Читать книгу The Lost Time Accidents - John Wray - Страница 12
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I CAN’T GO any farther, Mrs. Haven, without a tip of the hat to Michelson and Morley. They’re not Tollivers, per se, but they’re just as instrumental to this history. We’d never have met without them, you and I.
Albert Abraham Michelson was a broad-shouldered, obsessively tidy Jew from the Kingdom of Prussia—by way of Virginia City, Nevada—whose career was defined by a lifelong obsession with light. The speed of light was Michelson’s particular passion, and his quest to quantify it brought him, of all places, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met Edward Morley, the bucktoothed instructor of chemistry whose name would soon be linked with his forever. Michelson had invented a machine called an interferometer, a childishly simple and mind-bogglingly expensive contraption whose only purpose—as its creator liked to put it—was to measure the immeasurable. In a nutshell, Michelson’s invention was a system of pipes and mirrors that split a beam of sunlight, sent the two halves down tubes of varying lengths, then measured the difference between these two journeys as a series of pale and dark smudges. This might not sound so impressive, but it changed our understanding of light—and of time, and of the universe itself—forever.
More amazingly still, Mrs. Haven, Michelson and Morley’s machine did all of the above by accident.
In 1887, in the basement of a dormitory on the grounds of Case Western Reserve University, the two men built an immense interferometer out of glass and lead pipe, mounting the apparatus on a platform of marble, then floating that platform, in turn, in a pool of quicksilver, to insulate it from vibration. Michelson expected the speed of light to vary slightly, depending on whether the beam in question was traveling with the earth’s rotation or against it. To a passenger on a moving train, he reasoned, the apparent speed of a stampeding buffalo depends on which way the buffalo happens to be heading; why should light behave any differently? According to Michelson’s calculations, rays traveling counter to the earth’s spin should appear to be moving 108,000 kilometers per hour faster than those traveling with it. On May 27, conditions being perfect, the experiment was duly carried out. Light was measured traveling toward, and from, every point of the compass.
When the results were tabulated, its speed proved to be equal in every direction.
The experiment was a disappointment, even a failure; but it was the most spectacular failure in scientific history. The results, at first glance so drab, would eventually overturn a conception of the universe that had gone unquestioned since the Enlightenment. Two centuries earlier, Isaac Newton had managed to predict the courses of the planets through the heavens with astonishing accuracy, basing his work on the assumption—obvious to anyone with sense—that space and time were absolute. But there was no way of reconciling Newton’s laws with the results obtained in Cleveland. In order for the speed of light to appear the same under all circumstances, no matter how fast the observer himself might be traveling, some part of Newton’s system had to give.
Theories were put forward, of course, once the world had gotten over its astonishment: over the next few decades, attempts were made to explain the result in terms of ballistics, friction in the ether, experimental error, and whatever else the rear guard could dream up. The wildest theory of all came from a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz, who claimed that moving objects actually shrink along their lines of motion, so that, while light might in fact travel more slowly under certain circumstances, it also travels a shorter distance: in other words, that space is anything but absolute.
Lorentz’s theory—not surprisingly—was widely ridiculed, until it was determined to be true.
Such was the state of the scientific world, Mrs. Haven, at the time of my great-grandfather’s discovery. It was an era of chaos and confusion and nearly limitless possibility: a kind of panicked conceptual goldrush. The year 1903 had been typically revolutionary for the new century, having already yielded the gas turbine, electrostatic fume precipitation, razor blades and reinforced concrete; in Manhattan, a subterranean railway had just been opened from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Streets, and in a picturesque backwater of Switzerland—as far from Manhattan, in virtually every sense, as possible—a patent clerk with delusions of grandeur was beginning work on a paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which would introduce a concept he termed “special relativity.” Ottokar couldn’t have known all this, of course, but he’d clearly caught the fever of the age. And in Kaspar and Waldemar, his like-minded sons, this fever would eventually develop into a systemic infection: what came to be referred to, in our family, as the Syndrome.
Both boys immersed themselves in Ottokar’s notes, and—when these proved insufficient—in physics and mechanics textbooks ordered from Vienna by expedited mail; both showed a talent for their studies, and both applied to the university, when the time came, in the empire’s capital, some ninety kilometers distant. Their mother, a monochromatic, long-suffering woman who’d lived exclusively for her children since their birth, ushered them out of her life with the requisite mixture of pride and despair. Her sons returned to Znojmo only rarely after departing for Vienna: they felt relieved to be leaving the family—such as it was—behind them, and in any case their studies claimed them utterly. They showed an interest in every branch of the natural sciences, from chemistry to comparative zoology, but there was no question as to what was driving them. The Accidents had swallowed them alive.
In 1904, Toula & Sons Salutary Gherkins was sold to a well-heeled competitor, which surprised almost no one, though there are those who date the decline of the Moravian pickle industry from that moment. The money from the sale of the company, though less than expected, was more than enough to establish the boys in Vienna. They took rooms in a recently completed building in the Seventh District, in the poetically named Mondscheingasse—“Moonshine Lane”—a few minutes’ walk from the imperial stables. The house itself, though quaint in comparison with the radically plain style currently storming the city, struck them as the pinnacle of daring. Two colossal plaster lions presided over its entrance, their harelipped faces somehow more pathetic than ferocious; a pair of goosenecked dragons, in turn, kept an anxious watch over the lions. The dragons’ necks were affectionately intertwined, forming between them—whether by accident or design—a lateral figure eight, the mathematical symbol of infinity. This entranced Waldemar, though Kaspar was more impressed by the brilliant yellow paint, the view east toward the Opera, and the smell of fresh dung from the stables in the evenings, when the emperor’s horses were locked in their stalls for the night.
Both brothers studied the city around them, frankly and down to the slightest detail, with all the abandon of yokels freshly sprung from yokelhood. The girls especially, Kaspar notes in his diary, were a revelation. Ladies back in Znojmo were essentially potatoes, and they clothed themselves, appropriately enough, in formless, plain potato sacks; their Viennese counterparts flounced along the Ringstrasse encased in fabrics so opulent, so demonstrative, that their exhibition in broad daylight stopped a hair’s breadth short of bona fide perversion. To my grandfather’s bumpkinish eyes, the entire Kärntnerstrasse on a Saturday evening was transformed into a single vast seraglio. Men accompanied the women, of course—fidgety, purse-faced men, dressed in generic black or graphite-colored suits—but they might as well have been lapdogs, or pigeons, or even heaps of moldy winter pears. So much beauty and wealth and urbanity, so languidly displayed, never failed to make Kaspar feel insignificant, even piddling; but this feeling only heightened his excitement. All his consequence still lay before him.
Waldemar saw things differently. He was as fascinated by the capital as his brother, but even then, at the age of not-quite-seventeen, the immanent revolutionary in him recognized the city’s pomp for what it was: a garish, fetid flower, sprouting brightly from the slack jaws of a corpse. That was how he described it to his brother, at least, on those rare occasions when Kaspar consented to listen. The glitter and gaiety of Vienna, that “pearl in the crown of the Germanic world,” as the Führer himself would one day call it, were no more to him than the rictus on the face of a cadaver.
Waldemar came to disapprove of his older brother’s new habits—his drunken nights, his dalliances, his cabinet full of buckskin brogues in subtly differing shades—and he made no secret of his point of view. He chose to remain at an elegant remove from the life of the city, spending his evenings in studious seclusion, filling a growing pile of hardbound ledgers with his cramped and canting script, and relaxing before bedtime by scouring the gaps between slats in the floor with a fork expressly altered for that purpose. His aloofness only heightened his mystique at the university, where he was making a name for himself as a student of extraordinary promise. He left the apartment each morning just after sunrise and returned at eight every evening, punctual as a timing cog; but not even Kaspar knew where he spent his afternoons. There were rumors of a rose-colored villa along the Danube Canal, and of an older woman, possibly the wife of a professor; women in particular seemed eager to credit Waldemar with a voluptuous parallel life. Kaspar would have been delighted, of course, but he could only roll his eyes at the idea. “My brother is a religious fanatic,” he was fond of telling callers to their flat. “He hasn’t chosen a religion yet, to the best of my knowledge, but I have no doubt it will be a tidy one.”
He was to remember this quip of his in later years, and marvel—more than a little grimly—at his foresight.
Different though the brothers were, their first year of independence passed in relative harmony, if only because of their mutual obsession. Kaspar’s talent lay in mathematics, while Waldemar, romantic that he was, felt most comfortable in the giddy heights of theory; but both were in search of a skeleton key, either mathematical or hermeneutic, to their dead father’s chamber of secrets. A photograph of the brining-room laboratory hung tacked to the door of the newly installed water closet at Mondscheingasse, alongside a rendering by Waldemar of the pulpit mentioned in Ottokar’s note, which was unique in the empire (if not in the world) for having the form of a globe:
Waldemar in particular was fascinated by the pulpit, and claimed to have a memory of sitting beneath it, on his father’s lap, and celebrating midnight mass at Christmas. Its spherical shape impressed him as deeply significant. Kaspar found the whole notion silly, and had no recollection of the interior of Paměť Cathedral at all; but he felt drawn to the rendering regardless. Being more worldly than his younger brother—more interested in things as things, rather than as symbols—he often found himself struck by the marked similarity, from a structural point of view, between the pulpit and a pissoir.
