Timescape

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE MAITRE D’HOTEL AT THE TOP OF THE COVE RESTAURANT said, “Dinner, sir, s’il vous plaît?”

“Uh, yes.”

He led them to a spot with a commanding view of the La Jolla Cove below. Waves broke into foamy white sprays beneath the floodlights. “Ees zees taab-le hokay?” Gordon nodded while Penny rolled up her eyes. After the man had bestowed the huge menus and gone away she said, “God, I wish they’d cut out the accent business.”

“Vat ees eet, madame? You no like zee phony talk?” Gordon said.

“My French isn’t great, but—” she stopped as the waiter approached. Gordon did the wine ritual, selecting something he recognized from the fat book. When he looked around he saw the Carroways sitting some distance away, laughing and having a good time. He pointed them out to Penny; she duly entered the fresh datum in their running tally. But they did not go over to report the latest figures. The Colloquium lay five days in the past, but Gordon felt uneasy in the department now. Tonight’s splurge at the Top of the Cove was Penny’s suggestion, to lift him out of his moody withdrawal.

Something thumped at his elbow. “I open it now,” the waiter said, working at the bottle. “Muss lettit breed.”

“What?” Gordon said, surprised.

“Open ta da air, y’know—breed.”

“Oh.”

“Yes suh.” The waiter gave him a slightly condescending smile.

After he had left Gordon said, “At least he has the smile down pat. Are all the high-class restaurants around here like this?”

Penny shrugged. “We don’t have the old world culture of New York. We didn’t get mugged walking over here, either.”

Gordon would normally have sidestepped the now-what-you-New-Yorkers-ought-to-do conversation, but this time he murmured “Don’t krechtz about what you don’t know,” and without thinking about it he was talking about the days after he moved away from his parents and was living in a cramped apartment, studying hard and for the first time really sensing the city, breathing it in. His mother has assigned Uncle Herb to look in on him now and then, since after all he was living in the same neighborhood. Uncle Herb was a lean and intense man who was always landing big deals in the clothing business. He had a practical man’s disdain for physics. “How much they pay you?” he would say abruptly, in the middle of discussing something else. “Enough, if I scrimp.” His uncle’s face would twist up in the act of weighing this and he would inevitably say, “Plus all the physics you can eat? Eh?” and slap his thigh. But he was not a simple man. Using your intelligence for judging discounts or weighing the marketability of crew neck sweaters—that was smart. His only hobby he had turned into a little business, too. On Saturdays and Sundays he would take the IRT down to Washington Park Square early, to get a seat at one of the concrete chess tables near MacDougal and West Fourth streets. He was a weekend chess hustler. He played for a quarter a game against all comers, sometimes making as much as two dollars in an hour. At dusk he would switch tables to get one near the street light. In winter he would play in one of the Village coffeehouses, sipping lukewarm tea with an audible slurp, making it last so his expenses didn’t run too high. His only hustle was to make his opponents think they were better than he was. Since any chess player old enough to have quarters to spare inevitably also had an advanced case of chess player’s ego, this wasn’t hard. Uncle Herb called them “potzers”—weak players with inflated self-images. His game was no marvel, either. It was strategically unsound, flashy but built out of pseudo traps tailored to snare potzers who thought they saw an unsuspected opening suitable for a quick kill. The traps gave him fast wins, to maximize the take per hour. Uncle Herb’s view of the world was simple: the potzers and the mensch. He, of course, was a mensch.

“You know what was the last thing he said to me when I left?” Gordon said abruptly. “He said, ‘Don’t be a potzer out there.’ And he gave me ten dollars.”

“Nice uncle,” Penny said diplomatically.

“And you know last Friday, the Colloquium? I started to feel like a potzer.”

“Why?” Penny asked with genuine surprise.

“I’ve been standing firm on the strength of my data. But when you look at it—Christ, Dyson would’ve given me a break, would’ve backed me up, if there’d been any sense to it. I trust his judgment. I’m starting to think I’ve made some dumb mistake along the way, screwed up the experiment so bad nobody can find what’s wrong.”

“You should trust your own—”

“That’s what marks the potzer, see? Inability to learn from experience. I’ve been bulling ahead—”

“Zee compote, surrh,” the waiter said smoothly.

“Oh God,” Gordon said with such irritation that the waiter stepped back, his composure gone. Penny laughed out loud, which made the waiter even more uncertain. Even Gordon smiled, and his mood was broken.

Penny’s forced merriment got them through most of the meal. She produced a book from her handbag and pressed it on him. “It’s the new Phil Dick.”

He glanced at the lurid cover. The Man in the High Castle. “Haven’t got time.”

“Make the time. It’s really good. You’ve read his other stuff, haven’t you?”

