(cxvii)


It was nearly eight, and I was thinking about the Chaplin feature on campus. That wasn’t until nine. So I was reading. “A message from space!” it began. I thought about that. But then the telephone rang.

“Hello,” I said. Cautiously.

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

“Ah,” I said. Relieved. “So it is.” I looked around for a chair; dumped some papers on the floor; sat down. “And what would you report?”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m all right. I’m in Pasadena.”

I laughed. “You may find the reconciliation of these opposites a formidable task, even for the Determined Pollyanna,” I said.

She laughed. “No, it’s all right. I found an apartment. It’s nice. I hung up my plants. It’s only four blocks to the campus.”

“Four light years might be better,” I suggested.

“Oh,” she said, “even you aren’t that far away.”

“I’ll work on it,” I promised.

She laughed. “So what are you doing? “

“Oh,” I said, “I put on fifty pounds of mighty muscles, and went to work in the circus.”

She laughed. “No really, what are you doing now?”

“Ah,” I said. “I had intended to go out later. In the meantime I thought that I might read.”

“What are you reading?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked. “It’s either Tom Swift or Sir Philip Sidney.”

“Tom Swift?” She laughed. “Do you still read that stuff?”

“Rarely,” I admitted. “But then, I rarely read Goethe.”

She laughed.

“I’m perfectly serious,” I insisted. “If Faust is the type of Western Man, well then, the type of the American is Tom Swift.”

She laughed. “So what is the type of Western Woman?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I would hope an appropriately weighted mean between Brigitte Bardot and Madame Curie. Though no local exemplars come to mind.”

She laughed. “I thought maybe you were writing a song,” she said.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“So how is everybody? How’s Stefano?”

“Ah,” I said. Attempting the theatrical sigh. “Torpedoed by the Blues.”

“What? What happened? Did he leave her?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“She left him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Nor do I.” I sighed again. “It has of course yet to be determined whether this is merely temporary.”

“I just don’t understand,” she said.

I laughed. “Nor do I.”

“I hope she doesn’t go back. Will she?”

“Ah well,” I said. “I don’t know.” I lit a cigarette. “But I would appreciate some resolution of the affair, since at the moment my time is halved between them. She cries on the left shoulder, he on the right. It’s embarrassing.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “She hated your guts.”

“Well that was then,” I said, “and this is now.”

“But why did she leave him?”

“Ah,” I said. “This is also embarrassing. The proximate cause appears to have been my friend Doctor Dog.”

“Doctor Dog?”

“Yes. My roommate. Very tall, very handsome. Completely mad, of course: the classic Irish literary drunk. The saxophone player in our most recent band.”

“The saxophone player?” She laughed. “The Mad Dog?”

“Precisely. The worst of it is, that he was fulfilling the function of my best friend, you know, Stefano being so thoroughly married. The catastrophe reeks of incest.”

“Wow,” she said, “this is like Soap Opera.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have made this unfortunate discovery, you see, that Real Life is in fact indistinguishable from Soap Opera. — I say unfortunate because I would of course prefer that it were Space Opera. Thus my sudden rediscovery of Tom Swift. It’s escape, you know.”

She laughed. “So is she going to run off with this Mad Dog?”

“Unlikely. The Dog is nothing if not a gentleman. We discussed the matter over a few dozen gin and tonics, and agreed that he should absent himself from the premises for a while. So he’s disappeared into the metropolis to perform some experiments.”

“Some experiments?”

“Yes. The Dog is nothing if not an empiricist. He said something about determining the effects of alcohol upon primates.”

She laughed. “This life you lead.”

“Yes,” I said. “It may well be my own.” I laughed. “But distract me,” I said. “Tell me tales of “ — I laughed harder — “fair Pasadena.”

“Oh,” she said. “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet. I’m Weighing my Options.”

“Ah,” I said.

“There’s some work I could do that’s very interesting. But I’d have to work with shellfish toxin.”

Alarm. “I advise against it,” I said.

“Oh, it’s safer than it sounds,” she said. “But then there’s this other project, and I might go to South America, you know, up the Amazon.”

“Really?” I thought about it. “I like it. You can go up the Amazon and get lost. Then I’ll come after you.”

An audible grimace.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ll bring a camera. I’ve always wanted to shoot a Lost City epic. This would be perfect. Though I’m not sure how I’ll manage the escape by dirigible.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’ll need a romantic lead in a flight jacket, a wicked Grand Vizier, and a tribe of aborigines. Can you look like Fay Wray?”

