Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  “I'm worried Robin has been moving too slowly,” he told Marion.

  “I told you,” Marion said. “I'm not discussing it at the seder.”

  “This isn't the seder, this is well after the seder.” Sandy gestured at the kitchen table piled with platters and dirty dishes.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I think she might be dragging her feet,” said Sandy.

  “No, Robin would never do that,” Marion protested, drawn in despite herself. “She's been having some trouble with her—”

  “She's always having trouble.”

  “Yes, well, but I don't think it's for lack of trying.” Marion was concerned, of course. She had stood at Robin's side, reviewed her data, observed her cells. She had encouraged Robin, motivating her by promising she could move on to her bone tumor work full-time once she was finished contributing to Cliff's work. By now Robin should have progressed to duplicating Cliff's work in vivo; she should have been injecting the mice themselves. But Robin was having every kind of trouble—equipment trouble with the incubator, trouble with her cell line. Bitterly, Robin had even accused Cliff of giving her tainted cells to work with. Marion had chastised her for making accusations like that. She'd taken an unhappy Robin aside in the storage room and said, “I realize you're frustrated.”

  “It's impossible for me to work like this,” Robin burst out.

  “You can't just blame Cliff,” Marion reproved her. She was too delicate to add that blaming ex-boyfriends for one's failures was not the behavior of a scientist.

  “My position is untenable,” Robin said softly.

  Silently, Marion had agreed. Robin was miserable; she was struggling, agonizing that she would never claw her way out of this experimental hole and back to her own research.

  “In the long run,” Sandy said now, “the delays with Robin won't really matter.”

  Marion considered this.

  “We've got the paper fast-tracked. We'll have our names in Nature. And the results are fabulous.” He looked into her eyes. “Admit it: they're fabulous.”

  Philomena had started washing the china. Jacob came in bearing the seder plate.

  “Now we start collaborating in earnest. We'll get Stanford and Cornell jumping on the bandwagon with more and more people. We'll get objective, external confirmation. Can you imagine?”

  “I can, but I don't want to,” Marion said.

  Sandy smiled impishly. “Oh, you never want to imagine anything. But you're tempted. You're almost thinking about how it will be.”

  And he was right. She did nearly follow him into his castle in the air. She almost forgot she was standing in the kitchen. She hardly thought about the holiday, and the wine stain on the tablecloth, and Jacob, who was gazing at her with his clever eyes.

  6

  THERE WAS something wrong with Marion. Of course Jacob saw it at once. She was not herself. She worked as hard as always, did just as much, but she tore through her days with reckless speed. Her eyes were shadowed; her nights restless. She turned her pillow over and over in bed. Jacob hoped that this would pass, but he was afraid for her. She'd been infected by Sandy's hype.

  He had believed that Marion would never succumb to Sandy's ideas. She would never imbibe—or if she sipped his enthusiasm on occasion, she carried her own skepticism with her at all times, like quinine. Now, however, with R-7 everything had changed. The strategy was all Sandy, all the time. The plan was to push forward with this research program, and to move fast. Jacob had observed this aggression in the journal article itself, even in the technical language there. The paper was streamlined, straightforward, bold in its claims, practically quotable. That was all Sandy.

  “What's wrong with the paper, if it's well written?” Marion asked one morning at breakfast after Aaron had left for school.

  “It's not just well written,” Jacob said. “It's slick.”

  “I don't think so,” she said. “Obviously, the referees didn't feel that way.” She was completely irrational on the subject, so close to it all, she couldn't see. Sandy had that effect on people. He drew them in nearer and nearer, into his shining conjectural web, and then stung them with his enthusiasm.

  “He's treating this publication like an advertising campaign,” Jacob said.

  She sighed. “I know you think it's brash to speak of the results.”

  “Brash? I think it's revolting.” If Marion was leery of Sandy's efforts with the press, Jacob was absolutely appalled. “Don't you see? He's setting up expectations for R-7 that no one, not even you, Marion, can fulfill.” The toast popped up too soon in the toaster, and Jacob impatiently slapped the two slices down again.

  Marion had been the dominant partner in the lab. The lab was hers; had been hers to begin with. She had been the one who'd invited Sandy in. She had been the one who set the course, and decided on every word for publication. How insidiously Sandy had undermined her authority. He'd preyed upon her doubts when the research went poorly, magnifying the lab's shortcomings and her frustrations with his own impatience. Then, in an instant, with just the glimmer of possible success, Sandy had seized his opportunity, had charged forward, and Marion trailed in his wake.

  Jacob rued the day he'd ever recommended Sandy as an expedient to Marion; he cursed himself for urging that Faustian bargain on his wife. She was the scientist, but suddenly she took the supporting role. She had a unique mind, but Sandy's language, Sandy's vision, and Sandy's presence went out into the world. Like a woman, she would stand in Sandy's shadow. Like a woman, she would listen quietly, and work behind the scenes on details, while Sandy appropriated the bigger picture. And Jacob was jealous—not jealous of Marion and her relationship with Glass, but jealous for her. He burned with the desire for her to proceed on her own terms. To develop her ideas at her own pace. To earn recognition without Sandy; to write her papers without Sandy. To succeed without leaning on Sandy to mediate and manage her success.

