Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“My heavens. How did you do that?”
“My brand-new Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, volume twenty-four, page sixty-six. Do you want more?” Nieman was leaned
back in the chair. He was smiling. He was almost laughing. He was wearing thin khaki pants. His legs were strong and spread
out on the chair.
“Go on.”
“‘Fundamental research by many physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century suggested that cathode rays (i.e.,
electrons) might be used in some way to increase microscopic resolution. Louis de Broglie, a French physicist, in 1924 opened
the way with the suggestion that electron beams might be regarded as a form of wave motion. De Broglie derived the formula
for their wavelength, which showed, for example, that, for electrons accelerated by sixty-thousand volts, the effective wavelength…’
What? Why are you laughing?”
“Photographic memory?”
“Of course. It’s selective, and I have to be interested in something to imprint it. I’ve seen movies I can’t remember at all.
That was a test. If I couldn’t remember them, I didn’t review them.”
Stella was looking at his pants. He sat up straighter in the chair. He pulled his legs together. He coughed. “’The electron
image must be made visible to the eye by allowing the electrons to fall on a fluorescent screen. Such a screen is satisfactory
for quick observations and for focusing and aligning the instrument. A low-power binocular optical microscope fitted outside
the column allows the flower on the screen, I mean the image on the screen, to be inspected at a magnification of about ten
magnitudes….’”
“You want to see the AIDS virus?” Stella asked. She pulled a box of slides from a drawer and inserted one into a locked compartment
at the base of the instrument. “This is the virus on a human T-cell. I really hate this slide.” She pushed a button and the
lights came on the screen. Then an image appeared. Long tubular cells covered with watery stars of death.
“I’ve been to one hundred and seven funerals since this thing started,” Nieman said. “Have you been tested?”
“Dozens of times. This job has its drawbacks. I essentially hate viruses. I’m not one of those biologists who love nature.
Nature is not on our side. It’s always trying to take us back. I’m for the higher mammals straight out. How about you? Have
you been tested?”
“My dentist tested me. He never called me back so I assumed I was all right. How accurate do you think the tests are?” Nieman
leaned forward to study the screen. It was terrible to behold. “Cut it off,” he said and went back to looking at the flower
in the center of the camisole under Stella’s blouse.
Stella pressed a button. The screen went blank. The room was quiet. The overwhelming sense of déjà vu returned.
“I keep thinking I’ve been here before,” Nieman said. “In this room with you. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“I feel it too,” she answered. “I’m thirty-seven. I keep thinking about breeding. It’s probably hormonal. We are primates,
don’t forget that.” She turned around on the swivel chair and looked at him.
“Should we resign ourselves to that?”
“We could welcome it.”
“You think so?” Nieman stood up. “There it is again,” he said. “It’s the damnedest thing. Deja vu, it means already seen.
Of course we must have met somewhere. Then, of course, the gene pool is wide. These things might be chemical. See, I’m beginning
to think like one of you.” He smiled down at her and she reached up and touched, first his sleeve, then his hand. She didn’t
take his hand or grab it. She brushed her fingers across the back of his hand, then left them only inches away from him. “I
don’t have much experience with women, sexually, that is.” Nieman kept on smiling at her and at himself, at the strangeness
of the moment, the silliness and divinity of it. “But I haven’t given up on myself. I’d like to have an affair with someone,something
that mattered, that might matter to them also. Am I out of line here? You can hit me or dismiss me.”
“I haven’t had a lover in three years. If I had a love affair I’d be the inexperienced one. I always start thinking what I’m
doing is funny. Not the sexual part, per se, you know, but the thing entire, as it were. Well, what are we talking about here?”
“I think we are saying we like each other more than ordinary. I am saying that. I am saying, would you imagine some day, in
your time, on your terms, having me as a candidate for a lover?”
“We could get an AIDS test in the morning and have the results back in a day. Then, if we still wanted to, we could explore
this further. I have some time after my nine o’clock class.” She went on and put her hands on his hands. “I’ll admit this
is partly about your verbal skills.”
