As She Climbed Across the Table

2

My dissertation work, five years earlier, was on “Theory as Neurosis in the Professional Scientist.” On its strength I won an assistant professorship at the department of anthropology, University of North California at Beauchamp (pronounced beach ’em). The September I arrived was the first time I’d been to California, apart from the job interview.

My attitude was terrible at first. I wasn’t comfortable applying the social sciences, those fun-house mirrors, to real people engaged in real pursuits. It seemed presumptuous and unfair. So my tongue went into my cheek. My teaching suffered, and I was put through a severe departmental review.

Then I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing. The review itself was the key. I didn’t have to look any further for my life’s work. I would study academic environments, the departmental politics and territorial squabbles, the places where disciplines overlapped, fed back, and interfered. Like a parapsychologist, I set traps for the phantom curricula that wavered into existence in the void between actual ones. I applied information theory to the course catalogs, the reading lists, the food-service menus.

My new work was irrelevant and strong. It appeared only in translation, in the journal Veroffentlichen Sonst Umkommen, heavily footnoted articles, dry and unreadable as a handful of fine sand. My nickname around the department was the Dean of Interdiscipline. Interdean, for short. I got an apartment on campus, and there were days when I never crossed out of the benign square mile that included the buildings where I taught, ate dining-hall food, and read faculty notices on tattered, pinpricked bulletin boards.

It was some interdisciplinary project that first brought me to the gigantic and forbidding buildings that were the physics department, and got me grappling with the gigantic and forbidding theories that were modern physics. Even for the Interdean, that stuff was rough going. My reward was that hidden inside the theories and buildings, like a pearl in an oyster, was the new assistant professor specializing in particle physics, Alice Coombs.

I kept cooking up stupid questions, excuses to visit the collider where Alice was running her particles like champion greyhounds. It was a few weeks before I had the courage to ask her out. I suggested a walk in the hills that overlooked the cyclotron. I think it was my first time off campus in a month. I remember Alice with her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, picking her way over exposed roots in the path. The sky was some dramatic uptilted cloudscape. Like the clouds were escaping to the stars. Beauchamp beneath us, toy city. I remember thinking, I don’t like blond hair. But I liked Alice’s. I was an idiot. Out of breath from climbing, we stumbled into each other on the path and I smelled her. If olives were sweet—that was how she smelled.

“It’s funny like—”

“You reminded me—”

“We’re hardly—”

Talk was hopeless. We smiled apologetically, while our words went spilling like platefuls of barbecue sauce onto a white dress in a detergent ad, comical slow-motion disaster.

I could only kiss her. That worked. I got another whiff of the sweetness of olives.

Alice Coombs and I soon learned to do many things together, including talk. We could even banter. Argue, if necessary. But we maintained a little cult of leaving things unsaid. Somehow we were wiser with our mouths shut, knew each other better.

Or so we thought.

The silence is where the idea of asking Alice to marry me got lost, stranded forever on the tip of my tongue. It was too obvious and uncouth. Too institutional. We’d been living together for nearly a year now, anthropology and physics. I cooked dinner most nights. Alice worked late.