In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  It was hard to absorb it all, let alone believe anyone could have done it. “Where’s Cole?”

  “He was here a few minutes ago, shouting like a football coach.”

  Surely he couldn’t have … Surely he didn’t hate her that much!

  Miss Floris poked her head around the door. “I heard you were struck by a tornado,” she said, casting her sharp eyes around the room. “My goodness!” Her hand went to the front of her neat silk blouse. Then she nodded to Kate. “Dr. Whitaker wants to see you.”

  “What does he want?” Kate could hardly breathe.

  “He just said he wanted to speak to you as soon as you got in.” Miss Floris turned to go, then stopped and turned back. “Dr. Cole is with him,” she added kindly.

  Whitaker’s office was large and full of things. It had big windows on two sides, the blinds drawn nearly to the sills against the summer heat. An enormous wooden desk sat on carved eagle’s talons, its surface crowded with neat stacks of folders and journals, brass dishes of strange coins and dusty fossils, and a tiny live tree growing in a shallow bowl. Whitaker sat behind his desk. Cole slumped in a chair nearby, dabbing at his face with a folded handkerchief. When he saw Kate in the doorway, he sat bolt upright as though an electric shock had gone through him.

  “Come in, Miss Croft,” Whitaker said.

  Kate stood on the mustard-yellow rug with bright geometric designs. “I’ve just come from the lab,” she said to Whitaker, who was regarding her, unlit pipe bouncing in the corner of his mouth. “It’s terrible! I can’t imagine who …” But she stopped herself. Because of course she could imagine. She waited anxiously to hear what he would say, but it was Cole who spoke.

  “What’s this?” he demanded, and shook something at her—a piece of smudged and wrinkled paper.

  Her diagram. Kate’s heart began to thud so loudly she was sure they both must hear it. “Where did you find that?” she said. But she knew. The paper must have been left lying around when the room was tossed, and Cole must have noticed it. Or else he was snooping in her desk and found it himself, in which case—

  “Miss Croft,” Whitaker said. “Please sit down.” She sat in the chair he indicated, which had been designed for a taller person. He reached his hand toward Cole, who reluctantly handed the diagram over. Whitaker slid it across the desk to Kate. “Did you make this?” he asked.

  Kate took the rumpled paper and smoothed it on her lap. “Yes.”

  “That was my project,” Cole said.

  Kate could feel her face widen stupidly: mouth, eyes, pores. She looked up at Whitaker. “I know Dr. Cole worked on characterizing the chromosomes in the past. But he hasn’t actually been working on it for quite a while. Not since I’ve been here.”

  Whitaker took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke sternly. “That’s because he’s finishing a major trisomics paper, with which you are supposed to be helping him. Not going behind his back and analyzing his data.”

  “It’s not his data,” Kate said.

  But Whitaker wasn’t listening. “Dr. Cole is your supervisor, Miss Croft. That means you do what he tells you to do.”

  “I do do what he tells me!” Kate said. “Even when there isn’t any point.”

  “You see?” Cole said. “You see what I have to deal with?” Sweat dripped from his face, and dark patches spread down his shirt. He seemed to be melting like an ice cream cone as Kate watched in fascination and disgust. “That’s what you get when you let women do science,” he said. “Negligence and disrespect!”

  Whitaker banged the pipe down in the wide clay ashtray, and a cloud of ash leapt up and settled across a recent issue of Science. “Miss Croft, you’re a first-year graduate student, is that correct?”

  “Second-year.”

  “You must be very bright, I suppose. We don’t get very many young women here. But obviously there are some things you haven’t understood.”

  Kate could feel tears rising—tears of fury and of self-pity. She hoped she could keep them back until she got—where? Not to her lab, which was really Cole’s lab. “I understood that the problem needed solving,” she said. “And I could see a way to solve it.” Her voice sounded calm and distant, as though someone else were speaking.

  Whitaker lit his pipe. “A way nobody else could see.”

