Charades (21 page)

And it is intolerable that he should so take her presence for granted that he has never even asked her what she does with her days, what she lives on, where she disappears to at dawn; is so unpossessive that she might as well not have a name. And so she says with brittle gaiety: “I'm about to shoot through, as we say back in Oz.”

“But why?” He gets between her and the bathroom door, shuts it, and leans against it. “Why? I thought this was such a comfortable arrangement.”

“For whom?” She is zipping up her jeans. “You think in equations, you dream graphs, you're always off in the far reaches of time and space. Between one night and the next, you don't even know I exist. If I didn't gatecrash your classes now and then, I'd never even have seen you in daylight.” (Oh, she has not intended to be so explicit. Oh she has not intended to … She is out, now, at the tip of a very long branch. She is losing track of what she means, what she wants. Her Achilles heel is showing. Only fancy footwork can save her now.)

“But why haven't you …?” he says.“You've never indicated … I had no idea you …”

This is true. He thinks of their encounters as … (but does he still?
does
he still think this way?) at any rate, he has in the past thought of their encounters as a kind of supernova occurrence, doomed to fade, an episode in the life of a dying star, but still, for the brief duration, flashy and brilliant. He thinks (or has been in the habit of thinking) of their encounters as a problem equal in subtlety to the problem of the energy density of the universe.

If the energy density exceeds a certain critical value, the universe could be said to be closed. Space would curl back on itself to form a finite volume with no boundary. If the energy density is less than the critical value, space curves — but not back on itself, and the volume is infinite, the universe “open”. If the energy density is just equal to the critical density (that is, if
Ω
 = 1), the universe is flat. And he does not yet know — no astrophysicist or cosmologist yet knows — if the universe is open or closed or flat; he does not know (as yet) what value
Ω
had at the moment of the Big Bang, the moment when the universe was formed; but he does know that the current value of
Ω
is somewhere between 0.1 and 2.

As applied to Charade, this theory cannot explain how their encounters fit into any sensible larger pattern. But within the little bubble of space and time where they have found themselves, surely the
Ω
value, as it were, is approximately known. Surely they both agree on the pleasure of these nights? He reaches up to take her face in his hands but she pushes them away “After all this time,” he says (reasonable, rational), “you can't just …” He makes a gesture of bewilderment. “I can't seem to remember what nights were like before you … It's become a habit, it's been months and months.”

“Exactly a year,” she says. “A year ago tonight, as a matter of fact. Not that I expected you to keep track of anniversaries.”

“A
year
!”

“Three hundred and sixty-five nights, and a night.”

He is stunned. But now her behaviour makes sense. Within the scheme of their nights there are rules — the finer points of playing the game — that he has been breaking. “You're right to be angry,” he concedes.

“I'm not angry.” (Typical, she thinks explosively. Absolutely bloody typical. Apology without guilt or remorse; get off the hook without cost.) “And it has nothing to do with that. Absolutely not. That's a pure coincidence. The thing is, if you recall, I had something particular in mind when I tracked you down.” She plugs in the hair dryer and turns it on; she needs a stage and a reason for raising her voice. “I was looking for my father,” she says above its electrical buzz.

Theatrical gestures have been planned, he can see that, but bathroom humidity puts a crimp in her sweeping style. She switches off the dryer and reaches for a drawer, but the one she has intended to pull out with a violent tug is stuck.
Shit,
he hears; and other vehement words are muttered while she glances at him sideways, as though expecting, waiting for, provoking, a reprimand. (She is very young after all, he thinks.) When the drawer gives way, it does so with abandon and she lurches backwards. He watches with amazement the rain of little plastic bottles and jars,
creams,
lotions, combs, a brush. His drawer, his bathroom. But then, when has he opened that drawer? She scoops everything up off the tiles and crams them all back, a mess; and then fits the drawer on its tracks and slams it shut. She opens it again and takes out her hairbrush. “Of course,” she says (and even she can hear her six-year-old's voice, a voice gone beyond any power of stopping itself, the voice of a child who is throwing a tantrum but who teeters, dizzy, on its brink, having misplaced for an awful second the trigger of her rage), “of course, what would
you care?”

She brushes, brushes. He can hear the silent count. She could be punishing herself for something, pounding her own head.

Catching sight of his puzzled but fascinated face in the mirror, she summons up a word from the pit of rationalisation: “Nicholas,” she says. “That was the point of the whole thing.
I was looking for Nicholas.”

He continues staring, mesmerised, as she drags the brush through her mane, tosses it back over her shoulders, bends forward so that the hair falls like a slow and languid rain to touch the floor, runs the brush through it again and again, an
adagio
movement now, long sweeping strokes that end near her feet, near his feet too, and have the curious effect of seeming to pay homage to something. To what? Not to him, that is certain. Hair, he thinks, is responsible for a great deal of erotic confusion.

She wonders, slightly frantic now: Will nothing goad him
to action?

“It's my father I want,” she says, deliberately ambiguous, to shock him.

And then, peering out from the curtain of curls: “Oh don't look so shocked.” She straightens up, and her hair flashes in a golden arc above and behind her. “I'm not into incest. But I did want to see what you looked like, since Katherine mistook you for my father. Well, to be honest, first I wanted to find out if you were real. Because it's true, I have to agree with you, I can't tell how much Katherine makes up.” She tosses the brush onto the vanity cabinet and scoops the long curls loosely into a topknot.

“There's other stuff too. Other reasons. For instance: you cleared out and left your wife and kids. So I thought I'd study you. Maybe figure out why Nicholas left Bea, and why he's never so much as sent me a birthday card. Ever.” She is enumerating points on her fingers. “Also, you're a womaniser. And so was Nicholas, at least according to several well-documented views. Three: you're mesmerised by your ex-wife Rachel, the way Nicholas was by Verity; which isn't quite the same thing, perhaps, but still …”

“I see,” he says coldly. “A lab experiment.”

