The Rags of Time (10 page)

Fellow at MIT,
Gott said,
an elegant paper.

Squared it away, so to speak, the very problem I had been working on. Fellow at MIT beat me to it. We had stalked each other. Had I not been at the courthouse, I would have known of his triumph without our leader’s old news. So it’s a slice of humble pie, happens all the time, Lou, fellow edged me out in the crowded field. It was then suggested—Gottschalk’s no-nonsense words—that I am “a live wire” in the classroom, perhaps not a perfect fit with the theoretical, as though I wear a pinched shoe. Then again, sequencing has taken an energetic turn in the human-genome race, not to mention the tech market, nano coming into play. At the end of the day, end of the story, I have been advised to limp on to new fields.

Like Cyril, that’s our bright boy.
Now, why did I say that?

Not to get the laugh, though it was all quite pleasant after the tight shoe dropped, Gottschalk suggesting how I might recoup. Move on? Ein stein tells us that to move on, to take the next step beyond the signs and images of numbers,
conventional words must be sought for.
It is no consolation to know that he never solved everything, though he sure tried. Every last thing—how the universe got it together in this, our long allotted space-time. Well, I’m no Albie, apparently not much of a mathematician at all. But there is an endgame to the mystery that may give you some pleasure. Why had I not known that the problem was solved? Up there in Cambridge, fellow at MIT looking beyond his successful calculations to a bright Autumn day on the Charles. Because I had not accessed the information that a boy’s quest for an answer had been, in fact, answered. In those courthouse days, I became devoted to words written down, addicted to news of the past, which suddenly seemed more pressing than the tabloid headline: FREEMAN FLOPS TRANSITION. Early on, I had failed with hieroglyphics, with demotic script invoking my mother. And in our time, Louise, lost the scavenger hunt for my phantom father. Perhaps, after all, Bertie’s troubles were a dodge and this is just a family story. I see that these pages did not come easy at first, then too easy—spilling off the backlog of our birding, the meager discoveries of a day in Central Park. How I mocked your catalog of fears, my possible failure right up there with e-waste, habitat loss.

Conventional words, Lou: I am sorry.

 

 

One night not long ago, pre-courthouse, when your mystery was neatly solved, we laughed as usual at the festering state of the nation, unhealed by comic turns on TV. We looked forward to the midterm election that might salvage what was left of our honor. For a moment all was right with our little world. I attempted to join in the fun, deliver my layman’s praise of your recent work. The homey vision of your art—mind if I use the word?—which you have all but abandoned. You’d been working ahead on what Cyril calls Mom’s project—
it’s cool.

I said:
A turn on the kids’ refrigerator art, Lou.
Cyril’s precise launch pads and rockets, Maisy’s scribbles freehand. I believe, post-courthouse, care must be taken honoring your vision, so let me correct and revise.

Moffett’s paper memorial to our soldiers dead in this war decorates the glass shelf over the stove in our kitchen. The names of the dead are not memorialized in black marble, just written in ink on fragile paper scraps stapled one to two, two to three, three to four and so on. They were first recorded in a book meant to track the weight, height, amusing words, and fevers of our sickly child, but that record is long gone. Moffett’s memorial is now inscribed on strips of brown butcher paper that winds between the measuring cups and the copper stock pot that was my grandmother’s prize, then circles back on itself and sweeps round the broken coffee grinder
.
Where have all the young men gone?

In our cottage industries of art and science, we do move on, discovering the last stale breath in the shrunken bladders of this year’s birthday balloons, the hamster replacement spinning in his cage, Bert’s sentence called off pending our further interrogation. Again, I place my updated notebook by your chair. You will remember the owl, the cold eye of that Gina, our Maisy’s congestion, your impatience one day in the Park, the ten dollar bill pressed on my pretty student who couldn’t possibly, Professor, a girl with no fear of the city dark, though big readable numbers on Cyril’s watch told us 6:27,
gone the sun, from the hills, from the lake, safely rest
. . . . That is the trouble with memory: it sorts through the chaos, brings images to mind—watchtower of a phony castle, Bert sniffing his claret, the rough stuff of his poncho, rigging and mainmast, a gold dou bloon for the scoundrel who takes a death-defying chance.

 

 

Louise, notebooks in hand, stands before her husband, the plaintiff’s side of his desk.

“Our Sylvie,” she says, no need to say more. The children are safe at home with Sylvie Neisswonger. Louise has seldom been to Freeman’s office, a bleak room atop the curious little temple, Mathematics Hall, a cast-off aerie he shares with his aspiring pals—an acknowledged genius, boasting baby fat, who brings cookies to the children when invited to supper, devours them before the kids get a chance; an Indian woman who affects biker gear to counter her astonishing beauty, her great reserve. Artie is alone as Louise knew he would be, his schedule posted on their home page,
Works and Days.

“Your version of our birding? What you wrote, down there in the courthouse?”

She begins her case against him, then turns to the blackboard, of course. Of course there must be a blackboard screwed to the wall. An elaborate problem covers most of its surface. Underneath in the old wooden frame, some joker, or serious student, has carved PYTHAGORAS SUCKS.

“You left these for me to read as though we can no longer talk.”

“Lou-Lou.”

“Don’t Lou-Lou me.”

“Easy way out, writing it down.”

Artie comes round the desk, turns his wife to the window. A spectacular Autumn day, the sky wiped new blue. Students denying the chill in flip-flops and shorts litter the steps leading down to the broad campus from Low. The view from this height trumps that from Gottschalk’s office. Homer, Plato, Virgil, the usual suspects inscribed in the limestone cornice of Butler Library catch the late sun.

“Computation?” she says. “He’s got to be kidding.”

“Gott doesn’t kid. Demographics, genomes. Think small.”

“Not what you wanted, not ever.”

