In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “That’s not right,” he said at last.

  Kate raised her palms in a quick, sharp gesture. “You mean it’s wrong,” she said.

  He nodded slowly. “It’s wrong.”

  “I should have said something,” she said. “I should have stood up during the questions and said, Isn’t that sketch based on the slide I looked at and told you that the chromosomes on it were univalent?” Sweat bloomed under her arms and slid down her sides. She wanted to walk up and down, to burn off some of the rage, but there wasn’t any room in here. “I’m going to talk to Whitaker,” she said. “I’m going to tell him what Jax did.”

  “You can’t do that,” Thatch said.

  “I can’t not do it!” Unable to bear the heat of the room another a moment, she opened the door and stood half in and half out of the room, fanning herself with her hand.

  “You just do your work,” Thatch said sternly. “Kate, are you listening? The trisomics project. You help Cole finish the trisomics project, and you make sure it’s as good as it can be. And then you can talk to Whitaker about working with someone else.”

  Kate stared at him. “But it’s not right!” she said. “You said so yourself.”

  “You can’t win this fight,” Thatch said.

  “How do I know if I can or not if I don’t try?”

  “Kate,” Thatch said, more gently now. “You’re a marvelous scientist. That’s what matters. If you go snitching to Whitaker—”

  “Snitching!”

  “That’s not the right word,” Thatch said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  Thatch took a moment, getting his thoughts in order. She could see him calculating which arguments would have the best chance.

  “Do you think Whitaker will believe you?”

  She just stared at him.

  “Where’s your evidence?” Thatch said.

  “It’s the truth!” Kate said. “You know it is.”

  Thatch considered her as though she were an experiment that might have a flaw in its design. Then his eyes went up over her head. He said in a different voice, “Hello, Novak.”

  Kate turned and saw Paul standing behind her, smiling his lazy inscrutable smile. It was impossible to know how much of their conversation he had heard. “Do I smell coffee?” he said.

  Kate slipped past him into the hall. She stalked back to her lab, her mind humming with fury—at Thatch now as well as Jax. She had thought he’d understand, but that had been a mistake. He couldn’t, any more than a hedgehog could understand a bee. She stood outside the door of her lab for a moment, composing herself, and then she went in.

  In the lab, Cole stood over Kate’s desk, looking through a stack of papers, his hands all over her neat graphs and tables. “I need you to compile all the data from the last two seasons as quickly as possible.” His face was damp and red, and the bags under his eyes were like dark mirrors, reflecting her own dark mood back to her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you hear Jax Harrison’s presentation? Everyone is getting ahead of us! I’m not waiting. I’m writing this paper now.”

  “You can’t.” Panic flapped inside her. “The data aren’t good enough. We need to wait till the end of the season at least. Or maybe—”

  But he wasn’t listening. “Did you hear what I said?” His shrill voice ground against her, and the redness seemed to leak out of his sweating face and slide all over the room. “By the end of the week.”

  Kate nodded.

  But he was looking at the mess of papers on her desk and didn’t see. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She pulled the word up from her churning gut and pushed it out with her tongue. The heat seethed around them. If only it were winter: clean white fields of snow. Long frozen ponds, silent except for the wind and the hiss of the blade as the white-laced skate kissed the ice.

  She went out into the hall again, shutting the door carefully behind her.

  The light from the big windows at the end of the hallway drew her. She pressed her blazing forehead against the cool glass.

  Down on the lawn, a couple was picnicking. The boy set his half-eaten sandwich down on the blanket, leaned toward the girl, and said something near her ear that made her laugh. A few yards behind him, a crow eyed the sandwich. The girl, who had two long braids tied at the ends with pink ribbons, rummaged in a paper sack. She pulled out two apples and handed one to the boy. The crow hopped nearer. It made a winged leap and seized the sandwich in its hard, curved beak. “Hey!” the boy shouted as the crow flapped upwards, carrying its prize. The girl covered her mouth with her hand.

