Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  It was a windless night, but Jay and I stood in an eerie vacuum of weird feelings outside the Sez Who? Lights from the honking cars on the Strip flickered over us; sightseers and cruising kids shouted and called to each other. The huge billboard Marlboro man high up over the Strip puffed white smoke from his coffin nail, staring squarely into the face of Death: Howdy pardner. Jay bent slightly, his hands in his jacket pockets, leaning toward me the way one leans (patiently, condescendingly) towards a child or an old person. I realized, with the slow-rotating take of the very drunk, that he was looking at me disapprovingly; I began to gather that much. In fact, I further gathered, leaning back at him, peering, that he looked really pissed off.

  He spoke slowly, as if English were my second language.

  “Esme, t-tell me. Where in all your d-delusions, did you get the idea that you could ... d-do what you just did?”

  He stopped and ran a hand across his eyes.

  I’d been standing by, smiling dreamily, and now I reeled back as if he’d slapped me, teetering a bit on my heels. I caught myself.

  “Wait a second, what did you say?”

  “You d-destroyed me up there!”

  “Jay! I can’t believe ... I was trying to help you.”

  His face twisted. “I don’t need h-help.”

  “Those people were making fun of you. I couldn’t stand it—”

  “That’s my act, stupid! I act like a b-bad s-stand-up, don’t you get it?”

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t think they did either.”

  “Well, Christ, how c-could they get it, with you ch-charging up onstage—how could they—”

  “Jay, I’m sorry. I lost control ... I tried to”—I paused and looked around me—“help with the humor. And Jay, you have to admit—I was a little funny. People were laughing.”

  “Esme. People were laughing at you. Th-there’s a difference.”

  “Well, shit, you oughta know.”

  “This is my b-business! What do you know about it? Nothing! Do you kn-know what I was going to d-do next? The f-follow-up I do, when I g-get heckled like that is t-to use my st-stutter. I use the stutter! And it’s really f-funny.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He threw me a quick, bitter glance.

  “You’re so far out of t-touch you don’t even know it, Esme. Plus you’re stinking drunk. Your kind of help I don’t need. Ollie doesn’t need this k-kind of help. You’re c-crazy, Esme. And if what you did tonight isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to slow things down.

  “Jay. I couldn’t stand the way those people were mocking you.”

  My throat was dry and my shin began throbbing. I reached down and felt around and winced. I’d bruised it badly climbing onto the stage. As I bent over I felt the tears overflowing down my face. They surprised me. Everything this evening had been a surprise to me.

  “W-where’s your car?”

  “Over there.”

  I pointed and he set off in the direction of the parking lot behind the club, me limping behind.

  We stood in front of the jeep as I rummaged in my purse for the ticket to give to the parking attendant. I could feel myself sobering up. I began to shake with cold. I felt perfectly calm now, but the tears kept falling.

  “Jay. I came up onstage because I love you. I came to this club tonight because I love you.”

  “Too late, Esme. And a l-lie. You don’t get it, do you?” He flinched, then spat the words out. “I tried to understand you. I even r-read your science books. You never tried to know me.”

  “Why do you think I’m here tonight? Because I—”

  “Being f-funny was the only thing I had that was mine. I was a s-stand-up, it was mine. Now you’ve taken that away, too. You were trying to make me look like a fool.”

  He turned his back on me, talked over his shoulder. His left leg shook as if it were running on a separate engine of anger. The attendant pulled up in my car and I handed him a bill.

  “Can you drive?”

  “Drive? Why wouldn’t I be able to drive?”

  He sighed. “Do you want me to d-drive you home?”

  “Of course not.”

  I let myself into the car with injured dignity, then rolled down the window as Jay knocked on it.

  “You’re funnier than m-me, Esme. You’re s-smarter than me. OK? Does th-that make you happy?”

  “No,” I said, “that doesn’t make me happy.”

  He put his head down on the car roof for a second, then lifted it, cocked it, and looked in at me.

