Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  She flinched when she saw my hair, and I felt her draw away when she hugged me. I take a deep breath and let it out.

  Three weeks of this.

  Paul comes around the corner before my mind can begin to reconfigure this into a formula, and his foot hits the first step before he sees me. I grin at his look of surprise, the way he has to stop his long body from continuing the climb before he folds his legs beneath him and sits on the step below me.

  “How you doing?” he asks.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I say, and I realize that I am. In fact, I realize that I haven’t felt this rush, this crazy mix of emotions, in over a year, and I feel strong with it. I lean down and kiss Paul on his beautiful lips, surprising him. I am surprised too. The numbers have fled my brain and for a moment he is all I need.

  “Let’s do this thing,” I say, inclining my head down the stairs, and he grins at me, feeling my strength. He stands and pulls me forward and I join my downstairs life, accepting a glass of wine and looking forward to dinner.

  With my sister.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Halfway down the staircase, I faltered and considered turning around and burrowing into my borrowed bed. But I heard laughter filtering from the kitchen, and then music, and knew that for this house, the night was just getting started. I took a deep breath and found myself walking through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” Paul said, “there she is.”

  They all turned to look at me. Estella sat at the kitchen table, drawing something on graph paper for one of the students, and she motioned me over, startling me again with her ease among so many vibrant young people.

  “Let her through,” she said, and the students parted and Chelsea pulled a chair out for me. I murmured a thank-you as I sat, and nodded another thank-you as Paul poured me a new glass of wine.

  “Lisa?” I asked, looking around, and the blond young woman with the startling blue eyes lifted a hand in a little wave. “Thank you so much for giving up your room. It’s lovely.”

  “No problem,” she said with a grin. “Chelsea and I will have a sleepover, just like high school. It’ll be fun.”

  “Can I come too?” Steve piped up, and Lisa slapped him lightly on the arm. I sat back and relaxed a little, looking over at Estella. Her head was bent close to Chris’s, the two of them inspecting something on the graph paper.

  Chelsea leaned over them, pointing with a pencil and saying something about a devil’s curve and polar equations while Phil watched quietly, his lower lip caught in his teeth. I felt another pang, and realized with a start that it was jealousy. We’d had nights like this at our house, before Gib perfected his distance, before Luke started screwing baristas, before we seemed to want to be anywhere but in the same room together.

  “Soup’s on,” Paul announced, and everyone grabbed something to bring to the dining room. A breadbasket was placed in my hands, and I followed Estella, who was carrying a huge wooden bowl of salad, out to the table. Julia, one of the high school students, smiled shyly at me and patted the seat next to her. “You can sit over here, Connie.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and took the chair. The usual flutter of passing bowls and plates commenced amid good-natured banter, and I realized with surprise that I was hungry. I took a good helping of everything and was about to raise my fork to my lips when Paul stood, his glass of wine raised.

  “A toast, please, quiet down,” he said, and everyone found a glass of wine or soda. “A thank-you to our family for being here tonight to welcome Connie to our home. We’ve provided sustenance so you won’t eat her, a Go board in the living room so you won’t force her to dance for your entertainment, and wine, except for you poor underage folk, so that she may see us all through the fuzzy haze of liquor and won’t speak too badly of us when she returns home.”

  Everyone stood and leaned in to clink glasses and I said, “Thank you,” touched by such hospitality from Paul, who’d looked anything but hospitable when I’d arrived on the porch. As the serious eating got under way the conversation turned naturally toward classes and teachers. I stayed silent, listening to the foreign math terms and the gossip about professors, and much of the humor flew completely over my head.

  I saw the looks that passed between Paul and Estella and found myself reassessing Paul. I’d always thought of him in a rather vague Estella’s friend way, but it was obvious that they were still deeply in love after more than ten years together. In fact, everyone seemed solicitous of Estella. She was less, I realized, like a popular friend and more like a protected mother figure. For the first time, I wondered if she was sorry that she hadn’t had children.

