Pascal's Wager Read online

  “I have to get back,” she said.

  Then she gave that vacant grin I’d seen on the night of her award banquet and literally bolted from Marie Callendar’s, nearly mowing down Perky en route to the door. I stared after her until long after my French onion soup had gone cold.

  THREE

  Three nights later I realized how much of my think time was being consumed by the mental video of my mother. On my nightly run on the Stanford Loop, it occurred to me that for the last three nights I hadn’t clocked myself, checked my heart rate, or monitored the effectiveness of my pre-run hydration. The minute I hit the first hill, I was completely preoccupied with the memory of her flipping back and forth from sloppy drunk to coherent doctor to schizophrenic bag lady.

  My life at that point was neatly compartmentalized, and the Loop was where I went to concentrate on the fitness compartment. I’d turned into a runner in high school, when my mother had informed me that I had to take up a sport so as not to become lazy. The fact that I was already in advanced placement classes, National Honor Society, two academic fraternities, and private piano lessons three times a week made cross-country track the only option. Six weeks in the fall and it was a done deal, and it was enough to assure my mother that I was not going to lapse into a vegetative state.

  Secretly, I fell in love with running—not the competition, but the idea of being out there alone on the road with no one in my face. Everywhere I’d been since high school—at Princeton for undergrad work, at Mercer County Community College in Trenton when I was teaching—I’d always found a place to end the day with a run. Here the place was the Stanford Loop.

  Situated in the Stanford hills west of the main campus, toward the ocean side of the peninsula, it consisted of a long, hilly, winding trail that challenged me physically—or, to use the vernacular, kicked my butt. At its highest point, you could see the San Francisco Bay, the Dunbarton Bridge, the San Mateo Bridge, and Hoover Tower—the main landmark of the Stanford campus. On clear days you could make out the Bay Bridge and sometimes even the city itself, though most of the time the fog curled around San Francisco like a pair of protective hands.

  Personally, I appreciated the solitude of the Loop more than the view. Unlike a lot of the people who went up there, I was unconcerned about the recent Stanford edict prohibiting anyone from leaving the main path to follow the myriad of bunny trails that wound among the widely scattered trees. To do so, we were told, would irreparably damage the ecology of the area. All I wanted was a path where I could run literally for hours and not have to speak a word. Where I could pass other joggers who were in search of aloneness and not even feel the need to nod for the sake of politeness. Where I could focus fully on the fitness compartment.

  At least I had been able to do that, until my mother wouldn’t get out of my head. Working, teaching, dealing with Tabitha, putting up with Jacoboni, all of those compartments kept me too busy to wrestle with my mother issues the rest of the time. But once I hit the hills in my Nikes, my concentration went down the toilet.

  Look, I told myself the evening I finally put it together, you can’t let this mess with your head. Mother is a big girl. If she can’t see she has a problem, you’re not going to be able to do a thing to change that. Now get your tail on up this hill and stop obsessing.

  The first hill was a killer, shooting up for three hundred yards at a thirty-degree incline, and I prided myself on taking it on as a formidable opponent without batting so much as an eyelash. I normally latched my eyes onto the top and didn’t waver until I was standing there, and then congratulated myself on the fact that my thighs were still crying out for more. That night I took about two strides—pictured my mother lurching out of the booth at Marie Callendar’s—and was ready to bag the whole run. Only sheer stubbornness kept me going.

  By the time I got to the summit, I was breathing like a locomotive—no concentration whatsoever on controlling my inhale-exhale pattern. I actually started to get a stitch in my side, which hadn’t happened since about freshman year in college, and I slowed to a walk, hands planted on my hips in self-disgust. Thus, I was completely at my best when a figure just ahead of me leaped over the fence that caged us on the path and practically scared me out of my Spandex.