  She pressed her lips together so as not to speak.

  He shook the match violently out. “Dr. Cole is your supervisor, Miss Croft, as I said. As you know without my having to remind you. Among other things, that means you will show him respect. He’s been doing this work a long time, and you will learn from him.”

  Kate bowed her head. She would gladly have learned from Cole, she thought, had there been anything to learn.

  The tears streamed down the moment she shut the door to Thatch’s room. Thatch got up from his desk and stepped hesitantly toward her. She hunched her shoulders and put her hands over her eyes, but she didn’t resist when he touched her back and pulled her close. The top of her head reached only to the middle of his chest. Her tears seeped into his soft shirt, but she sniffled hard to keep back the snot. “Did you hear what happened?” she asked.

  “I heard someone messed up your lab. I heard Whitaker called you into his office.” His big hands lightly rubbed her shoulder blades. After a minute she pulled away and blew her nose.

  “Cole was there. Did you hear that?”

  He nodded.

  “He had my diagram! They didn’t even mention what happened to the lab!”

  “Cole had it?” Thatch said.

  “Whoever messed up the lab must have left it lying out. I could kill Jax! It must have been Jax.” She looked at him to see what he thought. She was afraid to tell him her other idea, that it might have been Cole.

  “I can’t imagine that anybody …” he began, but he had to stop. Because, of course, somebody had. “What did Whitaker say about the diagram?”

  Kate pulled herself up onto the desk and let her heels bang against the drawers. “What did he say? He said I shouldn’t steal my advisor’s project!”

  “You didn’t steal it!”

  Kate glared at him. “You thought I was wrong, too.”

  “I didn’t think it was wrong for you to do it. And I certainly never thought you stole anything. I just thought—”

  “I know what you thought,” Kate said.

  There was a silence. Then Thatch asked, “But when Whitaker was done yelling, what did he say about the diagram?”

  Again the stupid tears began to fall. She swiped them furiously away with her fists. “Nothing! Nothing! All he said was that I shouldn’t steal data, and that I should respect my advisor. He said …” She wanted to tell Thatch how Whitaker had said she might not understand certain things because of her sex, but her tongue refused to shape the words.

  It wasn’t possible to stay away from the lab forever. When she went back in, Cole was sitting at his desk with his back to the door, looking busy with something, and didn’t acknowledge her entrance. His slouched torso in its pallid lab coat looked monstrous. Kate began straightening up the papers, the slides, the overturned bottles. Waves of hideousness, emanating from Cole’s corner, washed over her, chilly and sickening. When everything was in order, she stood looking at him, wondering what she could say to him.

  “I never set out to go behind your back, Dr. Cole,” she said. “I tried to talk to you about the chromosomes.”

  Cole’s pen scratched across the paper, which she could see was speckled with blots.

  “Anyone might have done that work,” she said. “Everyone knew it had to be done. I mostly only worked on it late at night.”

  Cole slapped his desk. He turned and looked at her, his eyes screwed up in his face like a pig’s. “I don’t know why I was the one to get stuck with you,” he said. “If anyone had asked me, I would have said that it was a waste of time,
and I would have been right! Science is not a game. It’s not something to pass the time with until you get married.”

  Kate’s head buzzed and her feet were freezing. She felt as though she were floating out to sea on an iceberg. “I did in a week what you couldn’t manage in two years,” she said. But the buzzing was so loud she wasn’t sure whether her words were audible or not.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kate was at home reading Wildflowers of New York State after dinner when the doorbell rang. She went to the window and saw Paul slouching on the sidewalk, his hair looking very tawny in the evening light. “What do you want?” she called down.

  He looked up, shielding his eyes from the glare. “I thought I’d see how you were doing. I guess you had quite a day.” A slow smile spread across his face, though God knew there was nothing to smile about. Nonetheless she went down the stairs and let him in.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked primly.

  “All right.”

  She could feel the heat coming off him as he followed her up the stairs.

