Intuition

  Now he flinched. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you sac your mice,” she said.

  “When?”

  “I watched you in March. I saw you do it through the window, and you gassed them. You didn't break their necks.”

  “Jesus, Robin, what is going on?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “You tell me.”

  He sprang up. “You were spying on me.”

  The words hurt, but for the first time Robin saw fear in his eyes. She'd pressed and pressed, and now, for the first time, she'd drawn blood. He'd bent the rules, and when she called him on it, she'd scared him. She was so startled that for a moment she didn't know what to do. “I thought there was something wrong,” she murmured. “I thought it was me, and I thought it was the equipment, and I thought it was the cell line, but it wasn't. It was you.”

  He was indignant again, filled with righteous anger. “What are you trying to say? That I screwed up my own experiments? What are you doing—coming in here, taking my lab book, checking on my data? Why can't you just be honest with me, and come to me openly?”

  “I'm being honest now,” Robin said. “I'm coming to you now. Why didn't you break your animals' necks? Why didn't you sac them properly?”

  He might have admitted then that he didn't always decapitate the animals, or argued that Marion's strictures weren't necessary, but he panicked instead. “I did sacrifice them properly,” he burst out.

  “All of them?”

  “Look.” He turned to the page in his lab notebook where he'd recorded the deaths. There was the date in March, and all the data she was looking for in neat columns. He had sacrificed twenty-three animals, then dissected them. There were the tag numbers on the ruled page, printed boldly in black ink. The numbers made sense. She'd shaken him, but only for a moment, and now he was himself again, his new, confident self.

  3

  THE PICNIC was sacred. Every August at Walden Pond, the lab celebrated its successes and mourned the grants that got away. The picnic was a celebration and a wake, a feast and a swim fest. Mendelssohn and Glass each spoke, and typically said a few words of encouragement and thanks to each researcher, a subtle but public form of evaluation.

  No one missed the picnic without good cause: a bout with stomach flu, a death in the family. Robin could hardly have skipped the eleventh annual picnic just to attend a friend's wedding. She missed the gathering because she was a cousin of the bride, and had a part in the ceremony as bridesmaid.

  “She's the only one who couldn't come,” Marion told Jacob as they unloaded the car. Brandishing two beach umbrellas, Aaron had gone ahead to stake the lab's claim on the scratchy sand.

  The Mendelssohns were the advance team. Marion had brought a folding camping table and aluminum lawn chairs, old, clean blankets to spread upon the ground, and two coolers filled with individually wrapped sandwiches and desserts: brownies, lemon squares, and cookies from Rosie's Bakery. There were extra condiments, bowls of chips, potato salad, green salad topped with large croutons, quarts of prewashed blueberries, and packages of paper plates, plasticware, and napkins. Jacob and Aaron dragged all these things down from the parking lot in Aaron's old Radio Flyer wagon.

  Although Sandy was bringing drinks, Marion heaved a container of spring water with a spigot onto the table. As usual, she'd planned for every contingency. She carried extra garbage bags and sunscreen, and even a first aid kit. The others used to laugh at her for this, but the year before, when Aidan spiked his foot on a rock, Marion had been prepared.

  Sandy and Ann and the girls arrived next with the cider and sodas, and Feng and Mei pulled up with Natalya and Ivan. Prithwish had hitched a ride with Aidan and his new boyfriend, Tim. Cliff came with Nella. Marion and Jacob waved each of the newcomers down, flapping towels from their relatively secluded spot. Then Marion settled back in her lawn chair, satisfied. Aaron had found a good place close to the trees and far from the crowds, though the beach tapered out here, and the sand was coarse and sparse.

  “You know, it's so rocky here,” Sandy began from his lawn chair next to Marion.

  “Don't start,” she told him. He brought this up every year, insisting they should have gone to Crane Beach or Horseneck Beach, or even to the Cape, but Marion wouldn't think of driving so far just for a picnic. She was not a sun lover, and she liked her beaches to come with trees. She was dressed in blue linen pants and a white linen top and wore a large straw hat. She could swim, but no one had ever seen her do it. She preferred to watch the others from under her umbrella, to take in the scene: the noisy clamor in the distance; the green pond's graceful curve, fringed thick with oak and pine.

