Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 22

I HAVE A THREE-AND-A-HALF YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, AUDREY. She lives with her mother in New Jersey. I see her a half-dozen times a year, as often as my academic schedule allows.

I never meant to become a father; I sure didn’t plan to become one at fifty-three, let alone a long-distance father. Life has its own agendas.

The first and only other time I came close to fatherhood I was twenty years old. I’d gotten my high school sweetheart pregnant. Though I’d moved to New York to study art, on visits home Laura and I kept seeing each other. She was a shy, quiet girl, and we spent most of our time together in pursuit of means to avoid talking to each other.

During one such visit, I impregnated her.

Summer, 1977. Together with a group of other Pratt students, I sublet a Soho loft. One of the students had two kittens, Sacco and Vanzetti. Soho was much grittier back then. No boutiques, no Balthazar, its cobblestoned industrial streets noisy with trucks and strewn with graffiti.

The professor from whom we sublet left behind cans of purple, pink, and gray latex paint and a few large sheets of paper. I carried these up to the rooftop, where I spread the sheets out, their corners held down by bricks. With a set of lettering stencils, a roll of masking tape, and a very rough plan, I went to work.

Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns were my heroes. The paintings I did that day, surrounded by ventilators and tarpaper, owed everything to them.

Under a breezeless summer sun I worked all day long and into the evening. The forecast was good; not a cloud in the sky. I left the results to dry and went to sleep in my windowless white cube of a room built into the center of the loft.

The next morning I awoke to purple, pink, and gray paw prints everywhere. I raced up to the roof. My paintings were all destroyed.

An hour later Laura phoned with the news. She was three weeks pregnant and said she would not consider an abortion. I reasoned, argued, pleaded. My words echoed off the cube’s white walls.

Later that same day, the lights went out. Except for a few places in the Far Rockaways, the whole city went dark. Four thousand commuters had to be evacuated from the subways. Anarchic mobs ravaged neighborhoods. Thirty seven hundred arrests were made. Con-Ed called the blackout “an act of God.” Father Gabriel Santacruz of Bushwick disagreed. He told his candlelit flock: “Tonight we are without God.”

A week later, at the Burger King across the street from the Planned Parenthood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as my mother and I sipped twin milkshakes together in pained silence (a slab of bright sunlight slicing through the plate glass window, bouncing off our table), Laura had the life scraped from her womb.

Thirty-three years later, my daughter was born.

United States Patent # 2,736,353, INDUCED QUADRATURE FIELD MOTOR. “This invention relates to alternating current motors having the general characteristics of synchronous motors, and has for its primary object the provision of a motor having higher output at lower speed than a conventional alternating-current motor of similar physical size.” Filed Nov. 25, 1953.