  Back in her apartment, she filled the kettle, rattled cups and saucers, jangled spoons. From out on the street came the thump of the Journal landing on the stoop and the jingle of the paper boy’s bicycle bell. “That was me once,” Paul said, settling himself on her old flowered sofa. “I delivered papers. Ran errands, shoveled snow. My father died when I was ten, and I helped my mother as much as I could.”

  Kate made herself stop fidgeting and sit down across from him. She could see the hungry look lurking behind the closed watchful expression he habitually wore. She thought he was waiting for her to offer sympathy, or perhaps to tell him about her own childhood, but she had no desire to do either of those things. Her chest felt heavy as though her blood were slowly curdling. “Are you really Whitaker’s second cousin?” she asked.

  He smirked, leaning back against her cushions. “You’ve been listening to gossip.”

  “There’s a hypothesis out there. I’m trying to verify it.”

  This made him laugh. “Second cousin twice removed. I never met him before I came here. But I’d heard of him, of course. When I got interested in genetics, I decided to focus on corn partly because of him.”

  “Did you,” Kate said.

  “You could say I was inspired. And now that I’ve met him, I think we share certain traits, Evelyn Whitaker and I.”

  “You both seem to think highly of yourselves,” Kate said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  Paul smiled. “Among other things.”

  Kate got up and found the milk and sugar. She couldn’t fathom why she had let him come in, or why he had wanted to.

  “If you’re trying to insinuate that I got my position through family connections, I don’t deny it. But so what? That’s how things work.”

  “Not for everyone,” Kate said.

  “It’s not as though I don’t deserve it,” Paul said.

  Kate wondered about the second half of the rumor, the part about him being kicked out of the University of Kansas, but she didn’t see how she could ask. “What did you hear about what happened today?” she said instead. She was standing up and he was sprawled on her sofa, yet somehow he seemed to have more authority.

  “I heard that Whitaker saw your diagram. I heard he let you have it and that you stood up for yourself. That has people buzzing nicely. But I wasn’t surprised.”

  “I only said I hadn’t stolen Cole’s data,” Kate said. “As though Cole had any data anyone would want to steal!”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Kate stared at the wisps of steam beginning to slip from the kettle’s spout. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “How can I keep working with Cole? He despises me. Whitaker thinks I’m a thief. Probably he’s going to ask me to leave.”

  “Nonsense,” Paul said. “He won’t do that.”

  “But he said—”

  “He’s not stupid,” Paul interrupted. “He may not have figured out how good you are yet, but he’s beginning to. And he knows what a mediocrity Cole is.”

  That hadn’t occurred to her. “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course. Everyone knows that without your help, Cole will never publish anything. Maybe even Cole knows it.”

  As she let that idea sink in, Paul got up from the sofa. He turned off the stove, took the empty teapot from her hand, put it down on the countertop, and kissed her, bending over awkwardly. The kiss took her so much by surprise that she could do nothing immediately except let his mouth press against hers, first softly and then harder. His tongue probed the contours of her teeth. He seemed to want to lap her up. He clasped her neck, slid his calloused hand down her back, then squeezed her backside, making her shudder with pleasure. She turned her face away from his big wet tongue but allowed herself to be pulled toward him. Her breasts pressed into his chest and his fingers continued to knead her rear end, while her own hands clumsily patted the expanse of his back, not knowing where to settle.

  “Good work rises to the top,” he murmured in her ear.

  It had been a strange day, to say the least. It seemed fitting that the night should bring more surprises. She let him lift her up—which he did easily—and carry her across the room to the sofa with its slipcovers of faded violets, where he deposited her. He undid some number of buttons—her blouse, his trousers—very quickly and dexterously. When he found the tips of her breasts with his thumbs, she gasped, embarrassed at first, but then beyond embarrassment. His hand slid down her belly under her waistband, his fingers testing and investigating almost casually, creating one new sensation after the next as she lay, splayed and helpless, on the sofa cushions.

