Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  The day Prithwish left for Sri Lanka, Cliff took refuge in the animal facility. He scanned the cage racks for his experimental mice, and tried to comfort himself with their good health. Marion and Sandy had decided to delay submitting the new journal article. “This is not a reflection on you,” Sandy had reassured Cliff.

  “We want the paper to get a fair hearing, that's all,” said Marion.

  Cliff understood their logic, but he was miserable all the same. He was losing time, missing the chance to publish when his work was freshest. ORIS could deliberate for months. They would announce their findings at their leisure, and his new work would remain under wraps, smothered with innuendo.

  He knew now that he and Feng and Marion and Sandy would all be testifying before Representative Redfield's Subcommittee on Science and Technology. They had not been asked to testify, but commanded to appear. The documents and data ORIS had collected—even Cliff's personal notes—would be presented and entered into the Congressional Record. He perched on a stool in the room where most of his mice lived, and he tried to take this in. What chance could he have in front of Redfield? His work was beautiful, but the world was arbitrary and unfair. His methods were elegant; his work, this last year, the deepest joy he'd ever known. And now, just as he'd found his scientific way, ORIS blocked his path. He stood on the threshold and ORIS locked the door. He told himself he would not panic, he would not give up; but he would be testifying before politicians whose views were preordained. He had as little hope of escaping summary judgment as the animals scuffling in their cages.

  There was so little he could control. Labs at Stanford and Cornell were working to reproduce his results. Once, those researchers had been the competition. Now they couldn't work fast enough to satisfy Cliff; he prayed for Hughes's and Agarwal's success as a hostage prays for family to redeem him. If only he could give up this waiting and go to Ithaca or Palo Alto and advise the scientists there. Of course he could not interfere; those trials had to proceed independently. Still, he longed to guide them.

  How beautiful it must be at Stanford now, the great avenue lined with palms, the red-tiled central court soaking up the sun. But then, even Cornell sounded lovely to his ears, the campus split with gorges, boulders sheathed in ice, and all the fields knee-deep in snow. He wanted to run away, but he could not go. He was not a coward; he would not allow Robin to defeat him. Nor did he take his stand alone; his friends stayed with him, talking and teasing as they had always done.

  “You aren't bringing Nella?” Feng asked one wet December day as they divided colonies of cells into new dishes. Glass's Christmas party was that night.

  Cliff frowned, concentrating. “I haven't seen Nella in a while.”

  “And would that be because you're seeing Beth?” Aidan asked him.

  The others suppressed muffled laughter. They all knew Beth Leibowitz, the secretary downstairs.

  “Do not talk about Beth,” Cliff said with mock severity.

  “Why not?” asked Natalya.

  “Beth is a delicate flower,” Aidan said.

  Natalya snorted. “A delicate—?”

  “She's shy,” Cliff interrupted.

  “Oh really?” Aidan said. “We'll have to do something about that.”

  “No, you don't.” Cliff turned to him. “She's scared enough of you already.”

  “Of me?” asked Aidan, flattered.

  “All of you, so don't start,” he warned, but it felt good to bicker and banter in that way. Even petty disputes amused him now. Such was the gravity of his situation.

  “It's almost like a death sentence,” he told Beth that evening as they drove to the party in her Volkswagen Rabbit.

  “Oh, don't say that.”

  “I mean, it makes you understand.”

  She looked at him with tender concern. She was soft and gentle and utterly unscientific. “What do you understand?”

  “I see now that science is what I love. It's my life and they're trying to take it away from me. I never appreciated research before, and now I see it's my—”

  He stopped short; he couldn't say the word. These were Robin's sentiments. Unconsciously, he'd followed her turn of phrase, her anguished declaration.

  “I hate it here,” she'd confided once at the end of a particularly horrible day.

  “Then do something else,” he said. “Go to business school or New Guinea or something; climb around in the rain forest canopy. You like heights, right?”

