Black Glass (13 page)

Several years later, after Einstein has married Mileva and neither ever mentions Lieserl, after they have had two sons, a colleague will describe a visit to Einstein's apartment. The door will be open so that the newly washed floor can dry. Mileva will be hanging dripping laundry in the hall. Einstein will rock a baby's bassinet with one hand and hold a book open with the other. The stove will smoke. How does he bear it? the colleague will ask in a letter which still survives, a letter anyone can read. That genius. How can he bear it?

The answer is that he could not. He will try for many years and then Einstein will leave Mileva and his sons, sending back to them the money he wins along with the Nobel Prize.

When the afternoon post came, the postman had found the letter again and included it with the new mail. So there were two letters, only one had been already opened.

•   •   •

EINSTEIN PUT
the new letter aside. He put it under his papers. He hid it in his bookcase. He retrieved it and opened it clumsily because his hands were shaking. He had known this letter was coming, known it perhaps with Lieserl's first tooth, certainly with her first dance. It was exactly what he had expected, worse than he could have imagined.
She is as bald as ice and as mad as a goddess, my Albert,
Mileva wrote.
But she is still my Lieber Dockerl, my little doll. She clings to me, crying if I must leave her for a minute. Mama, Mama! Such madness in her eyes and her mouth. She is toothless and soils herself. She is my baby. And yours, Schatzerl. Nowhere is there a boy I could love like my Papa, she says, lisping again just the way she did when she was little. She has left a message for you. It is a message from the dead. You will get what you really want, Papa, she said. I have gone to get it for you. Remember that it comes from me. She was weeping and biting her hands until they bled. Her eyes were white with madness. She said something else. The brighter the light, the more shadows, my Papa, she said. My darling Papa. My poor Papa. You will see.

The room was too small. Einstein went outside where his breath rose in a cloud from his mouth, tangible, as if he were breathing on glass. He imagined writing on the surface of a mirror, drawing one of his gedanken with his finger into his own breath. He imagined a valentine.
Lieserl,
he wrote across it. He loved Lieserl. He cut the word in half, down the
s
, with the stroke of his nail. The two halves of the heart opened and closed, beating against each other, faster and faster, like wings, until they split apart and vanished from his mind.

I
wish you
could see me now. You would laugh. I have a husband. I have children. Yes. I drive a station wagon. I would laugh, too. Our turn to be the big kids, the grown-ups. Our turn to be over thirty. It astonishes me whenever I stop and think about it. It has to be a joke.

I miss you. I've always missed you. I want us to understand each other. I want to tell you what I did after you left. I want to tell you what I did during the war. Most of all, I want to tell you the truth. This is what makes it so difficult. I have learned to distrust words, even my own. Words can be made to say anything. I know this. Do you?

Much of what I will tell you actually happened. You will be able to identify these parts, or you can ask me. This does not mean, of course, that any of it is true. Even among the people who were there with me are some who remember it differently. Gretchen said something once that echoed my own feelings. “We were happy, weren't we?” she said. “In spite of everything. We made each other happy. Ill-advised, really, this putting your happiness into other people's hands. I've tried it several times since, and it's never worked again.”

But when I repeated this to Julie she was amazed. “Happy?” she asked. “How can you say that? I was so fat. I was being screwed by that teaching assistant. And ‘screwed' is the only word that applies. There was a war. Don't you remember?”

Can I tell you what I remember about the war? I remember the words. Vietnam was the language we spoke—secret bombing, the lottery, Vietnamization, self-immolation, Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, peace with honor, peace at any price, peace, peace, peace. Somewhere, I imagine, on the other side of the world, these words meant something. Somewhere they had physical counterparts. Except for the last set, of course. If peace has ever had a physical value anywhere, none of us has been able to find it. But the other words corresponded to something. There was a real war going on, and in many ways we were untouched by it. This is what I'm trying to say: If the words alone were powerful enough to shape us and our lives as they did, what kind of an impact must the real war have had on its people?

I remember sitting on our sofa watching television. Julie is on the floor at my feet. She's the red-haired Jewish one. She's studying set design and is busy gluing together a tiny throne, part of a mock-up for the set of
Saint Joan
. “Women have fought in wars before,” she reminds us, “but only when God tells them to.”

