Fortune’s Conjecture

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x#=?^?(x)p_i

ⁱ⁼¹

order of operations

On the day of our wedding she couldn’t afford a dress. I borrowed a suit from a friend and drove to city hall. When she took my last name, it meant forever. It was addition: the happiest kind of math.

We moved six hundred miles to St. Paul. We carried eight boxes up three flights of stairs to a one-bedroom facing the river. I was going to teach.

Our new lives started in seven days. We began to unpack.

multiply

We spent the first winter without heat. I had an adjunct’s salary but insisted guiltily that she not work. She always smiled when I came home. She lit candles so the grey walls seemed warmer.

When I learned she was pregnant I kissed her palms and said nothing.

I love you too much, I could have said. I’m scared for this baby. I love you.

Instead I drew a plus sign on her hand, and she closed her fingers around mine.

summation

In January she found a job at the library. I couldn’t object because she was luminous. I imagined her gliding between shelves, touching a finger to each spine as if pressing it to her lips. Shh. A story is not a secret, but wait, little one, wait to tell yours.

Sometimes I caught her asleep in a chair cradling a book like a baby, and I could only be thankful for someone so beautiful.

Pascal’s triangle

The librarian drove her to the hospital. Six times! she later joked. Six times I tried to call you! My scholar. My love.

I careened into her room, tripping over my dress shoes, terrified and elated and willing myself to stand still at her bedside. We’ll call him Blaise, she said. I smiled.

We made a perfect triangle, three sides of the same shape.

limits

He didn’t learn to ride a bike until the third grade. I never wanted him to scrape his knees, but she insisted that we let him try. I tightened the helmet strap under his chin and he looked seriously into my eyes.

I’m going to do it, he said. I know, I replied.

Now! he shouted and I let go of his seat, watched him wobble precariously down the sidewalk. He did not fall. He pedaled back to us, smiling a hero’s smile.

proof

The best days were when it rained. He woke up first to the soft splashing sound and crawled into our bed. As he grew this stopped, though he still savored the sound, tapping his fingers on the kitchen table.

I loved the night lightning. We sat on our bed, tangling limbs in the silence that followed the thunder. Her face burst into white light and I squeezed her hand. I’m still here, she squeezed back. I’m still here.

subtract

Suddenly we were old, and I held her elbow as we walked down the stairs, cupping its bony angles in my palm. We still had that old symmetry – in the way her fingers fit into mine, in the way our expressions would mirror each other across the table.

He did not stay once he was grown. I have to go away before I can come back, he said. He turned the corner with mathematical precision, slowly pulling away from our life.

absolute value

When I lived alone silence coated our apartment like a fine layer of dust. I kept things as she had, sitting in her chair in the afternoons, cradling a book as I had seen her do.

I kept a notebook of unsolvable equations to work out the knot in my throat. Sometimes I caught her reflection in a mirror – a cheekbone, a flash of her luminous skin – and I closed my notebook and covered my head with my hands.

solve for x

Our son escorted me to the ceremony where I was named professor emeritus of mathematics. He frowned as he looked at the notebook I clutched in my trembling hands, prying it from my grasp to flip through its pages.

What is this? he asked. What does this mean? These equations are unsolvable.

It’s not the equations, I tried to explain. It’s that they never end. Numbers are just another way of falling in love.