And then someone killed her.
He actually saw her just before she flew out of New York, because he happened to be in the city for a conference. He watched the back of her head as she went down the subway steps, her short unkempt hair, the worn leather knapsack on her much-traveled shoulder.
He’d spent the summer doing nothing but trying to work and trying to sleep, mostly failing at both. A mass of data from some telescope time the previous summer on molecular clouds had looked promising, but he just couldn’t get excited. Which was kind of terrifying. He’d always been puzzled by the large fraction of people who didn’t seem to love learning new things. Now he was just another sleepwalker.
He would get over it. Research indicated that people have emotional set points to which they return, following both good and bad events. But it didn’t feel like he’d get over it. Of course that feeling was a predictable aspect of not yet being over it, but still . . . Anyway, he wasn’t himself. And now he’d just had a dream about a student and he’d woken with an erection. REM sleep in men induces erections regardless of the content of the dream, but the chance contiguity of her presence in his dream with his waking in a tumescent state had now added to his thoughts of her a spurious erotic tone.
Her name was Saskia White. He went that far, bothering to learn it from the class list. And the fact that she was a local. But no further. After two or three more lectures he realized he was addressing his remarks to the right side of the room to avoid looking at her. How ridiculous.
Then one day she approached him again at the lectern. This was after the midterms, because he remembers that by this time he’d perused her test booklet and been impressed—ridiculous that he’d looked—and as she came up to him he addressed her by name, forgetting that there was no good reason why he would know it.
If she was surprised, she didn’t indicate it. But she surprised him all over again. He had been lecturing on the outer planets of the solar system and she had a question about Triton. He must have mentioned that Triton’s retrograde motion around Neptune showed that it could not have formed in the same part of the solar nebula as its host planet, but was probably a captured Kuiper Belt object. She wondered to him how likely that hypothesis was, given that Triton’s orbit was almost perfectly circular. “I mean, what are the chances that Triton would collide with another Kuiper Belt object and end up with exactly the right trajectory for that to happen? Isn’t that like the orbital dynamics version of a hole-in-one from, I don’t know, thousands of miles away?”
For a sophomore in an intro course who wasn’t already an amateur astronomer, this was a remarkably sophisticated question. “Good for you,” he has a feeling he might have said. “The initial orbit would have been eccentric, but tidal forces tend to circularize orbits, because a circular orbit is in a lower energy state, tidally, than a noncircular one.”
“But why is Triton’s orbit more circular than most of the other moons and planets?”
“The orbital influence of tidal forces depends on a number of factors, so there’s no standard timetable for circularization. Triton almost certainly interacted with other Neptunian moons, which had the effect of ejecting them entirely from the local system while reducing Triton’s eccentricity. This would help explain why Neptune has so few moons compared to the other gas giants. But as it happens, you’ve hit on a question that still is a bit of a puzzle since, despite what I’ve just said, the solar system isn’t old enough to entirely account for the near-total absence of eccentricity in Triton’s orbit. There’s a theory involving gas drag from a planetary debris disk—” and off he went (probably, he doesn’t remember exactly), chattering and nattering, backing and filling, restating and elaborating. He starts to use his hands a lot.
Finally, he noticed her looking bemused. Or maybe bored. “Sorry,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“I can go on too long.” (This part he remembers exactly. For what it’s worth.)
“Shit— Oh, sorry, I mean damn, or . . . darn. Or maybe even fudge”—and here she laughed—“don’t apologize, I’ll bet I could talk you under the table, most people talk about nothing but themselves, it’s adorable.”
Again he thinks a few seconds probably went by during which he just stood there like an ox. Even when he’s alone, his mind works deliberately. In social interactions he’s always three steps behind everyone else. Did she just call him adorable? Or did she mean the people who only talk about themselves? And if she meant him, wasn’t that kind of condescending and presumptuous? But if so, why did it fill him with delight? And if it was about him, and it delighted him, where were the warning bells that ought to be going off in his head? Or was wondering about warning bells in fact the warning bell?
He must have said something in response, but he can’t remember what it was. He suspects that even just seconds later he wouldn’t have been able to recall it. At moments of emotional confrontation he has no short-term memory of anything he says. Not so, his visual memory. He can call up now, twenty-two and a half years later, exactly what she looked like at that moment. She had applied a coral lip balm against the November weather, and her mouth was narrow and shapely beneath a well-defined philtrum; her smile was what people would probably call “roguish”; when she tensed her cheeks, as now, she had a dimple beneath her left eye; her earrings were lily-of-the-valley bells made out of misty blue-gray glass; her eyebrows were sparse;
