Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Then, just like that, it stopped.

He’d bought the hat — a Borsalino — along with the dark suit, for the commencement of his position. Borland’s advice: Don’t look like the rest of them. Go against the times. And this was what he was doing, striding among the long-haired students, leaning down now and then to pick up tiny melting fragments of the universe. Around him, the dowdy-looking faculty toed back kickstands and resumed their rides. The undergraduate boys emerged from under the eaves to boot a Hacky Sack again in the electric brightness of the storm’s wake.

Dr. Milo Andret, Ph.D.

He’d had time to think. The life he’d been living — the quatrant, the deadbeat parties, Cle’s obtuse, demanding visions — it was all behind him now. From this point on he would live by different rules. He’d sold the Valiant and tossed away the old clothes. Now he wore a bespoke suit and an astringent cologne. The world parting as he stepped. He wouldn’t miss a molecule of what he’d been through.

The briefcase had been a gift from Borland on the occasion of his dissertation defense, which had been a triumph. As he reached Fine Hall, he set it down, removed the hat, and poured the hail from the brim into his palm. Little messages from the stratosphere, crenellated oblongs from the heavens.

In the departmental office he found a trio of secretaries — a pair of blondes in sweaters typing at the desks up front and a darker one in back, her head down. He held out his palm.

One of the blondes said, “You brought us candy.”

“Wish I had,” he answered. “To tell the truth, it’s hail. Heavenly mothballs. You don’t get this kind of thing in Berkeley. It’s amazing, really.”

“Relatively speaking, I guess,” said the other blonde, not looking up from her typewriter. The first one laughed brassily.

“Well, it might be if you looked at it,” said the dark one in back, still not lifting her head.

“Might be,” said one of the blondes, glancing up at the wall clock. “But I was hoping it was candy.”

A hush. It was a Friday afternoon, just a few minutes before five — he glanced up at the clock himself now for the first time. It seemed that everyone else in the building had left for the day. “Well,” he said, “I was just hoping to get the key to my office. I’m Milo Andret. The new hire. I just got here.” He dropped the melting remnants into the trash can.

The two blondes went on typing. One of them looked at the clock again.

“Well,” said the dark one in back, “if nobody’s going to help Professor Andret, then I will.”

“I’m not a professor,” he said a few minutes later, after she’d ridden up with him in the elevator and unlocked the door to his office. It was a nice-sized room with two windows over a curving footpath and a view of a sports field truncated by evergreens. Princeton had recruited him heavily. Still: it was more than he’d expected. “I’m an assistant professor,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said, brushing the hair from her eyes. “I mean, I’m an assistant secretary.”

—

A FEW MONTHS before, within hours of showing the proof to Borland, rumors of the achievement had begun to spread. Soon after, the paper had been accepted by the Annals . Publication in October: an unheard-of turnaround. At thirty-two years old, he’d found a solution to one of the great problems in the history of mathematics. The article would arrive next month in libraries around the world: the Malosz conjecture, thanks to Milo Andret, had become the Malosz theorem.

He thought briefly of Kobayashi and Timofeyev.

On his first day on campus, he walked around unrecognized. The pressed suit. The fedora. He had the feeling that he was someone else, that he’d been handed a disguise. Even in the mathematics department, only the dark-haired secretary, whose name was Helena Pierce, paid him any notice.

That Monday, his first day at work, she showed him around the building. The semester didn’t start until the following week, but his mailbox was already filled with letters. “A lot of departmental duties, I guess,” he offered.

“Yes,” she said. “Or no, actually.” She blushed. “Probably not that many, at least not now. Chairman Hay tries to give the junior faculty time for their work.” She brushed the hair from her eyes again, then pointed to the slots on either side of his name. “Not that you’re junior.” The blush deepened. “In title, maybe. I read about the Malosz theory, I confess. Congratulations, Professor Andret.”

“Assistant Professor Andret.”

She ignored the flirtation. “These are your colleagues’ mailboxes,” she said. “The other new faculty are here, and here, and here. Not as full as yours — well, I guess you can see that.”

Now she paused, as though she’d overstepped.

“Thank you,” he replied. He lifted out a handful of envelopes. Several of them were hand-addressed. He lifted out a second batch. Even before he’d left Berkeley, he’d been invited to dozens of seminars.

“I noticed you get a lot of correspondence, Professor. More than some of the senior faculty receives.”

“Book-of-the-Month Club flyers.”

She blushed again.

“The other faculty probably pay their bills on time, too,” he said, glancing at her. She was a little formal, but she was pretty enough — long necked and pale. A girl from a Flemish painting. The wine color of her blouse brought out her eyes.

He shifted his attention back to the envelopes.

“Well,” she said carefully, “I was going to tell you — there’s a piece about you in the department newsletter. It’s very nice, obviously.”

“There is?”

“About the Malosz theory. It’s quite impressive. But of course you already know that. All right, I’ll be quiet now.”

“Perhaps I don’t already know that,” he answered, turning to smile at her.

—

LATER THAT EVENING, in the Downtown Club, a white-tablecloth establishment near Bank Street where he’d convinced her to stop for a drink, she broke a pause in the conversation by asking him about his research. “Just tell me a thing or two about topology,” she said. “For my own education. I like to learn a little at work.”

“Of course, of course.” From a far room came the sounds of a string quartet. He pulled the pewter ring from the rolled napkin beside him and set it at the center of the table. Then he bowed slightly and leaned in. “An introductory lecture on the subject of topology,” he said, “by Assistant Professor Milo Andret, on the occasion of his stupendously lucky hire.”

She blushed.

“This napkin ring,” he said, lifting it between them, “is the same to me as my coffee cup.” He poked his thumb through the napkin ring and then slid the pinkie of the same hand through the handle of the coffee cup. “See,” he said, holding them up together. “They’re both loops that I can stick a finger through. It’s just that the coffee cup has a little bleb attached to its loop, to hold the coffee. Whereas the napkin ring is nothing but the loop.”

“I see.”

“As a contrary example, the coffee cup is fundamentally different from the highball glass.” He picked up his bourbon with the other hand, turned it around in the air, and drained it. “There’s no handle on a glass of bourbon to put your pinkie through. In fact,” he said, “a coffee cup and a highball glass could hardly be more different, topologically speaking.”

“Yes,” she said. “Topologically speaking.”

There was something about her.

“What I’m saying with all this is that the coffee cup and the napkin ring are topologically equivalent. One is nothing but a loop, and the other can be quickly reduced to a loop. Another way to think about it is that if the napkin ring were made of clay, you could squeeze it and pinch it until it became the coffee cup. You see?” He made the motion with his fingers of pinching off a little bowl from the side of the napkin ring, so that it became a cup, and then tilted it to his mouth. “You wouldn’t have to make any holes in it, or cut it, or use any glue. You couldn’t do that with the bourbon glass, though, right? You couldn’t make it into a coffee cup with a handle on it no matter how hard you tried. Do you see what I mean?”