Penny held out her hand, palm toward him. “No. Wait. Two points, Gordon.” She ticked them off. “One, I didn’t arrange any meeting. Maybe Cliff was looking for us, but I didn’t know about it. Hell, I didn’t even know he was around here. Two—Gordon, do you think our getting married will solve anything?”
“Well, I feel that—”
“Because I don’t want to, Gordon. I don’t want to marry you at all.”
He came up out of the muggy press of late summer in the subway and emerged into the only slightly less compacted heat of 116th Street. This entrance and exit were relatively new. He dimly remembered an old cast-iron kiosk which, until the early ‘50s, ushered students into the rumbling depths. It stood between two swift lanes of traffic, providing a neat Darwinian selection pressure against undue mental concentration. Here, students with their minds stuffed chock full of Einstein and Mendel and Hawthorne often had their trajectories abruptly altered by Hudsons and DeSotos and Fords.
Gordon walked along 116th Street, glancing at his watch. He had refused to give a seminar on this, his first return to his Alma Mater since receiving his doctorate; still, he did not want to be late for his appointment with Claudia Zinnes. She was a kindly woman who had barely escaped Warsaw as the Nazis were entering it, but he remembered her impatience with late students. He hurried by South Field. To his left students clustered on the shallow steps of Low Library. Gordon headed for the physics building, perspiring from the effort of carrying his big brown suitcase. Among a knot of students he thought he saw a familiar face.
“David! Hey, David!” he called. But the man turned away quickly and walked in the opposite direction. Gordon shrugged. Maybe Selig didn’t want to see an old classmate; he always had been an odd bird.
Come to think of it, everything here now seemed a little bit odd, like a photograph of a friend with something retouched. In the yellow summer light the buildings looked a little more scruffy, the people wan and pale, the gutters slightly deeper in trash. A block away a drunk lounged on a doorstep, drinking from something in a brown paper bag. Gordon picked up his pace and hurried inside. Maybe he had been in California too long; everything that wasn’t crisp and new struck him as used up.
Claudia Zinnes was unchanged. Behind her warm eyes lurked a glinting intelligence, distant and amused. Gordon spent the afternoon with her, describing his experiments, comparing his apparatus and techniques with her laboratory. She knew of spontaneous resonance and Saul Shriffer and the rest. She found it “interesting,” she said, the standard word that committed you to nothing. When Gordon asked her to try to duplicate the experiment with Cooper, at first she brushed aside the idea. She was busy, there were many students, thè time on the big nuclear resonance magnets was all booked up, there was no money. Gordon pointed out how similar one of her present setups was to his own; simple modifications would make it identical. She argued that she didn’t have a sample of indium antimonide good enough. He produced five good samples, little slabs of gray: here, use them any way you want. She arched an eyebrow. He found himself slipping into a persona he had forgotten—pushy yid schoolboy, hustling the teacher for a better grade. Claudia Zinnes knew these routines as well as anybody living, but gradually his pressure piqued her interest. Maybe there was something to the spontaneous resonance effect after all. Who could tell, now that the waters around it had been muddied so? She gazed at him with the warm brown eyes and said, “It’s not for that you want me to check. Not to clear up this mish-mosh,” and he nodded, yes, he hoped she would find something else. But—a warning finger—let the curves speak for themselves. He smiled and made little jokes and felt a little eerie, living in his student persona again, but somehow it all came together and worked. Claudia Zinnes slipped from “maybe” and “if” to “when” and then, seemingly without noticing the transition, she was scheduling some time on the NMR rig in September and October. She asked after some of his classmates, where they were, what sort of jobs. He saw suddenly that she had a true affection for the young people who passed through her hands and out into the world. As she left she patted his arm, brushed some lint from his damp summer jacket.
As he walked away across South Field he remembered the undergraduate awe that ran through him in those first four long, hard years. Columbia was impressive. Its faculty was world famous, the buildings and laboratories imposing. Never had he suspected that the place might be a mill grinding out intelligent trolls willing and able to wire the circuits, draw the diagrams, to spin the humming wheels of industry. Never had he thought that institutions could stand or fall because of the vagaries of a few individuals, a few uninspected biases. Never. Religions do not teach doubt.
He took a taxi crosstown. The cab banged into potholes on some of the side streets, a jarring contrast with California’s smooth boulevards. He was just as glad Penny had refused to come; the city wasn’t at its best on the grill of August.
They had been tense with each other since the marriage thing came up. Maybe a short separation would help. Let the whole subject drift downstream into the past. Gordon watched the blur of faces going by outside. There was an earthen hum here, like the sound the IRT made going under Broadway. The hollow, heavy rumble seemed to him strangely threatening with its casual reminder of other people going about their other lives, totally ignorant of nuclear magnetic resonance and enigmatic sun-tanned Californians. His obsessions were merely his, not universal. And he realized that every time he tried to focus on Penny his mind skittered away, into the safe recesses of the spontaneous resonance muddle. So much for being captain of his fate.
He got out of the cab into the street where he grew up, blinking in the watery sunlight. Same beat-up trash cans adding their perfume, same grillwork, same Grundweiss grocery down the corner. Dark-eyed young housewives toting bags, herding their chattering children. The women were conservatively dressed, the only hint of undercurrents being their broad, lipsticked, sensuous mouths. Men in gray business suits hurrying by, black hair cropped short.
His mother was on the landing, arms spread wide, as he came up. He gave her a good-son kiss. When he came into the old living room with its funny, close flavors—“It’s in the furniture, the stuffing, it’s with us for life,” she said, as though the stuffing was immortal—it washed over him. He decided to just let everything go. Let her tell him the months of carefully stored gossip, show the engagement pictures of distant relatives, cook him “a good home meal, for once”—chopped liver, and kugel and flanken. They listened to calypso rhythms on the ancient brown Motorola in the corner. Later they went down to see the Grundweisses—“He tells me three times, bring that boy down. I’ll give him an apple like before”—and around the block, hailing friends, discussing seriously the statistics of earthquakes, heaving a Softball into the waning summer light for a bunch of kids playing in a lot. The next day, just from that one throw—“Can you believe it?”—his arm was sore.
He stayed two days. His sister came over, cheerful and busy and oddly calm. Her dark eyebrows moved with each arch of a sentence, each surge of her face, making dancing parentheses. Friends dropped by. Gordon went all the way over to 70th Street to get some California wine for these occasions, but he was the only one who drank more than a glass. Still, they talked and joked with as much animation as any La Jolla cocktail party, proving alcohol an unnecessary lubricant.