“So am I,” Simon tells him. “Take off your shoes, man, and let’s do this thing. Now.” He points to Hugh’s Adidas. “My mistake, you’re all set to run. You don’t have to take your shoes off, you can get down right now, and in ten seconds we can start. See that trash can?” Simon points; Hugh doesn’t have to look. “First one past that. Do you want a stake in this?”
“What kind of stake?”
“If I win,” Simon breathes out, “we get off this terrible tollway and we take the back roads to Buffalo. All right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man. Look at me. I’m beat. I’m winded. And I’m a pussy. You can beat a pussy. You’ve wanted to ever since you first met me, right? Come on, bro. Let’s do this thing now!”
“All right, goddamn it.” Hugh bends down next to Simon and puts his fist in the grass. He feels the blades work between his fingers as his heart accelerates and he hears Simon whisper, “On your mark.” Hugh inhales quickly, trying for a fix of oxygen. “Get set.” He looks up at the trash receptacle and sees a woman walking toward it with a German shepherd on a leash. He opens his mouth to say something, and just at that moment, Simon shouts, “Go.”
He flings himself up and out, the park area instantly becoming a blur, whitened. As he runs, thinking only of himself, he sees the trash receptacle gaining in size and the woman with her dog now in back of it, safely away: she has seen him and, alarmed, is watching him sprint toward her. He can’t see or hear Simon. He feels the air sucked down into his lungs and blown out again, and the ground hitting his feet with hammerlike thumps. Then he runs past the can, and he looks back and sees Simon crossing it, inches behind him.
Hugh slows down, stops, puts his hands on his knees and tries to breathe in and out. In what he feels now, he perceives a small shadow of something disturbed and sick, and as it moves away from his chest and out into the air, Hugh knows that it is his own death, a small pinprick shadow of what will darken him later from his head to his feet. Simon puts his sweaty arm over Hugh’s back and lowers his head next to his. “By God, you saved your honor today,” Simon pants, “and that of the whole civilized world.” He is smiling.
“Yeah.”
“I said you could beat me.”
“Then why’d you want to race?”
“It’s the difference between us,” Simon half-whispers. “I’m not afraid of losing.” He straightens up. “Let’s go find Dorsey.”
They walk together toward the car, past the family at their picnic table, and Simon raises a hand in greeting. “Looks good,” he says, glancing at the chicken and the paper plates and the Jell-O. The father nods, and one of the two children says, “I saw you running over there.”
Simon stops and says something about getting his old blood circulating, but Hugh keeps walking, leaving him there. He crosses the service drive and reaches the shaded area where Dorsey is humming as she watches Noah crawling around on a blanket she has set out on the grass. Hugh sits next to her. “I had a race with Simon,” he tells her. “I beat him.”
“Congratulations,” Dorsey says, tapping him on the forearm.
“We had a bet. If I won, we’d stay on the tollway. If I lost, we’d take the back roads.”
“You’d do that?”
“No,” Hugh says. “Very perceptive of you. I wouldn’t.” He scratches his arm. “Simon should be back in a minute. He’s talking to those people.”
“I can see.” Dorsey smiles, watching Simon talk. “Simon loves to pick up people.”
“Huh?”
“You know. You’re a grown-up.” She smiles and ruffles her hair. “Talk to people and pick them up and bring them home. That’s how he met me.”
“But then he stopped doing it.”
“No.” Dorsey shakes her head, looking unconcerned. “No, he went on doing it.” She laughs and pulls at the grass. In a moment Simon’s feet are next to her hands. She throws some grass at his ankles.
“Hi.” He sits down and puts his head on her shoulder. “I’m bushed.”
“You must be. And feel this.” She runs her palm along Simon’s back. “You’re soaking wet.”
“Your brother was afraid I would stink up the car.”
“Oh, no.” Dorsey gives Hugh her hard, prideful look. “Simon’s sweat doesn’t smell. Not a bit. It tastes just like salt water.” And before Hugh can remember to turn away, she raises her lips to Simon’s forehead and breathes in through her mouth.
