A Doubter's Almanac (12 page)

He was going to make her sorry.

“You look terrible” was the first thing Hans Borland said when he walked back into his office. One day still remained of the break. The campus was quiet, the students just beginning to filter in.

“Kamil Malosz and I have been in battle,” said Andret.

“Good, good. I can see it.” Instead of sherry, the professor pulled a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet and cleared off his desk. Two glasses, filled to the top. “And have you defeated him?”

Andret gulped the whiskey, then laid his notebook beside the glass. “Yes,” he said. “I believe I have.”

Fine Hall

P
RINCETON
U
NIVERSITY.
M
ILO
arrived on a day of hail—billions of white spheres the size of gumballs bouncing off the lawns and streets of central New Jersey as he carried his new briefcase across the quad. A miracle. Blue sky. Hot as a clothes dryer. And suddenly hail was bouncing up from the walk in a skittering dance higher than his belt—corn in a popper. Within a few seconds the brim of his fedora had filled with it.

Then, just like that, it stopped.

He’d bought the hat—a Borsalino—along with the dark suit, for the commencement of his position. Borland’s advice: Don’t look like the rest of them.
Go against the times.
And this was what he was doing, striding among the long-haired students, leaning down now and then to pick up tiny melting fragments of the universe. Around him, the dowdy-looking faculty toed back kickstands and resumed their rides. The undergraduate boys emerged from under the eaves to boot a Hacky Sack again in the electric brightness of the storm’s wake.

Dr. Milo Andret, Ph.D.

He’d had time to think. The life he’d been living—the quatrant, the deadbeat parties, Cle’s obtuse, demanding visions—it was all behind him now. From this point on he would live by different rules. He’d sold the Valiant and tossed away the old clothes. Now he wore a bespoke suit and an astringent cologne. The world parting as he stepped. He wouldn’t miss a molecule of what he’d been through.

The briefcase had been a gift from Borland on the occasion of his dissertation defense, which had been a triumph. As he reached Fine Hall, he set it down, removed the hat, and poured the hail from the brim into his palm. Little messages from the stratosphere, crenellated oblongs from the heavens.

In the departmental office he found a trio of secretaries—a pair of blondes in sweaters typing at the desks up front and a darker one in back, her head down. He held out his palm.

One of the blondes said, “You brought us candy.”

“Wish I had,” he answered. “To tell the truth, it’s hail. Heavenly mothballs. You don’t get this kind of thing in Berkeley. It’s amazing, really.”

“Relatively speaking, I guess,” said the other blonde, not looking up from her typewriter. The first one laughed brassily.

“Well, it might be if you looked at it,” said the dark one in back, still not lifting her head.

“Might be,” said one of the blondes, glancing up at the wall clock. “But I was hoping it was candy.”

A hush. It was a Friday afternoon, just a few minutes before five—he glanced up at the clock himself now for the first time. It seemed that everyone else in the building had left for the day. “Well,” he said, “I was just hoping to get the key to my office. I’m Milo Andret. The new hire. I just got here.” He dropped the melting remnants into the trash can.

The two blondes went on typing. One of them looked at the clock again.

“Well,” said the dark one in back, “if nobody’s going to help Professor Andret, then I will.”

“I’m not a professor,” he said a few minutes later, after she’d ridden up with him in the elevator and unlocked the door to his office. It was a nice-sized room with two windows over a curving footpath and a view of a sports field truncated by evergreens. Princeton had recruited him heavily. Still: it was more than he’d expected. “I’m an
assistant
professor,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said, brushing the hair from her eyes. “I mean, I’m an assistant secretary.”

—

A
FEW MONTHS
before, within hours of showing the proof to Borland, rumors of the achievement had begun to spread. Soon after, the paper had been accepted by the
Annals
. Publication in October: an unheard-of turnaround. At thirty-two years old, he’d found a solution to one of the great problems in the history of mathematics. The article would arrive next month in libraries around the world: the Malosz conjecture, thanks to Milo Andret, had become the Malosz
theorem.

He thought briefly of Kobayashi and Timofeyev.

On his first day on campus, he walked around unrecognized. The pressed suit. The fedora. He had the feeling that he was someone else, that he’d been handed a disguise. Even in the mathematics department, only the dark-haired secretary, whose name was Helena Pierce, paid him any notice.

That Monday, his first day at work, she showed him around the building. The semester didn’t start until the following week, but his mailbox was already filled with letters. “A lot of departmental duties, I guess,” he offered.

“Yes,” she said. “Or no, actually.” She blushed. “Probably not that many, at least not now. Chairman Hay tries to give the junior faculty time for their work.” She brushed the hair from her eyes again, then pointed to the slots on either side of his name. “Not that you’re junior.” The blush deepened. “In title, maybe. I read about the Malosz theory, I confess. Congratulations, Professor Andret.”

“Assistant Professor Andret.”

She ignored the flirtation. “These are your colleagues’ mailboxes,” she said. “The other new faculty are here, and here, and here. Not as full as yours—well, I guess you can see that.”

Now she paused, as though she’d overstepped.

“Thank you,” he replied. He lifted out a handful of envelopes. Several of them were hand-addressed. He lifted out a second batch. Even before he’d left Berkeley, he’d been invited to dozens of seminars.

“I noticed you get a lot of correspondence, Professor. More than some of the senior faculty receives.”

“Book-of-the-Month Club flyers.”

She blushed again.

“The other faculty probably pay their bills on time, too,” he said, glancing at her. She was a little formal, but she was pretty enough—long necked and pale. A girl from a Flemish painting. The wine color of her blouse brought out her eyes.

