"The Whole World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Winslow Emily)

CHAPTER 1

That whole thing in Nick’s office happened just around what would have been Thanksgiving. Home was, no doubt, drenched in crackling, flashy leaves. England does the season differently. Students at Cambridge are discouraged from having cars, so autumn comes with a flurry of bicycles. Leaves barely bother to brown before falling listlessly-the bikes make up for that in their number, variety, and motion. They swirl everywhere, as if blown into little cyclones by the wind.

I used to live in New Hampshire, which is all spectacular falls and knee-high winters, and summers thick with humidity and mosquitoes. It’s a parade of nature there; that’s what makes it special. But here in Cambridge, instead of trees and mountains and extremes of weather, there are buildings, all these towers, like something cartoonishly Atlantean that you’d put in a fish tank for guppies to swim through. Everything is made of stone, not clapboard. This city is like people, instead of God, made the world, and turned out to be good at this creation business.

The University has thirty-one colleges, which house, feed, and tutor students. The University departments provide lectures and exams. The older colleges downtown, founded by Plantagenets and Tudors, dominate the shops and houses like tall ships in a busy harbor. They’re huge and solid and walled, each with an arched entryway giving a peep of courtyards beyond. There’s usually a sign telling whether or not they’re open for tourists, and always a sign remonstrating that the courtyard grass is not to be walked on.

Peterhouse is on Trumpington Street. The college itself is on one side of the big art museum, and my room, in the dorm extension St. Peter’s Terrace, is on the other.

I love these old buildings because they’re still in use. They haven’t been made into museums. There’s something so sad about people filing through a famous rich person’s bedroom to ogle a made, never-again-slept-in bed. These college rooms are all lively with activity, just as they were built to be. They’re as different from museums as a wild animal is different from taxidermy.

I chose Peterhouse because it’s the oldest of the colleges, more than seven hundred years old. That seemed the right thing to do. If I was going to go to Cambridge, and live in actual architecture, and wear a monkish academic robe called a “gown” just to eat dinner, it seemed best to go all the way. Peterhouse had been the first of the colleges to get electricity, but it still lit meals only by candlelight. Its stained glass windows were by William Morris. There was a fireplace in my dorm room. When I saw that I laughed out loud.

Liv is American too, which is why we became friends. She was my first friend here. She’s Californian, and could have gone to Stanford.

I met her my first week. It wasn’t the way she talked that gave away her nationality. She hadn’t even spoken yet. It was that she sat cross-legged on the floor in a public place. British people don’t do that. She was sketching an empty windowsill inside the Fitzwilliam Museum.

I was above, surrounded by paintings of elaborate flower arrangements. She was below, on the middle landing of a fancy staircase, with two sets of steps going up on either side and another set heading down between them. She caught me looking at her drawing, and quickly hugged her sketchbook to her chest. Then she lowered it back to her lap, and smiled hello. She explained that there used to be three Chinese vases on this windowsill. “Close your eyes,” she said. “Go ahead and close your eyes. Just try to see it, okay?”

I’d descended the steps and was right in front of her. I closed my eyes.

“Three big vases, right? Right here. And this guy,” she said, “this guy-I swear this is true and you can look up the newspaper stories-he tripped, I swear, he tripped on his own stupid shoelaces right into those vases, and he totally took them down. I was in the gallery above those stairs, the floral room, right, and I heard it. It was, like, pow!-at first a hollow kind of sound and then a clatter. They shattered into six hundred pieces.”

I flinched.

“No kidding,” she went on. “I ran to the stairs. It was terrible to see them like that, all splattered, chaos where there should have been this-grace, you know?”

I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer. Right here, right where I was standing, they’d broken up into shards. I backed up onto a step, to get off of where they’d fallen.

She nodded. “I know, right? I know. I was horrified too. But then I was, like, kind of elated. And I was, like, springier and more alive, somehow. It made me think:

“This is all really here. It’s not like a picture in a book or on a screen. It’s not even under glass or behind ropes. It’s all just amazingly here. Until I saw some of it broken, I hadn’t really understood. I’m here, you know? And this is all real, real enough that if you bump into it something could break. I’m really here.”

She was beatific with the memory.

Then she grinned and snapped out of it. “It’s amazing, you know?” she said.

I smiled back. I just stretched my face and held it tight. I was remembering something broken too. I never should have closed my eyes.

“Where are you from?” she asked. “Is this your first year?”

I didn’t answer right away. I nodded, to buy time. I made my mind imagine vases. Over and over again my mind went clatter-pow. I forced it to be vases in my mind.

Liv’s college is Magdalene, which is pronounced like it means “sentimental.”

She lives in a riverside building with brick windowsills and fancy wooden banisters. The architect who designed it made every banister different so that drunk students could feel if they were on the correct stair. Hers had a kind of obelisk, and posts carved like checkerboards.

She’d covered the wall over her bed with pages from her sketchbook. I recognized details from paintings in the Fitzwilliam-lots of Monet poplars-and sights from around town. She didn’t choose obvious targets. There was no King’s College Chapel, its towers jutting from either side of its roof like the tufts on a great horned owl. Instead she drew two-story buses, shopwindow mannequins, and the snack aisle of the supermarket. There are literally dozens of flavors of potato chip here, and the many bright colors all lined up on the shelves give the appearance of a busy, upright garden.

“Here, give me a hand,” she said, plonking down a stack of printed pages on her bed. “Reusing is even better than recycling, right?” She had two pairs of scissors, one for each of us.

The pages were old essay drafts. She’d been cutting them up into intricate little snowflakes that now nearly filled a plastic grocery bag.

At first I watched her: She’d cut a small piece off, no worry about its shape, and then fold it twice. Snip, snip, snip, then unfold. The folding gave the cuts a symmetry within the random edges. I took a page. Cut, fold, snip. Each sheet made a dozen or more sharp flakes, each one different.

When we were done, she undid the fancy iron fasteners on the casement windows over her bed. She grabbed a handful of paper snowflakes and heaved them out. She pressed another handful into my open palm.

We threw fistfuls of paper snow down onto the busy path below, while Liv shouted, “Ho ho ho!” Some people stopped to look up at us in annoyance, shaking the papers out of their hair or brushing them off their shoulders. One didn’t. He bent to sweep up the scraps. At first I thought he was a neat freak, some kind of anti-litter crusader. But then he stood and pulled his arm back, and pitched the debris at us like a snowball. It couldn’t make it up to Liv’s window; it didn’t have the weight or cohesion for that. Instead it showered back onto him, drifting down past his great, huge smile.

