My favorite part of the day was the mornings, when we worked silently, without looking at each other, putting our heads down until it was time for lunch. Then he’d get up without saying anything, take his coat, and leave. He’d return with two bowls of soup from the cafeteria, one of which he’d place on the ground in front of my desk. Sometimes I would be the one to leave and return with two sandwiches, one of which I’d place on the ground by his desk. When we were both ready, we’d take our soups or our sandwiches and move to the little table he had in the corner of his office and eat them there. We never deviated from this routine.
Peter’s favorite part of the day was always when he got to stand at the blackboard and Figure Things Out (though I teased him that it was when he got to stand at the blackboard and Show Off). The difference between our preferences was due to the fact, I think, that Peter was fundamentally social in nature, while I was an introvert, preferring to work things out in privacy—and sometimes near secrecy. But it was good for me to learn how to work the way Peter did: I saw how progress could be made more quickly in collaboration with others, and it also taught me how to think on my feet (pun intended). Whereas before I had been cautious, preparing for hours before I put forth a thought, I learned now to be flexible, to throw out ideas to be questioned relentlessly so they would become more robust as they developed.
Another thing I learned from Peter was his capacity to be interested in anything and everything. His understanding of math was both wide and deep, and he seemed to comprehend new concepts with the most minimal explanation. At the time it seemed to me that math was his native language, whereas for me it was something I had to painstakingly learn. Now that I’m older, I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time making such comparisons. I tell my students that it isn’t always the dazzling talent who ends up doing the great work. Sometimes people grow into their work, sometimes people burn out, and you never know who will stumble on the right problem at the right time. It’s a matter of engaging fully, of persevering.
On the romantic front, despite the proximity, nothing had changed. It was particularly maddening because everyone assumed Peter and I were lovers, though since the night of the long walk we hadn’t so much as brushed against each other accidentally. We were always together, but with at least a foot of distance between us. This distance was torture for me: I always wanted to be closer to him. I felt like the air between us was ionized, magnetized, pulling me inexorably toward him.
I experimented with that distance, stepping an inch closer to him as we stood side by side, facing the chalkboard. I leaned forward, he leaned back. And the opposite—I stepped away, he stepped closer, as if an invisible elastic band kept us linked and separate at the same time. In the bathroom, at home, I examined my face in the mirror, I examined my body. I found myself reading beauty magazines. I started wondering what kind of girls Peter liked, if he would find me more appealing if I was shorter, or taller, or more slender, or voluptuous. It was an agonizing time.
I deferred to Peter on nearly everything. He was my professor, my mentor, my crush, and my hero. The only place where we ran into conflict was also perhaps the most critical one. I had asked Peter to be my thesis advisor, and he had enthusiastically agreed, but when I told him I wanted to work on proving something called the Mohanty problem, which involved proving that at least half of the zeros of the zeta function lay on Riemann’s line, he blanched.
“Katherine,” he said, “the proof you’re talking about requires very complicated analysis and would be a major step to proving the Riemann hypothesis. It’s a rather large topic for a thesis. Don’t you think you should start a little less ambitiously?”
I found myself flushing. He thought I was too ambitious, not knowing that I was after more than the Mohanty problem—that I wanted to one day tackle the Riemann hypothesis itself. Even now, I can’t help but smile at my youthful audacity.
Still, I said, “Why not? What’s the point if not to go after the big fish?”
Peter smiled, gently. “Listen,” he said. “This is a problem that’s broken mathematicians greater than either of us. Is this really how you want to begin?”
I swallowed. “It’s just that I think I figured out a way to tackle it by improving Selberg’s formula,” I said. “I think it’s all we need to get us to the next step.” I started putting the formula up on the board, but Peter held up his hand.
He said, “Hold on a moment,” and started a long explanation of why I had to tread carefully, how difficult the kind of work I was proposing was, how quickly things turned, and how easily mistakes could be made.
“I’ll be careful,” I assured him, still wanting to explore it further, but for the first time, he was impatient with me, unwilling to go through each step.
“I’m your thesis advisor,” he said. “Trust me. Great mathematicians have wasted decades of their best years on this problem and gotten nowhere. This is the kind of calculation where you won’t even know if you’re making progress until you’re there. Take my advice. Let this go.”
Unconvinced, I decided to work on it on my own. But around the same time, he invited me to work with him on another problem, and so, jumping at the chance to collaborate closely with him, I let go of my idea for the moment, and told myself I’d come back to it later.
The problem Peter identified for us to tackle was fun and dynamic, and we maintained a surprisingly good balance between us in terms of equally contributing to the work. I only gloated to myself once or twice about what my classmates from college would say, how jealous they would be to know I was working with Peter Hall on a paper. We finished the paper over the course of a year, and afterward it was immediately accepted for publication. We were invited to present our findings at a conference in Chicago in the spring after its publication. The thought of traveling with Peter exhilarated me, but I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to bear the proximity, the possibility—I thought all the time about saying something to him, about crossing our invisible boundary and placing my hand on his arm. I developed a strange extra sense—I could tell where he was at all times; even when we weren’t in the same room I could tell when he was close by, an extrasensory perception that extended only to him.
