Pascal's Wager Read online

  Stephanie Wang giggled nervously. “Maybe we’d better get back to that basil, Max.”

  I have to admit, the current state of my mother’s style sense slid out of focus. This was too good to pass up.

  “And does your picking up on her use of the word fetus reflect your views?” I said.

  Sam met my gaze head-on. “It does, actually. Why do you ask?”

  “Are we talking religion here?” I said. “I’m only asking because if we’re about to be spiritually mugged, I need to find another table.” Sam raised both hands. “I’m unarmed. But I do reserve the right to present a viewpoint.”

  “Just be forewarned: I don’t think science and religion are going to mix at this table.” I looked at the Wangs. “Am I right?” Stephanie looked like she’d rather be having a root canal.

  Dr. Wang folded his hands neatly on the table. “I’m open to a lively discussion.”

  Max groaned. “How lively do you want it?”

  “What, are we going to see verbal WWF?” Ellen said. “Should I clear the table?”

  Sam’s eyes were still on me. “I can stay above the belt if you can.”

  I hated that. The minute you started to debate with a man, he had to pull out a sexual innuendo. But I forced myself not to narrow my eyes at him.

  “You’re on,” I said. “Now?”

  “No, I think it was my turn to counter,” Sam said, his eyes focused in even more. He obviously relished an argument as much as I did. I doubted that he hated losing one as much, though. “You’re saying there is no blend of science and religion.”

  “Not if you’re going to be completely rational, no.”

  “You’re a mathematician.”

  “She’s brilliant,” Max put in.

  “Then you’ve heard of Pascal. Blaise Pascal? Father of geometry?”

  “I think you would have to build a case for his paternity, but yeah, I’m familiar with Pascal.”

  “I’m a little rusty,” Ellen said. “Refresh my memory.”

  “Seventeenth-century mathematician,” I said. “He did some work on vacuum theory. He’s credited with developing the first calculator?”

  “They named the computer language after him,” Dr. Wang said. “The same fella, yes?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. He was all but licking his chops. “Physics, math—he was pure science. All about rationality. The whole ball of wax. But after his conversion to Christianity—”

  “Conversion from what?” I said.

  “From what I’d guess you’d call perfunctory piety,” Sam said. “He went through the motions, but he didn’t internalize any of it. Anyway, after his conversion, he continued to invest all of his energy in science. Matter of fact, his most productive scientific work was ahead of him. But my point is, he was also about to deepen his understanding of human nature, and that is what he’s best known for.”

  “So he studied psychology,” I said. “That’s considered a science.”

  “Mmmm, that’s debatable,” Dr. Wang said.

  “And it’s a moot point, anyway,” Sam said. “He didn’t study psychology He studied faith.”

  “In what?”

  “In God.”

  I pulled my eyes away from his long enough to roll them. His eyebrows shot up.

  “You don’t believe in God,” he said.

  “Uh, let me think about it—no.” I knew my voice sounded spiky, but that’s because I was vaguely disappointed. I’d hoped for an interesting debate. “You will never convince me that there is some spiritual force that controls everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it can’t be proven.”

  “So you only believe in things for which there is hard evidence.”

  “Right.” I gave a dismissive shrug. “I’m a mathematician.”

  “You deal with infinity in mathematics?”

  “Ugh, this is bringing back memories of college math,” Ellen said. “Dr. Rosenberg, 8:00 A.M., Tuesdays and Thursdays.” She shuddered. “I’m going to need another piece of that carrot cake.”

  Max looked relieved to oblige and raised his hand to hail a server. I turned back to Sam’s intense eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mathematics has an infinity of infinities of propositions to expound. And they are infinite also in the multiplicity and subtlety of their principles. Those that are supposed to be ultimate don’t stand by themselves—they depend on others, which depend on still others, and thus never allow for any finality.” I slipped in a smile. “How do you think every math grad student finds a thesis to prove? Anyway, that’s infinity.”

  “I have a headache,” Max said. “More wine!”

  “Infinity,” Sam said, “sounds an awful lot like God to me.”

  “To you maybe. To me it sounds like a concept.”

  “Which you can’t prove unless you someday find the end of it. Never finding the ‘finality,’ as you called it, doesn’t prove there is no finality—it just means you haven’t found it yet.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is that just because you haven’t found God yet doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.”

  Dr. Wang tapped his spoon against his wine glass. “I think round one goes to Sam.”

  “No,” I said. “The round isn’t over yet.” I homed in on Sam again. “What visible difference does believing in a ‘God’ make? I don’t believe, you do believe, but both of us are going to die. Show me the difference.”

  “Now we’re getting into the nature of God. If you’re looking for a God who is going to allow you to live on earth forever, you’re not going to find that God because that God doesn’t exist.”

  “Besides,” Ellen said, “I think there’s more to life than just hanging out until you die.”

  “I’ll drink to that!” Max said, lifting his glass. “To all that is in between. Good music, good friends—”

  “Good conversation,” Sam said. He tilted his water glass toward me.

  Now I know, I thought, why I always wish born-again Christians had never been born the first time.

