Charades (2 page)

2

The First Night

“Any object looked at steadily …” Charade begins, her eyes fixed on something not in Koenig's apartment. He watches her, fascinated, as he rebuttons his shirt.

The sequence of events leading up to this moment is hazy.

He watches her. She could be eighteen or thirty; her body is slight and boyish, but her eyes seem old. She is certainly not beautiful, not at all the type he usually … Striking, perhaps, though he cannot quite pinpoint why. And there is some quality that tugs at him: the way she stands with her head slightly tilted; the way she crooks her knee and balances one bare foot against the other ankle.

Whatever has been absorbing her gaze releases her and she nods to herself. “Yes,” she says. “Any object looked at steadily and intently for too long begins to disintegrate before the eyes, isn't that so? And Katherine — Katherine Sussex, whom you don't seem to remember — Katherine thinks that is the explanation. You know how it is: molecules float away from each other, they drift across the iris in little haloes of gold, atoms peel themselves off from the molecules, electrons go flaking away from the atoms …”

What he listens to is less the words themselves than her exotic accent, the amazing shapes the sounds make in the air.

“Ah,” she says, misreading his smile and turning defensive. “I see I haven't got that quite right.” And he thinks of tracks made by muons and other particles in bubble chambers, he thinks of the lucent spirals and hairlines of light that they leave in their wake.

She perches, still naked, on the end of the bed and hugs her knees up under her chin. Is the action deliberate? he wonders. Deliberately wicked?

“I'm way off track, aren't I?” she asks. “I'm completely misinterpreting what you said about subatomic particles.”

Then again, perhaps she is unaware of the effect she creates. He can think of nothing at all. His buttons and buttonholes are hopelessly mismatched, and she smiles a little to see the odd loops of shirtfront. He begins again, making an effort not to appear flustered, but forgets that he has already tucked his top into his pants and goes on pointlessly pushing at the fabric and hiking up his belt.

“I do get distracted in your lectures,” she says. “Especially when you do things like that. I've sneaked into your big introductory class several times, you didn't notice, did you? Course 8.286, that is. ‘The Early Universe.' And did you realise you do that in front of the class sometimes? Check that your belt is still there, I mean. And rake your fingers through that shock of hair that falls into your eyes … Yes, like that … I realise it's a nervous gesture, but it's very attractive.”

“Uh …” he says, as she swings her legs over the side of the bed in a neat arc and crosses to his dresser. “Um, I'm not sure why I …” He watches her fiddle with his car keys, a set of cufflinks, a silver hairbrush. “Um — nervous like this, I'm not usually …” Of course he knows perfectly well the reason why; it is because she mentioned Rachel in the middle of the night, when she appeared beside his desk in the computer room. At least, he thinks she mentioned Rachel. He is afraid to ask, in case he imagined it.
He is afraid to ask in case he did
not
imagine it. “I'm not usually like this,” he says.

“So I hear.”

He jerks the belt a notch too tight. “Indeed?”

“Yes.” She leans against his dresser, arms folded, and studies him. “Energetic lover, very polished, very smooth; that's what they say. But a specialist in quick and tidy exits. Positively obsessive about it. A good fuck, a quick parting kiss, and then off with my lady's head. Well anyway, get her clothes back on her and shunt her out the door before the afterglow fades. That's what they say about you.” She shrugs disarmingly. “Around the dorms, that is.” She gestures with her hands to show how little this gossip affects her. “Anyway, I'm nervous too, which must be apparent. I'm sorry, I'll try to stop fidgeting with your things.”

He waves this aside and pulls on his socks while she watches. Probably, she thinks, he does everything with this kind of intense concentration. Probably it is an article of faith with him that socks hug ankles with the exactness of a mathematical matrix. A vibration crosses the floor and he feels it through one socked foot and looks up.

“Apparently,” he says stiffly, “this is very amusing.”

What she is doing, actually, is biting one fist to keep a gust of laughter back. “I'm sorry. It's just … well, we do look bloody ridiculous, pardon my Australian.”

