Adam & Eve

Adam & Eve -by Sena Jeter Naslund


PART ONE

WHEN THE PIANO FALLS


A NUDE COUPLE is standing in the shade of a small, leafy tree. The quality of the filtered light on their bare skin attracts me, and I stand with them to enjoy the dappled shade. Through pinholes formed where leaves cross, the sunlight creates globules of brightness on the grass. My bare toes nudge inside one of those softly defined orbs, but then I remember to look up.

From the sky, at the rate of 32.2 feet per second per second, a grand piano is hurtling down like a huge black bird of prey over our upturned faces. In that moment is a beginning and an end, alpha and omega, Genesis and Revelation.

Because we always ask, like any logical child, “Yes, but what came before the beginning and after the end?” I start with the year 2017, three years before I fell into Adam’s world and lived with him in the shade of an apple tree.

The instant before the piano fell, from a block away, I saw only a curiosity in the Amsterdam sky: a grand piano, aloft. To the beat of my rapidly moving feet, the words of the White Rabbit—“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”—played through my mind from Alice in Wonderland. My date was with my beloved husband, Thom Bergmann, an astrophysicist of international reputation. My name was and is Lucy Bergmann, and I was scheduled to join him and his colleagues for lunch. An imaginative, playful group for all their dedication to science, they’d named themselves collectively ELF—Extraterrestrial Life Focus. Using spectroscopy, they analyzed light from distant reaches of the universe to determine if the spectra had been emitted by biomolecules. My husband and his colleagues were searching for the atomic structure of amino acids, essential to life as we know it on Earth.

Not that I had anything to contribute to their scientific inquiry; I merely represented the curiosity of an ordinary, somewhat bright human being. Nonetheless, I knew something that none of them knew. I knew something that my husband had confided to me that morning in our hotel room. Because I had faith in my husband and believed what he told me, I knew a secret to which no person in the history of humankind had been privy. In an effort to contain my extraordinary excitement, I forced myself to watch the ascent of the piano as I hurried past the tall seventeenth-century Dutch houses on Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip Café.

That fine day in Amsterdam, in the spring of 2017, I thought it strange that the body of the delicate, expensive instrument was not dressed in a quilted case tailored to fit its unique shape. Darkly gleaming above the trees, the grand piano’s ebony-colored sides flashed back the fresh late-morning sunlight, but the three pedals hanging under the keyboard had been fitted with socks of green felt. To protect the piano cabinet from the abrasive cables of the sling at points of contact, plump red cushions had been placed between the twisted wire and the polished wood. Someone who lived on the top floor must have been in a great hurry to have a piano delivered.

My husband had been talking about buying just such a handsome grand. Like many people gifted in mathematics, Thom was also a fine musician.

As I walked down Prince Street, I speculated that the piano was being lifted up the outside of the narrow Dutch house because the interior stairs twirled their way up too tightly to accommodate the passage of so massive an instrument. Almost three centuries earlier, the clever Dutch had anticipated the installation problem posed by furniture too grand for their interior stairs yet essential to their egos as testaments of bourgeois magnificence. During the construction of these multistoried, substantial homes, their builders usually had a hook permanently implanted outside at the apex of the ornate, arched facade of each house. By means of a pulley attached to the hook, large and heavy furnishings could be raised by laborious degrees outside the building to even the highest level.

At the top of this particular Dutch house was a high, large window, subdivided into many small panes, and it had been flung wide from its side hinges, like an open arm, to welcome the huge piano. I tried to see if the glass of the mullioned window was wavy at the bottom of each pane, but my eyesight was not acute enough to detect such an irregularity in glass at that height and distance. I knew glass behaves rather like a slow-flowing liquid; over time, gravity drags its molecules downward. I touched my own just-beginning-to-sag jawline and thought how gravity was beginning to do its work on me, at age thirty-nine.

That Amsterdam day four years ago, I was not only excited but also upset. I had spent the morning of our arrival from the States by visiting the Anne Frank House. The remnants of Anne’s innocence—sepia photographs of movie stars pinned to her bedroom wall—and the horror of what had been done by the Nazis screamed that the world I called home was too terrible a place to abide.

