thinks of the floor that she doesn’t have to sleep on. She sees the dark little house he grew up in, and she remembers that even in his father’s last years, his parents’ money was so tight they couldn’t afford the paint to spruce up one of their bedrooms. She remembers that he helped her find the Victor Chemical job by scouring ads and making lists of addresses and telephone numbers, scouting managers’ names by writing to friends of friends. And years ago, when she mentioned that she occasionally sent care packages to Hildegard, he pitched in with his usual energy and his alarming focus and his sincere interest in the logistics of any project. He drew up more lists, researched nutritional needs and perishabilities, calculated mailing weights and costs. He improved every aspect of her system. Hell, she hadn’t had a system at all, she’d merely shipped stuff to Hildegard.

Long years with any man would be a challenge, right? In many ways—in most ways—she’s lucky.

But they will have another child. That is not negotiable.

1996

God’s in his heaven, Vernon’s in his study.

Vargas lies curled in the padded chair, enjoying the lingering warmth from Vernon’s padded ass. Gen is out for the evening at her so-called Spanish lesson.

All his life he has hated watching other people handle vinyl records. They grip them like Frisbees, rotating them this way and that, their fingers slathering the surface in skin oil and dead cells. Vernon takes the record in its paper sleeve and holds the vinyl-edge against the base of his right palm, supporting the disk from below with middle and pinkie fingers. He pulls the sleeve off with his left hand, allowing it to slide beneath the fingers until—voilà!—he is holding the naked record via edge and label. His ring finger is perfectly positioned for its tip to find the spindle hole. Now, if Vernon wanted, he could throw the sleeve over his shoulder, feint toward the cat, and duck through the linemen’s gap to the stereo, touchdown!, all with the record secure in his hand.

He brushes side A with a damp cotton cloth. (Wet the cloth, wring it out, roll it up inside a larger dry cloth, wring both. Special cleaning fluids and velvety wands sold by stereo stores are a waste of money.) He places the record on the turntable, lowers the needle, adjusts the volume. Sweeps cat from chair, sits, dons headphones, leans back. Beethoven Opus 127.

Vargas jumps into his lap.

Vernon’s former colleague Eugene came back to the lab for a visit a couple of years ago and they took him out to lunch, but the poor son of a bitch was a doddering shell. “When I can’t understand my old papers, show me the door,” Vernon would say to Frances, and she would make that exasperated gesture. She was difficult. Sometimes when she saw him in the morning, she’d say, “Don’t be depressed today, I can’t handle it right now.” It always surprised him. Was it that obvious?

Frances was the only reason he had published anything in the last decade. She arrived in the early eighties, the first woman in the lab—physicist, that is—and you had to be careful with her, she had a chip on her shoulder. She couldn’t write grammatically. You young people and the English language, he would try to joke with her. But she was a good scientist. She noticed a collection of data he had left over from a series of balloon shots he’d done in the seventies. Along with his target range in the near-UV he’d amassed figures for solar irradiance between 2000 and 3100 angstroms at 40 kilometers.

“J. V.,” she said, “why haven’t you published these?”

He told her he’d checked them against Ackerman and Frimout and they didn’t match very well, so he assumed he’d made a mistake somewhere.

She shot him that look. “Your figures are probably better. Nobody’s measured that range as carefully as you have.”

So they collaborated. She crunched the numbers, he introduced her to the subjunctive. They ended up publishing five papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research. On three of them, he insisted she put her name first.

But it was becoming clear he was just taking up space. He would fiddle around, forget what he was doing, go to lunch with Don and Mike, read articles in the afternoon, drift off. It was a disgrace to keep paying him. At his retirement party they gave him a pin and a citation suitable for keeping rolled in a drawer. Don and Mike told jokes, Frances hugged him tearily goodbye. He’d miss her, but he wouldn’t miss her moods.

So now he’s home all day, trying not to turn into Eugene.

Dead house, windowless room. Left and right walls are entirely covered in records, a glorious sight, except for a patch on the right where the ventilation blower is mounted. When Mark was little he would ask if he could rotate the steel crank, and Vernon would say go ahead. Mark would start turning, and after a second or two he’d begin to wail—he claimed like a fire engine, though he sounded coincidentally more like a civil defense siren. Vernon has thought about removing the blower for thirty years. Still thinking.

Not turning into Eugene means keeping busy, so he’s been reorganizing his LPs. He built new shelves above his desk and along the floor to the left of the door, then lugged down the four hundred overflow vinyls he was keeping in a small room off the bedroom, mainly records bought in the last ten years from desperate mail-order outfits offering twenty LPs for the price of one. He’s given pride of place to his string quartets, now arranged alphabetically by composer, from Arriaga to Wynne, in a big beautiful block on the left-hand wall. To paraphrase a line from C. P. Snow, “Excellent! Anyone with half an eye can see that that’s a collection of string quartets.”

The older he gets, the more he finds that string

Вы читаете The Stone Loves the World
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату