Bangor Maine
11 April 2007 | Brett | Stories
Einstein has nothing to do with this. That was what she had told herself when she accepted a job offer from the Institute for Advanced Study. She told it to herself again when she bought a white, clapboard house in Princeton’s Mercer Hill Historic District. And it was what she had told herself, over and over, as she leaned her back into an oak tree, a man in electric blue running shorts kneeling at her Sauconys. She had found herself scritching him behind his ears as if he were a cat, which seemed to be what was expected given how Bangor was lapping at her. Though she had felt in no way like a bowl of milk. That might actually have been pleasant, or something approximating pleasant. It had been more like he was trying to clean her, not thoughtfully but instinctively, compulsively. Einstein has nothing to do with this, she had thought, not with the tacit agreement that had resulted in this having happened, and not with anything that might make it stop nor eradicate its memory. I am consenting, she had thought, and then, to replace that thought, Einstein has nothing to do with this.
Marcia had long prized her ability to think. Not think logically. Not think dispassionately. For her, these qualifiers were redundant, perverse.
She had attended Cambridge because it suited her, read physics because it fit her disposition and intellectual abilities, continued on to Caltech because it gave her an opportunity to work alongside colleagues whose interests most closely approximated her own. Rational people do not follow their high school sweethearts to England and California, get married in Reno, then continue on together to Princeton. A thinking person understands coincidence and probability. Almost all odds are long, and the fact that something occurs, even if it occurs infrequently, should never be confused with kismet.
Sometimes things simply work out, and sometimes they cannot possibly work out, and one has to be prepared to be objective in either instance. They had happened to be admitted to the schools that topped their individual lists, and those schools had happened to be near each other, and so they had continued to date, and then they had gotten married when it seemed more useful to be married than not to be married.
His work in linguistics at Oxford, UCLA, and Princeton was exemplary. Her ability in physics, had she been a violinist, would have qualified her to play in any symphony in the world, but would never be that of a soloist. The evidence was preponderant.
One must never lie, not to others, and not to oneself. Her parents had believed strongly in Mark Twain’s advice on lying: if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. Ethics and fidelity were functions of rationality, not emotion.
And yet there she was, not only cheating for the first time in her life, but faking for the first time as well. Einstein has nothing to do with this, she thought. Einstein has nothing to do with any of this.
When it was over, at least most of it, he had kissed her on the forehead, just below her hairline. “Who is this Albert?” Bangor had asked. “Your husband?”
“Albert?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It happens all the time.”
“Okay.”
“Stop by the shop later,” he said. “I have a new recipe in mind. For a milkshake. In your honor.”
“Maybe.”
And then they were two joggers, back on the trail, her pace at first slightly quicker than his, though eventually much faster, her breath far quieter. Instead of finishing her run as she usually did, with a quick shower at home and lunch at her desk, she had run a bath and called the office to tell them she would be taking the afternoon off.
Though it was a warm, late-spring day, she ran a hot bath, filling the tub to the point where she would barely be able to move without splashing water over the rim. It was a technique she had taught herself in her early teens, before she had overcome her impulse to restlessness. She would lock the bathroom door, fill the tub with hot water, then force herself to sit still until the water grew tepid. If she spilled any water over the side she would refill the tub and repeat the process.
The tub in her parents’ house had been claw-footed and deep, and she had developed an appreciation for its shape. For her Princeton house, aside from having the bedrooms painted, having a period-appropriate claw-foot tub installed in the second upstairs bathroom was the one alteration she had made before moving in.
Marcia studied the tub before getting in, drained it, cleaned it thoroughly, ran the water again, and called Theresa, who greeted her before she spoke.
“How was your run?”
Marcia had anticipated the question, but realized she had failed to prepare a response. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”
“Welcome to Princeton,” Theresa said.
“What’s with this place?”
“I don’t know,” Theresa said. “But it works.”
Theresa, the director of fundraising at the Institute, was Marcia’s closest friend and also her boss. After leaving the physics department at Caltech, Marcia had joined its fundraising office and immediately began bringing in an unprecedented volume of noteworthy donations. Her success followed her to Princeton, and she found in Theresa not only a mentor, but also someone who shared her sincere devotion to advanced research and the tasks associated with attracting the donations that support it.
Theresa had taken her to one of Bangor’s shops for the first time to celebrate the Kessler Trust contribution, the first large gift that Marcia had secured for the Institute. Bangor Maine owned a small chain in town that sold ice cream and chocolates. The rumor among a select but apparently ever expanding group of Princeton women, Theresa had told her, was that he added a new item to the menu each time he had an affair with a married resident.
