“Andrew Undershaft,” Ann murmured.
“You have this . . . smart-alecky
way,
” Charlotte said. “You sit there and start lecturing everyone with this . . .”
“You're like Undershaft when he tells his family whatever they think and do is no good for anything, but manufacturing gunpowder is actually useful,” Kate told Sandy.
“And you don't even know what I—” Charlotte said.
“I catch on quickly,” Sandy told her.
“You catch on. You can't even let me finish a sentence.”
Sandy waved her off. “I know how they're going to end.”
The girls were huffy by the end of dinner, but they did appreciate it when he pitched in with the dishes. As soon as they'd finished, Sandy was up, stacking plates. “Bring them in here,” he called out to Louisa from the kitchen. He had just thought of a perfect abstract for the paper. He would have to call Marion as soon as he finished washing the plates. He imagined he'd catch her back at the lab.
But the lab was empty. Robin and Natalya had gone home. Cliff and Prithwish, Aidan and Feng, were all heading to the Wursthaus in the Square to celebrate. The young men pushed and shoved as they opened the heavy institute doors. They stepped out into the cold spring evening, teasing Feng about his stocking hat, striped green and white. “Where'd you find that one?” Cliff asked.
Grinning, Feng shrugged. They all knew his odd, frugal taste in clothes.
The four of them tramped over to Francis Avenue and cut through the parking lot there to get to the Harvard bio labs, where they'd pick up Mei.
“Shouldn't we stick to the path?” Prithwish suggested. None of them had boots.
“Nah.” Cliff plunged ahead in his sneakers. “Takes too long.” The moon was bright; the sky lit up, reflecting light from icy puddles. They jumped over parking-lot chains sparkling with melting snow crystals, and beat a path to the corner of the bio labs' courtyard. There, in summer, the Harvard grad students sometimes challenged the Philpott postdocs to volleyball, but now the net was stowed away, the ropes and pins stuffed into boxes in the redbrick bio labs' basement. The courtyard showed patches of grass and slush in the center, while the edges were still piled with stale snow.
“I'll be right back.” Feng headed through grand doors adorned with gold friezes of animal, insect, and plant life: giant wasps, ants, bees, mushrooms, elands. Frisky, joyous from the day, Cliff scooped up an icy snowball. He took careful aim and pelted one of the brass rhinoceroses that guarded the building. Then he shot the other, for good measure. The snow smacked and splattered against the verdigris flanks of the great animals.
“Dare you to climb up there,” Aidan said to Cliff.
“Just give me a boost.”
“That's cheating.”
Cliff looked at the ornamental, but anatomically correct, rhinoceros statues. These were no mere crouching lions; the rhinos stood on brick pedestals, and their height from toe to horn was at least six feet.
Cliff scrambled onto a pedestal and reached upward for a handhold on the brass rhino's ridged back. “Give me a push,” he called down.
“It's too high,” said Aidan.
“Come on, just push me up.”
“Here, I'll help you,” said Prithwish, and he tried to push Cliff from below. “Ouch!” Prithwish yelped as Cliff tumbled down onto the slushy ground.
“Once more.”
“This is your last chance,” said Prithwish with mock severity.
Cliff jumped onto the pedestal, Prithwish pushed, and Cliff flung himself hard onto the rhino's smooth, icy back. “I'm up!” he yelled, triumphant, straddling the beast. He leaned forward, trying to touch the metal horn.
Prithwish and Aidan were laughing at him. Cliff's jeans were soaked through.
“Can you get down?” Prithwish inquired politely as Feng and Mei emerged from the building. Seeing Cliff up there, Mei covered her mouth with her gloved hand.
“Yeah, I'm coming. I'm coming down,” Cliff called.
“Well, come on, then,” said Aidan.
Cliff should have slid off, or, by rights, he should have fallen. But he did not fall; he swung his legs up and knelt on the statue's back. He crouched there for a moment, and then, in one beautiful movement, found his footing and balanced like a surfer on the back of the rhino. He heard his friends cheering and laughing, but he didn't look down. The night shifted around him. The courtyard was no longer square. Long arms outstretched, he fought to stay upright another moment and then another, until, whooping, he jumped far into the air, far into the soft white night, to land and roll in the matted grass and scant, melting snow.
