Authors: Kamy Wicoff
“You have a
fireplace
?” she said.
Dr. Sexton turned and smiled, patting a spot beside her on the rug. “Isn’t it lovely?”
Jennifer approached cautiously. The hearth was perfectly positioned a few feet away from the couch, warming the sitting area with its glow, and the chimney extended upward
directly to the center of the ceiling, an unlikely placement indeed. Walking toward the fire, Jennifer told herself this had to be one of Dr. Sexton’s creations, despite feeling its growing warmth as she approached. Entranced, she reached out her hand to touch it.
“Jennifer!” Dr. Sexton cried, just as Jennifer yanked her hand back in pain. “How do you think it could produce heat if I hadn’t made it hot? For goodness’ sake. You ought to run cold water over that.” Jennifer, the tips of two of her fingers turning pink from a very minor burn, walked briskly over to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap.
“Is it real?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Dr. Sexton answered. “How on earth could I have a real fireplace smack in the middle of my apartment, in this building? It took months of work, this hologram,” she said. “But it was worth it, with winter coming on. I loathe winter. In the house I used to live in, we had a magnificent fireplace. An indispensable comfort on nights like these.”
Jennifer noted the use of the word
we
(for the second time that day, she thought), a term she’d never heard Dr. Sexton utter before. Her thoughts turned to Dr. Terry as she entered the kitchen at Dr. Sexton’s suggestion that she pour herself a cup of tea. Surely she and Dr. Terry were the
we
Dr. Sexton was referring to.
Jennifer carried her tea into the living room. She sat down on the floor next to Dr. Sexton, tucked her ankles beneath her, and took a sip. “Is this from the tea shop you told me about?” Jennifer asked. “Mariage Frères?” Mariage Frères was a magnificent tea shop in Paris, apparently, a city to which Jennifer had never been.
“No,” Dr. Sexton said. “This one comes from none other than Hanoi! I had a splendid time there. An unforgettable
landscape. Someday,” she added, “when your children are older, we should do some traveling together. It would do you good.” Dr. Sexton put an affectionate hand on Jennifer’s knee. “So,” she said, “tell me. What’s this about Norman?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, “he’s got a girlfriend. They’ve been together four months, but apparently it’s
very serious
. He didn’t bother to tell me about it, of course, and when I brought the boys to his place, there she was, all perky in an apron, making holiday cookies, and there was a wreath on the door, the whole thing. She kissed the boys. A lot. In front of me. It was like I was being ambushed by a sitcom.” Dr. Sexton patted her sympathetically. “Norman was quite impressed with himself that she’ll be thirty any minute now.” Jennifer sighed. “It isn’t really her, or him, even,” she admitted. “It’s me. Suddenly I felt like I was on the outside of something, my nose up against the glass, out in the cold.” Jennifer cupped her hands tightly around her teacup. “It’s so strange and painful to have created this unit, this thing, that is supposed to keep you safe and last forever, and then to lose it without any idea of what to replace it with. You know?”
“Yes,” Dr. Sexton said. “I do.” They were quiet for a moment. Another log met its end.
“What happens when it burns out?” Jennifer asked. “Do you have to add virtual wood?”
“I let it,” Dr. Sexton said. “That’s part of the pleasure. A dying fire.”
Another long moment passed. Dr. Sexton, it was clear, was not going to volunteer information about her personal life, even in response to Jennifer’s sharing details of her own. Jennifer was just going to have to come out and ask her.
“So,” she began, “where did you live before? And with who?”
“With
whom
,” Dr. Sexton corrected, smiling. Sitting up a bit,
she turned to Jennifer. “Surely you must have put this together by now,” she said. “You or Vinita, as bright as you are.” She turned back to the fire. “The Internet makes it relatively easy, of course, though I’ve done my best to avoid a presence there. But still there would be clues. About my partner, the great Susan Terry, and, for anyone motivated to look closely, about the nature of our relationship. The sapphic secret is no longer so secret that it can hide in plain sight. Am I right?”
Jennifer nodded, a bit sheepishly.
“I’m curious,” Dr. Sexton said. “What did you make of it? Of her, Dr. Terry’s, illustrious career? Of my place at her side, and of the fact that not once, in a single, solitary interview or acceptance speech, did she ever mention me by name?”
This took Jennifer completely off guard. Dr. Terry’s failure to acknowledge Dr. Sexton as her partner had not been her or Vinita’s focus. But now that Dr. Sexton pointed it out, it was glaring: nowhere in the articles or profiles of Dr. Terry was their relationship ever mentioned.
