Charades (22 page)

Charade swivels on the cushions and raises a sceptical eyebrow. “Oh. You've read Chaucer then?”

“Scientists aren't quite as illiterate …” The brandy makes an amber and dignified wave pattern within the snifter; actually, technically, he thinks, a wave
packet
since the waves are constrained within the sides of the goblet.

“Yes?” Charade prompts.

The first half of his sentence still floats on the surface of the brandy, waiting. “We aren't as illiterate as some students like to think. Liberal Arts students.”

“You've actually read
The Canterbury Tales.
That's what you're telling me?”

“Well,” he hedges, “not cover to cover. But when I was at Princeton —”

“I thought not. There isn't a
Kynge's Tale
.”

“Oh,” he says, crestfallen. “Well, there should be.”

“There's a
Physician's Tale,
which is about as close as you'll get in the fourteenth century to a physicist. Maybe you can use that one.”

“I don't need to use someone else's plot.” He sniffs the brandy's sharp bouquet with an air of exquisitely offended dignity. “I'm telling you the true story about my encounter with your Aunt Kay. Or rather, the brief and torrid Toronto affair of Kynge and Katherine. So I'll stick with
The Kynge's Tale.”

“Oh my,” Charade says.

“Once upon a time,” he begins, “there was a tormented physicist named Kynge.”

“Tormented.
Really
!
”

Koenig sets his brandy snifter on the table beside the sofa, walks over to the stereo, turns it down, busies himself with the lighting of his pipe. “Maybe I won't tell the story, after all,” he says.

“Okay, okay,” Charade cajoles. “I'll shut up. But really …” She waves her hand around the room to indicate a certain lack of torment in the tasteful appointments of a Cambridge town house. “Plus international scientific prestige, a Nobel Prize brewing, so I hear around MIT (oh, don't look so unsuitably modest), women throwing themselves at you … It just strikes me that
tormented
is a little …”

“I'll begin somewhere else,” he says. “I'll begin at the beginning, or near it. Once upon a time …” Here he fiddles for pipe tool, tobacco, matches.

Charade sighs. “A born storyteller, you're not.”

“Once upon a time,” he says, clearing his throat portentously, “a boy named Kynge shone a flashlight on the wall of his bedroom and asked himself: where is the light before it leaves the bulb, and where does it go after it hits the wall? One of his obsessions was born that night. He set out on a search for the birthplace of light.”

“Tan-tar-a, tan-tar-a,” sings Charade, making a trumpet with her hands.

“This was in rural Wisconsin,” he says sternly. “The boy Kynge came from peasant stock, farming stock, third generation immigrants, the kind who kept gilt-framed portraits of his great-grandparents over the mantel. Stylised and tiny, in the background of his great-grandparents' portrait, was their neat little Rhine valley farmhouse. For his third birthday, the young Kynge was given a toy tractor, for his thirteenth his own set of farm tools. But to no avail. Against all logic and tradition, he fell in love with mathematics and the stars. The high school yearbook summed up his social life with a cartoon: at the graduation ball, he danced with a slide rule, a model of the hydrogen atom, and a map of the galaxy, all of them done up in strapless satin and billowing net skirts.”

“Are you asking me to believe,” Charade interjects, “that you led a celibate life in high school?”

“My dear child,” he says dryly, “back in the Dark Ages, when I was in high school,
everyone
led a celibate life. And as for the innocuous dating and necking that went on, yes, as a matter of fact, I was painfully shy in those days. A nerd, as they'd say today I had a puritan adolescence. I discovered women late in life.”

“Ah,” Charade says. “That explains it. When do we get to Rachel and the hundreds of women and the torrid Toronto affair?”

“Rachel,” he sighs. “It's very difficult for me to talk about Rachel.”

There is a long silence which even Charade does not dare
to break. Between his thoughts and her thoughts, the long honeyed notes of the trumpet of Wynton Marsalis slide like suntanned swimmers. Cambridge traffic, muted, thrums from three floors down and a block away on Massachusetts Avenue. A dog barks somewhere. From further away, sirens. It is a jazz night, syncopated, cool, possibly heading for disturbance.

