Pascal's Wager Read online

  “Let’s have it,” I said tonelessly.

  He reached for my hands again, prying them right off my hips to squeeze them in his. “Try again to spend some time with her. Make her meet you for lunch. You two share some nice antipasto.”

  “Now I think you’re the one who’s on the verge of a breakdown,” I said. “Who do you know that can make my mother do anything?”

  “Just promise me you’ll try.”

  It was clear he wasn’t going to let go of me until I agreed, so I nodded. Then, as soon as he went off in search of my mother, I hightailed it out of there.

  I called Mother the next morning from my office in the math department, and I did get her on the phone—by disguising my voice and telling Alma, her secretary, that I was from the bank. Liz kept a tight watch on her finances. I knew that would get her scurrying to the phone.

  “It’s Jill,” I said when she picked up.

  There was a brief pause. After last night’s performance, it crossed my mind that she might be trying to recall who the heck Jill was.

  “Alma told me you were someone from the bank,” she said.

  “I think Alma’s getting a little ditzy,” I said. “Isn’t it about time for her to retire?”

  “I’m sure you didn’t call to check on Alma’s work status. Was there something else?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Her words were as pointed as ever, each one carefully selected to go into me as cleanly as a needle. But the thickness I’d heard in her voice during her speech was still there. Good grief, had she already downed a couple of Bloody Marys to take the edge off of her hangover? Max was even more clueless than I’d realized. How could he have missed this?

  “Jill, I don’t have time for this. Why don’tcha crawl me back when you have something to shay?”

  It took a moment to interpret. “No, no, I just wanted to set up a lunch date with you.”

  “I have lunch plans today.”

  “So how about tomorrow?”

  “I’m leaving for a conference. I’ll be gone until Monday.”

  “So Monday then,” I said. “Noon?”

  “It takes me a day to get out from under the work that pliles—piles—up while I’m away—”

  “Okay, Tuesday. Next Tuesday.”

  There was another pause. I thought she was considering hanging up on me.

  “What is this about, Jill?” she said finally. “You’re not usually this ang-shush to spend time with me. “

  Ordinarily by that point in such a conversation with my mother, I would have said, “And I’m not now either. Call me when you’ve got a minute, okay?” But “crawl” instead of “call”? “Ang-shush” instead of “anxious”? I had to get her to lunch—and I’d probably need a delegation from Alcoholics Anonymous with me.

  “I just need to talk to you,” I said.

  “Are you out of money?” she said.

  “No,” I said. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to bristle. She wasn’t too drunk to get my hackles up.

  “You’re not going to finish your dishertation in time, and you want me to intercede for you for more funding.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t about me, Mother. It’s about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. Next Tuesday, noon. I’ll meet you at Marie Callendar’s.”

  Then I was the one who hung up on her. “You owe me, Max,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” a husky voice muttered from the doorway.

  I looked up to see a tall, skinny girl peering in with apologetic gray eyes. It was Tabitha Lane, a freshman in my Math 19 class, the one who always reminded me of an adolescent giraffe. I’d totally forgotten she was coming by this morning.

  “Sorry about what?” I said. “Come in.”

  “I thought I heard you talking to somebody,” she said. “I can come back later if this isn’t a good time.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. I turned around and cleared off a seat on the straight-backed wooden chair next to my desk. Then I had to find the matchbook I always put under one leg so it wouldn’t rock and drive me nuts. Most of the furniture in graduate student offices, at least in the Alfred P. Sloan Mathematics Center, looked like it had been salvaged from the Stanford attic. I kept talking as I hunted under the desk for the matchbook. “You’ve got an appointment. I was just on the phone.”

  “I thought maybe you were talking to that guy you share your office with.”

  “Alan Jacoboni?” I said. “He never comes in until at least noon, the slacker. You know, you’d think with the amount of tuition people pay to go to this school, they could afford a chair that doesn’t require—”

  I stopped in mid-sentence at the sound of wheels rolling across the office floor. Tabitha was entering on roller blades.

  “What the heck?” I said, looking up at her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Her face went pale under the spattering of freckles that covered her nose and cheeks like carelessly thrown confetti. “Do you want me to take them off? Are they too noisy? I can take them off—”

  “No,” I said, still staring. “You can wear them in here. The question is, why?”

  “It’s so much easier to get around campus with these,” Tabitha said. “I was ending up late to, like, every one of my classes, and they frown on that around here and so then I saw this girl in my dorm putting them on and I go, what are you doing, and she goes, they’re totally the best, so I asked my mother to send me mine and of course it took, oh, maybe three weeks for me to get them because the mail is so slow—”

  “Well, good. Whatever works for you,” I said. It was no wonder she talked like she was hoarse, I thought. Overuse of the vocal chords. “I have to ask, though, how do you deal with steps?”

  Tabitha cocked her head, her short, blunt-cut, reddish hair spilling against her cheek. It would have fallen straight into her eyes if she didn’t have it pulled back with the clips that made her look even more like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There was a small outbreak of tiny pimples on her forehead, but she was obviously making no effort to conceal them.

