I Married You for Happiness (16 page)

Authors: Lily Tuck

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BOOK: I Married You for Happiness

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Oh, no, not that poor cat again, Nina says, interrupting.

Does the cat experience being alive and dead at the same time?—Are you listening, Lulu? Or is the cat dependent on someone opening the box and checking?

You mean for something to be real, it has to be observed? Louise asks, pushing away her plate.

Real in the perceivable universe, Philip says.

Okay, pass me your plate, Lulu, I’ll eat the rest of your lamb chops, he also says.

Philip has a healthy appetite.

He will eat anything—rooster testicles, shark fin soup, garbanzo bean stew, crêpes coquilles St.-Jacques, the
daube de boeuf à la provençale
that she will cook for him one day.

She remembers the roast chicken congealing downstairs.

An appetite for—

life.
She takes his hand. His fingers are cold and stiff and she bends them around until they meet hers. Then she brings his hand up to her lips.

“If I say, ‘I am 95 percent certain I locked the door before I left the house,’” Philip tells his students on the last day of class, “that is a classic example of epistemic probability—probability based on intuition. But if I say, ‘I am 95 percent certain that I will die before my wife’—we all know that women tend to outlive men—this is called
a posteriori
probability—probability computed after an event. By taking a large sample, you can compute the probability—according to the law of large numbers—of all kinds of events: who will get sick when, who will die when, and so forth, within a desired degree of accuracy. However”—here Philip pauses significantly—”I strongly suggest that you stay vigilant. Probabilities can be very misleading. You must try to expect the unexpected. The event no one predicted—an epidemic, a tsunami—the event that will make an enormous difference.

“Let me give you the famous example of the turkey—the British use a chicken instead,” Philip smiles. “Picture a turkey, a turkey who is fed regularly every morning for, say, a year. The turkey gets used to this routine. In fact, the turkey gets so used to it that he naturally comes to expect that every morning at a certain hour someone is going to come and feed him. But”—Philip starts to laugh—”one morning, maybe a week or so before Thanksgiving, that same person who comes and feeds the turkey every morning at pretty much the same time, instead of feeding him, wrings his neck.

“You see”—everyone in the class is laughing—”something unexpected happened that has completely altered our belief system and our reliance on past events. This raises the question of how can we predict the future by our knowledge of the past. These are important considerations that I want you to think about.”

Philip’s students stand up and clap.

In the Paris café, she does not look Philip in the face; she looks down at his neck. Sticking out of his open-collared blue shirt, she notices a little tuft of dark hair.

Her heart is pounding rapidly inside her chest.

Briefly, and however improbably, she wonders if she is having a heart attack.

Or else she is coming down with something—a grave illness.

Frowning, she looks away. She much prefers blond men to dark, hairy ones.

As if he can read her mind, he puts his hand up to his collar and buttons it. Then, holding out his hand, he says, I’m Philip.

The bedroom is getting lighter.

It is the hour before dawn that the ancient Romans called the hour of the wolf. The hour when demons have a heightened power and when most people die or children are born. The hour when people are gripped by nightmares.

L’heure bleue.

Hearing an unaccustomed sound in the bedroom—of something knocked down—Nina opens her eyes. The chair by the door with her beige cashmere sweater draped over it is lying on the floor. Someone has entered the room.

An angel.

The angel flaps his great wings.

The sound he makes is like
Hypatia’s
sails snapping and tearing in a high wind.

The angel is familiar.

He has the same curly red hair and black wings and he wears the same swirling piece of white cloth as the angel in Caravaggio’s
Rest on the Flight into Egypt,
the painting that had transfixed her. At the time, she could not move away from it, nor could she explain why, and Philip became impatient. The painting, he said, was sentimental and he preferred the realism of the two Caravaggios they had seen in one of the chapels of Santa Maria del Popolo. And it was lunchtime. But on the way from the Palazzo Doria Pamphili to the restaurant, Philip’s wallet was stolen. Only after they had eaten and it was time to pay did he notice that it was gone.

