The probability of a bear—Philip starts to say, but Nina cuts him off.
Priscilla—she remembers, Dr. Mayer’s first name.
For an instant, she wonders what has become of Andrew.
Doctor? Lawyer? Fireman?
She hardly remembers what he looks like—only that he was blond and robust—and chances are she would not recognize him—people change, age.
Sex with Philip is fine, she tells Dr. Mayer. They make love at least once a week. On Sunday morning, usually. And, yes, she always
has an orgasm. The problem lies elsewhere. That part is partly true. Nina feels resentful, bored, unfulfilled—how many different ways are there to describe this? The truth is, she refuses to sleep with Philip on Sunday or on any other day. A way of punishing him—she is not sure for what—only she does not tell Dr. Mayer this.
Dr. Mayer suggests that Nina find something to do. Something that interests her and makes her feel useful. She, Dr. Mayer, for instance, goes to a hospice in Sausalito once a week. She counsels people who are dying.
Why don’t you volunteer? she asks Nina. Volunteer at a homeless shelter.
For no reason she can explain, Nina starts to cry.
Dr. Mayer suggests that Nina and Philip come in together, as a couple.
The suggestion makes Nina cry harder.
Dr. Mayer suggests Nina take medication. Homeopathic medication.
Philip rarely takes anything—not even an aspirin after he falls and cuts his head in the restaurant on Belle-Île and when, the next day, the whole side of his face is black and blue.
What about when you fell out of the tree and broke your leg? Nina asks him. A compound fracture with the bone sticking out must have been very painful.
I guess it was. A stoic, Philip rarely complains.
How old were you then?
I’m not sure. Nine or ten.
Outside, the rain, heavy now, beats against the window pane.
The year they spend in Berkeley, it rains every day—thirty-four inches of precipitation in that year alone. Or dense fog. She hates the eucalyptus trees that line the street on which they live—how their bark hangs in long loose strips like flayed flesh. The rented house has a deck with a hot tub on it but she soon grows tired of sitting in it by herself. How old is Louise then? Eleven, twelve? She has to drive her everywhere: to school, to tennis lessons, to piano and ballet. Except on Saturdays, when Louise goes horseback riding and Philip drives her to the stables in Marin. He sits in the car and corrects student papers while he waits for her. Or else he goes to a nearby coffee shop and reads the newspaper. Lorna lives in Marin. Lorna, the brilliant, unstable, curly-haired Irish astrophysicist, who overdoses on sleeping pills.
Each morning, Nina takes the little white pills Dr. Mayer has prescribed. The pills look alike but are gold, silver, copper, and she lets them melt on her tongue. They are supposed to dispel her anxiety, her malaise.
Another nice word.
Chou-fleur, malaise
—she will keep a list.
And, twice a week, she drives across the Bay Bridge to work in a battered-women’s shelter in San Francisco. She works in the office, stuffing envelopes, licking and stamping them—mind-numbing work.
Away all day, in addition to teaching, Philip is doing research at the university. He is stimulated, satisfied, and exercised.
He rides home on his bicycle and they argue.
You said you would be home at seven. It’s now after eight. Ten past eight.
I’m sorry. The meeting went on longer than I thought.
Dinner is ruined.
I said I was sorry.
Last night you said—
Nina, please don’t start that up again.
Tell me why not?
Mom. Dad.
Okay, honey. Let’s sit down and eat.
And Nina slams down the overcooked dish on the table, spilling some of its contents, and runs upstairs.
Mom!
Louise is thirty-five and not yet married.
Who will walk her down the aisle?
She takes another sip of wine.
Mon chéri,
she leans over to whisper to him.
Ma chérie,
is how he answers her.
So Louise won’t understand, they occasionally speak French. They say things like
Un avion est tombé au milieu de l’Atlantique et il paraît que tous les passagers sont morts,
or
On dit que Jim le garagiste en ville a violé une petite fille,
but soon Louise understands enough French and asks, What plane crashed? Who died? or Jim did what?
Now they speak about more ordinary things; sometimes, she swears in French—
merde,
she says, if she accidentally bumps into something or if she drops a dish and it breaks.
