Proton Decay
by Max Apple
When Jerome Feldman addressed himself to the woman lodged beneath three thousand tons of water he decided that he would not be coy. He would tell her at once that he was serious, yet he would do it in a way that wouldn't sound as if he was replying to a personal ad. After all, she had not advertised. He had seen a feature on Irene Silver in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then shortly thereafter saw her in person, or at least it seemed like that, on 60 Mintutes. The problem was, why would she be interested in him? And yet, why not? A single woman living underground for a month at a time-maybe a thriving pharmacist wouldn't sound so bad to her. Feldman, thinning hair, nearsighted, quiet in conversation but sure of himself, Feldman, at forty-six, sometimes felt hot.
Especially so on Thursdays after work, when he drove Grandma to the Imperial Salon. It was not unusual for a woman waiting for her stylist to prefer striking up a conversation with Feldman to browsing through a current magazine. Usually he was the only male in the waiting area, but he liked to take some credit beyond his gender. This month alone he had been given a business card by an attractive lawyer and by the regional representative of Sprint. He felt flattered by such attention, but he daydreamed only about Irene Silver.
While Grandma camped under the dryer, Feldman composed in his mind a letter to Ms. Silver. Jackie Norton, the Sprint representative, interrupted his reverie. "Nice to see you again," she said She extended her hand and sat next to Feldman, only the width of her briefcase between them.
"I guess your grandmother and I have the same standing appointments," she said. Feldman smiled, stopped composing his letter so that he could concentrate on the slender, energetic woman so clearly flirting with him. "You didn't call," she said, and then she narrowed her eyes and made a child's sad face. She wiped away a feigned tear. "Just kidding, but I am disappointed."
"I've had a busy week," Feldman said.
"Workaholic?"
"Sometimes," he said.
"What did you tell me it was, drugstore?"
"Yes," he said, "and a package goods store. She runs it." He pointed toward the aquarium-sized hair dryer above Grandma's head. The manicurist noticed them and smiled in their direction. Feldman couldn't even see Grandma's face beneath the bowl of controlled heat, but her earrings, in the shape of Absolute vodka bottles, identified her.
"Is packaged goods liquor?" Feldman nodded. "And your grandma still works? she asked.
"Yes," Feldman said. "She runs the store. There are four employees but she's the boss."
"That is amazing," Jackie said. She reached over to squeeze his hand. "I know you must help her a lot."
"Actually," Feldman said, "I just do the ordering. She's completely in charge."
When Grandma emerged from beneath the dryer, she tipped the stylist and the manicurist and walked toward Feldman. He introduced her to Jackie. Grandma barely noticed the woman. "Hello," she said. "Let's go. I want to brush out the stuff they put on me." Feldman held Grandma's elbow as she led him toward the door.
"Call me," Jackie said. Feldman waved, noncommittal.
His father had died when Feldman was twelve, and when his mother died she left him a drugstore, a liquor store, and Grandma. He had expected his grandmother to move to Florida, as her few remaining friends had. The old woman hadn't worked in a decade, but when she arose from mourning her daughter, she returned to the Grant Street liquor store. Feldman had been trying to sell the business for months, with on offers. Street people camped out in the doorway. The windows had been broken so many times that even after he installed steel bars he still couldn't get insurance. His most reliable employee, Philip, a serious young man from Liberia, had been shot at, and two other clerks had been robbed, though without assault. Before Grandma took over, Feldman himself hadn't dared to go near the store after dark. Still, he couldn't talk her out of returning to work, and legally, the store was still hers.
"I'd rather die quick in a robbery than die of boredom watching TV in that overheated apartment you got for me."
Grandma was eighty-nine when Feldman put the store which she and Grandpa had started back in her hands. With the help of Philip and the ironmonger who had installed the bars she built herself a tower in the center of the store, two ten-foot safety ladders, topped by a little booth the size of a parking-lot kiosk. From her lofty perch she could look straight at the security cameras and also scan the sales floor. Her eyesight, after cataract surgery, returned to 20-20, but she wore two hearing aids ans still missed anything said in a conversational tone. At the store everyone yelled up to her. Feldman had expected her to last a week; she'd been there for three years without an incident. The men who came in to buy Ripple wine, the ones Feldman knew might've cut his throat for a bottle of cough syrup, threw kisses in the air to Grandma.
At ninety-two her health remained as stable as her profits. Whenever she needed to climb down, she buzzed for one of the floor clerks to assist her. For special customers she liked to toss down wall calendars or ballpoint pens, and every December, for the entire month, she dropped candy canes down to the customers who brought their children.The regulars came to treat Grandma as a sage. Because of her years and her remoteness they thought of her as wise. Nobody was allowed to climb the stairs to see Grandma, but when she came down to eat or to go to the bathroom, there were people waiting to ask for advice about personal problems.
"I don't hear most of what they're talking about, she told Feldman. "But I say things like, 'You'll get over this. You'll get over everything,' It's the truth."
