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

than twenty-five years? More to the point, a man without a valid driver’s license?

—Details, smiled Szilard. —Would you rather I asked your wife? I believe she has a vehicle too.

—So it’s blackmail now?

—I prefer to call it a friendly negotiation. The bus doesn’t go where I need to go and I can’t afford a taxi, I really can’t. I have twenty-three dollars that has to last me forever. In change.

Ben raised an eyebrow.

—It was a parking meter. It was already broken, I just—you know. Made an appropriation.

—How do I know you won’t make an appropriation of my truck?

—Please, said Szilard. —Do I look like a Grand Theft Auto?

Ben sized him up, a frumpy, rumpled man in striped pajamas, blinking in the sunlight on the top step.

—OK, I admit, said Ben. —Not so much.

—There are things I have to deal with, said Szilard. —Look at it this way: the sooner I get myself established, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair.

—A compelling argument, said Ben. —OK. You’ll have to drop me off and pick me up at work though. Get your clothes on quickly. I’m already late.

Ann was excited to have Szilard in the house, his unkempt busy presence intrusive, bombastic, but with a vector, a flurry of moving purpose. Up until now, she realized, before this time, there had been a lack: there had been a good life, a pleasant life, what she recognized and acknowledged was relatively speaking an outright gift of a life, but always without a slope.

Now she was running uphill, felt herself accelerating to the top, her soles angry against the ground and her knees jarred by the shocks.

—Stop! said Ben, as Szilard began to reverse out of the driveway and a cement truck rumbled past.

Szilard braked so hard that Ben felt his neck strain.

—Jesus Christ!

—There’s something wrong here! cried Szilard, and sat shaken and dumbfounded at the wheel. —I barely touched it!

—Power brakes, said Ben, running his hand through his hair and clicking the seatbelt into place. —Power steering. You’re not familiar with that.

—Certainly not!

—Right, I forgot. Being from the 1940s and all.

Szilard shook his head at the dashboard, perplexed, and leaned in close to squint at the digital readout on the odometer.

—OK, said Ben. No point in quibbling. —It’ll take some getting used to. Think of it this way: a hair trigger.

—But it’s dangerous! protested Szilard. —It’s a death trap!

—Just ease up on the clutch and touch the gas gently. Barely any pressure there. Easy does it.

—How people aren’t careening all over the road, grumbled Szilard, as they jerked backward out the driveway, seizing and shivering.

—I gotta tell you, said Ben. —So far your skills do not impress.

Einstein believed that Szilard overestimated the role of reason in human affairs. Admittedly Szilard felt, with Plato, that the world should be ruled by scientists, philosophers and other men of intellect—men, in fact, who closely resembled himself. If only human beings could marshal their rationality, policy changes could be made; structures and systems could be adjusted; a new social compact could be agreed upon and signed by all interested parties.

In life, Fermi was irritated and annoyed by Szilard. Chiefly an experimental physicist, he came to dislike working with Szilard because of the latter’s exceptional laziness when it came to the nitty-gritty of the experiments. But he had to concede Szilard’s genius, and made at least one speech in which he referred to Szilard as “extremely brilliant.”

Szilard liked Fermi but did not like Oppenheimer, finding his politics acceptable but his character unpleasant. Even those who worshipped Oppenheimer—and they were many—admitted he was impatient and sometimes sharp-tongued; Szilard’s bad manners took a more languorous form. He routinely slept through colleagues’ lectures sitting in the front row, snoring loudly and waking up only to confront them with painful and often unanswerable questions.

Oppenheimer and Fermi liked each other, Oppenheimer remembering Fermi after his death with fondness.

About Szilard, it is difficult to say exactly what Oppenheimer thought. During the war, Szilard’s insistent petitioning against the use of the bomb was certainly an irritation.

Jeff took her aside when she got in and cleared his throat several times. Then he confessed that on his Coworker Feedback Form he had mentioned her recent lateness problem.

—I wouldn’t have except you didn’t seem to like want to have a meaningful dialogue on the issue, he said.

—OK, she said. —Don’t worry about it.

—I just don’t want it to be awkward or whatever, so I hadda let you know.

—OK. Thanks Jeff.

—But it’s totally not personal.

—I understand.

—But so are you—

—Yes? What?

—Are you like gonna be keeping the more, like regular hours again? See it’s that I just get tied up and then there’s like people waiting, and the phones. So then I get totally stressed, which besides the whole, you know, like spiritual drain is harmful to my GI tract, because you know I had all that stuff with my colon, the bad high colonic and the whole thing with the litigation? Plus it gives me these headaches that are almost like migraines. Borderline migraines actually.

—I’m so sorry to hear that.

—Stress can also cause thinning hair. My brother, you know, who’s the commodities broker? He’s got like not a single hair on his head. And here’s a guy that practically had a Jewfro when he got out of college.

—OK Jeff.

Not long ago she would have been horrified at the evidence of her laxity, the self-indulgence it laid bare. For the first time she was not toeing the line, was not upholding her end of a bargain. She had always been a good soldier.

And there was a nice flight in it, it turned out, a light swoop of clenching, smug and giddy joy. Things were moving upward, over and over.

He knew there was a place for reassurance: but what was that place? On the one hand there is loyalty and faith, on the other skepticism, rigor, even common sense. In choosing to stand beside his wife in what looked like a grand delusion he was opting for the former.

Finally, though