Nobody's Baby but Mine(44)
“All right.”
“They don’t speak much English, but they seemed to know what they’re doing. Stay out of their way.”
She nodded and thought about asking him where he had been until two o’clock in the morning, the time she’d heard the toilet flush in the adjoining bathroom, but he had already turned to leave. As the door shut, she wondered if he was going off to be with another woman.
The thought depressed her. Even though their marriage was a sham, and he didn’t owe her fidelity, she wished he’d give it to her, just for the next three months. A premonition of disaster settled over her, a sense of impending doom that made her so uncomfortable, she hurried back to her computer and buried herself in work.
Her days settled into a routine, but the uneasiness never quite went away. To keep it at bay, she worked most of the time, although she managed a walk each day. She barely saw Cal, something that should have eased her mind, but didn’t, since she realized he had virtually imprisoned her. She had no car, he didn’t offer to lend her his, and the only people she saw were deliverymen and the two Korean cleaning women. Like a feudal lord with a moated castle, he had deliberately cut her off from the town and its people. She wondered what he planned to do when his family returned.
Unlike a medieval noblewoman, she could have put an end to her imprisonment anytime she wanted. A phone call to a taxi company would have done the job, but she didn’t have any real desire to go out. With the exception of the prickly Annie Glide, she knew no one here, and although she would have enjoyed seeing something of the area, she couldn’t resist the luxury of uninterrupted time.
Never in her life had she been able to devote herself so completely to pure science. There were no classes to teach, no faculty meetings to attend, no errands to run, nothing to distract her from her research. With her computer, modem, and telephone, she was linked to everything she needed, from the Los Alamos electronic library to the data coming in from crucial experiments being conducted in the world’s billion-dollar supercolliders. And work kept her uneasy thoughts at bay.
She began to lose track of time as she absorbed herself in the mathematics of duality, applying theoretical physics to unravel mathematical puzzles. Using a free-flowing mathematics of intuition, she pondered convoluted curves and mirror symmetry. She applied quantum field theory to count holes in four-dimensional space, and wherever she went, she left scribbled notes to herself—ideas scratched on the backs of pizza coupons that came in the mail, formulas written with a stubby golf pencil over the margins of the morning newspaper. One afternoon she walked into her bathroom only to see that she’d unthinkingly used her antique rose lipstick to draw a doughnut shape that was remodeling into a sphere on the bathroom mirror. With that, she knew she had to get out.
She grabbed her white Windbreaker, emptied the notes she’d stuffed into the pockets on previous walks, and left through the French doors at the rear of the house. As she made her way across the yard toward the path up the side of the mountain that she’d been climbing a little higher each day, her thoughts returned to the problems of convoluted curves. Would it be possible . . .
The shrill call of a bird blasted through her conjecture and made her aware of her surroundings. What was she doing pondering quantum geometry in the middle of all this beauty? If she weren’t careful, she’d become so strange that no child would want her as a mother.
As she climbed higher, she forced herself to observe the world around her. She drew in the rich scents of pine and leaf mold and felt the sun shining with new warmth. The trees had a fragile green lacework on them. Spring was arriving, and before long these mountain slopes would be alive with blooms.
But instead of being buoyed by the beauty, her spirits drooped, and the premonition of disaster that had been nagging at the edges of her consciousness for days grew stronger. By immersing herself so completely in her work, she had kept herself from thinking, but with the quiet of the damp woods around her, that was no longer possible.
As her breathing grew labored, she made her way to a rocky area off to the side of the path where she could rest. She was so tired of living with guilt. Cal would never forgive her for what she had done, and she could only pray that he wouldn’t take his hostility out on their child.
She remembered his veiled sexual threat the night they had arrived and realized she had no idea if he’d really try to force himself on her. She shivered and looked down on the valley, where she saw the house with its dark-shingled roof and crescent-shaped motor court. She watched a car turn into the gated lane. Cal’s Jeep. Had he come back to grab a fresh comic book from his collection?