The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “Not only can I tell you the answer but I also can tell you about the general theory,” Darius said.

  “Just the name is fine, Darius,” Rajmani said.

  “Albert Einstein.”

  “Correct. Congratulations.”

  Rajmani shook our hands and gave Darius a trophy—a pair of bronzed petri dishes suspended like the scales of justice. Darius trotted down the steps into open embraces. Students began packing up their ant farms and crystal radio sets. Families loaded into station wagons and minivans. A janitor was already at work on the balloons and posters. I stayed in my seat. My parents walked onto the stage, unsure of how to approach me. My father placed his fingertips on the edge of the table where I sat. I looked up at him.

  “You knew, right?” he asked. “Of course you knew.”

  I couldn’t move.

  “Well,” he said, “not to worry. We’ll dive a little deeper into this area over the summer…perhaps a camp or two. Now we better get the volcano home…before that lava congeals…” His voice trailed off as he started for the stairs. I could hear my mother breathing beside me; she was sitting in Darius’s chair.

  “No more science camps,” I said. My mother took my hand and held it; she’d seen this coming. She no longer stayed up late, making my father and me hot chocolate and serving us pie as we pored over undulating sine waves or squat letter variables. She knew it wasn’t a cathedral we were building; it was a chapel at best, maybe a shanty made of driftwood. My father stopped and turned on the stage stairs, but did not turn around completely. He spoke as if to someone in the wings. “Our minds are not our own, Nathan. They belong to the universe. No different than ozone or black holes.”

  My mother placed her hands flat on the table. “Oh, stop it, Samuel. Stop making him jump through all these hoops. Just let him be himself.” I could feel a biting pain in the back of my neck. My father played with a button on his shirt, then raised his eyes briefly, like a man offering a somber good morning. He walked to the back of the hall, foisted my volcano, and left a trail of smoke as he carried it out to the car.

  ten

  After the science fair, I stopped attending the whiz-kid camps and began to spend more time with Max and Ben. We roamed on bicycles, carved wooden figurines with pocketknives, chased tennis balls into storm drains. None of us, during early and midpuberty, were good with girls. Our exploits centered on a rock quarry and a swimming hole behind our property. Max was the leader, bespectacled, tan, and barefoot; Ben was the sidekick, squat and needle-voiced, the butt of many jokes; and I was the audience, the observer. My father may not have engendered a rigorously analytical mind in me, but he had given me some of his distance, occasional moments when I felt as if I’d been sent among the living to record their deeds.

  “Attack the fort, Nate. We’ll hurl these rocks at Ben over there!” Max roared at me one summery day at the rock quarry. I was staring down at the sandstone and quartz shards that crunched under our feet. His enthusiasm baffled me.

  “Let’s build things,” I said. “A rock temple.”

  Max spread his lips in disgust. “We’ve got a man in there waiting to be captured.” He charged toward the rock mound where Ben lay in wait. In a moment I heard Ben yowl, rushing from behind the mound, holding his head. For Max the rocks were simply weapons. I hated to admit it, but a part of me still wondered about what forces of nature, what ancient lava spills and eroded tablelands created these rocks. Max marched out from the rock cover, apologized to Ben, and huffed past me with the disdain he reserved for traitors and double agents. He’d needed an accomplice and I had let him down.

  Around this time my mother—capitalizing on her interest in foreign culture and clothes—joined and soon headed the Levart (travel backward) Club, which met in members’ living rooms and discussed world destinations. They cooked Indian, Thai, and Greek, collected foreign handicrafts, and planned group vacations. Some afternoons I would come home to a dimly lit house smelling of coriander and sweet basil, and a dozen housewives nursing glasses of wine in the parlor. I could picture these women sitting on far-flung beaches, reading racy novels in the sun. One night, during a Polynesian Island meeting, I heard my mother say, “Imagine wearing a skirt made from hibiscus flowers!” She sat on the couch in a tartan skirt and jade earrings, her legs crossed, her cheeks flushed with wine. The other ladies smiled and nodded and I could tell my mother enjoyed these interactions. She’d spent too many years holed up with her stoic husband and her faltering son. Now she was finding something for herself, even if it was sitting among middle-class housewives and being vaguely scandalized by her bare-chested, tribal cousins.

