The Hardest Geometry Problem in the World

First, I remember listening to her. Or perhaps, for her. The timbre of her voice was low and feminine. She related the events of the day to one of her friends sitting further from the wall. In rows, we sat and waited. I made mental notes of topics she was concerned about, ears perking when she mentioned movies or something funny or amusing. As the chalk moved in protest, my eyes darted from the blackboard to catch her like a criminal signaling a getaway. Then, back to the page, expressionless. I wondered if she liked someone younger or from above. I sat on the other side away from her and pretended I wasn’t interested. I was good at listening. I had experience with little else.

In high school, people are either good-looking or mysterious, and by junior year I came across someone who was both.

She was nonchalant, but expressive. She played basketball and her intensity ran the entire length of the court. Most games she was a point guard, but a shooter. A good passer full of vision and game winners. I imagined her as someone who could be heroic in the lives of others, the people’s warrior. We ended up in math class, and she sat there with brown hair pinned against the window.

Outside, she formed partnerships, alliances with the blond contingency. Everyone moved in groups, competing for space on the lawn of Upper School. I noticed, whether absent-mindedly or on purpose, she untucked her white, uniform shirt from time to time. For most, this was too rebellious. By some miracle, I told her I liked it it when I came upon her in the hallway. “Thanks,” she said. “I like yours, too.” and I looked down to see what I had chosen for the day.

Even now, I don’t know what possessed me to wear that blue Oxford with the sleeves rolled up. It was too hot for Houston. It was unrequired like the alternate jersey of a sports team.

As a quiet boy, I enjoyed solving imaginative equations. I remember, walking away, the significance of being noticed by someone I had deemed worth noticing.

…

The days I glimpsed her were long, undulating days. Sun spilling onto brick and grass. I was not around her for more than seconds, but such fondness arose when she was near.

I noticed that on certain mornings I would pass her if I chose a specific route, an angle travelling up and out of the classrooms bordering the Quadrangle. I would leave English at the sound of the bell and walk slowly north, turn left at the staircase and push the wooden door outward toward the circle drive. There, if I timed it, I would see her travelling in my direction, often alone, at times moving slowly like I was. Her walk was dignified, mature, old-fashioned. Her weight moved to her hips and back, to the outside of her shoes, swaying.

If this occurred, if I held fast until the second bell, I increased my odds of speaking to her. I knew, somehow through steely habit, that if I did it perfectly, if I threw my voice in her direction at exactly the time the bell should ring, it would hang there and cover the sound. This is what I projected outward, these rough calculations. In my youth and infatuation, I was able to stop time.

In one’s life, you may recall, especially if it was before the turn of the millennium, a moment when this was everything. A time when you might miss someone. When you did not know, through the missing, when you would see them again. Before cell phones and texting, if you would see the girl you cared for. Before the rise of social media, you figured how to make this happen. To cross paths, you kept watch. You forgot everything and sent your feelings to sea in hopes they would reach her shore.

Outside, if I spoke to her, it was by the tree that spread and hung along the edges of the concrete walk. It stood green and silent as a matron, a canopy. I approached and said my hellos. She returned them. We either talked or moved along.

…

Phone calls. Weekday nights devoted to homework and the slow, tilt of the earth. I’d finish my studies and go outside to shoot hoops, thinking of her, delaying the call as the sun went down on those cloudless, city nights. My house, the brick on Edloe St., became a blinking, army outpost. It sent the signal to the west in hopes she would receive it and write it down.

I worked out the mechanics on a notepad in the downstairs study. The theories on what to say: the calculations, the configurations. Breaking pencils and flipping pages. Sharpening the pencils and switching to pens. Often, growing frustrating and delaying the idea. Walking the back stairs to my bedroom. Collapsing, remembering. Mouthing the words as the ceiling fan turned.

Once, staying out past nine o’clock shooting, I returned out of breath and asked my older brother for advice. “You’ve got an hour,” he said, and returned to watching television. With no further input, I realized he was right. I tore upstairs to take a shower. I returned and consulted my barrage of notes. In an instant, I scrapped what I had written and decided to wing it. I dialed her number only minutes before ten.

