The Explanation for Everything (8 page)

Jeremy, and Sheila, whom he had barely seen in the weeks since whatever had happened between them had happened—passing her with a smile and a quick word at school drop-off, and once stopping to chat by the benches in front of Our Lady of Lourdes—they stood huddled outside his front door, filling Andy with an unpleasant anxiety. She hadn't mentioned anything about their encounter, and neither had he, and he assumed that whatever awkwardness it had engendered would soon enough evaporate in the repetition of their day-to-day routine. But she hadn't been in his house since that night, and her presence there now felt enormous. Without wanting to, he imagined her wide white body, that sturdy underwear. He opened the door. They came in, stood by the door.

“Hey, guys,” he said, standing, affable. Sheila had her hands in the pocket of her sweatshirt. “Anybody want some spaghetti? Rachel here was saying that we should start making our own sauce, but I don't know—”

“Actually, what I was saying was that I should have my own key to the house. Jeremy has his own key, right? And he's
eight.
”

“Rachel—” Andy said.

Now they were all standing, and Sheila looked apologetic, as though her very presence had started a fight. “We were just taking a walk home from pizza and saw your light on. We thought we'd say hi.” She paused. “It's been a while.”

“Isn't that right, Mrs. Humphreys? Doesn't Jeremy have his own key?” Rachel had a hand on her hip.

“You know, Rachel,” Sheila said, her expression turning from plaintive to responsible, “what your dad decides about you and your safety has nothing to do with whether Jeremy has a key—”

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you guys want to play foosball?” Belle asked. They'd found a foosball table at a rummage sale the previous weekend, set it up in the corner of the living room.

“Argh,” said Rachel, who could see she was getting nowhere. Jeremy, who was short and malnourished-looking (all those chicken nuggets) followed the girls out of the room. And then Andy was alone with Sheila, in his house. Outside, the crab apple tree was just starting to shed.

He turned to the sink, began washing the pans.

“I haven't seen you much,” she said, picking up a plate and ferrying it to sink.

“You don't have to do that,” he said, taking the plate from her hands. They were standing under the light by the sink, but the moody darkness was all around them, and Andy suddenly felt alarmed by how poor the lighting was in this room. Surely he could buy some lamps, some better bulbs.

“I just wanted to make sure—make sure everything was okay.”

“Of course it is,” Andy said. “Why wouldn't it be?”

She ferried another plate. “I don't know,” she said, disingenuous. “I just wanted to check.”

“Everything's great,” he said. He felt all the small good parts of his day vanishing, dinner, the rousing speech to Lionel, so that when he fell asleep later that night all he would be left with would be Sheila's pinched face and the guilt blooming in his stomach. Although why be guilty? Sure, he'd never had much of a swinging bachelorhood but he was fairly sure this was how it worked, that men and women could have sex with one another casually and still be friends later. Or had he blown it? Was he supposed to have asked her out to dinner? Was he supposed to have proposed marriage? Was he supposed to be haunted?

Sheila, in the pool of light, looked resigned. She was actually prettier than he gave her credit for.

“Really,” he said. “I've just been busy—I've been trying to finish this NSF grant, but I need to complete a few more studies first.”

“How's it going?” she asked. The table was clear, the plates were in the dishwasher, and Sheila seemed unsure what to do next. She leaned against a counter. “Your research?”

He motioned her to sit. “Do you want decaf? If I make some? It's going—well, it's been challenging lately.” He rarely made coffee after dinner but he felt a need to keep moving. “I thought I'd discovered a protein differentiation that explained why certain alcoholic mice were driven to drink past inebriation. Other studies had suggested something similar, so I thought I was on the right track, but now I'm not so sure. My experiments aren't going the way I'd hoped.”

“What would that mean?” she asked. “If your experiment works?”

“Something we've long suspected but is hard to confirm,” Andy said. “That there are differences—key differences—in the way alcoholic brains metabolize ethanol.”

“Like mine.”

“Well, I don't know about yours,” he said. He scooped out the decaf, turned on the coffeemaker. “We can't necessarily correlate what happens with mouse brains and human brains. I mean, mice are a fair representation of human brains, but I wouldn't want to make any leaps about your brain from what I did in my lab today. Unless you want me to dissect you.”

“What?”