That’s how we met Nick.

Liv was out in the hall before I even turned around. Her footsteps clattered down the stairs while mine padded. Out on the path, we tried to have a snowball fight, but even a ream of paper isn’t enough for that. We halfheartedly threw bits around, but the wind had carried a lot of it away. The river would be dotted with it.

A dozen paper flakes were caught in Nick’s hair. They were, by chance, arranged in a ring like a halo. Liv reached to tousle them out, but he ducked away from her hand. He reached up and rubbed them out of his hair himself. So Liv sprinkled another handful on, and he gave in and left them there. We all smiled. Teeth were everywhere.

Nick had to leave. He was a graduate student, a paleobiologist, at Magdalene too. He had a meeting. Liv got his phone number.

“Oh my God!” she said, laughing. “Oh my God!”

“What?”

“He’s so cute! Do you think he likes me?”

“Yeah! Of course he does. I think he really does.”

She hugged herself and spun around. She almost slipped on the mess of scraps, but caught my arm and righted herself. Someone else didn’t quite manage that.

“Oh!” A surprised woman fell backward. Her skirt rode up, and the side of one soft leather boot scraped against the walk. A thin white cane pointed straight up into the air. Oh crap, she’s blind…

“Shi-!” Liv said, rushing to help her. “It’s me, Liv. Here, let me…” She pulled on the woman’s hands to haul her up. Resistance; confusion. Liv ended up whacked in the face by the cane. She stepped back with her hand on her cheek while the woman got herself back up to standing unassisted. She wiped her damp knees and smoothed out her skirt. She demanded to know what was on the ground.

“Some idiot dropped paper all over the walk,” Liv explained. I sucked in a breath.

The woman’s thick beaded necklace was caught on her top button. Despite brushing her hands together and wiggling her fingers, a few paper flakes still stuck. “They should be reported to the porters,” she declared.

Liv agreed, gravely. It took both my hands to keep the laughing in my mouth.

There was a smear of dirt and scraps on the back of the woman’s peacock blue coat. “You look great,” Liv assured her.

Her heels and cane tapped on the path: click click click away from us.

“See you tomorrow! Gretchen!” Liv called out after her.

“Was that Gretchen Paul?” I asked, grabbing Liv’s arm. I’d heard of her from two girls in my building who studied English. “What class do you have with her?” Liv majored in Art History, so I didn’t know what she would be doing with a Lit professor.

“I don’t. I work for her. Shit, shit, shit. I hope she’s not mad.”

“She probably just needed to get somewhere,” I said, but actually she had looked pretty mad.

“Really?” Liv said. “Do you really think so?” She squeezed my hand.

I opened and closed my mouth. A porter saved me.

He boomed out, “Do you know who did this?” The broom in his hand contrasted with his neat, formal suit.

“Some first years,” Liv said easily, pulling me along like we had somewhere we needed to go. We didn’t slow down until we were out on Magdalene Street, heading for the bridge.

“What does it take to get someone to lighten up around here?” she shouted, with her hands cupped around her mouth. Quayside was full of people: waiting in line for coffee, hanging out, eating at outdoor tables. All of them looked at us.

It turned out we were both turning twenty that week. So we went out to a pub to celebrate. Liv was in her second year, and twenty because she had taken time off to paint before coming here. I was twenty as a first year because our school district had had a draconian cutoff for starting kindergarten. And I took time off after high school too.

“They call that a ‘gap year’ here. What did you do?” Liv slowed down with her own beer, even though she really didn’t want to, to keep pace with me, which was nice.

“Nothing. Just a break, you know?”

“Sure,” she said. “But really, doing what?”

The whole group at the next table cheered about something.

“Look, nothing, leave it alone.” I didn’t recognize any of the beers advertised on the cardboard coasters. I hadn’t smelled cigarettes in a restaurant since I was a little kid.

She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello? You were drifting away there for a minute.”

The pub was really noisy. I could barely hear her.

“I think I need to go back to my room. I might be coming down with something.” I got out into cooler air.

It was happening again. I felt strange and kind of out of it. I thought back to those vases she’d told me about before. Clatter-pow.

Newnham is the part of town where a lot of faculty live. It has big houses and pleasant, uncrowded doctors’ and dentists’ offices. Stephen Hawking lives there; I saw him once, whirring by.

Liv took me there to Gretchen Paul’s house to help with the project she was working on.

She rang the bell, and then got out a key without waiting. “Gretchen doesn’t mind,” she explained. “She just wants me to get it done.” The furniture inside, all dark and solid, was interspersed with exotic objects. I figured they must travel.

Liv hadn’t yet been able to figure if their money was hers or his. Gretchen’s husband, Harry, didn’t work. Well, he worked hard, but he didn’t work for money. He bred canaries in a special room upstairs, and was almost always home. He was gentle and seemed like the kind of person who would repair something thoroughly. His last name was Reed; Gretchen used her mother’s last name.

Harry offered us tea and brought it to us in the library: a pot, cups and saucers, milk and sugar. British cookies are brittle, meant for dunking. These had been made from scratch. Harry had a towel tucked into his belt, and wiped his hands on it as he left us to the work. We giggled. I felt like I was in kindergarten, playing tea party. We clinked our cups together in a happy toast. This is what saucers are for: I almost splashed onto Liv’s work, but the little dish caught it and saved me.

There were photos spread all over the table: sepia grandparents and black-and-white babies, vacation shots from the fifties, and orangey snaps of seventies teens. They were in piles, some large and definite, others small and spread out, in the beginnings of a system, like Liv wasn’t sure yet exactly of their classification. “Those are the same person,” I pointed out, indicating two black-and-white photos near each other but not stacked. The woman was beautiful; her eyes and mouth were striking, even at the two different ages represented.

“Maybe,” Liv said. “Or they could be sisters. Or, if they are the same, which of the two sisters is it? See?” There were two “definite” piles, one each for two similar-looking but not really identical women. In those, you could clearly see the widow’s peak on one, and the pointier chin and side part on the other, that differentiated them. The unsorted photos I’d pointed out could each be either.

“No idea,” I finally laughed. It wasn’t a simple project.

One of those sisters was Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul. The other sister was Gretchen’s aunt, Ginny. Gretchen needed Liv to figure out which was which.

