I Married You for Happiness (11 page)

They would be in bed by now, asleep.

As soon as Philip gets into bed, he falls asleep. Sometimes he snores a little.

Nina wakes up during the night. She always wakes up on the half hour: at three thirty, four thirty, five thirty.

She often gets out of bed, slowly removing the covers so as not to disturb Philip, and, in the dark, gropes her way downstairs. In the kitchen, she opens the refrigerator and finds something to drink, then crossing the front hall to the living room, she turns on the light and lies down on the sofa to read.

She reads whatever is at hand. Books, magazines, recipes:
daube de boeuf à la provençale
cooked with garlic and anchovies makes her mouth water.

Daube,
she repeats to herself.

She plans to make it one day.

A surprise for him.

Besides the rooster testicles, what else did you eat? Nina asks.

Bird’s nest soup. Delicious, Philip says, smacking his lips.

The nests are made out of saliva—birds’ saliva.

Nina makes a face.

They’re supposed to contain high levels of calcium, iron, and magnesium, and to have certain medicinal properties, Philip says, paying her no attention, like aiding digestion, alleviating asthma—

She pictures Philip scraping the last of the edible swiflet’s nest from the bottom of a precious blue-and-white Ming bowl.—and raising the libido.

According to Sofia—the woman whose house we had dinner in—the mark at the base of a piece of Chinese porcelain, Philip continues, changing the subject, designates the reign of the emperor at the time the piece was made. After dinner, she took me around the house and showed me some of the more valuable—

What was the house like? Nina interrupts.

Very modern, all glass, elegant—but let me finish. The bowl I particularly remember came from the Chenghua period—that’s the fifteenth century—and it was so fine you could see through it, but the mark at its base was very rough and the reason for this, Sofia explained, was that it was made by the emperor when
he was very young and his handwriting had not yet developed properly.

Philip has finished his bird’s nest soup and again she pictures how he picks up the bowl and holds it up in the air to look underneath at the mark.

Philip drops the bowl and the bowl breaks.

“Imagine a teacup falling on the floor and smashing into random pieces,” Philip tells his class. “If you were to film this, you could run the film backward and see all the pieces jump back together. Obviously, you cannot do this in ordinary life—believe me, I’ve tried although my wife complains that, soon, we won’t have any china left.” No one laughs. “The explanation for this,” he continues, “is that disorder or entropy within a closed system always increases with time—in other words, left alone, everything will decay. The teacup, which looks like such a delicate object is, in fact, a highly ordered thing. It took energy to make it that way and when the teacup breaks, some of that energy is lost and the teacup is in a disordered state. The increase of disorder or entropy with time is an example of what is called the arrow of time. The arrow of time distinguishes the past from the future and …”

Time, Nina says as she pours Philip a cup of coffee in the morning, is what prevents everything from happening at once.

Philip looks up from his newspaper. Where did you hear that?

I didn’t hear it. I read it.

Where?

Graffiti. In a public toilet.

You’re joking.

“However, should the universe stop expanding and start to contract,” Philip continues, “disorder or entropy would decrease and, then, like in the film played backward that I mentioned earlier, we would see broken teacups everywhere coming back together. We would also be able to remember events in the future but not remember events in the past.”

For the weekend, she has rented Bernardo Bertolucci’s
The Conformist
and
Blue
by the Polish director whose name she cannot pronounce and which begins with K.

Krzysztof Kieslowski—both his names.

Philip, she guesses, will choose
The Conformist.
He likes Dominique Sanda. He saw her in
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
—and what did he say about her?—she is cool and sexy.

On the whole, Philip prefers blonde women.

She would choose to see
Blue
again, her favorite among the three films that make up the trilogy:
Red, White,
and
Blue.

In her mind, a large French flag flaps noisily in a sudden gust of wind—
liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Blue
stands for liberty and, in the movie, Juliette Binoche plays the part of a woman who has lost her husband and daughter in a car accident.

