I Married You for Happiness (3 page)

Oh. What did she play? The piano?

But Philip does not answer.

When she first arrived in Paris, at the airport, she sees a man, in the immigration line ahead of her, take off his wedding ring and pin it to the lining of his attaché case with a safety pin that he must keep there for that purpose.

What about your wife?
she wants to shout.

Sometimes, in her mind, she accuses Philip of losing his wedding ring on purpose.
Her throat is dry; she finds it hard to swallow.

Downstairs, the lights are on. She goes to the hall closet, which is full of coats. Hers, his—a navy blue wool coat, a parka, a down jacket, a raincoat, an old windbreaker. The windbreaker must be twenty-five years old. She remembers how proud Philip was when he bought it. The windbreaker was bright yellow and on sale and, he claimed, would last him a lifetime. He is right. Now the windbreaker is faded, the collar and cuffs are frayed, without thinking about it, she takes it out of the closet and puts it on. Carefully, she zips it up. Her hands go to the pockets. Slips of paper—bills, a to-do list:
car inspection, call George about leak in basement, bank, pick up tickets for concert.
The list, she recognizes, is several months old; coins, paper clips, a ticket stub are in the other pocket.

She walks into the dining room. The chicken, the new potatoes, the salad are all on the table. Cold, waiting. Nina starts to pick up a dish to put it away and changes her mind. Tomorrow, she thinks. Tomorrow she will have plenty of time to put things away, to do the dishes, to do—she cannot think what. Instead, she takes the bottle of wine with the cork stuck inside it. Again, she tries to pull the cork out but can’t. Damn, she says to herself. She goes to the kitchen and gets a knife. With the handle of the knife, she pushes the cork inside the bottle and pours herself a glass of wine.

Still holding the knife, a sharp kitchen knife, she makes a motion with it as if to slit her throat. Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the dining room mirror, she shakes her head.

What would Louise think?

Holding the glass of wine, she goes back upstairs.
Outside, the sound of a police car siren. From the bedroom window, she sees a blue light flash by in the dark, then rush past the house and disappear. She thinks of the car full of teenagers playing loud music and she imagines it smashed into a tree, the windshield bits of glittering glass as smoke rises from the hood and someone in the backseat screams.

Another siren. Another police car goes by.

Poor Iris, she says to Philip.

Again, the phone rings.

Louise.

Earlier, she left Louise a message.
Louise, darling, something has happened. Call me as soon as you can.

Poor Louise.

Philip’s darling.

A beautiful, lively, headstrong young woman who looks like him—tall, dark, with the same gray eyes. Nina must answer the phone.

Hello, she says, picking up the receiver in the bedroom.

Louise?

Whoever it is hangs up.

A wrong number. In the dark, Nina looks for a caller ID on the phone but there is none.

She is relieved. She does not want to tell Louise.

It is three hours earlier in California, and Louise, she imagines, is having dinner. She is having dinner with a young man. A handsome young man whom she likes. Afterward, Louise will not pick up her messages, she will sleep with him.

For Louise, Philip is alive still.

Lucky Louise.

Nina takes a sip of wine, then, putting down the glass, reaches for his hand again. His hand is cold and she attempts to warm it by holding it between both of hers.

She loves Philip’s hands. His long blunt fingers. Fingers that have touched her in all kinds of ways. Passionate ways about which she does not want to let herself think—making her come. She presses the hand to her lips.

When did they last make love?

A Sunday morning, a few weeks ago. The house is quiet, the curtains are drawn, and the bedroom is dark enough. She is self-conscious about being too old for sex. Also, it takes him longer.

In Paris, too, in Tante Thea’s old-fashioned, shuttered apartment on the rue de Saint-Simon, where, on the way to Philip’s bedroom, she bumps into furniture—side tables, spindly-legged chairs, glass cases filled with porcelain figurines—and where in bed, afterward, Philip admits that he was nervous. Without telling her why, he says he had not made love in a long time. He was afraid, he says, he had forgotten how.

You can never forget—like riding a bicycle, Nina adds.

This or her trite remark makes him laugh and, reassured or, at least, not as nervous, Philip makes love to her again.

Has he been faithful to her?

She reaches for the glass of wine.

Also, not thinking, Nina reaches into the windbreaker pocket and pulls out a coin. It feels like a penny.

