I tend to be slow to notice my own feelings. It’s easier for me to identify deviations from a baseline than it is to speculate about motivations. For example, I observed that I was spending an unusual amount of time preparing for my meetings with Neel. I would think about what I was going to wear the night before; I would leave time to shower and wash my hair.
These aren’t things Neel would have done whether or not he was interested in a woman. He always wore a dark-colored T-shirt and corduroys. If it was cold, he wore one of two sweaters: maroon with a single black stripe, or beige wool (hole in left elbow), and put a Salvation Army peacoat over that. Neel was skinny and only about five foot nine. He went to the barber as infrequently as possible, as an economy measure, and so his thick black hair varied between almost military and mad scientist. He wore rimless glasses over his best feature: beautiful, heavily lashed dark eyes.
One day I wore a sweater my sister, Amy, had given me for Christmas. It was black with a white mohair collar and cuffs, more appropriate for a holiday party than a study session in February, and on the way from my room in Thayer, I regretted choosing it. The sweater had looked nice with my hair in the spotty mirror of our cold and unpleasant bathroom, but it was too dressy for a weekday, and it called attention to itself with the soft white collar in a way I didn’t like. I’d almost gone home to change it, but I have always had an anxiety about being late, and I decided that Neel wouldn’t notice anyway.
Neel was sitting at Arty’s desk when I came in.
“You’re dressed up,” he said, barely looking up.
I thought it was presumptuous of him to sit there; I never would have done it myself, especially when there were two other vacant chairs.
“I’m going out after,” I told him coldly.
Neel looked up, surprised by my tone. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t being critical.”
“You weren’t?”
“I guess I was.”
“So, what’s wrong with my sweater?”
Neel took off his glasses, considering.
“You look like a poodle.”
“A poodle?”
“With those furry things.” Neel touched his own neck and wrist. His wrists were thin and knobby, with black hair on them. Where did he get the idea he could say things like that?
“It was a present from my sister. I like it.”
Neel nodded. “It looks expensive.”
“Did you water?” I demanded, and when he shook his head, I took the pink plastic can into the bathroom and filled it. Then I came back and tended to Arty’s plants, acutely aware of Neel the whole time. When I finally did sit down, I launched into a detailed description of the solution to the fifth problem from Arty’s set, because I could see that Neel was only on the second. I was conscious that I was showing off—Neel was slightly less mathematically inclined than I was, though much better at designing an experiment—and once he stopped and asked me to repeat something.
“So it’s like a Hegelian synthesis,” he said, after I had explained.
We had a joke about one of our classmates, who had made a pretentious reference to that philosopher in section one day.
“Totally,” I said. “You hit it exactly.”
Neel smiled at me, and I had the uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself has evaporated—not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That’s the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.
It’s unbearable to be with other people when I’m in this state, and so usually I get up to go to the bathroom, where I can lock myself in and recalibrate. That’s what I did then, excusing myself. I rested my forehead on the inside of the cool metal stall and counted prime numbers down from 997; for some reason this usually helps. I waited ten minutes, but my panic (or whatever it was) didn’t go away, and so I went back to the office and told Neel I had to go.
“Where are you going?”
“Out to dinner with…a friend. What are you doing?”
“I’ll be struggling with number three,” Neel said. “But have fun.”
Charlie wasn’t in her room when I got home, and so I called another friend, Elaine, and begged her to go for a drink with me. We went all the way to the South End, only because I was afraid of running into Neel. I could’ve said that I’d changed my plans, but I wanted him to think I was out on a date.
Elaine listened patiently as I described how arrogant the guys in the physics department were.
“At least there are male human beings in your department.”
I had dragged her away from an anthropology paper she was supposed to be writing, and so I offered to buy our drinks. When I opened my wallet to pay, there was a folded piece of paper stuck in the pocket in front of my university ID.
“What’s that?” Elaine asked.
I read it quickly myself, and then I showed it to her—although I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it absolutely private forever, because it scared and excited me so much. On three separate lines, in almost illegible printing, it said:
The sweater is ugly.
The sweater is charming.
The sweater may be ugly, but you make it charming.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I explained our joke about Hegelian dialectics.
Elaine shook her head. “It doesn’t work. Those are opinions, not logical propositions. Also, Hegel didn’t even use that formulation. He borrowed it from Kant, and it was popularized by Johann Fichte. And why does he keep trashing your sweater? It’s not that bad.”
That was why I liked Elaine: she was honest and intellectually rigorous, unlike so many people you met in the humanities. But it’s strange how you can ignore even your smartest friends, when you start to fall in love.
11.
