They go down the stairs, separated by twenty seconds for discretion’s sake, Dorsey in the lead. When Carlo is out of the kitchen, she opens the door to the basement and fumbles along the wall until she finds the switch. When the light snaps on, she sees the steps and the handrail, and she’d like to turn around. But Danny is behind her, and she’s curious. She walks down the stairs sideways, afraid she’ll slip on the steep, narrow planks, and at the bottom she flicks on another wall switch.
There’s the water heater. And over there is a pile of books and papers, stacked in one musty corner. And nearer the stairs is a collection of old phonograph records, next to a standing cupboard with several graying jars of preserves. There is an unclean damp smell, like a bait shop. Dorsey thinks: eels.
“Wow,” Danny says behind her. “Look over there.”
He points to the wall, where lined up on a group of built-in shelves are several rows of seashells, carefully positioned and labeled with index cards tacked to the front. They remind her of the roadside seashell stands her parents used to stop at when she was a child. “I bet he did that with his wife,” Danny says. “Let’s see: sand dollars, starfish, and those are … what’re they called, the ones that look like—”
“—I don’t know what they’re called and I’m not staying down here. Come on, Danny.” She hits the switch, throwing the shells into the dark, and she climbs the stairs quickly, peering through the door to make sure that Carlo isn’t in the kitchen. “Come on,” she says. “Move.”
Without anyone noticing that they were gone, they are back in the kitchen, filling their glasses with more ice cubes.
One week later, Dorsey has invited Carlo Pavorese for lunch at an outdoor restaurant. He doesn’t seem to notice the people who pass by on the sidewalk. He doesn’t notice the sky. He sits hunched over, his face close to his food, his shoulders tense.
“Carlo,” she says, “what is it with you and Oppenheimer? What’s the deal with this biography you’re writing? Why don’t you just forget him?”
He hardly looks up from his shrimp salad. He glances at Dorsey quickly and lowers his eyes again. “You think it’s such a blessing to be intelligent, don’t you? You’re an innocent. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. Intelligence is bad luck. It only looks like a gift. It’s not a gift; it’s a debt for which you must pay and pay and pay. Oppenheimer finally—finally!—figured that out. Once I came on him in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His secretary had announced me but he had evidently forgotten that I was coming in. It was a time of his life when he was easily preoccupied. In any case, I entered the room and waited.”
He reaches for his glass of wine. He swirls the wine around in his mouth before he swallows it.
“Oppenheimer was sitting at his desk, his back turned to me, and he was staring out one of the windows. At first I thought he was bird watching, but there were no remarkable birds in those trees, and he was not the sort of man to give his attention to sparrows. To get his notice I decided to make a joke. ‘Robert,’ I said, ‘are you thinking about physics, or your sins?’ ”
Carlo Pavorese leans back to study a passing car. He glances at Dorsey, then looks down again.
“You didn’t joke about sin with Oppenheimer. After all, there was Jean Tatlock, his girlfriend, the one who slit her wrists, and there were the mental troubles in his youth, and of course all his flirting with Communism, to say nothing of his supervision of the building of the bomb. To say nothing of his marriage to Kitty, a Byzantine romantic relationship if there ever was one. Sin and physics. Exactly the wrong thing to ask him about. He knew the myth of Phaëthon, backwards and forwards.”
“What did he say?” Dorsey asks, deciding that she had better pick up the check on this one.
“What did he say? Well, first he turned his face toward me. Oppenheimer’s face was one of his great accomplishments. You take Einstein. Einstein’s a poster saint, an icon of genius. The Santa Claus of Princeton. But Oppenheimer’s face is more dainty. It’s more difficult to read. The aesthete and the bureaucrat are lodged in that face, and they’re struggling with each other. So he turned to me and looked. The cold sad faun’s face. I was meant to see the whole of his life in an instant of time. All right. I did.
“Then he smiled. I was off his hook. ‘Carlo,’ he asked me, ‘when did the Greeks decide that rhetorical questions were a form of untruth?’ I wasn’t meant to answer disputatiously. It was one of his typical sibylline epigrams. Narcissists love epigrams. You never interrupt an epigram. So we talked about the Greeks for the next few minutes. We didn’t talk about physics or sin. We talked about the Sophists, how they had been unjustly attacked by Plato as mere rhetoricians. It was the sort of discussion he liked. Sin he would not at first discuss in public. He appropriated sin for himself. He thought sin was original with him. By and by he accused other physicists of sin. And that, young lady, is one of the reasons I think about him. He saw it all coming. He could see the whole unhappy comedy unfolding.”