I didn’t reach her, but it gave me confidence. I hung up the phone on the fourth ring and eyed a different day.

When I called again, it was her mother who first answered. The adult voice, a raised vibrato. I identified myself as “Stephen Phillips.” and asked politely to speak to her daughter. I waited precious seconds and a soft, resonance manifested. The scraping of a chair. The gesturing to a husband. The evening, what was left of it, taking a strange turn at their house in the neighborhood of Memorial. She returned and said, “I’m sorry, who did you say is calling?”

Then, the moment I was waiting for, the girl interrupted. She said, “I’ve got it, Mom.” as so many before, so many since. In my father’s study, I pressed the receiver close to my ear. The click as her mother receded without further investigation. Now the stars would finally meet. “Sorry about that,” she said as I flipped on the desk light and leaned back in my chair. I crossed my feet on the edge of the desk and stared out the window into the small garden bathed in silver. Beyond, the light of the television, where my brother sat. I heard the sound of her voice traveling endlessly forward, forward and back, mellifluous expansion until it landed in my backyard.

These nights it came floating through the glass until I deciphered it. I pictured her curled in translation on the other side of town.

Two weeks later, I asked her to see the film Rushmore with me. This happened by the water fountain, under the awning, the shade of Upper School holding scattered sun between the buildings. When she agreed, I did not celebrate, but returned, dazed up the steps to the library where I often sat. Shell-shocked, a friend appeared to congratulate me. Then, another. I shook their hands like a lieutenant gaining promotion.

The three of us, celebrating, drawing looks from librarians on a Friday afternoon. Three young men conducting research. One of us had broken through.

…

Soon after, I drove to Memorial on a blackened, February night. The lens of my mind was focused and aligned. Outside, the pristine allure of the streets of Houston. Southside. Bellaire. Fire hydrants like oil on canvas. The chalk on driveway, lamp posts, the low cut grass. People walking away from shops and slowing. Moving from sidewalk into houses at the turn of dusk. The clockwork hour. Everything turning to paint as the sun set. Inside, families around tables as shadows moved from roof to lawn. The enveloping guardianship of Texas. The night watch. I drove on by. Everyone was alive and surfacing and finding theirvplace between the roads with white lines. I pushed my dad’s car up and onto the freeway, Loop 610, past the Waterwall and Westheimer until my hands loosed their grip.

Then, the most beautiful woman in the city where I lived. I was sure of it. She walked out of the crimson shadows of the cul-de-sac. Smiling, she opened the door and glided in. She closed the door and her profile shone for an instant before the light went out. Her hair falling down around her shoulders. We started and rode away together.

Turning, weaving our way back East, toward River Oaks, the gilded mecca. The lights of Westheimer and the smell of her perfume. Crossing under the freeway and moving to Kirby, further East. Blue jeans and cashmere, her face beguiling in the window’s reflection. She looked around while I stayed focused on the road. The theater, off Shepherd Drive, appeared in an array of red and blue lights, the tidings of Christmas. The marquee pushed out and hung proudly from the building like the sail of a strong ship. We moved under it, parked, and walked along the freshly cut path. The excitement of the crowd permeating. My body shivered. Her breath lifting from her lips.

She looked back at me and smiled against the edge of the swinging door. I opened it and my hand fell behind the small of her back as the patrons walked past. At the weight of her body, I disappeared into the unknown. She grew stronger, more feline and noble. Her hair grew and hips widened, yet she remained unchanged. Seconds passed, and I realized, in the rush of the theater, I was looking from the inside out. I had never touched anyone. Not only that, I had never been touched. I stood there, frozen, but accepting everything. I heard voices and my feet moved closer. Together, we found our seats.

