And they eat sago! What the hell is sago anyway? He’d read enough to know it was poisonous until you processed it, and what if you processed it wrong? But what did it taste like anyway? It was a mystery. And also crickets. They eat crickets and grubs. Although maybe he could manage the occasional monkey. But then it occurred to him: this is also culture. It was useless to go to Papua New Guinea! No authenticity there, either. So how can anyone be himself? Can anyone even be? Is there really a me? And if there’s no me, how can I ever be free?
He was still thinking about Sartre—whom he had not read since college, and then only skimmingly—but it seemed to him Sartre said the idea of freedom was so terrifying and boundless that it made you nauseous. And he did feel a little sick actually.
In the meantime, though, he continued to watch the ice skaters make their little circles around the tiny rink and beyond them the hawkers of souvenirs and the bums looking for handouts and the street jugglers putting on a show up and down the ticket line, and, farther off, an enclave of Rastafarians banging steel drums and some guy strumming a guitar and singing Bob Dylan songs, and beyond that was Geary Street with its Christmas traffic and its sidewalks thick with pedestrians, and beyond that, directly behind the pedestrians, in fact, every window decked with golden wreaths and silvery lights, was Macy’s.
The nausea got a little worse, so he found a vacant bench and sat himself down. He checked his watch. It was already past three. He had read about a physics experiment in which they had made time disappear, at least as far as the observer was concerned. They make a time hole by speeding up the speed of light going into an event and slowing it down coming out, or maybe it was vice versa, but whatever, and the event just disappears as if it never happened. Even though it did. Right before your eyes. Of course they did this on a micro scale of like a forty-trillionth of a second—but for that forty-trillionth of a second, time ceased to be. He checked his watch again. He should have been back at the office two hours ago. But it was nearly Christmas! Why should he even think about work this time of year? And anyway, there was the office party tomorrow, and then everyone would be off for three days, and then the no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when nothing gets done and most everyone just goes skiing or flies off to Maui. We make our own time holes, but, oh, if only time could really disappear!
He looked up from his revelry. Macy’s loomed over him, over the whole square, a great shadow.
I could get the perfume anywhere, he said to himself. There was Neiman catty-cornered cross the street. On the other side of the square was Saks. Or that little perfumery run by that old French couple just a block or so away. He could even buy it online with overnight delivery. Why am I so stuck on Macy’s? he asked himself.
It was a huge structure taking up an entire city block. And even that wasn’t the whole thing. The men’s store was a separate building on the other side of Stockton Street. Macy’s was so big it was beyond comprehension.
If only he hadn’t run into Daisy!
How could you not love Daisy? Anyone could see how great she was. It wasn’t just that she was smart—Margaret was also smart. Or that she was beautiful and funny and adventurous in bed. What set Daisy apart, he now understood, was that she had heart. And she experienced in her being the fact that other people had hearts, too. That Henry Quantum had a heart, even though he thought maybe he didn’t.
But he told her he loved Margaret. So why was the Chanel No. 5 weighing on him like a slab of granite? Perfume is a last-minute gift, and he knew it, a gift that required no thought, and it would be accepted as such—a pathetic, self-serving gesture of appeasement. And while it was true no one else could buy Margaret perfume—only a husband or a lover can buy a woman perfume—still, it was as impersonal as a cashier’s check. If the buying of perfume had been a ritual between them, if, for instance, at every Christmas he presented her with her favorite scent and a loving card, a marking of the time they shared together, that would be one thing—but let’s face it, he hardly ever bought her perfume, or anything else for that matter. He used to. But he reminded himself again that she never really liked what he bought. And these days, he rarely had the urge to please her. And why was that? Maybe Margaret wasn’t the kindest person in the world, not like Daisy, but she was very good-looking and could be wickedly funny, and once upon a time she, too, had been adventurous in bed. And wasn’t Margaret a good partner and easy to talk to? And didn’t she put up with his foibles, which he knew were manifold? And they shared the household chores without rancor, and there was some kind of tenderness between them, wasn’t there?
So Henry had to ask himself: What is the truth of this perfume?
And even if there was no such thing as an authentic act, on this day, sitting on this bench, Henry wanted to know, wanted to know truly, what it was he wanted to do and who it was he had become, and who it was he wanted to be.
And that is when Santa Claus sat down beside him.
The thing is, it wasn’t exactly Santa—no red suit, no black boots, no floppy cap—it was just an ordinary guy with a thick white beard and a huge, round tummy. His long ashen hair had been pulled back into a thin ponytail, and he wore suspenders over a pale blue short-sleeve shirt because he was too hot even in winter, and his trousers were charcoal gray and his shoes had thick crepe soles—and when Henry stared at him, the guy said, “Yeah, I know. All year long I’m just a fat guy with a beard, but in December, suddenly I’m Santa. Especially now, with just two days to go. I don’t mind. The kids come up to me and I ask them if they’ve been good, and the mothers aren’t even afraid of me like they are the rest of the year. But this isn’t Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street and I’m not the real Santa Claus.”
