I’d heard similar sentiments—not the love part, but the idea that I was slumming intellectually—from other mathematicians, including my father. “What is Rachela Karnokovitch’s son doing with applied mathematics studying clouds and turbulence? What a waste of talent!” That was the gist of this argument. It wasn’t true, and even if it was, it’s nothing you want to hear from someone you love.
I do what I do not to avoid mathematics. If I loved mathematics, I’d be happy being a mediocre mathematician (just like many a mediocre actor is happy to be performing on stage in Tuscaloosa or Madison instead of Broadway or Hollywood). When my wife said her words, they hurt. I looked at the bulge in my wife’s belly and thought, “Thank god this baby-to-be isn’t hearing and seeing this, two people who are beginning to hate each other.”
But the other half of her argument, my absent “fucking heart” was absolutely correct. I was focusing all my efforts on my dissertation not because I had to, but because it was easier than looking at the pain on my wife’s face, easier than having to concentrate to hear her rapid-fire sentences about how she was hot, how she was uncomfortable, and how my mother hated her. I was refusing to help her in a time of manifest need. What was wrong with me?
That night, during and after the shouting back and forth, I looked beyond myself for the first time in weeks. The windows were open yet again, and the thin plastic window covering was holding the cold back a bit. I heard Catherine’s words, coming at me so fast, and I didn’t just listen to their content but to the intent behind them. Her face was flushed, of course, but I also saw that her hair was thinning. I reached out to hold her and felt her heart beating fast, like she had just run a marathon, and I knew instantly that my “theory” about her dual heat masses was stupid beyond belief. She was physically ill.
We didn’t go to sleep that night. I took Catherine to the hospital and insisted I be with her in the examining room. They took her pulse, 140 beats per minute. The doctor—about fifty years old with an accent that I knew instantly was from Chicago’s West Side—looked at Catherine’s body, so skinny for someone pregnant. Despite eating prodigious amounts of cheese, something she always adored, she had barely gained weight. This doctor, unlike those at student health, knew what he was doing. “Your eyes, they’re bulging. Are you receiving prenatal care?” he asked.
“Of course,” Catherine said.
“Well, it hasn’t been good care. We’re going to take a blood sample. I’d bet my left nut that you’re hyperthyroid.” That’s how doctors talked back then. They still smoked. As in mathematics, there were few women in the medical field, and the men all seemed to behave like gods. These displays of braggadocio look vain and ridiculous in retrospect. Be that as it may, the doctor could keep his left nut. The blood sample proved he was right.
Medication was carefully administered. Catherine’s heart rate dropped. The constant patter stopped as well. There was halfhearted talk of having her retake her Ph.D. prelim, that her medical condition might have impaired her, but it was quickly dropped. So was our marriage. I continued to work on my dissertation with fervor. Catherine went back to beautiful California, to the lovely home of her parents in Marin County. Then she went somewhere else. New Zealand is where I guessed—that was where all her relatives were—but I didn’t inquire about the details. My mother was right in one way. My Catherine was not one to fight back from blows either intellectual or emotional. “We don’t think it would be a good idea for you to contact her anymore,” her parents told me when I called after she moved out of their home and I tried to get her new phone number. They were always so polite. They simply couldn’t just tell me to fuck off.
I would be at best obtuse if I didn’t also recognize that my failure didn’t end with Catherine’s leaving. I can’t understand to this day why for decades I was not willing to make the slightest effort to find her. It was as if I took her parents’ desire for me to disappear as some sort of edict from on high. I, of course, did not forget that Catherine would give birth to a child, our child. But what was once so real quickly transformed into the fuzzy and theoretical. What kind of pathology led me to let go completely, to have no need or desire to come face-to-face and touch or even hear the voice or see a picture of my own child? I still don’t understand it to this day. Yes, Catherine left and made no contact with me, but a real man with a real heart would not have let that deter him.