  The thief settled on a branch about twenty feet up, just opposite Kate’s window. She could see the sandwich clearly: thick slices of pink fatty ham. The bird cocked its head and looked straight at her with its bright, black eye as if to say, What do you think of that? Then it tossed the sandwich in the air, caught it again, and gulped it down.

  All along the hall, the labs and offices stretched away toward the stairwell. Each dark wooden door had its pane of frosted glass, and the walls between the doors were hung with photographs taken every year at the spring picnic. So many people toiling away in the fields of the maize kingdom! So many bright minds, and also of course the dull ones. Some lucky people, and others who never had any luck at all. Why had Whitaker assigned her to work with Cole? Was it because he wanted her to fail?

  If Jax had just turned and said, Kate gave me some valuable help with this project. Again the anger burned through her chest, lodging in her throat like a chicken bone. Probably Thatch was right that she shouldn’t go to Whitaker. But she could talk to Jax about what he had done. Slowly she drifted down the hall toward his lab. She knocked on the door, first softly, then, when no one answered, louder. “Jax?” she said. She turned the knob and went in.

  There was nobody in the room: not Jax, not his advisor, not the other graduate student, Bill Muller, who would be leaving at the end of the season for a job in Illinois. The Great Man was known for getting his vassals good jobs.

  On Jax’s bench, his microscope stood beside several small envelopes of corn kernels, each neatly labeled. She had been standing just here when Jax looked at what she had told him was there; as he had muttered to himself, If they’re univalent, they can’t possibly make viable gametes—repeating, word for word, what she had said.

  Kate picked up the nearest envelope, opened the flap, and poured the dried seeds into her hand. They were mostly yellow with sprays of dark brown speckles. She felt their weight, smelled their dry milky smell. One of the great things about working with maize was that you could learn so much from the kernels. There was information in the color of the flesh and in the arrangement of the speckles or streaks or spots. Every summer maize men (as they were called) waited impatiently for harvest: that first peek at the seeds that would give you a hint what your crosses had accomplished. You couldn’t do that with drosophila! Carefully, Kate slid the kernels back into their envelope and picked up another one. These seeds were deep maroon with wispy colorless stripes. You didn’t even see what you were seeing, she had said to him. Her palm holding the dry seeds was clammy.

  She knew what Thatch would say if he knew where she was. You’re lucky he wasn’t there. What good did you think talking to him would do? Sometimes she hated Thatch, with his decency and his social ease, his confidence that there was a right way to do everything.

  No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t hate him. But she wished he understood how lucky he was.

  She would have to make her own luck. She had known that for a long time.

  The seeds in her hand were a lovely rich color, like garnets but warmer, the pale streaks thicker on one side and finer on the other. Every maize kernel in the world was different. She could picture almost every important kernel she had ever worked with, they sor
ted themselves into cubbyholes in her brain like keys behind the desk in a great hotel.

  Perhaps she’d just play a little trick on Jax.

  She picked up the envelope with the yellow seeds, poured them out, and slid the maroon ones in. The yellow seeds went to the envelope the maroon seeds had come out of. She imagined Jax’s confusion as he looked inside, before he understood that the seeds had been switched. Probably he’d think he had made a mistake—had put the wrong kernels in the wrong envelopes himself. Well, he could stand to feel a little self-doubt. A little humility in the face of the grand enterprise to which they had pledged their lives.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was getting dark when Thatch stopped by to see if Kate wanted to get some dinner. “I have a lot of work,” she said. “Cole is in a frenzy.”

  “You have to eat,” Thatch said.

  “I’ll eat later.”

  “Did you have lunch?”

  “I think so.”

  Out in the hall Paul’s voice said, “Is she coming or not?”

  “Are you going?” she asked as Paul’s big tawny head appeared in the doorway.

  “Thatch says it’s possible to get a decent meal in this town. I’m calling his bluff.”

  Kate’s desk was covered with paper. Her hand ached from penciling figures into tables, and the figures themselves were starting to blur. Really it was the pointlessness that was so exhausting. If she’d had some useful work to do, she could have kept it up all night. “Give me five minutes,” she said.

