The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (93 page)

Tupper grinned at Elizabeth. “I try to pay my debts, and this is the thanks I get. You wouldn’t get mad at me if I took your roommate to a
dance, would you?”

“I might,” Elizabeth said. It was cold sitting on the cement. She was starting to shiver. “But I’d forgive you.”

“You see that?” he said.

“I see,” Elizabeth said disgustedly, but she was smiling at him now. “Don’t you think we’d better get this innocent passerby up off the sidewalk before she freezes to death?”

“Upsy-daisy, sweetheart,” Tupper said, and in one easy motion
she was up and sitting on the stone bench.

“Thank you,” she said. Her teeth were chattering with the cold.

Tupper knelt in front of her and examined her ankle. “It looks pretty swollen,” he said. “Do you want us to call somebody?”

“No, my husband will be along any minute. I’ll just sit here till he comes.”

Tib fished Elizabeth’s application out of the puddle. “I’m afraid it’s ruined,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Tupper picked up his bag of bowls. “Say,” he said, “you wouldn’t be interested in having a Tupperware party? As hostess, you could earn valuable points toward…”

“Tupper!” Tib said.

“Will you leave this poor lady alone?” Elizabeth said.

He held up the sack. “Only if you’ll go with me to deliver my lettuce crispers to the Sigma Chi house.”

“I’ll go,” Tib said. “There’s
this darling Sigma Chi I’ve been wanting to meet.”

“And I’ll go,” Elizabeth said, putting her arm around Tib. “I don’t trust the kind of boyfriend you find on your own. Jim Scates is a real creep. Didn’t Sharon tell you what he did to Marilyn Reed?”

Tupper handed Elizabeth the sack of bowls while he stood his bike up. Elizabeth handed them to Tib.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Tupper said.
“It’s cold out here. You could wait for your husband in the student union.”

She wished she could put her hand on his cheek just once. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

The three of them went down the walk toward Frasier, Tupper pushing the bike. When they got even with Carter Hall, they cut across the grass toward Frasier. She watched them until she couldn’t see them anymore, and then sat there a while
longer on the cold bench. She had hoped that something might happen, some sign that she had rescued them, but nothing happened. Her ankle didn’t hurt anymore. It had stopped the minute Tupper touched it.

She continued to sit there. It seemed to her to be getting colder, though she had stopped shivering, and after a while she got up and walked home, leaving the crutches where they were.

It was
cold in the house. Elizabeth
turned the thermostat up and sat down at the kitchen table, still in her coat, waiting for the heat to come on. When it didn’t, she remembered that Paul had turned the furnace off, and she went and got a blanket and wrapped up in it on the couch. Her ankle did not hurt at all, though it felt cold. When the phone rang, she could hardly move it. It took her several rings
to make it to the phone.

“I thought you weren’t going to answer,” Paul said. “I made an appointment with a Dr. Jamieson for you this afternoon at three. He’s a psychiatrist.”

“Paul,” she said. She was so cold it was hard to talk. ‘I’m sorry.”

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he said. “I told Dr. Brubaker you were on muscle relaxants for your ankle. I don’t know whether he bought it
or not.” He hung up.

“Too late,” Elizabeth said. She hung up the phone. The back of her hand was covered with ice crystals. “Paul,” she tried to say, but her lips were stiff with cold, and no sound came out.

I got to Hollywood around one-thirty
and started trying to check into the Rialto.

“Sorry,
we don’t have any rooms,” the girl behind the desk said. “We’re all booked up with some science thing.”

“I’m with the science thing,” I said. “Dr. Ruth Baringer. I reserved a double.”

“There are a bunch of Republicans here, too, and a tour group from Finland. They told me when I started work here that they got all these movie people, but the only one so far was that guy who played the friend
of that other guy in that one movie. You’re not a movie person, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m with the science thing. Dr. Ruth Baringer.”

“My name’s Tiffany,” she said. “I’m not actually a hotel clerk at all. I’m just working here to pay for my transcendental posture lessons. I’m really a model-slash-actress.”

“I’m a quantum physicist,” I said, trying to get things back on track. “The name is
Ruth Baringer.”

She messed with the computer
for a minute. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

“Maybe it’s in Dr. Mendoza’s name. I’m sharing a room with her.”

She messed with the computer some more. “I don’t show a reservation for her either. Are you sure you don’t want the Disneyland Hotel? A lot of people get the two confused.”

“I want the Rialto,” I said, rummaging through my bag for
my notebook. “I have a confirmation number. W-three-seven-four-two-oh.”

She typed it in. “Are you Dr. Gedanken?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” an elderly man said.

“I’ll be right with you,” Tiffany told him. “How long do you plan to stay with us, Dr. Gedanken?” she asked me.

