Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“Milo,” she said, rising up onto her elbow. “You have been here for two nights now. You are eating tablets. What is going on? You are afraid of something, yes? Or some one, is it?”

“I’m not afraid of anything. It’s damn cold in here.” He slapped closed one cabinet and began rummaging in the next.

“You have never stayed before one whole night even. You do not tell me there is not something new here. Is this your mysterious Annabelle?”

“If you heated this place it might almost be comfortable.”

“Why are you always such bastard? May I ask?”

“No, as a matter of fact. You may not ask.”

What could he tell her? That though he was here with her for the moment, he was indeed longing for Annabelle — but that Yevgeny Detmeyer had just returned from England? That his actual taste in women ran severely to the bland? That with the Abendroth now in smithereens, he was careening?

Under the sink now, at last: some gin. He replaced his wine with it and downed the pills, shuddering as he looked closely at the prescription: it was Ativan.

When he turned again, Olga was beckoning. He took another drink.

Annabelle Detmeyer had typed his papers for him. She’d been alongside him when he’d come so close to the consummate work of his life. She’d believed in him. Cle had believed in him. He had a feeling that even Helena had once believed in him. Now he had Olga, waiting for him to perform on a sprung mattress in an apartment so cold his balls had disappeared inside him. He took another swallow of gin and walked back into the room. The world skidded past. Her rapacious mind, tactfully obscured. Her copy of Inventiones Mathematicae, poorly hidden in the bathroom. Olga was a mathematician, and everything that brought to mind mathematics brought to mind his failures, their vilely polluted flame burning blackly in his head.

—

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, when he phoned the Detmeyer house, Annabelle had to pretend on her end of the line that he was an appliance repairman. He pictured the Nobel laureate glancing testily at the phone: the deception thrilled him. When he called again in the early evening, Detmeyer himself answered. An ill-tempered voice and impatiently barked words. Andret, behind the shield of Ativan, considered a confrontation with the man but asked for an invented name instead. Let the bastard wonder. Then he hung up and called Olga. No answer. He headed out to Clip’s for a refresher.

Nothing was right.

When darkness finally fell he walked back to his office, where the perfectly preserved wreck of his years of research rose up like a dead body to greet him. Failure. Failure. Failure. The damnable Abendroth and every one of its pitiable tangents. Boxes and boxes. A wasted decade. He swallowed another pill and washed it down with the last of the Maker’s Mark. A mathematician had to strike early — it was generally over before the age of forty. Now he had no future unless he chose another target and started fresh, this time at the base of some other unfathomable mountain.

Hans Borland would tell you to get right back to work.

Well, what did Hans Borland know about any of it?

To make things worse, his mind, which since the defeat had been a sluggish forgery of itself, had once again been running too fast. He needed the Ativan to slow it. On the flight home from his parents’ house, he’d had glimpses of his old troubles — warping lines on the plane’s fuselage and fields of imbricated prisms shivering in the windows.

In the sloppy office now, he paced the perimeter, trying to bring some idea to bear. He would need to go back to the well. He moved thickly — an elephant fighting a dart — stumbling in slow sequence against the books and papers and piles of slumping boxes. The wall lamp blazed in his eyes so he threw his jacket over it. The computer, unplugged from the socket and already mottled with dust, was a relic of cheap plastic. He hit it with an open palm. The mount vibrated and dropped a screw. He kicked it aside. Round and round he went, circling the boxes of dead-end scholarship that littered the floor like gravestones. He recalled Hans Borland’s desk. The cleared tableau. The neatly kept man himself.

There were other problems he’d considered before the Abendroth, but his mind couldn’t even hold their fundamentals anymore, let alone evaluate the chances at a solution. The possibilities flew by him like bats in the dark. The first Kurtman. The Goldbach. A dozen others. He lurched against the wall, grasping at the shelves. He knew he would never find another idea. Not ever again. That’s what the voice was whispering in his skull. The years of toil would never even begin. Never even begin. His brain was splintering to bits.

—

SOMETIME LATER, WHEN he woke on the floor, he felt decently refreshed. For a moment, his mind remained blank; but then the nightmarish tentacles reached up to drag him under again. A fourteen-year-old boy and a few weeks of work — maybe not even that. He rose and stumbled to the desk. Three more pills with the last drips of bourbon. The lamp had singed a hole in his suit jacket: that’s what the smell was. He watched the threads blacken and curl, then balled up the ruined cloth and threw it toward the trash.

Then he dropped into his chair. As he hit the seat, the Ativan arrived in his brain like an ambulance swerving to the curb. He reached for the phone and pushed through the Rolodex until her name came back to him. He remembered that it sounded like a weed.

When she answered, he said in a composed voice, “You were right.”

The sweet, rising calm flowing through him now.

“Who is this, please?”

“The Fields Medal. You were right about it.”

He waited, rotating the bottle slowly on the desk.

“Is this the Princeton professor?” she said. “Is this Milo Andret?”

“Yes, it is. You already know, then — I won the Fields this year.”

“Did you? No, actually, I hadn’t heard.”

Another blow.

The Ativan lapped right over it.

Soon they were chatting. She’d quit the Times, lived in Manhattan now, had married a banker at Goldman. Just like Cle — just like everybody else. A tinge of desolation flickered.

After a pause, she said, “Were you hoping to see me, Milo?”

“Why, yes, in fact. I was.”

“Well, I’m not coming to New Jersey.”

“I’ll come to New York.”

He heard her pouring a drink and longed for another. The ice shaken. Then a sip. “Three Pulitzers,” she said. “Now — even more impressive — a Fields.”

—

THAT NIGHT, A thought occurred to him: that despite Knudson Hay’s long faith in him, that despite Cle’s sturdy assurances on the phone, that despite a run of welcoming evenings in Olga Petrinova’s bed, his grief at his defeat did not exist anywhere but in his own mind. It was not shared by Princeton University; it was not shared by the cosmos; it was not shared by his lovers. It was hardly even shared by his parents.

It was his alone.

Once or twice a month now, he skipped his lectures. Left a note instructing the secretaries to inform the class that he was ill, then spent the afternoon asleep on his couch. His students hardly seemed to care.

Elusive bits. Scattering intuitions. The instinctive way-signs eluding him. His ruinous failure outside the window day and night like an assassin.

“I THOUGHT THERE were only two Pulitzers,” he said the next afternoon, rising from the sheets. Thelma Nastrum’s nightstand held a copy of Architectural Digest that contained a photograph shot from the very same nightstand. A foreshortened panorama of angles. The leaning pillows. The white credenza. The horizontal slabs of dark gray marble. He studied the picture, attempting to see whether it included a copy of the magazine itself. Several moments passed before he realized the impossibility of such a recursion. Another imbecilic mistake. A symptom. He was still no doubt good enough to make a killing in finance. Well, fuck you, Earl Biettermann: he would never ask for help.