Charades Read online

  really count on any of the usual things making me feel uneasy.”

  He is perfectly astonished by this little sermon and declaration of immunity. Recently departed wife and children, he thinks, stunned. He is astonished, too, by the speed at which she delivers pronouncements, and by the flashing ballet of her hands.

  It occurs to him that if they were tied behind her back, she might be unable to talk. It is as though she has suddenly been wound up tight, to full pitch, and let go. She cannot stop.

  “Just the same,” she says, “I will admit to a strong sense of the ludicrous, I admit I feel ridiculous — not uneasy, or indecent, just ridiculous — pacing around your living room naked while you sit there watching. Do you always dress so quickly afterwards? The pipe, yes, I’m used to that. It’s the first thing all academics do afterwards, but a great many, you know, are quite content to sit there propped up on pillows, with maybe the sheet pulled part way up, puffing away contentedly and talking, sometimes for hours. What’s really getting to me is that now you’re even putting your tie back on, which I think has to be construed as the most pompous, the most heavy-handed … No?”

  He is staring, puzzled, at his own hands knotting his tie. He still has a dazed sense of her voice hurtling on and on, but what startles him is the realisation that the last thing he wants her to do is leave; the last thing he wants to find his hands doing is dropping heavy and involuntary hints.

  “Still,” she says, “if you could just toss me my shirt, I’d feel a little less … Thanks.”

  While she does up a button or two at her midriff (not bothering with any other item of clothing), he loosens his tie, removes it, and throws it onto the bed.

  “How daring,” she laughs. She curls up in his armchair and hooks her legs over one side. That maddening knowing little smile of hers flutters in his direction, then rests on the abandoned tie for several seconds, then turns inward again.

  He waits.

  “You know,” she says at last, “I can’t stop thinking about the implications of your lecture last week. Heisenberg’s theory, wasn’t it? — about uncertainty as the essence of science, about the necessity of uncertainty, about how we simply have to accept that electrons are always in only a partially defined state, that there is, in fact, no other way they can be. That’s right, isn’t it? Yes, I copied it down, because it seems to me to have a bearing on my life. Philosophically speaking, that is.

  “And on yours too, right? All that energy pro and con, the things that did, that absolutely without question did happen; but which also, according to other people, couldn’t have happened. I mean, you know, your former wife Rachel, and the trial in Toronto.”

  Something alarming happens to Koenig’s breathing, he takes quick little in-out in-out in-out breaths, counts to ten, inhales slowly (from the diaphragm), holds, exhales, wills his muscles to unclench.

  She swings her legs across to the other arm of the chair.

  “Katherine says either we’re all slightly mad, we’ve all hallucinated our own pasts (which is a reasonably tenable theory, I think) or else there’s a perfectly rational explanation if we could just put our fingers on it. Katherine thinks — I say Katherine for reasons of formality, but in fact she’s my Aunt Kay. Well, strictly speaking, she’s not really my aunt, but we do that in Australia, you see. I mean, I don’t feel comfortable calling her just Kay. We’re still rather shocked at the casual way American children do that, call their elders by first names — even for total strangers they’ve just met, right?” She leans toward him, eyebrows raised. “Did you realise we find that abrasive?”

  He tries to concentrate on the question.

  “Anyway, in Australia, we don’t do that. Give kids free rein,

  I mean. Give them absolute social rights.

  “Speaking of children.” She gestures toward the kitchen. “I saw the drawings on your fridge door. Second marriage obviously.”

  He is mildly startled, but makes a non-committal sound.

  “It’s Joey, isn’t it? — yes, he’s signed his name — who drew that crayon rainbow over a number of green teddy bears. Was it you or your wife, by the way, who chose to display that particular drawing? Green teddy bears. It invites analysis, doesn’t it? Joey’s your more interesting artist, I think. Sara’s drawings are too neat and proper, it’s happening already, you see, it gets to girls awfully quickly, the desire to please the teacher, to do things right. You’re going to have to watch that, it’s a real killer. Though I myself was spared from the worst of all that by having a mother who was known as the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.”