∞
If my grandfather found himself less admired by his classmates than Waldemar was—less a figure of hushed speculation—he also found himself distinctly better liked. The snobbery of the Viennese toward outsiders of every persuasion (and especially toward Slavs) passed over his head without ruffling a hair. By the winter of his first year at the university, Kaspar had either won his skeptics over or stepped politely around them, and had become the Physics Department’s unofficial mascot. Unlike his brother, he rarely spoke about his research, and the impression he made seems to have been that of a bon vivant with a boyish enthusiasm for physics. His mathematical ability, as well as his solemn good nature and willingness to perform the most mundane of chores without complaint, endeared him to a number of professors in the department, and by the end of his first term he’d become chief assistant to Ludwig David Silbermann, director of the School of Natural Philosophy: a kindly, perpetually overwhelmed man whose primary qualification for his lofty position seems to have been his persistence in the belief that the emperor had the best interests of his subjects at heart. My grandfather was careful to hide the substance of his own work—his inquiry, thus far fruitless, into the nature of his father’s discovery—from Professor Silbermann, and as a consequence they got on very well.
Between his assisting duties, his studies, and his fondness for Viennese street life, Kaspar had little time to spare for his brother, and by summer he and Waldemar were little more than apartment-mates. Like an underground river, the mystery of the Accidents continued to run beneath the events of their day-to-day lives, connecting them and keeping them in motion; on the surface, however, there was very little trace.
It was probably inevitable that a young man as intoxicated as my grandfather was by the charms of fin de siècle Vienna should eventually be swept up in the moral and cultural civil war that was splitting the city in two; but the circumstances of his recruitment are no less unlikely for that. On a certain ash-gray August afternoon—August 17, to be exact—just prior to his second academic year in the capital, Kaspar found himself in a two-person booth at the Jandek, a café catering to Marxists and artists’ models and syphilitics, nursing a watery mocca and trying not to seem too out of place. He was looking for Waldemar: he had something to tell him. Word had reached him that their mother was ill (she herself would never have written about anything so trivial) and he planned to depart for Znojmo that same evening. His brother had grown even more reclusive of late, and it had been days since Kaspar had laid eyes on him. He’d spent the entire morning beating the departmental bushes, until finally a walleyed Tyrolean named Bilch had let the name Jandek slip, in so conspiratorial a whisper that Kaspar had taken it for some kind of brothel.
My grandfather had no aversion to brothels by his eighteenth year—he’d been to a number himself—but the Jandek made them look like milliner’s shops. His shoe heels were stuck to the floor of his booth, and the whole place was littered with bread crumbs and onions and cigarette ends, and packed to capacity with men who clearly had no other place to go. The shabbiest of them sat shoehorned together in the booth next to his, composing clumsy and obscene couplets about a well-known painter by the name of Hans Makart: they didn’t seem to care much for his paintings. My grandfather, who happened to care for Makart’s paintings a great deal, had just asked for his check when the kitchen doors opened, the smoke seemed to part, and a girl in a nightgown sashayed out into the light.
Kaspar knew the girl well—as well, that is, as one could know a girl of good family in 1905—but it took him a moment to place her. Her name was Sonja Adèle and she was one week shy of seventeen years old. She was also, as chance or fate or Providence would have it, the daughter of Ludwig David Silbermann. They’d eaten dinner in each other’s company perhaps a dozen times, and had had two brief, forgettable conversations; on one occasion he’d helped her to work out a sum. Nothing in any of those prior encounters had prepared him for the girl who stood before him now.
“Fräulein Silbermann!” he called to her as she went by.
She stopped short and spun on her heels—not like a lady at all—and glowered at him through the smoke. “Herr Toula!” she exclaimed, with undisguised amusement. “What on earth brings you here?”
“I could ask the same of you, fräulien.”
“Buy me a glass of kvass and I’ll tell you.”
“Kvass?” Kaspar said, more bewildered than ever.
“It’s a kind of Russian peasant beer, made out of old bread. A house specialty.” She pulled up a stool and sat down. “Do you know how the Russians say ‘Mind your own business?’ ”
Kaspar shook his head mutely.
“I’ll tell you, Herr Toula, but I’ll have to whisper it.”
He inclined his head toward her, asking himself what could possibly be considered inappropriate in such a place. Her breath against his earlobe made the soles of his feet prickle in their cashmere stockings.
“Вы не проникли, так что не ерзать ваши ягодицы.”
“Ah!” Kaspar said, nodding. “But what does that mean?”
“You’re not being fucked, so don’t wiggle your ass.”
“Ah,” he repeated, bobbing his head absurdly. “I see.” The blood was draining from his face, but there was nothing he could do about that. She was staring at him brashly, her cheeks lightly flushed, biting a corner of her mouth to keep from laughing.
