Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (28 page)

1

S
chrödinger: Life and Thought
was written by Walter Moore and published by Cambridge University Press in 1989. It’s a superb book, giving a detailed and dramatic narrative of Erwin Schrödinger’s life and a lucid explication of his ideas, not only his insights into quantum physics, but an account of his philosophical speculations as well. The author presents the world in which Schrödinger lived, his home, the places where he taught, the intellectual milieu around him—his passions, his friendships and the many women he loved. This is the book that Amy Bellacqua was reading.

Amy was twenty-eight and worked as a waitress at the Capri on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park. She had never been especially interested in physics but, as she said, she had nothing against it either. Furthermore, she liked biography and felt this one was good. Mostly good. It did have some fancy-looking equations, but they didn’t interrupt the flow of the story. Let me be frank—Amy was reading
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
because the young man who had moved into the apartment upstairs was getting his Ph.D. in physics and she wanted to be able to talk to him about something he liked the next time they met in the laundry room or the parking space out back. They rented flats in a small box-like house of yellowish stucco—Amy on the first floor, John Artopoulos on the second.

John was twenty-eight and was finishing a dissertation in theoretical physics at Stanford. In high school he had been a whiz at science and as a college freshman he had picked up a tattered paperback copy of George Gamow’s
Thirty Years That Shook Physics
and that book led to his becoming a physicist. He liked the informal style of the writing, and he was intrigued by Gamow’s drawings and most especially by his photographs—snapshots of Niels Bohr and his wife roaring off on a motorcycle, Werner Heisenberg taking a swim, a bare-chested Enrico Fermi swatting at a tennis ball, and Gamow himself with Wolfgang Pauli on a Swiss lake steamboat. Those people knew each other, got drunk together, sang songs and together developed quantum mechanics; he wanted to be part of that, wanted to join them. Now he was overworked and was beginning to wonder if that great sense of fun and friendship had gone out of physics. He spent his time in a small cubicle at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), or in his lonely apartment, or away at Heidi Egret’s studio north of Berkeley.

Heidi was twenty-eight, an artist, a painter. Of course she was still too young to be famous, but her reputation was growing and recently
California Spectrum
had listed her as one of the ten younger artists to keep an eye on. Her work had evolved rapidly, keeping pace with changes in the art market, and though she was not always in the spotlight she was usually nearby. She was best known for those abstract paintings in which she used a pointillist technique she called pixel transformation. People differed about Heidi’s work and whether it was advanced or merely an updated version of Seurat’s theories from a century ago, and some even debated whether it was well done or not. But everyone agreed that Heidi, who had spent some years as a surfer, was a knockout. John had met Heidi at a beach party one Saturday afternoon and had been dazzled.

2

That was the same Saturday that Amy Bellacqua had met John. Amy had been in the little parking area out back of the yellowish stucco house, trying to wedge a couple of tables into her small car. She had rolled the round table into place, its legs tilted up onto the back seat, but was having a hard time lifting and positioning the oblong table. Furthermore, she was getting hot. She rested one end of the table on the car seat and with her free hand she grabbed up the bottom edge of her jersey, mopping the sweat from her eyes just as the young man from upstairs came around the corner of the house in beach shorts and sunglasses, a duffle bag under his arm. He tossed the duffle bag into his car, then turned to her. “Can I help?” he asked, taking off his glasses.

“I hope so!” she said. It took a while, but together they were able to get both tables in. “Thanks,” Amy said, taking the opportunity to look at him openly now that they weren’t wrestling with the tables. “The tile makes them a little heavy,” she explained, then immediately regretted telling him the obvious.

“They look good, the tiles. Very colorful.”

Amy was uncomfortably aware that her damp jersey was clinging to her breasts. “Oh. Well. Thanks. I’m taking them to sell at a flea market. Actually.”

She smiled and waited for him to turn away so she could leave without being rude, but instead he said, “My name’s John Artopoulos,” and he put out his hand and she shook it and said, “I’m Amy Bellacqua.” He asked her if she worked at the flea market and she laughed and said, “No, I just go there when I have something to sell. I’m waitressing, mostly. What about you?” she asked.

“I’m working on a dissertation in physics.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Does it?” He looked surprised.

“Don’t you like physics?”

“Sure I do.” He laughed. “But it never sounds interesting to other people.” They talked of this and that for a brief while, then said good-bye and went their separate ways, John to the beach party and Amy to the flea market where she came across
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
and, after leafing through a few pages, she bought it.

3

John saw Heidi Egret’s paintings on their second date. “I like the colors in this one,” he said. “What’s it about? I mean, what’s it a picture of?”

Heidi hadn’t answered, so he turned to where she was seated cross-legged on her pink exercise mat, brushing out the tangles John’s frenzied embraces had made in her pale blond hair.

“I didn’t ask you to explain string theory. Right?” she said petulantly.

“Right,” he said.

“And you shouldn’t ask me to explain my paintings. It always confuses me to do that.—Anyway, what are we going to do next? Do you want a cigarette or something?”

From his first sight of Heidi at the beach party, John thought of her as the quintessential California girl. She had a tattoo on her right shoulder blade that other people might think was a devil’s pitchfork but which John saw as a trident, symbol of the sea god Poseidon. He had grown up in Massachusetts and had never met anyone like her—not just her looks—he’d never met anyone so open and easygoing, so laid-back. He called her his California, or his Californienne, which he meant as an endearment, but it annoyed Heidi, not simply because she was from Oregon but because, as she informed him on their third date, she wasn’t his. She was a free spirit and didn’t belong to him or to anyone. “Are you angry with me?” he asked. He had just driven up from Menlo Park and his knapsack slumped from his hand to the floor in disappointment.

