“Dr. Weisen, I have another analysis for you,” said Maggie.
“Good. Come along to my office.”
So it was to be business as usual. Monica replaced the fire extinguisher, carefully buckling its metal belt, thinking furiously. She knew, almost, but didn’t dare say anything. But as she turned back she caught the delighted and triumphant glance that passed between Maggie and Norman, and was sure.
She followed Maggie and Dr. Weisen down the hall and waited by the door, considering her unpredictable friend. Like Monica, Maggie was driving hard to finish her degree, but always had time for her friends. Monica found her as easy to talk to as a sister, her intelligence and empathy making up for their short acquaintance. Maggie’s appetite for knowledge was as fierce as Monica’s, but not as solemn; she snacked on humor. That wastebasket—poor Tom! Or that first warm day in April when Monica had come home to find her sitting cross-legged on the roof of their front porch, playing silly spring music on her flute while dipping it in a child’s bubble solution, so that shimmering spheres, light and silvery as the music, floated through the new air like promises.
Dr. Weisen had paused over one sheet. “What is this?”
“Confidence band on the kidney damage side effects,” said Maggie.
“But for the tumors you’ve done significance tests.”
“Right. And for all the side effects I’ve done confidence band estimates. That’s the best approach.”
“I see.” Dr. Weisen sighed in mock exasperation. “Another statistical fad.”
“Not a fad. A newly appreciated truth.”
“Good girl, stand up for your beliefs!” Dr. Weisen seemed pleased by her firmness. “But you will do significance tests too, for old-fashioned folks like me?”
“No, they aren’t appropriate. A confidence band tells you much better just how much risk of a side effect there is. This one says there are between eighteen and—”
Weisen laughed, holding up a hand as though to fend off an attack. “All right! I won’t fight. I certainly can’t keep up with your field too.” He looked at the rest of the pages, then handed her a new stack of data sheets. “Fine. It’s in good shape.”
“Thanks.”
“Come in, Monica.”
Maggie waited by the door while Monica asked, “Dr. Weisen, I understand that you may be selling the patent for this tumor treatment to a pharmaceutical company.”
“I certainly hope to, Monica. They can finish testing it and help tumor victims.”
“Yes. I was wondering, though, does that mean you’ll stop teaching?” Her face tensed with concern.
He smiled reassuringly. “Perhaps, Monica. I’d certainly continue through the fall term, at least. But no one has bought it yet, and I don’t plan to count my chickens too soon.”
“How soon will you know?”
“Representatives from the companies will be here June twelfth. We should have this last set of experiments completed by then.”
“June twelfth.”
“That should be soon enough for you to make plans.”
“Dr. Weisen, I need the very best training I can get.”
“Yes.” He looked at her kindly, Santa Claus even as he was threatening to withdraw the gift he had been giving her. “Monica, I’ll help you however I can. I’ll write letters of recommendation, of course, wherever I am.”
“Yes, Dr. Weisen, thank you. But it’s not just getting a good job. I want to be able to do the best work I can.”
“I understand. That’s my motive too.”
“Yes, of course.” She was being selfish, childish. As though her desire to do well justified keeping Dr. Weisen from realizing his own far more brilliant potential. She straightened and said firmly, “Thank you, Dr. Weisen. I do wish you the best of luck with the companies.”
“Thank you, Monica. I won’t desert my students. Don’t worry.”
Well, she’d have to be content with that. In four weeks, no, three, she’d know if she could complete her training with him, or if she’d have to start compromising. Hell. But no university could promise that their best professors wouldn’t suddenly be lured away by better offers, or take a sabbatic year off, or decide that the field in which they had earned their reputations was boring and they should move into some other research.
“My God, is it the end of the world?” Maggie’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she realized that they had been walking down the hall together while she frowned at the floor in moody silence.
“No, not that.” She knew about the end of the world. “But it’s disappointing. It took me a whole year before he’d even consider accepting me. I was really counting on him staying.”
“Yeah. It’s tough. But if he stays through December, you’ll have a year and a half of work with him.”
