Lost, Almost Page 5

  I knew before he said a word that all of my weekend words to myself, my reassurances, my plans to return to normal lab life as though none of this had happened, had been delusions. The voice I had silenced—the one predicting catastrophe—had had it right. He had never done anything like this before, he told me again, and he knew it was wrong, but he’d been fascinated by me from the moment he’d seen me, no, before that, and when I’d kissed him he knew, he just knew, this was it, it was love, and he wasn’t married, and neither was I, and it had been sixteen years since his divorce, no, never mind, he said, don’t think of it that way (I’d been five years old), and couldn’t we find a way? We could, of course there would be some way, and before he’d said even half of these words I knew that even if it were all framed as a request, if he told me that it would be perfectly all right to say no, a return to my place as one of three first-year graduate students in Lee Campanella’s lab was not an option.

  Tears flooded my eyes and I blinked them away, because I had done it to myself, that moment when I had kissed him; I had turned my back on the dignity of my work, a steady and loyal companion for as long as I could remember, for the momentary flash of pleasure at somebody wanting to touch me. I had known it, had recognized the cliff I was stepping over, and I had done it anyway.

  “Just think about it,” he said as I edged out of his office.

  Could I transfer to a different lab in the department? Everyone would know, and anyway, there was no one else on the faculty here who did the very particular thing I aspired to do. I could report him (to whom?) but I didn’t see where that would get me, either; I’d be back to the same problem, if anyone even believed me. If I left here, tried again to begin the next year, this false start would be a stain on my CV that could not be explained away, if, indeed, I could find another program that wouldn’t be put off by my present position. I couldn’t sit in my office; I wasn’t even sure I could ever go back to my office. I returned to my room and lay down on my bed. I pressed my thin, lumpy pillow over my face, trying my best to block out everything that had happened over the last five days. There was nowhere for me to go.

  I lay like that all morning and into the afternoon. I couldn’t, of course, tell my parents; even if I only told my father, he would tell my mother, and she would be so disappointed in me that I wasn’t sure she would ever love me again, so intense were her feelings about Women Who Did What I’d Done. It was the very worst thing to be berated by someone whose criticisms are so piercingly accurate, whose utter correctness you already know far too well. I could’ve called my baby brother; he would understand the force of desire. He was a reader of poems, a brooder from behind a lock of hair he’d allowed to grow into his eyes, but the answer would be easy for him: if I thought there might be love, I should find out, and if I didn’t think so, I should go find some somewhere else. There, again, was the hole where a friend should have been. And then, when I thought I might just die from anger and shame and loneliness, it came to me. I called Adam.

  He listened, as I’d hoped he might, without interruption. “I know Campanella,” he said when I’d finished. “But I’ve never known him to do anything like this.” It was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “So you don’t feel that you can stay, but you don’t want to go.”

  “Go where?” I said. “There’s no nowhere to go.”

  “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Jesus. Campanella. The man must be having some kind of breakdown or something. I mean, you’re a lovely girl, but there are men in this world who do things like that, and Campanella, as far as I could tell, has never been one of them.”

  “Some of it was my fault,” I said. “I kissed him back. Just that once, but—”

  “I heard you the first time. You know, I’m not convinced you couldn’t stay there if you wanted to. He’s the one that will have to deal with it. These things happen. They’ve always happened. My first years here, everyone who wasn’t married was sleeping with someone they worked with. And some of the married ones, too. And we all got our work done.”

  “He’s my teacher,” I said. “I would never know when he told me something about my work, why he was saying it. Why he was thinking it.”

  “You’ve made up your mind, then.”

  “Adam, am I being stupid? Am I overreacting?” I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t assess this objectively, that I didn’t know what I was doing because I had no way to know what a kiss or two was supposed to feel like, how two people usually met after such a thing and went on with their lives, or if they could. I wanted to tell him I was a stranger to all this, but as soon as I started to wonder, I thought of my grandmother, and of whether he had known women before her, and I knew it wasn’t something I could say, not to him.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “And I can’t imagine that a phone call form me would do anything to improve your situation.”

  “No,” I said, “I suppose not.”

  “You could speak to him,” Adam said. “Go into his office, and tell him that it was a mistake, and that you very much hope you can resume the professional working relationship you had.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said. I was crying and I couldn’t stop. “I’m ashamed,” I said. “And every day when I see him, I’ll feel—” My voice broke and I couldn’t form any more words.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Adam said. “I can’t help you with all that silly business. But I can probably get you out of there if that’s what you want.”

  “It is,” I said. I was certain it was the only way I’d ever manage to get on with work.

  “I believe it may be possible,” he said, “to get you a position at CERN, in Switzerland, for a year or two, and from there you could likely transition back into a very good graduate program.” CERN was a large hadron collider, a state of the art research facility, where I had never applied to go, because they did not run a graduate program.

