by Ann Bauer
* * *
“You okay to go for coffee or something?” Danny asked once they were outside the building.
It was 11:30 a.m., yet Carmen felt as if days had passed while she lay inside. She blinked in the hard sunshine and pulled her shawl tighter as if to block the rays. “I’m fine.” She swallowed once to check. The metallic taste had not yet appeared; she probably should drink a cappuccino today. Enjoy it.
“Are you okay to go for coffee?” Carmen asked. “I mean, we never have.”
Danny shifted. “Yeah, somehow that just doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore. Things have changed.”
“What exactly?” She faced him, this person whose body had been inside hers dozens of times, and understood even before he answered. It was not that Danny was different, or that his feelings were. It was she who had transformed. She’d shed her hair, a section of her left breast, and a percentage of her corporeal self. But in losing all this, she’d become someone new.
“For one thing.” He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket. “I’ve decided I kind of like your husband.”
“It’s a little late for that.” Carmen felt the glow intensify, a weird, pulsing calm.
“I’m not so sure.” Danny threw his long hair over one shoulder and slipped the sunglasses on. “We’re taking my car.” He put one hand on Carmen’s back and steered her toward the curb. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you back for yours.”
She thought of Rory, the long, shame-filled walk back to Olive’s BMW. Her young self, still damp with sex and regret. Then Jobe’s arms, bent like cricket wings, folding her in when she arrived home. That was the other Carmen. This one was unfamiliar but clean. She walked side by side with Danny—matching his steps exactly—and, for the first time in their relationship, climbed into the passenger side of his car.
“Kind of fancy for coffee, isn’t it?” She peered up through the windshield as Danny parked outside a little bistro she’d never before seen. There were wrought-iron chairs on a patio made of wooden slats and a weathered sign that said, DOMAINE THÉRÈSE.
“You need to eat,” Danny said.
“People keep doing this,” Carmen murmured, mostly to herself. “It makes me feel like I’m dying.”
“People keep doing what? Feeding you? Taking care of you? It doesn’t mean you’re dying. You’re just stubborn and not used to letting anyone else be in charge.” Danny turned and raised his sunglasses. “C’mon. We’ll have a nice lunch and I’ll tell you about this nice, young math wizard I’ve been corresponding with. Althea.”
Carmen leaned back, lolling in her soft leather seat. The temperature in the car had risen since Danny stopped it—his face was turning umber in the heat—but to Carmen it was delicious, the trapped fire feeding her, seeping in through her skin. “Althea? Hmm. Yes, I do think I need to hear about her.”
At least the hostess led them to a table on the patio. It had an umbrella but Carmen moved her chair so she was out of the shade and directly under the brilliant midday sun. In order to keep her scalp from burning, she wrapped a scarf around her head.
“I feel like I’m having lunch with a bedouin,” Danny said, grinning. “Or Audrey Hepburn, traveling incognito after she helped the mobster in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
The food came and was light, inoffensive but bland, or perhaps this was due only to Carmen’s hijacked senses. Her hunger was for none of the usual things—wine, food, sex—but for light, heat, music, and wind. She longed to go home and plunder Jobe’s CD collection, to find a piece that was meandering and waterlike, filled with cellos and bassoons.
“Two cappuccinos,” Danny said when the waiter came to clear their dishes. “I promised you coffee,” he said to Carmen after the man was gone. “And, I promised you this.” Leaning down, Danny drew from his briefcase a thin sheaf of papers. He handed the top sheet to Carmen. Geometry of Riemann Surfaces: A Conference to Celebrate the Man, it said. Below was a list of participants and Danny had circled two names: Althea Markos and Jobe Garrett.
“Did you know about this?” he asked. “It was held in Greece, earlier this summer. About two and a half months after Jobe died.”
Carmen shook her head. “I didn’t. But I wouldn’t, necessarily. He went to these things. Sometimes he told me what they were about, other times all I knew were the dates he’d be gone.”