  She laughed, but then she was serious again. “I want to give up, but I can't.”

  “You can't do what you want?”

  “No. I realize you always do what you want, so it's not such an issue for you.”

  “Mmm.”

  “But I can't give up research, because it's my vocation.”

  The scientists drank more than usual that year. Ann noticed right away. They laughed louder, talked faster than the other guests. Even Marion drank almost a whole glass of sherry, and Sandy teased her mercilessly.

  “Let's see if you can hold your liquor. You're looking a little red in the face.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Marion retorted, and took another sip. She sipped with great deliberation, as though she were courting mortal danger. Her pinched, concerted face sent everyone around her into peals of laughter.

  The merriment seemed to Ann a little forced. Now Marion and Sandy both had representation. Marion employed Sybil Halbfinger, famous for her early work in civil rights, her arguments before the Supreme Court, her seminal articles on jurisprudence, her white pageboy haircut and girlish voice and frilled collars. Contrary to expectation. Sandy had not chosen Leo Sonenberg, attorney to the stars, but the understated Thayer Houghton-Smith, who litigated high above the Boston skyline from offices fitted out with wing chairs and nautical paintings, grandfather clocks and china urns—antique ballast to counteract the vertiginous view. These lawyers were necessary now, each serving as a masque de guerre, projecting a grimace of formality.

  “Who wants another glass?” asked Sandy, scanning the room.

  Cliff and Beth slipped away to sit on the stairs. Kate just happened to be walking by, and came upon them there.

  “Hey, Kate,” said Cliff.

  She noticed the way their fingers entwined. “How do you do?” She held out her hand to Beth.

  Surprised by this formality, Beth roused herself to shake Kate's hand. Beth wasn't tall as Nella had been, or pre-Raphaelite like Robin. She had a small face, deep-set brown eyes, a tiny nose, tender mouth, weak chin, and a great deal of rough brown hair tied back. When she smiled, Beth seemed to shrink into herself, her eyes crinkling smaller, her mouth and chin receding with self-effacing pleasure. Surprised, almost offended, Kate could only think: She isn't pretty!

  “What's going on?” Cliff asked.

  “I don't know,” she said. Of course she knew all about the investigation.

  “Don't you have anything to rehearse?” He turned to Beth. “Kate is educating me in English literature and drama.”

  Beth laughed softly, and leaned against him.

  “Yes, well, I'm not competing on the speech team anymore,” Kate said.

  “What? You gave it up?” Elbows on the stair runner, he sat back in mock surprise.

  “I wasn't very good,” she said.

  “I thought you were,” he insisted. “Don't you have anything to read us?”

  “No,” she said, and then instantly regretted her curt tone. She knew he must be suffering; he must be exhausted, beset as he was on all sides. “Well, I don't know.” She relented, and disappeared in some confusion into the library.

  Beth had gone off to the dessert table when Kate came back carrying a worn copy of essays by Francis Bacon.

  Undistracted now, Cliff turned to her, and she felt his smile brush over her, as if they were standing quite close together and his eyelashes and his nose and his lips were brushing hers. She wanted to sit next to him, but she was too shy.

  “I found this,” she said, an
d sat as near as she dared—just one stair down. “This is the essay on truth.”

  “Excellent.” He leaned over her shoulder to see the page.

  “‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer . . .'” Her voice trembled a little as she read. She hoped he'd see why she had chosen the essay—that he would understand all she meant by it: all the lies and doubts and ugliness of the investigation would come to nothing; in the end the truth of what he'd done and what her father and Marion and the whole lab had achieved would come out. “‘Truth is a naked, and open day-light,'” she read, “‘that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day, but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights . . .'”

  “Hold on. Slow down,” he said.

  “Do you want to read it yourself?”

  “I'm a bit . . . I just need to follow a little more slowly,” he said. “So the truth is a pearl—and what was the diamond again?”

