The Middle Kingdom (21 page)

‘That'd be great,' Hank said, before Walter could object again.

I told myself Hank said that because he wanted me. I ignored every twinge of common sense I felt, every flash of reality, and I began to spend all my time tromping around with Hank. I traded in my silk dresses and linen jackets for old chinos and rubber boots and long-sleeved shirts, and I followed Hank like a faithful dog, my knapsack weighed down with binoculars and topographic maps and notebooks and specimen bags. Hank, who'd been uneasy at first, seemed to grow used to me. We established a rhythm and worked in circles as Walter had suggested, from the pond with its herons and ducks and geese to the marsh surround with its bitterns and snipe and then the thicket with its warblers and hawks. Hank made the sightings and called out the numbers and species to me, and I recorded whatever he said.

I might have grown bored if I hadn't had Hank to watch. Or to listen to – when we weren't slinking through the reeds, Hank amused me with bits of local lore, which he probably didn't mean to be funny. He called the least bitterns thunder-pumpers, from the weird noise they made. Great blue herons were shitpokes, from their habit of poking through garbage, and pied-billed grebes were water witches, sinking slowly beneath the surface when startled and vanishing like submarines. He seemed to take particular pleasure in crows.

‘My grandfather kept a crow as a pet,' he told me one afternoon. We had taken a break so I could strip off my boots and patch my blisters, and three crows near us were arguing over a gum wrapper. ‘Corvids are cool,' he said.

‘Crows, ravens, jays,' I said. ‘Is that right? Those are the corvids?'

‘That's right,' he said, pleased. ‘But crows are the best. They're smart. They're monogamous. They court. Some of them get to be twenty years old. My grandfather swore his was twenty-two.'

‘I like crows,' I said; I would have said anything to please him.

We'd spent four weeks together by then, and the closest I'd been to him was this. Our whole group often gathered on evenings and weekends, but then Hank was glued to Walter's side with the other students, listening wide-eyed as the conversation tumbled from computer modeling to evolution and reproductive strategies. One night I listened, tired and bored, as Page and one of the botanists argued over the relative energy costs of viviparity and oviparity while Tyler made a case for parthenogenesis.

‘Gall midges, weevils, aphids,' Tyler said. ‘Who could be more successful?'

I remembered why I'd dropped out of school.

‘That's one strategy,' Walter said. He sat in the rocker his students always reserved for him, which was quarter-sawn oak with fluted spindles and an oval back and carved, curved arms. A nice chair; I'd bought it myself. Somehow it had turned into Walter's throne. ‘The most generations in the least time,' Walter continued. ‘But then consider the other extreme. Semelparity.'

Hank blinked. The others nodded; they knew what Walter meant. Walter leaned down and explained this bit of jargon to Hank. ‘Living long,' I heard him say. ‘Breeding only once, enormously – the organism's entire energy budget goes into this one reproductive fling. Then dying. Pacific salmon.'

Those evenings made me frantic, but Walter was happier than he'd been in years. The swamp was teeming with his people, working on his project; Hank applied to Walter's department for graduate work and asked for Walter as his advisor. Page was furious – she'd lost whatever hold she'd had on Hank, and now she'd lost him as a student as well. She drew away from the project, claiming she had a paper of her own to write, and Hank was so caught up with the work and with Walter that he hardly seemed to notice.

Sometimes I let myself think that he didn't miss Page because he had me instead.

I should have understood, if anyone did, that it was Walter who was pulling Hank. I'd been through the same thing, falling into the field of Walter's excitement like a rabbit falling down a hole. Walter knew that he had Hank charmed, and he thought he had me as well – I was working for him again, neglecting my own business while I cooked huge dinners for everyone, and he was as smug as a cat because the change was so clearly good for me. Everyone remarked upon my new shape: I was slowly, steadily losing weight, which Walter attributed to clean living and exercise and lots of fresh air. Privately, I thought the cause was much simpler; I had no time to eat. Between working outside all day and collecting data at night, then lying sleepless in bed and plotting how I could get Hank to touch me, I was melting away.