Part III
Media
1
O
NLY
R
OBIN
was unhappy. No one excluded her. No one ignored her. On the contrary, Marion and Cliff asked her daily for progress reports on her experiments. In April, Sandy and Marion submitted the R-7 paper and set Robin to following up Cliff's work. She was supposed to discover whether Cliff's virus was effective on pancreatic cancer cells. Meanwhile, she had no time for her bone tumor work; the new project had fallen by the wayside. She had felt lonely before, toiling in isolation on Sandy's blood collection, but this was worse. This was like being drafted to join a war effort. This was everyone working together in the lab with gung-ho good cheer, and singing Glass's party line. A brutal, jingoistic marshaling of resources for R-7.
There was nothing inappropriate or unexpected here. Cliff had results, and the lab was pursuing them. This was Cliff's time. As a graduate student Robin had waited almost a year to file her dissertation, because the whole lab was concentrating on pushing another student out the door. Stefan had been there longer; his case was more urgent. For a good nine months the lab devoted all its resources to Stefan's project. The techniques were new, the genetic manipulations cutting-edge, but the psychology was utterly traditional. Dutifully, like younger daughters waiting to marry, Robin and the other grad students had worked and waited to finish their own degrees. “Absolutely, after Stefan,” Uppington had promised her, “you'll be next.”
But Robin was not a graduate student anymore, and she had no assurances at the Philpott that she would be next in anything.
At night Cliff stayed late in the lab, and Robin walked home to Waterhouse Street. She did love her apartment, rent-controlled and right on the Common in an old brick building. Her place managed to be both small and rambling, the bathroom down a long narrow passage, the kitchen right near the bedroom. There was not a single square corner; every wall stood at an angle. She loved to take off her shoes and slide in her socks on the smooth, old hardwood floors.
She had no roommates. There had been a goldfish, but only briefly. A year and a half before, she and Cliff had attended the wedding of a pair of frugal postdocs from one lab down. Instead of flowers, a goldfish in a glass bowl stood as centerpiece for each table. Despite her protests, Cliff had insisted on bringing a fish back to the apartment. He'd named it Linus, for Linus Pauling, and left it right on Robin's bookshelf. For days the fish stared at Robin, bug-eyed, creepily fanning its tail. She was sure it was going to die, and dreaded walking in the door to find it floating belly-up. Finally she made Cliff take Linus back to his place. She often told herself she'd rather live alone.
She sat on the couch and ate pita bread and tabouli salad from the container, showered, changed, and brushed her teeth. In her nightgown she sorted her mail and wrote out a shopping list. Note taker, list maker—inevitably she became secretary for any group to which she belonged. She kept a journal. Nothing fancy, just a blank book of graph paper she had found. She penned her entries in neat black print, sometimes several sentences, sometimes only a few words. She did not try to record all her feelings, as she had when she was younger. She kept a diary for the simplest reason, so the day would not slip away.
She had a quiet fear of vanishing and leaving the world without a trace. She'd published nothing of importance. She had a fear of disappearing when she'd hardly begun. This was not a weepy, sentimental melancholy of hers. She simply suspected she would die young. Her own mother had died at forty-one, when Robin was sixteen. Robin was now thirty-eight. Those were the facts; no cause for existential crisis. She had managed, even at the time. She had been in tenth grade, and missed school the day of the funeral, a Monday. The next day she'd taken a history test on the rise of the city-state of Venice. She'd received the highest score in the class. Her teachers were amazed at this. She actually overheard two of them talking in hushed voices in the hall: “Do you know who got the highest score?” She'd wondered what they took her for, and why they were so surprised she didn't fall apart. The test was easy. She'd prepared. That was all. Her grades had never slipped when her mother was sick. They'd only improved. Her teachers might have understood if they'd thought about it. Her mother was dying of breast cancer, and Robin sat up at night and studied. There was nothing else that she could do.