  He considers how best to explain Joey and Sara and the presence of their drawings in his kitchen, but instead, slightly dazed, echoes: “Tamborine Rainforest?”

  “Outside Brisbane. You do know where Brisbane is?”

  “Uh,” he gestures apologetically. “Well, Australia. But I guess I’m a bit vague about the precise …”

  She shakes her head. “That’s another thing about Americans, you’re so parochial. Your geographical ignorance is absolutely stunning.”

  “Well,” he begins, “I suppose it’s …” and trails into an uneasy silence that spreads and fills the space between bed and armchair and settles onto the girl. He cannot bring himself to ask what news she is bringing of Rachel, nor what the mysterious Katherine Sussex has to do with anything (though that name is beginning to evoke a pervasive and non-specific dread).

  The blues music of Cambridge traffic, muffled, rises into the room and holds them in some kind of spell. When it is fractured — a collision somewhere, quite close — they both jump, and Charade continues as though the track of her thought, briefly on hold, has been nudged back into sound.

  “The consequence of having Bea for a mother,” she says, “and having no father at all — although in another sense I had scores of fathers, but I could take them or leave them you see — the consequence was I escaped a lot of that caging, the bound feet business, the stuff that happens to girls everywhere, but especially in Australia. Charade, my mum would say …

  “By the way, you keep mispronouncing my name. It’s Shuh-rahd. I hope you don’t mind my pointing it out. It’s because Americans mispronounce the word itself. The word charade, I mean. The proper way, well, the Brit way, which is much the same thing isn’t it? is the way I say my name.”

  Koenig is aware of a rising sexual excitement, its origins murky. He is dimly conscious that it has something to do with the provocation of a woman who does not seem aware of his … well, standing in the scientific community. (Only last week a woman he had met at a Wellesley dinner party wrote a note inviting him for dinner and postcoital champagne. When she telephoned she said there was an aura about him.) Of course this kind of thing is tiresome.

  Nevertheless.

  Still.

  Has Charade Ryan no awe at all?

  Her hands flash, her eyes flash, she springs out of the armchair like a dancer and paces back and forth around his bed.

  “Anyway. Aunt Kay — Katherine — whom you have met in Toronto, though you remember nothing whatsoever about her —” It is clear, from the tone of her voice that this is a particularised item in a more general condemnation. “Aunt Kay is not really my aunt, though she’s close to it. She and my mother Bea were half-sisters. Sort of. For a few years anyway. It’s complicated, but I’ll get to that.”

  Yes, he thinks. She probably will.

  “Anyway, up till now I’ve thought that Aunt Kay and my mother were either right or wrong about my father, and that eventually, if I was persistent enough, I’d find out which. But after what you said about Heisenberg … I mean, if electrons can exist and not exist at one and the same time … Well, maybe the stories about my father and Verity Ashkenazy (the famous Other Woman in the piece), maybe they could be right and wrong. Both.”

  She is beginning, he notes with dismay, to gather up her clothe
s as she speaks, beginning to get dressed again, though in a rather haphazard and eccentrically disorganised way.

  “Maybe,” she says, “on odd days, my father is somewhere but keeps on vanishing without a trace. And on even days he doesn’t exist and never did. Which means that on even days I’m the product of an immaculate conception. Though not, I hasten to reassure you, in the precise Catholic and theological sense. Nothing to do with the sinless germination of the seed of the Virgin Mary in the untainted womb of St Ann. And certainly not, I promise you, with any pretensions toward either the messianic or the pure on my part.”

  “Well,” he says, bemused. “What a relief.”

  “Oh, quite the contrary, I assure you. No. I think it was another case of microphenomena in uncertain states. I think it was parthenogenesis in the manner of amoeba. They can sub­divide themselves just by thinking about it, right?”

  Her hand sweeps through a delicate arc, a sort of visual punctuation point, and he catches hold of her wrist and pulls her toward him. “Why are you getting dressed?” he reproaches.