“More or less. And four” — checking off the ring finger on her left hand with the index finger of the right — “you're about the same age as Nicholas. What year were you born?”

“1937.”

Even Charade is startled. “See? Same as Nicholas. Isn't that weird?” She sighs. “But what does it prove? Nothing. So I'm heading home.”

Is this the moment? he wonders. Is this the time that is inexorably on its way toward them, that nothing can prevent, the final cooling down, the end of the affair? “Home?” he echoes.

“Back to Queensland.” If he does nothing definitive now, if he says nothing decisive, she realises with panic, she will indeed have to leave. “I sort of miss my mum, you know. And Sid and Em and Davey and all the Bea-lings. I even have a hankering to see Michael Donovan again. Finish my history degree instead of dabbling in astrophysics. May I get by?”

“But wait.” He does not move from the door. “Wait. You can't do this.” He has a sense of the script going wrong. (Of course, all scripts go wrong, they all end this way, but he has a sudden passionate wish to … No, no, nothing sudden or passionate. He needs to be rational, analytical, he decides he has been developing in the last few minutes a conviction — call it scientist's intuition that this … this
experiment
has not yet reached critical mass.) “You can't just —”

“Why can't I?”

“Because …” He is caught. He is face to face with an answer. He almost says it:
Because I couldn't bear it if you left. Because I think it's possible that I 
…

He swallows.

“Why can't I?” she repeats.

A second passes.

He swallows again and says: “Because you can't conclude an experiment like that. You can't abandon a problem-set until you've solved it.”

She turns away. With an effort she says neutrally, “An experiment.”

“The quest for your father. Exorcism, sorting things out, the whole problem-set. You haven't solved it yet.”

“It doesn't have a solution.”

“Everything has a solution,” he says eagerly (his relief is visceral, its origins multiple and obscure), “once you construct a theory elegant enough to eliminate obvious contradictions.” We are past the danger point, he thinks. She will stay now. She will start to talk again. “You have to ask the question the right way. You haven't worked at it from enough angles yet. Besides,” he is cajoling her now, in his excitement he leaves the door unguarded, and paces the tiny room, “you've got me hooked. It's
my
problem-set now, mine too, and I don't have all the data in. For example,” — he waves his arms in the air, he could do with a stick of chalk and a blackboard — “consider the hypothesis that your mother must certainly know where Nicholas and Verity are. She must have a very good reason for not telling you — that's a significant
clue in itself. There has to be more you could tell me about Bea.”

“Yes, well, it's funny how I have to do all the talking.”

“But …” he says, surprised, “in the beginning, I couldn't shut you up.”

(And besides, besides, isn't that the way it's supposed to be? He has had, he realises it now, a vague and surely ridiculous sense that there was something almost preordained about her endless telling of stories. For some reason, he had fallen into the comfortable habit of imagining that it was she who wanted to stop
him
from losing interest.)

He says apologetically: “I've been taking you for granted, but I want you to know …” He frowns a little and adds, aggrieved: “But in the beginning, you know, you practically threw yourself at me. You just arrived in the middle of the night at my office. Did I make a pass? Did I seduce you? No. You walk into my life, you rearrange …” Now that anxiety about her imminent departure has faded, he begins to feel resentful. “I used to get a lot of my best work done late at night.”

“In the beginning,” she says, “there was something very odd about the way you walked into
my
story. At the very moment that Aunt Kay was thinking about Nicholas, you walk past the Royal Bank mirrors …”

“What? Just for starters,” he says, “we were nowhere near the Royal Bank.”

“I might have known you'd deny —”

“The open taxi door was a nice touch. But she was the one in the taxi. When I said
threw herself,
I wasn't kidding. She opened it and leaned out and offered me a ride. But it happened outside the courthouse. The Bristol Place was for real, but she was the one who gave the taxi driver directions.”

Charade stares at him. “I don't believe you.”

“Tell you what,” he cajoles. “If you stay all night, I'll tell you a story. It's my turn, right?”

He
wants
me, she thinks, jubilant, secretly triumphant, turning away in case she cannot keep her smile tamped down, in case it leaks out around the edges of her frown.

Encouraged by the hesitation he thinks:
We are not yet at terminal density,
and ventures: “I'll put on the Wynton Marsalis record if you'll pour the brandy.” And when she turns but still appears to be wavering, he risks stroking her cheek. “If you left, it would be …” He is floundering in the slippery language of risk. “I'd miss you,” he says, cautious.

For the first time, he finds himself wondering what she does with her days. Our age difference, he thinks. Is it
a problem? Would it have any possible bearing on the course
of events?

She is not exactly his first — though he shies away from running up a mental tally — she is not exactly his first twenty-four year old. He has, suddenly, a Petri dish vision of himself, a view of his life as an Einstein-Bohr thought experiment: what will this man be doing a few years from now? Will he keep bringing younger and younger students, though at less and less frequent intervals, home to his apartment, to this housekeeper-perfect Cambridge apartment, tastefully furnished to please the still-present shadow of his former wife Rachel? Will he invite the young students, blooming and brilliant, more and more often, but have his invitations ever more rarely accepted? A familiar craving hits him: a desire for the pure and pristine company of an insoluble (and hence endlessly seductive) mathematical problem. He leans toward the clear-cut difficulties of making Einstein apply to anything earlier than 10
-
45
of a second after the Big Bang, of the first simple second of Time. But the curve of Charade's cheek interposes itself, and he puts a record on
the stereo.

“So,” Charade says. “Tell me a story.”

“It embarrasses me,” he says, “to talk about myself in the first person, so I'm not going to. I'm going to call this
The Kynge's Tale
after Chaucer.”