  He didn’t see me. In fact, he continued on at a long-legged, lazy lope as if he hadn’t just emerged from forbidden territory. That was fortunate, as far as I was concerned, because even from yards behind I could tell it was Socrates himself—Sam Whatever-His-Name-Was from the night of my mothers dinner. I’d rather have run into Alan Jacoboni at that point.

  As I waited to let him get beyond catching-up distance ahead of me, I had a brief lapse and considered the fact that he had great legs. Nice muscle definition. Confident stride. Smooth, golden-olive skin—

  I turned abruptly and headed back the way I’d come. If beating myself up about my mother and fantasizing about some religious fanatic’s legs were my only two thought choices, I did need to bag the whole run.

  The next day, I was wishing those were my only choices. When I got to my office, there was a Post-It note stuck to the door. Jill, it said, See me ASAP. It was signed NF.

  NF. Nigel Frost. Dr. Nigel Frost. My advisor. The man who held my future in his hands at that juncture.

  As I was going up the stairs to his office, Deb Kent was on her way down, her eyes blinking furiously in her contact lenses as usual. Deb seemed to be in a constant state of high-level stress. You’d have thought she was running IBM.

  “I was going to come looking for you,” she said. “Do you realize you and I have to do a tea in a couple of weeks?”

  “If it’s not today, I’m not worried about it,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re organized. Some of us don’t have minds that function like Day-Timers, okay?”

  She tossed her naturally frizzy mop of chocolate brown hair and flipped open her calendar. I attempted to edge past her, but she actually put out a hand to stop me.

  “It’s the one before the seminar on wavelets or something. Doesn’t matter, I don’t know 90 percent of what they’re talking about at those things anyway.”

  Deb had a point there. Guest speakers came in to give seminars on a fairly frequent basis. Hence, the “tea”—a tray of bank cookies, a loaf of sourdough bread or two, a little fruit and a hunk of cheese—which grad students took turns setting up beforehand. The speakers were so specialized that you practically had to be a specialist yourself in the topic field or most of it was likely to blow by you. But everybody knew that was the case. I could never see why Deb claimed it made her feel like an illiterate moron.

  “I’ll pick up some cookies,” I said. “This is not the inaugural banquet, Deb. Relax.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re such a calming influence. Nothing bothers you. How do you do that?”

  I shrugged and started up the steps again.

  “Where are you going?” she said. “I thought you had a class this morning.”

  “I have to see Nigel.”

  “What a way to start the day. I hope you’ve had at least three cups of coffee.”

  Actually, I didn’t usually drink coffee. Jacoboni called me an “oddity” there, too, because I didn’t kick off every day on a caffeine high. I definitely didn’t need it for a chat with Nigel. We had a great relationship: I did the work, he approved it, we both looked good. I didn’t see how cappuccino could improve on that.

  His office door was open, and he was standing up at the dry-erase board on the wall, tapping his chin with a marker. Most of the time I saw him behind his desk, so when I did come upon him standing up, it always struck me how big he actually was, which was probably part of the reason most undergraduates in his classes found him intimidating. He was definitely rotund, but in a distinguished way. At least he had the good taste to go to a bigger size than he’d worn in his forties, rather than let his shirts gape open at the buttons or his belly hang over his belt.

  I tapped lightly on the door. “Dr. Frost?�
�

  He turned and looked quizzically over his half-glasses, then gave me a brisk nod. I’d noticed my first year there that the gray fringe that was left on his balding head matched his moustache exactly in content as well as color.

  “Come in,” he said, slipping the half-glasses into his shirt pocket. He headed in his typical unhurried fashion toward his desk. We were going into advisor-student mode. It was a safe bet he was going to bug me again about doing a teaching seminar.

  “I got your note,” I said. “Did you want to talk about—”

  “Sit down,” he said. “There’s something you need to read.”

  The half-glasses went back on, and he scanned his neatly organized desktop with his eyes. Jacoboni could have taken a few lessons from him in office decorum. Heck, maybe Nigel was going to assign me a new officemate.

