Like opening a bottle of champagne—for once Nina is listening—you can’t put the cork back in the bottle. Or having a baby.
On account of the snowstorm, Philip’s flight from Miami is canceled. He has to wait several hours before the runways at Logan Airport are cleared and he can come home.
I was frantic. I couldn’t sit still or read, he tells Nina, when, breathless, his coat buttoned up the wrong way, he arrives at the hospital. I knew you were both fine but I wanted to be with you. I wanted to see her right away.
He is holding day-old Louise in his arms. There are tears in his eyes.
She touches Philip’s cheek—cooler now. With her fingers, she traces the slightly raised scar on his forehead; she touches the lobe of his ear, his neck, his shoulders. Again she puts her head on his chest. He is all there still. But what, she wonders, happens when people die in cataclysmic ways, in explosions or in plane crashes, and their bodies disappear entirely or become ash, spindrift—a word she has always liked—or, simply, atoms? Are they still dead people? This leads her into the difficult realm of metaphysics. A realm she does not dare enter.
What about Philip’s soul? Has his soul departed and is it now floating somewhere in the ether looking for a place to settle?
Outside, the wind arrives in strong gusts and she hears the tree branches shake; the shutter bangs again. Twice in quick succession.
Several afternoons a week, Philip goes sailing with Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc is good company, intelligent, serious, Philip tells Nina. He plans to open a sailing school on Belle-Île and Philip gives him business advice. In return, Jean-Marc is teaching Philip a great deal—not only about sailing but about the sea, the tides, the region.
You’ll have to come with us, Philip tells Nina. I’ll pick a good day, a day that isn’t too windy. You’ll like it, I promise. And, with Jean-Marc on board, you’ll feel safe, he adds.
Yes, maybe, Nina, not yet keen on sailing, answers.
But she prefers to stay home, to read, sunbathe, swim. Sometimes she works a little in the garden, trimming the hydrangeas. Also, that summer she has begun to paint watercolors. She tries to do them fast; she wants to not hesitate.
How does it start?
They are having dinner at La Mère Irène, a popular restaurant, in Sauzon. The dinner is noisy, lively. Jean-Marc is a local son, a hero of sorts, he knows everyone—the chef, the waitresses, the other diners. They shout across the tables to one another; the food is local and cheap. Everyone drinks a lot of wine.
Philip is explaining Zeno’s paradox. She no longer remembers why or how the subject came up, but she remembers that she is wearing a backless sundress with a red zigzag pattern that ties at the neck and she has thrown a white cotton sweater over her shoulders; she is eating
moules,
cooked in garlic and white wine, and
frites.
This suggests that I can never cross a space, Philip says, holding up his glass of wine and pointing to the far side of the restaurant—he is sounding a little drunk—because I would have to pass an infinite number of points before I reach it. This also means that I would not be able to move any distance at all and motion itself would be impossible. Yet, of course, I can move, he almost shouts, which is why I believe that infinity, although an elegant and important concept in mathematics, does not hold up in the physical world. I don’t know of any simple resolution to Zeno’s paradox, but I know that I can walk across this room.
To demonstrate, Philip jumps up from his chair. Knocking it over, he trips and when he tries to stand on one leg—the leg that did not set properly—he loses his balance. He falls heavily, cutting his forehead on his wineglass.
Martine begins to cry.
Head wounds bleed a lot, Philip says, holding first one dinner napkin to his head, then another.
Jean-Marc accompanies them to the small clinic in Le Palais and stays while the attending doctor removes the imbedded shards of glass then stitches up Philip’s head. The doctor insists that Philip spend the night in the clinic so that he can be observed, although he assures Nina that the risk of a concussion is slim.
Merely a precaution, he says.
Jean-Marc drives her home.
There are, she notices, bloodstains on the front of her backless sundress. She also worries about her breath—that her breath smells of garlic. Also, too late, she realizes that the white cotton sweater must have slipped off her shoulders and, now, lies forgotten on the floor of La Mère Irène.
Zeno, Jean-Marc says, laughing and shaking his head, and untying her backless sundress.
Where, she tries to think, was Louise that summer?
It must have been the same summer Louise begs Philip and Nina to let her go to a girl’s camp in New Hampshire.
