Lost and Wanted(66)

I didn’t know who Paul Taylor was, a fact I wasn’t about to reveal. “So are you, like, having a liaison?”

Charlie gave me an exasperated look. “Helen, please.”

This conversation happened in the spring of our junior year, before Pope had done anything more than compliment Charlie’s intellect, and keep her in his office longer than their meetings were intended to last. There was a woman who warned Charlie about him, though. She was a senior named Trisha Young, whom Charlie knew from the Black Students Association meetings that she sometimes attended with Kwesi at the Student Center in the quad.

Trisha cornered Charlie in the dining hall at North House, where Kwesi lived, and told her that she should choose a different advisor, because two girls she knew (she wouldn’t name them) had dropped Pope’s seminar after rebuffing his advances. She described exactly how Charlie’s association with Pope would go. The professor would begin with suggestive comments, would gradually start to touch her in a friendly way, would then one day confess his uncontrollable attraction—but only after making himself indispensable to her academic career. You’re his type, Trisha had said.

    Charlie related the conversation with Trisha when she got home that night. She told me she’d assured Trisha she could handle Pope, and that she didn’t totally trust the older student, who she thought might have designs on Kwesi.

“You think she was lying about Pope?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“What did she say when you said you were going to apply for the tutorial with him anyway?”

“She said I’d go far.”

We were in the living area of our room in Lowell House, smaller and less comfortable than the one we’d had the previous year but also older in feeling, with its scuffed wooden floor, low ceiling, and mullioned windows, the glass thicker at the bottom than the top. Charlie was on the green futon underneath the buzzing halogen lamp, sitting as she usually did, with her feet tucked under her.

“Was she being sarcastic?”

She got a funny smile on her face. “I don’t think so,” she said.





8.


I’d promised Vincenzo that I would make my last changes to our electroweak paper while I was traveling, but instead I spent my time taking notes for the possible book about kilonovas. Being alone in the modern hotel room in P?llau, with its sleek wooden furniture and immaculate picture window, made me want to write. My window looked out on some ski slopes; I’d never learned, but I liked watching the old-fashioned double chair creeping up and down the mountain. The schedule for the conference was busy, a relentless series of mandatory lectures and panels, with social events at mealtimes. I rarely sleep much when I travel, and I got up early, even for Central European Time. Each of the three mornings I was there, I lay in bed until 5:30, then gave up and made coffee in the miniature espresso machine the hotel provided. I sat at the desk in front of the window, watching the winter sky lightening over the gingerbread roofs of the old village and the dome of the cathedral. The evergreens were blue under the snow. The sun came up, and the ski lifts jerked into action. The whole valley turned gold. It gave me a burst of confidence, as if for a moment you could see the precious stuff underground, which had been made inside colliding stars.



* * *



—

    I got back to Boston a day later than I’d planned, because my connection from Frankfurt had been canceled. There was no snow on the ground when I arrived at Logan, only a cold, driving rain, and it took forever to get a cab. When I walked in the door, my mother and father were lying on the floor. My mother was on her stomach in what I believe is the scorpion pose, wearing a shiny blue unitard with a hood. My father was lying on his back, on the kitchen floor, his body protruding from the under-sink cabinet.

“Is that Helen?” My father’s voice was muffled. “I’m rerouting your disposal pipe. I can’t believe it’s lasted this long.”

“I’m so sorry about the flight being canceled. I couldn’t believe it when I got to the airport.”

“That kind of thing’s happening more and more,” my father said.

My mother took a deep, whistling breath. “He has a problem with catastrophic thinking—everything and the kitchen sink.” I looked at my father, whose head was indeed hidden in that very spot. “This is especially good before or after a long flight, Helen. You should join me.”

Most physicists have strange parents. The parents of future physicists must avoid imparting certain basic facts about the world, such as the fact that a person gifted in abstract numerical thinking might make a fortune in any number of financial jobs; the fact that most people are happier with money than without; and in some cases, the fact that women are vastly underrepresented in the field. When people ask what my parents did to encourage me toward a distinguished scientific career, I say that they simply didn’t know any better. It’s a joke, but with a lot of truth in it.

“Where’s Jack?” I asked them.

“Downstairs, with your friends.”

Andrea and I had made all the arrangements for the handoff of the apartment to Terrence before I left, but the full reality of their arrival this weekend had escaped me during the last twenty-four hours of travel. It was a relief not being immediately responsible for Jack’s needs. I took my suitcase upstairs, dropped it in the bedroom, and washed my face. I’d developed a chest cold on the plane, and more than anything I wanted to lie down on the bed, take advantage of the fact that there were other adults who could be trusted to keep our small household running. A part of me wanted to ask my parents to stay even longer; my canceled flight had made them miss theirs, but I think they would have postponed it again, if I had asked. It wasn’t only pride that kept me from doing so. I’d resolved when Jack was born that I would manage on my own. I had the idea that child-rearing, done in this intentionally challenging way, might be more interesting, less likely to fall into conventional patterns. I can see flaws in that theory now, but I wasn’t ready to go back on it. And so I forced myself to go downstairs, where I found both my parents upright again, my father putting away his tools.