And yet here she is, in his seminar room. And here she is in his office, cluttered with papers and books. And here she is in his home, allowing herself to be directed, in her dissertation, by Carlo Pavorese, the eccentric, a man past his prime. There is this curious promise of darkened light he holds out to her. “Miss Welch,” he says to her, “I’m odd. I’m not like the others, I’m warning you. If you stick with me, you will not only learn how to solve these problems that your mind conceives, you will also begin to experience the history of modern physics, all its mixed blessings. You seem like a well-balanced woman. Do you really want what I can give you?
“Why not?” she says, her cheerfulness breaking through. “Maybe you don’t always have an effect on people.”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “In every life there are cracks into which wedges can be driven.”
He claims to be the tallest physicist on the West Coast. Professor Pavorese’s face is narrow and angular, punctuated by the generous overbite of his upper incisors—reminders, he says, of a childhood without braces, without dental repairs, without money. It might have been a purely Italian childhood but in fact it was spent in the Bronx, in a crowded squalling apartment where his two brothers and three sisters came and went and crooned and screamed, while quiet Carlo sat in his corner, surrounded by books, his face turned away from his family. He was so quiet, they didn’t notice him. They forgot about him: the idiot of the family, the runt, “the little librarian,” his sister Mirella called him. A big head of curly black hair, and at thirteen a dark heavy beard coming in, and grades skipped, and full scholarships and early admission to Princeton. In school no one teased him. You can’t tease someone who doesn’t live in the world.
Later, when they are almost through with each other, Dorsey says, “Sometimes you look like a gargoyle. There’s something eerie about you. Indolent and harsh.” She runs her hand along the side of his face. “But it’s beautiful, in its way.”
“No,” he says. “I am a gargoyle. I look out at the world and I frighten it.”
“You’re not so frightening.”
“Wait and see.”
He lives in a large house that is walking distance from the university, and all day his two black Labradors, Trayf and Tummler, sit in the fenced backyard, snapping at flies, and wait for him to come home. “They are the only ones who understand me, these fellows,” he says. Morning finds him being pulled by the two dogs around the block, Carlo Pavorese leaning backwards as he walks to prevent himself from pitching forward onto the pavement, yanked off his feet by their energy.
How long ago did his wife leave him? How long ago did his children go away? He says he doesn’t remember. “Of course I was married once,” he says, pointing to a photograph that is no longer on the wall. “My wife was beautiful. Her name was Margaret. She left. They all leave. I had two handsome children, two boys. They left too. Well, of course children should leave. After a while, no one can stand it. And you,” he says to Dorsey, “you will be like the others. One day you will hurry out of the door, and that will be that. You won’t turn back to look.” His bony fingers grip her hand. It almost hurts, and then it does hurt. “Don’t bother saying you won’t,” he tells her, squeezing even harder. “I know what I do to people.”
His house is wired shut. The windows are never opened. Electrical foil tape frames the edges of the glass panes, and if anyone breaks in, opening the circuit, an alarm will sound in police headquarters. The front door is protected by an electrical burglar alarm system that can be shut off only with a special circular key. The entire house is air-conditioned, but Dorsey thinks that something is wrong with the exterior air intake: the air in the house seems old, and each month it gets older.
She has tried to leave the front door open, but he has noticed immediately and rushed to slam it shut. “Don’t ever do that,” he says. “Don’t ever leave the door open.”
“Why?”
He turns his glasses toward her, glittering himself at her for a moment—the beautiful eyes, the infinity of his glasses—and, having communicated what he knows about extended open spaces with that look, he turns away.
At the beginning, all she discusses with him are purely technical issues in physics. He keeps his distance, is courtly and polite. She considers him a first-rate mathematician, who can spot flaws in her calculations in an instant through a kind of Gestalt scanning. “Here,” he says, “and here,” pointing to inexactitude and theoretical messiness. Even in this superficial guidance he projects a quality that is rarer than brilliance, more interesting, more curious. All the other physicists she has known have not had it. She is forced to think of it as darkness. Some shadow is eating away at Carlo Pavorese. Dorsey thinks she can eventually get close enough to him to find out what it is; perhaps she can even stop its progress, open up the house, bring in some fresh air. She thinks she can ventilate the mind of Carlo Pavorese.