  “Take a look at this.” He produced a copy of K-Theory, which I recognized as one of about three hundred journals published monthly for math fanatics. “Page twelve,” he said. “It’s marked.”

  “More background reading?” I asked. “I thought I’d covered all that already.” Covered it—ha. I’d read my eyes into an almost permanent bloodshot state my third year before I’d started my own research.

  “Just read it,” he said.

  His face was, as usual, impassive as he rocked back in his chair and crossed his legs. You could never read him, which was probably another thing that intimidated his undergrads. Tabitha would have complete cardiac arrest if she ever got into one of Nigel’s classes.

  I flipped open the journal to the page marked with one of Nigel’s ubiquitous Post-It notes and glanced at the title. Tabitha and everyone else disappeared when I saw the title of the article: “Topological K-Theory of Algebraic K-Theory Spectra.”

  No way. My eyes darted far enough down the page to confirm what the title suggested.

  I looked up at Nigel. He was watching me, glasses in hand, face without expression.

  “He proved my thesis,” I said. “This is my dissertation.”

  “More or less.”

  “How much less?”

  “Not enough, I’m afraid.”

  I stared at the offensive page and tried to keep my lip from curling. I’d been scooped. Some math geek from the University of Washington had done the same research I was doing, and he’d reached his conclusion before I had.

  My mother had never allowed me to swear; she’d always said it was a cop-out from expressing yourself with eloquence. Too bad. I wanted to blue the air. As it was, I flung the journal back onto Nigel’s desk, where it landed on the neat piles like an inkblot.

  “So what does this mean?” I said. “Do I start all over? Find a new thesis?”

  “Not exactly,” Dr. Frost said.

  “Not exactly? If I have to backtrack at all, it’s at least a week added on—and I don’t have that kind of time. What does not exactly mean?”

  He continued to look at me, until I realized I was standing up, driving my index finger into the desktop. I dropped back into the chair.

  “It means you can keep what you have,” he said. “You’ll just have to take it further than he did.”

  “Go further, go backward—it still means the same thing in terms of time. I’m so close. How many people on my committee will have read that article?”

  “I didn’t hear that,” Nigel said sternly, looking at me over the tops of his glasses, which had by then found their way back to his nose.

  “No, you didn’t because I didn’t say it. I just…thought it out loud.”

  “Well, don’t think it. We don’t breach integrity here.”

  “I know. I don’t want to duplicate somebody else’s research. I wouldn’t sleep at night. Not that I’m going to be doing any sleeping anyway. All right, what do I need to do? Come up with an amended proposal?”

  “Give yourself a day or two to fume,” he said.

  “I don’t have a day or two—” I caught myself and consciously put on a calm face. “And I don’t need to fume. There’s no reason to. Every graduate student knows this is a possibility. I’ll have a new proposal on your desk by, say, Friday, and then I’ll double up on my time on the weekends and get caught up. I’ll blow Mr. University of Washington right out of the water. Anything else?”

  Nigel took off the glasses again and slipped them back into his pocket. He placed K-Theory back on its pile on the corner of the desk. Finally, he leaned back in the chair again and crossed his legs.

  Come on, Nigel, I thought. If I don’t get out of here so I can drag my hand through my hair, I’m going to drag it through what’s left of yours.

  “I don’t want to see a proposal until Monday. You need to take the time to determine how you’re going to proceed. You may want to discuss it with me a bit, should you get into a bind with it—”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I don’t anticipate any problems. I’m well enough acquainted with K-theory to anticipate the challenges.”

  Yeah, even my mother would have been proud of that exit line.

  What I knew she wouldn’t be proud of, I thought as I finally escaped Nigel’s over-the-glasses scrutiny, was the fact that there was now a good chance I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation before my funding ran out. The thought of asking her for money was about the most bone-chilling thing I could imagine.

  By that afternoon, I had gone after my hair with my hands so many times that Jacoboni took one look at me when he came in and said, “Did you get the license number of that semi?”

