by Lily Tuck
Also, she remembers the example of the innumerate shepherd and his sheep.
She drinks a little more wine. She has not eaten since noon but chewing food seems like an impossible task. A task she might have performed long ago but has forgotten how.
She would like a cigarette. She has not smoked in twenty years yet the thought of lighting it—the delicious whiff of carbon from the struck match—and inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs is soothing. She and Philip both smoked once.
In Tante Thea’s apartment, after making love for the first time, they share a cigarette, an unfiltered Gauloise. They hand it back and forth to each other as they lie on their backs, naked, on the lumpy single bed—the ashtray perched on her stomach. And later when they begin to kiss again, she remembers how Philip licks off a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip, and, then, how he swallows it. At the time, it seems a most intimate gesture.
As if she is exhaling smoke, Nina lets out a long deep breath.
Are you a spy? she asks. Are you employed by the CIA?
At the beginning, she makes a point to be difficult. She does not intend to be an easy conquest. She does not want to fall in love yet.
No. Yes. If that is what you want to believe.
Philip has a Fulbright scholarship and is teaching undergraduate math for a year at the École Polytechnique.
And do all the girls have a crush on you?
Alas, there aren’t many girls in my class. The few are the grinds. Philip makes a face of distaste.
There’s Mlle. Voiturier and Mlle. Epinay. They sit together and don’t say a word. They have terrible B.O.
In spite of herself, Nina laughs.
Do I? Nina makes as if to smell her underarm.
No. What perfume do you wear?
L’Heure Bleue.
Philip smells faintly of ironed shirts.
He still does.
Spring. The weather is warm, the chestnut trees are in flower, brilliant tulips bloom in the Luxembourg Garden. In the evenings, they stroll along the quays bordering the darkening Seine, watching the tourist boats go by. On one such evening, a boat shines its light on them, illuminating them as they kiss. On board, everyone claps and Philip and Nina, only slightly embarrassed, wave back.
What I was saying about whether God exists or not, Philip continues as they resume walking hand in hand, is that, according to Pascal, we are forced to gamble that He exists.
I’m not forced to gamble, Nina says, and believing in God and trying to believe in Him are not the same thing.
Right but Pascal uses the notion of expected gain to argue that one should try to lead a pious life instead of a worldly one, because if God exists one will be rewarded with eternal life.
In other words, the bet is all about personal gain, Nina says.
Yes.
On the way home, as Nina crosses the Pont Neuf, the heel of her shoe catches, breaks off. She nearly falls.
Damn, she says, I’ve ruined my shoe.
Holding on to Philip’s arm, she limps across the street.
A sign, she says.
A sign of what?
That I lead a worldly life.
Shaking his head, Philip laughs.
On a holiday weekend, they drive to the coast of Normandy. They walk the landing beaches and collect stones—in her studio, they are lined up on the windowsill along with stones from other beaches. At Colleville-sur-Mer, they make their respectful way among the rows and rows of tidy, white graves in the American cemetery.
How many?
9,387 dead.
On the way to La Cambe, the German military cemetery, it begins to rain.
Black Maltese crosses and simple dark stones with the names of the soldiers engraved on them mark the wet graves.
More than twice as many dead—according to the sign.
Why did we come here? Nina asks. And it’s raining, she says.
Instead of answering, Philip points. Look, he says.
In the distance, to the west, there is clear sky and a faint rainbow.
Make a wish, Nina says.
I have, Philip answers.
Always, on their trips, they stay in cheap hotels—neither one of them has much money. Closing her eyes, she can still visualize the rooms with the worn and faded flowered wallpaper, the sagging double bed with its stiff cotton sheets and uncomfortable bolster pillows; often there is a sink in the room and Philip pees in it; the toilet and tub are down the hall or down another flight of stairs. Invariably, too, the rooms are on the top floor, under the eaves, and if Philip stands up too quickly and forgets, he hits his head. The single window in the room looks out onto a courtyard with hanging laundry, a few pots of geranium, and a child’s old bicycle left lying on its side. The hotels smell of either cabbage or cauliflower—chou-fleur.
