The Middle Kingdom (18 page)

He paled, and I knew he felt reproached again. ‘We could adopt,' he said. ‘If there's nothing else you want in this world …'

But I couldn't imagine how any child not our flesh and blood could fill the gap between us. We set that question aside, and as Walter's life grew even busier, we stopped talking about it. Finally Walter arranged for me to see a therapist at the University Health Service. ‘I'm worried about you,' he said. ‘I'm worried about us. We need to work out this baby thing, and you need to decide what you want to do …'

I went, but I hated it. My doctor was a woman, dry and aloof, whom I couldn't warm up to at all. Dr Amadon sat in a swivel chair, her short legs neatly crossed, and she asked me where I saw myself in twenty years.

‘On the street,' I told her bitterly. And that was true, that was all I could see. When I thought of Page, whom I no longer saw, I imagined her sailing through graduate school, through a fellowship somewhere, finally off in a lab of her own and running a part of the world the way Walter did. But when I pictured the life ahead of me, I saw nothing. ‘Wearing all my clothes at once,' I said. ‘With everything I own in a shopping bag.'

‘That's what you want?' she said. ‘To be a bag lady?'

‘That's what I see,' I told her. ‘I'm twenty-seven already. I'm not trained to do anything. Everything I have belongs to Walter.'

I never told her about the voices I was beginning to hear inside my head, or about the sense I sometimes had, walking down the street, that my skin had turned permeable. I felt myself leaking out my pores, and I felt other lives leaking in, and it scared me so badly I threw all my energy into finding something to do. Work, I thought. That was what I needed. Any work, anything that would catch me the way Walter's work had caught him and provide that crisp glaze of purpose and separateness.

On my third visit, Dr Amadon asked me why I stayed with Walter, and instead of answering I left her for good. I went out to the car Walter had bought me, a new orange Subaru with a flashy white stripe down the side, and I turned up the radio and headed for Belchertown, for the tip of the reservoir. Since the doctor had delivered his bleak news, I'd taken to keeping secret foods in the car, which I used as a mobile diner; as I drove I ate my way steadily through a box of chocolate-mint Girl Scout cookies and thought how even the girl who'd sold them to me had something to do.

Who could answer the question Dr Amadon had asked? I parked in the woods near the reservoir and remembered all the nights Walter had traveled, when alone in our bed I'd touched myself and come coldly, silently, my small shudder damped by my blanket of flesh. When we fought we fought in silence, never speaking what we meant, and whatever glue held us together couldn't be named. Three crows argued in the trees near me, their harsh calls echoing against the car windows, and two deer emerged into the clearing and then froze. On the blank margins along the back of the cookie box I wrote down their names:
Odocoileus virginianus.
Then I wrote down the crows,
Corvus brachyrhynchos
, and the names of the trees and the ferns and the small mammals and the geese passing overhead. All the names I could remember, all I'd learned, and when I was done I drove home and didn't tell Walter for weeks that I'd stopped seeing Dr Amadon. I left our house each Tuesday at the appointed time, and then I drove to the Quabbin or to the Chesterfield Gorge and I made species lists. I grew calmer, even a little slimmer. It wasn't much of an occupation, but it was something. Walter said the doctor must be doing me some good.

‘She's all right,' I told him. ‘We've been talking about what I might do for work.'

Which was not completely false – I had been thinking about that, thinking hard. I spent hours poring over the ‘Help Wanted' sections of the Springfield and Northampton papers, trying to think what I might do. There was secretarial work, always possible – I'd survived the Swedenborgian accountants in Philadelphia. The phone company – during high school, I'd spent a summer trapped in a room full of hot, fat women, plugging cords into black panels, pulling them out, timing calls, and I knew I could do that in my sleep. I could do laboratory work for Walter, who'd offered to bring me back into his lab as a salaried technician, or I could try for any one of those gray jobs that required no obvious qualifications. Receptionist, waitress, sales clerk, assistant of one sort or another. The ad that finally caught my eye early in January was encouragingly vague:

