“You don’t use formula?” Charlie asked, as she made room for the milk. “It makes it so much easier.”
“I would,” I said. “But I produce a lot.”
“Oh, I made enough,” Charlie said. “I just couldn’t deal with it. All that measuring and storing. And I never know when I’m going to be home from work.”
Terrence came into the kitchen with Simona, now sixteen months old. The few times I’d met him before the wedding, I’d found Terrence aloof and inscrutable; Charlie said that it was only shyness. His skin was lighter than Charlie’s, but not so light that you would necessarily assume he had a white parent, except for his very striking light green eyes. He had an especially strong, square chin, and his hair was in the same short dreadlocks I remembered from the wedding. In his track pants and faded T-shirt, he still looked as though he spent a lot of time at the beach, but without sacrificing the pleasures of fatherhood; as he bent down to hold the baby’s hand, his tenderness for her was obvious.
Charlie stretched out her arms to the baby, but Simona sank down to her bottom and crawled.
“Walk to Mommy.”
“Hey,” Terrence said to me. And then to Charlie: “She knows when you’re showing off.”
“Of course I am,” Charlie said, picking her up. “How could I not?”
Simona’s hair, what there was of it, stuck out in a little cloud around her head. Her eyes were giant, a variegated hazel color somewhere between her mother’s and her father’s, and she was wearing an expensive-looking playsuit with a pink crocheted top and creamy linen bloomers. It was clean, too—maybe Terrence had just changed her into it? Jack never went more than an hour without spitting up on whatever I’d put on him.
“Hat,” she said suddenly.
“She can talk!”
“That’s her big word,” Charlie said.
“She has seventeen words,” Terrence put in.
“Who’s showing off now?” Charlie smiled at her husband. “Is it okay if we catch up a little?”
“Sure,” Terrence said. “We have major plans. We’re going to the farmers’ market. Want to take a ride in the car, Sims?”
The baby made a sound like “heh,” assenting.
“Hopefully she’ll nap on the way back,” he said, taking Simona from her mother with one practiced arm.
Charlie leaned over and kissed him. “Thanks.”
“Nice to see you,” Terrence said, holding up his free hand.
“Can I make you a latte or something?” Charlie asked.
* * *
—
We sat outside and dangled our legs in the pool. It was close to eighty degrees in September, desert heat. The smell in the air reminded me of being a kid in Pasadena, sitting on the curb of our suburban block with my sister, our feet in the runoff by the drain. There was the same insect drone. You could hear the cars going by Charlie’s house outside, but the hedge gave it a separate, protected feel. A vine of brilliant pink bougainvillea began in a clay pot and grew over the wrought-iron fence.
“It’s beautiful here.”
“Terrence did most of it,” Charlie said. “He loves plants and all that—I keep telling him he should go back to school for landscape architecture. You can make a fortune doing that out here, and I’d be able to help him make a lot of connections.”
“What does he think?”
“Honestly?” Charlie said. “He doesn’t really want to work. His brother’s starting this surf company, and he may get involved in that.”
“He’s still really into the surfing?”
Charlie glanced at me. “You sound like my parents.”
“That’s not a criticism! It’s just—I don’t know anything about surfing.”
“He once told me that he wasn’t white enough for the white kids at his high school, and he didn’t sound black enough for the black kids. He said the beach was the only place he ever felt like everything about him was right.”
“That makes sense.”
“And when he’s not surfing, he just wants to take care of Simmi and cook. I get it, because that’s exactly what he didn’t have. His mom was single—I mean, not by choice.” Charlie hurried on: “They never had enough money, and they were always moving. That’s why he’s obsessed with the house, keeping everything so perfect. Which is better than the alternative, I guess. But sometimes I feel like he’s like a nineteen fifties housewife—a fifties housewife who surfs. It’s a huge stress for us. Or for me, anyway.”
“Because of money?” I was surprised that Charlie was confiding in me right away, and also ashamed in the same way I’d been in the kitchen. For me this visit had been loaded with anxiety about how I would appear to her, but Charlie wasn’t thinking of it as a competition; she was treating me as a friend. She actually seemed desperate to talk to me.
“Not really,” Charlie said. “I moved up a peg to co-producer on this new show—the one about Vegas—and I make enough, at least for now. It’s more like, what’s he going to do when she goes to school? And counting on me as the breadwinner is risky, at least long-term. The schedule when we’re shooting is really punishing. I feel fine now, but…”
“Because of the arthritis?”
Charlie shook her head. “It’s lupus now, officially.”
I looked at her. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I only found out a few months ago—I haven’t really told anyone, except my parents.”
I didn’t know what to say. I put my hand on hers, on the warm stone tile. She squeezed mine and let go.
“It’s kind of a relief to know. The treatment is clearer, for one thing.”
“Do you feel okay?”
“I do, yeah. It’s called a flare, with lupus—that’s what happened after I gave birth. I was so sick—rashes all over my body, fever. And the steroids blew me up like a bicycle pump—really disgusting. But then it went away, and I’ve been basically okay.”
“Is it an issue if you get pregnant again?”
