his mind drift. He recalled that a human being, eating and moving around, gave off 200 watts of body heat. This room trapped most of it, bringing prickly perspiration to his brow. His Adam’s apple snagged on the knot of his tie.
“Gordon!” a silvery voice called to him above the tangle of talk. He turned. Marsha threaded her way through the crowd. He bent and kissed her. She was toting an overnight case, swinging it with abandon as she turned to call hellos to people she knew. She told him about the crush of traffic getting into town after her shuttle flight from LaGuardia, eyebrows darting upward to underline a word, hands describing averted collisions with swooping arcs. The prospect of a few days of freedom from the children gave her a manic, gay air that spread to Gordon. He realized he had grown somber as this overheated, glittery reception went on, and Marsha had erased that in a moment. It was this quality in her, of swelling life, that he remembered best when he was away from her. “Oh, God, there’s that Lakin,” she said, eyes rolling up in a parody of panic. “Let’s move the opposite way, I don’t want to start off with him.” Wifely loyalty. She tugged him to the shrimp salad, which he had passed over, probably following instinctively a genetically ingrained dietary axiom. Marsha snared a few of their friends along the way—to form a protective barrier against Lakin, she said. All this was done with comic exaggeration, drawing chuckles from the somber faces. A waiter sought them out and delivered glasses of champagne. “Ummm, I’ll bet this isn’t what’s in the bowl over there,” Marsha said, sipping, lips puckered in approval. The waiter hesitated, then agreed, “The Chairman said to bring out some of the private stock,” and then was gone, fearing he had revealed too much. Marsha seemed to polarize the medium, Gordon noted, drawing friends out of corners of the large room to form a cloud around them. Carroway appeared, shaking hands, chuckling. Gordon basked in her compact energy. He had never been able to relax so with Penny, he remembered, and maybe that should have told him something from the start. In 1968, when they were in the thick of their last elaborate sparring, he and Penny had come to Washington in winter again. It was a veiled city. Fog rose from the Potomac’s shifting currents. He had avoided dinner parties with physicists that trip, he recalled, mostly because Penny found them boring and he could not predict when she would get into one of her political arguments or, worse, descend into a swollen silence. They had areas they had silently agreed not to talk about, areas which expanded in time. Each had axes to grind—you’re an injustice collector, Penny had accused, once—but, perversely, the good periods between the bad had become radiant with a released energy. He had oscillated in mood through 1967 and ’68, not buying Penny’s Freud-steeped recipes for repair, but discovering no alternative. Isn’t it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis? she said once, and he had realized it was so; he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences, with physics as the shining example. But they had taken the old Newtonian clockwork as their example. To modern physics there was no ticktock world independent of the observer, no untouched mechanism, no way of describing a system without being involved in it. His intuition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. And so, in the descending days of 1968 his personal nucleus had fissioned, and a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx, Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home. Remembering the events now, seeing them sealed in amber, he smiled as Marsha brimmed beside him.
The western windows of the long room now let in a light like beaten brass. Luminaries from the funding agencies were arriving, customarily late. Gordon nodded, shook hands, made appropriate small talk. Into Marsha’s crescent of conversation came Ramsey, smoking a thin cigar. Gordon greeted him with a conspiratorial wink. Then a face said, “I wanted to meet you, so I’m afraid I just plain gatecrashed.” Gordon smiled without interest, bound up in his own recollections, and then noticed the young man’s self-lettered name badge: Gregory Markham. He froze, hand hanging in midair.