In the sitting room, Alan was clinking an ice cube into his Scotch, his back to the room, when he was taken by surprise. Josh was right behind him, almost talking into his ear.
“Alan, sorry by the way if it seemed we were ganging up on you last night. If it’s a consolation, to go back to our conversation, there are a bunch of things that computers can’t do, may never be able to do in my opinion. Yeah, Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. So what? A computer can store more data about possible chess moves than humans ever could. But computers can’t beat humans at poker or Go. So it ain’t the end of the world as we know it. Not yet, anyway.”
Josh, in his way, was trying to be kind. But why do I need “consolation”? How weak does he take me to be? Do I act as if I think it’s the end of the world? He found himself standing in Van’s living room, once Josh had moved away, doing some furious mental computation of his own—to be precise, fighting the American War of Independence all over again. The Battle of Saratoga, but this time with General Burgoyne triumphant, not defeated, and using very different weapons. This young American, who looked only forward, not backward, who seemed able to discard everything that had produced who Alan was, and everything that Alan had produced … Well, let’s see how he’d actually get on in the modern world, without the British contribution. Gravity—Newton!—electricity—Faraday!—circulation of the blood—Harvey!—evolution—Darwin!—antisepsis—Lister!—penicillin—Fleming!—the steam engine—Trevithick!—the steam turbine (especially dear to him because that was where his dad had worked)—Parsons!—the atom—Rutherford!—the jet engine—Whittle!—the computer—Turing!—DNA—Crick! Or was it Watson? The English one, anyway. The modern age is British. Or was. Without any of that, without the country he so easily flicked aside, Josh would be a diseased, immobile caveman.
Dr. Kunis approached Alan, and hesitated. But it was too late, because Alan was staring at him—with a rather sickly look on his face, thought Kunis.
“Parties have exactly the same effect on me,” he said very charmingly.
“Oh, I’m fine with parties. Really I am,” Alan said quickly.
“That’s not how you looked.”
“How did I look?” asked Alan, all indifference. He expected Kunis to say something like “You looked like a lost child, as if you were reliving your childish fears of being abandoned by your mother,” and was relieved when the distinguished guest said, “You looked slightly annoyed, as if you haven’t been able to get exactly the right drink this evening.”
“That’s absolutely true, in fact.”
He told Dr. Kunis that he had to go upstairs for a minute: “nature calls.” And he quickly left the room, avoiding the lavatory behind the kitchen, climbing swiftly the loud, uncarpeted, cream-painted staircase. Kunis had blown it by asking Alan, once again, about his childhood in Durham. Good lord, he wasn’t going to stand here in Van’s house and be psyched out by his daughter’s own therapist. He didn’t need to pee, but went through the motions anyway, quietly entering the bathroom next to Van and Josh’s bedroom, locking the door behind him, and pointlessly standing in front of the lavatory. He hadn’t been in this room. It was modest. And not especially clean—the result of a couple whose higher-order occupations put dirt well below their notice. Sink, console, taps, and lavatory were all of the cheapest kind: the tap was one of those push-pull things topped by a crimped diamantine plastic disc; cheap as hell but hideously indestructible—the washers went on for years. Van’s long dark hairs were on the floor, in the sink, and clogged her large, upturned porcupine hairbrush; he thought of how, at home, the sheep left their cloudy white wool on the barbed wire fences. The underside of the lavatory seat was dotted with blurred yellowish stains. Josh’s dried piss. And Alan imagined Van, rushed and careless, spending two minutes on her knees with bleach and a cloth every once in a while, because although she didn’t care very much about such things, it was getting a bit revolting, and Josh never did anything around the house (of that Alan was absolutely sure)—and when this harried domestic picture came to him, he had a surge of compassion. Van!—he suddenly remembered Candace’s advice, and bent to look under the sink. Nothing there. The flimsy door closed with a cheap snap. Perhaps above the sink? He opened what was almost certainly an IKEA cabinet. Male stuff on the right—shaving foam, razors, deodorant. Female on the left? There was a pill cylinder, made out of an unfamiliar smoked-orange plastic, with a kind of white flywheel cap marked CVS. This was it. “Vanessa Querry. Bupropion (Wellbutrin). 0.5 mg.” The bottle was half-full. He committed the name to memory—certain that he would eventually get p confused with b—and flushed the toilet. It swallowed sluggishly, without much appetite; he wondered how it could possibly do its business when called upon to transfer Josh’s heavy crap.
Downstairs, guests were starting to leave. Dr. Kunis was already in the hall. The air was close, odorous, as if invisibly dropleted with alcohol. Alan was sorry he hadn’t spoken more to Vanessa’s colleagues. Perhaps he would see them in the next few days? Not Gary Mulhall: he was flying tomorrow—“weather willing”—to Austin, Texas, to give a paper at a two-day conference. Amy Isaacson said she would be around “on campus,” but said it in such a way that made very clear—without rudeness, Alan noted admiringly—she would have little time for Professor Querry’s aged old pa. By contrast Dr. Kunis had the ample hours of the elderly retiree: he would be delighted to see Alan again; he lived only three blocks away; Vanessa had all his details. In response, Alan tried to warn him off, with some of Amy Isaacson’s style, but succeeded only in seeming peculiar, even a little hostile.
Once the door had closed—ghosts of dead polar air clinging to them in the crowded hallway—Vanessa turned to her father and said, gently, “So, Dad, did you not like Theo Kunis?”
“Well, Vanessa, I think I have the right not to be psychoanalyzed by my own daughter’s therapist. I’m surely to blame for a great deal, but not for everything.”
“Oh, here we go! Daddy, he’s not a therapist or psychoanalyst, he’s never been one, though I know he’s read a lot of Freud. He was a doctor in town for twenty-plus years. My G.P., and Amy’s, too. Now retired. That’s the only connection. That and the reading group.”
“Is that true? Really?” He felt foolish. “Why did Helen claim he was your therapist, then?”
“I didn’t claim he was,” said Helen. “I didn’t know. I suspected he was.” She was smiling slightly, teeth showing.
“I think you were trying to wind me up, Helen. I don’t appreciate being tricked like that.”
For the rest of the evening, until she finally got Josh to drive them back to the hotel, Vanessa enjoyed playing parent—playing mum—to her warring father and sister. If they wouldn’t keep the peace, she would have to enforce it.