“Gretchen’s mother died recently,” Liv explained. “Linda Paul was this novelist, well, was a long time ago. She was kind of a big deal back in her day. Anyway, Linda always forbade Gretchen from writing a biography of her. She wouldn’t even let Gretchen have these. They were all boxed up in her attic. But now…”

Gretchen was in the garden; we could see her through the window, kneeling, pulling up weeds. She had to identify them by feel. Liv said she worked out there to think. She said that you could tell how stuck Gretchen was on something by how she tossed or punished the weeds as she piled them up.

Harry came into view behind her. He gathered up a small tree that had been leaning up against the shed. Its roots were still in a ball. He took it away and we heard the car doors open and shut.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered. The tree was pretty. It was a lilac.

“Oh, they had a fight about that a couple of days ago. He bought it for her, but she didn’t want it.”

“Mmm,” I replied, still staring out the window. Liv tapped my arm.

“Do you notice anything about the garden?” It was lush and vivid, but so were so many gardens here. The rainfall makes it easy for things to grow. “All the colors…?” Liv hinted. “Don’t you find that funny?”

I wasn’t sure. “I guess it’s strange for a blind person to focus on color.”

“Do you get it now?”

“Get what?”

Liv looked up at the ceiling, annoyed with my incomprehension.

“Just pretend I’m stupid, okay?” I told her.

“He wanted her to have a lilac because she’d smell it. But she thinks that’s condescending. She hates any kind of special consideration. Newnham or New Hall or Lucy Cavendish,” she said, naming Cambridge ’s three women-only colleges, “would have loved to have her. Instead, she came to Magdalene, not too long after they’d finally gone mixed. Some students wore black armbands over women getting in. Does that sound to you like she wants it easy?”

I looked out the window. Gretchen hunched over the earth, digging at something resistant. It was weird to think about how even if she looked up she couldn’t see me back. She probably didn’t even know I was there.

Liv said, “She hates that she needs my help to sort these pictures. I think she picked me because I’m not in her department. It would be, you know, awkward, to let one of her own students see her vulnerable.”

A tune started up in my bag. It grew in volume as I rooted around for the phone. It was Nick calling. “Oh, hi!” I said. Liv didn’t have a cellphone; that’s why he had to call me. “We’re in Newnham.”

The three of us had gotten together before, at the Fitzwilliam. Liv had shown us around, art being her thing. “No,” I said. “This time it’s my turn. We’ll go to the Whipple.” The Whipple is the museum of the history of science. That was my thing.

Later Nick would take me to the Sedgwick, which has geology and dinosaurs. And privacy, in his office upstairs. But there were weeks before we’d get there.

I mouthed to Liv, “Nick?” and she gave a thumbs-up.

“He says he’ll come meet us here in an hour or so,” I said after I hung up.

“Who?” Gretchen asked. I jumped. The house has plush rugs all over; I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Gretchen!” Liv chirped. “This is my friend Polly. She’s helping me with the photographs. I hope that’s all right. I know you want the work done quickly and, well, two heads and all that…”

“I certainly hope there’s been progress.”

“Oh, yes!”

“If you require assistance-”

“I don’t require it, it’s just helpful to bounce thoughts-”

“So long as she isn’t a distraction.”

“She won’t be.”

“I won’t be,” I echoed.

Gretchen turned to me. She knew where I was because of my voice. “Are you a student?”

I squeaked out, “Peterhouse. NatSci.” It’s an abbreviation for Natural Sciences, pronounced like it has a K instead of a C.

“You’re American,” she said, getting that from my few words. “My mother attended a boarding school in Virginia.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the box in her hands. It was a dirty, decrepit shoe box nestled in a plastic grocery bag.

“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked.

We stepped close and looked in. Small bones and plastic jewelry. Altogether it was shaped like a little dog. The plastic necklaces had been wound around the rib cage. The beads were bright, like tiny beach balls.

Liv jumped back. “Uh, that was a dog, I think.” Her hand went over her mouth, like she might throw up.

“I found it in the garden,” Gretchen said. “Someone must have buried it a long time ago. What are those plastic nodules…?”

“They look like a kid’s toy jewelry,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled. “How Egyptian.”

She turned toward Liv, still holding the thing. Liv backed up a little. “I want to emphasize to you the importance of the photographs set in foreign countries. Linda’s travels are an essential aspect of her character. As foreigners yourselves, I’m sure you can appreciate that. I expect results won’t be compromised by socializing. You have responsibilities. You have obligations.” She was really serious. The box quivered in her hands. The bones and beads in it rattled lightly.

She turned and headed back outside.

“Oh my God!” said Liv. “What was that?”

We held hands like little girls.

Later, at the Whipple, Liv reveled in the children’s activity corner, full of compasses and telescopes and other fun things for kids to try. She put on a felt vest and offered Nick the box of Velcro organs, teasing that he couldn’t put them all in the right place.

He wasn’t listening to her. He was looking at a telescope. He looked up and asked me if I knew the constellations. I don’t, really, besides Orion the obvious.

But I think about stars a lot. How, up close, they’d be fire and death; and just far enough away, like the sun, they’re life and warmth and daylight; and farther still, even so far away you’d think they wouldn’t be anything, they’re navigation and myth and poetry. Gretchen was like that about her family: Past the age when she needed a mother, and even past Linda’s death, Gretchen was still getting something out of her.

Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul, had written a series of five books about a young woman, Susan Maud Madison, trying to make it as a writer in the fifties. Presumably this was all semiautobiographical. I saw the books in Gretchen’s library, on their own shelf, with dustcovers still well intact though aged. Her mother had inscribed each one to her-“To my darling daughter”-with what I calculated to be the year Gretchen would have finished the equivalent of high school. Next to them were braille versions, which Gretchen had commissioned. The covers showed a woman with short blond hair and an exaggerated expression apparently romping through comic adventures with her social set, who, the plot summaries informed us, didn’t approve of the heroine’s ambition.

Nick and Liv and I saw a pyramid of paperback versions in the window of Heffers bookstore downtown. Heffers used to be Cambridge ’s indie bookstore, and even after being bought out by a chain it’s still got a local feel. Prompted by Linda Paul’s death, the store had made a special display.

