ask.
While their daughters are in school, they also smoke marijuana. Pot makes Nina laugh.
Stretched out on Patsy’s living room floor, on the yellow synthetic rug that has a sour chemical smell, the window shades drawn, the room dark as night, she listens to a recording of wolfhowls. The howls—a whole series of them—are described by a narrator with a clipped British voice.
A howl of alarm, he says.
Never, never
—ha ha
—has she heard anything so funny.
A chorus of howls.
Ha ha ha
—she laughs.
Hoo hoo hoo
—she howls like the wolves.
Next to her on the floor, Patsy and Todd are making out.
This, too, makes her laugh.
She never speaks of it to Philip.
She never speaks of it to Dr. Mayer.
Too late, come to think of it now, amyl nitrite is used to treat heart disease.
Again, she tries to remember exactly what he says when he comes home.
I am a bit tired, I am going to lie down for a few minutes before dinner, or does he say something else entirely?
She is spinning lettuce in the kitchen. She half listens.
What a day. All those meetings! You should hear how some of those physicists talk and talk.
Before going upstairs, he kisses her on the cheek.
She touches her cheek. This cheek.
Philip! Dinner! she calls to him.
Philip, darling! Dinner!
Darling, dear, sweetheart, honey
—endearments she rarely uses.
Nor does Philip.
Ma chérie,
he says.
Ma chérie
is how he addresses her in the letters he writes when he returns to the States in the summer. He writes her two or three times a week—telephone calls are expensive and, anyway, she does not own a phone. She cannot always read the letters that are written in black ink on both sides of onionskin paper in his small cramped handwriting; the blue airmail envelopes are addressed to
Mlle. Nina Hoffman, 8 rue Sophie-Germain, Paris 14ème, France.
He looks pleased when she tells him where she lives. A sign, he says.
A sign of what? Nina asks.
You don’t know whom the street is named for?
Nina frowns. No. She does not.
Sophie Germain was a famous eighteenth-century mathematician who set out to prove Fermat’s last theorem by saying that
n
is equal to a particular prime number and since prime numbers have no divisors….
Nina lives in a
chambre de bonne
six flights up narrow airless dark stairs; she has to share the toilet and the tub with the other occupants on her floor.
A sign of my not having a whole lot of money, she interrupts Philip.
“One of the most important correspondences in the history of mathematics,” Philip tells his students, “was between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. It began on August 24, 1654, and its object was to find a solution for the problem of the unfinished game.
“Take two players and place equal bets on who will win the best-out-of-five coin tosses. The players start the game but are forced to stop before either player has won, leaving one of them ahead 2 to 1. The question Pascal and Fermat pose is how will the two players divide the pot?”
Patsy never has enough money and Nina lends her some. And for a while, after she and Philip leave Berkeley, Nina stays in touch. Then Patsy moves to Santa Fe, then to Phoenix; Nina’s last letter is returned with
Address Unknown
stamped on the envelope.
“The way Pascal and Fermat solved the problem was to look at all the possible ways the game might have turned out had the two players finished and tossed five times. And since one player—let’s call her Louise after my six year old daughter—is ahead 2 to 1 after the three tosses—tosses that must have yielded two heads and one tail—the remaining two throws can yield—”
H H H T T H T T—Philip writes it out on the blackboard.
“And since each of these four tosses is equally likely, we can proceed thus: in the first, H H, Louise wins; in the second and third, H T and T H, Louise still wins; in the fourth T T, the otherplayer wins. This means that in three of the four possible ways the tosses could have
While their daughters are in school, they also smoke marijuana. Pot makes Nina laugh.
Stretched out on Patsy’s living room floor, on the yellow synthetic rug that has a sour chemical smell, the window shades drawn, the room dark as night, she listens to a recording of wolfhowls. The howls—a whole series of them—are described by a narrator with a clipped British voice.
A howl of alarm, he says.
Never, never
—ha ha
—has she heard anything so funny.
A chorus of howls.
Ha ha ha
—she laughs.
Hoo hoo hoo
—she howls like the wolves.
Next to her on the floor, Patsy and Todd are making out.
This, too, makes her laugh.
She never speaks of it to Philip.
She never speaks of it to Dr. Mayer.
Too late, come to think of it now, amyl nitrite is used to treat heart disease.
Again, she tries to remember exactly what he says when he comes home.
I am a bit tired, I am going to lie down for a few minutes before dinner, or does he say something else entirely?
She is spinning lettuce in the kitchen. She half listens.
What a day. All those meetings! You should hear how some of those physicists talk and talk.
Before going upstairs, he kisses her on the cheek.
She touches her cheek. This cheek.
Philip! Dinner! she calls to him.
Philip, darling! Dinner!
Darling, dear, sweetheart, honey
—endearments she rarely uses.
Nor does Philip.
Ma chérie,
he says.
Ma chérie
is how he addresses her in the letters he writes when he returns to the States in the summer. He writes her two or three times a week—telephone calls are expensive and, anyway, she does not own a phone. She cannot always read the letters that are written in black ink on both sides of onionskin paper in his small cramped handwriting; the blue airmail envelopes are addressed to
Mlle. Nina Hoffman, 8 rue Sophie-Germain, Paris 14ème, France.
He looks pleased when she tells him where she lives. A sign, he says.
A sign of what? Nina asks.
You don’t know whom the street is named for?
Nina frowns. No. She does not.
Sophie Germain was a famous eighteenth-century mathematician who set out to prove Fermat’s last theorem by saying that
n
is equal to a particular prime number and since prime numbers have no divisors….
Nina lives in a
chambre de bonne
six flights up narrow airless dark stairs; she has to share the toilet and the tub with the other occupants on her floor.
A sign of my not having a whole lot of money, she interrupts Philip.
“One of the most important correspondences in the history of mathematics,” Philip tells his students, “was between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. It began on August 24, 1654, and its object was to find a solution for the problem of the unfinished game.
“Take two players and place equal bets on who will win the best-out-of-five coin tosses. The players start the game but are forced to stop before either player has won, leaving one of them ahead 2 to 1. The question Pascal and Fermat pose is how will the two players divide the pot?”
Patsy never has enough money and Nina lends her some. And for a while, after she and Philip leave Berkeley, Nina stays in touch. Then Patsy moves to Santa Fe, then to Phoenix; Nina’s last letter is returned with
Address Unknown
stamped on the envelope.
“The way Pascal and Fermat solved the problem was to look at all the possible ways the game might have turned out had the two players finished and tossed five times. And since one player—let’s call her Louise after my six year old daughter—is ahead 2 to 1 after the three tosses—tosses that must have yielded two heads and one tail—the remaining two throws can yield—”
H H H T T H T T—Philip writes it out on the blackboard.
“And since each of these four tosses is equally likely, we can proceed thus: in the first, H H, Louise wins; in the second and third, H T and T H, Louise still wins; in the fourth T T, the otherplayer wins. This means that in three of the four possible ways the tosses could have
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