The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  ‘Balloon-back side chairs,’ I said. ‘Would you look at these?’

  ‘Nurse logs,’ Walter replied.

  We spoke in different languages and couldn’t seem to translate for each other; we lived like well-bred roommates. I worked, he worked, we cut deals on separate phones; he spent a few evenings a week in the lab and I spent a few at my house. When we crawled into bed at night we were tired but satisfied, and we had things to tell each other and excuses – reasonable, adult excuses – when our lovemaking didn’t go well or didn’t go at all. We were tired, we said. We were getting older. Our bodies were altering. And after a while it hardly mattered that we wore pajamas to bed and hugged in ways that brought only innocuous body parts together. Our bodies took care of themselves. Sleep made us strangers to each other, and when I woke sometimes, trembling and hot, from nightmares in which my new house burned and collapsed into a steaming cellar, I could often stroke my unconscious husband into surprising life.

  Once in a while I stopped to wonder what this was, to worry about what happens to couples who carry on when there’s nothing left between them but a piece of paper and routine, but I pushed those thoughts aside and concentrated on finishing the house. I had nothing to furnish a kitchen or a bedroom or a bath, but I had Tabrizes and Sultanabads and Herizes and Agras, enough to strew across every room. I had vases and pitchers and platters to set in every niche and windowsill. I still didn’t know what I meant to do with the house, but I painted the dining-room walls lacquer red and put pale-green grass-cloth in the living room.

  About then, in early May, the realtors started dropping by. Women, mostly, in low heels and tailored skirts and jackets and quiet blouses. They knocked at the door and then walked in, cards in their outstretched hands, and as the rooms fell into place, the right chain on the right rugs, the right tables crowned with the right lamps and jars, they went from saying, ‘Oh – I just dropped in because I was curious,’ to ‘Oh. Would you be interested in selling?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said at first. ‘These were my great-uncle’s things.’

  ‘Not the things,’ the realtors said. ‘The house. It’d show so well with all your lovely things in it, and you’ve done such a great job …’

  But I wasn’t done, I wasn’t ready to let it go. I was lost in the language of things, so entranced by what I’d done that I’d suddenly realized I could do this as a career. I could do to other houses what I’d done to this: renovate, rehabilitate, make something out of nothing. I took books out of the library and pored over them, and only when I felt that I’d learned enough did I let the most persistent of the realtors sell the house. She sold it for three times what I’d paid for it, more than enough to cover the commission and the cost of the repairs with plenty left over, and that was how I began my career, how I became a small success. I plowed the money from that first house into several other properties, painting and fixing and sprucing them up and then strewing them with Uncle Owen’s treasures, which seemed to induce a pleased hypnosis in prospective buyers. I did over houses in Amherst and South Hadley and Leverett, learning to translate my real desires into wood and cloth and paint, and I stopped only when Walter fell into a new project that captured me.

  Walter had a colleague named Tyler Robertson, who was studying the migration routes of monarch butterflies; we were at a party at Tyler’s house when I first heard Walter’s idea. I wasn’t paying attention at first: all Walter’s scholarly friends had a passionate interest in good investments, and I’d become quite popular since I’d learned to talk about tax credits and property values. A mammalogist was asking me about the potential of an old farmhouse in Conway when I overheard Walter say to a group of students, ‘I’ve been thinking about something we could all work on together. A team project, like the one at the Quabbin.’

  ‘The what?’ I heard one student whisper.

  Walter must have heard him too, because he winced at the idea that his new students were already forgetting his old work.

  ‘A new ecosystem,’ said a woman behind Walter. ‘But not a reservoir and its watershed. Something else.’

  Walter looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Page. It’s great to see you.’

  Page – of course she was there. I’d hardly seen her since the day I’d dropped out of school, but Walter had always made sure that I knew of her progress. She’d returned to his department as an assistant professor, after two years doing a fellowship at Yale, and she’d cut her hair to celebrate her new job. A spiky, asymmetric cut, short and clipped on one side, swinging low across the other cheek. She made me feel old.

