Ithaca

by Phan Viet

He had heard about her through some friends. The stories always went like this, "Oh, Cornell University? Well, at Cornell, there was a young lady getting her PhD in psychology. I heard she was such and such." He didn’t remember much; just a lady, one year older than him, getting a PhD at a good school.

But then, in his third winter in America, he had to go to Ithaca for a conference on elementary particles. Before leaving, he entertained the idea that perhaps he would email her when he got there. He would say, well, I had heard so much about you and would love to meet you; that is, of course, if you have time.

But having arrived at Cornell, it seemed impossible for him to write that email. What now? To write the email and to meet a lady who might be quite pretty, quite fun, quite this, and quite that... but so what? What could possibly come from a meeting with a lady living 6 hours from him by car and who is a year older than him? What can possibly come from any meeting any more?

The last day at Cornell, just three hours before he had to leave, he dad nothing to do. He checked his email and surfed the Internet. There was nothing new in his mailbox except a few spam emails. He deleted the spam and replied to some older emails. Then, out of boredom, he started reading emails that were a few years old. They were the ones he had sent out when he first arrived in America, in hopes of making new friends. It was bizarre to read them now and realize he no longer talked to any of these friends. There weren’t any arguments or tragic breaks during those three years, as far as he could remember, but somehow things just seemed to end.

Still two more hours to go, he thought, checking his watch. He clicked on the "Compose" button and typed fast without thinking.

"I am on campus for a conference and only heard about you a few minutes ago," he wrote. "If you have time, I hope we can meet. That is, of course, if you receive this email before 3pm." Then he shut down his laptop and prepared to wait until it was time to leave for the airport. "She won’t reply," he thought. "If I were her, I wouldn’t."

But 30 minutes later, his cell phone rang.

"Have you left yet?"

"I’m still waiting for you," he said.

"Oh good. I was afraid you had gone."

They met in a Starbucks cafe overlooking the college town and the pine forests – the only thing still green in January. In the days that followed, he could not remember what she wore. He only remembered that voice. A voice that sounded like the wind on the barley fields after the crop has been harvested. The wind would take up the seeds left scattered on the field and swirl them into tiny tornadoes, which danced happily across the fields.

For the first 10 minutes, he busied himself with ordering coffee, commenting on the cold January weather in New England and talking about Cornell – trying to get comfortable with her presence.

"Do you know Urie Bronfenbrenner?" she asked. "I came to Cornell because of him."

They talked about Hanoi and common friends in Boston and Chicago. Then they talked about America, the illusions they had when they first arrived, their illusions about the PhDs and what it took to be a true scientist.

"Why do you study physics?"

"Ah, that’s hard to answer. I don’t think I have enough time," he smiled.

"No no... You only need to give me an example. Something that, when you see it, you say to yourself, ah, this is why I want to study physics."

She leaned back, waiting. The waiting emptied his mind.

"Well, let’s see... I don’t think I have revealing moments like that. Things always come to me gradually. Naturally, I mean."

"Oh, I don’t mean revealing moments. I mean, what makes you still excited about physics after all these years? In my case, whenever I read an experiment that is designed beautifully, I get excited. I remember the first time I read Piaget’s notes. He wanted to know how children distinguished the square from the circle and rectangular. Have you ever sat for four hours to watch a child play?"

He said no, he never had. He said he didn’t know how to play with children. And perhaps he didn’t know how to play with adults either. She laughed.

But they had bypassed the question about physics. Why were they talking about physics? Good God, physics, of all things! Yet, it seemed natural.

"You know," she said, "I think one day people will find out that your physics and my psychology are not that far from each other. Western psychology only touches on the idea of the unconscious but they don’t believe in things like previous-life knowledge. And your modern physics doesn’t believe in Buddhist ideas about the origin of the world. Like The Four Noble Truths or the Original Karma."

"Well, Einstein said Buddhism comes closest to the truth about the universe."

"I believe him," she said and suddenly added, "It’s almost three."

"I’d better go back to the hotel," he said.

Outside the coffee shop, they stood facing each other. While he was trying to find something significant to say, she extended her hand.

"I will see you again."

"Sure. I will see you again."

They shook hands, smiled, then turned and walked away. He never turned around to look back.

Back in Baltimore, he googled the psychology department of Cornell and found a profile picture of her on the department’s website. The picture was accompanied by two lines saying she was studying speech development in children. Then he started searching for Piaget on JSTOR. He read Piaget’s experiments with children; then Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. He thought the next time they met, they must talk about psychology. He would say:

"You know, I think Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory has serious problems. That theory is like taking a snapshot of life, rather than seeing it as a course. It focuses on a moment, not the process. Just a random, particular moment. Which is pretty meaningless when one wants to examine the nature of things."

***

But there was a year between that first meeting and their second. In that one year, he did not contact her once. No email. No phone call. Nothing. He just couldn’t.

It was funny how things happened. The first week back from Ithaca he was obsessed with reading about psychology; he was sure they would meet again very soon. He was sure there had been a connection that, like gravity, would draw them closer to each other. It must happen, there was no other way around it. But then a week passed and it suddenly occurred to him that he should have emailed her right after he returned to Baltimore. He should have done something to acknowledge what had happened. Even gravity would have remained thin air if Newton hadn’t acknowledged it.

