She is drinking a
café crème
and reading a French book,
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute.
Je vous en prie,
she says, without looking up at him.
She works at an art gallery a few blocks away on rue Jacques-Callot. The gallery primarily shows avant-garde American painters. The French like them and buy their work. Presently, the gallery is exhibiting a Californian artist whose work she admires. The artist is older, well-known, wealthy; he has invited Nina to the
hôtel particulier
on the Right Bank where he is staying. He has told her to bring her bathing suit—she remembers it still: a blue-and-white checked cotton two-piece. The pool is located on the top floor of the
hôtel particulier
and is paneled in dark wood, like
one in an old-fashioned ocean liner; instead of windows there are portholes. She follows the artist into the pool and as she swims, she looks out onto the Paris rooftops and since night is falling, watches the lights come on. Floating on her back, she also watches the beam at the top of the Eiffel Tower protectively circle the city. Afterward, they put on thick white robes and sit side by side on chaise longues as if they are, in fact, on board a ship, crossing the Atlantic. They even drink something—a Kir royal. She slept with him once more but they did not go swimming again. Before he leaves Paris, he gives her one of his drawings, a small cartoonlike pastel of a ship, its prow shaped like the head of a dog. Framed, the drawing hangs downstairs in the front hall.
Philip begins by speaking to her about Nathalie Sarraute. He claims to know a member of her family who is distantly related to him by marriage.
At the time, she does not believe him.
A line, she thinks.
She hears the phone ring downstairs. As a precaution, she has turned it off in the bedroom—why, she wonders? So as not to wake him? She reaches for the receiver but the phone abruptly stops midring. Just as well. She will wait until morning. In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service—whatever needs to be done. Tonight—tonight, she wants nothing.
She wants to be alone.
Alone with Philip.
She is not religious.
She does not believe in an afterlife, in the transmigration of souls, in reincarnation, in any of it.
But he does.
I don’t believe in reincarnation and that other stuff and I don’t go to church but I do believe in a God, he tells her. Where were they then?
Walking hand in hand along the quays at night, they stop a moment to look across at Nôtre-Dame.
Mathematicians, I thought, weren’t supposed to believe in God, she says.
Mathematicians don’t necessarily rule out the idea of God, Philip answers. And, for some, the idea of God may be more abstract than the conventional God of Christianity.
At her feet, the river runs black and fast, and she shivers a little inside her leather bomber jacket.
Like Pascal, Philip continues, I believe it is safer to believe that God exists than to believe He does not exist. Heads God exists and I win and go to heaven, Philip motions with his arm as if tossing a coin up in the air, tails God does not exist and I lose nothing.
It’s a bet, she says, frowning. Your belief is based on the wrong reasons and not on genuine faith.
Not at all, Philip answers, my belief is based on the fact that reason is useless for determining whether there is a God. Otherwise, the bet would be off.
Then, leaning down, he kisses her.
His eyes shut, Philip lies on his back. His head rests on the pillow and she has pulled the red-and-white diamond-patterned quilt up to cover him. He could be sleeping. The room is tidy and familiar, dominated by the carved mahogany four-poster. Opposite it, two chairs, her beige cashmere sweater hanging on the back of one; in between the chairs stands a maple bureau whose top is covered with a row of family photos in silver frames—Louise as a baby, Louise, age nine or ten, as the Black Swan in her school production of
Swan Lake,
Louise holding her dog, Mix, Louise dressed in a cap and gown, Louise and Philip sailing, Louise, Philip, and Nina horseback riding at a dude ranch in Montana, Louise and Nina skiing in Utah. Also on top of the bureau is a lacquer box where she keeps some of her jewelry. Her valuable jewelry—a diamond pin in the shape of a flower, a three-strand pearl necklace, a ruby signet ring—is inside the combination safe in the hall closet. Closing her eyes, she tries to remember the combination: three turns to the left to 17, two turns to the right to 4, and one turn to the left to 11 or is it the other way around? In any case she can never get the safe open; Philip has to. And, next to the lacquer jewelry box, the blue-and-green clay bowl Louise made for them in third grade in which, each evening, Philip places his loose change. The closet doors are shut and only the bathroom door is ajar.