“I could say this,” Koenig ventures at last. “It is impossible to live with someone who is deeply and dangerously unhappy. And it is even harder to leave her.”

Another silence. Through the window, Charade watches a neon blinking, one corner of the sky blushing at regular intervals. Something in Harvard Square or by the Common; or perhaps the liquor store on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue. Wynton Marsalis and the sirens knit themselves together, a gifted ensemble.

“And this holds true,” Koenig sighs, “no matter how much you love the unhappy person, and no matter how … how
impeccable,
I suppose you could say … are the reasons for her unhappiness.”

Charade has a sudden queasy sensation of weightlessness. What she sees is Bea standing by the window of the ramshackle house in Tamborine; she sees the shutter that falls across Bea's eyes when Verity is mentioned. Charade curls up into the corner of the sofa and buries her face in a cushion because sounds are gurgling up through her throat. She cannot tell if they are sobs or laughter. Nothing but reruns. There are only three channels in the world, she thinks, and they recycle the same old plots.

She looks over the top of her cushion at Koenig who is staring at the night beyond the window. What's the point? she wonders. I'll never pry him loose from that ghost. Why can't I be as smart as Bea, as clever as my mum, the Slut of Tamborine Mountain?
(I reckon I've had a good life, Charade.)
She considers tiptoeing out of the room. He will never notice that she has gone. She believes that there are women who can do that sort of thing: escape from their own plots, intact. She fears that she, alas, is not one of them.

“I'll try,” Koenig says, “to tell the beginning and the end of my marriage. I can't speak about the long happy/unhappy middle. And when I say the end … well, I mean it loosely and imprecisely. I mean, some point near something that was more or less decisively a kind of ending. I mean, somewhere near the point where I moved out.

“In the beginning,” he says. “Or rather, before the beginning, Kynge's room-mate at Princeton, who was a Liberal Arts type, had two tickets to a play. Events intervened. The room-mate's girlfriend, for whom ticket number two was intended, was glimpsed necking in the stacks of the library with another, with the room-mate's most detested rival. Wretched and bitter and decidedly buffeted by alcoholic weather, the room-mate coaxed Kynge (who would much have preferred another night in the Physics Lab) into keeping him company: for heavy pre-theatre drinking, for the play, for a post-theatre party with the cast, most of whom were the room-mate's friends. It had been ascertained that girlfriend and rival (also drama types) were to be on the town in Manhattan for the night. Well-wishers and supporters on the cast gave out the consoling view that the room-mate's rival was a jerk,
and that comfort would be liberally offered at the post-play party.

“And thus the reclusive and studious and unliterary-minded Kynge found himself sitting fifth row, centre aisle, at a drama student production of Christopher Fry's
The Lady's Not for Burning.

“And thereby hangs a tale.”

No curtain, the young Kynge notes uneasily. Nothing to separate stage from audience. He fears something avant-garde and incomprehensible, he thinks longingly of the lab. Beside him, his desperately unhappy room-mate Arkwright slumps sideways, a heavy pressure on Kynge's arm. Arkwright's breathing, heavy and slow and fetid, fogs several unoccupied seats. The theatre is only half full, not a good sign.

On stage, Kynge notes a large and bulky lectern, possibly part of the scenery, possibly not yet removed from the last mass undergraduate lecture. Dangling against the black backdrop is a frame, obviously plywood, obviously innocent of glass or substantial attachment, apparently meant to indicate a gothic window. Beside it is a door frame and a door, connecting space with space. Penner, who is having difficulty with the physics course, comes and stands behind the lectern and busies himself with quill and parchment. Sawatsky, whom Koenig recognises from one of his mathematics courses, stands behind the dangling window frame and sticks his head through it.