A line from Handel’s Messiah haunted me: “But who may abide the day of His coming?” In a scrambled way, I thought of Hitler as a kind of Antichrist, and of course millions of people did not abide the day of his coming. Some people—Muslim thinkers—have said that Western civilization ended with all that preceded and comprised the conducting of World War II. Some say that in our beginning are the seeds of our ending, but I believe, more optimistically, that in our endings are new beginnings.

Of course I would not attempt to talk with Thom about the Anne Frank House or the Nazi atrocities until after luncheon, when we were alone. Although I had left the orthodoxy of the Christian religion long ago, I had been spiritually moved, and that was what I wanted to discuss with Thom. I knew the profoundly disturbing Anne Frank House was sacred to the human spirit.

To try to settle myself (my self, not just my nerves, teetering between my stunned wonder at Thom’s scientific discovery and the horror of human willingness to kill fellow humans), I had walked an extra block before I started down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip. I suppose that decision to take the time, despite being late, to soothe my agitation into a smoother coherence saved my life.

Thinking of the Holocaust, I remembered when my fifth-grade class had visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. My school friend Janet Stimson had pointed at the balcony and said, “Murder. That’s what happened here. Real murder.” Despite Janet’s words, I had been unable to grasp that reality—the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in my hometown. That morning in Amsterdam, at the Anne Frank House, I had felt the edges of murder. Like a thin sizzle crossing from ear to ear, real murder seemed to skewer my mind.

And yes, because of the reality of mass murder, I wanted Thom to buy himself a grand piano. I would tell him that much at lunch—just lean over and whisper in his ear. “You don’t have to perform in Carnegie Hall,” I would whisper, “to deserve to play on a concert grand.” Painfully, I wondered as I walked what childish ditties Anne Frank might have sung when she was five or six. At that age she had been a friend of Thom’s mother. Playing tea party, the little girls had lifted thin Dresden cups and saucers over a toy table to their dolls. Equally innocent, one had lived a full life, married, had a brilliant son, and one had not.

Perhaps, I mused as I walked—You’re late, you’re late, for a very important date—Thom and I might have a child: a daughter named Sarah Anne, for Thom’s mother and Anne Frank. Late thirties was by no means too late to have a child.

A dark-skinned man wearing a loosely wrapped white turban leaned over the high windowsill and looked down to check the progress of the piano’s ascent. He might have been from India or Africa. I wondered if Martin Luther King Jr. had visited Africa, the continent of his ancestors and of all our ancestors for that matter, if science is to be believed, before he met death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. I had the impulse to wave at the man, up there, but decided distraction would be unwelcome. His face seemed carved and soberly set. In the interior of my heart, I gave a discreet little wave. He reached out to touch the cable, almost as though he were twanging a single vertical string of a bass fiddle.

The piano continued to mount the sky. Strangely, it didn’t stop at the high open window, though the man reached out his dark arms through the space to guide it in. The piano continued to rise till the metal loop at the top of its sling slammed against the pulley—I heard the clangor of the collision. Held tightly against the pulley, the naked piano swung wildly. Suddenly the three cables broke apart at the top, opened, and released the expensive instrument and the three red cushions that had been protecting its glossy finish from the sling.

As the huge black piano fell a little crookedly, its lid opened out, flapped slowly like the single stiff wing of a monstrous bird. The protective felt socks dropped away, and sunlight transmogrified the pedals into the brass talons of a stooping bird of prey.

I began to run. Still running, I heard the impact of the instrument, heard how it broke in jangled discord and the terrified screams of people close by. I ran harder. Approaching the door of the café, I gasped first with relief to see our friend Gabriel Plum lying beside the wrecked piano on the cobblestones. Stretched out, unhurt, he held Thom’s eyeglasses with the thick black plastic frame in his hand and seemed to be studying the pavement through one of the lenses. Then I saw a pool of blood seeping from underneath the golden struts and snarled strings, the scattered keys and felted hammers of the shattered piano.

“Thom!” I screamed. My knees buckled, and I would have fallen but felt under my elbow the supporting male hand of some stranger who muttered in an unknown tongue the word Igtiyal!

Three years later, I would learn that this Arabic word meant “murder.”

The day of Thom’s death, I felt myself disintegrating, turning into dust, into nothing.



