Gray, shapeless, despite the fact that Nina washes them repeatedly, the booties smell of oil and sheep. The first time Louise wears them outdoors as Nina is pushing the stroller, one of the booties slips off her foot, drops in the snow, and is lost.
Natty Bumppo was poisoned. Someone, Philip tells her, threw poisoned meat out of a car window. A lot of the dogs in the neighborhood died. So did a few cats and squirrels. The street was a mess, full of dead animals.
Did Philip know he was dying?
He looks composed, his eyes are closed. He does not look afraid. He looks the way he does when he is asleep. Perhaps he is, she thinks, and this is a mistake.
A terrible mistake.
Philip, she calls to him.
Philip.
And did his entire life flash by in front of his eyes? Or just a few memorable incidents: falling out of the tree, solving his first quadratic equation, the first time he has sex….
Was he happy?
Did she make him happy?
They are happy on the windswept island of Pantelleria, in the two-room
dammuso
they rent for a week. The
dammuso
is built from local volcanic stone and the thick walls keep the house warm in winter and cool in summer, the vaulted roof allows the rain water to fall into a cistern below. There is no running water. Every morning, Philip hauls several buckets of water and brings them into the bathroom and into the kitchen. The bathroom is in a separate small building; a branch full of purple blossoms that grows outside serves as a curtain for the window and provides privacy.
Capers grow on the terraced hillsides; the vinelike bushes are abloom with blue flowers.
Iris.
No. She forces herself not to think of her now.
The capers are large, grainy, salty; they eat them every day for lunch with tomatoes, bread, and olive oil along with the local wine. Afterward they lie down in the dark cool thick-walled bedroom and sleep—a heavy, drugged sleep—for the rest of the hot afternoon. When they awake, they make love—slow, solicitous love—then, still naked, Philip gets up and hauls up more water from the cistern so they can both wash.
They swim in warm green inlets, aquamarine caves, and dark, colder grottoes that are divided by outcrops of rocks and lava pillars with Arab names. Above them rise the sheer cliffs of the island; perched on one is the village of Saltalavecchia—old
lady’s leap—where at midday they stop to buy bread and fill the car up with gas.
Perché lei é saltata in mare?
Nina asks.
Un marito perso?
A lost husband?
Un figlio perso?
A lost son?
The baker shrugs his shoulders, he does not know.
Nor does the garage attendant, or he has forgotten.
Saltalavecchia is just a name, a boy, pumping air into his bicycle tires, tells her. Like Firenze or Venezia or, for that matter, Roma. He says this without looking at her.
One morning, a thin brown and white dog comes and sits on the terrace steps. Nina fetches a bowl of water for him.
Careful, Philip says. You never know here.
He looks friendly enough.
During breakfast, she feeds him some leftover toast, buttered toast.
Now, you’ve done it, Philip says.
What shall we call him? Nina asks.
Philip shrugs and shakes his head.
Roma, she says. It’s just a name.
At night, curled up like a ball, the dog, Roma, sleeps outside their door; during the day, he stretches out flat on his side soaking up the sun on the stone terrace; from time to time, he sits up to scratch himself. He eats everything: tomatoes, bread, rice, fish—whatever Nina gives him. He eats greedily, wagging his tail. When Nina and Philip leave to go swimming or, in the evening, when they go out to dinner, he lies on the top step leading up to the terrace, his head resting on his paws, and waits for them.
What’s going to happen to Roma when we leave? Nina asks. Maybe we could take him home. We could find a vet, a crate, a—
No, no. Philip shakes his head emphatically.
Although Nina makes inquiries, no one wants a dog.
Another mouth to feed!
is what they all say.
At last, Anselmo, the waiter at a restaurant they frequent, agrees to take him, and on the last day, a few hours before they are due to leave, they put Roma in their car and drive to Anselmo’s house. Nervous, Roma sits panting and drooling in the backseat. Half turning, Nina pats his head as he tries to lick her hand.
He knows, she tells Philip.
He’ll be fine, Philip answers.
You’ll have a good home, Roma, she says.
They have difficulty finding Anselmo’s house, which is located in the interior of the island, a desolate, uncultivated area they have never been to before. The dirt road is rutted and bordered by stunted, twisted olive trees. It is near the airport, which, however, remains invisible to them, even as a small plane flies in low over their heads, nearly—or so it seems—grazing the roof of their car, its wheels down, ready to land.
We’re going to miss our plane if we don’t find his house soon, Philip says.
Anselmo, his wife, and his children are pleased to see them arrive. They offer refreshments but Philip and Nina are in too much of a hurry.
