Nina starts to laugh again.
Stop, Philip tells her, as he holds her tighter and moves faster inside her, making the bed rock and sway and bang harder against the wall.
Or I’ll come.
Yar,
he says.
Again the Swiss au pair pounds on the wall.
The shutter again.
Who said sounds are magnified at night?
Philip?
No, Andrew.
A dog has begun to bark. The neighbor’s old yellow Lab, she guesses.
She cannot think of his name.
Poor poisoned Natty Bumppo.
She cannot leave the bed, she cannot reach the sink, she throws up in the wastepaper basket by the side of the bed. Next, she throws up in the bed. All day and all night, she retches painfully, violently, until there is nothing left inside her but bile and she feels as if she is retching up her insides. She is certain that she is going to die.
At last, she falls asleep; then she hears knocking.
God, Philip says. What happened?
What time is it? Outside, it has begun to get dark, it must be the next day.
I called the gallery and they said you hadn’t come in yesterday or today.
I was sick, she says. A migraine.
She feels weak but better. The room is airless and smells of vomit. Slowly, carefully, she swings her legs out of bed—legs that look to be too thin to support her weight—and goes to open the window.
Let me take a bath, then I’ll clean up this mess, she says.
I’ll give you a hand, Philip says.
He runs the bath for her and holds her steady as she steps into the warm water.
Lie back, lean your head on my arm, he says.
You’ll get wet.
Rolling up his shirt sleeves, Philip kneels at the side of the tub and washes the vomit stuck to her hair.
Shut your eyes, relax, he tells her.
Have you thought of becoming a nurse? Nina asks.
Did you see an aura? Philip asks. Like with epilepsy, you are supposed to see one.
Nina, her eyes shut, is only half listening.
A few lights, maybe, she answers.
Epileptics were considered sacred. Some people think they still are. In Laos, for instance, the Hmong, Philip continues.
Lying in the tub filled with warm water in the cramped bathroom on the sixth floor of the apartment building on rue Sophie-Germain, her head resting on Philip’s arm, Nina comes close to telling him what happened to her in the forest of Chantilly but she does not.
Instead she says, How do you know this?
I knew a girl who had epilepsy.
Opening her eyes, Nina asks, Who?
A girl called Michelle in my English class, Philip answers. She was acting out the sleepwalking scene about washing the blood from Lady Macbeth’s hands when, all of a sudden, her eyes rolled back inside her head and she fell, her body jerking on the floor, and for a moment, we all thought it was part of the act, Michelle playing Lady Macbeth, but, of course, it wasn’t.
When I was in high school in Brussels, I played Lady Macbeth, Nina says, standing up.
Voici l’odeur du sang encore, tous les parfums de l’Arabie ne sera pas adoucir cette petite main,
she recites, giving Philip her hand to hold as she gets out of the tub. Funny how I remember those lines.
Your hand smells sweet only it’s wet, Philip says, leaning over and kissing it.
For a long time after, Nina is convinced that the migraine headaches are a punishment for her lies.
The neighbor’s dog is still barking—the sound is closer. They must have let him out of the house; otherwise, he will wake up their baby.
She thinks of the dog in Pantelleria—lying in a ditch, she supposes, run over.
Migraine
is what she calls the series of large red near-monochrome canvases in which she combines layering, smearing, and drip painting. The paintings take up most of the wall space in her studio and are unlike anything else she has done.
An experiment, she tells Philip, when she shows them to him.
Interesting but disturbing, he says.
She takes this to mean he does not like them.
She never has a migraine while she is pregnant with Louise.
Again, she takes this for a sign.
After Louise is born, however, the migraines come back, worse.
Now she has medication.
Alerted, this afternoon, by the familiar flicker of lights and a slight throbbing in her head, she leaves her studio and gives herself an injection, then she lies down on the sofa in the living room. The sofa is worn, the pattern, an old-fashioned chintz, is faded. She plans to get it recovered but, as yet, has not done so. A part of her does not want to make changes and Philip does not appear to notice or to mind how shabby some of their furniture—furniture they have had since they were first married—looks. The living room curtains, too, she reflects, just before she falls asleep, need to be replaced. The sun has rotted their linings.