  “I can’t skate down them,” she said, “so I just walk down backward. I don’t know why, but I just tried it and I haven’t fallen yet, but I do wear these kneepads so—”

  “Great,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  I pointed to the chair, and she skidded crazily toward it, sank into it, backpack and all, and let her feet roll out halfway across the room. She really did have the longest legs I’d ever seen on a girl, accentuated by the shorts she was wearing. Only the pink top that was fluttering at her waistline assured me that those legs didn’t come straight out of her neck.

  I sat down in my desk chair and looked at her, waiting for her to state her business. She just looked back at me, eyebrows furrowed over her big gray eyes in an expression of deep consternation. Her face wasn’t bewildered and confused like the rest of her; it was just concerned.

  “So,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need help.” Then her arms came up for no apparent reason and flopped back down on her lap.

  “With Math 19?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. I flipped open my grade book and ran a finger down to Lane, Tabitha. Yeah, she needed help, all right. She’d failed the first quiz, and although she turned in every homework assignment, it was clear that calculus was still a mystery to her.

  “What exactly is it that you’re not getting?” I asked.

  “All of it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s start with my explanations in class. Are they confusing you?”

  Her eyes got bigger, if that was possible. “Oh, no!” she said. “No, you’re a great teacher! I totally understand everything you say! It’s just when I get back to my room to do the problems, it’s, like, gone. Plus, I can’t even study in the dorm. It’s so noisy all the time—people are talking and going in and out all hours of the night. It’s like, yike
s, you know? So I go to the library and I look around and see all these people who are so smart and they obviously understand everything they’re doing and I don’t and I just start thinking I’m going to flunk out and be so humiliated and then—I just can’t do the problems.”

  Fortunately, she had to stop to take a breath. I took the opportunity to offer the only really compassionate thing I could ever think of to say to kids who were in over their heads.

  “Look, math isn’t for everybody,” I said. “I’m sure you do a lot better in courses for your major.”

  She blinked. “Math is my major.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “What are you, a masochist?” Instead I flipped open my date book and picked up a pen.

  “You’re going to need tutoring at least twice a week,” I said. “When can you come in?”

  She disentangled herself from the backpack and pawed through it. I stifled a groan. Spending two hours a week with an eighteen-year-old who was short on confidence and long on nonstop monologues punctuated with the words like and totally wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I applied for the coveted fellowship at Stanford.

  I told Alan Jacoboni about her that afternoon while he was waking up over a cup of Starbucks coffee. Why I ever discussed anything with the man was beyond me. I’d have been content to sit in the office in total silence, actually getting work done, since I was teaching a course on my own that quarter and getting pressure from the department to organize a teaching seminar for the other graduate students and being available to see students three hours a week and trying to finish my dissertation and getting it together to apply for post-doc positions. But Jacoboni never seemed to have much to do except talk in that educated Southern accent that sounded phony to me—although who would want to put that on was a question I couldn’t answer.

  “How does a child like that get into Stanford in the first place?” he said.

  “High school grades. Test scores,” I said.

  “And she’s flunking out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good luck, darlin’.”

  He smiled for no apparent reason, the way he did at the end of almost every sentence, and then propped up his feet, legs clad in cargo shorts, on his desk. As usual, he was wearing sandals, in spite of the fact that his feet were gargoyle-bony. It was his macho pose, one he had adopted early on when he’d discovered that he was the best-looking graduate student among the males in the math department. Math guys tended to be on the geeky side, so the fact that Alan was somewhat hip and played up his basic attractiveness made him look like Leonardo DiCaprio in a room full of Woody Aliens.

  I personally didn’t think he was all that handsome. He kept his generically brown, curly hair cut close to his head so it didn’t go wild on him, and he was going to be fighting the proverbial battle of the bulge someday if he didn’t stop living on beer and Cheetos. At twenty-eight, it was about time. Okay, so when he was dressed in nice slacks and a sport shirt and loafers he looked relatively attractive, but he usually schlepped around in shorts and T-shirts when he wasn’t teaching, and he didn’t do “sloppy-casual” well. He tended to just look sloppy.

  He was still leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, checking me out with his eyes, as if he hadn’t been looking at me every day for the last four years.

  “What?” I said coolly.

  “Darlin’, I bet it’s days like this you wish you were already out there knocking down the big bucks instead of in here tutoring pathetic little airheads.”

  “I’m not crazy about the pathetic little airheads,’” I said. “But I’m not here to learn how to make big bucks.”

  “Oh, bilge! We all are. What really burns my biscuits is when I get an e-mail from one of my fraternity brothers telling me he’s going to Cancun for a week. He’s got a bachelor’s in business and he’s already making six figures a year. I’ve got twice the education and I’m still living like a pauper.” He lifted a foot so I could see the large hole in the sole of his sandal.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “You can’t tell me that doesn’t bother you,” Jacoboni said.

  “It doesn’t bother me.” I made a huge deal out of opening a file folder and studying it intently, pencil behind my ear. He didn’t pick up the clue that, for me, the conversation was over.