Feldman's own problems he didn't discuss with Grandma. He had expanded after his mother's death to a third location, the mall superstore where he did a high-volume business in cosmetics and small electronics and on certain items could almost match Wal-Mart. In the new store he watched himself become a wealthy man. He bought season tickets for his beloved Browns and Indians, but now that he had it, he wanted more than financial success. Women were available and Feldman had many times attempted to be in love. But, like Grandma, he told women the truth-he was waiting until he was sure. At first he didn't take this interest in Irene Silver too seriously. He had an imagination. Sometimes he fantasized about a customer. Once while Feldman was trying to summon courage to speak to a woman who had caught his eye, he noticed her shoplifting shampoo and conditioner. He didn't even try to stop her-the price of his indulgence.
In the 60 Minutes closeups the scientist looked composed, calm; and who could stay calm with Mike Wallace glaring at you? He liked the way she laughed, too, a big laugh when the interviewer asked her, "Don't you get lonely underground?"
"Of course," she said. And then she turned the tables on Wallace.
"Don't you get lonely aboveground?" Feldman, seated in front of his flat-screen TV, a slice of pizza in his hand, rose from his chair as if he'd just seen a sports highlight.
"Sometimes I'm lonely in the midst of company, too," the scientist said.
"Loneliness doesn't have that much to do with being alone."
"Me, too," Feldman said to the television. "That's just how I feel." He continued to stand as the scientist, accompanied by the CBS crew, descended. At the bottom of the abandoned salt mine, Irene posed below an array of photomultiplier in her underwater laboratory.
"You're like a coal miner," Mike Wallace said.
"Not at all," the scientist answered. She wasn't falling for any of his lines. She held her lovely hand up to the camera. "No filth, no lung disease, no backbreaking work-I see no comparison to mining. I'm very fortunate to be able to do my work in such comfort and safety."
"And if you do find that a proton has decayed, do you think you'll win the Novel Prize?"
Feldman thought she looked so beautiful, like a Christmas window display. The photomultiplier behind her appeared to be M&Ms glued to tinfoil. She ignored the camera as she glanced toward her instrument panel. "Prizes don't concern me," the scientist said. "First of all, I don't work alone. There are other depth locations in the Untied States and abroad. If we do confirm an event-greater certainty about the universe, that will be out prize."
"Yes!" Feldman yelled. At Ohio State he had taken three physics courses and felt a keen interest, but a drugstore always lay in his future so he leaned toward chemistry. When it came to matter, Feldman had penetrated no further than the outer electron shell.
"Certainty," he said aloud. "That's exactly what I want, too."
On Feldman Pharmacy stationery he began.
Dear Dr. Silver:
The idea of you beneath all that water is so moving. I am not a scientist but I admit to a lifelong interest in Dr. Albert Einstein. I have read the recent tome by Abraham Pais, which is a beautiful work even though Dr. Pais loses me whenever he switches from words to equations. Fortunately he realizes that many of us are not so adept at math so he makes it possible to skip the formula and still get the life. I mean the essence of the work. What else is the life?
I am writing to you from my office at Feldman's Pharmacy in the Brady Oaks Mall; perhaps you have even been here? I read in the newspaper that when you come up, so to speak, for air, you like to shop in Cleveland. We have twenty-four thousand square feet of floor space and feature general merchandise as well as Cleveland's largest independent pharmacy.
Please do not think that I write to women all the time. You are the first and only. I am a serious man. May I suggest that we meet? In addition to the pleasure of seeing you face to face, I would like to talk about your work. If I understand correctly the decay of a single proton means that the entire universe will disintegrate. I look forward to discussing this with you.
Feldman looked up from his desk. It was 1 AM. Because it had an outdoor entry, the mall store stayed open all night. Like her work, Feldman's also never ended. But the certainties he pursued were far more modest. He had the routine of commerce, the steady revolution of seasonal goods, the holiday markdowns, the readjustments of Medicare reimbursement. Feldman, in good health and with his revenue growing at 20 percent year over year, came to the conclusion that he had little chance with the scientist. Irene Silver looked toward the end of time; at 8:30 every morning Feldman took Grandma to Dunkin' Donuts and then on to Grant Street. He reread his letter, then crumpled it.
An only child of an only child, Feldman had always been Grandma's boy, her little helper. When Grandma heaved in her foaming bath there stood five-year-old Feldman, lifeguard on the other side of the shower curtain. His mother hand Grandma would take their little pharmacist-to-be into ladies' rooms with them, into the tiny curtained dressing room at Simpson's Department Store, where skirts fell like spilled drinks and price tags dangled at their arms. At a young age he observed females up close, knew the underarm pad and the hook-and-eye snap. He loved the company of women and yet he had passed up marriage opportunities, satisfied with the occasional cashier or cosmetics clerk while he built his business.
