The Explanation for Everything (21 page)

This feeling is especially strong, I believe, among those who have lost their children. As it should be, I suppose. This is why I do not begrudge the Lims their thirteen-million-dollar settlement. They do not want my money. They want their daughter back. The money is a poor substitute, but it is all I can give them.

So now what?

I'm on eighteen pills a day and I take some in the morning and some at night, except for those mornings when I just can't face it or those nights when I'm too damn tired. The pills are keeping me alive unless they're not—unless what's keeping me alive is just me being feisty, which I've been told I am. Feisty. This is a word people use for pets and old people, and that's fine. Although I've never been anybody's pet.

Listen, Anita. I was so panicky at the thought of losing you that I never told you the things I should have. What should I have said? That love is important, of course. That if you have found this man who you think is a good guy, and who makes you happy, and will love you and take care of you and father your children, yadda yadda (and even now, here I am making fun, yadda yadda, I can't help myself). No, really, Anita—if this man loves you, and you love him, then you are a lucky woman, and congratulations to you both.

You should have children. Many children.

And also! Listen, Anita—listen to me. Right now you may think that you have discovered the truth, and that the truth isn't in a laboratory like you always thought, but the truth is in a chapel somewhere, or a holy book. Okay, fine. You're wrong, but fine. Believe in that chapel or that holy book or the words of your husband but just keep a little part of your brain (your heart, your intestines, take your metaphor) and leave it open to doubt. Or to wonder. To curiosity. Ask yourself, one day (the kids are grown, the husband is in his study, those awful parents of yours are memories in a photo album), how
did
this God of mine put life on earth? Through what mechanism? Was it really as simple as his Word, or was perhaps the Word a more complicated story?

I am sorry for what I did to you. I am sorry for the world, of course, and sorry for myself, but mostly I am sorry that I caused you such despair. That was never, ever my intention.

I know there is no heaven but now that I am older I have become able to conjure one up. This, they say, is one of the hazards of growing older, but I don't care. I don't care that my mind is failing, and there are long periods these days that I spend quite happily back in my childhood, eating my mother's cooking, going to yeshiva, playing stickball with my friends. I liked yeshiva. People say I didn't, that my life's work was in the main a rejection of a religious childhood, but this is quite untrue. I liked my schooling, I liked the rabbis, I liked some of the fairy tales they told us. I didn't like our angry God very much but Adam and Eve, them I found appealing. Abraham and Isaac. Poor old Moses. Those stories were good stories.

And I loved my mother and father, my brother and sisters, my grandparents, our apartment in the Bronx, the foyer I slept in, the elevator with the gate and the porthole window, the cousins in every neighboring building, the pretty girls, the overactive radiator in the winter and the nonexistent air-conditioning in the summer. I loved them all; I miss them all.

Ah—I'll stop! Although I was just there this morning.

So yes, time travel is one of the small graces of growing older, and within that time travel is, perhaps, a little bit of clairvoyance, the ability to see what's on the other side, or to imagine it with a certain amount of anticipation. I imagine you on the other side, Anita. You look exactly as you did when I knew you. You are small and serious. You are always at a computer. When you realize something enormously important, when you make a crucial connection, when you win two hundred thousand dollars because the world catches on to you—you let escape the smallest smile. Such a small, rare smile! I loved seeing it. Anita, if I'd only had daughters of my own, perhaps you would have been spared.

I kept up with Charles and your family for as long as I could bear. The parents are back in Korea. The brother and the wife are in Texas with many children. Charles is married. After the settlement, the parents decided—please do smile at this—to give the bulk of my money to his church.

And now the end of the day is getting closer and I have my pills to take, or not to take, as I decide. The man who owns this house has been worried for me and has started to send in a nurse, a nosy black lady I very much like except when she nags me too much about the meds. She cooks me Haitian food, fried pork, which in these sentimental days of mine reads a bit like trayf, so I eat it with gusto. It is spicy and soft and agrees with me. She is very pretty, this nurse of mine, but I can never remember her name. It is Agnes or Angela or something with a French accent. I never can remember, but no matter.

She does not mind if I call her Anita.

This was the last of the numbered manuscript pages. Stapled underneath, Andy found this note:

I expect it will not surprise you, Andy, that I am dead now.

He had to read the line three times and still it read like a joke. A terrible sort of practical joke.

