by Tom DeMarco
“You Po some problem,” Edward went on, “and think all the thoughts you’d have been thinking if that problem hadn’t gotten you stalled. And sometimes one of those thoughts helps you go back and solve the problem you Po’ed.”
“We do that,” Sonia said. “Maybe we don’t do it enough.”
“We do it here and it can help. But we never do it the way Lamar did it to himself. We Po a problem, but we remember that we’ll have to go back and face it someday. But when Lamar Po’ed something, that was it. It was gone. He’d convince himself absolutely that whatever it was just didn’t exist. And before long, everything was Po’ed. Our whole project was floating along in a neurotic stupor, denying reality on every front. It was a blessing when they cancelled us. Otherwise we would have had a group nervous breakdown.”
Loren winced at the thought of one of his old heroes having feet of clay. “But he does get things done, Edward, doesn’t he? His whole notion of Special Attractors is beautiful.”
“He gets things done. Or things get done around him. He is an important part of the chemistry that creativity requires. But he himself is a fraud.”
Beside Loren, Claymore was muttering over his tea. His face was twisted curiously. The others turned to stare at him. “Po Armitage,” he said, almost under his breath. “Po the whole sordid mess.” His eyes were unfocused, his hands shaking slightly. He made a low strangled sound in his throat.
Loren was on his feet. “Claymore…are you OK?” He took hold of Clay’s shoulder, wondering if the man might be having some kind of a seizure. Claymore looked up at him without recognition. Then after a moment his face relaxed into its familiar, easy smile. “Well,” he said, standing and reaching for his bag. “I’m off to Teagle Hall for a swim.”
4
SONIA
During the January before Chandler Hopkins’ April dinner party, Loren had observed his 25th birthday. The celebration was a private one, involving only himself and a very old file folder. Each year since childhood, he had written a letter to himself on his birthday. The letter was addressed to the Loren one year into the future.
In his apartment above the Cascadilla gorge, he took out last year’s envelope and slit it open. The letter inside, he remembered, had been written during a low moment. The success of his thesis on particle decay, and a few passing references to it in the international physics journals, had come and gone. And then nothing. He was stuck, with no idea what to do next. He would become, it seemed, an obscure professor (he was only a lab assistant so far) at a remote Spanish university. The year-old letter was short and to the point:
Dear Loren,
More of the same. Hope things are better for you.
Good Luck,
Loren
Only a few months later had come the great change in his life with Homer’s recruiting trip to Salamanca. And two days after that, Loren had found himself packing for Ithaca. Now, at last, he was on track, headed where he had always been meant to be headed. What a difference. He took out a pad of yellow paper and began to write slowly in Spanish:
Dear Loren,
I believe that I have at last found Myself, the person that was locked inside the old me, desperate to become free. I expect that I will live out all my life here at Cornell. I will construct a perfect career in science, thinking, and discovering, and figuring out the secrets of the universe. Most of all, I think I have found in Doctor Homer Layton, a man who is absolutely necessary for my own development.
Doctor Layton says that there are two kinds of physicists—he calls them Intrinsics and Mechanics. The Intrinsics are the ones who have an innate sense of the way things are. What is for anyone else a mystery is known almost intuitively to them. Hendrik Lorenz is an example of an Intrinsic. He understood that the Euclidean concept of space was flawed, that real space was slightly different. He knew that even before he could work out what the difference was. He knew that there must be a deformation of space that came with relative motion. He could feel this because he was an Intrinsic. A Mechanic is a physicist who takes the insight of an Intrinsic and explains it in mathematical and physical terms. He makes the idea accessible to others. Einstein was the greatest Mechanic of all time. What Lorentz had intuited, Einstein expressed in his special theory of relativity so that the rest of us could understand. It takes both an Intrinsic and a Mechanic to create something new.
Doctor Layton says that I shall one day be a famous Mechanic. And I believe that he is to be my Intrinsic.
Good luck in the wonderful future,
Loren
PS: It seems that I am destined to fall in love with Sonia.
He placed the letter in an envelope and sealed it for next year. It went back into the folder on top of the stack of old letters. He put last year’s letter at the back of the stack and then read through the whole set from first to last. As always, reading through the letters left him wondering about the nature of the writer. No coherent image emerged. Most of the early letters were concerned only with what had happened in the preceding days or moments. They often gushed excitedly about gifts opened on the Feast of Kings the day before, or went back over incidents and arguments with one or the other of his seven sisters. There was no clear pattern; the letters might have been written by eighteen different boys and young men with nothing more in common than the same day of birth.
He had decided years ago never to cross out words or start over, thinking that the record he was making ought to be of his most fervent feelings, rather than considered and carefully re-worked statements. But still, ‘constructing a perfect career in science’ seemed pompous. And why ‘destined to fall in love’ rather than just ‘falling in love’? Why not say that it had already happened?