Work was what Feldman knew. In grade school he had straightened aspirin bottles and dusted shelves. In high school he organized the stockroom and in college he took phone orders and alphabetized prescriptions. Both his parents worked until the day of their death and that was Grandma's plan, too. These were his models. When he put off marriage, he assumed that his own life would swell on like Grandma's, but who could know? With a station wagon full of greeting card returns his father, only fifty, had slumped at the wheel forever. The word remained him of Irene Silver. What did time mean to someone who awaited an event, that if it happened at all, might take seven billion years?
A few days after his attempted letter and even before Grandma's next hair appointment, Jackie Norton called to announce that she was in his very mall. Feldman walked to the Circuit City store to see her, then invited her to Ming's for lunch . The sales representative ate her salad daintily and with chopsticks. Feldman admired her skill. As she chewed, she explained the secrets of cell phone miniaturization. "I'm having my hair done on Thursday as you know, and it will still look good on Saturday."
The following Saturday night in the more romantic atmosphere of Brands Steakhouse, after a bottle of wine and much smiling and nodding of her head, Jackie got down to business. She reached into her purse and then placed her delicate closed fits on the table in front of Feldman.
"Curious?" she asked. She turned her fits in the candlelight as if she was trying to sell him her watch. Feldman admitted his curiosity. "Go ahead," Jackie said. She held her closed hands toward him. Feldman hesitated, not sure whether to open finger by finger or, in the more manly fashion, all four at once. He decided one by one, starting with her-tipped pinky. In the middle of her palm, an offering-wrapped in black foil, decorated with the image of a Greek warrior-a condom.
I'm in communications," Jackie said, "and there's nothing more important to communicate about these days, is there?" Feldman, accustomed to seeing cases at a time, looked with surprise at one.
"We're adults," Jackie said. "There's lunch, there's dinner, there's this."
She said it slowly, drawing out each word the way the announcer at the ballpark listed the Indians batting order: leading off, "lunch"; batting second, "dinner." Batting a third, "this." She paused for a minute. "Carl, my ex, he refused to use them. But that was the least of his flaws. I hope you're not against safe sex."
Feldman shook his head. "I'm all for it." He wanted to feel something like lust, some reason to close his hand around hers and say, "Let's go-right now." Jackie Norton looked so lovely, too, her bosom accommodating, her cheeks rosy-though it might have been makeup. But instead of imaging her panting beneath him Feldman pictured his own condoms in their revolving rack at the end of aisle 12.
"I hope you don't think I'm too aggressive," Jackie said. She kept her hand over the object. "I've learned in sales that you don't help yourself if you save your best for later. Sometimes there's no later."
Feldman nodded. "You're absolutely right," he said. And then, he surprised himself. "I'm flattered," he said, "and most of the time I would be...You know...Right with you. But at this time, I'm taken." Jackie didn't try to disguise her feelings. Feldman looked away, giving her the privacy of shame. In her disappointment, he felt genuine tenderness toward Jackie, though he decided not to hug,
"I wish you had told me right away," she said.
"I should have," he admitted. "I'm sorry."
"Well, she's a lucky woman to have such an honest guy."
Jerome Feldman, the outgoing president of the Ohio Association of Independent Pharmacists, decided that he would be assertive and honest. Like his fellow independents he worried about Rite Aid and Walgreen's and looked forward to seeing colleagues on a yearly basis. The annual convention keynote speaker alternated between extremes, one year an Ohio legislator, the next year a comic entertainer.
"I know that this is our year for scheduling a comedian," Feldman announced to the board. "But I have taken the liberty of inviting a scientist to speak to us." Feldman looked out at the fourteen pharmacists on the board. Not a hand went up in objection.
"A real scientist," he went on even though he didn't have to. "Someone who's doing pure research."
Connie, Feldman's secretary, made the call. Dr. Silver was surprised and delighted. She was not accustomed to trade association invitations. She said it would be no trouble for her to come to Cleveland on whatever day the group wanted her. Her schedule was very flexible.
"When I told her that we pay a thousand dollars, she didn't believe me," Connie said. "She goes, 'For one speech?' That's the going rate, I told her, She should hear the comedy people complain that it's not enough. She sounds nice but she didn't seem too sure about what we want her to talk about. Maybe you should give her a call."
This opportunity, too, Feldman declined. Not with her would his first exchange take place over such long and imprecise wavelengths. On the phone nothing was true enough. On the phone Grandma could chirp like a teenager. On the phone Einstein once told an interviewer, "Idea? I've never had an idea." When the time came for him to speak to Irene Silver, he would tell her both his position and his velocity.
A few days after she had accepted the invitation, Dr. Silver mailed in her credentials, her facts, etched in 12-point type. She had no middle name, no husband, no children. Feldman already knew this from Google. She was thirty-eight, hobbyless as well. She had gone to Cornell and Harvard. Her work she labeled merely "a study of proton decay."
