He was in Taft Auditorium, looking out at a hundred and fifty young strangers in varied warm-weather dress, bored or studious or on the tiresome mating prowl, a few of them actually interested in astronomy, the rest satisfying the college’s science distribution requirement with a course light on math. He nattered on about himself (it’s embarrassing to remember this), telling them more than they wanted to know about astrometry, and why—although measuring the positions and relative velocities of stars as accurately as possible certainly sounds dull, doesn’t it?—it was a necessary foundation for all of the other branches of astronomy, because how could any theory be evaluated without firm data etc etc.
A hand went up (he still sees it, for what it’s worth, about halfway up the rows on the left-hand side), which surprised him, since questions were supposed to be reserved for after lectures or during sectionals, but he said, “Question?”
“So you’re like a modern-day Tycho Brahe.”
He was so startled, he said, “Excuse me?”
“You’re like Brahe, making Kepler’s fancy-pants theories possible.”
He must have just stared at her for a second or two. She was petite, swallowed up in a sweater that looked too warm for the room. She had curly hair and complicated dangling earrings. She was smiling. It was a show-off question—or strictly speaking, a comment—but he was impressed that she knew enough to make it, and had the temerity to do so on the first day of class. It almost felt like she was teasing him. Finally he said, “Exactly.” Then he went on, but feeling self-conscious, he cut his description short. (Was it possible, he wondered much later, that that was her intention all along?)
She came up to him at the end of the lecture and he thought she was going to flaunt some more knowledge. He wanted to tell her that grading was done by the section leaders. But instead she apologized. “I have a tendency to show off.”
“Not at all. You’re interested in the subject. That’s great.” She really was quite small, perhaps not even five feet. She had a narrow asymmetrical face, glistening dark eyes, and a rather large nose, also asymmetrical. “Were you in the astronomy club in your high school?”
“Ha! God, no.”
“But you’re thinking about majoring in astronomy?”
“Not really.”
“But you know something about Tycho Brahe.”
“That’s only because I had a—” She stopped, shook her head, snorted. “I had a strange childhood.”
He couldn’t read her expression. Embarrassed? Proud? Could it possibly be flirtatious? Surely not. His students never flirted with him. In any case, he had no idea what to say, so he said nothing. After a moment she walked off.
In the following weeks, against his will, he always noted where she was sitting. She never missed a lecture, usually arriving at the last second, barreling through the door in the back on the left—though small, she really did kind of “barrel,” other students stepping and even jumping out of her way—and running down the left-hand steps, slipping into the first open aisle seat. She’d pull out a fat spiralbound notebook (few students had laptops then) and spend the hour writing furiously, pausing to chew on her pen, cupping her high forehead with her left palm. She didn’t raise her hand again, or speak to him after the lecture, and it bothered him that he even noticed this.
Against his will—of course that phrase makes no sense in this context—he asked her section leader, Paul, how she was doing. He’d briefly considered inventing an excuse for his interest, but he hated lying.
“I think she’s a couple years older than her classmates,” Paul said. “Talks a lot, is always wandering off topic into stuff like I’m not kidding medieval philosophy or eighteenth-century mapmaking. The other students roll their eyes. But she’s bright as hell and seems actually interested, which of course puts her in the minority.”
Sometime after that, he had a dream about her. He was lecturing in his underwear, and hoping that if he could just keep talking about Barnard’s Star, no one would notice. He was running out of things to say, and since there was a new university policy, adopted with great fanfare, that legally proscribed repeating yourself in a lecture, he was beginning to panic. She raised her hand. He was trying not to look at her, but she came down the aisle with her hand still in the air and sent him a challenge with her eyes across the lectern. He knew for a certainty that she was going to ask him something arcane about Barnard’s Star, but phrase it in such a way that it would sound like it was really about his underwear. He kept leaning right and left, trying to see past her, but she kept floating in front to block his vision. That’s when he woke up, wondering at himself.
Could it have to do with Susan? She had died in the spring, and he’d had a terrible summer, sleeping badly and having trouble concentrating. He had just turned thirty-four, and apart from a couple of relationships in his twenties that had lasted a few months, then seemed to fade away of their own accord (he worked too much, was one refrain), he’d been alone and never minded it. Or in any case, he’d never felt the desire to initiate a relationship. Both Stephanie and Janice had approached him. Yet it was true, now that he thought about it, that his distress after Susan’s death felt not unlike loneliness. Which in a way was odd, because he’d hardly seen his sister for years, and only rarely traded a letter with her. Of course there had never been a time when she wasn’t part of his world. He’d always looked up to her, not only as the smarter one, but the more honest, or . . . He didn’t know what word he was looking for. She was the delver, the unearther. She was like his emissary to the realm