How do I know that I am dead? Because poor Watson (a young lawyer and a former student of mine—and incidentally what does it say about the academic job market that biology students now turn to law school?)—poor Watson was under instructions not to send this mawkish piece of bullshit to you until I was good and gone. And since you're reading this, ergo sum, etcetera. I have been cremated, my ashes sprinkled spitefully by my poor dear Watson (I presume) about and around the Princeton biology department. Fuck 'em.

He read this again too. Dead? He wasn't dead. He was so viscerally alive! Everything Rosenblum had said, had taught him—his words—he was alive!

Dead! I promise you it's the truth.

Should he even keep reading this? He didn't need to keep reading this. Tomorrow would be another spring day. The world spinning. The lilacs blooming. The hawks circling. Hank Rosenblum, alive in Montauk.

As for the particulars—well, I died sometime after you applied for tenure, Andy, and I'm guessing sometime before the end of this summer. It's now July of 2011 and I'm feeling like shit, I don't mind saying. The end can't possibly be near enough. Congestive heart failure has me wheezing like a goddamn accordion, along with some obstructive lung problems that I knew were coming at me, but fuck it, my pipe was a comfort that sullen old age was never gonna be. So here I am, dying. Or here I'm not, since now I'm dead. I'm a ghost, Andy! But don't be scared.

Don't be scared. Andy took a walk around the room. Went to the sink in the bathroom and splashed water on his face.

So fine, you might be wondering why I'm sending you all this right now, why of all my former students and dear ones, you (and you alone, Andy—no sibling rivalries for you, my friend!) received this missive, and what I expect you to do about it now that it's in your care. Well, to answer the second and easier question first: nothing. You don't have to do anything with this little book of mine. These pages are the smoke and emissions from a dying car, an unquiet mind.

As for why you: well, of course I was always very fond of you, Andy. And though you might argue that I was very fond of all my students (untrue, but it makes me seem like a better professor if you say so) I also never quite got over the idea that I did poorly by you. I knew about your wife dying, Andy, and that you were alone with those two tiny daughters, and I never did anything about it. I could have used some of the few contacts I had left, maybe arranged a postdoc somewhere. Something, anyway, to have kept you somewhat whole and sane. The sort of thing that a friendly and interested mentor would have and should have done. But I was still grieving for Anita then, in the worst part of the grief, and I wasn't able to think about anybody but myself. I assume you know the feeling, Andy, but that doesn't make it excusable. As long as we're on this earth we should do right by other people. Especially those who have been good to us. You were a nice kid, a loveable kid, and you had a bright future ahead of you. And now you've ended up in that shithole of a college. Well. At least you're not a lawyer.

Anyway, Andy, I hope you can forgive me my absence. I would have reached out to you before I died, but as you can probably tell, I've been a bit feverish. And I was afraid, perhaps, that you would judge me unkindly.

My hope for you is that you have come to a happy place in your life. (How old are you now, anyway, kid? Could you be forty?) And of course you have an awful lot left of it. Enjoy it all, my friend, and know that I always thought of you with much affection.

And that was all.

Andy put down the pages. There was nothing to do about the cold pained surprise throbbing in him—no, he had not known that Rosenblum was dead, and had enjoyed (perhaps too much) the elaborate imaginings of surprising the old man at home, reconnecting, drawing him out of his solitude.

But the man was dead. He probably should have figured it out, but he was never quite the student Rosenblum wanted him to be. He splashed more water on his face, so that if he was crying he could not really tell. Then he took a cigar—his first one in a while—and went outside in the drizzly cold to light it, sheltering his Zippo with his hand. He tried to enjoy the lashing of the cold air as he stood on his porch and looked toward where the sun would soon rise. Across the street sat a prefab house with aluminum siding turning greenish, neighbors he rarely saw. But they were alive. Weren't they alive? And would it matter to him if they weren't? Did it matter that Rosenblum was gone if he refused to believe he was gone? Could he still be alive in Andy's mind?

Louisa's ghost just behind him. No, dummy, that's not how death works.

Andy walked down the street, the cigar smoke trailing behind him like a dog, ignoring as best he could the drizzle and Louisa's ghost, trying to conjure up Rosenblum's ghost instead, so he could yell at him. It wasn't fair of him to make Andy feel, once again, like an ignorant rube. He drew in on his cigar. Rosenblum was the one who taught him to smoke cigars, in the rose garden behind the math building, where smoking was politely ignored. Rosenblum cutting and lighting the cigar for skinny Andy, Ohio's prodigal son. Rosenblum was undeniably fat, his large head rimmed by a halo of wiry hair, brown eyes that didn't twinkle so much as glitter, a sharp nose, lascivious lips. Porcine Hardy to Andy's nervous Laurel. “Jesus, Andy, try to look like you're enjoying it.”