Feldman loved her modesty. No fancy language, no mention of the foundations and universities that had supported her research. Just a plain Jane of neutrino physics. Her accompanying letter was clear and direct, addressed to Connie-who else dis she know?
Dear Connie Denison:
Thank you and your committee for inviting me to speak. I will be happy to do so on August eleventh.
Feldman kept the folded letter in his pocket, memorized the resume, and waited for August eleventh. During the heat wave in the month of July, Feldman's stores boomed. He ran out of Sunblock and then After burn and Unguent-tine. Grandma reordered wine coolers twice a day. The superstore sold in a moth the season's supply of chaise lounges and barbecue grills and electric fans. Feldman, looking at sales printouts, could hardly believe how far he had come from the days when his father would carry home the receipts in a small briefcase. Yet, he did not want to introduce himself to Dr. Silver as a businessman. He wanted to sound more romantic and then, as he thought of romance, Feldman's heart clogged with jealousy. He began to imagine his competitors. After all, he had no idea with whom she stayed underground. Harvard men, pipe smokers, precise thinkers, men as patient and intelligent as Dr. Silver herself, men who would laugh if she told them that she had begun seeing a pharmacist in Cleveland. Feldman, on bad days, calculated his chances: one in ten? in a hundred? a thousand? On people who lived underground there were no statistics. The jealousy tortured him but he also enjoyed it. She was keeping him on his toes.
As the date of her speech approached, he though about her more and more. He gave her personal idiosyncrasies. To her professional resume he added a biography. She disliked animals, had a small streak of physical vanity. She was always polite but sometimes distant, like the women in perfume ads. But when she wanted to speak, to be warm, friendly, interested, boy oh boy could she do it.
By early August Feldman hardly paid attention to daily life. Grandma called twice about a late shipment of Mohawk brandy, then she sent Philip to check on him. The Liberian walked all the way from Grant Street, entered winded and sweating. "You okay, Mr. Boss?" Philip asked. "Grandma, she's worried about you."
Feldman offered a 16-oz. Coke. "I'm okay. It's just business, I'm too busy."
After downing the cola, the African cleared his throat. "I'll be leaving-around Thanksgiving, going back to Liberia."
"Going back? After all the war and the killing that you witnessed?"
"It's not that way any more," Philip said. "There's no more gangs, and the president is educated-a woman. I'm thinking of maybe going into politics myself."
Though stunned, Feldman admired the man's courage and knew it would not be easy to replace him, but how could he compare a new hire with a new life.
"I really think it's wonderful, and I want to help." While Philip waited near an air-conditioning vent Feldman went to his office to write a huge bonus check, half a year's salary.
Feldman hated horoscopes and long ago had dispatched God to the clearance bin, but he took Philips's decision as a good omen for all risk-takers. On August tenth he prayed that Irene Silver would take a chance, too, that she would see him as he was and be satisfied.
Before she walked up to the podium Feldman observed her from a distance. Anonymous among the group of pharmacists snacking on hors d'oeuvres, he would wait until she finished her speech to make his own. He watched as she peeled a celery stalk as if it was a banana, making a small meal of the celery and a few baby carrots. It pleased Feldman to notice that she, too seemed a little nervous. She scanned the room looking, he knew, for him.
Three days before her appearance, Feldman finally e-mailed his feelings, not all but enough. Irene Silver wrote back telling him that his words made her blush. He had attached a photo as well and instead of a resume, he ordered flowers delivered to her deep underground. One of them, a fading orchid, perched, as she spoke, between her heart and her left shoulder. Feldman told her where he would be sitting, described his suit and his tie. Five rows back, he placed himself where her eyes could alight comfortably on him and they did.
Dr. Silver spoke to the assembled pharmacists about the neutrino, the almost massless particle. With its nonzero weight and without charge it sailed through the cosmos equally indifferent to all matter. Every second a few billion neutrinos passed through Cleveland on their way...the scientist paused. "I can't say where they are going; nothing will stop them so the journey is endless."
As she spoke people coughed and buttoned their clothes against the frigid air conditioning. Some politely tiptoed toward the exits. Feldman, riveted, knew that she spoke directly to him.
"Why doesn't she say anything about drugs?" a man on his right whispered. "I wish she'd talk about baldness or Alzheimer's. Who gives a shit about neutrinos?"
When Irene Silver finished to scattered applause, from the back of the auditorium Feldman heard the shriek of Grandma's hearing aids. He had brought Grandma, too. There would be no secrets kept from Irene Silver. Feldman wanted to present her with everything: the three stores, his dead parents, the accumulated experience of his life as a man.