  ‘Page,’ I said. We smiled politely at each other. ‘Good to see you again.’

  ‘You too,’ she said. She turned and reached behind her, seizing the arm of a young man who was gazing out the window. ‘Have you met Hank Dwyer?’ she asked. ‘You two have a lot in common – Hank took five years off before he went to college, and then he decided to be a biologist after doing some work for Paul Glover. You remember that owl project? That’s what got him started. Hank’s a senior this year.’

  I felt the blood rushing up my neck. Where did Page find these men? Hank had huge hands and a big nose but was gorgeous anyway: twenty-five or so, tall and blocky, with streaky hair and thick straight eyebrows and green-gold eyes shot with copper, like a cat’s. But it wasn’t his features that got me – he sent out a force, a beam, some light like a laser that caused everything to well up in me, all the longing I’d tamped down since Randy. All I’d missed with Walter, which I thought I’d learned to live without. A voice in my head, just above my left ear, said. This, this, this. Him.

  I managed to stutter hello and then looked at Walter, and when I did I saw something interesting: Walter was uncomfortable. Walter was twisting the buttons on his shirt. ‘Page,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘This is your student?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘With some luck. Hank’s still an undergraduate, but I’m hoping to snag him for our program.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Walter said, still gazing at Hank. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  Hank edged closer to Walter. ‘Dr Hoffmeier,’ he said shyly. ‘I’ve read all your papers. I’m very interested in your work.’

  The surest way to Walter’s heart. ‘Why don’t you join us this summer?’ Walter asked. While the other students shifted places, Walter told Hank about his plans. ‘We need an untouched environment,’ he said. ‘Preferably not too far from the university, preferably with some water. We’ll do a more complex model than we did at the Quabbin. More factors, more data. Better algorithms. A much better computer.’

  The rest of the students chimed in then, suggesting various ecosystems. Swamps, forests, urban environments, another lake, a mountaintop. Someone started taking notes on a cocktail napkin. Hank listened to everyone, turning his head from voice to voice and tugging occasionally at his turtleneck. I stood at the edge of the group, wondering what he’d look like without his clothes.

  ‘I know a great place,’ Hank said. ‘If you’d be interested. There’s this swamp where I used to live – my family’s place is at the tip of it, and we own part of the acreage. And I’m sure we could get permission from the families that own the rest. It’s just sitting there, worthless land. Completely unspoiled.’

  ‘Really?’ Walter said. I could almost hear what he was thinking. Completely unspoiled – that was Hank, the kind of student Walter hadn’t had in years. He often complained how his current students worried about jobs and grants and salaries. ‘They’re all so petty,’ he’d say. ‘We never worried about those things.’ Never remembering how he’d never worried because he’d never had to. His generation of scientists had come up when money flowed like water and universities were expanding, when anyone halfway good had a job and a lab for the asking. Five-percent mortgages, easy tenure, automatic grants; Walter and his peers could afford to be idealistic. They could afford to look puzzled when their students dropped out or left for higher-paying jobs
. ‘If they’d worry less about money,’ Walter would say, ‘and more about science …’

  And here was Hank, as innocent as if he’d lived his life on a raft. They bent their heads together then; Hank gave directions to his swamp and Walter wrote them down. I took another look at Hank – a long, hard look – and I moved closer to Walter and said in his ear, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘What about?’ he said. Cool, stiff. He couldn’t imagine I’d be interested.

  ‘This new project?’ I said. ‘If you decide you want to do that swamp, I could help you, like in the old days. Remember?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said. He softened instantly and moved his hand in a slow spiral down my spine.

  ‘I could take a little break from fixing up the new house,’ I said. ‘I could help you instead. Really pitch in.’

  ‘You’d do that?’ he said. ‘For me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I felt strangely sad that he’d forgiven me so easily. Had that been all he wanted? A little attention, a little concession to the importance of his work, an offer to bend my life a bit toward his? I hated myself for all the times I’d withheld it.

