Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 38 Cambridge

The newlywed couple arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts on a muggy July day about six weeks before the fall semester was to make Greater Boston home to a quarter of a million students again. Max’s doctoral thesis described the sequencing lab-on-a-chip, all the technological innovations that would go into it, some prototyped components, and the application of the innovations to other disciplines. The work had convinced the search committee of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science that Max was ready for an academic appointment without fire-testing as a post-doctoral fellow.

His job was to complement their ongoing work in MEMS and quickly establish MIT as the leader in droplets. He’d been given a year’s grace before a teaching load would cut into his time for research. The Institute had also asked him to be a charter member of the Singapore-MIT Alliance being formed at that time, expecting that as a graduate of nus he would be an especially capable ambassador. Max had agreed, but only reluctantly. Having since learned that he had a daughter, a secret second family only a thousand miles from Singapore, he came to realize that the Alliance would give him a good excuse to see her.

Arianna would meanwhile set up a temporary home for them in MIT’s married graduate student housing while she looked for more gracious accommodations and began to prep for the lsat.

Cambridge in July was quiet compared to how it would be only two months later. The heat and humidity wore everyone down. With so few undergraduates around, every day was as sleepy as a Sunday morning. Not so for Dr. and Mrs. Frood.

They were still honeymooners. Between the obligations and anxieties of establishing themselves in this new place, they explored and sampled broadly. There were day trips to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich on Boston’s North Shore. There they walked, to the limits set by Max’s still-recovering feet, in sand and clear cooling ocean, and on the trails, all the time yakking lovers’ yak and observing birds in that natural sanctuary. They took overnights to Cape Cod and the twin islands of its underbelly. There were evenings in Lenox, listening to music under the stars. And there were lunches by the boathouse along the Charles River. It wasn’t Paris, but it was romantic. As the peak of summer passed in August, there was an occasional breath of fall in the air, and fall is Cambridge’s greatest season, every year a new triumph of hope over experience. That’s just the slightly cynical me, Dear Reader. It’s great there, really, and hope, really, hope is the best aphrodisiac, the best prophylactic, the best parent, and the best of many other things.

Arianna and Max found married student housing more satisfying than they had expected. Arianna quickly met French-speaking and Farsi-speaking couples, and pairs like hers with one immigrant spouse, and others who spoke only English or weren’t married at all, but plenty entertaining, and from them she learned what people like her needed to know: what’s the best route to the consulate, and where to find real pomegranate soup, and what’s it like to be married to an MIT professor. Max found something too, unexpected: relief from Arianna. Even though she was a fresh bride and at her prime, and he performed all the marital duties with pleasure, he preferred to be alone or to work most of the time, sometimes dreaming of gambling and often dreaming of men. Leaving her to the care and attention of others, he could get away.

“I missed him, and I tried to accept him—after all, I’d fallen in love with him because of his obsessions about work—but I had hoped he’d change for me, silly me. I wasn’t bored or lonely,” she explained.

When she first suggested that they stay in married student housing rather than look for their own apartment, or even a house that they could afford thanks to her family money, she worried that he would be his all-too-frequently-dismissive self and tell her it was a bad idea. He surprised her with, “Great idea!” but there was something about his reaction, a crack in the poker façade, a barely perceptible lack of contraction in the Oribicularis oculi, small muscles of the eyes that respond to genuine joy, that made her think he’d already decided it for them and was simply happy to have been spared the confrontation.

“Max gave no signs of being either happy or sad,” Arianna explained, referring to his return to the US, the place she thought of as his home. The roots, or many of them, that he might have held on to were broken. He had only one friend from Harvard and none he ever mentioned from childhood.

In the first years, he told her that his mind’s eye held only one recollection of his father. Rhetorically, Arianna asked me, “And how surprising was that, since the man died when the boy was only three?” What remained for Max was a single cloudy recurrent memory of his father running toward him. Was it in excitement? Max didn’t know. “On the first few occasions when I got him to talk about it, his attention then turned inward, as if he were trying to retrieve or make sense of another image that was just one too many neural firings removed, and there the conversation faded out.”

He had loved Miriam, his ultimate MILF, to the point of impregnation, and he missed her affections. He had never found, with any other woman, the same satisfaction. He had been empowered by her cries of joy—rapid and guttural, breathy cries, like a wild animal in full flight. They were the most artless, the most affecting he’d ever heard, as the scrapes of her nails were the most unaffected he’d ever felt. Returning, or trying as he had to return to his own womb, was not in the realm of the possible with anyone else. He knew what it meant when they said you can’t go home again. He’d gotten closer than most men ever had.

Arianna came within a short hair of Miriam’s standard. She made life exciting, discovering corners of MIT’s maziness where they could have a dalliance française, and he never failed to indulge her. The greatest risk, she thought, was always that she would attract attention with her shouts and cries and screams. And her fists pounding on the walls. And her feet stomping on the ground. Even at 2:30 a.m. she had to worry that they’d be discovered—coupling and woven together near heat pipes coughing in a basement corridor—by some freshman on his or her way back to campus dorms after fun-filled hours of checking a graded calculus problem set against the teaching assistant’s answers posted along the walls of those infinite corridors.

Max wanted nothing beyond that from a woman, except that she would not complicate his life. Max told someone later, and that someone later told me, “Fucking whores was like shooting fish in a barrel, unsporting. But at least they go home. At least I can pay them to go home.” And of course, Arianna brought complications and responsibilities along with all her charms.

Miriam, too, had been full of complications. She would have been jealous of Arianna. But mothers know things and maybe she’d seen through his cover to his real self. She might have guessed that the pretense of marriage wouldn’t last, and that no woman would ever truly win him away from her.

Max tried to forget Miriam, forget his father, forget the cheating scandal that led to his departure from Harvard, forget the traumatizing loss of Joosey to Jay, forget gambling, and forget his closeted needs, and to live as if he came from nowhere. By external appearances, he did a good job of it for a while.

Arianna missed her immense and immensely close family. She was not twice exiled, but she was twice moved far from what she knew. Some friends of her parents had children who had come to live in Boston, and some friends of her parents had moved there themselves. For the first year, she and Max had more invitations to dinners and brunches than they could accept. The great Ali Javan, Professor of Physics, inventor of the helium-neon laser, and her father’s and uncle’s childhood friend, opened his arms to them. There were professors of nuclear engineering, authors, political exiles, and middle managers and executives of multinational corporations. Max found something interesting in all these people, once, but not twice. He bled them for all he could learn right away and that was that. He preferred not to see them again. Where Max found some out some new fact, Arianna found friendships, and with these new friends she took excursions to the farmers- and outdoor markets where she preferred to shop, conversing, maybe haggling with the merchants about their cheeses and fruit. The sounds and smells reminded her of France, where she’d spent most of her life. Her memories of Tehran had faded, becoming as pale as watercolors held up against the saturated oils of the City of Lights. She hoped that law school would be a big extended family of a kind, and she promised her parents she’d join Hillel. In the meantime, she joined the Iranian Association and the French Cultural Center and wondered to herself why she had decided to study law.