This was prejudiced, shameful snobbery when it came to misery. Again, Robin tried not to let it show. How could she fault others for not yet knowing, or learning late, what only tragedy could teach them? Still, secretly, she did fault them. She faulted Cliff. She accused him in her mind of being thoughtless, selfish, young. Clutching her black pen tightly, she bent over her journal and wrote, He actually asked if I would stay and keep him company tonight to watch him work. Then when I said no, he was surprised. She might have written more. She could have ranted on, but for Robin that was a rant. She'd wrung those few sentences from her heart, and grieved at every word. Somehow Cliff assumed his project would be thrilling for her even from the sidelines. He was that self-centered.
She debated whether he would come to see her, or just go back to his place. She lay awake in bed and asked herself whether it really mattered. She had been weak. She had been lonely. Sternly, a little unfairly, she told herself she shouldn't have been. She prided herself on pragmatism and self-possession, but she had allowed herself to be possessed by him. How was it she fell in love so badly—with the least promising research programs and the luckiest of men? She despised herself, and despaired of him. She must loosen the knots entangling them. How else could she breathe? Over and over, she considered how she might end this foolishness, this needing him, this torturous sense of competition, the secret resentment she felt for him inside the open secret of their love affair.
By midnight, she was livid. Still, in spite of herself, as she heard him open the door, she felt a rush of joy, the quickening of her heart from habit. How stupid her body was, how eager and willingly deceived.
She padded out to the living room and he kissed her. His jacket dripped with rain; his face was lively from his bike ride.
“I want my key back,” she said.
“What's wrong now?”
“What's wrong?” she asked. “I don't need you coming and going in the middle of the night. I don't need you constantly waking me up and using me as your personal bed-and-breakfast.”
“I've never confused you with a bed-and-breakfast,” he said.
“Don't smile at me. Don't ask me what's wrong when you know exactly what's wrong. I was right from the beginning. I knew this was going to happen—all of it.”
“All of it.”
“Yes! You traipsing in and out at night, and then coming home to me as your long-suffering girlfriend. I'm not long-suffering, and I'm not going to be your girlfriend waiting up while you work late. I don't do that. I never wait up for anyone, and I want my key back, because I'm not waiting up for you.”
“Robin,” he said, “I never asked you to wait up for me.”
“But how can I help it when I'm here and you have my key? Don't you see—you've put me in this ridiculous position.”
“I asked you to stay!” he burst out.
“And do you have any idea how that makes me feel when you invite me to watch you work? Is that supposed to be fun? Educational? I know the work, Cliff. I know the experiments. They've got all of us working on your stuff too.”
He shook his head at her. If he'd made her so angry, why hadn't she said anything about it at the time? She'd only said “No, thank you” when he asked if she would stay, and then—this was just like her—she'd stewed and steamed and let her anger grow into volcanic rage. He took off his jacket and sank onto the couch. He'd been on his feet since early that morning. “Come here,” he said.
She stood instead, like an avenging spirit in her white nightgown.
“If you're working on my stuff, then it's your work, too, and you own some of it,” he told her. “Don't pretend you don't.”
“No, it's not my work,” she contradicted him. “It'll never be my work. I don't have time for my work anymore.”
“And is that my fault?” he demanded. “I really want to know, because ever since I've had these results you've been blaming me for your whole career.”
She hesitated a moment. “It's not the results,” she said. “It's how you act about them.”
“And how is that?”
“Selfish,” she said.
“Not true!”
“Ask Feng,” she told him, for she had heard whisperings from Natalya that Feng was not happy. “Ask him how he felt when you shut him out of the injections.” That was a betrayal of a confidence, but it was effective. For a moment Cliff was stricken. “Ask anyone.”
Cliff's eyes narrowed. “Ask you.”
“I want my key back.”
“Ever since I met you I've tried to be your friend . . .” Cliff began.
“That's one way of putting it.”
“And you've always doubted me, and you've always resisted, and you've always competed with me, and I don't understand why.”
She was close to tears. “You don't understand because you don't know me. You don't have any idea who I am.”
He stared at her, and she was so worked up and her words were so wild that she was indeed a stranger to him. “Who are you, then?” he challenged her.
“Your equal,” she said; but fiercely she thought, better.
“I know that.”
“Just as much a scientist as you.” But she was thinking, I've worked so much longer than you.
“Don't you think I realize that?”
“I know you don't.”
“Look, there's never any arguing with you, so just believe what you want to believe, all right?”
“I said I want my key.”
“And when you're done feeling jealous, let me know.”
“I am not jealous.”
“You're not? No, of course not. You could never admit that. You'd rather just hate me for some imagined crime like . . . belittling you or disrespecting you, or—”
“Give it to me.”
He reached into his pocket. “Here, Robin. Here's your goddamn key.” He threw his bunch of keys as hard as he could across the room, and they slammed into the wall, narrowly missing a group of framed family pictures before they fell to the floor.