  What I didn’t understand at first was that Walter was also enamored of Hank. Not that he would have admitted it; not that anything happened, or would ever happen, between them. The chemistry that flowed between them was intellectual, not sexual, but I had seen Uncle Owen and Dalton together and I knew that smile, that quickening of the eyes. I knew, from my days at the Quabbin, how irresistible Walter found an eager student.

  The project came together more quickly than Walter could have dreamed, and soon we were making field trips almost every day to the swamp that Hank had offered. Page and Tyler Robertson were both involved, as well as Hank and two of Walter’s students and three botanists Walter had recruited. And me: I kept my promise to Walter and I set my latest house aside for a while so I could be part of Walter’s team. In the afternoons we gathered at the lab and then traveled out to the swamp, Page and Tyler in one car, the students piled in a red van, me and Walter and Hank in my Subaru. Walter drove and Hank sat next to him. I sat in the back with a stack of field guides, brushing up on my taxonomy and listening to Walter’s enthusiastic comments. They were directed toward Hank, not me.

  ‘We’ll divide the area into sectors,’ Walter said. ‘Since it’s so complex. Work in concentric circles, from the water through the cattails, then up through the drier land to the limestone talus. We’ll run some percolation tests, define the boundaries of the microclimates and determine how the communities overlap. Then see how they change with time and rainfall and changing pH and the nitrate runoff from the fields …’

  He was thinking out loud, noodling with words, and Hank sat openmouthed and listened. I thought I knew how Hank felt. Excited that all this knowledge was opening to him; flattered at Walter’s focused attention; determined to deserve it. Walter was seductive in high gear, and I was so jealous of what was passing between them that I felt sick. One afternoon I leaned over the car seat and touched Hank’s arm, interrupting Walter’s monologue.

  ‘What are you going to start with?’ I asked Hank.

  ‘The birds,’ he said shyly. ‘Because that’s what I know. I’ll do a census for each sector, then determine the nesting sites while the birds are breeding. Then I guess I’ll work on capturing some specimens so we can determine the food web. Figure out who’s feeding on what and when – there’s so much stuff I want to do.’

  He was beginning to talk like Walter already. He looked at Walter for confirmation and Walter nodded happily and said, ‘The botany students can analyze the buds and seeds in their crops. Page can check out the insects they’re eating. Bob Jenkins says we can use his instruments for the pesticide analyses and the calorimetric data. And Tyler’s going to follow the larval hatches while I’m working on the fish.’

  No mention of me at all. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Since Hank’s new to this, why don’t I start by helping him? It sounds like he could use another pair of hands.’

  Walter looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘I thought you’d help me,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Later. But you’ll be busy coordinating everyone else at first and trying to make sense of the data. I’ll just get Hank started.’

  ‘That’d be great,’ Hank said, before Walter could object again.

  I told myself Hank said that because he wanted me. I ignored every twinge of common sense I felt, every flash of reality, and I began to spend all my time tromping around with Hank. I traded in my silk dresses and linen jackets for old chinos and rubber boots and long-sleeved shirts, and I followed Hank like a faithful dog, my knapsack weighed down with binoculars and topographic maps and notebooks and specimen bags. Hank, who’d been uneasy at first, seemed to grow used to me. We established a rhythm and worked in circles as Walter had suggested, from the pond with its herons and ducks and geese to the marsh surround with its bitterns and snipe and then the thicket with its warblers and hawks. Hank made the sightings and called out the numbers and species to me, and I recorded whatever he said.

  I might have grown bored if I hadn’t had Hank to watch. Or to listen to – when we weren’t slinking through the reeds, Hank amused me with bits of local lore, which he probably didn’t mean to be funny. He called the least bitterns thunder-pumpers, from the weird noise they made. Great blue herons were shitpokes, from their habit of poking through garbage, and pied-billed grebes were water witches, sinking slowly beneath the surface when startled and vanishing like submarines. He seemed to take particular pleasure in crows.