“Ah,” he said a third time, but by then she’d already left him for the boys in the neighboring booth. When the kvass came he drank it himself.
∞
Kaspar caught the train that same evening (he’d already purchased his ticket) and spent four restless days at his mother’s bedside. When his brother came home on the weekend, he returned to the city immediately, marveling at his lack of family feeling. He spent the next nine afternoons at the Jandek, drinking endless mélanges and repelling all comers, wearing unironed trousers and keeping his hat on indoors. At 15:15 CET on the tenth day, Sonja emerged from the kitchen exactly as she had two weeks before, and this time there was no gang of Makart disparagers to receive her. She came straight to Kaspar’s table, as though his presence there were no more than expected, and sat down without a single word of greeting. She was wearing the same shapeless gown as before, and she scrutinized him just as directly, but there was a disquiet in her manner now, even a hint of appeal. The feeling in Kaspar’s throat as he watched her was the same one he got when he ate chestnuts by mistake. He was mildly allergic to chestnuts.
“Kvass?” he said suavely, beckoning to the waiter.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she answered, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’d assumed—that is to say, I may be mispronouncing—”
“I’m finished with the Russians. They treat their workers abominably. You’ve heard of the disturbances in Minsk?”
“The which?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes, still looking past him. “What are you drinking?”
“Pilsner,” he mumbled, indicating the full stein before him. “In the town I come from, in Moravia—”
She turned back to him now with a different expression entirely. “You’re Czech?”
“Of a sort,” he said, choosing his words cautiously. “That is to say, the name Toula is originally from the Czech. It means ‘to wander about,’ apparently. Of course, we speak German in the home, and I’ve been learning English—”
“The Czech language is the most beautiful spoken in Europe,” Sonja said earnestly. “Worlds better than Russian.”
To the best of Kaspar’s knowledge, the Czech and Russian languages were part of the same cozy family; but he had the good sense not to point this out.
Sonja peered over her shoulder again, then took a ladylike sip of his pilsner. “He’s not coming out,” she said. “Thank heaven for that.”
“To whom do you refer?” said Kaspar, as nonchalantly as he could.
“Kappa, the painter. I model for him every second Tuesday.”
“You model for him,” Kaspar repeated. “I see.” Things were coming clear to him at last, but only slowly. “He paints you in the kitchen?”
“Close enough, Herr Toula. He has an atelier back there. Appropriately, it used to be the sausage-curing room.”
“I see,” Kaspar repeated, thinking hard. The notion of Sonja modeling made perfect sense and made no sense at all. It was difficult to conceive of a less suitable vocation for a young lady of standing. He’d met models before in the cafés, of course, but none who weren’t also prostitutes.
Sonja was watching him closely, taking sociable sips of his beer, which did nothing for his clarity of mind. He regained his self-possession by a furious effort of will.
“That would explain your outfit, I suppose.”
Her smile faded. “I beg your pardon?”
“That smock—or whatever you call it—that you have on. The first time we met, you were wearing a wonderful dress, I remember, with a charming blue bustle—”
“The dress you refer to,” Sonja said icily, “took thirty minutes and six hands to get inside of. Its stays were so tight I could barely breathe.” She shut her eyes and emitted a series of gasps, as though the memory alone were enough to suffocate her. “Have you ever watched the women promenading in the Prater, Herr Toula, or along Kärntnerstrasse on a Sunday afternoon? Have you ever taken note of how they move?”
“Oh yes,” said Kaspar, smiling in spite of himself. “They walk with tiny steps, like turtledoves.”
“They walk like cripples,” Sonja hissed. “You’re not one of those cow-eyed romanticizers, are you? Those chastity fetishists? I thought you told me that you were a Czech.”
My grandfather took a deep, pensive draught of his pilsner. Sonja regarded him through narrowed eyes.
“I do come from Moravia,” he said hopefully.
“Don’t be fooled by the ribbons, Herr Toula. The female anatomy is terrifying to man, so he hides it behind a wall of scaffolding. Under each of those dresses you find so bewitching, a body is locked away in quarantine.”
This was a bit much for poor Kaspar, but he was willing to tread water until he sighted land.
“Quarantine,” he repeated. “I see. So you wear that smock on your days off, as well?”
“This ‘smock,’ as you call it, is the rational answer to an irrational society. It was designed by the maestro himself.” When Kaspar said nothing, she added, slightly more tentatively: “When we have the society we deserve, it may be possible to attach a few bows here and there.”
This glimmer of weakness was all the encouragement my grandfather required. He sat forward soberly, every inch the bourgeois kavalier, and took Sonja’s plump, schoolgirlish hand in his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Fräulein Silbermann. I’m a pickle manufacturer’s son, new to this city, with a head for sums and very little else. But I’m willing to learn, if you’ll consent to show me. I’ll follow anywhere you choose to lead.”