Earlier that morning, after Thom and I got up, Thom had taken his computer flash drive, which I called the memory stick, though the term usually applies to a device for cameras, from around his own neck and lowered the black silk cord over my head. It was a familiar ritual for the first morning after our arrival for a conference in a foreign country. During the scientific meetings, I would venture out mostly on my own; Thom’s flash drive was a talisman, a love token, and a reminder that he was with me on my rambles. Without fail, I would return the memory stick to him at a shared meal just before he spoke at the conference.

That fateful day in our Amsterdam hotel, as he positioned the cord and its pendant around my neck, he said, “The keys to the kingdom.” Smiling fondly at me, he gave the titanium case of his flash drive a little pat against my breastbone.

Adjusting the stick so that it hung concealed inside my silk blouse between my breasts, I smiled to recall that as a child in Memphis I had sometimes worn the key to my grandmother’s home on a string around my neck.

“The keys to which kingdom?” I asked Thom.

“The inhabited universe.”

“Only that?” I teased.

“Let me show you, Ms. Smarty,” he said.

Drawing shut the hotel’s blackout curtains, he turned morning into night. By lamplight, his large adept hands moved automatically among the utilitarian instruments of his profession: a small projector, his computer, a connecting cable. When he retrieved the flash drive, cupping it in his hand, he remarked, “Already warm,” kissed it, and winked at me. Then he inserted the device into a port on the computer and turned off the table lamp.

In the darkness over our heads appeared a dazzling star-studded sky, clouded occasionally with reddish-pinkish zones.

“Behold,” he said dramatically. Then he spoke in his normal, soft voice, full of intimacy. “The reddish clouds indicate a statistical reality—where extraterrestrial life is most likely to be found.”

So many reddish areas! My knees felt wobbly. The tints of thin red and purple—sunset colors, dawn colors—looked like veils dropped here and there over the vast array of stars.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Spectroscopic analysis—new methods—for detecting the presence of biomolecules in deep space. Other life is very far away, but it exists.”

Like heaven, but where? I wanted to ask. Cloudy wisps of colors represented various biomolecules—pink, magenta, lavender, orange, a waver of green. Overlapping and combining in some places, the colors veiled the swirls of galaxies, stars, and golden intergalactic dust.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said, and my voice trembled. “You represent statistical reality as gorgeous.” I was moved by his graphic, the way works of art sometimes move me in their ability to combine truth and beauty. Sometimes the paintings of my patients moved me that way—I was an art therapist at University Hospital in Iowa City.

“I suppose we’re hardwired to see creation as beautiful,” he replied.

In one reddish area, a drop of pure crimson, red as blood, caught my eye. I pointed and said, “It’s throbbing.”

“Growing larger, actually,” he said.

As the dot enlarged, it lost its circularity and took on the point and lobes of a valentine. I realized I was seeing a love note from Thom emerge from the universe. The dot had become a heart. Hubris! I thought, but I was amused and pleased, too. In a red arch across the night sky I saw letters emerging. A message: “A Valentine to all the Lucys of the Universe.” I felt embarrassed, giddy, and terribly in love.

“Oh, Thom!” I said. “You’re not going to show this at the meeting. It’s too much!”

“No,” he said. “Not this part.”

Then he made the sun rise. The stars on the ceiling dimmed, and finally the letters faded away into artificial dawn. While Thom opened the curtains to admit the real world of a busy Dutch morning, he mentioned that the flash drive held his backup data and the programs for interpreting it. “Much of it’s also on the printout in my briefcase—the part I’m ready to present at the meeting.” He unplugged the drive from the computer and placed its cord around my neck again. “But you’ll bring me the memory stick, like always?” In the early days of our travels I had wondered why Thom wanted to risk the possibility that perhaps I would be delayed, through no fault of my own. Then this gesture of trust—in me, in good luck—became a ritual of our faith in each other. Again he patted the titanium case against my heart. “I won’t show ELF my love letter,” he answered.

As he bent to kiss my forehead, he remarked, “I’m not ready to tell them yet.”

“Tell them what?”

“It’s more than statistical probability. The place marked by pure red—that’s it.”

“What do you mean?” I felt blood suffuse my face, while my body flooded with fear.

“It’s there. The red dot marks the place. It’s there. Some form of extraterrestrial life.”

I was stunned. It was as though I were seeing an alien in Thom. Then came an impulse to throw my arms around him, to recover my Thom with a barrage of kisses all over his face, his head, his neck. Instead, I kissed him once, slowly and tenderly on the mouth.