There was a certain inevitability about his feelings for Sonia. He knew that their acquaintances had begun to think of them as a couple even before they’d come to that conclusion themselves. They looked rather alike, for one thing, both slender and very dark. Sonia’s hair was as black as his own. They were almost exactly the same height. And, of course, they were passionately involved in the same work. Sonia was a full year ahead of him in experience, so it was natural that she supplied some leadership when they worked together. But beyond that, he knew, she was his equal or better for pure intellect. When they had worked together on the tuning of Simula-7, for example, she had always seemed whole steps ahead of him. Even in the more familiar domain of particle physics, he had learned to believe that she was probably right about something long before he could grasp what it was she was saying. (Was she an intrinsic? He would have to ask Homer about that.) She was his teacher in simulation technique, in particle physics and in language, and through each of these, the bond between them was strengthened. The thought that they might not eventually fall in love was almost preposterous.
Much of the time that he was not working, Loren was asleep. He would stumble back to his apartment and be in bed half an hour later. When he woke up, he would head back for Clark Hall, usually to find the others already there. He assumed that they were all leading more or less the same life: work and sleep and little else. So it was a surprise to come across the following lines midway through the Daily Sun review of the Drama Society production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
...but it is Sonia Duryea’s delicious portrayal of the fairy queen Titania that is the evening’s great triumph. She is simply magical. As she says her lines, you believe again for a moment things that you haven’t believed since childhood. And she moves with a grace that is akin to levitation. It is as if her feet came only close to the floor. When in one scene she actually does fly (with the aid of wires, one supposes), you’re not the least bit surprised, you’ve been expecting it all along.
That night, Loren was in the audience to see her perform. The next day he bought a copy of the play from the Cornell bookstore and read it through, looking up the words that he didn’t know. And then he went to see her again. At the end of that performance, the production’s last, the players came down
into the audience to say thank you for all the applause. Sonia came straight up to Loren.
“You were here last night, too. I saw you.”
“You were…magic,” he said, sorry not to find his own word.
“That was the idea.” She laughed her wonderful laugh, the kind of laugh that of course a magical creature would have. Then she put her arm through his, walked him back toward the stage. “Will you come to the cast party tonight? I’m going to play hooky from work because it’s Saturday and because of the party and because I want to. We can each invite one person, and I’d like my person to be you.”
“Yes. I will come. Thank you, Sonia.”
“Just give me time to change and wash all this gunk off my face.”
After the cast party, Loren walked her back to her home up behind Beebe Lake. Sonia rented a studio cottage from one of the English professors. The cottage was tucked away in back of the main house, but had its own walkway and a small garden. They paused in front of her door. There were just the first few flakes of snow in the air, sparkling in the yellow light at her doorway. The air was cold and clean. In these next few moments, he thought, something wonderful could happen—if only he knew how to make it happen. He had walked all this way and formed no plan of what to do or what to say next. His only clear thought was that he didn’t want the evening to end. There must be some way to prolong it but his mind was a blank. He stood facing her without a word to break the silence. Sonia was smiling at him.
“Will you come in for a kiss, Loren?”
He could only nod. Inside she closed the door and turned to him right there in the kitchen entryway. She slipped her coat off her shoulders and let it fall at her feet as she wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her lips hungrily against his, she pushed his own coat off, then put her hands inside his jacket onto his chest. She kept her eyes open as she kissed him. He knew he had never really been kissed before, that everything before had been just pretend. There was tremendous need in Sonia’s kiss, need and urgency. She let him feel her body leaning into his. His own body was responding so suddenly that it was painful. He found himself embarrassed to realize that she could feel it coming alive. It was so crude, so obvious. He felt dizzy. He was unsure what to do, what was expected of him. Worst of all was to have her understand his inexperience, but inexperience was all there was to understand. Something was grinding into his back as she pressed him into the wall. She rocked him back and forth against it, touching him with the whole length of her body. Only that one long kiss. And then she stopped.
Sonia stepped away from him toward the center of the room. There was a lamp on the table that she turned on. She paused before her image in the dark window, adjusting her sweater and her hair. Loren turned to see what it had been on the wall behind him, a thermostat. He stumbled slightly in the mixup of their two coats at his feet. He picked them both up and folded them across the back of one of the kitchen chairs. There were two views of Sonia before him, one the real person and the other the reflection in the glass. She had both hands in the back of her hair, her elbows were thrust up into the air. It called into relief the front of her body, not once but twice, right side and it’s counterpart in reflection. Do something, he thought. He crossed behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. They had been friends for nearly five months, but now in five minutes in this room everything had changed. She placed her hand on top of his on her stomach, looked up to smile at him in the glass. It was the smile of that magic person, Titania. It was warm and affectionate. But it was also a bit distracted. She was done with kissing, intimacy was over for the present. She might have been a little surprised that he was still there. Perhaps he should be going.
“I should be…”
She turned inside his arms to face him and again put both hands on his chest. “Loren. I would like…” She paused.
“Yes.” Whatever she would like.
“Will you come and meet my parents?”
“I’d love to. You tell me when”
“Now. Right now. They’re just a few blocks away. We could be there in minutes.”