Apparently the play has begun, and Koenig fears the worst — and oh God, it is even worse than that. They are speaking poetry. Blank verse. There are metaphors as convoluted as octopi, he can't make head or tail of it. Arkwright begins snoring in a soft purr of whisky. Koenig lets his thoughts wander to Hubble's observation of the red-shifting of the galaxies, and drowses almost to the end of Act One when loud offstage noises wake him.

One of the characters, dashingly dressed in boots and cape but a dreadful actor, is ranting:
of witches she's the one
 … , after which several onstage exchanges are lost to the noises off, which sound like a locker-room brawl. Even drunken Arkwright stirs in his seat. There are shouts from the rabble, off, then the door which stands like a foolish obelisk, up stage, is pushed open and a girl appears.

When she edges in, and shuts the door behind her, there is a hush: from the noises off, from the stage, from the audience.

Partly, of course, it is a matter of spotlighting and other stage tricks; partly it is a matter of costume: a long black shift and a lustrous velvet cape, darkly green. For Koenig, however, sitting fairly close to the stage, it is the eyes caged within the pallor of the face. Is this acting? he wonders, feeling a spasm of anxiety, leaning forward on his seat to catch her voice.

There is terror in the eyes. When she leans her back against the door and wedges herself into the room, you can tell from her gasping, from her eyes, that she does not expect anything to serve. Willy-nilly, the door will be battered down, she will be dragged off, she will be burned at the stake as a witch.

Will someone say come in?
the girl gasps.

And it is all Koenig can do to stay in his seat. There is talk on stage but he does not follow it, though he hears the girl speak of
a sad rumpled idiot-boy who smiled at me,
and knows whom she means. He never does figure out the plot. He only knows from the girl's eyes when the danger is great and when it lessens.
He understands, at the final curtain call, that the play's meaning is that she is relatively, ambiguously, temporarily saved. He knows from the girl's eyes, however, that it is not so.

In the hubbub of people leaving, he reads his program.
Rachel Goldmann,
he says to himself.

He has no recollection of getting to the cast party, only of being there and of seeing the girl, still in the plain black smock she wore on stage. She is perched at the end of a makeshift bar. People come up to her, hug her, offer congratulations, buy her drinks. And she chats to them, she smiles, even laughs once in a while. And yet Koenig cannot shake the feeling that she is still the witch snatched from the stake, that she listens for noises off, that her eyes keep darting to the door, that she is waiting for someone, something, some bearer of harm, to arrive at
the party.

He would never have spoken. He would never have had the courage to approach her.

It is Arkwright, the drunken room-mate, who throws them together. In a manner of speaking. Arkwright passes out on the carpet, and Rachel Goldmann says she will drive him home. It is natural that Koenig be involved.

Rachel Goldmann drives. At the off-campus attic apartment, she and Koenig drag Arkwright up the stairs. To his certain knowledge, Koenig never says a word the whole trip. He is lost. He is a nervous wreck. He is under her spell.

“Hey,” she says at the top of the stairs. “Do you really want to spend the night with this drunk?”

“No,” he says.

They go back to her room for a drink (she is sharing a house with six others) and he does not leave.

Did he believe he could change the look in her eyes? Yes, foolishly and naively, he did. Was any element of historical guilt, of Lutheran Germanic Wisconsin guilt, involved? Probably. Yes, almost certainly. Does he regret that night? The question, for him, has no meaning. He does not feel there ever was a choice; he does not believe it could ever have been otherwise.

That night red-shifts away from him, further now than the Milky Way. But its thumb print is readable as headlines. And when the furthest splinters of the furthest galaxies go spinning far enough into outer cold, they will begin to return, to contract, to arc their elastic way back to the dense core where everything began, is beginning, keeps beginning and beginning again.

“Here endeth,” says Koenig, “the first lesson.”

2

The Tale of the End of a Marriage
and of a Torrid Toronto Affair

Here I am, Charade thinks. Night after night, his place again, nothing ever resolved.

