Wishful Thinking (26 page)

“Dr. Sexton!” he cried, lighting out of the room like a shot.

“
Mama
,” Jack said, promptly taking advantage of Julien’s absence to take the best mama spot available, snuggling up under her non-pancake-eating arm.

In the radical transformation of Saturdays that had begun with her evenings with Owen, Jennifer had added Saturday brunches with Dr. Sexton to her list—a ritual the boys enjoyed just as much as she did. They never met at Dr. Sexton’s, however, as, after the demise of an antique vase, it had been quickly established that it was best for the foursome to convene at Jennifer’s, land of the valueless and unbreakable, as opposed to Dr. Sexton’s, land of the irreplaceable and exquisite. But Dr. Sexton often arrived carrying instruments of physics or plans for experiments to conduct, just as she’d done the first evening she’d visited. Dr. Sexton and Julien had taken a particular shine to each other, but Jack was an exuberant participant in the activities, too, particularly when propulsion was involved.

Jennifer assumed Dr. Sexton and Julien would immediately set to work on something, so she continued eating her pancake, Jack tucked solidly under her arm. A moment later, however, and much to her surprise, Dr. Sexton appeared, arms akimbo, in Julien and Jack’s doorway. Even stranger, Dr. Sexton was as disheveled as Jennifer had ever seen her, her hair damp with spiky bits stuck to her forehead, her cheeks shiny with rain. In a glossy black slicker and galoshes (one red, one black), she looked a bit loony, and the pronouncement that followed did little to dispel the impression.

“There has been,” she declared in a booming voice, her eyes bright with an uncharacteristically girlish look of excitement, “a delivery.”

“What is it?” Julien cried, tugging at Dr. Sexton’s coat. “
Where
is it?”

“Come to my apartment in twenty minutes,” she answered, smiling at him, her eyebrows lifted high, “and you will find out!”

With that, she disappeared.

“Do you think it’s a spaceship?” Jack asked, his eyes wide.

“No, Jack,” Julien said impatiently. “A spaceship would be way too big to fit in Dr. Sexton’s apartment.”

“Don’t be so sure, Julien,” Jennifer said, picking up the tray to carry it back into the kitchen, dreaming of coffee. “Knowing Dr. Sexton, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

T
HE BOYS COULD NOT
have been more pleased with the “delivery” if it had been a spaceship after all. For when they arrived and Dr. Sexton ushered them inside, hair blown dry and looking a bit more put together (though still wearing a look of manic joy), she stood back and revealed nothing less than a torpedo, smack in the center of her living room.

Army green, twenty feet in length and nearly two feet in diameter, with a yellow nose at one end and a rudder and propeller at the other, the massive object was displayed on a stand. Even more startling, on its metal body was painted, in vibrant colors and fine, nearly photographic detail, a voluptuous, smoky-eyed woman. Richly adorned and reclining in the manner of an odalisque, she had dark eyes and thick, shiny black hair, gold jewelry hanging from every finger and toe, and thin, arched eyebrows that presided over an air of commanding seduction. Together, the woman and the torpedo were a knockout.

“Well? What do you think of her?” Dr. Sexton asked.

“Wow,” Julien breathed. Jennifer could not help but smile to herself, knowing that Julien was still at an age when the “wow” was a reaction to the torpedo, rather than to the pinup.

“Wow indeed,” Jennifer said, moving toward the alluring object.

“Wait!” Dr. Sexton said. “Not yet! I need to show you the
coolest part!” Jennifer, who had never heard Dr. Sexton utter any variation of the word
cool
, stopped in her tracks.

“Jack,” Dr. Sexton said, “will you assist me?”

“
I
want to assist!” Julien cried.

“You may assist too,” Dr. Sexton said. “Jack, hold this transmitter for me, just like that.” She handed him what looked like a simple remote control. “Julien, go over to the torpedo with your mother and open the door, just under Hedy’s—I mean,
the woman’s
—leg.” Jennifer and Jack did as they were told, locating a panel placed provocatively under a thigh and opening the torpedo’s small compartment. Inside, they saw a mechanism that included perforated tape on a scroll with rods underneath it, each positioned over a panel of tiny switches.

“All right, Jack,” Dr. Sexton said. “Would you like to steer?” Jack nodded enthusiastically. “Julien,” she said, “you watch what happens inside the receiver when we launch, and afterward I’ll explain it to you.”

