The Kynge’s Tale
“Oh,” Koenig says. “That Katherine.” He rolls away from Charade and reaches for his robe and heads for the bathroom. There is a shuss of shower curtain hooks and the sudden noisy comment of water.
Charade follows, yanks the curtain to one side and calls over the water: “That Katherine. The one with a name.”
She hoists herself onto the vanity cabinet, the formica cool beneath her buttocks, and leans back against the mirror. She folds her arms, half closes one eye, and takes stock. It is not often that she has a chance to assess him naked. “Aunt Kay thought you were the sort of person who felt more himself in clothes. She’s right, isn’t she?”
Koenig doesn’t hear, or chooses not to.
“Which is curious,” she says, “given your continuing reputation as a womaniser. In the dorms, that is. And dating from pre-Me, I’m assuming. I realise I don’t exactly leave you much time to —”
He reaches up and turns the shower head dial to full blast massage and subjects himself to the battering, though no force is likely to drown out that Toronto day, the trial testimony, the photograph of women and children, including the little girl, Rachel (he puts it into clear unassimilable thought: “my ex-wife, Rachel”) all of them, in the photograph, abstract as geometry: nothing but lines and angles, their ribs clear as graphed paper. He shuts his eyes and lets the water pound on his lids but the photograph is always there, an arrangement of parallel lines: barbed wire and bones. The photograph grows and grows the way things in nightmares do, it expands infinitely, projected onto the courtroom screen, and from the witness stand his ex-wife’s voice says, “There. That’s me,” as flatly as though she were pointing to a souvenir snapshot taken in front of the Schonbrunn Palace. Everyone looks, the entire packed gallery is watching, there are thousands of people staring at one small naked girl whose hands clasp themselves pathetically in front of her pubic triangle; it is so undefended that all the clothes of the rest of her life won’t cover it. And then Rachel looks up into the gallery where he hides behind a pillar and dark glasses and several other bodies. She looks right through him. He is frantic to get out of the courtroom, to stuff his senses with anything, anything: the first second of the universe, the first equation in time, the first woman he sees …
“Do you know,” Charade says, cocking her head to one side, “this is the longest stretch of time I’ve seen you naked? I’ve never known anyone dress so quickly afterwards.”
He is soaping himself the way he does everything else: meticulously, and in graphable patterns. It fascinates her: the way he moves the soap from ankle to thigh in a series of parallel lines. Then, round the genitals and working up to the neck, he follows the behaviour patterns of particles within waves: the endless little circles wheeling on, the cogs and rollers and flywheels of perpetual motion going nowhere. Lather is growing luxuriant along his limbs, spreading, foaming, a white fungus, and he turns with a kind of precise delicacy so that the shower water bounces only off the unlathered parts.
“You look like a birdman,” she says. “Or a faun or something.”
Her comments fall into the well of his absorption, or it could be soapy anger that he sets between them. He is obstinate as a mathematical formula, she thinks; a closed system. A glint comes into her eye. She stretches and slithers; one bare tanned leg, serpentine, follows her pointed toe down the front of the vanity, across the floor, and over the lip of the bathtub, the rest of her undulating after it.
In Koenig’s hand, the mathematically minded cake of soap pauses, continues, muddles a pattern of perfect arcs across his chest, pauses. Acrobatic Charade, steadying herself with one hand against the tiled headwall of the tub, fingerpaints (or rather, toepaints) a wavering line through the foam from sternum to navel to crotch, which she is circling in slow toe-wiggling exploration when the soap slips like a fish from his hand and he grabs her ankle.
“Brat,” he says. His tone is not angry, and not playful either. It is almost as though he were speaking of himself; or naming, with considered exactitude, some act of blasphemy. For a second he holds her ankle away from himself, forestalling her, forestalling whatever inevitability he reads in the soapsuds. Then they slither together like wet seals.
Perhaps it is the exhilarating pummelling of the shower; or perhaps it is the way his wet hands move over her — as though she were a woman without a name — that makes Charade toss words into the spray, words that are possibly playful, possibly not. “You know,” she says, “in a few more years, you’ll be an authentic Dirty Old Man. It’s so easy to turn you on, it’s
a joke.”
This gets under the edge of his abstraction. When he flinches, she can feel the scrape along the length of his pride, practically see the pinpricks of blood. Whatever it is that follows — a spasm of shock or of anger — can be measured by the strength with which he hoists her up onto the side of the bathtub. “Is that … the name … of the game?” he demands, jerkily, rhythmically, coming at her like a jackhammer. “Humiliate the dirty old man?”
“Maybe.”
He comes. She comes. The room is full of vapour. He turns off the shower, steps out, pauses. Charade sees his face.
I don’t care, I don’t care, she tells herself. Nothing reaches him. (“Believe me, Charade,” a girl in the MIT dorms has told her sourly. “There’s a steady line through his office. The man is an animal.”)
She does not believe the girl. She does not want to believe the girl, who may have an axe to grind. When would Koenig have time? But still, she thinks; but still, he could snap his fingers and forget I exist.
Nevertheless she has to turn away. It is true, there is something disturbingly vulnerable about him naked.
With a little flurry of movement, he turns the faucets on again, full blast, steps back into the tub and stands directly in the line of greatest force. He could be trying to scrape off a layer of skin. When he sees Charade’s eyes, he pulls the shower curtain across. Relentless, not even knowing why she does it, she jerks it back again and shuts off the drumming voice of the water.
“All right,” he says quietly, resigned, exhausted. “All right,” he says, his back against the wall. “What is all this about?” He might be a prisoner in the dock. “Some kind of feminist revenge? A message from Katherine in Toronto?”
“Don’t be silly. She doesn’t even know I’m here. To her, you’re incidental, an illusion, a freakish manifestation of the — Hmm,” she says, touching the mole in the hollow of his neck. “I wouldn’t call it star-shaped exactly. And I wrote to Mum, you know, to ask her if Nicholas had a star-shaped mole, or any mole for that matter, in the crook of his neck. And she wrote back: Bloody rubbish. Not a mark, not a blemish. One of Kay’s stories again. So who, I wonder, has the star-shaped mole?”
“Why do I suddenly have the distinct feeling that all the stories were leading up to some kind of attack?” He is towelling himself dry now, first gingerly (the way an invalid pats at his bruises), then with increasing and furious energy.
“How come,” Charade demands, “that some people who’ve given themselves the Gold Star Tragic Experience Award think they have a right to live rottenly ever after? Why do they think they’ve got some kind of licence to treat the rest of the world as shit?”
He holds the towel perfectly still in front of himself, a shield, and stares at her. At last he says, “My daughter sent you.” He announces it as fact. Puzzle solved. (He can see his daughter’s eyes as he stands and pushes past people’s knees, makes it to the aisle, walks from the courtroom with as much tact as he can manage, willing himself not to run.) “Prick him and see if he still bleeds.”
“Rubbish. You told Aunt Kay your name was Koenig, and you taught at MIT. If you hand out calling cards, what do you expect? I wanted to see if you really existed. I thought she might have made you up.”
“Ah. We’re back to Aunt Kay.”
“Whose name you didn’t even remember.”
“I had a lot on my mind,” he says irritably. “I barely knew what I was doing that day. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was.”
“Exactly.” She whisks his damp towel out of his hands and holds it between finger and thumb, at arm’s length: contaminated material. “It wouldn’t have mattered who she was. And does that happen to you often?” She drops the towel into the open toilet bowl.
“What did you do that for?” For whole seconds he contemplates the problem, a formal arrangement of porcelain hemisphere (white) and acute-angled towel (plush brown) — an equation whose solution eludes him — and then wearily fishes out the towel and stuffs it into the laundry hamper. But something about the dripping trail of water it leaves across the bathroom floor energises him. He is certainly angry now. First there is the slam of the toilet seat, which makes Charade jump, then the savage way he opens and shuts the medicine cabinet, dresses, yanks at his belt buckle. She is excited, she is made
perversely hopeful, she is aroused by this show of agitation.
“Oh yes,” he says, “of course it does. Of course that sort of thing happens all the time.” (Thickly now, laying it on in heavy strokes.) “A virgin a night, before you hung around so persistently.” (So many available virgins? Careful. This sort of thing betrays his age.) “One undergraduate girl per night,” he says savagely. “I had them served up.”
“So I hear.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” It is not possible, he is thinking, to translate middle age to youth, or horror to those who have not felt it, or a war to those born after it. “Anyway” — he resigns himself to speaking in a second language, one they can both understand, one stripped of complicated nuance — “anyway, as for the Katherine in Toronto … She practically threw herself at me.”
“She thought you were Nicholas. She explained that.”
“Did she? It so happens that I don’t remember. It was the day of the trial …”
A procession is winding its way through his head: Zundel and his coterie of hardhats. He stares at the fleshy faces, smug, confidently right, smiling beneath the yellow domes of their helmets. They might be colonists from Uranus, one of the dark cold lifeless planets. He envies them and hates them for their bovine certainties. For them indeed — you can read it in their faces — for them there was no holocaust; it didn’t touch them and therefore it didn’t happen. He hates the way they stay calm in court, confident that the riders in subway cars, the readers of tabloid newspapers, the people in the street, the vast and eternal subterranean currents of prejudice, are with them; while the survivors in the witness stand grow shrill in spite of themselves.
Charade says: “According to Rachel Koenig’s testimony — I looked it up in the trial records — she didn’t come from Le Raincy at all. Her family were Austrian Jews.”
He looks at her blankly.
“So why,” she asks, “did you tell Aunt Kay it was Le Raincy?”
“What? How could I have told her that? That’s your aunt’s invention. A lot of it is her invention. That wasn’t the way it happened.”
“Why would she make up a detail like that? What would be the point?”
“I’ve never even heard of Le Raincy.”
Charade sighs, “Well, I guess this is the end of the trail.”
“Meaning what? Why are you getting dressed?”
She raises an eyebrow, tugs at the tail of the shirt he is engaged in buttoning. “Listen to who’s talking,” she says. “I’m leaving.”
“What do you mean, leaving? It’s early. It’s only eleven o’clock, we haven’t had our brandies, you haven’t told tonight’s —”
“I’m leaving.”
He knows perfectly well what she means. From the start he has been convinced she would disappear again as mysteriously and suddenly as she appeared. This is a given. He has never believed he has any power to influence the course of events. What image billows up out of the word leaving? Answer: the hollow image of his future, a long long tunnel, the infinity corridor, curving back to the first second of unrecorded time, furnished or over furnished, by way of compensation for other starkness with comfortable mathematics. But these are the rules of the game: one always plays as though it were possible to win. And so he says, both hopefully and hopelessly: “But I’ve bought a jazz record, the one you mentioned, the Wynton Marsalis — and all day at the back of my mind I’ve been waiting to find out … especially now that I find I’ve met her. I mean, how did Katherine end up in Canada? And when? And why?”
“Typical,” Charade says, “of the quantitative mind. Seize on the boring and irrelevant facts and don’t let them go. Of course there are hows and whys for Katherine, but that’s another story. Another story altogether, another cycle, another book. It has nothing to do with my story. Anyway,” she says again, with an extra edge of petulance in her voice: “I’m leaving.”
(Because why should he skip right over “leaving”? Why should he react so mildly? It’s an affront the way it barely causes a ripple in his evening. Why should it be so easy? — a mere inconvenience for him, before someone else, whose name he will not remember, takes her place.)
Nothing I say, he tells himself forlornly, is going to make any difference. Someone else has written the rules. But he asks, as though he does not already know the answer: “Do you mean leaving leaving, or just leaving early?”
“I mean leaving leaving. This is it. I’m off.” She has of course no serious intention of leaving if she can help it, she most certainly does not want to leave. But whatever this is, this overwhelming inertia that keeps her from moving on, or from moving back home, whatever it is (and she most certainly does not believe in love, an outmoded, a bourgeois, a pre-feminist and colonising and ludicrous Romantic idea), whatever it is, why does it have her throwing tantrums and behaving like a fretful child? Passion is an illness, she thinks. Love (hypothesising for the moment that it exists) is cruel, is hell, is like shedding a layer of skin. Love stinks.
And it is intolerable that he should so take her presence for granted that he has never even asked her what she does with her days, what she lives on, where she disappears to at dawn; is so unpossessive that she might as well not have a name. And so she says with brittle gaiety: “I’m about to shoot through, as we say back in Oz.”
“But why?” He gets between her and the bathroom door, shuts it, and leans against it. “Why? I thought this was such a comfortable arrangement.”
“For whom?” She is zipping up her jeans. “You think in equations, you dream graphs, you’re always off in the far reaches of time and space. Between one night and the next, you don’t even know I exist. If I didn’t gatecrash your classes now and then, I’d never even have seen you in daylight.” (Oh, she has not intended to be so explicit. Oh she has not intended to … She is out, now, at the tip of a very long branch. She is losing track of what she means, what she wants. Her Achilles heel is showing. Only fancy footwork can save her now.)
“But why haven’t you …?” he says.“You’ve never indicated … I had no idea you …”
This is true. He thinks of their encounters as … (but does he still? does he still think this way?) at any rate, he has in the past thought of their encounters as a kind of supernova occurrence, doomed to fade, an episode in the life of a dying star, but still, for the brief duration, flashy and brilliant. He thinks (or has been in the habit of thinking) of their encounters as a problem equal in subtlety to the problem of the energy density of the universe.
If the energy density exceeds a certain critical value, the universe could be said to be closed. Space would curl back on itself to form a finite volume with no boundary. If the energy density is less than the critical value, space curves — but not back on itself, and the volume is infinite, the universe “open”. If the energy density is just equal to the critical density (that is, if Ω = 1), the universe is flat. And he does not yet know — no astrophysicist or cosmologist yet knows — if the universe is open or closed or flat; he does not know (as yet) what value Ω had at the moment of the Big Bang, the moment when the universe was formed; but he does know that the current value of Ω is somewhere between 0.1 and 2.
As applied to Charade, this theory cannot explain how their encounters fit into any sensible larger pattern. But within the little bubble of space and time where they have found themselves, surely the Ω value, as it were, is approximately known. Surely they both agree on the pleasure of these nights? He reaches up to take her face in his hands but she pushes them away “After all this time,” he says (reasonable, rational), “you can’t just …” He makes a gesture of bewilderment. “I can’t seem to remember what nights were like before you … It’s become a habit, it’s been months and months.”
“Exactly a year,” she says. “A year ago tonight, as a matter of fact. Not that I expected you to keep track of anniversaries.”
“A year !”
“Three hundred and sixty-five nights, and a night.”
He is stunned. But now her behaviour makes sense. Within the scheme of their nights there are rules — the finer points of playing the game — that he has been breaking. “You’re right to be angry,” he concedes.
“I’m not angry.” (Typical, she thinks explosively. Absolutely bloody typical. Apology without guilt or remorse; get off the hook without cost.) “And it has nothing to do with that. Absolutely not. That’s a pure coincidence. The thing is, if you recall, I had something particular in mind when I tracked you down.” She plugs in the hair dryer and turns it on; she needs a stage and a reason for raising her voice. “I was looking for my father,” she says above its electrical buzz.
Theatrical gestures have been planned, he can see that, but bathroom humidity puts a crimp in her sweeping style. She switches off the dryer and reaches for a drawer, but the one she has intended to pull out with a violent tug is stuck. Shit, he hears; and other vehement words are muttered while she glances at him sideways, as though expecting, waiting for, provoking, a reprimand. (She is very young after all, he thinks.) When the drawer gives way, it does so with abandon and she lurches backwards. He watches with amazement the rain of little plastic bottles and jars, creams, lotions, combs, a brush. His drawer, his bathroom. But then, when has he opened that drawer? She scoops everything up off the tiles and crams them all back, a mess; and then fits the drawer on its tracks and slams it shut. She opens it again and takes out her hairbrush. “Of course,” she says (and even she can hear her six-year-old’s voice, a voice gone beyond any power of stopping itself, the voice of a child who is throwing a tantrum but who teeters, dizzy, on its brink, having misplaced for an awful second the trigger of her rage), “of course, what would
you care?”
She brushes, brushes. He can hear the silent count. She could be punishing herself for something, pounding her own head.
Catching sight of his puzzled but fascinated face in the mirror, she summons up a word from the pit of rationalisation: “Nicholas,” she says. “That was the point of the whole thing.
I was looking for Nicholas.”
He continues staring, mesmerised, as she drags the brush through her mane, tosses it back over her shoulders, bends forward so that the hair falls like a slow and languid rain to touch the floor, runs the brush through it again and again, an adagio movement now, long sweeping strokes that end near her feet, near his feet too, and have the curious effect of seeming to pay homage to something. To what? Not to him, that is certain. Hair, he thinks, is responsible for a great deal of erotic confusion.
She wonders, slightly frantic now: Will nothing goad him
to action?
“It’s my father I want,” she says, deliberately ambiguous, to shock him.
And then, peering out from the curtain of curls: “Oh don’t look so shocked.” She straightens up, and her hair flashes in a golden arc above and behind her. “I’m not into incest. But I did want to see what you looked like, since Katherine mistook you for my father. Well, to be honest, first I wanted to find out if you were real. Because it’s true, I have to agree with you, I can’t tell how much Katherine makes up.” She tosses the brush onto the vanity cabinet and scoops the long curls loosely into a topknot.
“There’s other stuff too. Other reasons. For instance: you cleared out and left your wife and kids. So I thought I’d study you. Maybe figure out why Nicholas left Bea, and why he’s never so much as sent me a birthday card. Ever.” She is enumerating points on her fingers. “Also, you’re a womaniser. And so was Nicholas, at least according to several well-documented views. Three: you’re mesmerised by your ex-wife Rachel, the way Nicholas was by Verity; which isn’t quite the same thing, perhaps, but still …”
“I see,” he says coldly. “A lab experiment.”
“More or less. And four” — checking off the ring finger on her left hand with the index finger of the right — “you’re about the same age as Nicholas. What year were you born?”
“1937.”
Even Charade is startled. “See? Same as Nicholas. Isn’t that weird?” She sighs. “But what does it prove? Nothing. So I’m heading home.”
Is this the moment? he wonders. Is this the time that is inexorably on its way toward them, that nothing can prevent, the final cooling down, the end of the affair? “Home?” he echoes.
“Back to Queensland.” If he does nothing definitive now, if he says nothing decisive, she realises with panic, she will indeed have to leave. “I sort of miss my mum, you know. And Sid and Em and Davey and all the Bea-lings. I even have a hankering to see Michael Donovan again. Finish my history degree instead of dabbling in astrophysics. May I get by?”
“But wait.” He does not move from the door. “Wait. You can’t do this.” He has a sense of the script going wrong. (Of course, all scripts go wrong, they all end this way, but he has a sudden passionate wish to … No, no, nothing sudden or passionate. He needs to be rational, analytical, he decides he has been developing in the last few minutes a conviction — call it scientist’s intuition that this … this experiment has not yet reached critical mass.) “You can’t just —”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because …” He is caught. He is face to face with an answer. He almost says it: Because I couldn’t bear it if you left. Because I think it’s possible that I …
He swallows.
“Why can’t I?” she repeats.
A second passes.
He swallows again and says: “Because you can’t conclude an experiment like that. You can’t abandon a problem-set until you’ve solved it.”
She turns away. With an effort she says neutrally, “An experiment.”
“The quest for your father. Exorcism, sorting things out, the whole problem-set. You haven’t solved it yet.”
“It doesn’t have a solution.”
“Everything has a solution,” he says eagerly (his relief is visceral, its origins multiple and obscure), “once you construct a theory elegant enough to eliminate obvious contradictions.” We are past the danger point, he thinks. She will stay now. She will start to talk again. “You have to ask the question the right way. You haven’t worked at it from enough angles yet. Besides,” he is cajoling her now, in his excitement he leaves the door unguarded, and paces the tiny room, “you’ve got me hooked. It’s my problem-set now, mine too, and I don’t have all the data in. For example,” — he waves his arms in the air, he could do with a stick of chalk and a blackboard — “consider the hypothesis that your mother must certainly know where Nicholas and Verity are. She must have a very good reason for not telling you — that’s a significant
clue in itself. There has to be more you could tell me about Bea.”
“Yes, well, it’s funny how I have to do all the talking.”
“But …” he says, surprised, “in the beginning, I couldn’t shut you up.”
(And besides, besides, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? He has had, he realises it now, a vague and surely ridiculous sense that there was something almost preordained about her endless telling of stories. For some reason, he had fallen into the comfortable habit of imagining that it was she who wanted to stop him from losing interest.)
He says apologetically: “I’ve been taking you for granted, but I want you to know …” He frowns a little and adds, aggrieved: “But in the beginning, you know, you practically threw yourself at me. You just arrived in the middle of the night at my office. Did I make a pass? Did I seduce you? No. You walk into my life, you rearrange …” Now that anxiety about her imminent departure has faded, he begins to feel resentful. “I used to get a lot of my best work done late at night.”
“In the beginning,” she says, “there was something very odd about the way you walked into my story. At the very moment that Aunt Kay was thinking about Nicholas, you walk past the Royal Bank mirrors …”
“What? Just for starters,” he says, “we were nowhere near the Royal Bank.”
“I might have known you’d deny —”
“The open taxi door was a nice touch. But she was the one in the taxi. When I said threw herself, I wasn’t kidding. She opened it and leaned out and offered me a ride. But it happened outside the courthouse. The Bristol Place was for real, but she was the one who gave the taxi driver directions.”
Charade stares at him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Tell you what,” he cajoles. “If you stay all night, I’ll tell you a story. It’s my turn, right?”
He wants me, she thinks, jubilant, secretly triumphant, turning away in case she cannot keep her smile tamped down, in case it leaks out around the edges of her frown.
Encouraged by the hesitation he thinks: We are not yet at terminal density, and ventures: “I’ll put on the Wynton Marsalis record if you’ll pour the brandy.” And when she turns but still appears to be wavering, he risks stroking her cheek. “If you left, it would be …” He is floundering in the slippery language of risk. “I’d miss you,” he says, cautious.
For the first time, he finds himself wondering what she does with her days. Our age difference, he thinks. Is it
a problem? Would it have any possible bearing on the course
of events?
She is not exactly his first — though he shies away from running up a mental tally — she is not exactly his first twenty-four year old. He has, suddenly, a Petri dish vision of himself, a view of his life as an Einstein-Bohr thought experiment: what will this man be doing a few years from now? Will he keep bringing younger and younger students, though at less and less frequent intervals, home to his apartment, to this housekeeper-perfect Cambridge apartment, tastefully furnished to please the still-present shadow of his former wife Rachel? Will he invite the young students, blooming and brilliant, more and more often, but have his invitations ever more rarely accepted? A familiar craving hits him: a desire for the pure and pristine company of an insoluble (and hence endlessly seductive) mathematical problem. He leans toward the clear-cut difficulties of making Einstein apply to anything earlier than 10-45 of a second after the Big Bang, of the first simple second of Time. But the curve of Charade’s cheek interposes itself, and he puts a record on
the stereo.
“So,” Charade says. “Tell me a story.”
“It embarrasses me,” he says, “to talk about myself in the first person, so I’m not going to. I’m going to call this The Kynge’s Tale after Chaucer.”
Charade swivels on the cushions and raises a sceptical eyebrow. “Oh. You’ve read Chaucer then?”
“Scientists aren’t quite as illiterate …” The brandy makes an amber and dignified wave pattern within the snifter; actually, technically, he thinks, a wave packet since the waves are constrained within the sides of the goblet.
“Yes?” Charade prompts.
The first half of his sentence still floats on the surface of the brandy, waiting. “We aren’t as illiterate as some students like to think. Liberal Arts students.”
“You’ve actually read The Canterbury Tales. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Well,” he hedges, “not cover to cover. But when I was at Princeton —”
“I thought not. There isn’t a Kynge’s Tale.”
“Oh,” he says, crestfallen. “Well, there should be.”
“There’s a Physician’s Tale, which is about as close as you’ll get in the fourteenth century to a physicist. Maybe you can use that one.”
“I don’t need to use someone else’s plot.” He sniffs the brandy’s sharp bouquet with an air of exquisitely offended dignity. “I’m telling you the true story about my encounter with your Aunt Kay. Or rather, the brief and torrid Toronto affair of Kynge and Katherine. So I’ll stick with The Kynge’s Tale.”
“Oh my,” Charade says.
“Once upon a time,” he begins, “there was a tormented physicist named Kynge.”
“Tormented. Really! ”
Koenig sets his brandy snifter on the table beside the sofa, walks over to the stereo, turns it down, busies himself with the lighting of his pipe. “Maybe I won’t tell the story, after all,” he says.
“Okay, okay,” Charade cajoles. “I’ll shut up. But really …” She waves her hand around the room to indicate a certain lack of torment in the tasteful appointments of a Cambridge town house. “Plus international scientific prestige, a Nobel Prize brewing, so I hear around MIT (oh, don’t look so unsuitably modest), women throwing themselves at you … It just strikes me that tormented is a little …”
“I’ll begin somewhere else,” he says. “I’ll begin at the beginning, or near it. Once upon a time …” Here he fiddles for pipe tool, tobacco, matches.
Charade sighs. “A born storyteller, you’re not.”
“Once upon a time,” he says, clearing his throat portentously, “a boy named Kynge shone a flashlight on the wall of his bedroom and asked himself: where is the light before it leaves the bulb, and where does it go after it hits the wall? One of his obsessions was born that night. He set out on a search for the birthplace of light.”
“Tan-tar-a, tan-tar-a,” sings Charade, making a trumpet with her hands.
“This was in rural Wisconsin,” he says sternly. “The boy Kynge came from peasant stock, farming stock, third generation immigrants, the kind who kept gilt-framed portraits of his great-grandparents over the mantel. Stylised and tiny, in the background of his great-grandparents’ portrait, was their neat little Rhine valley farmhouse. For his third birthday, the young Kynge was given a toy tractor, for his thirteenth his own set of farm tools. But to no avail. Against all logic and tradition, he fell in love with mathematics and the stars. The high school yearbook summed up his social life with a cartoon: at the graduation ball, he danced with a slide rule, a model of the hydrogen atom, and a map of the galaxy, all of them done up in strapless satin and billowing net skirts.”
“Are you asking me to believe,” Charade interjects, “that you led a celibate life in high school?”
“My dear child,” he says dryly, “back in the Dark Ages, when I was in high school, everyone led a celibate life. And as for the innocuous dating and necking that went on, yes, as a matter of fact, I was painfully shy in those days. A nerd, as they’d say today I had a puritan adolescence. I discovered women late in life.”
“Ah,” Charade says. “That explains it. When do we get to Rachel and the hundreds of women and the torrid Toronto affair?”
“Rachel,” he sighs. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Rachel.”
There is a long silence which even Charade does not dare
to break. Between his thoughts and her thoughts, the long honeyed notes of the trumpet of Wynton Marsalis slide like suntanned swimmers. Cambridge traffic, muted, thrums from three floors down and a block away on Massachusetts Avenue. A dog barks somewhere. From further away, sirens. It is a jazz night, syncopated, cool, possibly heading for disturbance.
“I could say this,” Koenig ventures at last. “It is impossible to live with someone who is deeply and dangerously unhappy. And it is even harder to leave her.”
Another silence. Through the window, Charade watches a neon blinking, one corner of the sky blushing at regular intervals. Something in Harvard Square or by the Common; or perhaps the liquor store on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue. Wynton Marsalis and the sirens knit themselves together, a gifted ensemble.
“And this holds true,” Koenig sighs, “no matter how much you love the unhappy person, and no matter how … how impeccable, I suppose you could say … are the reasons for her unhappiness.”
Charade has a sudden queasy sensation of weightlessness. What she sees is Bea standing by the window of the ramshackle house in Tamborine; she sees the shutter that falls across Bea’s eyes when Verity is mentioned. Charade curls up into the corner of the sofa and buries her face in a cushion because sounds are gurgling up through her throat. She cannot tell if they are sobs or laughter. Nothing but reruns. There are only three channels in the world, she thinks, and they recycle the same old plots.
She looks over the top of her cushion at Koenig who is staring at the night beyond the window. What’s the point? she wonders. I’ll never pry him loose from that ghost. Why can’t I be as smart as Bea, as clever as my mum, the Slut of Tamborine Mountain?
(I reckon I’ve had a good life, Charade.) She considers tiptoeing out of the room. He will never notice that she has gone. She believes that there are women who can do that sort of thing: escape from their own plots, intact. She fears that she, alas, is not one of them.
“I’ll try,” Koenig says, “to tell the beginning and the end of my marriage. I can’t speak about the long happy/unhappy middle. And when I say the end … well, I mean it loosely and imprecisely. I mean, some point near something that was more or less decisively a kind of ending. I mean, somewhere near the point where I moved out.
“In the beginning,” he says. “Or rather, before the beginning, Kynge’s room-mate at Princeton, who was a Liberal Arts type, had two tickets to a play. Events intervened. The room-mate’s girlfriend, for whom ticket number two was intended, was glimpsed necking in the stacks of the library with another, with the room-mate’s most detested rival. Wretched and bitter and decidedly buffeted by alcoholic weather, the room-mate coaxed Kynge (who would much have preferred another night in the Physics Lab) into keeping him company: for heavy pre-theatre drinking, for the play, for a post-theatre party with the cast, most of whom were the room-mate’s friends. It had been ascertained that girlfriend and rival (also drama types) were to be on the town in Manhattan for the night. Well-wishers and supporters on the cast gave out the consoling view that the room-mate’s rival was a jerk,
and that comfort would be liberally offered at the post-play party.
“And thus the reclusive and studious and unliterary-minded Kynge found himself sitting fifth row, centre aisle, at a drama student production of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning.
“And thereby hangs a tale.”
No curtain, the young Kynge notes uneasily. Nothing to separate stage from audience. He fears something avant-garde and incomprehensible, he thinks longingly of the lab. Beside him, his desperately unhappy room-mate Arkwright slumps sideways, a heavy pressure on Kynge’s arm. Arkwright’s breathing, heavy and slow and fetid, fogs several unoccupied seats. The theatre is only half full, not a good sign.
On stage, Kynge notes a large and bulky lectern, possibly part of the scenery, possibly not yet removed from the last mass undergraduate lecture. Dangling against the black backdrop is a frame, obviously plywood, obviously innocent of glass or substantial attachment, apparently meant to indicate a gothic window. Beside it is a door frame and a door, connecting space with space. Penner, who is having difficulty with the physics course, comes and stands behind the lectern and busies himself with quill and parchment. Sawatsky, whom Koenig recognises from one of his mathematics courses, stands behind the dangling window frame and sticks his head through it.
Apparently the play has begun, and Koenig fears the worst — and oh God, it is even worse than that. They are speaking poetry. Blank verse. There are metaphors as convoluted as octopi, he can’t make head or tail of it. Arkwright begins snoring in a soft purr of whisky. Koenig lets his thoughts wander to Hubble’s observation of the red-shifting of the galaxies, and drowses almost to the end of Act One when loud offstage noises wake him.
One of the characters, dashingly dressed in boots and cape but a dreadful actor, is ranting: of witches she’s the one … , after which several onstage exchanges are lost to the noises off, which sound like a locker-room brawl. Even drunken Arkwright stirs in his seat. There are shouts from the rabble, off, then the door which stands like a foolish obelisk, up stage, is pushed open and a girl appears.
When she edges in, and shuts the door behind her, there is a hush: from the noises off, from the stage, from the audience.
Partly, of course, it is a matter of spotlighting and other stage tricks; partly it is a matter of costume: a long black shift and a lustrous velvet cape, darkly green. For Koenig, however, sitting fairly close to the stage, it is the eyes caged within the pallor of the face. Is this acting? he wonders, feeling a spasm of anxiety, leaning forward on his seat to catch her voice.
There is terror in the eyes. When she leans her back against the door and wedges herself into the room, you can tell from her gasping, from her eyes, that she does not expect anything to serve. Willy-nilly, the door will be battered down, she will be dragged off, she will be burned at the stake as a witch.
Will someone say come in? the girl gasps.
And it is all Koenig can do to stay in his seat. There is talk on stage but he does not follow it, though he hears the girl speak of a sad rumpled idiot-boy who smiled at me, and knows whom she means. He never does figure out the plot. He only knows from the girl’s eyes when the danger is great and when it lessens.
He understands, at the final curtain call, that the play’s meaning is that she is relatively, ambiguously, temporarily saved. He knows from the girl’s eyes, however, that it is not so.
In the hubbub of people leaving, he reads his program. Rachel Goldmann, he says to himself.
He has no recollection of getting to the cast party, only of being there and of seeing the girl, still in the plain black smock she wore on stage. She is perched at the end of a makeshift bar. People come up to her, hug her, offer congratulations, buy her drinks. And she chats to them, she smiles, even laughs once in a while. And yet Koenig cannot shake the feeling that she is still the witch snatched from the stake, that she listens for noises off, that her eyes keep darting to the door, that she is waiting for someone, something, some bearer of harm, to arrive at
the party.
He would never have spoken. He would never have had the courage to approach her.
It is Arkwright, the drunken room-mate, who throws them together. In a manner of speaking. Arkwright passes out on the carpet, and Rachel Goldmann says she will drive him home. It is natural that Koenig be involved.
Rachel Goldmann drives. At the off-campus attic apartment, she and Koenig drag Arkwright up the stairs. To his certain knowledge, Koenig never says a word the whole trip. He is lost. He is a nervous wreck. He is under her spell.
“Hey,” she says at the top of the stairs. “Do you really want to spend the night with this drunk?”
“No,” he says.
They go back to her room for a drink (she is sharing a house with six others) and he does not leave.
Did he believe he could change the look in her eyes? Yes, foolishly and naively, he did. Was any element of historical guilt, of Lutheran Germanic Wisconsin guilt, involved? Probably. Yes, almost certainly. Does he regret that night? The question, for him, has no meaning. He does not feel there ever was a choice; he does not believe it could ever have been otherwise.
That night red-shifts away from him, further now than the Milky Way. But its thumb print is readable as headlines. And when the furthest splinters of the furthest galaxies go spinning far enough into outer cold, they will begin to return, to contract, to arc their elastic way back to the dense core where everything began, is beginning, keeps beginning and beginning again.
“Here endeth,” says Koenig, “the first lesson.”