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  He adjusted so that he could see nearly half of her. Her face was turned toward the water and her left arm was out of frame, dangling in the tub, but he could see her right leg, the warp of her shin angling, and he remembered Baudelaire,

  Où saint Antoine a vu surgir comme des laves

  Les seins nus et pourprés de ses tentations,

  until she leaned, sloped herself back toward his view and the bed, and he could see her whole face, her mouth relaxed. His voice moved barely beyond the edge of the bedroom’s floorboards, that voice filled with the recitations of his favourite books of poetry, Herbert and Donne, his voice too soft and mannered to crash overtop the sounds of her getting into the tub, his question lost to the displacement splashing, threatening to pour over onto the tile. He thought about repeating himself but instead got up from the bed and walked, his hitching steps more comfortable in dusty boots than bare feet, through the open door to see her sprawled in the water, the smell of her soap – even in her own home she bought men’s soap for its lack of ornament – then looked at her, her feet propped against the silver taps and her fingers out and dripping, inches from the floor; she shifted slightly in his direction and pulled her eyes up him, beginning with his calves, past his dark and untrimmed pubic hair to his sparrow chest, his chin, and then eyes, vaporous and light underneath his mess of wiry hair creased and moulded by the sweaty sheets, the hair her fingers clenched, then raked through.

  He sat next to her and the two did not speak aloud. She soaked as she often did after they had sex; sometimes he would read to her, in his improving Sanskrit, passages from the Bhagavad Gita, then translate them for her, the translations a mix of Arthur Ryder’s and his own understandings of the text, and she would shut her eyes as he extended the ‘a’ sound as a song, as if he heard notes underneath the words that he was matching, his soft voice rising and falling as the water slowly got cooler and her skin pruned. But he did not read to her this time and instead repeated the question that began the conversation that led to the bed, a distraction from her non-answer, her avoidance a ‘no’ in itself, and when she did answer him, her eyes the mirror opposite of his, dark and thunderous, she answered with the enunciation of an actress:

  ‘I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

  I only know that summer sang in me

  a little while, that in me sings no more.’

  He knew the poem was one of her favourites, Edna St. Vincent Millay, an elegant name in her mouth when she spoke, her words extending from her fingerprints, manifesting in physical reaction to the air, changing his vision into swaths of coloured steam, bolts of sheer fabric pulled and fluttering, then dissipating, thinned to light through a prism. When she recited the poem, as she did often, he pictured her as a teenager, exploring her sexuality, and one night in particular, Jean and Eleanor Marie Sarton in New York: the two teenagers, young and wound with energy, had a hotel room and they spent the night with their bodies switching magnetic poles in cycles of attraction and shyness, rarely moving beyond tentative pressing of lips, stomachs together. As Jean told the story later, soaking in the warm water, she lingered in her leaving in the morning with her hand holding her Pall Malls in her jacket pocket, thinking of lighting one, all of them in succession, and she repeated how she craved those cigarettes on the train back to her mother, and all the while writing May a letter in her mind that explained the limits of her love for her. It wasn’t until she began her training in psychoanalysis years later, she confessed mid-bath, that she saw her love for May as the middle point of a dream, the exact centre or fulcrum in which the dreamer, full of the sensual objects and landscapes of her subconscious, shifts back toward the waking world, the hard nucleus of the surreal imagination receding as the mind emerges out of sleep. Not long after, her handwriting changed, leaned over from the previous rigid and redwood-esque lettering to a right-slanted scribbling.