“Gabriel Plum called last night,” Thom said quietly.

Gabriel was British, very dry and rational, a dear enough friend so that sometimes we called him “Sherlock” to tease him. Part of the Geneva group, he was enthusiastic about finding planets.

Thom went on, “Some fundamentalist group feels threatened by our search for extraterrestrial life.” My husband spoke the sentence thoughtfully; it wasn’t his style to ridicule anybody. “They contacted Gabriel.”

“You’ve told Gabriel? The red dot?”

“Before showing you? Not on my life.” He smiled at me. “But we communicate. He knows my methods for analyzing the data. He knows a discovery is imminent.”

“When will you announce it? At the meeting? At lunch?”

“All the amino acids are there, in the spectra. It’s life. I’m sure of it.”

“But?” I could feel his hesitation.

Thom glanced away from me. He studied the carpet in our hotel room. He seemed embarrassed. “You know Gabriel is looking for planets.”

“We’ve found thousands,” I said.

“They’re sterile. Gabriel wants them to be sterile.”

“Why?”

“He wants us to be the only ones. Earth is God’s chosen place. Where he sent his Son, in Gabriel’s belief.”

“But Gabriel was your student, years ago. He wants ELF to succeed.” I took off the memory stick. “I don’t want to wear it, Thom. It’s too important.”

He shrugged. Then he tapped his head. “It’s all in here. I could do it again if I needed to.”

“Yes, but how long would it take?”

“A few years. The programs are on the drive, too, the ones that make sense of the data.”

I heard the enthusiasm in Thom’s voice. Next he would offer to show me the programs, but I’d seen programs before—a jungle of numbers, tedious ones strewn with symbols, full of repetition. I had no training or ability to read them.

“I want to prepare people for the news. They aren’t ready. It’s too big. It will affect everything about our identity, about being human.”

I knew myself to be shaken in a hair-raising way. “It’s an earthquake of an idea,” I agreed. “A tsunami.” I squelched the impulse to ask him again, Have you really found life in space? Real life?

“I’ve invited an anthropologist, a Franco-Egyptian, to talk to them about the social and moral impact of scientific discoveries. He’ll come to lunch. Remember Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt?”

“What would a discovery of extraterrestrial life mean to people?”

“Different things, of course. Fundamentalists in any religion are literalists. They take the words of their scriptures to be true in a literal sense, not evocative, not symbolic, not sometimes mysterious and incomprehensible, not reflective of the historic moment when they were written. Beyond their literalist interpretations, they’re cocky enough to think they believe they have access to the mind of God.”

“What did Gabriel want you to do?”

Thom kissed first one cheek and then the other. “‘Consider the repercussions,’ was all Gabriel said. Adam was created in God’s image. If extraterrestrial life looks like green mold, then so must their god, I suppose.”

“I thought Adam was made of mud.”

“From the dust of the soil—adamah, in Hebrew—hence Adam. But made in the image of God.”

“Maybe polytheism is a better belief,” I said provocatively. “I always thought monotheism was an arrogant idea designed to serve repressive political goals. We ought to go back to the Greeks—the Egyptians! Over to India! Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of gods.”

After remarking that those cultures certainly had had their own forms of political oppression, Thom added, “Think how the discovery that the sun did not travel around the earth influenced our concept of our cosmic importance.”

“Why does Gabriel engage in extraterrestrial research if he doesn’t want to find life on any of the new planets?”

“Sometimes one does research to prove an idea is wrong.”

Squinting in the bathroom mirror the way he always did, Thom made his usual effort to part his curly hair with a small fine-toothed comb. “Twenty-twenty could be the scientists’ Year of Clear Vision,” he replied. “Let’s hope we’re ready by then. Today I’ll just talk about refinements in the methods of spectroscopy.” Amused at the prospect of seeing clearly, Thom turned to regard me through his own thick lenses. He slid his glasses to the end of his nose. “Remember, a president of the United States thought the rights of his God would be violated by stem cell research.”

In five minutes I knew those loose brown curls, increasingly tinged with gray, would be all over Thom’s head again in sweet disarray. He was a large man and strong; I thought he was aging just as gracefully as he did everything else.

I replied, “I’ll just meet you inside the Blue Tulip, right?”

