An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (7 page)

“L
YDIA, MEET DANIEL.” OLIN TURNED TO ME WITH A
look exaggerated in meaning. “Daniel, meet Lydia.”

We exchanged our awkward hellos. Olin rushed glasses of wine into our hands, “Empty hands, empty hands, the devil's playthings.”

“I think, Olin,” Lydia said, “it is
idle
hands.”

“Idol hands? Really?” Olin's voice in its fullest mock sincerity. “Well, the human hand is venerable, certainly. I can understand the desire to idolize it. I could sign up for that religion. Such a nicer object to kneel in front of than, say, a cross. Idol hands.”

I looked at Lydia. “He is hopeless, you know.”

“No asides, Daniel, no asides. I hear them all. Tonight is no Restoration drama. No monologues in the middle of the room in the midst of others. No invisible walls. Tonight we get to talk. Here are my two favorite colleagues (if, Lydia, I can claim a physicist as a colleague—I think I can) and more than a bottle of wine for each of us, carefully chosen to suit our personalities, wine with a personality itself—all we have to do is drink it to be brilliant conversationalists.” Olin looked to each of us in turn, an imploring look, as of a fawn to her mother. “And I'm not hopeless. Or I am. I forget which.” A hand on each of our shoulders, Olin guided us into the living
room, sat us down in facing armchairs, a fire not casting off too much heat, whose flames ringed the edge of our glasses with orange light, and backing away, “The coq au vin calls me back to him. Occupy yourselves with each other and don't despair, I'll return.”

I looked at Lydia looking at the fire, and then I looked at it myself. “A physicist?”

“Yes, it's true.” She paused as if, I thought, deciding whether or not to go on, knowing that the next word might incline the conversation to that inevitable sense of confession, helpless as gravity, of unfolding oneself in words to another person hardly known, an act in some ways more intimate than sex, more erotic, denying the retreat to embrace when words fail, no means of communication beyond what can be said that, unlike physical intimacy, is not a knowledge of another person by moving the body to the pleasures the body opens, but the opposite, knowing her only by what she tells of her life, some glimpse as strangely private as the blue vein in her neck seen just beneath the outspread veil of her hair when she looks away at the fire, or the pulse of her wrist when, reaching for her glass, the cuff of her sleeve withdraws. There was a magazine on the table between the chairs with an owl on the cover. She opened it. Two yellow eyes, one on each page, beak in the gutter—the perfect symmetry of the owl's face creased, as if it could be folded in half. And then Lydia unfolded each of those pages, lengthening away from each other, two, three, four times, until the pages extended almost past her own arms' reach; sitting
in her lap, outstretched arms holding the last feathers by their tips, spread out the whole wingspan of a great horned owl in flight. A fork dropped in the kitchen; Olin uttered some curse I couldn't quite hear. As Lydia began folding the wings back upon themselves she spoke: “It wasn't what my father expected; not at all. He was a musician, a cellist. I grew up playing the violin. I even composed some pieces. He had the highest hopes of my being a prodigy.”

“It sounds as if you were.”

“I loved it, but I didn't have to
think
about it, and as I grew older, I wanted to think, to struggle, to not understand. Music was second nature, almost innate. And so in college I turned from music to astronomy—”

“The celestial spheres—” I interrupted.

“Yes. The music of the spheres.” She took a sip of wine. “Astronomy led me to physics, and here I am.”

“As simple as that?”

“Well, it's not
that
simple. It is,” she paused, glancing at me, “musical. My father couldn't understand that, and I couldn't find a way to explain it to him. It is music that taught me how to think about the universe.”

“The ‘universe'—I have to admit, it sounds so implausibly lofty. Your job is thinking about the universe. I find that a little, well, intimidating.”

“Don't. It's your job, too—isn't it? Thinking about the universe?”

“I read books. I make my students read the books I read. And then we talk about them.” I felt bad at the sound of my voice, the defeat in it.

She looked at me for a moment, and tilted her forehead toward me just slightly as she spoke. “Exactly the same.” Small awkwardness: she kept rubbing her thumb in circles underneath the glass that now empty chimed low with the motion. “I disappointed my father.”

“Mine disappointed me.” Olin came back before I could elaborate on what I didn't mean to say. I stood up as if I hadn't spoken the words that had just left my mouth.

“Dinner, kids, is served.” A bottle of wine open between two candles whose light, after leaving the fireside, seemed to end in needle points. The chicken dished on the plates already, a thick burgundy stew steaming, and on the table, a baguette, and asparagus in a scalloped bowl. We all sat down, and Olin, picking up his glass, initiated the dinner, “To friends of mine becoming friends to each other.” We clinked and drank; a moth flew in circles within the shade of the floor lamp.

“What are you teaching this term, Olin?” Lydia asked, gracefully letting the intimate thread of the earlier conversation drop.

“I am teaching nothing disguised as an upper division class on philosophy of language.”

“Olin has mastered, so he tells me, the ability to riddle a student with her own questions in such a way that the student feels more intelligent for knowing nothing at all.”

“What a skill, Olin,” Lydia said, “you are a veritable Socrates.”

In full seriousness, deadpan, “It has been said before,
exactly so, dear Lydia, on a number of evaluations. It is lucky, I should add, that Phaedrus and Meno didn't get a chance to fill out evaluations; Socrates, I can attest, might have found it hard to get tenure. He was lazy, too, about publishing. But Lydia, enough about me, no more talking about me, I bore myself, I have bored myself for years, and see that boredom reaching into the future; I am just as Dickinson has it:
It might be more boring without the boringness;
that is exactly me.”

“That
is
exactly you, Olin,” I answered, “save Dickinson's was ‘more lonely without the loneliness.'”

