Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  It was as if a door were floating there, opening into the depths below. The door between this world and the next, the door to the rest of her life. Years later, as Rose looks up from her microscope, she’ll see something like that door and will hear the sentence, always the same, which confines her mother’s death: Walking along a lakeshore road, she was struck by a speeding tourist and killed instantly.

  Those are the words, always those words. Behind them lie all she’s forgotten. A noise Rose didn’t hear and then a moment she couldn’t name: the moment when Suky disappeared. Theo, stuck in his well of grief, was no help afterward, and although Peter showed up briefly, and alone, for Suky’s funeral, Rose was blind to him and clung to Bianca. Their differences mattered less then than their shared loss, and they drew together and closed out everyone else.

  Into a trunk—a smaller version of Suky’s closet; even Rose could see that she closed the lid exactly as she’d sealed that door—went the hand lens, the stolen library book, and the mysterious stew of feelings she’d once had for her parents’ cherished friend.

  When Rose and Peter met again, Rose was draped over a pair of chairs in the Detroit airport, looking over some notes for a talk and drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. She was waiting for her friend Signe to arrive from Oslo, so that they could share a rental car. This was a kindness on her part; they were both headed for the same enzymology meeting, and she knew Signe would be too exhausted to drive. Rose was in one of her airport trances. Her home near Boston left behind, the meeting and the prize she was to receive for her research still in the future; the air stale, the day still young, her thirty-first birthday a week away. Legs looped over the arms of one chair, feet braced against another, she was wondering if she’d reached the age when she could no longer sit like this, like a teenager, in public places. Then a hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and there was Peter Kotov.

  “Rose?” he said. The tone in his voice was pure wonder; they hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years. He was much changed, and yet still himself: the mustache grizzled, the black hair half gray; thicker at the waist and shoulders yet still with the same eyes. She’d changed more, she knew; she’d been a weedy girl when they last met and was amazed that he recognized her.

  “How did you know it was me?” she asked.

  “Your mother used to sit just like that—remember? With her legs draped over the arm of the couch? And the way you push back your hair with your left hand is so like her …”

  The oddest feeling passed over her, as if Suky had breathed in her ear. When she gazed into a mirror she saw only broken shadows of her mother, and it hadn’t occurred to her before that habits of body and gesture might link them, visible only in motion, and only to others.

  In the hour they had before Signe arrived and Peter had to catch his flight to Arizona, she was further amazed to learn that they’d been nearly neighbors for the last six years. All the time she’d been at the Institute, he’d been at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge; he lived in Watertown, not far from her apartment in Waltham.

  He was on his way to a huge entomology meeting in Tempe, he said; and she, in turn, revealed that she was headed for a gathering so small and prestigious that he raised both eyebrows when she named it. Briefly, she told him about her research, which didn’t seem to surprise him. Although he hadn’t been in touch with Theo in years, he’d heard that she’d gone to graduate school in biochemistry, done a stunning thesis, and set off for a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia when she was still very young.

  “But I didn’t know where you went after that,” he said. “I had no idea you’d ended up around Boston.”

  She didn’t tell him about the prize she was about to get, nor her grants and her embarrassingly large research budget, nor the fact that she was the youngest Senior Fellow at the Institute. “Is it still beetles with you?” she asked.

  “Still. Unfashionable beetles.” They talked briefly about his trials; how the money for whole-animal biology had dried up, and how the molecular biologists who’d taken over at Harvard and elsewhere scorned his kind of science now.

  “For a while I thought maybe I’d recruited you into the fold,” he said wryly. “Do you remember how much you liked my beetles?”

  She stared, amazed at how little he’d understood of her violent feelings. “Somehow I drifted away from that.”

  “It’s a shame,” he said. “You had a real flair for taxonomy. But it’s just as well, I guess—here you’ve ended up working in a hot field, and I’ve been relegated to the sidelines. I didn’t even have enough money this year to fly a graduate student to the meeting with me.”

  Rose changed the subject before the difference in their professional lives became more embarrassing. “Are you married?” she said. “Family?”

  Peter looked down at his legs and plucked at invisible lint. “I was married,” he said. “You must have known—I got married the year your mother died.”

  How could she have forgotten that? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t remember much from those years.”

  “Lauren,” he said. “You met her, I brought her to the house. We split four years ago, in ’82. Lauren wanted children, but we were never able to have any.” He looked up here, he looked right into Rose’s eyes. “She lives in Missoula now.”

  His hands were still plucking at the cloth on his legs, tenting then releasing the material, and Rose reached over and covered his fingers with hers.

  “I am fifty-one years old,” Peter said flatly. “And all alone. How about you?”

  “The same,” Rose said. Although this was something she never thought about, which she normally forbade herself to think about. Her life was interesting, and very busy.

  “But,” Peter said. “You know …”

  And then Signe appeared in the distance, bowed beneath her backpack and struggling with a suitcase; and it was time for Peter’s flight to Tempe. A flurry of introductions and almost simultaneous farewells, an awkward hug, everything left hanging and Peter suddenly distant, clearly embarrassed by what he’d revealed. He rushed away, his stride still that of a young man, bouncy in running shoes.

