Lost and Wanted(33)
Last year was the first in which unmarried Americans outnumbered married ones; and yet, even with all of these single people, we still don’t have a word for the person who was your most important person—if you don’t wind up with him or her. Neel was that person for me, and so the person he’d chosen took on a mythic dimension—was she also a physicist? Or a pianist, or a kindergarten teacher, or a director of marketing? Did the fact that they were getting married in India mean that she was Indian, as Neel’s parents had always hoped for him? Was she younger, or the same age we were? Was she okay with Neel’s well-established position on children? Was she pretty?
We had to wrap up before three, when Arty was teaching his famous Inflationary Cosmology lecture. Arty was one of those rare professors who could remain interested in explaining his work to each new generation of students, and there was no doubt that his lecture would be packed as usual. The three of us walked outside together, and Arty observed that I’d taken his parking spot.
“I always do.”
“Why not walk, in this weather?” he teased me.
“I have to get Jack,” I said. The truth, which Arty knew well, is that I can’t stand walking—it’s so slow. “When he’s older, we’ll bike.”
“How old is he?” Jason asked, to be polite.
We chatted for a minute about Jack. I told them that it was now possible to buy your child a Cosmic Microwave Background stuffed toy.
“Now I remember,” Arty said suddenly. Jason and I both looked at him.
“She’s a cardiothoracic surgeon,” he said, bobbing his head as he does whenever we’ve reached some kind of conclusion. “From Mumbai, I believe. She’s been working with Doctors Without Borders—wonderful organization. But now she’s got a new job here, at the Brigham.”
Understandably bored by details about people he didn’t know, Jason was pulling out his bike. I noticed that Arty was looking at me anxiously, as if even he could understand why this news might be upsetting. It seemed important to reassure him, not only for his sake.
“That sounds exactly right for Neel,” I said. “Someone smart, but practical.”
Arty smiled at me, relieved. “Exactly.”
17.
My own parents didn’t get married at first. When they moved in together, in Manhattan in 1965, my mother was a receptionist at the hair salon at Lord & Taylor (a job she says she got only because of her long red hair, which she used to iron straight). My father was working his way through college, and neither one of them had any interest in children. They insist that I wasn’t an accident, but a gradual change of heart, and that they had my sister to keep me company.
I was born in ’71 and then Amy arrived in ’73, after which they decided to move to California. My father left Con Ed in Manhattan for a construction management job in L.A., and my mother stayed home with us. When I was five, they got married in our backyard, “for you girls,” not because they had any newfound faith in the institution. Doing it the other way, the marriage without the children, has never made sense to me—or that’s what I said to the few friends with whom I discussed Neel’s engagement. What it really made me feel was that there was some magic I’d never experienced, which might make two people decide to yoke themselves together in that official way, for no practical reason at all.
The day after I went to see Arty, I taught my first seminar of the semester, for second-and third-year undergraduates: Introduction to Special Relativity. When I checked my phone afterward, there was a text message from Charlie. I did not believe, and yet my breathing and my heartbeat sped up. My skin was hot, then clammy. The message read simply—Where does the universe END?—not the kind of question that normally interested Charlie, but employing capitalization just the way she did, to reproduce her own animated manner of speaking. The following evening there was another email, blank except for the attachment: an article in which I was mentioned as one of ten female physicists “to watch.” It was nine years old and of course I’d seen it at the time; it was as if “Charlie” had just noticed it.
My first thought was that Terrence might believe me now. There was no ghost, but there was someone who was, as he had said, screwing with me—it wasn’t an anonymous spammer. I thought that if a health care worker or a delivery person had really picked up Charlie’s phone and guessed the lazy password, my name would’ve been easy to find in her contacts. I wasn’t under any delusions about being famous, but there had been times since the books were published that I had been recognized—usually in a bookstore, by a clerk who was excited about science, and once on the playground with Jack. A woman had approached me and said, “Are you Helen Clapp?” and we had talked for half an hour, while our children climbed and slid together.
There is a certain kind of person—usually male, but not always—who makes physics into a hobby, who reads all the popular books and makes an honest effort to understand. Sometimes all these people want to do is show you how much they know, but many of them (the woman on the playground included) are really curious. It doesn’t have to do with education, necessarily; there are just some people who get pleasure from considering abstract questions about forces and cosmology. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but sitting in my office after the seminar that afternoon—having just met eleven students with that type of brain, who’d also had the luck and drive to make their way to MIT—I thought it was possible that the person on the other end didn’t know whose phone they’d taken. Even if you had come into the house to provide some service, seen a phone on a counter, and pocketed it, there was no reason to assume it belonged to the dying woman upstairs—in fact, “Charlie’s iPhone” didn’t suggest that it belonged to a woman at all. And if she’d really used 1234 as a passcode, anyone who felt like it could’ve gotten in; Terrence was just fortunate that there hadn’t been a credit card or other financial information stored there.