The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(27)
A late erotic outburst. That’s what he needed.
Philip’s gaze settled for a moment on Dick Feynman’s jaunty portrait across the room—a man who was remembered as much for his naughty, winking personality as for his physics. “Even I,” he seemed to be saying from his eight-by-ten-inch prison, “had a lifelong weakness for topless bars and Vegas showgirls. You think I moved to California for the academic prestige? Nah. It was the girls, Philip, the girls!”
“Do you want to share a Three Mile Island Iced Tea?” Anitka asked innocently.
“I think I’m set.”
“How about a Bloody Marie Curie?”
He stood abruptly. “I have to go.”
“But we haven’t gotten to my dissertation.”
“Yeah, well—”
“How will you get home?”
“I have a rocket ship outside.”
Anitka burst out laughing, nearly falling off her chair. “Oh God, how did we get so smashed?” She steadied herself by grabbing his arm.
He looked at her hand. “I have a daughter your age, you know.”
She slapped the top of the bar. “That’s so funny, because I have a second cousin who’s your age.”
And with that, he grabbed his jacket and lurched out of the Hayman.
*
On the considerable walk home, Philip would have heaps of time to think over all the stupid things he had said that evening. I have a daughter your age? You can’t say things like that to a woman you were going to have to see later in sober daylight. And why was he practically fleeing?
He wondered what Jane would think of his current three-martini state. (Or had it been four?) Just as he was calculating how much drunkenness he could walk off before he reached home, he noticed a car trailing him through the Athenaeum parking lot. This feeling of being followed so disturbed him that he flattened himself against a hedge to wait for the car to pass. When the dark sedan pulled alongside him and stopped, an irrational shudder of fear moved through him. The passenger-side window slid down.
“May I offer you a ride, Professor Severy?” a man asked from the driver’s seat.
The interior of the car was half in shadow, and Philip couldn’t make out the driver’s face. “Do I know you?”
“Ms. Stone thought you’d like to be seen home.”
“Ms. Stone?” The man wore a suit, maybe a chauffeur’s getup. “I don’t under—”
The driver started to explain, but as he spoke, his accent seemed to thicken, and Philip was having a hard time making any sense of it. He was also feeling alarmingly pinned between car and shrub.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand. “I really don’t know what you’re saying. You’ll excuse me—”
He stepped through a serendipitous gap in the hedges, leapt onto the sidewalk, and headed swiftly in the general direction of his house. But the encounter—the whole night, really—unsettled Philip deeply, and in the forty-five minutes it took to walk home, he glanced behind him nearly a dozen times.
–?10?–
The Hotel
After the drama of Drew’s encounter with the four o’clock plant had run its course, Hazel returned to her dubious scavenger hunt. She explained to the family that she wasn’t quite ready to return to Seattle and the hassles of running her store, which was partly true. She tried to imagine walking into her shop the next morning, struggling to banter with customers while overdue notices collected daily on her counter. She imagined turning the store over to her employee, Chet, for the afternoon, asking him to tidy the displays or spruce up the store signage, knowing full well he’d just use her absence as an excuse to catch up on his reading. (And why not? Wasn’t that the whole point of working in a bookstore?) She knew that Chet’s reading wasn’t just reading, but research for an unnameable book he’d been working on for ages, one she pretended not to notice he was writing.
She’d then take a crisp walk to Bennet’s design studio. But she could only envision unhappy scenarios: Bennet so absorbed in the lines of a swivel chair that he barely registered her arrival. Or, worse, her boyfriend testing out a rocking-chair love seat with that cute assistant designer—the one with the bangs and sparkly tights—each pretending to evaluate the chair’s merits but secretly relishing their forced proximity to each other. And Hazel standing there, stupidly gripping a bag of Bennet’s favorite pastries.
She didn’t know why her mind insisted on imagining the worst, but the truth wasn’t so much that she was afraid to go home; it was that she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that she now had a purpose in Los Angeles. She finally had a function among the Severys, and an obligation to the man who had rescued her and her brother so many years ago.
Hazel spent much of the next two days holed up in Isaac’s study, poring over his letter, certain that the text was key to revealing the place where he’d hidden his work, perhaps somewhere in the house. Just in case, she called the Caltech math department to ask if there was a room 137 in their building. There wasn’t. Maybe 137 wasn’t an actual room but a code pointing to the text of the letter. But any permutations she tried—anagrams, wordplay, both vertical and diagonal acrostics—evaporated into nonsense. Not for the first time, she searched the internet for a John Raspanti but came up with the same results. There were several people with that name, none of them in the Los Angeles area, none of them with academic jobs or even a tenuous connection to her grandfather, and certainly none wearing herringbone.