The Middle Kingdom (16 page)

‘She's just trying to help,' I told him.

‘We don't need her help,' said Walter. ‘We'll be fine. Once you graduate, you'll relax and it'll happen.'

‘You're right,' I said. ‘That's probably it.'

I had never told him about the abortion I'd had when I was married to Randy, or about the infection I'd had afterward; and although I dreamed about my lost child each night, more and more sorry for that life I'd rejected, by the time Walter and I were trying to make another life I couldn't confide in him. I'd lent my past actions so much weight by not disclosing them sooner than now, almost by accident, I had a big secret. Maybe a guilty secret – when I bent double once each month, stabbed by ovarian cramps, I refused to go to the doctor. ‘This is normal,' I told Walter. ‘It's just the egg passing through.' Meanwhile I was sure my insides had been scrambled and fused by my past mistakes, a nest of adhesions and scars and wounds, nothing left pink and shining.

As the spring wore on, I found myself making love by the calendar and not enjoying it at all, my pelvis propped up on pillows to help the sperm swim in. I worried about the thickness of my vaginal secretions and about the tilt of my uterus. I wondered about the patency of my fallopian tubes. All my attention was focused on my physiology, and I couldn't concentrate on school. My worst class was an upper-level population ecology course – half graduate students, half seniors like myself – which was taught by a pompous fool with whom Walter often collaborated. ‘I ought to drop the course,' I'd told Walter. ‘It's making me tense.' He'd pointed out that this was my last semester, that I needed the credits, and that my classmates would help me acclimate to graduate school. I'd applied, after all, under pressure from him – to his school, to his department. Of course I got in. I had good grades and great recommendations, and I didn't tell anyone I planned to drop out as soon as I got pregnant.

The only good thing about my bad course – the only good thing about spring – was Page. I met her the day the teacher lectured on cyclic population changes. ‘These are the snowshoe hares,' he said, drawing a jagged graph on the board. ‘The population peaks every nine or ten years and then crashes.' He drew another line that roughly followed the first. ‘These are the lynxes,' he said. ‘Their population peaks about a year after the hares. Then it crashes, as they starve once the hares are gone.'

The woman sitting next to me turned and whispered in my ear. ‘Excited?' she said. ‘This guy could make sex boring.'

I had been lost in my own eggy thoughts, and when she spoke I was so startled I smiled. Page was a year or two younger than me, blond, sharp-featured, and bright, and when we had coffee together later she told me she was a first-year graduate student specializing in the lepidoptera.

‘I'm only taking this course because it's required,' she told me in the cafeteria. ‘That asshole, Tinbergen – he's never spent a day in the field in his life. Makes me sick, the way he goes on about lemmings and snowy owls like he ever actually
saw
any … God. This place. Where are you going when you graduate?'

‘Here,' I said. ‘I guess. Same department as you.'

She groaned and then laughed. ‘Why would you want to come here?'

‘I'm married to Walter Hoffmeier,' I confessed.

Most of my classmates knew that; it was why they avoided me. Page's eyebrows shot up. ‘Him?' she said. ‘No kidding. He's so much older …'

‘It's not like he's ancient,' I said. ‘You probably don't know him.'

She laid a placating hand on my arm. ‘I don't, really,' she said. ‘I'm sure he's nicer than he looks.'

‘He is,' I said. ‘It's just that he's so private. He really only opens up to me – we pretty much keep to ourselves.'

She made a wry face. ‘I bet. I was going to ask if you wanted to come to a party – a bunch of us first-year graduate students get together every Friday, and this week we're meeting at my place. But I guess you wouldn't want to come.'

‘I would,' I said, surprising myself. ‘I'd like to.'

‘With Walter? That might not be so good.'

‘I'll leave him at home,' I said. It was true that we kept pretty much to ourselves – Walter kept me so close to him that I'd had no chance to make friends my own age. But I yearned for some company just then, some entry into the graduate-school world I felt I was being forced into.

Page seemed ready to welcome me despite my connection to Walter, and all that week we sat together in class and mocked Professor Tinbergen's papery voice. ‘Animals associate in different ways,' he said. He read directly from our textbook, his thin hand fussing with the buckle of his belt. ‘Varieties of association include mutualism, competition, commensalism, parasitism, and predation.'

‘Food and sex,' Page whispered to me. ‘That's all he's saying – who they eat and who they fuck and how and when.'