So now she had a doctorate in biology from BU, and worked and worked in the Mendelssohn-Glass lab, and, naturally, she was a little afraid—not overwhelmingly fearful, but slightly afraid—of dying too soon and wasting her life. It was nothing, really; it hardly showed; it was like claustrophobia, or fear of dogs. She joked about it. “If I ever live that long,” she'd say. Or, cheerfully, “I'm planning to be dead by then.” The jokes were superstitious, to ward off fate and fear.
Her mother had left her with a feeling of impermanence, and a mission as well. She joked about the one, but never said a word about the other. She had buried the mission deep within her, the rusty desire to combat cancer as a scientist. Valiantly, hopelessly, she felt that even if she could not reclaim her mother, she might make some inroads against the disease. Anyone might have guessed this motive in her, but she tried to hide it, dedicating herself silently to her work.
Time was not on her side. This was true for everyone, but Robin understood it better than most. Because of this, certain people annoyed her. Those whose parents lived to ninety. Middle-aged people with both parents. She tried to be patient with them, but they took such a fey delight in themselves. Disease and disaster happened to other families, while these innocents just burbled along. They just lived and lived, and everyone around them lived forever. World without end. Only very occasionally, disaster struck. A father dropped dead. A boyfriend fell sick. There was an accident. The shock was terrible to these novices; they were so angry at God. They had known in theory, but never
really
known, that anyone could die. They grieved for this. Then, like the stuffed animals in
The Velveteen Rabbit
(a book much quoted at the goldfish wedding), these victims were transformed; they became real.
This was prejudiced, shameful snobbery when it came to misery. Again, Robin tried not to let it show. How could she fault others for not yet knowing, or learning late, what only tragedy could teach them? Still, secretly, she did fault them. She faulted Cliff. She accused him in her mind of being thoughtless, selfish, young. Clutching her black pen tightly, she bent over her journal and wrote,
He actually asked if I would stay and keep him company tonight to watch him work. Then when I said no, he was surprised.
She might have written more. She could have ranted on, but for Robin that
was
a rant. She'd wrung those few sentences from her heart, and grieved at every word. Somehow Cliff assumed his project would be thrilling for her even from the sidelines. He was that self-centered.
She debated whether he would come to see her, or just go back to his place. She lay awake in bed and asked herself whether it really mattered. She had been weak. She had been lonely. Sternly, a little unfairly, she told herself she shouldn't have been. She prided herself on pragmatism and self-possession, but she had allowed herself to be possessed by him. How was it she fell in love so badly—with the least promising research programs and the luckiest of men? She despised herself, and despaired of him. She must loosen the knots entangling them. How else could she breathe? Over and over, she considered how she might end this foolishness, this needing him, this torturous sense of competition, the secret resentment she felt for him inside the open secret of their love affair.
By midnight, she was livid. Still, in spite of herself, as she heard him open the door, she felt a rush of joy, the quickening of her heart from habit. How stupid her body was, how eager and willingly deceived.
She padded out to the living room and he kissed her. His jacket dripped with rain; his face was lively from his bike ride.
“I want my key back,” she said.
“What's wrong now?”
“What's wrong?” she asked. “I don't need you coming and going in the middle of the night. I don't need you constantly waking me up and using me as your personal bed-and-breakfast.”
“I've never confused you with a bed-and-breakfast,” he said.
“Don't smile at me. Don't ask me what's wrong when you know exactly what's wrong. I was right from the beginning. I knew this was going to happen—all of it.”
“All of it.”
“Yes! You traipsing in and out at night, and then coming home to me as your long-suffering girlfriend. I'm not long-suffering, and I'm not going to be your girlfriend waiting up while you work late. I don't do that. I never wait up for anyone, and I want my key back, because I'm not waiting up for you.”
“Robin,” he said, “I never asked you to wait up for me.”
“But how can I help it when I'm here and you have my key? Don't you see—you've put me in this ridiculous position.”
“I asked you to stay!” he burst out.
“And do you have any idea how that makes me feel when you invite me to watch you work? Is that supposed to be fun? Educational? I know the work, Cliff. I know the experiments. They've got all of us working on your stuff too.”
