Special Topics in Calamity Physics (42 page)

Hands folded in my lap, I tilted my head and set loose a Powerful Gaze of Omniscience across the room, a gaze reminiscent of the doves Noah set loose from the deck of his Ark, doves that returned to him with twigs.

"So said Thucydides, Book Two," I whispered.

Baba au Rhum's eyes bulged.

After three days of such agonizing meals, I deduced from the defeated look in Dad's eyes he'd come to the same conclusion I had, that it was best we find alternative accommodation, because, although it was all well and good they'd had bell-bottoms and sideburn length in common back at Harvard, this was the era of the ohs, epoch of serious hair and cigarette pants. Being Bon Amis at Harvard in the late 1970s with shirts fashioned out of cheesecloth and a widespread popularity of clogs and clip-on suspenders was certainly not greater than or equal to being Bon Amis
now
with minimalist fitted shirts in cotton blends and a widespread popularity of collagen and clip-on headsets so one could give orders hands free.

I was wrong, however. Dad had been severely brainwashed (see "Hearst, Patty,"
Almanac of Rebels and Insurgents,
Skye, 1987). He cheerfully announced he was going to spend the
entire day
with Servo at La Sorbonne. There was an opening for a government professor at the school, which would be an interesting fit for him while I w
as marooned at Harvard, and as I’
d undoubtedly find an entire day of faculty hobnobbing tedious, I was instructed to go amuse myself. Dad handed me three hundred euros, his MasterCard, a key to the apartment, scribbled down Servo's home and mobile phone numbers on a piece of graph paper. We'd reconvene at 7:30 P.M. at Le Georges, the restaurant on the top of the Centre Pompidou.

"It'll be an adventure/' said Dad with faux enthusiasm. "Didn't Balzac write in
Lost Illusions
that the only way to see Paris is on your own?" (Balzac wrote nothing of the kind.)

Initially, I was relieved to be rid of the two of them. Dad and Baba au Rhum could have each other. But after six hours of wandering the streets, the Musée d'Orsay, stuffing myself with
croissants
and
tartes,
at times, pretending I was a young duchess in disguise ("The gifted traveler can't help but affect a traveling persona," notes Swithin in
Possessions,
1910 [1911]. "Whilst at home he may merely be a hoi polloi husband, one of a million dull suited financiers, in a foreign land, he can be as majestic as he desires."), my feet were blistered, I had a sugar nadir; I felt drained and entirely irritated. I decided to make my way back to Servo's apartment, resolving (with more than a little satisfaction) to take the opportunity of Me Time to peruse a few of Baba au Rhum's personal belongings, namely, to locate some mislaid
foe-toe
drowning at the bottom of a sock drawer that revealed his girls not to be the chiseled Olympians their father led everyone to believe, but flabby, pimpled mortals, with dim eyes shoved deep into their heads, mouths long and bendy like pieces of licorice.

Somehow I'd managed to walk all the way to Pigalle, so I entered the first métro I could find, switched trains at Concorde and was walking out of the St. Paul station, when I passed a man and a woman moving quickly down the stairs. I stopped in my tracks, turning to watch them. She was one of those short, dark, severe-looking women who didn't walk, but
mowed,
with jaw-length brown hair and a boxy green coat. He was considerably taller than she, in jeans, a suede bomber jacket, and as she talked to him —in French, it seemed—he laughed, a loud but supremely lethargic sound, the unmistakable laugh of a person reclining in a hammock soaked with sun. He was reaching into his back pocket for the ticket.

Andreo Verduga.

I must have whispered it, because an elderly French woman with a floral scarf wrapping her withered face tossed me a look of contempt as she pushed past me. Holding my breath, I hurried back down the stairs after them, jostled by a man trying to exit with an empty stroller. Andreo and the girl were already through the turnstiles, strolling down the platform and I would have followed, but I'd only purchased a single ride and four people were waiting in line at the ticket counter. I could hear the shudders of an approaching train. They stopped walking, far to my right, Andreo with his back to me, Green Coat facing him, listening to what he said, probably something along the lines of, YES STOP I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN STOP (OUI ARRETTE JE COMPRENDS ARRETTE), and then the train rushed in, the doors groaned open and he turned, chivalrously letting Green Coat enter in front of him. As he stepped into the car, I could just make out a splinter of his profile.

