A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  Joe changed the subject. “I've been seeing Senator Solomon on TV a lot. He comes off better these days.”

  “I have to go,” Emmett said abruptly. “I am suddenly very busy.” Their conversation was over.

  After his call with Joe, Emmett called his friend Peter, who was reporting from Moscow for various newspapers and magazines. Emmett grilled the reporter, trying to determine Irina’s sad fate. Had a beautiful Moscow film star committed suicide one year ago? Peter had never heard of Irina, had heard nothing of a suicide. Emmett told him the director’s name, the film company’s name, and asked him to come up with something. At eight, he heard his daughter stirring, lifted her out of bed, asking her little nonsense questions – “Are you my little Paulette? My little Paulette Goddard? Are you daddy’s little angel?” – and made her breakfast in the kitchen, while he told her facts about Istanbul and little jokes about Ataturk. “Isn’t that interesting?” he asked her, and she nodded, her little face beaming.

  Emmett left his daughter in front of the television, wrote a first draft of his article, praising the films from Kazakhstan – who would have guessed it! – trashing the Turkish films for their murky brown tint, political skittishness and exploitative sexual angle. And of course he waxed poetic about Irina, the beautiful potential worldwide movie star, life cut short tragically, reportedly a suicide, though very little was known about her. The festival had provided a film still from Chernyy Glaz, a scene of Irina with her celluloid husband on the dark streets of Moscow, something Emmett had apparently slept through. He worried just a bit. Perhaps the film was not quite as good as he had imagined in the center of Istanbul, half-asleep, madly intoxicated by the beauty of the dead woman. Perhaps this would be an embarrassment. More likely, no one would remember or care.

  At ten, Katherine came yawning into Emmett’s den. He looked up from his computer screen. “I’m just finished.” He and his wife snapped their little daughter into the backseat of the car and drove twenty minutes to a playground with a large fountain filled with splashing, noisy children. Emmett and Katherine sat on a bench and let Paulette splash about on her clumsy, knobby little legs. Emmett could hardly believe that she was his child, all white and pretty and free as the wind, running and laughing, unburdened. She was so perfectly formed, a little girl with the best elements of her two parents.

  “I am amazed that I’m her father,” Emmett said, proud now of Paulette’s wide, little-girl smile. “I just want to sit all day and look at her, tell her little things.”

  “You’re lazy, deep down,” Katherine said.

  “Not so deep down. Pretty close to the surface.” He glanced over at her. “Thanks a lot for finding me a job, by the way. I had enjoyed being an agoraphobic house-husband. I could have spent my time cooking for Paulette, teaching her about neuroses.”

  “You’re happier now,” Katherine said. “Writing about your starlets.”

  “Writing about films, about art ....”

  “What are you writing about today?” she asked him, keeping an eye on Paulette. “Starlets again, right? Foreign starlets?”

  “If a movie has a woman in it, you say I’m writing about starlets.”

  “You and your starlets,” she said, mockingly.

  Emmett felt defensive every time Katherine equated his love of good acting with some sort of unconscious adultery. But he laughed good-naturedly, and he played along.

  Suddenly Emmett bolted forward.

  “She’s not too short is she?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Lucy. You know? Not too foolish, not too plain, not too pretty, not too fussy. But too short? Did you make sure she isn’t too short?”

  A bit of concern crossed his wife’s face. Then: “Damn! I don’t even know!”

  Emmett smiled.

  “Joe is well-over six feet tall. That was an important thing to ask,” he said.

  “I didn’t think of it, all right?”

  “That’s OK. Just, you know, it’s important. I hope,” he added, “that she’s at least five foot nine. I think anything less would be just unworkable.”

  An hour later, Emmett drove to the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, where he interviewed a European director for The Washington Post. Then he returned to his apartment, where startling news awaited him.

