Fifty Degrees Below (16 page)

After her talk many people, mostly men, clustered around her with what seemed to Frank a more-than-scientific interest. Turning to answer a question she saw him and smiled. “I’ll be just a minute.” Tiny rush of pleasure at that; ha ha, I get to take the beauty away, ooooop!

Her voice was low and scratchy, indeed it would be nasal if it weren’t so low. A kind of oboe or bassoon sound, very attractive. Some kind of accent, maybe Boston Italian, but so faint it was impossible for Frank to identify.

Then the others had been dealt with, and he was the only one left. He smiled awkwardly, feeling alert and on edge.

“Nice talk.”

“Oh thanks. Shall we go outside? I could use some coffee and maybe a bite.”

“Sure, that would be nice.”

They walked out into the bright sunlight on the Charles. Francesca suggested a kiosk on the other side of the Mass. Ave. bridge, and Frank followed her onto it happily; Boston’s river was full of light, open to the wind. It had good feng shui.

They talked about the dedicated institutes that NSF was planning, and Francesca said she had done a post-doc at the Max Planck in Bremen and been impressed. Then they reached the kiosk, bought lattes and scones, walked back onto the bridge. Frank stopped to look at a women’s eight, sculling underneath them like a big water bug. He would have liked to linger there, but Francesca shivered.

“I get cold out here,” she said. “It’s like Byrd said—the coldest he ever got was on the bridges over the Charles.”

“Byrd the polar explorer?”

“Yes. My husband did work on the Greenland ice cores, and he likes to read the polar classics. He told me Byrd said that, because I was always complaining about how cold I get.”

“Well okay, back to land then.”

“There’s some benches in the sun just over there.” She pointed.

“Didn’t Byrd fake getting to the poles?”

She laughed. “Maybe that explains why here is the coldest he ever got.”

“No, but didn’t he?”

“I don’t know, but he definitely wintered on the Ross Ice Shelf.”

“You couldn’t do that now.”

“Sure you could. There are people living on the big pieces of it still floating around. That’s what Jack tells me. Icebergs as big as Massachusetts, and so people have settled on them.”

“Fun. What does he do?”

“Paleoclimatology. He’s been studying the Younger Dryas for a long time now.”

“Really! That’s the climate we’re dropping into again, I hear.”

“Yes. He’s often away giving talks about it. It’s quite a scramble with the kids.”

“I bet. How many do you have?”

“Two. Angie is eight, Tom is five.”

“Wow. You must be busy.”

“Yes, it’s totally crazy.”

They sat on a bench looking out at the river, eating their scones and talking. She was a beautiful woman. Frank had not fully noticed this during the panel meeting at NSF. Of course he was well aware of the famous experiment in which an attractive woman approached men on a bridge with some question that allowed her plausibly to ask the men to call her later, after which seventy percent of the men on the bridge had called, as compared to only thirty percent accosted in the same way in a park. So, very possibly this was another example of the bridge effect. But whatever. She looked good. Black tangled curls framing sharp Mediterranean features; neat intilting teeth; all of a piece, stylish and intelligent. If you were to play the game of choosing which movie star should play her, you’d have to go right to one of the ultimate Italian exotics, a middle-aged Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale.

A joy even to watch her eat; and at this observation Frank could not help remembering another paper, on human female sexual attractiveness, which had argued that even facial beauty consisted of signs of reproductive prowess, symmetry revealing undamaged DNA, widely spaced eyes meaning good eyesight, and prominent cheekbones and a gracile jaw indicating “masticatory efficiency”— at which point in Frank’s reading of the paper Anna had looked in his door to see why he was laughing so hard.

“If you can chew your food well, it’s sexy!” he had informed her, and handed her the article while he continued to chortle convulsively. Sociobiology could be so stupid! Anna too had laughed, her gorgeous mirth pealing through the halls.

Frank grinned again thinking of it, watching Francesca sip her latte. No doubt she masticated very efficiently. And had legs fast enough to escape predators, hips wide enough to give birth safely, mammary glands generous enough to feed infants, yes, sure, she had quite a figure, as far as one could tell under her dress—and of course one could tell pretty damned well. She would certainly have many successful offspring, and therefore was beautiful. All so much crap! No
reductio ad absurdum
was more absurd.