Sonja blinked at him a moment, genuinely startled, then laughed in his face. “Eager to get your spats dirty, Herr Toula? I don’t imagine Papa would approve. He always speaks of you in the most lofty of terms!”
It was at this point—as he described it, later that evening, to his frankly incredulous brother—that Kaspar was visited by genius.
“To hell with your papa.”
The blood left Sonja’s face. “What was that?” she murmured. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
“Your father is a mediocre scientist, fräulein, and a blowhard besides. I couldn’t care less for his good opinion.” He raised the stein to his lips, downed the last of his pilsner, and set it down between them with a thump. “You might almost call him the Makart of physics.”
“You’re a bum crawler,” Sonja said, wide-eyed. “You’re an ingrate. You’re a hypocrite.”
“I’m a Czech,” my grandfather said simply.
Within the week the two of them were lovers.
I REMEMBER WHEN I first saw you, Mrs. Haven. You were trapped inside a Möbius loop of admirers at an Upper East Side party, backed against the kitchen counter like a convict bracing for the firing squad. You wore your hair short then, in a vaguely hermaphroditic schoolboy cut, and you looked as though you never went outside. A man in a boater said something to you, then repeated it, then repeated it again, and you nodded in a way that reduced him to dust.
I should have taken this as a warning—I understand that now. Instead I took it as a kind of cue.
I was standing in the home entertainment grotto, slack-jawed and helpless, gawking at you through the open kitchen door; you returned my stare calmly for exactly six seconds, then covered your upper lip with your ring finger. A mustache had been drawn between your first and second knuckles in ballpoint pen—a precise, Chaplinesque trapezoid—making you look like a beautiful Hitler. You held it there a moment, keeping your face set and blank, then solemnly tapped the right side of your nose. The air seemed to thicken. A signal was being transmitted, a semaphore of some kind, but I didn’t have a clue what it could mean. Perverse as it seems to me now, the image of you there, hunched stiffly against the counter with that obscene blue mustache pressed against your lips, will remain the most erotic of my life.
The apartment belonged to my cousin, Van Markham, the only member of the Tolliver clan who’d succeeded in adjusting to the times. His living room yawned snazzily before me, an airy product showroom accented by a sprinkling of actual people. I crossed it in a dozen woozy steps. The idea that just a moment earlier I’d been alphabetizing the DVD cases, counting the minutes until I could leave, seemed outlandish to me now, beyond crediting. Creation itself was blowing me a kiss, tossing me my first and only blessing, and all I had to do was let it hit.
The man in the boater was still droning on when I reached you, but now you sat crouched on the floor with your back to the fridge, so that he seemed to be complaining to the freezer. It might have been a suggestive pose, scandalous even, if you hadn’t been so obviously bored. I glanced at him in passing and saw that he’d clenched his eyes shut, like an eight-year-old steeling himself for a spanking. He was a giant of a man, a colossus in seersucker, but I was past the point of no return by then. I knelt down beside you and you gave me a nod and we hid ourselves under the counter. I’d foreseen all this happening—I wouldn’t have had the courage otherwise—but the fact of it was still beyond belief. Not a word had passed between us yet.
“I’m Walter,” I said finally.
“You look uncomfortable, Walter.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not usually this limber.”
You smiled at that. “I’m Mrs. Richard Haven.”
You saw the shock register on my face—you must have seen it—but you didn’t let on. You might as well have been married to Godzilla, or to Moses, or to some medium-sized Central American republic. By now, as you read this, you know the significance the name Haven holds for my family; perhaps you even knew or guessed it then. I should have stood up instantly and sprinted for the door. Instead I shook your hand, and said—if only to say something, to make some kind of noise, to keep you there with me under the counter—that you didn’t look like Mrs. Anything.
“That’s kind of you, Walter. I guess I’m well preserved.”
“How old are you?”
You waggled a finger, then sighed. “Oh, what the hell. I’m twenty-eight.”
I bobbed my head dumbly. In the light of the kitchen your skin looked synthetic. I felt an odd sort of pain as I watched you, a seasick alertness: the sense of something massive rushing toward me. For an instant I wondered whether I might be the victim of some elaborate prank, and studied the legs of the people around us, trying to identify them by their socks—I remember one pair in particular, striped red and blue and white, like barber poles—then realized I didn’t give a damn. You were still holding my hand in both of yours.
“He’s gone,” you said. “That’s something.”
“Who’s gone?”
“You know who. The Sensational Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby, I think you mean.”
You shook your head. “I’m married to him, Walter. I should know.”
