“Not something that she would use like a tool—for combing the hair?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. Anyway it doesn’t matter, right? Because she doesn’t have any hair anymore.”
“I see,” Ivan said, after a pause. “Now I understand your comparison. You’re saying that if you went to the freshman cafeteria today to look for me, you would be as useless as I am now at Mather House looking for you. Furthermore, you would be as useless as a watch chain without a watch, or a comb without any hair. This situation reminds me of a Hungarian expression: ‘As useless as a bald man’s comb.’”
I said that was a good expression.
“You say it for something that’s really useless,” Ivan said.
? ? ?
The spring issue of the literary magazine came out. My story was printed right after the one about the guy whose head turned into a butt, on a page facing one of Sandy’s woodcuts of a pig on the steps of a Hungarian church. After two pages you came to a poem about a waterfall that turned out to be about bulimia. The rest of my story was in the back, in tiny print. I was relieved, both that the text had been broken up and that the print was so small and dense, because it was almost physically impossible to read.
The next afternoon, I found an email from Ivan. He said that someone had stolen his copy of the literary magazine, so he wasn’t sure yet, but he had heard that I had won the whole contest—that my story was right there, across from Sandy’s pigs. It made me so happy, like only once before, he wrote. The other time had been when he was accepted to Harvard. That part of the email was in Russian.
? ? ?
Dinah came to our lesson almost an hour late, long past when I had stopped expecting her. I was just sitting there writing in my notebook.
“Oh, it’s the lady of the hour,” I said, because I was happy to see her and didn’t know what to say, and this was something I had heard people say before.
“What lady—who?”
“Nothing, I don’t know. It’s just good to see you.”
“Well, that’s why I came,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave you here. I didn’t want you to think I was gone.”
We had to confront a problem we had previously managed to avoid: negative numbers. Dinah didn’t understand negative numbers. I hadn’t noticed for a while, because she was able to add negative numbers to positive numbers, but it turned out she had made up a rule: “Always subtract, then keep the sign of the biggest number.” I told her that rule wouldn’t work if you had to add a negative number to another negative number. She wasn’t convinced. She seemed to think it wasn’t relevant. And in fact there weren’t any problems in the book about adding two negative numbers, so I stopped trying to explain it. But now the time had come to multiply negative and positive numbers, and here, too, Dinah wanted to keep the sign of the biggest number. It didn’t prevent her from getting the right answer sometimes. She correctly said that 2 times -5 was -10; on the other hand, she thought that -2 times -5 was -10. Also, she thought -5 was bigger than -2.
I told her that with multiplication it didn’t matter which number was bigger. If there was an even number of negative signs, the product was positive; if there was an odd number, the product was negative.
“So odd numbers are always negative?”
“No,” I said, feeling my pulse accelerate. “I’m sorry. Hang on, I’m going to think of a better way to explain it.”
Once she saw I was agitated, Dinah grew calm and comforted me, just like my mother did. “Honey,” she said, putting down her pencil, “don’t you worry, we’re going to get this right sooner or later.” She pushed her notebook toward me. “Now you’re going to write down exactly what you were just saying, with examples, and then I’m going to go home and look them over, okay? How does that sound?”
“It sounds good,” I said, and started writing in her notebook.
“But don’t forget to put in an example,” she said, looking over my hand, “because I see all these words, ‘coefficient,’ ‘variable,’ I just go, shoo-eee, I don’t know what that’s all about.” As I wrote in the examples, she nodded. “That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “Now we’re going to be just fine.”
? ? ?
Ivan called at ten that night.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m outside your house.”
I looked out the window. He was standing under a streetlight at one of the emergency telephones. Those phones were a direct line to campus police—they didn’t even have number pads. I had no idea how he had used one to reach my room.
I went downstairs. He seemed different from usual—more restless. “I think we need to get a drink,” he said. He had said before that he thought drinking would help me. He said it would help with talking. This obsession with drinking was one of the things that had most surprised me about college. I had always looked down on alcohol, because my parents liked to drink at dinner and it always made them more annoying. I had known that alcohol was supposed to be a big part of college life and that some people would really care about it, but I hadn’t realized it would be basically everyone, except the most humorless or childish people, and also some people who were religious. There didn’t seem to be any way of not drinking without it being a statement.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get a drink.”
Ivan took me to an upscale beer garden twinkling with white Christmas lights. The bouncer asked for our IDs. Ivan didn’t seem to understand at first why we weren’t being allowed in. He seemed to think we were somehow being discriminated against.
“I’m not twenty-one,” I told him.
“That’s the reason?”
“That’s it, pal,” said the bouncer.
We walked twenty minutes farther from campus to a crowded bar in a basement, where we came up against a warm wall of cigarette smoke, beery exhalations, and some kind of vaporous sawdust. Ivan found a table where people seemed to be thinking about leaving, a high table with stools, and loomed over them until they got up. “You can wait here,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Ivan looked at me for a moment and then went to the bar.
All around, people were shouting, wearing T-shirts. Their backs seemed more numerous than their faces. I saw Ivan leaning over the bar and talking to the bartender, who had a pixie cut, laughing eyes, and dimples, though her mouth wasn’t smiling. Ivan came back with two pint glasses of beer and handed me the paler one. The glass was heavy in my hand. It felt expensive and adult.
I didn’t understand why we had to be there in that place. At the same time there was nowhere in the world that I would rather have been. I thought about what a special, unusual person Ivan was—how much more present and alive than other people, how he said and thought things that nobody else said or thought, and how ready he was to walk around with me for hours. All I had to do was write him an email, and then he walked around with me all day long. Who else in the world would do that?