Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Then it was quiet again, at least quiet between us. There were other sounds, I suppose — probably milk was steaming, and silverware clinking, and newspaper crinkling — but I wasn’t noticing.

“Do you know what I’m wondering about?” Magda asked. I did not proffer my guesses, which were my dreads. “Rema’s hair,” she said. “I am wondering how is she wearing it?”

I must have looked at Magda strangely (but not on account of her question, instead mostly because I had my hand on that crumpled clue and I was still discussing Tzvi and Harvey and everything within the privacy of myself) because Magda began to explain herself: “It’s just that we used to fight over her hair. She’d hardly brush it, and she’d let it hang in her face and you couldn’t see her sweet features and she was making herself look vulgar and it would be this big argument. Between us, it really was ugly, what she’d do with her hair.”

I offered cautiously, “Her hair looks very nice these days.” And having the chance to say something that was simply true — it was not as much of a relief as I thought it would be. I coughed. Strands of Rema’s cornsilk hair seemed to be snaked at the interstices of my bronchi.

“And so now — well — so how is she wearing her hair now? She looks pretty?” Magda asked, rolling her eyes and smiling derisively, at herself I think, not at me.

“She’s very smart. Rema is very smart,” I said to Magda, but — and this just struck me now — I suspect it was myself I was accusing with that blunt comment.

“I smell oranges?” Magda said.

I said, “I’m sorry. You’d like her hair, I think. The way it looks now. It’s very tidy. And a beautiful color. Blonde like the inside of corn. She wears it usually in a low—” I demonstrated a ponytail with a gesture. “Holds it in a wide gold clip. And it’s long and trim. And in the summer she pins the flyaway hairs back with neat little parallel hairpins that are a natural color instead of just plain black. But she still gets these pretty little loose strands; they get kind of extra bleachy blonde-ish and wavy in the summertime, I think naturally, or maybe she does that on purpose. My mom used to do that with lemon juice, little highlights like that.” I unpeeled the pads of my fingers from the sticky surface of the table and saw the whorled print of my own grease, and it looked like the image from Tzvi’s research paper. “More or less like that, anyway, is what her hair looks like,” I added quickly. “I mean it’s not like I see Rema every day, so who knows what she’s doing with her hair on just any old day.”

“You love her, don’t you?” Magda said.

I re-adhered and de-adhered my finger pads on the sticky table. I patted at the cookie crumbs on the plate where there were no longer cookies. I think I said nothing and looked nowhere, but Magda, like Rema, knew how to crowd up the silent space. “I apologize if I have made you uncomfortable,” she said. “Please understand that I am not narrow-minded in these ways. It makes me happy to see that you love her. It would make me happy to know that she has a lover. I’m just saying this, about this love you seem to have, partially because, well, her husband: I never saw it in him. I never saw that he loved her. That is why you came to see me, yes, because you love her?”

I spotted the Rema-waisted waitress, re-emerged from the back, attending to a nearby table.

“Rema,” I declared, “isn’t the type to have affairs under any circumstances.”

No perceptible response in the spine of the waitress, no twitch of attention.

Then I dropped a spoon I hadn’t realized I was holding. I reached out to my sticky Blackberry and put it in my pocket. Soon afterward Magda left the coffee shop.

I love you , I wrote on the bill when I paid it, wrote as if a kind of test, in case somehow that waitress might really be Rema.

That evening, after watching the TV weather and reassuringly or disappointingly, I’m not sure which, receiving no signals from the forecast — I needed to verify constantly for myself that I wasn’t perceiving patterns and signals that weren’t actually there — I finally placed a call to the Royal Academy. I somewhat lost control of the conversation. This proved in the end fortuitous, perhaps even destined, or at least, I might say, determined , as in the folding of certain proteins according to the dictates of RNA.

I dialed what appeared to be the main number. “Yes. I’m returning a call?”

“Are you calling about the marital tension?”

“Someone called me.”

“Yes. Do you know your party’s extension?”

“Well, really, like I said, I’m returning a call. I was the object of calling, not the subject.”

There was a bit of confusion, since I really didn’t know to whom I was returning a call. So I mentioned that I was calling from Buenos Aires in hopes that the receptionist would then be put in mind of the expense I was incurring. Our “conversation” was not progressing well, and then on impulse I dropped Harvey’s name — which I of course immediately regretted doing — but suddenly there was a little bit of tender piano music, I was being transferred, and then, abruptly—

“You’re calling about the dog?” a trembly, almost theremin-y voice swelled.

“Yes,” I said quite surprised, “I think I am.”

“But the job is in Patagonia, not Buenos Aires. In El Calafate, right on the Moreno Glacier. You know that, yes? I think it wasn’t clear on the posting.”

“Excuse me?”

“El Calafate,” she repeated with warbling irritation. “Patagonia.”

“That’s where the dog is?” I asked.

“Listen. Calling four times in a row doesn’t help. We have your phone number—”

“But I’m not at my home phone anymore—”

“But like I was trying to explain, if you’re willing to be based in Patagonia, then there’s a real chance—”

“Is this related to the offer of fellowship—?”

“Listen,” she said, the pitch of her voice dropping, “the truth is — what the truth is — well the truth is that I just don’t know. And everyone’s been calling with questions. The person before you asked me how we knew that information could be retrieved from black holes. Was that a joke? Why ask me? Was he mocking me? This is not my regular post; this is just a temporary position for me and I’m feeling really overwhelmed—” she said, her voice flaking.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said, with genuine emotion, because I was sincerely moved by this stranger’s circumstances, even from the little I knew of them, just from the timbre of and tremble in her voice. “Really. I am really sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, obviously crying — lately everyone crying to me — and even laughing a little bit as well at the same time. “How ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t know why I can’t just keep my selves together,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said then. “It’s okay to cry,” I said. And the strange thing was that, not having actually to see this woman, not having actually to feel responsible for her distress, I really did feel it was more than okay to cry. In person, to be honest, I generally find weeping people repulsive. What can I do? I don’t have other antisocial personality disorder traits. I went on, “Crying can be like squeezing the pus out of a gluteal abscess. I mean, listen, some wounds just grow larger and more infected when you expel them, but with others that may be the only option. It’s a risk. You just don’t want to get obsessed with the wound; you don’t want to be looking for pus every day, poking and prodding, and making an ugly mess of your skin … but shedding a few tears over the phone to a stranger … well, maybe that’s just right.”