The Love of My (Other) Life (4 page)

The meaning to which art inspires us is worth drastic action.

Gates was mincing rapidly away. I grabbed his arm and yanked him around to look at some ghastly purple still lifes. I said, passionately, “People only buy this stuff because it matches their curtains!”

“What kind of hair are you shedding?” Gates wondered, staring at my jacket. “You need a new hairdresser.”

“Mr. Gates, there are artists who have studied their craft and developed their aesthetic out of a valid tradition and who have something to say that isn’t pedestrian!”

Gates held his hand to his forehead and honked.

“I’m getting a sinus headache. Is the barometric pressure dropping?”

What the hell, why couldn’t he hear me? I grabbed him by the collar and shook him. “You can show meaningful art!”

“Not if I want to make a living,” he responded.

He wriggled out of my grasp and closeted himself in his office.

They came in a tidal wave: disgust, anger, sadness—all my old feelings about the silly triviality into which art had degenerated since Marcel Duchamp did us all a disservice and foisted a urinal on us, which had a minute and a half of shock value before the novelty wore off. I mean, it’s been more that a hundred years, and artists, with their lack of originality and creativity, are still doing that urinal. I wandered back to the skull.

Then I couldn’t breath. What?

I was ensconced in a bear-hug like an iron corset.

“Like that skull? It’s only a million dollars,” chirped Brian.

“I hate it, and I want it to go die in a hole,” I whispered, struggling and wheezing for air. “Didn’t I tell you to get lost?”

“How do you know you’re a physicist? You avoid stirring your coffee because you don’t want to increase the entropy of the universe,” Brian asked and answered his own joke. Then he chuckled. That’s right, he was crazy.

“How crazy and delusional are you?” I demanded.

I froze, and maybe the sudden cessation of motion caused him to release me. I drew in a big sweet lungful of oxygen. I was happy to breathe freely. I was also incomprehensibly glad to see Brian—which really pissed me off.

“What I mean to say is, physicists think for themselves. You can’t just tell them what to do. It used to drive you crazy.” He picked up the skull and shook it next to his ear. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Tessa, a fellow of infinite jest.”

“Put that down,” I hissed and grabbed his arm.

“The rhinestones will come off. It’s only Elmer’s glue.”

“Here, didn’t you ever want to hold a million bucks in your hand?” Brian thrust the objet d’art into my hand.

I gawked. I was overwhelmed by a welter of feelings: disgust, envy, and other, fiercer emotions. I turned it over and over in my hand. “So ugly.”

“People love this stuff.”

“People who don’t know better; they’ve been duped by the corrupt commercial art establishment to think that the only thing art has to do is hang on the wall and get more expensive!” It was everything that was wrong with the art world, which had cost me so dearly.

“Down, girl,” Brian said. He took the skull from me and put it back on its base. “Someone will pay this much for it. A million dollars. Know what I’d do with a million bucks? Take you to Vienna. Mozart’s

’hood. You always wanted to go there.”

There was no answer to his absurdity, and my own was showing its life-demolishing fangs. I stormed off. Brian followed me. When I looked back, he was gazing at me with a melting expression. I took a deep cleansing breath. “Brian, I keep telling you to go away. Why are you still following me?”

“The thing is,” he said, and tilted his head in a bird-like expression of interest, “we’re married.”

“Professor, if you really are a professor, I feel sorry for you, but—”

“We are husband and wife. In an alternate universe. Lots of them exist. Imagine: there’s an alternate world where you love this art, where Cliff Bucknell is your idol.”

“Impossible,” I scoffed. “Cliff is a loathsome, narcissistic, manipulative, deceitful user.”

“No, in this other world, you’re obsessed with his work. In your eyes, it’s the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. There’s a universe where you own it. Maybe there’s even a universe where you love it enough to steal it,” Brian continued. He opened his hands expansively. “You can’t restrain yourself, your passions. The security cameras are out of order, there’s no guard and no attendant. So, in that other universe, you make the decision to slip it right into your bag.”

“No way.”

“It solves all the problems in your life, to possess this skull, which represents the pinnacle of beauty and wonder in the universe,” Brian said. He made one of his unrestrained gestures that stirred me to some distant, unresolved recognition, like a past life memory that could never be recovered—because I didn’t believe in reincarnation.

