Charades Read online

  “On a reference letter, he wrote that I was ‘brilliant but erratic’. Frankly, I thought he could have been more tactful. But my considered response is that erratic — in its pristine and original sense — did not have a negative connotation. No, that’s comparatively recent, a shift in etymological history. I have nothing against erratic, myself.

  “Errare, to wander, right? And by extension to make mistakes. But that’s the human condition, isn’t it? Not to mention the best pedagogical method — the meandering mistake-making self. Don’t you agree? That’s what makes life bearable. I’d say history comes out highly in favour of erratic folk.

  “Take Cook, Captain James Cook.” She props her elbows on the arm of the chair, rests her chin on her fists, and leans forward — what he thinks of as her earnest and sermonising pose. He waits for the lecture. “You’re almost certainly woefully underinformed about Captain Cook. Americans are. About any heroes and explorers other than their own, as far as I can see. Does the name mean anything?”

  “Ah …”

  “Just as I thought. Well, if Cook had been less erratic, if he hadn’t wandered round the Pacific and bumped into the east coast of Australia, this was in 1770, he wouldn’t have landed at Botany Bay and planted the flag and claimed the entire east coast of the land mass for King George III. And if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be here on an Australian passport working for cash in Central Square so that I can hang around and sit in on your course. Curious, isn’t it? Shit wages, I might add, but illegal, so I can’t complain. In that dive off Albany Street, d’you know it?

  “Funny,” she says, watching him watching her. “This reminds me of something in Cook’s journal. He got himself trapped inside the reef, you know, the Great Barrier Reef, and strafed the underside of the Endeavour so badly that he had to decamp on the north Queensland beaches. Where of course the crew saw Aborigines.

  “Quite naked. Cook wrote in his journal. Which would have made the point, don’t you think?

  “Without any manner of clothing whatever, he added, just a little fascinated, I’d say.

  “Even the women do not so much as cover their privates, he wrote. Hmm. They never brought any of their women along with them to the ship, the old perv went on to complain, but always left them on the opposite side of the river where we had frequent opportunities of viewing them through our glasses.”

  She shakes her head. “What a bunch of voyeurs!

  “I can’t think,” she says archly, “what brought that to my mind. Should I cover my privates?”

  “I’d much prefer not.” He reaches for her as she moves, with mock threat, to where her clothes are. There is a kind of languid skirmish, arms and legs brushing each other like ribbons, and then she has slithered away from him again, and he is in the armchair, she on the bed.

  “Anyway” — she is plumping up the pillows behind her — “from my point of view, of course, it was just as well that Cook was both erratic and possessive, since you people were getting so worked up about flags yourselves. At the same time too. I mean, if the citizens of Boston hadn’t done what they did while Cook was on his third and final voyage, hotfooting it to Hawaii to be murdered, then my mother Bea’s great-great-great grandmother, a hardworking thief from Bristol, would presumably have been sent to some plantation in Virginia instead of to Botany Bay.

  “And where would that have left me?

  “Which says a lot for erratic, in my opinion.

  “Quite aside from explorers, though, there’s all that evidence you keep giving in your lectures: those muon tracks that curl like ferns, and the wandering quark, and all that stupendous power, explosive power, nuclear I mean, from the erratic behaviour of microphenomena … There’s a lot to be said for it, isn’t there?”

  She sighs. “But academic supervisors, they like straight lines. You keep wasting time, they said to me. Whose time? I asked. Because I am ravenous about their courses, I can’t sleep at night for wanting to get through the extra reading list. So where am I wasting time?

  “But Professor Bickerton — I had him for history — now, there was an absorbing course, American Presidential Politics, though it is sometimes the seemingly trivial and idiosyncratic detail that rivets my attention. The Pepys’ eye view, as it were. Like this, for example: Eisenhower is making a speech on foreign policy to a packed lecture hall full of students. I can’t remember where, somewhere in the midwest for sure. There’s a lot of applause and a few whistles and question period begins. First question: a girl in a green sweater comes to the microphone. ‘Mr President,’ she asks earnestly. ‘Could you tell us why your wife wears bangs?’