My wife left, papers were eventually signed, and somehow I managed casually and coldly to erase two years of my life. I found the perverse will to forget that I was a father to someone who undoubtedly wondered who I was and felt my absence with at least a touch of sadness.
After Catherine left Madison, it took only a little amount of time before I began a new era, the phony era, of my love life. It was winter, and it was even colder, of course, than in the fall. One Saturday night I was in bed feeling crappy. Being on the first floor of the building meant that the heat rose to the upstairs units almost as fast as it blew into the apartment from the anemic vents. The large house had not a stitch of insulation, and its exterior was covered in red tar paper made to look like brick. Outside it hadn’t risen above freezing in forty or so days. It was maybe fifty degrees in my apartment, and I heaped blanket upon blanket on my body.
I knew I wouldn’t get a smidgen of sleep that night. I decided to put on my clothes and go back to the basement of the computer science building to my faithful DECwriters and debug my code, which had a habit of blowing up sometimes. It wasn’t blowing up in the traditional way of having numbers go to infinity. Instead, the numbers oscillated. These oscillations were, you could bet your left nut on it, driving me to complete distraction.
It was probably minus-twenty-five degrees outside, which my mother would have told you—like Zhelezniak and Kolmogorov and I don’t know how many Russian mathematicians—is fantastic weather for clearing your mind. It’s the best weather for coming up with original ideas and problem solving.
I walked around the Capitol building and looked up at Miss Forward, lit up on the dome and pointing west. It was where I knew my soon-to-be ex-wife had gone. But that’s not really what I was thinking about. Just random thoughts went through my head. There was an album that I was listening to nonstop at the time, a jazz album mixed with modern African rhythms. They were so exotic to me, these patterns. The rhythms went in and out like waves at the seashore.
Then it came to me. Those rhythms were like my fucking computer program output. There was nothing wrong with what I had done. My computer code was good. The oscillations were real. They were meant to be there. Idiot. The solution was meant to oscillate. Idiot. There was nothing that needed to be fixed.
I’d already written two chapters of my dissertation. Those chapters examining data from low-altitude balloons during storms were adequate science. They represented the kind of journeyman work that used to get people decent but not particularly prestigious assistant professor jobs at places like the University of Alabama. Nowadays everybody and their mother gets Ph.D.’s, professorships are hard to come by, and work like I’d done in those two chapters would get me a decent but not particularly prestigious postdoc at a place like the University of Alabama.
This third and final chapter of my dissertation was special. I knew it would be. I was trying to simulate the movement of air and moisture in a way that mimicked—yes, that word so negative in my mother’s lexicon but so positive for a person concerned with computer simulations of nature—the observations from those balloons. Using computers to solve equations that, as Hilbert had noted long before, still needed to be tied to the foundations of mathematics was heady stuff when I was a student. I didn’t know what I would find. My advisor thought I was crazy for doing this work, that my first two chapters were more than enough to make a dissertation, that I already had a job, and that I was simply trying to do the impossible. But I had the liberty to do such work through the munificence of a National Science Foundation schol
arship and computer time that cost little if you ran your programs after midnight.
No one had found anything like this before in computer simulations of the atmosphere. All I had left to do was prove that these solutions were indeed real. Not many atmospheric scientists could prove such a thing. But an atmospheric scientist who had been pushed to pursue pure mathematics and had “rebelled” to study something rooted in the physical world could certainly do so. The mathematical proof turned out to be fairly trivial.
It had been a bad few months, a horrible few months, in fact. I kept working through it all because my computer program, however problematic, was something tangible. Solving equations is not an abstract thing. To even a mediocre mathematician like me, an equation is as solid as an oak tree in my mind. If it wasn’t, I couldn’t solve it. People’s emotions are, on the other hand, much more abstract. You, or at least I, can go crazy chasing after such vaporous things.
