The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  Perhaps I believed it in part myself. Certainly I grew pale and queasy when I thought of returning to that lab and that row of jars, and I had as much trouble as Walter facing the idea that all that had drawn us together was falling apart. When I told him embryology reminded me of medieval cosmology, all description and airy theory, he looked at me as though I’d set a flag on fire.

  ‘I want us to visit another doctor,’ he announced, after a week of uneasy silences and bitter meals. ‘A fertility specialist.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘It’s only been a year. And the doctor didn’t say I couldn’t conceive – he just asked if we’d had any trouble.’

  Walter drew himself up and tucked in his chin. ‘The implication was clear,’ he said. ‘You had this abortion. You had an infection. You didn’t take care of yourself. We need to know what our chances are. And somebody here has to take some responsibility.’

  I was in no position to argue with him. I’d left school, betrayed him, lied to him; after I’d been taking antibiotics for six weeks, I went to the new doctor as meekly as a lamb. I had test after test, each more humiliating than the last, and after the laparoscopy the doctor finally said, ‘Your left ovary’s dysfunctional. But your right one doesn’t seem to have been affected at all. You’re producing viable eggs.’

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘So, you’ve been having unprotected intercourse for – what? A year now? You should be pregnant. Let’s check Walter out.’

  ‘Walter?’ I said. ‘But Walter’s fine.’

  ‘Just to be sure,’ he said.

  We had tested my urine, my blood, and my tubes; now we tested Walter’s urine and blood and finally his semen. The doctor spent two weeks trying to convince Walter to submit to this indignity. A magazine full of naked women, a darkened room, a small plastic jar. A sperm sample. A week later, Walter and I returned to the doctor’s office and sat in upholstered chairs pulled up to a broad teak desk.

  ‘Grace’s infection has responded well to therapy,’ the doctor said. ‘Her left ovary is scarred, but her right one is fine. There’s no reason she can’t conceive in time.’

  Walter turned to me and touched my arm, a light tap meant to indicate his forgiveness and to erase all his silent accusations.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ the doctor said. He cleared his throat and turned to Walter. ‘Unfortunately, your sperm count is extremely low. But there are still possibilities. We can chart Grace’s ovulations carefully, to maximize the chances of successful intercourse. And there are some techniques we can explore to increase the number and motility of your sperm …’

  We left the office in a gray, dazed silence. Outside, the streets seemed filled with parents and children, pregnant women, young men proudly carrying infants in canvas pouches pressed against their chests. Two boys flew by on skateboards and Walter, clipped by a set of rear wheels, stumbled and fell to the ground. He tore his trousers and skinned his knee, and when I tried to help him up he batted my hand away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ he shouted. ‘Just leave me be.’

  All around us people turned and stared curiously. Walter lay crumpled on the curb, dabbing at his knee with his handkerchief. I leaned over him, pale and troubled, while the leaves in the gutters moved gently with the wind.

  A Yellow Tie

  After that fall, the balance of power in our household shifted slightly. I had betrayed biology and the academic world; I had concealed my abortion and my failure to love science. But. But. But it was Walter’s body that kept us from making a child. We had come to a joint in our marriage, a sort of elbow where all that we’d wanted and been took off in a new direction, and nothing was easy between us after that.

  Walter called me deceitful. I called him cold. He was hurt that I didn’t want to be his assistant and student forever, and I was hurt that all he wanted of me was that, and we weren’t able to make the child who might have bridged our differences. And we never talked about any of this, because Walter became famous that year. The work that made his reputation had actually been completed at the Quabbin, where the bats had driven us together. But in the two and a half years since then, Walter had published ten papers with my help, and the media people seized on him as acid rain became hot news. It turned out that Walter’s sharply boned face and expressive hands looked good on TV.

