That evening she went swimming at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center, where she'd bought an athletic card. She walked past the weight machines to the women's locker room and changed into her navy one-piece bathing suit. Water streamed over her shoulders in the white-tiled shower. Powdery latex residue streamed off her hands; the stench of the animal facility washed down the drain.
She swam and she swam and she swam in the echoing indoor pool. When she came up for air, she saw a confusion of lane lines and gutters and red kickboards. When she turned her face down again, the blue world through her goggles was private, smooth, and deep. She had been a high school swimmer, and she cut through the water capably, no longer fast, but still strong enough to swim long distances. Twenty laps, forty laps. She flipped and turned underwater until the rhythm of her strokes began to drown out the words in her head. She swam until the other swimmers started to leave. The big pool stilled, and the lifeguards approached and pointed to the clock. Even then, she pulled herself out reluctantly, shivering and dripping on the deck.
He could not hurt her. She would never let him. She showered again and changed into her clothes, pulling on her sweater. Head down, she combed out her wet hair. She told herself she would forget everything about the day. Still, she remembered his hands pushing her away, his sharp voice, her outburst—her unthinking emotional reply. And then, confusingly, she remembered one night almost two years before when they were working late. The memory was just as vivid and returned to her with equal embarrassment.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” he'd asked.
She didn't answer.
“Not such a good idea?”
“Probably not.”
He pulled off his gloves and faced her. “All right, give me the list.”
“What list?”
“You know,” he said. “The reasons. If it makes you feel better.”
“All right.” She realized she needed a moment to reconstruct them. She had no boyfriend anymore. “First of all, I'm too old for you.”
“Okay.” He drew a little closer.
She was trembling. “Second of all, it definitely wouldn't work out.”
He drew closer still.
“Third of all, I don't want to,” she lied.
He kissed her softly, tentatively, on the lips, then drew back and looked at her as if to check that she was all right. She didn't move.
“Come here,” he whispered, and drew her into the darkness of the stockroom, and cupped his hands around her face and kissed her, all in a rush, seeking her out with mouth and hands. She wrapped her arms around him as he pulled at the band that held her hair.
“That hurts. Why did you do that?” she chided him as her hair fell around them. She tried to push his hand away, but he ran his fingers through the long strands. “Wait, wait,” she whispered.
“I did wait,” he said.
Light stabbed their eyes; they froze as Marion opened the door and caught them there in each other's arms.
Marion stood transfixed for a moment, speechless. What had she been thinking, seeing the two of them like that? What terrible thoughts had passed through her mind? “Excuse me,” Marion said. She turned the lights off again and shut the door.
“No,”
Robin whispered as soon as Marion was gone. “I can't believe it.” And in that moment she and Cliff were friends again and fellow sufferers. They held each other like guilty teenagers, mortified in the darkness.
“She didn't see anything,” reasoned Cliff.
“She did, she did.” Robin buried her head in his shoulder even as she laughed at herself and the absurdity of their situation. “She sees everything. She knows everything.”
“No, that's not true.” He was recovering remarkably fast.
“But what if she . . . ?”
“She won't.” He smoothed her hair. “Shh.” He was busy reassuring and distracting her, unbuttoning her.
“I think she'll—”
“Worry, worry, worry.”
Robin shouldered her bag now and trudged wearily out of the locker room. She tried to blink away those first kisses, the memory of his lips on her bare skin.
“I'm not afraid of Marion Mendelssohn,” Cliff had declared then.
“Well, you should be,” she told him, but he just teased her, biting her fingers when she covered his mouth with her hand.
The next morning, before Glass arrived, Robin rapped on the office door.
“Come in,” Marion called faintly. She was squinting, composing at her black-and-amber computer screen, and she scarcely glanced up as Robin came in. She typed a little more, hunt-and-peck. It was a small vanity of hers that she did not know how to type properly. She came from an era when women typed well, and those women were not scientists.
“Could I talk to you for a minute?” Robin asked.
Marion turned, blinking from her work, to stare at Robin's anguished face. “What is it? What's wrong?”
“I can't make any progress if I'm expected to drop everything for Cliff,” Robin said.
Marion took this in. She knew, of course, that Robin and Cliff had fought, that they were no longer speaking. She knew exactly why Robin came to her now. Still, even as she felt the heat of Robin's anger, Marion drew away. Disapproving of Robin's behavior, she would not now reward her by addressing the source of her anger directly.