Louise is alive.

But what if the plane she takes tomorrow crashes? A malfunction on takeoff or wind shear on landing? What if, on the way to the airport, she has an accident? Distracted, Louise does not see the stop sign at the intersection or, not her fault, a driver, driving drunk, crosses the double line and smashes into Louise’s little red Jetta? What if—

She must stop herself from thinking things like this.

In the dark, she tries to see Philip’s face.

Again, she is reminded of Schrödinger’s experiment.

If Philip were to remain unobserved, like the cat in the locked box—although she knows that the radioactive substance that may or may not set off the vial of hydrogen cyanide is an essential part of the experiment—he would be both dead and alive at the same time.

How can that be?

But our brains—how often has Philip tried to explain this?—cannot function in the world of quantum uncertainty. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical construct that embraces two incompatible alternatives, assigning to each its probability.

Only if we accept an interpretation of quantum mechanics, he goes on to say—but she has stopped listening and is thinking about something else: how to mix her paints to get the right carmine red? how long to keep the
daube de boeuf
in the oven?—can we begin to imagine that an infinite number of variant replicas of ourselves are living out their parallel lives and
that at each moment more of them leap into existence to take up their optional futures.

Aliens. Science fiction.

In an alternative universe, in another reality, Philip is shorter, younger, blond. He is a plumber, a real estate agent, an airline pilot. He is married to someone else.

And he is alive.

And yet?

Holding her breath, she strains to see if there is any movement under the diamond-patterned quilt.

If Philip is breathing.

Juliette Binoche looks good in a bathing suit. In the movie, she swims in a public pool as a way of trying to assuage her grief. The water and everything around her is blue.

A peaceable color blue.

What, she tries to think, is the word for the blending of two senses?

Philip would know.

Richard Feynman, one of Philip’s teachers, saw equations in color—light tan js, violet bluish us and dark brown
xs
flying around. In addition to attending his seminars at Cal Tech, Philip often goes to Richard Feynman’s house to hear him play the bongo drums.

Synesthesia, she remembers the word all of a sudden.
Iris, never mind the individual letters, is, of course, blue. A light, celestial blue, the same color as the Virgin Mary’s blue cloak.

The blue of the Caribbean is different—it is a greenish blue, an aquamarine blue. A glittering blue.

The blue of Jean-Marc’s eyes.

They have vacationed on various islands: St. Martin, Guadeloupe, Martinique—French islands.

Islands again.

Sunbathing on Marigot Beach, Philip, unashamedly, stares at the topless French women.

You’re staring, Nina tells him.

Lying next to him on her stomach, she is reading
Speak, Memory.
Nabokov also attributed numbers and letters with special colors
—s
and
c
are shades of blue,
f, p,
and
t
are green,
e
and
i
are yellow,
b
and
m
are different shades of red. From time to time, she glances over at Philip.

Did you forget your book?

No. Shaking his head, Philip holds up his paperback,
The Moving Toyshop.
On vacation, he reads mysteries.

She hears Philip turn pages but when she looks over at him, she sees that he is no longer reading. He is staring out again. Following his gaze, she, too, watches a slender young woman who is standing knee-deep in the water. The young woman bends over and splashes water on herself, on her small brown breasts, before she steps farther out into the sea. She
is wearing a bikini bottom with a red flower motif on it that only covers part of her buttocks. Shouting out, a darkly tanned, robust young man runs past her, splashing, and, grabbing her arm, he drags her with him into deeper water. When they resurface, they are laughing.

Nina looks away.

They will be kissing next.

Turning over, Nina lies on her back and, emboldened by the French women, she takes off the top of her bathing suit. Her breasts look shockingly white in contrast to the rest of her body, which is tan, but they are firm enough.

Nina! Philip exclaims, when he turns to ask her to pass him the suntan lotion.

What?

You can’t go topless.

Why not? Everyone else is.

Yes—but it’s not decent to have everyone looking at your breasts.

