Free I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck Page A

the shower and is drying himself with a towel—a towel he drops on the floor.
    He is whistling a tune.
    You should have married Paul Erdös, Philip teases her.
    Paul Erdös, he tells her, lived out of a suitcase. Instead of a shirt, he wore his pajama top; he had no money, did not eat meat, washed his hands compulsively, and did not know how to tie his own shoelaces. But he wrote or coauthored 1,475 academic papers. More than any other single mathematician in history.
    Philip has published with someone who has published with someone who published with Paul Erdös.
    Philip’s Erdös number is 3.
    Lorna, too, lived out of a suitcase—or nearly. Disorganized, unreliable, brilliant, she worked at the Center for Particle Astrophysics in Berkeley until she overdosed. The housekeeper found her in her bed; Lorna had been dead for several days already. Hard not to picture the decomposing body: Lorna’s curls framing her once beautiful, now discolored and disfigured face.
    Accident or a suicide? Everyone who knew Lorna was curious to know.
    So is Nina.

    Why do so many mathematicians commit suicide? Is it because their discoveries make them feel isolated and alienated? Or is there some other reason? she asks Philip.
    Instead of answering, Philip says, I should have gone over to her apartment when she did not answer the phone. I had a feeling something was wrong.
    Philip spends that night in his office working—or so he says. Or, perhaps, he spends the night driving around Marin, where Lorna lived. In the morning, when he finally comes home—Nina hears him climbing up the stairs to the bedroom—his limp more pronounced than usual.
    Suppose we were to fly through the entire universe in a spaceship, Lorna says one evening, early on in the semester, when she comes to Nina and Philip’s house for dinner, the way the early explorers circumnavigated the globe, we might just end up where we started. She laughs nervously, waiting for Philip to reply.
    Are you saying that the universe is finite, edgeless, and connected? Philip asks her.
    Earlier, Nina notices that Lorna’s shoes, ballet flats, are of two different colors—one black, one silver.
    She hesitates before pointing this out.
    Oh. Looking down, Lorna’s face turns pink. I must have been thinking of something else.
    What else did Philip and Lorna talk about? Theories of the early universe, chaos, black holes.
    Nina has set the table; she has cooked the dinner—a picky eater, Lorna does not eat meat or fish. After they finish the main course, Nina gets up and clears the dishes.
    But isn’t it absurd to think that the universe might be infinite, Lorna says, returning to the same subject as she pokes at the dessert on her plate with her fork.
    A pineapple upside-down cake Nina has baked especially.
    For if, say, we go beyond Einstein’s theory—if we find an ultimate theory of everything—the theory will prove that we humans are created from the same basic substance as the universe, and that we and the universe are just different manifestations of the same thing. How then could the universe be infinite when we ourselves are finite?
    Lorna speaks in short, almost inaudible, nervous bursts, so that one has to lean in close to hear what she is saying. She is small-boned and her arms are covered with freckles. She does not know how to drive a car and after dinner, Philip takes her home. To Nina, it seems as if the drive takes him longer than necessary. He is gone for two hours.
    The traffic, he claims when he finally comes home. And an accident on the highway.
    You shouldn’t have mentioned her shoes, Philip also tells Nina. You embarrassed her and it was childish.
    But, by then, Nina has decided that Lorna is the child. A careless, needy child who cannot exist in the actual world or with the people in it.
    You don’t understand, Philip says, frowning when, later, she again brings up the dinner with Lorna. Physicists do not have the freedom mathematicians have. Physicists deal