“We need to work together,” Marion said, “or the experiments won't get done.”
“Yes, but I was doing a completely different project,” Robin said.
“We're studying R-7 now,” said Marion.
“But why?” Robin burst out. “Why do I have to work on that?”
“You're suggesting we shift your work to someone else? Everyone here is doing just as much as you.”
“I need time for my own research,” said Robin.
“You have to be patient,” Marion told her.
“I have been patient.”
With surprise and some displeasure, Marion saw the set of Robin's lip, the fist tightening unconsciously at her side. Robin, who had always been so quiet, who had toiled in the lab so long, always the worker bee, hardly complaining, even as she dragged her wings. Robin, who had been so disciplined, until she'd gotten involved with Cliff.
Sandy had warned Marion about the two of them early on. Even when Cliff first arrived, Sandy had predicted, “They'll be trouble. You'll see.”
But Marion hadn't seen anything of the sort. She saw a bright young man come into the lab full of energy, brimming with new plans.
“You're blind,” Sandy told her once.
“And you're a gossip,” she chided him. He loved to speculate about who did what to whom, not only in their lab but in other labs as well. “You're terrible.”
“I know,” he said. “But it's fun.”
Marion protested, and he laughed at her, and she'd understood, fleetingly, even as she dismissed the very thought, that such gossip was Sandy's way of flirting with her.
“Look how he's watching her,” he'd whispered at a lecture they'd all attended.
She ignored this and concentrated on the guest speaker from Utrecht.
“And she's pretending not to notice,” Sandy said.
Marion refused to let him draw her in, even when she began to think that he was right. What if there was something between Cliff and Robin? It was no business of hers. She'd felt a jolt of panic when she walked in on them in the stockroom. She was horrified to find them there, and yet she'd felt protective as well. She'd known even at that moment she would never tell Sandy how she'd discovered them in each other's arms. She remembered her own youth, and how she and Jacob found each other. She remembered late nights and certain darkened passageways, the hiding places in Applebaum's chain of laboratories. She felt, oddly, that to expose Cliff and Robin would have been to betray her younger self. Close as she was to Sandy, free as she was with her ideas, there were some aspects of her life she would not share.
She hated the confusion of public and private life, the self-indulgent mix of work and love. Even as Robin bewailed her research program, begging once again for her bone tumor plan, Marion looked at her with sorrow and disdain.
“I still want to pursue it,” Robin said now. “I think I've got a good model there for metastasis. I've got the cell line and everything in place. I just need time.”
“That would mean starting from scratch,” Marion said.
“I know, but I don't mind,” said Robin.
“Yes, but the viral work is well under way. You could be on the paper there.” Marion shook her head at her wayward postdoc. How could Robin even suggest something so impractical? What was wrong with her? How could she be so bright and so hardworking and then demonstrate in so many ways such a lack of judgment? Years ago, Marion had advised Robin to stop working on Sandy's blood samples, but Robin hadn't listened. She was a bit like Cliff in this. She kept on working, blind. Cliff always had the big picture in mind, however, no matter how far-fetched that picture might be. He always worked toward a larger goal. Robin got mired in details. She was a wonderful technician, but she did not consider how each task might serve the lab's objectives. It galled Marion that Robin had been spinning her wheels for five years, and now because she'd fought with Cliff she refused to recognize the importance of his results for the lab. She was not thinking of the future at all. Marion sighed. “Why don't you sit down.”
Robin hesitated. There was only one other chair, and it was Sandy's. The office was not set up for visitors.
Marion went around to Sandy's desk and dragged his chair out herself. “Sit down,” she ordered, and Robin obeyed. “Now tell me what you want.”
“I want my time back,” Robin said. “I want to work on my own project without Cliff . . .”
“I imagine you can continue your bone tumor work,” Marion allowed. “In the next few weeks there will be more time for that.”
Robin sat back, thrilled with this promise, dazzled by the very thought of her own days and hours.
Marion was not done, however. “What do you want for yourself professionally, in the future?” she pressed. “How would you like your career to develop? What do you think would be your ideal situation?”
Robin's eyes widened. Was Marion actually planning to get rid of her? The development of her career? The future? What euphemisms were those?
“The thing about Cliff—” Robin began to explain.
“I don't want to hear about Cliff,” Marion snapped.
Robin flinched.
“I want to hear about you.”
