The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(6)
She stepped into a book-lined alcove not only to evade the rapidly filling living room but also to consult with herself as to what the hell she was going to do with the contents of her pocket. From a bookshelf flagged with family snapshots in lieu of bookmarks (her grandparents had been sentimental that way), she pulled down Newton’s Principia Mathematica and plucked from its pages an old photograph of Isaac standing amid roses in LA’s Exposition Park. As she directed her growing anxiety at his image, Hazel became aware of a clutch of guests huddled in the next room, none of whom she recognized. Their words were indistinct, yet she sensed they were gossiping about her grandfather.
“. . . a bit unhinged, maybe . . .”
She didn’t like their tone, and, as sometimes happened with her—had been happening as far back as she could remember—Hazel conjured up a scene of comic violence, in which she burst into the room and pelted the group with smoked salmon from the buffet table, before jamming a broken schmear knife into a few necks. Then, amid screams and sprays of blood, she fled the house, triumphant. The idiotic image evaporated, and she returned her attention to the photo where her then-middle-aged grandfather was looking overheated in a corduroy jacket. She had seen the snapshot countless times and had no need to study it now so thoroughly. She was merely delaying the moment when she would have to make herself visible to the mourners roaming the house. Go be with your family. Yes, these people were technically her family, but she had never entirely felt comfortable among them. She could fake it, of course—had faked it for much of her life—but with Isaac gone, her feelings of “other” were rapidly intensifying.
Nearly half the place was filled with mathematicians of one type or another. Growing up, she had thought little about the mental caliber of the guests who filtered through the house. But now, as an adult, Hazel could grasp the critical difference between mathematics and mere arithmetic, and she quickly discovered that there was nothing like a talent for the former to separate pure, distilled intelligence from the affected kind one picks up at college.
In the numbers arena, Hazel had always been lacking. She had barely gotten through precalculus in high school, and, after moving to Seattle for college, she had dived into the arts and humanities with scattershot enthusiasm—drama, dance, literature, history—sidestepping the hard and fast in favor of the slippery and indefinite. If she had been a member of any other family, she might have been confident in her choices. But with the Severys, Hazel often felt that whenever one of them looked at her—even Lily, who had double-majored in comparative literature and mathematics at Berkeley—they weren’t really seeing her but were scanning a set of data points visible only to them, like insects in ultraviolet. She could practically hear them whispering, “Why entrust this one with the letter?” Hazel had been asking herself this very question. As if her grief wasn’t enough to bear, she’d now been given this cryptic assignment?
She returned Isaac and the rosebushes to the Principia and nervously checked her phone, which set off another sort of anxiety: Why hadn’t Bennet’s name appeared in the call log? Why couldn’t she rely on him to support her today of all days? First, he had begged off joining her on the trip because of a work emergency, and second, after offering her a ride to the airport, he had diminished the favor by greeting her with a Nikon camera to the face. Though Bennet worked for an artsy furniture design company that promised to “blur the line between form and function, between our furniture and ourselves,” he nursed loftier creative ambitions outside of work. To that end, he insisted that his “emotions project,” or whatever he was calling his next art installation, demanded constant photographic vigilance. Click.
After examining the shot, he’d said, “I can never capture your sad face. Why is that? Cheerful, stunned, irritated—never sad.”
“Can you exploit my grief later?”
She could, of course, snap a photo of herself now so that her boyfriend might complete his collection. This is funereal me—sad enough? Though at that moment, her face more likely betrayed rising panic. Hazel slid her phone back in her pocket, at the same time checking the opposite hip. Her pockets weren’t terribly deep. What if the envelope fell out as she sat down?
With a mind to concealing the thing safely somewhere, she left the alcove and made straight for the hall, avoiding the populated end of the house. As she turned a corner, she halted at the sight of a middle-aged man in a light herringbone jacket chatting up a female guest, but it was only Isaac’s accountant, Fritz Dornbach. There was comfort in seeing this man whom her grandfather had always liked, and it occurred to her that if she were to confide in anyone, she could do worse than the family’s attorney-bookkeeper. But then, Isaac couldn’t have been more clear: Do not share this with anyone.
She stole behind Fritz toward the staircase, which someone had roped off with some tasselled curtain ties, presumably to discourage wandering guests. Hazel ducked under the barrier. The second-floor landing was dim, its windows curtained shut. As her pupils adjusted, she made her way past Isaac’s study door, where her step triggered a groaning floorboard—the same loose board under which she and her brother had once kept treasures and left each other secret notes. A loose nail pressed up through her shoe, as if a kind of prompt, but she discarded this as a potential hiding place; it was too easy for Gregory to get nostalgic and stumble upon it.
Turning to the study door, she imagined herself twisting the glass knob to reveal Isaac on the other side, hunched in a chair, looking up with a patient smile. For a second, she even thought she could hear his rhythmic murmuring coming from within, the sound of a mathematician thinking out loud. A murmur of mathematicians.