  “He doesn't say, exactly. Maybe half-truths are the diamonds and carbuncles, because they're faceted. They're more complicated, so they look better in candlelight.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.” He looked through the archway in the entrance hall to the dining room table, which flickered with the soft light of Ann's Hanukkah candles. “What does a carbuncle look like, anyway? I thought a carbuncle was a big, ugly, festering sore.”

  “It's a jewel,” she said.

  “I don't think so.”

  “It is.”

  “How much do you want to bet?” he asked her.

  She picked at the hem of her new black dress. “Nothing,” she said.

  “You'll bet me nothing. You don't seem very confident.”

  “I know I'm right,” she said. “You can look it up.”

  “All right, let's look it up, then. Where's the dictionary?”

  She led him into the library, and then into her mother's office, beyond. She turned on the desk lamp in the little room, which had once been a screened-in porch and then was converted into Ann's writing space. The battered wood desk was covered with stacks of graded papers. A well-thumbed volume of Darwin's letters lay open near the computer, along with credit card bills and shopping lists, and paperweights of clay and painted wood, framed pictures, a miniature Kate, and a shockingly young and bearded Sandy, clasping a baby and two little girls. Cliff hesitated in the doorway. Guests weren't meant to come inside Ann's office.

  But Kate was already opening the American Heritage Dictionary right on top of her mother's papers on the desk. Briskly she was flipping through the Cs. “Come, look,” she said. “Carbuncle.”

  “Ha!” said Cliff. “‘A painful localized bacterial infection of the skin through which pus is discharged.'”

  “Okay, fine,” she conceded, sounding a little like her father. “But look at definition two: ‘A deep red garnet.' And in this case, Bacon was talking about precious gems. So I'm right.” She shut the book.

  “I think you're just half right,” said Cliff.

  “Well, in the context of the essay I'm completely right.”

  “So truth depends on context?”

  “It shouldn't,” Kate said.

  “But sometimes it does,” he said.

  “I'm not going to let you get away with that.”

  “No?” He reached past her to turn off the light so they could go. “What would you say then?”

  “Lots of things.” But she was far too flustered by his presence in the sudden darkness to argue.

  6

  Wedding of Angeli and Nate was 100 in the shade. I walked home barefoot from the T. My heel was bleeding. C. carried my shoes and a goldfish even though I said . . .

  ROBIN SHUT the diary on her lawyer's desk. The very sight of the open pages made her cringe.

  “Can they really do this?” Robin asked her lawyer.

  “Yes, they really can subpoena your notes, and your lab books, and your personal diary. They can indeed,” her lawyer told her. She was a scrappy attorney named Laura Sabbatini: wiry, with small glasses, a freckled face, and short, spiky brown hair. When she spoke, Sabbatini spoke with emphasis, as one accustomed to instructing small children, or to explaining the world to those less brilliant, or more naïve, than she. She did both frequently, for she was the mother of two small boys, and by far the brightest associate at Brooks, Weinbach, McCabe. She was a little tornado of activity, and she had what people variously called a killer instinct, a cutthroat mentality, or a mean streak. As she understood it, she'd earned her moniker as a killer simply because she liked to work.

  “Not my journal,” Robin said. She'd already acceded to Hackett's arguments that her case was better served with primary documents and sent him Cliff's original notes by registered mail. Giving in to ORIS had been bad enough.

  “Your journal is some of the best evidence we have,” said Sabbatini.

  “They'll try to use it against me.”

  “Oh, two can play that game,” Sabbatini told her. “Where was that section?” She leafed through the bound composition book. “Yeah, I like this part.” She adjusted her glasses.

  I said I didn't want to and he said why not. I told him it was too soon but he said he didn't think so. Accused him of not listening, but. . . .

  “Stop. Stop!” cried Robin, covering her ears.

  Sabbatini looked up, amused. “When it comes to relationships in the workplace, it's a very, very thin line between consensual sex and sexual harassment. So if Cliff and company want to use your diary, they'd better watch their backs.”