We stopped in and I picked one up, reading aloud: “‘Susan Maud did her duty: She spread her towel out on the sand next to Margo. She slid off her wrap to create the illusion that she intended to sunbathe. Margo nodded in approval, and then jogged to catch up with Dick. Susan Maud pulled a notebook and pen from her bag, leaned on her elbows, and began chapter four. She hadn’t written twenty words before a pail of water was tossed onto her back. “Come on, Susie!” Dick called. “Get your feet wet!” Susan’s back arched in shock and, for a moment, anger. She pressed the soaked notebook facedown onto the towel, blotting the words to stop them sliding down the page. Then she sat up, smiled brilliantly, and retorted, “You bully! I’ll bet you can’t run fast enough!” She grabbed the bucket and filled it in the surf, tempted to add a stone or a crab. She chased him down the beach, finally soaking him on the top of his head. He shook his hair out like a dog and grinned, finally cool on the hot day. She hadn’t hurt him at all.’”

“Wow,” Nick said. “Edith Wharton it’s not, but still there’s something House of Mirth about it, what with the heroine wanting to be two kinds of mutually exclusive person at once.”

Apparently, these books had made a minor splash back in their day. Gretchen had found several instances of real women with the main character’s name, and she’d sent letters asking if their mothers had called them that on purpose. One was even a writer. Maybe it was a pen name, in homage? Maybe Linda Paul’s influence had resonated. Maybe Gretchen wasn’t the only one to adore her.

“My turn!” Liv announced, picking up a different volume. But when she read aloud the woman at the checkout glared at us. Liv speaks a little loudly. I nudged her to read a little more quietly, that was all. I didn’t mean for her to stop. But she closed the book and put it back.

This is how Nick got involved. It piqued his interest. We all started working on the photos together. Liv got paid to produce the actual index; Nick and I just helped because we all liked being together.

Nick rented a room from a family in a town house on the east side of town, near the big shopping mall. The father was a lecturer in mathematics, the mom was a journalist, and the two girls, eight and ten years old, went to Perse Girls, an elite day school. They were an Indian family, and he got to share their spicy cooking, which he told me they’re pretty generous about. The house was tall and narrow, with his room and bathroom on the top floor.

One time I waited for him in their small kitchen. Mrs. Chander had covered the dining table with papers, which made the place feel productive and cozy. She too was sorting into piles. Aahana and Aashika played in the small garden out back, building something that looked complicated. Mrs. Chander smiled and told me that they were building a replica of the Chateau d’If, the prison from The Count of Monte Cristo, to impress Nick, who’d challenged them to try it. They plainly adored him.

I’d seen Nick with the girls on the playground nearby. He took turns holding them up to reach the monkey bars. He was fair. They each got equal chance.

That’s what it was like with me and Liv, and him hanging out with both of us. Liv joined the Magdalene choir, so they saw each other a lot at practices. He sometimes worked out at Kelsey Kerridge when I was there for yoga.

He was being fair, I think. We were given equal chance.

We made some progress with Gretchen’s project, but it was slow going. Most of the photos weren’t labeled at all, and those that were labeled were not necessarily done so correctly. Because Gretchen had gone blind gradually, she could describe people and places to us, veto certain hypotheses, and describe scenes that she remembered from childhood. She’d seen the oldest photos when she was small, and remembered when most of the rest had been taken. This was usually helpful, but often not; sometimes she would insist that something was some specific way when we could plainly see it wasn’t. She got prickly having her memories challenged.

Gretchen tensed around me and Liv. She took offense. I think she was one of those women who interacts more easily with men.

Or at least, more easily with Nick. She was tense with her husband too.

In one of the baby pictures, Gretchen’s little-girl dress reminded me of something I’d worn when I was little. That’s all. I said to her, “I had a baby dress like this. The plaid one.” I said it in a nice voice, and in a complimentary way. Gretchen asked, “What dress?” which was a reasonable question, except that the way she asked it was like a wild animal sniffing the air. She was looking for a fight immediately. “I didn’t have a plaid dress.”

“It looks like a Christmas picture,” I described, trying to be helpful. “You’re sitting on a couch, holding an ornament, I think. You’re maybe… two?”

Gretchen pressed her lips together, then squeezed out the words: “I remember that. I wore a plain purple dress. No pattern. It was my favorite.”

Liv kicked my ankle. She’s the kind of person to always defend the right to speak one’s mind, except around Gretchen. She wanted to please her.

“There must be an unpatterned dress photo as well. We’ll let you know when we find it,” Nick said. I didn’t think there was one, really, but there could have been, I guess.

Gretchen’s breathing got hard and fast.

“I know the photograph,” she insisted. I shrank down and Gretchen stood over me, taller in that way that angry people appear to grow.

The silence stretched on until it was taut. At breaking point, Gretchen abruptly left the room.

Liv went after her. I busied myself neatening a stack of photos that was only slightly askew.

“She didn’t mean anything by it, Polly,” Nick said.

“I know,” I said curtly.

“It must be frustrating to have one’s only visual memories be so old,” he explained, as if I didn’t understand that.

“Everyone’s memories are vulnerable that way,” I said. “You don’t have to be blind to remember things wrong and get really freaked out about it.”

“I don’t think you’re being charitable, Polly,” he said.

My head snapped up, indignant. I hadn’t heard a tone like that since my fifth-grade teacher.

I opened my mouth to tell him off, but his ridiculous sternness cracked me up instead. I laughed at him. I opened my mouth and laughed out loud.

Now his head snapped up. He leaned back, surprised.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Would he stand up and leave?

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “Sorry.” And he laughed too.

Gretchen’s house was full of souvenirs. Not postcards or plates or thimbles, but carved wooden sculptures and thick-daubed paintings. Maybe they were Harry’s, or maybe Gretchen got something out of touching them, feeling the brushstrokes. My first time among all those touchstones of adventure and achievement I’d felt intimidated, but they became familiar. There was an Asian ceramic dog by the front door. By my third visit I was ready to scratch his ears and bring him a biscuit.

Gretchen sat down with us the next time we went over.

“I want to apologize for my… possessiveness sometimes about the photographs. You’re being my eyes for me and it’s just… difficult sometimes to give up what I remember seeing. I want to thank you for all the work you’re putting into it. I knew the photos were in a state, but I didn’t realize how bad of one. I only thought: All I need is a pair of eyes.” She pushed her eyebrows together. I could tell how hard that was for her to say. “I’m sorry it’s turned out to be so difficult.”