  There were the sunbathers and then there were the swimmers. Aidan and Tim, Louisa, Charlotte, and Natalya all arranged themselves in various states of undress on the sand. Cliff rubbed Nella thoroughly with sunscreen. But Feng and Mei and Prithwish ran down to the water and waded in. Shivering in her black tank suit, Mei inched her way along. She was small and fair, with a dark birthmark on her thigh; her hair was cut like a boy's, severely short, a jagged frame for her large eyes and faint eyebrows. Feng splashed her on the backs of her knees, and she screamed and splashed him back.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Prithwish protested, caught in the cross fire.

  “I'm getting out,” Mei said to Feng in Chinese.

  “Why?”

  “Because I'm freezing!”

  “Keep moving and you'll stay warm. Come on, swim.”

  “No. I'm frozen.”

  “Come on.”

  The three of them swam out a bit deeper, and then deeper still, until they could no longer touch the bottom of the pond, where mud oozed and sucked every footstep. They treaded water now, and spoke in bursts, out of breath from the cold and the effort.

  “Isn't it odd this is Thoreau's pond?” Feng said in English for Prithwish's benefit. “Don't you think it's ironic there is an ice cream truck?”

  “What's wrong with that?” Prithwish asked.

  “And parking lots and restrooms?”

  “I thought that's why we come here,” Prithwish said.

  “Ah.” Feng flipped over on his back. He filled his lungs with air and floated, gazing up at the sky. Where Walden had once been crystalline and still, the water was choppy with kayaks, the air filled with talk and children wailing. In China, of course, the great sites were always packed. He could not even imagine the Forbidden City without crowds of sightseers. There was justice in that—the imperial palaces thrown open to the people. Walden, however, had been only a little pond, a place for meditation. And now, where Thoreau had contemplated self-reliance, you could buy Popsicles.

  He missed his anonymity. He rued the way he had become the name and face associated with the lab's hot new work. The attention had distorted his role in the lab and damaged his friendship with Cliff. Where once they had joked constantly and teased each other, now relations were guarded and polite between them. Glass had taken Feng aside and spoken to him, tried to encourage him during the media barrage. He'd insisted in the long run that all this would help Feng find a good position, start a lab of his own, and establish himself at a biotech company or university. “You're a known quantity now. You have a name,” Glass said. “Do you know how valuable that is? It's terrific. You'll be able to write your own ticket.”

  But writing your own ticket and being written on were two different things. After all his press Feng wondered what kind of worth he could accrue, celebrated for the wrong reasons, lionized as the key figure in someone else's research program. “Look, it's just a matter of emphasis,” Glass explained. “The articles aren't wrong. Face it. They like you. You make good copy. Roll with it.”

  “I'm not some kind of hero, just for—” Feng protested.

  “Roll with it,” said Glass again.

  “It'll blow over,” Mendelssohn predicted.

  Feng was not comforted by this. He wanted to succeed; he and Mei looked forward to earning at least one liv
ing wage. They wanted to have a child, but they scarcely spoke of that, a baby was so far beyond their means. He hoped to do well, but he wanted to succeed scientifically. This media success was only rhetoric and hearsay, the opposite of science.

  Onshore, Kate sat cross-legged in cutoff shorts over her bathing suit. She was trying not to stare at long-legged Nella, who must have been six feet tall. Cliff's new girlfriend seemed a feminine Gulliver arrayed there on her towel, her slender fingers just brushing the sand.

  “What's up?” Cliff asked, friendly as ever. He sat down next to Kate with his sandwich in hand.

  “Not much.” She was slightly miffed, and at the same time she knew she had no right to be. She viewed him with a mix of offended pride and sixteen-year-old humility.

  “How's John Donne?”

  “Dead.”

  She hadn't meant to sound quite so perfunctory, but Cliff laughed and laughed. “I guess that's the problem with the seventeenth century,” he said. “It's kind of over, isn't it?”

