Claude Monet, famously, spent a summer on Belle-Île. A framed poster of his painting of rocks off the Atlantic coast—rocks that look like prehistoric beasts sticking their pointed, dangerous heads out of the water—hangs in her studio. She has stared long and hard at both the painting and the rocks, which she, too, wants to paint. The sea, in particular. How menacing it looks in Monet’s painting and how tame and lifeless in her own. Her sea looks like soup. Eventually, she gives up and destroys it. Later, back home, she paints the same scene abstractedly. The rocks are vertical brown lines, the sea blue, green, and red horizontal stripes. The painting is almost successful.
Louise learns how to swim and ride a two-wheel bicycle on Belle-Île. A few years later, Philip teaches her how to sail.
You should see how Lulu sets the spinnaker, Philip boasts. It takes her twenty seconds. He is proud of her.
Nina has an affair on Belle-Île but she does not want to think of that.
No, not now.
The house is only a short walk from the sea. The first thing she does when she arrives each summer is to go down to the beach and swim. The cold water is a shock, but bracing, and, after the long trip, it makes Nina feel clean.
Jean-Marc.
Is this the first time you’ve crossed the Atlantic? Nina asks, when she meets him.
Solo, he has sailed in a race from Belle-Île to an island in the Caribbean, and he has won. A celebration of his victory is being held at a local restaurant.
Fair-haired, solidly built, and not tall—no taller than Nina—his eyes are a light blue, like a dog’s. A husky. Or the blue of the Caribbean. He is a bit younger than Nina.
No, no, he laughs at her. This is my ninth trip across the Atlantic.
Oh. Embarrassed, she turns away.
Standing beside him, his pretty wife, Martine, smiles up at him.
Next, Philip is asking Jean-Marc a lot of questions: What type of sails? Does he have radar? Loran? How accurate is it? Loran, she hears Philip say, suffers from the ionospheric effects of sunrise and sunset and is unreliable at night.
Navigation systems never posed a problem for me. But nature, yes, Jean-Marc answers. Nature can pose big problems. Two years ago, when I was halfway across the Atlantic, a whale attached herself to my boat. First she swam on one side of my boat, then she dove under and disappeared for a few minutes—Jean-Marc makes the motion of a whale diving with his hands—before she reappears again on the other side of my boat. She was playing with me. She continues like this for two days and two nights—I can still see the whale’s little eyes shining up at me in the dark, Jean-Marc says, shaking his head. It makes me—how you say?—
complètement fou.
In French, whale is feminine,
la baleine,
Philip explains to Nina, imitating Jean-Marc’s accent and gestures, as he retells the story.
I know, she says.
Je sais.
Philip’s assurance always astonishes her. It is not arrogance but a confidence, based in part on old-fashioned principles and in part on intelligence, that he is right and, usually, he is. For Nina, this is both a comfort and an irritant.
Strange, too, Nina reflects for perhaps the hundredth time, how Philip, who was born and raised hundreds of miles from the sea, should have become such a keen sailor. None of his family are.
It began with rowing on the Charles, he tells Nina. Then, one day, over Memorial Day weekend, my roommate took me out sailing on his family’s boat, a thirty-three-foot ketch called the
Mistral
—I didn’t know the difference between port and starboard—and we sailed over to Martha’s Vineyard. The wind was just right, and I will never forget how peaceful I felt that night, lying on the deck and looking up at the stars and listening to the sound of the water against the boat’s hull. In a funny way, it was a moment—how to describe it—where I felt completely at one. At one with the world and with the universe.
Maybe you got enlightened, Nina tells him.
Not very likely, Philip answers.
Right then and there I almost changed my major from math to astronomy and I also vowed to myself that one day I, too, would own a boat.
Downstairs in the basement, there is a decrepit rowing machine and, for years now, Nina has rarely heard the whirr of it. She has begun a campaign to throw the machine out. Useless outmoded junk, she claims. A fire hazard.
Now she can throw it out.
She takes a quick, almost furtive look out the window. The night seems very dark and silent. She can no longer see any stars. What is the saying Philip likes to quote?