The weariness in your voice was both an invitation and a warning, and I felt the helpless jealousy then that only someone else’s past can trigger. The years that lay behind your weariness, with all their hope and risk and disappointment, were utterly out of my reach: as long as time ran forward, I would never see or touch or understand them. But the knowledge was pale and drab with you beside me.
“Whose party is this?”
Your question caught me by surprise, if only because you seemed so perfectly at ease under the counter. I noticed for the first time that you spoke with the hint of a lisp.
“Don’t you know Van?”
“Eh?”
“Van Markham.” I pointed into the living room. “The man in the gabardine shorts.”
You made a pinched sort of face, as though trying to make out something far away.
“Go easy on him, Mrs. Haven. He isn’t as bad as he looks.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“For the sake of full disclosure, he’s my cousin.”
“That explains you,” you said vaguely. You seemed to be thinking about something else already.
“What do you mean, that explains me?”
“Your being here, that’s all. At this kind of a party.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. You yawned and looked past me and I felt the first stirrings of panic.
“What’s your last name, Walter? Is it Markham, too?”
“Tompkins,” I answered at once. “Walter Tompkins.” The lie was out before I’d weighed its pros and cons, before I’d asked myself why: it was as automatic as ducking a punch. But of course I knew why. You’d just told me you were R. P. Haven’s wife.
“Nice kitchen he’s got here, this cousin of yours.”
“Very nice,” I said. “A premium kitchen.”
“He doesn’t look old enough for an apartment this posh. Is there family money?” You blinked at me sweetly. “You’re not a fabulously wealthy recluse, are you, Walter?”
“A recluse? Not at all. Why would you ask me that?”
“I was watching you earlier, out in the living room. You were alphabetizing all the DVDs.”
“I don’t think of recluses as going to parties,” I said stiffly. “I tend to think of them as staying at home, in a bunker or a tower of some kind. And as for those DVDs—”
You gave my hand a squeeze. “Don’t get your shorts twisty, Walter. I’m sure the DVDs were frightfully out of order.” You watched me for a while. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the blue-eyed, moony type. Also, for the record, I’m sloshed.”
I considered pointing out that my eyes were a sort of muddy greenish gray, but prudence prevailed. Your expression grew pensive.
“Do you mind if I ask how you pay the rent?”
“I’m working on—I suppose you could call it a book.” I stared out at the forest of pant legs and skirts. “A book of history.”
“History, did you say?”
I nodded.
“Anybody’s history in particular?”
Talking about my book always made me want to commit seppuku, and this was no exception. I hadn’t so much as glanced at it since I’d dropped out of college.
“Mine,” I answered, fighting the urge to bark or gnash my teeth. “My family’s, I mean.”
To my infinite relief you didn’t laugh. “Your family? What’s special about them?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Which was the second lie I told you.
“I know what’s special about mine, Walter. Would you like to know?”
“Very much.”
“We’ve always had noteworthy tombstones. My great-great-uncle Elginbrodde—of the Massachusetts Elginbroddes—wrote his epitaph himself, and it’s a doozy. Want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“All right, then.” You screwed your eyes up fiercely. “It was etched in a kind of cursive, I remember. Let me think—
“ ‘Here lie I, Melvin Elginbrodde:—
Have Mercy on my Soul, Lord God,
As I would do, if I were God
And Ye were Melvin Elginbrodde.’ ”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. If I hadn’t already known that I was at your mercy, Mrs. Haven, I’d have realized it then.
“That’s quite an epitaph,” I said at last.
“I’d like to read your book one day, Mr. Tompkins.”
No one had ever told me that before—and no one has since. “You would?” I said. “Why?”
“Something tells me I’d like it.” You turned my hand over, as if reading my palm. “If we become friends, maybe I could have a walk-on part.”
“It’s not that kind of history,” I managed to answer, painfully aware of how pompous I sounded. “It starts almost a hundred years ago. I’m trying to make a sort of pilgrimage, you might say, back along the causal—”
“There must be money in your family.” You let go of my hand. “An apartment this hideous doesn’t come cheap.”
“Van came by his riches honorably, I’ll have you know. By the sweat of his loins.” I attempted a grin. “He has a mail-order pheromone business.”
Your eyes widened. “He has a what?”
I cleared my throat carefully. “He sells pheromones—”
“Has he got any here?”
“Here?” Something in your voice made me uneasy. “In this apartment, you mean?”
Your face was close enough to mine that I could feel your hopsy breath against my neck. “In this apartment,” you said, “is exactly what I mean.”
I felt suddenly exposed under your attention, undersized and at risk, like a chinchilla caught in a searchlight. I found myself wondering whether it hadn’t been a mistake to tell you about Van’s business. I was still trying to make up my mind as I followed you out of the kitchen and up the spiral staircase to the second floor.