When she wakes up, the headache is gone and, relieved, she remains on the sofa a while longer to enjoy the feeling of well-being. Piled up on the coffee table, next to her, are a stack of science journals; picking one up, she leafs through it. She skims an article describing how experiments surgically joining together old and young mice are used for regenerative biology research, then, turning the page, some photographs of Japanese crop art catch her eye. Each year, she reads, the farmers in the small village of Inakadate, Minamitsugaru District,
Aomori Prefecture, located at the northern end of Honshu, plant purple-and-yellow-leafed kodaimi rice with green-leafed tsugaru-roman rice to create huge images based on works by famous Japanese artists. The images, according to the article, are first plotted on computers then marked with reed sticks on the rice paddies.
Did you see this?
she plans to ask Philip when he comes home.
You could try it with lettuce: red leaf, romaine, Bibb.
…
Instead he goes upstairs to lie down.
Philip prides himself on his garden. On warm spring weekends, he is out early, tilling, hoeing, planting, weeding. In the summer, they have more vegetables than they can eat.
The photograph she wants to show Philip is of a Sengoku-period warrior on his horse. The horse is made from the yellow-leafed kodaimi rice and is portrayed with mane and tail flying, his purple-leafed kodaimi rice nostrils flared.
Now who will tend to the vegetable garden?
She makes herself think of something else.
French gardens.
Parc Montsouris, with over a hundred different varieties of trees and shrubs from all over the world—except for the weeping beeches, she cannot recall any of them—is Philip’s favorite.
Her favorite is the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Closing her eyes, she retraces her steps.
In the spring, while it is still light and the gates to the park are not yet shut, she walks from the rue Jacques-Callot where she works and makes a quick left turn onto busy rue de Seine, then hurries to cross boulevard Saint-Germain and continues until she reaches a narrow shop on the corner of rue Saint-Sulpice that sells antique jewelry, and where she pauses a moment to admire the art deco bracelets, rings, and, in particular, a brooch in the shape of a dragonfly with emerald and ruby wings—wishing she could have it—until one day, it is gone from the window and she mourns it—mourns its loss as if the brooch had been hers. Once she catches a glimpse of a slender young blonde woman—no older than she—sitting by the window inside the shop, her head bent, stringing pearls. Reminded of someone—only she can’t think who—and attracted by how swiftly the woman moves her hands, again, she stops and, no doubt sensing Nina’s presence, the young woman looks up and smiles at her through the glass. A few more steps and rue de Seine turns into rue de Tournon, a wide elegant street that is flanked by old houses and expensive shops. At the next corner, a café. Then, straight ahead, the imposing Senate building, and, to one side, the entrance to the Luxembourg. At this time of year, the pear trees are in bloom and brilliant red and yellow tulips line the paths. When she comes to the boat basin, she pulls up two of the green metal chairs—one to sit, the other to put her feet on—and watches the children, who are still out prodding their boats in the brackish-looking water with long, wooden poles, and she can hear the mothers scold. Always, a man drags over a chair to come and sit next to her.
Vous avez l’heure, Mademoiselle?
She feigns incomprehension.
Voulez-vous prendre un café?
Often, the man follows her part of the way through the garden and Nina pretends not to notice.
A silly joke comes to her unbidden: an American girl, warned of the dangers posed by French men, learns a word to say in French to discourage their advances. The word is
cochon!
—pig! and, sure enough, when a man on the métro gooses the girl, she turns to him and shouts,
Couchons!
Although she always looks, Nina never again sees the pretty young blonde woman, sitting by the shop window, stringing pearls.
Come to think of it now, the pretty young blonde woman stringing pearls reminds her of Iris.
