Learning to Swear in America (10 page)

Mrs. Collum brought a plate of muffins over and set them on the coffee table. Dovie perched on the sofa beside Yuri, and when she sat the cushions moved and Yuri felt himself tilt toward her. For a moment it felt as though he were falling again. She drew her legs up beside her, and he felt faintly dizzy. She was wearing shorts, and her legs were tan and smooth and distracting.

“This isn’t whole universe,” Yuri said to Lennon. “That’s Saturn. See? We’re starting in own solar system.”

“Well, yeah.”

“There aren’t aliens in our solar system.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“Actually, I do.”

Lennon shrugged.

“Well, they usually pop up farther out in space, but you’d better be ready.”

Lennon started the game and went first, to show Yuri how it was done. Yuri tried not to think about Dovie’s legs. They moved slightly as she breathed, and that tiny movement was infinitely more fascinating than what Lennon was doing on the screen.

It made Yuri think of a three-body problem. If you knew the position, mass, and velocity of two bodies, figuring their motion was simple. Add a third, and it became incredibly complex. He was fine with Lennon, but when Dovie sat next to him and curled her legs up on the sofa beside him, everything was suddenly complicated. He was sitting up, but he felt like he was falling sideways. Dovie exerted a giant gravitational force. She was the closest thing to Jupiter of anyone he’d ever met, but you probably couldn’t say that to a girl.

Lennon stopped after five minutes, when he scraped a piece of space junk and had to go to a space station for repairs.

“Okay,” Lennon said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Yuri squinted slightly and gave the controls a trial spin, seeing how his ship would move. They were more responsive than he’d expected. He made it almost out of the solar system when he was sucked in by Pluto’s gravity and crashed. Lennon stared at him.

“We’re all doomed.”

“This has nothing to do with real asteroid,” Yuri said hotly. “And Pluto doesn’t have that much gravity. Is very small thing. In real life, I’d have gotten past it.”

“We’re all doomed,” Lennon said again.

They played for another half hour. Dovie watched Yuri as he played—not the screen, but him—and the right side of his face felt hot. How could he dodge aliens with those legs curving so close to his hip? Lennon was well off into space, and had acquired extra fuel packs and a tentacled girlfriend, when Yuri ended the game by dying for the fourth time.

“I was out of solar system,” he said.

“Dude, you were still in the Milky Way. This actually makes me a little nervous.”

Yuri stood and put the controller on the coffee table.

“We don’t use these. We use math.”

“Still.”

Dovie took Yuri’s hand and pulled him through the kitchen onto a tiny screened-in porch. She had an easel set up on a canvas drop cloth, and there was a little table with a chipped Formica top. A couple of shelves mounted against the house held see-through bins containing tubes of paint, brushes, and paint knives.

“This is where you work?”

“Yeah.” She pointed to the bare bulb overhead. “The light’s great during the day. Not so much now.”

She pulled a sheet of paper off a pad and clipped it to the easel, then tilted her head at Yuri and squinted slightly. She chose a
brush and reached over her head to bring down a bin of paint tubes.

“You’re going to paint me?” Yuri said. He was flattered. He knew he wasn’t exactly handsome, but maybe he had an interesting face. He liked symmetry and precision, but his features had failed to cooperate. Perhaps Dovie appreciated the slight irregularities.

“No,” she said. “You’re going to paint.” She held out the brush.

Confused, he looked from her to the brush to the empty sheet on the easel.

“I don’t paint.”

“You need to,” she said, and her tone was gentle. “No offense, but you’re kind of a weird guy.”

“I’m weird?”

“You’re wearing a suit. That’s definitely not normal.”

“You …” He rolled his hand toward her. “Your hair, the specular reflection around your eyes …
I’m
weird?”

“You’re both weird,” Lennon called in from the living room. “No need to fight over it.”

“We’re losing the point here,” Dovie said, ignoring her brother. “You could have died tonight. I can’t let you just leave without dealing with that. You need to paint what’s bothering you.”

“I don’t paint.”

“Yeah, well, you obviously don’t talk about your feelings, either, so this is what you’re stuck with.” She put the long, tapered handle of the brush in his hand and closed his fingers around it. The wood was smooth and cool. “You need to paint how you
feel.” She pulled tubes from the bin and lined them up on the table.

“I try not to have feelings.”

“See, that’s not actually better.”

“I don’t even know how I feel,” he said, exasperated. “It’s not something I sit around and think about.” He shifted his weight and put the brush on the table.

“Then paint what you’re afraid of,” Dovie said, and pushed the brush back into his hand.

He stared at her. This was not normal. Was this an American thing, or a Dovie thing, to acknowledge fear?

“Why don’t you have to?” he said, and it sounded belligerent.

She smiled, pulled another sheet of paper off her pad, and spread it on the table. She chose a shorter brush than his, pulled out the chair and sat, then unscrewed the lid from a tube of brown paint.

“Brown?” Yuri said. “You don’t seem like someone who would paint with brown.”

“I’m painting what I’m afraid of,” Dovie said.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Yuri said, and it sounded sharp.

“That’s okay,” Dovie said as she started to make a series of rectangles across the page with crisp, sure strokes. “Just paint.”

