Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

at arm’s length. He said a few words to her, —Hello, my name’s Yoshi, and then: —How are you?

But then he shook his head in apology when she tried to make small talk. He knew quite a few English words, Ben said, but it was difficult for him to string them into a sentence.

So Ben took him by the arm and led him to an alcove where there was a table and chairs. They sat down, Yoshi pulled a small lined notepad and a pencil from the pocket of his jacket, and Ben and Yoshi began drawing for each other. They had worked out a code of stick figures, which performed actions such as arriving at the door to the house or talking to each other in symbols: !? * $ #. Ben understood them quickly, and pointed out their meanings.

Now, Yoshi wrote, Roger and Lynn wanted a fountain in the front yard of the mansion, and they had commissioned one from a prominent Western artist, to be cast in bronze. This was a word Yoshi knew. —Bronze, he said. He had seen the sketches for it, and he could replicate them. He drew swiftly and efficiently: a horse with front legs flailing the air and an Indian warrior on its back, in full ceremonial headdress.

The horse would be rearing in the center of the fountain, and water would come spurting from his mouth. His mane would be flying wildly. The Indian would wield a tomahawk.

Behind her chair Ann heard a woman gasp and turned, panic rising. But the woman was only looking at another woman’s raised left hand, which bore a diamond ring.

The woman with the ring, whose lips shone a peachy orange, said, —Yeah. Just Saturday. We were at Ten Thousand Waves actually.

—Really? A group tub?

—Yeah right. But seriously, he wants to go to lousy Maui!

She listened to them as the jarring sensation faded, replaced by safety, insulation. Privately she told herself: See? They are just the way they’ve always been. Nothing has happened.

These people, the ones I’ve never been able to stand, she thought, these people are the normal background noise of the world. They are a guarantee.

She thought: It is wrong but even not liking them, even not being able to stand them, all of a sudden I feel grateful.

On the way home, three glasses of wine later, she held Ben’s arm again, this time to steady herself. She had talked at length to an obstetrician who had his own country western band. They specialized in covers of Conway Twitty songs and played at weddings, baptisms and keg parties, he told her. But seldom bar mitzvahs.

She was proud of herself for talking to him.

—See? she said to Ben, one of her slippers falling off her foot, swiveling to scoop it up again with her toes. —I can do it!

Later, when he got into the shower to wash the cigar smoke from his hair, she left the house again and ran weaving down the street, arms wide and foolish, to lie on her back on the front lawn of a neighbor, hidden in a pocket of trees. The grass was already moist from the dew.

She gazed with blurred vision at a constellation of stars in the sky and thought: a drunk woman in a neighbor’s front yard. Inside they lie in bed or do whatever else they’re doing, and we don’t know each other at all.

One of the books she had read about Oppenheimer claimed that it was at the moment of the first atom splitting that material things gained final ascendancy and took the place of God.

—But maybe God was just revealed, she whispered to the constellations, as though she possessed special wisdom, spinning and wet in the grass.

Before the mushroom cloud there had always been a dream of setting the human spirit free, a dream that the spirit could be loosed from its gates of skin, become airborne, ecstatic and undone.

And here it was at last: the mind of man.

3

For several days after she saw the photographs of Oppenheimer and Fermi it was impossible for Ann to read about them. She woke up confused, woke up and was awake for less than a second one morning before she remembered her confusion. She had the nauseated, hollow feeling of someone struck by a loss.

She considered keeping everything simple, actually adopting the pose that everything was simple, adopting the pose and denying all evidence against it. It could work. Denial was a time-tried method, well-proven. She saw herself wearing blinders, willfully looking straight ahead. She wondered how long it took for horses who walked straight ahead without flinching under the whip to feel their front legs buckle beneath them.

Although he had a relaxed manner and gentle posture Ben was inwardly in a state of constant vigilance. He had noticed the change and was watchful, always on guard against the sky falling.

He knew, like most of those on whom the sky has already fallen, that if the sky was, in fact, to fall there would be nothing he could do to stop it.

The sky was large.

She was pushing her cart down the produce aisle, looking for mustard greens, when to her right she heard someone say indignantly—What in God’s name is this?

She turned in the direction of the voice and there he stood, dressed this time in a gray suit and his porkpie hat and holding up a bunch of arugula.

She had let her cart roll to a stop and stared at them openly but they did not notice, intent on the arugula. She was wracking her brain for what to say when Oppenheimer finally put down the arugula and picked up a Daikon radish.

With this she stepped awkwardly toward him. Her shyness rose around her in walls but she felt pressed forward anyway, audacious, an impostor in her own skin.

—Excuse me.

—Yes?

—I’m sorry for intruding, but can you please—I think I know you from somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Can you tell me your