The Mathematician’s Shiva Read online

  “Now you’re talking to a bear instead of me?”

  “He’s a Kodiak. Probably in the old days, the Russians up there in Alaska, they talked to his ancestors. I’m continuing a proud tradition.”

  “If you had children, you wouldn’t be talking to bears. You’d be with someone fresh and young, someone with a little of your mother inside. A new generation.”

  “I have a child.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Like you even know him or her.”

  “Anna, you know you’re making me feel bad, right?”

  “I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to talk sense to you when your guard is down. You still have time. You’re still young. People live forever nowadays. Find yourself someone already. It’s well past ridiculous.”

  “What is ridiculous?”

  “I’ve been married three times. I have both two children and two grandchildren.”

  “And a third grandchild will come sometime this month, although I shouldn’t congratulate you before it happens.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  “Is this some sort of race?”

  “No, it’s not a race. But I lived. I didn’t stop. I had my work, sure. But I tell you, even today at my age, I know that I am still capable of falling in love completely, openly. You are, too.”

  “Now you’re talking nonsense.”

  “No, you’re the one talking to bears. I’m talking to you. Look at me, Sasha.” She pulled the arms of my topcoat, turning me toward her. She was still strong. My shoulders lurched forward. “Look at me, not the stupid bear.”

  I looked down at her. I hadn’t looked at anyone like that in years. It’s not like I hadn’t been up close to a woman. If anything, I’d seen far too many faces.

  I wasn’t looking at Anna like I did at other women. I wasn’t trying to determine the precise spot on her skin that needed a touch of my fingertips. No, I was looking at someone whose face I already knew well but through age and time looked both familiar and strangely new. I took it all in the way, perhaps, someone takes in new scenery as they cross over a hill on a day when the sun’s light is just so, exposing every detail.

  There was a little scar above Anna’s right eye, just a light-colored line on her otherwise olive skin that even when she was young would form into a wrinkle when she raised her brow. She didn’t know how she got it, she said. There were her rounded cheekbones, oddly similar to those of my mother, high on her face and broad as if they were specifically designed to allow her cheeks to be warmed by the sun. I knew these features well. I could have recalled them any time I wished. But there were also the shadows and lines that had developed over time, different than mine, finer and deeper etches along the lids of her eyes, furrows where there had once been the subtlest pair of curves accentuating her chin and lips.

  “You’re smiling at me,” I said.

  “It feels good to smile. I didn’t know until recently.”

  “You’re becoming an American, it seems.”

  “No, never. Not that. It’s good to be here, though. You’re the American, not me.”

  “Not really.”

  “Maybe not really. Not among women.”

  “How am I with women?”

  “Big phony. A Russian accent comes out of nowhere. Your eyes droop sad like a puppy. I know you.”

  “You’re amused by my behavior, are you?”

  “Yes, very amused. Was at any rate. But don’t you think it’s getting old? Tell me true now.”

  “And what about you. Three husbands. Five years and then what, poof? You throw them out.”

  “That’s over. I’m going to find myself a real man, successful, and hold onto him no matter what. I’m getting too old to be alone. Look at me. I’m telling the truth.”

  “You are. I can see it. I really can. I guess I’ll be going to a wedding soon.”

  “One more, yes. I want a big one. One last big wedding.”

  “Could be you and me.”

  “That’s disgusting. Incest almost. Your mother wouldn’t approve. I’m going to find someone who knows he’s getting something special.”

  “The bear is what’s watching us, not my mother.”

  “Forget the bear. You and your fucking bear. Smile for me, Sasha.”

  “Like this?”

  “No, not like that. That’s stupid. A real smile. Not some fake thing. I’ve seen you do it. I know you can do it.”

  “I need to think of something good, Anna.” I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up something that would make me smile the way that I knew Anna wanted me to. “Tell me what to think.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the pond over there next to the road. Where we used to go sometimes that first winter, when you were little. You’d put on your skates in the warming house and then show me how good you were on the ice. Little boy showing off. Remember?”

