EXCERPT

Einstein’s wife

IN 1914, ALBERT EINSTEIN PENNED A NASTY LETTER to his wife, Mileva Maric, that laid out the future conditions of their marriage.

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.34

Mileva was the only female physicist in Einstein’s class. She was his true intellectual companion. I’m not sure what led to this bitter marital list of demands. To be absolutely honest, I don’t want to investigate too deeply. In our time, revered men have been exhumed and assassinated for their characters. Picasso was cancelled a few years ago. Consequently, their genius becomes complicated, their mythology enlarged, their allure both inexplicable and undeniable. I have slotted Einstein into this kind of man whom I’d rather not know too much about. Suffice to say that around the time of his letter to Mileva, Einstein was already corresponding with another woman. Those letters don’t have demands.

In any case, I’m more interested in Einstein’s wife than Einstein. Item C.2 is the condition that stabs me. What was it like to share a house with a genius who did not want to talk to you? It must have seemed like he was saving all of his deep thoughts and humanitarian activism for other people. If I were Mileva, I’d question whether I was getting the real Einstein or whether his friends were. I would wonder whether the pain in my ankle qualified as a functional marriage conversation, perhaps only if it impeded my ability to bring him dinner.

We all have days when we’d prefer to be left alone. The children’s voices pluck the nerves. The partner’s interminable story about people we don’t care about seems petty alongside our meditation on playoff stats. Yet most of us would not go as far as Einstein and silence members of our household; we know that our loved ones merit our attention, some percentage of it, even when they are inconvenient.

The dearth of conversation in the Einstein household would shift his relationship with Mileva into something that was no longer familial. To the woman with whom he was having an affair, Einstein wrote, “''I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”35 When Mileva lay on her bed—in her separate bedroom—after spending the days alone, listening for Einstein’s footsteps, how could a resentment not harden against this man who was denying her something so simple and essential as a conversation.

The endlessly quotable Oscar Wilde said, “Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”36 Friedrich Nietzsche thought of marriage “as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age?”37 By ending conversations, Einstein was ending the marriage. I hope that Mileva had at least one friend who came over when Einstein was at his office writing theories, a friend who sat down at tea and called Einstein Neinstein and drew equations on the back of envelopes for her to test, a friend who laughed and smoked and plucked grey hair from Mileva’s head.

Good conversations are among the most sublime human experiences. To deny someone verbal contact, to me, is as cruel as denying someone touch.