  As promised, Emmett’s brother Joe did turn up at the restaurant, in a suit, not so much overdressed, he realized on walking in the door, but dressed in the wrong genre. He bent his head down on entering the room. A woman walked up to him, a dark-haired woman with large, powerful arms and legs. He towered over her. “You must be Lucy,” he said weakly, with no great enthusiasm; she nodded, and he added, with a little smile, “How’s Desi?”

  Lucy looked very confused. “Emily didn’t mention you were tall,” she said. Something in her manner, and in his own startled eyes, demonstrated that this would go no further, that the end of dinner would be the end of their life together. During the appetizer, the sun set, coloring the Sound a dazzling orange-red, which glowed on their faces; this was a striking, bittersweet and romantic image, given their unspoken agreement. Joe thought of another amusing pun – but he had promised Emmett that he wouldn’t make any puns. So he held it in check.

  During dessert, Joe said: “So what’s this thing I heard about, this thing they wrote about in Newsweek, the calculation from, like 1528, that mathematicians have just proven that changes the whole structure of everything?”

  “Well,” she said, “let’s see. I don’t remember the exact date, but the mathematician was Fermat, and I think it was about 350 years ago. He was reading a book on Diophantine equations which is named after, like, the ancient Greek guy Diophantus, who apparently studied them. So apparently he got this inspiration for this theorem while he was reading this book. And the theorem said, um, the equation X to the N plus Y to the N equals Z to the N has no solution for N bigger than or equal to three – or rather, I mean, for N as an integer greater than or equal to three – and X, Y and Z as positive integers. So one interesting thing about that is that the Pythagorean theorem which relates to the sides of a right triangle, and that’s X squared plus Y squared equals Z squared, and that actually does have integer solutions for X, Y and Z, for example 3, 4 and 5, but what Fermat was claiming was that if the exponent of the equation was bigger than 2 – so greater than or equal to 3 – then there were no integer solutions. And anyway, so in this margin of this book he wrote this theorem, and added, ‘I have a beautiful proof of this, but the margins of this book are too small,’ or something to that effect, but no one could find his proof after he died. One theory was that he later realized the proof was wrong and threw it away, but never bothered to go back and erase the margin of the book. Some people said he was dyslexic and he really meant to say N to the X plus N to the Y equals N to the Z. Now, as far as this relates to math in general, just the attempt at solving this problem has developed into enormous branches of math that took on lives of their own. One field is algebraic geometry and one was algebraic number theory. About 7 years ago, somebody showed that if you could prove the Taniyama-Weil conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves – which is a very important conjecture for algebraic number theorists – that would imply Fermat’s last theorem. Finally somebody used this whole mechanism that they developed over the years to solve the original problem. But this problem in itself doesn’t lead anywhere, it doesn’t imply anything. After all that, all the centuries, it’s just a dead-end, I think.” She paused, took a breath.

  “So the Pythagorean thing, that’s been shown to ....”

  Joe’s voice faded off.

  A little silence followed. Joe struggled for something to say. He could see the expression on Lucy’s face changing quickly, from pride in her knowledge of Fermatic history to embarrassment at what she now concluded had been a rambling and tedious monologue.

  “Look,” she said, reddening. “I mean, you asked. It’s not like I just started talking mathematics.”

  “I
know,” Joe said. “It’s OK. I asked, I just didn’t really completely – ”

  “I mean, don’t go phoning up your drinking buddies and say, The cunt talked mathematics all night.”

  Joe stammered, “I would never have said that in any case. I don’t use that word.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe not. But I saw you rolling your eyes.”

  “I thought the story, you know, the story itself was very interesting. The whole thing about how, you know, they found the theorem, but they didn’t know how it … I mean, then all those theories, maybe he was anorexic – ”

  “Dyslexic.”

  “ – or maybe he just never erased the thing, or whatever. That was interesting. Really.”

  Then: “Anyway, how’s your dessert?”

  After dinner, in the parking lot, she said, “Thank you very much for dinner. And say hello to Emily for me.”

