NASH STARTED to make occasional references to “the music librarian” in his conversations with Mattuck.1 He was at a crossroads. The dangers of his sexual experiments had become suddenly, devastatingly obvious. Marriage was a possible answer and he had, at his most frightened, almost convinced himself that he would marry Eleanor. Now that he was back in Boston and seeing her again, however, he could not bring himself to take any practical steps in that direction. Alicia came along at the right moment.
Moreover, Nash liked what he saw. The son of a beautiful mother would be drawn by the classical symmetry of Alicia’s features and the slenderness of her frame. Alicia’s aristocratic lineage and social ease appealed to his own sense of superiority. The effect of her intelligence on him should not be underestimated. Nash was easily bored. He found her interesting company, liked the fact that she set her own compass, and was amused by her flashes of sarcasm and irreverence.
It was part of Nash’s genius to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival. He took her willingness to pursue him, to make every effort, not merely as flattery, to which he was no less immune than the next man, but as a sign that she was prepared to take him as he was. He saw her determination to have him as a real key to her character, suggesting that she knew what she was getting and expected nothing more.
They shared a good deal. Both were close to their mothers. Both had emotionally distant but intellectually stimulating fathers. Both had grown up in households where intellectual achievement and social status, rather than emotional intimacy, were the coin of the realm. Both, on account of their intellectual precocity, had somewhat delayed adolescences. Both felt that they were, in different ways, outsiders and compensated for this by seeking status for themselves. There was a coolness, a calculation, that guided their actions.
• • •
Nonetheless, the progress of the courtship was slow. Nash finally asked Alicia out during the spring. In July 1955 she wrote to Joyce that they were seeing each other “on and off.”2 She said that he had introduced her to his parents some three weeks earlier. But she made it clear that they were not sexually intimate. The significance of his having introduced her to his parents, given his mother’s chronic concern over Nash’s social life, wasn’t clear. Alicia, who must have taken it as a hopeful sign, did not admit to taking it that way.
I’ve been making slight progress with JFN but can’t tell just yet if it’s significant. I don’t think he’s really too interested but more or less can take me or leave me. About 3 weeks ago I met his parents who’d come up to visit him for a week. I’ve been seeing him on and off and last Saturday we went to the beach together — I had fun.3
Alicia hinted at one reason why Nash remained lukewarm: “He still thinks I’m too innocent but has now condescended to accept me as is and just let my ‘sweet innocent little self’ develop.”
And in her own mind, Alicia was still playing the field, though it was clear that she was distracting herself and hoping in the process to pique Nash’s interest.
I’ve picked up a few admirers this summer including that Junior that Marolyn was talking about. I keep refusing dates with him but he doesn’t seem to get the idea and just follows me around, so far he has written a couple of cute poems that I’m keeping as suveniers [sic]. I realize that I’m sounding quite egocentric with all this but not much else has been happening.
Whether because of preoccupation with Nash or simply because of a waning interest in physics, Alicia failed to graduate with her class. She had to stay on to make up a number of courses. But the shock of not graduating on time, and the unpleasant business of having to admit this to her father, did little to refocus her attention on her studies. She says in the letter to Joyce that she is making up M39 but that “so far I’m up to page 10 in Hildebrand.”
Nash and Alicia saw more of each other in the fall. He took her to a math party. Then another. And out to the Newmans’ house or to Marvin Minsky’s. “Let’s go Minskify,” he would say to a group.4 Sometimes they double-dated with one of Alicia’s friends. On those occasions, he almost ignored her once they had arrived and the introductions were made, going off to join the circle of men talking about mathematics. Sometimes Alicia would stand at the edge of the circle listening to Nash say things like “Who are the great geniuses: Wiener, Levinson, and me. But I think maybe I’m the best.” Other times she found herself among mathematicians’ wives talking about their children. There was no flirtation, no going off in a corner to hold hands, but in fact the relationship was more intoxicating for those reasons. The other women treated her with the deference accorded to the genius consort, which made Alicia feel rather smug. As for Nash, he could not help but be aware that the other men, impressed and surprised, envied him this adoring, gorgeous creature.
Other times they would go out for lunch, usually with someone else. Bricker often joined them, and also Emma Duchane. Bricker recalled Alicia as “very bright” and “quite sarcastic.”5 Emma recalled, “She was not deferential at all. She never stopped talking.”6
True, Nash was not especially nice to Alicia. Among other things, he called her unflattering nicknames, including “Leech,” a nasty play on her childhood nickname, Lichi.7 He never paid for her meals, dividing every restaurant check down to the penny. “He was not infatuated with her,” Emma recalled in 1996. “He was infatuated with himself.”8
To Nash, Alicia was part of the background, charming and decorative. He treated her the way other mathematicians treated their women. But Alicia wasn’t looking for companionship either. Later Emma said: “We wanted intellectual thrills. When my boyfriend told me e to the pi times i equals negative 1, I was thrilled. I felt the absolute joy of the idea.”9 Nash was no less fun to be with than the other mathematicians.
• • •
A February 1956 letter from Alicia to a friend doesn’t mention Nash at all. But at the end of that month Alicia’s mother would move to Washington (Carlos Larde had gotten a position at Glendale Hospital in Maryland), a move that Alicia anticipated with some glee.
It was probably sometime that spring that Nash and Alicia began sleeping together, at the end of those evenings in company where they barely exchanged three words. Nash was still involved with both Bricker and Eleanor. Indeed, he may have continued, even at this late date, to think of Eleanor as his likely wife. Alicia and John were in bed one evening when his doorbell rang.10 John answered the door. It was not Arthur Mattuck, who sometimes dropped by unannounced. It was Eleanor, indeed, an angry and shaken Eleanor. She said nothing but walked right past Nash into the apartment. She acted as if she’d come to talk things out with him.
When she realized Nash was not alone, she began shrieking and crying and threatening until finally she had cried herself out and Nash drove her home. Alicia, meanwhile, white-faced, left.
The next day, Nash went into Arthur Mattuck’s office, told him the story, grabbed his head with both hands, and moaned, genuinely pained, over and over, “My perfect little world is ruined, my perfect little world is ruined.”
• • •
Eleanor called Alicia and told her that she was stealing another woman’s man. She told her about John David. She told her that Nash was planning to marry her and that she, Alicia, was wasting her time. Alicia invited Eleanor to her apartment for a meeting. Eleanor came; Alicia was waiting with a bottle of red wine. “She tried to get me drunk,” Eleanor recalled. “She wanted to see what I was like. We talked about John.”11
And, having met her, and realizing that Eleanor was an LPN, that she was practically thirty, that the affair had been going on for nearly three years, Alicia concluded that it wasn’t going anywhere. She was not shocked. Men had mistresses, they even had children by them, but they married women of their own class. Of that she felt quite confident. Eleanor had called her up to complain. Alicia was pleased. She took it as a sign that, as her friend Emma said, “she was beginning to matter.”12
• • •
Nash was due for a sabbatical the following year. He had won one of the new Sloan Fellowships, prestigious three-year research grants that would let the recipients spend at least one year away from teaching and, for that matter, away from Cambridge.13 He could go where he liked. He was, perhaps unreasonably, still worried about the draft, as he had confided to Tucker in a letter a year earlier.14 He decided to spend that year at the Institute for Advanced Study.15 He was beginning to think seriously about various problems in quantum theory and thought that a year at the institute might stimulate his thinking.
Alicia meanwhile complained in a letter to Joyce that February that she was “just vegetating.” She mentioned a vague desire (which she did not say was connected with Nash) “to get a job in New York instead of staying on at the Institute [MIT] to attend graduate school.”16
At the end of the spring term, Nash took Alicia to the math department picnic in Boston. The picnics were always held during reading week and often on the commons. Wiener came, as did all the graduate students. It was an unusually warm day, and Nash was in high spirits. Nash did something curious that engraved itself on the memories of another instructor, Nesmith Ankeny and his wife, Barbara. It was, of course, Nash’s notion of a joke. He wished to show everyone that he was the master of this gorgeous young woman, and that she was his slave. At one point, late in the afternoon, he threw Alicia to the ground and placed his foot on her neck.17
But despite this display of machismo and possessiveness, Nash left Cambridge in June without suggesting marriage or even that she move to New York.
Indeed, at the start of that summer, in June, another friend of Alicia’s described Alicia as being in Cambridge and “in an unbelievable state of depression, due to a certain instructor at MIT.”18