Maxine didn’t yet know that this man had a penchant for women’s feet. Any more than she knew they would marry and have a son and live together for twenty-four mostly harmonious years before he expired from a particularly virulent strain of West Nile virus he picked up while trying to make a new ultrafine mosquito netting available to every family in Nigeria. Lacking such clairvoyance, she had looped her arm around his back and they staggered across the bridge as if competing in some slow-motion three-legged sack race. Until then, her experience had been that men expected you to match your rhythm to theirs. Girls were taught to walk smoothly—her home ec teacher ticked off marks in a book as each female member of their seventh-grade class crossed the room with a yardstick balanced atop her head—while boys were left to develop whatever swagger or slink or gallop allowed them to cross a room without damaging the furniture or themselves. She had no idea what gay men did, who matched his gait to whose. But heterosexual men assumed their female partners would swagger or slink or gallop in tandem with them. With the few men she dated before Sam, they tripped each other up, elbows and hips colliding. So she was astonished when Sam matched his gait to hers. She worried he might be put off by her funk. But Sam loved a woman’s funk. Having been raised by WASPs who equated strong scents with the lower classes, he longed for the reek of body odor, onions, garlic, curry. On his trips abroad, he told Maxine later, he enjoyed nothing more than wandering an outdoor market. A woman would pass, and the oils in her hair, mingled with the smoke clinging to her robes, turned him on so much he needed to fight the urge to run after her.
Still, like most engineers, especially those who attended all-boy high schools, he hardly was adept at pickups. He asked Maxine if she knew the bridge they were crossing was understrength for the load it was carrying. “Whenever I’m on this bridge and I see a bus and truck cross at the same time, I consider the very real possibility I’ll end up going for a swim.”
The bridge vibrated ominously beneath their feet.
“Do you know about the smoots?” He pointed to the markings along the walkway, and Maxine didn’t have the heart to say she knew all about Oliver Smoot and the way, one drunken night, he had been laid end-to-end by his fraternity-mates so they could inscribe his measurements on the bridge, with the nearly mystical result that its length in smoots equaled the number of days in a year. (The length of the Harvard Bridge turned out to be 364.4 smoots, “plus or minus an ear,” as some wag had painted on the macadam nearest MIT.) And yet, Maxine lied and told Sam no. This admission of false ignorance surprised her. Back then, she was more likely to pretend to know something she didn’t than feign ignorance of something she did. She wasn’t a braggart. But the men at MIT assumed she knew nothing at all.
“I shouldn’t admit this,” Sam said, “but I have a soft spot for the guy. My middle name is Oliver.” Which was something of a tease because he hadn’t revealed his first or last names. “And we both stand five feet, seven inches tall.” Which made Maxine an inch shy of a smoot herself. “What I admire is the way he allowed himself to be picked up and carried along. He let a prank define his fate. The guy trained to be a lawyer. But do you know what he actually did become?”
This time, her ignorance was sincere.
“The president of the International Organization of Standardization. The man could have lived his life as a short, round lawyer with a funny name. Instead, he became the worldwide King of Measurements. He made the name ‘Oliver Smoot’ immortal.”
They passed the final smoot mark. Sam ushered her to a bench. Prince Charming in reverse, he knelt and unlaced her cheap red Ked. She considered jerking away her leg. But she derived a weird pleasure from the sight of this man caressing her bare foot. If her rescuer turned out to be a fetishist, would that make her his fetishee?
Sam must have thought better of the whole sordid affair. He dropped her foot and ran to fetch his car. She felt foolish driving off with a man she had just met. But cell phones hadn’t been invented. Besides, she was so new to Cambridge she hadn’t made any friends. When Sam pulled up in his wimpy blue VW bug, what could she do but allow him to transport her back across the bridge to the emergency room at Mass General? The doctor applied a cast. Sam drove her home and helped her up the three flights to her apartment. He ran out and bought her groceries, along with the latest issue of Scientific American. In the weeks that followed, he drove her back and forth to school, brought her sandwiches from the deli across the street and ice cream from Emack & Bolio. She was desperate to be kissed. But the WASP code of conduct apparently forbade a man from taking advantage of a lady’s injured ankle. He waited until the cast had been sawn off. Then, standing at the bottom of her stairs, knowing he would never again have an excuse to help her up them, he asked if she wanted to go see Superman.