  I’d drawn the elegant graphs linking reproductive cycles and lake acidity. I’d translated his scribbled notes into clean, clear sentences, deciphered the cryptic instructions each journal gave for the preparation of manuscripts, typed the final drafts. When Walter practiced his talks, I’d been his audience, following his retractable pointer as he traced his way through the figures projected on our darkened living room wall. I’d been the kind of assistant every scientist dreams of – docile, diligent, cheap – and I stood aside as Walter was tenured, promoted to full professor, and placed in charge of a laboratory with six graduate students, three postdoctoral fellows, and a budget that ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

  All through our marriage I’d kept Walter’s house warm and welcoming, cared for his clothes, paid his bills, dealt with minor repairs. I’d shopped and cooked and cleaned and entertained his students, made feasts when scientists visited from other countries. I’d been Walter’s wife before, but I hadn’t been only his wife – although Walter’s colleagues had gossiped (I was young, I was blond, I wasn’t Eileen, whom most of them had known), while I was still in school they had treated me with the same fond encouragement they gave their own students, tempered with the extra respect due Walter’s mate. But after I dropped out, no one seemed to know how to handle me. Walter became a power just about the time I gave up science, and his colleagues assessed the situation and adjusted their attitudes accordingly.

  Oh, my social stock plummeted that year. Suddenly I was just a wife, just a second wife at that, and our guests gently condescended to me when a quirk of dinner seating or party movement forced them near me. ‘But what are you doing?’ the bolder ones asked.

  ‘Resting,’ I answered sometimes. ‘Recuperating. Taking a break.’

  When I felt less sure of myself, I said, ‘I’m looking for a job.’

  When I’d had too much to drink and felt snippy and cross, I lied and said, ‘I’m trying to get pregnant.’

  That always shut people up, and as the year wore on they seemed to get used to my idleness. I painted the living room and redid the downstairs bathroom; once in a while I helped Walter prepare a manuscript. I threw elaborate dinner parties and tried recipes I’d gotten from library books: Moroccan Chicken. Moussaka. Pot au Feu. In March, Walter said, ‘You know, you only took a leave of absence. You could reapply for the fall,’ and he frowned when I told him I wasn’t ready yet.

  ‘I have a lot to think about,’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. If we’re not going to have kids …’

  He paled, and I knew he felt reproached again. ‘We could adopt,’ he said. ‘If there’s nothing else you want in this world …’

  But I couldn’t imagine how any child not our flesh and blood could fill the gap between us. We set that question aside, and as Walter’s life grew even busier, we stopped talking about it. Finally Walter arranged for me to see a therapist at the University Health Service. ‘I’m worried about you,’ he said. ‘I’m worried about us. We need to work out this baby thing, and you need to decide what you want to do …’

  I went, but I hated it. My doctor was a woman, dry and aloof, whom I couldn’t warm up to at all. Dr Amadon sat in a swivel chair, her short legs neatly crossed, and she asked me where I saw myself in twenty years.

  ‘On the street,’ I told her bitterly. And that was true, that was all I could see. When I thought of Page, whom I no longer saw, I imagined her sailing through graduate school, through a fellowship somewhere, finally off in a lab of her
own and running a part of the world the way Walter did. But when I pictured the life ahead of me, I saw nothing. ‘Wearing all my clothes at once,’ I said. ‘With everything I own in a shopping bag.’

  ‘That’s what you want?’ she said. ‘To be a bag lady?’

  ‘That’s what I see,’ I told her. ‘I’m twenty-seven already. I’m not trained to do anything. Everything I have belongs to Walter.’

  I never told her about the voices I was beginning to hear inside my head, or about the sense I sometimes had, walking down the street, that my skin had turned permeable. I felt myself leaking out my pores, and I felt other lives leaking in, and it scared me so badly I threw all my energy into finding something to do. Work, I thought. That was what I needed. Any work, anything that would catch me the way Walter’s work had caught him and provide that crisp glaze of purpose and separateness.

  On my third visit, Dr Amadon asked me why I stayed with Walter, and instead of answering I left her for good. I went out to the car Walter had bought me, a new orange Subaru with a flashy white stripe down the side, and I turned up the radio and headed for Belchertown, for the tip of the reservoir. Since the doctor had delivered his bleak news, I’d taken to keeping secret foods in the car, which I used as a mobile diner; as I drove I ate my way steadily through a box of chocolate-mint Girl Scout cookies and thought how even the girl who’d sold them to me had something to do.