  “He's rushing you,” Jacob said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem harried. He's pushing too hard.”

  “The results are public now,” she said simply. “We have to rush.”

  “You didn't care so much before about what was public.”

  She looked at him strangely. “I always cared,” she said. “The difference now is that we're first.”

  “It's dangerous to be first,” Jacob pointed out. “It's not necessarily the best position to be first.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The toast was ready, and he brought it to the table. Marion took her coffee black, and her toast burnt. She buttered her black toast and then glazed the butter with bitter orange marmalade. She loved to taste the bitter in food as much as other people loved the sweet. “In any case,” she said, “we are first, so there's no point discussing whether or not it's a good position. We're first, and we need to use it.”

  “You sound just like him,” Jacob said. “Just listen to yourself. That's Sandy's sport—thinking about science as a competition.”

  “It is a competition,” she said.

  “You never thought that before.”

  “But don't you see?” Marion said. “I was never in the running.”

  “Right, because you were working,” Jacob said. “Why don't you let Sandy place his bets and go off to the races.”

  “Because it's my race.”

  Not yours, he thought. His. All his.

  He brooded all day about this conversation, and then just when he was hoping to speak to her, she had to stay late at the lab and missed dinner. She came home past eleven, but he waited up for her, listening for her light, quick footstep on the stairs. It had been raining hard. Her hair was damp, as was her trench coat, but she didn't seem to notice. She just hung up her umbrella and wandered in, and he surprised her when he called to her from the kitchen. She'd thought he was asleep.

  “You're soaked,” he said when she came in.

  “The mice are beautiful,” she told him.

/>   “Yes, well, I hear Robin's cells are not.”

  “I hope she isn't broadcasting her problems everywhere,” said Marion, sitting down with him.

  “She isn't broadcasting anything. I saw her today after class, and I spoke to her.”

  “That wasn't necessary,” Marion said.

  “What do you mean? Am I encouraging her to betray a confidence?”

  “No, I mean, you can ask me about the lab. And you do ask me. You know everything already. You don't need to speak to her.”

  “Oh, well, I like external confirmation of what I already know,” Jacob said mildly.

  Something in that startled her, something sharp, and almost mocking. The suggestion that he spoke to Robin behind her back, the punning reference to the confirmation of Cliff's results that Robin had not been able to provide. “I know you don't like the paper,” she told him, “but you have no right to stand around sniping from the sidelines. You have to stop.”

  “No right?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I have every right,” he told her. “Because you can do better than this.”

  “I cannot do better than this,” she burst out, exasperated. “This is the best work I've ever done.”

  “Shh. You'll wake Aaron.”

  “Why can't you see,” she whispered to him, “that these are the best results we've ever had?”

  “Because they're only potentially the best results. And you are getting carried away. You know better,” he whispered back. “Think, Marion. You know better.”

  “I know these results are the real thing,” she said. “I know I'm right.”

  “He knows you're right, and you believe him.”

  “No, he believes me, and you don't. I don't think you ever will,” she added wonderingly.

  They sat together in the yellow kitchen light, the table layered with scientific journals and student problem sets. Jacob took Marion's hands in his; he clasped her delicate fingers. “I won't just believe you,” he said fiercely, “I love you. When you can reproduce Cliff's numbers, I'll believe your data.”

  In silence they undressed for bed. Marion slipped on her nightgown and Jacob watched her brush her teeth the full one and a half minutes the dentist recommended. She still fretted over particulars. She still thought like a perfectionist, but all her perfectionism served Sandy's ends. She had not entirely forgotten the pursuit of truth, but she had begun, like Sandy, to think that she possessed it. In silence Marion got in under the covers and curled up away from Jacob. He wanted to say something to her. He wanted to explain himself, and whisper in her ear, “Marion, I'm sorry.” But he wasn't sorry, and in any case, the damage was done. He could expound on his position all night, but he knew she was too annoyed to listen.

  He missed his wife. He wished she would turn to him and admit that she was rushing. He longed for her to confide in him and think her problems through with him, but she was sailing in a new direction, and nothing he could say would stop her. She'd tried the future on for size, tasted success. He wanted her to succeed—but to do it right. Not with press releases, and articles in the popular press, and photographs. Not with Glass. He thought and thought about Sandy Glass. He tried to trace exactly how and when Glass had begun to steer Marion's lab in his own direction. He lay awake and considered how the lab had changed under Glass's influence. He thought of Cliff. And he considered Robin.

  She was floundering. She faithfully attended Jacob's lectures at Tufts and sat in the front row with a stack of graded labs or problem sets in her folder, but while her attendance never flagged, Robin's manner had changed as the weeks passed. She put up a good front when Jacob spoke to her, but in the lecture hall, when she, like so many of the undergraduates, assumed fallaciously that the professor could not see her, Robin slumped down in her seat and stared into the distance. She looked utterly dejected and distracted. Her experiments were still not working.