  Three abreast, they walked through the hot evening down the hill to the Cayuga Grill, where Kate had never eaten before. With its padded booths and autographed photographs of celebrities, it wasn’t the sort of place she and Thatch could really afford. “Fancy,” she said as the waitress brought over a basket of warm rolls and a dish of cold whorls of butter on ice. Overhead fans stirred the air, making the hems of the tablecloths flutter.

  “This is where Whitaker takes visitors,” Thatch said. “Miss Floris told me. I thought we could pretend we were big shots.”

  “Which we will be someday,” Paul said, examining the menu. “At least, I will be.” That was his idea of a joke.

  Kate hadn’t thought she was hungry, but when her bowl of soup was gone, she borrowed a chicken leg from Thatch’s plate and gnawed it clean. Paul, who had ordered sirloin steak, ate half then pushed his plate away.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Thatch asked.

  “Nothing,” Paul said.

  “Isn’t it cooked right?”

  “It’s cooked fine.”

  Thatch shrugged. “Maybe Kate wants it.”

  “No, thank you,” Kate said. The thought of eating off Paul’s plate made her uncomfortable. All through dinner she’d thought she felt his hard green eyes on her, but every time she looked up to meet them, he was looking somewhere else.

  For dessert they ordered ice cream. Kate and Thatch had chocolate, and Paul had butter pecan.

  “You put away a lot of food for such a skinny girl,” Paul noted as Kate tucked into her bowl.

  “That’s a personal remark,” she said, flushing.

  “More like a scientific observation.”

  “Anecdotal,” she said. “One data point.”

  Paul leaned back into the dark red leather of the booth. “I suppose we’ll have to take all our meals together for a while, for the sake of the data set.”

  Again Kate found her cheeks burning. It was not a feeling she liked. “If your triploids aren’t taking all your time,” she said coldly.

  “If you can fit in a side project,” Paul said, “I can, too.” He meant her carmine stain, and the clear, vivid chromosomes it had revealed. A thrum of longing went through her. This afternoon she’d had another idea, something that might make the slides even clearer. If she tried the stain on the material she’d taken from the pollen cells, rather than the root tips …

  But that would have to wait. “I can’t fit in anything,” Kate said. “Cole is on a rampage. He’s determined to publish this paper without waiting for this season’s data.” She ran her spoon around the side of her bowl to get the last sweet streaks.

  “That’s sudden,” Paul said. “Why?”

  And then they were back to Jax again. Kate looked at Thatch, but he was stirring cream into his coffee and wouldn’t meet her gaze. Still, she knew what he was thinking: that she ought to keep her grievances to herself. Paul watched her steadily. The whole force of his attention was fixed on her; it was like a weight pinning her to her seat.

  If she told Paul what Jax had done, might he perhaps mention it to Whitaker? She sat up straighter, wishing she didn’t have to look up to look him in the eye, and began to describe how she had looked at Jax’s cells, and how she had told him what he had failed to see, and how he hadn’t bothered to give her any credit. All the time, at the edge of her vision, Thatch stirred his coffee. The loud clink of his spoon against the cup was the sound of his disapproval.

  Paul’s face, listening, was a mask: sun-brown skin, square jaw, full lips compressed with attention, straight tawny brows. When she was done, he said only, “Next time you’ll keep your insights to yourself, I guess.”

  Her anger blazed up. “Of course I won’t!”

  “You’ve seen what happens.” Paul shrugged. “People take what they can get their hands on.”

  “Not everyone is like Jax.”

  “Of course they’re not,” Thatch agreed.

  “Lots of them are.” Paul looked from one of them to the other, confident in his view.

  “What Jax did was wrong,” Kate said. “It was dishonest.”

  Paul laughed, but then he saw her face and stopped laughing. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s still Jax’s work. Sometimes people say things that help you along the way, things that help get you where you were going. But it’s still your work.”