One day in September I took drastic action. I'd already tried everything else I knew – I'd spent all the time I could alone with Hank. I'd flattered him and been helpful to him and listened to him. I'd sat next to him on rocks so small that they crowded us together. I'd baked special treats for our field lunches and watched him eat them; I'd unbuttoned the top of my shirt and then bent low over broken nests on the ground. Nothing had worked. Hank's idea of getting personal was to ask me about Walter.

‘You worked on the
Quabbin
project with him?' he said. ‘You were so lucky.'

‘I was just a girl,' I said.

‘That's what's so amazing. Even when you were an undergraduate you got to be around him all the time, watch him work, hear him think. You must have been so excited. Did you work with him in graduate school?'

‘I quit,' I said, wondering how to explain why I'd left the charms of Walter and science for a career that was bound to sound frivolous to Hank. I tried to make the change sound accidental. ‘I was sick for a while,' I said. ‘And afterwards I wasn't in any shape to do field work. And then my great-uncle died and left me his things, and I had to do something with them …'

So I stretched the truth a little. I stretched the truth, I changed my clothes and adopted the student uniform as shamelessly as Tyler had; I wore my hair long and flowing again; I stopped wearing jewelry and makeup. After years of trying to look older I tried to look twenty-two again, and it didn't work. Nothing did.

The day I chose was unseasonably hot. Hank and I were both wearing shorts, and while my legs were not nearly so wonderful as Hank's, I thought I didn't look too bad. We climbed up a limestone outcropping at the swamp's far end, searching for evidence of hawks, and when we reached the top I sat down and spread our lunch on a cloth. Below us I could see the transects the botany students had laid from the edge of the water through the reeds, stakes hammered at one-meter intervals. I gave Hank the cans of beer I'd smuggled in and he drank them gratefully. When he was done he took off his shirt and stretched himself out on the rocks.

‘God,' he said. ‘This weather's the best.'

‘It's nice,' I said. I lay down next to him and pretended to enjoy the sun, which was making me sweat.

‘This is great,' I said. ‘Do you mind …?'

He lay on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Mind what?'

I took off my shirt. He opened his eyes, blinked, looked at me again. Smiled. ‘Hell,' he said. ‘Why not? It's not fair, the way women always have to wear tops.' He closed his eyes again.

I lay next to him, no more exposed in my taupe satin bra than I'd be in a bathing suit. I moved my arm so that it brushed his.

Still nothing. He moved his arm away and smiled at the sun. I moved my arm again. He moved his. I moved my leg until our thighs touched. This time he shifted a little uneasily. Of course I should have left things there, moved away, pretended disinterest. Given up. I rolled over heavily and kissed him, my unclothed chest mashed against his.

He threw me off as if I were a rabid dog. He pushed me off, sat up, rose to his knees. ‘Jesus, Grace,' he said. ‘What the hell? You're
married.
To
Walter
.'

I kneeled next to him, a sharp stone pressed into my shin. ‘Forget that,' I said. ‘Forget Walter.' As if either of us could. I reached out and rested my arm on his shoulder. ‘Don't you want me?' I said.

His mouth opened and closed and he flushed dark red. He shrugged off my hand and stood up. ‘Let's just forget this whole thing happened,' he said. ‘Okay?' His voice quivered with his effort to stay calm. ‘Let's just get back to work. We don't want to wreck this project.'

But of course I did. I wanted to wreck this project, wreck him and Walter, tear apart this life I found myself floundering in. I was so humiliated and disappointed that I started crying. Hank looked at me for a minute and then grabbed his shirt and ran down the rocky path. He left me alone, hot and sweaty and half-naked, brokenhearted, and that's how Walter found me an hour later when he passed by with his gill net and happened to hear me crying.

‘Hello?' Walter called from below me. ‘Who's up there? Are you all right?'

I couldn't answer; I couldn't stop crying. Walter left his gill net by the transects and sprinted up the slope.

‘Grace?' he said. He kneeled down beside me and wrapped me in his arms. ‘Grace?' he repeated, completely bewildered. ‘What is it? Are you all right?' He checked me quickly for cuts and bruises, his hands pausing over the sweat and dirt and gravel stuck to my back. His face darkened. ‘Did someone …?' he asked. ‘Has anyone …?'

