Saving St. Germ (32 page)

I felt a sense of horror telling her what had happened, because now the events had become a narrative, a story, and this somehow distanced me from Ollie, set the unthinkable into predictable anecdotal sequence. But I had to talk to someone.

Rocky blinked her eyes and shook her head at me.

“You look like you died,” she said, and didn’t laugh. “I mean it. You look as if someone shot you in the back seven hours ago and you’ve been walking around ever since, losing blood and your memory.”

“Blood, maybe,” I said. “But I remember everything.”

She got up and went to the hot-drinks machine and came back with two cups of coffee. I drank mine down eagerly, even though it burned my throat. I heard Rocky rummaging around in the shelves and this time she returned with a pile of old towels. I set my coffee down and she threw one over my head. I dried my hair. Then, still shaking with cold, I wrapped myself in the remaining towels and went back to the coffee.

“Jesus,” she said again, “you look like shit.”

I toasted her with the plastic cup. “You’re back.”

She looked away.

“No,” she said. “I’m not. I just came in tonight to pick up my
stuff.
” She shrugged and looked around, scratching her arm and sipping her coffee. “My books and tape deck and stuff—I’m
leavin’
.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m leavin’. I’m droppin’ out of school, going back to work in the family store for a while.”

I sat up, spilling the last of my coffee. “What are you
talking
about?”

“
Hey,
Professor.
You’re
the one who said I wasn’t no good at science, just good at
fuck-
ing!”

“I didn’t say—”

“Hey Prof, I’m just throwin’
shade
on you. You hurt my feelings that night but ... that’s not it. I made this decision based on, you know, my
life.
”

“Rocky, don’t be
funny
.”

“My
life.
My GPA ain’t that hot overall, this place costs big money and ...” She looked at me. “There’s someone new in my life.”

“Rocky.
No.
”

I watched her as she took a stick of gum out of her jacket pocket, unwrapped it with maddening slowness, then popped it in her mouth.

“Rocky, you’re not going to do it, are you? You’re not going to
throw
this away?”

I tried to get her to look at me. She stuck out her lower jaw, stretching the gum inside her mouth. Her eyes were fluttering, half closed.

“How
many
grad students have I had in here? You’re a
kid
and you’re way
beyond
them. You’re so gifted, Rocky.” I paused to get my breath. “Who the hell
is
it, anyway? Another
Troy
? Or
Lance
?”

She snorted. “No. It ain’t
Lance
or Troy.” She chewed, watching me.

“I admit it: Science is important to me. You taught me a lot. But I need to have that same feeling I have in here ... in other places.”

There was silence. She shrugged again and stared into space, her jaws working. I blew my nose. She looked at me.

“You understand?”

“What’s to understand? You’re in love with some guy and—”

“Woman.”

We looked at each other.

“Woman. I’m in love with some woman. I got a new
girlfriend
.”

I shook suddenly with cold and she blinked, surprised, as if I’d flinched in revulsion. “Girlfriend?”

“Yeah.” She laughed at my face. “You never
guessed,
Prof? That I hang out on
both
sides? God, you’re major
uncool.
”

I put down my cup awkwardly; towels slid from my shoulders. “Who is she?” I asked, major-uncoolly.

“
Who
she is doesn’t matter. I love her. She’s not like me. She’s quiet, she’s deep. But the thing is I have this feeling with her which is very much the way I used to feel
in here
with you.”

“So are saying that you never cared about science, you just—”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t all
you,
don’t get excited, man. What I liked was the fact that two women, two of us, could work together like that. I liked that, Prof. I liked the work and I liked the idea of the two women. So what you said about cholos hurt me—but let me tell you, not as much as it hurt me to go into the graduate admissions office, where they looked at me like some kind of little
puta
! And I thought to myself in there, Why do I need to borrow forty thousand so I can go to grad school in biochemistry or molecular biology and end up working in a
paint factory
? Who’s gonna hire
me
afterwards?”

I rubbed my sleeve across my runny nose and felt tears starting up again. “You would
not
end up ...”

She folded her arms in front of her and snapped her gum with authority. Her look silenced me.