“‘Loneliness,'
that's right. I always forget there's a difference.” Olin paused, struck by himself. “And Lydia, what does the semester hold for you?”

Lydia put her fork and knife down on the china. “I don't have any teaching at all. They've given me the semester for research and writing.”

“And what are you working on?” I asked.

“Inflationary theory.” Lydia looked slightly abashed.

“It sounds awful,” Olin said, “like doomsday economics or the scientific study of balloon tying.”

“I know, it does sound awful. And I am very bad at tying balloons into animals; I tried once, at a niece's birthday party; I made a poodle that looked like a spider that made a five-year-old cry before it popped. No, it is a thinking back to the moment of the Big Bang, that first instant in which the universe exploded from a singularity to an infinitely expanding everything. There are some theorists, and I guess now I am one of them, who suspect that
multiple other universes began at the same time, each infinite in scope just like ours, but perhaps formed so differently as to have entirely other natural laws. These universes are, some say, the multiverse; they aren't wholly separate from one another. There are realms, theoretically, where one universe touches and merges into the other, where the ‘laws' collide, a genuine chaos that causes the birth of another universe. It's that collision I'm considering.” She looked a little flushed, seemed a bit out of breath; she didn't make eye contact with anyone, as if she had just divulged an embarrassing, half-thought-out superstition.

“Gravity working in reverse?” I offered. “Purple skies? Warm ice?”

“Well, sort of, but no, not at all. The difficulty, I find, in trying to explain any of this to anyone, even to myself, is that it is impossible to imagine. We always imagine other worlds by imagining this one.”

“We put wings on a horse!” Olin exclaimed.

“Yes. Pegasus. Monsters. Faeries. They are the other-worldly-this-world; it doesn't help me in my work. It is, I think, I sort of fear, my
imagination
that is the problem. I'm trying to think about another world, another universe. I do the math and the math points at the possibility. But when I describe it to myself, when I write about it in my notes, I reconfigure only what I already know, have seen already, or felt. There's only this world to imagine another. It is a serious problem for me. The world becomes what I imagine of a world.”

“It doesn't sound like science,” I said.

“It isn't science, Daniel. It's Proust,” Olin offered, “who writes not only of himself, and the endless parties, and the social hierarchies, but also of the multiple selves inside the self, one self a stranger to the other, the other self this self imagines, and the odd times when two versions of the self, like two books open face to face, occupy the same instant of time, and how the world bends its relation to time so that time is ambivalent, moves in two directions, past and future, and more directions than that, and Albertine, dead Albertine, sends a telegram to our narrator who, knowing she is dead, reads the note and believes she is alive. He misread the name; that's what he did—he didn't read it right, he made a mistake.” Olin took a sip of wine. “Literature and physics, the muses holding hands.”

“Do you teach Proust?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, I do. That's all I teach. I just refuse to do it in a class. I simply make the moment Proustian when I can, without anyone taking note of the lesson. I rescue Proust from his pages and put him back into the world. It's people knowing they're being ‘taught' that makes education impossible. The mind loves to get in the way of itself, and then we think we are thinking.”

“You're jaded, Olin,” I said.

“I know. And so are you. But you, unlike me, are, as you'd say, an
Isolato.”

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “An
Isolato?”

“Our friend Daniel is a Melvillian; he seems sane, but trust me, underneath the calm exterior is a man capable of feeling the cold November of his soul in any month,
and is equally capable of shipping out to the tropics. Save for him, November is the endless month in which every class occurs, and to ship out he must build his own boat—the novel he talks about writing, but hasn't.”

I felt a degree of chagrin, Olin revealing more about me than I would have revealed about myself; I was glad of it. He painted a picture of me for Lydia—and did this, I suspect, on my behalf—that gave me a darker substance, a greater mystery, than I could paint for myself. Olin, our little Marcel, was trying to make me an object of romance.

“Melville named—well, Ishmael named—the men on the whale ship
isolatos
. . . each man an island to himself.”

“A sad vision.”

I looked at Lydia. “It is—” The moth had ceased flying; it walked the top of the lampshade's circle. Olin stared at it as we talked. “—a vision that changes.”

“Death is such a nuisance,” Olin said in a low voice, talking it seemed to himself, “always reminding us it's around.” He looked up. The atmosphere of the night had inexplicably changed. There was in the air a sorrow we felt and could only dispel by talking not of it, but through it.

“I've not been reading
Moby-Dick
, but
The Encantadas
, a short work on the Galapagos Islands. Those islands, many sailors say, are made of what they call ‘clinkers.' The ground wasn't normal ground, but comprised of hard and resonant rocks that, stepped on, dully ring like a muffled bell. Sailors when they landed there would
scratch their names on these rocks. And sailors yet to come would arrive and step on those names when they stepped on the rocks, and the name wouldn't be spoken, but would ring out.”

“It's a beautiful image,” Lydia said. “Is it true?”

“I don't know. I only read books; I don't actually
live
. I've only read about those islands. I've never been, though my father has.”

“And did he step on the names and make them ring?”

“I don't know. He didn't mention it. Though I imagine it that way.” I paused, hesitant at the night's unexpected intimacy. “That feels to me to be what a novel is, stepping on the ground and every step rings out a name—it's what I would like to write, but can't seem to start.” I felt I needed to change the tone of what I was saying, self-pitying and self-defeating as it was becoming. “I like this thought of stepping on the names to learn them, reading as an act of the body more than the mind. Reading might be a vast ruse. We are distracted by the names because we understand them—the names for everything. But our mind is more the stick that strikes the gong than we can admit. We don't often hear the music beneath the speaking, the chime beneath the names.”