  “Microphenomena again, you see. Why is it, do you think, that the mind veers away from foreign policy and back to the little events? It’s an unexpected link, isn’t it? Hairstyles and the Marshall Plan. You think I’m just chattering on for the sake of it, but you’re wrong. I’m obsessed with the question, I find it overwhelmingly relevant: why does the mind fasten on the trivial? The inane? On the smallest subatomic particle of the whole?”

  Obviously she is not expecting an answer from him. Just as obviously, she expects him to take the questions very seriously.

  “At nights,” she muses, “when I look up at the black holes — and sometimes they seem to be everywhere, don’t you find? — there’s this thought about linkages that consoles me. Consider how many hundreds of thousands of them there must be, links which we never manage to trace. Consider the network of ‘coincidences’ which are simply cause and effect linked by not-yet-perceivable lines, the conjectures not yet refuted, the hypotheses not yet dreamed up … It’s mind-boggling.

  “Anyway, Professor Bickerton claimed that I had a grab-bag theory of knowledge and a first class grab-bag mind. First class, he said. But grab-bag.

  “I didn’t think that was very nice, but perhaps it’s true. I would say that all I have done is gone on collecting a great deal of unsortable material. As yet unsortable. But isn’t this good scientific method?

  “Professor Bickerton, incidentally, used not to put his clothes on before he lit his pipe. You really must have a very interesting image of yourself, Koenig.”

  She slides off the bed and sits on the carpet in front of his armchair and reaches up and begins unbuttoning his shirt, yet again, to his considerable pleasure. “Because I have a theory,” she says, “that it is during the phase when sexual excitement is winding down that we are our truest selves. My mother Bea would laugh about that right now, if she were here. She used to say to me even when I was very little, ‘Charade, you’re a different kettle of fish from me. You’ll never make your way in the world the same as I have, you like talking too much. You’ll drive men crazy. You like talking more than eating and sleeping and I’ll bet my last penny, when the time comes, you’ll like it more than sex.”

  Having completely unbuttoned his shirt, she climbs onto his lap and curls up with her cheek against his chest.

  “I would say that’s not entirely true,” she murmurs, “but I must admit I find it hard to separate the two.

  “Anyway, you obviously have a deep-rooted image of yourself as a clothed person, Koenig. Or perhaps it’s an astute awareness on your part of what I find irresistible about you. It’s true that tweed jackets and chalk-smeared corduroy trousers drive me wild.

  It all has to do with the absent father, you see, who — if he ever existed and ever engendered me at all — was a university man, according to the recollections of my mother and my Aunt Kay, both of whom found him unforgettable, though in different ways. Which brings me back to my hunch.”

  “What hunch?”

  “The one about my father. I told you last time. And I’m elaborating it now that you’ve got me reading up on probability theory, and indeterminacy, and such things.”

  “Mmm?”

  “It sounds a bit crazy,” she shrugs, “but then so does Einstein, and the more I think ab
out it, the more it rings true. So.

  “Hypothesis number one: my father, Nicholas Truman, was born in England and shipped to Australia as a boy; he may or may not have returned to England when he disappeared, he may or may not continue to spend his life as a global nomad, writing books, filing stories under a thousand and one different names. That is the particular history, the particle theory of my father’s life.

  “Hypothesis number two: my father was never more than a Platonic conception, an idealised object of adoration, in the minds of various people, most notably my mother Bea and my Aunt Kay. He glides forever on the crests of their imaginations. This is the wave theory of my father.

  “And the same goes for Verity Ashkenazy, his high school sweetheart and university lover, who was intended to be my mother; that is to say, he intended that she would be the mother of any children he had. She also existed and didn’t exist, in the same incompatible way that the wave theory and the particle theory of energy coexist and were once thought to refute each other.

