“I didn’t think she’d do it,” my father grumbled, starting right in as we waited for our food. Of course, he was talking about Mom. That year, she’d finally contacted a divorce lawyer.
“She has her own future to think of, Dad.”
“She used to think of mine, as well.”
“Yeah — and then you left her.”
He sniffed. “Well, fuck you, Son.”
“Well, fuck you, Dad.”
In my reflector, the girl raised her eyebrows again. I smiled into my water glass to make it clear that Dad and I were joking.
“Well, her future should be fine, either way,” he said. “I’m sure the judge is going to take care of her in style.”
“And she deserves it.”
“Oh, so you’re one of those.”
“One of whats?”
“One of the apologists.” He boomed the words, gesturing for another scotch. “Just like the two of them.”
I didn’t get a break from this kind of banter until after dessert, which he didn’t touch. But at last he rose from the table to use the men’s room. By then, I was pretty much beaten. I looked into my water glass and found the girl watching me. I smiled.
When the waiter arrived with another GlenDronach and set it at Dad’s spot, I reached across and downed it.
A moment later, I heard, “That was a fast one.”
I checked the glass: she was standing right behind me. “Oh,” I said. “He won’t even remember. I was actually doing him a favor.”
“I was just on my way to the ladies’ room.”
I pointed. “It’s over there.”
“Thank you, yes.”
Her voice was surprisingly southern and surprisingly lovely — though also surprisingly firm, like a magnolia trunk. (I could tell even then.) Her blouse was buttoned all the way to the neck, where a turn of white silk had been folded. And now I noticed that her nose contained a single, breathtaking bend, about halfway down. She pointed to the empty glass. “I hope you didn’t actually need that.”
“Well, I did.”
“Just to speak to me?”
“You weren’t here at the time.”
“Technically not.” She looked at me rather sharply. “That’s your father, isn’t it?” She nodded toward the far side of the room, where I saw now that he’d taken a seat at the bar. Another shot was being poured for him.
“Well, yes,” I said. “It appears to be.”
“Then if I were you,” she said, turning to make her way, “I’d be a little more careful.”
—
“YOU SEEM TO be far from an apologist, by the way,” she said.
“You were eavesdropping.”
“You were spying.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Could you tell?”
“Either that or you found the water in your glass extremely interesting.”
“In fact, I did.” I smiled. “The randomness of molecular behavior is overestimated. Brownian motion. It bears on my field.”
She smiled back, not as though she understood the thought but as though she understood why I might have had it. “And besides,” she said. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. Your father’s voice carries.”
“He’s a professor.”
“Of math?”
“That’s right.” I felt a twinge. “Of mathematics. Or at least, he was. How’d you know?”
“The same way I knew you weren’t an apologist.”
We were on our first date. Every evening of that week, I’d left the Trump Building early and dined alone at Le Pinceau. I’d become transfixed. Transfixed and suddenly lonely — a strange turn for a man who’d never thought much about companionship. How did you find a person you’d spoken to only once in a city the size of New York? Actually, it was the type of mathematical problem for which my training had perfectly prepared me. An intersection of probabilities, each one small. After my sixth night at the same table — my sixth pepper steak, my sixth gratinéed potato, my sixth dully bubbling glass of mineral water — I was reaching for the door handle at the exit to head back up to Physico for my sixth round of late-night brainstorming, when the door opened ahead of my hand. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said, under my breath.
“You look as though you were expecting me.”
Within moments, she’d agreed to dinner. (Sometimes, like my father, I could talk.) The waiter said nothing as he brought me my second pepper steak of the evening.
Texas. Small town. Alone in New York now, employed in book publishing. These were the facts, which she related to me while sitting straight, like a dancer, across the white-linened table. She kept her head tilted just slightly up, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off that tiny bend* in her nose.
“Women’s prison,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Book publishing.”
I pointed out the window, where, from up the block, 40 Wall Street was casting its stony stare at the sidewalk. “Then I suppose I’m in men’s prison.”
“Here’s to the inmates.”
When we set down our glasses of mineral water, I said, “I’m just wondering — how does a girl in book publishing manage to eat at Le Pinceau?”
“Carefully,” she answered. “And occasionally. And using a little secret.”
“Which is what?”
But she only smiled. She took another look around and asked if I minded going for a walk.
Minded?
I called Lorenzo (discreet nod of approval as he shut the door behind her) and had him bring us up to Central Park, where, sitting on a rough stone archway alongside the apple-scented horse trails, eating an oversalted pretzel from a cart, she told me about: (1) the collapse of her engagement (older man, a professor at her college); (2) her Hill Country childhood (rattlesnakes, imaginary friends); (3) her current dreams (children, a literary salon); (4) her family (brother, older, drying out for the third time).
She asked me about: (1) my own childhood (not much that I wished to recount); (2) my parents (the mulberry tree, the Art Institute, the cabin in the woods); (3) my sister (MIT, now Caltech, on faculty); (4) my work (the Shores-Durbans); and (5) my dreams (I’d never actually come up with any).
Like my father, I didn’t want to talk about my life. Like my father, I fell in love with the first girl who asked me about it.
—
UNLIKE MY FATHER, however, I married her.
* For those who care for an approximation of the tilt and bend: for y = 0…180, x = 170e−.00016(y − 23)2− 9.4e−.0025(y − 47)2.
Non-Brownian Gray
DAD SHOWED UP in New York City one more time, a couple of months before the wedding. Audra thought I should have dinner with him alone, but she offered to join us for dessert. Le Pinceau again — his choice. The same five whiskeys with the same appetizers and the same main course. Then another couple of Laphroaigs as we waited for her to arrive. I’d seen him in his cups before, on plenty of occasions, but now he seemed to be pushing himself up one last, terrible hill.
By the time she joined us, the dessert plates were on the table. At that point Dad had finished off an Irish coffee, too. Not five minutes later, as he was telling her about his early years at Princeton, he knocked a newly arrived GlenDronach onto the floor, lunging for it and nearly going over himself. The waiter was there in a moment, but he didn’t bring another.