“You are out of your mind,” I said, though I suddenly glimpsed a certain logic in his madness.

Wouldn’t it just solve a lot of problems if I took the skull? It wouldn’t even be theft, really, for reasons I couldn’t help but remember.

“Nope, just imagining the possibilities. Don’t you do that?”

I glared at him and didn’t answer.

“You have more gumption in my universe,” Brian observed. “Not gumption. Center. Self-possession.

Something. You have bark but no bite here.”

“I do not bark, and I do so have bite,” I said, a little archly, truth be told. I mean, I know I’m a pansy, but do I need to have some cuckoo homeless guy pointing that out to me? No. No, I do not need that. Besides, discretion being the more attractive part of valor, being a pansy is part of my ineffable charm. Such as it is.

Of course, it does beg the question of why I haven’t been out on a date in over a year. I need to start running again and get my ass in shape … . It occurred to me that my imagination, wonderful as it was, was not going to tone my derriere.

I was going to have to take action.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Brian was saying. “You seem lost and confused, actually.”

“I am not. And this is your universe.” I marched back to the skull and stared hard at it.

Brian was only a half-step behind me. He cupped my chin to turn my head to face him, then he assumed a lecturing posture and an authoritative tone. “One theory in physics says that every possible outcome happens with 100 percent probability.”

I felt myself being stared at and turned my head just fast enough to see Frances Gates peering out of his office door. I waved at him: Please come out!

Maybe he could rescue me from Brian’s lecture.

Gates slammed his door.

“Damn it. He’s afraid of a confrontation with someone who sees art not for its monetary value, but for its quality of moving and uplifting people,” I muttered.

“He’s afraid of you,” Brian said. “That barking thing you do.”

“I could do a lot of good with a million dollars.”

“See, I’ve got you thinking about the possibilities, that’s a good thing,” Brian enthused.

“Oh, I always think about the possibilities,” I muttered. “It’s the unintended consequences that trip me up.”

“You’re learning. Now, come with me.” He slipped his arm around my shoulders in a friendly fashion.

Did he expect me to go with him back to his flying saucer? Was he actually a psycho serial killer trying to lure me to some private spot where he’d murder me with an axe? Somehow—I didn’t know how—I was sure it wasn’t because we were married in an alternate universe. I didn’t think so. Somehow, I thought he was harmless. Possibly even well meaning. But, to err on the side of caution, I asked, “Come with you where?”

“Back to the big bang. Which wasn’t a single event.” He leaned his head close to mine and spoke in a conspiratorial voice. “Imagine, if you will, the velvety black of space, with multiple explosions radiating out … .”

His tone was so soft and persuasive that I could visualize it perfectly. It would make a lovely painting of some kind, but not a serious one, not high art, no … . What the hell was wrong with me? I knew better than to let him draw me into his mishegaas.

Brian was still talking. “In the theory of eternal inflation, there are endless, on-going big bangs breaking off from an underlying substrate of inflating space-time. Each one produces its own separate cosmos. Mine, yours.”

Out of my peripheral vision, I spied a security guard walking in the front door, carrying a paper cup of deli coffee. This was my chance! “Guard, guard,” I called.

The guard trudged over. “Can I help you?”

I shoved Brian at him. “This crazy man is bothering me.”

“I’m not crazy, I’m visiting. I know her better than I know my own self,” Brian returned vigorously.

“I’ve never seen him before today,” I said.

Brian pointed at my pelvis. “She’s got a heart-shaped birthmark on her back, right above the cleft in her ass—show him, Tessa!”

How did he know?

The guard cast his eyes at my ass with prurient interest.

“I’m not pulling down my skirt to show anyone my behind!” I said, outraged. But I was a little spooked. How did this goofball know?

Frances Gates must have summoned a pair of testicles because he marched out of his office, braced as if for battle. He asked coolly, “Is there a problem here?”

“Love that suit, hot damn!” Brian said. He threw his arms around Gates and hugged him effusively.

What was it with that crazy man and hugging?

What was it with that crazy man and his absurd, tantalizing ideas?

“Oof,” mumbled Gates. “A simple handshake will do. You’re spewing germs all over me.”

“I’m Dr. Brian Tennyson, physicist at large,” Brian said, pumping Gates’s hand. “Where’d you get this? Is it custom? It’s awesome. Never felt anything so soft!”

“Isn’t it fabulous?” Gates asked, preening. “I’d tell you the top-secret thing they do to the fabric, but then I’d have to shoot you.”

“I always wanted a red velvet suit,” Brian said.

“There’s no time like now,” Gates said.

“Ain’t that the truth. You always think you have forever, then you find it’s over before you realized,” said Brian.

The guard jumped into this thoroughly inane conversation, and I took advantage of their masculine absorption in gossip to do what I needed to do, and then to slip away.

My bag was a little bit heavier.

And I felt a new gumption surging through my veins.

T he lecture hall in Leitner Observatory was filling to capacity. Brian stood near the door, his eyes searching the rows. He saw her finally—in the back row. There was an empty seat beside her and he quickly slid in. He saw a sheet of music spread out on her lap, atop her notebook. He noticed that her hands were small and slim, and the fingers of her left hand bore thick calluses. It made him tingle to think of those fingers on his skin, on his neck and his back.

Then he thought of his hands on her skin, neck, and back, and his whole body burst into flame. He had to let her know how he felt. It was time. She wasn’t his student anymore. She was fair game.

“Welcome to astrogut, astronomy for non-science majors, an easy A,” he told Tessa in a hoarse voice.

She straightened, and wasn’t that a hopeful smile on her face? “Are you teaching this class?”

“Nope,” Brian said, looking at her mouth. “I’m stuck in calculus again this semester.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Auditing the class.”

“Right,” Tessa said. She leaned toward him, a slight motion, but it spoke a near infinite amount to Brian, who had a good grasp on quantification.

“I think you’re just glad you’re not my teacher anymore, and you’re here to see me.”

“That’s true,” Brian said. He realized he was barely breathing and forced himself to inhale. “Listen, I have to know: how many kids do you want?”

Tessa’s lips curved, and she shifted around in her seat. “Look, Prof, you’re cute and all, but I have a longtime boyfriend from home. You and I can only be friends.”

Brian tried to think of something quippy and clever to say, something über-Yalish and ironic that would impress her. He just didn’t have it in him.

This was always the problem with language; at crucial moments, it failed. But that’s what physics was for. And Brian got physics, understood it all the way from his scalp to his toenails as he had since he was seven years old and picked up his cousin’s tenth-grade physics textbook.

There was but one physical response to Tessa’s words. Brian went for it. He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her, quickly and sweetly. When he released her, the music had fallen off her lap. And he knew what those calluses felt like on his skin.

They were much smoother than they looked.

I was standing in front of Mrs. Leibowitz’s door, knocking and knocking. No one was answering.

Then the door swung open by itself. It hadn’t actually been closed.

This wasn’t good.

I stepped into the foyer, a small but well-furnished affair with a Persian rug, an old-fashioned crystal teardrop chandelier, and a mahogany case that displayed ceramic figurines. “Hello?” I called.

“Mrs. Leibowitz? Hello?”

Still no answer.

I walked through the foyer into the living room.

This room had good-quality but threadbare furniture, a couple of bookcases jammed full of old books, a grand piano, and another of those elegant Persian rugs. The air was so still I could see motes of dust swirling in the sunlight pouring in through the window. The stillness made me uneasy. “Mrs. L, are you here? It’s Tessa.”

Silence.

I made a circuit of the apartment, ending up in her bedroom. I called her name and paced around the room. I paused in front of her credenza to look at the photos: graduations, weddings, babies, family vacations. My fingers slid over a bridge trophy, bronzed baby shoes, and a plaque reading: PTA CHAIR – WITH OUR THANKS. A silver frame engraved with HAPPY 50th ANNIVERSARY showed Mrs. Leibowitz and her smiling husband leaning toward each other.

I picked up the anniversary picture. “Poor Yorick, indeed. Why would anyone pay so much for a resin skull that doesn’t reveal any truth about the human condition?” I felt a wispy nostalgia for something I didn’t have, and would I ever have it? I had lost a husband and nearly my own soul, and didn’t know if it was possible to replace either; there was no guy in my life under the age of seventy-five, and what about children? But I told myself I was just sad about the state of the art market.