  That ‘no’ was her third and he would not ask again. It was 1939 and he was thirty-four and she was twenty-four and Franco was on the edge of Spain and the Nazis were pointed toward Czechoslovakia and the California newspapers and radios oscillated between Europe and the USA, between the lush campuses of his and Jean’s coast, the edges of the Pacific bordering them, and the still-repairing cities of London and Paris and Berlin and Rome, only twenty years scarred over from the first World War. Her final ‘no’ was at once microscopic and enormous and she left later that night and never returned to that specific room or bathtub and they would never collide with the same intensity, even when he would sneak away from Kitty and the Los Alamos labs to see her, continuing to love her. Staring at her unopened letter now, he observes the two of them on that night in his memory, the volatile causality of happened events, of clearly linked reactions and counter-reactions; he holds the motion of her turning the hot-water tap with her foot adjacent to the gesture of her pulling her skirt over her thighs, straightening, holds both images adjacent to the figure of her reaching behind her body with her right arm to pull the door closed behind her, her eyes already down the stairs, the sidewalk. He holds all her gestures at once, clings to them.

  He cycles through the women of his life. First there was Katy, a love begun when he was just a teenager, unrequited but carried through the whole of the New Mexico landscape, important but ultimately constrained to a discrete place and time. Then there is Jean, a fiercely brilliant psychiatrist, a writer for the Communist Western Worker, untameable and the first woman to open his eyes to the complexity of his psyche and the sensations of the body. He knows that he asked her to marry him partly out of his own insistence that he, they, be married despite his fanatical and solitary nature, that it would be the healthy way to present himself to the world. So, just beyond Jean, overlapping in chronology still, is his wife, Kitty.

  His wife would only grudgingly discuss Jean as a necessary abscission, the woman who she thought had fallen away. Kitty would say this to him on the whispered edges of sleep, after he turned to her in the pitch of their bedroom, would explain that it was the natural conclusion, the end of the sequence. He would then tumble into sinuate dreamvisions where the two women crossed into each other’s narratives, Kitty in that California bathtub and Jean instead raising their children, his mind experimenting with different strains of memory, alternate but parallel. And he would wake up, often to their son, Peter, opening the door to their room, and Kitty would already be facing him as she pulled herself from her own dreams, her hand running along his arm, thinking of Donne,

  Give me thy weakness, make me blind,

  Both ways, as thou and thine, in eyes and mind;

  Love, let me never know that this

  Is love, or, that love childish is,

  and in these moments he would re-envision himself admiring Kitty as she stood atop her horse’s saddle as she rode, tall and shifting against the mountain backdrop, her legs locked and her eyes meeting each successive person with all the flourishes of a showwoman before a stunned audience, and when she came to him, gripped his gaze, forcing him into a grin.

  He had met her the previous year and they began their affair almost immediately, and he remembers specifically that first trip to New Mexico, in the early summer of 1940, after he had chosen the horses for them and directed Kitty toward a young mare, a deep-earth brown with a wild mane, that he found the version of Kitty – younger and bolder than Katy but much the same at her core – that he holds at the centre of his mind: she easily mounted the horse and then was moving, bounding the eastern fence at an extreme pace, the horse’s legs lifting off the ground in full gallop, only noticing him when he pulled alongside her, atop Crisis, the horse heaving happily with the exertion and company, the two riders, the two horses, in tandem and at the same incredible speed. When she showed off like that, with all the respect and knowledge of the horse underneath her, he would picture her as a small girl at her private school, defiantly rising from the saddle while the other girls prepped for the primness of future horse jumping and trotting, and Kitty in the
middle of them, raised and looking downward. When she talked about it after, she explained that, even standing, she could sense the horse’s mood and potential movements through her feet and calves, would send whispered ripples of trust back down her body to calm the horse, to take away from the strange sensations it must have felt, so used to weight central and sturdy on its back, now suddenly lighter, the horse faster. It was then that her nobility, her lineage, was most clear; she would repeat what her own mother had told her: she was part of a royal Belgian bloodline, a German princess whose father cast away his right to be a princeling and emigrated to be a chemical engineer in Pittsburgh. Her skills and symbiosis with a horse were hereditary, hard-won through centuries; in bolder moments she would tell the story of her ancestors, mid-twelfth century, riding in the Crusades, their cruciform armour resting heavy on their own horses’ backs as they drove toward Jerusalem and Damascus, warriors with high heads, graced by God’s plans. That they returned years later burdened by unnecessary violence and defeat was left unattended; for her, the mere involvement in that history, heiress of a direct combatant, was more than enough to push her above the other German emigrants filling early-twentieth-century America.

