The Middle Kingdom (12 page)

‘Fine,' Walter said, with the first trace of anger I'd seen him show. ‘Fuck yourself. Go. You're crazy if you think you can jerk me around like this again – I've had it.'

‘I've had it,' Eileen said, mimicking Walter's tight, trembling voice.

Walter clamped his teeth together and turned and headed down the hall without another word. I stared at his back – was that it? Surely he meant to do something else. Randy – even Randy – had painted my breasts green, and although that hadn't been an attempt to keep me at least it had been a response. Eileen looked up and caught me watching Walter. Her hair was cut in a shag and she was dressed like a student, but I saw in her face that she wasn't so young. Thirty, thirty-five – she had a fan of fine wrinkles around her eyes and her neck was gaunt. She picked up a purple satin pillow and clutched it to her chest. ‘Trot after Walter, fat girl,' she said, waving me away.

I blushed and did as she said. Walter stood at the end of the hall, waiting patiently at a door set perpendicular to the others. When I reached him, he opened it.

‘The room's above the garage,' he explained. ‘So it's a little cool in the winter, but I'll give you a space heater and an electric blanket. The other students have liked it fine.'

I shuffled past him and looked in. My room – a narrow bed covered with a rose-print quilt, a desk, a chair, a reading lamp, a closet, and a small counter with a hot-plate and a sink. Cream-colored walls that sloped toward the roof and a worn hooked rug worked in faded pinks and greens. My room.

‘There's a bathroom next door,' Walter said. ‘We don't use it. The hot plate is only for boiling water, but you may use the kitchen downstairs, within certain guidelines. We – I – travel a lot, and you'd be expected to look after the house when I'm away. That's why we rent this.'

I was faint with hope, giddy with desire. I wanted this room more than I'd wanted anything in years.

Walter ticked off the rules on his fingers. ‘No loud music,' he said. ‘No male visitors. No visitors at all when I'm away. No smoking. No drugs.'

‘No problem,' I said. ‘All I want is a quiet place to work and sleep.' I took a breath and asked the big question. ‘How much?'

‘Depends,' he said.

‘On what?'

He looked down the hall. Eileen had finished stomping around and was headed for the stairs, her purse and her purple silk pillow under her arm. ‘She's leaving,' I pointed out, thinking,
Go. Go after her. Do something.

‘I know,' he said. He crossed his arms over his stomach, holding his elbows in his hands, and when I looked at him quizzically he shook his head. ‘What am I supposed to do?' he said. ‘She's crazy. She hates men. This is the fourth time she's taken off, and I hope to hell she stays away this time. You can't imagine what it's been like, living with a loony-tune who blames you for every goddamn thing in her life. That women's group of hers, they've got her so twisted around she thinks I'm the anti-Christ.'

He sighed and ran his hand over the back of his head, where the hair was just beginning to thin. We stood there in the silence, looking away from each other and listening to the house empty itself. We heard the front door slam, the click of heels down the flagstone walk, the soft rustle of clothes being gathered into bags. The fence gate creaked, opening and closing. Walter parted the white curtains and stared out the window until the car below started and drove away.

‘She did it,' he said, his voice full of disgust. ‘She's gone. Good riddance.'

‘I have to go too,' I said nervously. ‘I'll call you later, maybe, and we can talk some more about this …'

He sighed again and squared his shoulders, and after a minute more he turned to face me. I couldn't tell if the lines in his face were from pain or age. ‘I'm going to need some help here,' he said. ‘Cleaning, laundry, perhaps some shopping and cooking. Would you be interested in doing that in exchange for rent?'

It was too strange to be true. I knew I shouldn't have seen any of this, shouldn't be in this house, but I had hardly any money and no other place to live. I leapt on his offer before he could change his mind, before I could think what I was getting into.

‘I'd love to,' I said. ‘I'll keep to my room, you'll hardly know I'm here, and whatever I find for a summer job won't get in the way of the housework.'

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Move in whenever you want.' He reached down and straightened the rose-print quilt on the bed, which was already perfectly taut.

I spent most of that first summer at Walter's house alone.

