Heart Calculation Finalem
The first day she walked into his class a phrase echoed in his mind so loudly that he wondered, terrified, if he’d said it aloud: belle-laide. Beautiful-ugly. He didn’t know how he knew this phrase, or even what language it was. (Later, when he looked it up, he realized it was French.) She trudged to the back of the room, her black knee-high boots with their thick heels clomping on the tiles. The frayed ends of her hair grazed her jaw and two full inches of white belly lay bare between the bottom of her red top and the waistband of her short plaid skirt. If any students saw him looking at her too long they might have thought he was wondering whether to reprimand her for her obvious attitude. Either way, they’d have thought he was being teacherly. He waited for his heart to beat its regular rhythm again—one and two and three and breathe out slow—and then he tore his eyes from her and began his lesson.
He’d awoken early this morning and lay there for hours, his hand on his heart. A few months had passed and he is still disturbed by the girl. How long has he been awake, considering how to read her? He thinks of her—Georgina—in bed at night, with his wife sleeping beside him. The other day in class she death-stared him—he can’t think of a better way to put it—while he was warning the students of an upcoming surprise math quiz. Her face was pinched, her eyes angry slits. Light begins to spill through the edges of the burgundy curtains while Jillian’s breath closes over him. She is just a rebellious teenager. Besides the constant thumping boots—does she really own no other footwear?—she wears what they all wear now, ripped jeans, their boyfriends’ hoodies, tight t-shirts or muscle shirts hidden beneath, skin exposed. Her black hair has poppy-red stripes painted into it. His own girls, also teenagers, went through similar ritualistic phases, though they didn’t insist on loud combat boots daily to school, thank God.
His heart has been acting up again, after all these years. Before Martha left—decades ago, now—he’d come home after last bell and lay down on the old plaid couch she hated, the one he bought at Value Village for ten dollars, with his left hand pressing down on his chest, his heart pulsing erratically beneath his fingertips. During those few months before Martha left, he spent hours on that couch striving to understand the mysterious formula his heart was trying to communicate. He followed the intermittent, unpredictable beats with his bare fingertips on the top left quadrant of his pale pectoral, searching for an answer through his ginger mat of chest hair. Were three quick beats in a row equivalent to three cubed? Were the long, frighteningly drawn-out pauses meant to be indicative of an equal sign? Or were they an indication of the secondary part of the formula? He never figured it out. All those years as a serious math student, practicing the formulas, making the numbers work, the sum always (so predictably gratifying) the logical outcome of the calculations, but when it came to his own heartbeat, the rhythm of the major organ inside of him, he simply could not find the answer.
He had tried to explain to Martha that it is always about understanding the formula first, and then everything afterwards follows with logical precision. Such an utterly satisfying exercise for him, every single time, and he couldn’t see how others refused to take delight in it. You simply had to learn the rules, understand how the numbers work together, and then, voila! Martha’s slim hips and curled black hair were silhouetted against the picture window’s dying light as she looked down at the space above his head with her vague, expressionless eyes. So rarely did she actually look directly at him, in those final months. Then, he’d hear her in the kitchen starting supper, and he’d raise his voice to tell her that his whole life, since childhood, he had been driven to finding the answers, and that working out the problem through numbers was the most logical route. It was around this time, near the end, that he frequently heard her say, “Roy, you’re being redundant.”
He pads downstairs to the kitchen and is greeted by a yellow circle of light cast across an open textbook on the kitchen table with his sullen eldest daughter’s face inches from its pages. Pretending not to hear him.
“You’re up early, Bella? It’s not light yet.”
Her voice takes on an old crone’s timbre. “Studying. Latin exam this morning.” He thinks she might have placed herself at the table at this exact hour, knowing her father’s morning routine and determined to have him see her diligence and studiousness. He wonders if she likes Latin. He lightly pats the top of her blond, thin-haired skull, pours himself a glass of orange juice, and goes upstairs to shower.
Despite his determination to find the answer all those years ago, the erratic vibrato in his chest was not giving way to any kind of formula. He didn’t understand the workings of the body. He only knew numbers, calculations, formulas. Logic. This new shaking way of the heart was lost to him. And so the beating of his heart was just that, he finally realized—primal, biological, uncontrollable. There was no formula; the only mystery lay in why it kept going.
On top of this, his heart actually, physically hurt, and Martha suggested he see a doctor but she didn’t seem that emphatic about it. He thought her tone suggested he was faking it. A few months later, he came home to an envelope with her goodbye note inside, a rectangle placed neatly in the center of the welcome mat inside the door, stark white against dirty brown. He appreciated the note later only for the care she took to place the envelope so that its four corners were equidistant to the corners of the welcome mat beneath it.