You look at everyone’s breasts—what’s the difference? That’s not the point.

What is?

You know perfectly well what I mean.

Getting up, Philip walks off.

I broke my leg falling out of a tree, he tells her. I was horsing around with Harold and I landed wrong.Did he push you?

Did he push you?

We had sticks. We were jousting with each other. Up in a tree?

We were always doing crazy stuff like that.

Didn’t you get along with Harold?

Yes, I got along with him. We just fought all the time, the way brothers do.

Poor Harold. She does not want to think of him lying in the grass outside the wedding tent, drunk, with his fly open.

Irish twins—Philip and Harold were born fourteen months apart.

She has seen a black-and-white photo of them as young boys—Philip looks to be about twelve and Harold must be eleven—dressed in overalls, their arms around each other. Behind them is a house with a large front porch and, on it, an old-fashioned metal canopy swing. Philip is a head taller than Harold and he is holding Natty Bumppo, who sits between them, by the collar. Both boys are squinting into the sun.

The photo was taken on my grandparents’ farm in Wisconsin, Philip tells Nina. We went there every summer.

At about the same age, while she is living in Montevideo, Nina makes up a twin for herself. The twin is identical, her name is Linda.

Linda, in Spanish, is beautiful—
muy linda.

Linda is good company and Nina confides in her. She is Nina’s closest friend and the only other person who exists in the world.

They are inseparable.

Linda, she whispers.

Linda, she says a little bit louder.

There is no answer.

Tilting her head back, Nina drinks the last of the wine. The bottle is empty.

At the time, she blames Linda for throwing the glass of water from the balcony at the boy below in the street.

Linda also shoplifts an expensive black-and-gold pen for which Nina is punished.

Feeling hot, she goes to the window and opens it, letting in a cool breeze that causes the curtains to again billow out. She stands there for a moment wrapped in their folds. Everything is dark and quiet and feels unreal.

Then—after closing the window and the curtains—a little unsteadily and holding on to the bedposts, she makes her way around to her side of the bed. Kicking off her shoes, she eases herself onto the mattress and lies down next to Philip.

Again, she reaches over and touches his cheek.

Cold.

His hands.

Very cold.

She sighs deeply and closes her eyes for a moment.

Sex.

She does not want to think about sex.

Yet she does.

They are in bed naked.

Where?—Paris? Pantelleria? Belle-Île?

Pantelleria.

Hot, very hot. It is four o’clock in the afternoon according to the alarm clock on the table by the bed and Philip reaches over and touches her stomach. A little pool of sweat lies in the hollow between her hip bones.

God, it’s hot, he says.

Opening her eyes slowly—she feels drugged by the sun, the wine at lunch—she focuses on the beaded curtain at the entrance of their room, which gives directly onto the terrace. The room is full of moving shadows, bits of light pierce through the beads making jittery patterns on the walls, the floor, the bed. Outside, it is still too bright. Something red is lying on a chair on the terrace—her discarded sarong. She hears the dog shift his position as he lies by the doorway, guarding it. She smells the sea, the earth, and rot.

Philip turns to her. His face open, calm, expressionless, like one of those Flemish portraits of a medieval saint. He puts his arm around her and starts to kiss her—her mouth, her breasts, her navel, and, farther down, her cunt. He does
not shave every day and his face is rough against her skin but she doesn’t mind. She holds his head tight between her legs as she comes. When he gets on top of her, she takes his penis in her hand.

Don’t. Let me, he says.

Inside her, he starts slowly, looking down at her face as if he is examining it for the first time and she looks back up at him. They don’t speak as, covered in sweat, their bodies smack against each other faster and faster until he comes. Afterward, he lies on top of her, motionless, like a dead person, his head resting heavily on her shoulder and she does not move.

When finally he rolls off her, he says, I’m happy.

She replays the scene once again in her mind.

And again.

She makes a few changes.