When I explained how I planned to spend the morning at the house where the Frank family had hidden, Thom reminded me that his mother had known Anne Frank when they were both young children.

“I remember,” I said.

“Sometimes,” he said soberly, “I think we should achieve peace on earth before we deal with extraterrestrial life. It would be a sign that we’re ready. Fission and fusion, the bombs, came too soon.”

I felt a surge of love for Thom. He was a scientist who cared about human life, about politics, about culture. But I said, “Thom, I feel frightened. I don’t think I should wear the memory stick.”

“It’s safer on you than on me. I could be kidnapped.” He smiled.

“So could I. And what should I do if—”

“If I keeled over from a heart attack?”

“If anything?”

“Well, wait for a sign. Wait till your heart tells you it’s time, till you see clearly. Consult Gabriel if you want to.”

The conversation was too spooky. We both stopped. Dazzled. My mind was dazzled by the magnitude of Thom’s discovery. He bent down, and I stretched up. Tenderly, we exchanged our last kiss.

More than twenty years earlier, in 1995, I had been a better-than-fair high school classical musician, but upon graduation I renounced playing the viola; I knew I was already nearing the limits of my musical talent, though not of my intellectual curiosity about my own mind or the minds of others. The last year in high school I read psychology on my own and insisted on taking the standardized exam for graduating college psychology majors. I scored well. In selecting a college from among several offering nice scholarships, I told my grandmother, “I want to be in the middle of the country,” and I somewhat capriciously chose Iowa as the heart of the Midwest, though I considered Chicago. Three weeks after my arrival in Iowa City, I met Thom at an orchestral rehearsal held in the Union at the University of Iowa. Despite having aborted my own musical career, in my loneliness I had been drawn toward the familiar scene of rehearsal.

At the rehearsal I became irritated when the conductor had the violin and viola soloists skip over the unaccompanied duet section of the Mozart Sinfonia. The conductor was depriving me and the rest of the rehearsal audience of hearing one of the best parts. I was mad at myself, too, for feeling desolate and missing my friends, especially Janet Stimson, and my grandmother, with whom I lived. (When I was nine, my parents had gone, as missionaries, to live in Japan.) Partly just because I wanted to have contact with somebody, I remarked crossly to the man sitting near but not next to me, “Haven’t they left out the cadenza?”

The man looked startled. He had a large head and wore thick glasses. His hair was curly and soft. “I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “I’m not familiar with this piece.” He turned back to the orchestra. In profile his nose and lips were large—suitable for his large head, I decided. The black temple piece of his thick glasses gleamed silvery in the mellow houselights. I forgot him.

No, after the music had been poignant in the way only Mozart could conceive, I glanced at my neighbor and noticed the quality of his attention. He wore the expression of one who could be moved by beauty. Then I forgot him.

Until, in a pause in the rehearsal, he blew his large nose into the neat white square of a folded cloth handkerchief. As a girl, I had learned to iron by ironing my grandfather’s similar 100 percent cotton white handkerchiefs, but my rehearsal neighbor wasn’t old. Older than I, but not old. Probably a doctoral student.

When I stood to go back to my dorm room, he smiled at me. It was the most purely welcoming smile I had ever seen—free of all intent but sheer friendliness.

“So they left out the cadenza?” he asked.

“A cadenza from eighteenth-century music characteristically ends with trills,” I answered. “We heard the trills, but no cadenza. I’m an old viola player.”

He looked at me quizzically. “Old?” Then he grinned. “Which high school do you go to?”

I knew I looked young: my hair was in two braids. I’m sure I flushed. “I’m a student at the university. From Memphis. Are you a graduate student?”

“I’m an associate professor in the physics department.”

We had both misjudged each other. I laughed, and he smiled.

He waited, and then with unexpected sophistication I realized what I must say if the conversation was to continue. I must exempt myself from being a student in his department.

“I’m a psychology major,” I said.

“A junior?” he asked, still smiling, and I knew he needed to guess my age.

“I’m a freshman,” I answered, “but they accepted me as a psych major because I aced the advanced test in psychology on the Graduate Record Exam.” It had been difficult to get permission to take the GRE; most high school students took the SAT.

“Did you?” He was obviously pleased for me. Perhaps he was pleased with me.

