Sarah's Window (10 page)

When two particles interact with each other, they exchange energy and/or momentum.

K
. C.
COLE, FIRST YOU BUILD A CLOUD AND OTHER REFLECTIONS ON PHYSICS AS A WAY OF LIFE

It had been three weeks since she had closed the door on John Wilde, but he had struck a presence in her heart that she could not erase. There had been only little Will to bring them together, and Will had been put back in the hospital for an indefinite period. She knew there would be no continuation of what had begun, that the stirrings in their hearts would be left to slowly wither and die with time. And yet the days passed by with a kind of renewed hope for some vague, undefinable happiness, and what had manifested itself on that wintry night traveled on through the core of her being like a deep tremor.

During this time, during the nights, she stayed awake to paint in oils, and she watched new things appear on her easel—landscapes of lonely houses perched among fierce hills and peopled with elongated shadowlike forms. Minimal, barely more than silhouette, but they were there, easily distinguished as man and woman and child. It had been many years since she had painted even the faintest abstraction of the human form.

When John was in Lawrence he generally ate a late lunch, if he ate at all. He avoided the funky old cafes on Massachusetts he had frequented as an undergraduate; even more fastidiously, he avoided the affluent West Lawrence neighborhood, steered clear of the shops and restaurants enjoyed by his parents and their friends. There was a new bakery and deli on Louisiana Street that he liked, a clean, sunny place called Wheatfields that reminded him of his favorite bakery in Berkeley. He usually tried to time it so that he missed the lunch crowd; it was generally quiet then and he could find a booth to himself and spread out his work and read while he downed a sandwich and a salad. He liked the ambience, the lack of pretense and the way the sunlight angled through the slats of the
Venetian
blinds.

He heard the door open and casually glanced up from his journal. When he saw Sarah walk up
to
the counter and pause to read the chalkboard menu on the wall, there was such a sudden change in his countenance that any casual observer would have noticed the effect she had on him.

He waited, following her with his eyes until she had paid and then paused to pick up a napkin from the service corner. When it seemed she was moving toward a table near the door and might not see him, he laid aside his journal and rose.

She saw the movement, turned her head. Her eyes held a look of disbelief, utter amazement; only slowly did she smile and walk toward him.

She was dressed as he had seen her before,
in
worn denim jeans and a loose, heavy-knit sweater, a backpack slung over her shoulder, the uniform of those who wish to blend in.

"Here," he said, "please, come join
me,"
and he cleared room on the table.

"I won't disturb you? Were you working?"

"No," he answered and quickly rolled up his journal and stuffed it down behind the worn leather briefcase near his elbow. "Please, sit down."

"Thanks," she said, and set down her tray.

He hid his hands under the table, tried to hide his nervousness.

"I never expected...," he began, then her backpack knocked over his iced tea and he grabbed for it.

"I'm so sorry," she said, quickly mopping it up with her napkin.

"It's all right."

Finally she was settled, the sandwich and Coke removed from her tray, and both of them took a deep breath and looked at each other and smiled.

"I like this place," Sarah said.

"So do I. One of my favorites."

"I used to work over at the Paradise Cafe. When I was in school here."

"You went to school here?"

She nodded. "Didn't graduate, though."

Carefully, she picked up her sandwich. There was a conscious reserve about her, and he wondered if she was as nervous as he.

He had forgotten about his own sandwich, had lost his appetite.

She cleared her throat. "How did your conference go?"

He smiled, relieved to have the conversation turn to something he could handle. "Very well. The paper'll be published next month."

She put down her sandwich and turned an inquisitive gaze on him. "So, tell me, what does a physicist do in a typical working day?" Then, with narrowed, smiling eyes, "In five words or less."

He leaned forward on his elbows. "I'll give it to you in one."

"Only one?"

"Math."

"I should have known."

"Why?"

"From what Amy said about you."

"Oh, yes. Amy. She tells me you helped her a lot more than I did."

"Only because I'm on her level."

"I should think you were a good deal above it."

"Perhaps because I enjoy it."

"Math?"

"Because it's logical. There are answers." She lowered her head and bit into her sandwich, but her eyes were still on him, watching him.

"My math isn't logical."

"It isn't?"

"No, not at all. Not in pure math. Like when you're dealing with integers and primes. Then it's really more intuition than logic. I come up with these theorems that work and I know they work, but I can't prove how. It's all really very mysterious. Which, I suppose, is why I love it."

Sarah had fallen into his eyes, was lost in their gentle blue gaze, and suddenly her appetite was gone and the roast beef sandwich she had eyed so hungrily seemed dry and tasteless in her mouth.

She put down the sandwich and reached for her Coke. "I thought you needed laboratories. Don't you? Things like... I don't know, electron accelerators?"

