“Nice place,” Neel said. He had a fierce sense of justice, coupled with his almost insane economy, and if Charlie had been white, and as adept at securing special privileges as she was, his disdain for her might have been immediate. As it was, he reserved judgment.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I went to see the dean of student services.”
“He just gave you this room?”
“We may have exchanged some services, but that’s what his office is for—right?” Then she winked. She was one of those people who could actually pull off winking.
Later, after everything had happened with Pope, I wondered if she regretted talking that way. If everyone else went up to a certain line with a joke, Charlie would be sure to cross it. This was true of her humor, her sophistication, her clothes, and even her intellectual life; she at first seemed to prefer French to American literary theory, the more impenetrable the better—de Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva—and then made a move toward black American feminists: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, and Hazel Carby. It was maybe a frustration with all of that theory—she was not interested in debates between black and white feminists—that pushed her toward popular culture. She admired Addison Gayle on blaxploitation and Barbara Creed on slasher films, but what she really loved was a period drama, anything set in another place or time. She was obsessed with the first film version of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, and especially with Glenn Close’s extravagant Merteuil; the film was what led her eventually to Laclos, with such unfortunate results.
“Your roommate seems a little unbalanced,” Neel told me, soon after they met. We were sitting on the mattress in the minuscule room he rented from the Grossmans, a retired couple in Somerville. He was the first of my friends to live off campus, to save money and because he chafed at the restrictions and ponderous tradition of dorm life at Harvard. Apart from the mattress that served as bed and couch, Neel had only a desk and a dresser (provided by his landlords) and his many piles of books. He didn’t smoke inside, but the room smelled of the Drum tobacco he rolled himself. It was a corner room on the first floor, with a separate entrance. I would knock at the door under the gingko tree, waiting for Neel to let me in. Although the atmosphere was dank (it seemed always to be overcast when I was there), there was a window onto the Grossmans’ yard, where you could see a storage shed with a padlock and, in the fall, the gingko’s yellow foliage. If Neel cracked his window during that season, you could smell the rancid odor of the round, rust-colored fruits. The gooseneck pharmacy lamp standing on the bare boards, the white paint peeling off the steam pipe in long, bark-like strips, the Grossmans’ narrow dresser with its cut-glass knobs, inside which Neel’s corduroys and wool sweaters had a temporary home: the scarcity of his possessions may make it easier for me to recall the visual details. Or it may be that the intensity of my feelings for him at that time allowed me to preserve this extraneous information—somewhat like the massive Higgs particle that announced its presence in the Standard Model long before it was discovered, as a medium for the less spectacular particles it affected.
“You don’t know her,” I told him. I began by defending her, which only encouraged Neel to argue. I wonder now if I secretly wanted him to point out her flaws.
“Does she really read all those fashion magazines?”
“It’s for her classes, actually. They do feminist readings of magazines and TV shows and stuff.”
“Uh huh,” said Neel, not bothering to hide a smirk. “What’s her family like?”
“Her dad’s a psychiatrist in private practice, but he used to run the department at Tufts medical school. And her mother started an art gallery. Now she’s on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts—and she runs a free after-school program for kids.”
“So they’re these very high-culture black people and she embraces anything popular, television, media, in order to annoy them. She wants to be an actor for the same reason. But”—Neel raised his index finger, a parody of our professor, Arty Hofmann—“she does it through the prism of academia, so she’s not escaping at all.”
I had to admit that this did seem like an accurate assessment of Charlie, one I hadn’t come to myself in spite of how much time I spent with her. As my friendship with Neel developed, we continued to talk this way about people, especially Charlie. Sometimes, sitting on his mattress and engaging in this glorified form of gossip, I knew I was betraying my friend and felt guilty. I didn’t read fashion magazines, not out of any discipline or intellectual purity, but because they made me feel unsophisticated and ugly. I was aware that Neel was giving me a sort of compliment, and also that this compliment was at the expense of my friend, and maybe women in general, but it felt so good to receive that I overlooked that part of it.
This kind of conversation extended to our love lives as well. During those times that Neel had a girlfriend, I knew about her from the beginning: her irresistible attractions, her humorous foibles, the thing he had identified that he guessed would doom them in the end. I shared the same information about my romantic life with him. I sometimes found myself on a second or third date—drinking at Shays, at a concert in the drained swimming pool under Adams House—distracted by the thought of how I would describe the interaction later on, to Neel. Sometimes, sitting and talking on that mattress, it seemed as if we’d outsmarted not only other people, but love itself.
* * *
—
Neel’s and my friendship was of a very collegiate type. We studied together, drank together, hugged each other each time we said goodbye, but in the first three years we spent together at Harvard, we never went beyond that. Later, when we did get together for real, we would speculate about what had taken so long, but I don’t think we really figured it out. I wonder now if it was the way we talked together that had kept us apart. It was so safe, so empowering, that neither one of us wanted to give it up for the real thing; we wanted to hold up that potential against which everything else could be compared.
