A. Einstein
19 ~ 21 April 2009
Despite the spectre of being sucked into an undertow of treacherous memories, Solitaire decided, two weeks after Em’s death, to accept her cousin Gillian’s invitation to visit her and her husband, Alec, in Hawaii.
A PHOBIC CONUNDRUM
In the process of mulling it over, however, Solitaire made a shocking discovery: she was afraid to travel alone. She who had ventured throughout much of Southeast Asia as a young reporter and in the years since then had lived all over the world was now afraid to hop on a plane for Hawaii. More than that, she was actually fearful of leaving her house. This was an insupportable situation. Solitaire wondered if the condition were typical; did other men and women, finding themselves eternally (as far as one knew) severed from their mates, suffer this sense of disabling dislocation, too?
All her life, or for as long as she could remember, Solitaire had been afflicted with claustrophobia and now, it turned out, she was on her way to developing full blown agoraphobia, as well. This meant that not only was she was afraid of getting locked into her house, she was also afraid of getting locked out. She realized that she must immediately conquer at least one of her ridiculous phobias. What if she were suddenly to decide, at 30,000 feet over the Pacific, that she had to leave the plane?
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| A case of Acute Claustrophobia |
Or what if she were to decide upon landing that she could not leave the plane? She could only imagine the humiliating, not to say, bizarre, scene with airport security that might result.
What to do?
SELDOM DO WE KNOW FROM WHICH QUADRANT
THE ANSWER WILL COME
In this particular instance, the solution to Solitaire's dilemma was provided, unexpectedly and inadvertently, by a casual acquaintance, a woman named Constanze Salcedo, whom she had met at a quantum physics discussion group. A what? One might think that Solitaire's participation in such a group was the stuff of comedy -- and one would be right. Whatever bodega of the human brain God had designated as a storage depot for such items as protons, photons, futons, neutrinos, and so forth, was, in Solitaire's skull, a tiny chamber of homely horrors occluded with rubber bands and quarks and paper clips and -- yes! --- bits of string, all paddling sluggishly in a stagnant pool of black matter.
But Solitaire, in fairness, did not attend these meetings for her own mental betterment, but for Em's. As she watched him retreating further each day into the fortress of his mind, she felt impelled to pull him out, to spark up his synapses and force him to reconnect with others of his ilk, persons who spoke with affection of waves and particles, argued exuberantly about nonlocality and uncertainty and quantum entanglement, and took turns reading aloud, chuckling now and then, from the works of Brian Greene or Dr. Feynman.
These small, convivial gatherings were held every Tuesay afternoon on the terrace of Constanze's villa until, one day, she married Neville Castleton and moved into the Castleton family hacienda, whereupon the venue changed from mountain-top terrace to river-valley verandah.
In the days since Em’s death, Constanze had repeatedly invited Solitaire to come and sojourn at her ranch.
“Stay as long as you like,” she urged. “Bring your dogs. I’ll be away for a month.”
THE BACK STORY
There were those in the Old Pueblo -– though Solitaire was not one of them –whose contention it was that Constanze Salcedo had married Neville Castleton for his money and his name. Why else, they said, would she have "taken up" with a man twenty years her senior? Salcedo, incidentally, was the surname of Constanze’s second husband, an alleged “drug lord” who had been gunned down in a shoot-out in a town called Ruby. When Constanze married Neville she dropped the “Salcedo” -- “like a hot burrito,” according to a number of her friends -- and became Constanze Castleton.
“Constanze Castleton ... tres chic,” Crystal sneered, pronouncing the first word as though it were the Spanish numeral “three” and the second as though it were a small chicken.
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“The problemo is," said Crystal, "that her name was never Costazi or whatever. I went all through Rincon High with that high-falutin’ phoney and her name was plain old Connie van Keuykendal. “
“What's so plain about that?" said Solitaire. "Anyway, Constanze told me she was named after Mozart’s wife, from whom she is distantly descended. A dubious distinction, by the way. Though some say Frau Mozart was much maligned."