Next, if you’ve seen the film, the sound of classical guitar and bass. The opening note of a familiar, classroom scene. In high school, the hardest geometry equation in the world. Max Fisher, the protagonist, taking the chalk from his instructor and leaving behind his newspaper, his calculator, his drawing of the Eiffel Tower. His coffee runs cold as he stands there, brazen in a navy jacket. He leaves his entire life in the classroom chair, unflinching. Understanding the mission, believing. In a matter of seconds, he puts his knowledge into practice. His classmates snickering, but in less than a minute, it is finished. Max is victorious. He is able to solve the unsolvable work.

I looked over as his teacher said, “You got it.” The class erupting. In the warm theater, the audience applauded. I saw her, a soft smile sinking lower in the seat and wondered if she noticed the color of his shirt. In the film, Max wakes in chapel as his old self, but happy. He finds himself the recipient of a dream.

…

One of the tricks of life is to realize, sooner or later, that it is all a dream. You are born and that is the start of it. When you die, you wake into something and continue on. Perhaps that is why these memories of someone have only started to take shape. It took the start of adulthood to prod me, the tiny severance that occurs around the age of twenty-three. It took the exotic enticement of my twenties lift me, strange lands filled with too many people in a crowded room. Now, in my thirties, I am alive enough to travel back. Those tiny, wonderful deaths have all accumulated. The point is to taste them and feel their weight.

When we arrived back to her house that evening, I heard a reverberating sigh among the crunching of the tires. A click of the seatbelt. Something severed as she let herself out and walked the short distance to the door. Weeks later, the bleachers by the football field. The drums chanting, voices echoing. We stood near the top as the wind weaved its way through the gray buildings of Houston.

If I turn my lens, it will still produce the reels of what happened in exhilerating, spectrums of color. Her body stood against the grass fields and sun-lit sky. We moved to the side and leaned towards each other. Excited shouting as students rode the semester to its end.

She stood up and that same white, untucked shirt hung staring at my eyes. Her plaid skirt and running shoes. Her lips moved, and she began telling me a story.

In that story, I was someone who would never be close to her. Never near her essence. Because of my faith, I was a crossed-out name. She mentioned, briefly, the Christianity I practiced. She was kind, but fiercely honest. She highlighted its hindrances and because of them, I was not for her. I sat there, a half-level above, and listened, longing to be something else. I never wished to speak more in my young life. I remember nodding, shaking loose the bleachers. I wanted to find a way to say, I don’t understand.

When it was over, there was no embrace, no looking over the shoulder. In the future, I would think of her running too fast for me to catch. The sun stood still, and I watched her slip back, up and away. She merged with the crowd as the world spun on an axis of make believe.

…

Even though I never blamed her, I blame her even less now. Hard times were still to come. I needed to carry something as I, too, slipped away.

Weeks turned to months as the summer raised its head. Then, graduation, the filling of a chapel. A crowded room of people, most of whom I would never see again. I found myself leaving Houston for a town beside the Hudson River, West Point. The days of training and discipline. I never spoke to her before I left.

The college years shaped me. Out of many, I became myself. Days spent in labor pains, groaning, preparing for battle. The wars in the Middle East looming. I studied politics and artillery and prepared to be unseen.

Then, a medical discharge. I was back in New York, but older. I took a job and began experiencing women at a frantic pace. I threw the doors and shutters open rapidly. Traveling, I was in cities but also abroad. I went to Paris and parts of Africa. I worked in Guatemala and Belize. At some point, past the age of twenty-seven, I began to question the pillars of the faith that shaped me. The remnants of it. It was passed down to me from parents from the day I was born.

Examining, I realized my life was still uncharted. The first half: scrawled, perpetrated, stolen. The second was blank and gleaming; it pointed the direction I should go. I decided the next pages would be unwritten by God, unannounced by the author of shame and sexual repression. Never did it occur before to write them myself. I renounced Christianity, went to London and fell in love.

At thirty-three, I had entered the center of my life. I was living and writing a column in Los Angeles. Still exited from the Bible, from Jesus, from the warnings of sin and sinners. I found myself in Houston for the wedding of a veteran I knew at the academy.

