A Doubter's Almanac (14 page)

He’d been equally capable of it during his years at Berkeley, of course, but he’d rarely had the opportunity to use it; none of his peers and none of the faculty had even been aware he could do it—not even Borland—and Andret himself had been no more impressed by it than he would have been on any given morning to see his unexceptional face in the mirror.

At Princeton, on the other hand, midway through the semester, he’d been approached at an outdoor café by one of the endowed professors and asked to produce a fully rotated rendering of a Steiner surface, which was formed from the smoothed union of three hyperbolic paraboloids. Andret had complied immediately, sliding a cocktail napkin to the center of the table and using the pen from his jacket pocket to move without hesitation from the top left of the paper to the bottom right. When he’d finished, the professor said, simply, “Remarkable.” For a few moments, the two of them exchanged pleasantries. Then the professor left, taking the napkin with him.

Yet equally remarkable was the fact that until this point in his life Andret had felt little desire to avail himself of such a talent. He never drew the world around him. Not trees. Not landscapes. Not the human figure. Never the land and never the lake or the woods he’d grown up with. Never the faces he knew. As a child he hadn’t entertained the slightest feeling toward art, and as an adult he’d remained entirely unmoved by the world of the visual. Princeton had an art museum. He would never have considered spending an afternoon there.

—

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of the winter, he’d narrowed his search to the Abendroth and two other possibilities. One was the Goldbach conjecture, a problem in number theory that had been around since Goldbach first posed it to Euler. Its statement was simple—
Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes
—yet a dozen generations of mathematicians had worked on it without finding a proof.

The first Kurtman hypothesis, on the other hand, was the product of a man who was still on the faculty at the Free University of Berlin. Andret had only learned of its existence when he’d stumbled upon Dietrich Kurtman’s face on the cover of a copy of
Der Spiegel
that was sitting on a coffee table in the department offices.

A mathematician on the cover of an international magazine. He’d felt his bile rise.

But in the end, he concluded, both the Goldbach and the first Kurtman were problems of number theory. He liked numbers, but he wasn’t a number theorist. He was a topologist. Hans Borland had seen it in him.

He would need to be disciplined now. He would need to make the wise choice.

Late in January, at the depth of the winter’s cold, he put away his notes on the Goldbach and the first Kurtman. He cleaned his office. Into a drawer he brushed everything from his side table, then taped together a file box. On the cover of the box he printed the words
ABENDROTH CONJECTURE: 1977–19—.
He had a feeling that Ulrich Abendroth had proposed a problem that might not be solved for decades; but he pulled the table alongside his desk anyway and set the file box on top of it.

Rise Over Run

S
ITTING IN HIS
warm office, he would begin by layering figures in his mind. When he reached the end of a construction, he would bring out the pad from his drawer, center it on the stained leather blotter, and draw what he’d imagined. He produced these drawings of the Abendroth not so much because he would need the references later but because the act of depicting a figure fixed it permanently in his memory. That was how his brain worked.

Now and then, at the monthly departmental cocktail hours that he’d begun to look forward to, he was asked to display his artistic skill. Usually it was the wife of a colleague who asked. There she would be, some mild beauty with a colored drink in her hand, pointing out the window at the bright spectacle of trees and spired rooftops that formed the view from the high floors of the mathematics building. Would he consider drawing the scene for her? Well, perhaps he would. The bejeweled fourth finger. The thickly lashed eyes. If he’d had the proper number of drinks himself, he’d comply, the picture emerging from the envelope, or the napkin, or the index card, as though a cover were being lifted from the corner of a photograph. He knew that these drawings would be shown later, at the back of the party or on the car ride home, and that eventually they might be folded into albums or framed on office walls, some emblem of an admiration he neither deserved nor fully comprehended. He sensed this admiration around him, and although he didn’t exactly understand it, it did bring him pleasure.

Sometimes, in fact, he thought that his hunger for such pleasure was the only thing that drove him forward.