“That’s odd. Because he’d been planning to take you.”
Carmen read the notice again, taking note of the location. “Anogia? I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s on the island of Crete, mountainous, supposedly the birthplace of Zeus.”
She shook her head, cheeks disappearing alternately into the fabric of her scarf. “You librarians know the most amazing facts.”
“Don’t give me so much credit. I looked it up on Wikipedia.” Danny paused as the waiter set two bowl-sized cups in front of them. The sweet coffee-and-milk steam rose to Carmen’s nose. This. She was hungry for this, too. “Jobe had booked a room for both of you, and a place for you at the dinner the first night of the conference.”
“How do you know?” She held the cup with both hands and inhaled. This was possibly the very best smell she’d ever encountered in her life.
“I talked to the organizer.”
“In Crete?” She imagined, for some reason, a crackling late-night call on an old-fashioned phone. Something from decades before that would cost three dollars a minute.
“Nope, Brooklyn,” Danny said. Not even a different time zone. “He said Jobe was expected to present something very exciting at this conference.” Danny grinned. “That was his word. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word exciting to describe math.”
“You have no idea. It was like a religion. When someone solved a proof there was always this Our Lady of Lourdes moment. Jobe would get completely awestruck.” She flushed, warmth emanating from inside her for the first time all day, as she remembered her husband earnest and wild-eyed as he explained the Poincaré Conjecture, which one of his colleagues was close to solving. “I miss that. It was like, for just a minute, I could see this amazing, different world.”
Danny went quiet and she wondered if she’d hurt his feelings. This was so tricky, reminiscing about her husband with her lover—who might, for that matter, no longer be her lover. In this different world of sparkling light and chemotherapy and public lunches she couldn’t be sure.
“Althea says Jobe was very close to solving Riemann,” Danny finally said. “I mean, she sent me an email that said that. She’s in Greece. A grad student who was working with Jobe somehow—I haven’t quite figured out the connection. But between work and Mega, I couldn’t quite swing a phone conversation.”
“Luca said that, too.”
“What, that my wife won’t let me make an overseas call?”
“No, about Riemann. Only, he said Jobe actually did solve it. He had a dream, Luca did. Olive, too.”
The sun had shifted and Danny had put his sunglasses back on, so Carmen couldn’t read his face. “They had dreams.” His voice was deadpan. “Are you serious?”
“They were, dead serious,” she answered. “So to speak. They’re absolutely positive Jobe has been visiting them at night, speaking through their dreams. And they both say the solution to Riemann is somewhere in those cardboard boxes from his office.”
“For Christ’s sake, Carmen.”
She stared into her empty cup. The dregs of her cappuccino—grounds and crusted foamed milk and bits of cinnamon—clung in a pattern she could not decipher. “I know. It’s insane, and I’ve been trying to talk to Luca about—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Danny had removed his glasses and was leaning forward intently. “I’ve been digging through what’s in the public domain, talking to people who knew Jobe mostly by reputation. If you have the actual papers and the solution, that’s easy. All we need to do is fax a copy of everything in those boxes to Greece!”
“Excuse me?”
“Okay, I’m no
t crazy. I don’t believe your dead husband is appearing to his mother and your son. I mean, sure, it’s a remote possibility.”
“It is?”
He stopped and considered, his narrow eyes flickering as if he was silently counting something off. “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t fuckin’ know much of anything. But if there’s even a chance that Jobe solved that problem and his work is just sitting in one of those boxes, we need to do something about it.”
“You mean, we owe it to him?”
Danny sighed. “Maybe. We owe it to someone. Don’t you think?”
She was finally thoroughly warm, which seemed backward. The wind had picked up. There was a thunderstorm coming. And the sun was fainter now, glimmering from behind a long, dark cloud.
Carmen loosened her scarf and removed it slowly from her head, setting it around her shoulders like a stole. “Yes,” she said, sounding to her own ears like Olive, which pleased her. “Yes, I believe we do.”