Charlie nodded. “I’d have to go off the methotrexate, first of all. And even though some lupus patients actually do better when they’re pregnant, that wasn’t true for me. A second pregnancy could make things a lot worse. It’s probably not going to be possible, my doctors say.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“That’s the thing. I’m not. I’m sorry for Terrence because he’d like two or three. I love her to death, but I don’t want another. Even if I weren’t sick.”
It sometimes seemed that every parent I knew had at least two, if not three, and I’d read the term “singleton” in the parenting books with distaste. The idea that Charlie didn’t want another, in spite of the fact that she was married, was reassuring.
“What I want is to run my own show.”
“What would it be about?”
“Black physicists on the Manhattan Project.”
“Where on earth did you get that idea?”
Charlie smiled. “Yeah, I know. I’m going to try to get you a consulting gig if it happens.”
“I could use a consulting gig.”
“Careful what you wish for, though. Because this industry is so much more fucked-up than you can imagine.”
“I’ve heard it’s a boys’ club.”
“There’s that, of course,” Charlie said. “But casting directors are usually women—white women. When I first got out here—back when I was still trying to act—people told me to go for everything. But if it doesn’t say black, that’s not what they’re looking for. They’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s not an ethnic role. And I’m like ‘ethnic’? And then you go to a call for black actresses, and there are three times as many people there, because there are one-thousandth the number of parts, and they’ll be like, ‘Can you do it more sassy?’ Which means that they want you to, you know, roll your neck and snap your fingers.�
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“Is it better now that you’re writing?”
“Not really. I was in a meeting with this guy at Sony the other day, he’s a really big deal. And not uneducated—he went to Stanford, I think. And he says this one character—Tyrone, naturally—is more ghetto and he wants me to write that.”
“And I say, I can do some research, and I make a joke about how I watched The Wire.”
“And he totally doesn’t get it—he’s like, ‘No, no, not like The Wire.’ Because this isn’t for cable and he wants people to be able to understand—‘without turning on the fucking subtitles. Write from your own experience.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh okay, yeah—my experience. Got it.’ But that’s what you have to say if you want to work.”
“Jesus, Charlie.”
“The mean streets of Brookline,” Charlie said. “But enough. Now tell me about you.”
9.
I went home that weekend with my baby, happy to have seen Charlie with her family, hopeful that our friendship was entering a new stage. I did a little research online, and learned that lupus affects men less often than women, and white women less often than black women, who inexplicably tend to contract it earlier, with greater risk of life-threatening complications. It’s a disease that can lie dormant for decades before suddenly flaring, that is sometimes ignored or misdiagnosed, but that produces persistent, excruciating pain in the people it attacks most severely.
I had those facts, but on another level, I didn’t understand. Charlie had complained about everything in college: the rooms we were assigned; the boys we dated; the deadlines we were expected to meet. She complained about authority figures, the university in general, and especially about her parents. I assumed that if her illness were really life-threatening, she wouldn’t hesitate to complain about that, too. The very obvious explanation—that the things Charlie had always made a fuss about were not her real grievances, that those were the ones she’d always kept quiet—didn’t occur to me. That was the kind of observation about people that came easily to Charlie, and that I often failed to make in my own life, especially after I stopped sharing it with her.
As our children grew up, Charlie and I fell more and more out of touch. The less I communicated with her, the more I looked at Facebook, and eventually at Instagram. Charlie posted photos and videos frequently, mostly of her daughter. There was Simmi onstage in a white ballet outfit; Simmi playing the guitar; Simmi doing a cartwheel on an actual balance beam. She was (as everyone had predicted she’d be) an extraordinarily pretty child, and she appeared to excel at anything performative. When I allowed myself the consolation that Charlie and Terrence pushed their daughter too hard, I would be confronted by a picture of Simmi on a boogie board in Malibu, Simmi eating an ice pop by the pool.
Just before he turned four, Jack had a series of health problems. First his adenoids were swollen and needed to be taken out, a minor procedure complicated by a bleeding disorder he’d inherited from my father. A few months later he had an episode of croup, something I thought he’d outgrown in infancy. The third time we went to the ER in the middle of the night, Jack was admitted for three days, and diagnosed with asthma. The attending pulmonologist gave me a nebulizer, vials of albuterol, and prescriptions for two different steroids, assuring me that at least ten percent of American children now suffered from asthma and that the rates were higher in other parts of the world.
Did these statistics comfort anyone? In the hospital, Jack and I read books, did puzzles, and were visited by Child Life volunteers who brought craft projects—plant a cactus in a clay pot, decorate a mug for Valentine’s Day—or, once, escorted us to a playroom for a magic show by a clown named Looney Lenny. In the playroom were bald children undergoing chemo, children with cystic fibrosis, a boy who couldn’t speak or focus his eyes, ten years old, in a wheelchair and a diaper. (There but for the grace of God, my maternal grandmother would always say.) Because of his comparative health, Jack was Lenny’s assistant, turning a scarf into a flower, and discovering a plastic dinosaur behind Lenny’s ear.