Heads? Tails?

“The probability of an event occurring when there are only two possible outcomes is known as a binomial probability,” Philip tells his students. “Tossing a coin, which is the simple way of settling an argument or deciding between two options, is the most common example of a binomial probability. Probabilities are written as numbers between one and zero. A probability of one means that the event is certain—”

When Louise is six years old, she begins to play a game of tossing pennies with Philip. She records the results along with the dates in a little orange notebook, which she keeps in the top drawer of Philip’s bedside table:

The more times you toss a coin, Lulu, Philip tells Louise, the closer you get to the true theoretical average of heads and tails.

5039 heads, 4961 tails — 3/5/1987

For the last entry, Louise relies on a calculator.

“Another thing to remember and most people have difficulty understanding this,” Philip continues to tell his class as he takes a penny out of his pocket and tosses it up in the air, “is if a coin has come up heads a certain number of times, it will not necessarily come up tails next, as a corrective. A chance event is not influenced by the events that have gone before it. Each toss is an independent event.”

Heads, Philip tells Louise.

Heads, again.

Heads.

Tails, he says.

Nina, on an impulse, throws the coin she found in the pocket of Philip’s windbreaker up in the air. Too dark to see which way it comes up, she places the coin on top of the bedside table. In the morning she will remember to look:
Heads is success, tails is failure

And record the date in Louise’s orange notebook:
5/5/2005. 5 5 5

What, she wonders, do those three 5s signify?

Numbers are the most primitive manifestations of archetypes. They are found inherent in nature. Particles, such as quarks and protons, know how to count—how does she know this? By eating, sleeping, breathing next to Philip. Particles may not count the way we do but they count the way a primitive shepherd might—a shepherd who may not know how to count beyond three but who can tell instantly whether his flock of, say, 140 sheep, is complete or not.

Also, she remembers the example of the innumerate shepherd and his sheep.

She drinks a little more wine. She has not eaten since noon but chewing food seems like an impossible task. A task she might have performed long ago but has forgotten how.

She would like a cigarette. She has not smoked in twenty years yet the thought of lighting it—the delicious whiff of carbon from the struck match—and inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs is soothing. She and Philip both smoked once.

In Tante Thea’s apartment, after making love for the first time, they share a cigarette, an unfiltered Gauloise. They hand it back and forth to each other as they lie on their backs, naked, on the lumpy single bed—the ashtray perched on her stomach. And later when they begin to kiss again, she remembers how Philip licks off a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip, and, then, how he swallows it. At the time, it seems a most intimate gesture.

As if she is exhaling smoke, Nina lets out a long deep breath.

Are you a spy? she asks. Are you employed by the CIA?

At the beginning, she makes a point to be difficult. She does not intend to be an easy conquest. She does not want to fall in love yet.

No. Yes. If that is what you want to believe.

Philip has a Fulbright scholarship and is teaching undergraduate math for a year at the École Polytechnique.

And do all the girls have a crush on you?

Alas, there aren’t many girls in my class. The few are the grinds. Philip makes a face of distaste.

There’s Mlle. Voiturier and Mlle. Epinay. They sit together and don’t say a word. They have terrible B.O.

In spite of herself, Nina laughs.

Do I? Nina makes as if to smell her underarm.

No. What perfume do you wear?

L’Heure Bleue.

Philip smells faintly of ironed shirts.

He still does.

Spring. The weather is warm, the chestnut trees are in flower, brilliant tulips bloom in the Luxembourg Garden. In the evenings, they stroll along the quays bordering the darkening Seine, watching the tourist boats go by. On one such evening, a boat shines its light on them, illuminating them as they kiss. On board, everyone claps and Philip and Nina, only slightly embarrassed, wave back.

What I was saying about whether God exists or not, Philip continues as they resume walking hand in hand, is that, according to Pascal, we are forced to gamble that He exists.

I’m not forced to gamble, Nina says, and believing in God and trying to believe in Him are not the same thing.

Right but Pascal uses the notion of expected gain to argue that one should try to lead a pious life instead of a worldly one, because if God exists one will be rewarded with eternal life.

In other words, the bet is all about personal gain, Nina says.

Yes.

On the way home, as Nina crosses the Pont Neuf, the heel of her shoe catches, breaks off. She nearly falls.

Damn, she says, I’ve ruined my shoe.

