I Married You for Happiness (9 page)

The first city that was home to her was Atlanta; next came Cincinnati; then her family was sent abroad. First, they went to Montevideo, later they moved to Rome, still later to Brussels. Nina’s father worked for a multinational company that manufactures household products: soaps, cleaning powders, detergents. As a result of all the moves, Nina learned to speak Spanish, Italian, and French but because she had to change schools so often, she never learned to speak any of those languages properly. Also, it was difficult for her to make friends; she spent her time reading, daydreaming.

What has made her think of this?

The car’s disappearing taillights?

Early on, when she was eight years old and living in Uruguay and long before she had heard of solipsism, she devised the idea that only she existed in the world. A war, an appalling crime, or, merely, a dish falling and breaking on the ground, a door slamming in the next house, occurred for her benefit alone. Everything else was a void, a huge emptiness, nothing.

She remembers little about Uruguay: the balcony overlooking the street outside the dining room and how once she threw a glass of water on a boy walking below—angry, the boy had looked up and shouted,
Puta, puta;
her school pinafore with her name plainly embroidered in thick red thread on her chest—
Niña, niña,
she was teased; the maid picking her up from school and teaching her how to roll her Rs.

RRRR—she curls her tongue and rolls the Rs out loud.

She has not forgotten how and this pleases her a little.

CaRRRavaggio—she tries again.

A little impatient, Philip claims that the painting is too sentimental. He much prefers, he says, the vigorous realism of
The Conversion of St. Paul on the Way to Damascus
and
The Crucifixion of St. Peter,
the two Caravaggio paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo.

I can’t explain it, Nina says as they leave the gallery, but there is something about the angel that is very sensual. Erotic almost, she says. He is so robust—the way he stands, nearly naked, on one leg, his hip jutting out. But his black wings look
too small, too delicate, as if they were painted on as an afterthought … Nina does not finish.

On the way to the restaurant—or perhaps the theft takes place while they are in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili—Philip is pickpocketed, his wallet stolen. Only after they have eaten and it is time to pay does he notice that the wallet is gone. He then has to spend the better part of the afternoon at the police station; he has to cancel his credit cards—already someone has charged thousands of euros worth of appliances—and he misses several important lectures.

I should have paid more attention, he tells Nina, patting his jacket pocket.

Diane, the other woman who works with Nina in the art gallery, goes with her. Her boyfriend, a medical student, has given Diane a phone number. When Nina dials it, a man answers. After asking her how many weeks she is pregnant, he gives her an address and tells her to come at two o’clock the day after next, which is a Wednesday—
mercredi.
In addition, he tells her to buy disinfectant and cotton—there is a pharmacy on the corner of the street—and to bring two thousand new francs in cash. He never tells her his name.

He might have killed her.

Fortunate, except for fog, they rarely encounter bad weather. Once, only, are they caught in a storm—the tail end of a Florida hurricane—with waves crashing on the deck, the wind tearing at the sails, the boat heeling so far over it takes on water.

Poor
Hypatia,
Philip says. She came close to being skinned alive a second time.

In the dark, she shudders and drinks a little more wine.

The boom breaks Philip’s nose and his front tooth; down below, Nina is thrown against the edge of the stove top and cracks a rib.

The hospital in the Maine coastal town is small, the staff efficient and friendly. Nothing can be done about her cracked rib except warn her not to cough or laugh. She is given pain pills. Philip’s nose is set by inserting a metal rod up his nostril; she hears him cry out. He is lying next to her in the emergency room. As for his tooth, the dentist at home will fashion an expensive cap for it.

Leaning over the bed, Nina touches Philip’s face; with her finger she traces the outline of his nose. No one could guess that he broke it.

Over and over, she tries to do Philip’s portrait in oil; each time, dissatisfied, she puts the painting aside. The quick sketches in charcoal are better. The problem is Philip’s mouth—she can never get it right—his lips curl in an unnatural way. The last time she paints him, she wants to do him nude.

Take off your shirt, your pants, she tells him, your shoes and socks.

Your boxer shorts, too, she adds.

Standing with his hands on his hips, Philip refuses to take them off.

Don’t be silly, Nina says.