“I’m not
you.
Harvard connections and all that. If I do this, it’s just gonna be the way
I
say. That’s all.”

The tears ran down my face and I put my head down.

After a bit she got up and knelt beside me and put her arms around me. She smelled like gardenias and Doublemint. I put my head on her shoulder and we held each other. Then she sat back on her heels and pushed her long hair out of her eyes.

“I found your note to me in here. The night guard let me in and hey, there it was.”

Gum snap.

“Thanks for writing it.”

I’d forgotten the notes I’d left; I’d forgotten everything, it seemed. Centuries ago (a sharp but muffled pain) I’d found out I’d been scooped by L.R., standing in this room.

I covered my face with my hands again. Gum snap—I felt her shake her hair. “You want me to kidnap Ollie back from Jay?”

I laughed into my hands—it felt odd to laugh. I looked up. “I want you to come back here to work.”

“You know, I can’t do that right now. I gotta think.”

There was another pause. She stared at me, cracking her gum, thinking. We were still kneeling.

“You ever see a
scientist
with an ass like
this
?” She turned around and waggled her rear end. “And hey, so help me, they can
kiss
it, man!”

“You were
born
to be in science, Rocky.”

She laughed. “I was born to cause trouble. Like you.”

She leaned over again and kissed me on the lips. Then she pulled away, a little frightened. I reached for her and hugged her.

“I love you,” I said. “I need you to help me.”

She shook her head dazedly and smiled. “You mean you’re coming back
here
?”

“I don’t know.” I stood up. Rocky stood up too. “I need a ride home. Can you drop me?”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re on my way.”

As we turned up my block, I saw that all the lights were burning inside my house. I couldn’t remember if I’d left them on when I’d taken off for Jay’s. I saw a silhouette moving inside. My heart moved—Ollie? Had Jay reconsidered and brought her back?

I leapt out of Rocky’s car, beckoning to her to follow, ran up the steps, and jammed my key in the door. Someone was in the hallway; a large shape stood there as I opened the door. I pulled my key free of the lock and stared. It was Q.

I
DON’T KNOW
who was more shocked. We stood staring without speaking. Then Rocky came up behind me and then my mother, wearing a blue silk bathrobe, appeared in the entryway behind Q. Then everyone spoke at once.

I was asking them what they were doing there and they were carrying on about the way I looked, and where had I been, and where were Jay and Ollie? Rocky was trying to say good-bye to me, having sensed family weather. Finally everyone stopped talking and Rocky hugged me, once, hard, and loped off across the lawn.

They pulled me into the house, where, despite the enormous distraction of their presence, a tidal wave of grief overtook me.

Her dragon still sat in the red chair where I’d put it the other night. Her yellow rain boots stood side by side near the umbrella stand. Her “TV” box in the corner. Her dreamy, startling little face looked out from photographs everywhere: on the walls, the coffee table, everywhere I turned. Sobs rose in my throat, but I caught them, one by one. I pulled myself back up straight. They were staring at me.

My mother stepped forward. She had that resolute I-can-fix-it look on her face that I remembered from childhood. It was a look that I’d come, over many years, to understand never existed in pure form. It always appeared in combination with a swift glance of accusation; so it was really the I-can-fix-it—you-did-it-again-didn’t-you-you-hapless-jerk look.

“Esme, my God, what’s wrong with you?”

We went into the living room together and sat down and I told them the story, or stories: the breakup, my suspension from UGC, the custody battle, Jay’s kidnapping of Ollie.

They listened sympathetically, exclaiming in the appropriate places, but once again, I felt the stubborn alarmed judgment of me going on just below the surface of their concern—what had happened to me, the protégée, the postdoc star? How had I done this to myself?

Q’s eyes flickered over me again and again: the torn, still-soaked jeans I’d had on for three—four?—days now; the ratty plaid shirt; my damp dirty hair hanging in my face; my filthy fingernails and sandals. He breathed sonorously, filling the room, a sound I remembered well. He looked older to me, but he’d acquired a kind of ruddy gleam, a patina of well-being. They’re good for each other, I thought, startled, and I stared for a second at them as a
unit,
as if they’d been placed behind glass in a museum: Last Happy Marriage on Earth, Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge.

