(xxxviii)


It was three o’clock when the telephone rang.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” she said. “It’s me,” she said.

“Ah,” I said.

“I got your letter,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Were you asleep?”

“It wasn’t terminal,” I said. “Wait a minute. I’ll have to get some cigarettes.”

“All right,” she said. “I thought you quit,” she said when I got back.

“That was last year. I changed my mind. I decided to give up giving it up.”

“Oh.” A pause. She inhaled. Strange how you could hear someone inhaling on a cigarette a thousand miles away. “I was going to call you anyway,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I wanted to ask you about Strings.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“Yeah, but I don’t get it. How does it work?”

The cigarette and I considered it. “It’s a development out of the Veneziano model,” I said. “They have this very nice guess about the form of the strong interaction scattering amplitudes, at least to first order, and it gives you some very nice properties for the mass spectrum of the hadrons, an exponential increase in the number of states as the energy goes up, for instance, and it all turns out to be the same spectrum you get out of a relativistic rubber band.”

She laughed. “Did you make that up?” she asked. “About the rubber band?”

“No, I think Feynman did. Or Gell-Mann, maybe. Murray has a way with words. But the idea’s Nambu’s. Him and some other people.”

She laughed again. “But I don’t get it,” she said. “How is it supposed to work?”

“I don’t know. I guess you imagine the quarks are tied together on the ends of the strings, or something. It seems an odd sort of thing to ascribe physical reality to, though.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I kind of like it, though. It suggests that quarks only see each other in one dimension. I like that.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose. But I don’t get it about the twenty-six dimensional space.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.” I looked at the cigarette. “It doesn’t sound topological, when you do that.”

“Why doesn’t it sound topological?”

“Because you can embed any graph in three dimensions.”

“Oh,” she said. A pause. “Maybe you can’t embed it the right way, though.”

I liked that. “Yeah,” I said.

I thought about it for a minute.

“Anyway,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “So what’s new?”

She sighed.

I laughed. “Never mind,” I said. A pause. “How’s Bernie?” I suggested.

“Weird,” she said. “She’s really weird.”

I laughed. “Good for her. What is it this time?”

“She has a boyfriend.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but it’s weird, she won’t tell anybody about it. She sneaks out to see him, she’s really secretive about it.”

I laughed. “I don’t blame her. I’d probably do the same.”

“Yeah,” she said. She laughed. “You probably would.”

“How’s Susie?”

“She has a boyfriend.”

“Ah.”

“He’s all right, this time. I think she’s going to marry him.”

“Did she ... ah ... .” A pause. The felicitous phrasing.

She laughed. “Yes. A long story. It was funny.”

“Ah.”

“So how’s it going with you? What’s ’Zago doing?”

“He joined the Foreign Legion.”

“What?”

“As close as he could come. He got a job teaching, in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.”

“Oh. How’s Stefano?”

“Well enough, I expect.”

I could hear her making the face. “Is he still married?”

“Yes.”

A theatrical sigh. “I just don’t understand.”

I laughed.

“So what are you doing?”

“I have the job.”

“Still?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you get tired of that?

“Yes.”

“I think you should travel.”

“On what? Anyway, it’s a Spiritual Exercise.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“I’m trying to Mellow Out,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She laughed. “Wait,” she said. “I don’t understand. I thought you had determined the guide of life was, Don’t Lay Your Trip On Someone Else.”

“I’ve analyzed the matter further,” I said. “It’s a corollary, you see. If you’re Mellow you won’t Lay Your Trip On Someone Else.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Eventually I’m supposed to move up the canyon with my old lady named Sunshine,” I said. “But I’m not that Mellow yet.”

“Where do you get the old lady?” she asked.

“That’s a problem,” I admitted. “But I’m working on it.”

She laughed. “So are you Hustling?”

“Not really. I gave up on the bars. It always made me feel like an anthropologist, you know, studying mating rituals.”

“Yeah,” she said. She laughed again. “So what are you doing? Pursuing female janitors?”

“No. All I have going at the moment is this weird romance with a female graduate student.”

She laughed. “I thought you’d learned.”

“Yeah, but I figured I ought to develop an infatuation, you know, however arbitrary, so I picked one out, you know, more or less at random. But I had to make do with the materials at hand. You know. It’s another Exercise.”

“Does she have big boobs?”

“Ah.” A silent grin. “Yes.”

A sigh. “So have you taken her out?”

I laughed. “No. She won’t even talk to me. I have the feeling she thinks janitors are subhuman, or something.”

“So what do you do?”

“Oh.” I lit another cigarette. “I smile at her. Every once in a while she smiles back.”

“Oh.”

“That’s my sex life now.”

“It’s better than mine, then.”

We both laughed.

“I mean, she’s more of a misanthrope than I am. And she’s arrogant, in a spaced-out sort of way. It’s weird. I have the feeling about her, that she gets up in the morning and looks at herself in the mirror and says to herself, ‘I have the Best Boobs in the Department.’”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t like her if she didn’t have a funny nose.”

“Oh,” she said. She considered it. “I think you should learn Body Language,” she said.

“Yeah, but I think it all comes down to a bulge in the right part of the pants,” I said.

“Oh.”

“No, the wallet,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“I can’t believe Stefano is still married,” she said.

I laughed. “Well.”

“Is Marriage Mellow?” she wondered.

“I should think it would involve Laying Your Trip On Someone Else,” I said. “But I’m not sure.”

“Perhaps,” she said. She sighed. “I just don’t understand.”

I laughed.

“So why didn’t you quit smoking?” she asked.

I inhaled, and considered it. “I don’t know,” I said. “It was strange. I went on all last year without it, and then I had to look for a job. It was fall, you know, and chilly, and one day I was walking through the campus on my way to make an application, and I’d bought this pack of Camels, I don’t know why, for company, I guess, and I had it in my pocket, I was wearing my Navy peacoat, you know. And I had my hands in my pockets, and I could feel the pack in there, and then I had this epiphany, it was like I realized how alone I was. It was like it was the dead of winter all of a sudden, and I was walking through the campus by myself and I realized that pack of Camels was the only friend I had.”

“So you lit one,” she suggested.

“No, I didn’t get around to that for another month. They were really stale by then.”

She laughed. “I’ll bet.”

“But it was like you said once, that pack of Camels was an Ally.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“It sucked,” I said, “looking for a job. I hate having to deal with those people.”

“Oh,” she said, “I have it figured out. They’re all Aliens.”

“Aliens?”

“Yeah, none of them are real people. Real people are an oppressed minority, there’re hardly any of us left, you know. The rest of them are Aliens. You can tell.”

“Oh,” I said.

“No, really, you can, can’t you? When you look at them you can tell.”

I thought about it. “Yeah,” I said.

As usual, she was right.