Dance for Two by Alan Lightman

Author:Alan Lightman [Lightman, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78962-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

A DAY IN DECEMBER

SHORTLY BEFORE SIX O’CLOCK on Thursday morning, December 6, 1979, someone’s dog, let loose, ran yelping down Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto, turned right on Waverley, and dropped from fatigue and boredom near the intersection of Santa Rita Avenue, having woken all sleepers within earshot. It was still dark. Lights blinked on one by one along the animal’s path, people groped for robes and went to the toilet, and another day began.

By half past seven University Avenue was filling with college students cycling to their early classes. At the doorway of one of the large homes on Waverley near University, a woman in her early forties, wearing a smart tweed suit, called out to her husband, “George, don’t forget the gardening book for Betty.” George, in pinstripes, nodded and drove away to a Silicon Valley company.

A couple of hours later, in his rented house on Camino a Los Cerros, Alan Guth got out of bed, had two hard-boiled eggs, and waved good-bye to his wife and son (who the day before had said, “Daddy’s home,” for the first time). On his ten-speed, which was kept in good repair with supplies from the Palo Alto Bike Shop, he rode southeast to Sharon Road, turned right, flew past the shopping center, turned left onto Sharon Park Drive, turned right on Sand Hill Road, and entered the grounds of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. His office was on the northeast corner of the third floor of Central Laboratory, in the theory group. Guth was a thirty-two-year-old physicist.

By this time it was half past ten. Students and student-types were beginning to hang around Printer’s Inc., a bookstore on California Avenue with a coffee bar and classical music in the background. A well-fleshed man in corduroys was thumbing through Diet for a Small Planet, wondering what to serve at his vegetarian dinner party.

On the street outside, the day was fine, unseasonably fine. The woman in the smart tweed suit, on her way to look at new wallpaper, decided to go home and change into something cooler. The weatherman had predicted rain. She hurried. Her old wallpaper of seven years, brimming with five-inch burgundy squares caught within a thicket of yellow diagonal stripes, had to go.

Guth started work with coffee. His colleagues on the third floor shared a community coffeepot for $3 a month per person. Around noon, after placing an anxious phone call about a possible job for the coming year, Guth went with two friends to lunch at the New Leaf. Afterward, back in his office, he wrote some correspondence—he did all his writing with a Radiograph pen, with its bold, neat lines—and later discussed magnetic monopoles and cosmology with a colleague. At six o’clock Guth pedaled home. Cedar, Camino de Los Robles, Monterey, Manzanita, Camino a Los Cerros. He knew the side streets on his route. In fifteen minutes he was home, had a broiled steak, medium rare, and after dinner he and his wife did laundry. He was out of underwear.

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