Lost and Wanted Read online

  I had told the Knight fellows that Jack was curious about the cosmic microwave background. Sometimes it feels like I end up regretting every anecdote I allow myself to tell about my son at work. Anyone would be attracted to the brightly colored map of the early universe created by NASA’s WMAP—an especially pretty golden satellite that spins around the project’s home page in animated form. A basic version of the concept—that the satellite took a picture of light left over from the Big Bang, teaching us a lot about the history of the universe—is possible to explain even to a six-year-old; it didn’t signify anything exceptional about my child that he was interested. Nevertheless, Rose had managed to find a cosmic microwave background stuffed toy (an item that could have been procured only in the immediate vicinity of MIT) and bring it in for Jack, and so naturally he remembered her.

  “So who did you see in my office who looked like Charlie?”

  “Not your work office,” Jack said. “Upstairs.”

  I was lost. “Here?”

  Now Jack finally looked at the picture on the calendar. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yep.”

  If he doesn’t want to answer a question, you can’t push him. I waited, and sure enough, he continued.

  “She was sitting at your desk, and I said, ‘Hi.’ I scared her.” He smiled, as if at a real memory. “She—” He jumped a little in his chair and opened his eyes wide, a parody of adult surprise.

  I have always thought that if there were ghosts, they would be unlikely to act as purposefully as they do in popular representations. It didn’t make sense to think of incorporeal human beings who nevertheless retained all of the preoccupations of the living. If they appeared among us, I thought it would be in the manner of subatomic particles, appearing and disappearing according to the energy transfers of quantum mechanics; and further, that our ability to perceive anything about them would be severely limited, just as all interactions between classical and quantum systems are limited.

  “When did this happen?” I asked Jack, and then reframed it, because his grasp of time is still evolving. Sometimes he’ll say “yesterday” to refer to something that happened recently. When he was four, “yesterday” meant anything that had happened in the past; sometimes to distinguish one day from another, he would say, “that other yesterday.”

  “Was it when you were in first grade? Or before that?”

  Jack looked frustrated at my inability to understand. “It was now.”

  “Now?”

  “Last week.”

  “I think you might have imagined that, Bug.”

  But Jack had gone back to the catalog. I thought later that it might have been better to explain, then and there, why it was impossible for him to have seen Charlie the previous week, in our home, what it meant that she was dead. But something prevented me from doing this, and I said nothing. And so I have to conclude that a good deal of what happened later was my own fault.

  7.

  I spent one evening going through boxes of old photographs in my closet, until I found the one I was looking for. It was a shot of me and Charlie at her wedding. She had worn ivory chiffon, a sleeveless column with a high, pleated neck, the kind of dress only Charlie could pull off. I was wearing a sage-green, strapless dress she had helped me choose. My expression is giddy—I was more than a little drunk—but Charlie is staring into the camera in a serious way. Maybe it’s the contrast in our expressions, but looking at this photo, now framed on my desk, I have the strange feeling that something in it is alive. Charlie seems to look through time, as if she knows what’s going to happen and has something very urgent to say, if only I could concentrate hard enough to hear it.

  By the time we graduated, Charlie maintained that she couldn’t stand the smugness, the insularity, or the poverty of the academic lifestyle, and that she’d always known she was going to L.A. This might have been true, but it was also true that if Charlie had wanted to apply to the Yale School of Drama, or the Henry Fellowship at Oxford (things she had claimed to want up until that point), it would have required a letter of recommendation from her thesis advisor, the man we referred to as “Pope.” With his heavy eyebrows, long nose, and dark, wavy hair, Charlie said he resembled the black-and-white engraving of the eighteenth-century satiric poet Alexander Pope reproduced on her handout from Comp Lit 96: Cross(pollinat)ing the Channel: Poetry of the Augustan Age. Professor Pope was a great lecturer, the most famous professor in Harvard’s Comparative Literature Department; like her mother, Charlie was a Francophile, and she took Pope’s seminar on French female writers of the Enlightenment—Du harem, aux salons, à la Révolution—the following year.

  Honors-track students in the humanities had a one-on-one tutorial every year after their first; most junior tutors were graduate students, although full professors would sometimes accept an especially promising student, if their research interests dovetailed. Charlie had decided to apply for a junior tutorial with Pope on the eighteenth-century playwright and epistolary novelist Françoise de Graffigny, whose work she read in the original. She told me privately that she hoped she could continue with him as her senior thesis advisor. The fact that an academic career, whether in theater or physics, would require at least one powerful mentor was clear to us even as undergraduates. Pope was the one who had told Charlie about the Henry Fellowship—whose recipients spent a year at Oxford, furthering their studies in their chosen field—because he was one of three people on the nominating committee.

  All of this worked out as Charlie had planned, and it wasn’t until well into the first semester of our senior year that Charlie confided in me about her problems with Pope. Even then it was with characteristic world-weariness that she told me her professor had literally gotten down on his knees one day during their tutorial in his office and confessed his uncontrollable attraction. At this point she was deep into her thesis about Choderlos de Laclos’s novel, Dangerous Liaisons. Charlie had chosen Laclos in part because she already knew she was playing Mme. de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s play; when race was not a theme, student directors at least seemed to feel more comfortable with what was then called “color-blind casting.” Her thesis was about the ways that twentieth-century dramatic adaptions of the novel reflected the cultures in which they were produced.