“
Excuse
me,” the man said, sounding desperate. He had bushy white hair and a dazed expression, as if he had just been through
a horrific experience or had been trying to check into the Rialto.

He wasn’t wearing any socks. I wondered if
he
was Dr. Gedanken. Dr. Gedanken was the main reason I’d decided to come to the meeting. I had missed his lecture on wave-particle duality last year, but I had read the text of it in the
ICQP Journal
, and it had actually seemed to make sense, which is more than you can say for most of
quantum theory. He was giving the keynote address this year, and I was determined to hear it.

It wasn’t Dr. Gedanken. “My name is Dr. Whedbee,” the elderly man said. “You gave me the wrong room.”

“All our rooms are pretty much the same,” Tiffany said. “Except for how many beds they have in them and stuff.”

“My room has a
person
in it!” he said. “Dr. Sleeth. From the University of Texas at Austin.
She was changing her clothes.” His hair seemed to get wilder as he spoke. “She thought I was a serial killer.”

“And your name is Dr. Whedbee?” Tiffany asked, fooling with the computer again. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

Dr. Whedbee began to cry. Tiffany got out a paper towel, wiped off the counter, and turned back to me. “May I help you?” she said.

I finally got my room at five, after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

“What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these
exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institute Henri Poincare people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”

“Speaking of St. Louis,” Dr. Takumi said, “have you seen David
yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Last year at the annual meeting you two were practically inseparable. Moonlight riverboat rides and all.”

“What’s on the programming
tonight?” I said to Abey.

“David was just here,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going out to look at the stars in the sidewalk.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Abey said. “Riverboat rides and movie stars. What do those things have to do with quantum theory? Racine would have been an appropriate setting for a group of physicists. Not like this…this…do you realize we’re
practically across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? And Hollywood Boulevard’s where all those gangs hang out. If they catch you wearing red or blue, they’ll—”

He stopped. “Is that Dr. Gedanken?” he asked, staring at the front desk.

I turned and looked. A short roundish man with a mustache was trying to check in. “No,” I said. “That’s Dr. Onofrio.”

“Oh, yes,” Abey said, consulting
his program book. “He’s speaking tonight at the opening ceremonies. On the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Are you going?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, which was supposed to be a joke, but Abey didn’t laugh.

“I must meet Dr. Gedanken. He’s just gotten funding for a new project.”

I wondered what Dr. Gedanken’s new project was—I would have loved to work with him.

“I’m hoping he’ll come to my workshop
on the wonderful world of quantum physics,” Abey said, still watching the desk. Amazingly enough, Dr. Onofrio seemed to have gotten a key and was heading for the elevators. “I think his project has something to do with understanding quantum theory.”

Well, that let me out. I didn’t understand quantum theory at all. I sometimes had a sneaking suspicion nobody else did either, including Abey Fields,
and that they just weren’t willing to admit it.

I mean, an electron is a particle except it acts like a wave. In fact, a neutron acts like two waves and interferes with itself (or each other), and you can’t really measure any of this stuff properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that isn’t the worst of it. When you set up a Josephson junction to figure out what rules the
electrons obey, they sneak past the barrier to the other side, and they don’t seem to care much about the limits of the speed of light either, and Schrodinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead till you open the box, and it all makes about as much sense as Tiffany’s calling me Dr. Gedanken.

Which reminded me, I had promised to call Darlene and give her our room number. I didn’t have a room number,
but if I waited much longer she’d have left. She was flying to Denver to speak at CU and then coming on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the middle of his telling me how beautiful Cleveland was in the winter and went to call her.

“I
don’t have a room yet,” I said when she answered. “Should I leave a message on your answering machine or do you want to give me your
number in Denver?”

“Never mind all that,” Darlene said. “Have you seen David yet?”

I completely forgot to warn Darlene about Tiffany, the model-slash-actress.

“What do you mean you’re trying to avoid David?” she had asked me at least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”

Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.

“Because I want to attend the
programming,” I said the third time around, “Not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”

“And David is a middle-aged man who, I might add, is absolutely charming.”

“Charm is for quarks,” I said, and hung up, feeling smug until
I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change. Tiffany asked, “May I help you?”
and left me standing there.

After a while I gave up and went back to the red-and-gold sofas.

“David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”

“There
are
no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.

“What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.

“There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom
and then some seminars.” I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.

“If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”

Dr.
Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.

“Did they give you a room with a seminaked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me twelve eighty-two, but the room numbers go only up to seventy-five.”

“I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,”
I said.

I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor, who couldn’t remember
where he’d stored my suitcase, and unpacked. My clothes, which had been permanent press all the way from MIT, underwent a complete wave-function collapse the moment I opened my suitcase and came out looking like Schrodinger’s almost-dead cat.