by Lily Tuck
Que j’aime à faire apprendre un nombre utile aux sages! Immortel Archimède, artiste ingénieur,
Qui de ton jugement peut priser la valeur? Pour moi, ton problème eut de pareils avantages
The head of the department, a man Philip dislikes, declaims in perfect French.
Excusing herself, Nina gets up from the luncheon table to go the bathroom as Philip taps his glass with his fork and prepares to stand.
He has agreed to recite the first one hundred digits of pi by heart.
31415926535897 …
She is splashing cold water on her face from the sink when the young assistant professor comes in.
I think you’ve made a mistake, he says, smiling. This is the men’s room.
Looking around, she notices the urinals for the first time; she also notices the graffiti on the door to one of the stalls.
So it is, she answers, blushing. Sorry.
… 640628620899.
In the dining room, people are clapping. Philip must be finished.
A hundred is nothing, Philip is saying as Nina sits down at the table. So far Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan holds the record. He has memorized the first forty thousand digits of pi.
It takes him nine hours to recite them, Philip adds, laughing. And during all that time, he never takes a break to eat, drink, or take a leak.
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once—she wants to remember what was written on one of the stall doors in the men’s room.
The phonetic code, Philip maintains, is useful as it turns meaningless numbers into meaningful words and can be used to remember phone numbers, postal codes. For example, he tells Nina, 1 is t or d; 2 is n; 3 is m; 4 is r; 5 is l; so that it follows that my is 3 and turtle is 1, 4, 1, and 5, and so forth. Every digit is associated with a consonant sound and that is how I can remember the first hundred digits of pi.
By the way, where did you go? Philip also asks.
The bathroom. I got my period, she lies.
This is a lie, the liar says.
Nina had her own code for remembering numbers—only she does not try to explain it to Philip.
The first 8 digits of pi would go like this: she is pregnant at 31; now, she is 41; 59 are the last two digits of Patsy’s telephone number; and 26—she has to think for a minute—2 plus 6 adds up to 8, and 8 is the street number of the building on rue Sophie-Germain where she used to live. Or, she can subtract 2 from 6 and get 4 and 4 is the floor she has to climb to on foot—the elevator is out of order according to a handwritten sign taped to the door—to reach the apartment in the building around the corner from the pharmacy where she buys cotton and disinfectant. And since the number of that building is 58 she can invert the 2 and the 6 and subtract the 4 and this will be another way to remember the next few digits of pi. And didn’t she have to take the number 6 métro from Denfert-Rochereau to La Motte-Picquet to get to 58 avenue Émile Zola? And, as for the 2—come to think of it—didn’t
Émile Zola have 2 illegitimate children, a boy and a girl, with his wife’s seamstress, his mistress?
For Nina, this is more than enough to remember.
She remembers the difficulty she has when she leaves the apartment, going down the four flights of stairs. On each landing, she sits down on a step and waits for a few minutes. The bleeding has not stopped.
The names of Émile Zola’s children are Denise and Jacques.
She and Philip wanted two children.
A brother or a sister for Louise.
“Suppose that, after many years, I meet an old friend,” is how Philip begins another class, “and the friend says to me: ‘I hear you have two children and the oldest is a girl’ and I answer, ‘Right, my oldest daughter is named Louise.’ Now the question is what is the probability of my second child being a girl? The answer is easy. The probability is 1 to 2. But, say, I vary the question a little and my old friend does not know whether Louise is the eldest or not and he simply asks: ‘I hear one of your children is a girl,’ the probability of both children being girls becomes 1 to 3.”
Holding a bucket in one hand, Louise steps cautiously into the sea. She is three or four years old and she is naked.
Where are they? Belle-Île?
A wave comes in and swirls around her sturdy little legs and, dropping her bucket, Louise retreats hastily to the beach.
Lying on their towels, a few feet away, Nina and Philip are watching her.
Getting up, Philip runs down to the edge of the water and retrieves the bucket for Louise, who has turned to them, her mouth set to cry.