“Launch?” Jennifer cried.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Dr. Sexton said. “I haven’t gone completely bonkers.” Then, with a flourish and a cry of “For Hedy!” Dr. Sexton pushed a button on the remote control in Jack’s hands. Immediately, the propeller started spinning, the perforated tape in the receiver began scrolling, and the switches beneath it commenced switching, one at a time, in an apparently random pattern.

“All right—now, send a signal!” Dr. Sexton cried, as the receiver clicked and buzzed. “Tell the torpedo to turn left!” Jack, an experienced Xbox player, immediately moved the joystick on the remote control to the left, and the rudder of the torpedo swayed dutifully to the left too. “You’ve got it!” Dr. Sexton said. “Keep going!” She then joined Jennifer and Julien. Julien was watching the mechanism like a hawk, though clearly without a clue as to what he was looking at. Dr. Sexton
joined him, peering into the receiver. She pointed.

“Do you see how the perforated tape has a very specific pattern imprinted on it?” she asked him. He nodded. “An identical pattern is printed on a perforated tape inside the transmitter that Jack is holding. The pattern tells the receiver and the transmitter which radio frequency, or channel, to use to send the signal. If the transmitter is on channel A, the receiver is on channel A, but a second later the transmitter has hopped to channel B, and the receiver has too.”

“Why?” Julien asked.

“During World War Two, the German army would try to stop torpedoes from communicating with their home ships by detecting the frequency that the ship was using to communicate with the torpedo and jam it. The idea behind this torpedo was that by randomly switching between frequencies all the time, the Americans could keep the Germans from jamming the signal, because the Germans would never be able to break the code. Its inventors called it
spread spectrum
. Sadly, the US government failed to recognize the brilliance of the innovation in time to implement it during the war. But now cell phones and bar-code readers and a whole lot of other things use it too.”

“Did this torpedo ever sink a ship?” Julien asked.

“No,” Dr. Sexton said. “This torpedo was never in a battle. It was made only a few weeks ago. It is a gift to me from a friend who knows how much I admire the woman who invented the idea of frequency hopping. A way of imagining what her torpedo
would
have been like had it ever been built.”

“Let me guess,” Jennifer said, smiling. “Hedy?”

“The same,” Dr. Sexton replied. “None other than the nineteen-forties movie star Hedy Lamarr. A brilliant woman, who was barely acknowledged, and never rewarded, for inventing, with the composer George Antheil, one of the most widely used technologies of the century.” Julien stared at the
woman on the torpedo with new admiration, and Jennifer did too.

A few minutes later, the torpedo had been shut down and the boys were playing with Dr. Sexton’s gyroscope collection by a window on the other end of the living room, out of earshot. “So?” Jennifer said, sitting down at the island to a plate of vegetable quiche and a green salad. (Dr. Sexton always had something delicious and elegant in her refrigerator: a quiche, a torte, a goose liver pâté. The only things Jennifer always had in her refrigerator were ketchup and string cheese.) “Who gave you this magnificent—and extremely sensual, might I add—weapon?”

Dr. Sexton took a seat across from Jennifer. “Susan,” she said triumphantly, her eyes lighting up with pleasure.

“Susan?” Jennifer asked. “Really? I didn’t know you two were speaking to each other, much less exchanging torpedoes.”

“It’s been several months, actually,” Dr. Sexton said, pouring the tea. “I didn’t want to say anything, but it was around the new year—a propitious time for romance, as you know.” Jennifer smiled at the reference to Owen, a development that had very much pleased Dr. Sexton. “Susan telephoned. She wanted to talk. I was reluctant at first. But I have missed her. Very deeply.” Dr. Sexton cut into her quiche and smiled. “It was wonderful to know that she had missed me too. Enough to swallow her pride, which for Susan is no small feat.”

“And?” Jennifer said.

“We met for coffee, but it was impossible to say all that needed to be said. I wanted to take it slowly. I needed to know, if we were going to attempt to reconcile, how things would change. If she would publicly acknowledge our relationship. Susan asked for some time to consider.”

Jennifer gestured toward the torpedo. “And then she sent that?”

“Two weeks ago I was in Marrakesh on a ‘journey.’” (
Someday,
Jennifer thought,
I have got to get out of the five boroughs.
) “Susan and I had spent a very romantic weekend in Marrakesh many years ago and had discovered a particular tea shop we loved— the same shop where I purchased the leaves for this extraordinary brew.” Jennifer took a deep breath of the tea Dr. Sexton had made for them, inhaling the fragrant vapor. “I was drawn to it, of course,” Dr. Sexton went on. “And when I arrived, Susan was there—in Marrakesh—for a conference on quantum mechanics! Can you believe it?” Dr. Sexton asked, beaming. “It was fate. One thing led to another. It was very passionate. We were together again.”