I much prefer a bold astronomer to a decorous star.
She disagrees. She prefers a star to an invention.
It must be late, she decides.
She needs to get more wine. This time she will bring the bottle back upstairs.
He won’t mind, she thinks.
“In general,” Philip might say, were he to turn her infidelity into a classroom exercise, “if we know for certain that my wife is not having an affair, the probability of the event would be 0; but, should we discover that she is having an affair, the probability would be 1. The numerical measure of probability can range from 0 to 1—from impossibility to certainty. Thus, the probability of my wife being unfaithful would be 1 over 2 because there are only the two possibilities: that she is having an affair or that she is not having an affair.”
While she and Jean-Marc are in bed one afternoon, someone knocks at the front door and calls out Nina’s name—the landlady checking on the new refrigerator or leaving her some fresh lettuce from her garden.
Un moment,
Nina calls back down.
J’arrive.
Only half dressed and holding his shoes in one hand, Jean-Marc climbs out the bedroom window. Jumping, he lands squarely on his feet. In another moment, he leaps over the hydrangea hedge and is gone.
Jean-Marc has the tight, muscular body of a gymnast.
“But let us take another example,” Philip continues. “The probability of a person crossing a street safely is also 1 over 2 because again there are only two possible outcomes: crossing safely and not crossing safely. Yet the trouble with this argument is that the two possible outcomes—crossing safely and getting run over—are not equally likely. If they were, people would not want to cross the street very often or if they did, a lot of them would get hurt or killed. So therein lies the fallacy. The definition given by Fermat and Pascal applies only if one can analyze the situation into equally likely possible outcomes, which takes me back to my original example—and to put your minds at ease”—a few of the students laugh—”since I know my wife to be a truthful and loving woman, she is not likely to be unfaithful and to have had an affair.”
General laughter and applause.
Trust is a word we have put too much trust in, Philip also tells his class.
Iris again.
Was Iris, like Philip, a native of Wisconsin? A blonde beauty of Scandinavian origin—her hair so blonde it is white. And a musical prodigy. Nina has read about children who learn how to play the piano at age three, compose their first piece at five, debut as a soloist at seven—was Iris one of them? She pictures her sitting, small and demure, a bow in her hair, on the piano bench in front of the Steinway grand, her feet reaching for the pedals as she starts to play. Her little hands move swiftly and assuredly; the sound she makes is passionate. She plays Philip’s favorite Chopin polonaise—Nina can hear the melody in her head—which promises redemption and celebrates Polish heroism. Were they high school sweethearts and did they sleep together? Perhaps Iris is pregnant and she has just found out. Twice she has missed her period and every morning now she throws up her breakfast. She has screwed up her courage to tell Philip in the car on the way home from the party. The reason he drives off the road.
Nina leans over Philip. Lightly, she touches his cheek. How can this have happened? How can this be?
Philip is so robust, so healthy, so—she tries to think of the right words—so engaged in life.
Come back, she whispers. Please, come back.
How can he leave her?
Without saying good-bye.
Without a word.
Please, she pleads.
Putting her head down on his chest, she listens.
At home, some evenings, Philip likes to play music and take her in his arms and whirl her in a quick two-step to
La vie en rose,
down the front hall, past the umbrella stand, the closet full of coats and past the pastel of a ship, its prow shaped like the head of a dog.
The top of her head reaches his collarbone, she can feel his heart beating.
His shoes are on the floor next to the bed. Old-fashioned, scuffed-up, lace-up brown oxfords. One shoe is lying on its side. Abandoned. Should she pick up the shoes and put them away in the closet? No, she will leave them there.
She picks up after Philip. It annoys her—no, worse: it angers her. His socks, his underwear, left lying around for her to put away, to hang up, to throw in the laundry basket. At first, she scolds but then bored by her own aggrieved tone and the futility of her words, she stops.
Untidiness in a man, she has read somewhere, is a sign of his having had a mother who dotes and spoils her son. Not so, in Philip’s case.
