He was provoked, but not in response to her transparent emotional reasons for saying it. No, it was the fucking conceptual framework of the argument that irritated him.

“The head-heart dichotomy is bogus,” he said. “Feelings originate in the head, too.”

“Well of course. I’m referring to thoughts versus feelings.”

“The thought-feeling dichotomy is so simplistic it’s functionally useless. Feelings are also thoughts, they’re just unexamined. I like to analyze my feelings before I dump them on other people.”

Obviously, she had hit a nerve. And equally obviously, he wasn’t going to admit it. Maybe he didn’t even realize it.

The end came on the summer solstice, under a romantic full moon. They’d had a late dinner downtown and then walked to the lake and picked their way out along the crumbling concrete breakwater to the little lighthouse that marked the entrance to the flood control channel. The sun had set an hour previously. No one was around. The moon had just cleared East Hill and was lighting up the lake in a way that was totally predictable in a thirteen-times-a-year kind of way, yet miraculous and unspeakably beautiful. They sat dangling their legs off the breakwater and as usual she had to make the move to hold his hand. A pity—those beautiful big hands, and he had no idea what to do with them.

“No matter how many times I’ve seen the full moon, it thrills me,” she said.

“It always surprises me how convincing the optical illusion is, that it looks bigger near the horizon,” he said.

She played with his fingers. This little piggy went to the weekend conference. This little piggy stayed home and caught up on a shitload of work. During dinner she’d talked about some writers she liked, and he’d mentioned that he didn’t read much fiction anymore. He said novelists often wrote about things they were ignorant of—the job their protagonist supposedly had, for example—and got basic facts wrong, and it killed his enjoyment because it reminded him that it was all made up. She said something about it being a pity that a little detail like that kept him from reading good fiction since there was no better way to broaden your understanding of other people. He hadn’t responded.

But now he said, “I read a novel by a Pulitzer Prize winner which began with a scene in the evening. The people described in the scene were believable—no one had three arms, for example—and the sentences I’m sure were very pretty. But in the sky there was a rising crescent moon. And I thought to myself, why should I have any confidence in this writer’s ability to observe anything, if she’s never noticed that crescent moons in the evening can only sink? Does she not understand why the moon is a crescent? Does she think the moon’s motion is retrograde?”

“But a lot of smart people don’t know that. Modern people spend most of their lives indoors, especially at night.”

“I think there’s an arrogance among literary folk. ‘I understand people better than you scientists do, so I don’t have to bother my head with simple facts.’”

Ah, so her comment during dinner had wounded him. Did he even understand why this bee was buzzing in his bonnet right now? She took pity on him. “That’s a good point. I can see how that would irritate you.”

“I tried to read another ‘acclaimed’ novel, and in that one a full moon rose at midnight. If the idiot had written that the sun set at noon I think even his literary readers would have realized something was wrong.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” You poor thing, you feel attacked. The good news: you do seem to care about my opinion.

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, during which the full moon correctly kept rising. You couldn’t see Polaris for the glare, but you could trust with all your heart (that is, the one in your head) that it was 42 degrees above the north horizon, standing as still as a soldier guarding the tomb of the Unknown Murdered Novelist.

She said, “When I was a kid, I don’t know, maybe eight, I first read about Newton and the apple and I didn’t get it at all. Everyone knows apples fall to the ground, so why would seeing that tell him anything about gravity? It wasn’t until I read a book for older kids, which explained his insight was that the same force might govern both the apple and the Moon—then I understood. And ever since, when I see the full moon, I think of it as a big ghostly apple.”

“The same force governs the apple, the Moon, and the Earth. Part of Newton’s insight was that the Earth also falls toward the apple.”

“Sure.”

“Strangely enough, that detail about the apple is true. It sounds like the storybook nonsense people love to make up later. But Newton mentioned the apple in his journal.”

“So anyway, with this apple and Moon thing, and of course the Earth, too, you’re right, being governed by the same force, and the fact that at first I didn’t understand the Newton story—I ended up with this vivid sense of how all things everywhere are tied together by gravity. I mean, that’s obvious—but the idea of it just stuck in my head and really appealed to me. Maybe because my family was pretty disconnected. My father was for all practical purposes as far away as the Moon. I don’t know, that’s kind of pop-psych. Anyway, then I read somewhere this medieval idea that gravity was a manifestation of love, you know, God’s love working in nature. I thought it was something Aquinas said, but then later I couldn’t find it. Maybe it was Boethius. But this idea that gravity is love, that it makes everything in the universe want to get closer to everything else, that you could say, in a way, that the apple loves the Earth that it falls toward—I thought that was just wonderful.”

He was silent. Then he said, “That’s silly.”

Stung, she glanced

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