On the eastern side of Ohio, just past Cleveland, both Simon and Noah asleep in the back seat, Hugh driving and Dorsey sighing with boredom, Hugh asks about Simon’s family.
“He says he doesn’t have any. I haven’t pressed him about it.”
Hugh can’t wait any longer; he’s waited this long. The road is going on forever. “Then tell me about Carlo Pavorese,” he says.
His sister turns and looks at him. “No,” she says. “I won’t.”
Just outside Buffalo, Dorsey says, “I’m sick. I have Autobahnschmerz. It’s not the distance. It’s the freeways and tolls and the speed and the time, and the fact that there aren’t any decisions a human being can make. It’s like being …” She thinks for a moment. “It’s like being a photon. You can’t decide where you’re going.”
Hugh shrugs and keeps his eyes on the road.
They are lost outside Buffalo and circle the freeway loop of the city twice before they find the proper exit on something called the Scajaquada Expressway, whose name Simon cannot stop saying aloud. Once they find the house, they call their agent at his office, and thirty minutes later he pulls up behind their trailer, waving the keys and smiling a Welcome-Wagon smile, festive with insincerity. As if he were the King of Buffalo, the agent—whose name is Vic Schroeder—praises the land and the people, making an all-purpose gesture toward the park as he describes “the good people of my town.” Reluctantly, he tells Dorsey and Simon that the electricity is on in their house, but not the gas; they’ll have to wait for a day before they can cook. “I don’t want to cook,” Dorsey tells him, as she stands near the front door, holding Noah, who is crying hysterically. “I don’t know how.” The agent gives her the keys, has her sign several papers, and then waddles back to his Cadillac, shouting praise of the city as he fits himself behind the wheel.
“It’s not as though we haven’t seen Buffalo,” Simon grouses, sitting on the front steps, pulling a drumstick out of a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket that Dorsey walked up the street to get them. Chicken sauce speckles his shirt and his pants; he looks tired and happy, a man who has finally arrived in a city that suits him perfectly. “We were lost. We saw all of it. Where are the good parts?
“Of Buffalo? There aren’t any,” Dorsey says. Sitting on the lawn, she watches the sky darken. “That’s what everyone told me.”
Hugh is keeping his thoughts to himself. The fact is that he’s never seen a city like this before, an industrial antique, gone to gray, with narrow lumpish lawns and a brooding Slavic resignation, the whole thing running on spare parts. Maybe it’s what Dorsey needs, after California; there’d be no happiness hysteria here, no therapeutic guerrilla theater. Nobody in Buffalo could possibly think that life was supposed to be fun. He hears an odd sound and thinks that it might be—he wonders if he’s hallucinating—the trumpeting of an elephant.
Through the afternoon, Simon and Hugh carry in the contents of the trailer; by six o’clock they have started to unpack the boxes. Because he has to leave tomorrow, Hugh is trying to get as much of this work done as he can, before he falls asleep on the job, as he knows he will. At nine-twenty a knock sounds at the front door. Simon is temporarily upstairs. Dorsey has been arranging the two chairs and the three lamps in the living room, and Noah, who has slept for most of the day, is now playing on the living room floor, watching Bowling for Dollars. He loves bowling shows; he stops crying if he sees pins falling. By the time that Hugh has gone to the door, he knows that it must be a neighbor and this will mean that they will have to explain the
mselves, the who what and where of their existences. He’s not in the mood. When he opens the door, his fears are instantly realized: a large woman with a face as white as meringue is nodding at him and holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies, each cookie almost the size of a 45-rpm record.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she says. “I am Mrs. Dlugoszewski, two doors down. I brought you some cookies.” When Hugh does not invite her in, and instead tactlessly examines the cookie plate—he’s never seen such large cookies or so many chocolate chips crammed into them—she says, rather angrily, “I baked them myself!”
“Well,” he says, “I’m sure you did.” He reaches for the plate, gives it a tug, but Mrs. Dlugoszewski does not release it. Belatedly he realizes that he’s not supposed to take it; he’s supposed to take a cookie and leave the plate alone. So he does. “Thank you,” he says. “I’m Hugh Welch. And this is my sister, Dorsey.”