He laughed a little at his own awkwardness. “Do you want anything in your coffee?”

“Black is fine.” He delivered their coffees and sat down across from her, played with a splotch of dried marinara with his thumb. “The idea of your research,” Sheila said, “is that alcoholic brains function differently from nonalcoholic brains.”

“Right.”

“And you don't think that simply feeding them endless amounts of alcohol might change the way their brains work?”

“You mean am I turning them into alcoholics?” Andy shook his head. “I don't think so. These are mice who should drink as much as I can give them.”

“But what if you never gave them any? I mean the alcoholic ones, what if you just kept them away from the sauce? Would their brains change? Would they be like normal mice?”

“I don't know,” Andy said. “I haven't tried that.”

“So you're just assuming they're the way they are because that's the only way you can see them?”

If she was getting at something deeper here, Andy wasn't interested. The research he was conducting was a basic study of the mechanisms of certain neuropeptides, which eventually, he hoped, might lead to a better understanding of brain chemistry under the influence of alcohol. Of course he had long stopped expecting that it would lead to a bigger or more prestigious job for himself, but he thought that maybe his own small work might help future scientists figure something out down the road. The work was important to him. He wanted to understand the mechanism of the alcoholic brain.

Sheila was fiddling with the Claddagh ring she wore in place of a wedding band. “I don't know much about the genetics here—I mean, I didn't study biology or anything—but, you know, nobody else in my family is an alcoholic.”

“That doesn't necessarily—”

“And I'm not entirely sure that if certain things in my life hadn't happened—look, alcohol is a cheap and easy way of feeling better. Right? Things happened to me and I needed to feel better cheaply and easily.”

“Sheila, this isn't about you.”

“Let me finish,” she said. “I had a small son at home. I didn't have time or inclination to go to therapy. I tried taking some Prozac but it made me nauseous and it didn't help—”

“Sheila, seriously, my research isn't about you.”

“How could you say that?” She laughed, but the laugh sounded bitter, which was unlike Sheila. And he knew and hated the idea that she was bitter about him, about his behavior. “Of course your research is about me.”

He sighed. “It's not. I started it before we even met.”

“Not me specifically, Andy, but it's about me, or people like me. Right? You want to stick alcoholics in a box, say they are the way they are because of their genes, so that me and everyone else in AA and the guy who killed your wife, you can make some kind of simple sense of us, and I get that—”

“Don't,” Andy said, surprised to feel his heart pound.

“Why not?” she said. She pushed her coffee mug on the table with one hand, then pushed it the other way with the other.

“Because my research is about more than just one person. Or even a group of people. It's about the brain.” He wished he was better at explaining this. It was hard for laypeople to separate biology from sociology, he knew that, but still he wished Sheila had just a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the way animal research worked.

“I guess I'm just not comfortable with you extrapolating data from mice into a grand understanding of alcoholism.”

“You might not be comfortable with it,” Andy said, “but that's science. In many ways mouse genes are a decent representation of our own, and if we experiment—”

“Mice don't find pictures of their husbands on the Internet with their best friends—”

“Sheila—”

“Mice don't find out their ex-husbands gave them syphilis.”

He blinked.

“Don't worry, Andy. It was years ago. I took the antibiotics right away.”

She stood, took her mug to the coffeemaker, even though she didn't need a refill. She put her hands on the counter. She had chipped pink polish on her fingers.

“Sheila, I'm sorry if my research makes you uncomfortable.”

She was still facing the other way. “Look, you don't have to avoid me because you're afraid it will be weird. It's not going to be weird. We can still be friends.”

“I'm not avoiding you,” he said. “Honestly. I've just been busy.”

She turned to him like she knew that he was lying. But instead of calling him on it, she said, “Fair enough.”

“Really,” he said. He stood too, went to where she was standing, tried patting her on the shoulder but the gesture felt forced so instead he gave her a half hug. She leaned her head against his arm for a second, but he couldn't tell if she was stiffening inside.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. Then she gathered her coat and called for Jeremy and said good-bye to Andy with a brief but not gingerly hug, and he felt like they'd be okay after a while, that they would still be friends. He wouldn't talk about his research with her anymore and she wouldn't talk about the guy who killed Louisa and that way they would still be friends.