When is a door not a door? When it is a …
Stop.
Perhaps she should put on her nightgown and lie down next to him and in the morning, when he wakes up he will reach for her the way he does. He will hike up her nightgown. Take it off, he will say. He likes to make love in the morning. Sleepy, she takes longer to respond.
She has not bothered to draw the curtains. Outside, above the waving tree branches, she can make out a few stars in the night sky. A mere dozen in a galaxy of a billion or a trillion stars. Perhaps death, she thinks, is like one of those stars—a star that can be seen only backward in time and exists in an unobservable state. While life, she has heard said, was created from stars—the stars’ debris.
What did he say to her exactly?
I am a bit tired, I am going to lie down for a minute before supper.
or
I am going to lie down for a minute before supper, I am a bit tired.
or something else entirely.
She is in the kitchen. Spinning the lettuce. She looks up briefly.
How was your day?
She half listens to his reply.
We had a faculty meeting. You should hear how those new physicists talk! They’re crazy, Philip says, as he goes upstairs.
She makes the salad dressing, she sets the table. She takes the chicken out of the oven. She boils new potatoes. Then she calls him.
Philip! Dinner is ready.
She starts to open a bottle of red wine but the cork is stuck. He will fix it.
Again, Philip, Philip! Dinner!
Before she walks into the bedroom, she knows already.
She sees his stocking feet. He has taken off his shoes.
What was he thinking? About dinner? About her? A paper he is reading by one of his students, arguing that Kronecker was right to claim that the Aristotelian exclusion of completed infinites could be maintained?
Infinites. Infinite sets. Infinite series.
Infinity makes her anxious.
It gives her nightmares. As a child, she had a recurring dream. A dream she can never put into words. The closest she comes to describing the dream, she tells Philip, is to say that it has to do with numbers. The numbers—if in fact they are numbers—always start out small and manageable, although in the dream Nina knows that this is temporary, for soon they start to gather force and multiply; they become large and uncontrollable. They form an abyss. A black hole of numbers.
You’re in good company, is what Philip tells her. The Greeks, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pascal all had it.
The dream?
No, what the dream stands for.
Which is?
The terror of the infinite.
But, for Philip, infinity is a demented concept.
Infinity, he says, is absurd.
“Suppose, one dark night,” is how Philip always begins his undergraduate course on probability theory, “you are walking down an empty street and suddenly you see a man wearing a ski mask carrying a suitcase emerge from a jewelry store—the window of the jewelry store, you will have noticed, is smashed. You will no doubt assume that the man is a burglar and that he has just robbed the jewelry store but you may, of course, be dead wrong.”
Philip is a popular teacher. His students like him. The women in particular, Nina cannot fail to notice.
He is so sanguine, so merry, so handsome.
Vous permettez?
He is so polite.
Too polite, she sometimes reproaches him.
They do not go to bed with each other right away. Instead he questions her about the well-known American painter.
I don’t want you to sleep with anyone else but me, he says. He sounds quite fierce. They are standing on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Saint-Simon, near the apartment where he is staying with his widowed aunt. A French aunt—or nearly French. She married a Frenchman and has lived in France for forty years. Tante Thea is more French than the French. She talks about politics and about food; she is impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed; she serves three-course lunches, plays golf at an exclusive club in Neuilly, goes to the country every weekend. She refers to Philip as
mon petit Philippe
and, over time, Nina grows to like her.
A hot Saturday afternoon, the apartment will be empty. Across the boulevard, a policeman stands guarding a ministry. A flag droops over the closed entryway. Cars go by, a bus, several noisy motorcycles. They stand together not saying a word.
Come, Philip finally says.
Mon petit Philippe.
