So. It was true.
Leo sat at his desk, trying to relax his stomach. They would have to assimilate this new company, learn their technique, test it. It had been patented, Leo noted, which meant they had it exclusively at this point, as a kind of trade secret—a concept many working scientists had trouble accepting. A secret scientific method? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Of course a patent was a matter of public record, and eventually it would enter the public domain. So it wasn’t a trade secret in literal fact. But at this stage it was secret enough. And it could not be a sure thing. There wasn’t much published about it, as far as Leo could tell. Some papers in preparation, some papers submitted, one paper accepted—he would have to check that one out as soon as possible—and a patent. Sometimes they awarded them so early. One or two papers were all that supported the whole approach.
Secret science. “God damn it,” Leo said to his room. Derek had bought a pig in a poke. And Leo was going to have to open the poke and poke around.
There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.
“Oh hi, Yann, how are you?”
“I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say good-bye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is finished.”
“Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.”
“Really?”
Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all. Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and potentially very helpful.
“Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Leo admitted. “It’s likely to be a biology problem, but who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.”
“That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.”
“Oh I will. See you soon.”
And their best biomath guy slipped out the door.
* * *
Charlie Quibler had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. “Have you got your backpack and your lunch?”—this not always being the case—and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream that always played out the same.
“Joey and Daddy!” Charlie would say then, or “Joe and Dad at home, here we go!” or “How about breakfast? Here—how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of Mom’s milk. Mom’s milk.”
This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.
So now Charlie had Joe there with him in the kitchen, crawling underfoot or investigating the gate that blocked the steep stairs to the cellar. Careening around like a human pinball. Anna had taped bubblewrap to all the corners; it looked like the kitchen had just recently arrived and not yet been completely unpacked.
“Okay watch out now, don’t. Don’t! Your bottle will be ready in a second.”
“Ba!”
“Yes, bottle.”
This was satisfactory, and Joe plopped on his butt directly under Charlie’s feet. Charlie worked over him, taking some of Anna’s frozen milk out of the freezer and putting it in a pot of warming water on the back burner. Anna had her milk stored in precise quantities of either four or ten ounces, in tall or short permanent plastic cylinders that were filled with disposable plastic bags, capped by brown rubber nipples that Charlie had pricked many times with a needle, and topped by snap-on plastic tops to protect the nipples from contamination in the freezer. Contamination in the freezer? Charlie had wanted to ask Anna, but he hadn’t. There was a lab book on the kitchen counter for Charlie to fill out the times and amounts of Joe’s feedings. Anna liked to know these things, she said, to determine how much milk to pump at work. So Charlie logged in while the water started to bubble, thinking as he always did that the main purpose here was to fulfill Anna’s pleasure in making quantified records of any kind.
He was testing the temperature of the thawed milk by taking a quick suck on the nipple when his phone rang. He whipped on a headset and answered.
“Hi Charlie, it’s Roy.”
“Oh hi Roy, what’s up.”
“Well I’ve got your latest draft here and I’m about to read it, and I thought I’d check first to see what I should be looking for, how you solved the IPCC stuff.”
“Oh yeah. The new stuff that matters is all in the third section.” The bill as Charlie had drafted it for Phil would require the U.S. to act on certain recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Did you kind of bury the part about us conforming to IPCC findings?”
“I don’t think there’s earth deep enough to bury that one. I tried to put it in a context that made it look inevitable. International body that we are part of, climate change clearly real, the UN the best body to work through global issues, support for them pretty much mandatory for us or else the whole world cooks in our juices, that sort of thing.”
“Well, but that’s never worked before, has it? Come on, Charlie, this is Phil’s big pre-election bill and you’re his climate guy, if he can’t get this bill out of committee then we’re in big trouble.”
“Yeah I know. Wait just a second.”
Charlie took another test pull from the bottle. Now it was at body temperature, or almost.
“A bit early to be hitting the bottle, Charlie, what you drinking there?”
“Well, I’m drinking my wife’s breast milk, if you must know.”
“Say what?”
“I’m testing the temperature of one of Joe’s bottles. They have to be thawed to a very exact temperature or else he gets annoyed.”
“So you’re drinking your wife’s breast milk out of a baby bottle?”
“Yes I am.”
“How is it?”
“It’s good. Thin but sweet. A potent mix of protein, fat, and sugar. No doubt the perfect food.”
“I bet.” Roy cackled. “Do you ever get it straight from the source?”
“Well I try, sure, who doesn’t, but Anna doesn’t like it. She says it’s a mixed message and if I don’t watch out she’ll wean me when she weans Joe.”
“Ah ha. So you have to take the long-term view.”