“Sure,” she said. They drove to Copley Square, then sat paralyzed by desire through a movie they would go on to quote for the entirety of their married lives. Who am I? one of the two might ask. And the other would respond: Your name is Kal-El. You are the only survivor of the planet Krypton. Even though you have been raised as a human, you are not one of them. You have great powers, only some of which you have as yet discovered.
After Christopher Reeve had saved the planet by revving it backwards in time, Sam drove her home. She led him upstairs, limping from habit.
“Don’t worry,” he said, laying her across the bed. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”
“I believe you,” she said. Because even then she knew he couldn’t inflict the slightest pain on her without suffering the same pain, reflected doubly, on himself. What she couldn’t have predicted was he would leave in such a way that he wasn’t around to feel the pain he caused by leaving.
Neither of the two men Maxine had slept with before Sam approached her with such determination. It was as if he were trying to persuade an important piece of apparatus to light up and buzz. And, before Sam, she hadn’t felt nearly so eager to light up or buzz. Neither of them considered themselves to be people who could achieve the erotic bliss they saw movie stars achieve—or simulate achieving—on the screen. But here they were, entwining in a superintuitive, synergistic collaboration that left each feeling more human, more real, than either had felt before.
They married. They moved to Ann Arbor. True, Sam’s appointment was much more prestigious than her own. The Residential College had seen its glory days in the sixties and now served as a repository for any oddball spousal hire the university didn’t know what to do with. But Maxine couldn’t have been more content. The students at the RC seemed more receptive to her classes on the effects of technology on human behavior and psychology than would have been the case elsewhere at the university. She and Sam would spend the week teaching, conducting their research, grading papers. Then, on weekends, they would loll in bed past noon, satisfying their desire, rise, and spend the remainder of the day canoeing the Huron River, sniffing vegetables at the farmer’s market, or drifting from painting to painting at the museum in Detroit. Come Monday, she and Sam would shower in the same stall, then dress and walk to school, kissing on the Diag before heading to their respective offices. Who wouldn’t love waking to a life like that?
After Zach was born, she grew happier yet. She would nod off in the middle of a feeding, only to wake and find her son snuggled between her breasts, fragrant and warm as a loaf of newly baked bread. When he grew old enough to escape his crib, she would discover Zach’s face at the edge of her mattress, willing her to open her eyes and pull him up, where she tickled him through the soft cotton of his pajamas, printed with cars or airplanes. She packed him off to daycare, then set to work on her first book, so she wouldn’t be disgraced when she came up for tenure. In later years, she rose each morning eager to meet the challenges of directing the institute she had come to see as the fulfillment of her childhood dreams.
Then Sam died, and whatever neurochemical fizz kept her excited to be alive got zappe
d out in the storm. Friends tried to fix her up. But she couldn’t summon the energy to meet someone new. Just as Oliver Smoot became the unit by which the world measured the Harvard Bridge, Maxine’s dead husband assumed the measure of what a man was meant to be.
Occasionally, she still teaches a course in the Residential College or meets a student here for a tutorial. But she avoids spending time in this office as much as possible. She doesn’t want to be reminded of all the afternoons she and Sam made love on the grimy wood floor, her husband grinding into her as she prayed the janitor wouldn’t choose that moment to unlock the door and empty the trash. Once, as Sam was extricating himself from her arms so he could hurry back to meet with a Global Initiatives donor, she had said, “Why do you get to direct an institute and I don’t?”
