to the right to 4, and one turn to the left to 11 or is it the other way around? In any case she can never get the safe open; Philip has to. And, next to the lacquer jewelry box, the blue-and-green clay bowl Louise made for them in third grade in which, each evening, Philip places his loose change. The closet doors are shut and only the bathroom door is ajar.
When is a door not a door? When it is a . . .
Stop.
Perhaps she should put on her nightgown and lie down next to him and in the morning, when he wakes up he will reach for her the way he does. He will hike up her nightgown. Take it off, he will say. He likes to make love in the morning. Sleepy, she takes longer to respond.
She has not bothered to draw the curtains. Outside, above the waving tree branches, she can make out a few stars in the night sky. A mere dozen in a galaxy of a billion or a trillion stars. Perhaps death, she thinks, is like one of those stars—a star that can be seen only backward in time and exists in an unobservable state. While life, she has heard said, was created from stars—the stars’ debris.
What did he say to her exactly?
I am a bit tired, I am going to lie down for a minute before supper.
or
I am going to lie down for a minute before supper, I am a bit tired.
or something else entirely.
She is in the kitchen. Spinning the lettuce. She looks up briefly.
How was your day?
She half listens to his reply.
We had a faculty meeting. You should hear how those new physicists talk! They’re crazy, Philip says, as he goes upstairs.
She makes the salad dressing, she sets the table. She takes the chicken out of the oven. She boils new potatoes. Then she calls him.
Philip! Dinner is ready.
She starts to open a bottle of red wine but the cork is stuck. He will fix it.
Again, Philip, Philip! Dinner!
Before she walks into the bedroom, she knows already.
She sees his stocking feet. He has taken off his shoes.
What was he thinking? About dinner? About her? A paper he is reading by one of his students, arguing that Kronecker was right to claim that the Aristotelian exclusion of completed infinites could be maintained?
Infinites. Infinite sets. Infinite series.
Infinity makes her anxious.
It gives her nightmares. As a child, she had a recurring dream. A dream she can never put into words. The closest she comes to describing the dream, she tells Philip, is to say that it has to do with numbers. The numbers—if in fact they are numbers—always start out small and manageable, although in the dream Nina knows that this is temporary, for soon they start to gather force and multiply; they become large and uncontrollable. They form an abyss. A black hole of numbers.
You’re in good company, is what Philip tells her. The Greeks, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pascal all had it.
The dream?
No, what the dream stands for.
Which is?
The terror of the infinite.
But, for Philip, infinity is a demented concept.
Infinity, he says, is absurd.
“Suppose, one dark night,” is how Philip always begins his undergraduate course on probability theory, “you are walking down an empty street and suddenly you see a man wearing a ski mask carrying a suitcase emerge from a jewelry store—the window of the jewelry store, you will have noticed, is smashed. You will no doubt assume that the man is a burglar and that he has just robbed the jewelry store but you may, of course, be dead wrong.”
Philip is a popular teacher. His students like him. The women in particular, Nina cannot fail to notice.
He is so sanguine, so merry, so handsome.
Vous permettez?
He is so polite.
Too polite, she sometimes reproaches him.
They do not go to bed with each other right away. Instead he questions her about the well-known American painter.
I don’t want you to sleep with anyone else but me, he says. He sounds quite fierce. They are standing on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Saint-Simon, near the apartment where he is staying with his widowed aunt. A French aunt—or nearly French. She married a Frenchman and has lived in France for forty years. Tante Thea is more French than the French. She talks about politics and about food; she is impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed; she serves three-course lunches, plays golf at an exclusive club in Neuilly, goes to the country every weekend. She refers to Philip as mon petit Philippe and, over time, Nina grows to like her.
A hot Saturday afternoon, the apartment will be empty. Across the boulevard, a policeman stands guarding a ministry. A flag droops over the closed entryway. Cars go by, a bus, several noisy motorcycles. They stand together not saying a word.
Come, Philip finally says.
Mon petit Philippe.
Nina smiles to herself, remembering.
He is so tentative, so determined to please her.
“The assumption that the man in the ski mask has robbed the jewelry store is an example of plausible reasoning but we, in this class”—is how Philip continues his lecture—“will be studying deductive reasoning. We will look at how intuitive judgments are replaced by definite theorems—and that the man robbing the jewelry store is in fact the owner of the jewelry store and he is on his way to a costume party, therefore the ski mask, and the neighbor’s kid has accidentally thrown a baseball through his store window.
“Any questions?”
Most probably a sudden cardiac arrest—not a heart attack—their neighbor, an endocrinologist, says. He tries to explain the difference to her. A heart attack is when a blockage in a blood vessel interrupts the flow of blood to the heart, while a cardiac arrest results from an abrupt loss of heart function. Most of the cardiac arrests that lead to sudden death occur when the electrical impulses in the heart become rapid or chaotic. This irregular heart rhythm causes the heart to suddenly stop beating. Some cardiac arrests are due to extreme slowing of the heart. This is called bradycardia.
Did he say all of that?
No, no, Philip has never been diagnosed with heart disease. Philip is as healthy as a horse. He had a physical a few months ago. That is what his doctor said. In any case it is what Philip told her his doctor said.
No, no, Philip does not take any medication.
Their neighbor, Hugh, looks for a pulse. He puts both hands on Philip’s heart and applies pressure. He counts out loud—one, two, three, four—until thirty.
Nina
