Saving St. Germ (7 page)

I introduced her to Q and spent the rest of the party watching them fall in love. I was mesmerized. It was like watching a movie. Millie laughed her great laugh; Q pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger, closing his eyes, leaning in to make an animated point. Then they toasted each other, clinking their glasses together in front of the cheery fire leaping in its stone grotto.

“What an amazing man!” Millie cried in the car on the way home. I was driving, a little drunk
—
I remember being so hunched over my chin almost rested on the wheel. It was a cold starry April night. Everything outside looked eager
—
the black march of the lampposts, the first electrified shocks of green green grass, waiting to be frozen out or sweetly engaged with the season: stunned to the roots by spring.

“I see now why you think so highly of him,” she said. She leaned over and touched my wrist. “And sweetheart, he thinks the world of you.”

So I got to see it, like a formula, a balanced equation
—
two people I loved fell in love. I could relive a little history of human chemistry. I was permitted to see my mother young again, laughing, swinging a pocketbook. I got to see Q controlling a kind of joyful goofiness. He pursed his lips at odd moments and reddened, as if he was compressing a huge burst of laughter. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if he didn’t believe what he saw before him. Then he’d go dutifully back to work
—
and quit early! To take my mother to a Pops concert!

I started applying for jobs
—
it was time. I wanted to go to Southern California because it was unlike anything I could imagine. It might as well have been the moon. I wanted to get away from my mother, Q, Cambridge, the familiar labs. I wanted a life that belonged entirely to me. Once I had wanted an academic reputation; now I simply wanted out.

When I was hired by the University of Greater California, UGC, I was a little stunned. Now I’d done it. UGC is big, but its chemistry and biochemistry faculties are highly inbred. In fact, in my area of biochemical research, the department was made up entirely of men. But I didn’t care if I’d been picked to fill a demographic requirement. I cobbled together a most peculiar situation at UGC. Though I was trained as a biochemist, with advanced work in molecular biology, I asked, as a special request, to teach undergraduate Organic. I wanted to prove to myself (and Q) that I could hug the earth and theorize. I wanted (I thought) to inspire the young with some kind of politics or rather, (god help me!) some sense of
honor
in a scientific age that goes without. At the same time, I didn’t want to just transmit the politics I’d contracted from Q.

What I really needed was time to
think—
and fortunately there was some time for that built in. The one thing I did right was to insist that I not be involved in grant-seeking or fund-raising
—
from the government or the private sector. Some professional, hired by the university, could advertise my work to potential backers. I wanted to walk in my lab
and work,
walk in my classroom
and teach—
not hustle for bucks.

One night before I left Cambridge, my mother telephoned.

“I can’t talk long, Mom
—
I’ve got a lot of writing to do on this manuscript.
And
I really haven’t analyzed my data.”

Mom was feeling terrible. She said she felt awkward bringing it up, but she’d been thinking about my “friendship” with Q and she wanted me to know that if her relationship with him caused me any anxiety, she’d end it.

I asked her if she was suggesting that I had a thing going with him.

“I’m not implying anything, Esme. He seems to think you might be feeling a little displaced.”

This pissed me off. I remember throwing down the novel I’d been
r
eading instead of rewriting my manuscript for my last publication as a postdoc. It was Charles Baxter’s
First Light,
one of my all-time favorites, and it pissed me off even more that the book lost pages as it slid across the floor.

“Well, that’s certainly fucking arrogant.”

“Esme ...”

“Mom. There’s nothing between Q and me, except scholarly respect. All on my part, of course. To him, I’m just a grunt, a slavey. If you’re attracted to him, that’s great. I’ve never been, I swear. I don’t know, Mom, have you looked really closely at his
ears
?”

So then I had to face him, had to go in to his office and have it out with him. All this time, I’d been avoiding him, making excuses, exiting the lab when he arrived.

I knocked at his door, then pushed it open. He was startled to see me, and he struggled to get up from his overstuffed chair. He began wheezing and barking, rearing way back
—
he had a lot to say, it seemed.

I held up my hand. “I am not in love with you.”

