Superstition (8 page)

“A high-achieving family. I'm impressed,” she commented.

“That was Dad. He never made us work, just made things interesting. If any of us asked a question about anything, no matter what, Dad either had a book in his library, or he'd pick one up next day and leave it lying around. It was just a talent for opening up kids‚ minds.”

“And your mother…?”

“Mom's an enthusiast—paints, plays oboe in the local orchestra, and writes novels.”

“Have I read her?”

“I doubt it. She only ever got one published, over twenty years ago, but that doesn't stop her. She also runs a travel group—went to China last year.”

“They sound terrifying.”

He laughed. “Just your average American family.”

“Not where I come from.”

Joanna's parents were by no means unsophisticated, but paled by comparison with the gifted eccentrics Sam had described. Her father had learned to fly with the navy, gone on to be a civil aviation pilot, then become an airline executive. Mom had always just been Mom, and still was: no mindless cookie cutter, but no world-traveling bohemian artist-writer either. And Joanna, as an only child in a nonbookish household, had gotten all her early intellectual stimulation, such as it was, from television. But she'd worked hard, gone to Wellesley and majored in journalism. The nice thing about the job, she always thought, was that learning was part of it; she could make up for lost time while getting paid for it.

“By the way,” she said eventually, and with what she hoped was not an exaggerated casualness, “have you ever been married?”

“No,” he replied equally casually, as though his answer needed no elaboration.

“Do you mind if I ask if there's any particular reason for that, in your view?” she inquired, with the smile of someone trying to draw her subject out on something about which he was being unduly modest.

He shrugged noncommittally. “Luck, I guess.”

“Would that be good luck or bad luck in your book?”

“I suppose the word I should have used was ‘chance.’ More neutral. Came close a couple of times, but it never happened.” Another shrug. “We tend to be late marriers in my family.”

She decided after a moment's reflection against pursuing the topic further; it was not, after all, a matter of great journalistic importance.

“So tell me,” she said, adopting a change of tone and shifting her weight slightly in the deep and well-worn leather armchair, “how did you get started on the work you're doing now?”

He thought a moment. “I'm not sure I can answer that. It just happened a step at a time, with a kind of inevitability, the way things do.”

“But it's an interesting series of steps. You started as a physicist, became a psychologist, then a parapsychologist. Did something happen, or what?”

He shook his head, as though searching for an answer and apologizing for not finding one. “I've always just followed through on whatever interested me most. So far this is where it's brought me.”

“But you told me once that you've never had any paranormal experience, seen a ghost, dreamed the future—anything like that. So it's purely intellectual curiosity?”

Again he paused a moment before answering. “I suppose something did happen once, a long time ago, that might have had something to do with it.”

A distant look came into his face as though he was focusing on some faraway time and place.

“All I remember is that I was walking down a road on the Cape. It was a beautiful day in early June, but nothing otherwise exceptional about it. I was alone, and without any warning, right out of nowhere, I was hit by a thought that took my breath away. It was like an explosion in the head. I don't think I even broke my stride. Nobody looking at me would have realized that anything had changed. But I suddenly had an overwhelming sense of something extraordinary happening.”

He paused, then started to speak again, and stopped, chewing thoughtfully on the corner of his lower lip as though striving to find the right words.

“This ‘extraordinary thing’ was simply the fact of being there—alive, conscious, part of this body that I could see if I looked down, with feet at the end going one after the other along the road. I was somehow inside and outside of this body at the same time. And in a way that I'd never realized before, I was also part of the landscape around me—a landscape that was suddenly strange and new but at the same time totally unchanged. It was a feeling that was frightening and exciting in about equal parts. It couldn't have lasted more than a couple of minutes, but while it did time meant nothing. In a way, it hasn't meant much ever since.”

He looked at her with an apologetic smile, as though hoping that he'd answered her question because he didn't know what else to say.

“Just your plain ordinary moment of oneness with the universe, I guess. The only strange thing about it is that we call it strange, when civilizations we label primitive take it for granted.”

She pondered her next question for a few seconds, then asked, “When did this happen?”

“Oh, a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Longer than I care to remember.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”

10

B
y the time they'd finished talking it was dusk. He offered her a glass of wine and produced a remarkably smooth, dry white from his refrigerator. When she remarked on it, he said it was a Condrieu from the northern point of the Rhone Valley in France—a gift from a friend who imported fine wines for restaurants all up the East Coast.

“By the way,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I really should have asked before, but if you happen to be free, can I offer you dinner?”

“That's very kind of you,” she said, dismissing as abruptly as it crossed her mind her mother's rule that a woman is never free for at least three days, five for a first date. “I'd like that.”

Then he surprised her again. “I've got a new recipe a friend of mine just e-mailed me from California. If you don't mind being a guinea pig I'd like to try it.”

“Sounds good,” was all she could think of in reply. As he refilled her glass, she vaguely wondered whether this was some standard technique of his, a carefully planned prelude to seduction. Once again she dismissed the thought as unworthy; the poor man was obviously broke and, unlike her, didn't have an expense account for eating out in restaurants. “Can I help?”

“Only if I get into a hopeless mess, but I think I'll be okay. Bring your glass and come and talk to me.”

The kitchen was cavernous and unmodernized, though plainly still much used. There were racks of herbs and spices, hanging pans, skillets and casseroles of gleaming steel and copper, and sets of knives with well-worn wooden handles and blades kept razor sharp. Sam had put some music on in the main room, and it was piped through into two large speakers with a brilliant sound quality. A concerto by Poulenc danced and pirouetted in the air as she watched him go to work. They talked of everything and nothing while he poached a fillet of cod in sake, then prepared soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions, ginger, and coriander separately. Served with basmati rice and accompanied by another bottle of Condrieu, it was delicious.

