Ordinary Matter, page 2
12 August 2003. 273 casualties.
13 August 2003. 189 casualties.
‘Emergency,’ she said. She dropped the pages and stood, raising her voice up into a night sky that refused to cool. ‘This is an emergency.’
Grand Canyon
1911 | Marie Curie | Chemistry
Prize motivation: ‘in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’
frank wagner, twenty-four years old, wearing a bow tie and tails, and with a face like a fish, needs to piss. His host, Mrs Andrew Carnegie, is not the person to ask for directions. The rules of the Curies’ visit have been laid out for him in very clear terms. Frank is not permitted to sit with the family at the table, having been employed only to carry their bags, keep the louses and the slobberers away, make sure the fans do not scare the ladies onto a ship back to France and, soon, to drive them west. After the war, Frank caught the IRT subway to Flatbush to work at a factory that made babbitt metal bearings. And now here he is: a man with a key in his pocket that unlocks a room at the Waldorf–Astoria.
The famous and remarkable Madame Curie has two daughters. It being their first time here, they are naive in American ways. Irene is twenty-three. Frank has hefted her bag, offered gum, listened to her attempts to speak English. A little reserved, but in that pleasing way where she lets others speak first, and for longer. Though not an intellectual himself, Frank has picked Irene as the genius of the two.
And then there’s Eve.
Just sixteen. Less terse than her mother, which is to be expected on account of her age. So confident! So lively! He is not a man impressed by fancy clothes, which is good, since Eve’s clothes are too big for her. (Hand-me-downs from her sister? How much money do scientists make?) The whole get-up – the coat, the hat, the dark brown heels with the chalky scuffs along the side – is not quite how American girls dress, but it’s only slightly off, like a bear with a mouse or a pie made of eggs. About the scuffs: perhaps at home in Paris, she is a hiker? An adventurer? More than once, Frank has dreamt of returning with her. To hold her purse under the Eiffel Tower, impressing her with his knowledge of many different cheeses. It is custom, she might say, for a man to kiss a girl beneath the cherry blossom. Would that be – how you say – ‘okay with you’, an American man in Paris? Yes, he would accept, if that is the custom.
Frank now raises a hand, and within seconds a servant comes round and directs him to the bathrooms. ‘Wow,’ he says, actually out loud, having never seen a bathroom like this. Luckily, the servant is gone – what sort of a man wants another man to hear him say wow? Frank licks a finger and drags it a short way down a wall that has a grand mirror at each end. The bathroom is shiny and high-ceilinged, like a church. He could pray in here, if he had to. If Mrs Carnegie burst in here demanding that he get on his knees and pray. Sure thing. He’ll do whatever these ladies ask of him.
Especially Eve. Frank unbuttons his fly and muses over the three conversations he’s managed with her thus far: that’s one per day and not bad for trying.
First conversation.
Eve: Mr Wagner, what are these?
Frank: Please. Call me Frank. That’s a chrysanthemum. You ain’t never seen one before?
Eve: Perhaps.
(Here, the young girl shrugged and held her shoulders for a brief moment right up near her ears. Her shoulders were not bare but covered in a filmy, silky fabric – Frank doesn’t know the names of things young ladies wear. Wow. That such a fabric could produce such an ache in him.)
Second conversation.
Frank: Hello.
Eve: Hello. Good morning.
Third conversation.
Eve: Oh. Mr Wagner.
Frank: Do you need—?
Eve: Thank you, no.
Frank: Well. Goodnight.
Eve: Goodnight.
He’s at the toilet pissing, taking in the gleam of the Carnegies’ white tiles. The first two conversations were fine. Light, airy, attractive words involving subject matter becoming of a young lady, like flowers. You could say it was perfect subject matter. Those French people and their flowers! His brother, Clyde, back home in Pines, Ohio, who didn’t know shit about sticks had been right. For once in his life!