Lauren is next to me. She's black, light-skinned, and freckled. Her dog is on her lap, giving the television the same studied attention the rest of us are. Gretchen is standing in the doorway to the kitchen drinking a diet soda. She has short brown hair and heavy bangs, a white Catholic though not a practicing one. She clings to Catholicism because it protects her from being a WASP. This unpleasant designation is applicable only to me. You know me. I'm the plain white one on the end there with my legs drawn up to my chest and my arms around them. And that ten-inch figure on the screen with his hands in motion before him and the map of Cambodia behind him, that's President Nixon. The Quaker. He is busy redrawing the Cambodian border and explaining to us that we are not really invading Cambodia, because the border is not where we have always thought it was. Gretchen swallows the last of her soda. “My God,” she says. “The man may be right. Just now, just out of the corner of my eye, I saw the border jump.”

Nixon is impervious to our criticism. He is content; he feels it is enough merely to have found something to say. I am twenty years old. I believe nothing I hear.

I was not always like that. Here is an earlier memory. We are standing on my parents' front porch and you have your arms around me. You have driven all the way down from San Francisco to tell me you have been drafted. I find this incomprehensible. I know you could have avoided it. Isn't Allen in Manhattan Beach, getting braces put on his teeth? Hasn't Greg moved three times in three months, burying his induction notice in the U.S. mails? Hasn't Jim joined VISTA, taking advantage of the unspoken agreement that if you are reluctant to burn villages and bomb children, your country will accept two years of urban volunteerism instead?

You are so thin I feel your bones inside your arms. If you fasted, you could fall below the required weight. Why will you do none of these things? I can't help feeling betrayed.

You try to explain and I try to listen. You tell me that the draft is unfair because you could evade it. You say if you don't go, they will just send someone else. (Yes, I say. Yes.) You say that perhaps you can have some impact from within. That an evasion won't realistically affect the war effort at all, but maybe if you were actually there . . . “Hey.” You are holding your arms about me so tightly, helping me to hold myself so tightly inside. “Don't cry. I'm going to subvert every soldier I meet. The war will be over by Christmas.” And I don't cry. Remember? I don't cry.

You disappeared into the real war and you never got one word back out to me. I never heard from you or of you again. So that is what I remember about the war. The words over here. The war over there. And increasingly little connection between the two.

•   •   •

YOU ARE PUT
on a bus and sent to basic training. You take the last possible seat, left rear corner. The bus fills with young men, their white necks exposed by new haircuts, their ears open and vulnerable.

It reminds you of going to camp. You suggest a game of telephone. You whisper into the ear closest to you. You whisper, “The Geneva Accords.” The man next to you leans across the aisle. The message travels over the backs of the seats and crisscrosses the bus. When it comes out at the front, it is “the domino theory.”

You try again. “Buddhist barbecues,” you whisper. You think the man next to you has it right, repeats it just the way you said it. You can hear the
b
's and the
s
's even over the bus motor. But the large man at the front of the bus, the one whose pink scalp is so vivid you can't even guess what color the fuzz of his hair might be, claims to have heard “strategic hamlets.” Someone is changing the words.

“Body bags!” You have shouted it accidentally. Everyone turns to look at you. Fifty faces. Fifty selected faces. Already these men are different from the men they were yesterday, a difference of appearance, perhaps, and nothing else. It may stay this way. It may be the first hint of the evolution of an entirely new person. You turn to the tinted window, surprised by your own face staring at you.

The other men think you have said, “Operation Rolling Thunder.” Even so, nobody smiles.

When you leave the bus, you leave the face in the window. You go and it stays. So it cannot have been your face after all.

•   •   •

AFTER YOU LEFT
I went to Berkeley. I lived in the student dorms for a year, where I met Gretchen and Julie. When we moved out, we moved together, into a fairly typical student apartment. It had a long shag carpet—even the rugs were hairy then—of a particularly putrid green, and the appliances were avocado. The furniture had been stapled together. There were four beds, and the rent clearly had been selected with four in mind. We advertised for a roommate in the
Daily Cal.
Although taking a stranger into our home entailed a definite risk, it seemed preferable to inviting someone we actually knew.

I remember that we flipped a coin to see which of us would have to share the bedroom with the newcomer, and Julie lost. She had some procedural objection she felt was sufficiently serious to require a second toss, but Gretchen and I refused. The new roommate hadn't even appeared and was already making things sticky.

Lauren was the first respondent to our ad—a beautiful, thin, curly-haired girl with an elegant white curly-haired dog. They made a striking pair. Julie showed Lauren the apartment; the conversation was brisk and businesslike. Gretchen and I petted the dog. When Lauren left, Julie had said we would take her.

I was unsettled by the speed of the decision and said so. I had no objections to Lauren, but I'd envisioned interviewing several candidates before making a selection.

“I'm the one who has to room with her. I should get to choose.” Julie held out one long strand of her own red hair and began methodically to split the ends. Julie was artistic and found the drab apartment painful. Initially, I believe she wanted Lauren mostly for decor. Lauren moved in the next day.