“Yes, it’s very busy,” she was saying between mastications, in response to a question he didn’t remember asking; she appeared to be unaware of his train of thought, but maybe not; he might be staring. “It works out—usually—but it feels so crazy. I don’t know how, but—” swallow “—things just seem to get busier and busier.”

Frank nodded as he chewed. “It’s true,” he said. “True for me, and I’m not even married.”

She grinned. “But that can make you even busier, right?” Leaning into his shoulder slightly with hers, giving him a conspiratorial bump.

Startled, Frank had to agree. There were lots of ways to be busy, he said, and his days were very full. She sipped her latte, looking relaxed and somehow pleased. Not flirtatious, but expansive. She could do what she wanted; what man was going to object? She licked coffee from her upper lip, neat pink tongue like a cat’s. For sure the symmetry-as-beauty hypothesis was wrong; Frank had a tendency to zero in on the asymmetries in other people’s faces, and he had often noted how it was precisely the asymmetry that drew or hooked the eye, that tugged at it like a magnet. As now, seeing the way Francesca’s sharp nose tilted very slightly to the left then back. Magnetic.

Of course he was envious of her too. Lab, tenure, home, partner, children: she had it all. And seemed relaxed and happy, despite her talk about the crazy pace. Fulfilled. As Frank’s mom would have said, in one of her most annoying formulations, “She has it all put together, doesn’t she?” At this point in his life Frank doubted that anybody on Earth “had it all put together” in the way his mom meant. But if anyone did, this woman might.

So: Frank chatted on happily, full of admiration, respect, envy, doubt, resentment, suspicion, and a lust that was perhaps bridge-induced but nevertheless real. He had to mask that part. She would be used to seeing it in men, no doubt. Nonconscious regions of the mind were very sensitive to that.

He would also have to be very circumspect when it came to inquiring about her business affairs. This was one way of characterizing what he had come up to do, and she was done with her scone, and no doubt would soon suggest returning to her duties, so now was the time.

But it was a subject that scientists did not often discuss at academic meetings, as it was too much like prying into matters of personal income. How are you turning your scientific work into money? How much do you make? These questions weren’t asked.

He tried a roundabout course. “Is the teaching load heavy here?”

It was.

“Do you have any administrative duties?”

She did.

“And you do some consulting too, I think you said?”

“Yes,” she said, looking slightly surprised, as she had not said any such thing. “Just a little. It doesn’t take much time. A company in London, another in Atlanta.”

Frank nodded. “I used to do some of that in San Diego. The biotechs can use all the help they can get. Although they seem to have a hard time turning lab results into products. Like the stuff we evaluated on that panel last fall.”

“Right, that was interesting.”

This was likely to be mere politeness talking. But then she glanced at him, went on: “I saw one proposal there that I thought was a good one, that the panel ended up turning down.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. By a Yann Pierzinski.”

“Oh yes. I remember. That was a good one. I was the outside member of his doctoral committee at Caltech. He does really interesting work.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the panel didn’t agree.”

“No, I was surprised at that.”

“Me too. So when Small Delivery told me they were looking for a biomathematician, I recommended him.”

“Oh, is that what happened?”

“Yes.”

Her irises were a kind of mahogany color, speckled with lighter browns. Was this the face of what science could become, so vivacious and sophisticated?

“Well,” he said carefully, “good for him. I liked his proposal too.”

“You didn’t seem to at the time.”

“Well—I was on his doctoral committee. And I try not to be one of the evaluators in my panels anyway.”

“No?”

“No. I just run the panel. I don’t want to sway anyone.”

“Then you must have to be careful which proposals you assign to Stuart Thornton,” she said with a brief ironic smile.

“Oh I don’t know!” he said defensively, startled. “Do you think so?”

“Hmm.” She watched him.

