you care?”
She brushes, brushes. He can hear the silent count. She could be punishing herself for something, pounding her own head.
Catching sight of his puzzled but fascinated face in the mirror, she summons up a word from the pit of rationalisation: “Nicholas,” she says. “That was the point of the whole thing.
I was looking for Nicholas.”
He continues staring, mesmerised, as she drags the brush through her mane, tosses it back over her shoulders, bends forward so that the hair falls like a slow and languid rain to touch the floor, runs the brush through it again and again, an adagio movement now, long sweeping strokes that end near her feet, near his feet too, and have the curious effect of seeming to pay homage to something. To what? Not to him, that is certain. Hair, he thinks, is responsible for a great deal of erotic confusion.
She wonders, slightly frantic now: Will nothing goad him
to action?
“It’s my father I want,” she says, deliberately ambiguous, to shock him.
And then, peering out from the curtain of curls: “Oh don’t look so shocked.” She straightens up, and her hair flashes in a golden arc above and behind her. “I’m not into incest. But I did want to see what you looked like, since Katherine mistook you for my father. Well, to be honest, first I wanted to find out if you were real. Because it’s true, I have to agree with you, I can’t tell how much Katherine makes up.” She tosses the brush onto the vanity cabinet and scoops the long curls loosely into a topknot.
“There’s other stuff too. Other reasons. For instance: you cleared out and left your wife and kids. So I thought I’d study you. Maybe figure out why Nicholas left Bea, and why he’s never so much as sent me a birthday card. Ever.” She is enumerating points on her fingers. “Also, you’re a womaniser. And so was Nicholas, at least according to several well-documented views. Three: you’re mesmerised by your ex-wife Rachel, the way Nicholas was by Verity; which isn’t quite the same thing, perhaps, but still …”
“I see,” he says coldly. “A lab experiment.”
“More or less. And four” — checking off the ring finger on her left hand with the index finger of the right — “you’re about the same age as Nicholas. What year were you born?”
“1937.”
Even Charade is startled. “See? Same as Nicholas. Isn’t that weird?” She sighs. “But what does it prove? Nothing. So I’m heading home.”
Is this the moment? he wonders. Is this the time that is inexorably on its way toward them, that nothing can prevent, the final cooling down, the end of the affair? “Home?” he echoes.
“Back to Queensland.” If he does nothing definitive now, if he says nothing decisive, she realises with panic, she will indeed have to leave. “I sort of miss my mum, you know. And Sid and Em and Davey and all the Bea-lings. I even have a hankering to see Michael Donovan again. Finish my history degree instead of dabbling in astrophysics. May I get by?”
“But wait.” He does not move from the door. “Wait. You can’t do this.” He has a sense of the script going wrong. (Of course, all scripts go wrong, they all end this way, but he has a sudden passionate wish to … No, no, nothing sudden or passionate. He needs to be rational, analytical, he decides he has been developing in the last few minutes a conviction — call it scientist’s intuition that this … this experiment has not yet reached critical mass.) “You can’t just —”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because …” He is caught. He is face to face with an answer. He almost says it: Because I couldn’t bear it if you left. Because I think it’s possible that I …
He swallows.
“Why can’t I?” she repeats.
A second passes.
He swallows again and says: “Because you can’t conclude an experiment like that. You can’t abandon a problem-set until you’ve solved it.”
She turns away. With an effort she says neutrally, “An experiment.”
“The quest for your father. Exorcism, sorting things out, the whole problem-set. You haven’t solved it yet.”
“It doesn’t have a solution.”
“Everything has a solution,” he says eagerly (his relief is visceral, its origins multiple and obscure), “once you construct a theory elegant enough to eliminate obvious contradictions.” We are past the danger point, he thinks. She will stay now. She will start to talk again. “You have to ask the question the right way. You haven’t worked at it from enough angles yet. Besides,” he is cajoling her now, in his excitement he leaves the door unguarded, and paces the tiny room, “you’ve got me hooked. It’s my problem-set now, mine too, and I don’t have all the data in. For example,” — he waves his arms in the air, he could do with a stick of chalk and a blackboard — “consider the hypothesis that your mother must certainly know where Nicholas and Verity are. She must have a very good reason for not telling you — that’s a significant
clue in itself. There has to be more you could tell me about Bea.”
