Lost and Wanted(65)
I sat down on the marble floor, my back against the wall opposite, and took out a paper I’d been meaning to read. I was forcing myself to confront Vilenkin’s proposed boundary conditions in superspace as limits for solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, when I heard them approaching the door. I scrambled to my feet, since there was something childish and undignified about sitting on the floor in Widener. Charlie came out first. She was wearing a short gray wool skirt, black tights, and a blue-and-white striped collared shirt, with a sweater on top. It was preppy and a little dressier than your average student, the version of Charlie that had attended Choate Rosemary Hall. She saw me and started, as if I’d tricked her by appearing there. Because she was Charlie, her training overcame any surprise or disinclination to see me; she turned to her professor and introduced us.
“This is my roommate, Helen,” she said.
You might have said that the professor looked at me “searchingly.” He had blue eyes, along with the Roman nose and dark, wavy hair, with just a little gray at the temples, that had suggested our nickname for him. I’m not sure at that point in my life that I’d ever met anyone French, and I expected perhaps a cigarette, an accent; it turned out that Pope had grown up in Montreal, and done his celebrated early work at the Sorbonne, before moving to the University of Toronto, and then finally to Harvard. He was wearing a slim, dark suit with a white shirt, but it was open at the collar, as if he were eager to escape the formality of his surroundings. He frowned slightly and his voice was ostentatiously gentle, as if he’d just learned that I was suffering from some kind of injury.
“Ah, Helen—the physicist,” he said.
Everything about him seemed mannered, which was, to be fair, something that people often said about Charlie, too. But where Charlie’s affect was a defense that you had to wear away at little by little, Pope seemed to be able to turn his on and off at will. He wasn’t tall or even especially handsome, but he had an obvious confidence in his own charisma that I disliked immediately.
“I hope so, eventually.”
“Charlie says you’re very talented. What’s your area of interest?”
“Quantum cosmology, especially inflation theory.” It was new for me, having an area of interest, and I couldn’t help being proud of it.
“So you’re a theorist.” Pope looked from me to Charlie, and back to me. “You know, it’s not actually all that different from what we do here, in our department. Charlotte has a brilliant critical mind, but my guess is that she’s going to be a playwright. What the playwright does is to take voices—often those voices and that specific language that has been with him—or her—since birth, and employ them to communicate some truth that he hasn’t determined in advance. Likewise you build a model that is a hypothetical solution to a problem, not yet observationally provable.”
I privately thought that it was a foolish analogy, and if Charlie had said it I would have laughed. An equation had nothing to do with people saying words on a stage, apart from the fact that both could be written down. The relationships between the forces in our universe had an objective reality, and that universe had a discoverable history; I wasn’t in the business of making things up.
“She’s a superstar!” Charlie said, with typical hyperbole. And then to me, “Don’t you have Glashow now?”
“It was canceled.”
“I do need to excuse myself, however,” Pope said. “I have the misfortune of having been chosen for a search committee, and so I’m off to spend two hours debating the merits of a candidate we’ve already decided won’t be hired.”
Charlie laughed, and he turned to her.
“Next week, Charlotte?”
He spoke in a different register, a continuation of whatever they’d been talking about before, and it was obvious—not only what Pope was doing, but that my friend was in some way enjoying it. He was brazen enough to touch her, just his fingertips on her elbow. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, but there was an elaborately fluted gold and sapphire ring on the pinky finger of his right hand. He nodded gravely to me, before returning to the dim sanctuary of his office, shutting the door behind him.
“What are you doing here?” Charlie said.
“Waiting for you.” I touched her arm, made my eyes wide. “Charlotte.”
Charlie grinned. “He’s intense—okay? But he’s basically a genius. He actually won a MacArthur genius grant, after his last book was published.”
“What was it about?”
“Pierre Choderlos de Laclos—who wrote Dangerous Liaisons. A biography of an eighteenth-century writer, which makes it even more incredible that people actually read it.”
“Well, but the movies were so popular.”
“But that was years ago. And he’s not writing about the movies—he doesn’t even like them. He writes about Laclos as a feminist, and also really a postmodernist, two hundred years before anyone even used that term.”
“Is that crazy thing his wedding ring?”
“His mother’s engagement ring—isn’t it gorgeous? He told me it’s vintage Boucheron.”
“But he’s not married?”
“No, he is. She’s a professional dancer, or she was. She used to be with Paul Taylor in New York, if you can believe that.”