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| Constanze Weber Mozart |
“Distantly what? Who?”
Crystal, who described herself as a natureopathic aesthetician, had a salon in the golf resort of Cielo Verde where she tendered the usual international services: French nails, Swedish massage, Brazilian wax job, Thai two-hander, Hawaiian lomi-lomi, etc.
Crystal gave Neville a mani/pedi every Monday morning and a haircut every Wednesday afternoon.
Crystal gave Neville a mani/pedi every Monday morning and a haircut every Wednesday afternoon.
The subject of who paid for what and who had more money than whom was a source of unending fascination and speculation among the local citizenry. There was a general consensus, especially among the friends of Neville’s former wife, Marjorie, that it was Neville who had the bulk of the boodle and Constanze who was after it. It was Solitaire’s opinion, on the other hand, that all three of them were loaded, one way or another, but that it was, in fact, Marjorie, whose family was in rum, candy bars and (formerly) slaves, who probably led the league.
“It was always Neville’s money,” Crystal insisted.
“If that’s the case,” Solitaire countered, “then how is it that Constanze had that magnificent villa up in the hills long before she married Neville?”
Crystal, who was giving Solitaire a "Sea of Cortez Algae Scrub"($85), paused in her ministrations to give her supine client a playful kidney punch. "Drug money," she said.
The irony, from Marjorie's perspective anyway, was that it was she who, when Neville fell ill, had hired Constanze to be her husband's nutritional planner and spiritual (California-Buddhist) guru. She was to provide positive emotional support, relieve him of stress through yoga-breath, mindfulness and meditation. She did all that, and possibly more. Within the year, Constanze and Neville were living together.
WHAT ON EARTH COULD MARJORIE HAVE BEEN THINKING?
Constanze was a raving beauty. She was tall and full-breasted, shaped like the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, (minus two of the four arms) with an exotic cast to her features and dark, long hair cascading in drifts of ringlets over her shoulders. Her clothes were not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but there was no denying that she had her own "look" -- a belted and booted, long-skirted style popularized by a shop called The Cowboy's Sweetheart. At home of an evening, she favored saris and sandals and bangles and bells that jingled and jangled gently in an aura that fairly glimmered as she swayed. Her demeanor was calm and beneficent and her voice so melodious, so soothingly modulated that a man had to lean in very close to hear whatever uplifting spiritual prattle she might be imparting. The simple message on her voice mail was murmured with such genuine feeling that one would have to have been the most jaded cynic to have doubted for even a moment her exhortation to:
"Have a really beautiful day!"
It should be noted in passing that Marjorie, too, was an attractive woman with her own distinctive style and persona, but she was tart and tendentious, and too smart for her own good. She was also twenty years older than Constanze.
WHAT ON EARTH COULD MARJORIE HAVE BEEN THINKING?
Constanze was a raving beauty. She was tall and full-breasted, shaped like the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, (minus two of the four arms) with an exotic cast to her features and dark, long hair cascading in drifts of ringlets over her shoulders. Her clothes were not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but there was no denying that she had her own "look" -- a belted and booted, long-skirted style popularized by a shop called The Cowboy's Sweetheart. At home of an evening, she favored saris and sandals and bangles and bells that jingled and jangled gently in an aura that fairly glimmered as she swayed. Her demeanor was calm and beneficent and her voice so melodious, so soothingly modulated that a man had to lean in very close to hear whatever uplifting spiritual prattle she might be imparting. The simple message on her voice mail was murmured with such genuine feeling that one would have to have been the most jaded cynic to have doubted for even a moment her exhortation to:
"Have a really beautiful day!"
It should be noted in passing that Marjorie, too, was an attractive woman with her own distinctive style and persona, but she was tart and tendentious, and too smart for her own good. She was also twenty years older than Constanze.