Andy coughed, felt like a fool, tried to look like he was enjoying it. After a while, he did enjoy it, and he and Rosenblum would meet frequently behind the math building whenever the weather was nice, and Rosenblum would expound, and Andy would smoke happily.

Now, Andy walked down Stanwick Street with his cheap cigar between his thumb and his forefinger, even though the walk couldn't possibly warm him up. He surveyed the neighbors' houses, Roberta Hayes who still had Saint Patrick's Day leprechauns on her chicken coops. Sheila's Ford in her driveway. Which was odd, because whenever it was rainy Sheila parked in her garage.

The Ford's windows were fogged. Why would the windows fog? He crossed the lawn toward her driveway, in a hurry. He wiped a clear space on her car window with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

She was in the driver's seat, eyes closed, mouth halfway open and apparently mumbling something in her sleep. “Sheila,” he said out loud; her lips kept moving but her eyes stayed closed.

“Sheila!” He banged on her window, and she stopped moving her lips. Her head was tilted back and a thin line of drool leaked from the corner of her mouth. She rubbed her nose, turned her head the other way. She wasn't wearing a coat. Where had she been at four in the morning with no coat? Why was she sleeping in the car? Should he wake her up? He almost certainly should wake her up. Was Jeremy okay?

Andy took a step backward. It was Sunday morning. Jeremy was at his dad's. And if it was odd that she should be sleeping in her car—well, it was odd too to be strolling in nothing but a worn-out sweatshirt in the frigid dawn. Smoking a cigar. Who was he to judge Sheila?

Still—she looked vulnerable there. She was certainly vulnerable there. But if he knocked on the window again, woke her up, she might have to tell him things she didn't want him to know. He'd leave her be. He stepped backward, away from her car, then hurried home, dropping his cigar in a frosty puddle as he ran.

SIXTEEN

The next day he took the girls—quiescent, agreeable—to school and then headed to the office. The semester was in full strut now, after spring break, and he had his midterm grades to take care of, and a meeting of the student advisory committee, and the accreditation committee, and although the NSF grant wasn't due until next week he still had to figure out how to make his numbers work. He still wanted a NanoDrop spectrophotometer and perhaps a new ultracentrifuge, although the truth was if he had this new equipment he would have to keep performing experiments, and for some reason the thought of this, of dosing more mice and then dissecting them in order to prove his ever more unprovable theory that alcoholics were resistant to behavioral changes—in order to prove that Oliver McGee should stay in jail—it suddenly seemed more than just pointless. It seemed cruel.

Should he have knocked on Sheila's window? Should he have left her there? Yesterday afternoon, on the pretext of checking in about the third-grade science fair, he had knocked on her door. Her hair was damp, and she looked tired but clean. Her house smelled like chicken nuggets. She told him
he
looked tired, and he agreed that he was. He left then, in a hurry.

That evening Rachel had made them lunches—tuna salad with curry powder packed into Tupperware in the fridge. Andy took his now to the picnic table by the faculty parking lot even though it wasn't quite warm enough to start eating outside. The wind tousled his hair as he walked across the old weedy campus, and he wondered what he would do with himself if he didn't teach here anymore, if he didn't get tenure. He was still, after all, in the first half of his life. He was still in possession of a thick head of hair. His tie blew eastward. Andy sat down at the picnic table and considered what, exactly, he loved about what he did. Mostly at this point it was the steadiness of it.

If he left here he could take his daughters to Ohio, his own mother and the Mother of Presidents. Or he could convince his mother to move with him somewhere else, Hawaii, California. He could have that beach house in California. He could find a job doing anything else. He didn't have to stay here, under the gray windy skies of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He didn't have to keep dissecting mice. He wasn't sure anymore what he wanted to prove.

As Rosenblum said, he was still a young man.

“Mister. Hey, Mister.”

But it was nothing, the wind.

That first night as newlyweds in their first apartment together in Philadelphia, seventeen years ago, a lifetime, Louisa asked him why his mother hadn't remarried.

“Really? You want to talk about my mother?” They were in bed, where they'd been all evening, eating fried chicken from a bucket, entirely naked and planning their futures.