“I guess I know what you mean. It was probably a mistake to invite him on the panel at all. But, you know.” He waved a hand: people legitimately on the cutting edge deserved to be asked, no matter their personalities.

She frowned very slightly, as if she did not agree, or did not like him pretending she did not know what he had done.

Frank forged on. “Anyway it sounds like Yann ended up all right, thanks to you.”

“Yes. Hopefully so.” She sipped her latte. Her fingers were long, her fingernails polished with a clear gloss. A thin wedding band was the only jewelry she wore. Frank looked down, unwilling to meet her sharp gaze. Her shoes were open-toed, her toenails colored pink. Frank had always considered toenail polish to be a kind of intelligence test that its users had embarrassingly failed; but here was Dr. Taolini, tenured at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, exposing pink toenails to the world without embarrassment. He would have to rethink some of his opinions.

“Still,” he said tentatively, “even though Yann has ended up all right, I’d like to get him into one of these new institutes.”

“Maybe you can,” she said. “Multiple appointments aren’t that unusual anymore.”

“In academia, anyway. Do you think his contract would allow for that kind of thing?”

She shrugged, made a little gesture of her own; how should I know, I’m just a consultant.

He had learned what he was going to learn about her connection to Yann. Pressing further would look weird. She basked in the windy sun, would soon want to go back in to the conference.

He could ask her outright if she knew anything about the surveillance. He could share what he knew. It was another prisoner’s dilemma: they both knew things the other could probably benefit from knowing, but it was a risk to bring them up; the other might defect. The safest thing was to defect pre-emptively. But Frank wanted to try the more generous strategies these days, and so he wanted to tell her: We’re being watched by Homeland Security, in a surveillance clustered around Pierzinski. Did you know? Why do you think that is? What do you think is going on?

But then she could very justifiably ask, how do you know? And then he would be stuck. He could not say, because I’ve fallen in love with a spook who kissed me in an elevator, and she told me all about it. That just wasn’t something he wanted to say to this woman.

Although in another way he did; it would be great to be close enough to this person to confide in her. She might laugh, might lean into his shoulder again, to draw out more of the tale.

But in fact he wasn’t that close to her. So he couldn’t talk about it.

A different approach occurred to him. “I’m getting interested in finding algorithms or other rubrics for sorting through the various climate proposals we’ve gotten, to see if some are worth jumping on right now. Ways of checking not only the physical possibilities, which is the easy part in some senses, but also the economic and political viability of the plans.”

“Yes?” she said, interested.

“I read about something I think came out of MIT, of course there’s a million things coming out of MIT, but maybe you’ve heard of this one, a kind of idea futures market? You gather a group of stakeholders, and sort the ideas by how much money people are willing to risk on them?”

“Yes, do you mean that simulation program they’ve written, for market makers?”

“Yes,” Frank said. “I guess so.”

She said, “I heard about it. To me it sounds like one of those situations where simulation misses the point. You might need real experts risking real money, to get the kind of feedback a futures market is supposed to give you.”

“Yes, I wondered about that myself.”

“So, I don’t know. You should talk to Angelo Stavros.”

“What department?” Frank said, getting out his phone to tap it in; then suddenly he recalled that his phone might be fully surveiled.

“Economics—but what is it?” She was watching him closely now, and he couldn’t be sure if she knew more about the idea futures market or not.

“I was just thinking you’re probably right. In the end it’s going to take the usual analysis of the options, like we always have done before.”

“Another panel, you mean.”

“Yes,” he laughed ruefully, “I suppose so.”

Her smile was suddenly wicked, and over it her eyes blazed, they
italicized
her words: “Better not invite Thornton.”

He walked the north shore of the Charles, enjoying the wind that ruffled the water.

So. Francesca Taolini appeared to have guessed what he had tried to do on that panel. Maybe putting Thornton on a panel was too blatant, like throwing a rock—thus drawing her attention, perhaps even sparking extra interest in Pierzinski’s proposal.

This realization was a shock, small but profound, like the shove of shoulder to shoulder. Balance thrown off. Presumably it would come back after a while. Meanwhile a shudder, an itch, an ache. In short,
desire
.