I shrugged out of my knapsack, filled as usual with about forty pounds of Xeroxed journal papers, and I dropped it with a big thud on the floor. I went over to the window and looked out at the sunny quad. I’d rehearsed everything that I was going to say and I didn’t want to screw it up. I turned around and faced him.

“I am not in love with you, but I
am
suffering because of you. I couldn’t say why for a long time, and now I’ve finally figured it out. It’s not you and my mother, I find all that kind of charming. I figured out that what’s really disturbing me is the way you think.”

Q sat absolutely still, for once unblinking, unwheezing.

“Go on, please,” he said. His phone buzzed; he reached over and clicked a button that held all his calls.

“Not long ago you told me that this work may be too emotional for me. I didn’t understand what you meant. Now I do. I’ve always believed that science requires its practitioners be in a state of despair, informed despair. The problem with you is
...”

What energy one derives from defiance! It fueled my speech, it filled my body, till I felt I was taller, stronger. He watched me, growing before his eyes.

“Look, Q, the problem is
—
you are too fake-hopeful
—
that’s what screwed me up. You are full of this
crap,
this Romanticism of Science. We’re not just investigating the nature of matter, but saving people as well. Affecting culture, determining the Good. How did all this social enlightenment creep into the lab? That’s what I want to know. Did it come in with the big grant money, when molecular biology got so sexy?”

Q stood up, a little shakily, pushing at his glasses. He had a very long, fine-lipped mouth. He opened it, then closed it again.

Some students went by in the hall outside, laughing raucously, calling out to each other. For a second, the sun went behind a cloud, the room darkened, and all you could hear was their voices, calling. “Erik? Jackson! Erik? Come on, let’s
go
!”

I found this a good moment to pick up my knapsack.

“I just want to be able to
think.
You know, maybe I’m not made for this bench work after all. Maybe I’m not such an egalitarian grunt; I don’t believe I can save everybody in the fucking world. I
want
them saved but
I
can’t do it
—
can you? MS, cystic fibrosis, AIDS ... can you? Why are you pretending you can?”

Q sat down again. He looked more in control, though he let go a wheeze that sounded like a loose fitting on a radiator valve.

“You
need
to feel like this,” he said. The desk phone buzzed again. “It’s OK, Esme.”

“Thank you for being my teacher, Professor Quandahl. But please don’t patronize me ever again.”

I paused in the doorway.

“You know what else I think, Prof Quandahl? I think the DNA industry is
hype.
DNA can’t catalyze reactions on its own; why is everybody pretending it
can?
It’s like Prof Lewontin says, we’ve made it into a
map—
of this holy genomic kingdom of the future. The whole Human Genome Project smells of
myth: We’ll fix everyone’s genes, we’ll never die!
You brag about being a
bench
scientist, but you insist on seeing genetics as
design,
intellectual insight as superior to physical
—
you don’t
like
the biological working class, the cell assembly line.” I stopped for breath. I was shaking.

“All of you guys, every molecular biologist in our acquaintance,” I continued, “has some sort of financial investment in biotechnology. Everybody’s
cleaning up
on the Genome Myth!” He opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head, dazed.

“You’re not going to let me talk at all, are you?”

I told him that I’d been listening to him for years. “It’s my turn now,” I said. “I’m entitled.”

“One last thing,” I said, over my shoulder. “I don’t want to hear this conversation played back from my mother’s lips.”

He found his voice.

“Conversation?”

“Well,
monologue
then.”

“I’ll do whatever you wish, Esme.”

I turned around again. I just couldn’t seem to get out the door.

“You do make a great couple. I wanted to be the first to tell you that.”

He smiled, then his secretary buzzed through the Hold. He inclined his head toward the speaker and it gave me some satisfaction knowing that when he looked up, I’d be gone.

Q was not the only one I said good-bye to. There was Jesse Falbo. Jesse was my roommate; he wanted to be my buddy—but he did best as my lover. He was my lover during a time when a lover seemed an unnecessary complication, during the height of my lab research. But in fact, most of the time his presence soothed me, he made my life easier for me.