  Then he stopped. She waited alertly to see what came next.

  “Give me your hand,” he said gravely, and she did. He took it and put it where he wanted it. “Ah,” he said. And, “Ah-ah-ah”—a naked sound she didn’t like at all. He wrapped her hand tighter and pushed it up and down. His face was a fist. When the milky liquid spurted out, it was impossible not to think of a corn tassel bursting from the stalk.

  Paul sighed and lay back drowsily among the flat cushions.

  Kate’s own perplexing body still buzzed insistently, but she didn’t even really know exactly what it wanted, let alone how to ask for it.

  The next morning, when she got to the lab, Cole wasn’t there. She went about her work as calmly as she could, though part of her mind was busy waiting for him to come in, and another part was waiting for Paul. She was sure he would come and see her. But the morning dragged on and no one came. On an ordinary day she would have relished working alone and uninterrupted, but today was not an ordinary day. Several times she caught herself staring blankly into space, wondering what would happen.

  At last, close to eleven, footsteps approached the door. Not Cole’s shambling ones but long strides. She turned eagerly to greet Paul, but when the door opened it was Thatch who came in instead. He looked worn out and also excited, and his hair stood up all over his head. “Whitaker wants to see you,” he said.

  Her heart closed up like a clam. “I’m out, aren’t it?” she said. “That’s it.”

  “No!” Thatch shook his head like a dog shaking itself after swimming. “No, it’s not that. I spoke to him.”

  “You—?”

  “Spoke to him! I explained what really happened. What you did. Using Belling’s stain, and working at night. All of that.”

  A wave of fury rose from her belly and reddened her neck and face. “Without asking me?”

  Thatch paused. “He understands,” he said, but more tentatively. “I told him what you did—how it was all your own ideas and your own data. And he understands.”

  “How could you go behind my back?” Kate cried.

  “I was trying to help you.” He stared at her as though the force of his gaze would make h
er understand.

  “Did I ask for your help?” This humiliation, at the hands of someone who claimed to be her friend, felt like the most monstrous betrayal of all.

  “Kate,” Thatch said. He looked stricken. Was that her fault?

  Was it his fault he had come in when she was waiting for someone else?

  She shut her eyes and pressed her hands down hard on her desk. She knew what he said about wanting to help was true. It might even be true that she’d needed his help, but she didn’t want to need it. Not his, or anyone’s. She opened her eyes. “You should have asked me first.”

  They regarded each other in silence.

  “This is a good thing, Kate,” Thatch said at last.

  She pushed herself up. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  In Whitaker’s office, her rumpled diagram lay in the middle of his desk in a clear space between the stacks of journals and the dishes of coins and the tree in the dish. Kate sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable chair she’d sat in the previous day, while he puffed on his pipe. “I’ve heard about Belling’s technique,” he said. “But I’ve never used it myself. Is it difficult?”

  The tree seemed to be some sort of spruce, with tiny bluish-green needles spiraling along the branches. What did you have to do to it to get it to grow like that? In nature it might reach two hundred feet high. “I had to try it a few times before I got it right.”

  “Write out a set of instructions.” He didn’t seem angry, nor was he penitent either. It was as though their conversation of the day before had never happened. “I’d like to see a draft paper within a week. It should be short. Just a note explaining what you did, and the diagram. Then we’ll discuss it. Now, let’s talk about exactly how you harvested the pollen.”

  Kate missed the next thing he said because—although she knew what he meant—the words conjured her hands on Paul.

  She was in Whitaker’s office for the better part of an hour. After a while she began to relax, almost to enjoy their conversation. He asked direct, insightful questions, and he listened to her answers without interrupting. Some of the things he asked, she found she didn’t have answers for. She would have to go back to the lab and think them over. But that was fine. It was more than fine: it was joyous. He was spurring her to think harder. He wanted to discuss the work on linkage groups, which would come next. “After Dr. Cole submits his trisomics paper, we can talk about that.”