The Goddess of Small Victories (41 page)

From the cocktails on, my husband had shown surprising interest in the stranger. He barely marked any irritation when the man launched into a dicey parallel between the incompleteness theorem and his own sociological research. Kurt had explained his views on this to me many times. If he raised objections and patiently explained his work to adventurous neophytes, they never understood. They held their position, then boasted of having discussed the matter with Professor Gödel, when all he had done was be polite. If he grew impatient and put them in their place, saying, “Don’t try to juggle concepts that are beyond you,” they accused him of arrogance. He never let that stop him from saying it to me. Kurt’s general practice was to feign distraction or play up his eccentricity. Light conversation, a necessary lubricant in the social game, struck him as a waste of time and energy. The vanity of others was too onerous a burden for him; he had enough to do looking after his own.

In his eagerness to shine, the surprise guest seized on the general apathy to launch a comparison between psychoanalysis and the formal sciences. He was careful to soft-soap Kurt along the
way. If he had known the other guests better, he would never have risked dipping a toe in this quagmire. Charles, struggling until then to keep his eyes open, looked as though he’d been lashed by a bucket of ice water. In fact, he’d been hoping for a dustup ever since the appetizers. He helped himself to a fourth cup of sweetened coffee in anticipation.

“From what I notice, psychoanalysts divide themselves into various groups, each publishing its own journal to explain its particular way of blaspheming, of outraging nature, of explaining the art.
⁵⁴
With mathematicians, it’s the opposite.”

Jessup appeared to consider the relevance of this statement, uttered as it was by a psychoanalyst, but in vain. He responded with a complicit smile. If there was anything to grasp, his smirk would pass for understanding; if not, it could be taken for subtle connivance. Oskar gave a cough. Erich, Lili’s husband, and Oppie had both abandoned us to loll on my deck chairs. Kurt was at the table in body only. Charles Hulbeck alone wanted to keep the conversation going. When his little dog stopped amusing him, he would eat him alive. Beate Hulbeck, good girl, rested a placating hand on the Californian’s muscled shoulder. I wondered how a vegan could develop such a physique. He smoothed the edge of the tablecloth several times before blurting out what he hadn’t had the opportunity to slip into the conversation earlier.

“I, too, am a therapist, in my spare time.”

“You’re a psychoanalyst? I thought you said you were a sociologist.”

“I don’t pay much attention to labels, Mrs. Kahler-Loewy. I consider myself simply a life counselor.”

I pricked up my ears. His counseling must have been lucrative, because the watch on his wrist was an expensive one and his linen suit appeared to be custom tailored. An admirer of art,
he had bought several canvases by Beate, who was an accomplished painter. According to Albert, Charles’s own collection was remarkable. Caring for the souls of others paid well.

“Who are your clientele? Or should one say ‘patientele’? ‘Clientele’ makes it sound like the corner butcher.”

“I prefer to talk about my ‘circle,’ Mrs. Gödel. I give counseling to businessmen, artists. I also have many actors. I live in Los Angeles when I’m not traveling.”

“What sort of methods do you use?”

“I am hyperempathic. A receptor of vibrations, positive and negative. I help my patients sort through their vibes. Because everything comes down to vibrations, no?”

Kitty, always on the lookout for fun, took up the baton.

“My dear Theolonius, I am ready to bet that you believe in reincarnation!”

He assented, before removing his dark glasses with a calculated slowness. His gaze, while not as transfixing as Oppie’s, was striking. At the moment, Oppenheimer was snoring gently, a cigarette burning between his fingertips.

“I prefer the term ‘metempsychosis.’ I’ve been to India several times. I am suffused with the culture of Asia. It doesn’t divide body from soul, as we do in the West. All is one. We are pure states of energy. We are quantum-physical.”

Charles was picking his teeth … unless he was sharpening them.

“What do you mean by quantum-physical, Theolonius?”

“My course of action is the fruit of long years of research and travel. Thanks to meditation, I have profoundly changed my consciousness of being-in-the-world. I’ve been able to develop a remarkable capacity for centering my corporospiritual being. It allows me to mobilize my energy in a quantum mode.”

“I didn’t understand that.”

