her pitch-driven Platonism gave her a power over Peter. He had hunches; she had convictions. It was never much of a contest. She had only to smile at his churchgoing, and from one Sunday to the next, he quit his family’s faith. With little more than a cocked eyebrow, she got him to grow out his flattop and trade in his button-downs for pullovers. And on a late March night near the end of his sophomore year, she took the war for his soul into the heart of the enemy camp.
She asked him to meet her after dark on the bank of the Jordan River. He arrived after a miserable three-hour failed struggle to identify an unknown in his Advanced Organics lab. She lay back on the damp, grassy rise, forever staining the back of her blue pencil skirt. He stretched out with his head in her lap, wrecked. They want me dead.
Her face curdled at the chemical reek of him. She combed back his hair with two fingers. Who does?
All of them. The alkenes, the alkynes, the paraffins . . .
Peter? She leaned down over him, and her silver lyre necklace charm grazed his cheek. She tugged on the hint of sideburn she’d gotten him to grow out. Who told you that you were a chemist?
Well, I’m not half bad at it, you know. Tonight’s disaster excepted.
And you’re ready to spend your whole life doing it?
He pressed his fingertips into the cold soil. The idea of spending a whole life doing anything filled him with something between wonder and panic.
Are you trying to please your father?
He rolled away, up onto one elbow. You mean my stepfather? My father’s dead .
I am aware. And you’re aware that no one can satisfy a ghost?
I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m learning chemistry. It’s not a bad way to make a living.
He wanted to add: For two, if that interests you.
Peter, it’s 1961. You’re a white man in college. And you’re worried about making a living? That’s what dance and wedding bands are for. No musician with your talent ever ended up in the gutter.
He tried to tell her: Chemistry made sense. Its problems had clean and repeatable answers. Its puzzles read like cosmic rebuses. Manipulating fundamental stuff, shaping whole new materials with properties that could raise the quality of life . . .
But Clara wouldn’t see the splendor in the system. She bent her arm along the crease of his chest. You think the chemistry won’t get done if you don’t do it?
You think no one’s going to play the clarinet if I don’t?
Clarinet? Who said anything about clarinet?
Her whole insane plan for him took shape and buzzed around his head. He swatted it away. She snared his wrists and held them to the chill ground.
Put away the Lincoln logs, Peter. Playtime’s over. Music pours out of you when you snap your fingers. That’s called a vocation. You don’t get a choice.
He sat and tilted his head at the girl Platonist, like he was the RCA dog and she the inscrutable gramophone. Then he started to hear them, those souls lined up in the celestial anteroom, awaiting reincarnation: all the preexisting sounds that only he might bring into being. The deep symmetries, the forms and formulas of chemistry that had so absorbed him for two years, turned into a mere prelude. It was true: he’d been trying to please someone. But that someone called for another pleasure.
He lay back in her lap and looked up at her inverted face. She opened her shawl to settle it again around her shoulders. Her draped arms were wings as wide as the night sky.
These pieces you want me to write, he said, awash on pure possibility. How many do you suppose there are?
She leaned down to answer him. How easy it would be, he thought, to kick out into the center of the lake until he couldn’t kick anymore.
FOR THE NEXT five weeks, when he should have been studying for final exams, he worked in secret. He stole hours from labs, from classes, even from Clara, who turned giddy with concealed suspicion. He took to working in lightning shorthand, sketching out music in
She asked him to meet her after dark on the bank of the Jordan River. He arrived after a miserable three-hour failed struggle to identify an unknown in his Advanced Organics lab. She lay back on the damp, grassy rise, forever staining the back of her blue pencil skirt. He stretched out with his head in her lap, wrecked. They want me dead.
Her face curdled at the chemical reek of him. She combed back his hair with two fingers. Who does?
All of them. The alkenes, the alkynes, the paraffins . . .
Peter? She leaned down over him, and her silver lyre necklace charm grazed his cheek. She tugged on the hint of sideburn she’d gotten him to grow out. Who told you that you were a chemist?
Well, I’m not half bad at it, you know. Tonight’s disaster excepted.
And you’re ready to spend your whole life doing it?
He pressed his fingertips into the cold soil. The idea of spending a whole life doing anything filled him with something between wonder and panic.
Are you trying to please your father?
He rolled away, up onto one elbow. You mean my stepfather? My father’s dead .
I am aware. And you’re aware that no one can satisfy a ghost?
I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m learning chemistry. It’s not a bad way to make a living.
He wanted to add: For two, if that interests you.
Peter, it’s 1961. You’re a white man in college. And you’re worried about making a living? That’s what dance and wedding bands are for. No musician with your talent ever ended up in the gutter.
He tried to tell her: Chemistry made sense. Its problems had clean and repeatable answers. Its puzzles read like cosmic rebuses. Manipulating fundamental stuff, shaping whole new materials with properties that could raise the quality of life . . .
But Clara wouldn’t see the splendor in the system. She bent her arm along the crease of his chest. You think the chemistry won’t get done if you don’t do it?
You think no one’s going to play the clarinet if I don’t?
Clarinet? Who said anything about clarinet?
Her whole insane plan for him took shape and buzzed around his head. He swatted it away. She snared his wrists and held them to the chill ground.
Put away the Lincoln logs, Peter. Playtime’s over. Music pours out of you when you snap your fingers. That’s called a vocation. You don’t get a choice.
He sat and tilted his head at the girl Platonist, like he was the RCA dog and she the inscrutable gramophone. Then he started to hear them, those souls lined up in the celestial anteroom, awaiting reincarnation: all the preexisting sounds that only he might bring into being. The deep symmetries, the forms and formulas of chemistry that had so absorbed him for two years, turned into a mere prelude. It was true: he’d been trying to please someone. But that someone called for another pleasure.
He lay back in her lap and looked up at her inverted face. She opened her shawl to settle it again around her shoulders. Her draped arms were wings as wide as the night sky.
These pieces you want me to write, he said, awash on pure possibility. How many do you suppose there are?
She leaned down to answer him. How easy it would be, he thought, to kick out into the center of the lake until he couldn’t kick anymore.
FOR THE NEXT five weeks, when he should have been studying for final exams, he worked in secret. He stole hours from labs, from classes, even from Clara, who turned giddy with concealed suspicion. He took to working in lightning shorthand, sketching out music in
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