“Something is better than nothing, you mean?”
“Right. And maybe his replacement will be good.”
“Maybe.”
Maggie put a rangy arm around Monica’s shoulders. “And maybe I should shut up and stop trying to make everything look jolly when it’s really crappy.”
“Maybe.” Monica met her friend’s sympathetic blue eyes and managed to return her smile. “Well, if he does leave, I’ll suck him dry between now and then, damn it!”
“That’s the spirit.”
They had come to the graduate office. Monica pulled her bag from her desk drawer and said, “Well, I’m off to see the veggies. See you at dinner.” Maggie waved good-bye.
The nursing home was forty miles away in the upstate hills, a flat yellow-brick building. Mrs. Audley was at the desk and smiled as Monica approached.
“Hello, Monica dear. It’s good to see you. They’re all looking forward to your visit.”
“It’s good to be here.” Monica signed the visitor’s book.
“I think they’re outside today. Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
“At last. They haven’t had much time outside yet this year.”
A long rectangle of ragged lawn, a wide gravel path around the border. On all four sides, yellow-brick wings rose three stories, pierced by little windows. Some wheelchairs were clustered at the far corner, where a locust tree had overcome the odds and spread vigorous lacy branches toward the sky. Monica walked quickly down the path toward them.
There were four of them besides Pauline, the nurse. Mary was about sixty, sitting patiently, sleeping a lot. Her speech and vision were both nearly gone, half of her brain dead from an inexorably growing inoperable tumor. A few more years and Dr. Weisen’s new drug might help people like her, but for Mary it would be too late. Jock was forty, a stroke victim, eyes still working busily but legs and speech gone. Bibbsy, the youngest, had been a passenger in a car that had failed to beat a train to the crossing. The teenage driver had been killed; Bibbsy would live for years with her useless body, her half-vision, her cheery meaningless speech. And Ted. Ted had been a communications specialist in Vietnam, theoretically behind the front lines, when a nervous recruit had fired at a shadow and sent a bullet through his left temple and deep into the parietal lobe of his brain. Ted could see only half of a world, and that half as unrelated details. He had epileptic seizures and frequent blinding headaches. The VA hospital had put him on the proper drugs and released him, but after a few months his overstressed family had sent him to this nursing home.
He could talk, a little. As she approached, his head drifted awkwardly to the side so that she was in the center of the visual field he could see. “Hello, Ted,” she said.
“Hello, Monica.” A foolish smile on his face.
“Hello Monica alonica alonica!” Bibbsy was euphoric, as usual, gibbering happily. Monica greeted Jock, shook his hand, then turned to the nurse.
“Pauline, is it okay if Ted and I go read?”
“Certainly, dear.” Pauline was a buxom, maternal-looking woman, skilled at her job without knowing a thing about neurons or parietal lobes. She did know that Bibbsy was distracting, and that Ted had great d
ifficulty concentrating.
“Let’s go to the sunroom, Ted.”
“Okay.” The foolish smile again. Ted’s walking was skilled and automatic, but he could not place himself accurately in space, so she had to guide him into the building and to a seat on the sofa. She sat next to him on his left, and opened the book.
“Okay, Ted, here we go.”
The smile disappeared as he turned his head sideways to see the book better. He concentrated fiercely. “L,” he said gamely. “I, T. Lit?”
“Good. Keep going.”
“T, L. T, T, L. E.” He stopped, confused.
“Little,” said Monica.
“I can only read, one two three.” His speech was halting, apologetic. “Then I read, four. Then I forget. One.”
“Yes, I know.” He could not see words as wholes. Three letters was his span, and if the next letters took any concentration, he forgot the first and had to start over. But he was better now. At first he couldn’t even remember the letters.
He had once been a chemist.
Painfully they went on through the sentences, from a fifth- grade reader, until he was exhausted. Monica closed the book. He said suddenly, “Dreaming. Am I?”
“Dreaming?”
“Am I dreaming?”
“No, Ted. You’ve been here two years.”