He stared back at me. God, I remembered those deceptively mild, inquiring eyes:
How do you confirm this hypothesis, Ms. Charbonneau?
or
How do you explain the discrepancy here between your results and the results in the textbook? What an intriguing theory, Esme, but even Mendel does not support you here.
I looked back into those eyes, trying to remain unshaken. He wanted to know, I supposed, the exact nature of my pathology. And more important, how could he have miscalculated? He’d bet on me, he’d put faith in me.

“But what I don’t understand clearly,” he said, inhaling noisily through his nose, “is why you stopped going to your lab.”

“I’m going to make some hot cocoa for everyone,” Millie announced gaily. She stood up and hurried out to the kitchen. I noticed that she wiped a tear away with the back of her hand as she rose.

“Professor Quandahl,” I began, and he held up his hand. For one awful moment, I thought he might ask me to call him Dad, and I froze.

“
Ken,
” he said, “please.”

“How about ‘Q’? I mean, I’d like to call you Q, OK?”

He nodded indifferently. He didn’t care what I called him, he just wanted an answer.

“I stopped going to the lab because I was sick of the pressure on me to perform some goddam miracle for funding. And ... there was another reason. Over the last couple of years, I’ve turned to theory. And theory began to obsess me, I mean, to the exclusion of my other work. I developed, with”—I paused; it was hard for me to say this name—“Lorraine Atwater, a theory of everything, a TOE. And it flew, Q, I’m serious. I’m serious,” I repeated to his amazed expression. “However, it happens that Atwater just scooped me,” I added in a small voice.

He sat, staring intently at me, breathing in loud rasps, his nostrils flaring.

“You’re not
shocked
at my being scooped, are you? Come on, you know this kind of thing goes on all the time, right? Prof—Q, I mean, people take other people’s research, other people’s ideas, routinely, don’t they? Honcho professors take grad students’ and postdocs’ research and call it all their own as a matter of course, don’t they?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Esme, you were a great help to me on albinism—your research was invaluable. Do you feel I used material you should have been credited for?”

“No—I’m just aware of how it happens, how the hierarchy stays in place.”

We stared at each other in silence for a minute, neither one of us eager to plunge into the swirling vortex before us.

“I’d like to ask
you
a question, at the risk of sounding rude. What are you and Millie doing here?”

My mother came back before he could answer, carrying a laden tray: a hand-painted china teapot (which Jay had given me for our last anniversary), cups, napkins. The delicious insipid smell of chocolate filled the room.

How did she do it?
Cocoa! Goddam cocoa!
I almost burst out laughing, but that kind of explosion would inevitably lead me to more weeping, I knew. I restrained myself and smiled at her.

She set the tray down on the coffee table; Q moved to help her. Then she sat down on the couch, lifted the top daintily off the china teapot, and stirred the steaming contents with a silver spoon, looking at me all the while.

“We wrote to you, Esme, don’t you remember? Didn’t you get the letter? Kendall”—she glanced over at him—“had a conference in San Francisco three days ago. We told you we’d rent a car and drive down from there for a visit. We just assumed you’d gotten the note. Luckily the elderly woman next door”—“Mrs. K.,” I murmured—“had a key and let us in.”

I glanced guiltily at a far corner of the room; somewhere in that direction was a cardboard box containing stacks of unopened mail. From the last few weeks. She was watching me closely.

“That’s weird. I don’t remember a letter like that.”

“Well. I think it’s weird too, Esme.” She put the top back on the teapot and shook her head. “I find ... all of this ... very weird. Very disturbing.”

She carefully picked up a cup and poured hot chocolate into it in a steady stream.

I felt anger, a spool of red shadows, unwinding fast in me. I stopped the spool.

“What exactly is weird, Mother?” She held out the cup to me and I took it. My hands were shaking so badly again that the cup rattled noisily in the saucer.

“Esme. Kendall and I are shocked to find you in this ... condition. You look like a ... derelict, your marriage has fallen apart, our grandchild has become the pawn in this dispute between you and Jay ...”