“Ah ha!” Mrs. Dlugoszewski marches past him, clutching the plate, heading straight for Dorsey, her quick glances taking in Noah in front of the television set, the two chairs, the three lamps, the boxes of books and kitchen ware scattered on the floor of the dining room. She puts the plate down on a chair and stands in front of Dorsey, giving her a gaze of womanly concern, before nodding to herself. “Welcome to Buffalo,” she says, putting her hands on Dorsey’s shoulders. “The Queen City.”
Dorsey seems surprised by the woman’s warmth; she flinches, jerking backwards. “The Queen City? Why’s it called that?”
“No one knows,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says. “Some people say Toronto is the king, and Buffalo is the queen. But it’s a continuing mystery.”
“Oh. Well, thank you for coming over,” Dorsey says. “Thank you very much.”
“All these books.” Mrs. Dlugoszewski flutters a thick, capable hand in their direction. “You’re a student?”
“A teacher,” Dorsey says. “Physics.”
“Physics!” Mrs. Dlugoszewski laughs and wipes her brow. “My goodness. I was never much for science. You all look so tired. You must have had a long drive. And this must be your husband.”
Having come down silently, Simon now stands at the bottom of the stairs, watching. “Hello hello,” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says. “I’m your neighbor, Krystyna Dlugoszewski.”
“I can see that,” Simon tells her. “I’m Simon O’Rourke.”
“I brought you some cookies. I’ll leave the plate here. You can bring it back tomorrow. Take your time with them, though. You are …?”
“Simon. Thank you very much.” He bows his head.
“And this little one.” She glances toward Noah. “Watching the television.” She looks at Noah, then at Simon, then back at Noah, and at last at Dorsey. “He certainly looks like his father!” Mrs. Dlugoszewski says, meaning to be kind.
8
After she calls him from the hospital, he knows he has no choice but to fly out to the West Coast and see her and the new baby. He thinks, putting the telephone down, that he’ll have to help her get back on her feet. After all this time, he says to himself. She didn’t even tell me she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me she was seeing anyone. After all this time, he says to himself, finally able to complete the sentence, after all the prizes and scholarships, after all the praise and glory and report cards with solid As, after all that, my sister has gone and done something crazy. My sister has finally messed up.
At the San Francisco Airport Hugh gives the address of the hospital to the cabbie, who tells him it’ll be a thirty-dollar fare, seeing as how it’s kind of out of town. “That’s fine,” Hugh says. “Just take me there.”
In the hospital he stands in the doorway, unobserved, and watches his sister as she holds the baby in her arms. The pillow frames her head and it makes Hugh think of a square cotton halo. He’s trying not to inhale deeply; hospitals, and particularly their soapy antiseptic smells, frighten him. Sunlight streams into the room across the foot of the hospital bed. The baby’s eyes are closed; he yawns, as Hugh watches, and one of his arms stretches out, the little fingers flexing.
After Hugh steps into the room, carrying the cut flowers he bought in the hospital gift shop, Dorsey sees him and smiles wearily. He’s never seen her like this: and the word that comes into his mind is adulterated. She’s been adulterated. Her hair is stringy and her eyes seem permanently darkened. She’s been wounded and interfered with but for the first time she looks completely happy, despite all the punishment she seems to have taken. Because he doesn’t know what to say, for a minute he just smiles and tilts his head to get a better look at the baby. But he also wants to look at his sister and to understand how a woman can have been hurt in that way and still, or therefore, be so quietly ecstatic.
Dorsey says, “I suppose this needs some explanation.”
Hugh shakes his head. “I’m not clever,” he says. “You know I’m not. You don’t have to explain things to me.” He lays the flowers on the windowsill and bends down to kiss Dorsey on the forehead. Her skin is warm and milky against his lips. “Your baby is beautiful,” he says. “He looks a lot like Daddy.”
“I know.” She waits. “You like the name?”
“Noah.” He nods. “Yes, I do. It’s a beautiful name.”
“Oh, love,” she says, “thank you for coming.” With her free hand, she squeezes him on the wrist. “I mean, with no grandparents, or parents, or cousins, you’re the only … the only …”
“The word is ‘family.’ ”
“Is it? Well, thank you anyway.”
