She and Philip often talk about this trip.
I’d like to go up the Mekong by boat, Philip says. The river is about two thousand miles long—the longest in Southeast Asia—and drains an area of about three hundred thousand square miles, discharging 114 cubic …
Her eyes closed, she sees herself on the deck of the boat as they sail past agile young men, throwing out their fishing nets from the banks of the river, past dark-haired women dressed in colorful sarongs, squatting on the raised decks of their wooden houses, cooking their spicy midday meal, and past naked children splashing and waving at them from the dirty brown water; occasionally a plastic bag floats by or, worse, a bloated dead animal.
She looks around the boat for Philip.
Where is he?
She must not forget to pack a hat.
With the guidebook, she fans herself.
Hot.
For her thirty-ninth birthday, Philip gives her a large-brimmed red straw hat.
Redheads aren’t supposed to—she starts to tell him but he interrupts her.
Redheads should always wear red, he says.
In his office, on his desk, there is a framed color photo of her sitting in her two-piece bathing suit on the beach at Belle-Île; she is wearing the red hat.
Is that your wife? people must ask him.
When was the picture taken? How long ago?
And where was it taken? Abroad somewhere?
Next to it, there is a more recent photo of Louise. A black-and-white formal portrait.
My daughter, Louise, Philip tells them.
Once again, she gets out of bed.
What would Philip say if he could see her walking uncertainly around the bedroom, dressed like a clown?
Would he laugh?
She goes to the window and opens it. The cool air feels good on her face.
The sky is filled with stars—late night stars she cannot identify.
No doubt Philip can.
She thinks of Lorna spinning around them.
What does she say that night at dinner? Something about how we humans are created from the same basic substance as the universe, how we are made from the same material as the stars.
Lorna is eating a slice of the pineapple upside-down cake.
She and Philip are talking about Einstein—about Einstein’s ultimate theory of everything—and, midsentence, Philip interrupts himself to say, Someone once told Einstein that, to an astronomer, man is nothing but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe.
And you know what Einstein replied? Philip asks.
Her mouth full of cake, Lorna shakes her head.
That may be true, but the insignificant dot is also an astronomer.
Lorna laughs, then, turning to Nina, says, This cake is delicious. Can you give me the recipe?
In the bathroom, Nina avoids looking at herself in the mirror.
Then she goes back and lies down on the bed.
Cautiously, she shuts her eyes.
Soon it will be daylight and morning.
Often, as soon as she awakes and before she forgets them, she tells Philip her dreams—vivid dreams that make no sense—and, less often—for as soon as he opens his eyes he claims to have forgotten them—he tells her his.
Dreams, Philip says, are generated in the brain stem and are meaningless until the dreamer transforms them to suit his or her own personal characteristics.
Nina disagrees. Dreams, she says, are motivated by desires.
Last night I dreamt about a dog, Nina tells him. A big black-and-white mutt—a mix between a German shepherd and some other breed. I was walking the dog when all of a sudden the street I was on, a vaguely familiar-looking street—familiar, perhaps, because I recognized it from an earlier dream—turned into a giant dump or landfill and the dog was straining at the leash trying to—
Funny, Philip interrupts, now I remember. I dreamt about walking a dog, too, last night. My dog, Natty Bumppo, I think.
What was the dog doing?
I don’t know. I don’t remember.
Maybe we had the same dream, Nina says.
Maybe, Philip answers.
Dr. Mayer urges her to write down her dreams.
During one of their sessions, Nina starts to tell Dr. Mayer about the recurring nightmare she had as a child—the one about the ever increasing numbers and how Philip has said that the dream stands for the terror of the infinite—but Dr. Mayer, she guesses, knows nothing about infinity.
Instead, she makes up a dream about a house. A large elegant house made entirely out of glass. A house unlike any other she has ever seen or been in. However, the moment she opens the front door and steps inside, she knows that she has come home.
This house is home—home for the past twenty years.
And this bed, too—she pats the quilt for emphasis.
The bed, an antique four-poster, was propped up on its side and covered in dust and bird droppings inside a barn that sold used lumber and farm equipment.