  The wood pieces around the room caught my eye. I’d never seen any of Paul’s work up close before, though Mother had shown me pictures of his bowls and sculptures. The pictures hadn’t done them justice. The bowls were exquisite, shaped out of the burls of trees, and highly polished so that the grain was revealed in stark contrast.

  The sculptures were all free-form, and many had blackened centers, with pieces of the wood flowing up like flames around them, as though he’d burned right down to their hearts and then carved them from there. My gaze froze on a picture frame. Most were empty, but this one was filled. I recognized the photo, and I glanced at Estella, looking for something I couldn’t define.

  “Your work is beautiful,” I said, flushing when I realized that I had interrupted a conversation, but Paul smiled openly at me.

  “Thank you,” he said with a nod. “I don’t usually keep so many pieces here, but a gallery is having a show next week and I’m stocking up for it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry we won’t be here for it.”

  He shrugged. “No big deal. There’s always a show going on somewhere. Estella’s been to enough of them to last a lifetime I’m sure.”

  “You finish the pieces here?” I asked, recalling the room upstairs.

  He nodded. “If I had more room here I’d move my entire workshop. I do the major work a few blocks away, and I used to finish everything there, but after Estella—”

  “I got tired of him coming home late,” Estella interrupted, with a bright smile at Paul.

  Paul agreed. “So I fixed the guest room upstairs into my finishing room. I try to stock up on pieces, do the turning on several at once, and then bring them all home. That way I can be here for long stretches of time. Stinks up the house a little, but at least I’m here.”

  “It must be nice to have him home so much,” I said to Estella. It was such an odd pairing. I had always pictured Estella with an older mathematics professor, or maybe a scientist, or, most often, alone. “It’s interesting that you two got together,” I blurted out and instantly regretted it. Paul looked at me quizzically.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Estella’s so . . . math-oriented, that’s all. And your work is creative. It’s just an interesting mix.”

  “Math and creativity?” Paul asked, and my mouth dried up when I realized I had the whole table’s attention.

  “Yes, you know, opposites attract and all that, I guess,” I finished lamely, feeling more out of place than ever. But to my surprise, everyone began speaking at once.

  Paul waved his hand to quiet the students and took a sip of wine. “Actually, math enables creativity, it supports it. I work with a natural medium, and Nature is the most exacting mathematician there is. My work has only benefited from Estella’s knowledge.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “This is an old, old discussion,” Estella said to me with a smile. “Not just around this table, but in the math world, the art world, the music world.”

  I nodded, thinking of Carson and my own music training. “Music is math, math is music,” I said, repeating Mr. Hailey’s words as if they were my own. I felt my cheeks burning.

  “Exactly,” Lisa said. “Look at Berg’s ‘Lyric Suite.’ Everything’s based on twenty-three and its multiples. He did that on purpose, planned it out.”<
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  “Beethoven and Shubert too,” Julia said.

  “Yeah, but they didn’t do it on purpose, and it wasn’t twenty-three,” Phil argued, looking to Chelsea to see if she approved.

  “How do you know they didn’t do it on purpose?” Julia contested.

  “And what about poetry?” Estella said, steering the conversation, obviously used to the little skirmishes.

  “Omar Khayyám,” Hal mumbled around a mouthful of spaghetti.

  “The Rubaiyat,” I said in surprise, and Hal nodded, swallowing and taking a big gulp of wine as he waved a piece of garlic bread at Chelsea to indicate that she should enlighten me.

  “He introduced a solar calendar superior to the Gregorian calendar in the eleventh century,” she said.

  Hal finally took a break from all the chewing. “Twelfth,” he said.

  “Eleventh,” Steve said, coming to his girlfriend’s defense, though he looked uncertain. “He also published a treatise on algebra. There have always been people like that, who’ve mixed mathematics and art of one kind or another. Look at da Vinci.”

  “Well, it was only a matter of time before someone brought him up,” Paul said with a smile.