As she nears the end of her time at the great university and comes close to the end of her dissertation (“Relativistic Gravity in the Solar System: The Brans-Dicke Scalar-Tensor Theory and Gravitational Anisotropy”), Carlo Pavorese appears to be noticing her with considerably more interest, as if she is interesting as a person, rather than a generator of problems. He looks in her eyes. He says, “Miss Welch, you shouldn’t take a job right away. Take a year off. Give yourself time to think. And I don’t mean problems in physics. I mean problems about physics.”
He leans back in his office chair, almost spilling a pile of yellow lined papers on top of the typewriter. “Damn these things,” he says. Dorsey glances down at his thin, bony ankles: the socks do match. She wonders how he manages to be so intense without ever becoming absentminded or funny.
“Are you listening to me?” he asks. “Why are you staring at my socks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen,” he says. “I have to be away for a week, next week. I want to ask a favor of you. Would you house-sit during the time I’m gone? It’d save me some worries, and some money, too, since I wouldn’t have to take Trayf and Tummler to the vet. The only thing you’d have to do is give them heartworm pills. Would you do that?”
“Sure,” she says, not thinking.
Much later, she thinks, It often begins so simply: watch my house, feed my dogs. There’s nothing to it. Here, come on, just try. There. There. That’s my girl.
• • •
Dorsey has been living in her own apartment, which she shares with a casual lover, a musician named Brant Wachtel. For his own reasons, which Dorsey has no inkling of, Brant has been sleeping with Dorsey for two years now. He comes and goes and is friendly, though he has periods of depression when he sits in the living room, wearing three or four layers of clothes in the eighty-degree heat, mumbling to himself.
He teaches music to children in a neighboring elementary school and he plays rhythm guitar in a local bar band. His face is as smooth as a boy’s, the skin so flawless it seems to have been processed out of a high-speed machine. Brant Wachtel says whatever he thinks, at the moment he has those thoughts. He has no disguises and, except for his depressions, no undisplayed interiors. He loves to take off his clothes, make love, and then go out for pizza. “Smile, honey,” he likes to say. “Let me see that pretty smile.” Her smile has a certain lack of enthusiasm, but she does not feel this as a deficiency in herself. She cannot stay totally interested—she never has been interested—in the intermittent broad sunlight of Brant Wachtel after having been exposed to the chiaroscuro of Carlo Pavorese. She gives Brant her best imitation of a grin, then leaves her apartment, carrying her backpack with a week’s worth of clothes.
“Welcome to Pavor Manor,” he says, as he greets Dorsey at the flaking burglar-proof door.
The furniture in this house defies style: the chairs are wood and leather with high, straight backs, and the tables have been refinished so often that they seem to glow with the abuse they have taken. On the walls he has hung an odd and confusing array of posters and reproductions: Dür
er, Nicolas Poussin, Tiepolo, Max Ernst, and several pictures by an American whose work he admires and whom Dorsey has never heard of before, Ralston Crawford. Upstairs he has hung pictures by Georgia O’Keeffe, sky and flowers and bones. In them, light approaches the absolute. It strips objects, then obliterates them.
There is one other picture upstairs, an old illustration showing Phaëthon driving the chariot of the sun across the heavens. “Do you know the story of Phaëthon?” he asks her. When she shakes her head, he says, “You should. If you’re a physicist, it’s the only story.”
Upstairs the two rooms once inhabited by his sons have been cleared of banners and high school letters and photos of girlfriends; the rooms have been converted into studies. One room is the Pavorese room. Here he keeps his professional journals. In this room, where the shades always are drawn, he came upon—he says he didn’t discover it, it was just there—what is now called the Pavorese effect, which, he proudly says, cannot be explained in words, only in its mathematical formulation. It has to do with large-body gravitational interaction in certain theoretical dimensions of spacetime. “I did it here,” Carlo Pavorese says, pointing at the desk. “I was sitting down.”