Holding on to Philip’s arm, she limps across the street.

A sign, she says.

A sign of what?

That I lead a worldly life.

Shaking his head, Philip laughs.

On a holiday weekend, they drive to the coast of Normandy. They walk the landing beaches and collect stones—in her studio, they are lined up on the windowsill along with stones from other beaches. At Colleville-sur-Mer, they make their respectful way among the rows and rows of tidy, white graves in the American cemetery.

How many?

9,387 dead.

On the way to La Cambe, the German military cemetery, it begins to rain.

Black Maltese crosses and simple dark stones with the names of the soldiers engraved on them mark the wet graves.

More than twice as many dead—according to the sign.

Why did we come here? Nina asks. And it’s raining, she says.

Instead of answering, Philip points. Look, he says.

In the distance, to the west, there is clear sky and a faint rainbow.

Make a wish, Nina says.

I have, Philip answers.

Always, on their trips, they stay in cheap hotels—neither one of them has much money. Closing her eyes, she can still visualize the rooms with the worn and faded flowered wallpaper, the sagging double bed with its stiff cotton sheets and uncomfortable bolster pillows; often there is a sink in the room and Philip pees in it; the toilet and tub are down the hall or down another flight of stairs. Invariably, too, the rooms are on the top floor, under the eaves, and if Philip stands up too quickly and forgets, he hits his head. The single window in the room looks out onto a courtyard with hanging laundry, a few pots of geranium, and a child’s old bicycle left lying on its side. The hotels smell of either cabbage or cauliflower—
chou-fleur.

Chou-fleur,
she repeats to herself. She likes the sound of the word.

Always, in her mind, she and Philip are in bed.

Or they are eating.

During dinner at a local restaurant, over their
entrecôtes—saignante
for him,
à point
for her—their
frites,
and a carafe of red wine, Philip talks about his class at the École Polytechnique, about what he is teaching
—nombres premiers, nombres parfaits, nombres amiables.

Tell me what they are, she says, in between mouthfuls. She is always hungry. Starving, nearly.

I’ve told you already, he says, pouring her some wine. You weren’t listening.

Tell me again about the ones I like, the amiable ones.

Amiable numbers are a pair of numbers where the sum of the proper divisors of one number is equal to the other. 220 and 284 are the smallest pair of amiable numbers and the proper divisors of 220 are—Philip shuts his eyes—1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, and 110, which add up to 284, and the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, which add up to 220—do you see?

Imagine figuring that out, she says, waving a forkful of
frites
in the air.

Who did?

Th?bit ibn Qurrah, a ninth-century Arab mathematician. How many amiable numbers are there? No one knows.

Then there are the perfect numbers—6 is a perfect number. The divisors of 6 are 1, 2, and 3, which add up to 6.

But she has stopped listening to him. Perfection interests her less.

Do you want dessert? she asks. The
crème caramel
or the
tarte aux poires?

She talks to him about how, more than anything, she wants to paint. Paint like her favorite artist, Richard Diebenkorn.

His still life and figure drawings. Do you know his work?

Philip shakes his head.

I’ll show them to you one day.

They argue, but without rancor, discussing and exchanging ideas. Both are attracted by abstractions. Sometimes she forgets that she has not known Philip all her life or not known him for years.

It was a happy time and they are married in the fall.

More than 10 percent of a person’s daily thought is about the future, or so she has heard say. Out of an average of eight hours a day, a person spends at least one hour thinking about things that have not yet happened. This will not be true for her. She has no desire to think about the future. For her, the future does not exist; it is an absurd concept.

She prefers to think about the past. Yesterday, for instance? She tries to remember what she and Philip did yesterday. What they said. What they ate.

When did she last speak to Louise? On the telephone, Louise described her job with the Internet start-up—a promotion, a raise, a cause for celebration. And is she, at this very moment, celebrating at her favorite Japanese restaurant? Nina pictures Louise talking excitedly to the young man who sits across from her, and as deftly with her chopsticks, she picks up expensive raw fish and puts it in her mouth.