The season after Martha left he met someone new, Jillian, and no one was more surprised than him. A casual meeting in the local library where they were both caught searching for the same book: Descartes’ Error. He asked for her number and she acquiesced, like a miracle. His unusual heart symptoms had calmed down by then, mostly. But since the beginning of this school year, the strange and distant quivering in his chest has become a daily occurrence, accompanied now by a persistent, muffled screech that pierces his inner ear. He’s never mentioned his heart to Jillian because he doesn’t want to break their routine. She wouldn’t react the way Martha did: seething, aloof. Accusatory. Jillian would wait for some time before suggesting, mildly, that they see a doctor. He knows what would follow not too long after: he would find himself one day in his doctor’s office with her by his side, wondering obscurely how he got there. He admits that her easy way of facing life’s obstacles or irritations is admirable. This is the quality he loves most about her but didn’t appreciate, nor did he understand its necessity until well into their marriage when the little emergent hiccups began: the baby’s fever too high, much higher than what the books suggested it should be, or the time the neighbor’s dog bit their six year-old daughter on the cheek and left a scar, or, years ago now, when they, far too late, realized the realtor bilked them out of thousands of dollars. Jillian neither faces that which does not suit her with fierce determination nor does she buckle under it; rather, she expects its presence and moves through it gently like a t’ai chi student moving through a shoulder-high stream.
Roy twists the shower faucet so cool pebbles of water pummel persistently at his heart. Georgina’s lips are often darkened red or glistening with something shiny. One day she wore powder-blue lipstick and long, false, fluttering eyelashes to school. Her skintight top was printed with bright orange and green dinosaurs. It looked like a toddler’s pyjama top. She is small, flat-chested, and thin-hipped. She has never looked directly at him, and despite her affectless expression, she speaks up in class too much and the other kids find her funny. Sometimes she whispers just loudly enough for her desk neighbours to hear, and he always thinks she’s talking about him, not positively, of course. He has not been able to stop her chatter yet. Mostly because, if he admits it, he hasn’t tried. He wants to hear her voice.
He does not believe that he is sexually attracted to her. Her face is narrow, pointed at the chin, strangely reminding him of a cut diamond, and scattered at the cheekbones and jawline are red and purple divots of acne which she attempts to hide behind makeup. Anyway, he hasn’t been sexually attracted to any of his students in years. There were a few he caught himself thinking about too much in those first years of his career, noticing their pointy breasts, the pillowed shape of their lips, the way they walked. He’d forced himself to stop the thoughts during school hours, but at home, in the mornings in the shower, he admits now with some disgust that he allowed himself to think of them as he achieved release. But he wants to get inside of Georgina, inside of her mind, if only as a way to understand that indifferent countenance. He wants to reach her.
The students he has reached have always been the ones who love numbers the way he does, but they are few and far between, a handful. Most students haven’t wanted to understand. They want to get through his classes with as little effort as possible. And every year students seem less interested in the numbers and more interested in their phones: Utube, Snapbook, Facegram, Tok-tok, all that social media stuff he doesn’t really care to understand, mostly because it draws them further away and into a world totally foreign to him. Their problem is the absence of a rigorous passion, a profound disinterest in the attainment of mystery. He wants to pierce their thick, screen-addled torpor with the clear measure of numbers, with their beauty, and imbue them with knowledge, so they may understand something glorious. The revelation strikes him deeply. Today is the day. He will call her forward and he will command her understanding of what she thinks she cannot love. He shivers at the thought of seeing the light and the victory in her. Her gratitude. He turns off the faucet. His skin is cold and rubbery to the touch.
When he started out, he refused to believe his colleagues who told him with high airs of authority that the students don’t care, and the vast majority will never love mathematics the way he does. Brace yourself, they told him. Be warned. But he wouldn’t believe them, and this was all part of his stubbornness that Martha had come to hate, he sees this clearly now. She never admitted it to him, not even right before she left him two years into his new teaching gig, that it was his stubbornness that turned her away. The way he set the dishes in the dishrack, always the same: forks together, spoons together, separate the sharp knives from the butter and the paring knives. The cups behind the glasses and the dinner plates behind the saucers. Everything in its place. She told him, many times, that she just wanted freedom to do what she wanted, to put things where she wanted on the dishrack, just for one day. She hated how he’d come and move them to their proper places as soon as she left the kitchen. Why did everything have to be so rigid, so constrained?
His heart thrums beneath his wet fingertips, volatile, rebellious. He thinks of telling Jillian tonight, after dinner, when the girls are asleep.