I don’t feel comfortable standing here naked, he complains. And it’s cold.

Nude not naked, Nina replies. And think of me as a professional and not as your wife.

How can I think of you as not my wife? Philip asks.

I don’t know. Aren’t you supposed to have an imagination?

Still, he refuses to take his boxers off.

Recently, at an exhibition, Nina saw a painting Lucian Freud did of his mother after she had died. A beautiful and serene portrait of a wrinkled, old woman with her eyes closed, her hands crossed over her chest, lying on her back on a narrow iron bed.

She cannot imagine painting Philip now.

The boxer shorts Philip wears while he poses for her are light blue but she paints them bright red—a carmine red—the closest she comes to have him nude.

Lorna again.

She runs into them unexpectedly in a popular health food restaurant. Sitting across from each other in a booth, they are eating lunch—not touching. What distresses her is how animated they look. When they catch sight of her, abruptly, they stop talking.

Philip waves her over.

What are you eating? Nina cannot think of what to say. Garbanzo bean stew—do you want to taste it? Philip holds a spoonful out to her.

No, thanks. Nina makes a face.

Philip’s metabolism is good; he does not gain weight. He eats what he wants and eats everything.

She remembers the chicken getting cold downstairs—the sauce and fat congealing together on the platter. She prefers the white meat, the breast; Philip prefers the thigh and drumstick.

How well suited they are.

Louise, she thinks.

Oblivious, Louise is asleep, content after sex, in the arms of a handsome young man. In the morning, everything will change. The handsome young man will be forgotten as Louise quickly packs her suitcase, drives to the airport, and flies back home.

Louise, Philip’s darling. Always strong and sensible.

When she was two years old, Louise came down with spinal meningitis. Nina did not recognize the symptoms right away—fever and vomiting. At the time, she thought Louise had a stomach flu or had eaten something that did not agree with her.

Then Louise had a seizure. Then she went into a coma.

For once, Nina prayed. In the hospital chapel, on her knees, she prayed and prayed. She lit candles for Louise. She made God all kinds of promises she could not keep.

God in heaven, Nina says to herself.

God in heaven, she repeats, not sure what she means.
Green pastures filled with contented white sheep is how she sees it. Wearing dresses, the color of candy, Iris and Lorna are waiting for Philip.

Like in a bad novel.

But going through the motions—attending church, kneeling, praying—is what, according to Philip, Pascal recommends for people like her who still question the existence of God.

She tries to remember the words of the psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures
—she shuts her eyes to think but she has forgotten what comes next.

A different song begins to sound in her head:

Hadn’t they once gone to a Grateful Dead concert?

A hot and humid summer night, the air thick with the smell of pot. The Hearst Greek amphitheater is packed with people waving their arms and screaming. Nina can hardly hear the music, much less the words—only she knows most of them by heart. She keeps her eyes fixed on one of the musicians, the piano player. His hair is long and parted in the middle; he looks stoned.

She pictures herself in bed with him.

And we bid you good night, good night, good night,
she and Philip sing in the car on the way home.

They come close then to getting separated.

Her only friend in Berkeley is the mother of one of Louise’s classmates. Dark-haired and thin, Patsy is divorced. She lives in an apartment complex a few blocks from Nina and Philip’s house; she has a younger boyfriend, Todd. Todd works at Mammoth as a ski patrolman; on his day off, he comes and stays with Patsy. He always arrives with marijuana and other forbidden substances in his worn black backpack.

Where does he get all that? Nina has to ask.

From skiers who break their legs and give him their stash, Patsy tells Nina. They don’t want to go to the hospital with that stuff in their pockets—the nurses will confiscate it or, worse, report them to the police.

Nina’s drug of choice is amyl nitrite, which comes in the form of a little blue capsule that she breaks in half and sniffs up her nose. Right away she gets a rush. Her blood vessels expand, her heart beats faster.

Poppers are good for sex, Patsy also tells Nina. They relax the sphincter muscles.

The what … Nina starts to ask.

While their daughters are in school, they also smoke marijuana. Pot makes Nina laugh.

Stretched out on Patsy’s living room floor, on the yellow synthetic rug that has a sour chemical smell, the window shades drawn, the room dark as night, she listens to a recording of wolf
howls. The howls—a whole series of them—are described by a narrator with a clipped British voice.