Gordon shrugged off the subject. He still wanted to talk about New York, for reasons he could not pin down. He compromised by relating to Penny the contents of his mother’s latest letter. That distant figure seemed to be getting used to the idea of him living “in flagrant sin.” But there was a curious vagueness about her letters that bothered him. When he first came to California the letters had been long, packed with chatter about her daily routine, the neighborhood, the slings and arrows of Manhattan life. Now she told him very little about what she was doing. He felt the void left by those details, sensed his New York life slipping away from him. He had been more sure of himself then, the world had looked bigger.

“Hey, c’mon, Gordon. Stop brooding. Here, I brought you some more things.”

He saw that she had planned a methodically joyous evening, complete with door prizes. Penny produced a handsome Cross pen and pencil set, a western-style string tie, and then a bumper sticker: Au + H2O. Gordon held it between thumb and index finger, suspending it delicately in the air over their table as though it might contaminate the veal piccata.

“What’s this crap?”

“Oh, c’mon. Just a joke.”

“Next you’ll be giving me copies of The Conscience of a Conservative. Christ”

“Don’t be so afraid of new ideas.”

“New? Penny, these are cobwebbed—”

“They’re new to you.”

“Look, Goldwater might make a good neighbor—good fences make good neighbors, isn’t that what Frost said? Little lit’rary touch for you, there. But Penny, he’s a simpleton.”

She said stiffly, “Not so simple he gave away Cuba.”

“Huh?” He was honestly mystified.

“Last October Kennedy signed it away. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers energetically. “Agreed not to do anything about Cuba if the Russians took their missiles out.”

“By ‘anything’ you mean another Bay of Pigs.”

“Maybe.” She nodded sternly. “Maybe.”

“Kennedy’s already helped out quite enough fascists. The Cuban exiles, Franco, and now Diem in Viet Nam. I think—”

“You don’t think at all, Gordon. Really. You’ve got all these eastern ideas about the way the world works and they’re all wrong. JFK was weak on Cuba and you just watch—the Russians will give them the guns and they’ll infiltrate everywhere, all over South America. They’re a real threat, Gordon. What’s to stop them from sending troops into Africa, even? Into the Congo?”

“Nonsense.”

“Is it nonsense that Kennedy’s chipping away at our freedoms here, too? Forcing the steel companies to back down, when all they did was raise prices? Whatever happened to free enterprise?”

Gordon raised a palm in the air. “Look, can we have a truce?”

“I’m just trying to shake you loose from those ideas of yours. You people from the east don’t understand how this country really works.”

He said sarcastically, “There might be a few guys on The New York Times who mull it over.”

“Left-wing Democrats,” she began, “who don’t—”

“Hey, hey.” He raised his palm toward her again. “I thought we had a truce.”

“Well… All right. Sorry.”

Gordon studied his plate for a moment, distracted, and then said with dawning perception, “What’s this?”

“An artichoke salad.”

“Did I order this?”

“I heard you.”

“After the veal? What was I thinking of?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“I don’t need this. I’ll flag one of those funny waiters.”

“They’re not ‘funny,’ Gordon. They’re queer.”

“What?” he asked blankly.

“You know. Homosexual.”

“Fags?” Gordon felt as though he had been deceived all evening. He dropped his signaling hand, suddenly shy. “You should’ve told me.”

“Why? It doesn’t matter. I mean, they’re all over La Jolla—haven’t you noticed?”

“Uh, no.”