Robin gazed into the air. “I would like,” she said slowly, “to make some progress—and to feel as though my work actually made a difference. I would like to be part of a community where resources aren't so scarce, and it doesn't have to be a choice between my work or his, or now or later. I'd just like to be part of something where I don't always have to follow, I could also lead.”
Marion nodded as she listened to all this; she listened carefully to every word. As a spelunker pokes gingerly into a dark underground passageway, Marion tried to think her way into Robin's narrow, self-pitying position: unpublished, unappreciated. Marion cared enormously about her postdocs; they were her academic children, and she only wanted to give the best advice. But she said something just then that devastated Robin. “It sounds as though what you'd really like to do is teach.”
2
T
HERE WAS
a hidden room at the Philpott. Newcomers walked right past the door where it stood, counterintuitively, kitty-corner to the stairs. The cleanup crew sometimes mistook it for a janitor's closet and unlocked the door, only to find a large room stuffed with scientific equipment instead of buckets and brooms. This was the institute's kitchen, where the scientists placed their orders for rich red media, chemical broth for growing cells.
The room had no windows. A large freezer and four refrigerators stood shoulder-to-shoulder against two walls. Thousands of dollars' worth of ingredients were kept in the refrigerators: liters of fetal calf serum the color of maple syrup; pen-strep (a solution of penicillin and streptomycin); Fungizone; and other antibiotics that the researchers mixed into media to fight off bugs and mold. A desk topped by a bookcase, the laminar flow hood, and two large carts on wheels took up the rest of the space. The room was packed to the ceiling with supplies: plastic funnels; cardboard cases of filters; test tubes with orange and white caps; dozens of foil-topped beakers standing up in rows, waiting to be filled. There were rolls of labeling tape—white, yellow, pale green, robin's egg blue—jars of powdered chemicals, and scores of books; fantasy and quilt-making books were shelved together with scientific catalogs: GIBCO BRL 1986,
The Quilter's Guide to Rotary Cutting,
VWR Scientific Products. The space was cluttered but entirely organized. This suited Nanette Klein, who ran the place.
Nanette was part tech, part cook, part witch, part dorm mother, certainly chief gossip at the institute. She might have been chief bottle washer, except she had other people to autoclave the glassware for her, thank
God
. She appreciated having the support staff, although she deemed them lazy. “They do
nothing,
” she exclaimed. “I've seen them, and they spend half their time drinking tea!” Nanette herself was always busy, always scooting in her swivel chair. She was a kindly, scolding sort of person, unafraid to call a senior scientist a slob, happy to spend hours counseling a new postdoc from Pakistan, equally willing to scream at anyone who came in behind her back and left supplies and chemicals in disarray. She'd posted signs on her cupboards and refrigerators:
CLOSE THE DOOR!!!!
and
DO
NOT
USE MY
NaOH!! STOP!!!!
Despite her name, she was not French. As a girl in Wisconsin, she'd always dreamed of traveling to Paris and going to the Louvre, and sitting on wrought iron benches in the Tuileries. And when she finally arrived there as a young woman, the city was as cobbled and misty and elegantly stuffed with statuary and impressionists as she'd imagined. The city was magnificent, but the Parisians laughed when they heard Nanette's name. This was not a real name, they told her. This was, at best, a nickname, not a proper name at all. And Nanette laughed with them, although the laughter hurt. She still made light of her visit, and liked to tell the story. Her own mother had never been to France, of course. She'd loved the movie
No, No, Nanette
and thought the name was pretty. How could she have known?
Nanette shrugged and pursed her lips and leaned into her work at the hood. She was short and plump, pale from spending so many hours indoors. She had a large backside but tiny feet. She wore elaborate quilted vests she made herself—wearable art—and pinned her long, graying hair back with old combs. And always, she kept talking, but she kept her eye on the red media flowing from the white plastic carboy on the table, through clear tubing that ended in a protective glass bell, and then down into jar after sterile jar. She filtered the media and she dyed it red for pH testing. With her foot on a pedal, she meted out 450 milliliters into each jar, lifting her foot from the pedal and cutting off the remaining media in the tube at exactly the right moment with her scissors clamp. She knew the proper level in the glass by eye.
“So what brings
you
here on this nasty spring day?” Nanette asked Robin, who sat in the smaller gray swivel chair Nanette kept for visitors. “Did you take my advice and kick him in the—”
“No!” protested Robin.