Not only did Solitaire like Constanze, she was definitely in her debt, for she was one of the few people who had been kind to Em when he was dying. She brought great pots of scarlet hibiscus to brighten up his hospital room and Solitaire never told her that Em had contracted MRSA while he was in St Joseph's Hospital and that therefore, although he had been allowed through hospital staff carelessness to become infected with staphylococcus bacilli, referred to scientifically as "Super Bugs" by medical personnel, he was not allowed to be contaminated with plants and flowers that might be bearing aphids or thrips.
Solitaire had been to Constanze's villa, but not to the recently remodelled hacienda about which she had heard so much. So, with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, she accepted. It would be a test run.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOWS
It was late afternoon when Solitaire arrived. The shadows were long, but the breeze was still warm and the top was down on her convertible. The poplars and cottonwoods growing along the river bank trembled overhead and their leafy sussurus rustled in counterpoint to the ecstatic scraping of the cicadas. Lying on the back seat, the dogs gazed up with expressions of mild wonder at the sunlight flickering in the trees high overhead. She wondered what they were thinking.
“Thinking?” Em would have laughed. “Thinking?”
Just before they reached the ranch, the road became a series of S-curves, the unpaved surface so thick and slippery with a top layer of caliche that the car seemed in danger of hydroplaning and she thought what a nightmare it would be in a flash flood during the summer rains.
In fact, it was only the previous August that Marjorie Castleton, then still married to Neville, but in the painful process of separating, came within an inch, a literal inch, of drowning. With characteristic determination, (and distracted, she later said, by her marital problems), she ignored an evening downpour and a large sign -- a sign that she herself had ordered to be placed at the river-crossing -- that said:
DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED
and foolhardily forged across this very wash, which only moments before had been dry. Almost immediately she found herself looking at a wall of muddy water roaring towards her. In that instant, she knew she was in serious trouble: the car engine stalled, the vehicle turned sideways and, totally out of control, swept along on the rushing waters of the Santa Cruz. Luck was with Marjorie, however. A willow tree, bent low over the water, snagged the car and held it in its branches, but Marjorie nearly reversed her luck by opening the door in an attempt to escape, at which point the water rushed in, filling the car before the door, under tremendous pressure, inexorably shut with the windows up and Marjorie trapped. The water had nearly reached her nose when a neighboring rancher, Hector Pratt, thinking it strange to see two headlights where there should have been none, walked out to investigate and pried Marjorie out of her Lexus with a crowbar.
"Is that a pun?" Solitaire asked.
But the monsoons were still three months away and the Santa Cruz River was no more than a trickle. A family of Gambel quail, the tiny new-born chicks already tricked out in their perfect little headdresses fluttered through the dust, cheeping and flapping behind their vigilant parents over the rocks and ropes of thick white caliche that coiled at the base of the cottonwoods.
Emerging from the cienega onto a road beside a horse pasture, Solitaire drove by fields of tall grass, dark gold in the setting sun and studded with mesquite and stands of black oak. Two bay mares were grazing, their tails and manes waving in the wind. She could feel her own hair blowing back, cooling her neck. The road took her along the side of the hacienda and around to the back where there was a four car garage and a barn and a grove of silvery eucalyptus.
Constanze had told Solitaire that Ramon, her foreman, (she called him “her” foreman, but in fact he had worked for the Castletons for many years) would be waiting for her and that she should collect the house keys from him. Ramon looked as though he had been sent over from Central Casting; tall, slim, with a trim mustache, he was the image of Cesar Romero, who for years had played the role of the Cisco Kid, as well as other gay caballeros and archetypal latin lovers. There were differences: Romero lived with his mother, Ramon with his wife. Having given Solitaire a quick once-over and tour of the villa, he left for home, climbing into his pickup truck with his two
spotted cattle dogs in the back and saying he would return early the next morning. When he had gone, Solitaire prowled around on her own.
spotted cattle dogs in the back and saying he would return early the next morning. When he had gone, Solitaire prowled around on her own.