Chou-fleur, she repeats to herself. She likes the sound of the word.
Always, in her mind, she and Philip are in bed.
Or they are eating.
During dinner at a local restaurant, over their entrecôtes—saignante for him, à point for her—their frites, and a carafe of red wine, Philip talks about his class at the École Polytechnique, about what he is teaching—nombres premiers, nombres parfaits, nombres amiables.
Tell me what they are, she says, in between mouthfuls. She is always hungry. Starving, nearly.
I’ve told you already, he says, pouring her some wine. You weren’t listening.
Tell me again about the ones I like, the amiable ones.
Amiable numbers are a pair of numbers where the sum of the proper divisors of one number is equal to the other. 220 and 284 are the smallest pair of amiable numbers and the proper divisors of 220 are—Philip shuts his eyes—1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, and 110, which add up to 284, and the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, which add up to 220—do you see?
Imagine figuring that out, she says, waving a forkful of frites in the air.
Who did?
Th?bit ibn Qurrah, a ninth-century Arab mathematician. How many amiable numbers are there? No one knows.
Then there are the perfect numbers—6 is a perfect number. The divisors of 6 are 1, 2, and 3, which add up to 6.
But she has stopped listening to him. Perfection interests her less.
Do you want dessert? she asks. The crème caramel or the tarte aux poires?
She talks to him about how, more than anything, she wants to paint. Paint like her favorite artist, Richard Diebenkorn.
His still life and figure drawings. Do you know his work?
Philip shakes his head.
I’ll show them to you one day.
They argue, but without rancor, discussing and exchanging ideas. Both are attracted by abstractions. Sometimes she forgets that she has not known Philip all her life or not known him for years.
It was a happy time and they are married in the fall.
More than 10 percent of a person’s daily thought is about the future, or so she has heard say. Out of an average of eight hours a day, a person spends at least one hour thinking about things that have not yet happened. This will not be true for her. She has no desire to think about the future. For her, the future does not exist; it is an absurd concept.
She prefers to think about the past. Yesterday, for instance? She tries to remember what she and Philip did yesterday. What they said. What they ate.
When did she last speak to Louise? On the telephone, Louise described her job with the Internet start-up—a promotion, a raise, a cause for celebration. And is she, at this very moment, celebrating at her favorite Japanese restaurant? Nina pictures Louise talking excitedly to the young man who sits across from her, and as deftly with her chopsticks, she picks up expensive raw fish and puts it in her mouth.
Three weeks before her due date, alone—Philip is at a conference in Miami—in the third-floor walk-up apartment in Somerville, Nina wakes up with contractions. Hastily, she gets dressed, collects a few things, and calls a taxi. The taxi company does
not answer. She tries to time the contractions but she barely has time to recover from one before she has another. Again she tries to call the taxi company, again she gets no answer. She dials 911. For the first time, she notices that it is snowing. Snow swirls in great wind-driven whorls blanketing the parked cars, the trees, obscuring the street. Putting on her coat and picking up her bag, she starts downstairs; once her foot catches and she trips, falling down several steps. In an apartment below, a dog begins to bark and she hears someone shout, Shut up, damn it. Half afraid whoever it is will come out and find her, she holds her breath. In the front hall of their building, her water breaks, a stream hitting the cracked linoleum floor. A few moments later, she sees a car pull up and, muffled in a hat and coat, a policeman runs to the door. Rosy-faced from the cold, he looks young—younger than she. Leading her out into the snow, he holds Nina up under the arms to keep her from slipping in her flimsy leather moccasins—the only shoes that still fit, so swollen has all of her become—as they make their way to the car.