She didn't say another word, not even to ask him to leave. She just walked into the bedroom and shut the door.
For days they didn't speak. They scarcely looked at each other, except when absolutely necessary. The others in the lab tiptoed around them with the utmost care, as though skirting a meteor crater.
Cliff hoped at first that her anger would pass. The first day and then the second, he thought he would be patient and she would come around, but she held tenaciously to her resentment. She advertised the break between them to the others, silently provoking him in the tight lab space. When her tube racks or her paperwork brushed against his, she refused to consolidate her work. Several times Cliff moved out of her way, trying to control his temper.
Then one gray afternoon he snapped. “Could you move? I need the microscope.”
Robin froze, shocked to hear his voice.
“Could you?”
And she said slowly, “I was just sorting out these notes.”
“Well, could you sort them somewhere else?” Cliff asked, holding his petri dishes. “Because I need to check my cells.”
“Of course you do,” she murmured under her breath, then turned back to her own bone tumor notes.
“Robin!”
Prithwish and Feng looked up from their bench tops.
“Just a second.”
“I said move,” he snarled. In the next moment, he shoved Robin and her notes to the other end of the counter.
Her breath caught inside of her, and her ribs hurt. “Don't you dare touch me.”
Reproachful, disgusted, he glared at her.
The others were watching. She was behaving badly. She was supposed to back down; his work had priority. He claimed she competed with him. If only she'd had the chance! She took a shuddering breath and walked down the hall to use the ancient ladies' room. She washed her hands at one of the stained white china sinks and splashed her face with cold water. Pulling a brown paper towel from the dispenser,
she rubbed her cheeks until they reddened. She told herself he could not hurt her. She was not so thin-skinned. She was overreacting. This is how it goes, she thought. This is just life. Right now his work is more important. He needs the microscope.
That evening she went swimming at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center, where she'd bought an athletic card. She walked past the weight machines to the women's locker room and changed into her navy one-piece bathing suit. Water streamed over her shoulders in the white-tiled shower. Powdery latex residue streamed off her hands; the stench of the animal facility washed down the drain.
She swam and she swam and she swam in the echoing indoor pool. When she came up for air, she saw a confusion of lane lines and gutters and red kickboards. When she turned her face down again, the blue world through her goggles was private, smooth, and deep. She had been a high school swimmer, and she cut through the water capably, no longer fast, but still strong enough to swim long distances. Twenty laps, forty laps. She flipped and turned underwater until the rhythm of her strokes began to drown out the words in her head. She swam until the other swimmers started to leave. The big pool stilled, and the lifeguards approached and pointed to the clock. Even then, she pulled herself out reluctantly, shivering and dripping on the deck.
He could not hurt her. She would never let him. She showered again and changed into her clothes, pulling on her sweater. Head down, she combed out her wet hair. She told herself she would forget everything about the day. Still, she remembered his hands pushing her away, his sharp voice, her outburst—her unthinking emotional reply. And then, confusingly, she remembered one night almost two years before when they were working late. The memory was just as vivid and returned to her with equal embarrassment.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” he'd asked.
She didn't answer.
“Not such a good idea?”
“Probably not.”
He pulled off his gloves and faced her. “All right, give me the list.”
“What list?”
“You know,” he said. “The reasons. If it makes you feel better.”
“All right.” She realized she needed a moment to reconstruct them. She had no boyfriend anymore. “First of all, I'm too old for you.”
“Okay.” He drew a little closer.
She was trembling. “Second of all, it definitely wouldn't work out.”
He drew closer still.
“Third of all, I don't want to,” she lied.
He kissed her softly, tentatively, on the lips, then drew back and looked at her as if to check that she was all right. She didn't move.
“Come here,” he whispered, and drew her into the darkness of the stockroom, and cupped his hands around her face and kissed her, all in a rush, seeking her out with mouth and hands. She wrapped her arms around him as he pulled at the band that held her hair.
“That hurts. Why did you do that?” she chided him as her hair fell around them. She tried to push his hand away, but he ran his fingers through the long strands. “Wait, wait,” she whispered.
“I did wait,” he said.
Light stabbed their eyes; they froze as Marion opened the door and caught them there in each other's arms.
Marion stood transfixed for a moment, speechless. What had she been thinking, seeing the two of them like that? What terrible thoughts had passed through her mind? “Excuse me,” Marion said. She turned the lights off again and shut the door.
“No,” Robin whispered as soon as Marion was gone. “I can't believe it.” And in that moment she and Cliff were friends again and fellow sufferers. They held each other like guilty teenagers, mortified in the darkness.
“She didn't see anything,” reasoned Cliff.
“She did, she did.” Robin buried her head in his shoulder even as she laughed at herself and the absurdity of their situation. “She sees everything. She knows everything.”