The thing I liked best about the hospital was the way that time seemed to stop there. I could ignore department meetings, student email, and articles for peer review. Sometimes I forgot to look at my phone for hours. At night I would climb into bed with Jack, being careful of the monitor (they attached it to his toe with surgical tape), move the gray cord, and rest my arm over his hip, to avoid making breathing more difficult. When he was getting oxygen, he would sleep with the mask, and I could hear the air whistling inside it. The pediatric nurses came often, and I preferred them to the doctors; they were so calm and unsurprisable. They opened the door in the dark, or slipped through the curtain in their scrubs and soft shoes. They were almost all heavy and maternal in shape, full-breasted and -hipped, with delicate hands that unceremoniously manipulated their equipment. I was terrified by the prospect of going home and having to operate the nebulizer myself, count the breaths per minute. In the hospital I knew that if Jack stopped breathing, even if I’d dozed off, someone would be with us in an instant.
10.
I have always liked to get up early, even before I had Jack. In my twenties I could do it without an alarm. I would simply think of the hour I wanted to awaken, and usually my eyes would open ten or fifteen minutes before that.
Those early mornings are the time I can do physics; in my office, everything else takes over, and while I can sit with a colleague and hammer out an idea—the way I used to do with Neel, my closest and best collaborator—I have to have done the real work beforehand, alone at my desk.
In the case of the Clapp-Jonnal model, my most significant insight came between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. I wasn’t technically at my desk but sitting with my back against the couch, looking at a preprint Neel had emailed me, if not actually reading it. I was drinking coffee and thinking about garden hoses. Specifically I was thinking of a hose my father had invented (but unfortunately never patented) sometime in the late eighties. Neither of my parents was a scientist, but my father was a mechanical engineer and a hobbyist inventor. He worked on a screened porch separated from our small living room by a set of French doors. My father’s hose was made of flexible fabric that crinkled when it wasn’t in use, then swelled to its full capacity when you turned on the tap. It was that swelling—the finite diameter of the hose, by comparison with the water flowing in one potentially infinite direction—that suggested the crucial geometry.
I was living near Porter Square in Somerville then, and I put on my running shoes. I shoved the piece of paper with the equations I’d scribbled into the armband with my phone—as if I could’ve forgotten them! It might have been faster on the T, but I couldn’t have stood there waiting. I ran right down Oxford to Harvard Square, past the Science Center, where I’d taken Physics 16 as a freshman and had felt grateful to know right away where I belonged. I ran south to the river in a light drizzle, over a glistening carpet of red and yellow leaves, past cars with early commuters inching forward with their lights on, and arrived at Neel’s apartment in Peabody Terrace, where he was a resident advisor to married students, just before six.
Neel was living with a girlfriend at the time, and I remember that Angie answered the door in a white terry-cloth bathrobe. There were things between me and Angie, having to do with my collaboration with Neel, Neel’s and my brief undergraduate romance, Angie’s perfectly symmetrical Japanese face, my red hair, big nose, and habit of interrupting, but that morning I put my arms around her: “Good morning—I’m sorry it’s so early—we did it!” I think that’s what I said. Neel was standing in the hallway leading to their bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, squinting at me, and when I thrust the paper at him, he had to go put on pants and find his glasses. Angie stood at the counter and made coffee while Neel, now dressed, sat at the kitchen table and went over it.
“Stop staring at me,” he told me at one point, but I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t wait
to hear what he thought. I knew he was as excited and hopeful as I was, and also that there was a part of him that hoped to prove me wrong—so that he himself could be the one to dream up the final piece of the puzzle we’d been working on since we’d returned to Harvard as postdocs.
It took us two pots of coffee and three hours of refining. (Angie went to one of her classes at the Design School; we barely registered her.) I skipped a department meeting, and Neel didn’t go into his lab, but by nine we were on the phone to Arty Hofmann, our advisor. That five-dimensional AdS/CFT model—the Clapp-Jonnal—was born that morning. We joked that if only it had been a 3+1 model, we might have called it the “Clapp-4-Jonnal.” (Jokes about physics are maybe not quite as amusing for non-physicists.) We decided that it didn’t roll off the tongue like Kaluza-Klein, but was nowhere near as bad as the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric.
We picked up frosted doughnuts on the way to campus. I remember that the sun had come out, as if it knew. I was thirty-two, and I tried to save the feeling as we walked to Arty’s office to show him our work. It was the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that. The model gave me a kind of happiness that didn’t depend upon anyone else; it could be carried with you. I thought that this was what religious faith must be like, the peace in knowing that there was something beyond the world you knew, and that your own inner experience would indeed endure.
* * *
—
Neel and I met when we were freshmen in Arty’s Inflationary Cosmology lecture course. Both of us liked to work in the Cabot Science Library, at the shiny wooden communal tables, their undersides blistered with gum, but we did it at different times of day, me in the early morning and Neel in the middle of the night. Because of our oppositional schedules, we might never have gotten to know each other if Arty hadn’t suggested we work together on a problem related to Gaussian functions. We began meeting once a week in his office in Jefferson. Arty was on leave that semester and often away; Neel and I were charged with watering his plants.
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