Under the branches of the weeping beeches in Parc Montsouris, she and Philip sit, hidden, on a blanket on which they have spread out their picnic lunch. As soon as they have finished, they lie down and Philip begins to kiss her. Kisses that taste of the red wine he has drunk. Long, drawn-out kisses—his tongue pushing and probing into her mouth until she has to catch her breath.
Wait, I have to breathe, she says, pushing him away.
Reaching for the bottle, Philip drinks more wine.
Nodding absently to herself, Nina takes another sip of wine. Holding up the glass, she can see that it is almost empty.
She sighs.
Hidden as they are by the pendulous beech branches, no one can see her raised skirt, his unzipped pants. She can hear a couple sitting on a nearby bench arguing, a child riding by on his bicycle, a baby stroller being pushed past. Philip presses his head against hers, his lips in the crook of her neck and in her hair, to try to muffle the sound he makes. Looking up, she hears a bird chirp his alarm.
She remembers the cat.
Noiselessly, a skinny, one-eyed, white cat—wrinkled pink skin covers the other eye—emerges from the beech branches as they are eating their picnic. Nina throws him bits of her ham sandwich.
He’ll never leave, Philip says. You shouldn’t do that.
Poor thing, he looks hungry, Nina says. I wish we had some milk.
He looks sick, Philip says. I wouldn’t touch him.
Instead, Nina gets to her feet and, hand extended, walks toward the cat.
Here, kitty, here, kitty, kitty.
The cat turns and runs.
Later, as Nina is shaking out the blanket and Philip is picking up the food wrappers and the empty bottle of wine, the cat reappears.
His tail up in the air, the cat walks over to Nina and presses himself against her legs.
Reaching down, she strokes him. What happened to your eye? she asks. I should take you home, she also says.
Something else about a cat.
Something she can never quite grasp.
Tell me again, she whispers to Philip.
This time, I promise, I’ll try to understand.
The experiment is meant to illustrate the futility of using quantum mechanics to try to consider everyday objects. By putting a live cat in a locked box—
A live cat? How cruel.
No, I told you it’s a thought experiment—by putting an imaginary cat in a box along with an imaginary small amount of radioactive material, small enough so that over the course of several hours one of the atoms in this material might or might not decay and kick off a particle, which in turn would trigger a hammer that would smash a vial of hydrogen cyanide, which would then fill the box with cyanide gas and kill the cat—
But I don’t see how the—
Nina, let me finish, Philip says a little sharply.
Schrödinger tried to show that the fate of the cat depends on a microscopic event that, in turn, is dependent on the unpredictable behavior of particles. Particles aren’t governed by laws we recognize, they are governed by probabilities. You can’t pin them down, you can only say that they might be in this state or that state. Each of these states is assigned something called a probability wave function and understanding probability wave functions is crucial to understanding quantum mechanics. Do you understand what I am saying so far?
Well, no. I don’t understand what you mean by probability wave function.
You are not alone. No one really understands it.
Are you serious?
Probability wave function cannot be understood in the normal sense because it does not make sense logically. It only makes sense mathematically.
But to go back to the cat, Philip continues. When the box is closed we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in both the decayed state and the nondecayed state at the same time. And since the decay of particles is not predictable, both realities—that of the dead cat and the alive cat—can exist simultaneously. Only by opening the box can the nature of the cat’s actual state be observed.
I still don’t get it, Nina says, shaking her head. Or is it like the riddle of the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it?
That’s only part of it. The tree falling in the forest may be pointing to questions of the perceivable universe but whether someone is there to hear it or not does not imply that the tree is both standing and fallen. You see the difference, don’t you?
She does not like his tone. The way he emphasizes certain words to make his point and the way he speaks to her as if she were a child.
She does not reply.
Don’t worry about it, Philip continues. Just think of the cat as a metaphor for the paradox inherent in quantum physics.
In her mind’s eye, the cat in the locked box and the skinny, one-eyed white cat she saw one spring afternoon in Parc Montsouris are one and the same.
It must be very late.
She is tempted to cry out.
But once she starts, she is afraid she will not stop.