The other room upstairs, the second study, is the Oppenheimer room; its windows face north and east, and if the curtains were ever drawn, it would be sunny for a few hours in the morning. The walls are painted sky blue. A signed photograph of Oppenheimer hangs on the wall. On the shelves of this room are many books written by Oppenheimer or about him, along with histories of Los Alamos, Livermore, and nuclear strategy. On a separate shelf are the books Oppenheimer claimed had helped to form his character: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the notebooks of Michael Faraday, L’Éducation Sentimentale, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, The Waste Land, The Bhagavad Gita, and Plato’s Theaetetus.
In this room Carlo Pavorese claims to be writing the spiritual biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He insists that it will never be published, that it is for his own benefit.
“Oppenheimer,” he says, “was the only American scientist of the twentieth century whose life was worth telling. And I know why. It is because, in Oppenheimer’s life, science and poetry and history came face to face with one another. First science defeated poetry. Then science defeated history. Then history defeated Oppenheimer. The symmetry is perfect, even down to Oppenheimer’s late rehabilitation. It’s an American life: a farce that has the appearance of a tragedy, but with a happy ending.”
The look on Carlo Pavorese’s face does not suggest that he actually thinks it was a farce.
• • •
During the week when Carlo Pavorese is gone, Dorsey prowls through the house every day before taking the dogs out for their walk. Trayf, she discovers, has an interest in birds and watches nothing else during the walk, while Tummler is concerned only with cars and watches each one go by with a suspicious gaze. Dorsey keeps both dogs—spayed females—on leashes, and even with one leash in each hand, the dogs control her completely, leading her, following the route Carlo always takes them on, as if there were no other possible places they might go.
She hides their heartworm pills in their dogfood, but Tummler carefully eats around hers. Against her own instincts and conscious wishes, Dorsey is forced to open the dog’s mouth and place the pill on the back of her pink tongue, and as soon as she has removed her hand from the dog’s mouth, she rushes to the bathroom to wash the saliva from her fingers.
She settles down in one of Carlo Pavorese’s ancient creaking chairs with her notepad in her lap, intending to work on physics, the dogs panting at her feet. Instead she begins to doze off, and she sees in front of her a set of distorted coordinates, curved from the effect of gravity, and numbers whose function she does not know passing in front of her mind’s screen. One of the dogs licks her on the soles of her bare feet. She sees her father, and then Hugh, waving their arms at her, and she tries to read the message that they’re giving her with this vigorous pantomime. Hello. Stand up. Get out.
Opening her eyes, she feels for a moment a sense that this house and everything in it has a purpose, which she does not know, directed toward her; she shakes her head, and now, the dark furniture and faded curtains and echoing wood floors seem to be expressing sadness and oppression. Desolation of spirit rises from the soiled rugs and ashtrays and floats out from the cluttered and crammed bookshelves. She gets up from her chair, puts on her shoes, and walks back to her apartment.
That night, she goes out with Brant Wachtel for burgers and beer. They end up at a dance club filled with cleverly dressed young people. Brant knows the musicians in the band, a local group called Peoria (“We will play in Peoria”) that performs Top Forty and oldies that are easy to dance to. Brant is an absentmindedly good dancer and can steer his way physically into almost any rhythm: his dancing resembles rhythmic sleepwalking, a bodily expression of a dream state that is both deeply remote and sensual. His specialty is a relaxed, easy sweatiness, a set of California moves: invitations offered, invitations withdrawn.
But Dorsey dances awkwardly. She’s never danced well, and now she knows that she looks like someone released from a cloister. The bar smells of cigarettes, beer, and musky physical meetings, and in this brackish air and doped-out light Dorsey would like to recover the rhythms of Brant’s unconscious pleasure in things, but she can’t, and Brant Wachtel won’t teach her. It’s her problem, not his. He’s doing fine. She’s the one who’s house-sitting at Carlo’s. Carlo Pavorese has done this to her. Four years of graduate study have done this to her. A life of study has done this to her. But until now, she hasn’t felt herself becoming self-detached.