“Yes. Although actually I tried it one time when Joe fell asleep nursing, so she couldn’t move without waking him. She was hissing at me and I was trying to get it to work but apparently you have to suck much harder than, you know, one usually would, there’s a trick to it, and I still hadn’t gotten any when Joe woke up and saw me. Anna and I froze, expecting him to freak out, but he just reached out and patted me on the head.”
“He understood!”
“Yeah. It was like he was saying I know how you feel, Dad, and I will share with you this amazing bounty. Didn’t you Joe?” he sa
id, handing him the warmed bottle. He watched with a smile as Joe took it one-handed and tilted it back, elbow thrown out like Popeye with a can of spinach. Because of all the pinpricks Charlie had made in the rubber nipples, Joe could choke down a bottle in a few minutes, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so. No doubt a sugar rush.
“Okay, well, you are a kinky guy my friend and obviously deep in the world of domestic bliss, but we’re still relying on you here and this may be the most important bill Phil introduces in this session.”
“Come on it’s a lot more than that, young man, it’s one of the few chances we have left to avoid complete global disaster, I mean—”
“Preaching to the converted! Preaching to the converted!”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Sure sure. Okay, I’ll read this draft and get back to you ASAP. I want to move on with this, and the committee discussion is now scheduled for Tuesday.”
“That’s fine, I’ll have my phone with me all day.”
“Sounds good, I’ll be in touch, but meanwhile be thinking about how to slip the IPCC thing in even deeper.”
“Yeah okay but see what I did already.”
“Sure bye.”
“Bye.”
Charlie pulled off the headset and turned off the stove. Joe finished his bottle, inspected it, tossed it casually aside.
“Man, you are fast,” Charlie said as he always did. One of the mutual satisfactions of their days together was doing the same things over and over again, and saying the same things about them. Joe was not as insistent on pattern as Nick had been, in fact he liked a kind of structured variability, as Charlie thought of it, but the pleasure in repetition was still there.
There was no denying his boys were very different. When Nick had been Joe’s age, Charlie had still found it necessary to hold him cradled in his arm, head wedged in the nook of his elbow to make him take the bottle, because Nick had had a curious moment of aversion, even when he was hungry. He would whine and refuse the nipple, perhaps because it was not the real thing, perhaps because it had taken Charlie months to learn to puncture the bottle nipples with lots of extra holes. In any case he would refuse and twist away, head whipping from side to side, and the hungrier he was the more he would do it, until with a rush like a fish to a lure he would strike, latching on and sucking desperately. It was a fairly frustrating routine, part of the larger Shock of Lost Adult Freedom that had hammered Charlie so hard that first time around, though he could hardly now remember why. A perfect image for all the compromised joys and irritations of Mr. Momhood, those hundreds of sessions with reluctant Nick and his bottle.
With Joe life was in some ways much easier. Charlie was more used to it, for one thing, and Joe, though difficult in his own ways, would certainly never refuse a bottle.
Now he decided he would try again to climb the baby gate and dive down the cellar stairs, but Charlie moved quickly to detach him, then shooed him out into the dining room while cleaning up the counter, ignoring the loud cries of complaint.
“Okay okay! Quiet! Hey let’s go for a walk! Let’s go walk!”
“No!”
“Ah come on. Oh wait, it’s your day for Gymboree, and then we’ll go to the park and have lunch, and then go for a walk!”
“NO!”
But that was just Joe’s way of saying yes.
Charlie wrestled him into the baby backpack, which was mostly a matter of controlling his legs, not an easy thing. Joe was strong, a compact animal with bulging thigh muscles, and though not as loud a screamer as Nick had been, a tough guy to overpower. “Gymboree, Joe! You love it! Then a walk, guy, a walk to the park!”
Off they went.
First to Gymboree, located in a big building just off Wisconsin. Gymboree was a chance to get infants together when they did not have some other day care to do it. It was an hour-long class, and always a bit depressing, Charlie felt, to be paying to get his kid into a play situation with other kids but there it was; without Gymboree they all would have been on their own.
Joe disappeared into the tunnels of a big plastic jungle gym. It may have been a commercial replacement for real community, but Joe didn’t know that; all he saw was that it had lots of stuff to play with and climb on, and so he scampered around the colorful structures, crawling through tubes and climbing up things, ignoring the other kids to the point of treating them as movable parts of the apparatus, which could cause problems. “Oops, say you’re sorry, Joe. Sorry!”
Off he shot again, evading Charlie. He didn’t want to waste any time. Once again the contrast with Nick could not have been more acute. Nick had seldom moved at Gymboree. One time he had found a giant red ball and stood embracing the thing for the full hour of the class. All the moms had stared sympathetically (or not), and the instructor, Ally, had done her best to help Charlie get him interested in something else; but Nick would not budge from his mystical red ball.