  Fortunately my cell phone rang just then, or I probably would have said something like, “Are you referring to the one that dragged you in here?”

  “Jill!” Max said when I answered. “It’s your Uncle Max.”

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

  If he noticed my clipped tone, he didn’t let on.

  “Have you seen your mother since we talked? I’m not nagging you. Heaven forbid I should nag.”

  “Yes, I saw her.”

  I moved out into the hall with the phone. Jacoboni had taken a sudden intense interest in his computer screen, a sure sign he was homing in on every word I said. The hallway itself was resembling Highway 101: Every freshman on campus was following Tabitha’s lead and skating through Alfred P. Sloan on roller blades, and that was compounded by the group of five male second-year grad students who seemed to be forever in the halls. I took the phone out the end door to the courtyard and sat on the edge of the circular planter that was overgrown with wandering Jew.

  “You still there?” Max said. “Jill?”

  “Yeah. Look, Max, I had lunch with Mother, and I know you think she’s the queen of Sheba, but I know she’s got a problem.” I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of our lunch date. He groaned with increasing drama at every plot twist.

  “Nobody acts like that unless she’s seriously hitting the bottle,” I said.

  “You actually smelled liquor on her breath?” Max said. “I’m just asking?”

  “No, but who could tell with the amount of perfume she was wearing? Since when did she start bathing in fragrance and forgetting the smaller niceties—like combing her hair?”

  “The stress is getting to her. I knew it—I saw it coming—but does she listen to me?” Max sniffed. Any minute now he was going to start blowing his nose. I could feel myself stiffening. I was already squeezing perspiration out of the cell phone.

  “What do you want me to do about it, Max?” I said. “I told you—when I even hinted that she might have, oh, a headache, she practically cleared the table. Do you want to be on the receiving end of one of her tirades?”

  “I don’t want to ruin a beautiful friendship. You, she’ll forgive. Me, she’ll put out with the garbage.”

  “Oh, come on, Max, you two have been friends for twenty-five years. And if she comes after you with her saber tongue, you’ll stand there and take it until she’s worn herself out. If she comes after me, I’ll say things I’ll regret and put even more distance
between us. That’s why I don’t get into it with her, ever.”

  “What are you talking about—-what distance? Her whole world revolves around you!”

  “Then you and I aren’t orbiting in the same solar system. She has been avoiding me for six months. There was a time when I cringed every time she called me. Now if my phone rang and it was her, I’d probably lose consciousness. Look, I tried, Max, and it didn’t work. After our little incident at Marie Callendar’s, she’s not going to make another lunch date with me for a long time.”

  “She said you were having lunch next week.”

  “What?”

  “She told me she was meeting you again for lunch next week. She said you discussed it.”

  “Where was I? I’m telling you, the booze is getting to her.”

  “It’s not booze.”

  “Then how do you account for—”

  “Last night, I finally talked her into letting me come over and cook dinner for her. I fixed everything she likes. Polenta with gorgonzola, my stracotto al barolo—that’s the beef braised in red wine sauce—”

  “Enough with the menu, Max. What happened?”

  “I told her, ‘Go upstairs and take a hot bubble bath and when you come down, it will be a feast to die for.’ While she was up there—God forgive me—I went through every cabinet, every closet, the pantry Not a drop of alcohol, just like always. Nothing. Nada. Not even a cork in the trash can.”

  “You went through the garbage?” I said. “Tell me you weren’t wearing your velvet jacket.”

  “Silk shirt. I hope the coffee grounds come out at the cleaners.”

  “Coffee grounds? Since when did she start drinking coffee?”

  “She didn’t. It was left in the pot from the last time I was over. I had just dumped it into the trash, then I stuck my arm in there. Maybe I’m the one with the problem?”

  “When was the last time you’d been over there?” I said.

  He paused. “Two weeks ago.”