But later, as he was tucking Belle into bed, she asked him if she and Jeremy were going to be brother and sister one day.

“I'm sorry? Are you what?”

“That's what he said,” Belle said. “That his mother said that maybe he and I would be brother and sister one day. With Rachel.”

“I don't think so,” Andy said. He kissed her on the head. “He must be daydreaming.”

“So you and his mom aren't getting married?”

“Belle, I promise you I would tell you if I were getting married.”

“That's what I thought,” she said. “Okay.”

It was almost ten when he went back out to the kitchen, where Rachel was assiduously chopping garlic. Ordinarily he would have told her it was probably a little late for cooking, and ordinarily she might have either listened or ignored him, but now, humiliated, he went straight for the television, unwilling to know what his oldest daughter knew, and unable to ask her any questions.

SIX

Princeton was one of the most beautiful places Andy had ever seen—rolling lawns and dignified courtyards and cottage-like shops selling Spode china—but still he left the day after he received his PhD and never returned. In fact, he'd been in Miami four years already before the thing happened between Rosenblum and the girl. It was this thing that ended his friendship with Rosenblum, not because Andy was so ashamed of what Hank had done (although he was) but because he had been too busy with his life in Miami to reach out to him, pick up the phone. As far as he knew, Rosenblum had never forgiven him his absence. But Andy also knew he'd been replaced in the old man's heart several times in the four years between his departure from Princeton and the incident with the girl; Rosenblum was profligate with his affection, but not constant, and several graduate students had already taken Andy's place even before the girl came along. Andy heard from some of them. Others, in shock, buried their heads in their own work, too sad about the girl, whom many of them had known.

The girl. Louisa had been stunned but not surprised by the grotesque story, and Rosenblum's behavior. “I always had a feeling Hank was going to get ahead of himself one day, do something accidentally terrible.”

“I still feel bad for him.”

“Are you going to reach out? Here, hold her down.” She was squeezing a dropperful of antibiotics into Belle's wailing maw, Belle who was plagued by ear infections until she got tubes on her second birthday.

“I will,” Andy said, “I'll call him,” knowing even then he wouldn't—knowing that it was possible he would never speak to Rosenblum again. After the antibiotics, they gave Belle Tylenol, then walked her in her stroller around Quail Run's pool until she fell asleep.

But although Andy never did call, he kept up, to a certain extent, with Rosenblum's whereabouts, first through the news reports and later through an informal network of postdocs who kept a lane of the Internet thrumming with news of the great man's peregrinations. It seemed Rosenblum was in Europe for a while, then South America for a valedictory tour through Darwin's Galápagos, cataloging those famous finches. Then the lawsuit went through and Rosenblum was suddenly bankrupt (Princeton refused to cover him, as he had already been dismissed when the verdict came in) and now, according to reports, Rosenblum lived near Montauk, in a small house given to him by an admirer of
Religion's Dangerous Lie.

Andy had thought about calling him when Lou was killed, then thought again. It was selfish to look for pity where he had offered none; moreover, Rosenblum's thoughts on death were broadly admirable but, on a person-to-person level, repellant.

Regardless, Andy was haunted by his old mentor—or, if not haunted exactly (only one person was allowed to haunt Andy at a time, thank you) certainly he felt attached to his memory, and often trailed by a feeling that Rosenblum was just around the corner, smoking a pipe, pontificating. Which is why he felt both astonishment and satisfaction to find a large envelope sitting on his office desk one morning covered in Rosenblum's kindergarten penmanship. He'd been expecting this without realizing he was expecting it.

“Rosemary? Where'd this letter come from?”

“UPS just dropped it off. Why? Is it suspicious?”

“No,” Andy said. “It's just . . .” He sat down on his chair to examine the envelope—it had a return address from a legal office, but the handwriting was unmistakable. Rosenblum! That old bastard. He held the letter in both hands, admiring it. A part of him wanted to kiss it. God, he'd missed him. He would not tear open the letter; he would savor it like a gift.

“Professor?” A timid knock on his open door. Lionel Shell, in a sweater-vest.

“Lionel?”

“I wanted to tell you thanks for the other day. I'm doing much better now. You really—I appreciated our talk. Thank you.”

