Louisa Hall - Trinity

She, too, was often awake. For hours, we talked to each other in whispers. I twirled the phone cord around my pointer finger. I twirled the cord around my neck.

She called me her baby girl. I asked about the club. I asked about the tennis court. I told her how much I missed her.

Then I hung up, and climbed back into bed with my husband.

SOMETIMES, EVEN THEN, I COULDN’T SLEEP. SOMETIMES I COULDN’Tbear to be alone in the darkness.

Then I’d wake Stan up and put his cock in my mouth, because I felt I had to do something to justify waking him from his peaceful slumber.

So I’d put his cock in my mouth, and often it made me less hungry.

By then, that kind of thing was the only intimacy between us. I was down to ninety-five pounds, and something had changed so it hurt to have sex. It was like sandpaper when he was inside me. So then I just put his cock in my mouth, and after a while I started to like it, like sucking a little stone when you’re hungry.

LISTEN, I’M SORRY IF THIS STORY DISGUSTS YOU.

It disgusts me as well, but I know I won’t say it again, and I want to finish, now that I’ve started.

That summer and the following fall, when I was working for Robert, I kept losing weight. Sometimes I fainted. But if this worried Stan, he didn’t say so. It’s possible he believed that all women fainted.

At the end of the day, despite all the fainting, Stan seemed basically pleased and content to have a thin wife who cooked him dinner and worked to support his graduate studies.

I liked it, too. There was something very fine about fainting. I particularly liked coming to, after that long moment of darkness.

Then I’d look up and see Stan kneeling above me. There he was, saying my name, and at first his lips were moving in silence, and then I heard what he was saying, and I realized that in Stan’s mind, I was still gone.

For him, I was still lost in that darkness.

So for a few minutes, all on my own, I could watch him from somewhere else.

I could watch him full of the perfectly luxurious knowledge that he couldn’t have me. I was entirely my own for a moment.

But after a while, I’d start to feel bad about leaving him there in the lurch. Then we’d go through the whole post-faint routine. Where am I, I’d ask. Who are you. What happened.

Needless to say, I already knew. But still, I let him tell me. I allowed him to give me my position again. And then I let him carry me into the bedroom, and tuck me in, and put me to sleep, and throughout that year, I often had a bruise on the back of my head, and also I was basically happy.

By then I was ninety-two pounds. I’d surrendered myself absolutely, and I walked around with such a calm, blissful look on my face that everyone thought I was in love with my husband.

IN ADDITION TO WEIGHT LOSS, ANOTHER POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT OFthat year was that I managed to strengthen my focus.

During my years of eating too much, I’d been inefficient. I was exhausted and weighed down by the effort.

Once I gave that up, I became clear-eyed and quick. Robert was like that as well. I should mention that he was losing weight also.

During those months, when he was attempting to redeem the crimes he felt he’d committed, by regaining his influence on the committee, his eyes also burned like a saint’s eyes. He also seemed to grow lighter. He’d always been thin, but now he walked around in a portion of his former substance.

By then he knew his phones were tapped, and he suspected they’d planted moles in the office. It was hard for him to keep still. In his office, or while we waited outside an auditorium, or as we walked to the train station, I noticed that sometimes, in his agitation, his hands started to tremble.

There were times when he couldn’t even light his own cigarettes.

Then, avoiding the phones, he communicated largely through letters. He’d go to Washington all the time, to testify before different committees, and when he came back, his eyes burned brighter than ever.

He felt responsible, he said, for the bad state of affairs.

He’d made those bombs in the first place.

He hadn’t seen how bad it would become, and now, having arrived at the knowledge too late, he felt that the only way to redeem what he’d done was to maintain what waning influence he had left. Nevertheless, however, he felt his pursuers approaching.

In those days, he made every new person he met read that Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” presumably to make them know how he felt. That is to say, that he was a beast in the jungle, pursued by some as-yet-unknowable hunter.

Needless to say, he was misreading that story, which, as I learned at Rosemont, and as Henry James makes very clear in the numbingly didactic ending, is really about a man who misses the one love of his life because he’s so preoccupied with an imaginary pursuer. If you read that story with your eyes open at all, you’d know right away that it’s about a man who’s made blind by his fear, but by then Robert wasn’t reading things clearly.

He was agitated to the point of excessive quickness in everything he attempted. His positions shifted each day. One day, for instance, he’d be on one of his tears about setting himself free, turning his back on Washington, returning full time to his teaching.

The next day, however, he’d be back at work plotting strategies to regain the influence that he’d lost, because he didn’t really want to be free.

He wanted to be forgiven the sins he’d committed.

ONE DAY, A CREW CAME TO FILM HIM FOR A DOCUMENTARY THEYwere making, and in preparation he asked me to run back to his house and pick up his copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

So I went running off to Olden Manor, the director of the institute’s house, which was lodged among all the finest houses in Princeton, stately brick manors with white columns and long plantation porches.

They reminded me of the houses in the neighborhood I grew up in, and of houses in movies about the old South, haunted by the ghosts of the slaves who were once whipped there. All those ghosts: women with scars on their bodies, men with no faces. They called to me in whispers among the stately old sycamore trees that lined the well-maintained sidewalks.

I went as quickly as I could, following the directions Robert gave me, and when I finally did find Olden Manor, I saw a dead mallard at the end of the driveway.

It was lying there at the side of the road, its green head gleaming, its neck doubled back in a U, and its one open black eye staring straight at me.

WHEN SHE CAME TO THE DOOR, KITTY WASN’T HAPPY TO SEE ME. SHEwas wearing blue jeans and she seemed unsteady. She glared at me in the doorway while I explained why I’d come. Then she went inside to find the Bhagavad Gita.

While she was gone, I thought about those insinuations that had been made, about the girlfriend in San Francisco and the trip Robert was meant to have taken. But before I had time to come to any conclusions, Kitty came back with the Bhagavad Gita. It was a small, battered pink book with a creased spine, held together with Scotch tape. Somehow it made me sad just to see it.

But I took it, nevertheless, then ran back out past the dead mallard and all the plantation houses and found Robert with the film crew. I gave him the book, and he started flipping through the worn pages, looking for some line he’d forgotten.

And then, a few minutes later, when they sat him before the lights and the boom and asked him what he was thinking when the Trinity Test first went off, he looked straight at the camera with that dark, beseeching expression and said:

“I was thinking of that line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”