A howl of alarm, he says.

Never, never
—ha ha
—has she heard anything so funny.

A chorus of howls.

Ha ha ha
—she laughs.

Hoo hoo hoo
—she howls like the wolves.

Next to her on the floor, Patsy and Todd are making out.

This, too, makes her laugh.

She never speaks of it to Philip.

She never speaks of it to Dr. Mayer.

Too late, come to think of it now, amyl nitrite is used to treat heart disease.

Again, she tries to remember exactly what he says when he comes home.

I am a bit tired, I am going to lie down for a few minutes before dinner, or does he say something else entirely?

She is spinning lettuce in the kitchen. She half listens.

What a day. All those meetings! You should hear how some of those physicists talk and talk.

Before going upstairs, he kisses her on the cheek.

She touches her cheek. This cheek.

Philip! Dinner! she calls to him.

Philip, darling! Dinner!

Darling, dear, sweetheart, honey
—endearments she rarely uses.

Nor does Philip.

Ma chérie,
he says.

Ma chérie
is how he addresses her in the letters he writes when he returns to the States in the summer. He writes her two or three times a week—telephone calls are expensive and, anyway, she does not own a phone. She cannot always read the letters that are written in black ink on both sides of onionskin paper in his small cramped handwriting; the blue airmail envelopes are addressed to
Mlle. Nina Hoffman, 8 rue Sophie-Germain, Paris 14ème, France.

He looks pleased when she tells him where she lives. A sign, he says.

A sign of what? Nina asks.

You don’t know whom the street is named for?

Nina frowns. No. She does not.

Sophie Germain was a famous eighteenth-century mathematician who set out to prove Fermat’s last theorem by saying that
n
is equal to a particular prime number and since prime numbers have no divisors….

Nina lives in a
chambre de bonne
six flights up narrow airless dark stairs; she has to share the toilet and the tub with the other occupants on her floor.

A sign of my not having a whole lot of money, she interrupts Philip.

“One of the most important correspondences in the history of mathematics,” Philip tells his students, “was between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. It began on August 24, 1654, and its object was to find a solution for the problem of the unfinished game.

“Take two players and place equal bets on who will win the best-out-of-five coin tosses. The players start the game but are forced to stop before either player has won, leaving one of them ahead 2 to 1. The question Pascal and Fermat pose is how will the two players divide the pot?”

Patsy never has enough money and Nina lends her some. And for a while, after she and Philip leave Berkeley, Nina stays in touch. Then Patsy moves to Santa Fe, then to Phoenix; Nina’s last letter is returned with
Address Unknown
stamped on the envelope.

“The way Pascal and Fermat solved the problem was to look at all the possible ways the game might have turned out had the two players finished and tossed five times. And since one player—let’s call her Louise after my six year old daughter—is ahead 2 to 1 after the three tosses—tosses that must have yielded two heads and one tail—the remaining two throws can yield—”

H H H T T H T T—Philip writes it out on the blackboard.

“And since each of these four tosses is equally likely, we can proceed thus: in the first, H H, Louise wins; in the second and third, H T and T H, Louise still wins; in the fourth T T, the other
player wins. This means that in three of the four possible ways the tosses could have come up Louise wins, and in only one of the possible tosses does the other player win. Louise then has a 3 to 1 advantage and the pot should be divided 3 to 4 to her and 1 to 4 to the other player. Are you following me?”

Silence.

“The point I want to make to you,” Philip says after a pause, “is that Pascal and Fermat’s letters first showed us how to predict the future by calculating the numerical likelihood of an event occurring and, more important, how to manage risk.”

In her
chambre de bonne,
the narrow bed covered in an Indian fabric is pressed up against one wall and doubles as a couch; across from the bed, there is a scarred wooden bureau; on top of that, an electric hot plate, a few dishes, two china cups, and a radio. A wooden armchair stands by the window and stacks of books are piled on the floor; on the shelf over the sink are her toiletries, soap, a packet of brown toilet paper, a few bottles of water, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, a half-empty jar of Nescafé, and a hand mirror. Several posters from the art gallery where she works, advertising upcoming shows, are thumbtacked to the wall. From the hooks nailed to the door dangle some hangers with skirts, dresses, her leather jacket; also, a man’s hat.

