Nachman hammered the dashboard with his fist and shouted an obscenity. In the twenty-first century in Los Angeles, a great city of cars where no conceivable depravity wasn’t already boring to high school kids, Nachman, a grown man, found himself agonized by an ancient moral dilemma.
Was it his duty to tell Norbert or to protect Adele? Would it make any difference if he told Norbert? Yes, it would make a difference. Nachman would seem like a messenger worse than the message. The friendship would be ruined. Nachman forced himself to ask: did he want to hurt his friend Norbert? There was no reason to tell him unless he wanted to hurt him. People who told unbearable news to friends, as if it were their duty, then felt very good about themselves while their friends felt miserable — Nachman was not like those people. Besides, to feel good about oneself was important only to narcissists, not Nachman. Nachman loved his friend Norbert and would sooner cut off his own arm than hurt him just to feel good about himself. In the righteous fervor of his thinking, Nachman forgot his dental appointment.
He drove to the ocean and turned toward Malibu. He barely noticed that he was driving well beyond his house. After a while, he saw a place to stop. He parked close to the beach and left his car. In his shoes, he trudged along the sand. The ocean was a sheet of glinting metallic brilliance. Gulls were dark blades soaring in the white glare of the afternoon sun. For the gulls, light was no different from air. For Nachman the difference between one thing and another was the most serious consideration in life. The gulls brought this home to him with terrible poignancy. He remembered his first lesson in mathematics, when he learned about differences.
After his parents divorced, when Nachman was five, his mother’s aunt Natasha Lurie had moved in with Nachman and his mother. She was a small elderly woman from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and had been a well-known mathematician in her youth. She decided to teach Nachman mathematics, and began the lesson by asking him, in a soft tired voice, to write the word “mathematics.” Nachman wrote it phonetically, with an a in the middle. Natasha, who reminded him of clothes hanging on a line, susceptible to the least touch of the wind, took Nachman’s pencil out of his fingers. Pinching the pencil between her own skinny white fingers, she dragged the eraser back and forth on the paper, back and forth, until the a was obliterated. Then she drew a round and perfect e, pushing the pencil point into the fiber of the paper and pulling the shape of the letter, like a small worm, slowly into view. More than four decades later, trudging on the beach in Malibu, Nachman saw again the red rims of Aunt Natasha’s ancient eyes. She looked at Nachman to see if he understood. The lesson had little to do with spelling or mathematics. She taught him there is a right way. It applied to everything.
He thought of Adele smooching on Fairfax Avenue as he trudged back to his car and drove to Santa Monica and then to his house. When he opened the door, Nachman heard the phone ringing. It continued to ring while he looked through the mail he had collected from the box attached to the front of his house. He entered his study and sat down at his rolltop desk. The phone continued ringing.
Nachman put the bills in one pile and dropped junk mail, unopened, into a wastebasket. Then he opened his personal mail. He found a request: Would Professor Nachman read the manuscript of a proposed mathematics textbook? It was being considered for publication by a major East Coast firm. The job would take many hours. Nachman would be paid five hundred dollars for his opinion and suggestions. It wasn’t much money, but he supposed he should feel honored by the request. He then found two invitations. One was to a conference on mathematical physics, in Indiana. Why had they invited Nachman? It wasn’t his specialty. The appropriate mathematicians had probably turned them down. The second invitation was for a defense job. It had to do with antiballistic-missile systems and would pay ten times what Nachman was making at the Institute of Mathematics. It was a job, Nachman supposed, that was held only by third-rate mathematicians and spies. Antiballistic missiles, indeed. Nachman felt insulted. What a terrible day. The phone was ringing. Nachman went to the bathroom and swallowed an aspirin. He then went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and took off his shoes and socks. The phone on his night table was ringing.
Late-afternoon light, filtered by the leaves of an avocado tree outside his bedroom window, glowed on the pine floor and trembled like the surface of a pond. It was a beautiful and deeply pleasing light, but the roots of the magnificent avocado tree had been undermining the concrete foundation of Nachman’s house for years. He thought about that almost every day. Sooner or later, he would have to choose between the tree and the resale value of the house.
There was sand in his shoes and socks, and sand between his toes. On the night table beside the bed, the phone was ringing. Nachman lay down on his back and placed his right forearm across his eyes.
Let the foundation be torn apart. Let the house fall down. Let the phone ring. Nachman would sleep. Let the phone ring … It was impossible to sleep. Nachman sat up on the edge of his bed and lifted the receiver. He didn’t say hello.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Goodbye,” said Nachman.
“Don’t you dare hang up. You knew it was me. You could hear the ringing. You’re the only person in California who doesn’t have an answering machine. You heard the phone. Why didn’t you pick it up?”
“Between you and me, Adele, a certain subject does not exist.”
“If any subject doesn’t exist, no subject exists.”
“So we have no subjects.”
“I caused you pain. Is that it?”
“I live a simple life. Like a peasant. I go to work. After dinner I go to sleep. I have no interest in adventures.”
“We have different needs. I’m not you, Nachman. And you are not me. I couldn’t live without an answering machine or a television set.”
“O.K., leave it at that and let’s not plunge into a discussion of electronics. I have a headache.”
“I don’t want to leave it at that. I want to understand. I have great respect for your opinions.”
“Adele, I am not in the mood for a confessional orgy. I will say only this — I don’t believe that experience, for its own sake, is the highest value. Kissing in the street, in the middle of Los Angeles … For God’s sake. How could you?”
“You saw me kissing a guy. Was it a threat to your peasant simplicity?”
“In the middle of the afternoon, on Fairfax Avenue, with the bubees and zeydes walking home with grocery bags. There are limits.”
“I think you mean morals.”
“O.K., morals. Yes, morals. You have something against morals?” Nachman heard himself shouting and felt his breath coming faster.
“Morals-shmorals. It sounds to me like you think I did something to you personally.
“I saw you kissing some guy who isn’t Norbert, my best friend, who happens to be your husband. It was a spectacle of irresponsible lust performed in public, in my face — Norbert’s best friend.”
“Nachman, get ahold of yourself! How the fuck would I know that Norbert’s best friend was stopped in traffic, twenty feet away.”