  “Language is math too,” Phil said, apparently full of one-liner facts. “Hebrew is math.”

  “And you’ve been watching Pi again, haven’t you?” Julia shot at Phil. “That’s numerology, not math.”

  “What do you know?” Phil asked. “You’ve never even seen it.”

  “The Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, they used Nature’s numbers, divine proportion and all that, even before da Vinci came along. I think he just put stuff down in writing before a lot of people,” Chris said.

  “That’s one theory,” Estella said. “But if we’re talking about that Leonardo we can’t forget—”

  “Fibonacci,” Lisa interrupted. “Three hundred years before da Vinci, Chris.”

  “Yes, but da Vinci was the first to introduce the principles in great art,” Steve said.

  “That’s debatable,” Hal said mildly.

  “Raphael, Rembrandt, Chagall, Dalí,” Chelsea said. “All geniuses, whether they even knew they were doing it or not, they were all fascinated by dynamic symmetry in nature.”

  My head was spinning. I had no idea what they were talking about. Estella, grinning at the discussion, saw the bewilderment on my face.

  “Dynamic symmetry encompasses what’s known as the golden rectangle, the golden triangle, and so forth. The divine logarithmic spiral, which da Vinci was intrigued with, is found in Nature all the time.”

  “I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “This is all a bit over my head.”

  “No, it’s not, it’s just the terms you’re unfamiliar with. Think of a ram’s horn, a spiral galaxy, the bands of a hurricane. There are specific proportions that repeat themselves over and over in Nature, which you would think would mostly concern mathematicians and scientists. But artists and poets and musicians throughout history have either consciously or unconsciously used those same proportions in their work. Math is connected to creativity in all kinds of ways we don’t completely understand. You should know that, Connie, you’re a wonderful musician.”

  “Bees are mathematicians,” Phil said. “Hexagonal tiling. Plants too. Phyllotaxis.” But everyone was looking at me.

  “What do you play?” Lisa asked.

  “Violin,” I said. “But Estella thinks too much of my talent.”

  “Not true,” Estella said quietly, and when she looked directly at me across the table it was as if the rest of the people in the room disappeared. The moment passed quickly. “She’s very talented.”

  “Will you play for us?” Hal asked, still shoveling food into his mouth.

  “Oh, no. Besides, I don’t have my violin,” I lied.

  “Yes, she does,” Chris said, and Phil shot him the sort of shut up, stupid look I’d seen passed between my own sons, but Chris either didn’t see or chose to ignore it. “It’s in the backseat. Case is, anyway.” He finally looked up to see everyone staring at him, and he ducked his head in embarrassment. “Uh, I really like the Escalade. We were just checking it out. I didn’t touch it or anything.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll let you look at it after dinner.”

  Chris shot Phil a smug look. “Cool.”

  “You brought your violin?” Estella asked. “Would you play?”

  “No, I couldn’t,” I said. “I’m exhausted, and besides, I don’t have anything prepared.” Which was another lie. I was forty years old. I had plenty of pieces I could have played with my eyes closed.

  “I play piano,” Chelsea said. “Got a keyboard upstairs. Come on, they make me play all the time. It would be nice to have some accompaniment.”

  I shook my head again, beginning to feel a little desperate, and Estella stood and grabbed her plate. “Let’s clear and get ready for dessert,” she said, taking the attention off me.

  Everyone took their own plates and began to make their way to the kitchen, with me following, my own hands full too. “What’s for dessert?” I asked, and they all started laughing, turning toward me with grins.

  “What?” I asked, just as the high school students, as if waiting for the question, all yelled “Pie!” at the same time.

  It took me a minute, and then I shook my head. “Who knew math was so funny,” I said, rolling my eyes at the continuing giggles as we milled around the kitchen, getting in one another’s way as much as we were helping.