Three weeks before her due date, alone—Philip is at a conference in Miami—in the third-floor walk-up apartment in Somerville, Nina wakes up with contractions. Hastily, she gets dressed, collects a few things, and calls a taxi. The taxi company does not answer. She tries to time the contractions but she barely has time to recover from one before she has another. Again she tries to call the taxi company, again she gets no answer. She dials 911. For the first time, she notices that it is snowing. Snow swirls in great wind-driven whorls blanketing the parked cars,
the trees, obscuring the street. Putting on her coat and picking up her bag, she starts downstairs; once her foot catches and she trips, falling down several steps. In an apartment below, a dog begins to bark and she hears someone shout,
Shut up, damn it.
Half afraid whoever it is will come out and find her, she holds her breath. In the front hall of their building, her water breaks, a stream hitting the cracked linoleum floor. A few moments later, she sees a car pull up and, muffled in a hat and coat, a policeman runs to the door. Rosy-faced from the cold, he looks young—younger than she. Leading her out into the snow, he holds Nina up under the arms to keep her from slipping in her flimsy leather moccasins—the only shoes that still fit, so swollen has all of her become—as they make their way to the car.

She lies down in the back of the police car, a grille separating her, like a criminal, from the back of the head and shoulders of the young policeman who is driving. The streets are unplowed and covered in several inches of new snow and she is aware of the eerie reflection of the car’s blue light, illuminating her in surreal-like flashes. The policeman speaks to someone on his radio;
ten-four,
he repeats, as he drives; when he has to use the brake, the car skids sideways. A truck with chains rumbles noisily past them in the opposite direction and Nina, momentarily caught in the truck’s headlights, has a glimpse of the driver’s surprised stare. Louise is almost there.

What, she wonders, does the young man in the restaurant with Louise look like?

Does he look like Philip?

Philip has an eidetic memory. He has total recall of names, places, and nearly every meal he has eaten—the good ones, in particular. He can quote entire passages from books and recite poems by heart:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Paradise Lost;
Shakespeare’s speeches: Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York—she hears his voice taking on a sonorous tone along with a British accent. He can recite lengthy bits in Latin that he learned as a young boy.

A trick, he claims. One has to make an association between the words and a visual image that one positions in space. The Greeks knew how to do this. The story of Simonides is the classic example.

You told me once but I’ve forgotten it, Nina says.

Simonides was hired to recite a poem at a banquet but when he finished, his host, a nobleman, refused to pay him as he had promised, complaining that instead of praising him in the poem, Simonides praised Castor and Pollux and he should ask the two gods to pay him. Simonides was then told that two men were waiting for him outside and he left the banquet hall but when he got outside—

I remember now, Nina says. No one was there but the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing everyone. The corpses of the guests were so mangled that they were unrecognizable but since Simonides had a visual memory of where each had been sitting, he could identify them. I remember you told me that story on Belle-Île, one summer. We were in a café next to the harbor. I think we were waiting for the ferry and for Louise.

That’s my point exactly, Philip says, smiling.

Closing her eyes, she can see the house on Belle-Île. A colorful, old house, one side is painted red; the shutters, too, are red, a deeper, darker red. The plaster walls are a foot thick and the ceilings are low. Blue hydrangeas grow in dense hedges all around the house.

The house looks like the French flag, Philip says.

From Quiberon, they take the ferry. Often the sea is rough and the boat pitches and rolls, sending spray high up to splash the cabin windows where the passengers sit, blotting out the island as it grows closer. One time, Nina watches a farmer try to drive his horse and wagon on the boat and the horse, his hooves clattering noisily and drawing sparks, refuses at first to step onto the metal ramp. It is low tide and the grade is steep and the horse rears and nearly breaks his harness. He is a big white farm horse and during the entire voyage to Belle-Île, Nina hears him whinnying from below deck.

For close to twenty years, they rent the same house. The house belongs to a local couple, who slowly, slowly, over the years, renovate and modernize it, so that each summer there is something new—a stove, a fridge, an indoor toilet, curtains. Even in bad weather when they are forced to stay indoors, it makes little difference to Philip and Nina. Life on the island is simple, food is plentiful: oysters, langouste, all kinds of fish; every morning, in town, there is a market. Nina buys vegetables, bread, the local cheese—a goat cheese, with an acrid gamy taste. She and Philip swim, sit in the sun, read; one summer they read all of Proust in French:
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte,
mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire “Je m’endors.”
—Philip can recite several more pages by heart. In the afternoon when the wind picks up, he goes sailing and she paints—or tries to.