FEBRUARY 1987
Jobe moved into his office at Johns Hopkins three days after they returned from their honeymoon in Italy.
He was teaching three courses and starting a research project; so often, Jobe would be gone for twelve hours. And though she was relieved for the perpetual closeness of their honeymoon to be over, Carmen was at a loss. They had more than enough money; she didn’t have to work. She’d already established there were no jobs for art history majors. If she were single, she’d probably be waitressing somewhere, looking at graduate schools, or joining one of those do-gooder organizations like the Peace Corps.
Olive had found them a home while they were gone: a rented brownstone in Charles Village that she said would be a perfect place to start out, while they looked for houses they might want to buy. She gave the couple veto power, of course.
“If you don’t like it, just say so,” Olive said, after giving Carmen and Jobe a tour while the rental agent looked helplessly on. “I have six or seven others on my list.”
But what was not to like? It was a cozy, compact, wood-lined two-bedroom in a neighborhood filled with other faculty, interesting little shops, and an old-fashioned drugstore with a lunch counter on the corner. Olive and George were giving them a year’s rent as a post-wedding gift. Carmen could spend some time furnishing the place, Olive said; it would be fun. And it was, for a couple of days. Carmen bought a twelve-piece sectional couch in forest green—paying a breathtaking $3,700 in cash, plus $250 for delivery—as well as a four-poster bed, a long teak dining table, and several brightly colored floor pillows.
But when Olive came over the first time and walked through, nodding too enthusiastically, Carmen very abruptly saw the apartment from a different point of view. It was hasty and unsophisticated—a mishmash of different styles and colors and tastes. She was ashamed, and confused. How was it that she, who had studied art and was able to deconstruct the elements of a great painting, was unable to synthesize a home? This could be an innate deficit, a sign that she was destined never to be a real part of any household but rather an outsider, poised to flee as she had been the entire time she stayed with the Garretts. The brownstone was one more mistake that she would have to leave behind she decided, as she followed her mother-in-law back down the winding stairs to the kitchen.
But once there, Olive looked around at the random dishes Carmen had picked up at yard sales and antique stores. “Oh, I miss this.” She sighed and then laughed. “That just-starting-out phase where things aren’t set yet and you get to try on anything and everything you like.”
Now it was Carmen who nodded like some bobbing animal toy, because she didn’t know what else to do. Tears came into her eyes as she turned toward the stove to heat water for tea. This was unlike her—to cry for absolutely no reason—but she felt desolate and confused. It was completely unclear whether Olive was humoring her or genuinely liked the strange, eclectic way Carmen had furnished the place. It was also unclear to her, under the circumstances, whose home it was, exactly.
No matter what the answer, the tasks of filling up the tiny place were quickly done and Carmen was left with an endless stretch of empty days before her. She went to the library one day, pretending to be that tattered and unencumbered recent college graduate who moved along a parallel track in some other continuum. Keeping her left hand jammed in the pocket of her jeans so he wouldn’t see her sapphire and two-carat diamond ring, she asked the earnest, long-haired young man who sat behind the desk to help her research volunteer options. He did so, quietly but with an eagerness that let her know he was interested. Here she was, wearing a skimpy T-shirt over breasts that seemed to have grown larger overnight, a selfless person who wanted to help others.
She had never dreamed there were so many ways. Not only the Peace Corps but programs that would take her to Benin to work as a nurse’s aide, or to the Bronx where she could tutor ten-year-olds who didn’t yet know how to read. She could teach fine art in Japan any time she chose: There was a three-page list of postings for young American teachers in that country alone. There was a boat shipping out to Antarctica looking for hardy young people volunteering to tag penguins for an environmental study; the trip would take four months all told, the ad warned, and for most of that time participants would be unreachable by phone and completely out of touch.