  After finals, during the first week of June, Robin came in with a stack of exams and sat with Jacob to record her section's grades. They sat in his office on the nubby orange couch that Marion had banished there, and Jacob asked her how the work was going. He asked in the most casual way, just as he always did, but this time Robin's eyes welled up.

  He was torn, then, about what to do. He dispensed tissues all the time to undergraduates, but they were children. He could not shame Robin by admitting he knew she was about to cry.

  She surprised and impressed him. Somehow she willed her tears back; they did not flow onto her pale eyelashes. He gave her a moment, and she steadied her voice and answered clearly, “It's not going well. I'm not sure what I should do.”

  “Oh, you know, these things usually go badly,” Jacob told her.

  “They go badly for me,” Robin confessed. “It's not just these experiments. My own aren't working either, and I've tried to be patient, and I've tried blaming people—and equipment—but I just can't seem to . . .”

  “You've done well here,” Jacob said.

  “Thanks.”

  “And you can do well there too.”

  She looked at him then, and all her gathering doubts seemed to cave in upon her. Despair lodged in her throat; she could scarcely swallow.

  Don't cry, he thought. He did not fully know why, but it was enormously important to him at that moment that she not cry.

  She struggled with herself, but when she spoke, her voice again held steady. “Cliff's results are so good—so clear—but I can't get the experiments right. I don't know what's wrong with me.”

  Jacob thought carefully before he spoke. He looked at Robin as she sat before him in her short-sleeved summer shirt; he considered her bare arms, her fine open face, the humility and baffled sadness in her confession. He thought about the place, the time, and Robin's state of mind. Quite deliberately, Jacob considered what his words might mean to her—hesitated a moment—then shot his subtle arrow anyway. He said, “The results seem almost too good to be true.”

  Part IV

  Intuition

  1

  JACOB'S WORDS slid in easily; they slipped under Robin's skin so fast, she scarcely felt them until several moments later, when she was practically out the door. Even then, the construction was so casual, “almost too good to be true . . . ,” she might not have noticed anything, except for the decided coolness in his voice. His words were mild, but his voice was cold, and it was the cold that crept inside Robin after the first moment, startling and paining her. What was he really saying? What was he trying to tell her? Even as she left the office, she turned back in confusion. “Do you really think . . .” she said. “Do you think there's something wrong?”

  Jacob looked up at her. “Something wrong with what?”

  “About what you said before?” She couldn't spell it out: the denigration of his wife's own journal article; the terrifying, disorienting opening of a world of doubt.

  “What was that?”

  “Do you think there's something wrong with the data?” she whispered.

  Jacob looked her in the face, and his eyes were so dark, and so lively, Robin felt for a moment that he was playing with her. She sensed, for an instant, that he could see right inside of her, and she drew back, horrified. There was a good five feet of empty space between them, but she felt as though Jacob had touched the inside of her thigh. Her heart was racing, but he'd already turned away as if nothing had happened.

  “Something wrong with the data?” he repeated slowly, absentmindedly, as he shuffled the papers on his desk. “No, of course not.”

  She told herself nothing had happened. Later, she almost convinced herself she had imagined the whole conversation. Still, she could not shake his words; they persisted inside her, clinging tenaciously like seeds with hooks, like little burrs. He would deny it, but his words were meant for her. That was the frightening part. Anyone else would have written off his comment about the results as a sour joke or chance remark, but Robin saw the significance immediately. She was struggling in the lab; she wa
s failing to duplicate Cliff's results. How could she possibly ignore Jacob's sly suggestion that the results were flawed? That perhaps the problems she was having in the lab were not of her own making? That there was something wrong with Cliff's experiments themselves? What did Jacob know? What did he suspect? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He would never question Marion's judgment. He deferred to his wife entirely when it came to science. He'd given up his career for her. Everybody knew that.

  Why, then, had he spoken to her that way? Was he just tormenting her? Teasing her? Why would he toy with her like that?

  He was strange. He had one of those odd, angular minds you ran into sometimes in science. He was brilliant and fastidious. He was known primarily as Marion's husband, but he was also highly opinionated. She thought of him at the Bach concert, sitting with his score, making some point about the music at intermission, shooting down Peter Hawking himself for offering a different opinion. Jacob was a force to be reckoned with. He was not what you might expect.

  That weekend, she went to Plum Island with three friends from her building. Tomas drove. He was a two-hundred-fifty-pound, bushy-bearded watercolorist who lived alone on the third floor with his sweet-faced parakeet, Pippin. After matriculating at Harvard, he had run into trouble in his freshman year and taken a decade's leave of absence, financed by his parents and punctuated by a couple of nervous breakdowns, so that he could devote himself to art. Tomas's father was Jewish, his mother Cuban. He was bilingual, but he spoke English with a slight lisp, as though he had spent time in Spain. His gentle manner belied his burly exterior. It was he who planned the Plum Island expedition each year, just as it was he who invited his neighbors to his place for tea. He was a community builder, and a family man of sorts, devoted to his mother and his father in Georgetown, and his sisters in Potomac, Maryland. Shyly he'd approached Robin in the lobby two years earlier and said, “I was wondering if you would you like to share some champagne with me. I'm celebrating a new stage in my life. I've just become an uncle.”