“No. But we can go to the bedroom and make up if you want,” she said, brightening. “It beats talking.”

That’s how it was with John and Heidi. The only reason he wasn’t with her all the time was that his research fellowship kept him at SLAC, down in Menlo Park, and her half-time teaching at Contemporary Arts kept her up north of Berkeley, a long drive. Her studio, with its big slanted skylight, was a happier place than his desolate apartment, so each weekend John drove up to her place. The weekends took time away from his dissertation, which had come to a halt, but he hoped his work was going to go better since meeting Heidi.

4

One weekend Heidi went up to Oregon to visit her stepfather. “After all, he’s paying the rent here. I owe him a visit now and then,” she had told John. The weekend Heidi went to Oregon was the same weekend Amy Bellacqua asked John about something she had read in
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
.

Amy was sitting on the back steps reading the book when John came around the corner to his car carrying a red plastic bucket. She watched as he began to roll up his car windows, then she slid the book behind her and called out, “Hi!”

He turned and saw her. “I’ve decided to wash my car,” he said. “Just to see what color it really is.” He came to the steps, turned on the garden faucet and let the water run into his red bucket, then turned it almost off while he tried to think up a way to engage her.

“Actually, I think mine’s dirtier,” Amy said. John crouched by the bucket, the throat of his shirt hanging open, and she saw his chest hair.

“I’ve got a couple of sponges. You can borrow my soap, if you want,” he offered, catching Amy unaware as she gazed thoughtfully at his chest.

“What? Oh! That. Okay! You go ahead,” she told him. “I’ll go get dressed in something that it won’t matter if I get it soaked.” She snatched up the book and ducked inside the door, tore off her blouse and jeans, pulled on a pair of old cutoffs and a black Grateful Dead T-shirt. But she never much liked the Grateful Dead, didn’t want him to think she did, so she tore it off, started to pull on another but remembered it said
Boys Lie!
, clawed it off, tossed aside
Jesus is coming. Look busy!
and pulled on the white one that displayed a steaming cup of coffee—
The Daily Grind, Albany, New York
. Then she raced back outside to where John was soaping his car.

They washed their cars, all the while talking about the kinds of people you meet at flea markets or at the Stanford Linear Accelerator and about movies they liked and whether you’d want to live in San Francisco even if you could afford it, talked about things like that. John finished first and after hosing down his car he helped rinse Amy’s. When they were finished, he put his sponges and soaps into his bucket while she coiled the garden hose. And that was that, car washing was over.

Amy went indoors feeling elated and disappointed at the same time, which was very confusing. She showered and decided it would not be smart to get involved with somebody who lived right upstairs. She got dressed feeling very clearheaded. Then John knocked at her door and asked did she want to get something to eat and she said yes.

They drove in John’s freshly washed car, which now showed all its rust, and they ate at a deli. John asked Amy where she waitressed and she told him about the Capri restaurant on Santa Cruz which, she said, wasn’t big but she liked her job there. It happened that John knew something about restaurants, too. “My parents have a restaurant, a Greek restaurant, in Boston. That’s where I’m from. And you’re from Albany, New York,” he told her.

“What? Me? No, no, no!” She laughed. “That old T-shirt comes from New York. But I grew up outside Sacramento. My dad teaches high school science. My mom’s a guidance counselor. I’m just all California, nothing else. What’s it like in Massachusetts?” Amy asked him.

John had spent summers working on a lobster boat when he was in college, and Amy had spent those same summers as a life guard on the beach. They talked and talked and talked much longer than they realized and would have gone on talking forever if John hadn’t suddenly remembered—“Damn! I just remembered!”—that he had to go over to his office before five. So they drove back to their yellowish stucco apartment house. As they turned into their street John was feeling exhilarated and oddly light-headed, as if he had been drinking wine all afternoon and not simply talking with Amy.

“I have a question for you,” Amy told him. “I’m reading this book about Schrödinger.”

“You are?”

“Yes. I found it at the flea market. I’m up to the part where he develops those wave equations. And I was wondering—” She broke off.

“Wondering what?”

“Schrödinger was married, you know, but in the middle of winter during the Christmas holidays he went off to the Swiss mountains and shacked up with this woman and that’s when he did it.”

“Did what?”

“Did everything. For two whole weeks all he did was make love to this woman and write those equations.”

“Really? That’s the way it happened?” He didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

“It’s in the book. But nobody knows the woman’s name. Nobody can figure out who she was.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” he said, clearly surprised.

“What I want to know is, can you find who the woman was by looking into the equations?”

He glanced sideways at Amy to see if she were serious. “No,” he said.

“I think so,” said Amy, agreeable and firm.

They rolled to a stop in front of their apartment house. John shook his head, no, and turned to her as if he were about to say something—his mouth even opened a bit—but nothing came out.

“Yes. I think she must be in there somewhere,” Amy said. Then she hopped out of the car, turned and smiled at John. They both said it was a great car wash and lunch, then they waved and John drove off, telling himself, “Don’t get involved with a crazy woman, no matter how great she looks.”

5

Heidi taught part time at Contemporary Arts, north of Berkeley, and she told John how much she despised her job. “It’s a second-rate art school with third-rate students,” she said. Her voice was somewhat muffled because she was lying on her stomach on the pink exercise mat. “They’re so materialistic, I mean utterly. The idea of art for art’s sake, the idea of pure art, it’s beyond them. All they care about is money. A lot of them have part-time jobs and come to class so tired they fall asleep. I mean, they really doze off. They say they want to be artists and then they turn around and ask me how to make art pay, like I cared, or something—Now do up by my shoulders,” she said, giving directions to John, who was massaging her dark blond back, a complex surface which he thought more engaging than any dreamed of by Euclid, especially with its little trident tattoo.