He shifted his attention back to the envelopes.

“Well,” she said carefully, “I was going to tell you—there’s a piece about you in the department newsletter. It’s very nice, obviously.”

“There is?”

“About the Malosz theory. It’s quite impressive. But of course you already know that. All right, I’ll be quiet now.”

“Perhaps I don’t already know that,” he answered, turning to smile at her.

—

L
ATER THAT EVENING,
in the Downtown Club, a white-tablecloth establishment near Bank Street where he’d convinced her to stop for a drink, she broke a pause in the conversation by asking him about his research. “Just tell me a thing or two about topology,” she said. “For my own education. I like to learn a little at work.”

“Of course, of course.” From a far room came the sounds of a string quartet. He pulled the pewter ring from the rolled napkin beside him and set it at the center of the table. Then he bowed slightly and leaned in. “An introductory lecture on the subject of topology,” he said, “by Assistant Professor Milo Andret, on the occasion of his stupendously lucky hire.”

She blushed.

“This napkin ring,” he said, lifting it between them, “is the same to me as my coffee cup.” He poked his thumb through the napkin ring and then slid the pinkie of the same hand through the handle of the coffee cup. “See,” he said, holding them up together. “They’re both loops that I can stick a finger through. It’s just that the coffee cup has a little bleb attached to
its
loop, to hold the coffee. Whereas the napkin ring is nothing
but
the loop.”

“I see.”

“As a contrary example, the coffee cup is fundamentally different from the highball glass.” He picked up his bourbon with the other hand, turned it around in the air, and drained it. “There’s no handle on a glass of bourbon to put your pinkie through. In fact,” he said, “a coffee cup and a highball glass could hardly be
more
different, topologically speaking.”

“Yes,” she said. “Topologically speaking.”

There was something about her.

“What I’m saying with all this is that the coffee cup and the napkin ring are
topologically
equivalent. One is nothing but a loop, and the other can be quickly reduced to a loop. Another way to think about it is that if the napkin ring were made of clay, you could squeeze it and pinch it until it became the coffee cup. You see?” He made the motion with his fingers of pinching off a little bowl from the side of the napkin ring, so that it became a cup, and then tilted it to his mouth. “You wouldn’t have to make any holes in it, or cut it, or use any glue. You couldn’t do that with the bourbon glass, though, right? You couldn’t make it into a coffee cup with a handle on it no matter how hard you tried. Do you see what I mean?”

“Because you couldn’t make the handle?”

“Exactly. Not without punching a hole somewhere for my finger to go through.”

“Yes, I can see that, I suppose.”

He took out the pile of letters now from his briefcase. There was a rubber band around them, which he pulled off and placed onto her hand. “To a topologist,” he said, “the rubber band is the primal object. That is because our field deals with what we call
continuous deformations
. You can stretch or twist a rubber band in any way you wish, to any degree you like, just as I did with the napkin ring; but you can’t ever cut it, or glue it, or make any holes in it.” He smiled at her, bowing slightly. “That’s it,” he said. “Those are the rules of topology.”

“I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.”

“Perhaps by degree.”

Now there was a silence. The sound of the string quartet grew louder. Helena Pierce appeared to be thinking, sipping absently at her water. “And I couldn’t make the napkin ring into the bourbon glass, either,” she said, “unless I glued it together, right? There wouldn’t be a bottom unless I could glue it closed somewhere.”

“Precisely. You and I are peers now.”

She tittered.

“I’m a napkin ring, too, by the way,” he said. “And so are you.”

A flush pinked her cheeks.

“I mean,” he said, “all human beings
are napkin rings,
topologically speaking. We have that in common, too.”

It was at this point that his second bourbon was delivered. He accepted it and nodded at the waitress for another. Technically, a human being wasn’t a napkin ring but a double torus; but this was too complicated to explain at the moment. He took a satisfying gulp of the woody liquid. She was still blushing. He said, “Would you consider helping me with my mail?”

“Of course, Professor.”

From the pile, he lifted off the first envelope.

“ ‘Dear Professor Andret,’ ” he read, leaning toward her again and lowering his voice. “ ‘You please excuse our not very good English. However, I am to select and ask for deliver this year the our first lecture named from Leonardo Fibonacci, guest of the Department of Maths in the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. The date will be the year next at city of Pisa, or April or May, your choose.’ ”

He read the remainder to himself. “Not from the department of Englishes,” he said finally.

“No. But it’s lovely.”

“I think they invited me to speak somewhere.”

“Yes, Professor. In Tuscany.”

The waitress arrived again. Milo saluted his new drink before handing back the old one.

“Should I accept?” he said.

“I would think so.”

“Perhaps. But it would be much more pleasant if I could convince another napkin ring to come along.”

Now she turned the color of her blouse.

“I take that back,” he said. “In retrospect, I don’t believe I meant to say that.”

“Of course not, Professor.”

“Let’s go on now.”

“Okay.”

On the table between them stood her own untouched bourbon, and to his surprise now she picked it up and tried it. But she sipped like a girl taking medicine from a spoon. Her first mouthful didn’t even uncover the ice cubes. It was charming, actually. She tried again, pursing her lips this time, and before long he realized he’d have to finish it for her.

—

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
at the door to her building, she turned and said, “Thank you for introducing me to all that, Professor Andret. I learned quite a lot.”

“
Assistant
Professor Andret.”

“Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Assistant Secretary Pierce.”

Her building was a narrow townhouse set behind a huge sycamore. She stood a couple of steps above him on the brick stairway, searching for keys in her purse.