A smack of the doors, the train belched and pulled out of the station.

I wandered back to Servo's apartment in a daze. It couldn't have been he; no, not
really.
I was like Jade, making things more exotic than they actually were. I
thought
I'd noticed, as he moved past me, unzipping his jacket as he hurried down the stairs, a heavy silver watch hanging on his wrist, and Andreo the Gardener, Andreo of the Bullet Wound and Badly Fractured English wouldn't have that kind of watch, unless, in the three years since I'd seen him (not counting the Wal-Mart sighting), he'd become a successful entrepreneur or inherited a small fortune from a distant relative in Lima. And yet—the shard of face I'd seen, the passing blur on the stairs, the muscular cologne that strolled through the air behind him like pompous tan men on yachts —it added up to something real. Or perhaps I'd just witnessed his doppelgànger. After all, I'd been spotting Jade and the others all over the city, and Allison Smithson-Caldona in her relentless study of all things double and dittoed,
Twin Paradox and Atomic Clocks
(1999), actually tried to scientifically prove the somewhat mystical theory that everyone had a twin wandering the planet. She was able to confirm this as fact in three out of every twenty-five examined individuals, no matter their nationality or race (p. 250).

When I finally eased open the front door to Servo's apartment, I was surprised to hear Dad and Servo in the living room just off the dark foyer and hall.
The bloom was finally off the rose,
I noted with satisfaction. They were fighting like Punch and Judy.

"Highly hysterical over—" That was Dad (Judy).
"You
can't comprehend what it actually means—!" That was Servo

(Punch). "Oh, don't give
me—
you're hot-headed as—go,
go— " "—always
content, aren't you, to hide behind the lecture podium?"
"—you
act like a hormonal preteen! Go take a cold shower, why—!" They must have heard the door (though I tried to close it silently), because their voices cut off like a big ax had just swung down on their words. A second later, Dad's head materialized in the doorway. "Sweet," he said, smiling. "How was the sightseeing?" "Fine." Servo's white round head bobbed into view by Dad's left elbow. His shiny roulette eyes tripped ceaselessly around my face. He didn't say a word, but his lips twitched in evident irritation, as if there were invisible threads knotted to his mouth's corners and a toddler was yanking the ends.

"I'm going to take a nap," I said brightly. "I'm exhausted."

I shrugged off my coat, tossed my backpack to the floor and, smiling nonchalantly, headed upstairs. The plan was to remove my shoes, stealthily tiptoe back to the first floor, eavesdrop on their heated dispute resumed in irate hisses and fizz (hopefully not in Greek or some other unfathomable language)—but when I did this, standing stone still on the bottom step in my socks, I heard them banging around the kitchen, bickering about nothing more calamitous than the difference between absinthe and anisette.

That night we decided not to go to Le Georges. It rained, so we stayed in, watching Canal Plus, eating leftover chicken and playing Scrabble. Dad combusted with pride when I won two games in a row,
hologram
and
monocular
being the
coups de grâce
that caused Servo (who insisted the Cambridge Dictionary was wrong, license was spelled "lisence" in the UK, he was sure of it) to turn crimson, say something about Elektra being president of the Yale Debate Team and mutter he himself had not fully recovered from the flu.

I hadn't been able to get Dad alone, and even at midnight, neither of them showed signs of tiring or, regrettably enough, any residual bitterness toward each other. Baba was fond of sitting in his giant red chair sans shoes and socks, his chunky red feet propped in front of him on a large velvet pillow (veal cutlets to be served to a king). I had to resort to my A-Little-Bread-a-Crust-a-Crumb look, which Dad, frowning over his row of letters, didn't pick up on, so I resorted to my A-Dying-Tiger-Moaned-for-Drink look, and when that went unobserved, A-Day!-Help!-Help!-Another-Day!