Liv said, “They must be very special memories for you…”

Gretchen teared up. “It was magical, those youngest years. Not just seeing-though seeing was good, of course-but it was what I saw! Mother had such a way of creating moments. She lived a life then that was… exotic and exhilarating… hotels and airplanes… I tagged along. Did you see the picture? At the Prater? On the horse?”

There had been several photos on horses, but Nick knew the one she meant. “The white one?” he suggested.

“Yes! It was a carousel made of living horses. I’ve always remembered that, though I didn’t learn it was the Prater in Vienna until much later. I just remember the child’s view of things. I remember sitting on the back of a white horse, and it wasn’t carved or painted, it was real.” She sighed ecstatically.

A bird flew suddenly past her face, coming to cling to the edge of her cup. It was steel blue, and she swatted at it. Her husband, Harry, came softly behind it, coaxing it with clicks and twitters. It hopped onto his finger and he took it back upstairs.

I found one of the Whipple’s pretty compasses in Liv’s room. Not a historic one, one of the kid ones from the activity corner. It wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t hers either.

She had it out on her desk like she wasn’t ashamed.

I didn’t say anything.

We had on our black academic “gowns” for dinner at one of Magdalene’s daily “formal halls”: a fancy meal, candles and everything, for cheap. You wait for the Fellows at the High Table to sit, and then the gong goes, and then the grace in Latin. I had to shush Liv sometimes to make her stop giggling. Then we would get to eat. There’s a set menu of multiple courses served by waiters. There’s wine.

We usually got tipsy at these things. This was one of those conversations. We hung out afterward, on the steps by the water in front of her building. Magdalene is one of the few colleges on the river. “Why does she care so much?” I said.

“Mmmm?” Liv asked.

“Gretchen,” I said. “Why does it matter so much to her that she had this posh childhood?”

“Do you really not get it?” Liv said this like I was stupid to have to ask. “Money’s important. What, are you so rich you don’t need to care?”

“I’m not rich.”

“Well, I was, once. My dad made four million dollars at a dot-com startup. That’s the truth. Then we lost it all when the stock tanked. Believe me, it matters.”

I gaped. “Where does four million dollars go?” I asked, trying to imagine a number that big, and how something that big could just disappear. You’d need something on the scale of a meteor and total climate change. That kind of money is at least as big as a dinosaur.

“It was the whole Silicon Valley bubble. My dad’s an engineer, and his company got bought by Racer. It was this huge deal. We moved up to Livermore, which is this mini wine country-no way near Napa or even Sonoma, but cute, and lots of new housing. We had a view of grapes through huge windows. There were Internet plugs in, like, every room. And we got it on a mortgage, not because we needed one, but because the rate on the mortgage cost us less than what we were making by keeping the money in stock. That was the thing to do. Everybody did it.

“Then, when NASDAQ crashed, we needed to sell but no one was in a position to buy. Our neighbors were trying to sell too. Half the houses hadn’t gotten curtains and blinds yet, and now no one could afford it. We could all see each other. You had to find a corner to get dressed in. And we could all see down into each other’s backyards, and half of them were still churned-up dirt. People couldn’t afford to do the landscaping.

“So we eventually sold, for less than we’d bought. Dad got another job. We moved into an apartment, an okay apartment. I mean, it wasn’t a house, but it was one of those nice places with cookies and newspapers in the pool house. So it was okay. But it wasn’t special. You remember the special. It felt good to live in a house like that. It felt like… it felt like you deserved it. I know that’s not true, but that’s how it felt. Just having it felt like you were the kind of person who was supposed to have it. That feeling is the kind of thing you hold on to.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Then my parents got divorced, and that sucked. I mean, that really sucked. So I remember not just the big house, and the Internet plugs, and that there had been this fountain, an actual fountain, in our yard. I remember that we were together there.”

I made a mental note to get friends tipsy more often.

She kept talking. “Holy crap, Nick is so hot. He never comes to these dinners. I saw him earlier today and asked if he was coming. He was busy or something.” I felt embarrassed, like I always did when she talked about Nick. She went on, “He was with his thesis supervisor. They were having this deep conversation. It just made me crack up, how serious they were. Richard-that’s his supervisor; he’s a Fellow here-is nice, but so weird. I heard that he’s been celibate,” she whispered that part, “between wives. Can you believe that? It’s been, like, ten years or something. He’s getting married again at the end of term.”

“Why would you even know that?” I asked, meaning the celibacy.

She laughed. “It’s a religious thing. It’s okay to know if someone’s religious. Can I help it if his religion is obsessed with sex?”

Just then-this freaked me out a little-he walked by. Being a Fellow, he’d eaten at the High Table at dinner. We’d stood up, as required, when he’d walked in. We ignored him now. I hoped he didn’t notice us. He didn’t stop to look or anything, but he might have heard us. I was mortified.

When he had passed, Liv leaned over and moaned, “Oh, Richard!”

“Why is it any of your business who has sex and who doesn’t?” I was peeved.

She retorted, “What do you care?”

Then she pretended to be from France to a couple of guys. It was weird but pretty funny too. Her accent was terrible. At first I kind of distanced myself, but at last she cracked me up. She did a little victory dance. I clapped and, just like that, everything was right between us again.

I thought about Liv’s lost money the next time I looked at Gretchen’s photos.

The best of them were those from the Brussels Expo in 1958. This is something I didn’t know about, but apparently it was a big deal at the time.

Gretchen told us about it. Liv used Gretchen’s computer upstairs to Google for specifics about various scenes, so she could label them properly in the spreadsheet. There was the Atomium, a massive building in the shape of an iron molecule. There were pavilions representing different countries.

We laid all the Brussels pictures out on the table at once. The nanny was blond and so always obvious. Until we could for sure call one sister Linda and one Ginny, we called them “side part” and “widow’s peak.”

The two sisters had laughed together in front of an African hut in the Belgian Congo sector.

Side part, the nanny, and Gretchen posed in front of a pagoda in the Thai pavilion.

Three of them stood in front of a lawn dotted with white flowers, part of the German pavilion. “Ginny took that,” Gretchen told us. “She tripped backing up to get a second shot, and twisted her ankle. I stayed with her at the motel the second day.” But that itself didn’t solve the problem of telling the sisters apart, because the Linda in that photo had turned her head. She was facing away, and blurry from motion.

I noticed that there were four photos of “widow’s peak” and six photos of the nanny, each alone. Maybe that meant that those two went to the Exhibition the next day, and just took photos of each other. Gretchen agreed that that sounded plausible. That made Ginny the one with the side part.