“Australian
,
”
he says. “I wondered where that accent —”

“You're not used to this, are you? You really are used to the quick fix.” She adopts a mock documentary tone. “Questioned under oath, the famous physicist confessed that he did prefer a woman to make a discreet and unmessy exit as soon as possible, and furthermore he expected her to be decently uneasy when invited into his Cambridge apartment, the air of which is so thick with the symbolic presence of his recently departed wife and children.” She takes a deep and rather dramatic sigh and reverts to her normal voice. “Actually it
is
 … there's this domestic and familial
humidity
everywhere, it's a bit hard to breathe, but I'm afraid you've bumped into the essence of unorthodoxy in me, you can't
really count on any of the usual things making me feel uneasy.”

He is perfectly astonished by this little sermon and declaration of immunity.
Recently departed wife and children,
he thinks, stunned. He is astonished, too, by the speed at which she delivers pronouncements, and by the flashing ballet of her hands.
It occurs to him that if they were tied behind her back, she might be unable to talk. It is as though she has suddenly been wound up tight, to full pitch, and let go. She cannot stop.

“Just the same,” she says, “I will admit to a strong sense of the ludicrous, I admit I feel ridiculous — not uneasy, or indecent, just ridiculous — pacing around your living room naked while you sit there watching. Do you always dress so quickly afterwards? The pipe, yes, I'm used to that. It's the first thing all academics do afterwards, but a great many, you know, are quite content to sit there propped up on pillows, with maybe the sheet pulled part way up, puffing away contentedly and talking, sometimes for hours. What's really getting to me is that now you're even putting your tie back on, which I think has to be construed as the most pompous, the most heavy-handed … No?”

He is staring, puzzled, at his own hands knotting his tie. He still has a dazed sense of her voice hurtling on and on, but what startles him is the realisation that the last thing he wants her to do is leave; the last thing he wants to find his hands doing is dropping heavy and involuntary hints.

“Still,” she says, “if you could just toss me my shirt, I'd feel a little less … Thanks.”

While she does up a button or two at her midriff (not bothering with any other item of clothing), he loosens his tie, removes it, and throws it onto the bed.

“How daring,” she laughs. She curls up in his armchair and hooks her legs over one side. That maddening knowing little smile of hers flutters in his direction, then rests on the abandoned tie for several seconds, then turns inward again.

He waits.

“You know,” she says at last, “I can't stop thinking about the implications of your lecture last week. Heisenberg's theory, wasn't it? — about uncertainty as the essence of science, about the
necessity
of uncertainty, about how we simply have to accept that electrons are always in only a partially defined state, that there is, in fact, no other way they
can
be. That's right, isn't it? Yes, I copied it down, because it seems to me to have a bearing on my life. Philosophically speaking, that is.

“And on yours too, right? All that energy pro and con, the things that did, that absolutely without question
did
happen; but which also, according to other people,
couldn't
have happened. I mean, you know, your former wife Rachel, and the trial in Toronto.”

Something alarming happens to Koenig's breathing, he takes quick little in-out in-out in-out breaths, counts to ten, inhales slowly (from the diaphragm), holds, exhales, wills his muscles to unclench.

She swings her legs across to the other arm of the chair.

“Katherine says either we're all slightly mad, we've all hallucinated our own pasts (which is a reasonably tenable theory, I think) or else there's a perfectly rational explanation if we could just put our fingers on it. Katherine thinks — I say Katherine for reasons of formality, but in fact she's my Aunt Kay. Well, strictly speaking, she's not
really
my aunt, but we do that in Australia, you see. I mean, I don't feel comfortable calling her just Kay. We're still rather shocked at the casual way American children do that, call their elders by first names — even for total strangers they've just met, right?” She leans toward him, eyebrows raised. “Did you realise we find that abrasive?”

He tries to concentrate on the question.

“Anyway, in Australia, we don't do that. Give kids free rein,
I mean. Give them absolute social rights.

“Speaking of children.” She gestures toward the kitchen. “I saw the drawings on your fridge door. Second marriage obviously.”