The morning of Charlie’s memorial, I woke up early with a dull ache in my stomach. I tried to go over some preliminary data from the Gaia satellite just released by the ESA, but I couldn’t focus. I was thinking that if I hadn’t already had coffee—I keep an electric pot on my desk so that I don’t have to go downstairs and risk waking Jack—I would have gotten back into bed. My phone was next to me, as it so often is now, and it pinged with a new message. When I glanced down, I saw that it was from Charlie Boyce.
Luvya lady!
Beyond this cryptic and almost offensive salutation, there was nothing. If someone was texting from Charlie’s phone, they weren’t hoping to sell pornography or prescription drugs. I couldn’t remember a specific instance in which Charlie had written “Luvya lady!” although she did use the abbreviation “luv” in her electronic communication, and would sometimes greet me, “Hi, lady.” Yet there were probably thousands of women who might have used the same formulation.
Who IS this? I wrote back, and then sat there staring at the phone, willing it to ping. A moment later it did, twice, with a message from Amazon alerting me that my package with Lazrwhite electric toothbrush heads and two other items would arrive tonight before 8:00 p.m.
I could still feel my pulse in my ears a few minutes later, when I heard Jack in the living room. I put on my slippers and went downstairs, where I found him crouched over whatever he was building, the rest of his Legos scattered on the floor. His ant farm had come with him from his room, maybe to keep him company, although I’d warned him several times about the consequences of dropping it.
“Good morning, sweetie,” I said.
“Hi.”
“What are you working on?”
“Train station.”
“It looks like South Station.”
Jack was concentrating, his tongue protruding slightly between his lips.
“Ar
e you trying to make a dome?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I help?”
We worked on the dome for a while, Jack getting down on his stomach and resting the side of his body against my hip. The ants went about their own enterprise with silent intensity.
“Today’s the funeral,” he said suddenly.
“Memorial—it’s a little different. A memorial is supposed to be a celebration of the person’s life.” I realized as I said it that nothing about the service in the church at Harvard was going to correspond to Jack’s idea of a celebration.
“Will she be there?”
“Who?”
“Your friend.”
“Oh. You mean, will her body be there? No, definitely not.”
Jack didn’t say anything, but he was visibly disappointed. “Will we see the coffin?”
“Nope.”
According to the psychologist at Jack’s school, we’re uncomfortable with the idea of death in our society, and for that reason often avoid talking about it with children. It was therefore good for them to experience the death of someone they didn’t know well, to prepare them for the deaths of loved ones later. I heard this back when I attended all the workshops the school offered, in an attempt to do as much exemplary parenting on my own as two people might have accomplished working together.
But the death workshop wasn’t especially illuminating. I’d been showing Jack dead leaves, worms, and insects ever since he could talk. We’d prodded a dead raccoon with a stick. This wasn’t some kind of acclimation process, but rather science, and although I wouldn’t have said it to the school psychologist, I didn’t feel the need to use Charlie for the same purpose. Society aside, I’ve always thought that most normal people are afraid of death.
Einstein famously was not; there is the letter he wrote to Michele Besso’s family, after his friend’s death: So he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
I have always wondered, did this comfort the Besso family? Did it comfort his wife, Anna, to whom Einstein had introduced him? Did she believe, as Einstein did, in a sublime order of which even the most gifted people—people like Einstein and her husband—could only perceive the dim outlines? Did she think of her husband’s illustrious friend when she wondered what to do with his leather boots, or held his glasses in her hand and gasped at their sudden strangeness?
“Where is the coffin?”
“There’s no coffin. She’s being cremated—that’s what most people do now, because there’s really not room to bury everybody. The body goes into a machine that turns it into ashes. We call them ashes, but they look more like pieces of bone. Sometimes family members scatter the ashes in a place that the dead person loved.”
It’s rare that I say something he finds interesting enough to make him stop playing, but now Jack looked up.
“Where do you love?” he said.
“You mean, where would I want my ashes scattered?”
Jack waited.
“Well, you know—I’m not going to die for a very, very long time. I told you my friend was sick, but I’m completely healthy.”
“Yeah I know. But I mean, if.”
I hesitated only a moment. “A lake in Switzerland. It’s the bluest water I’ve ever seen.”
Jack fit a tiny helmet onto a tiny yellow biker, and looked as if he were going to cry.
“But I told you—you don’t have to worry.” I tried to put him on my lap, but he squirmed away. How had we gotten into this before breakfast?
“My grandmother lived to be ninety-seven, and you know your grandma does all that yoga—she’s also going to be alive for a long time.”
But I couldn’t make Jack smile. He has his donor’s blue eyes and general coloring; a tow-headed baby, his hair has gotten steadily darker each year, stopping at the sandy color I remember from that photo on the website. His large, oval-shaped head is similar to my father’s, but his nose and pointed chin are like mine. So far his own father’s height is not in evidence, and the contrast between his big head and slight frame is striking. Especially when he’s unhappy, his face tends to look a little older than it is.