  Joe said he would, even though he wasn’t sure who Emily was.

  “You know,” she said, “in general, I really had a very nice time at dinner.”

  “I did also,” he agreed.

  “But,” she added, “we both realized it when you walked into the restaurant.”

  “Realized?”

  “You’re too tall.”

  “Funny,” Joe said, with a tone that sounded more stinging than he intended, “I thought you were too short.”

  They shared an awkward chuckle. Joe was annoyed that she had felt the need to break off the relationship when such a sever was clearly unnecessary. For her part, she seemed annoyed at being called “short,” which was far more insulting, she believed, than being called “too tall.” And the evening became just a little darker, the mood shifting from the delirium of subversive collaboration to the peevishness of mutual recrimination. Which one of them was the mutant whose deformity had destroyed their shared future? Was he too tall, or was she too short?

  When Joe arrived home, he found a message from an old New York girlfriend waiting on his answering machine, and suddenly he remembered his dream and the feeling of warmth that had flooded his body in the early hours of morning.

  The thing about Joe, thought Susan, driving North on 1-5, heading toward Seattle and her old friend, the thing about him was that he was too skinny and hairy for his height, and he made too many bad puns – awful puns, really awful pointless jokes, and then he would laugh at these jokes himself. But, she also thought, he would never leave you unless you slammed a door in his face, and even then he would come back if you just opened it a crack and called out his name. She had not much to say to him, she had not seen him much in recent years. But he was one of her dearest friends, somehow. There was something else about Joe, she thought with a little grimace. One short and unfortunate week of romance, now all-but-forgotten by them both.

  He had a nice house on the outskirts of Seattle, purchased with an advance from his job at a bank downtown. Joe was still dressed in his suit from work, he had not even taken off his jacket, and his tie was still tightly knotted. He gave Susan a friendly little peck on the cheek – his lips barely touched her skin – took her bags into the front hallway, then gave her a tour of the house. He took her out back, showed her his strawberry groves, and pointed out the glint of a lake peering through the trees as dusk descended. Susan said that the house was very big, the yard was very impressive.

  “I moved here with Rachel,” Joe said. “Of course, this was where we would raise our children.” He sighed. “Anyway.”

  She’d picked up dinner on the road, but she’d brought him some red wine – Washington State red wine – to thank him for his hospitality.

  “Quit whining,” he said to her, then burst into laughter, and Susan glanced at him quizzically. “You know, wine. Whining. Get it?”

  She nodded.

  “We can wine a little,” Joe said, and laughed again, loudly. He pulled up a chair, and they sat down on his patio, looked out over the garden and the trees and the lake. Joe filled her glass.

  “I’m sorry about Rachel,” Susan said. “I meant to drop you a note or phone when I heard she’d left, but I don’t know what – I mean, if she had died I would have known what to do.”

  “You know,” said Joe, “so would I. She said I was embarrassing.”

  Susan nodded, not trying to argue. “I’m sorry she said that. That was a cruel thing to say.”

  Joe brushed the subject aside. “Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry I missed your wedding.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” Joe said. “Weddings are important things. Maybe you feel as though a friend who isn’t there has abandoned you.”

  Susan told him that he should be glad he’d missed it. She described it to him, the ceremony – Jewish/Catholic – and the band music, which was typical wedding stuff, designed neither to please nor to offend. She recalled dancing with the groom, staring into his eyes, feeling beautiful, actually happy, happy to be married.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I heard how beautiful it was. I heard that everyone thought it was perfect, really beautiful.”

  “People said that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Who said that, Joe?” she asked grimly.

  He thought. “I don’t remember. Funny. I don’t know.”

  “Did you hear about all the commotion?”

  He shook his head, laughing. He had not picked up on her change of mood.

  “Well, when I was dancing, feeling so happy, I heard all kinds of commotion.” She seemed to stop herself suddenly. “I’m drinking too much,” she laughed. It was a mirthless laugh. “I shouldn’t really go on.”