  “How?” I said. “Doing what?”

  “I know someone who has a team there,” he said. “I suspect they could use you in a role with a mixture of technical assistance and theoretical discussion, for a year or perhaps eighteen months. A minimal stipend, I’m sure, but enough to get by.”

  “So I’d just drop out of MIT?”

  “You could see about an administrative leave,” he said, “if you think you may want to go back one day. I’m sure it could be arranged. You can always change your mind later if there’s somewhere you’d rather go.” He paused, then added, “Like Pasadena.” Almost instantly, the crushing weight I’d felt began to lift.

  “You must think I’m so stupid,” I said. “I ruined everything in four months because, because—”

  “Hush,” he said. “I think nothing of the kind. Shall I start making calls?”

  Surely I could have recovered from my twenty-one-year-old’s certainty that the shame I felt would never fade. But what Adam offered was a solution to be implemented, one that put an ocean between me and the mistake I had made.

  It was from the lab where I ultimately arrived, in Arizona, that I called on Adam a third time. A dozen years had passed; I was past thirty, and Adam was by all accounts an old man, no longer working regularly, though he still kept up with the field, and phoned me when articles appeared that he wanted to discuss. It was less, I knew, of a personal connection and more some mixture of relief and gratitude that out of a son, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren, one of us had emerged as a physicist, like him, a speaker of his dialect, a familiar soul in a room full of people who thought, by virtue of their similarities, that they understood, entirely ignorant of the differences and distinctions that made certain things utterly incomprehensible.

  We had seen each other every year, sometimes more, since I’d returned to the southwest and was now within a day’s drive; I often came home in December, when I had a break between semesters long enough for a visit but not long enough to get much of anything done alone in the lab.

  I had been in Arizona six years, and would
be up for tenure soon. There was another Assistant Professor in the department also up for review, and although on paper there was room for both of us, an independent up or down on each, it was reasonably plain to all involved that it was going to be one or the other. I knew there were those on my committee who would, consciously or not, rate me less favorably simply because I was a woman. I say that without self-pity, but as a measurable fact. I was angry about it but had come to the conclusion over the years of my uphill battle to get there at all that if I spoke out about it, I would become known as a feminist rather than a physicist, which would not accomplish a great deal for myself or for the women who came after me, my students and theirs, and that it was best to simply get as close as I could to the top.

  The problem was that my competition and I were equally qualified. I needed to be indisputably more qualified, such that choosing him would be indefensible. I had a decent piece of research nearly completed, and I thought, if I could just place it somewhere truly great, it could make the difference. It was with this request that, on a warm Tuesday night in October, with two beers in me for courage, I called Adam.

  “My dear,” he said. “How are the mighty saguaros?” He had never traveled to Arizona but had taken an interest in the cactus that grew here; on his desk he had a photo where I stood in front of one, contorting my arms awkwardly to mirror it.

  “Same as ever. Old. Tall.”

  “And the fraternity boys?”

  “Drunk. Tall.”

  “You amaze me,” he said. “I don’t know how you manage all this teaching business.”

  “I don’t mind it. I just wish it didn’t take up so much time.”

  “Well, I suppose I should be grateful that someone with a brain is doing it. People like me don’t make new physicists, and I’ll die, and then what?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I would have liked to stall a bit longer, but I thought I’d lose my courage, so I forged ahead. “Remember I mentioned a paper to you that I was nearly done with? On neutron oscillation?”

  “Sure, I remember.”

  “I want you to help me place it.”

  “You won’t need my help,” he said. “It sounded like a good piece of research.”

  “I know I can place it somewhere,” I said. “I want this to be big.”

  “Tenure-big,” he said. “This isn’t about the quality of the work, then? It’s visibility you’re after?” I nodded, then remembered that we were on the phone and he couldn’t see me.

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s what I mean.” He knew my review was approaching, and about the competition.

  “No,” he said, “I won’t do that.”

  “What?” I said. I thought there must be some trick to this, a next step, I won’t do that, but I’ll do you one better.

  “I’m frankly disappointed that you’ve asked,” he said.

  “But I always thought—other times, when I needed help, you’ve always—”

  “To help you secure the right kind of training,” he said. “There was nothing I wanted more. But training is over, Katherine, and I cannot lend my name to manipulate the system of review that separates the very best work from the merely careful.”

  “I just need the smallest boost,” I said. “This is good work. You said so yourself.”

  “It is not for me to say,” he said. I could see his face in my mind, his cold blue eyes. I didn’t want to think so, but I knew it was true. He had a way of doing that. I wondered where I might have ended up if I had never listened to a word the old man said.

