by Lily Tuck
H H H T T H T T—Philip writes it out on the blackboard.
“And since each of these four tosses is equally likely, we can proceed thus: in the first, H H, Louise wins; in the second and third, H T and T H, Louise still wins; in the fourth T T, the other player wins. This means that in three of the four possible ways the tosses could have come up Louise wins, and in only one of the possible tosses does the other player win. Louise then has a 3 to 1 advantage and the pot should be divided 3 to 4 to her and 1 to 4 to the other player. Are you following me?”
Silence.
“The point I want to make to you,” Philip says after a pause, “is that Pascal and Fermat’s letters first showed us how to predict the future by calculating the numerical likelihood of an event occurring and, more important, how to manage risk.”
In her chambre de bonne, the narrow bed covered in an Indian fabric is pressed up against one wall and doubles as a couch; across from the bed, there is a scarred wooden bureau; on top of that, an electric hot plate, a few dishes, two china cups, and a radio. A wooden armchair stands by the window and stacks of books are piled on the floor; on the shelf over the sink are her toiletries, soap, a packet of brown toilet paper, a few bottles of water, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, a half-empty jar of Nescafé, and a hand mirror. Several posters from the art gallery where she works, advertising upcoming shows, are thumbtacked to the wall. From the hooks nailed to the door dangle some hangers with skirts, dresses, her leather jacket; also, a man’s hat.
Picking up the hat, Philip asks, Who does this belong to?
From her window, she looks out on to mansard roofs and, craning her neck, she can also look down at a private interior garden that, except for a small white dog who occasionally runs maniacally around it, is always deserted. In the building directly across from her she can see into a dining room where, in the evening, a family—mother, father, and three children—eat their dinner. She watches as they talk, laugh, pass their plates, and refill their glasses.
In the morning, often late, she takes the métro to work, then, afterward, if it is not raining or cold, she walks home. That spring, she takes to wearing a man’s hat—it makes her, she thinks, look modish.
Except for those he wrote her long ago, she has received few letters from Philip. From time to time, a postcard from some far-flung place where he is attending a conference, which she does not always keep. One of these postcards—a postcard with a picture of a junk sailboat on it—arrived long after Philip himself gets home.
Last night I had dinner on the Peak in the house of a wealthy Chinese lawyer who is a trustee at the university here and his Eurasian wife. They have a fabulous collection of jade; also of Ming china. We ate off some of it. Dinner consisted of all kinds of exotic dishes including rooster testicles! The weather is glorious. I suggest we move to Hong Kong immediately. All my love to you and Lulu, Philip
Sofia, again.
A slender, dark-haired woman, in a tight-fitting silk qipao, eating rooster testicles with her slippery ivory chopsticks.
What do they taste like?
The rooster testicles? I don’t know. Rubber bands.
Does she speak English? Nina also asks.
Of course. She studied at Oxford and speaks several languages—English, French, Spanish, I think she said. To say nothing of Cantonese and Mandarin.
And the Ming china. What does it look like? Nina presses.
Blue and white. Philip frowns slightly, then says, which reminds me of how, once, according to Sofia, a guest at one of their dinner parties picked up a Ming bowl to look underneath for the mark and he dropped it. The bowl broke and, according to Chinese custom—so that the guest does not feel embarrassed and to show that he is not overly attached to his possessions—the host is supposed to break his own bowl.
And did she?
Philip shrugs. Yes, I suppose.
The poor guest. He must have felt terrible.
And what would you do under those circumstances? she asks.
I would go to an antique store and try to replace the Ming bowls.
Like turning the other cheek.
Would she have? No, probably not. She is too easily angered, too quick to take offense. A true redhead, her parents were always quick to remind her.
The result of a genetic mutation since neither one of them had red hair.
Redheads make up 5 percent of the world population, Philip tells her, as they lie pressed together on her narrow bed in the maid’s room on rue Sophie-Germain. Scotland, he also says, twisting a strand of her hair between his fingers, has the highest population of redheads. A redhead in Corsica is considered bad luck but redheads are good luck in Poland.