“When,” Koenig asks, “does a marriage end?” He is, of course, fully dressed, while she hunches up beneath the sheet, her back against pillows, and watches him. Probably, she suspects, he has forgotten that he is not pacing between a blackboard and tiers of seats. And indeed, he pauses and leans for a moment on the high carved post at the foot of the bed as though it were a lectern. “It's one of those endlessly absorbing conundrums,” he says, “like the moral philosophers asking ‘when does a life begin?' Because a marriage has begun to end long before one partner moves out.”

Charade conjures up the mournful but haunting face of Rachel Koenig: the translucent pallor, the dark hair, the disconcertingly large eyes. She pictures a delicate scene: two women bowing to each other with wary respect. The older one hands over a torch. Actually, she says, it was hopeless from the start. It began to end, really, almost as soon as it began. It always does, she warns; it always does. The ending is curled up inside the first encounter.

And the younger woman, accepting the trust passed on, lowering her head in deference to a wise sadness (though nevertheless convinced that the race she is about to run will be altogether different) sets out on her leg of the relay. There is some bond between the two women that has nothing to do with the man.

“On the other hand,” Koenig says, “a marriage certainly does not end with the final decree of the divorce.”

In Charade's vision, the younger woman finishes her lap and lo, here she is back where she began. In the starting blocks her predecessor waits, hand reaching back toward her future. My turn for the torch again, she says. I'll always be around, she promises.

“I think,” Koenig muses, “that Heisenberg is relevant here: the wider philosophical implications of his uncertainty principle. Because it would be true to say that in a very real sense I was never married to Rachel Goldmann, that she was always inaccessible to me. And it would also be true to say that in another sense I am still married to her and always will be.”

Charade thinks of one of his physics lectures: projected onto the white wall at the front of the room is a transparency.
Atomic and sub-atomic particles as such,
Koenig is explaining,
are merely idealisations, as Bohr has put it. They are useful abstractions. It is meaningless to speak of their existence or their non-existence. They have tendencies to occur. This slide is of various visual models of the probability patterns of the electron's tendency to be in various regions of the atom.

She knows he said exactly this because she wrote it down and memorised it. She memorised it as though it were Greek or a nonsense rhyme. Its meaning tantalises and eludes her. But what is clear and dazzling and unforgettable are those visual models thrown onto the wall: patterns of light in the shapes of bones, butterflies, concentric circles, Rorschach blobs of illumination, the totemic configurations of a concept that the eye understands but the mind cannot grasp. The eye says: these remind me of the cave paintings of primitive peoples.

Koenig had switched off the projector; and the white wall had stared blandly and blankly at the students. “The pictures on the wall do not exist,” he said. He switched the projector back on: “And they also exist.”

“At any given moment,” he asked the class, “how would you characterise the existence of those shapes of light on the wall? Could you say, categorically, that they have a material existence? Could you say, categorically, that they do
not
have a material existence?”

In the bedroom of Koenig's apartment, Charade closes her eyes and summons up (with dazzling clarity) the shapes of light which both exist and don't exist; which represent, by their presence (or their absence), diagrams of an electron's tendency to be either here or not here.

“And I subscribe, generally speaking, to the Copenhagen view,” Koenig says, leaving the lectern of the bedpost and pacing back and forth from dresser to door. “I think Bohr and Heisenberg won that argument over against Einstein, I think it's past denying. The imprecision of all perception. The observer, by imposing a particular set of questions, also predetermines the answers he will find.

“So the best I can do is tell you a tale of the day that Kynge began to ask himself certain questions, knowing full well that they would lead to a certain kind of answer.”

Once upon a time, on a day like any other suburban day, Kynge packed his children into the car and kissed his wife goodbye and pulled out of the driveway of his house in Brookline, Massachusetts.

“Don't forget,” his wife said, “to stop at the post office.”

