “It’s been so many years, Nachman. I’m Helen Ferris now. Do you know my husband, Benjamin Strong Ferris? He’s a lawyer. Also a name in computer science and cryptology. I assume you’re in New York for the cryptology conference. Benjamin goes there to find geniuses like you for his company.”
“As a matter of fact …” Nachman had said, but she was still talking.
“It would be wonderful if we could have a drink, just you and me, and remember the old days, but I have to run. There’ll be time to talk later. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we ran into each other. Actually, Nachman, I followed you for about five blocks. I couldn’t believe it was you. Benjamin will be so delighted. He’s heard me talk about you so often. Should I cook, or should we have dinner out? Oh, let’s decide later.”
When she had stopped talking, Nachman said he didn’t know the name Benjamin Strong Ferris, and he didn’t consider himself a genius. “I’m a good mathematician,” he added. “Good is rare enough.”
Helen Ferris smiled with affectionate understanding, as if his modesty amused her, but there was also something more. She seemed to believe a special bond existed between them. While Nachman’s every word nourished her smile, her dark brown eyes bloomed with sensual anticipation, as if at any moment Nachman might do something very pleasing. To disguise his ignorance — what special bond was there between them? — Nachman became expansive, even somewhat confessional.
He told Helen Ferris that he was indeed in New York for the cryptology conference; he’d been invited to a job interview by a representative of the Delphic Corporation. But whoever had invited him hadn’t given his name.
Helen Ferris obviously took great pleasure in listening to Nachman, and yet, in the center of her rapt, almost delirious focus, Nachman saw a curious blank spot, as if she were not conversing so much as savoring. Her brown eyes devoured his, and her smile suggested a rictus in its unrelieved tension and shape. This intensity, and her alarming red lipstick, made Nachman think she wanted to eat him. A smile is a primitive expression, he supposed, carried in the genes, the reflexive anticipation of a meal — not necessarily of people, but who knows the ancestral diet? Nachman smiled in response, but felt no desire to eat her.
“So the person who invited you didn’t give his name?” she prompted.
She’d repeated the information, presumably, to hold Nachman a moment longer and give him a chance to say something more. Her devouring smile made him nervous, and he astonished himself by talking like a man making a police report, obsessed with facts.
“The letter was signed by a secretary. Abigail Stokes. She just gave me the name of the hotel and a date and time for the interview. To tell the truth, I didn’t really come to New York because of the interview — I wanted to visit my father, who lives in Brooklyn. I haven’t seen him in years. And since Delphic was paying for my plane ticket and hotel room, why not? The interview was set for one o’clock this afternoon, and I figured they were taking me to lunch, but nobody was there to meet me. No one at the hotel desk had heard of the Delphic Corporation, and my room had been paid for by someone whose name they weren’t free to disclose.”
He paused after his recitation of the facts, then gave her a last little personal tidbit to chew on. “So, since then I’ve been walking around feeling a bit … I don’t know what. Weirdly disappointed.”
“It is weird,” said Helen Ferris. “But why feel disappointed? You got a free trip to New York. How clever of you! The airline ticket was prepaid?”
“If I had to put down one cent to fly three thousand miles and meet a nameless person, I wouldn’t be here,” said Nachman, with indignation. “I hate to travel, but I showed up for the interview. The other party didn’t.”
“I see. You were hurt. You’re sure there was no other name at the bottom of the letter? It didn’t say something like ‘Abigail Stokes for Joe Schmo’?”
Nachman wondered fleetingly i
f Helen Ferris thought he was an idiot.
“No Joe Schmo. Somebody anonymous wanted to interview me for a job. I have a job. I’m not looking for another one. But I agreed to come. Why not? I figured I might even learn about cryptology, an exciting field. A good mathematician could make a lot of money fooling with codes.”
“But that’s not like you. Would you really have considered taking the job?”
“I guess not, though it might be fun to be a millionaire. I fancied myself buying things like a dishwasher, but I don’t work for money. You know what I mean. My salary check pays my bills. I work like most people, not to waste my life.”
Nachman had begun to relax into his subject. “Have you been to Santa Monica? That’s where I live. On the beach you see people with nice bodies and no jobs. Also no brains. Life is too short to waste a minute getting a sunburn. I’ve never even taken a vacation. I don’t know why anybody would want to. Anyhow, as I said, I wanted to visit my father. This was an opportunity. Expenses paid by the Delphic mystery man.”
“You don’t own a dishwasher?” Helen Ferris asked, giggling. “That’s also mysterious. I bet I know what happened. Delphic sent out a form letter signed by Abigail Stokes. The letter went to a hundred mathematicians like you. A few of them accepted the invitation and came to New York. Before you arrived, Delphic decided to hire one of these. So you no longer existed as far as they were concerned. They simply forgot about you.”
“But they paid for my ticket and hotel room.”
“Just the cost of doing business. You feel disappointed, but it isn’t the least bit personal. You mean nothing to them.”
“I’m meaningless?” This was the one clear thought that emerged from her pelting of words.
“Not to me,” Helen Ferris said. Was she teasing him? Or was she right?
“I’ve got to go,” she said, touching his chest lightly. “I’m so excited. We’ll have fun tonight.”
When they parted, Nachman wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen Helen Ferris. He also wondered who, exactly, was Helen Ferris?
The Collected Stories Page 44