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Two marriages:

            Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.

            Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.

SARA

I don't think $20 is much for a bribe.

LOWELL

Isn't it? American? I was hoping it was a whole hell of a lot.

SARA

Maybe. Guys who work in airports make a lot of funny money different ways.

LOWELL

Oh but, oh, well. Yeah. Fuck. Well it was my first bribe.

When I bent down to stack the papers, I thought the sensation I had had in my brain earlier was the same sensation I had once felt when I shook a pomegranate near my ear. Or, not exactly a sensation, but a sound. That when I shook the pomegranate it had made the same sound as the sound my blood made when it swiveled in my brain, and that both sounds led to the same sensation: of something having dissolved where it shouldn’t have. I went over the memory, from when I picked up the pomegranate to when I shook it near my ear: I had squeezed the pomegranate by rolling it, had pressed into it with my thumbs, juiced it without cracking it open, because it’s the only way to juice a pomegranate without any special machines. All the juice was swiveling about inside the shell of the pomegranate, channeling its way around the seeds the way river water channels itself around driftwood. When I put the pomegranate down I could still hear the juice working its way around the seeds that were dead without their pulp. I had squeezed the pomegranate till the pulp was dead. I could invent a machine to juice pomegranates, I thought, and not just pomegranates but persimmons too, some very basic, cheap tool people could use in their homes, and then I imagined a thousand people, all wearing their house slippers, juicing their pomegranates and persimmons for breakfast, and I thought, never mind, no doubt someone has already invented it.

Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

My ex answers your call like shit is sweet, says, Good to hear from you, so fake you want to reach through the receiver. Next thing, she drops the phone minus nary a pardon and leaves you on an indefinite hold soundtracked by the blare of some rap video cranked beyond good sense. Meanwhile, you carry the noisy cordless into another room, crack the blinds, and watch a pair of baseheads, both thin as antennas, push a half-wrecked sedan down the street. The baseheads, they’ve got the sedan’s doors flung open, and seethe at each other across a scrappy ragtop roof. Farther, they jog their hooptie to a slow cruise, jump in on the run, and sputter off. It’s still plenty of lightweight action on the set. The old lady dressed in a who-gives-a-what-about-the-heat getup (down coat, snow boots, thick wool scarf) tugging a shopping cart full of thrashed cans. Down a ways, boys riding wheelies for distance on dirt bikes with mismatched rims.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.