He admitted she had a point. “No one is going to say: ‘Now, there goes a woman who deserves to direct an institute!’ But if you come up with an idea and ask the university to help you start it —”
Oh, come on, she had said. The only reason the university hired her in the first place was she was a bargaining chip to get him to accept his offer.
“Sure,” Sam said. “But then you surprised them. You published a book. You earned tenure. If a female faculty member proposes an institute, and they look around and see that every other institute at the university is directed by a man, they’ll be embarrassed to turn you down.”
She realized he was serious.
“How do you think any other program got started? Someone had the balls to propose a plan.”
She had waved toward her nether regions and joked that the last time she looked, she didn’t have any balls to speak of. But Sam had refused to laugh. “No,” he said. “But the last time I looked, you had a highly intelligent vagina.” Then he issued an assignment: She was to spend the day dreaming up an institute she wanted to direct. At bedtime, she would present her idea to him.
Naked as she was, she began describing her idea right then. She wanted to bring together the best minds of their generation, or the best minds she could find on campus, and set them figuring out the effect of all these new technologies on the human soul. With Sam egging her on, she drew up a proposal and approached the provost—not the provost who occupies the office now, but kind, scholarly Terrence Stanford. She wrote grants. She wooed the trustees of big foundations. She cajoled her colleagues into joining her. She developed an entirely new field, the study of immortality. Sam had lived long enough to see the Institute for Future Studies become reality. But six months after it opened, he was felled by that West Nile virus.
The floorboards where she and Sam used to make love glow so luridly the outline of her husband’s body might have been drawn in chalk. The filing cabinet where she keeps notes from the classes she used to teach is tacked with Zach’s school portraits from the first to seventh grades. Zach made most of the frames himself—from Popsicle sticks, acorns, buttons. His face narrows from year to year, skin coarsening, hair growing longer, then shorter, then longer, a boy evolving to a man, like the cartoon series on her door.
Most afternoons when Zach was in elementary school she picked him up and brought him here so he could play games on her computer while she met with students or attended whatever meetings she needed to attend before they could leave for the day. Later, when Zach was in junior high, he walked here on his own. She liked to think he had been as happy spending time with her as she had been to putter around her father’s repair shop. Sometimes she and Zach left early and visited the dinosaurs at the museum. A juggler might be practicing on the Diag, or a group of students protesting some injustice.
Still, there had been plenty of afternoons when neither she nor Sam could look after their son. Her mother nagged her to hire a nanny. But Sam didn’t want Zach to be coddled the way he had been coddled as a child. By seventh grade, Zach had refused to be minded by a sitter anyway. With Sam traveling so often, she had allowed Zach to spend too many hours playing video games. That was why she asked Thaddy to hang around with him after school. She ought to have been warier. But she hoped the two lonely young men, despite the differences in their ages, would be good for each other. At least they would keep each other company.
She takes out a blue cardboard file labeled “Ethics of the New Technologies, Fall 2002.” Along with the usual texts on the sociological implications of robots displacing workers and the effects of social media on our attention spans, she required her students to read Herman Melville’s brilliant but depressing “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” along with equally bleak works by Kafka, Huxley, Wells, Pynchon, Dostoevsky, and yes—she feels a chill—at the bottom of the list, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.
Hands shaking, she leafs through her lecture notes. Beneath these, she discovers the essays three of her students handed in but didn’t pick up. That used to hurt her feelings. Didn’t they care what she had to say? These days, she comments on her students’ papers digitally. (On the rare occasions she writes by hand, she finds herself driven mad by how slowly her fingers move and the failure of the page to correct her typos.) This arrangement is more convenient, but it means her students will have no physical copies of their papers. Years from now, they will come across no yellowing essays or blue books prompting them to marvel how much smarter they were in college, how devoted to reading a difficult text and pondering what it meant. They won’t have mementoes of their professors, as Maxine treasures her own professors’ handwritten notes.