He rose to introduce himself to the woman he had chosen to love. She watched him approach and held out her hand. "I hope you're not disappointed," she said. Feldman, too overcome to speak, took her hand and held it. He was thinking about Liberia for a honeymoon, but first, he understood, the lady would need some time to decide about the universe.
by Max Apple
When Jerome Feldman addressed himself to the woman lodged beneath three thousand tons of water he decided that he would not be coy. He would tell her at once that he was serious, yet he would do it in a way that wouldn't sound as if he was replying to a personal ad. After all, she had not advertised. He had seen a feature on Irene Silver in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and then shortly thereafter saw her in person, or at least it seemed like that, on 60 Mintutes. The problem was, why would she be interested in him? And yet, why not? A single woman living underground for a month at a time-maybe a thriving pharmacist wouldn't sound so bad to her. Feldman, thinning hair, nearsighted, quiet in conversation but sure of himself, Feldman, at forty-six, sometimes felt hot.
Especially so on Thursdays after work, when he drove Grandma to the Imperial Salon. It was not unusual for a woman waiting for her stylist to prefer striking up a conversation with Feldman to browsing through a current magazine. Usually he was the only male in the waiting area, but he liked to take some credit beyond his gender. This month alone he had been given a business card by an attractive lawyer and by the regional representative of Sprint. He felt flattered by such attention, but he daydreamed only about Irene Silver.
While Grandma camped under the dryer, Feldman composed in his mind a letter to Ms. Silver. Jackie Norton, the Sprint representative, interrupted his reverie. "Nice to see you again," she said She extended her hand and sat next to Feldman, only the width of her briefcase between them.
"I guess your grandmother and I have the same standing appointments," she said. Feldman smiled, stopped composing his letter so that he could concentrate on the slender, energetic woman so clearly flirting with him. "You didn't call," she said, and then she narrowed her eyes and made a child's sad face. She wiped away a feigned tear. "Just kidding, but I am disappointed."
"I've had a busy week," Feldman said.
"Workaholic?"
"Sometimes," he said.
"What did you tell me it was, drugstore?"
"Yes," he said, "and a package goods store. She runs it." He pointed toward the aquarium-sized hair dryer above Grandma's head. The manicurist noticed them and smiled in their direction. Feldman couldn't even see Grandma's face beneath the bowl of controlled heat, but her earrings, in the shape of Absolute vodka bottles, identified her.
"Is packaged goods liquor?" Feldman nodded. "And your grandma still works? she asked.
"Yes," Feldman said. "She runs the store. There are four employees but she's the boss."
"That is amazing," Jackie said. She reached over to squeeze his hand. "I know you must help her a lot."
"Actually," Feldman said, "I just do the ordering. She's completely in charge."
When Grandma emerged from beneath the dryer, she tipped the stylist and the manicurist and walked toward Feldman. He introduced her to Jackie. Grandma barely noticed the woman. "Hello," she said. "Let's go. I want to brush out the stuff they put on me." Feldman held Grandma's elbow as she led him toward the door.
"Call me," Jackie said. Feldman waved, noncommittal.
His father had died when Feldman was twelve, and when his mother died she left him a drugstore, a liquor store, and Grandma. He had expected his grandmother to move to Florida, as her few remaining friends had. The old woman hadn't worked in a decade, but when she arose from mourning her daughter, she returned to the Grant Street liquor store. Feldman had been trying to sell the business for months, with on offers. Street people camped out in the doorway. The windows had been broken so many times that even after he installed steel bars he still couldn't get insurance. His most reliable employee, Philip, a serious young man from Liberia, had been shot at, and two other clerks had been robbed, though without assault. Before Grandma took over, Feldman himself hadn't dared to go near the store after dark. Still, he couldn't talk her out of returning to work, and legally, the store was still hers.
"I'd rather die quick in a robbery than die of boredom watching TV in that overheated apartment you got for me."
Grandma was eighty-nine when Feldman put the store which she and Grandpa had started back in her hands. With the help of Philip and the ironmonger who had installed the bars she built herself a tower in the center of the store, two ten-foot safety ladders, topped by a little booth the size of a parking-lot kiosk. From her lofty perch she could look straight at the security cameras and also scan the sales floor. Her eyesight, after cataract surgery, returned to 20-20, but she wore two hearing aids ans still missed anything said in a conversational tone. At the store everyone yelled up to her. Feldman had expected her to last a week; she'd been there for three years without an incident. The men who came in to buy Ripple wine, the ones Feldman knew might've cut his throat for a bottle of cough syrup, threw kisses in the air to Grandma.
At ninety-two her health remained as stable as her profits. Whenever she needed to climb down, she buzzed for one of the floor clerks to assist her. For special customers she liked to toss down wall calendars or ballpoint pens, and every December, for the entire month, she dropped candy canes down to the customers who brought their children.The regulars came to treat Grandma as a sage. Because of her years and her remoteness they thought of her as wise. Nobody was allowed to climb the stairs to see Grandma, but when she came down to eat or to go to the bathroom, there were people waiting to ask for advice about personal problems.
"I don't hear most of what they're talking about, she told Feldman. "But I say things like, 'You'll get over this. You'll get over everything,' It's the truth."
