Equivocality

Science and Art are secretly in love and everybody knows it. Science watches Art from across the room, silent and uncomprehending in the face of her radiance. He watches as she glides effortlessly through the party, smiling and surrounded by her many friends. The sight of her is so overwhelming that it almost hurts to look. She is in full bohemian regalia tonight, dressed like a princess from some exotic galaxy, flowing silks and skin-tight leather and hair in braids and piercings he doesn’t understand. He tells himself that his confusion doesn’t matter. Really he knows he’s missing something, and uses words to try to cover his longing.

What he doesn’t know is that she loves him back. She circulates, she invisibly directs the ebb and flow of the celebration, but she always knows where he is standing. There: over by the bar. He’s deep in a discussion with one of his friends. Something about electronics. She doesn’t ever want to listen to such a conversation but she loves that he has them, because without geeks there would be no computers. Besides, circuit boards look kind of neat. And now Science is with his friend the astronomer by the couch. They are demonstrating with an orange and a desk lamp how to tell one’s latitude from the angle of the crescent moon in the night sky. She thinks this is sort of funny. Why do you need to know? she wonders. The moon is sideways near the equator, and it’s marvelous that it should be so, and isn’t that enough? Secretly though, she’s sort of impressed, because he knew the shape of the tropical moon long before he ever traveled to see it. Secretly, despite his terrible clothes, she thinks he’s really cute. His geekiness is kinda hot. Maybe it’s the glasses.

They’ve known each other for years now, but they’ve never consummated their affair. They won’t let themselves get close enough. She’s out of his league, Science thinks. Look at her dancing with that other man. She is liquid when she dances, no longer a body at all but a pure form, lost and alive. It makes his mouth dry. But when the song ends, Art glances up suddenly to find him, unconsciously seeking his bad tie. He is standing alone in the corner, poor man. No matter, she knows he’ll have his fun on Monday at the conference. There is a woman physicist he likes, and they will meet in the hotel bar after her paper. Art loves to hear Science talk about Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, loves the way his eyes cloud over and he goes somewhere beautiful where she just can’t follow. She knows that this physicist can join him there; she wonders what intimacies they will trace on each-other’s minds.

And yet, for all the impenetrability of Science’s discipline, Art knows things about it that Science does not. She knows that it is all just a big game, a playful joke even. He still thinks that the that the equations and formal proofs and the peer review and the weary skepticism of his endeavor are all somehow intrinsically worth a damn. They’re not: they’re just the constrains of his medium. The entire universe is fair game to Science, and so he needs a structure to work within, just as the painter needs the canvas’s borders and the writer needs the limits of language. Art wishes Science could admit that, and her smile is bittersweet as she watches him gesticulate wildly with his dessert spoon over some abstract detail. He can’t see that all the dreary ritual is just preparation for those ecstatic moments when insight comes, when he sees something that no one else has ever seen before. At those moments he runs to her without thinking, and babbles, and draws inscrutable pictures on napkins for her, so eager to share his discovery that he never even notices that she doesn’t understand a word he’s saying. Still she listens, because she understands not the abstractions but him. Art is most in love with Science at these moments of creation.

Yet when he Science tries to show her what he sees, he is frustrated by Art’s irrationality. She got mad at him when he told her that elephants wouldn’t be able to fly even if they did have bird wings because weight increases faster than area. In refusing logic, she makes her life so much harder than it needs to be: to figure out how many eight-foot sections of rebar are needed for her sculpture, he had to tell her, one simply divides. But then, math has never been her strong point. She still thinks it’s about numbers or something. It’s not; it’s much deeper than that, it’s a language to explore entire new universes of thought, thoughts that she will never care to have. This makes him a little bit sad, but then she winks at him as she re-enters the room in a new costume. She is wearing a outfit made entirely out of men’s neck ties, dozens of them tucked and woven together into a flowing dress. She twirls to dodge a guest, executes a unnecessarily perfect pirouette which sends the ties arcing out from her waist, revealing a flash of lace and thigh at the tops of her gartered stockings; she knows he saw, but she would have done it even if he wasn’t looking. At moments like this none of his doubts matter, because she is the counterexample that will not be captured in symbols. Her existence is completely outside of the universe he can describe, and he loves her for the awe that she gives so freely to the world. He loves her for trying to show him what beauty is without reason. He loves her for the sprigs of dried flowers she tucks into the dashboard of his nondescript car.

She walks up to him by the bar. She’s changed her hair along with her outfit, braided tiny ribbons of copper wire into it. He smiles tentatively, looks away for a moment, looks back and sees that she’s still standing there, wanting to talk to him. He asks if she wants a drink. She accepts and orders a Cosmopolitan martini, only she wants the sweet red concoction with an olive instead of a cherry.

“How’s work?” she asks

“Fine,” he says, knowing he can’t explain it to her. “Nice party,” he says instead.

“Yes it is,” she comments with a wry smile.

He wonders what to say next, she bites her tongue. He suddenly remembers to ask how the MP3 player he gave her is working out. She gushes genuinely about it for a moment, then runs dry again. She wouldn’t be uncomfortable in the long pauses except that he starts to fidget, needs to talk. It unnerves him how she can just look at him like that, without any reason.

“I liked your show,” he tells her.

“Which painting was your favorite?” she wants to know.

“The blue one,” he says, and she hides a grimace. That piece was terrible, but she doesn’t say that and he pretends he didn’t see her wince.

They have learned to be careful now. One day she carefully cut dozens of little square holes into her best evening dress to reveal whirlwind patterns of pale skin, but he was mortified when she showed up at the reception like that. Once he asked her out to the symphony but she declined with an imagined prior commitment because she just couldn’t stand any more Bach. That was the month when his research was stalled while his urgent request for equipment access festered in the university bureaucracy. She suggested that he simply show up at the lab in the middle of the night and run his experiments clandestinely, and could only frown as he stuttered at the thought, thoroughly aghast. And then there was the time they went to the fabric market in search of material for her new costume, but it just ended in another argument. What the hell is wrong with all these other reds? he finally screamed at her.

So she finishes her drink, delighting in sucking the sweet liquid off of the salty olive, while he idly he wonders whether atomic-scale internal reflection effects are responsible for iridescence of her necklace. She tries to give him a little kiss on the lips but misses on purpose as he stiffens; he has a moment of sadness and wonders why he did that. She wanders off, and he never even noticed her hair. They don’t talk again. But that night neither of them can sleep. Art thinks of how amazing it is that Science can know in such terrific detail how everything works, of how proud she was that he worked on the robot that gave her pictures from Saturn. She recognizes the best part of herself in the joy of discovery which motivates him. In another bed, Science stares at the ceiling and wishes he could dance like she does. He misses the way her faith in the absurd permeates her very being, the incredible life she exudes even as the practicalities of her waitressing job threaten to crush her. He knows somehow that she is what he fights for. One day she will teach him what impressionism is by taking him to the ocean and asking him to look, really look at the colors of the waves; one day he will help her design a geodesic dome and she might just suddenly realize that everything is mathematics. Until then, they will sleep alone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Art, Favorites, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.