Quickly, Philip picks Louise up in his arms and walks into the sea with her.
From where she is sitting, Nina waves at them but they are not looking back at her.
Standing waist deep in the sea, the waves breaking against him, Philip lifts Louise up in the air, out of the water’s reach, and he sings to her
Pi pi find the value of pi
Twice eleven over seven is a mighty fine try
A good old fraction you may hope to supply
But the decimal never dies
The decimal never dies
as, shrieking from both fear and delight, Louise clings to him, her chubby arms locked around his neck.
Thank God for Louise.
Watching them, Nina is jealous of her daughter.
“Conditional probability is attached to a person’s knowledge of an event and is revised according to new pertinent information that will affect the said event, so if my old friend were to ask me: ‘I hear one of your children is a girl born on a Wednesday….’”
Taking off her underwear and lifting up her skirt, she lies down on a rubber sheet that is cold and clammy against her buttocks and that is spread over what looks—although she is too afraid to look—to be a flimsy folding cot.
The man wears a dark vest over his shirt. He wears rubber gloves—the kind to do dishes with. A woman is with him. She wears a yellow cardigan sweater and she nods absently at Nina.
The man and the woman speak to each other in a foreign language.
Arabic, Nina thinks.
She closes her eyes.
Probably the man and the woman are Algerian, she decides. Pieds-noirs.
Barefoot, Sephardic Jews are said to have fled Spain to settle in Algeria and Nina tries to picture them as they walk, from one continent to the other, over water.
She hears the clinking of instruments in a metal basin.
The man says something to her as, with his hands, he forcibly spreads her legs wider apart.
She keeps her eyes shut.
The woman in the yellow sweater, she guesses, is handing him the instruments.
OAS—Organisation de l’Armée Secrète—she has heard Didier and Arnaud, his brother, speak of the right-wing underground group during Sunday lunch at Tante Thea’s.
I am not in favor of Algerian independence, declares Didier as he carves the gigot, but I am also not in favor of the methods of the OAS. Their use of torture.
The FLN is no better, Arnaud says. Front de Libération Nationale, he explains for Tante Thea, his mother.
I know, Tante Thea answers tartly. I read the papers.
Someone in my office received a pipe bomb at his home. Fortunately, it did not go off. His wife and children could have been killed. Make mine bleu, Arnaud also tells Didier about the meat.
One of my students, a pied-noir, at the École Polytechnique, Philip says, told me that they are throwing Algerians into the Seine with their hands tied behind their backs so they will drown.
Nina is passing around the plates with the slices of gigot on it. Looking down at the near-raw meat on the plate she is holding, she feels sick.
I saw you crossing the Yard, Farid, Philip’s student from the École Polytechnique, tells him. At first, I didn’t believe that it could be you until I looked in the telephone book and here you are, Farid says, pleased to have rediscovered Philip.
Philip has invited Farid to their Somerville apartment fo
r dinner.
At the door, he takes off his shoes.
No need, Nina says.
Farid is not wearing socks. Pieds nus.
Your parents—are they both French? she asks as they go into the dining room.
My father is French, my mother is Algerian—Arab.
It was terrible how they had to live then—there were curfews and the police always stopped them for their papers, Farid shakes his head. I had to leave.
She is exhausted—the baby does not sleep through the night—but she has pressed and put on a clean white shirt, a pair of black pants that still fit. She has made lamb stew, rice, baked eggplant.
So, tell me, what are you doing now? Philip asks Farid as soon as they sit down at the table to eat.
I’m working for a professor at Dartmouth who rarely bathes or shaves and whose beard reaches his waist—Farid and Philip both laugh—on how to assign probabilities to sequences of symbols that describe real world events that can be mapped to predict what comes next given what one already knows.
Algorithmic probability, Philip says, nodding and helping himself to food. To solve artificial intelligence problems.
In the next room, Louise starts to cry.
Excusing herself, Nina leaves the table to go and nurse her.
