Parallel

“You can’t come on too strong.” If you do, she’ll know I said something to you.
    “Yeah. Okay.” He’s trying to play it cool, but he’s failing. The boy is beaming, which is good, because the look on his face removes any doubt that I did the right thing. Not that I even did much at all—my words were nothing more than a nudge in the direction he was already heading. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself over and over again right now, trying to mitigate the rising swell of guilt. “Think she’ll be at the party tonight?” Tyler asks a few seconds later.
    “What party?”
    “Cul-de-sac party in that new neighborhood off Providence Road. Football team got a keg.”
    “Oh. No. She’s working at her dad’s lab tonight.” Thank God. Caitlin is scarily intuitive. She’ll take one look at Tyler’s dopey grin and know something’s up. He needs to recover from his euphoria before their next encounter. And figure out what to do about Ilana.
    Across the room, someone is waving. I’m not sure if the gesture is directed at me—all I see is a man’s hand flailing in the air. Whoever the hand belongs to is blocked by two obese women in silk taffeta. The women shuffle away and Dr. Mann comes into view, looking rather dapper in a gray suit. His smile widens when we make eye contact.
    “Ms. Barnes!” he calls across the crowd.
    “Who’s that?” asks Tyler, clearly amused by the wild-haired old guy moving toward us.
    “Dr. Mann,” I reply. “My astronomy teacher.”
    “ That guy won a Nobel Prize?”
    “Shhh.” I look past Tyler to my teacher, who’s balancing a plate of meatballs on a can of Dr Pepper. His other hand is extended to shake mine.
    “They didn’t give you a glass for that?” I ask, nodding at the soda can as I shake his hand. The old man laughs.
    “They offered me one, but I declined. It’s harder to spill on oneself from a can.” Dr. Mann smiles and takes a careful sip.
    Tyler looks at me. Again: That guy won a Nobel Prize?
    I ignore him. “Dr. Mann, this is my friend Tyler Rigg. He goes to Brookside also.”
    “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Rigg,” says Dr. Mann, shaking Tyler’s hand. “Perhaps I’ll have you in class next semester.”
    “I wouldn’t count on that,” Tyler says pleasantly.
    “So what brings you to the museum?” I ask Dr. Mann.
    “My daughter is on the board,” he tells me, and points at a woman who looks to be in her early thirties, wearing a demure black dress. She has an Audrey Hepburn quality and her father’s striking blue eyes.
    “So you got dragged here, too,” Tyler says. He stops a man carrying a tray of lamb chops and heaps six onto a cocktail napkin.
    “I’m afraid it was me who did the dragging,” Dr. Mann says. “Greta just flew in from Munich this afternoon and was planning to stay home, but I insisted that we come. I am a great admirer of ‘ le petit jeune chimiste qui accumule des petits points .’” His French is perfect.
    “Hmm . . . Something about a chemist and small dots?” I say, trying to parse it out.
    “‘The young chemist who puts together little points,’” he translates. Then he explains, “It’s how Gauguin described Seurat. He missed the artistry of the pointillist method, I’m afraid. Saw only the science.”
    “And you see both?” I ask.
    “In my view, the science is the artistry,” the old man replies. He looks past us to Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte , the painter’s most famous piece and the centerpiece of the exhibit, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. “With his ‘ petits points ,’ Seurat invited the viewer to participate in a transcendent experience instead of thrusting one upon him.” He points his Dr Pepper can at the painting. “The inherent order you perceive in that image has not been constructed on that canvas; rather, it is being constructed as we speak, in your mind.”
    This, of course, is not the first I’ve heard about pointillism. When you’re the only child of an art curator and a retired painter, you get more art theory at the dinner table than would fit in a semester on the subject. But for the first time, the theory resonates on a grander scale. Up close, all you see are the pieces, strewn about, heaped on top of each other. Total disarray. But step away, and a picture takes shape. When you make sense of the chaos, the chaos disappears. Or maybe, what looked at first like chaos never was.
    In an ocean of ashes, islands of order.
    It’s a line