Finally even Brant Wachtel notices. “Hey,” he says, “you’re a real nervous dancer tonight. I’ve never seen you do that.” He does a quick imitation of her splay beat stomp. It’s painful for her to see this decent man, this teacher of children, doing a version of her rhythmic spasms; it’s like hearing a child imitating, for laughs, the cries of an adult in pain. Seeing him, she walks off the dance floor, rattling her bracelets with nervous flicks. When he catches up to her, she grabs his arms and says, “I want to go home.”
The car is her car; she drives back. At home Brant Wachtel makes her a sandwich; he pours her a glass of water; he tries, in his quiet furry way, to soothe her.
They bed down, and he touches her in the way she likes. In the techniques of skin touching skin, he acknowledges the common sexual decencies. As soon as they’re finished, he falls asleep and snores, not an unpleasant sound. Dorsey finds it calming, like waves on a beach. She lets her hand descend to his neck and circles one of his curls with her index finger. She’s grateful that they don’t love each other. Instead, they have a kind of kinship. They found each other easily and will part easily, without rancor. He will think better of the minds of women because of her.
But it’s not enough. She rises from the bed, where Brant has made happy shallow love to her, and she gets dressed quickly. She drives back to Carlo Pavorese’s house and lets herself in with the circular key. The black Labradors jump all over her.
For the remaining five days she does not go back to her apartment, but instead moves from room to room in Carlo Pavorese’s house, soaking up what she thinks of as the atmosphere. Even on the bookshelves there is a sense of incompatibles being thrown together to see what kinds of explosions can be created. Dante, for example, is placed next to Nietzsche. In Carlo Pavorese’s shelving system, St. John of the Cross is next to Baudelaire, Walt Whitman next to E. M. Cioran, and Karl Marx is mated with Emily Dickinson. Boethius and Wittgenstein, Pirandello and Sophocles, Kant and the autobiography of Doris Day.
Wherever she goes, the dogs follow her, and as they lick her, and bark, and pull her outside, she thinks of her own life, her parents’ careful preparations for her, her brother’s pride in her efficient mind, having brought her to this darkened house, where the twentieth century lives in the form of a large gargoyle man who, sooner or later, is going to make love to her, because she wants
him to. As soon as he is back, he bends down hugely and gives her a kiss on the cheek. The dogs jump up and put their front paws on his chest, and he hugs them. He is dressed like a dignified but seedy haberdasher in a small town where no one is really interested in clothes: the pants and coat don’t match in either pattern or fabric. They are the clothes of a man who doesn’t look in the mirror often enough. “Good to see you,” he says. “I’ll cook dinner.”
He prepares lamb in a sweetish sauce. At the table he begins to talk, and the talk turns into a monologue that Dorsey finds herself unable to interrupt.
“I’ve just heard a lot of papers,” he says. “I go to these conferences, you know, as a spy. They think I’m a physicist, just like them, but instead I’m listening in on what recipes they’re brewing in their witches’ pots up there on Parnassus. Experimental results. I hate experiments. I always have. And, of course, the lovely theories. The creation and destruction of matter. Our field, Miss Welch, has become positively biblical. First and last things. Now that we have found a way to destroy the Earth fully and sufficiently, we are prowling around in the origins of the universe. These men would build black holes, if they could figure out how. After all, if you become a god, you have to create something, don’t you? And there, unfortunately, is the joke on us. We have studied matter, but all we can actually do is destroy it. And the angel of death descends with his baskets of cash. Isn’t that funny?”
“Carlo,” she says, “why don’t you—”
“God plays a trick on smart people: he lets them discover secrets that will kill them. And He doesn’t make them smart enough to know how to forget what they’ve discovered. It’s terrible and I love it. It’s my life.”