Servants of the Map (22 page)

By a stroke of coincidence Rose preferred to ignore, their love affair began in May, just when Peter had always visited her family in Hammondsport and at the height of beetle season. Deadlines for grants and papers loomed, talks for meetings later that summer had to be prepared, her students all had examinations, and in the lab, where she’d always worked far into the night, her research took a surprising turn that ought to have captivated her entirely. Yet still she made time for Peter. Whole Sundays she spent with him, driving into the forests of western Massachusetts in search of specimens. And evenings too, as the days lengthened. The names of the beetles returned to her, and she found pleasure in this—although for some years now she had, like every molecular biologist her age, spoken scornfully of descriptive biology and taxonomy. Peter, she came to understand, was one of the two or three people in the world most expert in the Silphidae; and within that family he knew more than anyone else about the burying-beetles.

That expertise, she thought—it might not be science, but it was something. She couldn’t hold it against him that he didn’t understand her own work: who did, beyond a handful of people in her field? In June she looked up at a dinner party—his friends, not hers; all a generation
older and so cultured she felt barbarous—and caught him listening as she tried to explain her research to an elderly cellist.

“I look at a protein called ubiquitin,” she said. A college girl in a crisp white shirt cleared the arugula salad and laid clean plates, making Rose uncomfortable; who was she to be waited on? There were flowers embroidered on the linen napkins, and cushions on the chairs. “It has that name because it’s so abundant, and found in all kinds of cells—in people, beetles, yeasts, everything. And it’s almost identical in every species.”

The cellist cocked his head attentively and touched his salmon with a silver fork. Rose wasn’t sure he even knew what a protein was. “What it does,” she said,”—in your cells, in any cell, proteins are continuously synthesized and then degraded back into their component amino acids. The degradation is just as important as the synthesis in regulating cellular metabolism. Ubiquitin molecules bind to other proteins and mark them for degradation. Without that marking and breaking down, nothing in the cell can work. I try to sort out the details of the protein-degradation process.”

She’d left out everything important but still the cellist looked mystified. She was about to change the subject when she saw Peter eavesdropping across the table. To Rose and the cellist, to the table at large, Peter said, “You see, our research isn’t so different after all. My beetles and Rose’s molecule both break large dead things into smaller bits, so new things can be made.”

The link he’d made between their research problems made her hands itch; surely he wasn’t implying that she’d chosen her work because of him and his beetles? But he did grasp her work after all, Rose thought. Or at least its point. Although later, when she tried yet again to explain the enzymatic pathway devoted to the covalent conjugation of ubiquitin to cellular proteins, he smiled and held out his hands palm up, in a gesture of incomprehension. “Different generation,” he said. “And a whole
different field.” But if the fractionating columns and chromatography setups littering her benches were alien to him, what he missed were only the details. He knew a part of her as closed off to the rest of the world as the cupboard where she hid her mother’s relics.

They made love in a dark museum attic, accompanied by the faint ticking of deathwatch beetles calling their mates through the old oak beams. They made love in dusky groves and on hot river rocks, in Rose’s lab and on her kitchen table, in Peter’s office surrounded by dead bugs. All of this—the conjunction of pins and papers and Latin names with flesh and hands and tongues, the mingling of past and present—was thrilling to Rose. Peter pointed to the hard, shell-like front wings of some dermestids scurrying around their colony and said, “Do you remember the name for these?”

She said, “Elytra?” and felt her knees grow weak. When he kissed her neck and buried his fingers in her and said, “Rose, Rose, Rose,
Rose,”
she closed her eyes and she was a girl again, he a young man again, and she came with startling violence. Closing her mouth around his cock, which was curved and smooth but sometimes reluctant, she did not see his paunch but rather the tight muscles vanishing into the pants in which he’d emerged from her parents’ guest room.

How confusing all this was! One night, after too many margaritas, he licked the palm of her hand and said, “When I close my eyes and listen to your voice, it’s as if I’m back in Hammondsport, listening to your mother.”

And she, made careless by the liquor, said, “Were you in love with her?”

“We were never lovers,” Peter said, moving his hand slowly over her breast. “If that’s what you mean.”

It wasn’t; she had never considered this. Only now did that disturbing image pass behind her eyes and then disappear.

“Your parents were happy together,” he went on. He touched the mole
in her armpit. “I would never have interfered. But it’s true I loved them, both of them. And if it hadn’t been for my friendship with Theo—I adored your mother, I did. When the three of us were together your father thrived on the charge between Suky and me. It made him feel even luckier to know that he was the one she’d chosen.”

But that wasn’t right, Rose thought with surprise. Or not wholly right; there had never been a real contest. On the night she’d first seen Peter, Theo had clearly been the sun in which Suky and Peter both basked. Nothing Suky had ever said or done had suggested anything different to Rose. Whatever Peter’s feelings for Suky had been, Suky’s bond with Theo had been unambiguous. Was it possible that Peter, after all this time, still read that wrong?

She sat up and folded her arms around her knees. “What happened between you and my father?” Until now she’d assumed that her mother’s death had separated the men. Some sadness that could not be bridged.

“After I married Lauren, he didn’t seem to want me around anymore,” Peter said, rising reluctantly. “Or not me and Lauren as a couple, anyway. You know how bitter he was, he couldn’t stand to see someone else happy—and we
were
happy those first years. The last time I saw him, he accused me of marrying Lauren just to comfort myself for the loss of Suky, and we had a fight. Then when he got married again I was in Costa Rica and couldn’t go to the wedding, and I guess he thought I was still angry with him.”

Who had taken comfort from whom? Rose wondered. Was it wrong? “I was in love with you then,” she said. “Did you know?”

Peter bent and kissed her leg.