“Yes, well, it’s funny how I have to do all the talking.”
“But …” he says, surprised, “in the beginning, I couldn’t shut you up.”
(And besides, besides, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? He has had, he realises it now, a vague and surely ridiculous sense that there was something almost preordained about her endless telling of stories. For some reason, he had fallen into the comfortable habit of imagining that it was she who wanted to stop him from losing interest.)
He says apologetically: “I’ve been taking you for granted, but I want you to know …” He frowns a little and adds, aggrieved: “But in the beginning, you know, you practically threw yourself at me. You just arrived in the middle of the night at my office. Did I make a pass? Did I seduce you? No. You walk into my life, you rearrange …” Now that anxiety about her imminent departure has faded, he begins to feel resentful. “I used to get a lot of my best work done late at night.”
“In the beginning,” she says, “there was something very odd about the way you walked into my story. At the very moment that Aunt Kay was thinking about Nicholas, you walk past the Royal Bank mirrors …”
“What? Just for starters,” he says, “we were nowhere near the Royal Bank.”
“I might have known you’d deny —”
“The open taxi door was a nice touch. But she was the one in the taxi. When I said threw herself, I wasn’t kidding. She opened it and leaned out and offered me a ride. But it happened outside the courthouse. The Bristol Place was for real, but she was the one who gave the taxi driver directions.”
Charade stares at him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Tell you what,” he cajoles. “If you stay all night, I’ll tell you a story. It’s my turn, right?”
He wants me, she thinks, jubilant, secretly triumphant, turning away in case she cannot keep her smile tamped down, in case it leaks out around the edges of her frown.
Encouraged by the hesitation he thinks: We are not yet at terminal density, and ventures: “I’ll put on the Wynton Marsalis record if you’ll pour the brandy.” And when she turns but still appears to be wavering, he risks stroking her cheek. “If you left, it would be …” He is floundering in the slippery language of risk. “I’d miss you,” he says, cautious.
For the first time, he finds himself wondering what she does with her days. Our age difference, he thinks. Is it
a problem? Would it have any possible bearing on the course
of events?
She is not exactly his first — though he shies away from running up a mental tally — she is not exactly his first twenty-four year old. He has, suddenly, a Petri dish vision of himself, a view of his life as an Einstein-Bohr thought experiment: what will this man be doing a few years from now? Will he keep bringing younger and younger students, though at less and less frequent intervals, home to his apartment, to this housekeeper-p
erfect Cambridge apartment, tastefully furnished to please the still-present shadow of his former wife Rachel? Will he invite the young students, blooming and brilliant, more and more often, but have his invitations ever more rarely accepted? A familiar craving hits him: a desire for the pure and pristine company of an insoluble (and hence endlessly seductive) mathematical problem. He leans toward the clear-cut difficulties of making Einstein apply to anything earlier than 10-45 of a second after the Big Bang, of the first simple second of Time. But the curve of Charade’s cheek interposes itself, and he puts a record on
the stereo.
“So,” Charade says. “Tell me a story.”
“It embarrasses me,” he says, “to talk about myself in the first person, so I’m not going to. I’m going to call this The Kynge’s Tale after Chaucer.”
Charade swivels on the cushions and raises a sceptical eyebrow. “Oh. You’ve read Chaucer then?”
“Scientists aren’t quite as illiterate …” The brandy makes an amber and dignified wave pattern within the snifter; actually, technically, he thinks, a wave packet since the waves are constrained within the sides of the goblet.
“Yes?” Charade prompts.
The first half of his sentence still floats on the surface of the brandy, waiting. “We aren’t as illiterate as some students like to think. Liberal Arts students.”
