Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  We sat at a table against the wall, Charlie insisting that I take the banquette. We talked about the children for a while, eating some sort of special miso soup with mushrooms. Charlie told me a funny story about Simmi, who had asked Charlie innocently whether people had to “do sex” to have a baby. I made the joke I always make, that it’s actually a lot easier to explain IUI birth with a C-section than it is a natural conception and birth.

  Charlie laughed. “Does Jack ask about his donor?”

  “A few months ago—he just came home from school and asked why he didn’t have a dad.”

  “Oh god,” Charlie said.

  “Right. I started in on my whole spiel—I’d rehearsed it in my head a million times. At the end I asked him if he had any questions, and he said: ‘Dylan’s dad got him a light saber that really lights up.’ ”

  Charlie laughed. “That’s what dads are for. You can borrow Terrence anytime you need someone to buy Jack plastic weapons.”

  “How’s it going, with his work and everything?”

  Charlie shook her head disbelievingly. “It’s amazing. I didn’t think it would work—I didn’t say it at the time, but I didn’t really think Ray could pull it off. Then some of the pro surfers started buying the boards. They were actually in the L.A. Times style magazine last month, and now the store is going crazy. Online orders, too. Terrence does the online stuff, which used to be great, because he was home so much.”

  “But not anymore?”

  We were sitting next to a large, tropical fish tank, presumably decorative, where fish we were not going to eat swam around: goldfish with swollen eyes, darting neon tetras, and an angry-looking lionfish, lurking against the multicolored pebbles at the bottom.

  “Things are really hard with us right now. He almost didn’t come to Boston.”

  Hearing about other people’s troubles with their spouses sometimes made me glad to be single; other times it just made me think I’d never meet anyone.

  “How come?”

  “It’s hard on him, me being sick. I decided I’m not doing staffing this year—that means competing for jobs on different shows. I had a flare at the end of the summer, and it was pretty bad. I’m a supervising producer now—that’s basically two levels from the top. The idea is that I’m going to stay home and create my own show.”

  “The Manhattan Project show?”

  Charlie nodded. “It’s changed a little, though. I think I’m going to focus more on the workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There were black nurses in the hospital, black laborers at the labs and the test sites. Did you know they segregated the female workers in a kind of barracks? I mean, you’d expect them to be racially segregated—but the women were even separated from the men, even the married ones. There was a curfew and guards outside the gate.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I feel like it’s a kind of Buffalo Soldier story, but with women. And science.”

  “I’d love to watch that.”

  “Thanks. Unfortunately, you’re not anyone’s target audience. And even if I can write it and sell it—that’s a big if—I don’t know if I have it in me, being in the office or on set in the way it would take to make it happen.”

  “You look great,” I told her.

  “People always say that,” Charlie said. “I mean, thank you, but that’s one of the things with lupus. You can’t always see it, so it’s hard for people to understand how bad it is.”

  Charlie had ordered us some dumplings that arrived steaming in a basket. We were drinking sake from purposefully mismatched green-and-purple shot glasses.

  “People keep telling me to stick it out another year, get the co-EP credit—that’s co–executive producer, the next level—and then leave. But I’m just sick of it. You know about ‘diversity staffing,’ right?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “So basically all the networks have these programs for women and minority writers, where they’ll subsidize the salaries of baby writers from those groups. That’s what you’re called when you’re a staff writer—entry level. Most of the programs will only pay staff writer salaries, so there’s no incentive for the showrunner to promote you. I know a woman who was at a show for three years, as a staff writer, and then they were like, ‘Okay, we need some fresh diversity!’ A lot of people from these diversity programs get fed up and leave.”

  “But that didn’t happen to you.”

  “No,” she said, “although my salary was paid by the network the first year. The showrunner said he would’ve hired me anyway—he was class of ’92, and I knew him from the Signet, so that helped—but it would’ve been crazy for the studio to pay a salary they didn’t have to pay. And then I was promoted after the first year, and I kept moving up. I had all the right connections, and so for me, it was easier. As usual. But then stuff still happens, even now.”

  “Like?”

  Charlie rolled her eyes. “This guy Josh, who I know from that horrible CW show—we’re kind of buddies. I can’t talk to Terrence about work because he doesn’t really get it. But Josh and I sometimes go out for a beer after work; he’s this menschy guy, and we always joke that everybody sees us and thinks he’s rich and I’m an actor.” Even in the restaurant I’d noticed people turning and looking at us; in the clothes she was wearing, and especially in Boston, Charlie did look as if she had to be famous.

  “We always go to the same dive on Highland,” she said. “And then the other night he asks me if I’m staffing for fall shows, and I say I don’t know. And he asks if I want to be his writing partner.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you share the work, and the salary. Josh said he could deal with the pay cut, temporarily, because he wants to write a pilot at the same time. And I was thinking that it would actually be perfect for me right now—you know, to get the co-EP credit but do half the work. And there’s this new Netflix show we’re both really excited about, and we’re talking about it. And then Josh says he thinks we would have a really good shot, because I would make us the ‘high-level diversity’ everyone’s looking for.” Charlie shook her head. “Do you know what that feels like?”