She lies down in the back of the police car, a grille separating her, like a criminal, from the back of the head and shoulders of the young policeman who is driving. The streets are unplowed and covered in several inches of new snow and she is aware of the eerie reflection of the car’s blue light, illuminating her in surreal-like flashes. The policeman speaks to someone on his radio; ten-four, he repeats, as he drives; when he has to use the brake, the car skids sideways. A truck with chains rumbles noisily past them in the opposite direction and Nina, momentarily caught in the truck’s headlights, has a glimpse of the driver’s surprised stare. Louise is almost there.
What, she wonders, does the young man in the restaurant with Louise look like?
Does he look like Philip?
Philip has an eidetic memory. He has total recall of names, places, and nearly every meal he has eaten—the good ones, in particular. He can quote entire passages from books and recite poems by heart: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Paradise Lost; Shakespeare’s speeches: Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York—she hears his voice taking on a sonorous tone along with a British accent. He can recite lengthy bits in Latin that he learned as a young boy.
A trick, he claims. One has to make an association between the words and a visual image that one positions in space. The Greeks knew how to do this. The story of Simonides is the classic example.
You told me once but I’ve forgotten it, Nina says.
Simonides was hired to recite a poem at a banquet but when he finished, his host, a nobleman, refused to pay him as he had promised, complaining that instead of praising him in the poem, Simonides praised Castor and Pollux and he should ask the two gods to pay him. Simonides was then told that two men were waiting for him outside and he left the banquet hall but when he got outside—
I remember now, Nina says. No one was there but the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing everyone. The corpses of the guests were so mangled that they were unrecognizable but since Simonides had a visual memory of where each had been sitting, he could identify them. I remember you told me that story on Belle-Île, one summer. We were in a café next to the harbor. I think we were waiting for the ferry and for Louise.
That’s my point exactly, Philip says, smiling.
Closing her eyes, she can see the house on Belle-Île. A colorful, old house, one side is painted red; the shutters, too, are red, a deeper, darker red. The plaster walls are a foot thick and the ceilings are low. Blue hydrangeas grow in dense hedges all around the house.
The house looks like the French flag, Philip says.
From Quiberon, they take the ferry. Often the sea is rough and the boat pitches and rolls, sending spray high up to splash the cabin windows where the passengers sit, blotting out the island as it grows closer. One time, Nina watches a farmer try to drive his horse and wagon on the boat and the horse, his hooves clattering noisily and drawing sparks, refuses at first to step onto the metal ramp. It is low tide and the grade is steep and the horse rears and nearly breaks his harness. He is a big white farm horse and during the entire voyage to Belle-Île, Nina hears him whinnying from below deck.
For close to twenty years, they rent the same house. The house belongs to a local couple, who slowly, slowly, over the years, renovate and modernize it, so that each summer there is something new—a stove, a fridge, an indoor toilet, curtains. Even in bad weather when they are forced to stay indoors, it makes little difference to Philip and Nina. Life on the island is simple, food is plentiful: oysters, langouste, all kinds of fish; every morning, in town, there is a market. Nina buys vegetables, bread, the local cheese—a goat cheese, with an acrid gamy taste. She and Philip swim, sit in the sun, read; one summer they read all of Proust in French: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire “Je m’endors.”—Philip can recite several more pages by heart. In the afternoon when the wind picks up, he goes sailing and she paints—or tries to.
Claude Monet, famously, spent a summer on Belle-Île. A framed poster of his painting of rocks off the Atlantic coast—rocks that look like prehistoric beasts sticking their pointed, dangerous heads out of the water—hangs in her studio. She has stared long and hard at both the painting and the rocks, which she, too, wants to paint. The sea, in particular. How menacing it looks in Monet’s painting and how tame and lifeless in her own. Her sea looks like soup. Eventually, she gives up and destroys it. Later, back home, she paints the same scene abstractedly. The rocks are vertical brown lines, the sea blue, green, and red horizontal stripes. The painting is almost successful.
Louise learns how to swim and ride a two-wheel bicycle on Belle-Île. A few years later, Philip teaches her how to sail.