A month later, on the drive back to the office after celebrating another gift, Theresa divulged that she herself had trysted with him a couple of years earlier. “I’m Chocolate Cherry Chunk,” was how she had put it.
None of which made sense to Marcia. Theresa and her husband, Brad, seemed to be one of the happier couples she had ever met. Moreover, the idea of Theresa ever having found anything appealing in Bangor seemed inexplicable.
“I have a bath running,” Marcia said to Theresa. “I really should get off the phone.”
Marcia had found herself turning it over in her head, trying to formulate a theory. There didn’t seem to be any reason for Theresa to put herself into position to inspire Bangor Maine’s Chocolate Cherry Chunk. But she was at a loss for evidence and so eventually, almost out of scientific duty, she had acknowledged Bangor’s clumsy flirtations, casually divulging her running route and schedule during one the times that she and Theresa had stopped in Bangor’s shop. He had begun running with her, at least as much as he was physically able, but she felt unmoved by whatever charms seemed to have moved Theresa and, allegedly, legions of others. Yet the menu seemed to expand at least weekly.
And so, earlier that day, she had cocked her head toward a secluded grove off the edge of the track and Bangor had put his sweaty palm into her hand and taken the lead. “An excellent choice,” he had said, and Marcia almost backed out of it, whatever it was, but she had gone that far and figured she might as well find out what all the fuss was about.
“Want to go for a milkshake later?” Theresa asked.
“You’re kidding,” Marcia said.
“Later then.”
“I’m going to take that bath now,” Marcia said.
“You really will thank me for it,” Theresa had said, and then hung up.
Marcia slipped into the tub with studied calm, and the bathwater reached to the precipice of the rim, but the only water that escaped left as steam. The water temperature was on the safe side of scalding, but only just, exactly how she liked it, pacifying and consuming. She settled in and let her mind work through the evidence.
If anything, Bangor’s appeal was less scrutable than before. The only thing that seemed clear to her that he wasn’t merely appeal-neutral, but was instead far less than appealing, very likely universally so, particularly as an indulgence. She considered the possibility that she was mistaken, that others saw or felt something she hadn’t, but the supposition struck her as epistemological and therefore pointless. Perhaps Theresa was simply playing a joke on her. But that didn’t seem like the sort of thing Theresa would do, least of all to her.
She thought back to the day Theresa had taken her to Bangor’s shop and introduced them. They had been celebrating something, Marcia thought, and remembered the Kessler gift. Marcia had walked into Theresa’s office to tell her the gift was official and Theresa had been so pleased that she had actually clapped her hands excitedly. Even now, thinking back to it, Marcia felt awkward. She had been brought across the country, she was being paid three times what her husband was making, and she had landed several gifts for Caltech that were several times larger than the Kesslers’. This was what fundraisers did. Did Einstein clap excitedly after a Kurt Gödel lecture?
“He’s proud of you,” Theresa had said.
“Who?”
“Whose picture do you have in your wallet?” Theresa asked.
“How do you know about that?”
“I don’t,” Theresa said, “But you don’t have any pictures of him in your office, so I figured there must be one in your wallet.”
“You never looked in my wallet?”
“You think you’re the only person who came here to be Einstein? If I had a million dollars for every genius who came here in search of a unified theory, this place would be fully endowed and I’d be shopping my resume.”
“You hired me to raise money,” Marcia said. “Einstein has nothing to do with this.”
“Look, Einstein was Einstein before he got here, but he wasn’t happy about it until he’d been here for a while. And now he’s proud of how hard you worked to land the Kessler gift. And so am I.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what you need?” Theresa had asked. “A treat. And I know just the place for you to get it.”
And they had gone to Bangor’s and gotten ice cream and the rest of what happened had happened, and now her bathwater had gone tepid and her husband would be home soon. She got out of the tub slowly, dried herself thoroughly, pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and then changed her mind. From the bottom of her underwear drawer she pulled out a camisole she hadn’t worn in years, not since the weekend of their wedding. She had bought it as a joke, something the two of them could laugh at together, like the drive-thru chapels or the squads of bridesmaids dressed like background singers.
The fabric felt cool, almost liquid against her torso, and she caught herself blushing even though no one else could see her. The urge to pull her shorts and t-shirt back on was almost overwhelming, though evidently not, because she resisted it, remained in her camisole until she heard a key in the door, and then she ran down the stairs to greet him.
She thought he would laugh at her, but he didn’t.