  They stayed at Perro Caliente for two months, and during that time he and Kitty would ride together under the heat of pride and competition across the hardest New Mexico trails, each admiring the other’s meagre movements of control, a flex of legs rarely aided by spurs in the stirrups, instead a light tap with the side of a palm or tug upward on the reins, their mutual wonder a recognition of each other’s shared muscle memory. She was there even though she was married to another man; in fact, he knew Kitty’s husband, Richard Harrison, a friend and doctor, and the two men would sometimes share notes and drinks in the restaurants near Berkeley, spaces crowded with noise. Yet he didn’t feel the yank of guilt and instead relished his and Kitty’s overlapping, a low and constant rumble like the engine of his exquisitely curved Chrysler Coupe as he drove Kitty around, the speed of the big car accented by his half-attention to driving and her describing how the two of them would soon stride into rooms together, powerful and charming and overwhelming. Although she was married, he would burst into parties pronouncing her his fiancée, and Kitty would emerge, inflorescent, from behind him, bursting out in unthinking laughter, her body unconfined by the distant and overwrought movement Jean showed even in hesitating when turning the kettle on, Kitty bathed in the scent of orchids, the large petals drooping over his thin fingers as he thrust the flowers excitedly toward the hosts. He would overhear her tell her friends, ‘I simply adore Robert,’ and knowing that he was listening, would explain how he would expand when he was in a conversation, become as large as the room in the way that a soft bulb glows and settles over every person and thing.

  They remained that way all through the summer, winding through the pines and spindly birches that blanketed the mountains, stopping only to build a secluded fire, eat, and, sharing a sleeping bag, groan against each other, ‘Robert,’ him above her and her hands clenching and pushing him further into her, ‘Robert,’ the stars just above them, white, large, blossoming. She told him how brilliant he was, how he was going to conquer the future, that she would conquer it with him, barbarians consuming mussels soaked in garlic butter and leeks, duck confit piled beside black currants, drinking the best wines of every city, of every decade, and he saw in her imagery sattvic, Krishna explaining the best of the three kinds of food,

  Where vigour, life, power, comfort, health

  Content are strengthened, food

  Bland, solid, cordial, savoury

  Is relished by the good,

  and she repeated to their guests at Perro Caliente, to an amused Katy after she handed back Kitty’s underwear, left at her ranch home, looking at him with bemusement and caution, and Kitty left that August pregnant with their son, Peter.

  She spent October in Reno waiting for him, a simple third-floor room of bare bulb and bed and bureau, sat with the window open and catalogue the dust collecting in the corners of the city, waiting for night to cool her, waiting. He would spend his days at his Berkeley teaching post and his nights obsessing over how much Kitty adored him, considering Jean’s ‘no’ and his unwillingness to forget her and to shed that version of her turning toward him in the tub, casually naked. He would pace across campus and repeat lines from the Gita, in an attempt to convince himself that he was, as Krishna explains to Arjuna, one of the truly wise who

  dive deep into themselves

  fearless, one-pointed

  and he didn’t deny himself either woman but instead spiralled inward, continued his fascination with psychoanalysis and the probing of the unconscious, his waking and sleeping dreams, and considered the finest, sharpest point of himself, and Krishna’s plea to dissolve himself of earthly pleasures and objects, considered the impossibility of that task, of turning away from the strong alcohol and heavy béchamel and espagnole sauces, of choosing between Jean and Kitty, and came to an internal compromise, not as a singular point but laciniate, weighed both women and decided what he had to give up and what he could keep.