  “Yeah, sure, I remember.”

  “I’d watch you skate. You were so happy. That’s the kind of smile I want to see.”

  I concentrated as best I could. The cold air is, indeed, ideal for isolating thoughts and maybe even acting on them, if not physically, at least emotionally and mentally. In my mind I was a kid skating backward on the ice, knowing someone beautiful was giving me a visual embrace. What boy wouldn’t smile in response to that?

  “That was better,” Anna said. “I saw the little boy in you. It was nice to see. No disappointments. A big future ahead of you.”

  “My future turned out quite well. I don’t have many disappointments. It’s true, don’t you think?”

  “Sure. You did what your mother wanted. What your father wanted. I’m not sure you’ve done what you wanted.”

  “My father wanted me to become a mathematician. I disobeyed him.”

  “And your mother? Did you ever disobey her?”

  “Who could ever disobey her? She was in charge of it all. Me, you, my father, Shlomo, Bruce, everybody. She was the boss. You don’t disobey the boss.”

  “Well, maybe now you can be your own boss.”

  “I could be independently employed, it’s true. But you’re the one sounding like the boss now. You wanted me to smile for you. I smiled. What do you want next?”

  “OK, if I’m the boss, will you listen to me?”

  “I’ve been listening to you since I was a boy. I’m certainly not going to stop now.”

  CHAPTER 12

  A Confession

  Did my accent really get heavier when I was flirting? Did I get all affected playing the immigrant card, and meld phony vulnerability with slightly questionable exoticism? Of course. I did it because it worked.

  Up until the year 2001, I had loved three women in my life. One was my former wife. The other two, my mother and Anna, would frequently repeat the claim that I had given up on love. I didn’t think that was right.

  I had honestly tried to love sometimes. OK, there had also been times when I met a woman and had just wanted her physically. It was also true that I’d sometimes been a rat, feigning love, or at least emotional interest, in order to get inside a woman’s dress. But that hadn’t been typical. I hadn’t been a player in the American way, serially acquiring and dumping women in an effort to collect an ever-increasing number of experiences. I admit, though, that it looked the same in terms of the balance sheet.

  Before I begin to talk about my era of phony love, I should spend some time talking about when I wasn’t a phony. Catherine Hampstead was originally from Ross, California. When I met her she was beginning her Ph.D. studies in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. I was working on my Ph.D. in meteorology, a pursuit that caused my father to rage not infrequently about me squandering my talent in mathematics. I wooed Cathy, married her, and for nearly two years we lived in youthful harmony. Then one afternoon, in a roomful of mathematicians, her life fell apart, and our ma
rriage soon went with it.

  It all started when this bright, beautiful woman failed her Ph.D. prelims. Walking into that room, she was confident and radiant. I could tell that she was also nervous and probably so could her Ph.D. committee. Who wouldn’t be? But she had never failed at anything before. We were certain it wasn’t going to happen then. Like an imprudent couple that invests its nest egg in an IPO whose value, despite months of glowing press, falls precipitously at the opening bell of the stock market and continues to decline day after day, we were stunned and devastated. It didn’t help matters that her Ph.D. advisor was also my mother.

  All Ph.D. students must take prelims after they take courses for a year or two. They study for a few months, and then five or six professors grill them orally for a few hours. It’s a painful experience even when they pass. It’s supposed to be painful. I know. I’ve sat on scores of these exams and was once, of course, a Ph.D. student myself. It isn’t a fair fight, really. Five or six very bright people who have studied your subject area for a combined 50 to 150 years are bound to ask you questions that make you seem like an idiot. Passing means that you are only a partial idiot. The good news is that after you suffer this humiliation, you are free to write your dissertation, and you can do that just about anywhere. On the other hand, failure means your attempt to earn a Ph.D. is done. Kaput. You can, of course, retake the exam, but not many people choose to do so.