He was the one who did the imitation of Q’s cough. More than anything, I think, I must have needed someone who could put Q in perspective for me. Jesse was the guy. He was completely irreverent. Harvard Med School had only made him more of what he was coming in: a tough Italian guy from Worcester, a jock, a deadpan joker, anarchist, son of a milkman, summer-upper, lover of solutions
—
occasional bar brawler when all other solutions failed. He was one of the med fellows at the institute and he’d discovered it delighted him to give me trouble
—
but I didn’t mind. Unlike Q’s criticism, Jesse’s seemed like ragging from a sibling. Jesse I could handle, I thought.

We said good-bye in a Thai restaurant. Our drinks came with hibiscus blossoms floating in them. I put my blossom in my hair and immediately sneezed.

Jesse looked down at his shirt. “Amazing aim,” he said. “You got snot all over me.”

“Don’t wash. It’s the last time you’ll get any of
my
bodily fluids on you.” I was leaving, driving to California in the morning. I thought I couldn’t wait.

“Last?” He raised his eyebrows. “The
very
last?” I looked at him, then at his hand resting on the table. It leaped into a focus of terrible anatomical clarity: bones and blood vessels beneath the skin: a clear throbbing map.

“Listen, Jesse, I’m getting sick. I keep sneezing. Or I’m allergic to
this
.”

I stabbed with my chopstick at the hibiscus, which had landed in my plate, then speared it and waved it in his face.

“Watch out with that thing. It’s pollinating. I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency in you toward hypochondria this last month or two. You say you’re sick all the time; you actually skipped lab five or six times. Does it have anything to do with your mother and Spock?”

I didn’t say anything. A waitress brought our appetizer: chicken and pork saté with peanut sauce.

“I
am
sick. I’ve been getting migraines and I have a terrible pain in my heart.”

“Yeah. Don’t we
all
.”

I did feel sick, but I picked up a chicken saté, dismantled it, and ate it, thinking irritably that he was right about the hypochondria. I’d had all my symptoms checked out and felt disappointed to learn that there was nothing wrong with me. But I couldn’t seem to ever feel good these days; I’d get up and fall back into bed, exhausted, unfocused.

The waitress scurried around, bowing, lighting little candles in translucent lotus cups. Jesse leaned into the glow as he ate, and his features took on an eeriness, like a kid’s face above a flashlight.

“Listen, Esme.”

His underlit face and the deadpan tone made me perk up as I chewed.

“OK.” He took a deep breath. “There’s a
feeling
in the air here. You feel it as well as I do. It’s not that you’re leaving, it’s
how
you’re leaving.
This
...” He waved his hand back and forth between us. “... doesn’t
get it.
You’re just gonna
disappear
? Huh? Hey,
talk
to me about it,
that’s
all.”

His face moved out of the candle power and he noticed that I was laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I put my head down and shook. The whole table shook. It had taken him a while to notice; had he thought I was weeping? The image of Jesse as ministering angel somehow made me giddy. But not because it was so farfetched. Because it was true. When I slept next to him, I felt safe.

The waitress came with more food, covered the table with steaming platters. Jesse sat across from me, looking astonished. When I look back, I can call up the expression on his face; he
must
have known that I was faking him out. I sat, wiping my eyes, trying to control my laughter, which sounded phony now, even to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t feel that
bad.
Just
peculiar
.”

There was a long silence. Jesse put down his chopsticks and picked up the hibiscus I’d thrown down earlier. It had furled itself into a tight cocoon, which he unrolled now carefully, pressing it flat with his fingers. I’ve always thought fallen hibiscus blossoms look like tiny shrouds, little dead babies littering the ground. This thought nearly sent me off into panicky, morbid laughter again, but I overcame it. We both stared at the blossom in his hand
—
unwrapped, gently wrinkled as human skin. His fingers traced the inward spiraling center around the stamen. This embarrassed me even more. His hands were deft, he was going to be a surgeon. They were always scrubbed clean, I noticed, unlike my own, hopelessly stained with lab muck.