They were apart that summer more than they would have liked. Rose had meetings in Atlanta and Montreal and Spain; Peter lost the last bit of funding for his lab and was forced to begin a humiliating campaign to pry money from the Museum. Each day seemed to increase the disparity in their professional situations, and neither could help knowing
that Rose’s star was rising fast while Peter was struggling just to stay in place. When Rose traveled she thought of Peter constantly, but not Peter as he was; away from him, she constructed a being half the Peter she’d known as a girl and half the Peter she knew now. Returning, seeing him move toward her down one of the long corridors at Logan Airport, she was surprised each time to see how old he was. On these occasions, before his arms wound around her and she sank back into her enchanted state, she felt briefly that there was something shameful in their coupling.

She admitted this to no one; she avoided the issue entirely by avoiding anyone who’d known her as a girl and might have remembered her family’s connection with Peter. She called Theo dutifully once a month, as she had for some years, but said little about her personal life. As she had not for some years. There was nothing so straightforward as a quarrel between them: only a long separation, and Theo’s continued depression, and Rose’s sense, since his remarriage, of no longer mattering to him. That she had not attended his wedding, and that she had not forgiven him for selling the winery; that he had spoken to her sharply when she objected to the sale—well, perhaps it was a quarrel after all, but she couldn’t bear to describe the distance between them this way. When she called she spoke coolly about her work and never mentioned Peter. She took it for granted that Peter, after all these years, wouldn’t reopen his friendship with her father now. To friends she presented her relationship with Peter as one of responsible adults. Bianca aided her inadvertently here; she’d returned to Alaska and was working that summer as a fire-jumper. She could not be reached, and so Rose could not be blamed for keeping her secret.

That it was a secret she finally understood in August, when Peter, pounding basil in olive oil as she cooked linguine, looked up and said, “Do you ever think about marriage? About having kids?”

“No,”
she said. Although of course she did, or had now and then; but not with him, never with him. What was this dreadful feeling in her chest? The heat, the humidity, overwork. For weeks the city had been
sunk in a heat wave, and her apartment was airless and sticky. She tried not to mind when Peter flung his sweaty clothes over the chairs, left bristles and shaving cream in the sink, tossed an arm across her chest in his sleep and then left it there hot and moist. But she did mind, she minded fiercely. As she was beginning to mind the disruption to her work, his bad digestion, her sense that, however patiently he waited up for her at night, he was
waiting.
And then there was the way he expected her to remember everything he’d taught her as a girl: as if her own work might not have driven out some of his. While she was down at the pond with him, helping him capture some
Necrodes,
he stopped her hand just as she was about to drop a specimen into the killing jar.

“That one just molted,” he said. “It’s still teneral—see how pale it is, and how soft? If you kill it now, it’ll shrivel as it dries.”

“How would I know that?”

“I
showed
you, years ago  …”

It was true, she realized. They’d had this conversation two decades earlier, down near Keuka Lake. One of his girlfriends—Lauren?—was with them, lying languid on a rock, and Rose wasn’t paying attention to Peter’s instructions. “I was nine,” she said irritably. “Maybe ten.”

“But mature for your age.” He kissed her shoulder and she twitched away. “Let it harden before you kill it.”

She held the beetle as it darkened and aged before her eyes. Egg, grub, pupa, adult, egg. Holometabolous development, the most advanced form of insect metamorphosis. When Peter wasn’t looking, she tossed her specimen into a shrub. That night, or perhaps the next day, he said, “It was Lauren, you know. I mean the reason we couldn’t have children of our own—it was never me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That it didn’t work out, that everything happened the way it did.”

A few weeks later she went to a meeting in Maine and slept with a
graduate student from a San Diego lab, who rode a mountain bike and wore his hair in a ponytail. When she returned to Boston Peter had bronchitis and emerged from her shower hacking and steaming, each cough making the loose flesh around his nipples shimmy. Something must have shown on her face, because Peter raised his head from a wad of tissue and said, “What?
What?”

“Nothing.” But she continued to stare. It was not so much that he looked like her father as that he was so obviously of her father’s generation.

“It’s no big deal,” he said, coughing again. “I know you hate it when I’m sick, but it’s not a sign, or a symbol, or a warning. It’s bronchitis. Anyone can get it.”

“I know,” she said. The biking biochemist had meant nothing to her, but she found herself thinking of his smooth legs.

She turned and went to her desk, where a huge stack of paper awaited her; she’d been asked to write a chapter for a book devoted solely to the mysteries of ubiquitin. It was absorbing, and very complicated. Nothing Peter could understand.
Can you write? Are you old enough to write?
In the other room, Peter settled onto the futon with a groan.

When they parted, after a quarrel she manufactured, it was like losing her childhood all over again. It was not his fault, exactly, that he’d altered her last vivid memories of her mother, nor was he to blame for the secret she’d kept from Bianca, which increased the distance between them. She had chosen all this, she had chosen him. But years later, when she went to visit her dying father, she found her old trunk in the storeroom. Long ago she’d ransacked her mother’s closet, hauling the contents around with her even during the years when she’d owned almost nothing else. But the trunk she’d left behind, the trunk she left with Theo. Inside it she found the hand lens Suky had given her after Peter’s first visit, the stolen library book, some beetle pictures Bianca had crayoned—when
was that?—and a postcard (she had forgotten this too) which Peter had sent on her eleventh birthday.

Hugs and kisses to my favorite beetle-girl,
he’d written.
Love, Peter.
She mentioned none of this to Theo. But when she sat by his bed and stared at his creased tired hands, it was their shared past she mourned for as much as him.

E
VERYTHING, THINKS ELIZABETH,
is in order.

Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table. In the kitchen—the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand—and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day.