“Great,” Andy said. “Glad to hear it.” He gave Lionel his you're-dismissed look, turned back to the letter. He'd forgotten how even Rosenblum's toddler scrawl could inspire, in him, a sense of revelation: when he first started working with Rosenblum he wondered if he should save the memos the great man left him just in case they were worth something some day. He'd imagined himself, in his wilder flights of fancy, one day cataloging Rosenblum's papers in the scientific libraries of Princeton or Oxford or MIT, archiving both the brilliant manuscripts and the tedious minutiae, and contributing, from his own files, forgotten handwritten missives like “see notes on self-reinforcing divergence” or “I've got some pastrami in the fridge.” And now, again, Rosenblum's writing in his hands.

“You got a present?”

Lionel was still in his doorway.

“I thought you left.”

“You going to open it?” Lionel said, smiling. He came into the office, plopped himself on Andy's extra chair.

He was too pleased even to scowl at Lionel. “Oh, why not?” Andy enjoyed the anticipatory beat of his heart for one more second, then took a pair of scissors from his drawer and slid them along the side of the envelope, opening it to reveal a handwritten note on stationery with a legal letterhead.

“Who's it from?”

“Jesus, Lionel, could I have a little privacy?”

Lionel looked wounded. “Sure. Sorry.” The boy collected himself, went away.

The letter was vintage Rosenblum:

Waite, been keeping up with yr dealings, know you filed for tenure. Assume you can't be hurt now from dealing with a semicriminal like yr old pal Hank. Proud of you for getting this far by the way, although half-ass school you gotta admit. Do you admit it? What kind of man have you become, anyway?

Wrote a book and would like your opinion if you still have time for the man who made you who you are. If not, you can fuck yrself. But if you're willing to look the thing over, send me a note care of my lawyer at Briggs Watson, New York. Thinking of you fondly. Hank Rosenblum

Stapled to the note was the manuscript's title page. The thing was called “Death and Immortality.”

Death and immortality, religion's dangerous lie.

Andy turned to his laptop immediately to write to Hank via the lawyer:

Yes, I'd love the manuscript. And please, if you could send me Hank's e-mail, his phone number, anything, I'd love the chance to talk to him. It's been years and I haven't known where to find him, but if you would be so kind as to pass his information along, I'd be appreciative.

As he was pressing “print,” he heard another tentative knock on his door. God, Lionel, go away.

“Professor Waite?” A female voice—not Lionel. Argh, but on the other hand, his light was on.

“Yes.”

Melissa Potter, in a protective position, slightly hunched, her backpack sliding over a shoulder. “You said this was a good time to meet?”

“I did?”

She looked alarmed. “To discuss my independent study,” she said. “I brought all these books,” she added, letting the backpack fall to the floor. “Is it still an okay time?”

Was it an okay time? What he wanted was to spend more time with Rosenblum, reread the note once or twice (what did he mean by “keeping up with yr dealings”?) and perhaps do a little Internet stalking. See what Rosenblum had been up to. He wasn't like his students or his daughters, people who spent so much time online researching their friends and rivals they could name what everyone they knew ate for breakfast each morning. It had been a long time since Andy had poked around, looking for news on Rosenblum. But now he thought he'd spend an hour or two on the cause. And maybe that lawyer at Briggs Watson would give him something to go on.

“Professor?”

Andy looked up at the girl, sucking on her cross in his doorway.
Didn't your mother ever teach you it's rude to stand in people's doorways?

“Can I please come in?”

She took his blank look as assent, slumped into his office and sat heavily on a chair. Then she bent down and began retrieving book after book from her backpack, piling them up on the corner of his desk. Reluctantly, Andy put Hank's letter back in its envelope, stuck it in his drawer. The books kept coming. They were all brand new and published by places he'd never heard of.

What would Rosenblum make of all this? Would Rosenblum ever have agreed to talking about intelligent design with this girl? He probably would have. Rosenblum loved a good fight, and he especially loved fighting with women. (Or maybe he wouldn't have seen it as a good fight at all—the opponent was so uninformed, and so droopy.)

“So,” Andy said, “these are the texts you're going to use for research?”

Melissa nodded, stuck her gold cross into her mouth, then let it fall. “I borrowed some of them from my church,” she said, bending again, fishing for more materials. “And some of them I ordered online. The bookstore didn't have them. But it's not like I was expecting them to. I mean, why would I expect diversity of opinion from a college bookstore?” She sat up with a smirk and a paperback in hand.