Alice, Philip’s mother, lives twenty miles away in a nursing home. The last time Nina and Philip visit her, Alice is not certain who
they are. Unfailingly polite, she speaks about people Nina has never heard of: Rick who built a fireplace made out of bricks—Rick rhymes with brick—nonsense. Nina lets her mind wander. She has brought tulips from the garden, which pleases Philip’s mother.
I’ve always loved bougainvillea, she tells Nina.
Tulips, Mother, Philip tries to correct her. Tulips from our garden.
Francis, my husband, loved bougainvillea, Alice continues. Our garden in Ouro Prêto was full of bougainvillea.
Ouro Prêto? Where is that? Nina asks, paying more attention.
In Brazil, Philip answers. I’ve told you how the year after they got married, before Harold and I were born, she and my father spent a year in Brazil. Ouro Prêto was a mining town, originally, it means black gold. Now, there’s a university. It’s full of ornate, baroque churches—I’ve seen the photos they took. My father was doing some kind of research there. Afterward, they spent a year in Mexico.
Strange what she remembers, Philip also says.
How did you like living in Ouro Prêto? Nina leans forward to ask Alice. She feels a surge of tenderness for the old lady, who is sitting in her wheelchair dressed in a faded blue robe and whose pale, lined face has suddenly come to life.
Oh, yes, Alice says. I remember how every evening after Francis finished his work, we walked through town up into the hills where we could see all of Ouro Prêto spread out below us. We could see the gold spires of the churches glittering in the setting sun. I remember we had a little dog. She smiles. His name was Kilo.
What kind of dog? Nina asks. She wants Alice to remember.
A little dog we found in the street. He was black and brown. And white, Alice adds before she closes her eyes.
It’s hard to imagine your mother as a young woman in Ouro Prêto, Nina says on the way home in the car.
But she can, easily.
Alice in a full skirt and an embroidered peasant blouse; she is wearing sandals; her dark hair reaches her waist. Hand in hand, she walks with Francis on the town’s cobblestoned streets, the dog straining at the leash. When they reach the hills above the town, they sit for a moment under a tree. Perhaps they make love, Francis lifting Alice’s full skirt while Kilo barks excitedly around them. Only it is hard to picture Francis, a formal, courtly man, having sex.
What are you smiling about? Turning to look at her, Philip asks.
Nothing.
Why, she wonders to herself, does she always have to picture people having sex?
Philip rarely speaks about his parents. Not from any resentment but from a sort of
pudeur
—a reticence. His parents, too, were reticent and undemonstrative. They hardly ever raised their voices, they rarely got angry. In their presence, Nina always felt too loud and flashy, too frivolous, although she is none of those things really.
Francis, Philip’s father, taught anthropology; like Philip he was tall and slender, but he had a thick white mustache that hid his top lip. For a few months, while they lived in Berkeley, Philip grew a mustache.
I’m curious. I just want to see how it feels. Don’t worry, I’ll shave it off soon, he promises Nina. Only he doesn’t.
It feels strange when you kiss me. And food gets stuck in it, it’s unhygienic, Nina says.
She believes he has grown the mustache to annoy her.
Also, he has gotten into the habit of stroking it.
It makes you look weird, is what Louise says to him, and it embarrasses me in front of my friends. It is she, not Nina, who persuades Philip to shave it off.
What will she tell Alice now?
Nina tries to remember how long ago Philip’s brother died. Five, six years, maybe seven. She has lost track. Poor Harold. Short, jovial, the son of the milkman, he joked behind his father’s back. Harold married and divorced the same woman twice, which further subjected him to ridicule.
How often does that happen? Nina wonders.
More often than you think, Philip says.
You have to be an optimist.
Or an amnesiac.
Harold worked for an airline as a navigator, flying all over the country until he was fired. Harold drank too much and died of cirrhosis of the liver. At Philip and Nina’s wedding, he passed out and Laura, one of her bridesmaids, found him lying on his back on the wet lawn, his fly open, his pecker out.
Nina pours herself more wine.
Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to
undo—take addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because, although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together again.