This was confirmed by Gretchen’s recollection of dinner atop the Atomium. In one picture, all four of them sat with a man at a table with an incredible view. They’d convinced the man to buy them dinner. “They all flirted with him,” she said. “The food was too fancy for me,” she added.

Then, “Ginny accidentally dropped a glass! I gave her mine. A waiter took the photo for us.”

Sure enough, there in the photo, the sister with the side part had a shot glass in front of her while the other adults all had wineglasses. Gretchen didn’t seem to have any idea what it was; I think she thought it was just some kind of kiddie cup. It must have been the only child-sized glass the restaurant had on hand.

So that was Linda (widow’s peak) and Ginny (side part) solved! Liv whooped. She said we should celebrate.

She wanted us to go out for shots ourselves. She tugged on Nick’s sleeve, past the point where it would have been charming, but he said he couldn’t go. He had something else to do. So then it was just the two of us, but I didn’t feel like drinking. I had a book to read for class.

“Aw, come on!” she said.

I resisted. It went back and forth like that as we walked toward town.

“This is why I don’t always tell you stuff,” she finally exploded. “You can be so prissy.”

“What?”

“Like about Gretchen’s computer. That really hurt my feelings.”

Gretchen didn’t want the photos leaving her house, so Liv used her computer upstairs to do research about the Expo. When Liv later tried to tell me stuff she’d read in Gretchen’s email, I’d told her I didn’t want to hear it.

I rubbed my forehead. “I never meant to hurt your feelings.”

“The whole reason I tried to tell you about the emails is because what was in them is relevant. If Gretchen isn’t going to tell us everything, then we have to look for it. Right?”

“I don’t get it.”

She sighed. “Well, can I tell you now?”

She stopped to face me dead in the middle of a little bridge across a mud patch on Sheep’s Green. I couldn’t get around her. “Fine,” I said.

“Someone else is writing about Linda Paul.”

“Really?” I guess Linda Paul’s general importance wasn’t all in Gretchen’s head.

“She’s a real writer too. She said she already had the okay from her publisher. I think she thought Gretchen would be flattered. Oh, and she asked if Gretchen has any photographs she’s willing to share. Ha!”

“Wow,” I said.

“She’s emailed, like, three times. Gretchen has never answered. But it was about when the first one came that she hired me. That explains some of her moodiness, don’t you think? The pressure?”

“Maybe.”

“Knowing stuff like that helps me help Gretchen, so it’s all good. Right?”

“Sure.”

We’d hit The Mill pub. “So you want to have a shot or what?”

Before Cambridge I hadn’t even heard of Linda Paul, and here people were vying to write about her. It was crazy. But having looked through the photos, and getting a sense of Linda and Ginny’s spirit and fun, it sort of made sense why Gretchen idealized those early years so much…

I shook my head to clear it. Liv asked, “Are you okay?”

I was. “I was just remembering my dad,” I said. When I was little, we used to walk to the bakery together on Saturday mornings. People used to wave at us and he’d wave back. That was as amazing to me as Gretchen’s carousel of living horses, and Atomium, and purple Christmas dress.

“Is he, like, dead?” Liv asked. I was shocked that she said that, because he wasn’t dead. Why would she think he was dead?

But I said, “Yes.” It was easier.

Liv never did get to celebrate with shots the way she wanted, but Gretchen marked our finding the distinction between Linda and Ginny by having us three over for dinner. She had been disappointed at first to learn that many of the best photos were of Ginny, not Linda. Ginny had really liked the camera. But anyway, Gretchen could get on with things now, and that was worth throwing a little party.

I brought wine. I had no ulterior motive here except hospitality, but I did wonder what effect it might have on Gretchen, already inclined to reminisce.

Then, with dessert, Harry poured us port. I was going to get loopy, no doubt about it.

Gretchen rambled about her childhood again. She asked Nick to read aloud a poem her mother had treasured. He blushed like a girl.

The poem had been found with the photos. It had obviously been important to someone. There was a clipping of it, from a newspaper, and several handwritten transcriptions. First Gretchen had thought that her mother had written it, but it was credited in the newspaper to “A. Simms.” Then she’d decided that it must have been her mother who cut it out and copied it. Either way, she was excited about sharing something that had been important to the woman.

Nick demurred. He really didn’t want to read it. Liv put her hand on his shoulder and shrilled, “Aw, Nick, you’ve got to!”

“Nick, it’s okay…” I said, meaning he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. I think he really was embarrassed. But Liv is louder than I am. I don’t know if she wanted him to do it because she liked him a little off-kilter and embarrassed, or if she just wanted to make him do what Gretchen wanted. Either way, I said, “Liv, Nick can decide for himself what he wants to do.” Liv glared at me.

To keep the peace, Nick stood and read aloud:

Liv clapped, which embarrassed him even more.

“It reminded her of her commitment to me,” Gretchen rhapsodized. “It wasn’t a popular choice for her to even have me, never mind give up everything for me. But she did. And she never regretted it.

“When I was three and a half, she made a decision,” Gretchen explained. “She made a sacrifice of her glamorous life to devote herself to my care. It was-sometimes I think it was too much. She left behind so much!” But Gretchen didn’t sound unhappy about it; she sounded proud to have been worth it. “The trips stopped. The handsome visitors, the cocktail parties. It all just… the tap ran dry.” She blinked and smiled. “From then on she mothered me. The nanny was dismissed.” She described this with a clipped voice, like the existence of the nanny was something on a par with rats in the house, something to be cleared up and ashamed of, something invited by bad habits. “She resolved to fully be my mother and she did it.” She drained her glass. “Sometimes I feel like my life has a dividing line-the life before, where I lived in her wake, sailing through a glorious world, and the life after, where I lived in her arms, thoroughly ordinary.” She seemed equally enamored of both.

I tried to change the subject; Gretchen ignored me. She said loudly, nearly crowed, “She gave up writing completely. She told me that I would be her story and she would write me. Isn’t that a much nicer way of saying ‘mothering is a full-time job’?”

Trying to recover from embarrassment, Nick had bent himself over the transcription. He ran his fingertip over the words. Then he got up and went to the library. He returned with a few key photos, and turned them upside down on the dinner table.

The loopy, flourishy writing that had hand-copied the poem was also on the backs of several of the older photos. They were labeled “Mother” and “Father,” so that writer would be Ginny or Linda.

But the newer photos, the color ones of a teenaged Gretchen, had a smaller, more careful style of writing on their backs. This was strong, though not certain, evidence that this writer was her mother. It would make sense for her to label the photos she took of her daughter’s friends. That would make the first writer Ginny. I was beginning to like Ginny. She had her mouth open in several of the pictures, laughing out loud. And it was she who had copied the poem. I knew Gretchen would be disappointed again. Liv put out her hand to stop Nick, but he told Gretchen anyway.

She took it better than I expected. “All right, then, the poem wasn’t Linda’s. So I had an aunt who liked pears. Who doesn’t?” The words were flippant, but her voice was tight.

Pears. Picasso’s violins. The female figure.

As if reading my mind, Gretchen defended her aunt’s heterosexuality. “You don’t know Gin. Love affairs with inappropriate men were her specialty. She died in a boating accident on the Mediterranean when I was seven. Mother told me that she’d been with a married man.” She whispered those last two words in an exaggeration of scandal.

Nick ducked his head. Liv would say that he was a prude. Gretchen’s memories of her mother were full of sexual conversations.

Still reminiscing, she told us about the Brussels Motel Expo, a temporary building designed only to last through the fair. They’d stayed in a cheap-looking room that was identical to all the others. The layout of the building was also repeated without variation throughout. Gretchen said that, one evening, they walked into the wrong room, interrupting a couple having sex. I winced, embarrassed for the three-year-old walking in on sex, and embarrassed for the fifty-year-old telling us about it. The man threw a shoe at them. Linda and Ginny and the nanny all laughed, and Gretchen says she laughed too, because they did. She laughed telling it.

Nick interrupted. “Do you really remember that, or did your mother tell it to you?” He shouldn’t have used the word “really.”

She bristled and insisted that she knows she remembers it, because she sees it in her mind. She says the man had a hairy chest, and that the shoe he threw was pointy in the heel and actually could have hurt one of them. But it hadn’t, and they’d laughed.

Harry tried to break the tension then by talking about his birds. Gretchen overrode him. He looked pretty beaten down, so I said, “May I see them?”

His face widened, I swear. It had to, to fit a smile that big.

The bird room was at the top of the house, a converted attic. The fluffy Norwiches chirped and flitted in their cages when we entered. Maybe they were anxious about strangers, or happy to see Harry. It was hard to tell the difference.

Harry greeted them as individuals, recounting their pedigrees and awards. They were all linked. He narrated every connecting thread: That one sired that one; that one mated with that one. The relationships made a web of the room. It was like being inside a mathematician’s brain.

The three of us walked home. We were tipsy and happy. Nick was between me and Liv, and we had our arms linked with his.

Liv teased him about the poem he’d been made to read at dinner, and she joked about his perfect life. “My life’s not really perfect,” he said. “But I know I’ve been lucky.”

And she said “Lucky!” to emphasize the understatement.

He said she should talk to his sister about luck. She hated British weather and wearing a school uniform. She read teenage novels set in America.

Normally you’d hit Peterhouse first, but Nick took us up Queen’s Road to drop Liv off at Magdalene.

Then he and I walked through town, past St. John’s and Trinity. At Trinity Lane, Nick grabbed my hand and pulled me into a shadowy corner next to a cobbled wall. His mouth had the tang of port still in it. We kissed like mad.

That’s not the time I had to push him away. That time I was as into it as he was. It’s not like we were in private or anything. It’s not like anything else could happen there.

Someone came around the corner and Nick jumped back about two feet. “Sorry,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he was apologizing to them or to me.

“I’d forgotten where I was for a moment,” he explained, looking down. “They took me by surprise.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

He didn’t kiss me again, but he held my hand. “I really like you,” he said earnestly. Everything flip-flopped: It wasn’t an insult that he’d jumped; it was a compliment that he’d been so carried away that he’d kissed me in public in the first place.

“Do you know,” he said as we moved on down King’s Parade, “I saw you once before. Before we met at Magdalene. It was at the Penrose lecture. I sat behind you.”

I remember that lecture. It was soon after I’d arrived in Cambridge. Even though I’m not up on theoretical mathematics, I’d attended because Penrose is famous. I’d expected his presentation to be polished and intimidating. But he used an overhead projector, like one of my old grade school teachers, instead of a laptop and PowerPoint. He’d made the illustrations himself, in a dozen different colors of magic marker, with underlines and squiggles, and dashes radiating out around the most important words. Each sheet was like the cover of a thirteen-year-old girl’s notebook. A thirteen-year-old who’s really, really good at math.

“You had a stack of library books in front of you. Some Muriel Sparks and Hilary Mantels, and then, on top and out of place, one of the Famous Five books. I thought you were charming.”

I felt ridiculous and foreign. I’d stuffed myself with British authors when I first arrived, mostly authors my mom used to read, right down to a children’s book on top. I didn’t think anyone would have noticed my silly burst of Anglophilia. “I just went kind of crazy with Englishness when I got here.”

“It was sweet,” he assured me. Our arms swung together as we walked. “Do you like it here?”

I stopped and looked around. I didn’t know. “I’m having a good time,” I said. The thumping in my chest sped up.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He squeezed my hand.

I unhooked from him and pointed with the hand he’d held. I could have used my other hand, but I didn’t. “Oh! Look!” Fitzbillies had put new cakes on display. We crossed the street and stood in front of the window, arms touching. There was one with a pirate ship on top of a delicate icing sea. There were little white tips on the blue waves, to show how wild the water was.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said, still pointing. “That’s why I like science. It’s bigger than me. Like the ocean is bigger than a ship. A ship isn’t trying to control the ocean, or make the ocean. A ship is just trying to get along with the ocean, and figure it out. If you get to know the way the ocean works well enough, you can ride it. You can, like, go for this amazing ride…” I put my hand over my mouth. Sometimes I blather.

“That’s why I like science too,” he said. He didn’t think what I’d said was weird. He didn’t think it was profound or impressive or intimidating either. It was just ordinary conversation. It could happen every day.

“I love it here,” I said, meaning it.

He put his arm around my shoulders. I let myself lean a little.

“So do I,” he said.

That’s not the time I had to push him away either. He walked me the rest of the way home and we pecked good night in front of St. Peter’s Terrace.

Telling Linda from Ginny wasn’t quite the job done. There were still the rest of the pictures to sort out, which was now much easier work but even so required thoroughness and effort.

