Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“Elegant as ever, Leo.”

“I did make an effort. Did you notice the necktie?”

“You look awful. Your shirt is all wrinkled.”

She straightened his necktie, thinking of all the times she had tied his shoelaces, rounded up his schoolbooks, and rescued him from punishment with an apt lie. He drained his glass in one gulp, his eyes studiously avoiding the library. The same memories must have been flooding through his mind. Anna kicked herself for having gone back so quickly to maternal gestures. Under his sloppy clothes, she recognized the tight-lipped boy who was either too shy to show his teeth or too clever to let his self-satisfaction show. His nose, which was extraordinarily large for such a narrow face, had given Leo quite a complex at puberty. Without his dark, laughing eyes, he could have been ugly. Embarrassed at being examined so closely, he waggled his eyebrows like a dime-store crooner.

“Did anyone offer you a drink?”

“I need to keep a clear head. I’ve been pressed into service as an interpreter for the French mathematician.”

“Totally unnecessary. His English is excellent. My father played the same trick on me. He’s hoping I’ll cozy up to Richardson III. Or is it IV? A goldbrick of the first water.”

Anna felt caught in a trap. So it wasn’t Leonard who had contrived their meeting. The door to the library had been closed for a long time. She said yes to the drink. Her friend slouched over to the bar. His formal shirt looked wrong on him. Anna had grown used to his inevitable T-shirts with their obscure taglines. His extreme sloppiness could easily fool an unwary observer. The younger Adams hid his crystalline mental rigor under the trappings of a two-bit rebel. He was nonetheless a pure analytic machine, like the computers that he had discovered at a young age and that had sealed his fate. His determined nonconformism had been partly responsible for his father’s thinning hair and his mother’s alcoholism, though it may also have been their natural consequence.

He returned with two glasses the size of soup tureens. Judging from the quantity of scotch in his glass and the sparsity of hair on his forehead, Leo had inherited from both his parents. Calvin Adams poked his head into the room and waved at them: the guests were arriving. His son responded with a blink. Anna wondered at his unusual docility. She remembered a night when he had walked out of the house barefoot, slamming the door behind him. He hadn’t managed to run very far. His parents sent Tine down to the police station to pick him up. Leo had refused to speak to his progenitors for more than three weeks. He had just turned ten.

“I hear that your father married one of his grad students. That must have given Rachel fits.”

“Ancient history. Since then she’s found herself a tanned anthropologist from Berkeley. Some catch!”

“Don’t complain. It could have been the other way around.”

She smiled, imagining her white-maned and patrician father in his gold-buttoned blazer on the arm of a wiry con man in khaki fatigues. Her mother with a pretty young minx was less hard to imagine.

Leonard lit a cigarette. Anna had stopped smoking on her return from Europe, not without difficulty. She stifled the impulse. Over the past several days, her hunger for cigarettes had sharply revived. Everyone in the world smoked except her.

“Why did you come back to Princeton, Anna?”

She finished her scotch in a single long swallow. The question was too direct to elicit a considered answer. Leo lacked nuance. As he had often said to her, “There are ten different kinds of people: those who understand binary numbers, and then everyone else.” His world was peopled with 1s and 0s, in black and white, while Anna’s harbored every gradation of gray. He was discrete, she continuous. They had never managed to define a border between them that was both simple and permeable yet also watertight enough that neither would dissolve in the other. Unlike in mathematics, Leo’s infinity seemed more voracious than Anna’s.

The Florence caper two years earlier had cut off their debate. One morning the doorbell rang in the distance in Gianni’s vast palazzo. He was asleep. He slept like a log, and the activities of the previous night gave him little reason to rise from his torpor. Anna had crawled out of bed, grabbed a man’s shirt off the floor, and yelled in Italian at the jerk who had the gall to come knocking at that hour to be patient. She’d opened the door to discover Leonard. He had a duffel bag in one hand and an indecipherable smile on his face. “Surprise!” was all he said in explanation. And surprised he had been to see a half-naked Gianni appear behind Anna. Leo had turned and walked away without a word. She hadn’t seen him since.

Gianni hadn’t made a scene of any kind, hadn’t asked her to “choose.” She’d had no choice to make. Everything was already ruined. He had let her go with only one reproach: “I wish you had told me about it first, Anna. It’s never pleasant to realize that you’re a stand-in. Especially when, like me, you spend your life tracking down forgers.” But he didn’t accept her apologies.

Leo punched her on the shoulder. He hated it when she drifted away from him.

“What happened to the Italian guy?”

“I guess it didn’t work out.”

Virginia Adams was waving her veils to draw them toward the table.

“Save me a place next to you.”

“So glad to be your all-purpose stopgap.”

“Same here.”

If you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,”

it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“The L fifty-one is available in two colors. The baby blue is particularly popular.”

“I don’t trust the Prescot line. The L eighteen had definite safety issues. Were they able to fix the Freon leak?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gödel. No one has ever complained about it. Except you.”

Our prosperous appliance salesman shifted his weight from one leg to the other, all the while admiring his nails. With his rabbit’s teeth and a smile that promised heaven on the installment plan, Smith looked like a Mickey Rooney gone to seed. He endured my husband’s interrogation with a lack of interest that bordered on insult. In his defense, this was only the latest of numerous sessions in which his patience had been tested.

“You don’t carry any European models?”

“Why not Russian while you are at it? Your husband sure is a card, Mrs. Gödel!”

Kurt dodged a manly punch on the arm. Smith had to recover his balance by making an awkward lunge.

“There is a whole world between the USA and the USSR. Are you unaware of it?”

“They’re all commies! What we sell here, Mr. Gödel, is good old U.S. technology.”

“Smith! You can’t suspect an appliance of being Communist, now, can you?”

“I know what I know, ma’am. And I’ll give you a $25 rebate on the Golden Automatic because you’re such good clients.”

“It costs $400, Kurt! We can’t afford to buy ourselves a refrigerator at that price every year!”

Ignoring my distrust, Smith polished a dazzling, chrome-appointed Admiral Fridge, priced at $299. He tried to clinch the sale with a series of unanswerable arguments: the model had an extra freezer compartment and the door opened either to the right or to the left. I hadn’t suffered the conversation of the greatest visionaries of the century to take the oily condescension of a local hardware man lying down. I dragged my husband outside.

“Adele, we need a new refrigerator! Ours is a hazard. We’re liable to get gassed by it.”

“We’ll have one sent to us from New York. Smith is too certain that we’ll buy from him. He’s stopped making any effort. He’s robbing us.”