The old ranch house had undergone a complete makeover by Constanze and her decorator. No expense, as they say, had been spared. Even before Constanze and Neville were married, major demolition and reconstruction had begun. Oldtimers were scandalized.
“What’s her hurry?” they said. “She must think he’s going to snuff it pretty quick and she wants to get everything all tied up and in her name before he does.” Indeed, by employing round-the-clock Mexican crews, and personally supervising them, the work proceeded with amazing rapidity, despite the fact that virtually every architectural feature was constructed to order on a scale at least one-and-a-half times normal and therefore had to be specially ordered and made by hand.
The eighteen monumental granite columns, for example, that supported the colonnade, looked as though they could easily have supported the roof of King Ashurbanipal’s palace at Ninevah. They had been made near Guadalajara and shipped up to the U.S. border by train, after which they were unloaded and sent by huge flat-bed trucks to the ranch. With characteristic generosity, Constanze told Solitaire that if she, too, wished to order several mega-tons of columns she had only to say the word and Constanze would include them in her next shipment.
The furniture, too, was massive, and hugely expensive, pillaged by Constanze and her decorator, Anselmo Pantaleón, in a series of lightning strikes around Latin America, or purchased from the elegant antiquarians, Holler and Sanders, in Nogales. And yet this seemed oddly fitting because the villa was redesigned, not for two people, and certainly not for one, but precisely for one-and-a-half people!
The cavernous master bedroom was draped with heavy brocades, the walls hung with tapestries and faux Zurburán paintings; shadowy illumination was provided by polychrome wood santos made into lamps, and high, coffered ceilings of ebonized mesquite loomed far above. Solitaire left the room, thinking how brave it was of Constanze to sleep there, and knowing, too, that she herself would never be able to spend as much as five minutes in that bed because she would never find her way out of it.
Neville's bedroom was a small white box clearly modeled after a cell in a Trappist monastery. It contained a narrow wooden pallet, a plain chest of drawers, a thorny black crucifix that was part of the decor, and an IV drip that was not. Solitaire left her overnight bag, removed the rolling drip bottle, and walked out onto the verandah. At the far end of the colonnade, a ghostly figure in white swayed toward them. The dogs, who were bowling like dust balls along the length of the verandah, braked to a stop, and growled at the apparition. It was Elena, who had been Neville's caregiver, in a long white Mexican dress and carrying a brace of hurricane lamps. "You might need these," she said.
Neville's bedroom was a small white box clearly modeled after a cell in a Trappist monastery. It contained a narrow wooden pallet, a plain chest of drawers, a thorny black crucifix that was part of the decor, and an IV drip that was not. Solitaire left her overnight bag, removed the rolling drip bottle, and walked out onto the verandah. At the far end of the colonnade, a ghostly figure in white swayed toward them. The dogs, who were bowling like dust balls along the length of the verandah, braked to a stop, and growled at the apparition. It was Elena, who had been Neville's caregiver, in a long white Mexican dress and carrying a brace of hurricane lamps. "You might need these," she said.
The two women leaned on the balustrade, mesmerized by the water cascading into the pool, the lengthening shadows, the flickering lamplight. From somewhere nearby came the the hoot of a horned owl and the sounds of mourning doves going to roost.
“It’s magnificent,” Solitaire said.
“Magnifico, si,” Elena said. “Pero muy triste.”
Elena was a sacral/cranial practitioner hired by Constanze to give succor to poor Neville whose cancer-ridden bones were so brittle that if you hugged him too effusively he would recoil, gasping with pain. But it was a long time since anyone had been allowed to hug Neville, effusively or otherwise; even a peck on the cheek seemed hazardous, the bones so sharp it was like kissing razor blades.