God Is a Rainbow.
The cover, cheaply bound, showed a blurrily printed rainbow with a pot of gold at one end and a cross at the other.

“A rainbow? Is that a metaphor?”

She looked confused. “It's my favorite. It was written by my pastor.”

“Ah.”

Adam's Rib
.
The Macroevolution Myth
.
The Mystery of Intent,
and this cover cribbed directly from the Sistine Chapel, except where God was supposed to be reaching out for Adam's finger instead he reached for a test tube.

“How many do you have here? Have you read them all?”

“Um, I think I have nineteen. These are the ones I've finished,” she said, gesturing to the pile on his desk. “I thought I'd give them to you so you could get started.”

“Me?” The various piles of papers on his desk looked lopsided, ready to fall, his research grant oversized and heavy—he reached out to straighten it, avoiding Melissa's narrowing gaze.

“How else are you going to understand my independent study? If you don't read these books how will you know what I'm doing? Besides, I agreed to read
your
books.”

“Right,” he said. “Well, you understand I'm busy. And also, as professor, it's my job to assign and yours to read.” He stopped fiddling with the stack, picked up
The Macroevolution Myth.

“So maybe you could look at just a few? Like five or six?”

Andy grunted. “How is it possible,” asked the jacket copy, “for
random mutations
to turn one species into another? Is this the best Darwinians can come up with? Shouldn't there be a better explanation to this most important of human questions?”

“I think you'll like that one,” Melissa said, settling herself on the chair. “It's pretty good. And here,” she said, flicking through her notebook, “I've outlined the dimensions of my study, the paper I'm going to write at the end. My thesis is that intelligent design is a more realistic alternative to Darwinian evolution, if you think that sounds okay. Or something—maybe you can make it sound smarter than that for me. I'm not sure I'm in love with ‘more realistic alternative.' ” She pondered this for a moment. “But anyway I realized I never had you sign the paperwork, so I brought a pen, if you could just—”

“Do you even understand the basics of Darwinian evolution yet?” He channeled Rosenblum. “Have you read anything that I've asked you to read? Or are you going to start debating something you don't even really understand?”

She hunched her shoulders, a silent harrumph. “I understand Darwinian evolution,” she said. “I read the books you assigned, and I took Bio 101 at County.”

“So what do you think it is, exactly?”

“Evolution? Uh, you know,” she said, sarcastic. “Survival of the fittest. Natural selection.”

“Right,” he said, “but what do those things mean?”

She sighed, heavily. She didn't like being underestimated. “Single-celled organisms evolved over countless generations, via the accumulation of small genetic mutations. The organisms that survived and passed on their genes continued to breed, and the ones that didn't went extinct. Eventually, these single-celled organisms evolved into all the different animals and plants and fungi and bacteria on the planet.”

“That's right,” Andy said, pleased with her succinct response, having grown accustomed, when asking questions of undergrads, to much more hemming and prevarication.

“But just because I can define it doesn't mean I believe it.”

“Because?”

“Because it's patently ridiculous,” she said. She stopped fiddling with her necklace. “If you're willing to accept that life came about because, I don't know, lightning struck some organic material in the primordial soup—and this, by the way, is not something I'm willing to accept—then fine, that's how life began. But to think that random mutations could be so miraculously beneficial as to create the eye, the wing, the lung—can't you see how silly that is?”

“Melissa,” he said, “just because your books say it's silly doesn't mean your books are right.”

“Why are you willing to ridicule books you haven't even read?”

“I'm not,” he said, then started again. “It's just—books like these, with these unprovable arguments—” He stopped. He was going about this the wrong way. How would Rosenblum have done it? With more sarcasm, of course, but also he wouldn't let the undergraduate frame the argument.

“Well?”

“Look, why
couldn't
random mutations develop into an eye over eons? In fact, why wouldn't they? If you started, say, with cells that just happened to be slightly more photosensitive than others, and if organisms that were able to detect light through these photosensitive cells had that much of an advantage, in a hostile world, over organisms that couldn't detect light, why
wouldn't
successive generations of selection refine those photosensitive cells into, you know—something like an eye?”