Lost and Wanted(17)

“At least there are male human beings in your department.”

I had dragged her away from an anthropology paper she was supposed to be writing, and so I offered to buy our drinks. When I opened my wallet to pay, there was a folded piece of paper stuck in the pocket in front of my university ID.

“What’s that?” Elaine asked.

I read it quickly myself, and then I showed it to her—although I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it absolutely private forever, because it scared and excited me so much. On three separate lines, in almost illegible printing, it said:

         The sweater is ugly.



     The sweater is charming.



     The sweater may be ugly, but you make it charming.





“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I explained our joke about Hegelian dialectics.

Elaine shook her head. “It doesn’t work. Those are opinions, not logical propositions. Also, Hegel didn’t even use that formulation. He borrowed it from Kant, and it was popularized by Johann Fichte. And why does he keep trashing your sweater? It’s not that bad.”

That was why I liked Elaine: she was honest and intellectually rigorous, unlike so many people you met in the humanities. But it’s strange how you can ignore even your smartest friends, when you start to fall in love.





11.


The morning of Charlie’s memorial, I woke up early with a dull ache in my stomach. I tried to go over some preliminary data from the Gaia satellite just released by the ESA, but I couldn’t focus. I was thinking that if I hadn’t already had coffee—I keep an electric pot on my desk so that I don’t have to go downstairs and risk waking Jack—I would have gotten back into bed. My phone was next to me, as it so often is now, and it pinged with a new message. When I glanced down, I saw that it was from Charlie Boyce.

Luvya lady!



Beyond this cryptic and almost offensive salutation, there was nothing. If someone was texting from Charlie’s phone, they weren’t hoping to sell pornography or prescription drugs. I couldn’t remember a specific instance in which Charlie had written “Luvya lady!” although she did use the abbreviation “luv” in her electronic communication, and would sometimes greet me, “Hi, lady.” Yet there were probably thousands of women who might have used the same formulation.

Who IS this? I wrote back, and then sat there staring at the phone, willing it to ping. A moment later it did, twice, with a message from Amazon alerting me that my package with Lazrwhite electric toothbrush heads and two other items would arrive tonight before 8:00 p.m.

I could still feel my pulse in my ears a few minutes later, when I heard Jack in the living room. I put on my slippers and went downstairs, where I found him crouched over whatever he was building, the rest of his Legos scattered on the floor. His ant farm had come with him from his room, maybe to keep him company, although I’d warned him several times about the consequences of dropping it.

“Good morning, sweetie,” I said.

“Hi.”

“What are you working on?”

“Train station.”

“It looks like South Station.”

Jack was concentrating, his tongue protruding slightly between his lips.

“Are you trying to make a dome?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I help?”

We worked on the dome for a while, Jack getting down on his stomach and resting the side of his body against my hip. The ants went about their own enterprise with silent intensity.

    “Today’s the funeral,” he said suddenly.

“Memorial—it’s a little different. A memorial is supposed to be a celebration of the person’s life.” I realized as I said it that nothing about the service in the church at Harvard was going to correspond to Jack’s idea of a celebration.

“Will she be there?”

“Who?”

“Your friend.”

“Oh. You mean, will her body be there? No, definitely not.”

Jack didn’t say anything, but he was visibly disappointed. “Will we see the coffin?”

“Nope.”

According to the psychologist at Jack’s school, we’re uncomfortable with the idea of death in our society, and for that reason often avoid talking about it with children. It was therefore good for them to experience the death of someone they didn’t know well, to prepare them for the deaths of loved ones later. I heard this back when I attended all the workshops the school offered, in an attempt to do as much exemplary parenting on my own as two people might have accomplished working together.

But the death workshop wasn’t especially illuminating. I’d been showing Jack dead leaves, worms, and insects ever since he could talk. We’d prodded a dead raccoon with a stick. This wasn’t some kind of acclimation process, but rather science, and although I wouldn’t have said it to the school psychologist, I didn’t feel the need to use Charlie for the same purpose. Society aside, I’ve always thought that most normal people are afraid of death.

Einstein famously was not; there is the letter he wrote to Michele Besso’s family, after his friend’s death: So he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.