Walter and his herd of graduate students stayed at his research station at the Quabbin Reservoir, collecting numbers: how many yellow perch lived in a certain part of the reservoir? How many trout? How many bass? How many square feet of algae, how deep the mud, how warm the water, how high the levels of pesticides, organophosphates, dissolved oxygen and nitrogen; along the shores and in the surrounding woods, how many rabbits, voles, moles, shrews, hawks? Each member of Walter's team was tracking something, and all of them generated numbers. Walter brought the numbers to me.

I was working for him – my title was ‘Laboratory Assistant' and he'd arranged to pay me for the summer from his research grant. Once or twice a week, he drove the twenty miles back from the reservoir to pick up some clean clothes and drop off his raw data. I didn't understand his work, that first summer, and I blinked vaguely when he explained how he hoped to feed all his data into the university computer and build a simulation model of the reservoir's ecosystem. But I didn't have to understand. All I had to do was to transcribe the data he brought me each week onto index cards and careful graphs. Walter praised my neatness and accuracy and I
was
neat – I had my Rapidograph and some lettering templates, and the graphs I made were better than he'd ever had.

When fall came and I started school, Walter encouraged me to study biology rather than art. ‘You already
know
how to draw,' he said. ‘Why don't you learn something new? You have a real flair for biology.' I was so lonely then, so eager for praise from anyone, that I took his advice. I took general zoology, introductory chemistry, and botany my first semester; when spring came I took genetics and physics and math. The work came easily to me, more easily than I expected, and by my second summer I was beginning to understand what Walter did. My hard work was repaid, then – Walter asked me if I'd like to join the summer team at the reservoir. This was an honor, he let me know; I'd be the only undergraduate there. And because the two of us had shared a house all year as innocently as siblings, sticking to our separate rooms even though I cooked, cleaned, did laundry like a wife, I didn't think to question Walter's motives.

‘I could use another pair of hands,' he said. ‘You could stay in the trailer with me and help out with the perch study.'

I was glad to be asked. I was glad, at first, to stay in the trailer and not in one of the shabby tents. The trailer, ugly and green, was parked on a grassy slope fifty yards back from the reservoir. When the wind blew, the undersides of the maple and basswood leaves near us shone soft and silvery, and at dusk swarms of swallows darted low over the water. The canvas tents where the students slept were surrounded by scrub and had no view at all. The students made fires down there in circles of blackened stones, and they played their radios and danced on the silty shore. Sometimes they pulled their sleeping bags out and slept under the stars. At night their voices would drift up to me, along with the sweet smell of marijuana and occasional shrieks of laughter, and sometimes I wished that I could join them.

The trailer had two bedrooms – one for me and one for Walter – along with a combination living room and kitchen and an attached laboratory that ran the trailer's whole length and held the deep freezers, the scales, the dissecting equipment, the microscopes and buckets and nets and poles. Walter's students had parceled out the birds and mammals and amphibians among themselves. Walter and I were working on the fish. Each day we rose at dawn to row across the reservoir and haul the nets we'd set the night before. The water was so cold that it numbed my hands, and often I wouldn't feel my stabs and scratches until later, back at the dock, where we hunched together over the net and disentangled the fish from the meshes. Trout, yellow perch, sunfish, suckers, bass. Their scales, under the dissecting scope, showed rings like trees.

Walter, wild with enthusiasm, lectured to me all day. In the boat, on the dock, during the afternoons in the makeshift lab as we dissected hundreds of fish in the shimmering heat and weighed testes and ovaries, determining fertility indexes and rushing to get through the day's catch before the fish rotted in our hands. We froze the reproductive organs so we could test them for pesticides later. My hands always smelled of fish. I never felt clean. At night I dreamed of legions of perch standing up on their tails and chasing me, and during the day I listened in a trance as Walter colonized my brain, transplanting huge wads of knowledge from his head to mine. When I sat at my lab bench he stood over me, wrapped his long arms around me, used his fingers to guide the scalpel in my hands. He leaned his thighs, cool on the hottest days, against my back. He told me I had a wonderful mind and lovely hair, and he made me first author on the paper we wrote together. He fed our data into the university computer, cross-matching it with his students' data on insecticide use, acid rainfall, wind patterns, temperature change, and one night he said he couldn't imagine how he'd lived without me.