  On the day before her prelims, Catherine had a promising future as a professor in mathematics. A loving family, supportive of all she did, had nurtured her dreams. At Wellesley, where Catherine had been an undergraduate, mathematics students were rare, but because there were no men, at least they weren’t ostracized. Briefly I nurtured her dreams as well. It certainly helped that I was someone who knew a bit about the difficulties women had as mathematicians and knew more than a bit about the difficulties of mathematics in general. But after her prelims, she didn’t have a promising future. Over a period of four hours, her dreams went poof.

  This profound disappointment, so unexpected, was the first real test of our marriage. We failed that test as badly as she failed her prelims. New marriages need nurturing, of course. They are tender little plants that do not do well under stress. Our environmental conditions had been, in hindsight, hostile.

  We were living in a drafty apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, close enough to Lake Mendota to catch the howling wind off the water. It was cold, the kind of gray fall cold filled with moisture. The apartment, with the furnace blowing, barely managed to inch up to sixty, according to the thermometer. I didn’t trust what that thermometer said. The building, built in the 1920s, wasn’t really an apartment complex, but rather was a large house that had been cut up into six units in a haphazard way. We were on the first floor, in Unit 3, which had two windows, one in the tiny kitchen and one in the bedroom.

  Desperate to keep what little warmth there was inside the apartment, I had covered the windows in thick, clear plastic bought from a hardware store. Partly I had done this because Catherine had been uncharacteristically complaining about sweating all the time and was keeping those windows open when I wasn’t around. I wasn’t sure why she was always warm. She was pregnant when she started opening the windows. The logic at the time was that we would have our first child early, when Catherine was still a student. That way, when eventually she took an academic position, the child would be a few years old, ready for day care and then school.

  The student health service, filled with trainees and burnouts from real hospitals, wasn’t about to investigate why Catherine was hot all the time. I was obsessed with finishing my Ph.D. so I could take my job in Tuscaloosa—whose warm climate I was already beginning to think was a decidedly good thing—and wasn’t paying much attention either. We had four goals that year. A very ambitious and organized couple we were. Goal one—Catherine passing her prelims—had not been achieved. But to my mind, that didn’t obviate the need to succeed at goals two through four. I needed to pass my dissertation defense and graduate. Cletus the Fetus, our name for the bulge in Catherine’s belly, needed to be born. Then, after all that, we, a lovely young couple with a beautiful baby in tow, needed to move to Tuscaloosa.

  I was focused, oh so focused, on my dissertation. I ascribed Catherine’s burning up day and night to having two heat masses, the fetus and her together. She was kind of a double furnace, I thought to myself, taking in fuel for two bodies and burning calories for two as well. Why shouldn’t she be warm? This would not be the first time I would twist physics to rationalize why I was ignoring a serious problem.

  My wife, formerly laconic, was also talking at the clip of a coffee-crazed TV host trying to squeeze in a bit of information before a commercial break. I ascribed this change to the unhappiness of failure. She was unhappy with her uncertain future, unhappy with my mother, and unhappy with my family, who she wanted nothing to do with after her exam. That was my internal pronouncement, although of course I couldn’t say so out loud. But I wanted to. Simply. Plainly, in a way anyone who grew up in a family like mine would say it. “You’re unhappy, I know. You’ve failed your Ph.D. prelim, I know. I believe in you. I love you. It will take time to get over this. But you will.” Except at the time, I didn’t know if indeed she would get over her failure. Plus, here is a horrible thing. Her failure was something I didn’t even want to be around. She knew it. I knew it. I wanted positive stories to keep me going and help me finish. There Catherine was, overheated emotionally and physically, trying to comprehend the newness of bearing a child and the newness of having no academic future in mathematics. Where was I? Busy, busy, busy at work.