  Robin took a moment to assimilate this. Six months after she'd left the lab, her questions were not hers anymore; her doubts had grown into weather systems of their own, her single intuition now transformed into a conspiracy theory implicating not only Cliff but nearly everyone who worked around him. After working so closely with him for so long, why hadn't Feng spoken up about Cliff's unorthodox record keeping? How could Marion, famous for overseeing every detail, have allowed Cliff to work virtually unsupervised? Had they not seized rapaciously on the promise of Cliff's work? Starved for results, they'd conjured up a banquet. Cliff had begun, and then the others followed, and the entire scientific community began to partake. Weren't they all, then, eating air?

  “I don't want to use my diary as a weapon,” she told Sabbatini.

  “But it is a weapon,” Sabbatini shot back, as if she relished the thought.

  At times like this, Robin felt as if she'd stepped through the looking glass into another world, where lawyers and politicians were the true investigators and scientists the pawns. Here, evidence was personal, not chemical or biological. She looked around her in this alien landscape and she understood that she was being used.

  Nevertheless, she had information that deserved publicity; she had rescued data that deserved a hearing, and the inquiry had provided Robin with an audience. In the land of ORIS, Robin's suspicion was praised as insight; her frustration called prescience; her skepticism no longer deemed self-destructive jealousy, but valuable, honest, and rare. Publicity had its price, but so did silence. She'd had no choice but to let her doubts loose, and watch and worry as the lawyers on the other side gave chase.

  “I don't want you to twist my words around,” she warned Sabbatini.

  “I'm just saying—they start twisting, and we'll twist back,” said Sabbatini. “Hey, listen to me. The nastier this gets, the better off we'll be. The more personal and ad hominem they are, the better. Bring it on! The more mud the merrier. You know why, don't you? Because they're desperate. They are so desperate.” Sabbatini bounced a little in her chair. “You still don't believe me, do you? Let's draw up a little balance sheet, okay? Let me see. What have you got? You've got ORIS seriously questioning the lab's integrity, you've got Redfield on the warpath, you've got the press smelling blood, you've got an incipient scandal and
cover-up going on at the institute. You've got the truth. Not to mention—me! And I've told you about the Secret Service. They've started their ink analysis on Cliff's notes. They're going to do the forensics to find out exactly how many pens Cliff really used there, and whether some of that data is really much older, or whether it was all from the same set and he really just left some of it out. You thought those questions that you asked would never get a real answer, but they will be answered. You've got the Secret Service on your side. You've got cutting-edge technology. Now, what do they have? Hmm. They have their prevarications; they have their pride; they have your diary.”

  “But I don't want them to have my diary,” Robin said, fretting.

  Laura Sabbatini knit her fingers together and rested her chin on her hands. “Oh, come on, Robin,” she chided, as though Robin were afraid of spiders. “You have practically the entire government working on your case.”

  “That's an exaggeration,” Robin said.

  “And the whole world ready to take up pitchforks for your cause.”

  “It was just one op/ed piece,” said Robin.

  “All right. So almost the whole world. We're going in there and shooting down the liars and the cheats and blowing the cover off an entire culture of scientific finessing and fraud. Don't tell me you're expecting this thing to be pretty, too.”

  The inquiry wasn't pretty, and that was just what Nanette liked about it. She phoned Robin regularly and left messages in a breathless Mata Hari voice. The two of them met for coffee at Café Algiers, surrounded by its red walls and polished brass samovars. They sat at the back where the kitchen door swung open to reveal Yasser Arafat's picture pasted on the wall, and Nanette predicted the downfall of the institute. She was sure the ORIS inquiry was going to bring the Philpott crashing to earth, and Robin thought she seemed strangely eager for this catastrophe, considering the institute was Nanette's employer.

  “Doesn't matter,” Nanette said blithely. “I could get a job at MIT in a minute. I'm good.”