To his own mind, in truth, his actual gift seemed closer to a form of idiocy. Cle had been right. It was as though he didn’t see the object he was drawing but the entire array of space instead—all things that were the object and all things that were not the object—with equal emphasis. It was symptomatic of something he’d noticed in himself since childhood—an inability to take normal heed of his senses, the way other people did as they instinctually navigated a course of being. In this way, it was like mathematics itself: the supremacy of axiom over experience. He wondered why others didn’t see this.

It was an expression, he knew in his heart, of confusion.

—

O
N THE DAYS
when work on the Abendroth went badly, or on the occasional one when he was afraid to face it at all, he would walk down to Nassau Street in the center of town and stroll among the businesses. There was a drugstore there, Brandt’s, that he liked because it reminded him of something that he might have found in Cheboygan. Brandt’s used a pulley to deliver orders through an opening in the wall at the back of the store. When a prescription was ready, a bell sounded, and a black iron basket the size of a bird cage glided out from a hole above the pharmacy counter, carrying a white paper bag that had been stapled closed. The basket paused with each pull of the cable above an aisle that displayed support hose and fold-up walkers and yellowing plastic humidifiers, descending in arm-long increments until it arrived alongside the cash register at the front. At Brandt’s, he saw few patrons from the university. These kinds of places, the dusty old spots on the rear streets of the downtown, were populated by a second phalanx of Princeton citizenry, a population of secretaries and maintenance men and low-level city workers who provided the bulwark for the professors and the professional class that had been appearing here for generations. The professors were all singletons of a sort, men and women like himself, arriving without history or ancestry, making their marks on their fields—or failing to—and then sending their children onward, or moving on themselves. They were outsiders to the drama—Andret found this fact comforting.

One winter day, as he was leaving through the double-glassed atrium of Brandt’s, he held open the door for a woman coming in. She was a member of this second phalanx of citizenry, a secretary or a travel agent or a store clerk, dressed in a brown wool coat and a winter hat, with a dark wool scarf wrapped over her face. Her shoulders were dappled with snow. She stepped in hurriedly. It was as she was stamping her feet and unwrapping the scarf that he recognized her.

Something struck him in his heart.

He couldn’t think of what to say, so he continued out the door into the cold. Outside, he quickly crossed the street, wrapping his own scarf over his face. There was a lunch counter on the other side of the avenue, and he took a seat at the front. The snow was swarming and the windows of Brandt’s were white with fog, but he could still see her. She’d stopped near the register.

It was Helena Pierce.

He leaned forward and wiped the glass. She turned toward him then and rewrapped her scarf. Was it really who he thought it was? He looked closer but still couldn’t decide.

It was the strangest thing: he could have seen her anytime just by walking into the departmental offices; but out here in town he felt disturbed. He wondered if she felt the same way. With his gloved hand he rubbed again at the window.

Then, as though she sensed him all the way from the other side of the street, she stepped toward the door. She took off her hat and pointed her gaze directly across at him. She didn’t lower her eyes.

After a moment, he raised his hand and waved.

She made no response.

When she turned again and moved toward the rear of the store, he realized that, whoever it was, it wasn’t Helena.

Instead of returning to his office, though, he stopped for the afternoon at Clip’s, a dark-paneled pub that catered to cops and road crews. Sitting at the bar with his bourbon, he gazed out at the sidewalk, at all the shoppers and clerks and bookbag-lugging students hurrying through the snow. At five o’clock the crowd thickened, and at the dinner hour it quieted. He stayed there until long after the streetlights had come on. A couple of times in their yellowish glow he thought he saw Helena again, moving toward him across the slushy sidewalk. But each time the figure drew closer, he realized that it was someone else.

—

E
ACH FACULTY MEETING
began with Knudson Hay straightening his tie and neatening the stack of papers in front of him, then noting attendance and reading the agenda. Then, within moments, the proceedings would degenerate into wrangling. Andret’s senior colleagues seemed to disagree over every imaginable issue, from whether the honor code allowed an undergraduate to remove an exam book from the classroom to which drinks would be served at the fall-semester mixer. Each item was approached like an affair of state. Some of the voices were decorous and level while others sounded like curses in a foreign street. At the center of it all, Hay kept his hand on a copy of
Robert’s Rules of Order.