“I’m eighteen,” I added. “I bet you waited too late to get a ticket to the performance. Like me.” Suddenly my confidence faltered, and I relied on stereotype. “A typical absentminded professor?”

“Actually,” he answered, “I do have a ticket. I just like coming to dress rehearsals. It’s more relaxed.”

“I procrastinated,” I confessed. “I meant to get a ticket.”

“I always get two. Usually the second one goes to waste. Maybe you’d like to have it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

As he handed over the ticket, he remarked, “The two seats are together.”

“Of course,” I answered, though I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

He grinned more broadly, amused at both of us. “I’m forty-one.”

The next day before the concert, I walked to the inexpensive beauty school near the campus and asked for a student stylist who could do an updo with curls. “With wings over the tops of the ears,” I added. For the first time, I wanted to be transformed from a big child into a young woman. Entranced with studies, teachers, and a few good friends, throughout high school, I’d never dated anyone.

While the stylist combed through my hair, I avoided my reflection in the mirror by mentally reviewing the appearance of the physics professor—his steep, rather forbidding forehead, the thick lenses of his glasses—what did he want to see through those glasses? Big black frames. I realized I didn’t know his name. A physicist—someone who wanted to understand the physical world in mathematical terms—E=mc2: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. A physicist was someone whose inquiry concerned the basic nature of the physical world. Probably he didn’t consider psychology to be much of a science, but I wanted to understand the immaterial realm—what were thought and feeling? What did being human mean?

“Did you bring a clip?” the hairstylist asked.

“No.”

“That’s okay. I can just pin it.”

I enjoyed tipping back my head and fitting my neck against the rounded curve of the big sink. My grandmother always said, “I love going to the beauty parlor—the shampoo.” I relaxed into the warm water flowing through my hair, the impersonal fingertips of the stylist pushing into my scalp and against the bone of my skull; I enjoyed considering how my brain was just beyond the stylist’s touch. Shampoo provided a time to wander effortlessly through one’s sense of self. How smoothly awareness moved from impression to thought to thought! What to make of it all? What did it mean to think? Even to see?

Sitting in the stylist’s chair before the glass, I passively watched how the shaping of my hair was changing the meaning of my face, my future.

On the way back to my dorm on Iowa Avenue, I paused in front of a shop window and immediately decided to buy a white eyelet dress, Edwardian, with a long skirt and a long overblouse. As we shifted hangers along the rack of dresses to find the right size, the dress clerk said to me, “Your hair is lovely. Just add earrings—sky blue. I have some.”

That night, I came to the crowded concert hall only a few minutes early. I was afraid I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say to the professor if we had a lot of time to fill. From a distance, I paused to notice how the professor was shifting nervously in his seat as he waited.

He glanced at his watch; he tucked his chin down and studied his diagonally striped tie; he pulled down the cuffs of his white dress shirt. He wore large midnight blue glass cuff links, arched like two blue-tending-toward-black marbles. He had dressed up, too. He shuffled his feet; he pushed his thick glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. When he saw me at the end of the aisle, he grinned. Happy that I had come, he was at ease with himself again.

As I stepped sideways across the knees of those already seated, he stood up, stretched out his hand to shake hands with me, to welcome me, and said, “My name is Thom Bergmann.”

“I’m Lucy,” I answered, not bothering with my last name, for in the loveliness of the moment, I felt sure my name, too, would someday be Bergmann.

Each year of marriage seemed better than the one before. I grew up, really, within the safe boundaries of a loving marriage. My study of psychology and my deep-rooted interest in the importance of aesthetic expression led to my career as an art therapist for those who suffer a range of mental disorders. Thom went on to be promoted to professor in his department, then to occupy the Van Allen-Bergmann Chair. Coincidentally the hyphenated chair was named for Gustav Bergmann, an eminent professor of ontology and the philosophy of science who happened to be a distant relative of my Thom Bergmann. Eventually Thom became known internationally for his work in spectroscopy, and we traveled the world together because of his lectures and scientific connections.

I still believe the piano crashing into the Amsterdam pavement crushed the best brain in astrophysics in the world—my husband, my gallant lover.

In a few years, with war in the Middle East seeming like an immutable fact of life, my path would take me back among the scientists. At the same time, another story—one I would come to know as well as my own—another connection that would redirect my life, had its genesis.