La prossima volta,
Philip promises.
Anselmo and his wife laugh. The children make a show of putting their arms around Roma and hugging him.
Before leaving, Philip hands Anselmo an envelope full of money. Money to look after the dog, he says.
Non si preoccupi signore,
Anselmo repeats,
il cane sará felice con noi.
Io sono felice, tu sei felice, egli è felice, noi siamo felici, she repeats to herself. In school, she learned how to conjugate Italian verbs and recite them by heart.
And which past tense should she use now—the near past
io sono stato felice,
or the past perfect
io ero stato felice,
or the remote past perfect
io fui stato felice?
Or, still yet, the conditional past
io sarei stato felice.
Several weeks go by before Nina telephones the restaurant—Anselmo does not have a home phone—and she is told that Anselmo no longer works there. Anselmo, the person who answers the phone says, left a month ago. When she tries to ask about the dog, the person who answers the phone says he knows nothing about a dog.
Taking another sip of wine, Nina again thinks about how Philip, a Midwesterner, was drawn not to fields of grain or to vast green plains but to the sea and to islands: Martha’s Vineyard, Belle-Île, Pantelleria.
And how he became a keen sailor.
His Hinckley Bermuda 40 has a sleek, French-blue hull, a solid butternut and teak interior, and shiny bronze fittings. The boat sleeps four comfortably, six uncomfortably, and, on it, they have sailed the cold waters of Maine and Canada—even, once, as far as Nova Scotia where, on account of the Gulf Stream, the water was surprisingly warm.
Hypatia
—Philip names the boat after the first known female mathematician.
But, unfortunately, Hypatia met a gruesome end, Philip tells Nina.
How?
She was attacked by an angry mob of monks who peeled off her skin with oyster shells. She was skinned alive, then dismembered and burned.
How horrible. Why?
Her teachings were considered heretical. She wore men’s clothes and drove her own chariot through the city of Alexandria. She did not know her place as a woman.
For a while, Nina resists sailing with Philip but, in the end, she gives in.
In the end, too, she grows proficient: taking the wheel while Philip puts up the sails, catching the mooring without his having to come about twice, reading charts and cooking meals on the tricky gas stove. She walks
Hypatia’s
deck on her sea legs without holding on to the wire guardrail, and, finally, she has grown accustomed to falling asleep to the lap-lap of the waves against the boat’s hull and has grown to like the sound.
Hypatia,
Nina mouths to herself.
Bradycardia,
she says.
Once a month, on Sundays, Philip stays in bed for most of the day—Winston Churchill, he has heard, did the same. Not to have sex, but to restore himself.
Philip has breakfast and lunch in bed, but by midafternoon the bed is full of crumbs, spilled drinks, the Sunday paper, books, journals, pencils, his laptop, and Philip is forced to get up. While he showers, Nina tidies and makes up the bed.
I feel like your maid, each time she tells Philip, who has come out of the shower and is drying himself with a towel—a towel he drops on the floor.
He is whistling a tune.
You should have married Paul Erdös, Philip teases her.
Paul Erdös, he tells her, lived out of a suitcase. Instead of a shirt, he wore his pajama top; he had no money, did not eat meat, washed his hands compulsively, and did not know how to tie his own shoelaces. But he wrote or coauthored 1,475 academic papers. More than any other single mathematician in history.
Philip has published with someone who has published with someone who published with Paul Erdös.
Philip’s Erdös number is 3.
Lorna, too, lived out of a suitcase—or nearly. Disorganized, unreliable, brilliant, she worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics in Berkeley until she overdosed. The housekeeper found her in her bed; Lorna had been dead for several days already. Hard not to picture the decomposing body: Lorna’s curls framing her once beautiful, now discolored and disfigured face.
Accident or a suicide? Everyone who knew Lorna was curious to know.
So is Nina.
Why do so many mathematicians commit suicide? Is it because their discoveries make them feel isolated and alienated? Or is there some other reason? she asks Philip.
Instead of answering, Philip says, I should have gone over to her apartment when she did not answer the phone. I had a feeling something was wrong.
Philip spends that night in his office working—or so he says. Or, perhaps, he spends the night driving around Marin, where Lorna lived. In the morning, when he finally comes home—Nina hears him climbing up the stairs to the bedroom—his limp more pronounced than usual.
Suppose we were to fly through the entire universe in a spaceship, Lorna says one evening, early on in the semester, when she comes to Nina and Philip’s house for dinner, the way the early explorers circumnavigated the globe, we might just end up where we started. She laughs nervously, waiting for Philip to reply.