“Oh, well, that's a pity.” Though Nanette's voice was sweet, her opinions were acidic. Legend had it that Nanette had been a researcher once herself, that she'd done brilliant work way back and then flamed out and given up on her doctorate. She certainly knew enough, and kept up with the journals. She was proudly overqualified.
“It's hard,” Robin admitted.
“Only if you let him get to you.”
“It's not just him,” Robin said. “It's the whole situation.”
“You mean, the whole situation around him,” Nanette said with maddening authority. “But I'm not going to say I told you so. I wouldn't be so—”
“Marion says I should teach,” Robin interrupted.
“Teach!” Nanette shrieked. “Is she out of her mind? What, stuffy little undergraduates, with their shitty little labs? I'd rather die.”
“I know.”
“She, of all people,” said Nanette.
“I know.”
“She only came to the Philpott to avoid teaching and to do her work in peace. I mean, why else would anybody come? God.”
“I was so offended,” Robin said. “And so . . . disappointed as a woman scientist, that she would say something like that to me.”
“You mean you expected her to offer you support and mentorship and all that stuff?” asked Nanette. “Ha.” She looked over her four dozen glass bottles filled with red media, pumped out all the media remaining in the carboy into one large bottle, then decanted from the large bottle into five small ones. She distributed the media evenly until those final bottles held the proper 450 ml amount. Now she'd used every drop of the precious liquid, and she turned and looked Robin in the face. “Don't you know,” said Nanette, “that women are always meanest to other women? Especially women scientists.”
“That's not really true,” said Robin.
“It shouldn't be true, but it is.” Nanette's caramel-colored eyes seemed to dilate slightly, magnified by indignation and her large tortoiseshell glasses. “They're always hardest on each other. It's because there're so few; they hate the young ones coming up. They're threatened.”
“Marion Mendelssohn is not threatened by me,” Robin said.
“She'd just rather see you off somewhere teaching. Off in some small school with no graduate program, no equipment, two courses a semester . . .”
“No!” Robin protested. “I know her. She would never want me to do that.”
“Women
hate
each other in science,” Nanette said. “You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.”
“You're so cynical,” Robin said.
“Who, me?” Nanette protested girlishly. “
You
work here for fifteen years. I still remember when Mendelssohn got here. She barely looked at anyone. She wouldn't even say hello if you ran into her on the stairs. She's actually a lot better than she used to be.”
“She thinks I should try out teaching part-time at Tufts,” Robin said.
“Ooh, ooh, let me guess. She wants you to work for her husband as a teaching assistant for free!”
“No, she said he has funds to pay me,” Robin said. “He hasn't been able to find a second teaching assistant and his class is bigger than he thought it would be.”
“Oh!” Nanette was genuinely surprised. “Oh, well, that's different. That's not so bad.”
“What do you mean? You just said she's telling me I should give up on research.”
“So what?”
Robin blinked, shocked at how quickly Nanette had changed tack.
“TA for Jacob Mendelssohn? It's practically free money! And the semester's half over! Just grade a few problem sets . . .”
“But symbolically.”
“Oh, so what about the symbolism. You could probably make twelve, fifteen hundred dollars! Take the money and run!”
Robin could use the money. Still, she was baffled by Nanette's advice. “And what about how women hate women in science?”
“That's exactly my point,” Nanette told Robin. “Women scientists do hate each other. Mendelssohn's
never
gonna nurture you. Therefore, it is incumbent on you to take whatever shitty opportunity comes your way. It's a gift!” She loaded her jars of media onto the cart.
“You just said teaching is a fate worse than death.”
“No, I didn't.”
“Practically.”
“Well, but working for Jacob isn't exactly teaching. He's so obsessive he wouldn't let you actually teach anything. You'll grade a little bit. That's it. A few problem sets. Lots of people have done it.”
“Like who?” Robin asked.
“Lots of people . . .” Nanette said, searching her memory of postdocs in years past. “Akira.”
“Akira?”
Robin had never known Akira O'Keefe, although she'd heard about him. “Akira tried to commit suicide,” Robin said.
“And others,” said Nanette. “There were others too.”
“I can't believe you'd use him as an example.”
“Well, he suffered from depression,” Nanette said. “And he had terrible luck with the mice—you know, the outbreak in the colony. He lost two years' work, and he was miserable. I mean, no one really understood how miserable he was. But it wasn't the
teaching
that got to him.”
Slowly Robin took the stairs back to the third floor. She knew that in her own way, Nanette had tried to cheer her up. She'd tried all her best tricks—reminiscence, humor, sympathetic disgruntlement, even practical advice, but none of it helped.