“Most of the waiters in any restaurant are. It’s a convenient job. You can travel around and live in the best spots. They don’t have family obligations, most of the time their family wants nothing to do with them, so…” She shrugged. Gordon saw in this gesture an unaffected sophistication, an ease with the world, which he suddenly envied very much. The way their conversation had shifted from topic to topic this evening bothered him, had kept him off balance. He realized that he still could not get a grip on the real Penny, the woman behind so many different faces. The comic Goldwaterite lived right alongside the literature and arts major, who in turn blended into the casual sexual sophisticate. He remembered opening the bathroom door at a faculty party last year to find her seated on the toilet, her blue gown crescenting the bowl like a wreath of flowers. They had both been startled; she held a square of yellow tissue in an upraised hand. Her heels dug into the grouting between the triangular brown tiles of the floor, so her toes canted cockily into the air. The low seat made her seem bottom-heavy. Between pale thighs he saw the unending oval yawn. A dark sheath of hose swallowed most of her legs, yielding only to the descending tongues of her garter belt. His jaw had sagged open with indecision and then he stepped in, mouth closing on the possibility of faux pas. The mirror on the far wall showed a startled stranger, puzzled. He shut the door behind him, drawn to her. “You can see this at home,” she said impishly. With a studious deliberation she patted herself, unmindful of him, and let the yellow paper flutter into the mouth of water below. She half-turned on the seat, pressed the chipped ceramic handle. An answering gurgle took away her business from his prying eyes before she arose. Standing, smoothing her dress, she was taller and somehow challenging, an exotic problem. In the bleached, tile pocket she appeared luminous with purpose, a Penny he had not known. “I couldn’t wait,” he said with a warmth that sounded strange to himself, considering that it wasn’t true. He edged by her, unzipped. The mildly pleasurable gush: release. “Getting domestic, aren’t we?” Penny raised one edge of her lipsticked mouth in the lyric curve of a half-smile, seeing the mood in him. “I guess so,” he said lazily. Outside, his colleagues were discussing superconductivity while their wives made shrewd observations on local real estate; the women seemed to have a better grip on what was real. Penny’s smile broadened and he concluded with a quick spurt that narrowly missed the seat. He gave himself a wobbly drying shake, tucked himself in and dried the seat with more of the yellow- tissues. He had never felt this simple and open with a woman before, in such a rich, enameled air. Not wanting to hang on to the moment for fear that it would burst, he kissed her lightly and popped open the door. Outside, Isaac Lakin leaned against the wall, studying the Breughel prints in the shadowed hallway and awaiting entrance to the bathroom. “Ah,” he said as they emerged together. “Up to something.” A simple deduction. Lakin’s eyes moved from one to the other as though he could glimpse the secret, as though he had just seen a new facet of Gordon. Well, maybe he had. Maybe they both had.

“Gor-don,” Penny urged him back into the present. “You’ve been going off like that all evening,” She looked concerned. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation. The dream Penny was soft and womanly; the one before him was a nag. “If you’re going to do that, why not just talk about it?”

He nodded. Her programmed night out, full of forced gaiety, had begun to wear on him. And the sudden shifts in his emotions bothered him as well. He normally thought of himself as rock-steady, unmoved by passing notions.

“Got a call from Saul today,” he said stonily, fleeing his own thoughts. “He and Frank Drake are going to get time on the big radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. They want to study 99 Hercules.”

“If they receive a signal, it will prove your case?”

“Right. It makes no sense, but—right.”

“Why no sense?”

“Look, I mean—” Gordon waved a hand in exasperation. One of the waiters took this as a signal and began to advance. Hurriedly Gordon motioned him away. “Even if you bought the story whole, the tachyons and everything—why think there should be radio signals? Why both? The whole point of using tachyons is that radio’s too slow.”

“Well, at least they’re doing something.”

“Were you a cheerleader in high school, too?”

“God, you’re a nasty bastard sometimes.”

“Wrong time of the month.”

“Look, Saul is trying to help.”

“I don’t think that’s the way to solve the problem.”

“What is?” When he waved away the question with a faintly disgusted look on his face, she persisted: “Really, Gordon, what is?”

“Forget it. That’s the best way. Just hope everybody else will forget it, too.”

“You don’t really—”

“Sure I do. You should’ve been at that Colloquium.”

She let him cool for a moment and then murmured, “You were confident a week ago.”

“That was a week ago.”

“At least you could work on it.”

“Cooper’s candidacy exam is two days away. I’m going to concentrate on helping him prepare, and then on getting him out. That’s my job” Gordon nodded abruptly, as though having a job to do resolved all issues.

“Maybe you should try something like what Saul’s doing.”

“No point.”

“How can you be so sure?” She folded her arms, sitting back in the rattan chair and looking squarely at him. “Have you ever thought about the rigid way scientists work? It’s like military training.”

“Bullshit.”

“What do they teach you? Write down everything you know about a problem. Set it up in some equations. Most of the time, that’s enough in itself, right? You just push the equations around a little and you’ve got the answer.”

“Not that simple,” Gordon said, shaking his head. But to himself he had to grudgingly admit that there was some truth to what she said. Assign symbols, making the x’s and y’s and z’s the unknowns, then rearrange. Made-to-order thinking. They were all used to it and maybe it hid some elements of the problem, if you weren’t careful. Dyson, for all his wisdom, could be dead wrong, simply because of habits of mind.

“Let’s have chocolate mousse,” Penny said brightly.

He looked up at her. She was going to make this evening end right, one way or the other. He remembered her perched on the toilet and felt a warmth steal over him. She had been both vulnerable and serene sitting there, performing an animal function amid a gauzy gown. Pert, and oddly elegant.

“Vas you-are dinner ex-see-lant, sir?”

Gordon peered at the waiter, trying to estimate if he was queer. “Ah… yes. Yes.” He paused. “Lots better than Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.”

The expression on the waiter’s face was worth the price of the meal.