I should move to Poland.
Redheads are more likely to be stung by bees, Philip continues. And the Egyptians burned all redheaded women.
I won’t go there, Nina says.
No matter now, her hair has turned gray.
“My wife has red hair—auburn is what she prefers to call it,” is how Philip begins another lecture. “As you can see, I have black hair although it is starting to turn gray”—the students laugh. “Our daughter, Louise, who is twelve”—here Philip pauses a moment—”no, she’s thirteen now, also has black hair, which leads me to today’s subject—the role played by probability in heredity. You all know how Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth-century abbot from Moravia, began his experiments with two peas: a yellow pea and a green pea and how he cross-fertilized these two peas and got all yellow peas, then how he cross-fertilized the second-generation peas and got three-quarter yellow peas and one-quarter green peas. This was not a new experiment but so far no one had explained it, until Mendel did. He showed how the seed of an offspring of the two original peas—the yellow and the green—contain the following combinations: yellow-yellow, yellow-green, green-yellow, green-green; and that the seed which contains a yellow gene will almost always produce a yellow pea because yellow is the dominant color….”
Before she gets into bed, Nina turns up the volume of a popular music station on the radio to drown out the noise of their lovemaking.
Taking off his shoes and socks, his shirt then his pants, Philip sings along with Johnny Hallyday singing “Let’s Twist Again.”
He makes her laugh.
Mimicking the way Johnny Hallyday pronounces year to sound like yar, Philip climbs into bed next to Nina.
In the room next door, the Swiss au pair pounds on the wall.
She’s just jealous, Philip says as, undeterred, he gets on top of Nina and slowly begins to move, making the narrow bed bang against the wall.
Nina starts to laugh again.
Stop, Philip tells her, as he holds her tighter and moves faster inside her, making the bed rock and sway and bang harder against the wall.
Or I’ll come.
Yar, he says.
Again the Swiss au pair pounds on the wall.
The shutter again.
Who said sounds are magnified at night?
Philip?
No, Andrew.
A dog has begun to bark. The neighbor’s old yellow Lab, she guesses.
She cannot think of his name.
Poor poisoned Natty Bumppo.
She cannot leave the bed, she cannot reach the sink, she throws up in the wastepaper basket by the side of the bed. Next, she throws up in the bed. All day and all night, she retches painfully, violently, until there is nothing left inside her but bile and she feels as if she is retching up her insides. She is certain that she is going to die.
At last, she falls asleep; then she hears knocking.
God, Philip says. What happened?
What time is it? Outside, it has begun to get dark, it must be the next day.
I called the gallery and they said you hadn’t come in yesterday or today.
I was sick, she says. A migraine.
She feels weak but better. The room is airless and smells of vomit. Slowly, carefully, she swings her legs out of bed—legs that look to be too th
in to support her weight—and goes to open the window.
Let me take a bath, then I’ll clean up this mess, she says.
I’ll give you a hand, Philip says.
He runs the bath for her and holds her steady as she steps into the warm water.
Lie back, lean your head on my arm, he says.
You’ll get wet.
Rolling up his shirt sleeves, Philip kneels at the side of the tub and washes the vomit stuck to her hair.
Shut your eyes, relax, he tells her.
Have you thought of becoming a nurse? Nina asks.
Did you see an aura? Philip asks. Like with epilepsy, you are supposed to see one.
Nina, her eyes shut, is only half listening.
A few lights, maybe, she answers.
Epileptics were considered sacred. Some people think they still are. In Laos, for instance, the Hmong, Philip continues.
Lying in the tub filled with warm water in the cramped bathroom on the sixth floor of the apartment building on rue Sophie-Germain, her head resting on Philip’s arm, Nina comes close to telling him what happened to her in the forest of Chantilly but she does not.
Instead she says, How do you know this?
I knew a girl who had epilepsy.
Opening her eyes, Nina asks, Who?