‘Something you'd like to share with us?' Professor Tinbergen said.

‘Not a thing,' Page replied.

While he droned on, Page drew butterflies on a notebook page, fantastic creatures with humanoid eyes and legs and oversize antennae and ridiculous clothes, pompous creatures engaged in silly acts. One was a caricature of Tinbergen. One was the department chairman. One, inevitably, was Walter, a pair of wings drooping sadly from his thorax and scalpels bristling from his feet. I laughed at that, and then felt immediately guilty, but Page was so open and friendly at first that before I'd known her a week I'd told her entirely too much. When she asked me how I came to marry Walter I described our summer in the trailer at the reservoir, cutting up fish and weighing gonads. She contended that I'd been overwhelmed by all that biology, and I couldn't offer a better explanation.

Page told me tales about our classmates. ‘Stay away from Timmy,' she said. ‘He gets weird when he drinks. John Webster sleeps in the woods for weeks at a time, watching hawks. Suzanne is married to Lon Brinkman, over in botany, but she's fooling around with Tony Baker. The one who works in Wasserman's lab?'

‘I've seen him,' I said; Tony was the student who'd worked with us at the reservoir and who had tried to invite me to the July Fourth celebration. My throat still got dry when I looked at him.

‘They'll all be at the party,' Page said. ‘You'll meet everyone.'

It was easy enough to get Walter's permission to go – all I had to do was tell him it was a meeting of my fellow students. ‘So I'll know some people,' I explained the evening of the party. ‘So I won't feel lost next fall.'

‘You know all the professors,' he told me, straightening some piles of paper on his desk. ‘You've been having dinner with them for two years.' Then he checked his calendar and looked at me sheepishly. ‘Tonight's one of our nights,' he said, meaning I was mid-cycle. ‘Try not to be late?'

‘I won't be,' I said. ‘I just want to meet some of these people I'll be working with.'

‘Have a good time,' he said.

I went off to Page's place alone. All the windows were open in her small apartment, letting in the warm April air. When I came up the stairs, I found only Page and a man in a black leather jacket, who had a beaked nose and a shock of dirty blond hair that fell in his eyes when he moved.

‘Hey,' this man said, fixing me with a hawk's predatory glare. ‘Fresh blood. Who's this?'

I blushed dark red. Before I could answer him, Page came out of the kitchen. Her hair was frizzed from the steam of the couscous she was cooking, and her breasts swung soft and loose under her Indian smock.

‘Grace,' she said. ‘Meet Jim. Jim, Grace.' Jim was still staring at me and I was staring at him, my feet edging me closer and closer. I felt like I might kiss him any second, and that if I did it would only be an accident, something I couldn't help. Page smiled wickedly and ran her hand down Jim's back. ‘Jim's my little secret,'she said. ‘He paints houses. He amuses me.' She turned and headed for the kitchen again.

‘Why don't you take her for a ride?' she called over her shoulder. ‘Keep her entertained until the others get here.'

Jim laid his broad, warm hand on my shoulder. ‘Would you like that?' he said. ‘You want to be entertained?'

I nodded dumbly, trying not to shiver as he gathered up my long hair and twisted it into a rope.

‘You're a pretty thing,' he said. ‘Where'd Page find you?'

‘In class,' I said faintly.

‘In class,' he mocked, his voice as high and tremulous as mine. ‘Well, put your coat on, missy. We're going for a ride.' He stomped down the stairs in his heavy black boots, leaving me to follow.

‘Have a good time,' Page called after me. ‘Don't do anything I wouldn't.'

Her laugh followed me down the stairs. Outside, Jim was already sitting on a huge black Harley Electra-Glide with a headlight as big as a grapefruit and sleek, curved fenders.

‘Hop on,' he said, handing me a helmet. ‘Ever ride one of these?'

‘Never,' I lied, putting out of my mind the boys I had known in high school. I sat behind Jim and he pulled me close to his back.

‘Settle in,' he said. ‘Wrap your arms around me. All you have to do is remember to hold on tight and lean with me on the curves. Don't fight the machine. Don't fight me. It's like dancing. Like sex. You understand?'

