Long Division (30 page)

 

A few days later Gus calls me and asks if I want to come over and watch a movie at his apartment. It's the kind of thing we did all the time in high school, summers and spring breaks during college. But it's been a while—years since circumstance has allowed our friendship to pick up its old ways and habits. We have our own homes now, and so it feels different. It's a weeknight, and I have no plans other than to maybe tweeze my eyebrows and read something, so I agree to come. Casual old Gus. Dorky old Annie. I ask if he wants me to bring anything. He says no.

On the way over I wonder what he wants to watch. I hope it's not a
Godfather
marathon or some documentary about an obscure musician I don't know. Gus lets me into his tiny apartment, and I immediately plop on a beanbag chair.
¹³⁶
I have already thanked him on the phone for the spectacular transformation he performed on Helen's egg, but something is urging me to do so again in person. But with a hug. Just as I'm thinking about it, Gus says “So have you decided about getting a new chicken yet?” He's in the kitchen behind me, and I can hear him riffling through a drawer of utensils.

“Oh, no. As much as I'd love to pay Edward Harrington another visit, I don't think I'm ready yet. And since I'm going to Boston soon anyway, I don't want to burden someone with feeding her—Helen II, you know, the new chicken.”

“I guess that makes sense. I'm making guacamole. Do you mind peeling some garlic while I chop?” I spring up from the chair and I notice that it's a more difficult leap to make with seven more years on my body.

“Oh, yeah. No problem. Sorry I didn't offer to help. I just saw the beanbag and got sucked into it. It reminded me of your dad's basement and all the stupid time we spent in there doing stupid things. All the time I spent sprawled on it whining to you about Brother Alden.” Gus looks up from the jalapeño he's chopping. He's very serious.

“That's not stupid, Annie. I'm sure I can think of seventeen stupider things you talked about from that chair,” he teases me. His smile threatens to recount fourteen stupid Annie Harper teen ideas.

“Let's not go into it.” I grab the head of garlic from a basket on the counter, rip off two cloves, and start to peel. My nails are short, so it's rather difficult to make the first little tear. It reminds me of the membrane around one of Helen's hard-boiled eggs.

“There's lemonade if you want some.” Gus tilts his head toward the fridge and catches me staring into the bowl of mashed avocado, tomato, and onion. I hand him the two shiny, clean cloves and grab two glasses down from the cabinet. “I made it just before you got here, so it won't be chilled. You'll need ice.”

“Hmm. Lemonade. So, what? Did you break down and buy the Juiceman juicer one night?”

“No. I used this.” Gus pulls an old-fashioned crystal juicer from the sink. Pulp and seeds still stick to its angular edges, rendering it imperfect, but still beautiful. “It was my mother's.”
¹³⁷

“Wow. Never seen that one. It's lovely.” I take the lemonade out of the fridge and swirl the pitcher a few times to mix the pulp and sugar that has settled on the bottom. In the freezer I find a single ice cube tray amongst several frozen lake trout from our fishing trip. There are four remaining cubes, and I divide them between our glasses. I reach for the faucet, pull the lever to the far right, and start to refi ll the tray.

“Wait,” Gus says, and he sets down the salt he was shaking over the guac and swings the sink fi xture over to the left side. “Hot water freezes faster.” And he doesn't say it this condescending, stupid-Annie way. He says it like it's this astonishing, beautiful secret. And the look in his face (the lift in his eyebrows and the slowly curling smile) confirms that it is. And that he's going to tell me about it. It's the look I know I should make with every lesson I teach my students. It's the look Max Schaffer gave when he handed me his gorgeous essay about spider sex. It's the look that says:
Here is the universe. Isn't it wonderful?

“Yeah, it's called the Mpemba effect, and people have been trying to prove it for centuries. It's hard to wrap your mind around, right? Water needs to chill before it can freeze—won't that take more time? But, no. Experiments have shown that hot water, not all the time, but most of the time, freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions.” Gus dips the tip of his pinkie finger into the guacamole and tastes it. “Needs more lime. Anyway, even Aristotle pointed this out at one point. But people kept on not believing it until this schoolkid in Tanzania—I forget his first name, but his last name was Mpemba—just wouldn't back down. He was a part-time ice cream vendor, and he made the observations about freezing while making ice cream. No one believed him. A teacher told him he must have confused the results. Eventually, he did a study with another teacher and they got it published in the sixties. So he's not really the discoverer, but the
rediscoverer.
I wish I knew more about thermodynamics and exactly why it works, but I know that it's one of many—something like sixty-eight—anomalies of water. The layperson always thinks that water is this simple, predictable substance because it's so abundant. But it's not. It's much more complicated. Surface tension. Boiling point. Water breaks a ton of rules. I mean, you know how they're always saying that if a planet has water, then there's a chance for life? I think it has something to do with all the anomalies. Like life itself is an anomaly of the physical world. That's the problem with being a philosophy major. Everything real I know is a mile wide and an inch deep. I need to read more. I think this is done. Taste.” Gus dips his pinkie into the bowl again, holds it out to me like a challenging, stern, tough-love teacher. I lean in slowly without moving my feet, close my eyes, and remove the sample in a single, firm swipe.

“It's perfect,” I say. “And that was very nice.”

“What?”

“The story. About Mpemba. And the ice cream.”

“Oh, right. Thank you.”

“Thank
you
for sharing.”