  “It bothers me. But not for long. Once I’m out of here, I’m heading straight for industry. Then I’ll be flying to Cancun for the weekend—in my private jet. Oh, yeah, baby.”

  Since he was obviously not going to shut up, I turned and surveyed him with one of my I-see-through-you-pal stares.

  “If you want to work in industry,” I said, “why did you come here? We have less applied math than almost any other school.”

  “Because it’s Stanford, honey. All I have to do is say the name and CEOs drop their dentures.”

  “Oh,” I said. The stare wasn’t working. I went back to the file.

  “I like being one of the two oddballs around here,” he went on. “You and me, darlin’.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “The two of us are the oddities. We keep our moods cool and our eyes on the prize.”

  I was grateful that Peter and Rashad showed up just then asking Jacaboni to come “see something”—undoubtedly the latest grad student scribbles on their office chalkboard.

  “Sure,” Jacoboni told them. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

  He winked at me as he left. When he was gone, I feigned throwing up in the trash can, just for my own benefit.

  I had Tuesday’s lunch date marked in red on my calendar, and I’d circled it three times so I wouldn’t forget. Mother, on the other hand, was still in her lab coat as she sailed into Marie Callendar’s at 12:15. She didn’t look much different than she did the night of her dinner, except that now she was wearing no lipstick at all. It made her look a little like a disheveled corpse.

  “What?” she said to me as she slid into the booth. “You’re looking at me like you’ve been waiting for two hours. I’m not that late.”

  I shook myself out of my stupor. “No, you’re fine.”

  “I don’t see why you wanted to meet all the way over here when there are places to eat on campus,” she said.

  She propped her menu in front of her, which gave me a chance to shift my face out of stunned mode. Not only did she look even more unkempt than the last time I’d seen her, but her voice was more slurred in person than it had been over the phone. It did nothing but confirm my drinking theory, and at this point even Max couldn’t have persuaded me otherwise.

  The problem was, if I was noticing it, it probably wasn’t escaping the people she was seeing every day—her colleagues, her employees, her superiors. I stared at my own menu without really seeing the words. If it was up to me as her dutiful daughter to say something to her about it, both of us were out of luck. Suddenly, I could conjure up the scene that would occur if I calmly said, “Mother, it’s time for you to admit you have a drinking problem.” I would be filleted with her icicle of a tongue and left for dead right there in the Marie Callendar’s booth. What had I been thinking, asking her here for a dressing down?

  I hadn’t thought at all, actually, and I was totally unprepared. It was throwing me—again.

  “What can I get you ladies?” said a perky little waitress.

  “Chicken potpie, order of corn bread, salad bar,” Mother said and then slapped her menu closed.

  Perky and I exchanged momentary blinking stares, and then I hurriedly ordered the French onion soup. By the time the waitress was bustling away, Mother had already polished off her own glass of water and was reaching for mine.

  “I’m sure she’ll come back with a pitcher,” I said.

  My mother drained my glass and set it down. “So what is this all ablout, Jill?” she said.

  I leaned forward, as much to get a whiff of her breath as to speak. I couldn’t detect any alcohol, though she seemed to have bathed in Clinique.
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  “Don’t you want to go get your salad first?” I asked.

  “What salad?”

  “You ordered the salad bar.”

  “I did not.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought you did.”

  “You thought wrong. Now what did you want to talk to me about? As soon as I eat, I have to get back to the lab.”

  My stomach tightened. This was such a role reversal. It had always been my mother summoning me to an interrogation lunch or commanding my presence at a cross-examination dinner. I raked my hand through my hair and then winced, waiting for the inevitable “Stop that, Jill.” She didn’t say a word.

  “I just wanted to spend some time with you,” I lied. “Find out what’s happening in your life.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because you’re my mother, and I haven’t had a whole conversation with you in six months.”

  “I’ve been busy. And as you can shee—see—I’m fine.”

  I got nowhere from then until the food arrived. From the way Mother had ordered, I expected her to devour it like a half-starved dog, but she picked at the crust of her potpie with her fork and then set it down. It occurred to me vaguely that I had never seen her eat a potpie anyway.

  “Do you want to order something else?” I said.

  “Since when did you start prashtishing—prashticing—your maternal instincts on me?”

  And since when did you start talking like you have a mouth full of couscous? I wanted to say. I did muster up the courage to get out, “Is there anything wrong? I mean, are you feeling all right?”

  Big mistake. She slid her plate aside so she could get her elbows on the table and fold her hands close to my face. Her small, blue eyes were intense as they locked right onto mine. My upbringing snapped into place—the thousands of times I’d been told to look at my mother when she was speaking to me.

  “There is nothing ‘wrong’ with me,” Mother said. “I am perfectly intact, functioning quite normally, thank you very much. Now rather than insinuating for the rest of the afternoon, I suggest you get to the point.”

  I was actually relieved that my mother had suddenly returned—collected, eloquent, and razor sharp. Until she abruptly snatched up her handbag and lurched out of the booth.