“Two years.”
“Yes.”
She waited. He could not summon words at will, except for the overpracticed early ones—hello, good-bye, okay. They both waited for the disconnected words to drift through his mind, waited for him to recognize the right one as it happened by.
After a while he said, “Buzzing. In, in, what is it? Not nose, not eyes.”
“Buzzing in your ears?”
“Ears. Okay. In my ears.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, except …” Long pause. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes your head hurts.”
“Sometimes, yes. Always … buzzing.” He leaned back, tired.
“Shall we sing a little?”
“Okay.”
He couldn’t remember words, but melodies were still easy for him. She had learned to sing “la-la-la” instead of trying to teach him to catch the elusive words. Now they sang together, her alto and his baritone blending pleasantly. It made him happy.
Finally Monica said good-bye, signed out, drove away. Mary and Jock, Bibbsy and Ted never would. Four friends, trapped by their own broken brains. Four of her reasons for studying, perhaps someday helping. Especially Ted, who still struggled courageously to fuse the bits of his shattered world into coherence. Who still remembered that things had once been different, that he had once been whole.
Maybe she would never discover anything that could help them. But with Dr. Weisen’s guidance, she meant to give it a damn good try.
Back in Laconia, she parked in front of her square brick house, then paused to wait for Maggie, who was at the corner mailing a letter. “Trying to send a message to the outside world?” called Monica.
“Yeah. My friend Nick.” Maggie, exuberant, sprinted from the corner, ending with a cartwheel. Then she pulled herself up with dignity and asked, “How were your friends today?”
“Fine. Soaking up sun.”
“Good for them. Listen, Mary Beth and Craig and I are going to the concert tonight. Can you come?”
“No, I’ve got to get back to the lab right after dinner. Have to check on those baby rats I delivered today.”
And so Monica was second on the scene. She unlocked the main door of the lab, and at the sound of her steps Norman erupted from the door of the animal quarters, gaping in terror.
“Miz Bauer, Miz Bauer! Come quick!” he pleaded. “Something terrible happened!”
Monica ran after him. He opened the door into one of the animal rooms, one of Dr. Weisen’s rooms. She said, “Oh, Christ!”
In the center of the room lay a heap of slaughtered rats, their backs broken and mangled, their skulls smashed.
II
“Peace, you foul ramping jade!” howled Nick O’Connor.
“Od’s foot, you bawd in grease, are you talking?” The rouged woman turned to him in fury, fingernails extended from her green sleeves. “Thou sow of Smithfield, thou!” She clawed at his snout.
“Thou tripe of Turnbull!” Nick lifted his stained skirts from his rosy pink legs and, bellowing insults, kicked the shrieking green-dressed woman through the arch. Then he turned back, patted down his skirts and greasy cap with preening pride, and gave his enormous breasts a triumphant jiggle. His audience was roaring with laughter. When he exited a moment later, with a final flirtatious bounce of his padded haunches, there was a wave of applause.
The familiar flowing warmth of work well done filled him. For a few moments here, in Nick’s greasy and repulsive self, Ben Jonson and Brooklyn had been linked. The seventeenth and the twentieth centuries had laughed together at their common human failings. His was a foolish and frivolous and worthwhile and deeply satisfying profession.
He ought to be happier than he was.
This was the final performance of Bartholomew Fair. The work had been the kind that Nick loved best, a meaty part in a good play. And once they were in production, George had found him some daytime TV work, a couple of weeks as the dying father of a young heroine on a soap opera. Add in last fall’s Elson Beer commercial and it had been a terrific year for an actor. His coffers were amazingly full. J. Pierpont O’Connor. His only problem was that he was too far away from Maggie. Who probably didn’t think it was a problem at all.