  Sam had gotten preachy, as far as I was concerned, and I was again disappointed. There was something attractive about him. His intensity—no, his casual command over his intensity…no, maybe it was his chin.

  Would you stop! I scolded myself. He’s a pompous jerk you don’t have time for.

  “Coffee, anyone?” Stephanie Wang was saying. “Last call before the speakers.”

  I nodded at the kid with the coffee pot who stood at her elbow. I was going to need some caffeine for the rest of this evening. I was about to reach for the cup when Sam put his hand on top of mine. I glared at it, but that didn’t seem to have the freeze-drying effect my glare usually had on guys reckless enough to try to play touchy-feely with me.

  “What?” said.

  “Just consider this one argument, and then I’ll drop it.”

  “Could I have a signature on that?” I said.

  He reached inside his jacket and took out a pen.

  “I was speaking figuratively,” I said.

  But he was already scrawling his name across a cocktail napkin. I noticed the skin on his hands was smooth and olive-colored. Not that it mattered.

  He pushed the signed napkin toward me, and I gave it a bored glance. His eyebrows were expectant.

  “Go for it,” I said. “What’s your argument?”

  “It’s not an argument exactly—it’s more of a wager. And it isn’t mine. It’s Pascal’s.”

  Dr. Wang snapped his fingers in recognition. “Pascal’s Wager.”

  “You’ve heard of it,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, but give me a refresher course,” Dr. Wang said, smiling at me.

  Sam leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. My mother, if she’d been at our table, would have been appalled. He learned his social skills in a pool hall, she would have said.

  “It goes like this,” Sam said. He focused on the chandelier as if to get his cues from i
t, and yet his eyes went beyond it. He was being a little dramatic as far as I was concerned. But I listened, as did everybody else at the table. Even Max looked entranced.

  “At the far end of what we’re calling infinity,” Sam said, “a coin is being spun. It will come down heads or tails. How it lands will reveal to you whether there is a God—heads—or whether there isn’t—tails. You have to wager. We all do. A choice has to be made.”

  “I’ve made mine,” I said. “Tails.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on reason.”

  Sam dug hungrily into his pants pocket and produced a nickel, which he placed on his thumbnail. “Can you reasonably tell me how this coin is going to land if I flip it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Reason can’t make the choice for the figurative coin either. We’ve already established that reason—hard evidence—can’t prove either way. So the wager posits this: If you wager that there is a God and you live your life as if there is one—if the coin comes up tails—you’ve lost absolutely nothing. But if it comes up heads and there is a God, you’ve won everything.”

  The eyes I’d been watching all through dinner took on a fiery quality, as if they were in the throes of some deep passion. I went for the cream and stirred my coffee.

  “I remember that now,” Stephanie Wang said. “I read it—it’s the wager that every man makes.”

  “But I’m not so sure about every woman,” Ellen said. She was half smiling at me.

  “Heads is a safer bet,” Sam said.

  “I’ll pass,” I said. I nodded toward the podium where some campus muckety-muck was adjusting the microphone. “Looks like it’s show time.”

  Everyone else started scraping chairs and rearranging themselves in their seats. Sam just looked at me. I waited for, “Can we finish this discussion over coffee sometime?” But it didn’t come. I had to concede the eye-holding contest and shift my focus to the front. The introduction of Dr. Elizabeth McGavock was just winding down.

  “Tonight, as we hear her speak, I’m certain it will become clear to you why we are honoring not only Dr. McGavock’s twenty-five years at Stanford Hospital, but also the quality of work she has done in that time. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Elizabeth McGavock.”

  The room erupted into applause, and my mother rose from her seat. In the instant it took her to get from there to the podium, I placed a wager I had absolutely no doubt about. I would have staked my last four years on it: Dr. Elizabeth McGavock was drunk.

  TWO

  I sat there staring like an idiot.

  The administrator who had just introduced her held out his hand to shake hers. She stared at it for a good three seconds before she took it and let him pump her arm while she gazed into his face—as if she were having trouble putting a finger on just who he was.

  He took her by the elbow and ushered her to the microphone amid the waning applause. As she gripped the sides of the podium, a vague smile crossed her face.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Hi? I wanted to shout at her. Hi? You are drunk! Except that my mother never consumed a drop of alcohol. Ever.

  I put my lips close to Max’s ear. “Since when did she start drinking?” I said through clenched teeth.

  He looked at me as if I’d just fallen in through the ceiling. “What are you talking about?”

  I jerked my head toward the podium. Mother had relaxed her death grip on the lectern, and her eyes were now focused on the audience.

  “It’s hard for me to believe I’m being honored for twenty-five years of service,” she was saying. “The difficulty is not in accepting that it’s been twenty-five years. Has it only been that long?”

  There was a ripple of laughter through the dining room. Max looked at me smugly.

  “No, it’s the honoring part that surprises me,” she said. “After what I’ve put these people through during that time, I’m amazed they aren’t asking for early retilement—retirement.” She paused, fixed a smile on, and turned to the head table. “Or are you?”

