Antiphony (7 page)

E
VEN
T
HE
G
RANDEST
disappointments and failures are often assuaged by small comforts. After a weekend spent with Ilene together tortured by the saturating presence of his speech, the foggy windows of the coffee shop near campus seem to offer Theodore the first semblance of solace. Finally, away from Ilene, Theodore can for a moment stop thinking about what he
has done. Their tour of the local wineries and dinners at high-priced Sonoma restaurants had been purged of enjoyment by the avoidance of the topic most on their minds. They tried to assimilate what the vintners were telling them about the absolute consequence of soil minerals and acidities, grape oxidation, malic acid, tartaric acid, sugars, and how all these factors relate to the taste and “nose” of the liquor they used to douse their sense of doom. But their hearts weren't in it, and each time Ilene tried to reassure Theodore that everything would work out for the best, he knew that she was really trying to convince herself that it couldn't be as bad as she imagined. When he said little or nothing in response, her eyes would dart away from him, look down at the floor or the couple at the next table; anything but see the grim face of the man across from her. They cut the weekend short and took an earlier flight home. Now Theodore feels he can finally exhale, alone with only himself again, back into the routine of a Monday morning on his way to work.

The coffee shop is one of many outlets in a national chain, but that does not diminish its charm in Theodore's eyes. It is wedged among a number of other storefronts on this city street, the doors at the front of the shop opening directly onto the sidewalk, flanked by a dry cleaner and a store that offers orthopaedic appliances—crutches, canes, and other more obscure fittings for bones and joints that no longer function the way they should. The coffee shop bustles with a brisk morning business. A line has formed along the glass counter where fattening pastries and gooey sandwiches are displayed. Recently, the girls who take his order have become more insistent at trying
to sell him some of these food items, and he has to tell them “no” more than once—he only wants the cup of coffee with room for lots of heavy cream. They are probably only doing what they have been told as a result of some directive from the corporate offices of the coffee chain, instructing the staff to up-sell each customer at least twice at point of purchase. When he reaches the front of the line, he does however add a cellophane packet of dried fruit and nuts to his order, a bit of extra sustenance to get him through this day and whatever it may bring.

A loose crowd of impatient customers jostles near the tiny bar where the drinks are served. As he waits, Theodore's head starts to swim, as if his world is suddenly lurching to the right. He guesses he may be hungry and starts to pull at the taut ends of the packet of nuts. It does not yield at first, and he is forced to pull harder. With an unexpected pop of air, the packet bursts open, strewing the nuts and morsels of dried cranberries across the floor. The woman in front of him looks down at the mess he has made with disdain. Most of the contents remain within the packet in his hand, but it still appears as if there has been an explosion of fruit and nuts that centers directly on him. He stoops down and picks a few of the nuts off the floor, claiming responsibility, but there are too many pieces too widely scattered amongst the wet shoes of his fellow customers to pick up all at once. He stands and searches for a waste basket to deposit the fistful of nuts he has retrieved. The nearest trash can is halfway across the crowded shop, and by the time he turns around again to continue cleaning up the mess, he sees that one of the ever-watchful staff has swooped in with a broom and
dustpan to clear it away. He has to give them credit—they do keep the place clean.

His instinct now is to not go back for his cup of coffee, but simply to leave. But when the young woman finishes sweeping up, she hustles around to the back of the counter and brings his drink out, searching for him. He raises his hand in a gesture of guilt more than anything, admitting that he is the one who has caused her the extra work.

“You had the extra large with room?”

He sees now, as she approaches, that he has misjudged. She is not young. It was only an assumption he made based on the type of girl he usually sees behind the counter, and also because of the peculiar hat she is wearing. The hat is a kind of faded velour chapeau suspended atop her head and apparently held in place by a black mesh net that encases it. He seldom sees anything this whimsical on a woman her age. It's surprising that they even let her wear such a thing in this store, it stands in such stark contrast to the green aprons that are required as a uniform.

“I like your hat,” is all he can manage to say.

“Thanks,” she says, handing him the scalding hot cup. “It's really two hats.” With her hands free, she reaches up and tugs the black mesh net away from the underlying tam, which flops down over her ears a bit. “I bought them separately, but then I realized they work better together.”

He wants to ask her where one would find such things, imagines this older woman—older than he is—rummaging through bins in bargain basements and the racks of vintage boutiques in the rough and tumble neighborhood that flanks the west end of
campus. She must be older than he is. Her eyes have the look of having seen too much. When she examines him more closely, her eyelids droop lower, crinkling at the corners into fine, crêpey folds, as if she is ashamed to be serving him and cleaning up after him. And this is perhaps what evokes the next admission from her: “I just started here over the weekend. The PR firm I was with laid me off… and I need the health insurance.” She steps closer. “It's not all bad. The people here are nicer, and I get to listen to this fabulous music all day. At my old office, it was deathly silent. You could hear someone whisper on the telephone from across the room, twenty yards away.”

He hadn't expected to have to speak to anyone here. He wants to be alone with his wounds for a few minutes, before facing the day at work. He turns away from her, prying the lid off his cup and pouring thick cream in. To fill the open end of the conversation his mishap has begun, he comments on the music. “Who is this, Bill Evans?”

“Yes.” She has followed him to the condiment station where the milk and sugar and napkins can be found. “I think it must be. Listen to those lovely gaps between the notes. The tones just hang there, suspended in the air. He gives them room to breathe. Like he is creating space.”

“Do you play?”

She considers. “I used to. I was trained as a classical pianist in college. But I don't have time for it anymore, not the time it deserves. If I tried to play anything now, I'd only disappoint myself.”