Yuri hesitated a moment, then shrugged. Why not? The whole week couldn’t get any weirder. He took the light blue-gray and added a touch of cerulean, mixed it, and began to spread it on the top of the paper. By the time he’d covered the whole sheet with
pale blue he’d forgotten about Dovie. He added little squares in rows at the very bottom of the paper, and a blob of cadmium yellow orange in the upper-right corner. Squares, and a circle.

He stood back. It looked ridiculous. He knew enough to know the composition was imbalanced, strikingly asymmetrical. It wasn’t a picture of anything, certainly not of his feelings or his fears. He felt movement beside him and Dovie was standing there. He shrugged.

“I didn’t paint anything,” he said, “but it was kind of fun.”

“You painted for an hour,” Dovie said, gesturing toward his paper. “And you don’t think that’s anything?”

He looked at it and felt uneasy. “I guess it’s asteroid. See in top corner, way above everything? It’s asteroid in blue sky.” He almost gasped. “And down there, little squares are houses. I painted asteroid coming toward Earth, and I didn’t even realize it.”

Dovie cocked her head and looked soberly at the picture.

“No, I don’t think you did.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“It’s such a lonely shade of blue, and there’s so much of it. The houses at the bottom are rich, warm shades, and way up at the top is this star, so bright and shiny, but all by itself, and so far away from everyone else.”

She turned to look at him.

“I think you painted what you’re afraid of. I think you painted yourself.”

He didn’t breathe for a moment. She put her arm around him and squeezed him from the side, and her breast pushed into his
bicep and he couldn’t even enjoy it because he was thinking:
Artists are sneaks. They have tricky ways of finding things out.

“I’ll clean the brushes later,” Dovie said, dropping them in a glass of mineral spirits. She led him back into the kitchen. Just at the last moment he thought to look back and caught a glimpse of her painting. It was completely filled with empty brown rectangles except for one, which trapped a girl.

Yuri made his good-byes and followed Dovie out to her car.

“I’m sorry is so late. I didn’t mean to keep you up.”

“I liked spending time with you.”

He gave her the name of his hotel, and she drove north to the highway, moving slowly as she searched for the right exit.

“Yuri? This thing with the asteroid is serious, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But we’ll take care of it.”

She searched his face, then nodded. “You’re special, aren’t you?”

He flushed, but made no effort to answer.

“Are we really made of star stuff? You hear that sometimes.”

“Yeah. All of elements that allow for life—like carbon—began as hydrogen in stars.”

“I think you have more star stuff left.”

“My hydrogen hasn’t fused into heavier elements yet?”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

Dovie found the exit on the second try, then prowled the access road until she saw the chain’s name in blue neon. She circled once,
figuring out the approach, then stopped behind the hotel in the restaurant parking lot.

He turned to look at her and thought he should say something charming and suave. Instead he said, “Your bangs just proved Isaac Newton wrong.”

She smiled, and he saw the white gleam of her teeth in the dark.

“With enough hair gel, I can break all the natural laws.”

He laughed, then shifted in his seat. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Will you teach me to swear in English?”

“What?”

“Other people at JPL are three times my age and speaking their native language. I sound stupid, talking to them.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Dovie said.

“I think it’s because I can’t swear.”

She looked him over carefully. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re ready.”

“Pardon?”

“Swearing is one of the humanities, and you’re no humanist.”

“You’re refusing to teach me to swear?” He was indignant.

She put her hand on his arm. “I’m saying you’re not ready.”

“I have Fields Medal!”

“That kinda proves my point.”

Yuri crossed his arms. “Well, all language is like that. Are you saying I shouldn’t be allowed to talk?”

“Of course not. You’re welcome to grunt and point.”

He snorted. “Language is stupid anyway. I mean, what makes word bad? In math, number is right or wrong, but never good or bad.”

“Language is more complicated, because it deals with people,” Dovie said. “Besides, there are other ways to communicate.”

And then she leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t a long kiss, just enough to know that her lips tasted of orange from her drink and they had a bounce, a give that was wildly appealing. And then he smiled, embarrassed, and got out of the car.

He lifted a hand in farewell and walked back to the hotel, bouncing a little as he walked. He was in bed, arms folded under his head, when he realized that he was the target of a bureaucratic kidnapping, that tons of rock were hurtling in from space, and that all he could think about was the taste of Dovie. And right about then, with a continent in the balance, he didn’t need the distraction.

JPL the next day was refrigerated and pale blue and sterile. Yuri’s face looked better, and he’d removed the gauze before catching his ride in. The driver had glanced at him but hadn’t said anything. Twice Yuri found himself tapping a half-chewed eraser on his desk and thinking about light reflection off glitter eye shadow. He suspected his lips were giving off a distinct heat signature—I’ve been kissed! There had to be a sensor somewhere in the building that could detect that. He refocused, ignoring the ache in his arms, and did his work.

He checked his Moscow State e-mail account. He didn’t have a personal account, and tried not to think what that said about him. He had 117 messages, most of which were academia’s answer to spam—custodial schedule of the week, hourly workers’ time sheets due by Friday—that kind of thing. Two were from students looking for letters of recommendation. Seven were from colleagues
in the department, but none from Kryukov. That was a little strange.

He opened the first, from an associate prof with whom he’d always been friendly, a guy in his thirties who studied B-meson decays.