  After pie, after coffee, after more useless protestations, I took Chris and Phil out to inspect the Escalade, and Chris carried my violin in to the living room. I tucked my wedding rings in the case and dragged out my preparations, tightening and rosining the bow, tuning, fussing with the shoulder rest. I was ready to play just as Chelsea got her keyboard set up. I was almost hyperventilating. I’d never had a problem with performance anxiety before, but here in my sister’s house, thrown off by the entire happy household vibe, I struggled to find where I fit, and came up empty.

  “What’s your poison?” Chelsea asked.

  “We’ve been working on ‘La Rejouissance’,” I said hopefully, looking at the sheet music at the top of my stack, but Chelsea shook her head, flipping through her music.

  “Nope, love Handel though. How about Vivaldi?”

  “ ‘Spring’?” I asked.

  “But of course,” she said with a grin.

  This is knew I had. I riffled through my music but Chelsea was already holding the pull-out violin section from her own music, and I smiled a thanks at her. She nodded, allowed me to set up, make a few more adjustments, and after a couple of abbreviated starts, we were off, alternately looking at our music and watching each other.

  Spring did indeed return with the first notes swooping down like the birds from the trees, and the birds sang for me, joyfully and with only a few errors that nobody else seemed to notice. As always, “Spring” seemed to make everyone happy, and Lisa rose and pulled Julia up with her and they performed an impromptu, technically doubtful but joyful ballet across the tile.

  The birds were closely followed by the fountains and they flowed easily, bouncing along in their constant movement, challenging me. Chelsea and I played well together, and when we finished we took exaggerated bows and curtsies.

  Prodded by Estella, they talked me into a short Tartini solo, and then Chelsea put my own carelessly phrased playing to shame with an accomplished Beethoven sonata. We finished together with a choppy, laughing “Flight of the Bumblebee,” or what I could manage to chime in with anyway, and I was sure that Chelsea toned down her obvious talent to match my own rusty performance.

  “Encore, encore!” Paul shouted and the rest of them took up the cry, but I demurred, claiming exhaustion. Chelsea looked pointedly at her watch.

  “We’ve got to get these kids home anyway,” she said, nodding at the already protesting high school students. “I’ll drive them, it’s too late for the bus. I’ll need to get out,” C
helsea said to me as I was putting my violin away, and I remembered the Cutlass in the driveway. Of course it was Chelsea’s, not Paul or Estella’s. But it didn’t irritate me as much as it once might have.

  Once the students left, Estella and I cleaned up the dessert and coffee dishes, and I started a hundred different conversations in my mind, but each time I opened my mouth, Estella turned away to open a cupboard or hang up a towel.

  “Well, I guess I’ll get to bed. Long day,” I said, but her back was to me as she rinsed cups.

  “Good night,” she said. “You played beautifully.”

  I was already out the swinging door when she said it, and I’m sure my thank-you was lost.

  I lay awake, unable to drift off. Estella and I had spent all but the beginning and the end of the night surrounded by other people. I could distill our conversation down to a few sentences. We hadn’t even discussed Mother’s absence. Tomorrow we wouldn’t have the distraction of Paul and the students. Two people in a car on a long ride are very alone if they aren’t talking to each other.

  I heard Lisa and Chelsea giggling in their room, occasionally breaking out into full-fledged laughter, and felt those pangs of jealousy again. Estella was so lucky, I thought, and then immediately listed the reasons why I was luckier, but they seemed hollow. A sweet aroma tickled my nose, and I thought that the girls lit some incense, but I laughed softly when I recognized the smell of pot within a few moments.

  I lay there for a few more minutes, arguing with myself, and then made my decision. For the first time since college I was alone. Not just alone, but lonely. The evening, surrounded by young people without the weight of divorce hanging over them, without the hostility I felt in my own home, made me desperate to feel part of something again. There was nobody to worry about but myself. No kids, no husband, just me.

  I crept down the hall and knocked lightly at their door, whispering, “It’s just Connie.” Lisa cracked the door and peered out at me. When I grinned at her she giggled and opened the door enough to allow me to slip in, welcomed back into that old familiar place of girly friendship that I had lost long ago.