Timescape

CHAPTER SEVEN

PENNY TURNED THE IGNITION KEY AND THE RADIO came alive, blaring a shrill, “Pepsi Cola hits the spot! Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot—” Gordon reached over and clicked it off.

Penny pulled out of the parking lot and onto the boulevard. Cool night air fanned her hair. The strands were mousy brown at the scalp but then lightened into blond, bleached by sun and the clorine of swimming pools. A sea tang thickened the soft breeze.

“Your mother called,” Penny said carefully.

“Oh. You told her I’d call back?” Gordon hoped this would chop off the subject.

“She’s flying out soon to visit you.”

“What? Goddamn, why?”

“She says you’re not writing her at all any more and she wants to see what the west coast is like, anyhow. She’s thinking of moving out here.” Penny kept her voice calm and flat and drove with quick, precise movements.

“Oh, Christ.” He had a sudden mental picture of his mother in a black dress, walking down Girard Avenue in the yellow sunlight, peering in the windows of the shops, a full head shorter than everyone else going by. She would be as out of place as a nun in a nudist colony.

“She didn’t know who I was.”

“Huh?” The image of his mother frowning at the thinly clad girls on Girard distracted him.

“She asked if I was the cleaning lady.”

“Oh.”

“You haven’t told her we’re living together, have you?”

A pause. “I will.”

Penny made a humorless smile. “Why haven’t you already?”

He looked out the side window, which was smeared with oil where he had been leaning his head against it, and studied the scattering of jewellike lights. La Jolla, the jewel. They were running down the bumpy canyon route, and the fresh, minty scent of the eucalyptus stands filled the car. He tried to place himself back in Manhattan and look on things from that angle, to anticipate what his mother would think of all this, and found it impossible.

“Is it because I’m not Jewish?”

“Good God, no.”

“But if you had told her that, she’d be out here in a flash, right?”

He nodded ruefully. “Uh huh.”

“You going to tell her before she arrives?”

“Look,” he said with sudden energy, turning in the bucket seat to face her, “I don’t want to tell her Anything. I don’t want her butting into my life. Our life.”

“She’s going to ask questions, Gordon.”

“Let her ask.”

“You won’t answer?”

“Look, she’s not going to stay in our apartment, she doesn’t have to know you live there, too.”

Penny rolled her eyes. “Oh, I get it. Just before she gets here, you’ll start hinting that maybe I should pick up a few of my things that are lying around the apartment? Maybe take my face cream and birth control pills out of the medicine chest? Just a few subtle touches?”

He wilted under her withering tone. He hadn’t thought that clearly, but yes, some idea like that had been floating around in his mind. The old game: defend what you have to, but hide the rest. How long ago had he gotten into that pattern with his mother? Since Dad died? Christ, when was he going to stop being a kid?

“I’m sorry, I…”

“Oh, don’t be a retard. It was just a joke.”

They both knew it wasn’t a joke, but instead hung somewhere in that space between fantasy and a reality about to materialize, and that if she had said nothing he would have stumbled his way into the suggestion eventually. It was this uncanny way she had of seeing his mind working on a problem with its blunt tools, and then leaping ahead to the spot he would reach, that endeared her to him at the most unlikely of moments. By tipping over the rock and exposing the worms underneath she had made it easy for him; there was no alternative but to be honest. “God damn, I love you,” he said, suddenly grinning.

Her smile took on a wry cast. Beneath the flickering street lights she kept her eyes intently on the road, “That’s the trouble with going domestic. You move in with a man and pretty soon, when he says he loves you, you hear underneath it that he’s thanking you. So, you’re welcome.”

“What’s that, WASP wisdom?”

“Just making an observation.”

“How do you girls on the west coast get so smart so fast?” He leaned forward, as if questioning the California landscape outside.

“Getting laid early helps a lot,” she said, grinning.

This was another sore point with him. She had been the first girl he had slept with and when he told her that, at first she wouldn’t believe it. When she made a joke about giving lessons to a professor he had felt his veneer of eastern sophistication shucked away. He had begun to suspect, then, that he used that intellectual carapace to protect himself from rubbing against the uncertainties of life, and particularly from the spikes of sensuality. As he watched the stucco beach cottages go by, Gordon thought, a bit grimly, that merely acknowledging a flaw didn’t mean you had overcome it. He still felt a certain uneasiness at Penny’s direct, straightforward approach. Maybe that was why he couldn’t think of her and his mother in the same world together, much less their meeting in his apartment, with Penny’s clothes in the closet as silent testimonial.

He impulsively reached out and switched on the radio. Its tinny voice sang, “Big gurrls don’t cry—” and he snapped it off.

“Let it play,” Penny said.

“It’s junk.”

“Tills up the air,” she said meaningfully.

He turned it back on with a grimace. Over the refrain of “Bi-ig gurrls?” he said, “Hey, it’s the 25th, isn’t it?” She nodded. “The Liston-Patterson fight’s on. Wait a sec.” He thumbed the dial and found a staccato announcer filling in pre-fight statistics. “Here. They’re not televising it. Look, drive on into Pacific Beach. We’ll eat out. I want to hear this.” Penny nodded silently and Gordon felt an odd sensation of relief. Yeah, it was good to get away from your own problems and listen to two guys pound each other to a pulp. He had picked up the habit of following the fights from his dad around the age of ten. They would sit in the overstuffed chairs of the living room and listen to the excited voices coming from the big brown old-fashioned Motorola in the corner. His father’s eyes jerked back and forth, blank, seeing the punches and feints described from a thousand miles away. Dad had been overweight even then and when he unconsciously threw an imaginary punch, jerking his right elbow forward, the fat flapped on his upper arm. Gordon could see the flesh move even through his father’s white shirt, and watched to see if the ash on his cigar would jerk off and crumble into a gray stain on the carpet. It always did, at least once, and his mother would come in on the middle of the fight and cluckcluck about it and go out to get the dust pan. Dad would wink at him when there was a good punch or somebody went down, and Gordon would grin. He remembered it now as always happening in the summer, so that a traffic hum drifted up from 12th Street and 2nd Avenue, and his father always had damp crescents under his armpits when the fight was over. They drank cokes afterward. It had been a good time.

As they entered the Limehouse, Gordon pointed to a far table and said, “Say, there are the Carroways. What does that make our average?”

“Seven out of twelve,” Penny pronounced.

The Carroways were prominent astronomers, an English couple recently recruited into the Physics Department faculty. They were working at the forefront of the field, struggling with the recent discovery of the quasi-stellar sources. Elizabeth was the observer of the pair, and spent a good deal of time nearby at Palomar, taking deep plates of the sky and searching for more reddened points of light The red shifts indicated that the sources were very far away and thus incredibly luminous. Bernard, the theoretician, thought it pretty likely that they were not distant galaxies at all. He was working on a model which regarded the sources as expelled lumps from our own galaxy, all rushing away from us at very nearly the speed of light and thus red-shifted. Either way, neither had the time to cook, and they seemed to prefer the same restaurants Gordon and Penny frequented.

Gordon had noticed the correlation and Penny was keeping track of the statistics.

“The resonant effect seems to be holding up,” Gordon said to Bernard as they walked by. Elizabeth laughed, and introduced them to the third member of their party, a compact man with a piercing way of looking straight at people as he talked. Bernard asked them to sit at their table and soon the conversation turned to astrophysics and the red shift controversy. Partway through it they ordered the most exotic items they could find on the menu. The Lime-house was a rather second-rate Chinese restaurant, but it was the only one in town and the scientists were all confirmed in the belief that even second-level Chinese was preferable to first-level American. Gordon was wondering idly if this was an outcome of the internationalism of science when he suddenly realized that he hadn’t caught the other man’s name correctly. It was John Boyle, the famous astrophysicist who had a long string of successes to his credit. It was surprises like this, meeting the very best of the scientific community, that made La Jolla what it was. He was very pleased when Penny made a few funny remarks and Boyle laughed, his eyes studying her. This was the kind of thing, meeting the great, that would impress his mother; for this reason he instantly decided not to tell her. Gordon listened to the ebb and flow of the conversation carefully, trying to detect what quality made these colleagues stand out from the rest. There was a quickness of mind, certainly, and a lighthearted skepticism about politics and the way the world was run. Beyond that they seemed pretty much like everybody else. He decided to try a feeler of a different sort.