  Joe shook his head. “Go on,” he urged her. He was still smiling. “Why don’t you tell me the story?”

  “It’s not a funny story, honey,” Susan said.

  “That’s OK,” Joe nodded, hopelessly dim. “I’d like to hear the story anyway. I’d like to know all about your wedding. I heard such beautiful things about it.”

  “Joe!” Susan exclaimed in exasperation. “You’re not hearing me. It was not a beautiful thing!” Joe’s forced humor, his resolute cheeriness, seemed consciously designed to force unhappiness to keep its distance. Inside Joe’s little world there was nothing but laughter and sunshine. Was that how he really looked at life? Susan doubted it. But she wanted to beat that smile off his face anyway. And so she told him the story of her wedding.

  “When I heard all the commotion,” she said, “I looked around and saw a little crowd of people gathered around the buffet table, all upset. I left the dance floor – I just ditched my groom in the middle of the dance floor – and I lifted up my gown and ran. My father had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the table, and now he was lying on the floor. There was a little trickle of blood on the floor, too. It was horrible, but it wasn’t embarrassing until ... well, the embarrassing part was that I screamed, the top of my lungs, you know? It was an awful scene – a bride, all in white, screaming. It didn’t fit – it scared and horrified people.” She paused and took a gulp of wine. “Anyway, it was a Jewish wedding, right?– so there were plenty of doctors. And they revived him before the ambulance came, and everyone said it was very lucky that he’d collapsed at my wedding so that all the doctors could save him. So the hospital opened him up, fixed everything up good as new and sewed him shut again. And then he lasted a couple of months, so having those doctors there to save him just meant that he went through a lot of unnecessary pain.” She put the glass to her lips, tilted her head back and let the wine slide down her throat until it was all gone. “I think that the wedding reminded him that he’d lost the will to live, and so he died.”

  Now she felt ashamed. She had told Joe this story to chastise him, to shock him out of his dull good humor. “And it was stupid, you know,” she said, more gently, “because it was such an unnecessary wedding. I was even dubious on the day of the wedding. When I said my vows, I sort of crossed my fingers, inconspicuously. It was hard to smile for the photos. Getting married,” she con
cluded, “is not a good way of dealing with depression. I should have just gone on a two-week drinking binge instead. And so, you see, my father died for nothing.”

  Joe was very quiet. “I didn’t realize this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I feel like such an idiot.”

  That was all terribly sad, of course, and it embarrassed her more, and it also seemed to devastate Joe, who had, after all, urged her to continue with a big smile on his lips. She was not drunk enough to postpone the embarrassment until the following morning, and so she said good night.

  She couldn’t sleep. She was only slightly drunk and her bed only spun slightly. She pushed back the covers and walked naked to the window, parted the curtains a crack. She looked out across Joe’s garden, at the woods that lay beyond and the small patch of lake glowing through the trees. “Joren,” she said out-loud. Then, to herself: I hate you for leaving me alone like this.

  In his bedroom, Joe sat at the desk, scrawling the day’s events. Each sentence had a subtext unknown to those who might find the diary after his death. “Susan came to visit today,” he wrote, while thinking: How strange that Susan came to visit today. “We didn’t talk at all about before,” he wrote, which really meant: We did not discuss our affair – why is this something that we cannot acknowledge to each other? He had not changed for bed, had only slightly loosened his tie. The door was half-open.

  Susan appeared in the hallway. She held a bottle of wine – his wine – in her left hand, and asked if he would join her in a night-cap. “I can’t sleep at all,” she said softly. “All the traveling, I guess it shakes me up. All the talking.” Her robe hung open just a bit, perhaps carelessly. Nothing could be proven.

  Did they actually drink any more wine? It was not an important detail. Perhaps they sat on his bed and drank for a half hour. Perhaps he walked to the doorway and pushed her robe open. Or she let it fall open. Susan would not remember, later.