The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [37]
“For what?”
“An idea.”
“Personal or professional?”
He blew again, then he said, “Don’t you have an old recorder or something around here?”
“It’s on the mantel.” He brought it to the table and began blowing into it, covering holes. Then he handed it to me and said, “Play a note.”
I played a G.
“Hmm.”
“What’s the idea?”
“Why couldn’t you tell whether there was a leak in a pipeline by the pitch of sounds going through it?”
“You mean the ammonia pipeline?”
“Or natural gas. Any pipeline. Blow another note. Put all your fingers down and lift one finger off at a time.”
I played C, D, F, on up the instrument. He said, “You could even tell where it was, if you had the proper acoustic equipment.”
“And you wouldn’t have to turn off the pipeline to locate it, only to fix it. The pitch would locate it.” I sat up and smiled. This was why Michael and I were together. “And you wouldn’t have to send any special sound through it. In fact, you could test it regularly with just the pumping noise as your sound. You could rig up a computer program that would test it automatically, every thirty seconds.”
“What if it were a branching pipe?”
“The branch would act as another leak. It would just change the base line pitch.”
“Maybe.” He poured out the wine and pushed back the food. I reached over to the sideboard for some graph paper. “Shit,” he said, “I wish I remembered more acoustics.”
“You’re a genius,” I said.
By midnight we had worked out all the variables we might find in the pipes at our own plant—multiple branching, length, diameter, acoustic interference, where to attach the sound-testing machines, how often to test, how many people would be put out of work (my contribution), how long production had been shut down for leak detection in the last year (Michael’s contribution). By midnight, Michael was sitting very close to me on the couch, his shoulder against mine and his thigh along my thigh. When he finished his peach pie, I got up and carried his dish into the kitchen, and when I came back, I saw him. He has long legs, and he was sitting deep in the couch, so his knees jutted out above the coffee table. His blue jeans stretched around his thighs so that I could make out the hardness of the muscles. He scratched his full head of hair and pressed his beard down with the flat of his hand, the way he does. He is a good specimen. I like him to be a little distracted, and he was, so I sat down beside him again.
He squeezed me around the shoulders, and I looked around the room. The walls are a sort of rosy gray, the shades are Japanese rice paper. Hardwood floors, Scandinavian throw rugs, things my mother wouldn’t have spent her money on. I love this room, the circles of light spreading and joining, the neatness and quietness of it, the fact that it is mine, and the doors are closed and locked and the shades are drawn. Michael said, in a voice that showed that he thought he had earned something by the ingenuity of his idea, “Talk to me. Let’s have some news of your inner life.”
I leaned against his knee and said, “I’ve told you that I don’t have an inner life. There is no inner life.” I kissed him. “I may look pretty, but it’s just natural chemical engineering.”
He smiled and said, “Reactor design, huh? Ever heard of sympathetic detonation?”
I smiled, and said, “That’s purely a problem of distance.” His flesh gave off a steady warm glow. I could not resist sliding my arms beneath his and laying my head against his chest.
After Michael left, I sat down to write my mother a letter. I addressed the envelope first, just to try it out. There is no reason at all to believe that she still lives where she did. She likes to move. She doesn’t decorate, and she arranges the furniture the way it was in the previous apartment, but she does like the rooms to have different sizes and floor plans. We used to hate this moving habit of hers. Miriam would say, “Mom! We just got settled.”