Carmen sat at a table surrounded by the materials the young librarian had given her, bewildered by the fact that she had never thought of this before. Had she spent last spring signing up to mentor inner-city kids or save endangered animals, rather than cheating with Rory and looking halfheartedly for jobs, no one would have objected. George and Olive might have felt stung, but would have had to admit that the money they spent educating her was being put to good, philanthropic use. Jobe undoubtedly would have understood.
She sat, staring at the materials for most of the afternoon, finally rising—fifteen minutes before the library was to close—to ask if she could get some Xerox copies. There was a frumpy woman behind the desk now and she fussed irritably, glancing at the clock, sighing, and demanding that Carmen give her fifteen cents for each page. But as she waited for her copies, the male librarian returned. He was fine boned and blond with a sparse, jazzy little goatee.
“Hey, did you find everything you were looking for?” he asked, returning to his chair but not sitting. “I have a friend I could ask about the Peace Corps for you. She …”
He paused, staring down. Carmen followed his gaze. She had grown sloppy and stood with her left hand resting on the boxy computer top: the heavy white-gold band, sapphires like two deep eyes, and glittering diamond with its million of tiny facets sending off sparks of light in between. By the time she looked back up, however, the man had readjusted. “My name is Brant,” he said almost formally. “You can ask for me if you call.”
Once back at the brownstone, Carmen sat at her own sturdy oak table, again examining the smeary copies. Antarctica would mean four months away, no contact with anyone. It was extreme but feasible. She could drive to the airport in some other city, such as Philadelphia, leave her car at the airport, and board a flight bound for Buenos Aires. She had access to enough cash for the ticket; their wedding had brought in nearly $30,000 from Olive’s and George’s friends, most of which still sat in a joint savings account.
Even if Jobe and his parents succeeded in finding out where she’d flown, there would be no way to guess her final destination. Antarctica was the most remote, unlikely place she could imagine. According to the flyer, once she flew the rest of the way to Ushuaia (“the world’s southernmost city”), she would board a boat owned by an environmental group that she had never heard of. She would be virtually impossible to trace.
Of course, it could be a scam. This could be nothing more than a pipeline to white slavery: young women just out of college shipped off from the bottom of the globe to markets where they would be sold to rich, fat sultans. Then she’d be in the same position, only far worse off—with a brutal owner instead of a meek, pale husband who came home at s
even o’clock each night, apologizing for the fact that he’d forgotten about the time, pulling off his long, black socks and massaging his veiny feet while he asked if she would like to go out to eat.
She weighed the risks again the following morning, sitting with her coffee, wearing only the long T-shirt in which she’d slept. When she stood to get another cup, her breasts grazed the table’s edge. They were suddenly enormous—plump and round and tingling. The current became more intense when her nipples made contact with the hard wood. Carmen was puzzled; she’d been a solid C cup since high school. And though men took notice of her breasts on a near daily basis, she’d never given them much thought. Now, however, they seemed to be growing and alive. It was as if they were trying to tell her something she couldn’t decipher. Stay. Go. It was impossible to tell.
But it wasn’t until a week later, when she pulled out her calendar to schedule a dentist’s appointment, that Carmen realized how late she was. She’d never been very good about keeping track, but she distinctly remembered the last time her period had come: It was about three weeks before the wedding, she’d gone out tasting cakes with Olive and eaten too much because inside her gut was that sucking, achy feeling that only food could soothe.
“It’s like wine tasting, dear,” Olive said at one point. “You don’t eat so much as analyze, just a smidge so you’ll have room for the next.”
“I thought you spit when you tasted wine,” Carmen said, through a hefty bite of white cake with icing of lavender essence.
“That,” said Olive, “is a ghastly practice dreamed up by Californians.”
And this, now, was the phrase that wound through Carmen’s head. A ghastly practice dreamed up by Californians. It seemed to have some hidden application to her current state, about which she had no doubt. But she had nothing to do that afternoon, anyway. So after the receptionist had confirmed her appointment time and Jobe’s as well (she was trying to be the kind of wife who would protect her husband’s teeth), Carmen drove to the drugstore and picked up a pregnancy test.