Then one day a college student named Jeannie came by his office. She was dark haired and tiny—as pretty and light as a bird, her bones so delicate that her whole body seemed translucent, as if the light incandesced through her. Her eyes were enormous. If I had been a man, I thought, I would have fallen in love with her. I stayed seated at my desk, transfixed. Her eyes flicked over me and she blinked once, then she directed her eyes to Peter. She smiled.
“Hi, Peter,” she said.
He looked up, and then back down, raising his left hand to signal her to be quiet as he finished what he was writing. I felt vaguely triumphant. But when he was done with his sentence, he leapt up and said with real delight in his voice, “Jeannie! How are you? I’ve been wondering about you!” He practically bounded across the room to her. Then, without saying good-bye or so much as glancing at me, he placed his hand on her tiny shoulder, cupping it under his palm, and propelled her out the door.
For the rest of the day I couldn’t read or work. I sat at my desk trying to focus so if he came back and asked what I’d done, I would have a list of interesting ideas to impress him with. It didn’t work. Finally, I packed up my books and, defeated, went home for the day.
The next day I kept waiting for Jeannie to reappear. She didn’t, but late that night I couldn’t stop worrying about whether or not he’d gone to meet her somewhere, if he was spending time with her. I thought of how large his hand had looked on her shoulder and longed for him to cup my own shoulder, so I could lean my cheek against his fingers, so I could feel his skin on my skin. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t do my work.
After a week or so of this, I broke our implicit rule of never interrupting each other’s work, and after a long minute of watching him work from across the office at his desk while I sat at mine, I
said, “So I haven’t seen that pretty girl around in a while.”
Peter barely looked up. “Hm?”
“The girl who was here last week,” I said.
“Hm.”
“Jeannie, was it?” I pressed.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Who is she, a student of yours?”
“Former student.”
“Hm,” I said. And then, “I was thinking perhaps I should start working from my own office again.”
That got his attention. He looked up immediately. “Why?”
“I thought maybe you’d want your own space.”
“No, I work better with you here.” A pause. “Do you want your own space?”
Now it was my turn to look down. I pretended to study the papers on my desk. “No,” I said. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”
“That would make me very sad, but if this isn’t working for you, you should say so.”
“Thanks,” I said, thinking I’d gone too far. I hadn’t meant for him to turn it around on me. “I was just thinking that if you’re going to have girls over here often, it would be more comfortable for everyone if I wasn’t around,” I said in a rush, digging myself deeper.
“Girls?” Peter asked. He started to laugh. “Since when do I have girls over here?”
I shrugged.
“Do you mean my student Jeannie?”
“Maybe.”
“Katherine, what’s this about? Do you have a problem with Jeannie?”
“Never mind. Let’s talk about it later,” I said.
“I think we should talk about it now.”
In all the many conversations I’d imagined us having with each other about this, I had not imagined it would go so awkwardly or that I would feel so foolish. It was both terrible and strangely pleasurable to have him focus all his attention on me at last.
He pressed on. “Why don’t you want me bringing girls around here?”
“I can’t answer that question,” I said.
“Why not?”
I looked down. I was embarrassed. “I’m going to go back to doing work now.”
“That’s really not fair,” Peter said. He was looking at me intently from across the room.
I didn’t answer, but continued to shuffle the papers on my desk, feigning absorption. But I could feel my ears burning.
After a few minutes, I heard Peter push his chair back and cross the room. I ignored him. Then he was behind me, looking over my shoulder. I felt him lean closer, so close I could feel his breath on my neck. I went absolutely still.
He pushed my hair to the side, and my whole body filled with heat. Neither of us moved. In the room, it was still enough to hear the ticking of his watch, and the even sound of his breath. He swiveled my chair around to face him, and I was so used to watching him sideways from the corner of my vision, that it was almost too much to be looking at him straight on, and so close. I tried to focus on a freckle at the top of his cheekbone, I looked down at his mouth, I looked back at his eyes. I couldn’t look away—everything in my body clamored to touch him, and as he held my gaze, I felt as if he was pouring himself out of his eyes into my eyes, and I was filling up with it, with him, and there was no room for anything else, nothing to do but pour myself back.
It was like this with everything else: he kissed me, and having started, we couldn’t stop—once his lips had touched my lips, I felt like they had to keep touching, keep passing this current between us. And once we held hands, we couldn’t stop holding hands, and—later—once we made love, we couldn’t stop making love, marveling at the energy that sprang up between us and flowed at every point of contact, as if together our bodies were a closed circuit of spirit.
Math had always seemed miraculous to me because of the beauty it revealed underlying nature, because of the deep sense of rightness that came over me when I understood something all the way through, as if for a moment I’d merged with the grace I only ever caught glimpses of. Being with Peter was like that to me: I looked at my fingers splayed against his fingers, felt his legs tangled in mine, tucked my chin into the space between his neck and his shoulder, and thought—there was a matching part of him for every part of me. Sex was the proof of that, a revelation: his body pressed against me, inside me—each inch of my body clamoring to touch each inch of his, his breath so close it felt like my own.
