by Lily Tuck
Yeah, yeah, to your friends, Louise says.
No one speaks.
You’re being rude and unkind to your mother, Philip says finally.
She is tempted to laugh.
Philip’s shrunken penis is all but hidden in the thick bush of his pubic hair as, thin, naked, and wet, he kneels in front of her on the beach.
Ploudalmézeau, Tréglonou—again, she mouths the names.
You’ll catch cold, she tells him.
Is that your answer? he asks.
Yes, she says.
Yes.
Naked is to be oneself and nude is to be seen naked by others, Nina says, to convince Philip to take off his clothes while she is doing his portrait.
Nudity is to be put on display, she also says.
I am not sure I want to be put on display, Philip says.
If you look at European paintings of nudes—Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, for example, Nina continues, warming up to her subject, and look at the way the model stares out from the canvas, it is clear that she is aware that someone is looking at her, admiring and desiring her. The nude in the portrait is both the compliant object and the seductress.
What about nakedness?
Nakedness is you and me taking off our clothes before we go to bed at night. Nakedness has no disguises, nakedness has no surprises.
I haven’t smoked in years, Philip says, but all of a sudden I really want a cigarette.
You surprised me, Philip tells her after they make love in Tante Thea’s apartment on rue de Saint-Simon. Your body. Somehow, I pictured it differently.
Differently how? Nina asks him.
Fatter?
No, not fatter. Just different.
Can you be more specific?
Not as beautiful, Philip says.
It snowed the day before but the narrow country road they are driving on has been plowed and is clear. As they turn a corner, the car headlights pick up two deer eating the salt by the side of the road. Startled, the deer raise their heads and start to run across the road.
Damn, Philip says as he applies the brakes.
Swerving into the other lane, the car lurches to a stop as the first deer disappears into the woods and as, behind it, the second deer just manages to clear the car’s front fender.
Nina lets out her breath but does not say anything.
That was close, Philip says, once they are back on the right-hand side of the road.
Is everyone okay? he also asks, glancing toward the backseat.
Did you have your seat belt on? he asks Louise.
I couldn’t find it, she says. I landed on the floor, she adds, settling herself again on the backseat and rubbing her knee.
How old is this car? she asks. Isn’t it time you bought a new one?
For a while no one says anything as Philip slowly drives on. Oh, and, Dad, your windbreaker, Louise mumbles. Don’t you have a decent-looking jacket? It’s embarrassing.
Lulu, honey, this happens to be my favorite jacket. If your mother ever decided to throw it out, I’d leave her.
They are silent during the rest of the drive home.
Once in the house, Nina goes straight upstairs, without saying good night to either Louise or Philip.
She undresses and gets into bed. Too agitated to sleep, she waits for Philip.
At dinner, did Louise drink too much?
Where did all the anger come from?
Downstairs, late into the night and until, finally, in spite of herself, she falls asleep, Nina can hear laughter. What, she wonders, are they doing?
Tossing pennies?
Whatever it is, Philip and Louise have forgotten about her and Philip has forgotten Louise’s harsh words.
In her dream that night, Nina conflates the deer crossing the road with Iris.
Soon, it will be light.
Depending on how it is observed, light is both a wave and a particle—this much she knows for certain. The next morning, at breakfast, Louise apologizes.
If you can bring yourself to forgive me, Mom, she says, I would love to have one of your paintings to hang in my apartment. I’ll give it pride of place in the living room.
Yes, of course, Nina answers, putting down her coffee cup. I am honored—only it will cost you.
In her portrait of him wearing red boxer shorts, Philip is holding a cigarette in his hand.
A Gauloise Bleue.
Nina opens her mouth and exhales loudly as if exhaling smoke.
Shutting her eyes, she slowly runs her hands down along her body—a body, covered in the red silk coat and Philip’s old nylon windbreaker, that she can hardly feel and that does not feel like hers.
How long ago everything seems to her.
And how unreal.
She cannot imagine a life without Philip.
Nor does she want to.
Philip is young, good looking, and they are about to meet.
Vous permettez? he asks, pointing to the empty chair at her table.
Je vous en prie, she shrugs, without looking up at him.
What is your book about? he asks her after a while.
Again she shrugs.
Hard to explain, she says, not looking at him. It’s about trying to capture and transform into language the manifestations of the inner self, the vibrations and the tremors of feelings on the threshold of consciousness. In other words, the book is an attempt to try to put into words what essentially is nonverbal communication.
Sounds like a thankless task, Philip says.
Already, she is in love with him.
A love that has not yet manifested itself on the threshold of her consciousness.
A love whose vibrations and tremors she cannot yet feel; a love it will take her some time to become aware of.
And put into words.
In the meantime, she will resist him.
And, so far, she has barely glanced at him. If she were asked, she would have a hard time describing him: tall? dark-haired? a nice voice.
She is scarcely civil.
He raises his arm to get the attention of the waiter.
Are you a student? he also asks.
No, she replies.
You’re French, right?
No, she says again.