Merde
is also how one says “good luck” in French.
“Luck alone,” Philip tells his students, “rarely solves a mathematical problem but concentration and imagination do. Especially the imagination.” To prove his point, he tells the story of what the German mathematician David Hilbert is reported to have said when one of his students dropped out of his math class to become a poet: “Good—he did not have the imagination to become a mathematician.”
“Any of you poets?” Philip asks.
For a few seconds lightning illuminates the room and Philip’s face—his high brow, his deep-set eyes, his determined, chiseled chin.
Abe.
The nickname some of his colleagues have given him on account of his height and lanky frame; she rarely uses it.
He has also been mistaken for a Jew, but his grandparents were Polish Catholics from a town in Silesia.
One and two and three and four and five, Nina counts, waiting for the thunder, which sounds at number seven.
She is afraid of thunderstorms, of lightning striking the house, but tonight it will not matter.
She is not afraid.
A loud clap of thunder followed by a blue light filling the cabin of his boat is how Jean-Marc describes being struck by lightning to her. The acrid smell of ozone and burning electrical insulation, he adds, grimacing and reaching for her pack of cigarettes although he does not smoke.
She is sitting outside in a deck chair, sunbathing. She is topless.
She did not hear him arrive and it is too late to put the top of her bathing suit back on.
Overhead, dark clouds have begun to form and, in the garden, the hydrangeas have taken on a darker, almost navy blue hue. It is about to rain. The reason they talk about the weather and the possibility of an approaching storm.
He has brought over a book for Philip. A book on sailing.
Philip is out, she tells Jean-Marc. He’s playing tennis.
Dieu merci,
the sailboat was grounded, Jean-Marc continues, exhaling a stream of smoke, but the lightning destroys the radio, the radar, the Loran, the navigation lights, all the electronics on board. Fortunately, I was not far from shore.
How far? she asks.
You have nice breasts, he says.
Just then she feels a drop of rain.
Reaching for her shirt, she says, we better go in the house.
Just then, too, Philip drives up in the car.
It’s raining, he tells them. We had to stop playing.
The affair lasts only the one summer. If Philip was to suspect or if he was to accuse her of it, she would deny it.
She is a liar.
The liar says:
This is a lie.
She can never
get it.
If it is false then it must be true, yet it cannot be true because then it would be false—the paradox eludes her. The reason, perhaps, that mathematicians go mad trying to solve problems of logic.
Or are they trying to solve problems of Truth?
Another flash of lightning and she stands up too quickly. Dizzy, she waits a moment for the feeling to pass. Then groping her way in the dark, she goes to the bathroom. Once inside, she shuts the door and turns on the light.
The light is sudden and too bright. In the mirror, her face looks strange—pale and her eyes are enormous. She picks up her hairbrush and starts to brush her hair. What for? she says out loud to the face in the mirror and puts the hairbrush down.
She starts to open the medicine cabinet but changes her mind, the contents are familiar.
She looks at his toothbrush in the glass, at his toothpaste lying next to it—again, he has forgotten to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube—she looks away.
Drying her hands on a towel, she turns to open the bathroom door. Hanging on the hook are his striped pajama pants and a white cotton T-shirt. The T-shirt is so old it is transparent. The older and softer the T-shirts, the more he likes them. Next to the
T-shirt and pajama pants hangs the pretty, cambric nightgown she bought in Rome a month ago.
While Philip is attending lectures, Nina sightsees and shops. In addition to the nightgown, she buys an expensive brown leather shoulder bag with a gold clasp in a store near Piazza di Spagna—the leather, the saleswoman says to convince her, is indestructible. Feeling guilty, Nina does not show Philip the shoulder bag. Later, she tells herself, she will.
Now she never will.
In the Palazzo Doria Pamphili, Nina stands in front of
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
and stares at the red-haired angel and his outstretched black wings. Except for a swirl of white cloth, the angel, his back to the viewer, is naked; he is playing the violin for the Holy Family as they rest. Only Joseph and the donkey are listening; holding the baby Jesus in her arms, Mary is fast asleep.