“You’ve actually read The Canterbury Tales. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Well,” he hedges, “not cover to cover. But when I was at Princeton —”
“I thought not. There isn’t a Kynge’s Tale.”
“Oh,” he says, crestfallen. “Well, there should be.”
“There’s a Physician’s Tale, which is about as close as you’ll get in the fourteenth century to a physicist. Maybe you can use that one.”
“I don’t need to use someone else’s plot.” He sniffs the brandy’s sharp bouquet with an air of exquisitely offended dignity. “I’m telling you the true story about my encounter with your Aunt Kay. Or rather, the brief and torrid Toronto affair of Kynge and Katherine. So I’ll stick with The Kynge’s Tale.”
“Oh my,” Charade says.
“Once upon a time,” he begins, “there was a tormented physicist named Kynge.”
“Tormented. Really! ”
Koenig sets his brandy snifter on the table beside the sofa, walks over to the stereo, turns it down, busies himself with the lighting of his pipe. “Maybe I won’t tell the story, after all,” he says.
“Okay, okay,” Charade cajoles. “I’ll shut up. But really …” She waves her hand around the room to indicate a certain lack of torment in the tasteful appointments of a Cambridge town house. “Plus international scientific prestige, a Nobel Prize brewing, so I hear around MIT (oh, don’t look so unsuitably modest), women throwing themselves at you … It just strikes me that tormented is a little …”
“I’ll begin somewhere else,” he says. “I’ll begin at the beginning, or near it. Once upon a time …” Here he fiddles for pipe tool, tobacco, matches.
Charade sighs. “A born storyteller, you’re not.”
“Once upon a time,” he says, clearing his throat portentously, “a boy named Kynge shone a flashlight on the wall of his bedroom and asked himself: where is the light before it leaves the bulb, and where does it go after it hits the wall? One of his obsessions was born that night. He set out on a search for the birthplace of light.”
“Tan-tar-a, tan-tar-a,” sings Charade, making a trumpet with her hands.
“This was in rural Wisconsin,” he says sternly. “The boy Kynge came from peasant stock, farming stock, third generation immigrants, the kind who kept gilt-framed portraits of his great-grandparents over the mantel. Stylised and tiny, in the background of his great-grandparents’ portrait, was their neat little Rhine valley farmhouse. For his third birthday, the young Kynge was given a toy tractor, for his thirteenth his own set of farm tools. But to no avail. Against all logic and tradition, he fell in love with mathematics and the stars. The high school yearbook summed up his social life with a cartoon: at the graduation ball, he danced with a slide rule, a model of the hydrogen atom, and a map of the galaxy, all of them done up in strapless satin and billowing net skirts.”
“Are you asking me to believe,” Charade interjects, “that you led a celibate life in high school?”
“My dear child,” he says dryly, “back in the Dark Ages, when I was in high school, everyone led a celibate life. And as for the innocuous dating and necking that went on, yes, as a matter of fact, I was painfully shy in those days. A nerd, as they’d say today I had a puritan adolescence. I discovered women late in life.”
“Ah,” Charade says. “That explains it. When do we get to Rachel and the hundreds of women and the torrid Toronto affair?”
“Rachel,” he sighs. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Rachel.”
There is a long silence which even Charade does not dare
to break. Between his thoughts and her thoughts, the long honeyed notes of the trumpet of Wynton Marsalis slide like suntanned swimmers. Cambridge traffic, muted, thrums from three floors down and a block away on Massachusetts Avenue. A dog barks somewhere. From further away, sirens. It is a jazz night, syncopated, cool, possibly heading for disturbance.
“I could say this,” Koenig ventures at last. “It is impossible to live with someone who is deeply and dangerously unhappy. And it is even harder to leave her.”
Another silence. Through the window, Charade watches a neon blinking, one corner of the sky blushing at regular intervals. Something in Harvard Square or by the Common; or perhaps the liquor store on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue. Wynton Marsalis and the sirens knit themselves together, a gifted ensemble.