  They laughed appreciatively. Max started a round of applause. I stayed locked in on my mother. Retilement? No, there was definitely booze in her immediate past. I craned to get a glimpse of her now-vacated place at the table, in search of a wine glass.

  “It has been a journey for all of us,” she went on. “I can’t speak of anybody else’s. I’m only here to shlare—to share—my own experience at Stanford Hospital.”

  I bored my eyes into the side of Max’s face, but he didn’t look at me. He was hearing it too, though, I knew. His proud expression looked as if it had suddenly met with a stun gun.

  Across the table, Ellen Van Dyke cleared her throat, and I realized there was a long pause going on up at the podium—an interminable pause in the public speaking world. My mother was gazing at the audience with an empty grin on her face. If it had been anyone else, I’d have assumed she was waiting for the next car in the train of thought. Max reached over and grabbed my hand.

  “So,” Mother said finally, “my journey. Yes, it escaped me for the moment!”

  And then she threw her head back and laughed, a juicy snorting sound that came straight out of her nose. One hand left the podium with a jerk and made contact with the glass of water in front of her. She watched as it dropped to its side, the same look of dismay on her face that Max and the Wangs were now wearing on theirs. In the drop-dead silence that followed, I could hear the water dripping over the edge of the lectern and onto the floor.

  My mother gaped at it for a moment, and then her persona suddenly snapped back into place—as if it had just been off in the ladies’ room powdering its nose while Liz’s body kept the audience entertained.

  “This is why I became a well-educated woman,” she said. “I could never make it waiting tables!”

  While the audience roared—more out of relief than glee, I was convinced—I gave Max a sharp jab.

  “I’m telling you, she’s half schnockered,” I hissed through clenched teeth.

  “She’s stressed,” Max said. “That’s all it is. She’s fine now. It’s just the stress.”

  I folded my arms and tried to focus on the “journey” my mother had been promising to recount for the last five bungled minutes. Max was patently wrong. The only theory more ridiculous than her being drunk was her being stressed. It didn’t happen. The woman oversaw dozens of medical technologists while they juggled ten different machines that ran thirty blood tests at a time—and she seldom even smudged her makeup in the process. The word stress never crossed her lips.

  She got through the speech without any further overturning of the stemware or obvious lapses of memory. But the slurring of her words was so noticeable to me that I kept sneaking glances around to see if anybody else was picking up on it. If restless repositioning of chairs and faces squinted in concentration were any indication, it wasn’t escaping anybody.

  The final “thank you” was no more out of her mouth than the audience came to its feet en masse, clapping. I suspected as I joined them that they were determined not to give her a chance to say anything else. I hoped that from a standing position I could get a better view of my mother’s wine glass, but Sam Bakalis was blocking my view. I noticed only in passing that he was a lot taller than he looked sitting down.

  When the formalities were finally exhausted and my mother was in possession of an engraved plaque, I skipped the good-byes to the Wangs and the rest and told Max to meet me in the hall.

  It took him a good ten minutes to get out there, during which I raked my hand through my hair enough times to drive my mother to drink. I knew I was obsessing, but I got that way when I was thrown completely off balance. Most disturbing of all: My mother had been the one to do the throwing. She might have been critical, judgmental, domineering, and cold, but at least I always knew what to expect. That woman who had practically slobbered her way through a speech to her colleagues was nobody I had ever seen before.

  In mid-rake number forty-two, I
spied Max’s bearlike form emerging from the dining room and waved him over. It took him another two minutes to get to me with people stopping him for hugs and handshakes and brief dialogues on Paderewski. I was ready to chew glass by the time I was able to get my fingernails into his velvet jacket and drag him into a smaller hallway off the main one.

  “Okay, Max, what is going on?” I nearly shouted.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “Mother looked like Robert Downey Jr. up there.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “She slurred every other word. She forgot what she was going to say. She snorted, for Pete’s sake! You can’t tell me you didn’t notice. You were practically cutting off the circulation in my hand.”

  “All right, calm down.” Max took my arm and tucked it through his, trying to stroke my fingers.

  I wrenched myself away. “You saw it.”

  He shrugged. “So she was a little off.”

  I drilled my eyes into him and put my hands on my hips. He drooped like a scolded spaniel.

  “Something was wrong. She was distracted,” he said. “I told you it was the stress.”

  “Since when does she let something as benign as a job where people’s lives are in her hands get her down?” I said. “She thrives on that.”

  “Maybe not so much anymore.”

  I could tell Max wanted to grab my hands again. I kept them firmly planted on my hips.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” he asked. “I mean really saw her—sat down and talked to her?”

  I could feel my jaw stiffening. “It’s probably been six months. But that’s been her choice, not mine. She doesn’t return my calls. She barely answers my e-mails. When I do happen to get her on the phone, she always has some reason to dash off somewhere.”

  “You see?” Max said, bringing out the soothing voice. “She’s too busy. Anybody is going to crack sooner or later under the kind of schedule she keeps.”

  “Are you saying she’s about to have a breakdown?”

  “I’m saying you’re jumping to conclusions. Your mama is under a lot of pressure, and that’s all. But I will tell you this, though God forbid I should try to give you advice—”