That time was a blur of joy during which I thought we could talk about anything. We talked math, we talked love, we were astounded by the things we had in common: we had, for instance, matching scars on the insides of our elbows—like crescent moons, about half an inch long and curving up in a smile. His was from a fishing accident, the origin of mine was unknown. When he was a child, he’d been tied up with a belt by a doctor who came to his house to give him a polio vaccination—I’d been strapped to a chair by a dentist who pulled four of my baby teeth to keep the teeth coming out beneath them from emerging crooked.
I couldn’t have left Peter in those months if I’d tried. He could have rushed at me with an ax and I would have stayed immobile, gazing at him with eyes overflowing with love. Yes, I said, to everything he asked, to anything he wanted. All the space between us was alive with that word. Yes. Its reverberations echo still.
Chapter 12
THE FOLLOWING MARCH, PETER AND I WENT TO CHICAGO for the conference to present our paper’s findings. We went a week early to meet an old friend of his and to see the sights, and we booked a room together, as Mr. and Mrs. Hall, and it surprised me how easy it was to lie. Nobody at the hotel questioned whether or not we were married, nobody asked for evidence. I thought of my parents and wondered if this was all that marriage was anyway, if it was this easy, if everyone accepted it as true just because you said it was so.
When we arrived at the hotel, I was treated so courteously, and with such solicitude—Mrs. Hall, will you be needing anything else tonight? Mrs. Hall, please let me carry that for you—that I began to wonder if this was the reason women, in fact, got married at all. It wasn’t just that doors were opened and bags were carried, but how—there was something in the eye contact, the tone of voice, the tip of the hat, as if now I was a person of consequence. I told Peter this, and he smiled broadly. “Maybe one day it will always be so,” he said, missing the point. For my part, I was torn between explaining it to him and wanting to swoon.
The afternoon before the start of our conference, we walked from our hotel to the lake. It was laced with ice, and endless as an ocean. I couldn’t see Indiana or Michigan: the water went on and on to the sky. A frigid wind blew from it, and though I wrapped my coat around myself, it chilled me to the bone. Peter rubbed my hands vigorously. He grasped me by the arms and jumped up and down, pulling me with him until I was breathless and laughing and warm.
“Let’s walk,” he said, and we wandered a whole hour on the lake path from downtown Chicago to Hyde Park, where we strolled around the campus of the university until it was time to meet Peter’s friend Sal for coffee.
Sal was an engineer Peter had worked with on thermonuclear weapons at Los Alamos, and the first thing he did when we entered his office was lean forward and ask, “Peaceniks still giving you trouble?”
Peter laughed, and said, “I’ve got one with me right now.” He put his hand behind my back and thrust me forward.
Sal rose from his desk, grinning. He was a big man with red cheeks, and I expected his hand to be clammy when he took mine in it, but it was smooth and delicate and soft. He held on a beat longer than I expected, smiling warmly.
“Sit,” Sal commanded, pointing at one chair and pulling another out for me. He sat in front of us, his legs spread wide and his elbows on his knees. “So,” he said, looking from Peter to me and smiling that slow grin, “tell me everything.”
Everything, of course, was work, and Peter launched into a summary of every paper he’d read for the last month, and the things he was working on, and what he wanted to work on next. During the recitation of this long and exhaustive list, Sal
asked a few pointed questions, and he and Peter went back and forth in an easy rhythm. Occasionally they’d loop me in with a question, but I was content to watch them go. Peter was loyal to Sal, loved him—it was Sal who’d taken him under his wing in Peter’s first year of graduate school, and Sal who had taken him to Los Alamos.
Sal had immigrated to the United States in the 1930s from Germany and was—as Peter told me—a true intellectual. His father had been a famous chemistry professor and his mother had been a piano virtuoso. Sal had sung the theme of a Bach cantata at the age of ten months old and had been something of a violin prodigy. (Like Einstein, like Sherlock Holmes, he played every day to clear his mind.) He had taught himself eight languages and crossed Europe as a teenager on a tour of scientists’ homes across the continent. He was eighteen when he came to America, but he spoke with no discernible accent.
Sal had no wife or family. His father had remained in Germany, certain that his name would protect him from the Nazis until it was too late. Sal’s entire extended family had been killed. Peter thought Sal never married or had a family of his own as a kind of penance for surviving when everyone else he knew had died, and while there may have been some truth in that, we discovered many years later that Sal was gay.
Just looking at him, though, you couldn’t have guessed at all the things he had lived through. He was free and generous of manner—and so trusting in his nature that I couldn’t help but respond in kind. Peter had opened up to Sal because of this kindness. He’d had other teachers who’d recognized his formidable talents, but it was friendship that Sal offered before anything else, and it was this friendship that Peter had grasped with both hands.
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