Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

Anna stopped on the steps of Pine Run to say hello to Jean, Mrs. Gödel’s favorite nurse, who was juggling a cup of steaming coffee and a cigarette. “You look really great, Miss Roth! Did you do something to your hair?” Anna instinctively raised a hand to her head. To her utter surprise, the pink demon had done a nice job. The young woman could tell as soon as she’d rushed to a mirror after the session. Jean gave her an update on Adele’s state of health. The old lady was very agitated, and they couldn’t manage to bring down her blood pressure. Anna pursed her lips. Their escapade had exacted its price.

The nurse stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of her clog, then slipped the half-smoked butt into her pocket. “Gladys gave you a haircut, and you took Adele to the movies. You’re quite the adventuress!” She walked off laughing.

Adele had gone back to looking like a sulking little girl. She was bored stiff.

“You don’t want to watch TV?”

“It’s shit in a glass jar!”

“What if I read to you for a change?”

“Anything but that! I much prefer conversation. You are too fond of books and not enough of people. You remind me of my husband.”

Anna had been hearing this reproach all her life. As a child, she was always being made to get some air. She would hide in the closet so she could keep reading. Since her empty-handed return to Princeton, she had been devouring crime novels one after another, as though fictional mayhem could somehow make her own unhappiness more bearable. While others fed on cloying, sentimental novels, Anna, under the guilty tent of her duvet, wolfed down murders, rapes, whores, pimps, dealers, and blow jobs. She needed the alternate dimension from which these dark words issued. Once the book was closed, she washed her hands, drank a glass of wine, and felt a momentary relief, despite her soiled heart.

“I have the impression that reading helps me understand others better.”

“No one can go into another person’s head. You have to learn to live with solitude. None of your books will change that. A fuck is the one honest thing.”

Adele looked at her out of the corner of her eye. The young woman hadn’t flinched.

“Do you miss sex at this point?”

Mrs. Gödel smiled. That she had taken a step closer to the Nachlass crossed Anna’s mind, but she didn’t dwell on it. She surprised herself by her indifference.

“I miss the desire more than I miss the pleasure. I was quite ravenous in that department. Kurt stopped his attentions toward me too early. He neglected his body and by the same token he neglected mine.”

“How did you manage?”

“Was I an adulteress? No. I had a very strict upbringing. It never goes away. I suffered so much from the years when we lived in sin, as we used to say, that I swore I would be a model wife. And I was. Yet men were still attracted to me. I was good-looking before I became this … thing.”

She weighed her enormous bosoms in her hands with an air of disgust.

“I look like an ocean liner. It’s horrible to feel that you are imprisoned in a strange body. Inside, I am twenty years old. No, actually, I am your age. My age at the time I met Kurt.”

“How did you win his affections? I know you were attractive physically, but Mr. Gödel was not an ordinary man.”

Adele twisted her wedding ring around her swollen finger. It hurt Anna to see it. The old woman couldn’t bring herself to wear it around her neck. She preferred mild pain to symbolic betrayal.

“Scientists are men like the rest. Genius or not. I applied Adele’s theorem. It has never let me down. But the world has changed, as you have pointed out to me.”

Adele smiled impishly. Two rays of light came to tickle the wall. Where they crossed, a perfect, dazzling square seemed to open another window. “God is with us,” breathed Adele. The two women stared at the poetic and ephemeral undulation, until a cloud dissolved it.

“First, you must learn how to listen to men. Let them talk, even if they are sermonizing on a subject you know more about than they do. Especially then! And if the subject is foreign to you, soak up their words like manna from heaven. Inside each man, there is a prophet sleeping. If his liebe Mama ignored him at all as a child, you will appear a godsend to him. With your fresh face of a Virgin Mary, it shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

“Is there a word for female machismo?”

“So what? All that matters is the result.”

The young woman didn’t tell Adele that she reminded her of her mother. Rachel had always granted herself permission to play every angle. Anna, by contrast, had never resolved the ambivalence of her upbringing, which enjoined her to be a seductress and also an intellectual. One always detracted from the other. And mixing the two felt inappropriate, shameful. She preferred to wait for someone to seduce her.

“I follow the basic principles of metallurgy. First, heat up your work piece! I don’t need to explain how, you are not so naïve. Then make it cold all of a sudden. It works every time.”

“You applied this method to Kurt Gödel?”

“He was always very susceptible to my flattery.”

She cupped both hands under her chin and spoke in an admiring voice: “ ‘Kurtele, your talk was by far the best!’ I would watch his smile appear. Even if, between you and me, I had quietly grabbed a few winks during the lecture.”

“But according to Adele’s theorem, we have to willingly subordinate ourselves in order to seduce. I’m sorry, Adele, but it’s a reactionary idea.”

“Seduction is nothing. Constancy is what is difficult. And it was worth it. In spite of everything. In the end, it all depends on how the mother of the chosen male brought her son up. If he was the center of everything, he will insist on staying at the center. If he was neglected, he will need to be reassured.”

“And which upbringing did your husband have?”

“His was at the exact intersection of the two.”

Anna thought about the letters from Marianne that Adele had burned. Relations between the two Frau Gödels must have been exceptionally violent.

“Let us leave my mother-in-law to one side! I will be seeing her again soon enough. If you don’t believe my theory, try this experiment. Look a man straight in the eyes. But pay attention! There cannot be the slightest trace of sarcasm! Then purr at him, ‘You’re so strong …!’ ”

Anna stifled a fit of giggles. She couldn’t decide just how seriously to take the conversation. Nor where the trap lay.

“You’ll see. Not one of them can resist. The sentence freezes their brains. Of course, some are more resistant than others. Still, the information neutralizes their thought process for at least a moment. It strokes their prehistoric brain. It is a shortcut implanted in little boys by their mother.”

This time, Anna smiled happily. She could easily imagine the young Adele’s blandishments.

“It is all in the conviction of your voice and the ingenuousness of your gaze. My theorem also works on cats.”

“I’ll try it on mine. Before attacking the human species.”

“I thought I noticed cat hair on your clothes! My favorite are the Manx cats from the Isle of Man. They have no tail. My neighbors had three of them. One day I told them I was going to cut off the tail of my alley cat to make it look more like theirs. They implored me to reconsider. ‘Mrs. Gödel, cats need their tails in order to maintain their balance!’ And blah, blah, blah. They didn’t see the joke. A few days later, my hairdresser in Princeton tried to talk me out of committing such a horrible act. Hulbeck, our psychiatrist, had been telling everyone in sight. The madman’s wife, is she crazy? Yes! The genius’s mate, is she a genius? Certainly not! That’s how they thought of me in the neighborhood.”