Theory of Remainders (3 page)

It was nearly dark when Philip trudged up the steps of the subway station, briefcase in hand. Halfway down the block he stopped at a Chinese restaurant, soon reappearing with a white sack. Two blocks further along he let himself into the brick apartment building.

In the mirrored wall of the entryway he saw a bearded man with tired eyes, over the crest of middle age, lugging a briefcase and a carry-out bag, his necktie askew. This image of himself was reflected again from the wall behind, back and forth between the two mirrors, producing an infinite number of Philip Adlers receding into the distance. Who was this man really? In the psychology of childhood development, the mirror stage was well documented: when the infant recognizes his own reflection, the identification plays a crucial role in the formation of the ego. But what about adults, especially those who are past their prime? When Philip glanced into a mirror these days, it was hardly identification that awaited him. Each time, the man looking back was a little less familiar.

Yvonne, too, would have aged. But she’d have managed it more gracefully than he—just as she did everything else.

He would send a card, some flowers. That much was possible. But she shouldn’t expect anything more from him.

In the apartment upstairs he flicked on the light and entered a broad living room banked with windows, one side lined with shelves, the other adorned with framed photographs. Like his office, the apartment was filled with objects, but unlike his office, this more personal museum appeared to have been ransacked. Newspapers and discarded clothing obscured the sleek lines of the furniture. Used glasses and coffee mugs stood on the desk and end table. Dirty plates were stacked in twos and threes, silverware heaped on top. On the floor by the sofa lay shoes and slippers, abandoned where he had cast them off.

During the workweek, disorder established beachheads in Philip’s life, creeping forward and outflanking him. Every weekend he beat it back to a safe distance.

“Edith?” he called as he parked his briefcase by the desk. “Edith? Where are you?”

Out of the dark bedroom trotted a slim Calico cat, a mask of black surrounding one eye, the other ringed with tan. She stepped primly forward, her nose twitching.

He held up the sack. “Chicken chow mein. Our favorite.”

She rubbed against his ankles. Philip knew this was a simulacrum of affection, one designed to hasten the presentation of his offering, but he didn’t mind. To the contrary, he relished Edith’s uncompromising catliness, her unapologetic feline narcissism. By the measure of the Hare Checklist for antisocial disorders, all cats would be psychopaths. And yet, such endearing ones!

He scooped a serving of food into her bowl, and stroked the back of her neck as she began to eat. Dishing up his own serving, he carried his plate out to the sofa, settled in, and clicked the remote. On the screen an attractive woman stood before a group of assistants, writing on a white board as she brandished a Ziploc bag with her free hand. A detective series. Some mystery. He tried another channel, only to find a nearly identical show. The characters were interchangeable, the dialogue inane.

As he cracked apart the wooden chopsticks, a word leapt into his mind like a spark:
baguettes
. It was the French term—not just for long loaves of bread but also for these tiny utensils. A detail Yvonne had taught him many years ago.

How strange it had been to hear her voice again today. The tight vowels, the purring R. She had started to address him calmly in English, but after he spoke, something broke inside of her, and then only French had poured out, interrupted by heaving breaths. Even Yvonne’s sob was familiar. How many times had he heard that in the months leading up to the divorce?

He stiffened. Probably she knew what effect her voice would have on him. Perhaps she’d slipped into French right on cue. He wasn’t going to fall for it. She had no right to disturb him. No right to ask for anything anymore.

On TV a woman (was it the first one?) rode in a car with a burly black colleague, tracking a pick-up truck that had begun to accelerate. Tires squealed, and as the vehicle raced around a curve, two wheels lifting from the pavement, Melanie Patterson came to mind. A controlled skid. Side-slipping like that was dangerous. People died that way.

He clicked off the set and started his rounds through the apartment, collecting dishes and newspapers. The current issue of the
American Journal of Psychiatry
lay on an end table, the cover bearing a brown halo from a coffee cup.

The desk was strewn with the week’s mail, including bills for magazines that had accumulated unread in a stack on the floor. He cleared off the chair and woke the computer. On the chess website there was an alert. Faruk89 had made a new move: Nf4. On the screen, where their dwindling armies occupied the checkered terrain, Philip reviewed the black knight’s new position, squinting hard. What was Faruk89 up to now? It seemed like such a harmless position. A little too harmless. According to his profile, Faruk89 lived in Istanbul, and although they’d only recently been matched via the website, Philip already recognized him as a formidable opponent. Worst of all, he suspected that 89 was Faruk’s birth year, the proverbial Young Turk reminding Philip he was losing his edge. So far he’d managed to keep the youngster at bay by springing surprises, making unpredictable moves that were highly risky but disconcerting. He’d have to give Nf4 some thought.

In the bedroom he plucked up dirty clothes under the watchful eyes of his parents, who presided in a photo on the wall, a shot of the three of them when Philip was only fifteen—Max stout in his black suit, his arm on his son’s shoulder, his mother in that absurd hat, clutching his hand in both of hers, crowding against him with an eager smile. Cautious people, they’d been.
Don’t be showy
, his father had always said.
Keep a low profile.
They’d lived through the forties, after all, had seen what could happen to their kind, and they’d taken self-effacement to the extreme, nearly allowing their branch of the Adler line to die out unnoticed.

In another frame the three of them stood under an oak tree after his college graduation, his parents already looking old. It was the last shot he had of the family together. Within eighteen months they would both be dead. Heart disease for one and cancer for the other, at least according to the certificates. Philip knew the real cause of death: terminal fretfulness.