“I guess I was staring,” said Henry.
“It’s fine. Sometimes I get off on it. I’m just having a tough day. Sometimes even Santa has a shitty day.”
“I’ve had a strange day myself.”
“Yeah, you look a little forlorn, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Forlorn?” said Henry.
“Haggard.”
“What are you, an English professor?”
“Cabdriver. But that doesn’t mean I’m a moron. Actually I went to Princeton.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, all Princeton graduates drive taxis.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Bad day for Santa.”
“I really look forlorn and haggard?”
“You do. All bent over, holding your head in your hands.”
“I didn’t realize I was.”
“Yeah, you were.”
“It’s funny—the day started with me thinking about distance and the speed of light—I mean, about how far away from us everything really is, and how it’s impossible to ever truly experience anything in the moment, even yourself. There’s always the mediation of time, of space, of something that comes between the self and everything else. It kind of depressed me. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
“Not at all. You have a philosophical mind.”
“You know, the light from the Sombrero Galaxy takes thirty million years to get to us, so when we look at the pictures Hubble takes, we’re seeing it as it was thirty million years ago.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“So we have no idea what it looks like now, or if it even still exists.”
“But it exists for us.”
“As a photograph. As an image on our retinas. And the thing is, this morning all I could think about was that terrible, terrible distance. And then I ran into this old friend, this old girlfriend actually, and the same feeling came over me—that distance times time equals impossible, if that makes any sense.”
“Yeah, I get you.”
“And now I have to decide whether or not to buy my wife some perfume at Macy’s.”
“I see.”
“It sucks,” said Henry.
“Well, you know there is another theory out there.”
“Of what?”
“That the universe is really two-dimensional, and that space doesn’t exist at all. That all of space is just an illusion, and we’re, like, holographs.”
“That’s nuts.”
“It’s the latest theory.”
“Are you also a physicist?”
“Just interested in how the world works.”
“Yeah, it’d be great to know how the world works.”
“Well, this theory arose from a simple well-known fact. That at the level of quantum, a particle can be at two places at the same time. This has been a great mystery—how can something be in two places at the same time? And the answer they came up with is that there is really no such thing as two places. Because space itself is an illusion. It has to do with black holes and the energy that gets sucked into them and the energy that gets pushed back out and how more energy actually comes out than goes in, or something like that, but the point is, they say that at the edge of a black hole, all the data of all the material that has been sucked into it is encoded on its lip like a residue or a hologram, and therefore is not lost, and that actually our entire universe is nothing but a kind of super massive black hole, and we are simply representations of what’s inside it. It’s like looking at the hologram on a credit card. We’re just data on a flat surface, made three-dimensional by the addition of light.”
“So there is no space between us? Between you and me?”
“Not really.”
“And no space within us?”
“No.”
“Kind of like the Buddhist idea?”
“Kind of.”
“And you said a quantum particle can be in two places at one time?”
“Yes, it can.”
“Because space is an illusion?”
“I think that’s it.”
Henry leaned back against the bench. Wow, he thought, I must have been wrong about everything. Maybe it really is possible to connect to another human being on the deepest level. But even more amazing to him was that it was possible to be in two places at one time. This was the breathless revelation he’d been yearning for all day. To be both in love with Margaret and not in love with Margaret, to both desire Daisy with all his heart and avoid Daisy with all his might, to both walk into Macy’s and buy that goddamned perfume and to never set foot in Macy’s as long as he lived; and what’s more, it was also possible to do one’s work diligently and put it off indefinitely, to fetch his brother-in-law at the airport and also to let him wait till he turned to dust, and if he really wanted, he could stay on this bench forever talking with this man who was both Santa Claus and not Santa Claus, and at the same time he could fly off to Papua New Guinea and never come back.
He thought about all this and then suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he told everything he was thinking to the man with the white beard.
The older man smiled warmly, stood up, and placed his hand upon Henry’s shoulder.
“The only problem,” he said, “is that you’re not a quantum particle.”
“Yeah.” Henry sighed. “And you’re not Santa.”
“But on that,” the fat man replied, “you’d be wrong.” He leaned back and laughed the best Santa laugh Henry ever heard.
And then Henry was left alone on the bench, Macy’s in front of him, the ice rink behind, and the sun above him beginning its drift into the sea.
He looked again across Geary at all the people passing in front of Macy’s huge bronze doors—and realized just how far away they were.
PART TWO
MARGARET
CHAPTER 6
* * *
December 23rd, 9:15 a.m.–12:03 p.m.