“And this holds true,” Koenig sighs, “no matter how much you love the unhappy person, and no matter how … how impeccable, I suppose you could say … are the reasons for her unhappiness.”
Charade has a sudden queasy sensation of weightlessness. What she sees is Bea standing by the window of the ramshackle house in Tamborine; she sees the shutter that falls across Bea’s eyes when Verity is mentioned. Charade curls up into the corner of the sofa and buries her face in a cushion because sounds are gurgling up through her throat. She cannot tell if they are sobs or laughter. Nothing but reruns. There are only three channels in the world, she thinks, and they recycle the same old plots.
She looks over the top of her cushion at Koenig who is staring at the night beyond the window. What’s the point? she wonders. I’ll never pry him loose from that ghost. Why can’t I be as smart as Bea, as clever as my mum, the Slut of Tamborine Mountain?
(I reckon I’ve had a good life, Charade.) She considers tiptoeing out of the room. He will never notice that she has gone. She believes that there are women who can do that sort of thing: escape from their own plots, intact. She fears that she, alas, is not one of them.
“I’ll try,” Koenig says, “to tell the beginning and the end of my marriage. I can’t speak about the long happy/unhappy middle. And when I say the end … well, I mean it loosely and imprecisely. I mean, some point near something that was more or less decisively a kind of ending. I mean, somewhere near the point where I moved out.
“In the beginning,” he says. “Or rather, before the beginning, Kynge’s room-mate at Princeton, who was a Liberal Arts type, had two tickets to a play. Events intervened. The room-mate’s girlfriend, for whom ticket number two was intended, was glimpsed necking in the stacks of the library with another, with the room-mate’s most detested rival. Wretched and bitter and decidedly buffeted by alcoholic weather, the room-mate coaxed Kynge (who would much have preferred another night in the Physics Lab) into keeping him company: for heavy pre-theatre drinking, for the play, for a post-theatre party with the cast, most of whom were the room-mate’s friends. It had been ascertained that girlfriend and rival (also drama typ
es) were to be on the town in Manhattan for the night. Well-wishers and supporters on the cast gave out the consoling view that the room-mate’s rival was a jerk,
and that comfort would be liberally offered at the post-play party.
“And thus the reclusive and studious and unliterary-minded Kynge found himself sitting fifth row, centre aisle, at a drama student production of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning.
“And thereby hangs a tale.”
No curtain, the young Kynge notes uneasily. Nothing to separate stage from audience. He fears something avant-garde and incomprehensible, he thinks longingly of the lab. Beside him, his desperately unhappy room-mate Arkwright slumps sideways, a heavy pressure on Kynge’s arm. Arkwright’s breathing, heavy and slow and fetid, fogs several unoccupied seats. The theatre is only half full, not a good sign.
On stage, Kynge notes a large and bulky lectern, possibly part of the scenery, possibly not yet removed from the last mass undergraduate lecture. Dangling against the black backdrop is a frame, obviously plywood, obviously innocent of glass or substantial attachment, apparently meant to indicate a gothic window. Beside it is a door frame and a door, connecting space with space. Penner, who is having difficulty with the physics course, comes and stands behind the lectern and busies himself with quill and parchment. Sawatsky, whom Koenig recognises from one of his mathematics courses, stands behind the dangling window frame and sticks his head through it.
Apparently the play has begun, and Koenig fears the worst — and oh God, it is even worse than that. They are speaking poetry. Blank verse. There are metaphors as convoluted as octopi, he can’t make head or tail of it. Arkwright begins snoring in a soft purr of whisky. Koenig lets his thoughts wander to Hubble’s observation of the red-shifting of the galaxies, and drowses almost to the end of Act One when loud offstage noises wake him.
One of the characters, dashingly dressed in boots and cape but a dreadful actor, is ranting: of witches she’s the one … , after which several onstage exchanges are lost to the noises off, which sound like a locker-room brawl. Even drunken Arkwright stirs in his seat. There are shouts from the rabble, off, then the door which stands like a foolish obelisk, up stage, is pushed open and a girl appears.
Charades Page 21
