The Mathematician’s Shiva (9 page)

D
id my accent really get heavier when I was flirting? Did I get all affected playing the immigrant card, and meld phony vulnerability with slightly questionable exoticism? Of course. I did it because it worked.

Up until the year 2001, I had loved three women in my life. One was my former wife. The other two, my mother and Anna, would frequently repeat the claim that I had given up on love. I didn’t think that was right.

I had honestly tried to love sometimes. OK, there had also been times when I met a woman and had just wanted her physically. It was also true that I’d sometimes been a rat, feigning love, or at least emotional interest, in order to get inside a woman’s dress. But that hadn’t been typical. I hadn’t been a player in the American way, serially acquiring and dumping women in an effort to collect an ever-increasing number of experiences. I admit, though, that it looked the same in terms of the balance sheet.

Before I begin to talk about my era of phony love, I should spend some time talking about when I wasn’t a phony. Catherine Hampstead was originally from Ross, California. When I met her she was beginning her Ph.D. studies in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. I was working on my Ph.D. in meteorology, a pursuit that caused my father to rage not infrequently about me squandering my talent in mathematics. I wooed Cathy, married her, and for nearly two years we lived in youthful harmony. Then one afternoon, in a roomful of mathematicians, her life fell apart, and our marriage soon went with it.

It all started when this bright, beautiful woman failed her Ph.D. prelims. Walking into that room, she was confident and radiant. I could tell that she was also nervous and probably so could her Ph.D. committee. Who wouldn’t be? But she had never failed at anything before. We were certain it wasn’t going to happen then. Like an imprudent couple that invests its nest egg in an IPO whose value, despite months of glowing press, falls precipitously at the opening bell of the stock market and continues to decline day after day, we were stunned and devastated. It didn’t help matters that her Ph.D. advisor was also my mother.

All Ph.D. students must take prelims after they take courses for a year or two. They study for a few months, and then five or six professors grill them orally for a few hours. It’s a painful experience even when they pass. It’s supposed to be painful. I know. I’ve sat on scores of these exams and was once, of course, a Ph.D. student myself. It isn’t a fair fight, really. Five or six very bright people who have studied your subject area for a combined 50 to 150 years are bound to ask you questions that make you seem like an idiot. Passing means that you are only a partial idiot. The good news is that after you suffer this humiliation, you are free to write your dissertation, and you can do that just about anywhere. On the other hand, failure means your attempt to earn a Ph.D. is done. Kaput. You can, of course, retake the exam, but not many people choose to do so.

On the day before her prelims, Catherine had a promising future as a professor in mathematics. A loving family, supportive of all she did, had nurtured her dreams. At Wellesley, where Catherine had been an undergraduate, mathematics students were rare, but because there were no men, at least they weren’t ostracized. Briefly I nurtured her dreams as well. It certainly helped that I was someone who knew a bit about the difficulties women had as mathematicians and knew more than a bit about the difficulties of mathematics in general. But after her prelims, she didn’t have a promising future. Over a period of four hours, her dreams went poof.

This profound disappointment, so unexpected, was the first real test of our marriage. We failed that test as badly as she failed her prelims. New marriages need nurturing, of course. They are tender little plants that do not do well under stress. Our environmental conditions had been, in hindsight, hostile.

We were living in a drafty apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, close enough to Lake Mendota to catch the howling wind off the water. It was cold, the kind of gray fall cold filled with moisture. The apartment, with the furnace blowing, barely managed to inch up to sixty, according to the thermometer. I didn’t trust what that thermometer said. The building, built in the 1920s, wasn’t really an apartment complex, but rather was a large house that had been cut up into six units in a haphazard way. We were on the first floor, in Unit 3, which had two windows, one in the tiny kitchen and one in the bedroom.

Desperate to keep what little warmth there was inside the apartment, I had covered the windows in thick, clear plastic bought from a hardware store. Partly I had done this because Catherine had been uncharacteristically complaining about sweating all the time and was keeping those windows open when I wasn’t around. I wasn’t sure why she was always warm. She was pregnant when she started opening the windows. The logic at the time was that we would have our first child early, when Catherine was still a student. That way, when eventually she took an academic position, the child would be a few years old, ready for day care and then school.

