A Beautiful Mind (40 page)

I’ve been making slight progress with JFN but can’t tell just yet if it’s significant. I don’t think he’s really too interested but more or less can take me or leave me. About 3 weeks ago I met his parents who’d come up to visit him for a week. I’ve been seeing him on and off and last Saturday we went to the beach together — I had fun.
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Alicia hinted at one reason why Nash remained lukewarm: “He still thinks I’m too innocent but has now condescended to accept me as is and just let my ’sweet innocent little self develop.”

And in her own mind, Alicia was still playing the field, though it was clear that she was distracting herself and hoping in the process to pique Nash’s interest.

I’ve picked up a few admirers this summer including that Junior that Marolyn was talking about. I keep refusing dates with him but he doesn’t seem to get the idea and just follows me around, so far he has written a couple of cute poems that I’m keeping as suveniers [sic]. I realize that I’m sounding quite egocentric with all this but not much else has been happening.

Whether because of preoccupation with Nash or simply because of a waning interest in physics, Alicia failed to graduate with her class. She had to stay on to make up a number of courses. But the shock of not graduating on time, and the unpleasant business of having to admit this to her father, did little to refocus her attention on her studies. She says in the letter to Joyce that she is making up M39 but that “so far I’m up to
page 10
in Hildebrand.”

Nash and Alicia saw more of each other in the fall. He took her to a math party. Then another. And out to the Newmans’ house or to Marvin Minsky’s. “Let’s go Minskify,” he would say to a group.
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Sometimes they double-dated with one of Alicia’s friends. On those occasions, he almost ignored her once they had arrived and the introductions were made, going off to join the circle of men talking about mathematics. Sometimes Alicia would stand at the edge of the circle listening to Nash say things like “Who are the great geniuses: Wiener, Levinson, and me. But I think maybe I’m the best.” Other times she found herself among mathematicians’ wives talking about their children. There was no flirtation, no going off in a corner to hold hands, but in fact the relationship was more intoxicating for those reasons. The other women treated her with the deference accorded to the genius consort, which made Alicia feel rather smug. As for Nash, he could not help but be aware that the other men, impressed and surprised, envied him this adoring, gorgeous creature.

Other times they would go out for lunch, usually with someone else. Bricker often joined them, and also Emma Duchane. Bricker recalled Alicia as “very
bright” and “quite sarcastic.”
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Emma recalled, “She was not deferential at all. She never stopped talking.”
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True, Nash was not especially nice to Alicia. Among other things, he called her unflattering nicknames, including “Leech,” a nasty play on her childhood nickname, Lichi.
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He never paid for her meals, dividing every restaurant check down to the penny. “He was not infatuated with her,” Emma recalled in 1996. “He was infatuated with himself.”
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To Nash, Alicia was part of the background, charming and decorative. He treated her the way other mathematicians treated their women. But Alicia wasn’t looking for companionship either. Later Emma said: “We wanted intellectual thrills. When my boyfriend told me
e
to the
pi
times / equals negative 1, I was thrilled. I felt the absolute joy of the idea.”
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Nash was no less fun to be with than the other mathematicians.

A February 1956 letter from Alicia to a friend doesn’t mention Nash at all. But at the end of that month Alicia’s mother would move to Washington (Carlos Larde had gotten a position at Glendale Hospital in Maryland), a move that Alicia anticipated with some glee.

It was probably sometime that spring that Nash and Alicia began sleeping together, at the end of those evenings in company where they barely exchanged three words. Nash was still involved with both Bricker and Eleanor. Indeed, he may have continued, even at this late date, to think of Eleanor as his likely wife. Alicia and John were in bed one evening when his doorbell rang.
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John answered the door. It was not Arthur Mattuck, who sometimes dropped by unannounced. It was Eleanor, indeed, an angry and shaken Eleanor. She said nothing but walked right past Nash into the apartment. She acted as if she’d come to talk things out with him.

When she realized Nash was not alone, she began shrieking and crying and threatening until finally she had cried herself out and Nash drove her home. Alicia, meanwhile, white-faced, left.

The next day, Nash went into Arthur Mattuck’s office, told him the story, grabbed his head with both hands, and moaned, genuinely pained, over and over, “My perfect little world is ruined, my perfect little world is ruined.”

Eleanor called Alicia and told her that she was stealing another woman’s man. She told her about John David. She told her that Nash was planning to marry her and that she, Alicia, was wasting her time. Alicia invited Eleanor to her apartment for a meeting. Eleanor came; Alicia was waiting with a bottle of red wine. “She tried to get me drunk,” Eleanor recalled. “She wanted to see what I was like. We talked about John.”
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And, having met her, and realizing that Eleanor was an LPN, that she was practically thirty, that the affair had been going on for nearly three years, Alicia
concluded that it wasn’t going anywhere. She was not shocked. Men had mistresses, they even had children by them, but they married women of their own class. Of that she felt quite confident. Eleanor had called her up to complain. Alicia was pleased. She took it as a sign that, as her friend Emma said, “she was beginning to matter.”
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Nash was due for a sabbatical the following year. He had won one of the new Sloan Fellowships, prestigious three-year research grants that would let the recipients spend at least one year away from teaching and, for that matter, away from Cambridge.
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He could go-where he liked. He was, perhaps unreasonably, still worried about the draft, as he had confided to Tucker in a letter a year earlier.
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He decided to spend that year at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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He was beginning to think seriously about various problems in quantum theory and thought that a year at the institute might stimulate his thinking.

