Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

In the living room of that brownstone was a Mpingo coffee table that had cost as much as Lorenzo’s Lincoln. I’d bought it with about an hour’s salary.

—

THE FIRST DINNER my father and I had together in New York was at Le Pinceau. A warm, ginkgo-scented fall evening not that long after I’d started at Physico. I’d only seen him once during the whole time I was at OSU, a single weekend in the middle of my second year when I took the bus up to Michigan to talk with him about my thoughts on the Shores-Durbans. We ate every meal at the Green & White, and he gave me a couple of good ideas about the mathematics, which I have to admit might have been helpful if I’d ever gotten around to writing a dissertation.

Now, here he was in New York, looking rather well. Dapper, even. Pale linen suit and the old Borsalino. His belly was flat, and his face was aglow with the burnished sunburn that he’d started to exhibit despite the fact that he was living full-time in a woods. He moved solidly across the dining-room floor to the seat across from me. He’d flown in from Detroit, first class. Courtesy of me, of course. I’d walked down the block from the office.

“I’ll pay for my own dinner” was the first thing he said.

“No need. Really.”

He looked around, smirking. “Not many mathematics professors in here, I see.”

“Not many Fields winners, anyway.”

This softened him. Undoing his coat, he glanced at the menu. “They serve decent scotch. I think I’ll try the Laphroaig first. What about you?”

“Nothing for me, Dad.”

He raised his eyebrows, then smiled from one corner of his mouth.

By the time our appetizers arrived, he’d tried the GlenDronach, too; and by the time the endive salad was rolled to the table and dressed with ground peppercorns and a twenty-five-year-old Modena balsamic, he’d offered opinions on the St. Magdalene and the Glenfarcias, each of which he’d dispatched in a single appreciative slit-eyed swallow that looked a little bit like a snake putting the final touches on a mouse. For the main course, he ordered a bison steak and a mound of shoestring potatoes, then sat back for another GlenDronach.

At a table a few feet from us that night was a young woman dining alone. Not a derivatives trader. Not even in the financial business, I could see from her wardrobe, whose warp and brownish palette brought to mind sheep rather than tiger. I’d noticed her while waiting for Dad. She was pretty. She was sitting behind me, though, and a little off to the side, so that I’d been reduced to angling my water glass against the dining-room mirrors to get an occasional view of her features. When my father ordered the first GlenDronach, I noticed in my reflector that she glanced up with hardly more than an eyebrow. Still. She was older than I was — who wasn’t? — but nonetheless a little young to be dining alone in a place like this, even in New York City: somewhere in her mid- to late twenties was my guess. I straightened my tie, which was a dark Hermès picked out by one of my secretaries, then nodded gravely over Dad’s shoulder, signaling for the waiter. I was spending a lot of time in those days trying to look older.

“I didn’t think she’d do it,” my father grumbled, starting right in as we waited for our food. Of course, he was talking about Mom. That year, she’d finally contacted a divorce lawyer.

“She has her own future to think of, Dad.”

“She used to think of mine, as well.”

“Yeah — and then you left her.”

He sniffed. “Well, fuck you, Son.”

“Well, fuck you, Dad.”

In my reflector, the girl raised her eyebrows again. I smiled into my water glass to make it clear that Dad and I were joking.

“Well, her future should be fine, either way,” he said. “I’m sure the judge is going to take care of her in style.”

“And she deserves it.”

“Oh, so you’re one of those. ”

“One of whats ?”

“One of the apologists.” He boomed the words, gesturing for another scotch. “Just like the two of them.”

I didn’t get a break from this kind of banter until after dessert, which he didn’t touch. But at last he rose from the table to use the men’s room. By then, I was pretty much beaten. I looked into my water glass and found the girl watching me. I smiled.

When the waiter arrived with another GlenDronach and set it at Dad’s spot, I reached across and downed it.

A moment later, I heard, “That was a fast one.”

I checked the glass: she was standing right behind me. “Oh,” I said. “He won’t even remember. I was actually doing him a favor.”

“I was just on my way to the ladies’ room.”

I pointed. “It’s over there.”

“Thank you, yes.”

Her voice was surprisingly southern and surprisingly lovely — though also surprisingly firm, like a magnolia trunk. (I could tell even then.) Her blouse was buttoned all the way to the neck, where a turn of white silk had been folded. And now I noticed that her nose contained a single, breathtaking bend, about halfway down. She pointed to the empty glass. “I hope you didn’t actually need that.”

“Well, I did.”

“Just to speak to me?”

“You weren’t here at the time.”

“Technically not.” She looked at me rather sharply. “That’s your father, isn’t it?” She nodded toward the far side of the room, where I saw now that he’d taken a seat at the bar. Another shot was being poured for him.

“Well, yes,” I said. “It appears to be.”

“Then if I were you,” she said, turning to make her way, “I’d be a little more careful.”

—

“YOU SEEM TO be far from an apologist, by the way,” she said.

“You were eavesdropping.”

“You were spying.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Could you tell?”

“Either that or you found the water in your glass extremely interesting.”

“In fact, I did. ” I smiled. “The randomness of molecular behavior is overestimated. Brownian motion. It bears on my field.”

She smiled back, not as though she understood the thought but as though she understood why I might have had it. “And besides,” she said. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. Your father’s voice carries.”

“He’s a professor.”

“Of math?”

“That’s right.” I felt a twinge. “Of mathematics. Or at least, he was. How’d you know?”

“The same way I knew you weren’t an apologist.”

We were on our first date. Every evening of that week, I’d left the Trump Building early and dined alone at Le Pinceau. I’d become transfixed. Transfixed and suddenly lonely — a strange turn for a man who’d never thought much about companionship. How did you find a person you’d spoken to only once in a city the size of New York? Actually, it was the type of mathematical problem for which my training had perfectly prepared me. An intersection of probabilities, each one small. After my sixth night at the same table — my sixth pepper steak, my sixth gratinéed potato, my sixth dully bubbling glass of mineral water — I was reaching for the door handle at the exit to head back up to Physico for my sixth round of late-night brainstorming, when the door opened ahead of my hand. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said, under my breath.

“You look as though you were expecting me.”

Within moments, she’d agreed to dinner. (Sometimes, like my father, I could talk.) The waiter said nothing as he brought me my second pepper steak of the evening.

Texas. Small town. Alone in New York now, employed in book publishing. These were the facts, which she related to me while sitting straight, like a dancer, across the white-linened table. She kept her head tilted just slightly up, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off that tiny bend *in her nose.