Theolonius laid his hand on Beate’s shoulder. “I know, it’s complicated. But first and foremost it’s a question of faith.”

She glared at him: his condescension had just cost him a precious ally. Theolonius clearly needed a good spanking. Emboldened by the scientists’ lack of response, he pushed ahead. He dished up a kedgeree that melded body, consciousness, curry, matter, and spirit. I saw Kurt raise a perplexed eyebrow. I could make no sense of the man’s blathering either, but I wasn’t sure my vocabulary was up to the task. The quantum-physical guru, being the savvy snake-oil salesman that he was, took no offense at our silence. Was there not a potential “circle” around the table?

“Quantum-physical space is a wave field where the duality between what is
I
and what is
not-I
ceases to obtain.”

“I’m relieved to learn that Pauli didn’t inflict those diabolical matrices on us for no reason.”

Oppie’s comment floated to us from his deck chair. Even with his eyes closed, he didn’t miss a shred of the conversation. I couldn’t tell whether Jessup was a fraud or simply clueless. His cosmic hodgepodge might go over with some Hollywood starlets, but here in Princeton? Even I could see his effrontery. I was sorry Albert and Pauli were not around; they would have roared with pleasure at tearing this specimen to pieces. Kurt, speechless, picked nonexistent specks of dirt from his white suit. He had taken off his necktie; his open collar gave a view of his scrawny neck. This little patch of light-colored skin triggered in me a spasm of tenderness. I smiled at him; he nodded complicitly. Oskar Morgenstern shifted the conversation; he wanted to discourage our crackpot from embarking on any more dubious disquisitions. By spiriting Charles’s quarry from under his nose, he had snatched his toy away.

“Kurt, have you finished your paper on Carnap?”

“I withdrew it from publication.”

“Why? What a waste of energy!”

“I wasn’t happy with the result. It was polemical. My old friend Carnap wouldn’t have had time to reply. It wasn’t right. From now on, I’m devoting myself solely to philosophy. I’ve become deeply interested in Husserl’s phenomenology and his work on perception.”
⁵⁵

“Are you bored with mathematics?”

“Where you see a tangle, I am drawing out a single thread, Lili. My ambition, my hope, is to discover an axiomatic foundation for metaphysics.”

“By studying the work of others?”

“Study is never in vain.”

Theolonius came back to the charge, reinvigorated. “I, too, endorse a marriage of traditional approaches and modern scientific theories. Truth is undivided.”

Charles was savoring these words like so many grains of caviar. He was preparing a scathing reply. My husband foiled his plans by subjecting his guests—already saturated with words and alcohol—to a lecture on phenomenology. The philosopher Husserl, his current obsession, was, he claimed, engaged in an identical quest for analytic purity in thought. I’d quietly examined Husserl’s works to try and understand Kurt’s new monomania. I’d never read anything so hermetic, not even my husband’s dratted mathematics, which, transposed into my language, sometimes became imaginable. This Mr. Husserl had a talent for coming up with a terminology that was even more obscure than the subject it was meant to explain. Even Kurt admitted it was dry. Which is saying something!

“On the subject of perception, are you familiar with Aldous Huxley, Mr. Gödel? He has just written an essay called
The Doors of Perception
. I’ll send you a copy.”

“He stole the title from William Blake!”

My husband waved his hand as though driving away a pesky wasp.

“Let him speak, Hulbeck! The subject interests me.”

Delighted, Theolonius launched on a panegyric of Huxley and his experimentation with mescaline, a derivative of peyote. He believed the substance of great import in the study of perception. According to him, it opened doors onto other dimensions, doors that would normally be hidden from us by reason. He preferred LSD, which was a legal drug, over peyote. He was kind enough to tell us that mescaline gave you diarrhea. He and his circle used it in making extrasensory experiments. It allowed him to see music and listen to colors. I wondered if this potion could also make a wife’s voice audible to her husband, but I forbore to ask. Charles was muttering and mangling toothpicks one after another: Jessup was now trespassing onto his flower bed. This miraculous LSD was no recent discovery, and Charles had treated a number of his patients with these psychoactive substances. While LSD could alter one’s sense of time and space recreationally, it had numerous side effects, including the loss of appetite and the onset of dangerous hallucinations, unsettling the mind in a way that some people never recovered from. Charles argued too zealously against its use, and Kurt only became more interested. His curiosity did not worry me unduly; he was too afraid of being poisoned to experiment with such substances. And I recognized symptoms that my husband had already brought on himself just by abusing his faculty for thought.

