Lost and Wanted(31)
For a moment the words meant nothing; then I knew. The year we lived in Thayer Hall, Charlie had written a term paper on something called “The Black Hole of Lough Derg.” Unlike its astrophysical corollary, this was an actual hole—a pit in the ground in Northern Ireland popular among medieval pilgrims because it was reputedly an entrance to the underworld. Sleeping in that damp, cold recess overnight was supposed to shorten your time in purgatory. “They really believed that they might be bound to wheels of fire, or hung by their necks from fishhooks for years at a time,” Charlie told me. “They were terrified. Isn’t that amazing?”
Charlie learned about Lough Derg in an undergraduate Shakespeare lecture about Hamlet meeting his father’s ghost on the ramparts of Elsinore. She did think at one point about writing a Shakespeare thesis, but Pope advised her to choose the “relatively untrodden territory” of Laclos. That was a valid argument, and Charlie was flattered that he would take an interest. This is maybe an opinion I’ve developed since becoming a teacher myself, but most of us are humble. Or at least, most of us aren’t arrogant in the way my father’s parents assumed when they called him “professor”—poking fun at him, because he said he wanted to go to college. It’s more like the arrogance of priests, robed in humility, the secret belief that one has dedicated one’s life to something pure. And the concomitant idea that this entitles one to little leeways, pleasures, indulgences, small things in comparison to the great work: the life of the mind.
* * *
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My own mentor has won almost all of the big prizes, including the Wolf and the Kavli, but he would be the last person to feel any such entitlement. The university has bestowed on him even more honors, as well as time, money, and a parking space a few steps from Jefferson’s entrance—which normally sits empty. I’m sure that this must annoy his less decorated colleagues, and also that Arty is unaware of this fact, as he cheerfully preaches to them (as he has done to me) about the benefits of doing physics while walking. Even though he lives in Newton, about six miles from his office, he often commutes on foot.
The first time I met Arty, I thought he reminded me of my father. I was a nineteen-year-old redhead from Los Angeles, and while that provoked different reactions in the other faculty members I encountered (dismissal, mild flirtation, or embarrassingly chummy encouragement), Arty was the only one on whom my physical person seemed not to register. Arty himself is unremarkable-looking, with a large, boyish face; gray hair that he wears too long; large, square glasses; and a habit of raising his shoulders toward his ears. His smiles are sudden and slightly out of his control, in a way that could be either charming or off-putting depending upon your point of view.
On that afternoon in September, after I bought Jack his erasers, I went to Arty’s office in Jefferson. He’d asked me to come and discuss a paper one of his postdocs had coauthored on Advanced LIGO detection of black-hole binaries in globular clusters. It was a fashionable topic: when LIGO detected a gravitational wave, it would be the biggest news of twenty-first-century physics, and theoreticians everywhere were scrambling to get in on the action, even before a detection had actually occurred. I was sorry to see through the window in Arty’s door that the postdoc had arrived already; he was sitting with his back to me, wearing a T-shirt and a knit ski cap; his bike lock was clipped to one of his belt loops. In general I don’t care what people wear—you can do physics in a bathing suit, if you want—but it was seventy-three degrees outside, and the air-conditioning in Jefferson has never been such that you need to put on outerwear indoors.
“Helen!” Arty said. “Come in, come in. Meet Jason. You both have classical Greek names.”
This was typical Arty, awkward but effortful. He has told me that the most difficult part of socializing in a group for him is the need to come up with “topics,” by which I think he means topics outside of the physical sciences. Arty carries the kind of suppressed excitement that you sometimes find in people who’ve just fallen in love, an almost maniacal focus on one thing, and a just barely concealed desire to turn any conversation to that subject.
Jason stood up. “It’s great to meet you,” he said. His T-shirt said, I’d rather be lost in the woods, and he had heavy muttonchops, with a soul patch, that may have been intended to distinguish him from less style-conscious colleagues.
“I can’t remember who Jason was,” I said.
“The captain of the Argonauts,” Arty supplied. “Husband of Medea, the sorceress.”
“The one who kills her kids.”
Jason smiled. “And Helen caused the Trojan War.”
“She was the scapegoat,” I said. “I don’t think she caused it.”
“My wife is a chef,” Jason said, “which is sort of like sorcery. But we don’t have kids, thank god. Are you married to a physicist, or—”
“I’m not married. But I have to pick up my son after this, so we should start.”
Jason looked slightly taken aback, probably by my tone, which can sometimes be a little short. Arty swiveled his screen toward us and started in happily:
“We were looking at redshifted chirp masses before you came in—red is high metallicity here and blue is low.”
After I started working as Arty’s research assistant during my final undergraduate year, and we began spending more time together, I realized that it wasn’t my father he reminded me of so much as myself. If there were a way to strip us of our genders and synchronize our birth dates, Arty and I would be people with the same frame of reference, the same interests, and the same way of relating to other human beings. It’s just that being female makes it more difficult to blurt out whatever comes into my head without seeming rude or crazy. Whereas people generally find Arty’s eccentricity winning—if not a sign of genius.