  “Because it’s almost daylight,” she says, indicating the window.

  3

  Matter, Anti-Matter

  and the Hologram Girl

  “The creation of a hologram,” Koenig’s colleague, the experimentalist, is saying to a cluster of awe-struck undergraduates, “begins with the splitting of a laser beam in two.” He is holding court in a corner of the Media Lab, and Koenig stops to listen. “And then,” his colleague says, “the beams spread out to caress, as it were, the entire subject — in this case an arrangement of doughnuts, styrofoam cups and one hot dog.”

  Koenig watches with the mildly patronising disdain of the theoretical physicist. There is a certain doggedness to all this, a terrier-like persistence that one has to admire, but when all is said and done, the Media Lab people are little more than brilliant technicians, dealers in nuts and bolts and razzle-dazzle. Experimentalists. It is not that Koenig is an intellectual snob, he quite absolves himself on that score. It is simply that mere electronic hocus-pocus is not particularly interesting, and nor is mere data; and he is not inclined to be swept off his feet by the narrowly empirical until he has a theory that will give it grace and shape.

  His colleague is displaying the developed holographic plate in white light now, and the undergraduates gasp as phantasmal coffee cups and doughnuts and a solitary three-dimensional hot dog float in the air. “Is that a dagger I see before me?” someone demands theatrically, lunging at ghostly colour. A scattershot of nervous laughter ricochets round the room.

  Several young women move closer to their magician-professor and one of them touches his sleeve, possibly believing that energy will leap across the gap or that sorcery is contagious.

  “You can do other things. Visual music, for instance. I’ll demonstrate.” What an exhibitionist, Koenig thinks. His colleague is lapping up attention, fussing with glass plates, lasers, white light. “What I do, essentially, is tape myself playing blues on my sax, run the tape, and then transpose the music into visual equivalents with computer graphics.” He has the plate in position now. “It’s a sort of collage with photographs, mathematical notations, graphed equivalents of sound, cathode ray tubes, and electronic imagery. I call this one Blue Lady.”

  Fanfare. Koenig could swear the room is humming with trumpets, all of them blown by Professor Magician himself.

  How can the students be taken in? Koenig composes an instant jazz riff of his own, hums it silently, calls it Cheap Trick.

  And then, out of the murky room, out of nowhere, out of the saxophone and the puddle of lasers, steps the Blue Lady who brushes by them with an ectoplasmic spin.

  It is the girl. Charade. Whom Koenig has not seen since she vanished from his bedroom several nights ago.

  She twirls like a top, her skirt flaring and rising. From certain angles you can see her thighs, and then as she spins more slowly, languidly, the blue skirt sinks, drifts, floats about her calves and ankles. From everywhere you can see her eyes, which are very very blue, or maybe teal, or maybe blue-green (depending on the lift and dip of the skirt).

  Koenig, feeling dizzy, has to lean against a bookcase.

  “All done with mirrors,” his colleague jokes. “Plus beam splitters and cathode ray tubes and video photography.”

  In the hallway later, Koenig asks casually, indifferently, “That girl. The hologram girl. She a graduate student?”

  His colleague says sourly: “Not your type, Koenig. She’d break your balls.”

  * *

  Tuesdays and Thursdays, the mornings of the large introductory course, Koenig scans the tiers of seats but she does not come. Others come. They knock on his door, they saunter in the lot where he parks, no effort seems to be required; Radcliffe women, MIT women, Wellesley women, faculty and students, murmuring brilliant, murmuring famous, murmuring Nobel Prize, it seems to be an aphrodisiac, he does not remember their names. They come and go and nothing helps.

  Nothing helps because he dreams of the girl Charade. Nothing helps because in any case the mournful eyes of Rachel, his former wife, are always watching. Nothing helps; but still the women come and go.

  “You should be put in a museum, Koenig,” his colleague mutters one day in passing. “The compulsive consumer, a macho antique.”

