Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

She was a visiting scholar from St. Petersburg State University, newly arrived after the thawing of Soviet relations. Even her work was fashionable: hyperbolic and elliptic geometries. She drank the bourbon like water.

After her second one, she stopped calling him Professor.

After her third, he felt a knee against his thigh.

He excused himself. In the bathroom, he looked into the tiny mirror and saw the same face he’d always seen — long and stolid, wide at the temples, the nose overly defined, the dark eyes made prominent by the thickness of their ridges. Young for his age, a face flawed by overreaching. It had always slightly shamed him.

Since the Malosz theorem, though, it seemed to have gathered a new charisma.

He tightened the knot of his tie, the bourbon gently separating him from his thoughts. He checked the mirror again, decided the knot was better loose, and walked back out to the bar, loosening it.

—

THAT SEMESTER HE was assigned to teach the midlevel introductory class in calculus. Three days a week he found himself at a dusty green chalkboard expounding in front of a lecture hall full of first-year students. These were not the mathematics majors or the electrical engineers; and these were not the poets from Professor Rosewater’s class at Berkeley; these were the doctors and the accountants and the bankers, the young men — Andret could see few female faces — with enough intelligence to make it to the top but without nearly enough brainpower to change anything. He realized he was envious.

That year, having accepted every lecture invitation in his mailbox, he’d discovered himself to be an able speaker; but this audience of submissive-looking teenagers didn’t seem to care. Looking out at their vaguely distracted faces, he suspected that whatever would induce them to their historical destiny hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. Sometimes he would lower his voice to a whisper — a trick he’d learned while on the lecture circuit — or pause for several long moments, waiting for their attention to return.

He always had a drink or two before he taught, and now and then his mind would bring him back to his own undergraduate days in East Lansing. By the time he was a sophomore, he was already taking upper-level courses, sitting at the back of the room considering the differences between himself and the boys he’d gone to school with in Cheboygan, most of whom were by then a good way through their second or third tours in Vietnam. He himself had been kept out of the draft by collapsed arches in his feet — he still sometimes wondered if the doctor had exaggerated his condition — and then in Berkeley had been given another five years of reprieve. Now the war was over, and the draft, too, and when he looked out over his classes, the seriousness of those times seemed no more relevant to the students in front of him than some ancient Assyrian epic. In East Lansing in the sixties, the men — future or past soldiers, nearly all of them — had worn ties to class, and there was a gravity to the tone that he hadn’t found since. Not even in graduate school at Berkeley, the thought of which, as he stood before his class one day recalling the incense that burned in the back corner of the Lime Rose, deflated him. On the other side of the podium, in the rows of sloping, newly upholstered seats, sat the sons of attorneys and financiers. They rested their sneakers on the chairbacks, passed notes across the aisles, and opened sodas loudly as he spoke. A few of them fiddled with skateboards.

—

AT THE BACK of his mailbox one morning, a sealed envelope with his name on it.

I was buying a humidifier for the office. (I never shop there myself, the prices are ridiculous.) If you need anything related to the department I’m available and hope you will ask. I’m not ashamed about what happened but I’m not proud on the other hand, and it’s better if we just ignore whatever it was and pretend it didn’t occur. (Of course I mean better for both of us.)

THERE WAS NO denying it: time had passed, yet he’d made almost no progress on the Abendroth. He wouldn’t be able to overpower it the way he’d overpowered the Malosz.

Tactic rather than force: that’s what he would need.

At first consideration, the problem appeared almost facile; but the essentials quickly hid themselves. He’d begun to conceive of the proof as a fortified castle pierced by ten thousand brightly painted doors, each of which was designed to deceive him. All ten thousand would open — this wasn’t the issue — but so far, none of them had allowed him entrance.

Perhaps none ever would.

After a year and a half of effort, he realized that it made sense to limit his aspirations. Perhaps it would help to give up on a solution altogether and focus instead on merely locating the proper vulnerability.

He also understood with a dull sense of foreboding why so many gifted men had been circling the problem for most of a century. The work to all of them must have seemed a seductive lover. By now he’d grown accustomed to waking in the middle of the night with some electrifying premonition, to hurrying through the dark to the mathematics building, to laboring alone in the predawn hours while the radiators clanged around him, as though being hammered by Ulrich Abendroth’s own imperious ghost. But over the course of the pale, tree-obscured sunrises, which turned his office from blue-gray to dusky orange to a brightly nauseating yellow, his thrilling premonitions uniformly faded. He could find no passage in.

—

ONE AFTERNOON NEAR the end of his second year at Princeton, there was a knock at his office. He ignored the interruption; but a moment later it came again. When he opened the door, a woman said, “Oh! You’re here then.”

“Forgive me,” said Andret.

She was well dressed, almost prim — his own age or slightly younger. Dark red heels and a somewhat-dowdy outfit of a related color. Although he never trusted his memory of people, he was fairly sure he’d never seen her before. “I must have been lost in my work,” he said.

“I’d give anything for that.”

He looked again. A rather pretty face. Maybe a little rebellion in the eyes. No: they’d certainly never met. “Would you?” he said.

“You must be busy. I just wanted to see if I could make an appointment. But I can come back another time.”

For a woman who’d arrived uninvited she seemed insistently timid. Yet on the other hand she made no move to leave. In fact, she appeared to keep herself before him by some calm demonstration of will, like a mystic holding a finger in a flame.

He lifted a box of work off the visitor’s chair and gestured her in. “The problem,” he said, taking the seat at his desk, “is that I might be even busier the next time. You’d have to estimate those odds, too. What may I do for you?”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Nothing is absolutely sure.” He smiled. “But now’s as good as ever.”

She sat down across from him and returned his gaze. Her name was Annabelle Detmeyer, and she was an associate professor in history. “My husband, Yevgeny Detmeyer”—she paused—“my husband is the chair of economics and the co-chair in political science.”

“Ah. A double threat.”

She laughed, pleasingly. Her laugh wasn’t so dowdy.

“How can I help you?”

“I just wanted to learn what a mathematician does,” she said. “It’s so different from what I do, and I’d heard so much about you. I read an article about the Malosz theorem, and I was intrigued. I actually tried to read it. The proof itself, I mean.” She laughed. “I got about a half a sentence in.”

“Well, history might be beyond me, too.”