Yet equally remarkable was the fact that until this point in his life Andret had felt little desire to avail himself of such a talent. He never drew the world around him. Not trees. Not landscapes. Not the human figure. Never the land and never the lake or the woods he’d grown up with. Never the faces he knew. As a child he hadn’t entertained the slightest feeling toward art, and as an adult he’d remained entirely unmoved by the world of the visual. Princeton had an art museum. He would never have considered spending an afternoon there.
—
BY THE MIDDLE of the winter, he’d narrowed his search to the Abendroth and two other possibilities. One was the Goldbach conjecture, a problem in number theory that had been around since Goldbach first posed it to Euler. Its statement was simple—Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes—yet a dozen generations of mathematicians had worked on it without finding a proof.
The first Kurtman hypothesis, on the other hand, was the product of a man who was still on the faculty at the Free University of Berlin. Andret had only learned of its existence when he’d stumbled upon Dietrich Kurtman’s face on the cover of a copy of Der Spiegel that was sitting on a coffee table in the department offices.
A mathematician on the cover of an international magazine. He’d felt his bile rise.
But in the end, he concluded, both the Goldbach and the first Kurtman were problems of number theory. He liked numbers, but he wasn’t a number theorist. He was a topologist. Hans Borland had seen it in him.
He would need to be disciplined now. He would need to make the wise choice.
Late in January, at the depth of the winter’s cold, he put away his notes on the Goldbach and the first Kurtman. He cleaned his office. Into a drawer he brushed everything from his side table, then taped together a file box. On the cover of the box he printed the words ABENDROTH CONJECTURE: 1977–19—. He had a feeling that Ulrich Abendroth had proposed a problem that might not be solved for decades; but he pulled the table alongside his desk anyway and set the file box on top of it.
Rise Over Run
SITTING IN HIS warm office, he would begin by layering figures in his mind. When he reached the end of a construction, he would bring out the pad from his drawer, center it on the stained leather blotter, and draw what he’d imagined. He produced these drawings of the Abendroth not so much because he would need the references later but because the act of depicting a figure fixed it permanently in his memory. That was how his brain worked.
Now and then, at the monthly departmental cocktail hours that he’d begun to look forward to, he was asked to display his artistic skill. Usually it was the wife of a colleague who asked. There she would be, some mild beauty with a colored drink in her hand, pointing out the window at the bright spectacle of trees and spired rooftops that formed the view from the high floors of the mathematics building. Would he consider drawing the scene for her? Well, perhaps he would. The bejeweled fourth finger. The thickly lashed eyes. If he’d had the proper number of drinks himself, he’d comply, the picture emerging from the envelope, or the napkin, or the index card, as though a cover were being lifted from the corner of a photograph. He knew that these drawings would be shown later, at the back of the party or on the car ride home, and that eventually they might be folded into albums or framed on office walls, some emblem of an admiration he neither deserved nor fully comprehended. He sensed this admiration around him, and although he didn’t exactly understand it, it did bring him pleasure.
Sometimes, in fact, he thought that his hunger for such pleasure was the only thing that drove him forward.
To his own mind, in truth, his actual gift seemed closer to a form of idiocy. Cle had been right. It was as though he didn’t see the object he was drawing but the entire array of space instead — all things that were the object and all things that were not the object — with equal emphasis. It was symptomatic of something he’d noticed in himself since childhood — an inability to take normal heed of his senses, the way other people did as they instinctually navigated a course of being. In this way, it was like mathematics itself: the supremacy of axiom over experience. He wondered why others didn’t see this.
It was an expression, he knew in his heart, of confusion.
—
ON THE DAYS when work on the Abendroth went badly, or on the occasional one when he was afraid to face it at all, he would walk down to Nassau Street in the center of town and stroll among the businesses. There was a drugstore there, Brandt’s, that he liked because it reminded him of something that he might have found in Cheboygan. Brandt’s used a pulley to deliver orders through an opening in the wall at the back of the store. When a prescription was ready, a bell sounded, and a black iron basket the size of a bird cage glided out from a hole above the pharmacy counter, carrying a white paper bag that had been stapled closed. The basket paused with each pull of the cable above an aisle that displayed support hose and fold-up walkers and yellowing plastic humidifiers, descending in arm-long increments until it arrived alongside the cash register at the front. At Brandt’s, he saw few patrons from the university. These kinds of places, the dusty old spots on the rear streets of the downtown, were populated by a second phalanx of Princeton citizenry, a population of secretaries and maintenance men and low-level city workers who provided the bulwark for the professors and the professional class that had been appearing here for generations. The professors were all singletons of a sort, men and women like himself, arriving without history or ancestry, making their marks on their fields — or failing to — and then sending their children onward, or moving on themselves. They were outsiders to the drama — Andret found this fact comforting.
One winter day, as he was leaving through the double-glassed atrium of Brandt’s, he held open the door for a woman coming in. She was a member of this second phalanx of citizenry, a secretary or a travel agent or a store clerk, dressed in a brown wool coat and a winter hat, with a dark wool scarf wrapped over her face. Her shoulders were dappled with snow. She stepped in hurriedly. It was as she was stamping her feet and unwrapping the scarf that he recognized her.
Something struck him in his heart.
He couldn’t think of what to say, so he continued out the door into the cold. Outside, he quickly crossed the street, wrapping his own scarf over his face. There was a lunch counter on the other side of the avenue, and he took a seat at the front. The snow was swarming and the windows of Brandt’s were white with fog, but he could still see her. She’d stopped near the register.
It was Helena Pierce.
He leaned forward and wiped the glass. She turned toward him then and rewrapped her scarf. Was it really who he thought it was? He looked closer but still couldn’t decide.
It was the strangest thing: he could have seen her anytime just by walking into the departmental offices; but out here in town he felt disturbed. He wondered if she felt the same way. With his gloved hand he rubbed again at the window.
Then, as though she sensed him all the way from the other side of the street, she stepped toward the door. She took off her hat and pointed her gaze directly across at him. She didn’t lower her eyes.