  By the time we were seniors, Charlie had been paying her dues in the Dramatic Club for three years, waiting for a starring role in the annual student production on the mainstage at the Loeb, which normally housed the American Repertory Theater. She had played Lucienne in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear and Miranda in The Tempest in smaller Harvard venues. The big show our junior year had been Six Degrees of Separation, and Charlie had read for both Tess and Ouisa, the part Stockard Channing played on Broadway and in the movie. The director, a friend of hers, later confided that her auditions were excellent for both parts, but that casting her in either would have been “too confusing” for the audience. Charlie told me this in a matter-of-fact way, and went on that semester to play the stepdaughter in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, in the smaller black-box theater attached to the mainstage. The difference between the two shows was in degree, not in kind, she joked, and didn’t make a big deal about it. Even if she were thinking it, she could hardly have been the one to suggest to the director that a student production might make its mark with this kind of unconventional casting, or that there might have been something productive about confusing the audience in this way.

  Pope knew about her role in the play, of course, and began attending rehearsals, sitting in the back of the theater as if he didn’t want to be noticed. Charlie’s friend Brian, an especially talented classmate who would go on to start his own innovative theater company in New York, was thrilled that one of the foremost experts on Laclos should take such an interest in his production. He would approach Pope after the rehearsals, ask earnest questions about lighting, or the range of implications in the wo
rd lenteurs. In the private tutorial Charlie attended in Pope’s office every week, Pope mocked her friend the director’s flamboyant mannerisms, and also told Charlie that watching her onstage affected him so strongly that he had to remain seated for some time after the lights came up. That was the kind of thing he said; the meaning was always clear, but could conceivably be interpreted a different way, if it were someday repeated.

  Throughout the semester, Charlie had thought about switching thesis advisors. There was a more junior, female adjunct who had offered to take her on. But because she wasn’t feeling well—was skipping an increasing number of classes in order to save her energy for rehearsals—dropping the thesis altogether was a more attractive option. What Charlie’s immunologist had identified as chronic fatigue syndrome was making it hard for her to complete even an ordinary amount of schoolwork, much less a book-length paper. Without the thesis, her chances at securing any of those postgraduate fellowships were almost nil; but as Charlie reasoned then, she would’ve needed Pope’s approval for the Henry, the fellowship she wanted most. She told me then that no fellowship was worth approaching him for a favor.

  Charlie went to L.A. after graduation, hoping to act, but was disgusted by the number of roles that her skin color (what casting agents referred to as her “look”) eliminated. She was living on her cousin’s couch, in a small apartment in Echo Park, hostessing at an Italian restaurant frequented by industry types on La Brea, and in desperation, she told me later, she’d emptied her bank account and checked herself into a hotel (a strategy she would repeat on and off after Simmi was born), where she spent three nights finishing a Law & Order spec script. I could picture her in a modern Los Angeles hotel room, clothes strewn across the bed and the floor, the small space smelling of her perfume, lemon and vetiver, ordering meals from room service and leaving the trays in the hall.

  This was the kind of extravagant behavior that had always thrilled and shocked me about my friend, as it seemed to contradict everything I’d ever believed about work and success. As it turned out, that script got her her first staff writing job on a WB drama about teenagers, from which she moved on to one show after another, eventually rising to become a co–executive producer by the time she was thirty-five. And so my doggedness, and Charlie’s daring, returned almost equivalent results in our respective fields, where we were both successful early.

  The difference was in the way we responded to the inevitable cooling-off that accompanied our mid-career period, especially after our children were born. I put my head down and worked, taking on committees, evaluations, grant proposals. When my sabbatical came, I chose conferences and workshops carefully, attending only the most prestigious, eliminating anything that might be construed as fun. Incredibly, I believed that this dutiful plodding was one of my strengths, for which I would someday be rewarded. Charlie had no such delusions, and maybe that was the reason why, even before she got her diagnosis, she seemed to fall into a kind of despair.

  8.

  I went out to L.A. just after Jack was born, to see my parents and to speak at a particle phenomenology conference at Caltech. The conference wasn’t strictly necessary, but I wanted to prove to myself that things wouldn’t be so different, now that I had a baby. I discovered quickly, though, that a simple cross-country trip with a three-month-old required an enormous amount of planning. I had decided to nurse exclusively, and had been stockpiling milk a few ounces at a time in plastic bags in my freezer. Only I couldn’t take any of it with me without risking losing it, either in security or because it might defrost. That meant that I had to get up several times the first night in L.A. while Jack was sleeping, in order to pump enough milk for a bottle to leave with my parents while I’d be at the conference.

