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

regularly emitted an ear-splitting screech.) When, after the war, he switched from physics to molecular biology, he invented the chemostat, which is still used today in microbiology, and was the first to theorize what is now known as “negative feedback regulation of enzyme activity,” for which someone else later received the Nobel Prize. He studied sperm preservation and promoted research that would eventually lead to the discovery of the birth-control pill.

And it was Szilard who first suggested—to Nikita Khrushchev, in fact—a nuclear telephone hotline between the president of the United States and the premier of the Soviet Union.

He took out numerous patents including one for low-fat cheese, an early “lite” food product.

Szilard was perennially broke and perennially alone until quite late in life. After two decades of friendship, in 1951 he finally married his longtime penpal and confidante Trude Weiss. He was secretive about this and when belatedly told of the marriage, a colleague at Columbia inquired with genuine curiosity, —Who would marry Szilard? It must have something to do with taxes.

Excited, grasping the newspaper tightly, she left the doves clucking and walking in circles. When she got to her desk at work she clipped the story and called the police department to find out whether the fat man claiming to be Leo Szilard was still in custody. They told her no charges had been pressed and the man had been released, only to turn his attention to the FBI field office in Albuquerque, where he had also demanded to be fingerprinted.

The FBI had refused to accede to his request and had released him on his own recognizance.

For the first time, hanging up the phone, she felt practical, hard-nosed, not adrift but detail-bound and equal to difficult tasks. Recalling that she had found Ben in the phonebook she looked up Detectives, see Investigations, which yielded a listing billing itself as Complete Investigative Services, Professional Expedient Confidential, Criminal Defense Personal Injury Child Custody Missing Persons Pre-Marital & Background Checks.

She called to set up an appointment and then made several photocopies from a book.

The office of the so-called Investigative Services was not dark and strewn with ashtrays but brightly, blankly lit. There were posters of Hawaii on the walls and yellow and orange paper flowers in ceramic vases on the coffee table in the waiting room.

The receptionist noticed her looking at these.

—Vic one of the owners? He just like has a thing for Hawaii, it’s like a Magnum PI fixation or something.

On her way back to the library she drove to the mansion, where she parked her car beside Ben’s truck and walked down into the garden. He was planting passion flower vines at the base of the bronze horse statue, not without reluctance. He told her the pale tendrils of the vines, thin as threads with curling ends, would grow around the hooves and fetlocks and up the muscular legs. Quickly they would produce complex, delicate flowers of purple and white and hairy green fruits the size of pecans.

When he stood and pulled off his gloves by the fingertips, slapping off the dirt across the thigh of his workpants, she told him she felt lighter, loftier having suspended her disbelief. She told him she had been afraid of collapsing inward, but now she felt she was expanding outward, growing lighter, shedding weight.

—Your first thought will be that I’m psychotic, she said.

—I can’t wait.

They sat down on a rock ledge and she went on, with effort, —There are these scientists that are supposed to be dead.

—What? said Ben.

Before she answered she glanced up at the street, where a Volvo passed and a young blond girl with a smooth and perfect face looked out the window at her, bored.

—I saw them once in a bar, and now I’m looking for them.

In a greeting card store Ann browsed for a card for her older brother. It was his birthday. All over the cards was written I love you.

Ann did not select any of those cards. Her brother did not want a card that said I love you. People forget, thought Ann looking at the furry animals, the flowery flowers, that even love is only an idea. And the people that believe they hate ideas, the ones that claim no interest in the abstract, buy greeting cards and songs that say I love you by the billions. At once brimming with and devoid of meaning, I love you is a sacred cliché.

It cannot be assailed.

He liked being alone in the garden. He had long, warm stretches of solitude, broken only by the times when Lynn came and talked to him for too long, when he had to tell his assistants what to do or meet with Yoshi to go over designs. The assistants were mostly self-sufficient and Yoshi rarely needed him, so it was chiefly Lynn who was responsible for interrupting. Luckily she usually kept busy. When she was at loose ends his days could be burdensome.

And even though he resented the removal of Ann he also savored the fact that his daytime separation from her was complete and seamless. There was a neatness in the division between work and play, one he had to admit he did not mind. So it jarred him when her coworker Jeff from the library called him on the cell phone, intruding.

He barely knew Jeff. Jeff tended to wear a pinky ring, he recalled, of a small coiled snake with forked tongue protruding. It was this snake he remembered when he pushed the TALK button and heard the man’s voice. Vaguely he also saw carrot sticks in a freezer bag that Jeff had been carrying the first time they met, in the library’s parking lot. And he recalled Jeff’s checked shirt, which featured fake mother-of-pearl snaps, and the flaky dryness of Jeff’s lips.

—The thing is, said Jeff, —I was wondering if there was anything going on that I should know about. At, you know, home. I don’t mean it’s my business, obviously it’s not, I just mean in case