His great black wings outstretched, the angel comes and stands next to her by the bed. He puts out his hand to Nina.

Where is it? Nina asks. She is thinking of the wallet.

Smiling, the angel shakes his head.

She must be dreaming.

It does not matter.

She is neither frightened nor surprised.

Nina takes the angel’s hand and she lets him lead her over to the window. The angel pulls back the curtains and opens the window wide. Fresh air streams into the bedroom. The sun is
shining and it is a beautiful, clear day. Below, in the garden, a little wet still from the rain, the lilacs and peonies are in bloom. Nina takes a deep breath. From where she stands, she can smell the lilacs. French lilacs. Then, as her eyes grow accustomed to the light, she can make out Philip.

Dressed in his blue work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he is already out in the vegetable garden—hoeing, planting, weeding. When he sees Nina at the bedroom window, he stops what he is doing and, straightening up tall, he waves to her.

Acknowledgments

Like the despised magpie who shamelessly steals from other birds’ nests to line her own, I have done so on page 18, from E. T. Jaynes,
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
(Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 1); on page 26, from Mary-Louise von Franz,
Psyche and Matter
(Shambala, 1992); on page 40 and again on page 110, from Morris Kline,
Mathematics for the Nonmathematician
(Dover Publications, 1985, pp. 524–26); on page 46, from Simon Singh,
The Code Book
(Doubleday, 1999, pp. 260–61); on page 56, from Adam Phillips,
Monogamy
(Vintage,1996, p. 105); on page 79 and again on page 124, Lorna’s conversation is paraphrased from Janna Levin,
How the Universe Got its Spots
(Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 1, 4, 7); on page 88 and again on page 126, from Frank Wilczek who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 and is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at MIT and who with his wife, Betsy Devine, wrote
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern
Physics
(W.W. Norton & Co., 1989); on page 96, from Douglas Hofstadter,
I Am a Strange Loop
(Basic Books, 2007, p. 252); on page 107, from Keith Devlin,
The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern
(Basic Books, 2009, pp. 2, 9, 25–26, 29); on page 125, from Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
(Bantam, 1988, pp. 148–50); on page 127, from Patricia Lynne Duffy,
Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their World
(Times Books/Henry Holt, 2001, p. 22); on page 138, lyrics quoted from the Great Courses recording
The Joy of Mathematics,
lecture 12,
The Joy of Pi,
taught by Arthur T. Benjamin (he attributes the lyrics to Larry Lesser, a friend); on page 139, from the Great Courses recording
What Are the Chances? Probability Made Clear,
taught by Michael Starbird; on page 150 and again on page 184, from an interview with William Kentridge by Michael Auping in
William Kentridge: Five Themes
(San Francisco Museum of Art and Norton Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, pp. 230–245); on page 161, from John Berger,
From A to X
(Verso, 2008); and on page 178, from John Berger,
Ways of Seeing
(Penguin, 1972); on page 184, from Richard Feynman,
Six Easy Pieces
(Basic Books, 1963, p. 5); and on page 187, from Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
(Random House, 2007, p. 40).

I also want to acknowledge the various Internet sites I have used for information: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LawofLargeNumbers.html; http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/probability/info.htm; http://members.chello.nl/r.kuijt/en_pi_onthouden.htm; www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/overview.html; and www.templeton.org/pdfs/articles/Physics_World_Faraday07.pdf.

My special thanks to Nathaniel Kahn for his keen observations and explanations.
Un grand merci
to Irène Bungener and Bertrand Duplantier. For their friendship, advice, and support, I want to thank Molly Haskell, Michelle Huneven, Frances Kiernan, and Patricia Volk. I am also greatly indebted to Trent Duffy for his editing of this book. As always, I thank Georges and Anne Borchardt. And, finally, I want to thank my most gracious and excellent editor Elisabeth Schmitz.

Copyright

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EPub Edition AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9781443408721

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