  Who could answer the question Dr Amadon had asked? I parked in the woods near the reservoir and remembered all the nights Walter had traveled, when alone in our bed I’d touched myself and come coldly, silently, my small shudder damped by my blanket of flesh. When we fought we fought in silence, never speaking what we meant, and whatever glue held us together couldn’t be named. Three crows argued in the trees near me, their harsh calls echoing against the car windows, and two deer emerged into the clearing and then froze. On the blank margins along the back of the cookie box I wrote down their names: Odocoileus virginianus. Then I wrote down the crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos, and the names of the trees and the ferns and the small mammals and the geese passing overhead. All the names I could remember, all I’d learned, and when I was done I drove home and didn’t tell Walter for weeks that I’d stopped seeing Dr Amadon. I left our house each Tuesday at the appointed time, and then I drove to the Quabbin or to the Chesterfield Gorge and I made species lists. I grew calmer, even a little slimmer. It wasn’t much of an occupation, but it was something. Walter said the doctor must be doing me some good.

  ‘She’s all right,’ I told him. ‘We’ve been talking about what I might do for work.’

  Which was not completely false – I had been thinking about that, thinking hard. I spent hours poring over the ‘Help Wanted’ sections of the Springfield and Northampton papers, trying to think what I might do. There was secretarial work, always possible – I’d survived the Swedenborgian accountants in Philadelphia. The phone company – during high school, I’d spent a summer trapped in a room full of hot, fat women, plugging cords into black panels, pulling them out, timing calls, and I knew I could do that in my sleep. I could do laboratory work for Walter, who’d offered to bring me back into his lab as a salaried technician, or I could try for any one of those gray jobs that required no obvious qualifications. Receptionist, waitress, sales clerk, assistant of one sort or another. The ad that finally caught my eye early in January was encouragingly vague:

  Are you bright, creative, talented, energetic, and underemployed? Have you had trouble finding a career that suits your unique capabilities? I’m looking for an assistant – preferably female, 25 to 40 – and you could be the singular person I want. PO Box 6046.

  I spent three days writing a flashy letter. I mentioned my art background and left out Randy; mentioned my biology training and the work at Quabbin but left out Walter. I said I was a spectacular cook, an avid reader, an appreciator of Oriental art and antiques (I left out Uncle Owen), and a former graduate student who’d left school to explore the universe on my own. I exaggerated wildly and appropriated talents belonging to the men I’d known, and a week later I received a bright yellow envelope in return. Inside was a single sheet of heavy, electric-pink letterhead. A L I V E was stamped across the top in bold black letters, followed by the outline of a lightbulb in place of an exclamation point. The message read:

  Dear Grace —

  Certain I am that this isn’t (real!?) news to you, yet I’ll say it again – You must be described as a phenomenon, and not in terms known to the average being (alive!) in this Universe. We are the source of our knowledge – I have no choice but to follow my intuition and reach for a certain passing (flashy!) star. Contact me at the number below, and we’ll arrange a (stellar!) meeting. Which will be (I’m certain!) for our mutual best.

  Live!

  Rollo Carlson

  Printed below was a California address and an italicized line in quotation marks: ‘You are the source of all thought.’

  I called, of course. Who could resist? I reached a smooth-voiced woman, who told me to meet Rollo Carlson in a restaurant in Northampton. ‘He’ll be wearing a dark suit,’ the woman said. ‘Pink shirt, yellow tie. An unusual pin in his tie.’ Somehow I knew the pin would be in the shape of a tiny lightbulb.

  ‘I have long blond hair,’ I told the woman nervously. ‘I’ll be wearing …’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘He’ll know you by your aura. Be there at one.’