But conversation number three smells a bit rotten, actually –yes, it’s like he’s left a bag of fruit somewhere and, remembering it, his brain goes oof! He used to get in trouble for this at school. Brain wandering, brain wandering – thinking of cold slices of pear, thinking of a girl’s fingers on his groin (brain hopeful), thinking of round buttocks on the hot sand of Coney Island (brain memory) – then the teacher is screeching at him and oof! Gotta control the brain wandering. A new goal, perhaps.
Still pissing now – something to be proud of? Duration of piss? Who knows? Most likely long duration of piss due to Mrs Carnegie serving onion soup, watermelon salad, champagne, iced tea, hot tea. Lots of liquid, period. Most regular days, he has two cups of coffee, tops, and a mouthful of radon water before bed. Frank is thinking of an alternative scenario about conversation number three, working it hard like raw dough. Is it possible that by putting her foot in the door of her hotel room at the Waldorf–Astoria the girl did not mean to wedge it shut against him? Alternative: she was actually trying to keep it open? Is it possible that the language barrier or French lady manners made it difficult for Eve to express her sixteen-year-old fledgling desire for him, Frank, one-time owner of three baby bear cubs?
Pissing done, buttoning up fly. All right, yes, the knock on her hotel room door had been late. And the chrysanthemum he popped into his top pocket on the way out of his own hotel room was a hasty, potentially unusual, addition. But what if Eve or her sister required something? That’s where his brain had gone to make him rise from his bed and pad down the hall. Maybe their bodies were stuck on continental time, and they would be awake and greet him warmly: Irene at his feet, easing off his shoes; and Eve near his head to touch him on the temples? Would he like a refreshment? At eleven o’clock at night? It is the French way, after all. Or perhaps they were hungry and didn’t know how to ask, and they were stuck, sobbing about Americans’ lack of hospitality. The girls spoke some English. Their French was incomprehensible to his ears, but the sound of it coming from Eve’s lips was like a vast and perfect galaxy. It was a bowl of strawberries and cream. Her voice was a light on a darkened stage coming up on his shabby upbringing in Pines, Ohio. He could learn French one day.
The soap – what is that scent? Frank rubs his hands vigorously under the spout and sniffs the tips of his fingers. He suffers from a skin condition that, thankfully, hasn’t flared up for two weeks. In the mirror, his cheeks are smooth and clear. He has a sudden but not unexplainable desire to masturbate, quickly, in the Carnegies’ bathroom. It’s the soap that does it. It’s the soap and remembering those buttocks on Coney Island when he was fifteen years old and visiting his cousin with the limp in New York City for the first time.
Eve.
Her name itself is a low and fruitful moan, punctuated by a bite of the lips. Vvvv.
Before things become too risky, he heads out through the bathroom door and back to the dining room. Frank would like to compliment Mrs Carnegie on the plushness of her towels. Would that be all right to say? Would the brittle and intimidating but also extraordinary Madame Curie pushing her beef and white beans around the plate overhear this and be invigorated by thoughts of, Oh, what an observant man! Observation being vital to the conduct of a scientist. Surely a trait she would appreciate in a son-in-law. Mr Curie is fifteen years gone, and Mr Carnegie almost two years. Mrs Carnegie is a generous host. She is plain and very, very rich. If Frank got lost in this enormous house, stayed here for some time, he doubts she would catch him for ages.
The dinner table seats a dozen. The women are safe with these people, though he cannot remember their names – a professor of something from upstate New York, a railway man, an oil man, a man in dynamite. Flowers in crystal vases have been placed along the length of the table, and tall candlesticks too. The other men seem much more comfortable in their suits than Frank feels. Standing in a room off to the side, he peers round but is careful not to stare at Eve too much. Instead he spreads his attention among the old, the boring, the hard of hearing, the dim, the ugly, the uninspiring. Eve leans into her sister – a bit wonky-looking, pale, pinch-nosed – and they touch their spoons together. The spoons are like two silver tongues. Even the ting! sets his mind alight. The girls giggle and do the spoon thing again. Must be a sister thing. Or French thing? Mrs Carnegie has served Horton’s ice cream in three different flavours. Eve darts a finger up, and this time Frank cannot look away. The cream from her bottom lip, it gets swept up into her small wet mouth. Those dark eyes and milky skin. The ice cream reminds Frank of the soap in the bathroom. He thinks of the girl’s finger, her tongue. In a week, they will go to the Grand Canyon, together.