A girl called Michelle in my English class, Philip answers. She was acting out the sleepwalking scene about washing the blood from Lady Macbeth’s hands when, all of a sudden, her eyes rolled back inside her head and she fell, her body jerking on the floor, and for a moment, we all thought it was part of the act, Michelle playing Lady Macbeth, but, of course, it wasn’t.
When I was in high school in Brussels, I played Lady Macbeth, Nina says, standing up.
Voici l’odeur du sang encore, tous les parfums de l’Arabie ne sera pas adoucir cette petite main, she recites, giving Philip her hand to hold as she gets out of the tub. Funny how I remember those lines.
Your hand smells sweet only it’s wet, Philip says, leaning over and kissing it.
For a long time after, Nina is convinced that the migraine headaches are a punishment for her lies.
The neighbor’s dog is still barking—the sound is closer. They must have let him out of the house; otherwise, he will wake up their baby.
She thinks of the dog in Pantelleria—lying in a ditch, she supposes, run over.
Migraine is what she calls the series of large red near-monochrome canvases in which she combines layering, smearing, and drip painting. The paintings take up most of the wall space in her studio and are unlike anything else she has done.
An experiment, she tells Philip, when she shows them to him.
Interesting but disturbing, he says.
She takes this to mean he does not like them.
She never has a migraine while she is pregnant with Louise.
Again, she takes this for a sign.
After Louise is born, however, the migraines come back, worse.
Now she has medication.
Alerted, this afternoon, by the familiar flicker of lights and a slight throbbing in her head, she leaves her studio and gives herself an injection, then she lies down on the sofa in the living room. The sofa is worn, the pattern, an old-fashioned chintz, is faded. She plans to get it recovered but, as yet, has not done so. A part of her does not want to make changes and Philip does not appear to notice or to mind how shabby some of their furniture—furniture they have had since they were first married—looks. The living room curtains, too, she reflects, just before she falls asleep, need to be replaced. The sun has rotted their linings.
When she wakes up, the headache is gone and, relieved, she remains on the sofa a while longer to enjoy the feeling of well-being. Piled up on the coffee table, next to her, are a stack of science journals; picking one up, she leafs through it. She skims an article describing how experiments surgically joining together old and young mice are used for regenerative biology research, then, turning the page, some photographs of Japanese crop art catch her eye. Each year, she reads, the farmers in the small village of Inakadate, Minamitsugaru District, Aomori Prefecture, located at the northern end of Honshu, plant purple-and-yellow-leafed kodaimi rice with green-leafed tsugaru-roman rice to create huge images based on works by famous Japanese artists. The images, according to the article, are first plotted on computers then marked with reed sticks on the rice paddies.
Did you see this? she plans to ask Philip when he comes home.
You could try it with lettuce: red leaf, romaine, Bibb. …
Instead he goes upstairs to lie down.
Philip prides himself on his garden. On warm spring weekends, he is out early, tilling, hoeing, planting, weeding. In the summer, they have more vegetables than they can eat.
The photograph she wants to show Philip is of a Sengoku-period warrior on his horse. The horse is made from the yellow-leafed kodaimi rice and is portrayed with mane and tail flying, his purple-leafed kodaimi rice nostrils flared.
Now who will tend to the vegetable garden?
She makes herself think of something else.
French gardens.
Parc Montsouris, with over a hundred different varieties of trees and shrubs from all over the world—except for the weeping beeches, she cannot recall any of them—is Philip’s favorite.
Her favorite is the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Closing her eyes, she retraces her steps.