Immediately, objectionable characteristics began to surface. If I'd had your address, I would have written long complaints. “She dresses with such taste,” I would have said. “Who would have guessed she'd be such a slob?” Lauren's messiness was epic in its proportions. Her bed could hardly be seen under the pile of books, shoes, combs, and dirty dishes she left on it. She had to enter it gingerly at night, finding small empty spaces where she might fit an arm or a leg. She would sleep without moving, an entire night spent in the only position possible.

“She's late wherever she goes,” I would have written, “not by minutes or quarter hours, but by afternoons. On her night to cook, we eat in front of Johnny Carson.”

Then I would have divulged the worst complaint of all: “She talks baby talk: to the dog, which is tolerable; to her boyfriend, which is not.” Lauren's boyfriend was a law student at Boalt. He was older than us, big, and wore his hair slicked back along his head. Of course, no one wore their hair like that then. There was a sort of mafioso cut to his clothes, an intensity in his eyes. I never liked being alone with him, but Lauren called him Owlie and he called her his Sugarbear. “It is absolutely sickening the way you two go on,” I told her, and she was completely unabashed. She suggested that, although we didn't have the guts to be as up front about it as she was, we probably all talked baby talk to our boyfriends, an accusation we strenuously denied. We had no boyfriends, so the point was academic. Owlie studied judo as well as the law, and there was always a risk, opening some door, that you might find him demonstrating some hold to Lauren. Sickening, like I said.

I would have finished my letter by telling you, if you could only meet her, you would love her. Well, we all did. She was vivacious, imaginative, courageous. She removed some previously unnoticed tensions from our relationships—somehow with four the balance was better. By the spring of 1970, when the war of the words achieved its most intense pitch ever, this balance had become intricate and effortless.

I had gone out to protest the Cambodian invasion and come home in a cast. The police had removed their badges, donned their gas masks, and chased us down, catching me just outside Computer Sciences. They had broken my ankle. Owlie was gone. His birthday had been drawn seventeenth in the lottery, and he'd relocated to a small town in Oregon rumored to have a lenient draft board. Gretchen had acquired a boyfriend whose back had been injured in a high school wrestling match, rendering him 4-F with no tricks. He went off to Europe and was, consequently, very little trouble. Julie had switched her major from set design to Chicano studies. We heard that the National Guard was killing people on the campus of Kent State. I heard nothing from you.

•   •   •

YOU ARE IN
a small room, a cell. It is cold and the walls are damp stone. You sit cross-legged like a monk on the thin mattress and face the wall. There is so much moisture you can imprint your hand in it. By 10 a.m. the prints disappear. The sun has reached the wall, but it still is not warm. If you were sure no one would come to look, you would levitate yourself into the sunshine. You are thinking of me.

How much I expected of you. How stupid I am. I probably believed you could end the war by Christmas. You can imagine me believing that. Even now I am probably working out long chain-letter calculations: If you subvert four soldiers every day and they subvert four soldiers and they subvert four soldiers, how many days will the war last? When will you come home?

Do I expect miracles from a prison cell? Why should you provide them? You make a decision. You decide to be warm. You exhale your warmth into the air. It rises to the ceiling, it seems to disappear, but as you repeat this, over and over, the layers eventually drop to where they surround you. When you leave the cell, you will leave it filled with your heat.

It is a small room. Any man can accomplish a small task.

•   •   •

IN RESPONSE TO
the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State (Can I say murders? Will you object? Will you compare those four deaths to the body count in Vietnam on any single day or on 4 May itself and believe you have made some point?) UC Berkeley suspended classes. When they recommenced, they had been reconstituted; they were now supposed to be directly relevant to the single task of ending the war in Southeast Asia. I will not pretend to you that there was no opposition within the university to this. But a large segment of the campus made this commitment together—we would not continue with our lives until the war was over.

At the same time Nixon made his own pledge to the American people. He promised them that nothing we could do would affect policy in any way.

The war of the words took on a character which was at once desperate and futile, a soul-dampening combination we never shook free of. We did the work because it seemed right to us. We had no illusions of its potency. It began to feel like a game.

Julie and I had volunteered for a large committee whose purpose was to compile a list of war profiteers so that their products could be boycotted. We researched mergers and parent companies; the list grew like a chain letter. It would have been quicker to list those companies
not
turning a profit in Vietnam. I remember Lauren perusing our list one day with great dissatisfaction. “The counterculture makes roach clips,” she said. “It makes liquid sculptures you can plug in and they change shape.”