As She Climbed Across the Table: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jonathan Lethem

If she were a bit less in love she might do less crappy physics, but we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

“It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The spin of a particle, the color or flavor of a quark. A field or horizon. Beauty, truth, and strangeness. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”

I couldn’t relax with them in the apartment. The blind men listened too hard. It made me too aware of my sounds, the scuffling of chair legs on hardwood, the flutter of turned pages. Each visit to the bathroom was a disaster, urine pounding into the bowl, ear-shattering flush.

If I’m lonely, I thought, I should at least be alone.

“You’re not from the campus,” I said. “No.” “Not affiliated.” “No.” “Not a graduate of the school.” “No. No connection.” “You can’t imagine how that turns me on.”

She looked at me and I saw that she had science gaze. The look that seemed to encompass my whole life inside theoretical brackets. Paradigm Eyes.

No, they are in no danger of learning anything.”

“Relax,” she said. “I am relaxed. It’s just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I’m very relaxed.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.”

Weird haha. English prof vs physics prof, physics prof ends up running away to barf

“Tea?” I said. “We could have tea. I heard someone say tea builds bridges between people. Coffee is more isolationist.”

“Do you think there are bootleg tapes of Muzak outtakes? Maybe they get excited by the groove and really cut loose sometimes. And the producer says, okay, boys, that was swell but now let’s try to get this wrapped so we can all go home.

My body knew how to answer all the questions hers was posing,

Adrenalin sped through my tollgates without paying.

We all smiled. Our packet of heads was happy now, normalized, made like the others around it, the tittering bunches.