I spent three days writing a flashy letter. I mentioned my art background and left out Randy; mentioned my biology training and the work at Quabbin but left out Walter. I said I was a spectacular cook, an avid reader, an appreciator of Oriental art and antiques (I left out Uncle Owen), and a former graduate student who'd left school to explore the universe on my own. I exaggerated wildly and appropriated talents belonging to the men I'd known, and a week later I received a bright yellow envelope in return. Inside was a single sheet of heavy, electric-pink letterhead. A L I V E was stamped across the top in bold black letters, followed by the outline of a lightbulb in place of an exclamation point. The message read:

Printed below was a California address and an italicized line in quotation marks:
‘You are the source of all thought.'

I called, of course. Who could resist? I reached a smooth-voiced woman, who told me to meet Rollo Carlson in a restaurant in Northampton. ‘He'll be wearing a dark suit,' the woman said. ‘Pink shirt, yellow tie. An unusual pin in his tie.' Somehow I knew the pin would be in the shape of a tiny lightbulb.

‘I have long blond hair,' I told the woman nervously. ‘I'll be wearing …'

‘Don't tell me,' she said. ‘He'll know you by your aura. Be there at one.'

I wore a flashy teal dress with a white linen collar and cuffs, long silver earrings, low shoes. Some combination, I thought, of the exotic and the practical. At twelve-thirty I walked into the restaurant and took a table in the far corner from which I could see the door, promising myself I'd slink away if Rollo looked too strange.

The restaurant was almost empty. Two Smith girls tore at croissants and discussed their love lives in shrill voices. A woman in her early forties held hands surreptitiously with a man in his late twenties. In the back, two of the waiters read the paper and the bored hostess sat at the cash register, filing her nails.

My heart was pounding with excitement. I ordered a turkey club sandwich, just to calm myself, and then an ice cream soda to wash it down. In the opposite corner, a pudgy woman with an unlined face and startling white hair mashed her spoon in a brownie covered with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. She glanced at her watch; I glanced at mine. She pulled out a compact and checked her careful makeup and adjusted the beads at her neck. I looked at my reflection in the back of a spoon. The Smith girls left; the middle-aged woman at the front table withdrew her hand from her companion's and bent her head and wept. At one, the door opened and a swarthy man with a big nose and a mane of swept-back hair walked in.

Dark suit, pink shirt, yellow tie. I smiled, half rose, upset a glass of water. Across the room, the woman with the white hair smiled, half rose, twisted her fingers in her beads. Rollo walked to a table in the center of the room and beckoned to both of us. ‘Connie,' he said in a low voice. ‘Grace. Come sit, my dears.'

We made our way nervously toward him, eyeing each other. Rollo introduced us. ‘Grace Hoffmeier,' he said. ‘Meet Connie Chrisman.' He beamed at us, revealing huge white teeth. ‘Two phenomenal women in one place,' he said. ‘Remarkable! We're all
alive!
' Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited.

We didn't say anything. We sat; he sat. Just when the silence was becoming truly uncomfortable, Rollo said, ‘Well – you know who
I
am – I'm sure you've read my books and familiarized yourself with the A L I V E! movement.'

Connie and I shifted in our seats. The A L I V E! movement? Rollo's books? ‘Time is precious,' Rollo said. ‘Time is
alive!
I was so impressed with both your applications that I decided to learn about you by listening in as you talk to each other. Let me see the spirit within you. Let me see how you exist in the Universe! All that lives is
alive!
and you are the source of all life. Begin.'

He was so dark, so strange, sitting there in his hot pink shirt and his yellow tie and the tiny pin proclaiming his Alive!ness. I looked at Connie and Connie looked at me, and then she rose and slung her purse over her shoulder and picked up her coat.

‘If you're
alive
,' she said to Rollo, ‘I'd rather be dead.'