When she returns, Philip and Farid have finished dinner and are in the living room drinking the Algerian wine Farid has brought as a gift.
Nina clears the table and washes the dishes before going back in the living room. Busy talking, neither Philip nor Farid look up.
Since according to Kolmogorov’s concept, the complexity of any computable object is the length of the shortest program that computes—Philip is saying.
I just want to say good night, Nina interrupts.
She could have worn a burqa.
Each Christmas, they get a card from Farid. Married with three grown sons and a grandchild—a photo of a dark-haired baby in the arms of a yellow-haired daughter-in-law was included in the most recent card—he lives and teaches in Montreal.
The baby’s name is Chelsea.
The baby has to be Didier’s—sex with Didier was unprotected.
Too soon to determine the gender—for the first trimester, the fetus has identical genitalia. The only way to tell now is to do a chromosomal analysis.
Nor did she ever think to ask.
A boy, she guesses.
Saltalavecchia, she thinks.
The old woman who leaps off the cliff—only she is young and beautiful and has no choice. She is pregnant. She has been sleeping with a married man or a man already betrothed to someone else. They meet each other on moonless nights and make love on the terraced hillside among the caper vines—he makes her a crown out of the blue flowers and places it on her head, and, although dry and faded now, she keeps the crown under her pillow. Or she is the one married. Her husband is older, impotent, he cannot give her children. Every day on her way to market she passes by one of those idle, near-handsome young men who owns a motorcycle and loiters outside the village café. One day, he calls out to her and, without thinking, she drops her shopping basket and gets on the back of his motorcycle. She pulls down her skirt to try to cover her thighs then puts her arms around him as he starts up the motorcycle and guns it down the winding island road.
Nina is afraid of heights. Not because of vertigo but because she feels irresistibly drawn to them. The truth is she is tempted to jump from windows and balconies, from high places. She wants to know how it feels to free fall through space—her body twisting, turning, somersaulting, effortlessly, like a high diver, in the air. Almost, she envies those suicides but not their terrible, bone-crushing, crashing death.
She is reminded of a poem—a poem about a stewardess who is sucked out of an airplane when the emergency door suddenly opens. The poem is based on an actual incident and it describes how, high up in the air over the Kansas cornfields, the stewardess starts to take off her clothes—a kind of death-defying striptease—first her jacket with its insignia of silver wings, her blouse, her skirt, her girdle (stewardesses were required to wear them then), and how, next, she kicks off her shoes, peels off her stockings and, finally, her brassiere, until she is naked.
Instead of a sacrificial victim falling to her death, the stewardess is both a bird and a goddess marveling at the exhilaration of flying and at her newfound erotic freedom. She is “the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas”—a line Nina remembers.
Saltalavecchia, Nina repeats.
Jean-Marc owns a motorcycle—a Moto Guzzi, an Italian make.
Walking along the harbor one evening, Philip and Nina run into him as he is parking it in the street. He is waiting for his wife who is arriving on the ferry, Jean-Marc tells them. She has been visiting relatives in Brest.
I’ve never seen a Moto Guzzi up close before, Philip says as he walks around Jean-Marc’s motorcycle, inspecting it. I thought BMWs made the best bikes.
Let’s have a drink while you wait, Philip also says.
BMWs may be the best, Jean-Marc answers, but, from my father, I have inherited an aversion to all German-made goods.
Why is that? Philip asks, although he probably knows the answer. What will you have? he also asks as they sit down at an outdoor café and he raises his arm to get the waiter’s attention.
My father was interned in a German POW camp, Jean-Marc says. Bad Orb, near Frankfurt. When he returned, after almost five years, he refused to have anything to do with anything German. He would not ride in a Mercedes car.
At home, we have a Volkswagen, Nina says, but as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she regrets them. Jean-Marc, however, does not seem to hear her.
Do you want to see what I bought today? she asks, to change the subject. Out of her shopping bag, she pulls out a pair of red espadrilles. Do you like them?
That makes how many pairs? Philip says, smiling.