“They’re probably in here,” you said, opening the door of what my cousin liked to call his “cockpit.” “This is where I’d keep the monkey drops.”
“Monkey drops?”
“The pheromones, Walter.”
You were already rifling through the drawer of Van’s night table. A vaguely pornographic poster above the headboard advertised something called Equus Special Blend: two women with airbrushed, lava-colored bodies caressing a man-sized vial of iridescent goo. I studied it for a while, trying to figure out why Van could possibly have had it framed, then recognized it as a poster for his company. The vial was sweating angrily and so were both the women. A banner of digital-looking text across their genitals proclaimed:
YOUR. TIME. IS. NOW.
“Your time is now,” you said quietly. You were standing at my shoulder, gazing up at the poster with a look that I couldn’t interpret. “Isn’t it always?”
“If that were true, Mrs. Haven, my cousin would be out of a job.” You sighed, and I realized—too late—that your expression was one of melancholy. “I only mean that, in this case, ‘your time’ is a reference to getting a girl—I mean, to finding somebody to—”
“It’s always now,” you said. “It’s never then.” You seemed to be speaking only to yourself. A second wave of jealousy broke over me, even more overpowering than the first. My sense of predestination was gone without a trace.
“I’d rather not talk about time, if you don’t mind.”
“Why not?”
“If you really want to know, Mrs. Haven—” I hesitated, at a loss as to where to begin. “You might say that time is my family curse.”
“Time is everyone’s curse.”
“That’s a popular misconception, actually. Without progressive time—that is to say, without what physicists refer to as the ‘thermodynamic arrow,’ life as we experience it—”
“Put a cork in it, Walter,” you said, pressing the thumb of your right hand against my lips. Your left hand held two vials of brownish liquid. I was gripped by a new sensation then, one that I’ve always hated: the feeling of life imitating advertising. The mimicry wasn’t perfect—you weren’t sweating or lava-colored, and you had your clothes on—but it was close enough. I took one of the vials from you, squinted at it a moment, then pulled out the rubber stopper with my teeth. A smell of grease and toffee filled the room.
You gave a tipsy-sounding laugh. “What’s your next move, Walter? What are you—”
“My time is now,” I said softly. I knocked the little vial back like a shot.
For the space of a few seconds I felt nothing: my sense of propriety stirred in certain of the remoter furrows of my brain, but that was all. Almost at once, however—with astonishing speed, at any rate—a warmth began to muster at the bottom of my spine. My eyes had closed at some point without my noticing, and I quickly lost all awareness of the room, of the party, even of the fact of you beside me. Purple and crimson and cinnamon-colored shapes began to creep across my sight, and behind or below them were other shapes, less abstract, more carnal, squirming and writhing together in patterns and rhythms that brought a prickling flush to my skin. I felt exalted, singled out by obscure and erotic forces, ready for anything as long as it was filthy. I have no clear sense of how long this condition lasted, Mrs. Haven, or how obvious my voluptuousness was to you. With every passing second I became more deliciously aware of each fold and recess of my body, more physically greedy, more depraved. I took in a deep and languid breath, held it as long as I could, then decided I was ready to have my way with the cosmos, beginning with you.
When I opened my eyes, you were staring at me as though I’d just swallowed a tooth.
“You’re not supposed to drink it, Walter. It’s a musk.”
By the time I’d fully grasped what you were saying the voluptuousness had drained away completely, rushing out of my body as if it couldn’t wait to escape, leaving me baffled and self-conscious and alone. For the blink of an eye, I was able to savor a feeling of mortification as acute as my arousal had just been; then, without the slightest transition, I was lying facedown on the corkwood floor.
“Walter? Come in, Walter. Are you alive?”
Your voice was all breath and no sound, the voice of a panicked conspirator, and I wondered, considering my position, how I was able to hear you at all. Then you spoke to me again, and your lips brushed my earlobe, and I realized you were with me on the floor.
“I hear somebody coming, Walter. I think maybe it’s time to get up.”
“Why are you lying down, Mrs. Haven? Did you take a shot, too?”
You cursed under your breath and rolled me over. I opened my eyes with reluctance. You were floating above me like a kind of cherub, but also like a creature in a lithograph I’d once seen, a gargoyle hunched over a woman in the throes of a terrible fever.
“I love you, Mrs. Haven.”
You pursed your lips at that, looking more prim than I’d have thought possible, and patted me very gently on the cheek. “That’s nice of you, Walter. How soon are you going to be sick?”