  Kitty was divorced and married on the same day, November 1, 1940, surrounded by the past wealth of the gold rush in Virginia City, Nevada, and he kept his palm flat against her stomach through the whole ceremony, tremoring with effort to control their giggles, so much so that the judge at the courthouse asked them if they needed a moment, perhaps a glass of water. He turned then to their witnesses, a janitor and a clerk from the courthouse, and asked if they wouldn’t mind waiting just one moment while he got his wife a drink. He watched her tip the water into her mouth and swallowed as she swallowed, gasped as she gasped at the end of the glass. They would return to a new home near the Berkeley campus and Robert would trade his coupe for a Cadillac, which they named Bombsight, and, soon after, at Kitty’s suggestion, began wearing suits tailored to hug the shorelines of his gaunt body, spinning then settling into a mock pose for her in their living room; still, while he wore different and better clothes, he kept his familiar brown porkpie hat, and kept seeing Jean, holding her in the fog of San Francisco evenings.

  He sees them both as a reflection of him and his paths to finding a place for his own intelligence and ambition in the world. In this, Kitty and Jean in overlay, both dark-haired and flirtatious, both incredibly direct in their gazes, both with strong Communist pasts, both beyond intelligent, Jean a doctor and Kitty a botanist, the two women separate and equal centres of gravity in every room they entered, bright lodestars, and it becomes harder to keep the two disconnected; the different versions of each that he holds in his memory do not conjoin but neither do repel. Rather, they flit between each other in reaction, neither static but rather both increasingly interdependent collections, two distinct and continuous voices echoing in an otherwise silent basin landscape of hearty grasses and lanky birch trees, reverberating against the other and amplifying, and, despite the simultaneous and superimposed vocals, he can still focus on one and follow Kitty’s discussion of her lineage or Jean’s rearranging of her friendship with May, can choose one but only at the expense of the other, so that the other becomes distanced and muted.

  Even still, he takes satisfaction, during late-night quiet, in threading the two together as a way of understanding his own inner emotional clockwork and the gears, like the metre of a sonnet, that link and turn underneath his skin. Staring at Jean’s letter on his desk, he remembers her walking along the edge of the water, Berkeley, as the late-spring cold nipped through their light coats and forced her to lean into him, San Francisco and its lights and sounds sporadically drifted toward them as subdued mists, and Jean confessed that she too used to ride horses, told him about a trip she took with her mother when she was young, to the Kawuneeche Valley in Colorado where she spent mornings riding through the Never Summer Mountains and spent the first part of the trip pushing well ahead of the group and listening to her mother call her back; Jean would ignore her and keep coaxing the horse
off into the unbroken branches just aside the trails, savouring the care needed to guide the horse through the unmapped brush and over mossy logs. Before she would circle back, she would stop and close her eyes, listen, catch all the different bird calls, then slowly open her eyes in the direction of their songs and try to find them, their nests. Lower down the mountains, near the start of their trips, she often got to watch the brilliant yellow and crimson darting of western tanagers, vibrant and elusive; other mornings she would catch the bulbous mountain chickadees perched delicately above her and twisting their heads from side to side. If they stayed on the valley floor, where the summer heat lay trapped, the horses would breathe more heavily and move more slowly, even with prompting, the dark sheen on their necks hot to the touch. As they wound back along the bay toward her house, her bed, Jean retold the story of when the group embarked on an all-day trip to Lake of the Clouds and she described the shifting talus and the precise moment that they rose above the treeline, the sky widening suddenly, and her involuntary intake of breath, always too short at that altitude. He remembers recognizing that story as the clearest inarticulable connection that he could see between him and her, even if she told it only for the tapered ending: that she begged to dive into the glacial waters of the lake but no one else wanted to and no one let her. But Jean told the story with the same defiant tone she took when turning down his beautifully arranged bouquets, telling him to pay more attention to the lines of men that wound around the block asking for food, even going so far as to throw the flowers to the ground, the petals pulling apart with the velocity and gravity of her downward motions.