That was the night of July Fourth, and so everyone everywhere was celebrating. In the small towns surrounding us, people marched in parades and waved flags and roasted themselves at cookouts. Aging men injured themselves at softball games. We worked, a day like any other, and when the fireworks splattered the sky that night, Walter looked up from his papers and cupped his ears and identified the displays by sound. ‘Ware,' he said. ‘Barre. Athol.' He might have been a bat. He listened rather than looked because we weren't outside, standing in the water with his students and waving sparklers and catching the occasional high explosion over the trees. We were inside the trailer. I was lying on the floor, my legs up on the arm of the couch where Walter sat, reading his manuscript to me. It was sixty-three pages long and had to do with the effects of changing water pH on the reproductive success of various fish. The effects of acid rain.

He read to me for three and a half hours, pausing only to sip at a lukewarm glass of water. I listened. I listened hard, trying not to be distracted by the pop and thump of the fireworks, by the celebrating students, whose laughter occasionally rose and broke, by the low bass notes that emerged from someone's tape player and moved through the ground and up the hill to me until I felt them in my back. I listened, knowing I'd have to ask intelligent questions when he was done. Wanting to ask those questions – the work was good, it was interesting, part of it was mine. All of it was what I thought I wanted to do.

Walter finished reading just before midnight. ‘Well?' he said. His face was tired and drawn, but he looked happy.

‘It's wonderful,' I said, and it was. It was original and interesting and well-written. It wasn't hard to praise.

‘Really?' he said. ‘Really?' He slid down the couch to the end where I'd draped my legs, and he touched me shyly on the shin. I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at him.

‘Really,' I said. ‘This is wonderful stuff.'

He reached for my leg just as the students galloped up the hill and pounded on the door. Each night after supper, they all came to the trailer for a general meeting, to discuss the plans for the following day. But they had never burst in like this before. Walter glared at the door, his fingers an inch from my leg. I scrabbled to my feet and went to intercept the students. There they were, the six of them, and in the front stood the dark-haired one named Tony, whom I had sometimes stared at. I was twenty-four then, no older than most of them; Walter was thirty-six and old for his age.

‘You
guys
,' Tony said, peering through the door at Walter surrounded by his papers. ‘I can't believe you're still
working
.'

‘We've been going over the new manuscript,' Walter said stiffly.

‘Come on,' Tony said. ‘It's a holiday. We've got some beer down there, and some barbecued chicken, and some tunes …'

‘I can't,' Walter said. ‘But thanks for asking. You enjoy yourselves.'

My hand was resting against the doorframe and Tony covered it with his. ‘What about you?' he asked, so softly that Walter might not have heard him. ‘You don't have to stay – just come down for a while, get high, relax a little …'

I turned my head over my shoulder and saw Walter, watching me intently. I turned my head back to Tony, who was smiling. Whose hand still covered mine. ‘I don't know,' I said, more drawn than I wanted to admit. ‘Maybe …'

‘Yeah?' he said. ‘Great.'

But when I turned my head again I saw that Walter's face was stricken. We hadn't finished talking about his paper; we'd only barely begun. He'd read to me for all those hours and I'd hardly given him anything back. ‘Um, actually,' I said to Tony, ‘maybe not. Or at least not till later.'

Tony laughed and made a curious face, almost a smirk, almost a leer. One of the students behind him whispered something to another and then both of them giggled. I realized, for the first time, that they all assumed Walter and I were sleeping together.

I shut the door. I sent them away. For an hour I told Walter, in great detail, how good his paper was, and then we went to our separate beds and Walter had one of his frequent nightmares, which he never discussed but which I knew about because he sometimes called out in his sleep. That night, while I lay awake listening to Tony and the others party on the stretch of sand below us, I heard Walter make his broken cry; he sounded so unhappy that I crept across the corridor to his room and woke him up. I led him gently to the living room and made some coffee, watching as the still invisible sun began to lighten the sky. Walter sat heavily in his striped pajamas, his face droopy and fogged.