“That isn’t important. I want to—”
At that moment my cousin reeled into the room, leading a sniggering young man by the collar of what appeared—from what I could make out—to be a uniform of the merchant marine. The two of them grappled for a while at the foot of the bed, taking no notice of us whatsoever, butting foreheads like amorous elk. I’d never seen my cousin behave in this way, though I can’t honestly say I was surprised. Something about Van has always brought late-night nature programming to mind.
“Hello, cousin,” I groaned.
Van gave a slight jerk, as though he’d been stuck with a pin; the boy closed his eyes and flopped onto the bed. You sat up and arranged your hair and dress.
“Jesus, Waldy. What are you doing down there?” Van squinted at us for a moment. “That can’t be Richard Haven’s fucking wife.”
“This man is ill,” you said politely.
“What have you got to say for yourself, Waldy? You’re sick? Is that true?”
“It will be soon,” I managed to reply.
As I write this, Mrs. Haven, it occurs to me that our romance was bookended—set in parentheses, as it were—by visits to the toilet to be sick. You waited just outside the bathroom door, chatting cordially with my cousin; I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror (scruffy brown hair in need of a cut, startled-looking gray eyes, general air of defeat) and resigned myself to the inevitable. Our illicit encounter, such as it was, was over. Our desert island had been colonized.
Van was gone when I finally emerged, but you were just where I’d left you, leafing through an Equus Special Blend brochure. I stood beside you sheepishly, steadying myself against the wall, waiting for you to acknowledge me. When you did I knew at once that it was over.
“I have to go,” you said flatly. “The Husband is waiting. I told him that I’d left something upstairs.”
“That something being me.”
“You don’t understand the chance we’re taking, Walter.” You looked suddenly tired. “He has a possessive streak—a nasty one. If he starts to suspect—”
“I’m not afraid of him. Let him come up.”
Your reply was a yawn, which was what I deserved. It’s typical of my cursed nature that I discounted the fact that you were risking your marriage—and most likely far more—by waiting while I threw up in the bathroom. All I cared about was that you’d soon be gone.
“Mrs. Haven, I feel it incumbent on me—”
“You talk funny,” you said. “Like an actor playing the part of a college professor. I’m not sure I like it.”
“I come from an odd family. Let’s blame it on them.”
“What sort of a family?”
“Millionaire recluses.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, the way you talk.” You considered me a moment. “I like it.”
“You’ve already made up your mind?”
“That’s right, Walter. Sometimes it goes fast.”
I put my hands on your shoulders. “Mrs. Haven—”
“It seems a bit weird, your calling me that now.”
“Why?”
“No one’s ever called me that before they kissed me.”
For some reason this stopped me cold. “You haven’t told me your name,” I said. “Your given name, that is.”
“I guess this means we’re in a stalemate, Walter.”
We stared at each other, both of our expressions guarded, as though it had just occurred to us that we were strangers. “My name isn’t Walter,” I said finally. “It’s Waldemar.”
You narrowed your eyes. “What sort of a name is Waldemar, if you don’t mind my asking? Are you a wizard?”
“It’s a family name. It came from my grandfather’s brother.”
“That family of yours again. They keep popping up.”
“Mrs. Haven, I’d like very much to—”
“Your breath smells like toffee,” you said, wrinkling your nose. “Don’t operate any heavy machinery tonight, Walter. Okay? Take a cab.”
I took a step toward you—more of a lunge, really—but my cause was clearly hopeless. You were at the head of the staircase already, frowning at me slightly, as though I were becoming hard to see. All the seconds and minutes that had hung suspended since I’d met you hit the floor with a crash, scattering like ball bearings across the parquet. I watched your cropped head spiral out of view as smoothly and irrevocably as the water in the toilet had just done.
A thought came to me then, or the ghost of a thought, but I flushed it irritably from my mind. It had to do—of all possible thoughts, in that place, at that instant—with time, and with our progress inside it. I found myself spinning clockwise—the opposite spin to your descent of the staircase, to the swirling of the toilet, to the direction in which I wanted time to move—but it had no effect at all on your departure. At the end of the hall, like a frigate coming over the horizon, my cousin drifted grimly into view.
“What are you trying to do, Tolliver? Can you answer me that?”
“I’m putting up resistance,” I mumbled. “I’m testing a theory. By turning in the contrary direction to the prevailing—”
“Shut up, asshole. What the hell were you doing with R. P. Haven’s wife?”
I came to rest and stared into Van’s eyes. He looked chillingly sober.
“I wasn’t doing anything, really. I found her under the counter. She was—”
“Do you have any idea how important Haven is for me? For my company?”
I’ve always had trouble distinguishing rhetorical questions from literal ones, Mrs. Haven, and this was no exception. “I have a hunch,” I said care-fully, “from the look on your face, that he’s one of your principal backers.”
Van said nothing for a long, reflective moment.
“Get out of my house, Tolliver.”
