Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

Last year was the first in which unmarried Americans outnumbered married ones; and yet, even with all of these single people, we still don’t have a word for the person who was your most important person—if you don’t wind up with him or her. Neel was that person for me, and so the person he’d chosen took on a mythic dimension—was she also a physicist? Or a pianist, or a kindergarten teacher, or a director of marketing? Did the fact that they were getting married in India mean that she was Indian, as Neel’s parents had always hoped for him? Was she younger, or the same age we were? Was she okay with Neel’s well-established position on children? Was she pretty?

Vincenzo thinks of himself as an especially stylish writer of physics papers; if there is anything that writing the trade books has taught me, it’s that the words we choose have real consequences for the version of reality that we’re describing, and that it’s almost always best to go with the simplest possible option. According to Vincenzo, this preference is symptomatic of a certain American obstinacy on my part.

At MIT the campus had the frantic energy typical of November, as if everyone, students and faculty, were competing to see who was the busiest, who had the most to get done before the holidays.

The phone was silent for about twenty minutes. When it pinged again, I reached for it eagerly—but this time it was Chendong, asking if she could stop by to talk about figure 2 in the electroweak symmetries paper. I agreed, trying to suppress my disappointment. It struck me that I was anticipating messages from “Charlie” the way I did when I met a new person-of-interest: my ordinary life buzzed with possibility every time I looked at my phone. I put it away and looked purposely out my window, but already on that dark afternoon it had the quality of a blank screen, reflecting my blurred image back at me.

Terrence looked at Roxy. “Imagine what her organization could do with that much money.” “True,” Neel said. “But I just read that they spent 445 million making The Force Awakens, and our government’s defense budget was 601 billion this year. So, you know, money doesn’t always flow to the noblest cause.” Terrence nodded, as if in agreement. “Sometimes it flows into black holes,” he said.

The expression on her face was an extreme version of the way she looked during the day, which I had taken for aloofness, even conceit. But it had been transformed by sleep. What I suddenly thought of, standing in the dark room, were the plaster casts from Pompeii: the lidded, alarmed eyes, mouth slightly open, chin tilted up, as if her face had been fixed in a moment of suffering. Suffering, but in four dimensions—what you might call yearning.

entirely: I might have tended to allow other people to choose me, but once I was in a relationship, I was usually the one in control. My conversations with Neel, on the other hand, felt more equal, or even as if I were going to have to prove myself, if I wanted to hold his attention. I wanted to prolong the potential of a real relationship as long as possible, not take any step that would propel Neel and me in one direction or the other. I couldn’t imagine anything better than imagining myself with Neel.

Maybe today black girls and brown girls and white girls, lesbians and bisexual and trans people sit in their dorm rooms talking about privilege and adjacency and intersectionality. It’s just that it wasn’t like that then. Talking about it would have violated every unspoken rule of our friendship, which was like that game, popular in the nineties, in which you removed rectangular blocks from the base of a tower, adding them to the top. Charlie had the theater, I had the lab; Charlie had her social club, I played intramural soccer; Charlie had a “summer place” in Gloucester, I had a work-study job; Charlie was black, I was white. When that last binary came up, we dismissed it with a kind of eye roll. It was uncool, sort of embarrassing and outdated, to make a big deal about it.

Patricia laughed bitterly. “What I said was, ‘You’re going to go far, because you’re the type of black person white people like.’ ” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “She didn’t tell you that part?” “No.” “I guess she wouldn’t have. Anyway, I’ve always felt bad about it. My radical period—but that’s no excuse.” “I think Charlie might have wondered if she should’ve stuck it out, gone into academia after all,” I said. “I wish I could’ve relieved her mind about that.” There was a silence, in which I thought that we had gotten deeper into this conversation than either of us had expected, and were now unsure how to extricate ourselves. “I think there was a lot I didn’t understand about the pressure she was under,” I said. “No,” Patricia said. She was generous but definitive. “You couldn’t.”

It’s astonishing for someone of my generation to see how uncritically young people today believe in romantic love. They’ve exploded gender, race, class, all the old shibboleths. But for some reason love is unassailable.”

I knew Charlie didn’t want to talk about being sick, but what if I had insisted? I had respected the boundaries she put up around her disease so carefully that our friendship had been squeezed out into the shrinking margins of her life. There was the body and there was the brain. Eventually there had been nothing but the body to talk about, and so we’d stopped talking. And I’d been self-involved enough, stupid enough, to take that as a rejection of me.

You can hear about something for a lifetime, though, even something you know is happening all around you, and still not really believe it—until it happens close enough to feel yourself.

Addie considered that. “They say the technology is having all kinds of negative effects on kids, with bullying and sexting and all of that. But I have a friend with a teenage son—she thinks he’s able to express himself better on his phone than in person. He and his friends talk about their feelings in a way that boys never would have done, when she and I were young.”

“I always talk about a scar: that the wound never goes away, but that it gets covered by some protective tissue, more and more each year. And then one woman says to me, ‘Yes, and then the tissue grows so thick you can’t see out.’ ”

Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It’s almost nothing—I can’t feel it—but it’s the same force that binds our planet to our star. That’s the very simple, very elegant purpose of the rotor: to hold a pair of tiny stars. Each time one of them swings toward the laser, spacetime bends just slightly; the laser must travel a slightly longer path to reach the mirror; a line spikes on one of LIGO’s screens. Even that silent signal could be enough to let us reimagine gravity, and the way it moves us on the human scale.