They ate by candlelight at one corner of a long oak table in the adjoining dining room, paneled where its walls were not obscured by shelves of books. For dessert he had prepared fresh sliced mangoes with a rich lemon sorbet. He offered to make coffee, but she declined. He came around the table to pour what remained of the wine into her glass, and stayed to kiss her long and tenderly.

“All right,” she said about an hour later as they lay in bed in each other's arms, still elated by the suddenness and vigor of their lovemaking, “off the record, what's the real story on how you've stayed single all these years?”

“Hey, I'm not
that
old,” he protested in a tone of mild reproach.

“I didn't say you were. But I get the feeling that you like women, which means that if you haven't stuck with one you must have had an awful lot of them.”

“Are you one of those women who thinks there's automatically something wrong with a man who isn't married by the time he's thirty?”

“I'm not ‘one of those women who’ anything.”

“No, you're not, are you…?” He ran his hand over the lightly muscled smoothness of her back and pulled her gently toward him once again.

Later they perched cross-legged on the window seat of Sam's living room, eating fruit yogurt and popcorn washed down with champagne. “That proves it,” she exclaimed triumphantly when he produced the bottle.

He looked at her questioningly. “Proves what?”

“You planned this whole thing—even down to a bottle of champagne in the fridge to celebrate.”

“It was left over from a party,” he protested, spreading his arms in a gesture of innocence. “I'd forgotten it was there.”

“Can you really cook? Or do you always do that same dish to impress your girlfriends?”

“Come back tomorrow and try me.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “I might.”

They talked some more about themselves, their backgrounds, their lives up to the present, then wandered back to the subject of the experiment and the things that remained to be arranged, principally the composition of the group. He broke off in the middle of something he was saying and looked out over the dark waters of the Hudson. She was already becoming familiar with these moments of distraction in him, as though his mind abruptly traveled to some place of its own, cut off from the world until it had dealt with whatever preoccupied it at that moment. It was an oddly attractive quality because it was so wholly without self-consciousness. It implied an unexpected vulnerability, a certain loneliness.

“You know something,” he said after a while, “if I could get Roger Fullerton into this group, it would not only be the coup of a lifetime but an absolute blast.”

“Who's Roger Fullerton?”

“My old physics professor at Princeton. He's actually very famous, twice nominated for the Nobel, though they haven't given it to him yet. Having him in the group would really get some attention from the kind of people who dismiss any and all paranormal research as something between group hysteria and outright fraud.”

“Would he do it?”

“I don't know.” Sam laughed softly, turning his attention from the river back to her. “He's always been one of the people who dismiss this kind of work as something between group hysteria and outright fraud.”

“You told me this thing could only work if everybody involved had an open-minded, uncritical approach. Now you're saying let's have a skeptic.”

“The thing about skepticism is it cuts both ways.
Real
skeptics
have
open minds. Roger worked with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. He was on the tail end of that whole generation that discovered that reality disappeared the closer they looked at it. You'd think telepathy and psychokinesis would be food and drink to guys like that.”

“So why aren't they?”

Sam shrugged and reached out to pour the last of the champagne into her glass.

“Ask him yourself. Are you free Saturday afternoon?”

“I could be.”

“Come out to Princeton. I think you'll like Roger. And I know he'll like you.”

11

I
t started to rain as Sam parked his car. Huddling beneath the old umbrella that he had found in the trunk, they hurried down tree-lined walks between the neo-Georgian carved-stone buildings of the campus. On the second floor of one of them Sam knocked at a door, and a crisp voice called out, “Enter.”

“Spry” was the word that came to Joanna's mind to describe Roger Fullerton. He wore an immaculate three-piece suit in excellent tweed and sported a white mustache with a waxed twirl at the ends. The twinkle in his eye as they were introduced left her in no doubt why Sam had suggested that her influence with the old man might well exceed his own.

They settled into leather armchairs and someone brought in tea. The room was where Fullerton had taught and held discussion groups for over forty years. It bore the imprint of a long, distinguished life. Framed photographs of people she knew but couldn't quite place, some of them also featuring a young and good-looking Fullerton, hung casually at rakish angles on the paneled walls. Books and papers were scattered everywhere in what seemed like carefully ordered chaos. A computer sat on a table by a window with a stained glass pattern.

“So,” Fullerton said, shifting his gaze back to her face from her legs, where it had lingered for a moment with an appreciation so open and innocent as to be wholly inoffensive, “I gather the purpose of this visit is to persuade me to get involved in one of Sam's lunatic ‘experiments,’ as he likes to call them.”

There was a faintly English inflection in his speech that made Joanna think of Ray Milland or Cary Grant in some of the old movies she'd seen on late-night television. She glanced in Sam's direction, but he had his nose in his teacup and seemed oblivious of Roger's brusquely dismissive tone.

“I think he's more or less abandoned that ambition,” she said guardedly. “On the way over he said he'd probably have to settle for just another argument, but at least it keeps him in shape.”

Roger chuckled. “Well, I'll try not to let him down.”

Since their first conversation about him, Sam had filled her in on the background of his relationship with the older man. They had met when Sam used to go to his lectures and always asked questions at the end. The friendship they struck up had survived even when Sam abandoned physics for psychology—a nonsubject, in Fullerton's view, lacking clear parameters. But that disapproval was nothing compared to the outrage he had expressed when Sam became interested in parapsychology.

Within minutes of setting tea things aside and getting through the basic requirement of social niceties, the two men had picked up their ongoing quarrel like a game of chess played on and off whenever the opportunity arose. No piece had been moved since last time, and both knew exactly where they were.

“You're simply ignoring half of the thinking that's gone on in the last hundred years,” Sam was saying. “At the end of the nineteenth century there was an explosion of interest in psychic phenomena…”