  He called her, though. Two weeks later, after they’d both returned from their meetings, he called her at work and asked her to meet him for dinner. She was on her way to Italy and had to put him off. When she returned he was in Costa Rica with a group of students, gone for the rest of the semester. But finally they were both in town at the same time, and they did get together. He visited the Institute and she toured the Museum; he cooked a mushroom risotto for her and she made a complicated dish with eggplants and pine nuts and goat cheese for him. The first time they went to bed together was in her cluttered apartment, and it was not a bed they shared but a futon. Peter knocked over the lamp. Later he showed her the oval, slanted holes in the slab of tree trunk she used as a coffee table. “Longhorn-beetle larvae,” he said. From the floor the underside of the table was easy to see.

  By a stroke of coincidence Rose preferred to ignore, their love affair began in May, just when Peter had always visited her family in Hammondsport and at the height of beetle season. Deadlines for grants and papers loomed, talks for meetings later that summer had to be prepared, her students all had examinations, and in the lab, where she’d always worked far into the night, her research took a surprising turn that ought to have captivated her entirely. Yet still she made time for Peter. Whole Sundays she spent with him, driving into the forests of western Massachusetts in search of specimens. And evenings too, as the days lengthened. The names of the beetles returned to her, and she found pleasure in this—although for some years now she had, like every molecular biologist her age, spoken scornfully of descriptive biology and taxonomy. Peter, she came to understand, was one of the two or three people in the world most expert in the Silphidae; and within that family he knew more than anyone else about the burying-beetles.

  That expertise, she thought—it might not be science, but it was
something. She couldn’t hold it against him that he didn’t understand her own work: who did, beyond a handful of people in her field? In June she looked up at a dinner party—his friends, not hers; all a generation older and so cultured she felt barbarous—and caught him listening as she tried to explain her research to an elderly cellist.

  “I look at a protein called ubiquitin,” she said. A college girl in a crisp white shirt cleared the arugula salad and laid clean plates, making Rose uncomfortable; who was she to be waited on? There were flowers embroidered on the linen napkins, and cushions on the chairs. “It has that name because it’s so abundant, and found in all kinds of cells—in people, beetles, yeasts, everything. And it’s almost identical in every species.”

  The cellist cocked his head attentively and touched his salmon with a silver fork. Rose wasn’t sure he even knew what a protein was. “What it does,” she said,”—in your cells, in any cell, proteins are continuously synthesized and then degraded back into their component amino acids. The degradation is just as important as the synthesis in regulating cellular metabolism. Ubiquitin molecules bind to other proteins and mark them for degradation. Without that marking and breaking down, nothing in the cell can work. I try to sort out the details of the protein-degradation process.”

  She’d left out everything important but still the cellist looked mystified. She was about to change the subject when she saw Peter eavesdropping across the table. To Rose and the cellist, to the table at large, Peter said, “You see, our research isn’t so different after all. My beetles and Rose’s molecule both break large dead things into smaller bits, so new things can be made.”

  The link he’d made between their research problems made her hands itch; surely he wasn’t implying that she’d chosen her work because of him and his beetles? But he did grasp her work after all, Rose thought. Or at least its point. Although later, when she tried yet again to explain the enzymatic pathway devoted to the covalent conjugation of ubiquitin to cellular proteins, he smiled and held out his hands palm up, in a gesture of incomprehension. “Different generation,” he said. “And a whole different field.” But if the fractionating columns and chromatography setups littering her benches were alien to him, what he missed were only the details. He knew a part of her as closed off to the rest of the world as the cupboard where she hid her mother’s relics.

  They made love in a dark museum attic, accompanied by the faint ticking of deathwatch beetles calling their mates through the old oak beams. They made love in dusky groves and on hot river rocks, in Rose’s lab and on her kitchen table, in Peter’s office surrounded by dead bugs. All of this—the conjunction of pins and papers and Latin names with flesh and hands and tongues, the mingling of past and present—was thrilling to Rose. Peter pointed to the hard, shell-like front wings of some dermestids scurrying around their colony and said, “Do you remember the name for these?”

  She said, “Elytra?” and felt her knees grow weak. When he kissed her neck and buried his fingers in her and said, “Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,” she closed her eyes and she was a girl again, he a young man again, and she came with startling violence. Closing her mouth around his cock, which was curved and smooth but sometimes reluctant, she did not see his paunch but rather the tight muscles vanishing into the pants in which he’d emerged from her parents’ guest room.

  How confusing all this was! One night, after too many margaritas, he licked the palm of her hand and said, “When I close my eyes and listen to your voice, it’s as if I’m back in Hammondsport, listening to your mother.”

  And she, made careless by the liquor, said, “Were you in love with her?”

  “We were never lovers,” Peter said, moving his hand slowly over her breast. “If that’s what you mean.”

  It wasn’t; she had never considered this. Only now did that disturbing image pass behind her eyes and then disappear.

