Superstition

10

By the time they'd finished talking it was dusk. He offered her a glass of wine and produced a remarkably smooth, dry white from his refrigerator. When she remarked on it, he said it was a Condrieu from the northern point of the Rhone Valley in France-a gift from a friend who imported fine wines for restaurants all up the East Coast.

“By the way,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I really should have asked before, but if you happen to be free, can I offer you dinner?”

“That's very kind of you,” she said, dismissing as abruptly as it crossed her mind her mother's rule that a woman is never free for at least three days, five for a first date. “I'd like that.”

Then he surprised her again. “I've got a new recipe a friend of mine just e-mailed me from California. If you don't mind being a guinea pig I'd like to try it.”

“Sounds good,” was all she could think of in reply. As he refilled her glass, she vaguely wondered whether this was some standard technique of his, a carefully planned prelude to seduction. Once again she dismissed the thought as unworthy; the poor man was obviously broke and, unlike her, didn't have an expense account for eating out in restaurants. “Can I help?”

“Only if I get into a hopeless mess, but I think I'll be okay. Bring your glass and come and talk to me.”

The kitchen was cavernous and unmodernized, though plainly still much used. There were racks of herbs and spices, hanging pans, skillets and casseroles of gleaming steel and copper, and sets of knives with well-worn wooden handles and blades kept razor sharp. Sam had put some music on in the main room, and it was piped through into two large speakers with a brilliant sound quality. A concerto by Poulenc danced and pirouetted in the air as she watched him go to work. They talked of everything and nothing while he poached a fillet of cod in sake, then prepared soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions, ginger, and coriander separately. Served with basmati rice and accompanied by another bottle of Condrieu, it was delicious.

They ate by candlelight at one corner of a long oak table in the adjoining dining room, paneled where its walls were not obscured by shelves of books. For dessert he had prepared fresh sliced mangoes with a rich lemon sorbet. He offered to make coffee, but she declined. He came around the table to pour what remained of the wine into her glass, and stayed to kiss her long and tenderly.

“All right,” she said about an hour later as they lay in bed in each other's arms, still elated by the suddenness and vigor of their lovemaking, “off the record, what's the real story on how you've stayed single all these years?”

“Hey, I'm not that old,” he protested in a tone of mild reproach.

“I didn't say you were. But I get the feeling that you like women, which means that if you haven't stuck with one you must have had an awful lot of them.”

“Are you one of those women who thinks there's automatically something wrong with a man who isn't married by the time he's thirty?”

“I'm not ‘one of those women who’ anything.”

“No, you're not, are you…?” He ran his hand over the lightly muscled smoothness of her back and pulled her gently toward him once again.

Later they perched cross-legged on the window seat of Sam's living room, eating fruit yogurt and popcorn washed down with champagne. “That proves it,” she exclaimed triumphantly when he produced the bottle.

He looked at her questioningly. “Proves what?”

“You planned this whole thing-even down to a bottle of champagne in the fridge to celebrate.”

“It was left over from a party,” he protested, spreading his arms in a gesture of innocence. “I'd forgotten it was there.”

“Can you really cook? Or do you always do that same dish to impress your girlfriends?”

“Come back tomorrow and try me.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “I might.”

They talked some more about themselves, their backgrounds, their lives up to the present, then wandered back to the subject of the experiment and the things that remained to be arranged, principally the composition of the group. He broke off in the middle of something he was saying and looked out over the dark waters of the Hudson. She was already becoming familiar with these moments of distraction in him, as though his mind abruptly traveled to some place of its own, cut off from the world until it had dealt with whatever preoccupied it at that moment. It was an oddly attractive quality because it was so wholly without self-consciousness. It implied an unexpected vulnerability, a certain loneliness.

“You know something,” he said after a while, “if I could get Roger Fullerton into this group, it would not only be the coup of a lifetime but an absolute blast.”

“Who's Roger Fullerton?”

“My old physics professor at Princeton. He's actually very famous, twice nominated for the Nobel, though they haven't given it to him yet. Having him in the group would really get some attention from the kind of people who dismiss any and all paranormal research as something between group hysteria and outright fraud.”

“Would he do it?”

“I don't know.” Sam laughed softly, turning his attention from the river back to her. “He's always been one of the people who dismiss this kind of work as something between group hysteria and outright fraud.”

“You told me this thing could only work if everybody involved had an open-minded, uncritical approach. Now you're saying let's have a skeptic.”

“The thing about skepticism is it cuts both ways. Real skeptics have open minds. Roger worked with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. He was on the tail end of that whole generation that discovered that reality disappeared the closer they looked at it. You'd think telepathy and psychokinesis would be food and drink to guys like that.”

“So why aren't they?”

Sam shrugged and reached out to pour the last of the champagne into her glass.

“Ask him yourself. Are you free Saturday afternoon?”

“I could be.”

“Come out to Princeton. I think you'll like Roger. And I know he'll like you.”