  My father spent his evenings with Charles Mingus and obscure physics problems. In the mornings, he left for the college before I was awake. We ate dinner together and found it difficult to talk. For years we’d spoken of this contest and that math program over my mother’s elaborate cooking. Now we struggled to find new ground. At the dinner table he often stared at his place mat or out the windows at the orchard. One night, after a sprawling silence, my mother said, “Samuel, could you make the slightest effort to live on this planet? Could you? Would it kill you to ask us about our days and chat about the weather or current affairs?”

  My father looked up from his place setting and smiled meekly. “How is everybody?”

  My mother said, “It’s too late now. Learn your lines for next time.” My mother gave me the dish of chicken cacciatore to hand to my father. “Give your father more, please, Nathan.” He was being punished with food. I took hold of the glazed dish. It was painted a Moroccan blue, little islands of chicken floating off a sapphire shore. Without looking at my father, I heaped some chicken pieces and sauce onto his plate while he held his silverware plaintive and upright. He said, “You both treat me like a child.” My mother, retreating to the kitchen with some dishes, said, “And why do you think that is?”

  My father and I sat in silence and continued to eat.

  MY PARENTS WERE MARRIED THREE months after they met. During and immediately after college in Madison, my mother had dated dentists, businessmen, and trial lawyers, older men who went trout fishing at their summer cabins and made alimony payments. I wonder now if these men were father figures, if they represented an orphan’s misplaced affections. They had names like Brewster Macintosh and Jimmy Butterworth. I think she planned to marry well and have lots of children. She had dreams of living abroad, of joining the diplomatic corps. Then Aunt Beulah died and left her the house. My mother couldn’t bear to sell it or rent it out, so she moved back to her hometown. Soon after, she met my father at a potluck being hosted by a college professor’s wife. My father, fresh from graduate school at Stanford, was an assistant professor of physics at the college.

  “He was standing all by himself with a plate of mashed potatoes,” my mother had told me once. “Back then his beard was almost stylish. I think they called it a Van Dyck beard. He was all dressed in black and looked like a Basque poet. Anyway, he finally got up the gumption to walk across the room and talk to me. We were the only unmarried people there.”

  “Did he ask you if you’d like to solve some quadratic equations and order pizza sometime?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not he asked me if I’d like to go hear some modern jazz. He was very shy but I liked that. He spoke softly and precisely, and when he listened I felt like I could have told him anything in the world.”

  My mother folded her arms and smiled when she told me that. I tried to picture my parents flirting in a room full of tweed. I imagined them in Madison, sitting in smoky basement clubs listening to difficult, off-tempo jazz. What did they talk about? Had my father once been capable of charm? Now, fifteen years and one mildly gifted son later, they had little to talk about. They were prone to epic silences and kept up their little hostilities like rubbed bronze.

  IF MY FATHER WAS MORE distracted after the science fair, he also tried to make contact again in his own way. He made regular trips to the Stanford Linea
r Accelerator, where he was working on a collaboration project. Sometimes he returned like a gambler walking away from a heavy loss—hands jammed in pockets, red-eyed and slumped. He spoke of endless data, the bumps that didn’t quite pan out, the physicists who were making bigger breakthroughs. On those returns I sometimes saw my father stand in the adolescent grunginess of my bedroom (my mother had mostly relinquished title to my room), watching me. I don’t know how often this occurred, but he stood there with his hands in his pockets, maybe thinking about the blue-lit collisions of electrons, about copper wires that edged out of the San Andreas Fault, and he stared at me while I pretended to be asleep. I can’t really say what he was thinking, but it’s enough to know that he came up there for comfort, to check on me in some way, to assure himself after banging subatomic particles together that his son was still breathing under the auspices of gravity and motion.