There seemed to be no question too small to generate a half hour of steady opposition. Would a third, lower-level calculus course be added? Should there be a bench in every hallway or only in those that ended at a ladies’ restroom? By some kind of self-imposed discipline, the new hires sat in metal folding chairs in the center of the grand room, generally unwilling to speak, while the tenured professors arrayed themselves among the leather armchairs at the perimeter. Obviously there were factions and alliances, but Andret couldn’t parse them. Along with the rest of the new faculty, he sat silently.

Midway through the semester, there was a deliberation about whether to plant an oak tree or a sycamore tree in the mathematics quad, in honor of a recently deceased emeritus chair who had been an accomplished cabinetmaker. The conversation went back and forth among the senior faculty while Knudson Hay took notes at his desk in the center. This was the pattern on most questions, at the conclusion of which the group would generally vote.

Finally Andret could contain himself no longer. “Why not a beech?” he blurted. “There’s no tree as magnificent as a beech.”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then, to Andret’s surprise, Knudson Hay said, “Well then, a beech it shall be.”

—

I
T WAS TRUE:
he’d sometimes thought he’d seen her other places, as well. Standing in a group of pedestrians once, under a traffic signal where he’d been waiting for the light; in the parking lot of the dry cleaner’s another afternoon when he was running to his car in the rain; even outside on the front walk of his own building one spring evening, when he opened the windows for the first time after winter and saw a woman walking away from him following a small dog on a leash.

But he couldn’t say with certainty whether any of them had actually been Helena Pierce.

What he felt when he saw her each time, he couldn’t discern. Shame? Disappointment? Longing? He was aware of something attempting to make itself known inside him, but he couldn’t decide what it was.

—

“Y
OU LOOK NERVOUS,”
said a voice behind him. “You have done something wrong?”

Andret turned, laughing falsely. “Is it so obvious?”

“No, is not exactly obvious.”

She was pretty. Short chestnut hair and a tight skirt. Vaguely Eastern features. He’d positioned himself next to the sangria bowl, and now he held the ladle over her glass. It was the first mixer of the new semester.

“Thank you,” she said. “And I see you have chosen strategic place to fish, Professor Andret.” She glanced down as he filled her drink.

“Have I?”

“I would expect no less. Certainly not from man who defeated Kamil Malosz.” She took a sip and frowned. “But why this dirty water you are fishing in?”

Twenty minutes later, he and Olga Petrinova were walking in two different directions across the campus—she insisted on taking her own car. And ten minutes after that they were sitting side by side at a plywood bar upstairs from a defunct auction-house on the outskirts of town. In front of them were two double bourbons, no ice.

She was a visiting scholar from St. Petersburg State University, newly arrived after the thawing of Soviet relations. Even her work was fashionable: hyperbolic and elliptic geometries. She drank the bourbon like water.

After her second one, she stopped calling him Professor.

After her third, he felt a knee against his thigh.

He excused himself. In the bathroom, he looked into the tiny mirror and saw the same face he’d always seen—long and stolid, wide at the temples, the nose overly defined, the dark eyes made prominent by the thickness of their ridges. Young for his age, a face flawed by overreaching. It had always slightly shamed him.

Since the Malosz theorem, though, it seemed to have gathered a new charisma.

He tightened the knot of his tie, the bourbon gently separating him from his thoughts. He checked the mirror again, decided the knot was better loose, and walked back out to the bar, loosening it.

—

T
HAT SEMESTER HE
was assigned to teach the midlevel introductory class in calculus. Three days a week he found himself at a dusty green chalkboard expounding in front of a lecture hall full of first-year students. These were not the mathematics majors or the electrical engineers; and these were not the poets from Professor Rosewater’s class at Berkeley; these were the doctors and the accountants and the bankers, the young men—Andret could see few female faces—with enough intelligence to make it to the top but without nearly enough brainpower to change anything. He realized he was envious.