Picking up the hat, Philip asks, Who does this belong to?

From her window, she looks out on to mansard roofs and, craning her neck, she can also look down at a private interior garden
that, except for a small white dog who occasionally runs maniacally around it, is always deserted. In the building directly across from her she can see into a dining room where, in the evening, a family—mother, father, and three children—eat their dinner. She watches as they talk, laugh, pass their plates, and refill their glasses.

In the morning, often late, she takes the métro to work, then, afterward, if it is not raining or cold, she walks home. That spring, she takes to wearing a man’s hat—it makes her, she thinks, look modish.

Except for those he wrote her long ago, she has received few letters from Philip. From time to time, a postcard from some far-flung place where he is attending a conference, which she does not always keep. One of these postcards—a postcard with a picture of a junk sailboat on it—arrived long after Philip himself gets home.

Sofia, again.

A slender, dark-haired woman, in a tight-fitting silk
qipao,
eating rooster testicles with her slippery ivory chopsticks.

What do they taste like?

The rooster testicles? I don’t know. Rubber bands.

Does she speak English? Nina also asks.

Of course. She studied at Oxford and speaks several languages—English, French, Spanish, I think she said. To say nothing of Cantonese and Mandarin.

And the Ming china. What does it look like? Nina presses.

Blue and white. Philip frowns slightly, then says, which reminds me of how, once, according to Sofia, a guest at one of their dinner parties picked up a Ming bowl to look underneath for the mark and he dropped it. The bowl broke and, according to Chinese custom—so that the guest does not feel embarrassed and to show that he is not overly attached to his possessions—the host is supposed to break his own bowl.

And did she?

Philip shrugs. Yes, I suppose.

The poor guest. He must have felt terrible.

And what would you do under those circumstances? she asks.

I would go to an antique store and try to replace the Ming bowls.

Like turning the other cheek.

Would she have? No, probably not. She is too easily angered, too quick to take offense. A true redhead, her parents were always quick to remind her.

The result of a genetic mutation since neither one of them had red hair.

Redheads make up 5 percent of the world population, Philip tells her, as they lie pressed together on her narrow bed in the maid’s room on rue Sophie-Germain. Scotland, he also says, twisting a strand of her hair between his fingers, has the highest population of redheads. A redhead in Corsica is considered bad luck but redheads are good luck in Poland.

I should move to Poland.

Redheads are more likely to be stung by bees, Philip continues. And the Egyptians burned all redheaded women.

I won’t go there, Nina says.

No matter now, her hair has turned gray.

“My wife has red hair—auburn is what she prefers to call it,” is how Philip begins another lecture. “As you can see, I have black hair although it is starting to turn gray”—the students laugh. “Our daughter, Louise, who is twelve”—here Philip pauses a moment—”no, she’s thirteen now, also has black hair, which leads me to today’s subject—the role played by probability in heredity. You all know how Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth-century abbot from Moravia, began his experiments with two peas: a yellow pea and a green pea and how he cross-fertilized these two peas and got all yellow peas, then how he cross-fertilized the second-generation peas and got three-quarter yellow peas and one-quarter green peas. This was not a new experiment but so far no one had explained it, until Mendel did. He showed how the seed of an offspring of the two original peas—the yellow and the green—contain the
following combinations: yellow-yellow, yellow-green, green-yellow, green-green; and that the seed which contains a yellow gene will almost always produce a yellow pea because yellow is the dominant color….”

Before she gets into bed, Nina turns up the volume of a popular music station on the radio to drown out the noise of their lovemaking.

Taking off his shoes and socks, his shirt then his pants, Philip sings along with Johnny Hallyday singing “Let’s Twist Again.”

He makes her laugh.

Mimicking the way Johnny Hallyday pronounces
year
to sound like
yar,
Philip climbs into bed next to Nina.

In the room next door, the Swiss au pair pounds on the wall.

She’s just jealous, Philip says as, undeterred, he gets on top of Nina and slowly begins to move, making the narrow bed bang against the wall.