At the end of one of my evenings in his cold and uncomfortable apartment, it was a pleasure to return to the spacious, overheated room I shared with Charlie in Lowell House. She was always awake. If she wasn’t shut in her room with her boyfriend, Kwesi, she would be puttering around our messy common room in a white silk bathrobe with multicolored butterflies. We would make Swiss Miss hot chocolate, dumping two or three packets in the mugs we’d stolen from the dining hall, until the surface of sludgy liquid was swimming with marshmallows, and talk until the early hours of the morning.
Charlie had been with Kwesi—straight-A philosophy concentrator, varsity soccer player, and president of the Black Students Association—since freshman year. (Kwesi would go on to win a Rhodes and teach at the London School of Economics.) Through Kwesi, Charlie was able to move between the black and Latino–centric social world of the Radcliffe quad, and her mostly white friends from boarding school, the Hasty Pudding Club, and the Signet, an arts club where she sometimes ate lunch on Thursdays. In our day, housing at Harvard was “semi-random,” which meant that you could list your three top choices on your housing form; the fact that black and Latino students often chose the less convenient houses at Radcliffe in order to remain together—this strikes me now as one of the most quiet and effective protests I’ve ever witnessed—embarrassed the university, and no doubt led to the institution of complete randomization a few years after we left.
Charlie and Neel didn’t get to know each other well until our senior year, but each of them seemed amused by my description of the other. When I was with Charlie, the whole style of Neel’s off-campus apartment seemed pretentious, and the things he said—he was planning to teach physics to children in rural India after graduation; he was a Marxist-Leninist—absurd. Charlie made fun of his clothes (which he did actually have the money to replace, had he chosen to) and his hand-rolled cigarettes (which she purposely misidentified as cloves).
When I was with Neel, though, it was the other way around. Neel even suggested that Charlie was tolerated by her black friends because of Kwesi, but that there were people who dismissed her as a snob, a Black American Princess, and worse. I defended her—how could you please everyone?—but Charlie and Neel were the two best talkers I’d ever known, and I found myself susceptible to their arguments. I sometimes consoled myself with the thought that this was the way a scientific mind worked, constantly doubting, open to revising its ideas if new evidence presented itself. But the fact was that Neel and Charlie did just as well academically as I did, and they weren’t constantly changing their minds, or finding that their own ideas shifted under the influence of powerful fields created by two equally magnetic friends.
14.
I had suggested we get the kids together. I’d done it because I didn’t know what to say to Terrence after the service, but I hadn’t expected him to agree. I didn’t think he considered me a good enough friend, maybe even of his wife’s, to want to talk to me about her now, and I couldn’t imagine what use Simmi would have for a new playmate, especially a shy younger boy, just after her mother’s death.
But Terrence had taken my number at the memorial, and texted me two weeks later to arrange it. He and Simmi showed up on a Sunday morning at exactly the appointed time. We half hugged at the door, and then I led them into the living room, where the four of us stood in uncomfortable silence. Or rather, the three of us; only Jack was perfectly content, watching Simmi. Recent events, not to mention her age and costume (she arrived in leopard-print tights and a tank top with a sequined star on it), clearly fascinated him. Terrence was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that said Zingaro in fancy black script. The clothing made him more recognizably himself, but the change from the man I remembered was still striking, perhaps only because of his close-cropped hair. It made his face less boyishly handsome, more angular and dramatic. There was a tattoo I couldn’t make out on the inside of his left arm.
I suggested that Jack show Simmi his room, but Simmi sat down cross-legged on the floor and started looking at an old issue of the MIT Technology Review. There couldn’t have been anything there to interest her, but she turned the pages systematically, as if it were a hurdle she had to cross before moving on to whatever business was at hand.
“Simmi,” her father said, and Simmi looked up, but at me rather than him. Her hair was secured in two very neat French braids; it seemed like an unlikely skill for a father to have, and I wondered if Addie had done it. Simmi’s features, like Charlie’s, were perfectly regular, but her face was wider, heart-shaped like Terrence’s.
“Are you an astronomer?” she asked, her eyes on me.
“No. But I do use data—information—that astronomers and astrophysicists collect.”
“So you study stars?”
“Not usually.”
“What do you study?”
“It’s a little hard to explain, but I mostly study forces. Like the way the very smallest things we know about move around, and also the very biggest things, like stars and planets.”
Simmi looked impatient, as if I were intentionally being difficult. “So you know what stars are like.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think you could say that.”
“Is there, like—” She slapped our hardwood floor twice with the palm of her hand: “ground?” Her face had an intensity that made me uncomfortable. Terrence had been frowning out the window, but now he gave me a kind of warning look.
I thought Simmi noticed that and was trying to keep all my attention on her.
“No,” I said carefully. “A star is just a hot ball of gas.”
“Because of the nuclear fusion reactions in its core!” Jack was showing off for our guests, but Simmi ignored him.
“Isn’t it too hot for people on stars?” she asked.