Feldman's own problems he didn't discuss with Grandma. He had expanded after his mother's death to a third location, the mall superstore where he did a high-volume business in cosmetics and small electronics and on certain items could almost match Wal-Mart. In the new store he watched himself become a wealthy man. He bought season tickets for his beloved Browns and Indians, but now that he had it, he wanted more than financial success. Women were available and Feldman had many times attempted to be in love. But, like Grandma, he told women the truth-he was waiting until he was sure. At first he didn't take this interest in Irene Silver too seriously. He had an imagination. Sometimes he fantasized about a customer. Once while Feldman was trying to summon courage to speak to a woman who had caught his eye, he noticed her shoplifting shampoo and conditioner. He didn't even try to stop her-the price of his indulgence.
In the 60 Minutes closeups the scientist looked composed, calm; and who could stay calm with Mike Wallace glaring at you? He liked the way she laughed, too, a big laugh when the interviewer asked her, "Don't you get lonely underground?"
"Of course," she said. And then she turned the tables on Wallace.
"Don't you get lonely aboveground?" Feldman, seated in front of his flat-screen TV, a slice of pizza in his hand, rose from his chair as if he'd just seen a sports highlight.
"Sometimes I'm lonely in the midst of company, too," the scientist said.
"Loneliness doesn't have that much to do with being alone."
"Me, too," Feldman said to the television. "That's just how I feel." He continued to stand as the scientist, accompanied by the CBS crew, descended. At the bottom of the abandoned salt mine, Irene posed below an array of photomultiplier in her underwater laboratory.
"You're like a coal miner," Mike Wallace said.
"Not at all," the scientist answered. She wasn't falling for any of his lines. She held her lovely hand up to the camera. "No filth, no lung disease, no backbreaking work-I see no comparison to mining. I'm very fortunate to be able to do my work in such comfort and safety."
"And if you do find that a proton has decayed, do you think you'll win the Novel Prize?"
Feldman thought she looked so beautiful, like a Christmas window display. The photomultiplier behind her appeared to be M&Ms glued to tinfoil. She ignored the camera as she glanced toward her instrument panel. "Prizes don't concern me," the scientist said. "First of all, I don't work alone. There are other depth locations in the Untied States and abroad. If we do confirm an event-greater certainty about the universe, that will be out prize."
"Yes!" Feldman yelled. At Ohio State he had taken three physics courses and felt a keen interest, but a drugstore always lay in his future so he leaned toward chemistry. When it came to matter, Feldman had penetrated no further than the outer electron shell.
"Certainty," he said aloud. "That's exactly what I want, too."
On Feldman Pharmacy stationery he began.
Dear Dr. Silver:
The idea of you beneath all that water is so moving. I am not a scientist but I admit to a lifelong interest in Dr. Albert Einstein. I have read the recent tome by Abraham Pais, which is a beautiful work even though Dr. Pais loses me whenever he switches from words to equations. Fortunately he realizes that many of us are not so adept at math so he makes it possible to skip the formula and still get the life. I mean the essence of the work. What else is the life?
I am writing to you from my office at Feldman's Pharmacy in the Brady Oaks Mall; perhaps you have even been here? I read in the newspaper that when you come up, so to speak, for air, you like to shop in Cleveland. We have twenty-four thousand square feet of floor space and feature general merchandise as well as Cleveland's largest independent pharmacy.
Please do not think that I write to women all the time. You are the first and only. I am a serious man. May I suggest that we meet? In addition to the pleasure of seeing you face to face, I would like to talk about your work. If I understand correctly the decay of a single proton means that the entire universe will disintegrate. I look forward to discussing this with you.
Feldman looked up from his desk. It was 1 AM. Because it had an outdoor entry, the mall store stayed open all night. Like her work, Feldman's also never ended. But the certainties he pursued were far more modest. He had the routine of commerce, the steady revolution of seasonal goods, the holiday markdowns, the readjustments of Medicare reimbursement. Feldman, in good health and with his revenue growing at 20 percent year over year, came to the conclusion that he had little chance with the scientist. Irene Silver looked toward the end of time; at 8:30 every morning Feldman took Grandma to Dunkin' Donuts and then on to Grant Street. He reread his letter, then crumpled it.
An only child of an only child, Feldman had always been Grandma's boy, her little helper. When Grandma heaved in her foaming bath there stood five-year-old Feldman, lifeguard on the other side of the shower curtain. His mother hand Grandma would take their little pharmacist-to-be into ladies' rooms with them, into the tiny curtained dressing room at Simpson's Department Store, where skirts fell like spilled drinks and price tags dangled at their arms. At a young age he observed females up close, knew the underarm pad and the hook-and-eye snap. He loved the company of women and yet he had passed up marriage opportunities, satisfied with the occasional cashier or cosmetics clerk while he built his business.