“So are you?” Jennifer asked. “Together again?”

“Once I was back in New York, my doubts returned. During our night in Marrakesh, we avoided, so to speak, difficult subjects. However …” Dr. Sexton picked up an envelope and took out a handwritten note. She read: “‘Display it anywhere you like (on the quad, maybe?), and tell anyone who asks it was a gift from the woman who loves you, and always will: Dr. Susan Terry.’” Setting the note down, Dr. Sexton smiled. “It is an extravagant gesture,” she said, turning to the torpedo, “which is just the sort of gesture I like.”

Jennifer laughed.

“And you?” Dr. Sexton said, regarding her playfully. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that it’s your birthday, my dear. What do you and your handsome guitar player have in store? Not that I can testify to his handsomeness, as you refuse to let me meet him.”

“I don’t ‘refuse,’” Jennifer said. “I just like to keep things separate, that’s all. Everything in its place.”

“But you are not divided into parts. You’re a whole person. A mother, a career woman, and my friend.” Dr. Sexton said. “Surely Owen appreciates all those things about you. Surely you wish to share all those things with him.”

“Does Susan know about the app?” Jennifer asked challengingly.

Dr. Sexton paused and took a long draft of tea. “Touché,” she said quietly. “I suppose I’m in no position to judge on the subject of transparency.”

Jennifer had clearly struck a nerve, and she looked down, feeling bad. Telling Susan or Owen or anyone else about the app was not the same as introducing Owen to Dr. Sexton, or her friends, or otherwise integrating the rapidly diverging parts of her life. It was something Owen had lately been pushing her about too.

“It’s all right, dear,” Dr. Sexton said, affectionately patting Jennifer’s hand. “There is no need to rush. That is what the app is for, after all. To slow down and let yourself be fully present in the world at each moment, without constantly feeling as though you ought to be somewhere else.”

“Is it?” Jennifer said, thinking of the lists, videos, voice memos, and calendar reminders that had increased threefold since she’d begun to use the app to live life in triplicate. “Sometimes,” she added, “I just feel like I should be in more places than ever.”

T
HE BOYS PLAYED INDOOR
soccer at Chelsea Piers (Norman had gotten Jack a spot after all), a massive sports complex on Manhattan’s West Side. Weekends at Chelsea Piers were a madhouse, teeming with the comings and goings of thousands of New York families desperate for open space for their children in the wintertime. That afternoon they arrived late, as usual (Jennifer often wished she could pop the boys through the portal of Wishful Thinking when they needed to get somewhere on time), and as soon as they got there, Jennifer hastily outfitted them in their shin guards before sending them onto the Astroturf fields. She then took her place in the parent pen, as the grown-ups not so affectionately referred to it—an area at one end of the fields with benches where parents were allowed to sit. It was Jack’s first year, but Julien had been playing soccer there since he was four, and there were families they had been seeing every winter Saturday for years. This included Tara and Josh, whose son, Frank, was Julien’s age. As soon as Jennifer sat down, Tara ambled over to her, holding a coffee.

“At least he didn’t show up with Dingbat today,” she said, gesturing to Norman, who had just arrived and was giving the boys some last-minute soccer tips. He was showing off a trick he’d perfected when they were in college, where he flipped the ball neatly over his head with one foot—a trick Jennifer had always thought was kind of cool. Smiling at Tara, Jennifer rolled her eyes and shrugged. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon,” she said. Tara had provided Jennifer with some much-needed comic relief when it came to dealing with the Norman-and-Dina situation. She was a loyal friend, but she was also a bit of a curmudgeon and clearly enjoyed having something to make cracks about on otherwise-uneventful soccer Saturdays.

“Hello, ladies,” Norman said, approaching them jauntily. “Any good gossip this morning?”

Jennifer didn’t reply. She knew that Tara really liked Norman—she had worked in the entertainment business, too, as a casting director, and she was soon offering him a few choice bits. But while Norman usually ate up Tara’s industry chatter, today he seemed distracted as he listened. He kept looking over at Jennifer, trying to catch her eye.
Oh God
, she thought.
He wants to talk to me about something.
For months she’d been successfully managing to avoid him, relying on the glacial pace of their lawyers’ communications (she’d finally gotten one) to stall any further discussion on the subject of custody.