Kynge dropped his daughter (four years old) at nursery school, and his son (six years old) at the playground where grades one to three were swarming over swings and climbers. At the post office he handed in the card and waited for the registered letter. To and from Toronto, where his wife's mother lived (and where indeed his wife, between the ages of seven and eighteen, had passed the post-European and pre-Princeton years of her life) all postal communication was sent registered, and had to be signed for. His wife's mother trusted no system to work without the taking of extraordinary additional precautions; nor did his wife. The desk clerk returned with a parcel and looked at Kynge strangely. “It's the same parcel,” she said, “that your wife returned yesterday as undeliverable. Are you sure you want to take it again?”

Kynge frowned. The parcel was addressed to his wife's father, whom he had never met; who had been presumed dead since 1945.

“Yes,” Kynge said, with a brisk confidence he did not feel. “Sorry about the confusion.” And instead of driving on to his office, he drove home.

From the moment his car turned into the driveway, he sensed that certain tendencies had suddenly reached intolerable levels. He imposed the first of several significant questions. How long can this go on? he asked himself. He could see that everything was abruptly and unalterably different. He could see, for example, that the hedge of cedars which he had planted on the weekend (the hedge which had been, just a half hour previously, a hopeful row of ten-inch baby-green saplings), was now bushy and overgrown with age, higher than the windows of the house. It was unkempt. It was brown with winterburn and
quite unsightly.

Inside the house, his wife Rachel was nowhere to be seen — although her immaculate, her fastidious absence was clamorous in the spotless kitchen counters, the dust-free surface of the furniture, the manicured house plants, the tasteful antiques. The inside of the house was her cocoon. She left it rarely. She curled herself up inside it like seaslick inside a nautilus shell. For as far back as he could remember, it had been getting
more and more difficult to entice her beyond the cedar hedge.

On his third tour of the house, Kynge became slightly frantic and irrational, checking the small and never used bathroom in the basement, the furnace room, opening the closets. This was against all logic, checking the closets. His wife, having been three years old when the box cars took her family from one kind of history to another, had both a passionate and inchoate fear of confined spaces and a fear of leaving them.

He found her in a section of their bedroom closet. In her half of their wall-to-wall wardrobe. All the clothes and hangers and shelves had been removed, and the closet resembled nothing so much as a cubicle in a university library. There was a desk, a lamp, a chair. Head bent over the desk, absorbed in her task, Rachel was writing a letter.

“What are you doing?” Kynge asked.

She flinched, but otherwise remained still. In a low voice (you could not have said its intonation was fearful, nor could you have said it was without fear), in a voice which intimated that an interminable wait was now at last over, a voice which almost seemed to express relief, she said: “I am writing letters.”

“To whom?” he asked.

“To a lot of people,” she said. “To Aunt Grethe, and to Frau Sachs, and to Malka — she used to play hunt-the-beetle with me — and to —”

“Rachel,” he said. “Rachel, all those people …”

But what was the point of saying that all those people were dead?

“Yes?” she said. She raised her eyes and looked at him then, looked at him with the eyes of an animal in a trap, the eyes of someone waiting to be carried off, to be arrested, to be mugged, to be stabbed, to be raped, to be committed to an asylum, to be burned at the stake. She was waiting for the end that had always been coming towards her.

“Rachel,” he implored, as though she could be cajoled into seeing herself from where he stood. “This is insane.”

“Is it?” she asked.

“You have to forget,” he said. “You have to put it behind you and forget. They are gone, those people, and nothing will —”

“For me,” she said, “they are not gone.”

And he knew only too well, of course, that time curves, that clocks in motion slow down, that a human heartbeat orbiting space runs more slowly and therefore returns younger than its twin on earth, that particles accelerated to the speed of light increase their life spans by seven times, that time is nothing more than a very imprecise word.

Nevertheless he sat on the bed with his head in his hands and asked her: “Rachel, how long can this go on?”

When he looked up she was calmly writing again, sitting there at her desk in the closet, dressed in the plain black smock that she had worn in the long-ago play.