“What comedy?” Dorsey asks.
“You’re a Ph.D. now,” Carlo Pavorese tells her. “You figure it out.” Finally he sits up and leans back. “Do you understand yet how a soul can be taken over? You’re going to learn.”
It is days later. She is back in his house, sitting in one of the living room chairs, while Trayf and Tummler lick her hands.
“Why do you listen to me?” Carlo Pavorese asks.
“You’re a fine teacher. You’ve helped me.”
“Yes. But my dear girl, you’re still here. You come over here. You eat my food and you walk my dogs.” He points into the dining room. “And you do your work at the dining room table while I pace about and act oddly. Your attraction to me is peculiar. I’m not as famous as I used to be. I’m almost a crank. Do you like to hear me talk?”
“ ‘Like’? No, that’s probably not the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
“I listen to you, don’t I?” She waits. “Is it love if I listen?”
She gazes at him, and he turns away.
“Yes,” he says. “You listen.”
At home she removes some cold potato soup in a Tupperware container from the refrigerator and warms it up on the stove. While the soup is warming, she makes herself a spinach salad. At the last minute she pulls out a frosty bag of frozen shrimp from the freezer, defrosts a few under the tap, and adds them to the salad. When the soup is ready, she sits down at the kitchen table, the evening paper to her left. She remembers some white wine in the cupboard, opens it, and pours herself a glass. She sits down again. But something is wrong. As she brings the soup to her mouth, she sees that her hand is trembling, and in the large circular soup spoon she can see the small wave motions her hand’s trembling has created, a rippled surface. It’s an interesting surface of ripples. She lowers the spoon and waits for the shaking to stop.
Away from physics and Carlo Pavorese, Dorsey has one friend, living across the hall from her in the building: Maude Ann Norris, a single parent who works as a buyer for a local department store, what she calls “an upstairs job,” which means that she sits at a desk and does not have to stand all day, as she did once as a sore-footed clerk in the cosmetics section on the first floor. Maude Ann knocks at Dorsey’s door, brings her cups of hot tea and plates of butter cookies from Denmark, complains briefly of the intransigence and disloyalty of men, and praises her son, Gerald, for his beauty and intelligence. Gerald is beautiful, Dorsey thinks with envy. He is Maude Ann’s greatest achievement. He builds multi-storied skyscrapers, using hundreds of differently shaped blocks. He is frisky and likes to dance on the dining room table.
Maude Ann herself has a pleasant hello-world face, which always reminds Dorsey of the yearbook photographs of the girls in Five Oaks: eighteen-year-olds who would make themselves into princesses by a sheer act of faith.
Maude Ann has heard all about Carlo Pavorese and disapproves of him. “He sounds like a creep,” she says. “Oka
y, so he’s smart. But I say a creep is a creep.” Brant Wachtel may have been a minimalist when it came to character, but Maude Ann once saw him in the hallway wearing only his Jockey shorts, and the sight left an impression on her. “Where did you find him?” Maude Ann asked Dorsey. “I’d like a map to that place.”
Now that Brant has left—Maude Ann thinks that his departure is bad news for Dorsey and every other woman in the building—Maude Ann complains about Dorsey’s facial fatigue lines, the crazy hours she keeps, her failure to keep her kitchen well-stocked, the general disarray in the living room. Maude Ann brings sandwiches and glasses of milk in an effort to keep her friend nourished. “You’re never around,” she complains, “except in the middle of the night. I only see you when I can’t sleep. When do you sleep? I never see you sleeping. You’re awake all the time. That’s bad. You should take better care of yourself.”
When he walks around his house, followed by his dogs, the parts of his body appear to be out of synchronicity with themselves. His arms and legs are in separate time zones. Carlo Pavorese is not simultaneous with himself: no event can occur to all his body’s elements at the same time. Event-waves journey through his tissues like earthquakes down fault lines. His neural paths are slow, and he is a dangerous driver, who brakes five seconds after his mind has sent his foot the instructions to hit the pedal.