  “Kind of,” she said. Her heart was pounding, her mind confused. Were he and Nella serious? Had she told a joke just then? “So you're famous now,” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “Charlotte brought Jeff's article.” She picked up the copy of the Crimson lying on the sand. There was Cliff's picture on the front page and the headline “Postdoc Wants to Make Cancer History.”

  “Here's hoping no one reads it,” Cliff murmured as he skimmed the first two columns.

  “Well, it's just a student paper,” Kate reasoned. “And it's the summer.”

  “Could we sort of . . . hide this?” Cliff slipped the folded pages under Kate's beach blanket. He had just begun to understand Feng's frustration with the press.

  “Is it that embarrassing?”

  “I come across like a total jerk trying to steal credit.”

  “I think it was meant to be flattering,” Kate ventured.

  “Yeah, well, it isn't.”

  “It's not really about you, anyway,” she said philosophically.

  “Who else could this article be about?”

  “It's all about Jeff,” said Kate. “It's about how he wants to be editor of the newspaper. It's him showing off, not you.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm, what?”

  “You're very . . .”

  She held still, waiting. She was very what? Smart? Small? Perceptive? Persuasive? Pretty?

  The word remained unspoken. He picked up her paperback and read the cover out loud: “She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith.”

  “We're doing it in the fall at school,” Kate said.

  “Oh, you're going to be in it?”

  “I'll probably write the program notes. But I'd like to . . . I wish I could . . .”

  “Who would you be?”

  “Kate,” she said. “Kate Hardcastle.”

  “Since you are Kate, they should give it to you,” Cliff said, turning the slim book in his hands. “What's it about?”

  “Well . . .” Kate began.

  But just then her father announced, “All right, enough of this eating and lazing around. Who's swimming across the pond? Natalya? Aidan?” He sized up Aidan's boyfriend, who lay face down, working on his tan. “Tim?”

  “God, no,” said Tim, voice muffled in his towel.

  “Where's Robin when I need her?” Sandy growled. “Cliff? You coming?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Cliff smiled at Kate apologetically, then stood up and stretched. “Here.” He returned the book, then dumped his keys and wallet and T-shirt in a heap at her feet.

  The four men marched down to the water, Glass first—short, wiry, and intrepid, with zinc oxide on his nose—then Aidan, blond and European in his monokini. Prithwish wore swimming trunks in a blue-and-white hibiscus pattern, and his belly hung over the top. He'd grown stout, but he was a fast and fluid swimmer. “Hurry up,” he called to Cliff, who much preferred the warm Pacific to this frigid water. Cliff's red bathing trunks had faded to a dull rust color, and his skin was pale for lack of sun, but Kate thought he had a beautiful back, broad and bony. She imagined Cliff would outswim them all.

  They glided off, kicking fiercely. Glass and Prithwish swam in front; Aidan and Cliff followed. Competitive and quick as ever, Glass set a punishing pace. Prithwish and Aidan slowed a little, but Cliff found, to his surprise, that he had no trouble keeping up. His body relaxed into each stroke, and his muscles seemed to curl and stretch with joy just to move again in water.

  When the four were no more than specks heading to the opposite shore, Kate wandered over to the table and picked out a chocolate chip cookie. Next to the drinks cooler, Jacob and Aaron sat playing Go on towels in the sand.

  “Do you know how to play?” Aaron asked politely.

  “No.”

  “We could teach you,” he offered.

  “No thanks.”

  He was hurt, but said nothing. She was just a year older than he. As grade-schoolers he and Kate had played for hours at these picnics, digging moats and mounding up castles of wet sand, but that had been a long time ago. Now she hurried away to her sisters and her mother.

  Charlotte was in a funk. Jeff was busy traveling in Brazil because he'd gotten his summer travel grant. She wished she'd gotten hers, but she never spoke of her disappointment. She didn't want to give her father the satisfaction. Disaffected, she viewed the pond through dark sunglasses and listened to the Talking Heads through earphones until she was almost someplace else. Louisa, however, had brought a folder full of photocopied journal articles and was highlighting them industriously.

  “I might not work on Robert Hooke,” she informed her mother.

  “Might not work on him!” Ann exclaimed. “I thought you loved him.”

  “I loved Micrographia,” Louisa said grimly. “Hooke was an asshole.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “He slept with his sixteen-year-old niece.”

  “Well,” Ann began. “In those—”

  “I just can't write my dissertation on somebody like that.”

  “I thought he was the most important, most neglected English scientist.”

  “And he discovered the great red spot on Jupiter,” Kate chimed in.

  “Well, he was a great scientist, and he is neglected,” said Louisa, “but he's also a slime bag.”

  “He may have had his problems,” Ann conceded, “but presumably the work is more important to you than the life.”

  Louisa thought for a moment. “No,” she said.

  Ann smiled at that.

  “What?” Louisa asked, irritated.

  “Nothing.” Ann wasn't going to call Louisa naïve and stand accused of condescension. She wasn't going to fall into that trap. Still, she knew something about the interplay of selfishness and creativity. Her own unfinished book examined three eminent Victorians: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Each had been hampered by a mysterious psychosomatic ailment, each freed by sickness and neurosis to pursue the life of the mind, even while their families sacrificed for them and their servants catered to them. For years Ann had contemplated the way that weakness became strength. More than once as she ran her busy household, and organized her husband's and children's lives, she'd wished that she, too, could come down with some mysterious but non-life-threatening ailment; that she, too, could be delivered from the ordinary realm of errands and appointments, college teaching, and schedule keeping into the rarefied realm of art, or medicine, or science. She had come to envy, and even admire, Browning's reclusiveness, Darwin's delicate stomach, and Carlyle's acute hypochondria. In her professional as well as her personal life, Ann had come not only to forgive but to find the creative power in willfulness and human frailty. And so when Louisa fell out of love with Robert Hooke for being a sexual predator, as were so many men of his class in his day, as well as a genius, as so many men were not, Ann thought her daughter a bit shortsighted.

  “If I'm going to devote years of my
life to studying a scientist, it's going to be somebody I respect,” said Louisa.

  “You have high standards,” murmured Ann.

  “You mean ruling out incestuous relations? How is that such a high standard?”

  “I just meant it might be difficult to find a great neglected early modern scientist who was also an entirely good man. You might find someone great and good, but I doubt in that case he'd also be neglected.”

  Louisa stuffed her journal articles and highlighter into her beach bag and flopped down on her towel. “I'd compromise on the neglected part,” she said. “If he—or she—has to be famous, so be it.”

  “That's very generous of you,” Ann said.

  “Oh, stop it, Mom.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Just stop making fun of me. You sound like Dad.”

  “I'm not making fun of you, sweetie,” Ann said. And, in fact, her heart broke a little at the thought of Louisa struggling like a latter-day Diogenes, searching through history for an honest man.

  Cliff was warm now from swimming. They were at least halfway to the other bank, and the trees rose up in front of them, lush and green. But Aidan was lagging far behind, and called out, “Hey! Hey, you guys!” Glass didn't hear Aidan at first, and kept on swimming, but Cliff stopped, treading water.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I'm getting tired,” Aidan called. “I think I want to head back.”

  “I'll go with you,” Prithwish offered.

  “It's okay, I'll be all right.”

  “You shouldn't swim alone,” said Prithwish.

  “I'm really fine.”

  Prithwish and Cliff hesitated a moment, their heads bobbing in the green and silver water. The pond was deep, and it was a good twenty-minute swim to either shore.

  “I'll go with you,” Prithwish decided, and swam back toward Aidan.

  “Come on, Cliff,” Glass sang out. Cliff was getting a bit tired himself. Still, he felt he had no choice but to follow. He put his head down and paced himself, swimming in Glass's wake. Not for nothing did Glass jog every morning. Not for nothing did he train and run the Boston Marathon each year. He was scarcely out of breath when they finally made it to dry land.