  “Your parents were happy together,” he went on. He touched the mole in her armpit. “I would never have interfered. But it’s true I loved them, both of them. And if it hadn’t been for my friendship with Theo—I adored your mother, I did. When the three of us were together your father thrived on the charge between Suky and me. It made him feel even luckier to know that he was the one she’d chosen.”

  But that wasn’t right, Rose thought with surprise. Or not wholly right; there had never been a real contest. On the night she’d first seen Peter, Theo had clearly been the sun in which Suky and Peter both basked. Nothing Suky had ever said or done had suggested anything different to Rose. Whatever Peter’s feelings for Suky had been, Suky’s bond with Theo had been unambiguous. Was it possible that Peter, after all this time, still read that wrong?

  She sat up and folded her arms around her knees. “What happened between you and my father?” Until now she’d assumed that her mother’s death had separated the men. Some sadness that could not be bridged.

  “After I married Lauren, he didn’t seem to want me around anymore,” Peter said, rising reluctantly. “Or not me and Lauren as a couple, anyway. You know how bitter he was, he couldn’t stand to see someone else happy—and we were happy those first years. The last time I saw him, he accused me of marrying Lauren just to comfort myself for the loss of Suky, and we had a fight. Then when he got married again I was in Costa Rica and couldn’t go to the wedding, and I guess he thought I was still angry with him.”

  Who had taken comfort from whom? Rose wondered. Was it wrong? “I was in love with you then,” she said. “Did you know?”

  Peter bent and kissed her leg.

  They were apart that summer more than they would have liked. Rose had meetings in Atlanta and Montreal and Spain; Peter lost the last bit of funding for his lab and was forced to begin a humiliating campaign to pry money from the Museum. Each day seemed to increase the disparity in their professional situations, and neither could help knowing that Rose’s star was rising fast while Peter was struggling just to stay in place. When Rose traveled she thought of Peter constantly, but not Peter as he was; away from him, she constructed a being half the Peter she’d known as a girl and half the Peter she knew now. Returning, seeing him move toward her down one of the long corridors at Logan Airport, she was surprised each time to see how old he was. On these occasions, before his arms wound around her and she sank back into her enchanted state, she felt briefly that there was something shameful in their coupling.

  She admitted this to no one; she avoided the issue entirely by avoiding anyone who’d known her as a girl and might have remembered her family’s connection with Peter. She called Theo dutifully once a month, as she had for some years, but said little about her personal life. As she had not for some years. There was nothing so straightforward as a quarrel between them: only a long separation, and Theo’s continued depression, and Rose’s sense, since his remarriage, of no longer mattering to him. That she had not attended his wedding, and that she had not forgiven him for selling the winery; that he had spoken to her sharply when she objected to the sale—well, perhaps it was a quarrel after all, but she couldn’t bear to describe the distance between them this way. When she called she spoke coolly about her work and never mentioned Peter. She took it for granted that Peter, after all these years, wouldn’t reopen his friendship with her father now. To friends she presented her relationship with Peter as one of responsible adults. Bianca aided her inadvertently here; she’d returned to Alaska and was working that summer as a fire-jumper. She could not be reached, and so Rose could not be blamed for keeping her secret.

  That it was a secret she finally understood in August, when Peter, pounding basil in olive oil as she cooked linguine, looked up and said, “Do you ever think about marriage? About having kids?”

  “No,” she said. Although of course she did, or had now and then; but not with him, never with him. What was this dreadful feeling in her chest? The heat, the humidity, overwork. For weeks the city had been sunk in a heat wave, and her apartment was airless and sticky. She tried not to mind when Peter flun
g his sweaty clothes over the chairs, left bristles and shaving cream in the sink, tossed an arm across her chest in his sleep and then left it there hot and moist. But she did mind, she minded fiercely. As she was beginning to mind the disruption to her work, his bad digestion, her sense that, however patiently he waited up for her at night, he was waiting. And then there was the way he expected her to remember everything he’d taught her as a girl: as if her own work might not have driven out some of his. While she was down at the pond with him, helping him capture some Necrodes, he stopped her hand just as she was about to drop a specimen into the killing jar.

  “That one just molted,” he said. “It’s still teneral—see how pale it is, and how soft? If you kill it now, it’ll shrivel as it dries.”

  “How would I know that?”

  “I showed you, years ago …”

  It was true, she realized. They’d had this conversation two decades earlier, down near Keuka Lake. One of his girlfriends—Lauren?—was with them, lying languid on a rock, and Rose wasn’t paying attention to Peter’s instructions. “I was nine,” she said irritably. “Maybe ten.”

  “But mature for your age.” He kissed her shoulder and she twitched away. “Let it harden before you kill it.”

  She held the beetle as it darkened and aged before her eyes. Egg, grub, pupa, adult, egg. Holometabolous development, the most advanced form of insect metamorphosis. When Peter wasn’t looking, she tossed her specimen into a shrub. That night, or perhaps the next day, he said, “It was Lauren, you know. I mean the reason we couldn’t have children of our own—it was never me.”