I knew then and there that my last chapter was essentially done. I also knew that this would be the kind of work that would draw attention to me in ways that it rarely did to any newly minted Ph.D. in my field. My personal life was rotten, but my professional life was about to take a hugely positive turn. As I walked down the beginning of State Street, I decided to celebrate. The bars would be open for another half hour or so, and I needed to take advantage of what they had to offer.
I walked into the first bar I saw, a narrow little Greek joint next to an old movie theater from the Depression era. I sat down next to a woman maybe thirty years old, with dark hair and ivory skin. To me she looked old, of course. “You look cold,” she said.
“Yeah, cold and happy.”
“You like the cold, I guess.”
“Well, you know, I’m Russian. I’m used to it.” I dropped into my ridiculous Russian accent. The woman was intrigued. My little act worked. We all have tricks to make up for our inadequacies. I drank vodka, of course. She drank gin. The woman had been married and divorced. I had been married and would soon be divorced. We had so much in common. The bar closed and we walked together in the cold air. We continued our conversation in my apartment.
Now how do I put this in a nice way? Well, I can’t. I absolutely cannot put this in any way that makes me seem like anything but a jerk. Here it is, though. All of my life, I had been surrounded by smart people, smart women. Intellect is everything to me. Even drunk, it’s everything to me. Here I was with a woman who couldn’t possibly understand the first thing about what I did intellectually. But she was impressed in a way that no woman had ever been impressed with me. When I told her what I did, her eyes grew big, and she said, “Oh, you must be a big brain.” I liked that. Yes, it’s trivial and petty to like such stupid flattery, but I liked it.
I liked her, too. Laura, her name was. She had two children and a lousy, mean ex-husband who made me seem like an angel in comparison. It was easy to be with Laura. She expected so little of me that it was a relief. Here’s another thing. American women can be so optimistic about what the next minute of life will bring. Where does this sense of a better world just around the corner come from, anyway? It’s a wondrous bit of character, this optimism and hope. No one in my family possesses it. We pound and pound and work until something breaks and a little opening of light appears.
I suppose it could be called optimism that we assume we can see that light eventually. But no, it’s really different. It’s not American at all. It’s our egos at work, not blind optimism about the world around us. It’s the idea that despite all the obvious and unforeseen obstacles, we will manage to beat the devil. It’s desperation that fuels us.
But not Laura. She felt that her life on this Earth would change for the better one day. It was a feeling she held as deeply as the devout believe in God. This was something new to me, this belief in the power of positive thinking. I couldn’t believe it myself, but to be around that glow was life affirming. Who wouldn’t want that?
I never saw Laura after I moved to Tuscaloosa. I never tried to meet her when I came to visit my parents. Years later I got an e-mail from her. She had seen me on a CNN show about a hurricane that had hit the Gulf Coast. “I always knew you’d be famous someday,” she wrote.
There would be other Lauras in Tuscaloosa. Of course they had different names. I liked the women in Alabama a great deal. I liked the flattery they dished out, little pieces of candy to make a man feel strong and powerful.
This is what Anna and my mother meant about me giving up on love. But I didn’t really think that was true. I had given up on the kind of romantic love they wanted for me, yes. Their ideal was that I should find an equal, someone strong and as intense and powerful as they were. Anything less was unacceptable. The truth was that I didn’t believe I possessed the strength to be with someone like that, at least romantically. I’d tried that once. Catherine was like them in her own way, independent and judging others by lofty standards.
How many demanding women can one man have in his life? How many judgments can be made on him before he starts to feel their weight and feels inadequate, clumsy, and lacking? I had two women like this. Their constant evaluations of me were something that, while difficult, were also valued because they pushed me to do more. At the time I was convinced that there would be no more Catherines in my life. Instead, there would be only Lauras. These women weren’t trying to achieve anything artistically or intellectually, weren’t striving to live the kind of life that leads to write-ups in magazines and in the New York Times, and weren’t even consciously trying to make the world a slightly better place. They wanted their houses to look nice. They wanted their children to be respectful. They starved themselves to keep their figures and spent copious amounts of money on clothes and makeup. My mother couldn’t understand my attraction to these lalkas and neither could Anna. My father was indifferent. My uncle understood perfectly.