  “No,” I said. “But we have this program called ‘Career Development.’ Five of the female professors in the department are in it, and also the one African guy.”

  “Right,” Charlie said. “Network shows are seventy-one percent male. And I’m one of the ones who made it, but I had a real leg up. And I just feel like such a fucking traitor sometimes—when we’re in the room, and I laugh at a joke just because everyone’s looked over to see if I’m going to laugh.”

  “What did you say to the guy—Josh?”

  “I laid into him. I said I’d rather try for the seventy-one percent of spots that go to white men than for the twenty-nine percent that go to everyone else. And then when I got one, I’d like to enjoy the luxury of not having anyone say that I got it because I’m a black woman.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wrote me a lovely apology over email the next day. But I still don’t want to be his writing partner.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  Charlie sat up straight and shook her head. “It’s way less depressing than the disease. I can handle Josh, and all the people who make Josh look like an angel—when I’m feeling good. I can even deal with the physical pain; my doctor says I actually have a high threshold.” She smiled wryly: “A high threshold for a lupus patient. Which would be no threshold for anyone else. The disease basically rewires your neural pathways, so that your brain is getting messages that your body hurts when it really shouldn’t.”

  “What are you taking?”

  “I tried Lyrica, and now I’m on Cymbalta—the drugs all sound like women in Shakespeare.”

  “But they don’t work.”

  “They work a little. You know
what the worst thing is, though? They call it lupus brain fog. It actually cuts off some of the blood flow to parts of your brain. You can get confused, disoriented. You start forgetting things.”

  The waiter came and put the sushi in front of us. It was so pretty that it didn’t look like food.

  “Once Simmi came into my bedroom after school, and I got up to give her a hug. I said how happy I was to see her, asked her how school was and all that. And she’s just looking at me like I’m crazy. I told her I hadn’t heard her come in, and she says, ‘Mama, I already came in.’ I looked at the clock and it was four-thirty—she’d been home for an hour. I’d just forgotten that I’d already seen her.”

  I imagined not being sure whether my brain was functioning the way it should, and felt a visceral fear. Beneath that fear was something terrible I was ashamed to feel—a faint relief, that it was her and not me. I reached down to pick up my napkin, which had fallen to the floor. When I sat up, Charlie was looking right at me: I thought she had seen what I was thinking, but was pretending she hadn’t.

  “Has it been any better working at home?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I’ve had good days. Like when I get to eleven without a migraine. And then other days Terrence takes Simmi to school, and I go into the bedroom and close the blinds and just lie there in the dark until the sitter brings her home.”

  “It’s good you have the sitter.”

  “We didn’t used to—Terrence used to pick her up most days. But he’s been spending way more time at Zingaro or at Ray’s place. He says it’s because they’re so busy—and they are. But I also think it’s because he’s afraid to come home.”

  “Afraid?”

  “I’m no picnic when I’m sick.”

  “I’m sure you’re not that bad.”

  “I am. I get really angry at myself when I can’t work.”

  “But that’s because you’re sick.”

  “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s because I can’t see the point.”

  “The point of working?”

  “It’s a really long haul, Helen. This is my whole life. Balancing the meds, being exhausted. A great day is when I feel okay. I can’t even remember what it was like to feel normal. My mom’s like, ‘You’re a fighter.’ But I don’t know if I am.”

  “You are.”

  “You think? Because sometimes I think if it wasn’t for Simmi, I’d just be done with it.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, and then I saw it on her face. “Charlie!”

  “Do me a favor and don’t ask if I’ve thought about how I’d do it.”

  “Have you thought about how you’d do it?”

  Charlie looked startled, and then she laughed. “I love you, Helen.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She sat back in her chair, poked at a piece of seaweed in a desultory way, then put the chopsticks down on a ceramic rest made to look like a fish. She didn’t look at me, but her mouth was set in a way I recognized, refusing pity.

  “But I am tired,” she said.

  7.

  At some point that night, Charlie told me that she’d walked Terrence and Simmi through Harvard Yard, because they’d been in Cambridge for the afternoon, and her parents had suggested it. She had resisted opening “that can of worms” initially—since the difference in her education and Terrence’s was such an issue for her parents—but both Terrence and Simmi had loved Harvard. Terrence had said that it was one of the few places that turned out to be just what you expected—in a good way. Simmi had liked the library steps; she had wanted to climb up and hop down again and again. It was only while Charlie was standing in front of that library, watching her daughter do an unwitting Shirley Temple routine on its marble steps, that she had realized Pope might actually be in there. She knew that several women, slightly younger than we were, had gotten together to make a complaint against him, and that they had been successful in ensuring that he no longer taught undergraduates.

