Chapter 22 - A Visit from Doug
Spring comes to Madison Wisconsin like a soft morning, waking the land from the bleak and frozen nightmare of winter. A gentle warm breeze stirs the fruit trees. It picks up the barely perceptible scent of cherry blossoms, combining it with the sweet and spicy smells of a mixture of newborn garden flowers, and spreads the smell of spring everywhere. At ground level a visual explosion of red and yellow tulips dots the campus landscape.
Small birds flit through the low bushes and the flowering trees, perching for an instant on a branch, darting to the back of a white wrought iron garden chair, fluttering in small groups to bathe in the big fountain, little wings splashing in the water. They tweet brief cheerful songs of five or ten notes to one another, in languages that only birds can know.
On the broad open lawns of the University campus, young men and women walk to classes, energetic with health and youth and the joy of the reawakening world. Wearing lightweight jackets or no coats at all, the students look at each other as if seeing strangers. Young men drink in the welcome sight of pretty girls in bright spring clothes that reveal the structure of their bodies, soft curved lines that had been hidden from sight for months under heavy winter coats.
Students smile and wave to each other as they pass. Small groups pause here and there to stand together and talk for a minute or two under the trees. Some sit together as couples on stone benches. Others chat and laugh together in small groups. Exchanging papers and texting each other bits of information about their classes or their social plans, the students reawaken to life after winter.
Katrina sits on a white wrought iron chair at a small table on the patio outside the Student Union coffee shop, reading a book. After a time, the tall slim figure of an athletic young man in blue jeans appears, striding over to join her, full of self-assurance and energy. He carries a standard issue student backpack, giving the impression he might be a student. His blue jeans are clean and pressed, his T-shirt a little too new. He wears expensive sneakers, equally spotless. His clothes and his posture scream that he comes from a moneyed background, not just upper middle class, but well to do. His eyeglasses, though a fashionable style, suggest he may be more of an intellectual than his athletic build implies. Uncharacteristically suntanned for the northern climate, he stands out from his paler colleagues. His eyes twinkle with a happy conspiratorial glow as he seats himself without asking at the table with Katrina. She looks up from her book. He smiles and unzips the main compartment of his backpack, bringing out a tea canister and a jar of sugar cubes. He places them in the center of the table, in front of Kat. "Herbal tea," he announces. "A special blend just for you. Fresh from the Paradise Islands."
She smiles back, glancing only for a second at the jars on the table as her gaze rises to focus on his eyes. She is a little surprised to notice that her heart flutters. An odd sensation rises inside her, similar to the feeling she had the first time she surprised a wild deer while hiking in the woods, and it leapt away in a flash of poignant beauty. She realizes for the first time that her childhood friend Doug, the gangly boy she met at summer camp, is now a good looking young man. How long had this been true, she wonders. It couldn't have happened overnight. She had just failed to notice before.
"Your eyes are bluer than the Caribbean skies," he says, and she laughs.
"and they sparkle more dazzlingly than the sea," he adds.
She laughs again, and the laugh fades slowly into a smile that lingers. She tilts her head slightly and shakes it as if to say no, I don't believe this. "My valiant knight has returned from his quest," she announces, smiling with her whole being and locking his eyes with her own. A part of her realizes that she is suddenly in a good mood, a too unfamiliar feeling.
"I have crossed the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean for you, my Lady Katrina," he responds happily. "Across the sandy seacoast I have come, over the towering Appalachian mountains, through the vast dread plains of the American Midwest. There is no barrier I would not scale, no risk I would not take, and no obstacle I would not overcome." So saying, he stands and bows with a hand flourish, losing eye contact. He seats himself again and says, "Seriously, I drove all night."
"Thank you, Doug. You're ... fantastic. Really fantastic," she responds sincerely, and their eyes are again joined in silence.
At length he summons the courage to suggest, "So how about we have lunch together? Do they serve food here, or are these tables just for show?"
She laughs again. She sees no reason to abandon this pleasant interlude too soon. She can't give Charlie the cure until tonight anyway. "Sure, let's have lunch," she says. "You're buying. They sell food right in there," she adds, pointing to some double doors a few yards away from the table. "Bring me anything you like as long as it's Vegan and the components are readily identifiable."
He laughs and rises. "Start with a sugar cube appetizer while I'm gone," he suggests to her, smiling but serious. So saying, he moves away toward the doors into the Student Union coffee shop slash cafeteria. She watches him walk away and disappear.
While he's gone she examines the contents of the jars. A full canister of a brownish powder that could pass for ground tea. Ten sugar cubes. Ten? Okay, fine, ten. Enough to dose five people. Hunh, she thinks, wondering what mathematical formula Baldwin had used to come up with the number ten.
After a few minutes Doug returns with a tray. The tray contains a platter of salad-like antipasto items: black and green olives, celery and carrot sticks, radishes, bits of lettuce. There are a few pieces of fruit and five pint size bottles of fruit juice.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Sir Doug," she announces as he sits down, "but the army isn't here to join us. Methinks you may have brought too much food."
"Lady Katrina," he answers, "I've worked up a serious appetite questing for several days. Permit a humble knight some lunch."