The student health service, filled with trainees and burnouts from real hospitals, wasn’t about to investigate why Catherine was hot all the time. I was obsessed with finishing my Ph.D. so I could take my job in Tuscaloosa—whose warm climate I was already beginning to think was a decidedly good thing—and wasn’t paying much attention either. We had four goals that year. A very ambitious and organized couple we were. Goal one—Catherine passing her prelims—had not been achieved. But to my mind, that didn’t obviate the need to succeed at goals two through four. I needed to pass my dissertation defense and graduate. Cletus the Fetus, our name for the bulge in Catherine’s belly, needed to be born. Then, after all that, we, a lovely young couple with a beautiful baby in tow, needed to move to Tuscaloosa.

I was focused, oh so focused, on my dissertation. I ascribed Catherine’s burning up day and night to having two heat masses, the fetus and her together. She was kind of a double furnace, I thought to myself, taking in fuel for two bodies and burning calories for two as well. Why shouldn’t she be warm? This would not be the first time I would twist physics to rationalize why I was ignoring a serious problem.

My wife, formerly laconic, was also talking at the clip of a coffee-crazed TV host trying to squeeze in a bit of information before a commercial break. I ascribed this change to the unhappiness of failure. She was unhappy with her uncertain future, unhappy with my mother, and unhappy with my family, who she wanted nothing to do with after her exam. That was my internal pronouncement, although of course I couldn’t say so out loud. But I wanted to. Simply. Plainly, in a way anyone who grew up in a family like mine would say it. “You’re unhappy, I know. You’ve failed your Ph.D. prelim, I know. I believe in you. I love you. It will take time to get over this. But you will.” Except at the time, I didn’t know if indeed she would get over her failure. Plus, here is a horrible thing. Her failure was something I didn’t even want to be around. She knew it. I knew it. I wanted positive stories to keep me going and help me finish. There Catherine was, overheated emotionally and physically, trying to comprehend the newness of bearing a child and the newness of having no academic future in mathematics. Where was I? Busy, busy, busy at work.

Catherine wasn’t found to be an incompetent mathematician. My mother, a harsh judge in all things mathematical, would never have said such a thing, because it wasn’t true. Rather, the committee told Catherine after the exam that she was bright, of course. Her grades were testimony to that. But there was a difference between being bright and possessing those sparks of ideas that lead to original thought. She was not an original thinker, my Catherine. She was instead a “mimic.” That’s the word my mother used after the exam. Using that word was cruel. My mother would say that she was only being honest, that there is no value in sugarcoating the truth. I think it’s just easier to be mean. To have a light touch takes work.

Is it fair to expect every Ph.D. student in mathematics to possess originality? Again, according to my mother, there were plenty who didn’t—most in fact did not—but not under her watch. “We have to be better. Women cannot be ordinary in this business. They must tower above everyone else to survive.” That was what she said to me way back when. We were in her house in the kitchen. This was a sober discussion between a mother and a son. We weren’t drinking vodka, but tea. I can remember her saying these words. I can remember also erupting, standing up and shouting. I screamed not in English, but in the dirty and gruff weathered language of where I was born. “I don’t give a shit about what it takes for a woman to survive. Even if it’s true, Catherine is not just a student of yours. This is your daughter-in-law. Exceptions have to be made for family.”

“What do you know about family?” my mother replied. “You bring in this girl to join us. You don’t ask me or your father about her. You just announce it, you’re getting married. Two years you’ve been married to this girl who has nothing in common with you or me or your father or anyone else we know and love. She has led a life of ease, of no hardship, of no struggle. She can’t do the work, this little doll of yours. I don’t need dolls.”

In the space of thirty seconds my mother had condemned not only my wife’s intellectual abilities, but also my judgment in choosing a life partner. I knew it was only going to go downhill from there. Somehow I did manage to find the strength to try and challenge my mother not as a son tries the patience of a parent, but as an adult who questions the judgment and fairness of another. “Maybe she can do the work,” I said. “But you don’t want her to. Maybe you’ve decided she’s a little no-brained
lalka
because it’s convenient for you. It lets you knock your daughter-in-law down to a manageable size.”