Nina smiles to herself, remembering.
He is so tentative, so determined to please her.
“The assumption that the man in the ski mask has robbed the jewelry store is an example of plausible reasoning but we, in this class”—is how Philip continues his lecture—”will be studying deductive reasoning. We will look at how intuitive judgments are replaced by definite theorems—and that the man robbing the jewelry store is in fact the owner of the jewelry store and he is on his way to a costume party, therefore the ski mask, and the neighbor’s kid has accidentally thrown a baseball through his store window.
“Any questions?”
Most probably a sudden cardiac arrest—not a heart attack—their neighbor, an endocrinologist, says. He tries to explain the difference to her. A heart attack is when a blockage in a blood vessel interrupts the flow of blood to the heart, while a cardiac arrest results from an abrupt loss of heart function. Most of the cardiac arrests that lead to sudden death occur when the electrical impulses in the heart become rapid or chaotic. This irregular heart rhythm causes the heart to suddenly stop beating. Some
cardiac arrests are due to extreme slowing of the heart. This is called bradycardia.
Did he say all of that?
No, no, Philip has never been diagnosed with heart disease. Philip is as healthy as a horse. He had a physical a few months ago. That is what his doctor said. In any case it is what Philip told her his doctor said.
No, no, Philip does not take any medication.
Their neighbor, Hugh, looks for a pulse. He puts both hands on Philip’s heart and applies pressure. He counts out loud—one, two, three, four—until thirty.
Nina tries to count out loud with him—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one …
She has trouble making a sound above a whisper.
Poor Hugh, he does not know what to say—something about a defibrillator only it is too late. His dinner napkin is still hanging from his belt and he only notices it now. Blushing slightly, he pulls it off.
No. He must not call anyone.
Nina ran next door to fetch him just as he and his wife, Nell, are sitting down to their supper in the kitchen. Their dog, an old yellow Lab, stands up and begins to bark at her; upstairs, a child starts to cry. They have two children, one a month old. A girl named Justine. A day or two after Nell came home from the hospital, Nina went over with a lasagna casserole and a pink sweater and matching cap for the baby. How long ago that seems.
Hugh says, Call us any time. Nell and I … His voice trails off.
Yes.
Yes, yes, I will.
And call your physician. He’ll have to draw up the death certificate.
Yes, in the morning, I will.
Will you be all right
…
? Again, his voice trails off.
Yes, yes. I want to be alone. Thank you.
Thank you, she says again.
She hears the front door shut.
Bradycardia.
The name reminds her of a flower. A tall blue flower.
Iris.
An old-fashioned name.
The name of the woman killed in the car accident. She must have been pretty, Nina imagines. Slender, blonde. Both are young—Iris is only eighteen and he is driving her home after a party, it is raining hard—perhaps Philip has had one drink too many but he is not drunk. No. Around a curve, he loses control of the car—perhaps the car skids, he does not remember; nor did he when the police question him. They hit a telephone pole. Iris is killed instantly. He, on the other hand, is unhurt.
Nina wonders how often Philip still thinks about Iris. Did he think of her before he died? Did he think he might have had a happier life had he married her? In a way, Nina envies Iris. Iris has remained forever young and pretty in his mind while he has only to glance at her and see how Nina’s skin is wrinkled, her hair, once auburn or red—depending on the light—is gray, her breasts have lost their firmness.
Philip spoke of the accident on their honeymoon, on their way to Puerto Vallarta.
I just want you to know that this happened to me is what he says.
It happened also to Iris
is what Nina wants to say but does not.
It took me a long time to get over it and come to terms with it is what he also says.
How did you come to terms with it?
Nina wants to ask.
It was a terrible thing.
Yes.
Now, I don’t want to think about it anymore, he says.
And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you understand, Nina?
Nina said she does but she doesn’t.
What was she like? Iris? she nonetheless asks. She tries to sound respectful. Was she Southern? Iris is such an unusual name.
She was a musician, Philip answers.