“What is it, Bug?”
He hesitated a long time, but finally spoke. “I’m scared I won’t be able to find it.”
I did take him in my arms then. I put my face in his hair and closed my eyes.
“I’ll leave you a map.”
I could tell that he liked that idea, because I felt his body relax. When he has grievances against me later, at least I’ll be able to say that I talked to him like an adult, that I tried not to lie. We sat there like that for a while, before Jack decided that he wanted French toast.
“No problem,” I said. Breakfast is the only meal I enjoy preparing. He wiggled away and started playing, and I got up to go make it. On my way to the kitchen, he called out to me.
“I want mine at that place in California.”
“What place?” I asked.
“You know.”
“Zuma Canyon?”
“Is that where we had pizza?”
“It’s where we went hiking—with the waterfall.”
“I mean the place with the colored balls.”
“Chuck E. Cheese’s?”
“Right!” Jack said happily. “Right in the pit!”
“Okay. But you’ll have to tell your own children about that.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll give them a map.”
12.
Luvya lady, I thought, as we crossed Harvard Yard. What it meant depended upon the punctuation:
luvyalady
Luvya, lady!
Luvya,
Lady
It was a hot July morning. The campus felt empty and still, as if those three-hundred-year-old buildings had breathed a sigh of relief in expelling their messy human occupants. Oaks and honey locusts threw sharp-edged shadows on the grass, and across the radial paths. The bells in the steeple would ring at nine.
“You know I’m going to have to get up and say something,” I told Jack. “You’ll just sit right there until I’m finished.”
“But I won’t say anything.”
“No, of course not. You don’t have to.”
“Will Simmi?”
I was surprised that he remembered the name. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s only a little older than you.”
“But it’s her mom.” He looked to make sure he’d gotten that right. He and Simmi had never met.
“Still.” I wanted to stop talking before we reached Memorial Church, where I could see Charlie’s mother, Adelaide, standing on the columned portico, calmly greeting family and friends. Not everyone would be composed enough do that, I thought, but it didn’t surprise me that Addie was. She looked perfect, in a gray summer dress and black, short-sleeved lace jacket. Charlie’s father and her brother, William, were standing on either side of her. I didn’t see Terrence or Simmi.
“Helen,” she said, when we reached the front of the line. She took my shoulders in her hands. The face that had once put her in magazines, with its high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, was only slightly aged, with a smooth brow and delicate crow’s feet. I didn’t know what she’d done to herself, if anything, but it didn’t look false or unnatural; it was only uncanny that the twenty years since I’d last seen her seemed to have had so little effect. Her hair was done in a smooth, dark bob; her lipstick was plum-colored. Apart from the serious way she said my name, there was no visible sign of her grief. I had the same feeling I’d always had around Addie—that she saw obvious errors in the way I’d arranged my appearance, and yearned to fix me up.
“I’ve been thinking of you, and Dr. Boyce.” It was awkward, even apart from the odd formality of “Dr. Boyce,” but that was the way I’d referred to him when Charlie and I were students. Addie glossed over this gracefully.
“Carl and I were so glad you agreed to speak. We realize that her friends are mostly in Los Angeles now.” Addie looked down at Jack. “And who is this? He’s just a couple of years younger than Simona, I think?”
“Jack.” I nudged him, and he said hello very quietly, forgetting to extend his hand. He was wearing a navy-and-white checked shirt with a collar, which seemed to emphasize the narrowness of his frame. His hair hadn’t been cut for a while, and was starting to curl at the ends.
“A little more than a year,” I said.
Addie nodded. “Simona’s tall for her age.” She put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “She’s inside with some other children. She’ll be so happy you’re here.”
Carl finished speaking to another guest, and then turned to us, squatting down first to talk to Jack. He’d gained weight since I’d seen him last, and he wore his mustache and beard neatly trimmed; his head had been bald and shiny as long as I’d known him.
“Hi there,” he said. “You must be Jack.” Even in the midst of his grief, it had occurred to Carl that my son—whom he’d never met—might be uncomfortable or frightened at a gathering like this, and he took steps to remedy that, bringing the conversation immediately to his level. “I bet you’ve been to Harvard lots of times.”
Jack’s eyes lit up. “For the bouncy house.”
“That’s what he remembers from Reunion a few years ago,” I explained. “They had one for the kids.”
“I never understand why they don’t get one for the grown-ups,” Carl said, making Jack giggle. “Lord knows we need it.” Then he straightened up and gave me a forceful hug. “Thank you for being here.”
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