Are you saying that the universe is finite, edgeless, and connected? Philip asks her.
Earlier, Nina notices that Lorna’s shoes, ballet flats, are of two different colors—one black, one silver.
She hesitates before pointing this out.
Oh. Looking down, Lorna’s face turns pink. I must have been thinking of something else.
What else did Philip and Lorna talk about? Theories of the early universe, chaos, black holes.
Nina has set the table; she has cooked the dinner—a picky eater, Lorna does not eat meat or fish. After they finish the main course, Nina gets up and clears the dishes.
But isn’t it absurd to think that the universe might be infinite, Lorna says, returning to the same subject as she pokes at the dessert on her plate with her fork.
A pineapple upside-down cake Nina has baked especially.
For if, say, we go beyond Einstein’s theory—if we find an ultimate theory of everything—the theory will prove that we humans are created from the same basic substance as the universe, and that we and the universe are just different manifestations of the same thing. How then could the universe be infinite when we ourselves are finite?
Lorna speaks in short, almost inaudible, nervous bursts, so that one has to lean in close to hear what she is saying. She is small-boned and her arms are covered with freckles. She does not know how to drive a car and after dinner, Philip takes her home. To Nina, it seems as if the drive takes him longer than necessary. He is gone for two hours.
The traffic, he claims when he finally comes home. And an accident on the highway.
You shouldn’t have mentioned her shoes, Philip also tells Nina. You embarrassed her and it was childish.
But, by then, Nina has decided that Lorna is the child. A careless, needy child who cannot exist in the actual world or with the people in it.
You don’t understand, Philip says, frowning when, later, she again brings up the dinner with Lorna. Physicists do not have the freedom mathematicians have. Physicists deal with the actual world while mathematicians choose their worlds.
Downstairs, she hears a noise. The house settling or a piece of old furniture? The tall mahogany highboy in the dining room, she guesses. One of the drawers is filled with the Russian niello silver spoons that Philip collects.
Collected.
The spoons are carved with intricate patterns of flowers and leaves; some are even more intricate, with castles, hunting scenes, and—Philip’s favorite—a full-rigged sailing frigate. On special occasions—Christmas, New Year’s, a dinner party—Philip carefully places the spoons on top of the pristine white linen napkins Nina uses to set the table.
For decoration only, he warns the guests. Niello is made from one part silver, two parts copper, and three parts lead. Should you use the spoon to eat your soup you will risk brain damage.
Everyone but Nina laughs.
In spite of herself, she glances at the clock. The luminous dial points to a few minutes past two.
She does not feel tired.
On his mother’s side, Philip’s grandfather was a well-known silversmith. The Revolution in 1917 put an abrupt stop to his work and he left Russia for America. He managed to take some silver with him—spoons, a snuff box, various items he had worked on. When his children got married, he gave them each a piece of silver. His mother, Philip says, got a spoon.
What happened to it? Nina asks.
She may have lost it. Or she sold it.
Next time we visit, you should ask her.
Philip shrugs. She may not remember.
Nina will ask Alice.
Better yet, she decides, she will bring Alice one of Philip’s spoons.
Look, Alice, she will say, Philip found your old silver spoon. The one with the full-rigged sailing frigate carved on the back of the bowl.
Nina’s parents died several years ago. She rarely thinks of them—not, she tells herself, because she did not love them. She did. Retired, they lived in Florida. Her father played a lot of golf; her mother played board games and bridge. They were self-sufficient and uncomplaining. Eventually, they moved to a retirement home where Nina, once or twice a year, dutifully visited them. On the last visit—by then, her father had died of complications from a stroke—she walked on the beach and played Scrabble with her mother. Despite a recent hip replacement, which caused her to tire more easily, her mother won the game handily with the seven-letter triple-word-score
xerosis.
Challenging her, Nina lost. Xerosis means abnormal dryness of the skin—a condition her mother suffered from.
Downstairs, the noise again. Nina tenses. The front door is not locked. Anyone, she thinks, can walk in. How ironic—if that is the right word?—were a thief or, worse, a murderer to break in.
Would he assume that Philip is asleep and shoot him? Kill him twice. As for her, the murderer would first demand money, jewelry, before tying her up and shooting her as well. In the head, quickly, she hopes.
She does not want to think of the alternative.
In town a few years ago, in the spring, a young vagrant knocked on an elderly woman’s door asking for yard work. After pruning her lilac bushes and trimming her hedge, he put the same sharp clippers to her throat and raped and sodomized her. Soon after, the elderly woman died. She never recovered from her torn cervix and rectum or from her shame.