“She's a nice woman, and she's good-looking,” Lou said, picking a crispy bit of skin off a drumstick. Andy had never eaten in bed before he met Louisa, never spent entire hours naked (nudity was for showers and medical procedures), never kissed anyone after waking up and before brushing his teeth. Her work hours were odd, staggered—she'd have twelve-hour shifts for three days straight and then a week off—and Andy found himself unable to write his dissertation when she was home (oh, to be naked, eating fried chicken off dirty sheets, Louisa's tan back) and unable to work when she was away, either—he could only sleep or count the hours until she came home. Now he pressed his thigh against her calf, picked up her arm with the scar along the cephalic vein and kissed her there.

“No, really, why do you think that is?” she asked. “Has she just not recovered from your father's death?”

Andy shrugged. In the years since he'd lost his father, he'd never considered his mother remarrying. They were so much a set, his parents—yin and yang, salt and pepper—that for either of them to make a life with someone else would have felt nonsensical. And as soon as he died, she'd seemed to cut off the part of herself that might share a life with someone else. She'd sold the house in Shaker Heights, moved to a condo in Akron. Sold his father's car, donated his clothes. “I think she lost the taste for marriage to anyone else,” he said. “A lot of widows do.”

“But not widowers?”

“Widowers remarry,” Andy said. “At least that's what I'm told.”

“Would you? If I died?”

“Jesus.”

“I'd want you to,” she said. She leaned back across the bed, totally naked, smelling like vegetable oil and chicken. “If I die, I want you to remarry. She has to be uglier than me, of course, not as smart or funny or blah blah blah.”

He was still holding her arm. “A pale imitation.” He sucked on her finger.

“The palest. But still. You shouldn't be alone, Andy. It's not good for a person.”

“I can't believe you actually want to talk about this.”

“Seriously, Andy.”

Was this a conversation they had really had? In bed, on their first night as a married couple? Or was this a conversation he wanted to remember, especially as the undergraduates were spilling out of their classes and tumbling across the quad, toward the cafeteria or the few shabby eating places on Main Street in Reed Township? He was sitting here by the faculty parking lot, shivering in the cold, because he did not want to see Melissa. He had not seen her or talked to her since the baptism, and almost certainly she'd come looking for him in his office.

He wanted to think about Louisa, reimagine the things she might have told him.

“Andy! Is that you? I thought that was you. I was looking for you at your office but you weren't there.”

Found, but it was only Linda Schoenmeyer, puffy and out of breath as she walked across campus in the wind. She was wearing one of her huge shawls, and the tassels at the ends fluttered. Her face was pink. “Rosemary said I might be able to find you here. Do you mind if I sit? Tuna, is that what you're eating? Looks good.”

Andy gestured for her to take the seat next to him, but she sat down opposite him and crossed her hands on the table. Linda wore rings on every finger: moonstones, topazes.

“Is something the matter?” Had he forgiven her for her brutality at Marty's party? He probably had. She couldn't help her behavior any more than he could help his own.

“One of your students—you know Lionel Shell, correct?”

“A bit,” Andy said. “I think he's a fan of mine.”

“I should say,” Linda said. “Somehow he's managed to finagle getting credit two times for your course.”

“Yes, well—” Andy hedged. How annoying the way Linda always made him feel he'd done something wrong. “He wrote two entirely different term papers, we had two different reading lists—”

“No, that's fine. It's just he's in my ornithology class this semester and I was wondering if he seemed, I don't know, all right to you. Mentally.”

“I don't—I mean he's never been the most normal kid, I guess. He's eccentric.”

“He's incredibly depressed, Andy. Or at least that's what I think is going on. I caught him crying outside my classroom twice, and when he bothers to come at all, he just sits there looking like his best friend died. It's disturbing. Sometimes he starts to shake. And then sometimes he takes these frantic notes—at least I thought they were notes, but when I asked to see what he was writing he refused to show me.”

“He shakes?” Andy said.

“Shakes,” Linda said. She shook her head, cast her eyes toward the picnic table so Andy could see the sparkly blue she wore on her lids. “I called him in for a conference, just to see what was going on. He said you were the only person on campus he felt like he could talk to.”

“Me?”

“He also said a few things about existentialism I didn't really get.” Linda blew out through her mouth. “I'm just wondering if you wanted to talk to the kid, maybe, or if I should get student services involved or what.”

“His twin sister's an existentialist,” Andy said. “That's what he told me.”

“I see.”

“He's very upset about Camus.”

“Camus,” Linda said. She allowed herself a small smile, then thought the better of it. “Well, I don't know much about that,” she said. “Or anything else as far as philosophy goes, but if this student's going to blow then I think it's our responsibility to get him the help he needs. And since he said you were his close adviser—”

“Hardly,” Andy said. “The kid doesn't even like me, as far as I know. He took my class twice just so he could fight with me about God.”