  I wore a flashy teal dress with a white linen collar and cuffs, long silver earrings, low shoes. Some combination, I thought, of the exotic and the practical. At twelve-thirty I walked into the restaurant and took a table in the far corner from which I could see the door, promising myself I’d slink away if Rollo looked too strange.

  The restaurant was almost empty. Two Smith girls tore at croissants and discussed their love lives in shrill voices. A woman in her early forties held hands surreptitiously with a man in his late twenties. In the back, two of the waiters read the paper and the bored hostess sat at the cash register, filing her nails.

  My heart was pounding with excitement. I ordered a turkey club sandwich, just to calm myself, and then an ice cream soda to wash it down. In the opposite corner, a pudgy woman with an unlined face and startling white hair mashed her spoon in a brownie covered with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. She glanced at her watch; I glanced at mine. She pulled out a compact and checked her careful makeup and adjusted the beads at her neck. I looked at my reflection in the back of a spoon. The Smith girls left; the middle-aged woman at the front table withdrew her hand from her companion’s and bent her head and wept. At one, the door opened and a swarthy man with a big nose and a mane of swept-back hair walked in.

  Dark suit, pink shirt, yellow tie. I smiled, half rose, upset a glass of water. Across the room, the woman with the white hair smiled, half rose, twisted her fingers in her beads. Rollo walked to a table in the center of the room and beckoned to both of us. ‘Connie,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Grace. Come sit, my dears.’

  We made our way nervously toward him, eyeing each other. Rollo introduced us. ‘Grace Hoffmeier,’ he said. ‘Meet Connie Chrisman.’ He beamed at us, revealing huge white teeth. ‘Two phenomenal women in one place,’ he said. ‘Remarkable! We’re all alive!’ Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited.

  We didn’t say anything. We sat; he sat. Just when the silence was becoming truly uncomfortable, Rollo said, ‘Well – you know who I am – I’m sure you’ve read my books and familiarized yourself with the A L I V E! movement.’

  Connie and I shifted in our seats. The A L I V E! movement? Rollo’s books? ‘Time is precious,’ Rollo said. ‘Time is alive! I was so impressed with both your applications that I decided to learn about you by listening in as you talk to each other. Let me see the spirit within you. Let me see how you exist in the Universe! All that lives is alive! and you are the source of all life. Begin.’

  He was so dark, so strange, sitting there in his hot pink shirt and hi
s yellow tie and the tiny pin proclaiming his Alive!ness. I looked at Connie and Connie looked at me, and then she rose and slung her purse over her shoulder and picked up her coat.

  ‘If you’re alive,’ she said to Rollo, ‘I’d rather be dead.’

  Briefly – as I had when I’d first met Page, when Page had mocked Professor Tinbergen – I thought of Zillah. I looked at Connie and saw, not a middle-aged woman whose life had somehow reached a point where she was interviewing for a job in a dark restaurant, but a girl who’d tried to counter the world by growing wings. Before she could vanish, I grabbed my things and followed her. Once we were outside we leaned against the door and laughed together.

  ‘Christ,’ Connie said, wiping her eyes. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘I never heard of him,’ I said. ‘Or his books, or the movement – I was just trying to find a job.’

  ‘Me too,’ Connie said. ‘I should have known from the ad …’

  We laughed some more, and then she asked me if I wanted an ice cream. When I said yes, we drove to Friendly’s and ordered enormous sundaes, consoling ourselves for our lost hopes. Connie was Walter’s age, but we had so much in common that our age difference hardly mattered at first. ‘My kids are teenagers,’ she said. ‘They’re done with me. They think I’m a fossil. And my husband – he’s over in History. Full professor, tenured. Reformation.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Zwingli,’ she said airily, waving her plump arm. ‘Melanchthon. All that stuff.’

  She told me her hair had turned white when she was my age, and that she had a degree in home economics from a Baptist college in Texas. ‘I taught junior high for a while,’ she said. ‘But I had to quit.’ She leaned over her mocha praline sundae and peered through her heavy glasses. Her eyes were large and startling, almost violet. ‘I have this little weight problem, and all that cooking in class …’