“We weren’t really thinking about that,” Jennifer said. “We, I mean Vinita, we were more thinking, it just seemed strange, you moving in here so suddenly, and then the app, relying on an area that Dr. Terry also works on, you know, quantum foam …”
“You are making no sense whatsoever,” Dr. Sexton said sharply. “What are you trying to say?”
Jennifer took a deep breath. “Did
you
invent the app?” she asked. “Or did Dr. Terry?”
Dr. Sexton’s eyes widened, and her head jerked back in naked disbelief. She remained frozen in this posture for a moment and then began to shake her head and laugh. “
Naturellement!
” she said. “How fitting. It is remarkable how rooted we become in our own view of things. I look at the public record of Susan’s life and find
myself
missing. You look
at the app and find
Susan
missing, or at least assume that I could not have done it without her.” Jennifer began to apologize, but Dr. Sexton waved her off. “I don’t come off too well in the record of all those journals and prizes, or in the annals of scientific achievement, I know. I never really went in for that sort of thing. It’s a job in and of itself, my dear, seeking that kind of recognition. Very time-consuming. For most scientists, however, it’s a necessary evil. It’s impossible to do the work otherwise. One needs resources, institutional support, money. But I have money, and Susan gave me access to the rest. We were an open secret, in more ways than one— she the superstar, and a little lab space for me the price of acquiring her. They’d give her the professorship and bask in her glory, and in turn she always made sure I had access to what I needed to continue my research.”
“But that changed?” Jennifer said.
“It’s a long story,” Dr. Sexton said, her slender fingers slowly scratching the soft skin behind Lucy’s enormous ears. “I suppose I’ve never told it all the way through.”
“Please?” Jennifer said. Smiling, she added, “I bet it’s a good one, knowing you.”
Dr. Sexton let out a little laugh and clasped Jennifer’s hand warmly. “What a wondrous connection we’ve formed,” she said. “And in so short a time.”
Jennifer felt it too. For a moment she thought of her dishonesty, lying to Dr. Sexton about how much she was using the app. But somehow she knew: if Dr. Sexton ever found out, she would forgive her.
“So?” Jennifer said. “Will you tell me?”
Dr. Sexton nodded, and, after getting up briefly to pour herself a second cup of tea, settled in beside Jennifer again. With Lucy’s heavy head resting in her lap, she began.
* * *
T
HE STORY BEGAN ON
the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Dr. Sexton and a younger brother, whom she evidently preferred not to discuss, were raised by aging parents, both members of old and established New York families, both on their third marriages, and, surprisingly, both previously childless. Dr. Sexton’s father was fifty-six when she was born, her mother forty, and her household was a quiet, scholarly one, dominated by her father’s gentlemanly but advanced pursuits of astronomy and linguistics, and her mother’s love of entomology, which had resulted in a butterfly collection to rival Nabokov’s. Neither parent was much interested in children, as it turned out, and it was not until Dr. Sexton reached the age of eight that her father began to take notice of her. She had an exceptional mind and was quick to grasp concepts her father assumed beyond her reach. By the age of ten, the acute loneliness of her early childhood behind her, the young Diane had become her father’s prize student and intellectual confidant and was soon pulled from private school to pursue her studies with her father at home. Her mother had no objection, as she was often away for extended periods on collecting trips. Her brother, who was sent to boarding school not long afterward, was resentful.
Diane, for her part, wanted nothing more than to escape the dull goings-on at the all-girls school she’d been attending and threw herself into her new role with passion, quickly extending her studies well beyond her father’s chosen fields. Colleagues of his became her informal tutors in a variety of subjects, but by the time she was seventeen, physics had become her great and all-consuming passion, and she had outgrown the ability of these men to teach her. She wanted to go to university. She wanted to jump into the quantum fray, where physicists had recently determined the existence of quarks, a discovery that thrilled her. It was, however, 1964.
Her world at home resembled an enlightened eighteenth-century household, headed by a gentleman scholar committed to the instruction of a brilliant daughter, while the world outside resembled, as Dr. Sexton put it,
Mad Men
. Undeterred, the young Diane applied to numerous physics programs and, with her money and connections, eventually found a place at the University of Chicago, home of Enrico Fermi and, most important, Maria Goeppert Mayer. Goeppert Mayer had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963—the only woman since Marie Curie. She was to be Diane’s mentor.
Diane received this news in February. A month later, her father died suddenly of a heart attack.