“It sounds quite tempting.”

“Altering one’s thought processes is not the same thing as purifying them! Kurt, this will lead you to drug addiction!”

“That’s not what I meant by tempting, Oskar. Yes, I would be afraid to lose myself in it. I’m searching for, let us say, less chemical means. The human body has resources of its own for achieving this end. While I seek to open a new door of perception, it’s not by distorting my senses but by detaching myself from them.”

“In the first place, you would have to believe that there is a reality separate from the one captured by our senses!”

“We have talked about this a hundred times, Oskar. Mathematical objects are one aspect of this other reality. They form a universe apart, to which we barely have access.”

“It is a world you have the good fortune to frequent, Mr. Gödel.”

“Only as a temporary visitor, I’m sorry to say. Sometimes I hear voices when I work. These voices belong to mathematical beings. I would almost say … to angels. But my friends seem to get coughing fits when I mention the subject.”

Kurt was being unfair, particularly to Morgenstern, who had always greeted his fanciful ideas with unlimited indulgence. Finding him deaf to his flights of fancy, Kurt likened Oskar to a blind man who would deny the existence of colors on the grounds that he had never seen any.

Theolonius stripped off his jacket, giving us a good look at the shirt stretched over his pectoral muscles. The ladies smiled, half mocking and half stirred by this
objective
reality that their own men had long since given up maintaining. The hunk from California couldn’t get over his good fortune: he had assumed the role—not without courage—of the lunch party’s exotic black sheep and found an ally in the logician, a paragon of rationality. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Kurt felt that nothing should be discarded because of the dogma of reason. What seemed absurd today might become tomorrow’s truth.

“I, too, believe in angels. Every human being has an invisible and benevolent companion.”

“Gödel is not talking about harps and golden curls, Theolonius. For him it’s more a philosophical principle.”

“You are blunting my ideas, Charles, because they terrify you! I sense the existence of a suprasensory world and a specific ‘eye’ of the mind fitted to distinguish it. We possess a sense capable of apprehending abstraction. A sense similar to hearing or smell. Otherwise, how can we explain mathematical intuition?”

“Are you imagining an actual physical organ?”

“Why not? Certain mystical philosophers believed the pineal gland to be the seat of knowledge.”

“Among the Hindus the third eye, the instrument of clairvoyance, belongs to Shiva. No doubt it is the third eye of the man of the future. The pineal gland could be its internal appendage, still in dormancy.”

Hulbeck pointed out testily that the pineal gland was a hormonal regulator, not a cherub-detecting radar. By way of proof he advanced the dissections he had performed as a medical student. I didn’t see how it supported his assertion, but I enjoyed our unpredictable Dadaist’s fulminations against “that crap about a third eye.” Charles, who was overly fond of taking a polemical stance, sided against what might have been his own conviction. It was delicious to see him forced into the conservative role by his need to be in opposition. Theolonius sipped his whey, while my husband kneaded his stomach ostentatiously.

“Whoever has experienced the effulgence of mathematics, the conversation of the angels, will try to gain access to that realm again. And if I have to pass for a madman, Hulbeck, so be it.”

The angel of silence and the demon of embarrassment both descended on the table in the garden. Kurt’s friends didn’t like it
when he openly embraced the common verdict about him. If he kept notions of this kind to himself, they would remain socially acceptable follies. If he stated them within a framework of logic and personal belief, the label of madness might still be avoided. But when he described himself as a madman, no one could hide behind a screen of politeness.

Penny came and laid her soft head on my lap. I patted it while looking for a way to defuse the situation. Kitty, no dullard, opted for false naïveté, as does every woman accustomed to pacifying warring spirits.

“I notice a depressing corollary to this assertion. If I’m going to believe in angels, then I also have to allow for the existence of evil spirits.”