There was a look my mother showed when confronted with what she deemed to be arrogance mixed with idiocy. It was as if you could feel her presence leave, that it was not worth her while to even hear another word. “I don’t mix the personal with the professional, Sasha. Not in that way. Now you are being ridiculous.” There was no anger in her voice. As far as she was concerned, I was the equivalent of a love-struck teenager who thought he knew all about life.

I cannot remember a single time when I won an argument with my mother. Perhaps this was the last moment I seriously tried. I certainly can’t say I was alone in my futility. If my father ever won an argument, it didn’t happen while I was present. He could be a formidable adversary, but in comparison to my mother, he was always a distant second. Everyone was. I stopped screaming and stomped out of her house.

So there was the added tragedy of Catherine’s failure. She was being held to a very high standard, an absurd standard, really. At the time I thought I had learned an obvious lesson. Do not fall in love with someone when that love is heavily dependent on the goodwill and kindness of your parents. Find someone else. It’s a stupid thing to expect a family to help you tie up your love life into a nice bow, and smart people do stupid things far more often than most people realize.

Now, looking back, I don’t think that’s the lesson that I should have learned. I should have understood that when you love someone, and they are being subjected to cruelty, you need to do whatever you can to shield them, to defend them, even if the source of that cruelty, maybe especially if the source of that cruelty, is your own mother. This is your obligation. There are no exceptions.

My mother wasn’t the only one with a talent for condemnation. Catherine had it as well. I heard her words after a return from a late-night trip to the basement of the computer science building. I had been trying to code solutions to moisture movement in clouds using the Navier-Stokes equation night after night for months with little success. I came home, as per usual, at 4:00
A.M.,
and Catherine wasn’t at all happy. “I could do your fucking work,” she said. “It’s as stupid as making ketchup. You have a fucking recipe. You put it in a computer. Big fucking deal. You only have to use half your brain to do this. And you don’t even have the fucking heart to use the other half for me.”

I’d heard similar sentiments—not the love part, but the idea that I was slumming intellectually—from other mathematicians, including my father. “What is Rachela Karnokovitch’s son doing with applied mathematics studying clouds and turbulence? What a waste of talent!” That was the gist of this argument. It wasn’t true, and even if it was, it’s nothing you want to hear from someone you love.

I do what I do not to avoid mathematics. If I loved mathematics, I’d be happy being a mediocre mathematician (just like many a mediocre actor is happy to be performing on stage in Tuscaloosa or Madison instead of Broadway or Hollywood). When my wife said her words, they hurt. I looked at the bulge in my wife’s belly and thought, “Thank god this baby-to-be isn’t hearing and seeing this, two people who are beginning to hate each other.”

But the other half of her argument, my absent “fucking heart” was absolutely correct. I was focusing all my efforts on my dissertation not because I had to, but because it was easier than looking at the pain on my wife’s face, easier than having to concentrate to hear her rapid-fire sentences about how she was hot, how she was uncomfortable, and how my mother hated her. I was refusing to help her in a time of manifest need. What was wrong with me?

That night, during and after the shouting back and forth, I looked beyond myself for the first time in weeks. The windows were open yet again, and the thin plastic window covering was holding the cold back a bit. I heard Catherine’s words, coming at me so fast, and I didn’t just listen to their content but to the intent behind them. Her face was flushed, of course, but I also saw that her hair was thinning. I reached out to hold her and felt her heart beating fast, like she had just run a marathon, and I knew instantly that my “theory” about her dual heat masses was stupid beyond belief. She was physically ill.

We didn’t go to sleep that night. I took Catherine to the hospital and insisted I be with her in the examining room. They took her pulse, 140 beats per minute. The doctor—about fifty years old with an accent that I knew instantly was from Chicago’s West Side—looked at Catherine’s body, so skinny for someone pregnant. Despite eating prodigious amounts of cheese, something she always adored, she had barely gained weight. This doctor, unlike those at student health, knew what he was doing. “Your eyes, they’re bulging. Are you receiving prenatal care?” he asked.