He laughs.
I am not either.
She looks up at him.
Where are you from? he asks.
All over, she says. Most recently, Massachusetts.
Me, too, he says.
What are you doing in Paris?
Do you want another coffee? he asks.
Deux cafés crèmes, he tells the waiter before she can answer him.
Outside, in the garden, she hears birds chirping.
She takes only a small sip of the café crème he has ordered for her.
She does not want to be beholden to him.
Too much caffeine, she tells him. It might give me a migraine.
You get migraines? he says, sounding concerned. Already she has divulged too much. She does not yet want his sympathy.
They must be terrible but the good news is that they’re working on a new group of drugs that constrict the blood vessels in the brain and may prove to be very effective for relieving migraines.
Are you a doctor?
A mathematician, he says. And you, what do you do?
She hesitates.
I paint.
How do you approach a painting? Philip asks while he is posing for her in his boxer shorts. I don’t mean a portrait. That’s obvious.
Do you know what the painting will look like when you finish it? he continues. I am interested in the process—how people create. How it applies to mathematicians as well.
I start with a line, a color, and then I look for something else—it’s hard to describe what exactly, Nina answers.
Is it random? Do you just stumble accidentally on whatever it is?
Sometimes. But, no, not always. Stand still, she also tells him.
She is painting his long l
egs, exaggerating how thin and long they are, like a Giacometti sculpture, making the lump larger in the left one.
I read somewhere that art is about navigating the space between what you know and what you see, Philip says.
I look for clarity, Nina tells him.
In a class Philip once took, Richard Feynman described the size of an atom by telling his students to think of an apple magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms inside the apple are the approximate size of the original apple.
Clarity.
For a dollar, Nina sells Louise one of the near-monochrome Migraine paintings and, as promised, Louise hangs it on the living room wall of her new Russian Hill apartment. Most of Louise’s furniture is modern, stark, and white, and Nina’s red painting stands in sharp contrast.
It looks great, like a Rothko, Louise tells her mother.
How will she tell Louise?
What will she say?
I’m so sorry but Dad—
I don’t know how to tell you this, but your father—
Or, simply, Dad died—
She cannot think properly, she thinks.
The brain is a three-pound bag of neurons, electrical pulses, chemical messengers, and glial cells, Philip likes to lecture Louise during dinner. There’s the right brain, the left brain, the four lobes: the frontal lobe, the occipital or the visual cortex, which is in the back of the brain—
Please, Dad, I’m eating.
You’re not eating much, Philip says, looking over at her plate, before he continues. The parietal cortex, the temporal lobe, which is behind the ears—can you pass the broccoli, Nina? The lamb chops are delicious. The limbic system, the seat of emotion and memory, the brain stem, the seat of consciousness that keeps us awake or puts us to sleep at night. I wish they would teach the geography of the brain in schools the way they teach the geography of the world—Ecuador, Nigeria, Bulgaria, can you tell me where those countries are, Lulu? he asks.
Dad, please! Louise says.
We know that our brain functions have evolved to react to atoms in reliable ways but we still have no real understanding of the physical basis of consciousness in the brain, Philip goes on, glancing again at Louise’s plate—aren’t you going to eat your meat?—and this brings me back to the question—since we accept the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—what does that cat inside the box experience consciously?
Oh, no, not that poor cat again, Nina says, interrupting.
Does the cat experience being alive and dead at the same time?—Are you listening, Lulu? Or is the cat dependent on someone opening the box and checking?
You mean for something to be real, it has to be observed? Louise asks, pushing away her plate.
Real in the perceivable universe, Philip says.
Okay, pass me your plate, Lulu, I’ll eat the rest of your lamb chops, he also says.
Philip has a healthy appetite.
He will eat anything—rooster testicles, shark fin soup, garbanzo bean stew, crêpes coquilles St.-Jacques, the daube de boeuf à la provençale that she will cook for him one day.
She remembers the roast chicken congealing downstairs.
An appetite for—
life. She takes his hand. His fingers are cold and stiff and she bends them around until they meet hers. Then she brings his hand up to her lips.
“If I say, ‘I am 95 percent certain I locked the door before I left the house,’” Philip tells his students on the last day of class, “that is a classic example of epistemic probability—probability based on intuition. But if I say, ‘I am 95 percent certain that I will die before my wife’—we all know that women tend to outlive men—this is called a posteriori probability—probability computed after an event. By taking a large sample, you can compute the probability—according to the law of large numbers—of all kinds of events: who will get sick when, who will die when, and so forth, within a desired degree of accuracy. However”—here Philip pauses significantly—”I strongly suggest that you stay vigilant. Probabilities can be very misleading. You must try to expect the unexpected. The event no one predicted—an epidemic, a tsunami—the event that will make an enormous difference.