There was nothing he could do, so he left. He drove to his office. He threw himself into work, his classes, his discussions with students. He worked late, and although he could not remember exactly why it had become essential to work long and obsessively that night, although the morning had dwindled to a sort of bruised ache just below the level of consciousness (the way a forgotten dental appointment can keep one anxious and uneasy), he succeeded in putting off until after midnight the return to his domestic life. He knew, as soon as he pulled into the driveway, just how intolerable that life had become. He knew by the sound of crying, by the way his little children sobbed and whimpered, by the way they cowered from him and followed him with their wide accusing eyes.

About some things, looking back, Kynge is uncertain. Did he forget to pick up the children from school? Was he at fault? Is his memory scrupulously accurate? He is willing to concede that Rachel might not have been wearing the black shift on that day. It is, in fact, almost certain that she was not. He will also acknowledge that the day the letter-writing came out of the closet as it were, the day it first manifested itself in this extreme form, was a day when some other severe disturbance had occurred to trigger it: perhaps it was the time their little boy was hit by a car and rushed to hospital; or it may have been the time that the local synagogue was firebombed. It is even possible that there was only one day in all the years of their marriage when she actually hid in the closet and wrote. As time goes by, he is less and less certain about the desk and about whether there was more than one letter.

But other facts are beyond dispute: the sense of a chasm opening, that was a fact. And a fact needs logical causes — which he has tried, with varying ways and scripts and successes, to provide. It is certain that as he fell, as he went freefalling through this chasm of nothing, as he clutched at its sides, shifting gears in the Toyota and pulling back out of the driveway, a cry escaped him.
Out of the depths had he cried unto 
… And the cry was picked up.

On radio signals, on needy antennae, along nerve ends, in eye-to-eye contact, his cry kept being picked up. At the office one of his students was waiting, a flawless young woman, a woman unmarked by history, a woman whose understanding of the situation was instant and compassionate and total. And he did what any man
in extremis
would do. It is certain that this student, or another, or yet another, was later waiting in a restaurant in Harvard Square, and in a hotel room in New York, and at a conference in Miami. Sometimes, when he gave papers at international colloquia, she, they, one of the sympathetic young women, showed up in Zurich, in Paris, even Moscow. It is certain that she once leaned out of a taxi and beckoned, right in front of the courthouse in Toronto, and when he got in she said to the driver: Bristol Place Hotel, near the airport. She had no face and no name. She came and went and left him hungry.

And furthermore, it is beyond dispute that when he had left his house that morning, the morning of the dead letters in the closet, his children had worn the untroubled eyes of happy innocence. His son (six years old) had been dreaming of a Little League game, and his daughter (four years old) had been cuddling her teddy bear and singing a nursery rhyme to herself. But when he returned that midnight, they were frightened, they did not understand, they accused him, they turned against him. His son, suddenly tall as a beanstalk, announced that he was not going to college, that he wanted no part in the academic rat race, given what it had done to his parents' marriage. His son said he was going out west to build log cabins and live on the land. His daughter was tearful. “Daddy,” she sobbed, “how could you do this?” How could he? she asked her brother, who gave her a daisy, who gave out daisies and leaflets at La Guardia airport.

What is certain is that whenever he looked at Rachel, she was sitting in the closet in her black shift, writing letters to all the people she had lost.

“How long can this go on?” he asked himself, knowing both the answers.

Charade sighs and runs an index finger lightly up and down Koenig's chest. “Yes,” she says. “I see.”

The lace curtains in the bedroom, long ago chosen because Rachel would have approved, lift and fall as silently as mist; and the curved shells, the Cluny lace shells — embroidered in pure and heavy cotton — offer themselves in undulations, sink under their own weight, billow forward again. Charade keeps her eyes on the ruck of French knots that gleam like the eyes of molluscs. “After you moved out,” she says diffidently, “and Rachel, ah, moved back to Toronto … When you go there from time to time, to Toronto I mean, for weekends … actually, you've done it at least five times since I've known you …” But she decides not to pursue the question she is looking for, and instead says: “The Zundel trial. It's difficult to see how, if she'd become agoraphobic …”