  My father began to spend more time with Whit Shupak, a colleague from the physics department who had been recently divorced. Whit, a fellow home-brewing enthusiast, was the originator of the brain-food recipe. He was also a retired air force major and onetime astronaut who’d spent two months in a fixed orbit in space in the early seventies. The rumor was he’d had some kind of a breakdown when he was up there spinning and had never been the same since. My parents seemed to have adopted him; he started hanging around the house, staying for dinner, and, eventually, sleeping several nights a week in our guest room.

  If by nothing else, my father was intrigued by the fact that Whit had seen our small blue planet from a distance. Also, he was someone who was comfortable with obscurity and distance. For my mother, Whit was an admirer of her cooking and an eternal fix-it man. Whit was happiest in the throes of an obscure and long-overdue errand or repair—chopping down dead trees in the orchard, removing wasp nests from the rafters, varnishing outdoor furniture. When I asked my mother why Whit was always around, she said, “Ever since space, Whit’s been looking for a unit to join. He’s one of those people who can’t be alone.”

  Whit had bright red hair, a square-set jaw, and a wrestler’s stride and swagger. He coasted on the tails of his one jaunt in space like a rock star who’s had a single smash hit. At parties and potlucks and barbecues there was Whit buttonholing a Levart husband with stories of take-off g-forces and Earth vistas, reaching for a fork to illustrate the angle of ascent, talking of the space dust that finally sent him a little nuts.

  “Never been the same since. Something in all that spinning…” He turned and whirled his hands through the air, like a slow-motion disco move.

  When Whit walked in our orchard, he pulled apples straight from the trees to eat them. One day, staring at the red McIntosh in his hand, he muttered about his ex-wife, who’d left him, or so he said, for another astronaut—Chip Spates, an actual moon lander. “Good riddance to old luggage,” he said.

  Whit, my father, and I were walking toward the creek. Behind us, twenty Levarters gathered at wooden tables, eating yams and spit-roasted pork. The meal had a Hawaiian theme. It was dusk; clouds banked across the sky. My father and I were still standoffish with each other.

  Whit said, “When I was in orbit they gave us these little squirt tubes of applesauce. I used to dream of the genuine article—a gigantic Granny Smith.”

  By now I’d heard every imaginable story of Whit’s training and his six weeks in orbit: the stress-making machines, the large centrifuge called the wheel that flung Whit around at the navy’s Acceleration Laboratory, the in-flight meals he called TV dinners, the gravity-free dreams, the death chill of the moon.

  It was in this setting, in the silence of space orbit, Earth’s continents adrift below him, that Whit first took up writing poetry. Unfortunately, a trait that afflicted his speech also damaged his verse: malapropism. Whit constantly used words and expressions incorrectly. It’s a doggy-dog world. That’s just an old wise tale. It’s a mute point. After a good night’s sleep he was known to comment that he’d slept like a house on fire. The only poem I ever read was entitled “Space Recipes” and began with the line “Up here in the dark, far from the poi-holloi…” It was a celestial lament for home cooking. My mother loved that poem.

  The three of us walked through the trees, away from the party. Whit spoke from the side of his mouth at me. “Truth is, Nathan, space is a great teacher. All my best lessons were learned up there. Solitude. Stars for amigos. That’s not every man’s idea of a night out.”

  “I’m envious,” said my father, putting his hands in his pockets.

  “I’d like to go back up, personally. But NASA is becoming like Lloyd’s of London—way too conservative. Risk is what got us to the moon in the first place, dang it.” Whit generally allowed himself three ways to swear: dang it, hiney, and cripes.

  “Did you take photos up there?” I asked.

  “A few. But most of my photos are right here,” he said, knocking against his temple.

  The Levart people were playing hula music and a couple of them shimmied with glasses of rum-spiked tropical punch in their hands. Whit looked over at them. “Natives are getting rested,” he said.

  “Sometimes I think the Levart Club is just an excuse to get drunk,” my father said matter-of-factly.

  Whit said, “You’re getting cynical, Samuel. These people crave exotic gods and zesty cooking. Anybody can see that.”