“You’re right, it’s much too hot. In the middle there’s hydrogen—that’s one of the two ingredients in water—and helium, like what’s inside balloons. The tiny pieces of hydrogen crash together to make helium, along with light and heat. Some of the stars we’re looking at are so far away that the light we’re seeing is thousands or even millions of years old.”
“The speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe!” Jack said. “Faster than Power Rangers!”
“It’s like a fire pit,” Simmi said. “Like hell.”
“No, it isn’t,” Terrence said firmly.
“There’s no hell,” Jack said.
Simmi focused on him for the first time. “How do you know?”
“He’s right, baby,” Terrence said. “Everybody knows that.”
I could see the next question on Simmi’s face, the obvious one that I wondered myself as a child, when I’d heard my own grandmother talk about meeting her parents in heaven—how could there be one and not the other?
“Most astronomers do think there are other solar systems like ours out there,” I said. “Maybe even with planets like Earth. They could just be too far for us to get to.”
But Simmi had turned back to the magazine, examining a glossy and somewhat frightening portrait of Elon Musk standing in an empty airplane hangar, leaning on one of his cars.
Jack had also lost interest in cosmology and was shifting from one foot to the other. “Do you want to see my room?”
I could tell Simmi wanted to say no, but her father accepted for her.
“Go on, Sims.”
Simmi uncrossed her legs and stood up reluctantly.
“Do you like Legos?” Jack asked eagerly.
“Not really.” But her tone was truthful rather than harsh. “My best friend in L.A. is Piper,” we heard her say as they walked down the hall. “She’s nine already.”
“My cousin is nine,” Jack said gamely. Then they went into his room, and shut the door.
I looked at Terrence. “I’m not sure I did the best job answering that one.”
He shrugged. “It’s her grandmother. She said that maybe Charlie was ‘smiling down on us’ from a star.”
“Oh—”
“You have no idea, the conversations we’ve had about that one.”
I agreed with Terrence that the idea of Charlie smiling down from a star—in addition to sounding vaguely out of character—was unlikely to comfort a child who had just turned eight. On the other hand, there are all kinds of platitudes I’ve heard myself repeating to Jack that I never would’ve expected, comforting banalities I must’ve been told so many times that they had been hardwired in there.
“I can imagine,” I said.
Terrence expelled a breath, said nothing. He sat down, not on the chair itself, but on one upholstered arm. He ran his hand over his head, as if feeling for the missing hair, then interlaced his fingers. On his left hand was the simple platinum wedding band.
Apart from the few words we’d exchanged at the memorial, we hadn’t spoken since the phone conversation when he’d first told me about Charlie. That was two days after she died, the day after I received the wordless phone call, which he’d dismissed as a pocket dial. I didn’t think he would be able to do the same with the symbols that had come over email the next day, or the text on the morning of the memorial itself—but sitting across from him, I felt it would be wrong to bring those things up.
“I made some coffee, if you want?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
There was a ridiculously long silence, in which Terrence seemed to be studying his fingernails. They were either clipped or bitten very short.
“What’s Zingaro?”
Terrence looked up. “Oh, it’s our company—mine and my brother’s. We make wooden surfboards.”
“What does it mean?”
“Gypsy,” he said. “It’s a British word for an Italian Gypsy.”
“I’ve never heard it before.” There was the sound of th
e children’s voices from Jack’s room. They at least had overcome the initial awkwardness.
“Charlie would be glad we’re doing this,” Terrence offered suddenly. “I mean, a playdate. She’d talk about you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Like when there was an article or something—I think she had a Google Alert on your name. She told Simmi how you were a famous scientist and everything.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, but I was pleased. It was one thing to hear it from Charlie, who tended to flatter people, another to think that Charlie cared enough to follow my career remotely.
“I think she also wanted Simmi to know there’s another kind of famous,” Terrence said. “Not just pop stars and actors—you know?”
“It’s impressive that Simmi remembered.”
“She’s something,” Terrence said. “She could read when she was three.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Terrence glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. Was I trying to impress him? And even if I were, would this be the way to go about it? I know better than to bring up the spooky stuff my parents have told me: that my first words were a full sentence, spoken at eight months—“Candle makes light”—and that I seemed to read from a book ten months after that, a Jane Austen novel that was lying open on the bed. The parson is coming to dinner, I supposedly said, startling my mother, who was ironing. In third grade, Mrs. Katz made me stand in front of the class while she threw addition and subtraction problems at me. I’d been rude, she said, claiming that I “already knew how to add and subtract,” and she wanted to teach me a lesson. I got them all, up to four digits, and was surprised when it turned out I had to sit through addition anyway.
Jack does not manifest the unusual abilities I displayed early. His report card, which doesn’t yet have letter grades on it, is always good; although he professes to dislike math, his evaluations in that subject and in science are often excellent. His teachers’ most frequent complaints are about the sloppiness of his homework, and his disinclination to speak up in class. These are issues I struggle to help him with, since I had the opposite problem as a child; I was so eager to please, not only to show what I knew but to be allowed to move on to whatever was coming next, that I couldn’t shut up.
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