“It’s almost 2 A.M., Sonia.”
“They’ll be up. They keep funny hours.” A long pause. There was no telling what she was thinking. “They would be so pleased, Loren.” She was looking down at the front of his chest where her fingers were wrapped in his tie. “They’re worried about their daughter, their only child, you know. Worried that she works all the time and never has any fun.” She looked up at him. “They’re going to meet you and say, Now that’s what’s been missing from Sonia’s life. And it will make them very happy.”
He held her coat for her. They bundled up and headed back down alongside the frozen lake. Sonia had his hand in hers, leading him, hurrying him along. They even ran part of the way through the chilly night.
Both of her parents, he knew, were retired from jobs in the administrative offices of the university. They were Canadians, come to Ithaca some seven years before, when Sonia was first enrolled as a freshman at Cornell. Before that they had never settled, but had moved around through all of Canada, stopping briefly in each of the provinces. The parents had been in some sort of dance or theater troupe. He had learned all this from Kelly. Sonia never, ever, spoke of herself.
The longest the parents had ever stayed anywhere, Kelly said, was a winter in Calgary, just long enough to comply with the requirements of the local adoption agency. Sonia was an adopted child. Then they were off again. Sonia had never even been to a school until she’d entered Cornell.
She had taken off his left and her right glove so their bare hands could be clasped together, stuffed together into the wide pocket of her coat. He was aware of her hand in his, unaware of everything else. So when they came up to the Duryea’s small modern house, he realized that he had no idea where he was, wasn’t even sure of which way to walk when he would have to find his way home. Then he was inside meeting Matthew and Margaret.
Loren was still out of breath from the run, from the cold, and then the sudden heat, from the kiss. He hadn’t said anything yet, through all the greetings. When Sonia’s mother offered her hand, he lifted it to his lips as he had always been taught, and they laughed. He knew that it was not an entirely appropriate gesture in this society, but laughing made it OK.
“So this is el famoso Lorentino, fenomeno Español that Sonia has told us about,” said Matthew.
“Si, Señor. A very minor fenomeno and not too famoso.”
“Welcome to our home, Loren,” Margaret told him, “Esta en su casa.”
“Gracias, Señora.”
Loren was dimly aware that little of what was happening now or being said would stick easily in his memory for this night. He looked sharply at Sonia’s parents to be sure that he would recognize them again, to force their faces into his mind. They were a comely couple in their sixties or even older. Both looked healthy and fit. Matthew had a wiry frame, and the ruddy complexion of a man who spent much of his time in the outdoors. Margaret was fair, blue-eyed. They were both a little shorter than Sonia. Sonia was relaxed now, stretched out on the rug, smiling. She listened to her parents talk, but was mostly silent herself. Loren repeated the parents’ names silently so he would not forget: Matthew and Margaret. He was still a bit dizzy. It was warm in here. The room as he looked around at it was modest and not overlarge, but had a very high ceiling, a cathedral ceiling.
He thought he should say something, not just listen. “You have been in the theater, I believe, Mr. Duryea. Were you actors like your very talented daughter?” He chose his words carefully, wondering if women could be actors, or if he should have said instead ‘actor and actress.’
“No, I’m afraid Sonia is the only actor in our family, certainly the only one ever to play Shakespeare. Margaret and I are circus people.”
“Circus?”
“Yes. We were acrobats for most of our lives. Our parents were circus people too. We traveled together in the same circus almost since birth.”
Margaret piped up, “When he was ten years old, Matthew could juggle flaming torches while he stood on the back of a prancing white horse. Of course, I fell in love with him. Who could resist?” Her face was all smile lines. She was on the floor near Sonia, pressed up against her daughter casually. “But we must offer our guest something, Matthew.” She stood up. Loren had never seen anyone rise from the floor in quite the way that Margaret did. She put her palms on the floor and pressed herself up so that at one point she was on her feet, legs unbent, but with her palms still on the floor. Then she straightened effortlessly. When Sonia stood up, she did it the same way.
Loren listened in some confusion to Matthew’s tales of their life touring through the provinces. Mostly, he was having trouble fitting Sonia into the picture Matthew was forming. Loren had lived all his life in a small town near Salamanca, so he had no sense of what it must have been like to move frequently. The Duryeas hadn’t moved every year, as Kelly had suggested; they had moved every single week. And Sonia had not just gone along as part of the audience. She had actually worked with her parents, she had been an acrobat. He looked at her in wonder when she came back into the room.
“Well of course she was an acrobat. What else could she be? An animal trainer?” Matthew said this scornfully as if animal trainers were a lower form of life. “She was, and she is still a beautiful acrobat. Here, Darling, we’ll just show this Loren a thing or two.” He reached for his daughter’s hands with both of his.
“Daddy! I have a skirt on, for goodness sakes. I’m not going to let you turn me upside down in front of Loren.”
“Well go change, silly. Put on some tights. Come on. Hurry up. The audience is waiting. The show must go on.”