"Okay," she says simply, and takes an olive.
"I still count ten sugar cubes," he admonishes the object of his affection.
She removes one of the sugar cubes from the jar and places it in her mouth. "So this is a vaccine," she says, making a face as if reacting to something odd. "It tastes kind of funny."
"Funny?" he asks, leaning forward, concerned. Could the vaccine have gotten contaminated on the trip, or spoiled or something? Had he needed to keep it refrigerated and nobody told him?
"Yeah, it's like," she answers, a serious expression on her face, pausing as if searching for a word. "What do they call that stuff?" she adds and pauses again. At last she says, "Sugar. I remember now. It tastes like sugar."
He smiles and exhales forcefully, then leans back in his chair. That's our Kat, he remembers. Always with the jokes.
Again she smiles back. This is all right, he thinks. Worth the trip. Maybe she'll go out to dinner with me or something if I play it right.
"So, whatcha readin?" he asks, gesturing with a celery stick toward the closed book at her side on the table. "Plain paper cover. Is it porn?"
She laughs. "Not porn," she says, and opens the book to reveal the title of a recent scientific study she's been reviewing.
"You take the vaccine too," she decides, taking a sugar cube out of the jar and holding it out to him as she speaks. "You're taking risks here."
"I already had mine," he answers. "They dosed me in St. Lucy."
She returns the cube to the jar.
"So tell me," he says, nodding towards the book, "are you really all that interested in physics? Or is this about Charlie? Pursuing a life of science together? Did you get interested in physics because of Charlie, or did you get interested in Charlie because he's so awesome in physics? Where's the direction of causality there, anyway?"
Immediately he regrets mentioning Charlie, because her face falls and she becomes introspective. "Never mind," he tries to backtrack. "What I really want to know is, how's Nina? Was she able to get samples from that
dead woman in Indiana? The one with all the cats?"
"She got an old blood sample," Katrina answers, "that they took when the woman first came into the hospital. It hadn't been thrown out yet. I don't really think there's anything else there, but she's still looking. She won't be up here with it until this weekend, though. Are you going to hang around until then? I don't think it's a good idea to send a blood sample by post. It'd be great if you could take it, but you've been doing an awfully lot for us lately. I hate to keep asking you to do all this."
"For you, Katya. I've been doing a lot for YOU," he corrects her sternly, then smiles. "It's no trouble, though, really," he then lies. "I go down to see Zeph and Baldy anyway. St. Lucy is a great place. Cold beer, hot women. Nice beaches. What's not to like? I get some deep sea fishing in. Maybe I should start a regular courier service. What do you think?"
She chews on a carrot stick and says nothing, as if digesting the question.
"Nah," he answers himself. "Bad idea. That's not what my father means when he says he wants me to start my own business. I know that. Okay, nix the courier service idea. Listen, there's a concert in the quad this afternoon. Boy, they don't waste time getting started once the weather breaks. I saw a flyer for it inside the Student Union in there." He pauses and gestures toward the doors to the building, as if the provenance of the concert were in question. "So I might go to that. If you don't have a class or anything planned, maybe we could go together. I mean, if I'm going to hang around until Nina comes up this weekend, may as well fill the time. What do you say?"
"It's wouldn't be like a date," she answers slowly, eyes slightly narrowed but still in good spirits. "You know I still have a relationship with Charlie."
"Let's face it, sweetheart, your boyfriend's a vegetable," he says, deciding spontaneously to lay out the truth for her.
She laughs, which surprises them both.
"Not only that," he continues, cheerful but still in truth telling mode, "if you're honest with yourself, you know you aren't really in love with him anymore. You're loyal. I respect that. He's in trouble. I get it. You have to help him. But what happens after that? You know you don't feel the same way now as you felt before all this happened. Here's a news flash: You never will. Once it's gone, that feeling doesn't come back. Sad but true," he finishes the revelation, picks up another celery stick, and looks at her eyes, observing her response and waiting for an answer.
She eats another carrot stick, then an olive. She unscrews the top of an apple juice bottle and takes a sip.
"It wouldn't be a date," she repeats her earlier answer, "but yeah, I'm not doing anything that can't wait. I'll go to the concert with you. Who's playing?"
He names some local groups he's never heard of before, but remembers from the flyer. Eventually he comes to one she recognizes and her eyes light up a bit. He stops talking.
"I like them," she says, nodding. "Sure. It'd be fun. Just so we're clear that I'm still with Charlie."
"You're still with Charlie," he agrees, nodding back at her. "I had definitely noticed that." Not a bad result, he reflects, sitting back in the chair. Better than he had expected, though short of what he had hoped for. I still have a few more days to work on her, he thinks to himself. She'll come around. Her boyfriend's a vegetable.
"So, what time do you two have dinner?" he asks her. "At home? That's when you'll be giving Charlie the tea?"
"Yeah. Around six o'clock," she tells him. "I should try to be home by five thirty. Leave campus around five."
He nods. He has Katrina for the next five hours, and the competition is a human vegetable. Moreover, the vegetable should be recovering soon, so she won't be bound to him by feelings of responsibility. He likes his chances.
Let Them Eat Tea Page 24