Thaddy had typed his final paper. But he penciled his name across the top, the printing spiky and cramped, as if he were writing Hebrew. On the back page he had written this note: “You are the only actual human being on this campus. Merry Christmas. Or happy Hanuka (sp?). I will stop by later to pick this up. Thaddy R.”
Everything comes rushing back. The way, eleven years ago this past September, she had stopped by the mailroom to pick up the roster for her seminar. The way she noticed, toward the end of the list, the name “Thaddeus Rapaczynski,” which she looked forward to pronouncing correctly because the shop teacher in her hometown used to pound a hammer on a nail to drive home the proper pronunciation of his name: Mr. Rap-rap-rap-a-chin-ski. The way, when the class gathered around the seminar table that first afternoon, Thaddy signaled by his expression how little he wanted to be there. How much smarter he was than his fellow students. How much more deeply he had considered the topics they would be discussing. When she handed out the syllabus, Thaddy snorted. When they discussed the reasons for the recent Y2K panic, he sat shaking his head, no doubt because Maxine’s knowledge of the technical shortcuts that might have led to a crisis was so limited.
At the end of the second class, she had asked Thaddeus if he would drop by to see her. He didn’t seem surprised, as if he guessed she wanted to lecture him on his failure to be agreeable. A few days later, he shuffled into her office—this one, at the Residential College—and stood by the door, having fulfilled his end of the bargain by showing up.
“So,” she had started. “Can I ask why you signed up for my class if you are not interested in the material? Or don’t you think I’m qualified to teach the course?”
He seemed taken aback by her honesty. Flustered, he crumpled to the one extra chair in her office and clasped his big, knuckly hands between his knees. He was a graduate student in mathematics, Thaddy said. The university had this idiotic rule that everyone, no matter his department, was required to take a class outside his area of expertise. At one time, Thaddy might have welcomed the chance to explore his other interests. But he already had accomplished enough research to earn his doctorate, having published two seminal papers in a field called Boundary Functions, which, he told Maxine, she couldn’t possibly understand. All he wanted was to finish his degree and leave. He had chosen her seminar because it was the only class that appealed to the questions he had been considering on his own. But then he had seen the reading list. Why had she assigned fiction? Novels and
short stories were based on nothing but emotion. An author could spout any sort of speculative nonsense without subjecting his statements to rigorous logic or empirical evidence.
Maxine allowed Thaddy to express his views. She humored him—to a point. He was correct in assuming literature couldn’t be proved. But if one’s object was to study the effects of technology on human society, then the emotions of the humans who were being influenced by that technology might be worthy of analysis. Maybe, if Thaddy examined his reactions to her seminar, he would find that his disappointment had little to do with the material but rather with the class being taught by a female professor. Sexism wasn’t logical. But even the most rational mind might be blighted by such a flaw.
Thaddy’s face—square jawed, a cleft in the chin—seemed locked tight as a safe to which even the owner couldn’t remember the combination.
Then he emitted a strangled sound and the safe flew open. What it was holding inside was pain. Why didn’t women ever like him? What was he doing wrong? The undergraduates in his classes hated him. He was a good teacher. Really! He prepared hours for every class! He was shy, that was all. He wasn’t a performer. He didn’t like making jokes. When he did make a joke, the students just sat there. They wrote mean comments on his evaluations. Was it his fault they preferred a clown, an entertainer, to someone who wanted to convey the beauties of the mathematics they were supposed to learn?
He looked so baffled, so hurt, Maxine wanted to assure him a woman would fall in love with him. There was something wounded about him, sure. He was too intense. But he was a surprisingly handsome man. He was like the quiet, brainy guy you got assigned to in your electronics lab. You hadn’t really noticed him. But when you were huddled over the same hunk of circuits, trying to make sense of the wiring, you realized how good-looking he was. How determined to make you like him.
The Professor of Immortality Page 9
