Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [207]
I hope you are happy with your maid. Now you will always have your sex laid on. I think I begin to understand what you mean by a “good relationship.” … But I can’t understand why you are so afraid of marriage? Is it too dull for you? I thought think sex without love wasn’t isn’t very satisfying, that the satisfaction only came by both parties desiring the happiness of the other, given in complete faith, truth & love without reserve. Anything short of that, I thought, was lust or fucking like animals.—Perhaps that is why you have such a large turn-over with your women.
A half-year later she finally returned his medal.
He surprised Gweneth with his excitement at the news that her visa had finally cleared the consulate. “Well, at last!” he wrote. “I was overjoyed to hear that you are coming at last.”
I need you more than ever… . I’m looking forward to being much happier… . I have to take care of you too, you know. As soon as you arrive here you are a responsibility of mine to see you are happy & not scared.
He had pared back the domestic side of daily life in minimalist fashion, striving for the least drain on his consciousness. When Gweneth Howarth finally arrived in the summer of 1959 she found a man with five identical pairs of shoes, a set of dark blue serge suits, and white shirts that he wore open at the neck. (She surreptitiously introduced colored shirts in deliberate stages, beginning with the palest of pastels.) He owned neither a radio nor a television. He carried pens in a standard slip-in shirt-pocket protector. He taught himself to keep keys, tickets, and change always in the same pocket so that he would never have to give them an instant’s thought.
At first he kept her presence secret from all but a few close colleagues. She took charge of the household as promised. He reveled in his pretty English domestic servant. He taught her to drive and experimented with letting her drive him about chauffeur-style, while he sat in the rear seat. She worried that he thought she was fluffy-minded; in fact he discovered that she was cool and independent. She made a point of finding men to date—a Beverly Hills stockbroker replaced the German optician—but Feynman’s friends gradually realized that their arrangement was turning romantic. They would appear at parties together and then make a show of departing separately, as though they had different places to go. Sometime in the next spring he realized how contented he felt, but he was not sure how to make the next decision. He marked a date on the calendar several weeks ahead and told himself that if his feelings had not changed by then, he would ask Gweneth to marry him. As the day approached, he could hardly wait. The evening before, without telling her why, he kept her awake until midnight. Then he proposed. They were married on September 24, 1960, at Pasadena’s grand Huntington Hotel. He hid his car so that no one could tie tin cans to the fenders, and moments after the reception he ran out of gasoline on the Pasadena Freeway. He told Gweneth cheerfully: So this is how we’re starting life. Murray Gell-Mann, who had married an Englishwoman he met at the Institute for Advanced Study several years before, thought Feynman was playing catch-up—now he, too, had acquired an English wife and a small brown dog.
The Feynmans and the Gell-Manns bought houses not far from each other in Altadena, north of the campus, nestled in the high hills that cup the smog drifting up from Los Angeles. Richard spent long hours teaching the dog, Kiwi, increasingly circuitous tricks; Feynman’s mother, who had moved out to Pasadena to be near her son, made droll remarks about what a child would be up against. Gweneth began a garden with citrus scents and exotic colors that could never have survived a Yorkshire winter. In 1962 a son, Carl, was born; six years later they adopted a daughter, Michelle. It was instantly clear to Richard’s friends how much he had wanted children. At