In the incubator, Robin's cells were dividing wildly. She didn't care. They would not contribute in any way to her future. They were all part of the grand effort to reproduce Cliff's results. She hated working with those cells, but she hated it more that no one considered how she felt about the matter. The grant proposal was out, long gone to NIH, and Mendelssohn and Glass were pushing ahead. The two of them were preparing the R-7 paper to submit to
Nature,
and this was all they thought about. But now, undermining her very thoughts, Sandy Glass was rushing toward her in the hall.
“Robin! Robin! I've been looking all over for you,” Glass exclaimed.
Startled, she wondered if he had some good news for her, or some idea. She hated herself for the way her heart pounded.
“You didn't buy your ticket to Aidan's concert.” Glass shook his finger at her.
“Oh,” she said.
“I've got the tickets in an envelope on the office door, and you can leave the—” He interrupted himself and looked at her. “You are coming, aren't you? You know he's singing Jesus. I've got us a block of seats, front and center of the mezzanine.”
She'd been to Aidan's concerts before. All the lab went because, as Glass said, they were family, and because Glass happened to love early music. Aidan was terrific with the mice, but there was no doubt his singing had helped him get the lab tech position. While Mendelssohn didn't care about such extracurriculars, Glass was entranced by people who enriched the lab with music or photography or famous relatives, or at the very least, new languages: Tagalog, Burmese. When Aidan came along with his sweet, crisp baritone, Glass managed to get the lab to most of his performances. They'd sat through ballads and cantatas, and airs on period instruments: citterns and viols, lutes, krummhorns and sackbuts—or fat butts, as Cliff dubbed them. Robin liked classical music better than most, but she was hardly in the mood for a lab outing. “I'm going to try to be there,” she said.
“Robin, you
will
be. This is Jesus in
St. Matthew's Passion.
” Sandy rocked forward on his toes, as he always did when he was most excited. “This is a milestone in Aidan's career.”
In addition to his love of music and pride in Aidan, Sandy had a political motive for the evening. The lab had fourteen tickets to the
Passion,
and Sandy had invited the Philpott's director and his wife along. Sandy needed support just now from the institute: publicity and as much internal money as the director could spare. As always, promotion was essential, but in this case, he and Marion had produced real, live results. Work in their own lab could bring heaps of attention to the Philpott from the outside world, showers of gold from the granting agencies in Washington.
Before the performance, as the audience swirled around under the vaulted ceiling of Harvard's Memorial Hall, Sandy stood as the evening's impresario, with the elderly and rather austere institute director, Peter Hawking, on one side, and Peter Hawking's plump, stentorian wife, Barbara, on the other. Marion and Jacob completed the inner quintet, beyond which floated Ann, shepherding Kate, the only daughter who'd agreed to come, Feng and Mei, and Cliff, Prithwish, Natalya, and her red-bearded cryptographer husband, Ivan—and where was Robin? At the moment Sandy was far too busy to think of looking for her. He was telling Hawking about the new paper for
Nature
and speculating on the chances it might be published sooner rather than later. Of course, Sandy had several ideas about facilitating this.
“Yes, I'm sure you do,” murmured Peter Hawking.
Barbara put her hand on Peter's arm and laughed, as though he'd said something witty. But no one beyond Sandy's inner circle could hear the joke in the cathedral-like hall, with concertgoers and student ushers swarming all around. Laughter echoed against marble plaques cut with the names of Harvard's young Civil War dead: Nathaniel Saltonstall Barstow. Thomas Bayley Fox. Charles Redington Mudge. Name upon name and arch upon arch. All conversation was swallowed up in the vaulted space, its polished wood tracery, its stained glass allegory dark against the outside night.
Cliff strained to hear. He tried to move in closer. This was his research, after all. But the crowd was too thick, the lights already blinking. He followed the others up the carved staircase and into Sanders Theatre with its curtainless stage, the blond wood covered with risers and chairs for the choristers. Glass's party took two rows of seats, and unapologetically Sandy ushered Hawking and his wife into the front to sit between him and Marion. Kate and Ann took the seats to the left of Sandy, and Jacob took the seat to the right of Marion, and then the postdocs arrayed themselves in the row behind. The seats were on great wooden benches like pews in church, and when Robin rushed in, Natalya and Ivan scooted over for her. She'd arrived just in time.