I booked a hotel, saw family and drank with friends. One of them told me about the girl, her marriage, her children, as we sipped coffee by the Menil Museum. The way he said was the unearthing of something discovered long ago. Of perfect vision. She was a woman now and wondrous. I stood up, excused myself and turned my face from the sun.

…

Walking the grounds of the museum, I was as unprepared as a tourist. My shirt soaking up the afternoon heat, jeans sticking. The battery on my phone drained, and I meandered like a child to the hotel only miles from where I grew up.

I said my goodbyes, flew back to L.A. and slept through the weekend. I poured more coffee and on Monday removed the yearbook from its prison of busted cardboard.

Flipping through it, I saw the faces of my youth matted down in black and white. Between the pages, the person I once was. The people-pleaser, the follower. The do-gooder. The one who belonged to Christ. I thought of the repression, the confusion, the miles I traveled to arrive to that place. From Austin to Houston, I was a born again a child of God.

Accepting Jesus at five years old, attending worship. Being baptized, becoming a missionary. Too young to drive a car, but old enough to spread the gospel. Too young to know anything truly, but at night, my parents prayed that God’s vision would unfold. My father guided me. My mother held my hand. Sophomore year, a vow of purity before the entire congregation. “True love waits,” I said. I made a promise with God watching from above.

Only beneath the uniform, I did not wait a single moment. To belong to someone, anyone, just not a God I did not understand.

The woman was not a problem to be calculated. Or avoided. She was not a stumbling block of temptation, but the unsolvable mystery of my time. As raging as the ocean, I walked toward the crashing of waves. Who needed God’s approval? Together, we were our own creation, much greater than the sum of His parts.

In a flash, I slammed the yearbook shut and watched the spine crack against the floorboards. I kicked it from the room, the pages splaying and unyielding. I rose up and lifted, tearing my page, the photo from my senior year. The last one captured, I ripped it from the seams. The ones behind it came, too, and the sound of paper wailed, high-pitched and frozen.

Then, battering it over and over, that heavy bastard of memories. Against the table, pummeling. Smashing the book against the jutting corners of the wall. I was outside myself this time and writhing. I saw everything unseen and knew to bring it down. My hands began sweating as I swung it over my head toward the sink. My chest, expanding. I heaved and saw it meet the metal. The sound of it, the punishment. The arousal of defenseless death. The sun shot through the window as I blindly swung away. Everything inside was squeezed and coming out in flashes of a murder planned long ago.

On the last blow, my failed efforts. The entire book intact, too heavy to crack open. I looked, began to whimper and saw only my right hand bloodied from cuts of paper. I pushed against the faucet as the water ran and the black mass fell to the floor.

…

Sometime later, in darkness, I fell sideways until I met the center of the bed. The moon receded from the corner of the curtains. On my face, a mix of tears and acceptance that soon would travel well.

Drifting to sleep, I arranged the chapters in my mind that always read as field manuals. Fittingly, the worn out pages, the ache of what the world denied me then. Not sex, but sexuality. Intimacy, romance. The chance to express love. The chance to discover love without having to escape fear. Without hesitating, the girl who gave me these by offering herself.

One morning, after the second bell had rung, she thanked me for a note I had written her. Somehow I had composed it and slipped it to her after class. Something had happened — was it at home, at school, another boy? — and I addressed it in words and phrases. I made sure I was using blue ink. Light blue, the color of sky. The same color as the shirt I was wearing that belongs on campuses where Max Fisher once reigned.

Then, she leaned her body toward me, two layers of cotton between us. I felt curious and taller. The perfume of approaching days of summer. I felt her arms move up and past me, her right one drop, and I stayed there like a rock clinging to a stream. In an instant, her hand found the ridges of my back. Brown hair, no one looking. She pressed into me. No bells to be rung or other lessons for the day.

Women, when embracing purely, will aim high instead of low. They take your shoulders, too impatient for the chest. The only thing I have forgotten is if I bent down to meet her or stood up straight.

It was likely the former. When they are moved, you are on the receiving end.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

***