They’re on the road, heading west. They stop in Greensboro, North Carolina; and Fayetteville, Arkansas; and Amarillo, Texas, where they get to a roadside kiosk and Eve asks Frank to buy her and her sister a Coca-Cola. He fishes two nickels from his pocket, thinking he’ll be able to watch her take a sip. Instead, they slide the bottles into bags at their feet, saying they’ll take them home. Do the French not have Coca-Cola? What else do these mysterious women go without?
There are seven of them in two automobiles: the three Curies, Professor Jansen from New York, Professor Harrington from Virginia, Mrs Meloney, the lady who organised this whole thing and brought the three women across the Atlantic, and Frank. They are driving at night, the cold desert air coming in through the windows and sending Frank’s brain tumbling back to a night in his old neighbourhood in Pines when he and his brother were out stealing copper pipes to sell to Mr Adquist and they’d heard a shout, then beyond the fence they saw two men lifting a girl into the cold, dark mouth of the woods. Frank made eye contact with her, briefly, the whole lot, but wordlessly he and his brother decided to clang the pipes around, speaking over each other about the copper, about how they’d better hurry before whoever these people were came home. All so they could pretend the maybe-bad thing with the girl wasn’t happening. Because who knows? Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe they got it wrong.
The next morning, the sky all splotched with colour like three flavours of Horton’s ice cream, the girls announce they’ve never ridden a horse, and Harrington says he’s heard about some Indian ponies on a reservation nearby. So they take a detour and communicate, quite easily, with the Indians about what they want them to do. The Indians stand the cranky creatures on a ridge high above the valley. Frank chugs on a warm Coca-Cola. The sun is doing damage to the follicles on his face. He has his sleeves rolled up, suspenders and a hat from Krugman’s in Brooklyn. His cousin took him there in his first week in New York City. He can feel his cheeks broiling, and the backs of his hands, all of it searing.
The girls have mounted the horses. Eve is a pale lily. The girls are waving. ‘Wave, everybody!’ someone says. So they wave. Let’s get this show on the road, Frank thinks. Madame is feeling unwell today and sits with Mrs Meloney, who pats her hand, in the back seat of the Packard Twin Six four-passenger Special Touring – a glorious automobile. Frank could cry sick and go and luxuriate in the back seat too under the soft top. The sun is hot. What are they trying to do? Ride to the Grand Canyon? What with the burning sun and the capillaries on his face – he inherited his ma’s capillaries – Frank is not his usual gentlemanly self. Let them ride ponies. He is, as his ma likes to say, pooped. Why does he need to be out here watching it? Isn’t there a nice cool well he can dunk his burning face into?
The girls’ pelvises are rocking backwards and forwards out there past the wells and the little houses painted yellow. What did Frank expect? His first Indian reservation? Teepees perhaps, and feathers. Instead the Indian kids are running around like nothing exciting is going on at all – do they not care about French people? Or about how many tonnes of pitchblende the girls’ mother sifted through to find smidgens of radium? It makes Frank think of the copper pipes he and Clyde stole to sell to Mr Adquist. In a similar vein to Madame’s efforts, when you think about it. You take a material from deep underground, you move it around, or sift through it, or drive up to the Adquist place in Clyde’s truck and honk and Mr Adquist comes out in his dressing-gown, holding a mug of beer for them to share before he sorts through the lengths of copper. That kind of thing.
The girl in the woods. Well, she’d probably been fine. The most likely scenario – off the top of his head – was that it had been Halloween, the screams being part of it. That she had known those boys carrying her away, two limbs each. Yes, that was it. Nothing bad whatsoever was happening out beyond the rows of dahlias and the bricks stacked ten high to stop the crows from getting to the chicken coop. For a while he wondered if the girl – well, it wasn’t – but he wondered if it may have been Katherine O’Kelly. From science class, and from Sunday school. The week after the copper and the woods, sure, she seemed different at school. Clyde didn’t know what the heck Frank was going on about and couldn’t he drop it? When your older brother tells you to drop it, drop it you do. Like when your cousin with the limp takes you to a titty bar down a set of stairs on your first night in New York City and both of you are immediately booted out: you drop it. You do not raise that embarrassing scene again with your cousin, the one with the limp.