  “Or, to draw an analogy from my field of study, are wave/particle paradoxes much the same as what the thirteenth-century thinkers in the Faculty of Arts in Paris would have called an instance of Double Truth, which posits that a concept can be simultaneously true and false — true in the philosophical sense, but false in the theological sense, and vice versa? Of course this theory of the Double Truth resulted in certain excommunications from the Church in 1277, most notably that of Siger of Brabant — though, as you might not know, it was not that the theologians of Paris held the theory to be untenable, just downright undesirable. The theologians sniffed Averroës and other heresies, all of which smelled of the loss of power to them.

  “Anyway. From either direction, science or metaphysics, it seems a thing can be both true and false. So what I want to do, Koenig, is track down the odd numbered days, the days when my father exists. I’d like to find him in his particular Nicholas shape, as his particle self.

  “Koenig,” she says, running her lips lightly across his forehead, his closed eyelids, his mouth. “Koenig,” she whispers on a low husky note of entreaty. “I’ve run into dead ends. But surely, I keep thinking to myself, anyone who has a handle on the issues of quarks and black holes, on space that is void of space … anyone who can say to me that the selfsame photon is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave depending on the context … well, surely such a person has some answers.”

  5

  Koenig

  Some days blackness moves in on him and settles like an internal fog. Almost anything can touch off these moods: a stray comment in a restaurant, a newspaper reference, books displayed in a store. Sometimes it is sufficient to bury himself obsessively in work; at other times Rachel — his former, his first, his only wife — hides inside every equation. Then it may be necessary to draw up someone else’s body like a screen, which may or may not help. If the attack is severe, he may have to telephone his daughter in Toronto.

  “Is she all right?” he asks. “Should I come up?”

  “I don’t think that would help,” his daughter says guardedly. “She’s all right.”

  “Alison …”

  “Yes?”

  But what is there to say?

  “I’d, uh, love to have you come down to Boston for a visit.”

  “I know, Dad. Perhaps I will one day. Bye.”

  Sometimes he has to fly up for a day or so: rent a car, drive by, keep tabs on them, reassure himself in some slight way.

  The invisible guardian, the watcher.

  Then back to work, what else is there?

  The fracturing of chalk, mid-formula, he has long ago discovered, is a particularly effective way to break out of fog: suggestive of fission, of lunatic Einsteinian energy, of intelligence fizzing and spitting under pressure. Then to turn to the class and smile gently, wearily; to hint at the physical cost of descending from rarefied air to the foothills of explanation. He turns, he smiles. He feels faint.

  Because she is there again, the hologram girl, Charade Ryan, high up in the room near the back. He hasn’t seen her since that second night when they … How long ago was that? How could he have forgotten? After the chasm, the weekend in Toronto, he has not …

  Her hand is raised.

  Yes? he attempts to say. He nods in her direction, but then what is the question? He listens blankly as words buzz like flies. “Perhaps,” he says, “if you were to stay behind after the class …”

  Because she is right about that: talk is what glues one minute to the next. Back in the apartment in Cambridge, Koenig reaches up and feels blindly along the shelf where he keeps words, and hurriedly pulls down multiple sets, double volumes, whole phrases. “Don’t leave. Please. I certainly don’t want you to leave. I had to go to Toronto and there wasn’t time to … It certainly wasn’t meant to indicate …” He relaxes, catching hold of her hand and licking her fingers one by one. “Don’t stop talking.”

  He must have made sense, since she sits in his chair

  as usual. Though there is no way of knowing for sure, a word being an infinitely unstable element. He deals in hieroglyphs all the time, he knows how they branch unpredictably in the minds of readers, lab technicians, scientific colleagues. And he notices that she is sitting rather formally, sitting forward, ready to get dressed and leave at any time. “Perhaps you should …” — he is groping for reasons to keep her there, get her talking again — “perhaps you should elaborate, about your father you know, be more specific.”

  “Well …” she says doubtfully.

  “You could …” he begins, and has to clear his throat.

  “Yes, I could tell you a story,” she says. “By way of explication. It’s something I more or less have to do all the time, for myself. Like marking my position on a map, you understand?”