“Is there anything after she turned four?” I asked Liv. She grabbed a small pile and handed it to me. These were mostly photos from puberty onward. Gretchen had the typical adolescent awkwardness and animation, and I could tell her sight had dimmed considerably. The fashions were laughable. The house behind her looked homey and plain. She looked happy. The photos usually had friends in them, boys and girls matching her age.

“I guess her mom was less interested in being the center of attention once their lifestyle changed,” I said. Previously, Linda had put herself into most of the photos. In these she was always behind the camera.

“That’s just age plus vanity,” said Nick. “The last time I have a photo of my mum and me together I’m in a chorister’s robe.”

“Are there any of her dad?” Liv asked.

“He’s the one in the white dinner jacket with a martini glass in his hand.” Gretchen was suddenly there. She didn’t need to tap a cane in her own home. Liv stammered, embarrassed to have been caught prying.

Gretchen overrode her. “Do you have the photo to hand?” She leaned against the doorframe while Nick fished it out. “Jim” was written on the back. “He was my mother’s accountant. They remained good friends. They were never really lovers. Well, of course they were, but I mean in the social sense. They were never a couple. He was kind to me. He always had a toy or something in his briefcase for me, I remember that.” She smiled. This seemed a genuinely pleasant memory to her; there was nothing of the deprived or abandoned about it. “Their friendship ran its course. The only thing she’d ever really been devoted to utterly was me.”

“Do you want us to keep this one out, to frame it?” Liv asked.

“He’s not a ‘daddy’ to me, dear. He was just a friend of Mother’s. I don’t need to have him on display.” She moved to face the window. I think she could see strong contrasts-light and shadow. “Nick, do you have the one on the island to hand? There are palm fronds and such. It’s Mother, Aunt Ginny, and me. We were all laughing. I remember when that was taken. Mother’s Pekingese had run off with a cutlet from the kitchen and was wrestling it on the carpet. We all laughed instead of stopping him. We spoiled that thing rotten.”

Nick found it. “I could scan this and have it blown up for you. It would be really nice in eight-by-ten.” He was gallant at heart, and earnest and courteous.

“Thank you, Nick, I’d like that,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. Good boy, I added in my head, as if she were scratching him behind the ears too. She was so cold to me and Liv, but with Nick… Sometimes what he inspired in others made me laugh.

If he hadn’t been so good with people, I wouldn’t have ended up in this position. I would have sidestepped the whole thing. But everything he did was so spotless in its motivation that going along with him always seemed the right thing to do.

Since the night we’d kissed on the way home, Nick hadn’t changed his demeanor toward me. He was, as ever, courteous and attentive, but there was no new possessiveness or pushiness. I would have bolted at the first sign of it.

The only outward show of his interest was the way he looked at me. But he’d looked at me that way for as long as I had known him.

When my old boyfriend Jeremy and I had started having sex, when I was sixteen, the most awkward part had been finding where to do it. I was too tall to manage in his car. Our parents were all home in the evenings. We had siblings with varying schedules in and out of our houses after school. My cousin Rain had solved the problem by letting us use her house when her dad was away on business. Rain didn’t have a mom, and her dad traveled a lot. She was in college and spent a lot of time at her boyfriend’s anyway. So that gave us the place to ourselves on some afternoons or weekends-whatever we could arrange around my cello lessons and Jeremy’s soccer.

I refused to do it in Uncle Joe’s bed or Rain’s bed; that would just have been gross. So we’d put a sheet on the couch in the TV room. We had to bring our own sheet. This is what I mean about it being complicated.

The TV room was on the back side of the house, with the lumpy couch. The good couch was in the front room, but being there would have necessitated closing all the blinds, which would have looked suspicious. There was no air-conditioning, so when it was hot we had to be quiet because of open windows; all the windows had to be open for a cross breeze if you didn’t want to choke on the heat. We’d turn on the TV to further mask the sound; we’d have sex to cartoons or talk shows and sometimes we’d just crack up. It was all very cloak-and-dagger. And of course we used condoms. Preparing to do it was this huge effort of planning each time, which means sex, to me, had this incredible lead-up with logistics and scheduling and packing. I don’t think of it as improvisational.

So, unless he sent me an explicit invitation, Nick was going to take me by surprise.

It was daytime when we visited the Sedgwick. It wasn’t like a dinner date, or anything else self-conscious. The Sedgwick has dinosaurs and fossils and rocks. I like geology.

I flitted around the gem room, admiring the bright colors and natural sharp facets. I took off my jacket. He watched me. He leaned back on the red cushion of a window seat.

“You are gorgeous,” he said, and it wasn’t casual.

I was really pleased. I wasn’t thinking ahead. I did that duck-the-head-shyly thing, to show I was both modest and delighted.

“Come on,” Nick said, tugging my arm. He pulled me past the plesiosaur and iguanodon skeletons and unlocked a stairwell. He prodded the button to call the elevator. When the thing came it had one of those old iron grilles, which he shoved aside for entry. He pressed me against the back wall of the box and kissed me.

I didn’t see him again, even though he wasn’t yet gone. We avoided each other. Of course we did. I’d made an idiot of myself. He’d offered me something, and I’d acted like I wanted it, and then I’d gotten angry, and sick, and who does that? Who acts like that? Who’s going to kiss a girl he’s watched throw up, who’s going to want a girl who throws up over a kiss? I’d messed up everything. I’d messed up something good.

I think I did it to protect myself. Which is roundabout and stupid, but I think it’s what I was trying to do. I remember long ago thinking about Jeremy, “He means the whole world to me.” I meant that at the time, really meant it, and that was how big my world was: It was as big as the ten blocks between my house and his. You could have told me there was more, you could have drawn me maps and told me myths of a bigger world, or other worlds, or however you wanted to define whatever there was outside of that space, but the whole world as far as I could perceive it and touch it and cared about was the size it was. It had him and me in it, and my parents, who made a mess of things. And that-not him, or my parents or the mess, but really the size of my world-is why I’ve done everything I’ve done since, and why I came here, and why I pushed Nick away.

Cambridge is, in its way, another small town. But looking back to the start of the universe, and looking ahead to new ways to figure it out, is a wide world to me. Studying expands me, whereas sex had squeezed me to within a little pinpoint.

Jeremy had meant the whole world to me. I never want my world to be that small again.

Nick disappeared two days after I’d been sick in his office. So I continued to not see him, but this not seeing was worse. He really wasn’t there anymore.