The headboard is hand-carved, the owner, a farmer, told her, spitting tobacco juice into a can. Six hundred dollars. Not a penny less.
Look at the cracks. The frame needs a lot of work, Nina argued back.
She had bargained him down to four hundred and fifty dollars. At the time, it was a fortune.
And how many nights have she and Philip slept in the bed?
How many hours?
“Take for example,” Philip tells his first-year students, “that, on average, my wife and I sleep eight hours each night. However, this is not always true”—a student in the back row gives a snort of laughter. “The reason being,” Philip continues, ignoring the student, “we have a newborn baby. Her name is Louise and, during the day Louise smiles and coos, but at night Louise is transformed into a different baby altogether, a baby who does nothing but cry”—a few students, most of them women, laugh—”and either me or my wife has to get out of bed and go change and feed her, which means that we may only get five or six hours of sleep a night. But as we have seen”—here, Philip turns his back to the class and starts to draw on the blackboard—”the normal distribution, known as the Gaussian distribution, will show us how, at least approximately, any variable—the nights my wife and I don’t get to sleep eight hours—tends to cluster around the mean, which is that glorious night of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep when Louise does not cry—”
Nina stops eating dairy—coffee ice cream, an afterdinner treat—along with onions, cabbage, cauliflower, vegetables she does not much care for but that give her gas. She gives up caffeine—her morning coffee—all the better to breast-feed Louise.
Colic, pure and simple.
Month after month, Louise cries every night. For hours, Nina rocks Louise in the rocking chair; she gives her a warm bath but, in the tub, Louise only cries harder, she is inconsolable. Exhausted, Nina puts on her coat over her nightgown, hauls the bassinet with Louise in it, still crying, down the three flights of stairs—again, the dog in the apartment below them barks and his owner yells
Shut up, damn it
—and she puts Louise in the backseat of the car. Except for the streetlights and for an occasional shout from a bar open late, the streets are dark and quiet as, slowly, tentatively, holding the wheel tightly in both hands, Nina drives through Cambridge, Mt. Auburn, and Watertown. Once she drives as far as Waltham before Louise finally stops crying and falls asleep.
At night, Nina begins to hate Louise.
Natty Bumppo, the black-and-white German shepherd mix, in her dream, was straining so hard on the leash that the leash broke. She chased after him, calling out—
Tobias—without thinking about it, she remembers the name of the neighbors’ old yellow Lab.
Stiff and a little uncomfortable, she shifts her weight carefully on the bed.
She does not want to disturb Philip or wrinkle the red silk coat.
Aboard
Hypatia,
in a sudden gust, the red straw hat blows off her head and into the water.
Oh, she cries. My hat!
Too bad. Philip shakes his head.
Come about, she pleads, let me try and get it.
Already, she has gotten the boat hook and is hurrying up to the bow.
Ready about, Philip yells.
I’ll come up alongside it to starboard, he also says.
Lying flat on her stomach on the boat’s deck in the bow and holding out the boat hook, Nina leans as far over the side as she dares, watching the red hat, bobbing up and down in the water, as it comes closer, and determined—even if she falls overboard—to grab it.
Faded, the straw broken and frayed along the brim, the red hat hangs from a nail on the wall of her studio. Next to it hangs her painting of it floating in the water. In charcoal, at the bottom among the waves, she has scrawled:
el sombrero cayó en el agua.
A joke.
According to her mother,
el sombrero cayó en el agua
were the first words Nina, as a child, learns to say in Spanish.
Sombrrrerrro
—she repeats to herself, rolling the Rs.
Why? she wonders.
Did her hat fall in the water?
Or was it her twin Linda’s hat?
Padre Nuestro, que estás en los cielos….
At one time, she could recite the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish.
Later, she learns it in French:
Notre Père, qui es aux cieux …
A superstitious child, she never steps on a crack, yet she does not believe in a God.
Now she is not sure.
Our Father who art….
She should toss a coin.
Heads? God is.
Tails? He is not.
She should not have drunk so much wine.
Philip believes that the universe had a beginning. Once there was nothing and now there is a lot. But this, he says, has nothing to do with God.
How do you mean there was nothing? Nina asks.
I mean nothing.
Air? Space?
No. Nothing.
I can’t imagine it.
No one can.
She shuts her eyes.
Nothing is like nonexistence.
Like death.
But what if God created the big bang? What if God made the universe make itself? For argument’s sake, Nina asks.
That would satisfy a lot of people who believe in the story of Genesis. Pass me another crêpe, please, and the jam. Not apricot, the other kind, Philip says.
Myrtille.
She and Philip are the last ones having breakfast in the dining room. A waitress is clearing the dishes off the other tables and heaping them noisily on a tray.
Encore deux cafés, s’il vous plaît,
Philip calls out.
She wants us to leave, Nina says, nervous, glancing over at the waitress.
The day before, they take the train from Paris to Brest, and from Brest, a bus to Ploudalmézeau, where they rent bicycles. From there, in the driving rain, they bike the thirteen kilometers to the village of Tréglonou.
I’m sopping wet, Nina complains when they stop by the side of the road so that Philip can study the map.
We must have missed the turn, he says.
Let’s ask someone, Nina suggests as a car speeds past.
I know where we are. It must just be a few hundred meters back down this road. Let’s turn around and keep going.
Back and forth they ride down narrow roads bordered by
wet green fields, where bunches of horses and cows are huddled together against the rain. Wait, wait, Nina wails to herself as she pedals behind Philip. She is wearing a long skirt and the hem catches in the spokes of the bicycle wheel, twice she has almost fallen off. Philip does not appear to notice.
In the village of Plouvien, Nina stops to hike up her skirt. Across the street, a priest in a long black cassock is locking the door to a church, then, turning, he opens his large black umbrella. When he sees Nina straddling her bicycle by the side of the road, he walks over and asks her if she needs his help.
This morning, it is still raining.
But I thought you said you believe in God, Nina says.
I believe in a libertarian God. A God who allows room for free will, Philip says, yawning. I wish we could go back to bed, he also says, taking Nina’s hand and bringing it to his lips.
Nina smiles. Are you saying that God can’t predict the future?
Let me describe another possibility, Philip says, rearranging the plates on the table as, frowning, the waitress brings them more coffee.
Merci, madame,
Nina says.
Let us suppose that I order two breakfasts. This one, he points to his plate, is a classic breakfast: a crêpe with
myrtille
jam or a crêpe with apricot jam, the other, the quantum breakfast, he says, taking Nina’s empty plate, is a crêpe and a superposition with both
myrtille
and apricot jam.
Nina shakes her head. A superposition of—
The superposition principle states that if the world can be in any configuration and also in another configuration, then the world can also be in a state that is a superposition of the two. In other words, the God-created universe and the big-bang-created universe can coexist. By using the mathematics of partial existence, we can think critically about both theology and physics. Or, to use my example, I can eat my
myrtille
and apricot jam breakfast at the same time.
I haven’t understood a thing you’ve said, Nina says.
Finish your crêpe—the classic one—and, look, she tells him, it’s stopped raining.
Ploudalmézeau, Tréglonou—
ou, ou
—she pushes out her lips to form the syllables as, silently, she practices pronouncing those Celtic names.
B.B.B. and A.B.B. is how we divide cosmic time, Philip also tells her that morning at breakfast. B.B.B. stands for before the big bang, the way B.C. stands for before Jesus Christ, and A.B.B., of course, stands for after the big bang.
Of course.
All day the sun tries to shine through the heavy, low gray clouds. Occasionally, for a few bright moments, it succeeds, shedding an intense light over the flat countryside that makes the grass look greener, the sea bluer, a field of cauliflowers sparkle like diamonds.
Chou-fleur,
she says to herself.
Myrtille.
Across the road, the cows and horses stand sharply outlined.
I should have brought a hat, Nina says, shading her eyes. She wears jeans and has no trouble keeping up with Philip as they ride toward the coast.