  “They called me to say they were writing a letter,” Charlie said. “I think that woman, Trisha, might have given them my name—that pissed me off. I wanted to put the whole thing behind me, and so I said I didn’t have anything definitive to say about him. Now I really wish I’d added my name.”

  Charlie hadn’t been part of the official complaint, but she had looked Pope up more than once online, and seen that as a retired professor of such eminence—a professor whose retirement was quietly insisted upon, but might well have been voluntary considering his age—he retained an office, not in the Comparative Literature Department on Quincy Street, but in Widener Library itself. She told me she thought about going in and telling him what she was doing now, how much she earned as a supervising producer, and what she thought of the way he’d behaved.

  She said she’d almost done it. She was going to tell Terrence and her parents that she was nostalgic, and wanted to go up and see the Francis Child Memorial Library on the third floor. But then she asked herself what would be the point. Someone like her friend Josh could learn, if she took the time to explain his mistake to him, and if he really cared to listen. But a seventy-year-old professor? She said it would be for herself that she was doing it, and she questioned why she still needed anything from a person like Professor Pope.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I met Pope, I was looking for Charlie in that third-floor room where she liked to study. This was in the spring of our junior year, before cell phones, when you would guess where someone might be, and go try to find them. Once Charlie had dragged me up a little-used staircase, to show me the view of the star-shaped paths from above, and then forced me to read a poem she liked on the subject of the trees in Harvard Yard. I remember remarking that it didn’t seem like a good poet would write a poem about Harvard, and Charlie had been impatient with me, told me that I knew nothing, that a great poet could write a poem about a comic strip or a shovel or her own ass and say something profoundly true.

  This time Charlie wasn’t there: I knew her schedule by heart, and when I looked at my watch, I realized she must be at her tutorial. I was so eager to tell her my news—I had gotten a summer internship at Fermilab outside Chicago, where the Tevatron particle accelerator was then operating—that I decided to go to Pope’s office and wait for her. I asked a student, who directed me; when I reached the room number he’d given me, I could hear Charlie’s voice coming from inside.

  I sat down on the marble floor, my back against the wall opposite, and took out a paper I’d been meaning to read. I was forcing myself to confront Vilenkin’s proposed boundary conditions in superspace as limits for solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, when I heard them approaching the door. I scrambled to my feet, since there was something childish and undignified about sitting on the floor in Widener. Charlie came out first. She was wearing a short gray wool skirt, black tights, and a blue-and-white striped collared shirt, with a sweater on top. It was preppy and a little dressier than your average student, the version of Charlie that had attended Choate Rosemary Hall. She saw me and started, as if I’d tricked her by appearing there. Because she was Charlie, her training overcame any surprise or disinclination to see me; she turned to her professor and introduced us.

  “This is my roommate, Helen,” she said.

  You might have said that the professor looked at me “searchingly.” He had blue eyes, along with the Roman nose and dark, wavy hair, with just a little gray at the temples, that had suggested our nickname for him. I’m not sure at that point in my life that I’d ever met anyone French, and I expected perhaps a cigarette, an accent; it turned out that Pope had grown up in Montreal, and done his celebrated early work at the Sorbonne, before moving to the University of Toronto, and then finally to Harvard. He was wearing a slim, dark suit with a white shirt, but it was open at the collar, as if he were eager to escape the formality of his surroundings. He frowned
slightly and his voice was ostentatiously gentle, as if he’d just learned that I was suffering from some kind of injury.

  “Ah, Helen—the physicist,” he said.

  Everything about him seemed mannered, which was, to be fair, something that people often said about Charlie, too. But where Charlie’s affect was a defense that you had to wear away at little by little, Pope seemed to be able to turn his on and off at will. He wasn’t tall or even especially handsome, but he had an obvious confidence in his own charisma that I disliked immediately.

  “I hope so, eventually.”

  “Charlie says you’re very talented. What’s your area of interest?”

  “Quantum cosmology, especially inflation theory.” It was new for me, having an area of interest, and I couldn’t help being proud of it.

  “So you’re a theorist.” Pope looked from me to Charlie, and back to me. “You know, it’s not actually all that different from what we do here, in our department. Charlotte has a brilliant critical mind, but my guess is that she’s going to be a playwright. What the playwright does is to take voices—often those voices and that specific language that has been with him—or her—since birth, and employ them to communicate some truth that he hasn’t determined in advance. Likewise you build a model that is a hypothetical solution to a problem, not yet observationally provable.”

  I privately thought that it was a foolish analogy, and if Charlie had said it I would have laughed. An equation had nothing to do with people saying words on a stage, apart from the fact that both could be written down. The relationships between the forces in our universe had an objective reality, and that universe had a discoverable history; I wasn’t in the business of making things up.