  ‘My grandfather kept a crow as a pet,’ he told me one afternoon. We had taken a break so I could strip off my boots and patch my blisters, and three crows near us were arguing over a gum wrapper. ‘Corvids are cool,’ he said.

  ‘Crows, ravens, jays,’ I said. ‘Is that right? Those are the corvids?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, pleased. ‘But crows are the best. They’re smart. They’re monogamous. They court. Some of them get to be twenty years old. My grandfather swore his was twenty-two.’

  ‘I like crows,’ I said; I would have said anything to please him.

  We’d spent four weeks together by then, and the closest I’d been to him was this. Our whole group often gathered on evenings and weekends, but then Hank was glued to Walter’s side with the other students, listening wide-eyed as the conversation tumbled from computer modeling to evolution and reproductive strategies. One night I listened, tired and bored, as Page and one of the botanists argued over the relative energy costs of viviparity and oviparity while Tyler made a case for parthenogenesis.

  ‘Gall midges, weevils, aphids,’ Tyler said. ‘Who could be more successful?’

  I remembered why I’d dropped out of school.

  ‘That’s one strategy,’ Walter said. He sat in the rocker his students always reserved for him, which was quarter-sawn oak with fluted spindles and an oval back and carved, curved arms. A nice chair; I’d bought it myself. Somehow it had turned into Walter’s throne. ‘The most generations in the least time,’ Walter continued. ‘But then consider the other extreme. Semelparity.’

  Hank blinked. The others nodded; they knew what Walter meant. Walter leaned down and explained this bit of jargon to Hank. ‘Living long,’ I heard him say. ‘Breeding only once, enormously – the organism’s entire energy budget goes into this one reproductive fling. Then dying. Pacific salmon.’

  Those evenings made me frantic, but Walter was happier than he’d been in years. The swamp was teeming with his people, working on his project; Hank applied to Walter’s department for graduate work and asked for Walter as his advisor. Page was furious – she’d lost whatever hold she’d had on Hank, and now she’d lost him as a student as well. She drew away from the project, claiming she had a paper of her own to write, and Hank was so caught up with the work and with Walter that he hardly seemed to notice.

  Sometimes I let myself think that he didn’t miss Page be
cause he had me instead.

  I should have understood, if anyone did, that it was Walter who was pulling Hank. I’d been through the same thing, falling into the field of Walter’s excitement like a rabbit falling down a hole. Walter knew that he had Hank charmed, and he thought he had me as well – I was working for him again, neglecting my own business while I cooked huge dinners for everyone, and he was as smug as a cat because the change was so clearly good for me. Everyone remarked upon my new shape: I was slowly, steadily losing weight, which Walter attributed to clean living and exercise and lots of fresh air. Privately, I thought the cause was much simpler; I had no time to eat. Between working outside all day and collecting data at night, then lying sleepless in bed and plotting how I could get Hank to touch me, I was melting away.

  One day in September I took drastic action. I’d already tried everything else I knew – I’d spent all the time I could alone with Hank. I’d flattered him and been helpful to him and listened to him. I’d sat next to him on rocks so small that they crowded us together. I’d baked special treats for our field lunches and watched him eat them; I’d unbuttoned the top of my shirt and then bent low over broken nests on the ground. Nothing had worked. Hank’s idea of getting personal was to ask me about Walter.

  ‘You worked on the Quabbin project with him?’ he said. ‘You were so lucky.’

  ‘I was just a girl,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what’s so amazing. Even when you were an undergraduate you got to be around him all the time, watch him work, hear him think. You must have been so excited. Did you work with him in graduate school?’

  ‘I quit,’ I said, wondering how to explain why I’d left the charms of Walter and science for a career that was bound to sound frivolous to Hank. I tried to make the change sound accidental. ‘I was sick for a while,’ I said. ‘And afterwards I wasn’t in any shape to do field work. And then my great-uncle died and left me his things, and I had to do something with them …’