“Let me give you the famous example of the turkey—the British use a chicken instead,” Philip smiles. “Picture a turkey, a turkey who is fed regularly every morning for, say, a year. The turkey gets used to this routine. In fact, the turkey gets so used to it that he naturally comes to expect that every morning at a certain hour someone is going to come and feed him. But”—Philip starts to laugh—”one morning, maybe a week or so before Thanksgiving, that same person who comes and feeds the turkey every morning at pretty much the same time, instead of feeding him, wrings his neck.
“You see”—everyone in the class is laughing—”something unexpected happened that has completely altered our belief system and our reliance on past events. This raises the question of how can we predict the future by our knowledge of the past. These are important considerations that I want you to think about.”
Philip’s students stand up and clap.
In the Paris café, she does not look Philip in the face; she looks down at his neck. Sticking out of his open-collared blue shirt, she notices a little tuft of dark hair.
Her heart is pounding rapidly inside her chest.
Briefly, and however improbably, she wonders if she is having a heart attack.
Or else she is coming down with something—a grave illness.
Frowning, she looks away. She much prefers blond men to dark, hairy ones.
As if he can read her mind, he puts his hand up to his collar and buttons it. Then, holding out his hand, he says, I’m Philip.
The bedroom is getting lighter.
It is the hour before dawn that the ancient Romans called the hour of the wolf. The hour when demons have a heightened power and when most people die or children are born. The hour when people are gripped by nightmares.
L’heure bleue.
Hearing an unaccustomed sound in the bedroom—of something knocked down—Nina opens her eyes. The chair by the door with her beige cashmere sweater draped over it is lying on the floor. Someone has entered the room.
An angel.
The angel flaps his great wings.
The sound he makes is like Hypatia’s sails snapping and tearing in a high wind.
The angel is familiar.
He has the same curly red hair and black wings and he wears the same swirling piece of white cloth as the angel in Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the painting that had transfixed her. At the time, she could not move away from it, nor could she explain why, and Philip became impatient. The painting, he said, was sentimental and he preferred the realism of the two Caravaggios they had seen in one of the chapels of Santa Maria del Popolo. And it was lunchtime. But on the way from the Palazzo Doria Pamphili to the restaurant, Philip’s wallet was stolen. Only after they had eaten and it was time to pay did he notice that it was gone.
His great black wings outstretched, the angel comes and stands next to her by the bed. He puts out his hand to Nina.
Where is it? Nina asks. She is thinking of the wallet.
Smiling, the angel shakes his head.
She must be dreaming.
It does not matter.
She is neither frightened nor surprised.
Nina takes the angel’s hand and she lets him lead her over to the window. The angel pulls back the curtains and opens the window wide. Fresh air streams into the bedroom. The sun is shining and it is a beautiful, clear day. Below, in the garden, a little wet still from the rain, the lilacs and peonies are in bloom. Nina takes a deep breath. From where she stands, she can smell the lilacs. French lilacs. Then, as her eyes grow accustomed to the light, she can make out Philip.
Dressed in his blue work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he is already out in the vegetable garden—hoeing, planting, weeding. When he sees Nina at the bedroom window, he stops what he is doing and, straighte
ning up tall, he waves to her.
Acknowledgments
Like the despised magpie who shamelessly steals from other birds’ nests to line her own, I have done so on page 18, from E. T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 1); on page 26, from Mary-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter (Shambala, 1992); on page 40 and again on page 110, from Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician (Dover Publications, 1985, pp. 524–26); on page 46, from Simon Singh, The Code Book (Doubleday, 1999, pp. 260–61); on page 56, from Adam Phillips, Monogamy (Vintage,1996, p. 105); on page 79 and again on page 124, Lorna’s conversation is paraphrased from Janna Levin, How the Universe Got its Spots (Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 1, 4, 7); on page 88 and again on page 126, from Frank Wilczek who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 and is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at MIT and who with his wife, Betsy Devine, wrote Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (W.W. Norton & Co., 1989); on page 96, from Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007, p. 252); on page 107, from Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern (Basic Books, 2009, pp. 2, 9, 25–26, 29); on page 125, from Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988, pp. 148–50); on page 127, from Patricia Lynne Duffy, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their World (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2001, p. 22); on page 138, lyrics quoted from the Great Courses recording The Joy of Mathematics, lecture 12, The Joy of Pi, taught by Arthur T. Benjamin (he attributes the lyrics to Larry Lesser, a friend); on page 139, from the Great Courses recording What Are the Chances? Probability Made Clear, taught by Michael Starbird; on page 150 and again on page 184, from an interview with William Kentridge by Michael Auping in William Kentridge: Five Themes (San Francisco Museum of Art and Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, pp. 230–245); on page 161, from John Berger, From A to X (Verso, 2008); and on page 178, from John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972); on page 184, from Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces (Basic Books, 1963, p. 5); and on page 187, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007, p. 40).
I also want to acknowledge the various Internet sites I have used for information: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LawofLargeNumbers.html; http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/probability/info.htm; http://members.chello.nl/r.kuijt/en_pi_onthouden.htm; www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/overview.html; and www.templeton.org/pdfs/articles/Physics_World_Faraday07.pdf.