He thought about it for two weeks, half wondering if he should do something now and half wishing she would write him. When there was no contact from her either as the weeks passed by and when the psychology readings became so complicated that they pushed him into a strange world, he started thinking that he had been right not to email. It would have been a burden to her and it would have exposed him. "I must be mad to think there was a connection. It’s just me and my old tricky mind," he thought.

He had more reason to believe this after they met accidentally at a friend’s birthday party in Washington DC. It was March and a year had passed since Ithaca. When he saw her sitting on the couch of his friend’s sitting room, he thought she was a mirage. But when he realized it was really her another thought occurred to him. She had come to DC without letting him know, even just as a friend.

Especially when, for the past year, he had waited for a "natural" chance to go to Cornell once again.

"I am here to see the cherry blossoms," she said. "I’ve been in the US for four years and have never been to DC."

"Well, there’s not much to see in DC but it’s still the capital and worth visiting in that sense. If you are not familiar with the city, I can take you around."

She looked straight into his eyes when he spoke. Immediately, he knew something was not right.

"Oh thank you," she smiled. "But I am going home tomorrow."

Before he could figure out what he was feeling, a man and a young girl came up to them. They told her that the others traveling in their group decided they would stop by Philadelphia on the way back to Ithaca. She nodded, then introduced them. The man had recently come to Cornell for a master’s degree in public administration, and the girl was a first-year student. Their group of 8 people had been visiting DC for the last few days.

He said hello, made some brief small talk and then excused himself. Their paths didn’t cross for the rest of the evening. An hour passed. At 8 o’clock, he told the host that he had to leave. He did not stop by the couch to say goodbye. He took his hat and winter coat from the closet, then opened the door and walked out.

***

Time trudged on. Since that second meeting in DC, he had met other girls – quite a few girls in fact. He knew that she was in Hanoi the next summer, when he was also there. Then the next fall, he had another conference in Cornell, which he attended, but never told her about. The following winter, he met a 24-year-old girl earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins. They soon started dating. When the next summer came, he heard she had returned to Hanoi to get married to the public administration man from the party. He broke up with the public health girl. From then on, news about her was always accompanied by news about her husband or vice versa. As for him, he went on many more dates with more girls but somehow the excitement often faded away before he started to care how he felt about the girl. He never really thought why. It all seemed natural.

He received his doctorate the next summer. In the fall, he went to Cornell for his post-doc. She had graduated that summer and returned to Hanoi with her husband. After the one-year postdoc, he left Cornell to work at the Fermi Lab in Illinois. Time kept passing.

A year later, they met again in Hanoi at the wedding of a mutual friend. She was at the wedding alone, on behalf of her husband, who was in Belgium for business. In the corridor outside the wedding hall, they had some time alone. Neither one was nervous any more. Smiling easily, he said:

"You know. I think Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory doesn’t make any sense. It only takes a snapshot of life, rather than viewing it as a journey. It doesn’t look at the process and only focuses on a moment. A random moment. Which doesn’t make any sense and has no significance whatsoever because a random, silly moment can say nothing about a man’s life. Only the journey is important."

He stopped, surprised that he still remembered that stuff and even felt excited to talk about it.

"You really think so?" she replied.

The question was simple. She didn’t even seem to expect an answer. He looked straight into her eyes. Suddenly, a thought seized him like a strong wave crashing down on him. It was obvious. The last 5 years of his life, with all its ups and downs, the vague longing, the unnamed fear, the doubt, the diminishing excitement and the prolonged but unacknowledged lovesickness. They all originated from that random moment when he wrote her the short email from Cornell, only two hours before he had to go to the airport. Perhaps his whole life had been determined by that silly moment, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Nothing that came before it seemed to warn him of that moment nor prevented what happened afterward. No prior experiences seemed to have been able to stop him from writing that email; and all his free will and reason could not help him in the years that followed. There was no process. There was no journey into and out of that moment. It was just a random particular moment; a gigantic disruption that had no place in his life. Even he did not have a place in it.

And while he stood there, surrendering unconditionally to the present, he heard a soft laugh from her.

"You and I, we are always like two drifters."

Two drifters! Two drifters! "Two drifters off to see the world". That afternoon in the Starbucks in Ithaca, he had heard those Moon River lyrics while they waited for their coffee. He had held on to reality by repeating these words in his mind while watching her from the corner of his eye. That day, she wore a long white winter coat, with a light gray scarf that had tiny white fringes.

Two drifters. Two drifters. She knew it. She had known it all along.

From then until the end of the wedding, they did not exchange another word. They sat opposite each other at a table that was arranged for former students in the US. He did not look at her once and she didn’t look at him either. But he felt he knew every one of her thoughts. He knew them all because he knew she had been thinking of him and waiting for him in the years after the afternoon in Ithaca. They had been both scared and stupid.

But he had no regrets.

***

The years passed by. They sometimes ran into each other here and there, one time at a reunion of former New England expats, another time at a conference and another time at a house-warming party for a friend they didn’t even know they had in common. At these chance encounters, sometimes they were arranged to sit next to each other. But they rarely talked to each other nor to other people at the table. They just sat and listened; and answered only when they had no choice. If her dress accidentally touched his trousers under the table, she would apologise and draw her chair further away. Or if his elbow touched hers on the table, he would excuse himself and pull back. But then, at the end of the conference or party, they would find a minute to be alone at the door. There, they would look straight into each other’s eyes and hold the look for a moment while they bowed slightly in farewell. — VNS

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