  Koenig is startled. “Listen to who’s talking,” he says curtly.

  “Not everyone chatted up by the Nobel committee gets to Sweden,” his colleague says.

  Koenig works late. He is pushing back, mathematically, to that busy stretch of time between the Big Bang and a specific point occurring 10-35 of a second later. With present data, he measures the red-shifting of the light from distant galaxies. He works at the borders, at the junction of astrophysics, particle physics, cosmology. What he is obsessed with is cross-fertilisation, the braiding of disciplines. What absorbs him is the way the girl seemed to hold words in her hands and the way she appeared one night (did she not?) in his apartment, and the way she spoke of his wife Rachel, and the way …

  More and more he works in the basement of Building 6, rather than in his office or his Cambridge apartment, in case she reappears. He is waiting for her to tap on his door.

  Sometimes, on Tuesdays or Thursdays, he thinks he sees her from the edge of his eye as he writes on the blackboard. But when he turns, it is always someone else altogether, someone bearing no similarity to her at all, except for a braid tossed to one side perhaps, or a few curls across the forehead, or blue-green eyes.

  In the murky basement light, beneath coiled ducts, he dallies with the text of a speech that is to be presented at the Science Museum. Matter, he writes, a sense of the solidity of matter, is one of our most persistent illusions. The presence of matter represents nothing more than a disturbance in the field at a given point, the figure in the carpet as it were.

  “What a sentence,” she says. And is still there when he turns.

  4

  The Second Night

  When he blinks they are in his apartment again and she is asking, surprised, “Just Koenig? Really? That’s your first name too?” And before he has time to answer: “Well, ah, Koenig — yes, it’s nice, it suits you.”

  She hooks her legs over the arm of his chair and watches as he pulls on his pants. “You know,” she says, “I haven’t decided whether I’m flattered or insulted that you obviously expected me to drop by your office again. Eventually.”

  “Well. I haven’t decided whether I’m flattered or insulted that you obviously expected I’d be there.”

  “No,” she says, ruling this out. “Not valid. You’re always there.”

  “All right then. You obviously expected I’d invite you back here.”

  “You know,” she says earnestly, “I feel you seriously mis­understand why I … It’s true, of course, that I didn’t wander into your office or your class by acciden
t, but I wouldn’t want you to misinterpret my reasons. It’s not sex.”

  “Oh.” He pauses momentarily between one shirt button and the next.

  “Have you ever felt that you were on the lip of a black hole?” she asks him. “And that unless you found something to hang onto in the next few minutes, you’d cross the ‘event horizon’?”

  After that everything was irreversible and absolute annihilation was just a matter of time. So he had explained in Course 8.286.

  And has he ever …?

  Oh yes, he has been at the dangerous rims of black holes.

  “They eat stars, you said. They eat quasars.” As though watching such distant galactic events, she unwinds herself from the chair and stands, looking at nothing, in another of her curious trances. From the window, a faint haze of neon blurs her shape and at the same time gives it a thin radiant outline, a line that shifts and turns misty, so that he has an odd sense of her body as translucent. Her hologram self, he thinks with a slight shock. He can in fact see the blue veins in her breasts, and goes to her and draws the lightest of circles around her nipples with his index finger.

  “You’re not listening to me,” she reproaches.

  And then, for a considerable length of time, she can say nothing at all.

  She manages, at last, to disengage herself from him without breaking the erotic fog in which they move, but establishing nevertheless a delicate space. She curls up in his armchair again and he watches her from the bed. In a curious way, all this seems to him a mode of sexual contact. It is as though they are still physically coupled.

  “No,” she says. “It’s not sex. It’s because of Katherine.”

  He waits and watches.

  “But it’s something different again that keeps me,” she says. “It’s what you know. I want to … well, one of my professors at Sydney Uni described me as an academic glutton. He said I was driven by cerebral curiosity and greed, although he found me lamen­tably deficient in direction and purpose. That’s what he said.