Briefly – as I had when I'd first met Page, when Page had mocked Professor Tinbergen – I thought of Zillah. I looked at Connie and saw, not a middle-aged woman whose life had somehow reached a point where she was interviewing for a job in a dark restaurant, but a girl who'd tried to counter the world by growing wings. Before she could vanish, I grabbed my things and followed her. Once we were outside we leaned against the door and laughed together.

‘Christ,' Connie said, wiping her eyes. ‘Did you know?'

‘I never
heard
of him,' I said. ‘Or his books, or the movement – I was just trying to find a job.'

‘Me too,' Connie said. ‘I should have known from the ad …'

We laughed some more, and then she asked me if I wanted an ice cream. When I said yes, we drove to Friendly's and ordered enormous sundaes, consoling ourselves for our lost hopes. Connie was Walter's age, but we had so much in common that our age difference hardly mattered at first. ‘My kids are teenagers,' she said. ‘They're done with me. They think I'm a fossil. And my husband – he's over in History. Full professor, tenured. Reformation.'

‘Oh?' I said.

‘Zwingli,' she said airily, waving her plump arm. ‘Melanchthon. All that stuff.'

She told me her hair had turned white when she was my age, and that she had a degree in home economics from a Baptist college in Texas. ‘I taught junior high for a while,' she said. ‘But I had to quit.' She leaned over her mocha praline sundae and peered through her heavy glasses. Her eyes were large and startling, almost violet. ‘I have this little weight problem, and all that cooking in class …'

‘I failed Home Ec,' I told her. ‘In seventh grade. My teacher wore false eyelashes and spent all her time trying to show us how to use lip pencil and waggle our butts like the models do. Doreen Sandowsky and I brought a shoebox full of field mice into the kitchen and let them loose, and Mrs Kriner broke her ankle trying to jump up on the windowsill. She flunked us both. I weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds my junior year of high school. Then I got thin, then I was fat again, then thin again. Now this.'

Connie laid her soft hand over mine. I guessed her weight at a hundred and forty. Small shoulders, large breasts, most of her weight in her hips. ‘Diets,' she said. ‘I've tried them all.'

‘Who hasn't?'

‘You're married?'

I told her about Walter. ‘Zoology,' I said. ‘Lake ecology, acid rain …'

‘Children?'

‘We can't. Walter …'

‘School?'

‘I quit,' I said. ‘More than a year ago. I've been trying to figure out what to do since then.'

She smiled at me fondly and pushed up her glasses. ‘So,' she said. ‘We're bright, not bad-looking, educated. We live nice lives. Why are we chasing after stupid jobs? Why aren't we having fun?'

‘Because we're not doing anything?'

‘That's right,' she said. ‘What we want is something to
do
.'

What we did, in the few months we had together before Connie got a job in a New Age bookstore, was to get together twice a week for lunch. We took turns cooking; we turned out exotic meals and then ate them secretly, in the middle of the day. While we cooked and ate we picked our lives apart, as if going over our old tracks would show us where to go next; and so when I was browsing through the
Times
one Sunday and came across a review of Randy's first one-man show in New York, it seemed natural to save it and show it to Connie. She dipped her finger in the sauce that had enveloped our Thai chicken, and she said, ‘You were
married
to him?'

Together, while the coffee burbled and plunked in the pot, we studied the photo of Randy and of one of his pictures: an abstracted, wildly skewed view of the block of rowhouses where we'd lived. He'd turned the people who walked our street into cockroaches, earwigs, city bugs; the sky was a jagged field of blue and green. ‘What a nutball,' Connie said. ‘You sure know how to pick them.'

‘It's true,' I said. ‘I really do.' Randy had earrings in both ears and hair so long it fell over his shoulders; beneath a leather vest his chest was bare. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and his fingers pointed toward his groin. He looked dangerous, even deranged, wholly improbable as a candidate for fatherhood – but the article said he shared a loft with a set designer and their infant daughter, Persia.