  Catherine wasn’t found to be an incompetent mathematician. My mother, a harsh judge in all things mathematical, would never have said such a thing, because it wasn’t true. Rather, the committee told Catherine after the exam that she was bright, of course. Her grades were testimony to that. But there was a difference between being bright and possessing those sparks of ideas that lead to original thought. She was not an original thinker, my Catherine. She was instead a “mimic.” That’s the word my mother used after the exam. Using that word was cruel. My mother would say that she was only being honest, that there is no value in sugarcoating the truth. I think it’s just easier to be mean. To have a light touch takes work.

  Is it fair to expect every Ph.D. student in mathematics to possess originality? Again, according to my mother, there were plenty who didn’t—most in fact did not—but not under her watch. “We have to be better. Women cannot be ordinary in this business. They must tower above everyone else to survive.” That was what she said to me way back when. We were in her house in the kitchen. This was a sober discussion between a mother and a son. We weren’t drinking vodka, but tea. I can remember her saying these words. I can remember also erupting, standing up and shouting. I screamed not in English, but in the dirty and gruff weathered language of where I was born. “I don’t give a shit about what it takes for a woman to survive. Even if it’s true, Catherine is not just a student of yours. This is your daughter-in-law. Exceptions have to be made for family.”

  “What do you know about family?” my mother replied. “You bring in this girl to join us. You don’t ask me or your father about her. You just announce it, you’re getting married. Two years you’ve been married to this girl who has nothing in common with you or me or your father or anyone else we know and love. She has led a life of ease, of no hardship, of no struggle. She can’t do the work, this little doll of yours. I don’t need dolls.”

  In the space of thirty seconds my mother had condemned not only my wife’s intellectual abilities, but also my judgment in choosing a life partner. I knew it was only going to go downhill from there. Somehow I did manage to find the strength to try and challenge my mother not as a son tries the patience of a parent, but as an adult who questions the judgment and fairness of another. “Maybe she can do the work,” I said. “But you don’t want her to. Maybe you’ve d
ecided she’s a little no-brained lalka because it’s convenient for you. It lets you knock your daughter-in-law down to a manageable size.”

  There was a look my mother showed when confronted with what she deemed to be arrogance mixed with idiocy. It was as if you could feel her presence leave, that it was not worth her while to even hear another word. “I don’t mix the personal with the professional, Sasha. Not in that way. Now you are being ridiculous.” There was no anger in her voice. As far as she was concerned, I was the equivalent of a love-struck teenager who thought he knew all about life.

  I cannot remember a single time when I won an argument with my mother. Perhaps this was the last moment I seriously tried. I certainly can’t say I was alone in my futility. If my father ever won an argument, it didn’t happen while I was present. He could be a formidable adversary, but in comparison to my mother, he was always a distant second. Everyone was. I stopped screaming and stomped out of her house.

  So there was the added tragedy of Catherine’s failure. She was being held to a very high standard, an absurd standard, really. At the time I thought I had learned an obvious lesson. Do not fall in love with someone when that love is heavily dependent on the goodwill and kindness of your parents. Find someone else. It’s a stupid thing to expect a family to help you tie up your love life into a nice bow, and smart people do stupid things far more often than most people realize.

  Now, looking back, I don’t think that’s the lesson that I should have learned. I should have understood that when you love someone, and they are being subjected to cruelty, you need to do whatever you can to shield them, to defend them, even if the source of that cruelty, maybe especially if the source of that cruelty, is your own mother. This is your obligation. There are no exceptions.

  My mother wasn’t the only one with a talent for condemnation. Catherine had it as well. I heard her words after a return from a late-night trip to the basement of the computer science building. I had been trying to code solutions to moisture movement in clouds using the Navier-Stokes equation night after night for months with little success. I came home, as per usual, at 4:00 A.M., and Catherine wasn’t at all happy. “I could do your fucking work,” she said. “It’s as stupid as making ketchup. You have a fucking recipe. You put it in a computer. Big fucking deal. You only have to use half your brain to do this. And you don’t even have the fucking heart to use the other half for me.”