“Not every man needs to find a woman who understands him. Sasha already has that anyway,” he would say to my mother in my defense. Thank you, Uncle Shlomo. You know what it’s like to be ordinary.
PART 2
THE MATHEMATICIANS
CHAPTER 13
The Gathering
The mathematicians arrived. They came to the land of Badger Ingenuity on flight after flight on a ridiculously cold day. A Canadian high-pressure mass descended on my home state, and it looked like it would stay put for at least the entire shiva. This was a good thing in a way. It wouldn’t snow. The sky would remain blue day after day. If we were lucky and ventured north a bit outside of town, we might even be able to get a peek at the northern lights at night. But the absence of clouds meant a prolonged period of temperatures below zero, perhaps minus twenty in the wee hours of the morning. I was going to freeze to death. Bruce, too. We had become weather wimps, and in our family, being a wimp about anything was a definite black mark. We had both heard the withering criticism about any of our complaints as children. “You’re kvetching over this? Over this? Have a soldier put the muzzle of a rifle to your nose and then you’ll have something to complain about.” We couldn’t compete against our parents’ past misery, and they never let us forget it.
Some flew directly to Madison. Others found their way through Milwaukee or Chicago. Calls came from the most narcissistic and cheap of the bunch to provide a free airport shuttle service and housing. I had no patience for such nonsense. I could feel a crustiness that I had worked so hard to smooth over in Tuscaloosa return quickly. Maybe I was even emboldened by the absence of the crustiest of the crusty, my dearly departed mother. Whatever the reason, I dealt curtly with these shnorers and would say, “This isn’t a wedding, you cheap bastard. It’s a funeral.” I would speak sometimes in English, but usually in Russian. “Rent a car. Take a cab. Walk. I don’t care. Mooch off your math friends in Madison. There’s a HoJo’s walking distance, more or less, to the synagogue if you need it.” I didn’t wait for any response before I hung up.
Our
block of rooms reserved at the HoJo’s by the math department’s secretary—or I should say the H Jo’s, since the “o” light in the “Howard” had burned out twenty years before and had never been replaced—filled up quickly. One of the sweetest mathematicians on this planet, Ollie Knutson, came forward to organize the logistics of housing these people and shuttling them around town. Ollie was a number theorist of considerable note who had “come home” from UCLA to take a professorship. His father, like my parents, had been a part of the faculty in the math department since the 1950s. Ollie was a saint that week. I can well imagine what he endured.
They came from Russia, France, Israel, Korea, Germany, and Japan to pay their respects to one of the two students of Kolmogorov who probably exceeded the genius of the master. The other one? Vladimir Zhelezniak, sly, humorous, self-deprecating, everything my mother was not. He was also my mother’s mortal enemy. Zhelezniak would be there as well. “He’ll come to dance on my grave, that one,” my mother said to me when she was sick. She rarely mentioned his name, but every time I heard something negative about “that one” or “him” or “the bastard” as a child, I knew to whom she was referring. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
I’d never met Zhelezniak. I’d seen pictures of him, beagle-faced with sad, big eyes. His bald crown was fringed with curls. A man possessing a face like his, so obviously Semitic to the Russian eye, would have had a difficult time as a child and a young man, I knew. He would have had to prove himself quietly and never make himself and his genius too visible, except in the presence of someone like Kolmogorov. My mother’s beloved great Kolmogorov didn’t give a shit who your parents or grandparents were, and only cared about the size of your brain. At nineteen, Zhelezniak shocked the mathematical world by solving Hilbert’s thirteenth problem. My mother, however, was not shocked. She was outraged.
The Mathematician’s Shiva Page 10
