Or am I a new breed of man, hearing my lies yet clear that they are not — and believing them so very honest I then doubt.
Chuck the philosopher’s wife has her dream. She does well to share it. I have mine. Or, rather, Liz’s. Cupped in the middle of the night in my one unpillowed ear. Not like the answer I got at dinner when, just the two of us, I’d asked if she felt Val’s parents were different from her own, more strict, more together, that kind of thing; and she said, No, she didn’t think so, not much; and I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents?
You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth — what’s for dessert?
Yogurt on a stick, I said — raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious.
I was more than a father supporting a daughter’s research, taking an interest in her homework, suddenly last month’s, last week’s. She answered that it was a math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers, she remembered that much. She goes to a private school. I sensed that she might have more to say later. She said that she had a stomachache and excused herself. She does well in math, and so when I ascertained that she had received A-minus in topology yet in all honesty (her own) could not say what topology was, I decided topology was something you practiced more than thought about. I checked the dictionary and had something to think about then. What holds constant through the April showers and cloudy nights, through changes, through turnings, twistings, and stretchings. Rubber-sheet geometry, her math book says.
I kissed Liz goodnight, waiting. I went to bed early, so I must have been tired.
Somewhere in my sleep a phone began and began and began to ring. I strove to answer it and woke up on my feet hearing, “Liz! Liz! Liz!” and knew the words meant How could you! and heard them outside me like a set of real objects self-possessed; then, with the next words, I knew the speaker deep in the dark apartment was my daughter now crying, “I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!”
The phone was still ringing in my head. My back was cold.
“It’s OK, Liz,” I said firmly and half asleep. “It’s OK. I’m here.” This, I was glad to feel, was true.
But then, as if I had been running around doing things in the apartment, I knew what I’d stepped on back in the bedroom; for I heard another voice back there behind me say, “What?” and I turned around hearing again but quieter and muddled and now behind me the prior voice of Liz: “I didn’t.”
I went back to bed, remembering a warm place near my wife’s hip. I left her shoe where she had left it when she had come home. She was asleep, whatever she said.
Morality is a composed state of mind, said Chuck, the black philosopher, which seemed reassuring that health-club party-day of the forty-third-floor sunset. But now it seemed wrong, its wrongness reassuring.
Our organist friend put us on the Unitarian Universalist mailing list and the church’s weekly newsletter came and I found in it under the headline “Ultimate Questions,” this supposedly West African saying:
When you think how things are,
And you don’t know how they began,
And how they will go on,
And you don’t know whether they will end…
But rather than quote the rest, I’ll paraphrase it according to my own eclectic faith: “Complete it yourself.”
PARTICLE OF DIFFERENCE
One night it was late, father and son looking out into the street at the weather. Twelve years old, almost thirteen, the boy will sleep soundly but he has a theory or two of what is to be seen out their city window. “The rain has insomnia,” he said. The boy’s mother somewhere out there on her own knows not her limits, but father and son are finding theirs. Give her credit for work, thick skin, looks, getting out of the home and not coming back. There’s the door. The lock hasn’t been changed.
The man would hear the news from a distance, if it was news, like someone out on the landing, rain in the air, things going slow or is it fast? — music overheard. What the boy’s mother’s up to. A bird on the wing. Give her a hand, original-looking woman, pretty fair photographer, no telling how far she’ll go. The boy is beyond whose fault it is, isn’t he? He seems to know something. They named him Lang, and not such a long time ago.
What’s the worst thing that can happen? said an old acquaintance with a sense of humor, checking his watch at lunch one day. More power, dude, you got a day job to pay some bills, and as for her let’s say she’s a screaming success, which she probably isn’t, what’s the worst that can happen?
The man knew his limits and more than that, maybe didn’t. Hunched at the piano, on hold and counting, supper in the oven, on the burner, in the fridge, he wouldn’t bet against his gone wife. What about the kid he gets off to school in the morning who probably knew even these odds and did his own math?
The mother phoned after supper sometimes during homework. Lately something guessed-at from this end of phone calls which he believes she has conveyed but the boy doesn’t say — a new departure you have to feel and it’s not just work. Lang needs no help with homework but puts companionship to use. The living room table itself picks up the clamor of Lang’s mind. They think together, father and son, don’t they?
Jotted on blue graph paper the steps of a problem, a step skipped before you knew it.
“Wait a sec, she wants—”
“Dad—”
“—how you did it,” parent holds steady, who didn’t always get the advanced algebra himself, then did. Slowed down, Lang explained the new and improved denominator. Yet jumps into biology. (How does my child think?) Hydras with their tentacled mouths, cells so simple you could graft one hydra onto another — believe it. (Seems unfair to the hydras.)
The boy saw something in his father, he talked to him. Something’s happening in math. Physics sneaking in! (But math (?): in homework, the father cleaves to what has been asked.) Math is Mrs. Mukta (you can talk to her, smells good, her accent, her get-up, Indian, a transcendent lady, a star the father can tell, the kid’s doing her). Absent occasionally lately, something going on with Immigration, while in class the substitute’s sneaking some physics in. Mad smart, Dad, what T.P. knows. This substitute they know by his initials. Math’s not advanced enough for him, physics is cool, it’s, Sorry, can’t wait till eleventh grade — hey you all, it’s quantum time. The father gets it. Two different ways of same event happening simultaneously, everyone loved it. Can they be ready for it?
“String theory (?),” the boy gives Dad the benefit of the doubt. (Well who didn’t know about string theory, the man thought, nodding, but who did? The very small, you understood; too small.) “My great-aunt Ruth tied a string around her finger so she’d remember.”