‘Hank!' I wailed. Perhaps I meant Walter to understand that the only way he could. Perhaps that cry simply tore itself from my heart.

‘Hank?' he whispered. ‘Hank did this?'

I never contradicted him. I let him dress me, lead me back to the car, think what he wanted. I let his own heart break, half with rage at my supposed violation, half with a pain he could never admit, and I didn't care. I knew I could never face Hank again, never survive unless Hank was out of my life. I could never stand to watch Hank and Walter together. I brought our world crashing down around us, the end of another life.

No one could have missed the changes that occurred in Walter after that. Over the years, five horizontal lines had carved themselves across his forehead, which folded into neat corrugations when he lifted his eyebrows. Now a pair of vertical lines sprang up above his nose, crossing the horizontals in a ragged checkerboard. The web of fine diagonals around his eyes darkened and deepened, and two furrows cut from the wings of his nose to his mouth. His face cracked into a complex map, as if I'd carved it with a razor; and at night, when he thought I was sleeping, he groaned. Not once or twice, on falling asleep or awakening, but all night long. Each time he rolled or moved he let out a low, broken sound, as unforced and unstoppable as breath. In the mornings he lay in the tub, quite defeated, and he couldn't get out until I'd brought him coffee. Through all this he could never say what was hurting him so: as if, by his not saying, I wouldn't know.

I knew. Walter had confronted Hank and Hank had refused to defend himself; all he'd ever said to Walter was, ‘I didn't touch her.' Walter turned all his frustration and hurt into anger and cut Hank off completely, and still it wasn't enough for me. I was seized with a sense that I'd lived my whole life wrongly, falsely, badly; and all I could think of to do was to thrash at the world around me. Walter's project collapsed and his group disbanded and Hank transferred to Page's lab, and I congratulated myself on how well I'd punished everyone, even me: Walter was perfectly kind and sympathetic, but he could no longer make love to me. Perhaps he knew more of the truth than he knew he did.

As the fall wore on, Walter threw himself into the plans for an international conference he'd been invited to organize in Beijing, for the following September. He grew tired and anxious, drowning in a sea of visas and invitations, travel agents and hotel brochures, but I couldn't make myself help him or even show any enthusiasm for the trip. This was my chance to follow in Uncle Owen's footsteps and see what he had seen, but I had never meant to go like this: a forced march on the arm of an angry husband, who refused to allow me to stay at home alone. Our living room filled with papers and abstracts and I grew guiltier each day, until finally I roused myself enough to write Dalton and tell him some of what was happening. I described Hank and what had happened in the swamp, and what I had done to Walter; ‘… and now he wants me to go to China with him,' I finished. ‘What am I supposed to do?'

‘Whatever you have to,' Dalton wrote back. ‘But just go.'

His note lay on top of a big box of Uncle Owen's things, all his diaries and dictionaries and maps, and despite myself the box roused my interest a bit. I compared Uncle Owen's things with the guidebooks Walter brought home, and even that brief acquaintance was enough to tell me that the China Uncle Owen had visited was gone. The walls around Beijing had vanished; broad streets cut through the old alleys; concrete towers had replaced the low houses. Even the language was different:
Beijing,
not
Peking. Cixi
rather than
Tzu Hsi.

I tried to take an interest in that. I buried the knowledge of what I had done, I buried everything, and I tried to forget Hank and to warm toward Walter, to show a little enthusiasm for this trip he was working on so hard. I tried to believe we might enjoy traveling together; we had in the past. But meanwhile I had nothing to do but eat.

When my mother visited early in December, she turned white with horror at the sight of me. She turned white and then laughed and then frowned and then smiled, and then she tore a sheet of paper from a pad and started outlining a diet. Slim as always, she wore a straight navy skirt and a white blouse with a boat neck, beneath which her bra straps showed. For my birthday, she'd brought me two bras that resembled armor, boned and thick-sided and fastened with long rows of hooks and eyes, as expensive as a good pair of shoes. Neither of them fit.

‘Grapefruit,' she said firmly. ‘Grapefruit after every meal – burns up the calories. High protein, no fat, no carbohydrates, ten glasses of water a day – how did you let this
happen?
'