Finally: they arrive at the Canyon in the late afternoon. Streaks of gold and orange swim from the rock to the sky, sharing the colours between them. Out of the Packards everyone climbs, and they follow the signs to South Rim. A great brown eagle swoops from one speck of a perch of rock to another.
Frank is obliterated by the size of the Canyon, by its colour and depth. By the idea it had been formed by God, the same God who’d watched on that time Frank looked after three baby bear cubs till the smallest one fell into a trap and died. He is obliterated by Eve, her bravery, her proximity to the edge of the hole right now while he stands away from the edge, frozen. The hole is a mile deep. He is obliterated by the idea that those Indians might have legends about this place. What did all this mean to those kids whose ponies the girls borrowed and sat on and dug their heels into? The sky, most likely: the Indians likely had stories about the sky.
He realises all his life has been a series of obliterations.
He thinks of his ma’s shabby house – the plinky piano wedged onto the back porch, empty soda cans in the garden beds, her vast collection of gravy boats – tucked into the bottom of the canyon like a stone in a shoe. Frank, obviously not always wishing his mother could hear his thoughts, wants her to know he is thinking of her. Here at South Rim, the rock is layered like splodges of buckwheat pancake batter. All these dead rocks, thrumming with life. This current job of his – bag-holding, keeping the public at arm’s length from Madame Curie and her girls – that he should be so close to these women when he’s a nobody who will leave no impression on the world after he’s gone. Just another obliteration. Soon the three ladies will go back to Paris.
‘Some place,’ is what he says, lifting his eyes back to Eve, who has gone out further, without him noticing.
She seems to be staring into the void. Imagine being able to do such a thing, at any age.
‘As long as I live,’ she says simply.
It’s enough, though, isn’t it, thinks Frank. As long as I live. ‘Miss Curie, please come away from the edge.’
Irene, who is crouched on a rock with her skirt gathered beneath her legs, glances up and over.
Frank sees the neat square heels of Eve’s boots, delicate against the rocks. The scuffs that have always been there, well, they stand out even more in the golden hour. She is sort of swivelling on the heels of her boots, no longer on an Indian pony, waving from its warm back, or from a railing the length of a white cruise ship. He steps closer.
Madame stands some distance away with Mrs Meloney and the two professors. Mrs Meloney is pointing things out to Madame, who holds a hand against her forehead. Frank has barely dared to approach her this whole trip. He’s carried her suitcases without making a sound. Madame has asked him mildly and politely for things, and once waved him over to help when she couldn’t unclasp a tin of Altoids. When Mrs Meloney had to cancel engagements because Madame needed to see a doctor, Frank stayed close to her daughters. Mostly, their mother has remained a mystery. That such a woman exists. And such a mind. Frank is obliterated once more. Dressed darkly again, Madame is a spindly blackbird on the buttery ridge.
‘Eve?’ Frank says. ‘You’re too close there, Miss.’
She turns, and he catches the musicality of her face, the sharpness even in her eyes, which seem half-opened most of the time. The skin on his cheeks stings while he watches this beautiful creature raise a hand to her forehead. She is gazing at something behind him.
‘Hey,’ a voice comes from over his shoulder.
Frank turns, achingly, away from Eve.
Professor Harrington calls out, ‘Wagner!’
Madame has fallen onto her side, her black dress trapped under her like a terrible wave. He catches sight of her white face. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is slack. What is going through her mind, so far from home?
Here is a life he can save. Swift like a coyote, Frank bounds, scrambles up the rock on all fours. He thinks he hears two pairs of small boots running after him.
Something Close to Gold
1935 | Irène Joliot-Curie | Chemistry
Prize motivation: ‘in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements’