“I play some,” he confesses. “When it's late and no one else is around to hear.” He smiles and regards her again. It is a rare
moment for him when he can talk to someone about a topic in which he is not the acknowledged expert. He carries so much more around in his head than nearly everyone he meets. “Mostly some of the easier Schubert pieces. I'm working my way up to Beethoven's Emperor and Grieg's A Minor.”

“Very impressive—you're teaching yourself? I used to give lessons to the daughters of Hyde Park profs, but I couldn't stand being dreaded so much. And hearing so much bad music. They would look at me like I was running a Nazi death-camp when I made them stumble through their scales. Now I sing, in the choir at the Central Avenue church. Much more satisfying.”

There is something challenging about this woman, a sense that she knows how much she has fallen short in life, how many talents she has not fully expressed, but these talents remain hers nonetheless. For a moment, they fall silent and nothing in the store seems to move. Bill Evans has just completed a tricky run up the keyboard and is letting the last note hang in the air, suspended, forsaken. The space between them is only a matter of inches; she is an unstruck tone, a resonance that extends to him and causes him to vibrate at a higher harmonic, like a tuning fork that picks up a sound from the aether. The other people in the store, the hot paper cup he holds in his hand, are merely extensions of the two of them. He turns to take his leave, and the spell is broken.

She calls to him, as he leans his elbow on the door. “If you like music,” which she must know by now, “you can come to the church and hear us sing.”

He doesn't look back. And as he steps into the frigid February glare on the sidewalk outside the shop, he realizes that he doesn't even know her name.

O
N A BETTER
day, he might wave to the secretaries that guard the corridor that leads back to his office. There are two of them, and he does think of them as sentries, both young enough to still be mistaken for students when they are walking across campus together after the work day is through. Though their primary jobs are to complete and compile the reams of paperwork generated by the scientists in the warren of cubicles behind them, their most important job is to deflect any visitors who come to this building without notice or an appointment. The work being done here is so highly theoretical that it does not warrant an actual armed guard or any kind of security clearance—it is not as if they are developing weapons systems or the next energy source—all these men are doing is trying to track down the secrets behind how everything that exists came to be. He passes by the two sentinels with his head down, pretending to study the lid of his coffee cup. They watch him pass, and know enough to say nothing.

To his left is the break room, a drab space where he sometimes goes for an afternoon soft drink, a few tables and chairs augmented by vending machines, a refrigerator, microwave oven, and a view of the parking lot. Next to the break room is a small conference room and adjacent to that is the room where
the copier, fax, and office supplies can be found. The center corridor he chooses is lined by cubicles, most of them empty, even though he is coming in late today. These cubes are the domain of associate research staff, mostly young men and a few women in their late twenties, some of them still finishing their Ph.D.'s, grinding through the first rugged years of a life spent climbing the highly-politicized ladders of academia. Groping for a suitable thesis topic or research grant, kow-towing to the senior staff members such as himself, whose offices, with real walls and doors and windows, line the outside of the space. By walking down the center corridor, he avoids his senior colleagues in the window offices. He takes a left at the intersection of two corridors in the middle of the large open forest of cubes, and follows this corridor directly to his office, at one corner of the irregularly-shaped building.

He is in. Perhaps the hardest part of the day is behind him, without having to say a word. He lays his computer bag down on the desk and shrugs off his overcoat, hanging it on the coatstand by the door. This is his comfort zone, the place where he does some of his best work, surpassed only by his library at home. Here are his books, his files, his desktop computer, which is linked to the network that shows him the most current results of testing at the particle accelerator twenty-five miles away in the distant countryside beyond the western suburbs of the city. Here are his framed art prints that liven up the plain beige walls and indicate to all who visit him here how erudite his taste in worldly things has become. Here is the sound system that he can use to play his music at a discrete volume, to break up the tomblike silence of the central block of cubicles.
And here is his prized view of the north quad of the campus, with its steeple spires and towers of mellow ivy-covered limestone that climb above the trees. All this is his, and he has earned it. He could close the door if he chooses. He often does for hours at a time, when he wants to be alone with just his thoughts or when he has a daunting round of administrative work to plow through. But that would be too conspicuous just yet. Typically, in the morning, he settles in to the first wave of email and waits for Pradeep to show up. And this appears, against his expectations, to be like any other Monday morning.

He logs on to his desktop computer, leaving the laptop in its bag. He prefers the laptop, actually, with its clever icons and sleek, artsy design. But the desktop has secure wide-area network access that isn't allowed on laptop machines, and the email loads a tick faster than when he's checking it over the web. There are a couple of notes pertaining to the Board Meeting Wednesday morning, confirming the conference room and meeting time, and another one with the official agenda. This is the meeting he has been waiting for, the one at which the candidates for the position of Research Director will be formally presented to the Institute's Board of Directors, and the one at which, ostensibly, the new Research Director will be chosen. Until this weekend, he has been expected to have the inside track for the job. Now, he's not so sure. The question he has been turning over and over in his head all weekend long is not an easy one to answer: Can a lifetime of laudable work be wiped away by one unfortunate introduction to a speech?

There are a half dozen more routine emails having to do with administrative matters—committee meetings and reports
and communications from junior staffers who tend to copy him on everything they do, to show him they are working hard. He deletes them. If he read all this stuff, he'd never get anything done. And there is another fairly interesting note from Pradeep about the new research they are working on together, a project they are just getting underway on solid-state and fluid thermodynamics that has been occupying most of his creative thinking lately, even though it is a much more applied type of research than he is accustomed to doing. He always likes the startup phase of a project best, the time when all the critical conceptual thinking takes place—framing the problem, shaping the nature of the solution—figuring things out. Other than these notes, there's nothing to indicate anything unusual has happened. Nothing from Victor, his boss. Nothing from Pradeep. No scathing backlash from the three men who walked out of the room, or any of his other colleagues at the Institute. Nothing whatsoever.