An infinite number, Nina replies. She, too, is smiling.
Here comes the ferry, Jean-Marc says, pointing with his chin. Here comes my wife.
Later, to Philip, Nina says, I don’t see how riding a Moto Guzzi is any different. The Italians and Germans were allies during the war.
The Germans were evil; the Italians were stupid, is what Philip answers her.
Briefly, in her head, she revisits the German military cemetery with its rows and rows of black Maltese crosses that mark the stones with the names of the nearly twenty thousand dead.
Names like Dieter, Friedrich, Hans, Felix.
Happy Felix—except Felix is dead.
Looking over at Philip, she tries to imagine what it is like to be dead. Is it how it was before he was born, before he was alive?
A contradiction. Impossible to imagine his or, for that matter, her own nonexistence. Yet an astrophysicist—an astrophysicist like Lorna—would know how to exist in abstract spaces, spaces with completely different geometrical properties that extend the methods of vector algebra and calculus and the two-dimensional Euclidean plane to ones with any finite or infinite number of dimensions. Hilbert space, momentum space, reciprocal space, phase space.
Spaces Nina knows nothing about.
There.
There she is!
Nina envisions curly-haired Lorna, with her skinny arms covered with freckles spread out in a perfect T, expertly navigating her way in the blinding space in which Uranus and Neptune orbit around the sun—she who did not know how to drive a car!—wearing the mismatched ballet flats: the one silver, the other black.
She is impervious to the cold—the temperature on Neptune averages minus 218 degrees Centigrade.
She is impervious to the wind—the winds on Neptune blow up to 2,100 kilometers an hour.
Yet Lorna manages to stay serenely aloft and steer her appointed course. And, oh, the blue. Lorna marvels at the color of the two planets. Never in her whole life could she have imagined such vibrant colors! The result, she knows all too well, of the absorption of red light by the atmospheric methan
e in the outermost regions of the planets. At the same time, she cannot help noticing that Neptune’s blue is a brighter, richer blue than the blue of Uranus, which she is tempted to describe as aquamarine. Her mother, she has just enough memory to remember, wore an aquamarine ring and the stone, she claimed, came from a country in South America. Peru. But she must not let herself become distracted by unscientific thoughts. The planet’s aquamarine color could be the result of an as yet unknown atmospheric constituent.
If only she had the time to discover what that constituent might be.
She wishes she could linger here on Uranus; spend a summer day that could last several years or sleep for a night that lasts longer.
The thought of it makes Lorna yawn.
And if only Lorna could describe those blues, or paint them.
Nina blinks then opens her eyes wide.
Was she dreaming?
She must have fallen asleep.
The image of Lorna in space lingers in her head.
Round and round she will go, always returning to her starting point, since Lorna believes in a finite universe.
Nina is tempted to wave to her.
To say bon voyage.
Philip and Nina talk of returning to Angangueo but they never have. Instead, one year, as an anniversary present, Nina paints Philip a watercolor of six butterflies on handmade Japanese mulberry paper. She copies the butterflies from a book of photographs. At first, she had thought to paint only one butterfly, the monarch, but, absorbed by the photos, she decides to paint more.
She begins with a solar ellipse, a yellow butterfly, the color of an Italian lemon, with orange flame spots on its wings; the second butterfly, an aurora, is electric blue with purple streaks on its wings; the third is transparent—except for a deep rose blush on the lower part of its wings—and so delicate that Nina holds her breath while she colors it on the page; she places the orange monarch, the biggest butterfly, in the center of the watercolor and paints the white dots and splashes on its wings using the tip of her best sable brush; the fifth butterfly is a garish green-and-orange-and-pink-and-yellow-and-black sunset moth. A moth, Nina reads, flies at night while the butterfly flies during the day; the moth rests with its wings clapped horizontally on its body while the butterfly rests with its vertically. … The last butterfly, a silver satyr from Chile, is the color of shiny Christmas tinsel, with a wash of cocoa brown on the tips of its serrated wings, and is the most starkly beautiful.
