When Women Were Dragons(110)
Dinner was served. The laureate’s table, as is traditional, occupied the middle of the room, with the prime minister, the Nobel Committee, and various other government and cultural officials all carefully eating their beautifully presented food. But no dragon. Was she coming? People in the banquet hall began to whisper.
The committee chairman, as is traditional, called the ceremony to order and gave his yearly speech, with its attempts at humor. The guests indulged him with wan smiles. A film showed dramatic moments from the Guardian Dragons’ heroic efforts, plus interviews from rescued families, protected villages, and the negotiators of progressive new peace deals, hailed around the world for their innovations in protecting human rights and human dignity as well as establishing new protocols to empower the citizens of the region. When power belongs, not to the violent, and not to the wealthy and well-connected, but to the people, a different sort of future begins to present itself. A lasting, global peace seemed not only possible, but probable.
The crowd was moved. Several dragons wept. The committee chairman called for the laureate, who entered from a side door. She was a beautiful dragon. Though surprisingly small. All potential energy and compact heat. She seemed to vibrate with excitement. She was accompanied by a slight woman with very short hair, lightly shot with grey. They embraced tenderly, the woman resting her hand on the dragon’s face and giving her a kiss on the cheek. They were standing very close to the microphone. The banquet attendees heard the woman say, “You are my favorite sister, honey. I’m so proud of you.” They heard the dragon reply, “Last I checked, I’m your only sister. But thank you.”
The crowd leaped to their feet, applauding until their hands were raw and red. Makeup smeared. Men with hardened faces wept. The dragon cleared her throat, and the attendees took their seats once again.
“Thank you so much for being here,” the dragon said. “Thank you for sharing in our collective commitment to peace. I want to talk to you about the work we are doing, and the people that we all can help save. But first, I should probably introduce myself. Officially. In public. For the first time. My name is Beatrice. Beatrice Green. And I’m so happy to meet you.”
44.
As I write these words, my head swims a bit, but I attribute much of that to the indignities of old age. My joints creak, my back is bowed, my hair has paled, wisped, and fallen away. Every day, I am lighter, weaker, more fragile, my skin like rice paper crinkled over a skeleton made of grass. So it goes. I was an astrophysicist once, and perhaps I still am. I built mathematical models to better understand the composition of stars, using that foundation to predict larger and larger structures, moving toward a unified understanding of the movement of the universe. Every day, there were galaxies in my eyes. I claimed a life that was bigger than I was, a presence in the world that was larger than the one I was told that I could have. I held the threads of the universe in my mind and attempted to pull them together. I could have dragoned with my first, precious love. But I didn’t. I chose this work, this path, this life. This precious life. Would that I could have chosen both.
My path sent me to universities all around the country and the world, giving lectures, presenting papers, probing the universe, and coaxing her to reveal her absolute truths, until, at last, I chaired the Department of Physics back where I started, at the University of Wisconsin, and where I remained until my retirement. My lovely wife, Camilla—a loudmouthed and often profane ceramic artist from Rome—complained bitterly about the weather and complained passionately about the food, but loved living near my dragon aunties, who still occupied the same building and still made their living baking bread. Camilla tenderly cared for each of my aunties in their old age, minding the house and tending the garden and managing the kitchen and cooking massive vats of food (all her grandmother’s recipes), and making sure everyone—from the aunties to their nurses to the various neighbors and even the mailman—was fed. Her sculptor’s hands were gentle and kind. She caressed their faces and adjusted their beds, and held their hands as they slipped away. They loved her as if she was their own daughter. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Sometimes, the expansive nature of family takes my breath away.
Camilla—oh, heavens. It pains me now to write her name. The wound is too fresh. What can I say, other than that our life was beautiful. That she was beautiful. Her work was beautiful. She made the world more of itself and tied me to it—tied my mind to my body, tied my heart to hers. An unbreakable knot. Sometimes, I feel that we are all tricked by love, and its rigid requirement of pain. We find the love of our lives and cleave to our beloved when we are still quite young and do not yet understand that we must, by our nature, die someday. In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone. What is grief, but love that’s lost its object?
If I had known how this story would end, would I have done anything differently? Would I still have loved her, body and soul? In my mind’s eye, I can see Camilla asking me that very question.
Oh, my darling, I feel my heart answer. I wouldn’t change a single thing.
She passed away only a month after my retirement, just as we planned to set off around the world. I still see her face glittering in the stars from time to time. Which is why I’ve taken to sleeping in the hammock at night. Beatrice remains out of her mind with worry. She fusses over me endlessly. Sometimes she flutters down and carries me indoors, cradling me in her arms as I did for her, as my mother did for both of us, once upon a time. Once again, the past and the present wind together: they loop, they twist, they pull in tight. Tension and response, filament and friction and time. A knot. There was so much that my mother understood, even as she got so much so very wrong.