She listens for another sound, a door shutting, footsteps on the stairs, but hears nothing. Getting up and putting her hand against the wall for balance, she walks to the hall and looks over the banister. From where she stands, she can see the front door and, next to it, the large Italian ceramic pot that serves as an umbrella stand.
The pot is from a shop in Pantelleria. Nina has kept the owner’s card. Piero? Pietro? she no longer remembers which. She remembers that he flirted with her a bit.
Ah,
signora,
he says, holding her hand up to his lips, welcome to my shop.
Are you English? he also asks.
No, Americans, Philip tells him.
Americans. I have shipped to Ohio, to Nuova York, to California. Ah, beautiful California.
Have you been? Nina asks, freeing her hand at last.
Piero or Pietro shakes his head. No, no. My brother, he live in California.
Despite her look of disapproval, Philip does not bargain and pays for the pot in cash.
You’ll see, he is never going to send it to us, Nina tells him as they get back in the car. I don’t trust him.
You never know, Philip, an optimist, answers.
Months later, the pot arrives, intact. It is packed with newspaper and straw in a large handmade wooden crate.
You have to have more faith in people, Philip tells Nina.
Iris again.
What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer. Or what if Louise, who is helping her sort through Philip’s papers, finds it—a small, 2½-by-2¼ black-and-white photograph.
Look, Mom. Who is this blonde girl standing next to Dad? She looks like Grace Kelly. I love her dress. So fifties. Look at her tiny waist. Dad’s got his arm around her. Is she a relative? There’s something written on the back. It’s hard to make out—”To my darling.” Yes. “To my darling Phil.”
Yes, a relative, Nina tells Louise.
And, no, not Grace Kelly, Nina thinks. Grace Kelly is too sophisticated and well heeled. Iris looks more like Eva Marie Saint—the way Eva Marie Saint looks in the movie
On the Waterfront:
pretty, naïve, and full of convictions.
Eva Marie: the name of Philip’s best man’s fourteen-year-old daughter who was killed in an avalanche as she skied down the unpatrolled backside of a mountain in Idaho. Getting buried in snow, Nina thinks, must be like drowning.
When Philip is away and she is alone in the house at night, she moves the umbrella stand directly in front of the front door. If an intruder was to come in, he would knock over the umbrella stand and break it. The noise will wake her.
Undecided for a moment, Nina stands in the hall and looks around. The door to Louise’s bedroom, the doors to the guest room and guest bathroom are all shut.
Three doors.
She shakes her head a little, recollecting.
How many times have I tried to explain this to you?
She can hear the bantering and slightly irritated note in Philip’s voice.
You have three doors in the game and behind one door is a car, a diamond ring, or—
How about a new washing machine? Nina interrupts.
Okay, then, there is a new washing machine behind one door and a goat behind each of the two other doors.
One of those expensive German ones. A Bosch.
Are you listening or not? Otherwise, I am not going to try to explain this to you again.
I am listening.
Okay, so you choose a door. The door stays closed but since the game show host knows what is behind each door, he opens one of the two remaining doors—one with a goat behind it. He then asks you if you want to stay with the door you chose or if you want to switch to the last remaining door.
I would stay with the door I chose, Nina says.
Don’t you see, Nina, Philip goes on, raising his voice, once the game show host has opened one of the doors that has one of the goats behind it, he has reduced your chances from 1 in 3 to 2 in 3 to open the door with the washing machine? It’s to your advantage to switch. It’s obvious. I can explain it to you logically. I can explain it to you mathematically.
Still, Nina refuses. I told you, I am not switching doors.
What does he call the problem? A veridical paradox, for although it appears to be absurd it is demonstrably true. And what does he call her?
A stubborn goatherd.
Back in the bedroom, Nina pulls up one of the chairs and places it next to the bed.
Again, she touches Philip’s cold hand.
Philip, she whispers.
He wants to be cremated, he has said so. He also says that he does not want his ashes to be buried but spread in the sea. In the Atlantic, he specifies.
The largest park in Paris. It’s over a hundred acres, Philip informs her, as they stroll through the Père Lachaise cemetery on a sunny spring day soon after they meet.
A veritable history lesson among the seventy thousand graves, he says.
They have taken the métro and walked down the boulevard de Ménilmontant; outside the entrance a woman is selling flowers. Philip stops and buys Nina a bunch of red carnations.
Hand in hand, they walk up and down the avenues of tombs, reading off the names out loud to each other: Marcel Proust, Édith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde …