The sign in the terminal said Viva La France. “How quaint,” Nin said. “Signage in a dead language.”
“What does it say?” Quan asked. “I don’t recognize the symbols.” He was the graduate student in technical history about the same age as Porliche. His cheekbones indicated Asian heritage, darker skin, possibly aboriginal, and average in height for a man but a bit shorter than Nin. He had the paunch of a guy who had sat for years. His hair was black and short on top but longer on the back and neck, like so many other students on campus. ___.
“It’s ancient, and the letters are derived from Latin,” Porliche said. “The language is French and dead longer than English.”
“There are a lot of extinct languages.” Quan stared at the posters on the walls depicting scenes from antiquity. There was a woman in armor holding a sword in battle, a group of women holding up skirts and kicking, and a big tower made of metal beams.
“Oh, honey,” Nin said, “there have been tens of thousands languages. Most are lost. Each language gradually changed over time with influence from and exposure to other cultures because of commerce or conquering. Don’t they teach you this in school?”
“It’s engineering, Nin. There are translators for current languages.”
“All six of them,” Porliche said.
“There’s our bags,” said Sparky. “Looks like they got here and they’re all on a car, the way they should be.” He lumbered in that direction, skinny arms hitching up his pants under his small roll of fat.
“Sparky, I think that is the longest sentence you have ever used,” Nin said.
“Smartass.”
“Maybe that’s why you like it so much.” Nin smiled and patted him on the rear as they walked in the lead.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Quan.
The flatbed cart that held their luggage followed them to a loading zone where a van awaited. The bags and trunks were auto-loaded as they climbed on board. Sparky slipped a small card into a slot, and the van left the airport. It drove onto a moving train, and, after two more moving transfers, they arrived at a mountainous locale many kilometers almost due north of the large coastal city of Nice where the plane had landed. Over the last millennium, many towns in this region were renamed to their ancient appellations to encourage tourism.
“Sparky, would you take our bags to our room, sweetie?” He took a rolling cart with three bags and two trunks into an elevator along with Quan, who carried a backpack and pulled a trunk. Nin and Porliche sauntered into a bar.
“When do you want to start in the morning, poor girl?”
“The site opens at nine. It will take us at least twenty minutes to get there from here, so how about eight thirty?”
“Do you want to meet for breakfast first?”
“Sure.” They ordered drinks. Porliche admired Nin, dressed in her usual tight and stretchy short tube, a long, luxurious coat draped over the back of the chair. “I have a question, Nin. How long have you been with your husband?”
“Nine or ten years, I think.”
“So tell me how it works for you to sleep with Sparks while you still have union with, uh, what’s his name?”
“Parnet. He doesn’t care. In your culture, monogamy is the norm. In our culture, union is not an exclusive contract. Sex is something to share. It is an act of hospitality and friendship, a way of loosening up.”
“Do you love Parnet?”
“Sure,” she said casually.
“How do you feel about Sparks?”
“I like him for a change of pace.”
“I think that is strange.”
“What is love between two adults? Would I sacrifice for them, give a part of me, of my time and life? Yes. Do I have an emotional sensation, like a feeling deep in my chest when I see either of them? I do. With whom do I want to spend all the days of the rest of my life? Maybe neither of them. Maybe no one. Which of those things is love? Relationships are dynamic.” She took a sip. “This is good vodka.”
“Doesn’t that make you insecure?”
“Not at all. That’s a funny question, Por.”
“Do you have affairs often?”
“What’s an affair? A single encounter? A few days? Weeks, months, years? More than one intimate relationship at a time? I don’t have, how shall I put this, repetitive engagements more than two or three times a year. Maybe none. It depends. Parnet and I are nearing the end of our intersection, I think.”
“Intersection?”
“Some people, a small percentage, meet and join then stay happily together for life. I think of them as a double helix—two lines that twist around each other from the time they meet until death. Most of us are curves that intersect and stay close for years. Our lines or lives eventually diverge as they grow. Few of us move in the same direction with similar periodicity and velocity for very long. The few that do are the double helices.”
“Where does this come from?” Porliche asked as she rolled her eyes in mockery, unnoticed by Nin, whose eyes were scanning the bar.
“It’s not my original idea. It was something I learned from my number two.”
“Number two?”
“Parnet is number three. Man two, Bosan, was a physicist and mathematician. I have no idea how he came up with this, but it resonates with me. We exist physically in the standard four dimensions of space-time. We also have personality characteristics that exist in at least four dimensions or scales if you will. You can be intro- or extroverted. I’m extro. There is an axis of logic and emotion, an axis of self-interest or self-sacrifice. I must be the latter, which is why the Reaper doctrine appeals to me. Another axis is sensual versus intellect. Some love pleasant sensations, while others find suffering to be edifying. Maybe sensation and intellect are two separate axes. I’ll have to ask Bosan when I see him again and see what he thinks. It doesn’t matter too much. The curves or waves of our lives are often so complex that most of them are bound to diverge.”
“I hope Bhat and I are double helixes.” Porliche missed him after only two days apart. The thought of him and of being together gave her a maudlin happiness that she tried to keep away from her face.
“Helices.”
“Yeah, that.”
“You are high on the scales of intellect, introversion, and logic. Do you think this Bhat fellow is the same?”
“Kinda, I think.”
“Why do you want to be his reflection, Por?”
Porliche looked into her glass as if the answer was written in the pattern of pulp clinging to the ice cubes. She took a sip, thinking. “I don’t think of it like that. I’m my own person. We complement each other.”
“I like that. It’s like up quarks paired with down quarks.”
Porliche had no idea what she was talking about. “I think it is romantic to go through life and grow old with one intimate mate. I love Bhat.”
“I love Bosan. He made me a better person. He opened up thoughts and insights like no one else could. I had some of the greatest times in my life with him. But my life went off in one direction, and his went in another. I know I changed his life as well, and I’m happy with that. But we became unhappy together. Our time was done. I still love him, and I always will.”
“Where is he?”
“He lives in Zealand.”
“What does he do?”
“When I knew him, he was faculty at the university. His passion is mathematics, and he publishes theory. Most of his income is from a real estate conglomerate. He develops formulas for the sales force to use to determine the personality dimensions of customers so they can sell vacation properties to all or almost all of the people they get into their presentations.”
“That’s a switch.”
“Like I said, we diverged. And you changed the subject. Why do you want to orbit Bhat for the next eighty years?”
“It’s not orbiting—it’s our ideal, our culture. We just think that marriage is for life.”
“Don’t people get divorced over there in the other hemisphere?”
“Oh, yes. My parents split up. About half of all unions end up lasting less than twenty years.”
“Do you see older couples that are miserable together that would be happier with someone else or living alone?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“These are people whose curves have diverged, but at least one dimension of their personality will not let the wave go where it wants to go, hoping to keep it constrained. This creates a great deal of tension and requires a lot of energy. Bosan says it is like a proton. It consists of three quarks weighing five something units each. But the weight of the proton is like nine hundred. So fifteen is the weight of the quarks, and the rest of the weight is the energy it takes to keep them together.”
“A weird mix of quantum mechanics and sociology.”
“Maybe you and Bhat are each helical waves with similar direction that can be the ideal you hope for, a double helix. Maybe you are not. I see you professionally as a hyperbola.” Porliche looked at her quizzically as Nin smiled. “I’m kidding. I threw out a random curve.”
“I find it interesting that you still love your ex.”
“I love every man with whom I’ve had a significant relationship except man number one. He became toxic.” She shook her head in distaste. Her hair flew in a halo.
“What do you see in Sparks?” She let a little of her disgust come out.
“Sparky is a diversion. His quiet balances my outlandishness. We have nice conversations about an area of life I know little about. I love to learn. He doesn’t threaten my career or compete in the work environment. He is a slow lover, which is a great thing for a change. Most men are in such a rush, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know about most men.”
“I also think I will change him in ways he will both enjoy and appreciate.”
“Why would you want to change someone?”
“It’s not that I want to. People are dynamic, always changing regardless of interactions with other people. When people are close, they affect each other. Bosan used to call that the wave-particle duality of our life waves. He was such a lovable, objective, mathematical loon.” She laughed with a tinge of mist in her eyes. “These interactions occur with friends, coworkers, and sometimes people you meet briefly. The effect between durable lovers living together for an extended period is much greater. If you recognize that change is inevitable, as you get closer, you can better anticipate where a relationship will go. Sparky and I have waves that are pretty different, and I expect the intersection will be brief but productive for him and fun for me.”
“Strange.” She thought for a moment that Nin was more than just from a faraway country but some alien deposited on the planet from a passing flying saucer.
“Not strange. Normal for humans. Don’t misdirect your life with a paradigm that works for someone else. Find one that works for you. Don’t base your expectations on false assumptions or unreality. I know that reality is not always pleasant, and I enjoy escape and living in some other ideal world as much as anyone on this planet. But I find for me that life is easier if I accept what actually is, not grasp for what is supposed to be. Can I buy the next round?”
“You bought the first two rounds. This one is mine. How do you know the difference?”
“The difference?”
“Between what is and what is supposed to be.”
“The ‘supposed to be’ is an expectation based on an ideal. It may have dissonance with the world as it is. One must choose to ignore or simply fail to see the disagreements. Love is blind, they say. I say wanting makes you blind, and it doesn’t matter if its desire for some object or objective. Money, power, politics, fame, a long-term marriage,”—she smiled and rubbed the back of Porliche’s hand—“desire for them can make you ignore the negatives that accompany them. If and when facts finally get in the way, then there is a shift from your ideal to cold reality. For you, marriage should last a lifetime. That’s your paradigm. The truth is that most relationships change and people grow apart. It would be nice if we made the right decision when we were young, but who wears the same style when they’re fifty that they bought when they were twenty-five?”
“In this construct of yours, what about children?”
“Huge quantum effects on both mom and dad. If you continue in this life-wave way of looking at it, a child has a lot of mass and energy and dramatically distorts the path of the waves of those close to it. In the perfect world, the kid would help keep the curves together, a kind of triple helix or a braid. Research shows that children do best with two parents, a mom and a dad together. Prior to procreating, people should be comfortable with at least a twenty-year future together.”
“Do you have children, Nin?”
“No. It’s easier to theorize if you have no experience.” She smiled broadly for a moment before laughing loud blats that she could not contain. She shook her golden mane and looked around the sparsely occupied and dimly lit bar. “I’m probably just a flake, a sex addict who can’t commit to just one guy.” She stirred around in her fresh drink as her eyes wandered. “Having a kid was not even a consideration with man one or three. I hoped Bosan would have been a great father. I found he was a terrible father for his kids from his first wife. The more I looked at that, the less I wanted to have his baby. He did not want another, probably because he could see that he stunk at parenthood. So I have left procreation to others. Do you want a baby?”
“Yes, after I finish this degree and get a job.”
“Tell me about Tot.”
“Bhat. It’s late, and I need to call him before I go to bed. We’ll have to do this again. It’s been fun. I love your perspective.” She stood up, finished her martini, stretched, and yawned. She noticed a grizzly man looked hungrily through the gloom at her navel.
“See you at eight, then,” Nin said. Porliche left, hopeful of finding documents the next day that would illuminate the mystery. She left Nin, a predator, surveying the men in the room.