is three hours earlier in California, and Louise, she imagines, is having dinner. She is having dinner with a young man. A handsome young man whom she likes. Afterward, Louise will not pick up her messages, she will sleep with him.
For Louise, Philip is alive still.
Lucky Louise.
Nina takes a sip of wine, then, putting down the glass, reaches for his hand again. His hand is cold and she attempts to warm it by holding it between both of hers.
She loves Philip’s hands. His long blunt fingers. Fingers that have touched her in all kinds of ways. Passionate ways about which she does not want to let herself think—making her come. She presses the hand to her lips.
When did they last make love?
A Sunday morning, a few weeks ago. The house is quiet, the curtains are drawn, and the bedroom is dark enough. She is self-conscious about being too old for sex. Also, it takes him longer.
In Paris, too, in Tante Thea’s old-fashioned, shuttered apartment on the rue de Saint-Simon, where, on the way to Philip’s bedroom, she bumps into furniture—side tables, spindly-legged chairs, glass cases filled with porcelain figurines—and where in bed, afterward, Philip admits that he was nervous. Without telling her why, he says he had not made love in a long time. He was afraid, he says, he had forgotten how.
You can never forget—like riding a bicycle, Nina adds.
This or her trite remark makes him laugh and, reassured or, at least, not as nervous, Philip makes love to her again.
Has he been faithful to her?
She reaches for the glass of wine.
Also, not thinking, Nina reaches into the windbreaker pocket and pulls out a coin. It feels like a penny.
Heads? Tails?
“The probability of an event occurring when there are only two possible outcomes is known as a binomial probability,” Philip tells his students. “Tossing a coin, which is the simple way of settling an argument or deciding between two options, is the most common example of a binomial probability. Probabilities are written as numbers between one and zero. A probability of one means that the event is certain—”
When Louise is six years old, she begins to play a game of tossing pennies with Philip. She records the results along with the dates in a little orange notebook, which she keeps in the top drawer of Philip’s bedside table:
5 heads, 10 tails — 10/10/1976
9 heads, 11 tails — 3/5/1977
17 heads, 13 tails — 2/9/1979
The more times you toss a coin, Lulu, Philip tells Louise, the closer you get to the true theoretical average of heads and tails.
5039 heads, 4961 tails — 3/5/1987
For the last entry, Louise relies on a calculator.
“Another thing to remember and most people have difficulty understanding this,” Philip continues to tell his class as he takes a penny out of his pocket and tosses it up in the air, “is if a coin has come up heads a certain number of times, it will not necessarily come up tails next, as a corrective. A chance event is not influenced by the events that have gone before it. Each toss is an independent event.”
Heads, Philip tells Louise.
Heads, again.
Heads.
Tails, he says.
Nina, on an impulse, throws the coin she found in the pocket of Philip’s windbreaker up in the air. Too dark to see which way it comes up, she places the coin on top of the bedside table. In the morning she will remember to look:
Heads is success, tails is failure
And record the date in Louise’s orange notebook: 5/5/2005.
5 5 5
What, she wonders, do those three 5s signify?
Numbers are the most primitive manifestations of archetypes. They are found inherent in nature. Particles, such as quarks and protons, know how to count—how does she know this? By eating, sleeping, breathing next to Philip. Particles may not count the way we do but they count the way a primitive shepherd might—a shepherd who may not know how to count beyond three but who can tell instantly whether his flock of, say, 140 sheep, is complete or not.
Also, she remembers the example of the innumerate shepherd and his sheep.
She drinks a little more wine. She has not eaten since noon but chewing food seems like an impossible task. A task she might have performed long ago but has forgotten how.
She would like a cigarette. She has not smoked in twenty years yet the thought of lighting it—the delicious whiff of carbon from the struck match—and inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs is soothing. She and Philip both smoked once.
In Tante Thea’s apartment, after making love for the first time, they share a cigarette, an unfiltered Gauloise. They hand it back and forth to each other as they lie on their backs, naked, on the lumpy single bed—the ashtray perched on her stomach. And later when they begin to kiss again, she remembers how Philip licks off a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip, and, then, how he swallows it. At the time, it seems a most intimate gesture.
As if she is exhaling smoke, Nina lets out a long deep breath.
Are you a spy? she asks. Are you employed by the CIA?
At the beginning, she makes a point to be difficult. She does not intend to be an easy conquest. She does not want to fall in love yet.
No. Yes. If that is what you want to believe.
Philip has a Fulbright scholarship and is teaching undergraduate math for a year at the École Polytechnique.
And do all the girls have a crush on you?
Alas, there aren’t many girls in my class. The few are the grinds. Philip makes a face of distaste.
There’s Mlle. Voiturier and Mlle. Epinay. They sit together and don’t say a word. They have terrible B.O.
In spite of herself, Nina laughs.
Do I? Nina makes as if to smell her underarm.
No. What perfume do you wear?
L’Heure Bleue.
Philip smells faintly of ironed shirts.
He still does.
Spring. The weather is warm, the chestnut trees are in flower, brilliant tulips bloom in the Luxembourg Garden. In the evenings, they stroll along the quays bordering the darkening Seine, watching the tourist boats go by. On one such evening, a boat shines its light on them, illuminating them as they kiss. On board, everyone claps and Philip and Nina, only slightly embarrassed, wave back.
What I was saying about whether God exists or not, Philip