“For me it’s the flower on your undershirt and your Ph.D.” Nieman laughed. “Or the electrical systems in this building are
affecting our brains. Tell me where to meet you. I’ll be there.”
“Would we really do this?”
“I think we are doing it. In my old life I always maintained that thought was action. So the question is: Would we actually
carry it out?”
“It’s what the young people do, but not the first time they knock the papers out of someone’s hands.”
“How long do they wait?”
“I think three days. I heard three days from someone who was confessing something to me. I’m a student adviser part-time.”
“Then grown people only have to wait one day because we have a shorter time to live.”
“That’s a theory? Shall we leave now?”
“I suppose we should. Let me help you turn things off.”
“All right. The switches are on the wall.” They turned off the lights in the laboratory and walked to the elevator holding
hands. They went down on the elevator and Nieman walked her to her car. “What time in the morning?” he asked.
“You’re serious?”
“More than I’ve ever been in my life.”
“Do you know where the student health center is now?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there at quarter past ten.” It was very still in the tree-bordered parking lot. The earth smelled like birth and
death and love. There were stars in the sky and a new moon above the physics building. Luckily they were both intuitive, feeling
types. A sensate might have swooned.
At ten-fifteen the next morning they met at the student health center and asked to be tested for the AIDS virus. They filled
out forms and sat in the waiting room reading magazines and were called in and blood was drawn and the nurse told them to
call that afternoon for the results. “Sometimes it takes a couple of days if they’re backed up but it’s been slow this week.
I’ll tell them it’s for you, Doctor Light. I think you’ll get these back by five.” She smiled a professional smile and Nieman
held open the door for Stella and they walked back out into the waiting room and out the door onto the blooming spring campus.
“Are you free tomorrow?” he asked.
“Pretty much. I have some papers to grade.”
“I was thinking we could drive up Highway One to Mendocino and spend the weekend together. I mean, no matter how the tests
come out. I want to talk to you. I want to be with you some more. I don’t know how to say all this.”
“I would love to go to Mendocino with you.”
“Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
“I don’t know where you live.”
“Then you’ll find out, won’t you? Call me at six. If we’re positive, we’ll get drunk. If we’re negative, we’ll, I don’t know.”
“We’ll be negative. Perhaps all we are supposed to do about that is be grateful. I’ll call then. I’ll call at six.”
A young technician named Alice Yount put the slides underneath the microscope and watched the fine, free T-cells swim in their
sea. She called the health center and made the report and then sent the papers over. It was a good morning. Only one test
had come back positive and that was a man who had known it already. Some happiness, Alice was thinking as she took off her
apron and washed her hands. Some good news.
At seven o’clock that night Nieman appeared at Stella’s door. He was wearing a blue shirt he bought in Paris. He was wearing
his best silk socks and seersucker pants and he had taken off his watch and ring. I am putting myself in the path of pain
and suffering and life, he told himself. I am a Mayan sacrifice. I have seen this movie but I have never played in it. I can’t
believe it is this exciting and terrible and irresistible. I want to burn every word I’ve ever written. What did I know?
Then she was there and they walked into her kitchen and poured glasses of water and sipped them and were shy. They walked
around her house looking at the books, the bare stone floors, the clean windows, the stark white walls, the wide white bed.
It was not silly when it happened and neither of them was afraid. “Nice scar,” he told her later, examining her knee.
“Bike wreck when I was ten,” she answered. “What do you have to show me?”
“Navel?” he asked. “Appendix scar? Cut on eyebrow?”
At two in the morning Nieman went home to pack for the weekend. “I forgot my sleeping pills,” he explained. “There are limits
to what the psyche can take. I might keep you up all night.”
“Go on,” she answered. “We’re pushing the envelope. I’d like to be alone for a few hours. What do you take?”
“Ambien. Benadryl. Xanax if I travel. If I’m at home I usually just stay awake.”
“Distressing, all the people who can’t sleep. Do you think it’s the modern world?”
“No. I think it’s always been that way. Neurotic from the start. That’s how I view our history. Short lived and neurotic.
