Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“So you’re angry at Adele?”

“I love Adele. Who wouldn’t love her? I asked her why is the mustache so important? Why do you need him? She says she doesn’t know why. Nachman, you live with numbers. One plus one is two. It was always two, and it will always be two. For you there are problems, but no mysteries. The solutions exist, so take a vacation.”

“Don’t say another word. A vision is coming. I see a man who looks like me walking on an empty beach. He is on vacation. I know this because he is barefoot, collecting seashells. Now he is holding a shell to his ear, listening to the ocean, the chaos in which this shell was born. He knows that it was shaped according to a law which is expressed in the ratio of the rings on the shell. My God, he realizes the shell can be described mathematically. The shell is a resolution of chaos, a mathematical entity. Do you understand?”

“Yes. You are constitutionally incapable of taking a vacation.”

“What’s real is numbers. When I solve a problem, I collect a piece of the real. Other men collect paintings, cars, Hawaiian shirts. They even collect women. So I’m a little different. You’re angry at Adele, but why at me?”

“You need to believe I’m angry at you?”

Norbert was clearly angry at Nachman. The feeling was mixed, but anger was there. He was angry because he had felt obliged, as a matter of pride, to confess the affair with the student. His confession sounded like boasting. It was forced, somehow unconvincing. Nachman understood that Norbert was embarrassed as well as angry, and he was concerned to protect his wife.

“Does Adele know about the guy who kissed the girl?” asked Nachman.

“A man is a man.”

“He doesn’t have to account for himself?”

“There is always something for which there is no accounting. Take, for example, the whole world.”

“This is between you and me, not you and the whole world. If you’re angry at me, you should tell me why.”

“Let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”

Norbert got up and strode to the bar. He reached into his pants pockets, fingers scrabbling along his thighs, searching for money to tip the bartender. There had been ugly tension between them when he ordered. The gesture meant Norbert was leaving with no hard feelings. It also meant that Norbert had forgiven Nachman.

They drove in silence to Nachman’s house. As Nachman got out of the car, Norbert said, “Come to dinner this Friday. Adele told me to invite you.” Norbert’s expression, in the glow of the dashboard, was unreadable. His big head and the wide slope of his shoulders resembled a pit bull’s. The shape was very familiar to Nachman. Even if he saw only Norbert’s head, at a distance, in a crowded street among a hundred moving heads, it would be enough to recognize his old friend. Nachman said, “I’ll look forward to dinner.”

Later that night, as always before going to sleep, he sat in bed reading. The book was called Die Innenwelt der Mathematiker. Nachman read German slowly and with difficulty, struggling with the sentences, consulting a dictionary every few minutes. Five pages took him nearly an hour, but he persisted. The book examined the question of whether mathematics is a social creation or a mysterious gift offered to certain individuals. Nachman didn’t see how it could be a social creation. Mathematicians collaborated sometimes, but he had never heard anyone say, “We solved the problem.” Nachman had never even met a mathematician who could tell you how a solution came to him or her. It just came or it didn’t. The great genius Ramanujan said the goddess of Namakkal came to him in his dreams bearing formulas. Well, no goddess had ever come to Nachman. But he did occasionally awake at night and stumble from his bed to a nearby table where he kept a pencil and paper. In the morning, when he discovered that he had scribbled the solution to a problem, he didn’t always remember having done so. What could be less social? It couldn’t even be said Nachman socialized with himself. In truth, he didn’t really know what “social” meant. He and Norbert were the closest of friends, but were they social? Norbert was Norbert. In his pit-bull head, he dreamed of cars. Nachman was Nachman. He dreamed of numbers.

With the Innenwelt book open in his lap, Nachman fell asleep and had a vivid, frightening dream. He saw Adele kissing the mustache man. Nachman ran desperately toward them to pull her away. “No!” he cried, and he found himself awake, crying, “No, no, no!” his feet churning beneath the blanket, running nowhere.

Shaken by the dream, Nachman turned off the lamp and lay staring into the darkness. He didn’t know what, if anything, his dream had revealed to him. He was aware only of a certain tumultuous feeling. He’d been aware of it before, when Adele had asked if he was in love with her. He saw the silent question in her green eyes, and he heard her cigarette voice say, “I thought we were friends.” Nachman suddenly felt very lonely, lying in the darkness, wondering if he was in love with Adele.

NACHMAN HAD ARRIVED IN NEW YORKthe previous evening, and was walking along Fifth Avenue when she came up behind him, calling, “Nachman, Nachman, is that you?” He looked back and saw a woman shining with happiness, for which he, apparently, was responsible. His mere existence had turned on her lights. Nachman kissed her on both cheeks, and then they stood chatting at the corner of Forty-second Street, the millions passing with the minutes. When Nachman parted from her, he was holding her business card and the key to her apartment in Chelsea, having promised to join her and her husband for dinner that evening.

“If you arrive before us, just wait in the apartment,” she had said. “It’s been so many years, Nachman. I’m Helen Ferris now. Do you know my husband, Benjamin Strong Ferris? He’s a lawyer. Also a name in computer science and cryptology. I assume you’re in New York for the cryptology conference. Benjamin goes there to find geniuses like you for his company.”

“As a matter of fact …” Nachman had said, but she was still talking.

“It would be wonderful if we could have a drink, just you and me, and remember the old days, but I have to run. There’ll be time to talk later. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we ran into each other. Actually, Nachman, I followed you for about five blocks. I couldn’t believe it was you. Benjamin will be so delighted. He’s heard me talk about you so often. Should I cook, or should we have dinner out? Oh, let’s decide later.”

When she had stopped talking, Nachman said he didn’t know the name Benjamin Strong Ferris, and he didn’t consider himself a genius. “I’m a good mathematician,” he added. “Good is rare enough.”

Helen Ferris smiled with affectionate understanding, as if his modesty amused her, but there was also something more. She seemed to believe a special bond existed between them. While Nachman’s every word nourished her smile, her dark brown eyes bloomed with sensual anticipation, as if at any moment Nachman might do something very pleasing. To disguise his ignorance — what special bond was there between them? — Nachman became expansive, even somewhat confessional.

He told Helen Ferris that he was indeed in New York for the cryptology conference; he’d been invited to a job interview by a representative of the Delphic Corporation. But whoever had invited him hadn’t given his name.

Helen Ferris obviously took great pleasure in listening to Nachman, and yet, in the center of her rapt, almost delirious focus, Nachman saw a curious blank spot, as if she were not conversing so much as savoring. Her brown eyes devoured his, and her smile suggested a rictus in its unrelieved tension and shape. This intensity, and her alarming red lipstick, made Nachman think she wanted to eat him. A smile is a primitive expression, he supposed, carried in the genes, the reflexive anticipation of a meal — not necessarily of people, but who knows the ancestral diet? Nachman smiled in response, but felt no desire to eat her.