“You’re welcome.” She slips her hand into his, her thin fingers giving him a tiny sensual charge. “I can’t stay for more than a couple of days, just long enough to get you back to your place and set up.”
“That’s fine. The baby’s healthy. We’ll be going home today.”
“There’s something I want to ask you,” Hugh says, examining his sister’s face for evasiveness or guile. Not a trace. “I’ll just ask you once, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want to do this, and then I won’t bother you again.” He touches the baby’s forehead with the thumb of his left hand. “Will you tell me who the father is?”
Dorsey gazes at the sunlight cutting across the foot of the bed. “Do you remember calling me and asking me who I was seeing? You said I was seeing this person, somehow.”
Hugh shakes his head. He can’t remember. Sometimes, in the deep end of the night, drunk, he has called his sister, and he doesn’t remember what he’s said.
“You said,” Dorsey tells him, “that I was seeing somebody who had bad teeth and was maybe tall. I swear I don’t know how you knew.”
“I don’t remember any of this.”
“You don’t have to. You won’t ever meet him. I won’t let you. He’s a strange, wonderful, terrible man. I’ll say his name and then I won’t ever say it again. All right?”
He nods.
She speaks the name, Carlo Pavorese, then closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she is blinking rapidly. Having stepped backwards, Hugh can feel the heat of the sun across his shoulders and arms, and he can tell from her expression that she still might love the man whose name she has just spoken.
III
9
“Light,” Carlo Pavorese says, glittering himself at his students. He chalks an equation on the board, balancing first on one foot, then the other. Back and forth, in rhythmical shifts from one foot to the other, he sways in front of them, a human pendulum articulating the mathematics of photons. As he speaks, the sun reflects off his glasses. Dorsey looks up from her notes to examine his face. The frames of his glasses hold the lenses in grooves of burning gold wire. The lenses themselves are set so close together that they almost form the sideways figure eight of infinity.
He interrupts himself, the interruptions signaled by a change in his facial tone, as if he were about to blush. Like a horse suddenly startled by a wolf, he will jerk backwards, pause, and without looking at anyone’s eyes, he will say, “This discipline is a nightmare from whi
ch … no one will ever awaken.” Ignoring himself and what he has just said, he then continues his lecture. His students ignore his other outbursts as well, as they ignore his quotations from William Blake. He says poetry is physics, and they smile.
His voice is often soft and the students must lean forward to hear. Between sentences, while he is thinking, he makes a sound: huhum, uhmmm, uhumum. It is rhythmic and persistent; his mouth opens and shuts like a baby after a feeding. These rhythmic vocal pulsations are the rippling sound of thought, the sound of the infernal machine of his mind, the sound, one student has whispered, of one hand clapping.
“Why do you do that?” Dorsey asks him, months later.
“It’s a tic I picked up from Oppenheimer,” he says. “Where he got it is anyone’s guess. He infected me with it. Can’t you see the value in it?”
“No,” Dorsey says.
“It prevents interruptions. Robert hated to be interrupted.”
This enormous building, the Hall of Physics, constructed in 1960s rectangles of glass and brick and cement, with its long corridors of offices and seminar rooms receding to pinpoints at their far ends, is filled with students rushing all day long from one place to another. Some wave their arms, spilling papers, while others walk near the windows, brooding. Dorsey has waved her arms herself, happily gripped by the power of these various puzzles, by the power of the discipline. Her teachers are practical and straightforward. It is a profession that thrives on joking and playfulness, on the perpetual “Why?” addressed to the drip of a faucet or the rotations of a spinning plate. The enigmas of matter and energy are slowly decoded by persistence and ingenuity, by neat men and women who line up their papers and pencils carefully on their desks.
In the fellowship, and sanity, and good sense, and liberality of his profession, Carlo Pavorese takes no part. Dorsey has been warned away from him. “Pavorese? He’s temperamental and impossible to his students. His productive period is over. He’s gloomy. He broods. Stay away from him.” This is the conventional wisdom, articulated by her teachers and friends.