Alicia meanwhile complained in a letter to Joyce that February that she was “just vegetating.” She mentioned a vague desire (which she did not say was connected with Nash) “to get a job in New York instead of staying on at the Institute [MIT] to attend graduate school.”
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At the end of the spring term, Nash took Alicia to the math department picnic in Boston. The picnics were always held during reading week and often on the commons. Wiener came, as did all the graduate students. It was an unusually warm day, and Nash was in high spirits. Nash did something curious that engraved itself on the memories of another instructor, Nesmith Ankeny and his wife, Barbara. It was, of course, Nash’s notion of a joke. He wished to show everyone that he was the master of this gorgeous young woman, and that she was his slave. At one point, late in the afternoon, he threw Alicia to the ground and placed his foot on her neck.
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But despite this display of machismo and possessiveness, Nash left Cambridge in June without suggesting marriage or even that she move to New York.

Indeed, at the start of that summer, in June, another friend of Alicia’s described Alicia as being in Cambridge and “in an unbelievable state of depression, due to a certain instructor at MIT.”
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28
Seattle
Summer 1956

N
ASH LEFT
C
AMBRIDGE
for Seattle in mid-June with the light heart of a man making a temporary escape from a tangle of personal and professional dilemmas.
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Travel always lifted his spirits and this trip was no exception. The month-long summer institute at the University of Washington was exactly what he wanted. A top-notch crowd of mathematicians working in differential geometry would he there: Ambrose, Bott, Singer, as well as Louis Nirenberg and Hassler Whitney. Nash expected that his embedding work would make him one of the centers of attention. And he was looking forward to hearing Busemann’s seminar on the state of Soviet mathematics because everyone knew that the Russians were doing great things, but the authorities were no longer allowing even abstracts of their mathematics articles to be translated into English.

The signal event of the summer institute turned out to be the surprise announcement, within a day or two of the start of the meetings, of Milnor’s proof of the existence of exotic spheres.
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For the mathematicians gathered there, it had the same electrifying effect as the announcement of a solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles of Princeton University four decades later. It stole Nash’s thunder.

Nash reacted to the news of Milnor’s triumph with a display of adolescent petulance.
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The mathematicians were all camping out in a student dormitory and eating their meals in the cafeteria. Nash protested by grabbing gigantic portions. Once he demolished a pile of bread. Another time, he threw a glass of milk at a cashier. And on one occasion, during a sailboat outing, he got into a shoving match with another mathematician.

Nash didn’t immediately recognize Amasa Forrester, who looked like a shaggy bespectacled bear with the hint of a double chin, a haphazardly shaven face, and glasses, and who even walked like a bear with a slightly forward-leaning gait, when
the latter buttonholed him after a talk.
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Forrester had to remind Nash that they’d been at Princeton together, Forrester having been a first-year graduate student during Nash’s final year. After they starting talking, however, Nash remembered Forrester as a Steenrod student who was always holding court in the Fine Hall common room, waving a water pistol around.

Despite his somewhat unprepossessing appearance, Forrester had interesting things to say. He was fast, aggressive, and seemed to know everything about everything that came up in their conversation. Forrester explained some of the details of Milnor’s work to Nash. They also talked, then and later, about Nash’s embedding papers, which Forrester appeared to know quite well.

Forrester invited Nash to come to see his living quarters, moored on Lake Union, between Lake Washington and Puget Sound in downtown Seattle.

To Nash, Forrester was “a different sort.”
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He would later refer to Forrester, who went by the name Amasa, in the same terms that he used when he compared Thorson and Bricker to the Beatles —“young,” “colorful,” “amusing,” and “attractive” — someone who made him feel like “the girls who love the Beatles so wildly.”

There was much to draw them together. Forrester, who had just turned thirty, was as brash and brilliant as Nash.
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He’d had a stellar graduate-school career. Steenrod, who was on his dissertation committee, had given him spectacular references. He was disorganized and sloppy but he had a photographic memory and wide-ranging interests. He hadn’t done much since arriving in Seattle in 1954 and, indeed, hadn’t been able to publish his dissertation because it turned out to contain a substantive flaw, but he was still full of enthusiasm, or at least so it seemed to Nash. He shared Nash’s predilection for insult and one-upmanship — at Princeton he’d been referred to as King of the Common Room for that reason — and was given to sweeping judgments of the kind Nash admired. Once, for example, when a listener tried to question him after a talk, he responded by claiming, “It’s easier to predict what mathematicians will be talking about fifty years from now than what they’ll be interested in next year.”
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His obvious eccentricity made him seem like a kindred spirit. This was a young man who had once managed to get himself permanently banned from the dining rooms of the Graduate College by Sir Hugh Taylor, the dean, for having deliberately broken dishes and crockery in the breakfast room. And his relationship with his mother was fodder for all kinds of stories. Former friends recall that a family record of worldly success and an overbearing mother both weighed heavily on him. Arthur Mattuck, who was at Princeton with Forrester, recalled: “’Amasy, Amasy, Amasy!’ his mother would say. ’Oh, mom, you know how much I love you,’ Amasa would coo back in a falsetto.”
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Forrester was also openly homosexual. It’s unlikely that his graduate-school
professors or Sir Hugh were aware of this, but “he was fairly open about his homosexuality at Princeton and everybody at the Graduate College knew,” said John Isbell, a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow graduate student at Princeton.
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Initially, Forrester had been quite circumspect with his colleagues at the University of Washington, but by the time Nash ran into him — perhaps because things were beginning to loosen up even in Seattle — he had concluded that he no longer had to pretend to be what he was not. Robert Vaught, a retired logician at the University of California at Berkeley, shared a house with Forrester during their first year as instructors in Seattle. He recalled:

It wasn’t that he “discovered” his homosexuality then. It was very difficult for homosexuals then. In those days people thought the best thing to do was to get rid of it by some act of will. He sort of decided that he had to be a homosexual. Sometime during his third year in Seattle he bought himself a houseboat — there was a far-out group living on the waterfront — and gradually he began to let people know about his homosexuality.
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