His physical singularity is not a matter of taste but fact, in the same way that it is not a matter of opinion that granite is a solid rather than a liquid. His hair rises from his thin face like cold threaded flames. Dorsey finds herself ritually fascinated by the fact of Carlo Pavorese’s harshness, by his blotched skin, his obsessive tormented monologues. She is fascinated by his shame. Here on the West Coast, in the country as a whole, he’s almost an anomaly.
He is standing again in his living room, gesturing nervously with his right arm, his feet in the square of sunlight cast onto the floor.
“Why,” he asks, “do people put up posters of Einstein on their walls? People who never read the special theory of relativity, much less understand it?”
Dorsey holds a cup of coffee in her hands, and she leans back on a dining room chair. “Because Einstein was a genius.”
“No,” Carlo Pavorese says. “There are other geniuses whose faces do not appear on posters. Think again.”
“He had a beautiful face.”
“Nonsense, and you are a sentimentalist.”
“All right, Carlo. I give up. Why do people put up pictures of Einstein on their walls?”
“Because people admire power, Miss Welch, and Einstein had it. People think he invented the bomb, and that’s why his picture is up on a thousand walls, in the hopes that that pseudo-kindly face will be the face of modern physics. They want our profession to be governed by Santa Claus. No one wants Oppenheimer’s face on the wall. Who wants to be gazed upon by a rueful faun? A man who went around quoting Baudelaire? ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté.’ He used to quote those lines to me. I don’t know whether he thought they referred to paradise or to physics. ‘There, nothing else but grace and beauty, / Richness, quietness, and loveliness.’ I wonder if that’s how he felt when he discovered the theory of gravitational contraction in 1939? Not much luxe in a black hole.”
“Carlo,” she says.
“I just don’t want you to be innocent,” he says. “Americans eat too much candy. Their diet is very high in sugar.”
Because of course she and Carlo Pavorese have slept together several times; she has let this happen, drawn to it, curiosity and the urge to clean out his shadows controlling her. It might even be love; she has no idea. The first time it happened he had made her a dinner of Sicilian fish soup, followed by a pasta in a Neapolitan sauce, and a tomato salad with basil. They sat in the dining room under the dusty wrought-iron chandelier, with the dogs at their feet slobbering quietly and waiting for handouts. Dorsey and Carlo Pavorese were discussing mythic animals. Dorsey said that her favorite was the unicorn. Carlo Pavorese waved his hand impatiently and said that women always say that. He wagged his gargoyle face. His favorite was the Bunyip. “It’s feathered and gray and lives in the sea,” he said. “It has an emu’s head, which is covered with a thick pelt. Many poems and fables have been written about the Bunyip. It is said to project a waterspout behind it that distresses and overturns fishing boats, drowning honest fishermen. The stories claim that it has a cry.”
“What does it sound like?” Dorsey asked.
“Like this.” He opened his mouth and made the two-note, high-low call of a foghorn. “You see?” he said. “The story is that foghorns are based on the sea cry of the Bunyip. Haven’t you ever thought, when you heard foghorns, that you were hearing the cry of a large and probably extinct furred-and-feathered animal that lives in the sea?”
“I never heard foghorns until I moved out here,” she said. “They don’t have foghorns in Five Oaks, Michigan.”
“Maybe they should. Maybe there are shipwrecks in the heartland, too. The foghorns we have out here, those Bunyips swimming around in San Francisco Bay, I’m one of them. I have kept myself in check, Miss Welch, but you are no longer officially my student, and I must tell you that your skin and your eyes and your purity have riven my heart. Please forgive me, but I must ask you to do me the greatest favor a young woman can do for an old man.”
She watched him rise from the table.
“I will walk upstairs,” he said, “and you may follow me or not.”
He stood, and after two minutes she mounted the stairs. She would do this for him, but she would also do it for herself, out of affection and curiosity. She waited for him to switch on the lights, but he would not, and when she edged toward a lamp, she heard him say, “Don’t.” He took her hand. His fingers were dry and crusty. With his right arm pressing against her back he steered her toward his bedroom: the sleep museum, she thought. He said he would like to undress her but was too old to understand women’s clothes. Would she do it? “Carlo,” she said, “I don’t have my diaphragm. It’s back at the apartment.” She felt him nearby, standing quietly in the dark alcove. Through the curtains the streetlight gave him the barest hint of an outline, charcoal on charcoal. “What are you worried about?” he said. “I’m an old man.”