“What did you think of Liston knocking out Patterson?”

Blank stares.

“He decked him in only two minutes of the first round.”

“Sorry, don’t follow that sort of thing,” Boyle said.

“I should imagine the spectators would be rather miffed if they paid very much for seats.”

“A hundred dollars for a ringside seat,” Gordon said.

“Almost a dollar a second,” Bernard chuckled, and that got them off on a comparison of time per dollar of all human events, considered as a class. Boyle tried to find the most expensive of all and Penny topped him with sex itself; five minutes of pleasure and an entire costly child to bring up if you weren’t careful. Boyle’s eyes twinkled and he said to her, “Five minutes? Not a great advertisement for you, Gordon.”

In the quick bubble of laughter no one noticed Gordon’s jaw muscles clench. He was mildly shocked that Boyle would assume they were sleeping together, and then make a joke about it. Damned irritating. But talk moved on to other subjects and the knotting tension eased away.

Food arrived and Penny continued to inject witty asides, plainly charming Boyle. Gordon admired her in silence, marveling that she could move so easily through such deep waters. He, on the other hand, found himself thinking of something original to say a minute or two after the conversation had passed on to something else. Penny noticed this and drew him in, feeding him a line to which she knew he already had a funny reply. The Limehouse swelled with the hum of talk, the tang of sauces. When Boyle produced from his coat pocket a notebook and made an entry in it, Gordon described how a physicist at a Princeton party was writing in his notebook, and Einstein, sitting next to him, asked why. “Whenever I have a good idea, I make sure I don’t forget it,” the man said. “Perhaps you’d like to try it—it’s handy.” Einstein shook his head sadly and said, “I doubt it. I have only had two or three good ideas in my life.”

This got a good laugh. Gordon beamed at Penny. She had drawn him out and now he was fitting in well.

After dinner the five of them debated going to a movie together. Penny wanted Last Year at Marienbad and Boyle favored Lawrence of Arabia, contending that since he only saw one film a year he might as well take in the best. They voted in favor of Lawrence, four to one. As they left the restaurant Gordon hugged Penny in the parking lot outside, thinking, as he leaned to kiss her, of the smell of her in bed. “I love you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, smiling.

It seemed afterward, as he lay beside her, that he had turned her on the lathe of the light slanting in from the window, reforming her in an image that was fresh each time. He shaped her with his hands and tongue. She, in turn, guided and molded him. He thought he could sense in her sure moves and choices, first this way and then that, past imprints of the lovers she had known before. Strangely, the thought did not bother him, though he felt that in some way it should. Echoes of other men came from her. But they were gone now and he was here; it seemed enough.

He panted slightly, reminding himself that he ought to get down to the beach and run more often, and studied her face in the dim gray street light that leaked into their bedroom. The lines of her face were straight, without strategies, the only curves a few matted damp strands of hair across her cheek. Graduate student in literature, dutiful daughter to an Oakland investor, by turns lyrical and practical, with a political compass that saw virtues in both Kennedy and Gold water. At times brazen, then timid, then wanton, appalled at his sensual ignorance, reassuringly startled by his sudden bursts of sweaty energy, and then soothing with a fluid grace as he collapsed, blood thickening, beside her.

Somewhere, someone was playing a thin song, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Lemon Tree.”

“Goddam, you’re good,” Penny said. “On a scale of one to ten, you get eleven.”

He frowned, thinking, weighing this new hypothesis. “No, it’s we who are good. You can’t separate the performance from the players.”

“Oh, you’re so analytical.”

He frowned. He knew that with the conflicted girls back east it would have been different. Oral sex would have been an elaborate matter, requiring much prior negotiation and false starts and words that didn’t fit but would have to do: “What about if we, well…” and “If, you know, that’s what you want…”—all leading to a blunt incident, all elbows and uncomfortable positions that, once assumed, you feared to change out of sheer unspoken embarrassment. With the intense girls he had known, all that would have had to happen. With Penny, no.

He looked at her and then at the wooden walls beyond. A puzzled concern flickered across his face. He knew this was where he should be urbane and casual, but it seemed more important now to get it right. “No, it’s not me or you,” he repeated. “It’s us.”

She laughed and poked him.