  “Wh-what were you t-trying to do tonight?”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again. “I wanted to save you—something I had neither the power nor right to do. I tried to do something really dumb—an act of chivalry. Do you know what I mean?”

  He stared, then his mouth twisted and he pulled away.

  “Go h-home, Esme,” he said. “Sleep it off.”

  Chapter 18

  “SO YOU REALIZED that you loved him—and then you, like, screwed it up,” said Rocky. “I mean, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I screwed it up? How?”

  “How? How? Your husband is standing on a stage in front of a club filled with people ...” She stopped to scratch her eyes and feel around for her glass. It was two-thirty in the morning. “And you leap up from your seat and jump up onto the stage, grab the mike from his hands and begin tellin’ jokes. And you ask me how?”

  “I did not tell jokes. I talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” I stared at the bottom of my glass. “And I told them off.”

  “Yeah, well. You sort of ... hijacked his act, right? Did you think he’d be real happy about your stealing his thunder?”

  “Well it wasn’t exactly thunder, it was more like static. I stole his static.”

  “Let’s go back. To the part where you suddenly go leaping up.” She laughed and shook her head, obviously enjoying this. “You got this feeling inside for him, right? Real desire to protect him.”

  “I’m tired,” I said. “It’s almost three.”

  Rocky poured herself more tequila.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing as what you did tonight. It’s fucking amazing to me. But how can you, who are a damn smart person, be so fuckin’ stupid? This is the question we gotta answer! This is the question!”

  “Yeah, well, if you come up with a definitive answer let me know. Maybe I wouldn’t have to think about theory anymore.”

  Rocky dropped her head to one side, drunk but hanging in there.

  “Why are you dicking around with this theory, Prof? We got so much work in the lab—I don’t get it! This a1AT’s enough to keep me busy night and day and you’re out there in the stars somewhere, even, when you do come in.”

  She propped up her head with her hand and grinned lopsidedly at me.

  “I miss you. The lab seems really empty these days.”

  I raised my glass and sang: “I’ve grown accustomed to your blots!”

  Rocky snorted and emptied her glass. I looked at mine halfheartedly. I’d been drinking, off and on, since eight or nine. When I’d come limping in after midnight, Rocky took in my agitated state and broke out an old bottle of Cuervo Gold of Jay’s she found in the pantry. We toasted him with the first swallow, lifting our faceted glasses to the dim yellow-domed kitchen light.

  Now the bottle was half empty. Oreos and Doritos littered the table, and a fat low red candle had burned down into its hollow.

  “To theory!” cried Rocky. “Fuck it.”

  We clicked glasses and drank, then winced at the cactusy taste. I coughed a little.

  “Rocky—why do you stay on in the lab?”

  She wrapped a long spiral of hair around her finger, looked at it, then let it go; slowly, slowly it repositioned itself.

  “I like the procedures. I like very much knowing, for just once in my life, exactly what’s going to happen.”

  “Me too. That’s pre
cisely why I chose science. From the time I was a little kid, I loved the sense it gave me, not so much that there were answers, as that certain things always happened the same way and you could count on them.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  “And then, at Harvard, I had this professor, Q—right, I know I’ve mentioned him to you—who kept insisting that the answers be plugged into fairy tales, you know: The holy crusaders set off to save the babies. Or the Genome Project: We’re going to decode the language of life and thus end all human suffering, and triumph over death. Well, that’s admirable, but what if it’s not true? It takes the incorruptibility of the answers away. There are hardly any disinterested researchers anymore. Scientists are invested in these biotech companies up the old wazoo. I care a lot about those kids with gene deficiencies, but there’s not that much that can actually be cured. You know why? There is no normal gene sequence that we can use as a standard. All sequences are unique—shit. No more crippled babies, no more death. Shit.”

  Rocky shook her head woozily, grinning. She pulled a Baggie from a jacket draped over the back of her chair, plopped it on the table, spat on a paper, and began rolling a joint. She spun it nimbly between her fingers into a cylinder, lit it, inhaled, sucked on it again, and passed it to me. I took a hit.