Now we’re long lived and neurotic. I call that progress, any way you look at it.”
“Me too.”
At ten the next morning Nieman picked her up in Freddy Harwood’s Jeep Cherokee and they drove out over the Golden Gate Bridge
and took the Stinson Beach exit and began the 1,500-foot climb into the coastal hills. At Muir Woods they got out of the car
and held hands and looked at the ocean for a long time. Already their bodies were joined at the hip. Already there was nothing
that could keep them apart.
“Where’s Nieman?” Nora Jane was asking. “What did he want the Cherokee for?”
“I think he’s in love,” Freddy answered. “It’s the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen. He’s trying to keep it a secret.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t even look at me.”
“He’s getting laid. My God, imagine that.”
“He had on a brand-new polo shirt.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not. May lightning strike me if I am. It still had the creases in it. He hadn’t even washed it.”
“My folks drove this highway on the bus,” Stella was asying, “I wish they didn’t disavow that so much.They were just kids,Eveything
is in a state of anarchy, Nieman. Every single thing we see about us. Our universe is a nanosecond, the blink of an eyelash,
and yet, we are here and this experience seems vast. Last night, after you left, I fell asleep giggling. I kept seeing us
marching into the student health center to be tested. That will be all over the campus by the time we get back. Technically
I can’t date you, you know. Since you are a student.”
“We aren’t dating.” Nieman slowed down. He drove the car to a wide place that overlooked the sea. He turned off the motor
and turned to her and took her hands. “I am in love with you. That’s been clear since Friday afternoon at six o’clock. I have
waited all my life for you. I want to marry you, or live with you, or do whatever you want to do. I have three hundred and
forty-seven thousand dollars in assets and no responsibilities I can’t get rid of in an hour. I will go anywhere you want
to go. I will live any life you want to live.”
“My goodness.”
“I wrote that down several times this morning. There’s a draft of it in my jacket pocket. You can have it.”
“Let’s get something to eat first. I can’t get engaged on an empty stomach.”
“This is real, Stella. This is deadly serious on my part.”
“I know that. I’m serious too. Don’t you think I know a miracle when one slaps me in the face?” Then Nieman was extremely
glad he had borrowed Freddy’s Cherokee, because it had an old-fashioned front seat and Stella slid over next to him and stayed
there all the way to Stinson Beach.
Which is how Tammili and Lydia Harwood finally got to be bridesmaids in a wedding. “I thought it would never happen,” Lydia
told her friends. “The last person I thought would give us this window of opportunity was Uncle Nieman. I am wearing pink.”
“And I am wearing blue,” Tammili would add. “It’s going to be at our beach house. There will be two cakes and lots of petits
fours and Jon Ragel from Vogue is going to take the photographs.”
“Uncle Nieman will never get a Nobel now,” Lydia would sigh. “Dad says Nieman has forgotten all about wanting a Nobel prize
for biochemistry.”
T
HE WEDDING HAD BEEN PLANNED
for June. Then for August. Now it was the tenth of September and at last Nieman Gluuk and Stella Light had set a date they
wouldn’t break.
“We are mailing the invitations today,” Stella told Nora Jane. They were having tea on the patio of the Harwoods’ house on
the beach. It was Friday morning. Stella was missing a faculty meeting about grants for the graduate students, but the dean
had let her go. No one was expecting much of Stella or Nieman this year. The world will always welcome lovers. This is especially
true on the Berkeley campus, where many people have thought themselves almost out of the emotional field. “We have set a deadline.
Every invitation in the mail before we sleep. Are you sure you want to have it here? This close to the baby coming?”
The women were sitting on wicker chairs with a small table between them. The table held cheese and crackers and wild red straw
berries and small almond wafers Stella had brought for a gift. “I told the department head I had to have a week and he said,
Take two weeks.”Stella shook her head. “I think we’ll just go to the Baja and lie in the sun and read. I have never imagined
myself being married. It seems like such an odd, old rite of passage. Are you sure you want to have it here?”