  The high booth with its gleaming leather was making Kate claustrophobic. Everything was sweating, not just her hot flesh but the water glasses, the cream pitcher, the crystal dish of butter whorls sinking into a soup of melted ice. She longed to dip her hand into that cold soup and splash her face with the water. If Paul hadn’t been there, she’d have done it just to make Thatch laugh. “It’s Jax’s work,” Kate said, “but my help was hardly trivial. If I hadn’t come along and looked at his slide, he wouldn’t have had a result at all. It’s wrong not to acknowledge that.”

  “Maybe he would have seen it later that day. Or the next day.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t have,” Thatch said.

  Kate glared at him. Did he think she couldn’t speak for herself?

  “The point is,” Paul said, “that right and wrong, the way you mean them, aren’t the relevant categories here.”

  “What do you mean, the way she means them?” Thatch asked. “What other meaning is there?”

  Paul’s shoulders were broad in his striped shirt. His sleeves were rolled neatly up well past his wrists, and his forearms gleamed with golden hair in the light from the wall sconces. “We all want to solve problems,” he said. “We want to get the answers right: that kind of right. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s what science is.”

  Thatch banged his spoon down on the tablecloth. Kate could see that he was shocked. She was shocked, too—part of her was—but at the same time she saw what Paul meant. “Yes,” Thatch said. “But not at any cost.”

  “Would you have done what Jax did?” Kate asked Paul. She really wanted to know.

  Paul smiled a thin, scimitar-like smile. It seemed to cut through the heavy air and the whir of the fans and the fog of assumptions and preconceptions Kate carried around inside her head all the time without even noticing. “I wouldn’t have needed to,” he said. “I would have seen it myself.”

  Thatch laughed.

  “If I were you,” Paul said to Kate, “
I’d try and forget it.” Which was more or less exactly what Thatch’s advice had been.

  “I don’t want to forget it.” Then, though she had meant not to mention it, she went on, “As a matter of fact, I took matters into my own hands.” She began to describe the trick she had played on Jax.

  As Paul listened, his eyelids drifted slowly down as though he were being hypnotized, until his eyes were just green slits. “Well, well,” he said.

  “To give him a little jolt!” Kate said. “To give him a surprise when he opens the envelope and finds the wrong seeds!”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Thatch said. He pushed his empty cup away and his voice was low and cold.

  Kate turned her head on the long stalk of her neck. “It was just a joke,” she said.

  “He’ll write his paper all wrong,” Thatch said.

  “He’ll figure it out in two seconds!” she cried. “He’ll just think he made a mistake and put the seeds in the wrong envelopes!”

  “He won’t,” Thatch said.

  “Of course he will! He’s not that much of an idiot.”

  “Can you identify all your seeds by looking?” Paul asked. He sounded absolutely serious.

  “Of course!” She turned to him incredulously. “Can’t you?” But she began to feel a hot wave of dread.

  “No,” Paul said. “No, I can’t do that.”

  Kate looked from one man to the other. The rich ice cream rumbled in her stomach in uneasy combination with Thatch’s chicken.

  “I think you should tell him,” Thatch said.

  “Fine. I’ll tell him,” Kate said flatly.

  “Tomorrow,” Thatch said.

  “He’s going to be pretty mad, I bet,” Paul said cheerfully.”

  Kate dug into the pocket of her trousers and pulled out a couple of dollar bills. “Please excuse me,” she said. “It’s late. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” She tossed her money on the table and slid out of the booth.

  Outside, the night was warm and still and overcast. Kate walked quickly along the street and turned up the hill toward campus. The heavy air pressed down on her head. Her body buzzed unpleasantly as though filled with gnats, her stomach and mind both churning. She needed to think. Tomorrow she would talk to Jax. If he was furious, well, then he was furious! There was nothing she could do about it. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now. She could see bats fluttering down between the trees, the big leaves of the elms hanging absolutely still. Did the trees rest at night, freed from the endless business of photosynthesis? What was it like to be rooted to one spot as the birds came and went, as insects burrowed under your bark, as men approached with axes?