They were everywhere on each other, noisy and damp, taking in air the way you drink down water, deep and sort of smacking, in drawn portions. He was here to be explored a little. She liked stopping and watching, or looking away actually, or guiding his hand, or going into the kitchen for a glass of water and coming back and pouring it partly on his chest, a body disproportionate to the bedding, and then handing him the glass and watching him drink and thinking there was nothing crazy going on that she could clearly locate except that she was naked in her workroom.
Then they were everywhere at once again, looped about each other, everything new for the second time, and she closed her eyes to see them together, which she could almost do, which she could do for the sheerest time, bodies turned and edged and sidled, one way and the other, this and that concurrent, here but also there, like back-fronted Picasso lovers.
When he went to find the toilet she thought she'd feel strange and crazy and out of her mind, finally, but she just sat on the mattress smoking.
'Thirteen inch we got.'
'Thirteen inch.'
'What-do-you-call. Admiral.'
'Admiral. This is, what, better than Captain?'
'Clear. No snow.'
'Thirteen inch. What kind of thirteen inch? You want thirteen inch? Bend over,'
'Hey. You and what army?'
'Bend over. I'll show you no snow.' '
'
Bronzini stood before his class, forty-four stoical souls in general science. Most sixteen years old, a few older, even eighteen, the dopier ones, the discombobulates, left back at some point in the long alpine march to knowledge.
He stood behind his platformed desk and spoke to the walls and the ceiling, to the windows at the far end of the room. He spoke to the bus-fumed air of Fordham Road and the university in the trees beyond, where seniors at the college wore bachelor robes and where the names of the alumni dead of World War I were engraved on capitals atop the stone posts that marked the south boundary of the campus.
'We can't see the world clearly until we understand how nature is organized. We need to count, measure and test. This is the scientific method. Science. The observation and description of phenomena. Phenomena. Things perceptible to the senses. The seasons make sense. At a certain time the cold diminishes, the days grow longer. It happens at the same time every year. We spoke last class about the difference between equinox and solstice and you remember this, I trust, Miss Innocenti. The planets move in an orderly manner. We can predict their passage across the skies. And we can admire the mathematics involved. The ellipsoid passage of the planets around the sun. Ellipse. A slightly flattened circle. Here we detect form and order, we see the laws of nature in their splendid harmony. Think of the rhythm of waves. The birth of babies. When a woman is due to give birth, Applebaum, eyes front, we say she is coming to term. The precision of nature becomes evident in the birth-giving process. The woman follows stages. The fetus grows and develops. We can predict, we can say roughly this week or next week is the time when the child will be born. Coming to term, Miss Innocenti, as you chew your gum a mile a minute. Carrying the fetus to term. Nine months. Seven pounds two ounces. We need numbers to make sense of the world. We think in numbers. We think in decades. Because we need organizing principles, Alfonse Catanzaro, yes, to make us less muddled.'
A voice piped up at the back of the class.
'Call him Alan.'
A rush of amusement moved through the room like wind over dune grass. Bronzini did not have major problems of discipline. The students sensed his unwillingness to engage in confrontation and they read his museful mild delivery, sometimes far-wandering, as a kind of private escape, not unlike their own, from the assignment of the day.
A second voice near the window, a girl's, sissy-mimicking.
'Don't call me Alfonse. Call me Alan. I want to be an actor in the movies.'
A deeper ripple of mirth this time and Bronzini was sad for the boy, skinny Alfonse, but did not rebuke them, kept talking, talked over the momentary rollick-skinny sorry Alfonse, grape-stained with tragic acne.
'We need numbers, letters, maps, graphs. We need scientific formulas to understand the structure of matter. E equals MC squared.'
He wrote the equation on the blackboard.
'How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history? Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small is the atom? I will tell you. If people were the size of atoms-think about it, Gagliardi-the population of the earth would fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that has mass-a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind what happens when we split the atom and release this energy. Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work. I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyzes and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom-to express all this with a bing and a bang on a blackboard. The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source of nuclear energy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. proposed the idea of the atom. B.C., Miss Innocenti. Before Chewing Gum. Small, small, small. Something inside something else inside something else. Down, down, down. Under, under, under. Next time, chapter seven. Be prepared for an oral quiz.'
Barely an audible groan.
'Maximum public embarrassment,' Bronzini said.
They bundled out of the room and into the long halls, where four thousand others were beginning to mass in the vast hormonal clamor that marked the condition of release.
It was still winter but there was something soft in the air today, that rhythmic fiction of early spring, so sweet to be deceived by, and Albert took his usual route into the shopping streets, poking into stores and social clubs.
Here he ate a pignoli cookie and asked after the woman's son, an artilleryman in Korea. There he thumbed his mustache and stood amused in the company of an eager complainant, a man loud with the measliest grievance, pink-eyed and spitting.
In the pork store he talked to a couple of newcomers, Calabrian, a woman and her trail-along daughter, and it made him think of his mother and sister, down that memory tunnel, and how the girl fairly clung to her mother.
Now the mother lay in a plot in Queens, in a great wide meadow of stones and crosses, thousands of souls outside the ordinary sprawl, a sovereign people uncomplaining.
He bought meat here, fish there, and headed home. He thought about the saint's day every summer when members of the church band walked through the streets playing heart-heavy pieces that brought women's faces to the open windows of the tenements. It was the custom of the musicians to slow-step along a certain residential street and stop at a particular private house, a frame structure with a front porch and rose trellis, the home of the olive oil importer. When they stopped playing the family invited them in and they entered in their band uniforms of black pants and white shirt, carrying their instruments. Such an old and dignified custom, the elderly men, the obese trombonist, the young man hollowed out by the bass drum strapped to his torso, each shuffling into the shady house for a glass of red wine.
Juju didn't want to follow him in but he had to. Once Nick went in, Juju had to go in too.
He'd wanted to see a person dead and Nick was going to show him. They stood in the anteroom of the funeral