When Margaret heard the BMW pull out of the garage, she got up from the table and went to the window, the better to see her husband disappear down the street. Then she showered, carefully chose her underwear, skirt, blouse, jacket, and shoes, returned to the bathroom to put on her makeup and brush her hair, examined herself in the mirror, changed out of her skirt, jacket, and blouse into a little dress, changed the shoes, put on different jewelry, checked herself again in the mirror, took off the dress, put on a different skirt and this time a tight-fitting sweater and a third pair of shoes, went back to the original earrings and bracelets, added some pearls, removed the pearls, attached a pin to the sweater, looked again in the mirror, took off the sweater and put on a second blouse, repinned the pin, adjusted her hair, and went back down to the kitchen. Then she picked up the phone and called her office, told them she would not be coming in today but would be working off-site, picked up her purse, went into the garage, jumped into her MINI Cooper, tuned the radio to classical, and went on her way.
She would be driving out to Marin, meeting Peter at the Mountain Home Inn up on Mount Tam for a bit of brunch on the deck. Then they would leave one car behind on the mountain and drive together down the winding curves to Stinson Beach. It was a bit of a schlep to get to the Golden Gate Bridge from Twin Peaks, where she and Henry lived, and so it gave her time to think, not that she wanted to think. She wanted to get there, to see Peter, to start their day, their full day, their stolen day, their day in the sun, their day of being a real couple.
Or to feel like a real couple anyway. Such freedom! There was a little motel on the beach, nothing fancy—she swung onto Clarendon Avenue and then onto Seventeenth and then hung a right on Stanyan and followed it through the upper Haight, past the east edge of Golden Gate Park. She whizzed by house after house until the landscape suddenly gave way to shops and restaurants—she noted the American Cyclery shop, where years before she had purchased Henry a beautiful white Bianchi that he rode maybe twice and then gave up because of the hills. She had dreamt they would put their bikes on the roof of the car and drive them out to Napa or Sonoma and ride from winery to winery or spend long Sunday afternoons in Golden Gate Park cycling all the way to Lands End—but it never happened. But that was then, and this was now, and she was already turning onto Park Presidio, which fed directly onto the bridge.
There was nothing really wrong with Henry. Aside from the neurosis of course, and that imagination that drove her crazy, and the fact that he accomplished virtually nothing he set his mind to. She had thought— But never mind. That was also long ago and not worth thinking about anymore.
She reached over to the back seat to make sure the package was there—the one she had hidden in case Henry looked into her car. Through the Tiffany bag she could feel the little box with its distinctive bow, and the card was there, too. A small wave of pleasure pulsed through her. She couldn’t wait to present it to Peter. She would find just the right moment to make it perfect.
As she approached the bridge she was relieved there wasn’t much traffic—she and Peter had timed it that way. It was now going on 10:00 a.m. and she’d be there in half an hour or so. To her right, the wide, smooth bay stretched out toward Alcatraz and she could see all the way to the Berkeley Hills, though instantly she regretted looking because that is where she met Henry. Sixteen years ago it was, waiting outside a Chinese restaurant on Shattuck Avenue; she was with her friend Dede, but she couldn’t remember whom he was with, just some guy, and they got to talking because the wait was interminable, and before long he’d asked her out, or maybe she asked him out offhandedly—“Hey, we’re going to a party later, want to come?”—but already in her mind it was a date. She could even now vaguely recall how exciting that was, the promise of hot, new love. He was tall, cute, a little nerdy but trying his best to be brash. Sweet. She was twenty-six then, forty-two now. She couldn’t even remember what she looked like then, couldn’t even imagine it anymore—the skin, the breasts, the ass of the twenty-six-year-old Margaret. She’d never liked her body and still didn’t, but when she looked at old photos, she thought, My God, that flat tummy! Her bosom had been high if not full, and her legs weren’t bad, either—but it was like a dream because now all she could see was how thick her thighs had become with the telltale mottling of cellulite and the disfiguring webbing of veins t
hat had begun to push up through the plump skin. The rounding of her belly, the distinct drooping of her breasts, which she had thought she would avoid since she had never given birth, the sharpening of her neck into bony rivulets rising from her breastbone—all this was the burden she carried with her every moment of every day. Her body wasn’t her temple—it was her tomb. But Peter told her she was beautiful, and she trembled at the thought of him.
Suddenly the traffic came screeching to a halt and she had to slam on the brakes. She waited a minute or two for the cars to start up again, but they didn’t. No traffic coming from the other direction, either. Soon sirens could be heard rumbling up from San Francisco—ambulance, police cars, rescue. Drivers turned off their engines and stepped out onto the bridge. Even the pedestrians and bicyclists had been cordoned off and were not allowed to move forward. Margaret turned her car off, too, leaned out her window and called to some fellow standing beside his pickup, “Can you see what’s happening?”
“Jumper!” he said.
“Are you serious?”
“I think so. That’s what the guy in front of me said. I can’t see anything myself.”
Someone else had gotten up on the roof of his SUV, and Margaret yelled over to him, “Can you see?”
“Yeah,” he yelled back, “they’re all around the railing. I don’t think the guy’s jumped yet. I think maybe he changed his mind but is stuck or something. He’s, like, hanging there.”
“Jesus!” she said.
“It’s a woman, actually.”
“Jesus!” she repeated.
The Heart of Henry Quantum Page 7