What about Belle-Île? What about our sailing together? Philip is reluctant to let her.
All my friends are going to camp. Why can’t I?
I’m not going to France. I hate France, Louise also says.
Look, I’ll tell you what, Lulu. We’ll toss a coin. Heads you go to camp, tails you go to France.
That’s not fair.
Why?
Dad, please.
In tears, Louise runs out of the room.
Tossing a coin high up in the air, Philip slaps it down on the back of his hand. Heads, he shouts out to Louise. Heads, Lulu—you go to camp.
Let me see, Nina says.
It’s tails.
Shivering, she hugs herself. The feel of the windbreaker’s rough texture is a slight comfort. She can still hear the wind blowing outside and the room is quite dark.
In bed, Philip is an outline.
Go back, she tells herself. Go back.
She can feel his arms around her. His warm breath on her neck. Sweet, teasing, familiar. They have a good time together. They laugh a lot. Is laughter the secret to a good marriage, she wonders?
They know each other well.
Just what I was thinking, she says.
You read my mind, Philip says.
Is it the food they eat? The air they breathe?
They nearly have the same dream once.
In bed, she knows what he likes, what pleases him; he knows what pleases her, what gives her an orgasm. It is not complicated; it is not kinky, not an embarrassment. At times, it is perhaps too predictable, but as they get older and their options lessen, it is a comfort. They are both grateful. They are both gratified.
It has begun to rain, a gentle rattle against the glass. She goes to the window and opens it. Leaning out, she lets the rain fall on her face. A light cleansing mist and she breathes deeply. She imagines the grass, the plants, the trees, growing taller, greener.
Briefly, she wonders whether her studio windows are shut. No matter. The three canvases she is working on are of sky and water. Hard to tell where the water ends and where the sky begins.
She uses a lot of white paint. White and yellow and some blue paint. Just a hint of blue. Both the sea and sky look like bolts of cloth thrown down at random. The paintings are to be a triptych.
A triptych?
How presumptuous.
Who does she think she is? Hans Memling? Francis Bacon? Tomorrow, first thing, she will destroy the canvases.
A car drives slowly by, its headlights blurry in the rain. Reluctantly, she shuts the window and draws the curtains before she goes and sits next to him again.
He drives too fast. Often, he is distracted.
Look over there, he says, one hand on the wheel, the other pointing.
A tree. A beautiful field.
Look out, she answers.
There’s a car making a turn.
A truck.
Part of her feels—part of her even knows it for certain—that she, too, like Iris, will die in a car accident. It will be an awful coincidence. At the same time, isn’t it true that events tend to duplicate one another? Like copycat murders. If there is a plane crash, instantly, there are two more.
“And what would be the probability of such a tragedy reoccurring?” he might later ask his class, as he writes out an equation
on the blackboard. “The probability distribution of the number of occurrences of an event where
n
is the number of successes and
N
is the number of trials that happen rarely but have many opportunities to do so is called the Poisson distribution, named after a French mathematician, Siméon-Denis Poisson”—Philip stops to write the name on the blackboard—”and it is also known as the law of small or rare numbers, that Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz”—again, Philip turns to the blackboard to write out the name—”made famous when, in 1898, he published a book,
The Law of Small Numbers,
in which, during a period of twenty years, he recorded the number of soldiers kicked to death, each year, by horses in the fourteen Prussian cavalry corps. This is commonly known as the Prussian horse-kick data and it shows that the numbers follow a Poisson distribution.”
She pictures it exactly. Rain coming down in dark sheets, the wipers straining, barely keeping the windshield clear, the road invisible, except for the unsteady red back lights of the car directly ahead. On either side of them, trucks leave huge splashing waves of water in their wakes, and, finally, the radio so full of static she turns it off.
We should get new windshield wipers, she says, in order to ease the tension she feels.
Philip does not answer. Hunched over in the driver’s seat, for once, he is concentrating; next to him, she is in the passenger seat, the death seat.
Maybe we should pull over for a while, until the storm passes, she says.
Don’t be silly, he answers.
“In fact,” Philip adds in class, “many math historians feel that the Poisson distribution should have been renamed the
Bortkiewicz distribution. I don’t have a strong opinion either way on the subject except that, frankly, I find Poisson a lot easier to spell.”