Neville suffered from relentless insomnia. So Elena spent the better part of the late afternoon preparing Neville for sleep. Around four o’clock, Ramon carried him out to the verandah and laid him gently on a massage table, where to the sound of falling waters and Farsi love songs, Elena unblocked his chi with acupuncture and reflexology, alternately heated and cooled his weary bones with warm black stones and iced white river stones, smudged him with burnt sage and turkey feathers (eagle feathers were illegal), drizzled clarified butter into his eyes, and basted his crispy sun-roasted skin with essence of amber and lavender. After two hours Ramon carried him back to his cell and laid him gently on his monastic bed. At which point, Neville was so blissfully knackered he could have slept through Austerlitz. In December, the day before his 89th birthday, Neville died.
The two women ate supper in the kitchen.
“Where are you going to sleep?” Elena asked nervously.
“In the small bedroom.”
Elena grasped her arm. “You can’t do that!”
“Why ever not?”
Elena looked over her shoulder, then whispered hoarsely, “Because Neville died in that bed!’
“Well he can’t very well hold that against me,” Solitaire said.
"Who knows how the dead think? ... what grudges they may carry?"
"Wait a minute... Are you saying that Em's shade might be angry if I slept in another dead man's bed?"
"Perhaps." Elena shuddered and looked over her shoulder again. "I think you should come home with me."
Solitaire, while tempted, knew that it would defeat the whole purpose of this sleepover were she to yield to her cowardly impulses, so she thanked Elena and refused.
Soon after Elena's departure, a storm moved in, the first lightning bolt struck, and the power failed. It was a hell of a show. Thunder crashed, branches thrashed, the wind howled and sheets of rain lashed the window panes. The house creaked and groaned, the dogs woofed and growled. At last the storm moved off, grumbling. The leaves of the sycamores and gum trees dripped, the horned owl hooted, coyotes yipped, the house settled and sighed, the dogs whimpered and whined.
"Who knows how the dead think? ... what grudges they may carry?"
"Wait a minute... Are you saying that Em's shade might be angry if I slept in another dead man's bed?"
"Perhaps." Elena shuddered and looked over her shoulder again. "I think you should come home with me."
Solitaire, while tempted, knew that it would defeat the whole purpose of this sleepover were she to yield to her cowardly impulses, so she thanked Elena and refused.
Soon after Elena's departure, a storm moved in, the first lightning bolt struck, and the power failed. It was a hell of a show. Thunder crashed, branches thrashed, the wind howled and sheets of rain lashed the window panes. The house creaked and groaned, the dogs woofed and growled. At last the storm moved off, grumbling. The leaves of the sycamores and gum trees dripped, the horned owl hooted, coyotes yipped, the house settled and sighed, the dogs whimpered and whined.
Fully clothed, Solitaire lay on her back on her cenobitic cot, still as a stone sculpture on a sarcophagus, arms folded across her chest, afraid to move for fear she might disturb the dead or dislodge one or both of the small dogs pressed against either leg. She felt as though she were entombed in a medieval catacomb.
She lay wide-eyed until first light, at which point she stretched cautiously and the dogs stretched and the three of them yawned and blinked. Then Solitaire sat up and looked at her watch….5.07…
“Okay, guys,” she said, pulling on her boots, “we’re out of here!”
The three of them bolted from the bedroom and raced through the kitchen, where she tossed the house keys on the counter. Dashing through the mud room, they surprised two marmalade cats at their morning toilette, the cats vaulting with wide-eyed agility from litter box to window sill.
Running out into the rising sun, they leapt into the car and as they drove down the road beside the pasture, the mares, excited, galloped with them, kicking up their heels. The river had abated but she could see from the detritus how high the waters had risen. Within the hour they were back in Tucson and she was on the phone with her cousin Gillian, then with Hawaiian Air, and then with her friend Melissa who agreed to stay with the dogs.
That same evening she packed her bag and got into bed and as she lay there waiting for sleep, she was wrapped in a haze of dozey contentment and self-congratulation, knowing that she had vanquished at least one of her two phobias.
Never again, she thought, would she allow herself to be so timid, so fearful just because she was solitary and single. So she was single; so what?