I nodded and tucked my hair into the helmet. He jumped hard on the starter and then we were off. Through the back streets of Northampton, down by the railroad tracks and the warehouses; then up through the edge of the Smith College campus, startling pale, thoughtful girls; then into Florence, past the diner and around the square. Up Route 9, through the dark parking lot of a silent factory, down quiet residential streets. The engine roared. Fast, then faster, my chest mashed against his back, my hands clutched across his stomach, my hair tumbled from my helmet and whipping across my face; Jim shouting and laughing, taking corners hard, screaming at me to lean. Me leaning, finally screaming too, my mouth open wide and stretched as the night air roared past us and the buildings passed in a blur. When we screeched to a stop in front of Page's building I was trembling all over, and Jim bent with laughter when he pulled me off his machine.

‘You liked that,' he said. ‘You loved it.' He pulled me roughly to him and I buried my face in his chest. He was very tall.

That was it. That was all that happened, but I felt as if I'd been in bed with him for a week. I walked up the stairs on shaky legs, acutely aware of Jim behind me, and when I entered the living room, now full of people and noise, I felt as exposed as if I'd shed my clothes on the ride. I met the rest of Page's friends but I hardly noticed them; I ate couscous and drank too much wine and tried to keep myself from creeping across the floor to Jim. All night long he watched me, smiling whenever he caught my eye, and when I finally got up to leave he smoothed my hair away from my cheek and ran his thumb along the curve of my ear before he turned away. For years after that I dreamed of his back: that back, that beautiful back. I went home to Walter that night, my knees rubbery with lust, and if ever I should have conceived a child it should have been then.

That fall, I discovered that I couldn't share Walter's joys. I wanted to; I meant to. But once I entered graduate school, all I felt was duty, pressure, grinding work.

Biochemistry, embryology, research methods – everything suddenly seemed harder and much less fun than it had when I was an undergraduate. Hundreds of textbook pages blurred past me; grainy films flickered by; a fertilized egg cleaved into two, four, eight cells, formed the hollow ball known as the blastula, indented as if pressed by a thumb into the double-walled gastrula. Everything went by too fast. I grew weak and faint, stunned by all I didn't know, the mornings I sat in the lecture hall. When I went home to Walter at night, I lied through my teeth.

‘It's fine,' I told him. ‘The work's really interesting.'

‘Isn't it?' he'd say, his eyes sparkling. While I bent over my books he leaned over me, his chin in my hair and his hands warm in mine. ‘Isn't this
wonderful?
' he'd say. ‘I can still remember learning this for the first time. The archenteron, the blastopore, the growth of the neural plate …'

When I looked in his face I saw true joy, true excitement. Oh, he loved his work – and that was one of the things that had drawn me to him at first. Sometimes, when I wandered the halls of the zoology department, I'd stop outside his classroom and listen to his voice crackling with enthusiasm. But even with him to help me I fell behind. My teachers grew more and more distant, the students in my lab sections grew openly contemptuous, and Page and her friends, who had initially welcomed me, began to pull away.

My worst course was embryology, which confused me completely: an endless sequence of movements and changes to memorize. These cells move here, those move there, this turns into that and that into something else. An eye is derived from this structure, a finger from another. Black magic. When I said, ‘How? But how does this happen?' my teacher spread his hands in the air and said, ‘Answer that and you'd win a Nobel Prize. But you can't begin to ask
how
until you know the sequence of development as well as you know the alphabet. You're learning a
language
here. Vocabulary.'

But I was stuck on grammar. He was trying to teach me ‘what' and I wanted ‘how' and ‘why,' and our classroom became a battlefield. I grew to dread it, and as I lost confidence there I dreaded, even more, the switch I had to make three times a week from student to student teacher.

Our department ran thirty sections of lab for Zoology 101; I had to teach three of these, as did all the graduate students. For weeks I'd stood in front of the blackboard, my hands shaking as I tried to discuss the basic properties of animal cells. I'd talked into my bosom, eyes lowered, head ducked, and I'd tried to make up for my lack of knowledge by covering the board with colored drawings. The students stared at me coldly in that huge dim room, squirming on the wooden stools that surrounded the lab benches, and when they grew bored they hung paper airplanes from the plastic human skeleton that guarded the door. They smirked and whispered among themselves when I put the wrong slides in the microscopes, the wrong transparencies in the overhead projectors, assigned the wrong workbooks. They yawned through the endless afternoons and galloped away when I ran out of breath hours before their labs were meant to end.