Nina cannot move away from Caravaggio’s angel.
Time for lunch, Philip says, impatient.
Wait, she pleads.
She tries to remember what the conference in Rome is about. Something to do with computational and scheduling problems: finding the shortest route that takes a salesman to every city exactly once, finding the most efficient way to pack a truck or pack a bin. Problems for which there are no algorithms, problems that do not interest her.
She packs the nightgown and the new shoulder bag in the bottom of her suitcase. No problem.
She will give the shoulder bag to Louise, all of a sudden, she decides.
The decision and its suddenness pleases her.
As for her pretty nightgown, it might as well be made out of burlap.
Take it off,
he always says.
It has stopped raining and, again, she goes and opens the window and leans out. The trees stand as massive shapes in the garden; above them the sky is dark. She cannot see any stars.
All is quiet.
Shutting the window, she goes back and sits next to him, by the side of the bed.
How was your day? Again, she asks. This time she will listen. How was yours?
I began a triptych. The first panel is going to be a calm sea, the second a stormy sea, the third—she stops and shakes her head.
Has she drunk too much wine?
Holding up the bottle, she tries to read the label in the dark. An Italian wine: Flaccia—she cannot make out the rest.
His arms around her in bed, he whispers endearments in an Italian accent. He makes up names to make her laugh.
They are trying to conceive.
He touches her breasts.
Tell me again who Fibonacci was?
A thirteenth-century mathematician.
And what did he discover?
His hand is on her stomach.
A number sequence where each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 …
He puts his hand in between her legs.
Tell me about the rabbits.
You start with two rabbits, a male and a female, born in January, and two months later, they give birth to another pair of rabbits, and two months later, that pair of rabbits gives birth to another pair, and each new pair of rabbits produces another pair who …
His fingers move quickly, confident.
The question is how many pairs of rabbits will there be in a year? In two years?
What if a rabbit dies? She is having trouble speaking, she is about to come.
The rabbits don’t die; the rabbits are immortal.
After two years there are 46,368 pairs of rabbits, he says as, with a groan, he gets on top of her.
And in less than a year, there is Louise.
He finds Fibonacci number sequences everywhere: in flower petals, in pinecones, ferns, artichoke leaves, the spirals of shells, in the curve of waves.
In Louise’s newborn face.
When Philip first holds her in his arms, she is a day old. He weeps.
She has never seen Philip cry before nor has she since—not when his brother Harold died, not when his father died. Then, he looked pale and perturbed but he did not shed a tear.
The last time I cried—really cried—he tells Nina, is when my dog died. I think I was fourteen. The dog was a mixed breed—half German shepherd, half something else. His name was Natty Bumppo. He was a great dog—he had a sense of humor. He used to bare his teeth and grin at me.
How about when Iris died?
she wants to ask but does not.
She pictures him, dry eyed and stricken, in his one dark suit as he slowly makes his way down the church aisle.
Instead, she asks, How did the dog die?
Not too bad, Philip says, as he puts the booties on Louise’s tiny feet. A perfect fit.
What are you going to knit her next? Nina asks. A sweater set?
Across from the hotel where the conference was held, Philip explains, there was a crafts shop. I have no idea why I went in—something must have caught my eye—a big basket full of wool right by the door. Big balls of natural wool and the woman in the shop said knitting was relaxing. Anyone could knit. She sold me the needles, the wool, the instructions. I went back to the airport and while I waited for my flight I began to knit and, she was right, it helped calm me down. On the plane, too, as luck would have it, the woman seated next to me offered to help. I had dropped some stitches, she said.
What, Nina wonders, caught Philip’s eye? Or, more likely, who? A lonely, talkative woman who sells wool and who dresses in an earth-tone smock and wears noisy wooden clogs? To her outfit, Nina adds an abstract-shaped silver pendant—the work of an artist friend—dangling on her unsupported breasts. She is not Philip’s type. Instead, Nina imagines, a tidy blonde with an engaging, bright smile, who sits next to Philip on the plane and points out the dropped stitches.