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Feynman told these very stories to the women he dated. Despite their too-good-to-be-true quality, they were convincing and funny. No one ever caught him in a lie. Like many people who discover that storytelling is a talent—that they can hold an audience, focus a roomful of eyes—he honed his repertoire, never caring whether the crowd included people who had heard a story before. Nor, mostly, did they care. With his stories, his laughter, his dancing, his ability when alone with another person to concentrate his attention absolutely, he was intensely attractive to women. This despite the central coldness he held so close—this noetic Casanova. They suffered, sometimes, enormous pain. A second woman told him euphemistically that she had had an abortion: “The whole thing is horrible, cruel and wretched, and happens about once in two million… . I’m sure you never dreamt that any harm would come of such a sudden urge (shall we say, the ‘shortest part’ of an urge) but as I mentioned before the innocent have to pay, etc. etc.” Later she asked him to forgive the mean things she had said.

They almost always did forgive him. They loved to recite his virtues. A catalog that one woman set down on paper:

1. Handsome (could be)

2. clever (he thinks)

3. tall (very)

4. well dressed (trim)

5. a dancer (From a whore in Mexico City)

6. a drummer (whow!)

7. personality plus (oh boy!)

8. smart (putting it mild)

9. conversation (good)

10. sweet (sometimes)

On professional trips overseas he seduced women so regularly that his hosts knew he expected them to make introductions. In London he would meet Pauline or Betty, in Paris Isabelle or Marina, in Amsterdam Marika or Genny. He would see a woman for days and then file her farewell letter with the others:

My love for you is so great that I’m sure it would have brought us both a wealth of happiness … please always remember, when in the evening of your life … that somewhere in the world there is me and that I love you. For I shall always remember you because you are the only person that I have felt at complete ease and sympathy with.

There were so many attitudes a woman could assume for a short-term love affair. His lovers would warn him jovially not to break too many hearts, or they would wish him luck with all his projects “be they blonde or mathematical—or physical!” They would hint that they might appear on his doorstep—that his “sorcière” might not know the way to the moon and stars but could find the USA—or implore, “concerning your work hurry up to find an atomic broom which could fly from Europe to California in a couple of hours.” They would accuse him of preferring his own company—of a “Narcissus-of-the-mind complex.” They would wonder aloud what home really meant to him—was he not a little lonely, after all?

He was. His friends refused to understand why he finally chose to settle down with Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas, who had met him in a Cornell cafeteria and pursued him—they said cattily—all the way to Pasadena and finally accepted his proposal by mail from Rio de Janeiro. They considered her a platinum blonde (“the girl with the cellophane hair” was one unkind nickname that floated behind Feynman’s back) who wore white high heels and tight white shorts to picnics. They thought she was older than he was (the age difference was actually just a few months). Even before they married, they quarreled by mail about how much they should spend on interior furnishings and how he looked in old clothes. She made clear that she did not usually think scientists were much fun. She had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles—that was exotic enough to interest him. While he was in Brazil, she taught courses at Michigan State University in the History of Furniture and Institutional Interiors, mainly to men pursuing careers in hotel or restaurant management. “The pattern is that the girl who teaches this course usually marries one of those characters,