 

I have a hard time concentrating throughout the first several scenes of the movie
¹³⁸
because I'm remembering a time when David told me the same thing about making ice. We were at my apartment and I was filling the tray and he was standing behind me, big and strong and shadowy. He said, “Use warm water, hon,” and then bent down to peer into the fridge. And that's all he said. And then I didn't say anything. I just did it. Both of us, unquestioning, uncurious, unable to stop thinking about the bland burgers we were grilling and the status of our cheddar cheese supply.

Comfortable.

Accepting.

Tepid.

But then I get into the movie more. It's alternately disturbing and beautiful. Marco, the boyfriend of the bullfighter, is lodged in this weird place between grieving and hoping. How do you act both sad and optimistic? Though a war is by no means a coma, I can kind of relate to Marco. My heart sinks for him. And when he befriends the bizarre nurse, Benigno, as both a distraction and out of genuine human interest, it makes perfect sense to me.

There's this scene where the nurse tells the motionless ballerina about this silent film he's just seen. The viewer sees the film under Benigno's narration. It's about a scientist whose experiments have run amok and his entire body is physically shrinking at an alarming pace. His wife is mega distraught and the final scenes—before he dissolves into nothing—show him as wee little inch-long man, climbing into his inevitable death. Into her vagina! And it's hard to think of the man as small and the rubber vagina as normal-sized. Even with the frame flashing to the woman's normal face and back to the tiny scientist, sobbing before her rubber labia, he just doesn't seem small. The plastic vagina just seems big. And that's about where I fall asleep. It's not that I'm disliking the movie; I'm simply tired. Blame it on the guacamole resting slack and cozy in my gut. Or the lack of afternoon coffee. Or maybe on the fact that I'm just comfortable dozing between Gus and rubber vaginas.

I wake up to Gus squeezing my calf over my jeans, and I notice that I've nuzzled my feet under his thigh. “Annie,” he whispers. “I'm sorry you fell asleep. It was a really powerful ending.”

“Yeah, me too. I didn't mean to. What happened? Did either of the women wake up from their comas?” Gus takes his hand off my leg and I shiver a bit, realizing I'm cold. He reaches to grab a blanket draped along the back of the couch and then clutches it to his chest.

“I can give you this blanket and we can play the ending again.
Or
, I can give you this blanket and we can not play the ending again.
Or,
I can not give you the blanket and we can play the ending.
Or,
we can do none of the above.” I rub my eyes to moisten my contact lenses, and when I'm done I look straight at Gus's eyes, which are not crusty or sleepy or annoyed by my narcolepsy.

“Yes to blanket,” I say, and I thrust a fist into the air. “And yes to replaying the ending!”

Gus tosses the flannel throw over me like it's a picnic blanket and I'm a shady patch of grass. He tucks the blanket's edge under my toes and I try to will his hands into touching my feet for longer. Extended tender hand/foot contact. Does that count as infidelity? Surely David has other soldiers—maybe even Jayna Austin—rub down his tired hooves? Do their hands not linger? But Gus's hands shy away and he asks, “What do you last remember?”

“The rubber vagina!”

“Rubber vagina, here we come!”

 

As I drive home, I feel very peaceful. Maybe it was the mini nap or the salty/sweet combo of the guac and lemonade. I've fallen asleep midway through at least eighty-nine movies in the company of at least fourteen different friends and family members. When the credits roll and my companions rustle about or nudge me or change the channel to barking late-night talk shows, I usually emerge from my drooling pose and receive some playful chastisement for konking out and missing this kissy part or that car exploding. Some people get offended—
how could you pass out with that beautiful scenery?
Others are more aloof—
well, it's your loss, Annie.
But no one has ever offered to rewatch the end with me. Right then. Maybe everyone thinks I'll just fall back asleep again and that a second chance would be totally futile. But to Gus it seemed like perfect logic. And to me it seemed like perfect logic. And ultimately, it was perfectly successful. I saw the end. I enjoyed it. It was great to be given that chance.

T
oday I'm calling my book
Between a War and a Window
, and by window I mean those tiny round airplane windows where the glass is so thick you can't even see your reflection. And I mean the window of the Dairy DeLite that Gus paints for every holiday. And I mean the window above my kitchen sink where I used to stare fondly at Helen. And I mean the windows of my classroom where we taped up a million snowflakes this past winter, back when I was full of love and hope and certainty.

I just got back from a week in Boston! It was mostly marvelous. I felt like a criminal out on bail—a temporary delay before a punishment I deserve. I didn't have to think about David so much, and I didn't have to feel bad for thinking about Gus from time to time. Michelle has this adorable Cambridge apartment in an area called Davis Square, which isn't much of a square, but more of an intersection: a really great intersection with ice cream shops on three of the four corners.

The first few days Michelle had to work, so I mostly traipsed around the city alone. My first morning, I walked the entire Freedom Trail, which is this painted red line (or sometimes section of red bricks) that zigzags around all the historical parts of Boston. The towering, gold-topped statehouse, that church where Paul Revere hung the lanterns, the site (it's basically a median of an intersection) of the famous Boston Massacre. Though I'd been to Europe before, this trip was my first to the American East, and thus, the oldness of everything was rather overwhelming. Not simply because things are old, but because they're still smoothly functioning. Slanty buildings that house the offices of hotshot lawyers. Ancient gravestones that still stand and that are carefully mowed around centuries after their occupants are laid to rest. There's this big meeting house—Faneuil Hall—from the 1700s that's now a sleek, colorful food court selling overpriced corndogs and beers. Had the revolutionaries been told their sanctuary of ideas and community would transform into a bustling strip of fast-food joints and crappy bars, they'd have guffawed their funny wigs off.