Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“But is it you?” she asked Azarya with the directness of a small child, and he laughed.

“But where are your”-she curled her index fingers beside her ears- “your baguettes à cheveux?”

Azarya, who didn’t know French but couldn’t help getting Pascale’s drift, pointed to the Red Sox baseball cap he was wearing. He lifted it off his head with a flourish, and two dark-blond payess came flopping down.

Pascale shrieked with laughter, which cracked them all up, Gabriel Sinai joining in with a high whinnying noise.

“Non, non , you must put them back tout de suite! It is so much better like that. Oui, comme ça! Plus beau! You are a beautiful boy! It is amazing how the beauty comes out. Better, why don’t you just snip, snip?”

She ran with her frantic movements, the high heels clacking on the wooden floor, to the kitchen drawer, and pulled out the poultry shears- Cass was surprised she knew where to find them-and advanced toward Azarya, in a pretend menacing way, moving her black-sheathed legs like a stalking panther. She jiggled the poultry shears beneath Azarya’s right ear. Cass uneasily wondered what Pascale was capable of in such an antic mood.

“I’m not quite ready for that.” Azarya was laughing back at her, not looking worried himself-but, then, he didn’t know Pascale. “One thing at a time.”

“One thing at a time,” she echoed back. “But of course! We will snip first the one and then the other!”

They were all laughing, Pascale most of all, suddenly thrust into one of her high-spirited moods. In one of those quick reversals that Cass had seen in her before-in fact, to which he owed his marriage-she now liked Azarya with all the savagery of her certainty. Pascale was kind, as Cass had always known, but with the kindness of a child. She’d been repelled by the sense of his strangeness, perhaps believing that his appearance entailed a rejection of the world outside his own, a smug assertion of superiority. But as soon as she had been able to recognize a fellow human being and see that he was a citizen of a wider sphere-or in any case longed to be-her natural kindness had blossomed.

Azarya handed Pascale the tulips, and with a happy little exclamation she tore off the paper from the bunch of purples and pinks and yellows.

“Very beautiful,” she said, gathering them to her narrow chest. “The colors of spring.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Also the colors of the poet.” He then presented her with the bottle of wine.

“I hope it’s good. You can imagine how little I know about French wines. The man in the wine store said this was a good one.”

“Bordeaux! Oh, it is very good! You are being civilized rapidement . Only now let me cut off the unlovely baguettes!”

Cass had never seen Pascale this animated. It occurred to him that having mathematicians around was probably familiar and therefore wonderful for her, reminding her of her girlhood in the idyllic Bures-sur-Yvette, which she’d spent benignly ignored by her distracted father and hanging upside down on the jungle gym with other mathematical offspring, who were “not so annoying as other children.” Gabriel was fluent in French and clearly enjoyed speaking it, so he directed most of his comments to Pascale and in her native tongue, which put her in a jollier mood still. Gabriel knew Claude Puisssant very well and thought that he might even remember Pascale as a young child, sometimes playing piano at gatherings.

“I did not play so well!” she said.

“That’s true,” he agreed, and she shrugged and poured some more of the Bordeaux for herself and Cass. Gabriel and Azarya were sticking to the Carmel.

But the real treat was to come after dinner, when Gabriel loped over to Pascale’s baby-grand piano. There was sheet music on top and Gabriel looked it over for a while, and then sat down and, without any sheet music, forcefully played the famous third movement of Mozart’s Turkish Sonata. He immediately launched into something else, sounding vaguely familiar, though it was Azarya who got it first, laughing gleefully, and explained to Cass and Pascale that Professor Sinai was playing the same movement from the Turkish Sonata, only “upside down”-that is, inverted.

Azarya was elated with Gabriel’s inversion of the Mozart and asked him if he could try something that he, Azarya, thought was possible, though he didn’t have the technical proficiency to do it.

“The idea is to combine the harmonies from the Prelude in C Major, the first in Volume I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier , with the arpeggios of the first étude from Chopin’s Opus 10, also in C major. I can hear it in my head, but I can’t play the piano well enough to do it.”

“I’ve never studied the Chopin,” Gabriel said, but despite that disclaimer he instantly launched into the challenge, and played the entire Chopin étude from start to finish, with all the Bach harmonies substituted for the original ones, and then, without pausing, he did the reverse, combining the harmonies of the Chopin étude with the more reserved but beautiful figurations of the Bach prelude.

Azarya, who could follow much more closely than Cass or Pascale, was beside himself.

“This has been an impossible dream! It’s as beautiful as I had imagined-more beautiful!”

Gabriel laughed in his high whinny. He was now completely comfortable, his rubbery mouth stretching into easy smiles, showing his full set of chaotic teeth.

“It’s a terrific idea. I’m going to add it to my repertoire. Any other combinations you’ve been impossibly dreaming?”

“I’ve got something I can sing for you. Here’s the idea. You take the thirty-two variations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, each with thirty-two measures. You take one measure of each of the variations, always in diagonal fashion-in general, the n th measure of the n th variation.”

“Nice,” Gabriel said. “Let’s hear.”

The chimelike voice of the child that Cass still remembered was now a tenor, each note struck pure. Gabriel’s face was creased with concentration, and when Azarya had finished, he declared it a marvel.

“You’re basing it on Cantor’s diagonal proof, of course,” he said, and Azarya smiled, and Gabriel said, “That’s it. You’re coming to MIT.” Cass had known that Gabriel Sinai would be the ideal collaborator.

Gabriel launched into playing “Sheiner’s Diagonal Variation on Bach’s Goldberg Variations” for himself, more rapidly than Azarya had sung it, and was, by Cass’s count, on the eighteenth measure of the eighteenth variation when Cass heard the phone ringing-nobody else noticed it- and quietly went off to answer it.

It was his mother. It was difficult to hear her over the laughing and music. He kept his eyes on the action at the piano, Azarya sitting there now and jamming with his gaon . Gabriel was playing the right hand of something that Cass didn’t recognize, and Azarya was playing the left. He seemed to know more about the piano than he had let on.

“Mom, can you speak up a little? I can barely hear you. Azarya’s here playing a piano duet with Gabriel Sinai. I wish you could see this.”

Pascale stood behind Azarya, proposing alterations. She had both her hands resting on his shoulders as she leaned over and watched the keyboard, and either he didn’t notice or she was his relative so it didn’t count as a strange female or he just didn’t care.

His mother said something that he didn’t catch. She barely sounded like herself.

It wasn’t like Pascale to make casual physical contact. It wasn’t only the faithful who couldn’t help themselves from leaning inward toward Azarya, that crush in the Costco House of Worship, with the tiers of yearning Valdeners straining downward to the child standing on the tish between the gigantic bowls of oranges and apples that the Rebbe would soon be tossing to the scrambling Hasidim.