I Married You For Happiness. Lily Tuck
does not answer.
When she first arrived in Paris, at the airport, she sees a man, in the immigration line ahead of her, take off his wedding ring and pin it to the lining of his attaché case with a safety pin that he must keep there for that purpose.
What about your wife? she wants to shout.
Sometimes, in her mind, she accuses Philip of losing his wedding ring on purpose.
Her throat is dry; she finds it hard to swallow.
Downstairs, the lights are on. She goes to the hall closet, which is full of coats. Hers, his—a navy blue wool coat, a parka, a down jacket, a raincoat, an old windbreaker. The windbreaker must be twenty-five years old. She remembers how proud Philip was when he bought it. The windbreaker was bright yellow and on sale and, he claimed, would last him a lifetime. He is right. Now the windbreaker is faded, the collar and cuffs are frayed, without thinking about it, she takes it out of the closet and puts it on. Carefully, she zips it up. Her hands go to the pockets. Slips of paper—bills, a to-do list: car inspection, call George about leak in basement, bank, pick up tickets for concert. The list, she recognizes, is several months old; coins, paper clips, a ticket stub are in the other pocket.
She walks into the dining room. The chicken, the new potatoes, the salad are all on the table. Cold, waiting. Nina starts to pick up a dish to put it away and changes her mind. Tomorrow, she thinks. Tomorrow she will have plenty of time to put things away, to do the dishes, to do—she cannot think what. Instead, she takes the bottle of wine with the cork stuck inside it. Again, she tries to pull the cork out but can’t. Damn, she says to herself. She goes to the kitchen and gets a knife. With the handle of the knife, she pushes the cork inside the bottle and pours herself a glass of wine.
Still holding the knife, a sharp kitchen knife, she makes a motion with it as if to slit her throat. Catching a glimpse of her reflection in the dining room mirror, she shakes her head.
What would Louise think?
Holding the glass of wine, she goes back upstairs.
Outside, the sound of a police car siren. From the bedroom window, she sees a blue light flash by in the dark, then rush past the house and disappear. She thinks of the car full of teenagers playing loud music and she imagines it smashed into a tree, the windshield bits of glittering glass as smoke rises from the hood and someone in the backseat screams.
Another siren. Another police car goes by.
Poor Iris, she says to Philip.
Again, the phone rings.
Louise.
Earlier, she left Louise a message. Louise, darling, something has happened. Call me as soon as you can.
Poor Louise.
Philip’s darling.
A beautiful, lively, headstrong young woman who looks like him—tall, dark, with the same gray eyes. Nina must answer the phone.
Hello, she says, picking up the receiver in the bedroom.
Louise?
Whoever it is hangs up.
A wrong number. In the dark, Nina looks for a caller ID on the phone but there is none.
She is relieved. She does not want to tell Louise.
It is three hours earlier in California, and Louise, she imagines, is having dinner. She is having dinner with a young man. A handsome young man whom she likes. Afterward, Louise will not pick up her messages, she will sleep with him.
For Louise, Philip is alive still.
Lucky Louise.
Nina takes a sip of wine, then, putting down the glass, reaches for his hand again. His hand is cold and she attempts to warm it by holding it between both of hers.
She loves Philip’s hands. His long blunt fingers. Fingers that have touched her in all kinds of ways. Passionate ways about which she does not want to let herself think—making her come. She presses the hand to her lips.
When did they last make love?
A Sunday morning, a few weeks ago. The house is quiet, the curtains are drawn, and the bedroom is dark enough. She is self-conscious about being too old for sex. Also, it takes him longer.
In Paris, too, in Tante Thea’s old-fashioned, shuttered apartment on the rue de Saint-Simon, where, on the way to Philip’s bedroom, she bumps into furniture—side tables, spindly-legged chairs, glass cases filled with porcelain figurines—and where in bed, afterward, Philip admits that he was nervous. Without telling her why, he says he had not made love in a long time. He was afraid, he says, he had forgotten how.
You can never forget—like riding a bicycle, Nina adds.
This or her trite remark makes him laugh and, reassured or, at least, not as nervous, Philip makes love to her again.
Has he been faithful to her?
She reaches for the glass of wine.
Also, not thinking, Nina reaches into the windbreaker pocket and pulls out a coin. It feels like a penny.
Heads? Tails?
“The probability of an event occurring when there are only two possible outcomes is known as a binomial probability,” Philip tells his students. “Tossing a coin, which is the simple way of settling an argument or deciding between two options, is the most common example of a binomial probability. Probabilities are written as numbers between one and zero. A probability of one means that the event is certain—”
When Louise is six years old, she begins to play a game of tossing pennies with Philip. She records the results along with the dates in a little orange notebook, which she keeps in the top drawer of Philip’s bedside table:
5 heads, 10 tails — 10/10/1976
9 heads, 11 tails — 3/5/1977
17 heads, 13 tails — 2/9/1979
The more times you toss a coin, Lulu, Philip tells Louise, the closer you get to the true theoretical average of heads and tails.
5039 heads, 4961 tails — 3/5/1987
For the last entry, Louise relies on a calculator.
“Another thing to remember and most people have difficulty understanding this,” Philip continues to tell his class as he takes a penny out of his pocket and tosses it up in the air, “is if a coin has come up heads a certain number of times, it will not necessarily come up tails next, as a corrective. A chance event is not influenced by the events that have gone before it. Each toss is an independent event.”
Heads, Philip tells Louise.
Heads, again.
Heads.
Tails, he says.
Nina, on an impulse, throws the coin she found in the pocket of Philip’s windbreaker up in the air. Too dark to see which way it comes up, she places the coin on top of the bedside table. In the morning she will remember to look:
Heads is success, tails is failure
And record the date in Louise’s orange notebook: 5/5/2005.
5 5 5
What, she wonders, do those three 5s signify?
Numbers are the most primitive manifestations of archetypes. They are found inherent in nature. Particles, such as quarks and protons, know how to count—how does she know this? By eating, sleeping, breathing next to Philip. Particles may not count the way we do but they count the way a primitive shepherd might—a shepherd who may not know how to count beyond three but who can tell instantly whether his flock of, say, 140 sheep, is complete or not.
Also, she remembers the example of the innumerate shepherd and his sheep.
She drinks a little more wine. She has not eaten since noon but chewing food seems like an impossible task. A task she might have