Embarrassing. But Charlie was used to that. The problem was not just Nick’s immobility or Joe’s hyperactivity, but the fact that Charlie was always the only dad there. Without him it would have been a complete momspace, and comfortable as such. He knew that his presence wrecked that comfort. It happened in all kinds of infant-toddler contexts. As far as Charlie could tell, there was not a single other man inside the Beltway who ever spent the business hours of a weekday with preschool children. It just wasn’t done. That wasn’t why people moved to D.C. It wasn’t why Charlie had moved there either, for that matter, but he and Anna had talked it over before Nick was born, and they had come to the realization that Charlie could do his job (on a part-time basis anyway) and their infant care at the same time, by using phone and e-mail to keep in contact with Senator Chase’s office. Phil Chase himself had perfected the method of working at a distance back when he had been the World’s Senator, always on the road; and being the good guy he was, he had thoroughly approved of Charlie’s plan. While on the other hand Anna’s job absolutely required her to be at work at least fifty hours a week, and often more. So Charlie had happily volunteered to be the stay-at-home parent. It would be an adventure.
And an adventure it had been, there was no denying that. But first time’s a charm; and now he had been doing it for over a year with kid number two, and what had been shocking and all-absorbing with kid number one was now simply routine. The repetitions were beginning to get to him. Joe was beginning to get to him.
So now Charlie sat there in Gymboree, hanging with the moms and the nannies. A nice situation in theory, but in practice a diplomatic challenge of the highest order. No one wanted to be misunderstood. No one would regard it as a coincidence if he happened to end up talking to one of the more attractive women there, or to anyone in particular on a regular basis. That was fine with Charlie, but with Joe doing his thing, he could not completely control the situation. There was Joe now, doing it again—going after a black-haired little girl who had the perfect features of a model. Charlie was obliged to go over and make sure Joe didn’t mug her, as he had a wont to do with girls he liked, and yes, the little girl had an attractive mom, or in this case a nanny—a young blonde au pair from Germany whom Charlie had spoken to before. Charlie could feel the eyes of the other women on him; not a single adult in that room believed in his innocence.
“Hi Asta.”
“Hello Charlie.”
He even began to doubt it himself. Asta was one of those lively European women of twenty or so who gave the impression of being a decade ahead of their American contemporaries in terms of adult experiences—not easy, given the way American teens were these days. Charlie felt a little surge of protest: It’s not me who goes after the babes, he wanted to shout, it’s my son! My son the hyperactive girl-chasing mugger! But of course he couldn’t do that, and now even Asta regarded him warily, perhaps because the first time they had chatted over their kids he had made some remark complimenting her on her child’s nice hair. He felt himself begin to blush again, remembering the look of amused surprise
she had given him as she corrected him.
Sing-along saved him from the moment. It was designed to calm the kids down a bit before the session ended and they had to be lassoed back into their car seats for the ride home. Joe took Ally’s announcement as his cue to dive into the depths of the tube structure, where it was impossible to follow him or to coax him out. He would only emerge when Ally started singing “Ring Around the Rosie,” which he enjoyed. Round in circles they all went, Charlie avoiding anyone’s eye but Joe’s. Ally, who was from New Jersey, belted out the lead, and so all the kids and moms joined her loudly in the final chorus:
“Eshes, eshes, we all, fall, DOWN!”
And down they all fell.
Then it was off to the park.
Their park was a small one, located just west of Wisconsin Avenue, a few blocks south of their home. A narrow grassy area held a square sandpit, which contained play structures for young kids. Tennis courts lined the south edge of the park. Against Wisconsin stood a fire station, and to the west a field extended out to one of the many little creeks that still cut through the grid of streets.
Midday the sandpit and the benches flanking it were almost always occupied by a few infants and toddlers, moms and nannies. Many more nannies than moms here, most of them West Indian, to judge by their appearance and voices. They sat on the benches together, resting in the steamy heat, talking. The kids wandered on their own, absorbed or bored.
Joe kept Charlie on his toes. Nick had been content to sit in one spot for long periods of time, and when playing he had been pathologically cautious; on a low wooden bouncy bridge his little fists had gone white on the chain railing. Joe however had quickly located the spot on the bridge that would launch him the highest—not the middle, but about halfway down to it. He would stand right there and jump up and down in time to the wooden oscillation until he was catching big air, his unhappy expression utterly different from Nick’s, in that it was caused by his dissatisfaction that he could not get higher. This was part of his general habit of using his body as an experimental object, including walking in front of kids on swings, etc. Countless times Charlie had been forced to jerk him out of dangerous situations, and they had become less frequent only because Joe didn’t like how loud Charlie yelled afterward. “Give me a break!” Charlie would shout. “What do you think, you’re made of steel?”
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