In the spring, while it is still light and the gates to the park are not yet shut, she walks from the rue Jacques-Callot where she works and makes a quick left turn onto busy rue de Seine, then hurries to cross boulevard Saint-Germain and continues until she reaches a narrow shop on the corner of rue Saint-Sulpice that sells antique jewelry, and where she pauses a moment to admire the art deco bracelets, rings, and, in particular, a brooch in the shape of a dragonfly with emerald and ruby wings—wishing she could have it—until one day, it is gone from the window and she mourns it—mourns its loss as if the brooch had been hers. Once she catches a glimpse of a slender young blonde woman—no older than she—sitting by the window inside the shop, her head bent, stringing pearls. Reminded of someone—only she can’t think who—and attracted by how swiftly the woman moves her hands, again, she stops and, no doubt sensing Nina’s presence, the young woman looks up and smiles at her through the glass. A few more steps and rue de Seine turns into rue de Tournon, a wide elegant street that is flanked by old houses and expensive shops. At the next corner, a café. Then, straight ahead, the imposing Senate building, and, to one side, the entrance to the Luxembourg. At this time of year, the pear trees are in bloom and brilliant red and yellow tulips line the paths. When she comes to the boat basin, she pulls up two of the green metal chairs—one to sit, the other to put her feet on—and watches the children, who are still out prodding their boats in the brackish-looking water with long, wooden poles, and she can hear the mothers scold. Always, a man drags over a chair to come and sit next to her.
Vous avez l’heure, Mademoiselle?
She feigns incomprehension.
Voulez-vous prendre un café?
Often, the man follows her part of the way through the garden and Nina pretends not to notice.
A silly joke comes to her unbidden: an American girl, warned of the dangers posed by French men, learns a word to say in French to discourage their advances. The word is cochon!—pig! and, sure enough, when a man on the métro gooses the girl, she turns to him and shouts, Couchons!
Although she always looks, Nina never again sees the pretty young blonde woman, sitting by the shop window, stringing pearls.
Come to think of it now, the pretty young blonde woman stringing pearls reminds her of Iris.
Under the branches of the weeping beeches in Parc Montsouris, she and Philip sit, hidden, on a blanket on which they have spread out their picnic lunch. As soon as they have finished, they lie down and Philip begins to kiss her. Kisses that taste of the red wine he has drunk. Long, drawn-out kisses—his tongue pushing and
probing into her mouth until she has to catch her breath.
Wait, I have to breathe, she says, pushing him away.
Reaching for the bottle, Philip drinks more wine.
Nodding absently to herself, Nina takes another sip of wine. Holding up the glass, she can see that it is almost empty.
She sighs.
Hidden as they are by the pendulous beech branches, no one can see her raised skirt, his unzipped pants. She can hear a couple sitting on a nearby bench arguing, a child riding by on his bicycle, a baby stroller being pushed past. Philip presses his head against hers, his lips in the crook of her neck and in her hair, to try to muffle the sound he makes. Looking up, she hears a bird chirp his alarm.
She remembers the cat.
Noiselessly, a skinny, one-eyed, white cat—wrinkled pink skin covers the other eye—emerges from the beech branches as they are eating their picnic. Nina throws him bits of her ham sandwich.
He’ll never leave, Philip says. You shouldn’t do that.
Poor thing, he looks hungry, Nina says. I wish we had some milk.
He looks sick, Philip says. I wouldn’t touch him.
Instead, Nina gets to her feet and, hand extended, walks toward the cat.
Here, kitty, here, kitty, kitty.
The cat turns and runs.
Later, as Nina is shaking out the blanket and Philip is picking up the food wrappers and the empty bottle of wine, the cat reappears.
His tail up in the air, the cat walks over to Nina and presses himself against her legs.
Reaching down, she strokes him. What happened to your eye? she asks. I should take you home, she also says.
Something else about a cat.
Something she can never quite grasp.
Tell me again, she whispers to Philip.
This time, I promise, I’ll try to understand.
The experiment is meant to illustrate the futility of using quantum mechanics to try to consider everyday objects. By putting a live cat in a locked box—
A live cat? How cruel.
No, I told you it’s a thought experiment—by putting an imaginary cat in a box along with an imaginary small amount of radioactive material, small enough so that over the course of several hours one of the atoms in this material might or might not decay and kick off a particle, which in turn would trigger a hammer that would smash a vial of hydrogen cyanide, which would then fill the box with cyanide gas and kill the cat—