He is mildly startled, but makes a non-committal sound.

“It's Joey, isn't it? — yes, he's signed his name — who drew that crayon rainbow over a number of green teddy bears. Was it you or your wife, by the way, who chose to display that particular drawing? Green teddy bears. It invites analysis, doesn't it? Joey's your more interesting artist, I think. Sara's drawings are too neat and proper, it's happening already, you see, it gets to girls awfully quickly, the desire to please the teacher, to do things right. You're going to have to watch that, it's a real killer. Though I myself was spared from the worst of all that by having a mother who was known as the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.”

He considers how best to explain Joey and Sara and the presence of their drawings in his kitchen, but instead, slightly dazed, echoes: “Tamborine Rainforest?”

“Outside Brisbane. You do know where Brisbane is?”

“Uh,” he gestures apologetically. “Well, Australia. But I guess I'm a bit vague about the precise …”

She shakes her head. “That's another thing about Americans, you're so
parochial.
Your geographical ignorance is absolutely stunning.”

“Well,” he begins, “I suppose it's …” and trails into an uneasy silence that spreads and fills the space between bed and armchair and settles onto the girl. He cannot bring himself to ask what news she is bringing of Rachel, nor what the mysterious Katherine Sussex has to do with anything (though that name is beginning to evoke a pervasive and non-specific dread).

The blues music of Cambridge traffic, muffled, rises into the room and holds them in some kind of spell. When it is fractured — a collision somewhere, quite close — they both jump, and Charade continues as though the track of her thought, briefly on hold, has been nudged back into sound.

“The consequence of having Bea for a mother,” she says, “and having no father at all — although in another sense I had scores of fathers, but I could take them or leave them you see — the consequence was I escaped a lot of that caging, the bound feet business, the stuff that happens to girls everywhere, but especially in Australia. Charade, my mum would say …

“By the way, you keep mispronouncing my name. It's Shuh
-rahd.
I hope you don't mind my pointing it out. It's because Americans mispronounce the word itself. The word
charade,
I mean. The proper way, well, the Brit way, which is much the same thing isn't it? is the way I say my name.”

Koenig is aware of a rising sexual excitement, its origins murky. He is dimly conscious that it has something to do with the provocation of a woman who does not seem aware of his … well,
standing
in the scientific community. (Only last week a woman he had met at a Wellesley dinner party wrote a note inviting him for dinner and postcoital champagne. When she telephoned she said there was an
aura
about him.) Of course this kind of thing is tiresome.

Nevertheless.

Still.

Has Charade Ryan no awe at all?

Her hands flash, her eyes flash, she springs out of the armchair like a dancer and paces back and forth around his bed.

“Anyway. Aunt Kay — Katherine — whom you have met in Toronto, though you remember nothing whatsoever about her —” It is clear, from the tone of her voice that this is a particularised item in a more general condemnation. “Aunt Kay is not really my aunt, though she's close to it. She and my mother Bea were half-sisters. Sort of. For a few years anyway. It's complicated, but I'll get to that.”

Yes, he thinks. She probably will.

“Anyway, up till now I've thought that Aunt Kay and my mother were either right or wrong about my father, and that eventually, if I was persistent enough, I'd find out which. But after what you said about Heisenberg … I mean, if electrons can exist and not exist at one and the same time … Well, maybe the stories about my father and Verity Ashkenazy (the famous Other Woman in the piece), maybe they could be right
and
wrong. Both.”

She is beginning, he notes with dismay, to gather up her clothes as she speaks, beginning to get dressed again, though in a rather haphazard and eccentrically disorganised way.

“Maybe,” she says, “on odd days, my father is
somewhere
but keeps on vanishing without a trace. And on even days he doesn't exist and never did. Which means that on even days I'm the product of an immaculate conception. Though not, I hasten to reassure you, in the precise Catholic and theological sense. Nothing to do with the sinless germination of the seed of the Virgin Mary in the untainted womb of St Ann. And certainly not, I promise you, with any pretensions toward either the messianic or the pure on my part.”