“I'm just telling you what he told me, Andy. I asked him if there was anyone he thought he could talk to, and he said you were the only person who might understand.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll get in touch with him.”

“You sure?” Linda said. “I could put in a call to student services.” She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, waited for Andy's nod. “By the way,” here her voice turned coy, “it was very nice to meet your lady friend. I have to say I was surprised. Not at all what I expected. But you've been alone long enough.”

A shot of cold stabbed at Andy's gut. Linda found out about Melissa?

“How long have you two been together, anyway?”

Andy found himself searching for how to phrase it, how to explain himself, not that Linda seemed the least bit mad—only amused. Why was she amused? Wasn't it actionable behavior to become sexually involved with an undergraduate? And here he'd done it so stupidly, so casually, letting her become part of his life.

“Oh, don't tell me it's over already,” Linda said, trying to gauge Andy's muttering. “That's really too bad. We all liked her so much.”

Sheila. She meant Sheila.

“Well,” Andy said. “We're just—” He waited for his tongue to recover his words. “It's still a casual thing.”

“I see,” Linda said. “Well, like I said, a very nice lady.” She stood, heavily, hands on her knees. “Anyway, do me a favor and get in touch with Lionel Shell. I don't want any of our students offing themselves on my watch.” And then she lumbered back toward campus, into the wind, her shawl blowing behind her like a sail.

D
UT
IFULLY,
A
NDY SENT
off the e-mail to Lionel before he returned home for the evening: Just checking in, wanted to see how you were—which sounded much too chummy for his ears but he wasn't sure how else to phrase his concern. Then he got back in time for Rachel's Caesar salad and homework.

“You know, for a scientist you really don't know much about geology,” said Belle, who had moved on from volcanoes to a map of the striations of New Jersey bedrock. Her drawings were spread out in front of them on the kitchen table. Behind them, sitting on the counter, Rachel was using his laptop to type away in Google Chat, talking to someone he didn't know about something his eyes weren't good enough to catch.

“I haven't studied geology since college, Belle,” he said, gently tugging on one of her braids for insubordination.

“Yeah, but you don't even know how to spell
aeolian.
I mean, come on.” She shook her head at him, left for the siren call of the TV.

“Rachel, what are you writing?”

“Nothing.”

“Did I give you permission to use that program?”

“I'm in public,” she said. “What's your problem?”

Andy sighed, got a glass out of the cabinet. He needed to steal his laptop back momentarily, see if Melissa had written to him, try to figure out what to say back to her. He poured himself some water, wished there was some junk food in the house, something his daughter hadn't assiduously prepared. Something with nitrates.

“So who were you writing to, anyway?”

“Lily Dreisinger,” Rachel said.

“Why don't I know this Lily Dreisinger?”

“I don't know,” Rachel said. “You've met her. She was at the father-daughter dance.”

All those glittery preteens, impossible to tell apart. Andy leaned back against the counter. “You were writing to her quite enthusiastically.”

“We're in a fight.”

“You are? About what?”

“God,” Rachel said.

“Seriously?”

“I told her about Belle's baptism, about how we believe in God now, and she said that we didn't believe in the real God because we don't belong to a church, and how we were probably still going to hell, and I was like, whatever, you're an idiot, and she was like I shouldn't pretend to be something I'm not just to fit in. We've been kind of fighting about this for a while. She's sort of really mean when it comes to this stuff.”

“I see,” Andy said. He sipped his water. His ripple effect.

“Is that what you think we were doing?” he asked. “Just trying to fit in by going to church?”

“No,” she said. “That's what I told Lily, that it's not like everyone needs to do exactly what she does to be cool, or whatever. But she can be such a bitch.”

“Rachel—”

“Sorry,” she said, looking abashed. “I shouldn't say that.”

“No,” he said. “You shouldn't.”

In the back of a cabinet, he found a small package of Oreos, which had probably been there for months. Did Oreos expire? He shook out several cookies, put them on a plate, sat down at the table across from his daughter. She looked at them for a second, weighing the various chemicals and sugars, and then gave in to being eleven and popped one in her mouth.

Andy ate one the way he did as a child, twisting off the top, licking off the cream.

“We need some milk,” Rachel said.

“True,” Andy said, but neither one got up to get any.

“So I have a question for you,” Andy said, when they had reduced the number of Oreos on their plate by half. “Why do you think we really went to church? If it wasn't just because everybody else does?”