Work was what Feldman knew. In grade school he had straightened aspirin bottles and dusted shelves. In high school he organized the stockroom and in college he took phone orders and alphabetized prescriptions. Both his parents worked until the day of their death and that was Grandma's plan, too. These were his models. When he put off marriage, he assumed that his own life would swell on like Grandma's, but who could know? With a station wagon full of greeting card returns his father, only fifty, had slumped at the wheel forever. The word remained him of Irene Silver. What did time mean to someone who awaited an event, that if it happened at all, might take seven billion years?
A few days after his attempted letter and even before Grandma's next hair appointment, Jackie Norton called to announce that she was in his very mall. Feldman walked to the Circuit City store to see her, then invited her to Ming's for lunch . The sales representative ate her salad daintily and with chopsticks. Feldman admired her skill. As she chewed, she explained the secrets of cell phone miniaturization. "I'm having my hair done on Thursday as you know, and it will still look good on Saturday."
The following Saturday night in the more romantic atmosphere of Brands Steakhouse, after a bottle of wine and much smiling and nodding of her head, Jackie got down to business. She reached into her purse and then placed her delicate closed fits on the table in front of Feldman.
"Curious?" she asked. She turned her fits in the candlelight as if she was trying to sell him her watch. Feldman admitted his curiosity. "Go ahead," Jackie said. She held her closed hands toward him. Feldman hesitated, not sure whether to open finger by finger or, in the more manly fashion, all four at once. He decided one by one, starting with her-tipped pinky. In the middle of her palm, an offering-wrapped in black foil, decorated with the image of a Greek warrior-a condom.
I'm in communications," Jackie said, "and there's nothing more important to communicate about these days, is there?" Feldman, accustomed to seeing cases at a time, looked with surprise at one.
"We're adults," Jackie said. "There's lunch, there's dinner, there's this."
She said it slowly, drawing out each word the way the announcer at the ballpark listed the Indians batting order: leading off, "lunch"; batting second, "dinner." Batting a third, "this." She paused for a minute. "Carl, my ex, he refused to use them. But that was the least of his flaws. I hope you're not against safe sex."
Feldman shook his head. "I'm all for it." He wanted to feel something like lust, some reason to close his hand around hers and say, "Let's go-right now." Jackie Norton looked so lovely, too, her bosom accommodating, her cheeks rosy-though it might have been makeup. But instead of imaging her panting beneath him Feldman pictured his own condoms in their revolving rack at the end of aisle 12.
"I hope you don't think I'm too aggressive," Jackie said. She kept her hand over the object. "I've learned in sales that you don't help yourself if you save your best for later. Sometimes there's no later."
Feldman nodded. "You're absolutely right," he said. And then, he surprised himself. "I'm flattered," he said, "and most of the time I would be...You know...Right with you. But at this time, I'm taken." Jackie didn't try to disguise her feelings. Feldman looked away, giving her the privacy of shame. In her disappointment, he felt genuine tenderness toward Jackie, though he decided not to hug,
"I wish you had told me right away," she said.
"I should have," he admitted. "I'm sorry."
"Well, she's a lucky woman to have such an honest guy."
Jerome Feldman, the outgoing president of the Ohio Association of Independent Pharmacists, decided that he would be assertive and honest. Like his fellow independents he worried about Rite Aid and Walgreen's and looked forward to seeing colleagues on a yearly basis. The annual convention keynote speaker alternated between extremes, one year an Ohio legislator, the next year a comic entertainer.
"I know that this is our year for scheduling a comedian," Feldman announced to the board. "But I have taken the liberty of inviting a scientist to speak to us." Feldman looked out at the fourteen pharmacists on the board. Not a hand went up in objection.
"A real scientist," he went on even though he didn't have to. "Someone who's doing pure research."
Connie, Feldman's secretary, made the call. Dr. Silver was surprised and delighted. She was not accustomed to trade association invitations. She said it would be no trouble for her to come to Cleveland on whatever day the group wanted her. Her schedule was very flexible.
"When I told her that we pay a thousand dollars, she didn't believe me," Connie said. "She goes, 'For one speech?' That's the going rate, I told her, She should hear the comedy people complain that it's not enough. She sounds nice but she didn't seem too sure about what we want her to talk about. Maybe you should give her a call."
This opportunity, too, Feldman declined. Not with her would his first exchange take place over such long and imprecise wavelengths. On the phone nothing was true enough. On the phone Grandma could chirp like a teenager. On the phone Einstein once told an interviewer, "Idea? I've never had an idea." When the time came for him to speak to Irene Silver, he would tell her both his position and his velocity.
A few days after she had accepted the invitation, Dr. Silver mailed in her credentials, her facts, etched in 12-point type. She had no middle name, no husband, no children. Feldman already knew this from Google. She was thirty-eight, hobbyless as well. She had gone to Cornell and Harvard. Her work she labeled merely "a study of proton decay."