Now, she will die some other way.
She pours herself more wine; the bottle is half empty.
Every surface—the desk, the tables, the chairs, the windowsills—in his office downstairs and in his office in Cambridge is filled with stacks of papers, periodicals, journals. There are similar stacks all over the floor.
Philip rarely talks about his work—his work outside of his teaching—or if he does, he describes it as the art of counting without counting.
If Nina tries to describe it she says: the probabilistic methods in combinatorics.
Can you be a bit more specific, dear? Philip says, shaking his head and laughing at her.
No, I can’t, Nina replies. Something to do with randomness.
Derandomization.
There you go, Philip says. You’re getting warm.
Don’t move anything, Philip warns Marta, the housekeeper. Don’t touch anything.
No, no, Mr. Philip. I touch nothing, Marta replies, frowning. Her look conveys both disapproval and martyrdom.
Marta is from Colombia. Her two children, whom she has not seen in three years, live in a remote mountain village with her parents. Once a month, she sends the money she can spare back home to them.
Marta has worked for Nina for eight years. Nina trusts her completely. She gives Marta old clothes, leftover food, whatever she does not want. Every Wednesday morning at nine, she goes to pick up Marta at the bus stop and at three in the afternoon she drives her back.
What will she tell Marta on Wednesday?
A Catholic, Marta believes in God, in Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, in a whole bunch of saints. Marta will pray for Philip’s eternal soul.
If only she could pray. But it is too late to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God. And what would she pray for?
To be reunited with Philip in heaven? According to what she once read—she tries to remember where—the people on earth who have found the perfect spiritual and physical partner will be joined again in heaven for the rest of eternity in a union that—she now remembers where—Emanuel Swedenborg calls conjugial love.
And how did Swedenborg arrive at this belief?
Angels, he claimed, spoke to him.
Angels—Nina scoffs at the idea.
The bedroom curtains billow out in a sudden draft and startle her.
Again, she reaches for Philip’s hand and, absently, she starts to twist the wedding ring around his finger—the ring they bought to replace the one he lost in the sea, off the coast of Brittany.
How did the silly story he told her go?
A fish, most probably, attracted by the shine of gold swallowed the ring, then, most probably, too, a bigger fish swallowed that fish, then a still bigger fish, a shark, swallowed the second fish and, who knows, Philip continues, my ring may finally have come to rest in an elegant restaurant in Shanghai or in Hong Kong. A surprise gleaming at the bottom of a bowl of shark fin soup.
When, years later, Philip is invited to a conference in Hong Kong, he comes back dazzled, dazzled by the sights and sounds and smells of China—nearly China.
The food as well.
At one of those floating restaurants in Aberdeen Harbor—a restaurant called Tai Pak—I got to pick the fish I wanted to eat out of a tank, he tells Nina, and, at the time, I couldn’t help thinking about my wedding ring and wondering what my chances were of finding it inside the fish. A million to one? A billion to one?
But these things happen, Philip says. They happen more often than you think.
The fish I picked, he adds, was delicious.
He also attends an elegant dinner in someone’s home on the Peak. The couple collects jade and the wife is Eurasian, he tells Nina. Her name is Sofia, like the city. Her father was
born there, she confided to Philip during dinner. Her mother is Chinese. He drinks tea and eats tea cakes in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel as the orchestra plays Strauss waltzes, he spends an afternoon at the horse races in Happy Valley, and goes shopping on Hollywood Road, where he buys Nina a red silk coat embroidered with green and blue peonies. An antique, but she rarely wears it. The coat smells of a too-sweet perfume—of tuberoses. It hangs in the back of her closet, its bright sheen hidden in plastic, so as not to eclipse her ordinary darker clothes.
Turn around, let me look at you, Philip says, when she first tries on the coat for him.
It fits you perfectly.
It was made to measure for you.
The color, too, suits you.
Sofia. She says the name outloud to herself.
Dr. Mayer, a therapist Nina went to for a year—the year she and Philip lived in Berkeley—tells her that jealousy sustains desire or that, at least, it arouses it, which also suggests how fragile desire is.