She is on top of him, rising up and down on her hands and knees, her breasts swinging near his face; she is lying on her stomach, her face pressed into a pillow, as he enters her from behind.

But always there is the same suffocating heat; always the same shattered light in the room separated from the terrace by the beaded curtain; always the dog nervously shifting his weight outside; always a glimpse of her red sarong draped over the chair and the acrid smell of sea, earth, and rot.

After, he tells her, I’m happy.

For once, he is not thinking about numbers; he is not counting.
And always, carefully, she sniffs the air.

Blue plastic bags filled with garbage, thrown out of car windows by picnickers, dot the single main road of Pantelleria. Long before they are collected, the bags burst open in the sun or a dog or a wild animal chews through the thin plastic to get at what is inside. If the wind is right, she can smell the rotting garbage all the way to the house.

In a ditch, the carcass of the dog, Roma.

The room has begun to spin and she opens her eyes.

Sitting up, she places the pillow squarely behind her back.

She drinks too much at an annual faculty lunch party to which spouses are invited.

A party to celebrate
pi
on March 14 at 1:59 p.m. exactly.

A silly tradition, she tells Philip.

And the date of Albert Einstein’s birthday, he answers. A nice coincidence.

My turtle Pancho will, my love, pick up new mover, ginger,
a young assistant professor recites. The nonsense phrase is a mnemonic based on a phonetic code for the first 27 digits of the mathematical symbol
pi.

My movie monkey plays in a favorite bucket,
a pretty young PhD candidate laughingly takes up another mnemonic for the next 17 digits.

The head of the department, a man Philip dislikes, declaims in perfect French.

Excusing herself, Nina gets up from the luncheon table to go the bathroom as Philip taps his glass with his fork and prepares to stand.

He has agreed to recite the first one hundred digits of
pi
by heart.

31415926535897 …

She is splashing cold water on her face from the sink when the young assistant professor comes in.

I think you’ve made a mistake, he says, smiling. This is the men’s room.

Looking around, she notices the urinals for the first time; she also notices the graffiti on the door to one of the stalls.

So it is, she answers, blushing. Sorry.

… 640628620899.

In the dining room, people are clapping. Philip must be finished.

A hundred is nothing, Philip is saying as Nina sits down at the table. So far Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan holds the record. He has memorized the first forty thousand digits of
pi.

It takes him nine hours to recite them, Philip adds, laughing. And during all that time, he never takes a break to eat, drink, or take a leak.

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once—she wants to remember what was written on one of the stall doors in the men’s room.

The phonetic code, Philip maintains, is useful as it turns meaningless numbers into meaningful words and can be used to remember phone numbers, postal codes. For example, he tells Nina, 1 is
t
or d; 2 is n; 3 is m; 4 is r; 5 is l; so that it follows that
my
is 3 and
turtle
is 1, 4, 1, and 5, and so forth. Every digit is associated with a consonant sound and that is how I can remember the first hundred digits of pi.

By the way, where did you go? Philip also asks.

The bathroom. I got my period, she lies.

This is a lie,
the liar says.

Nina had her own code for remembering numbers—only she does not try to explain it to Philip.

The first 8 digits of
pi
would go like this: she is pregnant at 31; now, she is 41; 59 are the last two digits of Patsy’s telephone number; and 26—she has to think for a minute—2 plus 6 adds up to 8, and 8 is the street number of the building on rue Sophie-Germain where she used to live. Or, she can subtract 2 from 6 and get 4 and 4 is the floor she has to climb to on foot—the elevator is out of order according to a handwritten sign taped to the door—to reach the apartment in the building around the corner from the pharmacy where she buys cotton and disinfectant. And since the number of that building is 58 she can invert the 2 and the 6 and subtract the 4 and this will be another way to remember the next few digits of
pi.
And didn’t she have to take the number 6 métro from Denfert-Rochereau to La Motte-Picquet to get to 58 avenue Émile Zola? And, as for the 2—come to think of it—didn’t