Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

‘Most of the time it’s fine, really.’

‘But?’

‘But there are times when it’s frustrating, times when I yearn for someone to share thoughts with, to talk to about the sheer creative joy of physics.’

‘Joy?’

‘Yes, joy, the excitement of thinking at the edge, you know, of stepping right up to the boundary of human knowledge and then going beyond it. There can be nothing as exhilarating, as passionate, as creative as that moment. Who understands that, though, without knowing quantum physics or relativity or event horizons?’

‘Hey, I can’t pretend to know what those things are like, but I know about the joy of creation. When I’m painting and I catch the essence of what I’m searching for, there are no words that can explain that feeling and, like you say, all I want is to share the moment, to be with someone who understands that feeling without having to put it into words.’

‘My God, you understand what I mean. Essence, I like that, it’s a wonderful word.’

‘I may not be as smart as you, Jack, but I fucking know how you feel.’

We danced for a moment without further words. ‘What sort of painting do you do?’

‘Slightly abstract, but ideas rooted in the everyday that transcend what you’d normally expect. Not unlike what you do in a way—trying to look at well-known things in a new way, trying to push the boundaries of the usual understating of an object. Why don’t you come round and have a look sometime.’

‘I’d love to.’

Two days later I visited Caroline in her Titirangi home. It was set back from other houses with bush surrounding it on all sides. Once off the road it felt as though I was swallowed by greenery. The paving stones of the driveway were cracked and uneven, the encroaching trees of the bush out of control. A wooden deck encircled the house. It started on the driveway side of the building, but the land fell away so steeply at the rear that when I stood at the back rail the grass was more than four metres below. Now I was above the bush that only seconds before had engulfed me. There was a clear view of the city some fifteen kilometres away. Cicadas sang below and the smell of the trees was fresh. The back of the house had sliding doors, which were open, and I could see Caroline kneeling on the floor, hunched over paper on which she was drawing with a charcoal stick, her arms rotating in sweeps. She moved with urgency, but she was graceful, as though her drawing was in itself an artistic performance. Her hair, once tied up, had started to slip and strands of gold fell to her cheeks. As she worked, a spare hand pushed the strands behind her ears, but they soon came loose again. Suddenly she stopped working and stepped back to appraise the drawing. Her head was cocked to one side in the same way as when she stood on the terrace at the wedding just a couple of days before. Reluctantly I let the moment go and knocked on the window. Without hesitation, as though expecting my visit, she waved me inside. It was hot and there was a strong smell of smoke and dope in the room.

‘Jack, how wonderful to see you.’ She half ran to me and planted a wet lingering kiss on my cheek, just millimetres from the corner of my mouth. Beautiful and erotic, she smelt of perfume and sweat, drink and smoke. Smudges of charcoal marked her face and a loose shirt revealed most of her braless breasts. When she walked they moved playfully, excited to be free, delighted to be so gorgeous. ‘Come and see.’ She took my hand and led me to the picture on the floor. It was large, a metre and a half square. In one corner she had drawn a dish with fruit, in another a fish and in the middle a goblet. They all rested on an abstract table. ‘It’s a Last Supper representation. What do you think?’

‘Great.’ I wasn’t sure. I mean, the drawing was good, but it was just a bowl of fruit, a fish and a cup. It seemed a long way from the Last Supper, or any supper for that matter.

‘It represents the simplicity of the early church in contrast to the great edifice built by the early church fathers—as represented by the Da Vinci Last Supper, which I’ll incorporate in miniature somewhere, just not sure where yet.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘You don’t like it, do you?’

‘I do like it. Yes I like it very much. I think once you get the miniature on it will clarify its meaning better.’

‘Fancy a drink?’

‘Love one, thank you.’

‘What’s your tipple then, Jack? What do geniuses drink?’

‘You choose.’

‘Now you might regret that.’ She scurried off to the kitchen where I heard her opening and shutting cupboards with some gusto. I looked again at the picture, conjuring again the sight of her working. Scattered all over the floor, on chairs and beside the drawing, were open art books. I squatted to look, but Caroline was back from the kitchen before I turned any pages.

‘Here.’

I took the glass and drank. ‘Wow, what the hell is that?’ I coughed with the bite of the liquor on the back of my throat. I looked at the clear liquid as ice broke in the glass.

‘Tequila.’

‘I like it.’

‘Good, it’s the drink of the artist.’ She nodded to the books on the floor, her head to one side in her now familiar pose. ‘I like working with great pictures around me—Raphael, Da Vinci, Van Gogh.’ She paused and moaned as she looked at a picture of a Van Gogh wheat field, ‘Man, I love him. I know you may find this hard to understand, but sometimes I feel this kind of…wind blowing off them and it engulfs me in this creative storm. There are times I don’t even draw, I just sit and surrender myself. I close my eyes and I’m in Florence, or Paris, or Rome, walking the streets, modelling naked for the masters, painting, laughing with the artists, fucking them and sharing all their joys and sadness, success and failure.’ She closed her eyes as though she was half there already.

Her words touched my core. I thought such feelings were mine alone, but now I’d learnt she shared them. ‘I know just what you mean. Christ, it’s just like at the wedding—you seem to really know some truths. Where does it come from, Caroline?’

She touched her heart. ‘Do you ever feel like that?’

‘When I went to Cambridge and started walking through the old colleges I just felt this amazing resonance from the walls, as though the intelligence of everyone who had been there before me had soaked into them. And when I saw Newton’s old rooms at Trinity, it was as though a shadow of the man was burnt onto the walls. I cried, you know, to be there, where he worked and lived. I felt the same as you described, as if there was this…not so much wind, more a force entering my head, and I glimpsed something indefinable, some basic creative essence. Your word again.’

‘It’s weird to hear you talking about creativity. I never think of scientists as being creative—it runs against the grain of the image of the scientist poring over his experiment.’

‘Great science is at heart truly creative. All the great scientific masterworks: gravity, relativity, quantum theory—they’re all works of beauty, beautiful in their basic simplicity, in their power to affect our lives, to change us all. If only I could do the same. In my quiet moments I dream of touching that greatness.’

‘Does Mary understand what you yearn for?’

‘To be honest, no.’

‘Let’s drink some more tequila. Let’s seal our new-found understanding.’

‘You pour, I’ll drink.’

We drank for an hour. Caroline brought the tequila bottle and a plate of ice from the kitchen and we poured and dipped our hands in the plate like children fishing for sweets at a birthday party. Soon I was drunk, my head spun and I started floating whenever I closed my eyes. Caroline giggled when she stood, half fell and steadied herself by clutching my knee. ‘Let’s have some music, shall we?’ With a little effort she stood in front of a small tapedeck on some shelves opposite the couch where I sat. ‘Ah yes,’ she muttered to herself as she found a tape, dropped the plastic cover on the floor and noisily inserted the tape into the machine. John Lennon’s ‘Woman’ blasted the room.