“I was utterly lost,” Dr. Sexton said, shushing Lucy, who was emitting a series of stifled yelps, her eyelids fluttering as she dreamed of squirrels. “I had no friends my own age, having immersed myself completely in my father’s world. My mother, when my need was greatest—perhaps precisely for that reason—became more distant than ever. It was almost as though my brother and I had been orphaned, and soon we were. The summer before I was supposed to go to Chicago, we lost our mother too. She was killed in a climbing accident while giving chase to a Kaiser-i-Hind butterfly in the Himalayas.” Dr. Sexton laughed darkly. “Can you imagine? My father had just died, and my mother dead not five months later, chasing a butterfly?” Jennifer couldn’t. “My brother threw himself into his studies, determined to forget my careless parents and make his own fortune. We rarely speak now, but he ended up in your line of work, my dear. Politics, that sort of thing.” Jennifer was about to ask Dr. Sexton more about her brother, but she went on, and Jennifer did not want to interrupt her.
“My memories of that time are scarce,” Dr. Sexton said. “All I can tell you is that at the age of seventeen I came into a great deal of money, and there was nobody but an extremely
indulgent trustee, an old friend of my father’s who adored me, to tell me what to do with it. And so, with the impetuousness of youth, I told the University of Chicago ‘no, thank you’ and set off to see the world. Can you believe it?” Dr. Sexton said, shaking her head and laughing. “‘No, thank you’ to Maria Goeppert Mayer! I sent a telegram, like a coward, something I regret to this day.” She paused, looking into the fire. “I flew to the Orient—an unfashionable way of saying it now, but quite exotic then. I was looking for my mother, I suppose. Driven by anger and grief.” This time it was Jennifer who squeezed Dr. Sexton’s hand. “Curiosity drove me, too, of course. Having spent my adolescent years masquerading as an eighteenth-century scholar, I wanted to channel my inner adventurer, to live the life of a fearless explorer.” Dr. Sexton gestured to an illustration hanging on the wall. “Eighteenth-century women scientists, and the countless other women scientists I soon became obsessed with from centuries before and since, were better suited than anyone I knew to be my guides. In fact, the first piece I ever collected in the little museum I have here,” she said, pointing as Jennifer rose to take a closer look, “was that plate, taken from
Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium
by the Dutch naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who, at fifty-two, after selling most of her belongings to fund the trip, traveled to Surinam with her daughter in 1699 to classify new species of insects.” Jennifer studied the exquisite illustration. It depicted, in vivid ink that was both delicate and bold, painstaking and ravishing, the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. “As you can see,” Dr. Sexton added quietly, “Merian’s specialty was butterflies.”
Just then, the last log in the virtual fire settled into the grate with a thud, its coals going from orange to red.
“But I digress!” Dr. Sexton said. “And the fire won’t wait. Onward, to Susan. I traveled for several years. I will be forever
grateful to my mother and these women,” she added, glancing around her apartment at her treasures, “for inspiring me. During those years I learned to be alive, and to seduce men and women alike with a heady sense of conquest.” At this she winked at Jennifer mischievously. “But it was not the life for me, mostly because I couldn’t stay away from physics any longer. I had to come back to the United States to resume my work! The quantum universe was expanding so rapidly then, and I’d managed to keep track of things even when I was in parts of the world that were very remote. I could not apply to Maria again, however. And so, upon my return, I set out to find a place in another PhD program—to lie about my previous education if I had to.
“And so I did. Lie, which was much easier then, and enter a PhD program too. That was when I met Susan. At Caltech. They’d only just begun accepting women. There were only, in fact, we two. And the men—Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, William Fowler—an intimidating group, to say the least. But Susan had arrived a few years prior to me, and, rather than see me as a rival, she mentored me. Our first bond was intellectual, and it lasted many years before developing into something more. By that time, Susan had already established herself as one of the most gifted physicists in the country. I, however, had established myself as a mouthy crackpot, who could talk of only one thing when studying quantum mechanics, even after string theory emerged:
time travel
.” Jennifer smiled. “I was officially a kook. But Susan loved my passion, and she alone, perhaps, understood what I was capable of. You asked if Susan invented this app?” Dr. Sexton said, looking at Jennifer. Jennifer nodded, again feeling bad for doubting her. “I would answer that we did it together. Nothing exists in a vacuum, least of all invention. There are others I worked with over the years to whom I owe a debt, but
none more than her. Which makes it all the more difficult that she has no idea that I’ve achieved it.”