The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(31)



But she couldn’t bring herself to call. Instead she held the phone out in front of her and snapped a photo. She sent the image to Bennet with the words: This is my sad face.





–?11?–


The Appointment


Philip sat down at his desk and examined the card Nellie Stone had given him. The name P. Booth Lyons looked up at him in a neat serif—and now something that had been lunacy to him last week seemed perfectly sensible. His father would want him to resolve this, to find out who this Phone Booth was and what he wanted. “Aren’t you curious?” he could hear his father asking. “Don’t the riddles of the world interest you at all?”

But Philip wasn’t kidding himself. He knew exactly what he was doing when he picked up the phone, dialed, and waited for Ms. Stone’s schoolmistressy voice to answer. Yes, he was calling to demand what it was about his father’s work that was worth his being stalked through the Athenaeum parking lot the other night. But he was also running away from a student who was making him perspire at the mere idea of seeing her shadow on the milky glass of his door.

He had known Anitka Durov for years without ever having been affected by her charms, but now the creeping symptoms of something—something not allowed—had quite suddenly revealed themselves in his body, like a covert disease. What had been shaping up to be a mere “late erotic outburst” had transformed over the past few days into a kind of madness. He hadn’t felt this way in ages (not since Jane) and had forgotten over his many years of arcane concerns and hunched inquiry just how involuntary this sort of attraction was, how completely out of one’s control or reason. He could almost hear his father chiding: “Oh, but you can’t, Philip. You may not be the towering physicist you had hoped—heir apparent to Newton and Einstein—but you’d never betray the ones dearest to you. Do people even have affairs anymore? Isn’t that some clichéd activity from decades past?”

But any kind of sermonizing was useless, because that’s not where passion lived—it wasn’t anyplace in the brain where one could go in and futz with the wires. The entire stupid, blushing, infatuated area was, by its very nature, blocked off and totally indifferent to your long list of arguments against its existence: You’re married! Happily! Happily? She’s not even that beautiful! Oh, but she is. Jane would find out! What the hell are you thinking! And so went the lone voice of principle in his head, bellowing at a locked gate.

He thought of his parents’ apparently successful marriage. Had his father ever been afflicted by this nonsense? Or his mother, for that matter? At the thought of Lily, he knew he was overdue for a visit. That’s what he should be doing this afternoon, making a leisurely drive to Santa Monica with Jane and the kids, taking in the ocean air with Mom. But the idea of having to keep up with her batty cognitive processes depressed him. Or, more accurately, the fact that his father had practically discarded his mother, sent her away to an assisted living facility—and Philip had done nothing to stop it—depressed him. But then, once the mind was shattered, whether it be from senescence, illness, or drug abuse, it was as if the person were already dead. That’s how it was with his family.

The phone picked up after a single ring, and Ms. Stone’s unceremonious voice greeted him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Severy. So happy to hear from you.”

Philip cleared his throat. Caller ID was forever taking him by surprise. “Hello, Nellie. Can I call you Nellie?”

“Of course.” He could hear her smile traveling down the line. “You can call me Lennie if you’ll agree to that lunch.”

“All right, but it’ll have to be today.”

A pause. “Could you hold for a moment?”

The line went silent for what seemed like several minutes. Philip was considering hanging up when her voice returned. “Can you come out to Malibu? I’ll send a car.”

Twenty minutes later Philip found a town car idling on California Boulevard. It might have been the same car that had followed him through the parking lot that night, but when he questioned the driver about it, the man shrugged and said he only worked days.

Once inside the humming cocoon of the back seat, Philip’s tension fell away, and for the next hour, through traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway and all the way up the breezy Pacific coast, he was able to put the haunting image of Anitka aside and focus on some notebook mathematics. One of the advantages of his chosen profession was that he could work anywhere with nothing but pencil and paper. Whenever a stranger asked Philip to describe what he was scribbling, if he was feeling generous, he might use a metaphor he had borrowed from a colleague at Princeton: his brand of mathematics was like stepping into a mansion where all the lights had been turned off, the curtains drawn, and the light switches strategically hidden. The mansion was infinitely large, with an endless number of rooms and doors, and with various physicists working at opposite ends of the estate. The hope was that someday they would all meet up in the murky middle.

But for now, Philip was on his own. His task was to map his particular wing, one room at a time, without breaking or knocking anything over. It was only when he had mapped out one area of the house that he could properly move to the next. When entering a darkened room, he would stumble around for a while, arms chopping the air, bumping into this or that. Each identifiable object gave him clues to the surrounding objects. Where there is a dressing table, there must be a chair. Where there is a brass poker, there is a fireplace. As was the nature of this madly designed manor, the light switch was never near the door but always in the last place he looked. Not until he turned it on could he fully appreciate the strange elegance of his surroundings.

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