At long last, Dad announced he'd see me to bed. "What were you fighting about when I came home?" I asked when we were upstairs, alone in my room.

"I would have preferred if you hadn't heard that." Dad shoved his hands into his pockets and gazed out the window where the rain seemed to be drumming its fingernails on the roof. "Servo and I have a great deal of lost baggage between us —mislaid items, so to speak. We both think the other is to blame for the deficiency."

"Why did you tell him he was acting like a hormonal preteen?"

Dad looked uncomfortable. "Did I say that?"

I nodded.

"What else did I say?"

"That's pretty much all I heard."

Dad sighed. "The thing with Servo is—everyone has a
thing,
I suppose; but nevertheless, Servo's
thing—
everything is an Olympic competition. He derives great pleasure from setting people up, putting them in the most discomforting of situations, watching them flounder. He's an idiot, really. And now he has the absurd notion that I must remarry. Naturally, I told him he was preposterous, that it's none of his business, the world does not revolve around such social—"

"Is
he
married?"

Dad shook his head. "Not for years. You know, I don't even remember what happened to Sophie."

"She's in an insane asylum."

"Oh, no," Dad said, smiling, "when controlled, given parameters, he's harmless. At times, ingenious."

"Well, I don't like him," I pronounced.

I rarely, if ever, used such petulant one-liners. You had to have a strong, experienced, ain't-no-other-way-'round-it face to say them with any authority (see Charlton Heston,
The Ten Commandments).
Sometimes, though, when you had no sound reason for your sentiments—when you simply had a
feeling—
you had to use one no matter what kind of face you had.

Dad sat down next to me on the bed. "I suppose I can't disagree. One can only take so much inflated self-importance before one feels ill. And I'm a bit angry myself. This morning, when we went to the Sorbonne, me with my briefcase full of notes, essays, my résumé—like a fool —it turned out there was no job opening as he'd led me to believe. A Latin professor had requested three months' leave this fall, and that was
it.
Then came the actual reason we'd ventured to the school— Servo spent an hour trying to get me to ask Florence of the guttural r's to dinner, some
femme
who was a leading expert in Simone de Beauvoir—of all hellish things to be an expert in—a woman who wore more eyeliner than Rudolph Valentino. I was trapped in her crypt-office for hours. I didn't leave in
love
but with lung cancer. The woman chain-smoked like nobody's business."

"I don't think he has children," I said in a hushed voice. "Maybe just the one in the Colombian rain forest. But I think he's making the others up."

Dad frowned. "Servo has children."

"Have you
met
them?

He considered this. "No."

"Seen pictures?"

He tilted his head. "No."

"Because they're figments of his unhinged imagination."

Dad laughed.

And then I was about to tell him about the other incredible incident of the day, Andreo Verduga with the suede jacket and the silver watch shuffling through the métro, but I stopped myself. I noticed how outlandish it was, such a coincidence, and reporting it in all seriousness made me feel stupid— tragic even. "It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality," wrote Albert Pooley in
The Imperial Consort of the Dairy Queen
(1981, p. 233).

"Can we go home?" I asked quietly.

To my surprise, Dad nodded. "I was actually going to ask you the very same thing this afternoon, after my dispute with Servo. I think we've had enough of
la vie en rose,
don't you? Personally, I prefer to see life as it actually is." He smiled.
"En noir."

Dad and I said farewell to Servo, to Paris, two days before we were scheduled to depart. Perhaps it wasn't so incredible a thing, Dad calling the airline and changing the tickets. He looked deflated, eyes bloodshot, his voice prone to sighs. For the first time since I could remember, Dad had very little to say. Saying good-bye to Baba au Rhum, he managed only "thank you" and "see you soon" before climbing into the waiting taxi.