  We walked along the creek toward a hill that pitched abruptly. We climbed it and stood on a ridge, facing west. The banks of cloud had turned from pewter to bands of saffron and purple. We sat down on the grass, watching.

  “Pretty sunset,” I said.

  My father and Whit looked at each other, then my father said, “We really can’t use that kind of terminology anymore.”

  Whit sighed.

  “What terminology?” I asked.

  “Sunset. You see, when Whit was up there, dangling in space, watching our planet spin, he was reminded that, for the most part, we’re the ones that are moving. The sun doesn’t set or rise.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “We prefer to call them earth dips and earth rises. Still not quite accurate, but much more sensible,” Whit said.

  I polished the apple I’d been carrying and went to take a bite. Whit took it from me. He held it up, tilted it on its axis, and began to turn it.

  “Sometimes things move so gradual-like that you don’t even notice. Out there, Earth’s a big ol’ bowling ball coming down the lane at you.” A brief silence fell over us as the light crested, then receded.

  “Earth dip sounds weird,” I said.

  “Things can be weird and true,” my father said to the descending darkness.

  Whit said, “You expect the sun out there to be kind of yellow. No, that would be incorrect. It’s more of a bluish white, and perfectly round. Actually, it reminded me of the huge arc lights we used to have back at the Cape. It was so bright I had to use filters to look directly at it.”

  “So what does the earth dip look like from out there?” I asked.

  “Good, see, he’ll catch on,” Whit said. He leaned forward, nodded at the horizon. “Well, I first witnessed it over the Indian Ocean. The sun seemed to flatten out a bit just as it appeared to sink, and a black shadow moved across the earth until all the part facing me was dark, except for this ring of light on the horizon. Earth kept spinning and the more it moved the more the sun band turned from white to orange. But there was red, purple, and light blue thrown in there. Made my blood freeze. A diamond sun-blast. I expected angels to appear.”

  “Can I have my apple back?” I asked.

  “No problemo.” Whit handed it back to me.

  We sat on that ridge until it was dark and the North Star appeared above our heads. Whit spoke about families of fractionally charged particles. “They keep a low profile. Edge out of the muck when you least expect, hit a home run from an electron traveling at twenty clips.” And my father saying, “Yes, somehow they snuck up on us. Fractionally charged—imagine growing half an apple
.” He said this and they both paused, considering that unlikely statistical probability. From the orchard we could see the Levart people lighting lanterns and hear the faint sound of exotic music lifting into the air.

  eleven

  It was 1984. The year that two astronauts made the first untethered space walk and two physicists were awarded the Nobel Prize for their role in discovering new subatomic particles. Field particles W and Z. They sounded like courtroom exhibits, indictments against my father’s line of work. “I know these fellows from conferences. A Dutchman and an Italian. I shared some collision data with them one time,” he said blandly on the morning of the Nobel announcement. I thought at the time he might have been inflating his own work, but when I go back and read the scientific journals of that period I see that he was right: the name Samuel Nelson is mentioned in the same articles that trace the experiments that yielded the Nobel Prize.

  It was also the year that my father destroyed the mystery and scandal of sex for me. It happened after my mother found a magazine called Ribald under my bed and demanded that my father have a talk with me. The magazine was open to a page in which a man and woman were engaged in what my mother called “mutual oral gratification.” She called my father and me up to the bedroom, holding the magazine with two fingers.

  She said, “He had this stashed under his bed, Samuel.” I had been reduced to third person.

  My father was holding a copy of Scientific American in one hand; she had roused him from his study. My mother handed Ribald to my father and he took it with some dismay, staring down at the fellatio tableau. She made a clicking noise with her tongue and said, “I think you should have a talk with him, Samuel. A man-to-son.” She left the room and closed the door behind her. I expected my father to be panicked, but he calmly set his own magazine down on my dresser and crossed to my bed slowly, holding the porn magazine firmly with two hands, as if it weighed as much as a city phone book. I sat in a chair opposite him. He flipped through the pages, registering only curiosity at each turn.