“No, that's not true.” He was recovering remarkably fast.
“But what if she . . . ?”
“She won't.” He smoothed her hair. “Shh.” He was busy reassuring and distracting her, unbuttoning her.
“I think she'll—”
“Worry, worry, worry.”
Robin shouldered her bag now and trudged wearily out of the locker room. She tried to blink away those first kisses, the memory of his lips on her bare skin.
“I'm not afraid of Marion Mendelssohn,” Cliff had declared then.
“Well, you should be,” she told him, but he just teased her, biting her fingers when she covered his mouth with her hand.
The next morning, before Glass arrived, Robin rapped on the office door.
“Come in,” Marion called faintly. She was squinting, composing at her black-and-amber computer screen, and she scarcely glanced up as Robin came in. She typed a little more, hunt-and-peck. It was a small vanity of hers that she did not know how to type properly. She came from an era when women typed well, and those women were not scientists.
“Could I talk to you for a minute?” Robin asked.
Marion turned, blinking from her work, to stare at Robin's anguished face. “What is it? What's wrong?”
“I can't make any progress if I'm expected to drop everything for Cliff,” Robin said.
Marion took this in. She knew, of course, that Robin and Cliff had fought, that they were no longer speaking. She knew exactly why Robin came to her now. Still, even as she felt the heat of Robin's anger, Marion drew away. Disapproving of Robin's behavior, she would not now reward her by addressing the source of her anger directly.
“We need to work together,” Marion said, “or the experiments won't get done.”
“Yes, but I was doing a completely different project,” Robin said.
“We're studying R-7 now,” said Marion.
“But why?” Robin burst out. “Why do I have to work on that?”
“You're suggesting we shift your work to someone else? Everyone here is doing just as much as you.”
“I need time for my own research,” said Robin.
“You have to be patient,” Marion told her.
“I have been patient.”
With surprise and some displeasure, Marion saw the set of Robin's lip, the fist tightening unconsciously at her side. Robin, who had always been so quiet, who had toiled in the lab so long, always the worker bee, hardly complaining, even as she dragged her wings. Robin, who had been so disciplined, until she'd gotten involved with Cliff.
Sandy had warned Marion about the two of them early on. Even when Cliff first arrived, Sandy had predicted, “They'll be trouble. You'll see.”
But Marion hadn't seen anything of the sort. She saw a bright young man come into the lab full of energy, brimming with new plans.
“You're blind,” Sandy told her once.
“And you're a gossip,” she chided him. He loved to speculate about who did what to whom, not only in their lab but in other labs as well. “You're terrible.”
“I know,” he said. “But it's fun.”
Marion protested, and he laughed at her, and she'd understood, fleetingly, even as she dismissed the very thought, that such gossip was Sandy's way of flirting with her.
“Look how he's watching her,” he'd whispered at a lecture they'd all attended.
She ignored this and concentrated on the guest speaker from Utrecht.
“And she's pretending not to notice,” Sandy said.
Marion refused to let him draw her in, even when she began to think that he was right. What if there was something between Cliff and Robin? It was no business of hers. She'd felt a jolt of panic when she walked in on them in the stockroom. She was horrified to find them there, and yet she'd felt protective as well. She'd known even at that moment she would never tell Sandy how she'd discovered them in each other's arms. She remembered her own youth, and how she and Jacob found each other. She remembered late nights and certain darkened passageways, the hiding places in Applebaum's chain of laboratories. She felt, oddly, that to expose C
liff and Robin would have been to betray her younger self. Close as she was to Sandy, free as she was with her ideas, there were some aspects of her life she would not share.
She hated the confusion of public and private life, the self-indulgent mix of work and love. Even as Robin bewailed her research program, begging once again for her bone tumor plan, Marion looked at her with sorrow and disdain.
“I still want to pursue it,” Robin said now. “I think I've got a good model there for metastasis. I've got the cell line and everything in place. I just need time.”
“That would mean starting from scratch,” Marion said.
“I know, but I don't mind,” said Robin.
“Yes, but the viral work is well under way. You could be on the paper there.” Marion shook her head at her wayward postdoc. How could Robin even suggest something so impractical? What was wrong with her? How could she be so bright and so hardworking and then demonstrate in so many ways such a lack of judgment? Years ago, Marion had advised Robin to stop working on Sandy's blood samples, but Robin hadn't listened. She was a bit like Cliff in this. She kept on working, blind. Cliff always had the big picture in mind, however, no matter how far-fetched that picture might be. He always worked toward a larger goal. Robin got mired in details. She was a wonderful technician, but she did not consider how each task might serve the lab's objectives. It galled Marion that Robin had been spinning her wheels for five years, and now because she'd fought with Cliff she refused to recognize the importance of his results for the lab. She was not thinking of the future at all. Marion sighed. “Why don't you sit down.”
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