  “I’ve always loved theory. Which I turn to again and again because there seems to be so little order at all in the universe, not since relativity’s real implications hit, anyway, and everybody’s making up voodoo hypotheses, but at least they’re humble, you know what I mean? Theoretical physicists and chemists don’t feel like they’re designing futures—they can’t even define what the future is, or the past. Nobody dares talk about Laws anymore, there are only models, suggestions of the way it might be possibly, in special circumstances. And then too, the observer unquestionably alters what is observed. They talk about God, Rocky, about finding God.”

  “Wow,” squeaked Rocky. Her voice had gone tight as a drum and she squinted at me, then released a huge billow of smoke from her nostrils. “Wow. God!”

  “No, look, I’m serious. And you know when scientists look for God, they really haven’t a clue. Which is a good state for a scientist to be in: Clueless. Starting from scratch.”

  I swayed unsteadily, then slumped back down in my chair, exhausted.

  Then I got up into a kneeling position.

  “I mean, OK, the theory people use metaphors too! God knows they’ve got eleven dimensions squeezed up like Cheez Whiz in Super Strings. ... I know this biologist, Richard Lewontin? He made the distinction clear for me: There’s a difference between useful metaphors that allow the mind closer to a verifiable reality, and metaphors that are identities, that become the thing itself.”

  I stood up on my chair, waving my glass. “They stole Descartes’s clock!” I shouted, almost falling. “Now they’re selling Descartes’s clock!”

  I paused and regained my balance. “Rocky!” I cried, swaying. “Who owns the story of the future? Who owns the Bedtime Story?”

  “You know what?” Rocky interrupted. I sat down, deflated, and she handed me the joint. “You know what? I’m the first one in my family to go to college.”

  I held the joint to my lips, then stopped. I’d had enough for one night. I handed it back.

  “Is that true, Rock?”

  “Yeah! It’s a real smart family, my family, but no higher education. Except my mother’s sister in Guatemala. She’s a teacher. Everybody works in the store—the grocery store in Pacoima. But not anymore little Rocio! I go to school. They sent me. They put their hard-earned money behind me.” She looked up at the ceiling. Smoke, in a blue torrent, poured out of her red mouth. “I was good with numbers. That’s all. I could add up things in my head. Now I gotta be sure I don’t flunk out, ’cause my family, they think I’m so great.”

  “You are, Rocky,” I said. “There’s no grad student who could do the job you do.”

  She beamed at me. “I learn fast, huh? Too bad I forget just as quick.”

  “Rocky,” I said. “You are the lab right now. You’re it.”

  “But what about a1AT?” she asked. “You given up on that?”

  I held the roach, pincerlike, between my fingers; she shook her head and I stubbed it out.

  “I think about it every day. Just because I’m not in the lab doesn’t mean it’s not on my mind. I just can’t stand Faber’s shadow all over me.”

  “Yeah, I know. Bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s bad.”

  “Well yeah. I know that. But sometimes I think, What about me? What about me, Prof? You plucked me off my motorcycle, got me hooked—and now, now you shake me off like water from a dog’s butt.”

  “Rocky, don’t you start on me too. I can’t take it, I swear.”

  “Well, fuck you, Professor. I have feelings too. You taught me a whole new way of looking at science, you taught me laboratory procedures, you were my teacher and my friend, at least I thought you were my friend. But then you just, like, walked out the door. What kind of friend leaves a partner high and dry?”

  “Me. I’m terrible—a terrible wife who messes up her husband’s life, a bad mother who won’t get her weird kid professional help, an incompetent teacher who doesn’t teach, and a lousy lousy friend and lab partner who’s never there. That’s me, right? Did I sum it all up? Did I miss anything?”

  Rocky laughed. “Yeah. You missed yourself. You’re messing up yourself. You think that you’re thinking for yourself but you’re just thinking in reaction to everybody else. You’re pissed off at the schools in L.A., you’re pissed off at Q and Faber, you’re pissed at Jay, at big-bucks science, money metaphors, but you run away, you don’t face up, man. Then you get yourself in trouble. Climbing around out in the galaxies ain’t gonna do nothin’ for it. That’s why I thought when you got up on that stage tonight it was great, you actually got real for once. You kicked ass.”

