Summary
Catherine tells Hal that her father was a graphomaniac, a condition which made him write compulsively. Hal knows this, but insists that there is some good work in Robert’s studio. “There’s no connection between the ideas. There’s no ideas. It’s like a monkey at a typewriter. One hundred and three notebooks full of bullshit,” Catherine says.
Hal tells Catherine he has to go hear a band play at a bar, and that they are probably going on around 2 AM. The band members are other faculty members in the math department. He tells her about a song called “i” in which they don’t play anything for 3 minutes, to signify an imaginary number. “It’s a math joke,” he says.
He elaborates on the band, saying, “…they’re geeks who, you know, can dress themselves…hold down a job at a major university…Some of them have switched from glasses to contacts. They play sports, they play in a band, they get laid surprisingly often, so in that sense they sort of make you question the whole set of terms.” Catherine asks Hal if he’s in the band, and he admits that he is, and he plays the drums.
“I loved your dad,” Hal says, and explains that he thinks that Robert had some great ideas, alluding to a lucid year Robert had about a year prior. “It was more like 9 months,” Catherine says. Hal insists that Robert made huge contributions to game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear operator theory. When he insinuates that he is interested in Robert’s work in so far as it seems like a ticket to an appointment at a university, Catherine becomes suspicious and asks to see his backpack. “You’re hoping to find something upstairs that you can publish,” Catherine says, sure that Hal stole one of Robert’s notebooks and plans to publish it under his name.
Hal insists that he would publish whatever he found under Robert’s name, but Catherine is sure that Hal is lying. Hal calls her paranoid to which she replies, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t something in that backpack.”
As their struggle heightens, Catherine becomes emotional, telling Hal about all the ways she had to care for her ailing father, how she had to make sure he bathed, his insatiable hunger for knowledge and books. “Then I realized he wasn’t reading,” she says, “He believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books.”
“What kind of messages?” Hal asks, to which Catherine replies, “Beautiful mathematics. Answers to everything. The most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music.” She tells Hal she had to drop out of school and that she’s glad Robert is dead. When Hal insists that other people will come to the house to look at the notebooks, Catherine insists that she will do it herself. “You wouldn’t know the good stuff from the junk,” Hal says, but Catherine informs him that she’s a mathematician and she could look through the notebooks.
Hal is sure that Catherine would not be able to understand, and she snatches his backpack to see if he’s stolen anything. When she finds that he hasn’t, she hands the backpack back to him, sheepishly, and tells him that he can come back the next day. Hal tries to level with Catherine, telling her that his mother died a few years earlier and that he spoke to the doctor following her death and it helped. He also recommends running. Before he leaves, he invites her again to come to his band’s show, but she declines.
As Hal leaves, he realizes he forgot his jacket and Catherine goes to hand it to him. As she does, a notebook of Robert’s falls out. Catherine becomes enraged, but Hal wants to show her something. She calls the police and reports Hal’s act as a robbery in progress. As she does, Hal reads a note from Robert from 4 years ago, from a time when his illness was apparently in remission. Catherine hangs up the phone, as Hal reads the note, which details Robert’s relation to his mental illness and his gratitude to Catherine for taking care of him. The note ends, “Today is her birthday. She is 21. I’m taking her to dinner.” It is dated September 4th.
Hal tells Catherine he was going to wrap the book for her birthday, then hands it to her. He leaves and Catherine weeps, as a police siren comes towards them. “Shit,” Catherine says.
Scene 2. The next morning, Claire, Catherine’s stylish sister, drinks coffee. Catherine comes out, her hair wet from the shower. It becomes evident that Claire made Catherine shower, and she encourages Catherine to put on the dress she picked out for her. She asks Catherine if she used the conditioner with “jojoba” that she recommended, and Catherine quips that hair is dead, and so cannot be made “healthy.” Claire tells Catherine that she plans to invite people to the house after the funeral, as “it’s the only time I can see any old Chicago friends.” She then sends a greeting from Mitch, her boyfriend, before revealing that they are getting married in January.
Claire asks Catherine how she’s feeling about their father’s death, and what she plans to do next. Catherine has no ideas, and doesn’t understand the “point” of Claire’s questioning. Claire tells her that some policemen came by while she was in the shower to check up on things. When Claire asks why Catherine called the police, and Catherine tells her that she didn’t actually want them to come, that she just wanted to get Hal to leave. “Is ‘Harold Dobbs’ your boyfriend?” Claire asks, trying to add everything up and suss out if Catherine was hallucinating.
“The police said you were abusive,” Claire says, before asking, “Did you tell one cop…to go fuck the other cop’s mother?” to which Catherine replies, “Not with that phrasing.” Claire asks Catherine if she would like to come to New York and stay with her, trying to sweeten the deal by telling her that Mitch has gotten into cooking, but Catherine has no interest. Suddenly Hal shows up, and Catherine berates her sister for her intrusive helpfulness. As Hal goes into the house, Claire knowingly comments to Catherine about the fact that he’s cute.
Analysis
In spite of their rocky beginnings, Catherine and Hal soon strike up a kind of antagonistic chemistry in their conversation. Catherine is skeptical of Hal, but he insists on talking to her, and especially wants to let her know how much he liked her father. He also tells her some comic anecdotes about himself, like the fact that he is in a nerdy band with fellow mathematicians. While Catherine finds Hal to be somewhat of a pest, he also has an offbeat charm that is undeniable.
One thing that Hal has that Catherine does not is a belief in Robert’s work. A former student of Robert’s, Hal is sure that the deceased mathematician had yet more brilliant work that has yet to be discovered in the study. He gushes about the fact that Robert made huge contributions to various fields in mathematics, and sees Robert’s illness as a symptom of his brilliance. While Catherine looks back begrudgingly at her father’s mental illness and sees it as something to fear for herself, Hal believes that it was all part of Robert’s academic virtuosity, something to be admired.
Catherine soon silences Hal’s romanticization of Robert when she explains to him the nitty-gritty of what it was like to care for Robert. She explains that Robert had insane delusions that huge cosmological and existential questions could be answered through some kind of perfect proof. Robert’s vision of what mathematics could do was so grand as to be delusional, all-encompassing, and impossible. While, in the abstract, this relation to knowledge sounds compelling to someone like Hal, Catherine insists that it ruined her life, that she had to drop out of school to take care of him, and that she resents her father because of it.
Claire, Catherine’s sister, could not be more different than Catherine. She is perky, competent, and a little superficial, worrying about the party surrounding the funeral, the conditioner she’s recommended to Catherine, and the fact that there isn’t any food in the house. She fundamentally doesn’t understand her sloppier, more intellectual sister, and perceives her life as somehow deficient. While Catherine has her own doubts about her effectiveness and ability to take care of herself, she certainly doesn’t appreciate Claire’s prescriptive and aggressive mode of “care.”
Claire is an all the more complicated figure because she is trying to help Catherine improve her life, which Catherine needs, but she is not going about it in a very helpful way. They are completely incompatible people—Claire is diligent, fancy, and status-conscious, while Catherine is messy, intellectual, and a little touched—but Claire is right about a few things. She encourages Catherine to be nice to Hal, acting as a kind of unwanted matchmaker, and encourages her to find some much-needed purpose in life, after years of a thankless job caring for their father.