“Just different. I will not
contribute.
Love that terminal squeak? The Big Bang, first or last, will blast off without me. Fellow’s paper beating me out by a mile may be published too early, pie in the sky, amount to nothing at all.”

“Then why is it elegant?”

“You hear me talk solutions—beautiful, stunning. Some friend of Ein stein’s said elegance ought to be left to the tailor, the cobbler. Take Gott, for instance. The proof of his pudding may amount to nothing more than his elegant labels—Gucci, Armani, or so we students suppose.”

But she wasn’t listening—as she had so often—to the tolerable lectures attempting to make his work real to her. When they lived downtown in the loft, she had followed his every word, or tried to. At the turn of the millennium, Louise understood perfectly why the world would not end in a slippage of time, Y2K snuff the soul out of our computers. With reparation we would move on. Artie had called his return to mathematics the makeup class in whatever the world might be made of, that his scribbled lineup of symbols and numbers were the merest foot soldiers to a general theory of everything, don’t you know? At times he would attempt to draw strings coupling, or make visible the loop-de-loop of quantum frenzy. She never quite got it but took the pencil from his hand, shaded in, crosshatched to get the depth of possible dimensions. Her own work had given way to house and children as though, much like old Gottschalk, she wiped away the rubber crumbs of her art, leaving the smudge of line and perspective unsolved.

On the South Lawn below, a card table flaps its antiwar poster. No patrons to read the leaflets, sign the petition. Too brisk, too bright a day, the message worn, ineffectual.
Long time ago,
1968, that war, the students had stormed the president’s office, but that siege doesn’t come to mind; she just wishes he had not used that gentle folk song in his account of her work. She must tear down her kitchen art. The private notice of her mourning seems foolish today, Art Speak to no listener other than Artie. Once she had drawn the arrow of time for Freeman, a birthday card, and once exhibited a cloudy solution in a bottle of water, half empty, half full, a show playing with uncertainty, the assault of time on the body, that’s all. Time passing as we know it, day by day.
Not mere numbers,
he had said of the evaporating water in a hand-blown bottle—his judgment kindly, self-effacing. Now as she listened to his babble of knots and loops, she did not try to understand, not this time. Perhaps she was never meant to. From the rising pitch of his voice, she guessed he was going on about proof. What matter whether the conjecture was true or false? Something absurd, how he fell into the swamp of the excluded middle, laughing, still foolin’ around.

He said: “Oh, Artie,” imitating the caress of her incalculable scolds.

“Don’t,” she said, “don’t go there.” She held the notebooks to her breast, his new one from Pearl Paint and the old greenie with her bird notations, heard the shuffling of papers into his backpack and the familiar snap of his laptop as he prepared to walk Cyril to school each morning. Closing up shop, but she did not think so, not now, perhaps never. He couldn’t give up playing the numbers. On the way home, they would speak, a few words with a bitter edge to be glossed over. Then they would talk for how many years? They would move, though never far from a classroom, and she would again have a studio. Change of direction might not suit them, not again. They would honor the yearly trip to the farm in Wisconsin. What mattered was here and now, the probable life just outside the city, a garden perhaps, doghouse, sandbox, but never a plastic feeder to fake out the hummingbirds with sugar in a bowl. She would plant red flowers to lure them, though she could not yet name them—cardinal flowers. Our Sylvie would discover her young friends still within range of their starting line, Lower Broadway. He would make light of Lou’s fears. She would endure his mixed metaphors, his puns, the dated phrases of his grandfather, Cyril O’Connor. The difficult pearl buttons at the top of every nightgown would be snipped off for the hope of easy access on nights reclaiming their eager bodies in the loft, skin to skin. Nightclothes came with the children. She wished he had not used that song. It belonged to his mother, to her mother, too. Or perhaps he did not remember the appropriate line:
Where have all the young girls gone? Taken husbands every one.
Though that was not true, not true of his mother, who left him by accident to an orphan boy life. He switched off the buzzing fluorescent light, the room behind her in semidarkness now. She thought, how unfair: Artie lost, Bertie won. Would they still go to Connecticut for the Christmas goose, the tasteful Boyce glitter, snubs from their spoiled children? She would not speak; the anger was still there, a clutch in her throat that he’d never told her, that he’d written his failure out as though it’s no more than a story. Put words in her mouth. On the way home, she would relent, hand over the notebooks, say
good job
to his account of their day in the Park, entirely man-made, their birding, her fears. But that would never do, for that’s what she said to the kids—
good job
—when they showed her their brave efforts with Play-Doh, Legos, with Magic Markers of their refrigerator art.

The sun at the window was still bright, almost blinding. Squinting, Louise could see a Frisbee fly over the patch of lawn on the campus designated for play, and a tour guide leading prospective students and their parents up the steps into Low, where they would be awed by the dome of the rotunda, for sure a temple of learning. She could hear Artie scrape back the chair from his old desk, funky like Gottschalk’s. As though there for a show at the end of this day, birds flitted from tree to tree on Campus Walk. She would not call them city pigeons. Pale mourning doves, she named them in a coo.
Colum-um-bidae.
When she turned, her husband was erasing the intricate problem on the blackboard. Chalk dust fell in a haze. Not to steal his words, she waited for him to say it.

“Clean slate.”

The children, by which we mean grandchildren, have carved a pumpkin for us, lest we forget. He—it’s a he—sits on our front hall table. His snarling smile, jagged teeth, triangulated eyes don’t scare us at all. Part of their pleasure was making the mess. They are scheming, wacky tricks, I presume. We’re stuck in the waiting game. The costume I’ve been wearing these many years, middle-class woman in the last days of the Holocene, surely belongs to someone else, though the plot as it plays out, remains the same. Conception to the grave. The rest is filler.