  “Yeah, and you know what’s real, right? You really can tell me about the world from your vantage point: after dark in the back seat! Cholos, frat boys, what does it matter, right?”

  I meant this humorously, or I thought I did, but it sure didn’t fly.

  Her face turned dark. “I don’t fuck cholos!”

  She leaped up, knocking the chair over.

  “I don’t fuck frat boys, for the history books, either. I ain’t fucked anybody since I started this goddam convent job, working for Mother Superior.”

  Her mouth turned down, like a little kid’s, like Ollie’s, and she started to cry.

  “Rocky, oh God, wait. I’m sorry.”

  She threw herself from her chair and went crashing around the room, picking up her jacket and bag, her cast-off bracelets, a jeweled belt, shoes.

  “No. You’re right. Hey, I don’t belong in your lab. I’m not that far anyhow from Pacoima. I got no right takin’ up your space, huh? You got better things to do now anyway, right? You’re fuckin’ Einstein. And me, I fuck cholos!”

  “Rocky. Don’t do this, please. I’m sorry. I just can’t say anything right tonight. I’m not funny, I’m just not funny. Don’t go, Rocky, you’re in no condition to drive!”

  “I just sobered up.”

  I shook my head and laughed. “Jesus,” I said. “This is goddam entropy, the Second Law.”

  Rocky walked up to me, bent over, and put her face in mine as I sat in my chair. “No,” she said. Her brown eyes looked huge from the dope, the pupils were dilated, tears glittered on her cheeks, and her hair was wild, it seemed to have grown longer and wilder through the force of her anger.

  “This ain’t no Second Law. This is Rocky’s First Law, which says that if you treat people like shit, after a while they gonna treat you ditto.”

  The door slammed. There was the sound of an ignition, then a screeching turn, loud acceleration off into the night. I sat for a while and then I went in to check on Ollie. She was sleeping on her side, holding her dragon tight. Then I went into the bathroom, turned on the ligh
t, and looked in the mirror. And there she was: the troublemaker, the great theorist, stand-up physicist. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything. I stared at myself. I remembered how Q had kept me feeling safe all those years. Remarkable, I thought. I couldn’t make Rocky feel safe for one semester.

  I walked around the house, checking windows, locking doors, turning off the lights. I turned the phone machine on and I poured myself a large glass of water. I went back to the mirror and lifted the glass in a toast.

  “Chirality,” I said aloud and drank it down.

  Dimly, through a haze of impressions: Ollie standing sentinellike at the side of the bed, the phone ringing; I came awake. I patted Ollie on the head and felt around on the floor for the bedside clock. I read its luminous dial (caused by a form of radioactivity known as alpha decay) and gasped. Noon. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn.

  “Shit,” I said to Ollie’s serious face. “My lab.”

  “Shit,” said Ollie. “My lab.”

  “Sweetheart, how long have you been up?”

  “Two cookies fell on the raisins. Ollie danced and danced in her box.”

  “Great. Since nine, huh?”

  I felt I’d swallowed a dump truck’s load of sand, that same truck had backed up and poured some into my eyes for good measure. The phone rang again. I picked it up warily.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello? Professor Charbonneau? This is Mrs. Vickers, Dr. Faber’s secretary. He would like to speak with you, if you can just hold one—”

  “Ah, that won’t be necessary, Mrs. Vickers. Just tell him I discovered a cure for cancer and AIDS this morning. That’s why I couldn’t make it to my lab.”

  “I beg your pardon? I—”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Vickers.”

  I hung up.

  “Well, Ollie,” I said, “it’s just you and me, kiddo.”

  And it was. Just Ollie and me. We had breakfast, then we went to the store and stocked up on groceries. I bought enough for two or three weeks. Then we went to the children’s bookstore and the toy store and stocked up there too. I still felt light-headed and I had to stop every so often and breathe deeply, tell myself I was all right.