  Why was I—a single mother with a demanding career—nursing to begin with? Why, for several months at least, did I prepare my own baby food, freezing it in BPA-free rubber trays? I’d read several studies that suggested the immunological benefits of breastfeeding were exaggerated, and the number of nights Jack and I order pizza now has certainly undone any of the good that organic strained sweet potato and amaranth cereal did in his babyhood. I would’ve denied it at the time—would have said something breezy about how nursing was just simpler than mixing bottles in the night—but the fact is that I like doing things the hard way. I’d turned down an epidural at the birth for the same reason: not because I thought the anesthesia would be any danger to Jack, but because I wanted to prove something to myself.

  As the date of my trip to California approached, I resisted calling Charlie. The last time I’d heard from her at any length she had been struggling with childcare, and nothing more serious than arthritis; it seemed to me that she had less reason to be out of touch than I did, and that it was just a symptom of the haphazard way she did things. Once she had told me only the day before that she would be in New York for the weekend; could I come down from Boston? It was petty, but I resolved to do the same thing with her, and held out until two weeks before my visit, when my desire to see her took over and I emailed. This time she wrote back right away, with enthusiasm, saying that she couldn’t wait to see me; I should bring Jack and come anytime.

  At the conference I talked about supersymmetry-breaking and the consequences of the Large Hadron Collider for Neel’s and my model. This was in September 2008: the conference had been organized to coincide with the inauguration of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. I had beautiful slides of the facility: the underground tunnels where the scientists sent beams of protons in opposite directions, examining the exotic by-products of their collision, as well as of the detectors, especially the five-story, fourteen-thousand-ton magnet called the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector. Some people hear “Compact Muon Solenoid” and stop listening; when I sent Charlie an image of that spectacular multicolored clockworks, she had written back: “the rose window of particle physics,” with appropriate awe.

  What no one had known—not the conference organizers, not me when I accepted, and certainly not the team of physicists in the lab in Geneva, who spent their time replicating the extreme conditions we believe existed at the universe’s birth—was that a massive explosion would shut down the Collider just days after its debut. A faulty connection between two of the superconducting magnets released six metric tons of liquid hydrogen, destroying the vacuum in the beam pipe and contaminating two thousand feet of it with soot: a totally unanticipated disaster. In Geneva they went ahead with the Collider’s inauguration—the speeches, the food, and the customary champagne—but the fact was that nobody could be sure that the repairs would be successful. I couldn’t help thinking that if Congress hadn’t stopped funding for the Superconducting Super Collider (an appropriately Texan name for a machine that would’ve been located just south of Dallas), we would have had energy levels three times what the Large Hadron Collider could provide here in the U.S. already. What did it mean, I asked the audience, that the richest and most powerful country in the world had stepped away from funding high-level scientific research?

  This question looks naive from where I’m standing now. But in the year Jack was born, the year Obama was elected, the decision to defund a cutting-edge research facility on which American taxpayers had already spent two billion dollars seemed more like an aberration than a sign of things to come. When I finished my talk, there was a message on my phone from Charlie, asking if I wanted to stop by that afternoon. I begged off a lunch with the conference organizers with excuses about my new baby; called and asked my mother to give Jack the one bottle I had; and reparked, next to a hedge. I covered my chest with a scarf I’d brought for the purpose, held both shields with one arm, and texted Charlie back with the other. Like every woman I’ve ever talked to about it, I hated pumping: the indignity, the surge of hormonally triggered sadness, the primitive machine’s repetitive wheeze. To me it always sounded as if it were saying, Give i
t up.

  Once I’d zipped the plastic bottles of milk into the insulated cooler bag, though, there was an enormous sense of freedom. In the gloomy auditorium, I’d given an optimistic speech about the potential once the Collider was repaired. I’d done it in a different time zone, traveling alone with an infant. In the clothes I’d chosen for the presentation, a black suit and gray silk blouse, I felt that I looked as good as I could possibly look under the circumstances. My mother texted me that Jack was asleep, but that she would give him the bottle as soon as he woke up. I had another three hours until I absolutely had to be back.

  Charlie’s house was a white, Spanish-style three-bedroom in Los Feliz, about twenty minutes from the Caltech campus. It was nothing like as luxurious as the one she and Terrence eventually bought in Santa Monica, to be closer to the beach, but it was designed in a way that made it seem bigger than it was, with a path that wound around a small, free-form pool, up terra-cotta tiled steps, past a lemon tree and a bed with birds of paradise, to the front door.

  Charlie met me at the door, screaming as she grabbed me. Then she called to Terrence, “Helen’s here!” and stepped back. I hadn’t seen her since Simona was born, but she hardly looked different. She was wearing a white tank top and jeans, and appeared to have lost all the weight from the pregnancy. Nothing about her face or the way she moved suggested that she was ill.

  “You didn’t bring him!”

  I explained about the conference and my parents. I said that maybe I could bring Jack by before I left, but that I had to seize the opportunity to socialize when I could. I asked if I could store the milk in the fridge, and Charlie took me into the kitchen, small but with brand-new stainless steel appliances. Everything was very clean and modern, and even the colored wooden blocks on the floor looked as if they’d been arranged by a stylist. I remembered Charlie telling me that Terrence was obsessively neat.