After the curtain call he took off the repulsive pig-woman costume, cap and wig and breasts and buttocks and all, and hung them in the costume corner. Then he headed for the makeup tables, in nothing but pink tights and his own natural hairiness. Nick the dancing bear. His arms and neck and face all had the artificial ruddy glow appropriate to the fat bawd and pig-seller of Jonson’s fair. He slathered on cold cream and wiped it off, and gradually emerged again as broad, muscular, pleasantly ugly Nick O’Connor, inspecting his bald spot with melancholy as he scrubbed off the makeup. Wouldn’t be long now, he thought; the lovingly tended strands that stretched across the bare skin were fewer every day. He touched them encouragingly.
Next to him his friend Carmen smiled her beautiful triangular smile. “Don’t feel bad, Nick,” she soothed. “Bald men are sexy.”
“So I’m told,” said Nick. He turned his attention to removing the pink on his forearms and declaimed, “What he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.”
She laughed. “Well, I’ll have to admit they loved you tonight, you old pig-woman. Aren’t you sorry it’s over?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a dull three weeks ahead, just one TV audition before my summer stock job starts. What can I do to fill up the time? Study Greek? Build the Brooklyn Bridge from toothpicks? What are you doing?”
“I told you, Nick. A vamp in The Wicked and the Wild.”
“Oh, right. That ought to keep you in meat and potatoes for a while.” He threw away the last stained tissue and stood up.
Carmen said, “Nick, come on over for a little drink, okay? Wind up the show properly.”
Maybe it was the scolding his friend George had given him that afternoon, the stern instructions to quit mooning over Maggie, the offer to fix him up with yet another boring stranger. Or maybe it was just closing night. And he did like Carmen. She had shared with him the ups and downs of her affair with the stage manager until the final rupture two weeks ago; and Nick had told her a little about his wife’s sad death. Carmen was sympathetic, bright, and straightforward once you got past the facade. Back in Missouri she had been Susie May Holman, queen of her county fair, though she had decided that Carmen suited her dark-eyed and billowy beauty better. Perhaps it did. But Nick was fond too of the Susie May who still glowed beneath the veneer of studied glamour. They got along. Maybe she could help him forget. Hell, give it a try.
He said, “I’ll meet you at the
stage door in ten minutes, okay? I’ll just go get Zelle.”
“Great!” There was delight in Carmen’s angular smile. “I love Zelle.”
In the men’s dressing room, he let his wriggly black cocker spaniel puppy out of her crate and accepted her enthusiastic greeting. Then he peeled off his pink tights, pulled on his jeans, and carried her down to wait for Carmen at the stage door.
He woke at that lowest of times, three-thirty in the morning, too warm, and too close to having a headache, and too lonely. Beside him, the queen of the county fair sprawled sleeping, as lascivious and irrelevant as a Playboy centerfold. The rank sweat of an enseamed bed. Nick turned his face from her.
Last night, Carmen had been sweet and appreciative, eager in her lovemaking, timid in her suggestion afterward that something more permanent might be worked out, philosophical in her acceptance of his statement that he wasn’t ready.
“Yeah. We’ll go slow,” she had said. “It’ll probably take a while. You know, your wife dying and everything.”
“I guess that’s it. I’m just not ready for a commitment.”
Which was a lie. He was committed already. To Maggie, who didn’t want him. And now, at three-thirty, when the dark parts of the mind stir in their sleep and make their presence known, Nick felt like a liar. Stewed in corruption. A filthy creature worthy of Jonson’s play. Nick the pig-man, taking off his steamy bawd’s breasts to rut in the hay with the queen of the county fair. God. Sweet Susie May, with her enthusiasm and her shy hopeful desire for commitment, deserved more than the pig-man could give her.
He sat up quietly on the edge of the bed and reached for his shirt. He needed his own apartment now, the honest loneliness of his empty bed and coffeepot for one. As he buckled his belt, Carmen stirred.
“You okay?” she asked drowsily.
“Yeah. Zelle and I just got the urge to go home.”
“Oh. Okay. Listen, you want a cup of coffee or something?”
“It’ll be better if I just go,” he said, loathing himself. Carmen was no one-night stand. Accepting her invitation had been a promise, he had known that. A promise to give this new intimacy a fair chance. A promise he couldn’t keep.
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