She wished she had had more wine: she could not remember ever being touched by a man toward whom she felt physical curiosity rather than attraction. She had an impulse to run out of the room, down the stairs, and out through the front door, slamming it, so that its flaking blue paint would flutter down onto the welcome mat, placed there years before by Carlo Pavorese’s wife and never removed by him. She followed herself, in her own mind, as she walked briskly down the sidewalk, crossing street after street, her shadow walking behind and then in front of her as she passed under the mercury streetlights, the two miles back to her apartment, coming upstairs, knocking at Maude Ann’s door, to tell her what Carlo Pavorese had asked her to do.
“What!” Maude Ann would say, aghast, scandalized. He wrapped his arms around Dorsey and bent down so that his face was next to hers. He sighed. It felt like being embraced by a sheet of papyrus. “He did what?” Maude Ann would ask. She would go to the kitchen and make some tea, either the orange pekoe she always drank or some plain old no-name brand. She would bring out every package of cookies she owned; there would be a towering heap of cookies on a plate. His fingers were trembling. He said, “You are so beautiful,” as he touched her face. Maude Ann’s eyes would be as wide as headlights. She would look like Gloria Swanson. Listening to this story, to what Carlo Pavorese had proposed to do upstairs, where in fact they were now, she would be outraged. It was a relief that she could not see him, at least, that she only felt his thin knobby longing against her. The dogs were out in the hallway, panting. Carlo’s voice was hoarse, like a surgeon who has spent all day in the operating room. “What beauty you have,” he said, his hands touching her. What would Maude Ann be wearing? White socks (or she’d be barefoot) a
nd her worn-out blue jeans, and her Ghirardelli Square T-shirt. She’d sit, bent over toward Dorsey, the classic pose of a woman listening to another woman, and she would listen, and nod.
Dorsey would drink her tea and try to explain what it was that had brought her into this old man’s house in the first place. She wouldn’t use the word “love”; Maude Ann wouldn’t believe her. She might even say something about the call she had received from Hugh, that odd warning. She’d tell Maude Ann all about her brother, his frustrated grace and strength. Maude Ann’s son, Gerald, would hear none of this; he’d be safely asleep. For a moment, lying on the bed and covered, it seemed, by Carlo Pavorese, Dorsey lost the image of Maude Ann and thought instead of the Bunyip swimming in San Francisco Bay, uttering foghorn cries. The dogs were on either side of the bed, watching. With his clothes off, Carlo Pavorese smelled of dust and glue. He said, “You are … a gift.” Then he whispered, the only time Dorsey could remember him doing so. “I live alone … you shouldn’t be a physicist … you are beautiful.” She didn’t want to think of what this meant and put herself back into Maude Ann’s apartment, where Maude Ann was congratulating her for getting out of that old guy’s place before he whispered anything else. Maude Ann would grab a chocolate layered cookie and bite it angrily and then chew with her mouth open, the way she often did. Dorsey smiled, thinking of Maude Ann’s hearty eating styles. She thought of her friends; she thought of the passing gratification to women afforded by younger men, men her own age, who understood the sexual decencies. And then she thought of Hugh, her brother, and she realized that he was the only other human being on earth who probably, at this very moment, knew exactly where she was, and why she was there.
She thought: the people who come and go. She thought of a star chart, and then she pictured the stars in the southern hemisphere, the constellations, including Crux, the Southern Cross; Pavo, the Peacock; Centaurus, the Centaur; Carina, the keel of Jason’s ship, the Argo; and Hydrus, the sea serpent. Maude Ann was not interested in this and wanted more details of what Carlo Pavorese had tried to put over on her. And her brother, Hugh, was shaking his head, shaking it back and forth, leaning against one of his beloved Buicks. She could see him mouth, silently, “Don’t do this.” Why couldn’t she hear him say that? This was not like making love with a younger man. No, not at all. There was some pleasure in it, but of an unexplainable kind: remote, unlocalized. There were the dogs gazing at her in the dark, and Carlo Pavorese needed some help, and when she finally gave it to him, she thought for a moment that it was raining and the roof was leaking, because she felt first one and then a second drop of water on her face. She held her hands up; they met Carlo Pavorese’s wet cheeks.