“Is it necessary?” she asked.

“It’s essential,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But actually I like it here. I go to all the physics seminars. Last week I saw Murray.”

“Really?” I laughed. “How is the Great Man?”

“Oh, he’s cute. I like him. He talked about supergravity. He likes that. He reminds me of you.”

I laughed.

“No, really, he’s a dork, you know, just like you. He was wearing this bow tie. It was really cute.”

I laughed harder.

“No really I like him.”

“Not Richard?”

“No, I don’t like him. He’s a lizard you know.”

I laughed.

“No really. He’s a lizard. I was at this seminar last week, and after it was over I was standing there talking to this friend of mine, we were having coffee, you know, and I looked over and he was staring at me.”

Laughing very hard. “You can’t say that I didn’t warn you.”

“Yeah, I know what you said, there aren’t many women here. But I like Murray better. He’s a dork, you know. He’s just like you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Murray’s a dork I suppose. But he’s also the smartest man in the world.”

“Really? You really think so?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Wait a minute.” I got up and walked into the kitchen and got a cup of coffee and came back. “All right,” I said.

“But I meant to ask you,” she said, “about quantum gravity.”

“Ah,” I said. “What?”

“How do you do it? I mean, do you know how to do it?”

“I thought I did,” I said. “But now I’m not so sure.” I sipped the coffee and thought about it.

“Why aren’t you sure?”

“Because my ideas were all algebraic,” I said, “and algebraic ideas tend to be local, not global. But it’s just the global things that are important in general relativity.”

“But why did you think it would work then?” she asked. “Didn’t you think you could make them global?”

I laughed. “Yes.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Ah,” I said. “The algebraic ideas dissolve into this peculiarly formless state.” I sipped again. “You can write over all of quantum field theory in terms of Lie algebras, for instance. But they’re infinite-dimensional, and the structure theory falls apart.”

“But shouldn’t the geometry suggest a structure?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought about it. “It should. Though I’m not sure what it is.”

“You ought to work it out. I thought you had a lot of ideas about this.”

“I did,” I said. “I do.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t understand quantization,” I said. “I had some ideas about that too, stolen from von Neumann, but I don’t see how it all fits together.”

“Perhaps you should ask the Mad Dog,” she suggested.

I laughed. “I will, when I see him.”

A pause.

“Well,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve become one of those people, you know.”

“Which people?”

“You know. One of those people who thinks that Mozart Can Do No Wrong.”

“Ah,” I said. “Yes. I’m that way about Duke Ellington.”

She laughed. A pause. “So you’re still there,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I’m here.”

“Yes.” What smelled of gin? “Perhaps we should do something about that sometime.”

“I think we did already,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I guess we did.”

“Well,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You can call me any time you want,” she said. “Call collect. I’m Flush.”

“All right,” I said. I wrote down her number.

“Well,” she said. “See you later.”

“Later,” I agreed. And hung up.


I got another cup of coffee, and stared out the window for a while.


There is a scene at the end of The Gold Rush, after all the gags and pratfalls, in which the Tramp, improbably become a millionaire, meets his lost love Georgia again upon a steamer; and, poor dork in love, ineffably embarrassed despite his fortune, can say nothing, but only smile his shy smile. And just for a moment the mask slips away, and you can see through the Tramp to Chaplin as he really was, the genius and the magic and the irresistible allure. The character is there upon the screen, but just for this moment someone else looks out through him. And then the mask slips back.

The Dork was a mask, I supposed. I wondered who she’d thought she’d seen behind it.


It still wasn’t nine. I decided to go. I put the peacoat on, and stuck a pack of Camels in the pocket. Then I pulled the pack out again, and got a cigarette, and lit it, and put the pack back. Then I went out.

It was Fall again, and chilly. Had it been this cold, in Berkeley, in Pasadena? I couldn’t remember now. I walked out through the student ghetto in the dark, down the sidewalk under the trees, hands in my pockets, singing to myself: Help me Rhonda.

On the bridge over the creek a couple passed me going the other way. The girl was hanging onto the guy’s arm with both hands, face turned up into his, animated, walking in big stomps. “You don’t mean it,” she was saying. An accent fell on every word.

I wondered about Bernie: where she was, what she was doing. Had she found a boyfriend after all? So beautiful, so strange. You could never tell. Wherever she was, I thought that I loved her.