He straightened the photographs on the wall and collected coffee mugs from the bedside table. The apartment was coming together. He’d do the laundry tomorrow, but in the kitchen he packed the dishwasher with a week’s worth of plates and cutlery. The dishes looked especially plain this evening. Nothing like the breakfast bowls they used to keep in the kitchen in Paris—creamy, gentle pieces, well proportioned, with a curve of just the right depth for two hands to cup around. For years he and Yvonne, and then Sophie too, had greeted the morning with those bowls, in the French way, filled to the brim with coffee or hot chocolate.

The dishtowel draped over his shoulder, he leaned against the counter like a man steadying himself at the railing of a ship.

It was after the death of his mother that Philip had left for Paris, taking on a residency at the American Hospital. It had felt like the opportunity for a new life, especially when, two months later, he met a French girl at a party. The start hadn’t been promising. “Are you British?” she’d asked as he butchered her language. “No, American.” “I see,” she’d replied with a smirk, “I guess nobody’s perfect.” Yvonne didn’t like Americans, felt they were shallow and had no sense of history. He’d labored hard to overcome that bias, finally earning her begrudging respect by sheer doggedness. And only later her affection.

All for what? So that they could march hand in hand toward the catastrophe that awaited them?
Nobody’s perfect
. Perhaps he should have listened to that assessment on Day One.

From the coffee table he picked up two books and returned them to the wall of shelving, shoving them into the available crannies. Someday he would deal with this, too: the old set of encyclopedias, the obsolete textbooks, the well-thumbed novels. Nothing but ballast, all of it, ready to be tossed.

Take some time, Jonas had said. But time was Philip’s enemy, and he did all he could to fill his schedule as tightly as these shelves.

Take some time
.

He sighed. Anne-Madeleine had been a fine woman, full of spirit. And she’d accepted him, a foreigner, into her family—had eased his membership into the Aubert clan, with Roger, Évelyne, Flora, and their assorted spouses. And now she was gone.

Yes, Jonas was right: he should take some time. But only a little. Granting Anne-Madeleine his attention would be like pulling at a loose thread: the whole fabric could start to run. But he owed her this.

Kneeling down, he retrieved a leather-bound photo album from the bottom shelf and settled onto the couch. He rolled his tongue through his mouth, feeling the tug of an old thirst, but dispatched the thought as soon as he recognized it. No. Now he was to focus on the pages in front of him.

The very first images were shots of Paris: a broad avenue with mansard-roofed apartment buildings; a café bustling with customers and aproned male servers; statuary in a small park; a wrought-iron gate. Then came a much younger Philip Adler standing with a group outside a restaurant, his eyes on an attractive woman, dark-haired, with high cheekbones.

He remembered the excitement of that evening—the night he had first curved his hand around her waist. He recalled Yvonne’s laugh, their shared sense that they were opening a door on something wholly new in their lives.

Then came the family home in Yvetot. Yvonne’s brother, Roger. The party after her dissertation defense. A handful of wedding pictures fluttered by, then a jumble of shots of apartments and friends.

The album was an incomplete narrative, a blighted sample, like the scraps of family life a tornado strews over cornfields, miles from the disaster. Most of the photos were torn at the edges, bearing pushpin holes in their corners, or residue from Scotch tape—refugees from the earlier homes of bulletin boards, refrigerator doors, scrap books.

He skipped ahead and found the picture he wanted, showing Anne-Madeleine and her already elderly husband, Guillaume, on the front steps of the home in Yvetot, their children and in-laws gathered around.

Now Philip hesitated. He’d reached a limit, and if he went further the slope could become too steep. He risked losing his footing, and then the only way out would be through the very bottom. But like a drunkard already on his third drink, he had no power to stop. There was no sense pretending. He turned the page.

It was the picture of an infant: a slip of a swaddled body, lying on Yvonne’s chest. Philip’s eyes rested there for a long moment before he lurched ahead, turning the leaves of the album faster and faster, as though hurrying to be done with it. The infant grew into a toddler, the toddler became a preschooler. A few pages later Philip came across his younger self trotting alongside a ten-year-old girl pedaling madly on a bicycle. They were on a dirt path, the one he remembered from Yvetot. In this picture he reached out to the seat while the girl batted him away, wanting to do it all herself. Yes, he thought, that captured her spirit.

Through the next pages the girl matured. In one shot she stood in a tennis skirt, racket in one hand, the other palm angled against her hip, an impertinent smirk on her face. In another she held up her right arm encased in plaster, brandishing the cast like a trophy, her eyes wide and mocking.

The last one was a photographic trick. It showed the same girl in a double profile, face to face, the two noses only an inch apart. As he tipped the page to the right, he no longer saw the silhouettes, but rather the space between them, a black, vessel-shaped outline. Faces or vase—that old illusion. He remembered how they’d set that picture up using a wardrobe mirror and work lights. Yvonne had accused them of insanity, but he and his daughter had giggled their way through, delighted with the result.

Then came the blank, black pages at the end, one after another.

Was it really his daughter he remembered, or just these reproductions of her? In some way he supposed it didn’t matter, for the mechanics of emotion were the same. He knew how it worked. Stimuli reached his amygdala and sent impulses to his hypothalamus, which in turn triggered the sympathetic nervous system. His chest would contract and his pulse quicken, the result of simple cause and effect.

Tucked inside the back cover were newspaper clippings, now yellowed and brittle, and he unfolded them carefully on the coffee table, the snippets of headlines forming a collage of words:
Sophie Adler . . .
portée disparue . . . la police enquête . . . Édouard Morin . . . inculpé . . . non-lieu.
Many clippings bore the date: 1993. A few included grainy photos of his daughter.