  Oh yes, he understands.

  “I’ll call it the Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow,” she says. “Because time is definitely something I don’t understand and maybe you can explain. Or even … even if you could just say to me authoritatively: Look, no one understands time. Relativity’s made a cocked hat out of time, the very concept’s passé, the past isn’t done with, it could pop up again tomorrow, the whole thing is up for grabs. Even that would help. If I could have it on the best and latest scientific authority. Just some sort of anchor, no, just a buoy or two would do.”

  He watches the way she walks around his living room in her unfastened overlarge shirt. He watches the way she touches things, constantly, in passing. She is more agitated than before, she cannot keep still or silent.

  He asks himself: How did we get from Building 6 to here? He is still addicted to the habit of assuming temporal chains, to ferreting out cause and effect, even when the route maps go haywire as they usually do.

  After the class, there must have been a progression of events between there and here, but it is lost. Very likely it involved frantic calculations about the cleaning lady, since in moments of extremity the mind, which is a faulty and endearing mechanism, always turns to minutiae. (As she, the girl, has commented.) So it is quite possible that before they had even left the classroom (or else later, in his car? or in a cab? or had they taken the subway?) he had asked himself whether or not he had got around to leaving a key for Joanna while he was away in Toronto. And, since he is here with Charade, he must have concluded that yes, he’d contacted her. He must have concluded that since today is Joanna’s day to clean, the apartment would look more or less decent.

  So here he is again with the girl who is not much older than his daughter Alison, his daughter who avoids visiting him and whose reproachful eyes follow him constantly but who has left no trail of crayon drawings on his refrigerator door. Those are the work of the children of Joanna his cleaning lady, he lets her bring the kids, why not? as long as they come in his absence.

  So here he is again with the girl who talks, who talks and talks, who h
as blue-green eyes, weird hair tamed into a long thick braid, weird name. Charade. And she is more or less young enough to be his daughter. As a matter of fact, he has a son who is only slightly younger than she. His son is a Moonie now, voyaging into the far galaxies of inner space. Lost.

  Charade is pacing, pacing, touching the spines of his books on the shelves, touching the mouldings of the window frames (he approves of that; she has a taste for sensuous detail; the mouldings are old and intricate), trailing her fingers over the large soapstone carving that Rachel bought in Toronto for his birthday years and years ago. (Funny that Charade sensed Rachel’s presence after all these years. Domestic humidity,

  she said. He is fairly sure she said that.)

  And all the time she is spinning a safety net of talk.

  She turns to him suddenly from out of the middle of a sentence. Behind his ribs there is a sensation of pinching and kinking and he tenses, waiting to know what will be expected

  of him. Apparently, to her, it is both amusing and exasperating that he has dressed again. He has no specific recollection either of taking off his clothes, nor of putting them back on, but it is most certainly not true that he has an image of himself as a clothed person.

  He always feels alarmingly exposed.

  Even now he shivers and reaches for a robe to put on over his jacket and pants. And she, noting this, pauses …

  When she moves back and forth in front of him, he can hear the black nylon whisper of her thighs murmuring one to the other, a come-hither sound, full of solace. But why is she getting dressed?

  “Don’t go.” There is something he wants to explain. A stroke must be like this, he feels. First the massive cardiac jolt and then the muscles and nerves simply forgetting their lines; the power of speech going; the ability to walk going; the complicated sequence of picking up a comb and running it through the hair getting lost. On hospital wards, he has seen limp figures in striped pyjamas and wheelchairs watch the movement of a nurse’s arm with a greedy prurient interest. Now he understands it: not craziness, just a passionate copycat envy. How to begin again? How to recover the knack of swimming smoothly from one minute to the next, to keep on fitting each new day into the puzzle the way everyone else does without thinking? Without thinking. Probably that is the crux of the matter. Talk is glue, and thought is the great and terrible solvent. Everything falls into the well of too much thinking and comes apart at the seams.