You should see how Lulu sets the spinnaker, Philip boasts. It takes her twenty seconds. He is proud of her.
Nina has an affair on Belle-Île but she does not want to think of that.
No, not now.
The house is only a short walk from the sea. The first thing she does when she arrives each summer is to go down to the beach and swim. The cold water is a shock, but bracing, and, after the long trip, it makes Nina feel clean.
Jean-Marc.
Is this the first time you’ve crossed the Atlantic? Nina asks, when she meets him.
Solo, he has sailed in a race from Belle-Île to an island in the Caribbean, and he has won. A celebration of his victory is being held at a local restaurant.
Fair-haired, solidly built, and not tall—no taller than Nina—his eyes are a light blue, like a dog’s. A husky. Or the blue of the Caribbean. He is a bit younger than Nina.
No, no, he laughs at her. This is my ninth trip across the Atlantic.
Oh. Embarrassed, she turns away.
Standing beside him, his pretty wife, Martine, smiles up at him.
Next, Philip is asking Jean-Marc a lot of questions: What type of sails? Does he have radar? Loran? How accurate is it? Loran, she hears Philip say, suffers from the ionospheric effects of sunrise and sunset and is unreliable at night.
Navigation systems never posed a problem for me. But nature, yes, Jean-Marc answers. Nature can pose big problems. Two years ago, when I was halfway across the Atlantic, a whale attached herself to my boat. First she swam on one side of my boat, then she dove under and disappeared for a few minutes—Jean-Marc makes the motion of a whale diving with his hands—before she reappears again on the other side of my boat. She was playing with me. She continues like this for two days and two nights—I can still see the whale’s little eyes shining up at me in the dark, Jean-Marc says, shaking his head. It makes me—how you say?—complètement fou.
In French, whale is feminine, la baleine, Philip explains to Nina, imitating Jean-Marc’s accent and gestures, as he retells the story.
I know, she says.
Je sais.
Philip’s assurance always astonishes her. It is not arrogance bu
t a confidence, based in part on old-fashioned principles and in part on intelligence, that he is right and, usually, he is. For Nina, this is both a comfort and an irritant.
Strange, too, Nina reflects for perhaps the hundredth time, how Philip, who was born and raised hundreds of miles from the sea, should have become such a keen sailor. None of his family are.
It began with rowing on the Charles, he tells Nina. Then, one day, over Memorial Day weekend, my roommate took me out sailing on his family’s boat, a thirty-three-foot ketch called the Mistral—I didn’t know the difference between port and starboard—and we sailed over to Martha’s Vineyard. The wind was just right, and I will never forget how peaceful I felt that night, lying on the deck and looking up at the stars and listening to the sound of the water against the boat’s hull. In a funny way, it was a moment—how to describe it—where I felt completely at one. At one with the world and with the universe.
Maybe you got enlightened, Nina tells him.
Not very likely, Philip answers.
Right then and there I almost changed my major from math to astronomy and I also vowed to myself that one day I, too, would own a boat.
Downstairs in the basement, there is a decrepit rowing machine and, for years now, Nina has rarely heard the whirr of it. She has begun a campaign to throw the machine out. Useless outmoded junk, she claims. A fire hazard.
Now she can throw it out.
She takes a quick, almost furtive look out the window. The night seems very dark and silent. She can no longer see any stars. What is the saying Philip likes to quote? I much prefer a bold astronomer to a decorous star. She disagrees. She prefers a star to an invention.
It must be late, she decides.
She needs to get more wine. This time she will bring the bottle back upstairs.
He won’t mind, she thinks.
“In general,” Philip might say, were he to turn her infidelity into a classroom exercise, “if we know for certain that my wife is not having an affair, the probability of the event would be 0; but, should we discover that she is having an affair, the probability would be 1. The numerical measure of probability can range from 0 to 1—from impossibility to certainty. Thus, the probability of my wife being unfaithful would be 1 over 2 because there are only the two possibilities: that she is having an affair or that she is not having an affair.”
