Lost and Wanted(6)
“I did live in Paris,” Charlie sighed. “But it’s not true that I hate to lie. I love lying. It’s so liberating.”
In our era at Harvard, there were various, distinct types: the international students; the children of immigrants; the scattering of anonymous valedictorians from all across the country, like me, the only ones from their high schools. And then there were the kids from New York: the rich ones, nearly all white (with some Saudi royalty thrown in), whose fathers and grandfathers had gone to Harvard, who belonged to the final clubs and the Hasty Pudding. Having begun in public school in Brookline, spent the year in Paris, and then finished high school at an elite boarding school in Connecticut, Charlie managed to have friends from this set without belonging exclusively to it. Then there were the graduates of the specialized New York City public schools, brilliant math and science grinds from Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech—mostly Asian, with a smattering of black and white nerds—and the culturally sophisticated, mostly Jewish crowd from Hunter and LaGuardia.
I would have said then that Charlie and I—an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena—didn’t fit into any category, and that that’s why we were eventually drawn to each other. Now I think that the twenty-some eighteen-year-olds in the room that day must have been equally uncategorizable, each with their secret, disjunctive parts. I think that the boxes we used to sort them were nothing more than comforting fictions, like Bohr’s atomic model, which is so pretty and so sensible—its particles orbiting the nucleus like a miniature sun and planets—that it’s still the definitive representation. This is in spite of its incompatibility with everything we now know about the very tiniest pieces into which the world can be broken.
4.
It was about a month after I got the news about Charlie that Jack said he’d seen the ghost. Our house is more than a hundred years old. I bought it in 2005, with the money my grandmother left me. A narrow blue Victorian in Cambridgeport, a five-minute drive from MIT, it had a front porch, a hexagonal tower, and a German couple already installed in the rental unit downstairs. The Germans rode off together every morning on their bicycles to their studio, where together they were making a documentary film about the few remaining Wampanoag tribespeople on Chappaquiddick.
Once—this must have been soon after I joined the faculty at MIT—I came home from work and found the Germans passionately kissing in the front hall. The blond bulk of him obscured her narrow frame entirely, such that I thought for a moment he was leaning against the door in some kind of despair. He stepped back when he heard me, revealing his black-haired, blue-eyed wife.
“Excuse us,” he said, and their expressions were as if I had surprised them in their house, rather than the other way around. They looked at me with barely concealed pity, as if I must feel so lonely. This surprised me, because at that time I was the furthest thing from lonely.
(When a group of physicists publishes a paper, we will sometimes parenthetically note a related topic that we plan to explore later. After we published our model, Neel left to join the LIGO effort at Caltech, under Kip Thorne and David Reitze. For four years Neel and I emailed each other almost daily, a correspondence that ranged from particle physics to the incredible machines Neel’s team was building in Washington and Louisiana. We didn’t only talk about physics, but about the politics of his lab and my department, the politics of our country, the books we were reading, the people we were dating, what we ate for lunch. It was the most indirect and the most exciting conversation of my life, and by the time I finally asked Neel the two questions I most wanted to know—
1) whether he was ever coming back to Cambridge, and
2) whether he had changed his mind on the subject of children
—I was thirty-six. There was a kind of relief in getting his answers. In general I like to know the facts.)
That was when I decided to have a baby. People said I was crazy to give up so soon. Thirty-six was so young, and anyway, they all knew someone they hadn’t thought to set me up with until now. Was I interested in coffee, dinner, a hike? I smiled and nodded, but I had already picked out the father online. The number of PhD students in physics among the candidates was striking—a qualification that apparently signals intelligence to the general population—but I’d skipped over these quickly. I was familiar with the characteristic quirks of such people, and anyway, I was looking for genetic product that would complement rather than enhance my own strengths. The father I selected was a rock-climbing graduate student in musicology, cryobank handle “Papageno,” who had grown up on a farm in Washington State. Papageno was six feet two inches tall, with sandy hair and blue eyes. In his childhood photo (the only type the site permitted) he grinned at me as if he knew he’d done something wrong, and also that I would forgive him.
I sat across from wasted, adult specimens in bars and restaurants—once, in a canoe—and tried to be polite, then went home and stared at the gorgeous boy on my screen. I wasn’t giving up; by having a child, I was releasing myself not only from these pointless encounters, but from the pressure to settle for someone who didn’t meet my standards. In the meantime, I would get pregnant. I’ve never waited so breathlessly for anything as I did for that package from California, vacuum-sealed vials that produced the love of my life.