Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced. She liked to do it more than once, and he was usually able to comply. Bourbon was his gasoline. Between sessions, he poured it at the counter while she lay panting on the sheets. Sweat burnished her body. The lean neck. The surprisingly full breasts. He would down another glass and return. The competition would continue in the relentless searching of her eyes, which never rested. Sometimes there was even a third time, in which those eyes, even as they sharpened with arousal, then fogged with it, continued their accusation: he was a cad; he was really just using her; he cared little for anybody.

He was aware, of course, that all of this was true.

—

ANNABELLE DETMEYER, ON the other hand, would greet him at the servants’ door of the Detmeyer estate, humid eyed and already wrapped in some easy-to-remove vestment. In the kitchen a meal would be waiting. Some sumptuous-smelling casserole warming in an iron pot beside a pair of parsley-garnished bowls. Heated bread beneath a square of linen. The Detmeyers had two girls, five and nine, but the house had a half-dozen bedrooms on the second floor alone and an entire top story above that. Behind the property ran a tract of forest preserve. He used the preserve for cover, entering it behind a parking lot in town and emerging like a spy at its near end, across from the tamarack that hid the back door of the Detmeyer garage. Annabelle preferred his visits in the morning, just after the girls had left for school. Except for the few feet of lawn between the woods and the first branches of the tamarack, it was an entirely cloaked journey; but he wore an overcoat anyway, and a pair of dark glasses. Her husband traveled nearly every week.

Bookshelves lined the walls of the house, not only in the library and study but in the living room and kitchen and all the bathrooms.To Andret’s mind, this gave the whole downstairs the appearance of a rambling, geometric painting, in which the colored spines of thousands of books formed unintentional refuges of color — predominantly green here, predominantly maroon there — the way random patterns tended to do. In the mathematics section of the study, in fact — Yevgeny Detmeyer taught quantitative economics — there were treatises on exactly such patterns. Andret amused himself with the titles.

About mathematics Annabelle herself knew nothing. She liked bourbon, though, and after their first meeting in town they’d been drinking it regularly at the house. With the children in school they could lounge together on the plush European mattresses upstairs. There were three guest bedrooms on that floor alone, but to his surprise she preferred the master suite, despite the bowl of cuff links on the dresser there. He indulged her preference. The room took up the full width of the house and on two sides looked out on nothing but forest, which allowed him to rise when they were done and gaze out the window like a baron.

His mind in those moments was suffused with calm, the work gone for a few moments of a day. He found Annabelle a refuge and partook of this refuge on every weekday morning that he could. She was strongheaded and not particularly bright — for Princeton, anyway — but unfailingly generous.

As a lover she was somewhat demure — maybe this was her prairie upbringing — and like Olga, she required conversation. With Annabelle, though, it was always about him. His work. His plans. The detailed narration of his endeavors, both professional and quotidian. In this way she reminded him of Cle Wells, constantly fitting him to an ambition that seemed somehow to have become her own.

In bed, she liked to start out prone. He would begin by kissing her spine through her dress as he answered queries about his life, moving slowly to the neighboring regions — her smooth shoulder blades, the moist rise of her neck, the hot sides of her breasts as he released them from the fabric. Her skin smelled of mint. As he moved, she continued to question him, her eyes closing finally as he began to answer only in grunts, her hand reaching for his hair. When she was sufficiently aroused a hush would finally settle and then with a sigh she would roll over gently onto her back, like a doe turning in leaves.

How he loved that bed! Yevgeny Detmeyer, as it turned out, spent an inordinate amount of time abroad, in Tokyo and Zurich and London and Berlin and Zagreb. He was an extroverted and unstoppable public personality, a highly regarded macroeconomist, and an avidly sought consultant on international politics. And as Andret discovered one afternoon while thumbing through the Princetonian in the man’s own kitchen, he was also regularly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Prize!

That was Princeton for you. The fact revved his libido.

One day near lunchtime, from the side window of the bedroom, he watched the two Detmeyer girls clomp up the porch steps with their bookbags. Annabelle sat up in bed and gasped at the sound: she’d forgotten that they’d been let out early from a field trip. As she rummaged in the closet for an outfit, he made for the door, pulling on his clothes and hurrying down the back set of stairs.

After that, she wouldn’t see him past eleven in the morning. But this wasn’t a problem. In fact it made things simpler. He learned that day that if he took a diagonal through the woods and came out of the trees alongside the soccer fields, he had time to stop at Clip’s for a pick-me-up and still be at Olga Petrinova’s before the afternoon sun came through the window.

IN KEEPING WITH the fickle nature of the work, however, his optimism soon began to wane. On most mornings, he woke with a vivid idea of the day’s endeavor, but he’d also begun to recognize that his new state of hope was also a state of agitation. And the agitation wearied him.

He’d been at Princeton now longer than he’d been at Berkeley. At the mixers every September, the new hires were already in the habit of asking him to draw their portraits, a practice that had grown to become something of a welcoming rite into the department of mathematics. He’d taken to performing it as a kind of joke: he’d look at the face of whichever new assistant professor had approached him, then look down at the paper, then back up at the face, then back down at the paper, drawing steadily until at last he presented the recipient with a perfect rendering, depending on the man’s subject, of Descartes, or Pascal, or Grothendieck. The likenesses were framed in half-a-dozen offices around Fine Hall.

On and on he worked. He walked around campus worrying the lessons of the Erdős paper like a man fingering a wound in his side. It seemed possible now that the paper’s conclusion would be no more crucial to his final push against the Abendroth than any of a dozen others he’d read. Yet still it battered him. He was certain there was a clue there, even if he’d not been able to name it. That was the nature of mathematics. You mined a hunch until the hunch was proved either right or wrong. So far, he’d proved it neither.

In the meantime, he’d befriended a man at Clip’s. DeWitt Tread was a former member of the mathematics department who’d either been denied tenure or resigned it and now worked as a fabricator for the School of Engineering. This mattered nothing to Andret. What mattered, at least at the start, was that Tread liked to drink. He was from an aristocratic East Coast family and had the facial features of a white-wigged colonial governor, but his life had been one long rowdy procession of drugs and booze and shady business deals that had left him with two teeth broken at the front of his mouth. Like Andret, he wore suits at Clip’s; but Tread’s, unlike Andret’s, were worn to a shine. He owned a huge, ruined house in Princeton Junction and filled it with all kinds of junk that he was always either buying or selling. Most nights, he closed the bar. They began spending time together.