Solitaire was in that elusive moment of descending sleep, eyelids dropping insistently, when she heard a knocking on her bedroom door -- four sharp raps of knuckles on wood. Then the door swung slowly open and she saw the tall figure of a naked man silhouetted against the light. Frozen in terror, she sat stock still. Without moving her head, she glanced down at the dogs; although they had woofed and growled incessantly the previous night, now they did not stir, but lay curled in their beds like pea pods. The figure, too, remained motionless, hips akimbo, right arm raised and braced against the door frame. At last, Solitaire reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and when she did she saw that the door was indeed open, but that there was no one there.
_____________________________________________________________________
*"Spukhafte fernwerkung!" scoffed Albert Einstein, thus denouncing the controversial theory of "quantum entanglement," or "action at a distance," which seeks to explain electromagnetism as the interaction of two bodies vastly separated in space, despite the absence of an intermediating agent or mechanism. Similarly, it posits that human bodies do not necessarily have to touch in order to interact.
It was in 1935 that Einstein, along with his colleagues Podolsky and Rosen, presented a paper (the EPR Paradox) refuting the theory as "bosh." As everyone knows, this disparagement led to the epic dust-up between Einstein and Bohr, sometimes known as The Copenhagen Catastrophe, in which Bohr attempted to bolster his argument by applying, ironically, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, to which Einstein countered that information could not be propagated at speeds faster than the speed of light. He then stuck out his tongue and gave a Bronx cheer, a moment that was famously captured for posterity on the Box Brownie of a Princeton passerby.
Thus was the whole world of physics thrown into a cocked hat until the 1960s when John Bell, by applying Einstein's own theories, as well as theories of nonlocalities, inequalities and hidden variables, suggested that so-called hidden variables could be ruled out. Moreover, "quantum entanglement" could not be used because resultant ambiguities of photon A (or B) would cause the wave to collapse.
(Footnotes culled from Solitaire's quantum physics discussion group notebooks.)
Solitaire was in that elusive moment of descending sleep, eyelids dropping insistently, when she heard a knocking on her bedroom door -- four sharp raps of knuckles on wood. Then the door swung slowly open and she saw the tall figure of a naked man silhouetted against the light. Frozen in terror, she sat stock still. Without moving her head, she glanced down at the dogs; although they had woofed and growled incessantly the previous night, now they did not stir, but lay curled in their beds like pea pods. The figure, too, remained motionless, hips akimbo, right arm raised and braced against the door frame. At last, Solitaire reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and when she did she saw that the door was indeed open, but that there was no one there.
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| Fu and |
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| Chu |
SEMPER FIDO
_____________________________________________________________________
*"Spukhafte fernwerkung!" scoffed Albert Einstein, thus denouncing the controversial theory of "quantum entanglement," or "action at a distance," which seeks to explain electromagnetism as the interaction of two bodies vastly separated in space, despite the absence of an intermediating agent or mechanism. Similarly, it posits that human bodies do not necessarily have to touch in order to interact.
It was in 1935 that Einstein, along with his colleagues Podolsky and Rosen, presented a paper (the EPR Paradox) refuting the theory as "bosh." As everyone knows, this disparagement led to the epic dust-up between Einstein and Bohr, sometimes known as The Copenhagen Catastrophe, in which Bohr attempted to bolster his argument by applying, ironically, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, to which Einstein countered that information could not be propagated at speeds faster than the speed of light. He then stuck out his tongue and gave a Bronx cheer, a moment that was famously captured for posterity on the Box Brownie of a Princeton passerby.
Thus was the whole world of physics thrown into a cocked hat until the 1960s when John Bell, by applying Einstein's own theories, as well as theories of nonlocalities, inequalities and hidden variables, suggested that so-called hidden variables could be ruled out. Moreover, "quantum entanglement" could not be used because resultant ambiguities of photon A (or B) would cause the wave to collapse.
(Footnotes culled from Solitaire's quantum physics discussion group notebooks.)
I love this story..the writing is wonderful, and the tale transporting and told with such light-hearted hilarity, despite it's seriousness. Wish I knew this woman!!!
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