Feldman loved her modesty. No fancy language, no mention of the foundations and universities that had supported her research. Just a plain Jane of neutrino physics. Her accompanying letter was clear and direct, addressed to Connie-who else dis she know?
Dear Connie Denison:
Thank you and your committee for inviting me to speak. I will be happy to do so on August eleventh.
Feldman kept the folded letter in his pocket, memorized the resume, and waited for August eleventh. During the heat wave in the month of July, Feldman's stores boomed. He ran out of Sunblock and then After burn and Unguent-tine. Grandma reordered wine coolers twice a day. The superstore sold in a moth the season's supply of chaise lounges and barbecue grills and electric fans. Feldman, looking at sales printouts, could hardly believe how far he had come from the days when his father would carry home the receipts in a small briefcase. Yet, he did not want to introduce himself to Dr. Silver as a businessman. He wanted to sound more romantic and then, as he thought of romance, Feldman's heart clogged with jealousy. He began to imagine his competitors. After all, he had no idea with whom she stayed underground. Harvard men, pipe smokers, precise thinkers, men as patient and intelligent as Dr. Silver herself, men who would laugh if she told them that she had begun seeing a pharmacist in Cleveland. Feldman, on bad days, calculated his chances: one in ten? in a hundred? a thousand? On people who lived underground there were no statistics. The jealousy tortured him but he also enjoyed it. She was keeping him on his toes.
As the date of her speech approached, he though about her more and more. He gave her personal idiosyncrasies. To her professional resume he added a biography. She disliked animals, had a small streak of physical vanity. She was always polite but sometimes distant, like the women in perfume ads. But when she wanted to speak, to be warm, friendly, interested, boy oh boy could she do it.
By early August Feldman hardly paid attention to daily life. Grandma called twice about a late shipment of Mohawk brandy, then she sent Philip to check on him. The Liberian walked all the way from Grant Street, entered winded and sweating. "You okay, Mr. Boss?" Philip asked. "Grandma, she's worried about you."
Feldman offered a 16-oz. Coke. "I'm okay. It's just business, I'm too busy."
After downing the cola, the African cleared his throat. "I'll be leaving-around Thanksgiving, going back to Liberia."
"Going back? After all the war and the killing that you witnessed?"
"It's not that way any more," Philip said. "There's no more gangs, and the president is educated-a woman. I'm thinking of maybe going into politics myself."
Though stunned, Feldman admired the man's courage and knew it would not be easy to replace him, but how could he compare a new hire with a new life.
"I really think it's wonderful, and I want to help." While Philip waited near an air-conditioning vent Feldman went to his office to write a huge bonus check, half a year's salary.
Feldman hated horoscopes and long ago had dispatched God to the clearance bin, but he took Philips's decision as a good omen for all risk-takers. On August tenth he prayed that Irene Silver would take a chance, too, that she would see him as he was and be satisfied.
Before she walked up to the podium Feldman observed her from a distance. Anonymous among the group of pharmacists snacking on hors d'oeuvres, he would wait until she finished her speech to make his own. He watched as she peeled a celery stalk as if it was a banana, making a small meal of the celery and a few baby carrots. It pleased Feldman to notice that she, too seemed a little nervous. She scanned the room looking, he knew, for him.
Three days before her appearance, Feldman finally e-mailed his feelings, not all but enough. Irene Silver wrote back telling him that his words made her blush. He had attached a photo as well and instead of a resume, he ordered flowers delivered to her deep underground. One of them, a fading orchid, perched, as she spoke, between her heart and her left shoulder. Feldman told her where he would be sitting, described his suit and his tie. Five rows back, he placed himself where her eyes could alight comfortably on him and they did.
Dr. Silver spoke to the assembled pharmacists about the neutrino, the almost massless particle. With its nonzero weight and without charge it sailed through the cosmos equally indifferent to all matter. Every second a few billion neutrinos passed through Cleveland on their way...the scientist paused. "I can't say where they are going; nothing will stop them so the journey is endless."
As she spoke people coughed and buttoned their clothes against the frigid air conditioning. Some politely tiptoed toward the exits. Feldman, riveted, knew that she spoke directly to him.
"Why doesn't she say anything about drugs?" a man on his right whispered. "I wish she'd talk about baldness or Alzheimer's. Who gives a shit about neutrinos?"
When Irene Silver finished to scattered applause, from the back of the auditorium Feldman heard the shriek of Grandma's hearing aids. He had brought Grandma, too. There would be no secrets kept from Irene Silver. Feldman wanted to present her with everything: the three stores, his dead parents, the accumulated experience of his life as a man.
He rose to introduce himself to the woman he had chosen to love. She watched him approach and held out her hand. "I hope you're not disappointed," she said. Feldman, too overcome to speak, took her hand and held it. He was thinking about Liberia for a honeymoon, but first, he understood, the lady would need some time to decide about the universe.