  Adam Brooks, 1953

  There aren’t many women here, but there don’t have to be, because this one, the one who has just crossed the street fifteen feet in front of him, is something else. She has messy dark hair and green eyes, and she is tall—Adam would guess five-foot-ten—though she is often sitting when he catches sight of her. He has spied her in a number of places: at one of the long tables in the library, perched on a wall outside a classroom, reading a novel. Several times he has seen her in the dining hall with a man he doesn’t recognize, probably someone in chemistry or biology. She is young, perhaps even younger than he is, and he avidly hopes that the man is a professor and not an overgrown graduate student, and that he is her father, or her uncle.

  He also realizes that in a university of young men, he can’t be the only one watching her. Others will know her father, will know what one ought to say to a pretty girl, and, for that matter, will care less about their coursework so as to give them time to go chasing after her. This is not a contest he can win with his academic clout. So he just watches her, whenever she appears, and secretly enjoys those moments. He takes pleasure in the slight tilt of her head, in the way strands escape from the knot at the back of her neck. Once, he’d lain awake at night unable to stop thinking about her, wondering what he might say if he approached, wondering what she might say if he approached, and he’d only been able to get his mind off her by getting out of bed and working a series of equations at his desk.

  After a few weeks he has realized that it’s on Wednesdays and sometimes Saturdays that she appears for dinner. The professor is Dick Travis, in chemistry; Adam saw his photo on a poster for a lecture. He has wished to keep this fascination to himself. It might damage his image, and he likes being seen as something apart, propelling himself past his classmates’ levels of understanding without ever displaying the usual human needs. If anyone could read his thoughts now, he would seem just like one of those boys roaring away in a convertible on Friday nights and spending the weekend doing God knows what in Los Angeles.

  It’s 5:30 on a Wednesday and Chuck, his roommate, is putting on his shoes, ready to leave for dinner. Professor Travis and the girl come a bit later, 6, or even 6:30, and if they go now he may miss them entirely. Chuck looks over at him. “Well?” he says. “You coming, Junior?” A nickname they’ve given him mostly in jest; he is, in fact, the youngest graduate student in the department, but also indisputably among the most senior in terms of scientific understanding.

  “I—I’ve got an equation to work out first,” Adam says. “Just something I wanted to finish up.”

  “A likely story.” Chuck is right; if there were anything urgent, Adam would’ve been doing it already, but instead he is stretched out on his thin mattress, his feet propped on a stack of blankets. “Who are you avoiding?”

  “I’m just not hungry yet,” Adam says.

  “You are the worst liar I have ever met.”

  “Fine. Do you know Dick Travis?” he asks. “Chemistry?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  “Some days when he comes to dinner, he has this girl with him. I think it’s his daughter.”

  “Oh, baby,” Chuck says. Then, “you want me to sit here hungry for an hour so you can stare at a girl you’re never going to talk to?”

  “That’s the long and short of it.” Adam’s face begins to burn, and he thinks he might just stay right here, in this cramped dorm room, for the next few weeks. He hates that Chuck has read him so easily, hates that he is right.

  “Well, only one thing to do about that,” Chuck says.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. We’ll go at five past six, and I’ll bet she’ll be there, I think I know the one you mean, and from the first sighting, you’ve got ten minutes before I go talk to her.”

  “No, no, no,” Adam says. “Let’s just forget it. We can eat in town, at the diner. Later. Let’s go to the lab, what do you say?”

  “You don’t have to come,” Chuck says. “That’ll make it even easier on me when I sweep her off her feet. But if you do want to come, I’d wash up first. You’ve got pencil smudges all over you.”

  They leave the room at five to six. Chuck is kind enough to stay silent as they mount the steps, and even, miraculously, when they catch sight of her, toward the end of the buffet line, holding her plate without a tray, balancing a fork across it. She is wearing a dark green sweater.

  “Clock’s ticking,”
Chuck whispers in his ear. Adam looks wildly around the room. There has to be a way to talk to her without walking up to the table where she’s sitting with her father.

  “Can we set the deadline at anytime before she leaves?” Adam says. “I have a plan.”

  “If they head for the door I’m chasing them.”

  “Deal.”

  Adam hastily fills his plate with more food than he wants, soggy green beans, a rubbery pork chop, and takes a seat with his back to her. Chuck sits across from him, facing the girl. Adam keeps his eyes down as he mechanically cuts his meat and chews, spears one bland green bean after another. He senses that Chuck is watching him, trying his hardest not to laugh at Adam’s discomfort. Two more guys join them, Ted from the lab across the hall and his roommate whose name Adam can never remember, and Adam barely says hello. Ted is trying to talk to him, to get his advice about a theory he’s working out, but Adam barely hears. And then it is all happening at once: she is out of her seat, returning to the buffet exactly as he had imagined she might, having gone through the line the first time without room for dessert on her plate, and he springs from his chair to do the same, to the buffet table where she now stands over the plate of cookies, hunting for the one she wants, and then he is beside her, and he is telling her his name, his department, and she is telling him that her name is Angeline.

  Retreat