He shook his head at her. If he'd made her so angry, why hadn't she said anything about it at the time? She'd only said “No, thank you” when he asked if she would stay, and then—this was just like her—she'd stewed and steamed and let her anger grow into volcanic rage. He took off his jacket and sank onto the couch. He'd been on his feet since early that morning. “Come here,” he said.
She stood instead, like an avenging spirit in her white nightgown.
“If you're working on my stuff, then it's your work, too, and you own some of it,” he told her. “Don't pretend you don't.”
“No, it's not my work,” she contradicted him. “It'll never be my work. I don't have time for my work anymore.”
“And is that my fault?” he demanded. “I really want to know, because ever since I've had these results you've been blaming me for your whole career.”
She hesitated a moment. “It's not the results,” she said. “It's how you act about them.”
“And how is that?”
“Selfish,” she said.
“Not true!”
“Ask Feng,” she told him, for she had heard whisperings from Natalya that Feng was not happy. “Ask him how he felt when you shut him out of the injections.” That was a betrayal of a confidence, but it was effective. For a moment Cliff was stricken. “Ask anyone.”
Cliff's eyes narrowed. “Ask you.”
“I want my key back.”
“Ever since I met you I've tried to be your friend . . .” Cliff began.
“That's one way of putting it.”
“And you've always doubted me, and you've always resisted, and you've always competed with me, and I don't understand why.”
She was close to tears. “You don't understand because you don't know me. You don't have any idea who I am.”
He stared at her, and she was so worked up and her words were so wild that she was indeed a stranger to him. “Who are you, then?” he challenged her.
“Your equal,” she said; but fiercely she thought,
better.
“I know that.”
“Just as much a scientist as you.” But she was thinking,
I've worked so much longer than you.
“Don't you think I realize that?”
“I know you don't.”
“Look, there's never any arguing with you, so just believe what you want to believe, all right?”
“I said I want my key.”
“And when you're done feeling jealous, let me know.”
“I am not jealous.”
“You're not? No, of course not. You could never admit that. You'd rather just hate me for some imagined crime like . . . belittling you or disrespecting you, or—”
“Give it to me.”
He reached into his pocket. “Here, Robin. Here's your goddamn key.” He threw his bunch of keys as hard as he could across the room, and they slammed into the wall, narrowly missing a group of framed family pictures before they fell to the floor.
She didn't say another word, not even to ask him to leave. She just walked into the bedroom and shut the door.
For days they didn't speak. They scarcely looked at each other, except when absolutely necessary. The others in the lab tiptoed around them with the utmost care, as though skirting a meteor crater.
Cliff hoped at first that her anger would pass. The first day and then the second, he thought he would be patient and she would come around, but she held tenaciously to her resentment. She advertised the break between them to the others, silently provoking him in the tight lab space. When her tube racks or her paperwork brushed against his, she refused to consolidate her work. Several times Cliff moved out of her way, trying to control his temper.
Then one gray afternoon he snapped. “Could you move? I need the microscope.”
Robin froze, shocked to hear his voice.
“Could you?”
And she said slowly, “I was just sorting out these notes.”
“Well, could you sort them somewhere else?” Cliff asked, holding his petri dishes. “Because I need to check my cells.”
“Of course you do,” she murmured under her breath, then turned back to her own bone tumor notes.
“Robin!”
Prithwish and Feng looked up from their bench tops.
“Just a second.”
“I said move,” he snarled. In the next moment, he shoved Robin and her notes to the other end of the counter.
Her breath caught inside of her, and her ribs hurt. “Don't you dare touch me.”
Reproachful, disgusted, he glared at her.
The others were watching. She was behaving badly. She was supposed to back down; his work had priority. He claimed she competed with him. If only she'd had the chance! She took a shuddering breath and walked down the hall to use the ancient ladies' room. She washed her hands at one of the stained white china sinks and splashed her face with cold water. Pulling a brown paper towel from the dispenser, she rubbed her cheeks until they reddened. She told herself he could not hurt her. She was not so thin-skinned. She was overreacting. This is how it goes, she thought. This is just life. Right now his work is more important. He needs the microscope.