Dr. Mayer specializes in sex therapy. The walls of her office are covered with drawings of naked men and women coupling. She asks Nina a lot of intimate and embarrassing questions to which Nina replies with lies.
Not only do we need to find a partner, Dr. Mayer tells Nina, but we also need to find a rival.
She dislikes Dr. Mayer, she dislikes her self-assured tone, her taste in artwork, yet she feels duty bound to keep seeing her.
She tries to remember Dr. Mayer’s first name. An unusual name. A name that does not suit her.
You cannot change the present but you can reinvent the past—did Dr. Mayer say this as well? Or did someone else?
What, she wonders, would she reinvent?
Philip did not know Iris. Iris is a stranger. Only as he is leaving the party—a graduation party from college—does he stop at the door and offer her a ride. She is standing alone—her friends have left without her. Also, it has begun to rain; lightning flashes in the sky followed by the not so distant sound of thunder. Perhaps he has noticed her earlier, perhaps they spoke briefly. Or he dances with her. He hardly remembers. She is wearing a pretty sleeveless dress with a pattern of some kind. Her arms are slender, and it turns out she lives a few blocks from Philip.
No problem, he says, I’ll drive you home.
Thank you, I appreciate it, Iris says.
She does not have a coat. Gallantly, Philip takes off his jacket and puts it around her shoulders as they run to the car in the rain.
I’ve seen you around campus, he says, once they are inside his car.
I’m a freshman.
Oh.
What will you do next? Iris asks.
Go to graduate school. M.I.T.
Is that in Boston?
Cambridge, actually. And you? What do you want to do?
I don’t know yet. Maybe teach. I like kids. There are seven of us in my family. She laughs when she tells Philip this.
Lucky you. I only have one brother.
Oh, yeah. Is he older or younger?
Boy, look at that rain come down, he might also have said.
Can you see all right? Since she does not drive herself, she is not overly concerned.
So what do you want to teach? Philip asks, turning to look at her with a smile.
They might have gone on talking like this until they reach her home. Polite conversation, small talk. She is pretty in a pale, fragile sort of way and Philip might have wondered whether he will try to kiss her when he drops her off and whether she will let him—except that around a sharp curve in the road, a truck going the other way takes the curve too wide and crosses the dividing line. To avoid hitting the truck, Philip drives off the road.
Iris holds out her slender arms as if to ward off a blow and she lets out a little scream, more like a yelp.
Unaware of what has occurred, the truck driver keeps on going in the blinding rain.
Philip has no memory of the near miss or of the truck.
Only, on occasion, on a predawn, dark morning, awakening, he again hears that yelp.
She and Philip have been married for forty-two years, six months, and how many days? How many hours?
How childish she is.
And during those forty-two years how many countries have they been to? How many houses have they lived in? How many animals have they owned?
The animals are for Louise.
Two dogs, a cat, a hamster, several goldfish.
Louise must have finished dinner by now, she thinks.
And, of course, in those forty-two years, how many times have they made love?
What is the old joke about the beans in the jar? A bean goes into a jar for each time a couple makes love during their first year of marriage, then a bean comes out of the jar for each time the couple makes love ever after.
Nina first has sex on a camping trip. Inside a tent, on a sleeping bag, she remembers the discomfort of it—a stone or a root digs into the small of her back—then the sharp pain of her hymen tearing. In his excitement, the boy, whose name is Andrew, comes right away. They are camped near a stream and, as soon as he rolls off her, she takes the flashlight and goes outside. Shining the light on the insides of her legs, she sees that they are smeared with blood and sperm. Barefoot, she walks into the stream. The stones hurt her feet but the water is so cold it numbs them. Squatting, she begins to wash, throwing the cold water up herself with her hands when, across the stream, she hears a thrashing noise.
Andrew, she calls.
The thrashing is louder.
A bear, she thinks. A bear attracted by the smell of blood.
Andrew, she calls again.
Sounds are magnified at night, Andrew tries to explain.
A squirrel or a rabbit, he guesses.
She tells the story to Philip, only she changes it. For some unacknowledged reason, she does not want Philip to know how or when she lost her virginity and how distasteful it was. Instead, she tells him how, unexpectedly, during the night, she gets her period and how, flashlight in hand, she goes to the stream to wash. I’ve never run so fast, she says.