Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

The first time Andy met Louisa, she was covered in blood. He was a bit bloodied himself, having just suffered a minor bicycle accident where Nassau intersects with Mercer and nobody can see himself coming or going. It was a Sunday morning in 1994, and Andy was wearing the ridiculous clothing he’d let himself get talked into by the cute salesgirl at Kopp’s, purple spandex shorts—“junk-huggers!” Rosenblum hooted—and a black and silver nylon shirt. Anyway, he’d been daydreaming, yes, but he was reflexively careful at that intersection. And then an Audi out of nowhere, some cursing, an unnecessary ambulance, and now here he was, cradling what was almost certainly a broken wrist and thinking about his dissertation and the way the Mercer County emergency room smelled like urine and paint. The orange plastic chair was hard under his butt; his bicycle-friendly spandex shorts offered no padding whatsoever.

Then, as CNN began to rotate through yet another story on O.J. Simpson, this girl sat down next to him, hair trailing down her shoulders and around her face, the most magnificent sample of human hair he’d ever seen. Brown and gold streaks and some blond in there too, curls and waves, like in a magazine. The face wasn’t bad either, as far as he could tell from profile: a nice curve of the cheek, a slightly oversized, bumpy nose, a full mouth. But it was that hair he couldn’t stop looking at. He had the absurd compulsion to stick his hands in it, and was grateful to his probably broken wrist for stopping what would have otherwise been a sure breach of etiquette.

She was not looking at him. Her left hand was wrapped in red-stained gauze, and she had blood on her white T-shirt, and blood on her jeans.

“What are you here for?” he asked. The question was absurd, but he felt that if he talked to her, he would almost certainly not stick his good hand in her hair, or, if he did, conversation would offer him an opportunity to first ask permission.

She turned her head. The face was prettier straight on than it was in profile, nice eyes, the shape of almonds, and irises the color of almonds too, and the bumps in the nose receded as a matter of perspective. She had small, shell-like ears, each one rimmed with stud earrings. She smiled. “I cut myself.”

“Right,” he said. She smiled at him again, and for the first time since the Audi, he didn’t think, even obliquely, about his wrist. “How so?”

“Opening a can of caviar. Isn’t that ridiculous? I think I cut a cephalic vein. The shit will not stop bleeding.” She looked down at her bandaged arm, sighed heavily.

“A cephalic vein, huh?” he said. “Interesting.” Here Andy was thinking of the Latin word cephalicus and trying to show off. “Isn’t that a vein in your head?”

“Your arm,” she said, holding out hers. It was a thin, freckled arm, finely covered with reddish gold hairs, except for the part that was wrapped in reddening gauze.

“But cephalization is the formation of neural structures in the head.” He knew this from his biology training. “So that doesn’t make any sense, that it would be in your arm.”

“And yet it is.”

“But that doesn’t make sense.” Why was he fighting with her? “Are you a biologist?”

She shook her head. “I’m actually a nurse,” she said. “In Philly. Which is too bad, because if I were in Philly I’d probably get some kind of professional courtesy. But of course I have to cut myself in Princeton, where nobody knows me. And so,” she said, grandly, “I wait.”

“Was it really a can of caviar?”

“Who would make that up?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No worse than your wrist,” she said, looking at the wrist he was cradling. Her gaze was pointed; his wrist was in his lap. Andy crossed his legs. Oh, these ridiculous bicycle shorts!

“How long do you think I’m going to wait, anyway?” she asked, raising her almond-colored eyes.

“I’ve been here since eight thirty.”

“Christ,” she said. “It’s almost noon.”

“Is it?” Could he say to her that time stopped the second he first caught sight of her and her hair? She leaned back against the chair, closed her eyes. She had long black lashes, thick like a paintbrush. She breathed in and out deeply, as though she were a person preparing to sleep. Andy hadn’t spent time with a woman with anything like regularity in months. Most of his friends in the department were male, and Rosenblum, of course, and even the plurality of his students. How nice it was, he thought, to talk to a woman! To this beautiful woman!

“What are you doing in Princeton?” he asked, even though she gave no indication she wanted to keep talking.

“Boyfriend,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“Oh,” Andy said. He did not feel dejected, because he had never considered himself an actual candidate to become this woman’s boyfriend; the fact that she already had one couldn’t be a deterrent from a position he had never considered occupying. How could he ever be this woman’s boyfriend? The women Andy dated were severe, prone to nervous breakdowns over their studies. When they cut themselves, it was usually on purpose. “Where is he now?”

“He had to study. He’s got his math orals coming up.”

“So he just dropped you here?”

“I know, right?” She opened her eyes. “It’s probably time to get a new boyfriend.”

But before Andy could follow that tantalizing lead—what kind of new boyfriend and where would you go looking for this new boyfriend?—a woman with a clipboard appeared in the doorway to the examining room. “Waite? Andrew Waite?”

He stood.

“Is she telling you to wait?” the woman said. Lou. Lou asked him this. She was sitting up again, and the gauze around her wrist looked ever darker with blood, and he wanted to pick her up and carry her off to a better place or, at the very least, give her his place in line.

Instead, he said, “That’s my last name. Waite.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Do you want my turn?”

She smiled at him again, gently, as though he were a fool.

“You look like you’re in worse shape than I am,” he said in a rush. “Seriously. I’ll be fine. You should take my turn, you’re bleeding to death.”

She shook her head and a curl of that hair fell into her face. “That’s nice,” she said. “Thank you, that’s really nice, but you should go ahead. I’m not going to die.”

Andy felt himself heartened by this. This girl wasn’t going to die. Louisa—he did not yet know she was Louisa—said she wasn’t going to die. And he did not yet know that he shouldn’t believe her.

”Okay,” he said, and followed the beckoning of the woman with the clipboard, and when he turned to look at her one more time, she winked at him, and he was fairly certain he blushed back. He wished once more that he was wearing a different pair of shorts.

HANK ROSENBLUM, ANDY’S friend, mentor, and guide to all things masculine, who had been divorced four times yet paradoxically considered himself an expert on women, said that she had just been looking to flirt. In Rosenblum’s opinion, women who said, “I probably need a new boyfriend” to the goobers breathing down their necks in emergency rooms were almost certainly just looking for a little affirmation, but still, he said, there was no reason Andy couldn’t keep an eye out. In fact, Rosenblum said, if she had a boyfriend in the math department, he’d be happy to do a little spying on Andy’s behalf. Although Rosenblum himself was a member of Princeton’s biology department, he had a few friends in math he liked to hit up for statistical models every so often. Further, the mathematicians enjoyed a garden behind their building where a man could smoke a pipeful of tobacco in peace. Rosenblum liked to spend time there, identifying flowers with a pipe in his mouth. He fancied himself a gentleman horticulturist.