"I fly back to Berkeley every so often."

"And the rest..." She fingered her straw. "The rest is in the math."

"Yes. In the equations."

"What can you see?"

"A lot. Its own kind of imagery. Certain things, certain physical realities. Things that are easier to describe with an equation than with words."

She nodded. "Yes. I think I see what you mean."

She glanced toward the window. The afternoon light streamed through the blinds, falling in narrow, bright shafts across the room. She pressed the backs of her hands to her flushed cheeks.

"Goodness, it's warm in here."

"Yes, it is bright, isn't it."

She unzipped the pocket of her backpack and removed a wide green clip and, with the same gesture he had observed in his car that night, wrestled her sorrel hair into a loose knot and secured it on top of her head.

Suddenly, he could think of nothing else to say, nothing that made sense. He rose and offered to get them some ice water, and she thanked him.

She watched him while his back was turned—the lean, muscular body, the brittle energy that seemed locked in every movement. In his absence she scanned his belongings, the scuffed briefcase with his initials engraved on the bronze latch, the old leather jacket thrown over the heap, the scientific journal, as if she might find the answer to why he so intrigued her, why she could not get him out of her thoughts.

He set down her water and she thanked him.

"Now," he said as he settled back opposite her, "tell me about Doughty."

It took her a moment to follow him.

"Doughty?"

"Your book."

"Oh, yes...," and he noticed a faint blush rise to her cheeks. "I never thanked you."

"No need to."

"I kept meaning to. And the envelope."

"I sealed it."

"Thank you."

"I assumed they were personal."

"Yes." Then, with a slow shake of her head, "I can't believe I did that."

"You were still half-asleep when you left."

"I guess I was." She took a sip of her water, eyed him over the rim of the glass. "Did you read them?"

"Yes," he replied without hesitation, freezing her with a look of such directness that her heart fluttered in her chest. "You seemed like a different person. In the letters."

"I was."

The blue eyes warmed inquisitively.

"I was different with him. I became someone else."

"And did you like who you became?"

She narrowed her gaze on him and smiled. "Yes. Very much."

"He was English?"

"Oh, yes," she replied, lifting one of her fine, arched brows. "Very."

"You didn't leave with him."

"Oh, but I did. For two years."

"Married?"

"No." She took a deep breath. "We had serious disagreements."

He watched her closely, could read the shadows of some not-yet-forgotten pain, saw it between her eyes, the way she furrowed her brow. He was aware of a sensitivity toward her that he had never felt toward any other woman, a kind of tender curiosity.

"Are you still..."

She shook her head. "No," she replied. "The last time I heard from him, he was in Argentina. That was almost," she paused to calculate, "three years ago."

There was a clatter when a busboy rolled his trolley up to the booth behind them. When he had cleaned off the table and squeaked on by, Sarah continued.

"I think in many ways we were well suited to each other. But we wanted different things. In the end."

All this while he watched her fingers caress the glass, and now the fingers grew still.

"He lives only for himself. But that wasn't apparent at the beginning."

She raised the cold glass and pressed it to her cheek and then to her neck.

John said, "God, what a fool he was."

Again, the color rose to her cheeks, and she kept her eyes lowered.

"I think maybe now he regrets it. Maybe."

She shrugged and leaned back, finally lifting her eyes to meet his, and said, "He will become what he is to become, and fatherhood will not be part of that experience."

"I see," John said, a shade embarrassed, and looked away, at the young man with the trolley.

After a moment he added, "And you're still here."

"Yes."

"No desire to leave."

"Sometimes."

"But you don't."

"I will."

"But not now."

"I have ties here. Ties that bind."

"Are you waiting for that to change?"

She looked up at him, a little off guard.

"Good question."

He searched her eyes for the longest time, and once again it seemed as if a wordless communication flowed between them.

"Why we do what we do," she said.

"Mystery."

"Yes. Mystery."

John had always been drawn to the invisible: more specifically, the invisible connections between things. As a child he had puzzled over the phenomena ordinary men take for granted in modern life: the connection between a flick of a switch and the sudden appearance of light, or sound, or image. He tore things apart—old lawn mower engines, radios, watches— looking for the connections. But his interest went beyond the engineer's obsession with mechanical cause and effect, with deconstructing and reconstructing physical reality: he searched for things that would leave him awestruck, things residing in mystery and obscurity. Invisible connections.

It was this fascination and a high tolerance for ambiguity that led him to the doorstep of the world of particle physics: here there were no absolutes, no unequivocable rights and wrongs. Truth took a meandering path, and what appeared absolute one day could be refuted or proven to have limitations the next. In the world of physics, rules broke down beyond certain parameters; in extreme states—at extreme velocities or extreme heat or cold, in extremely massive or minute dimensions—matter behaved strangely, bizarrely.