by Gish Jen
“Do you see,” he says suddenly, “what a waste of time all this is? How gloriously inefficient I’ve been?”
Attached to one sawhorse is a wooden placard, with what appears to be the boat’s name branded on it: DISCONCERTED.
“I’m trying to force myself off task,” he says. “My life having turned into one long concerted effort.”
“You were turning into Anderson.”
He laughs. “Who’s waiting for his Nobel now, you know, for his genome work.”
“The Nobel your dad didn’t get.”
“Miss Confucius!” He laughs again, open-mouthed. “How have I lived without you?”
“Though he didn’t want it anyway, did he?” She swivels some more, stretching her back.
“He did and he didn’t. He always said he wanted his picture to hang in the halls of his alma mater; you know how they have that long line of scientists. But with his picture facing in, he used to say, so that it wasn’t about glory. So that it was about his contribution and his place.”
“And was it?” She stops. “Hung face-in, I mean.”
“Of course not. Though you know, I don’t think he really would have minded. He wanted to be a person who didn’t care about status. He admired people like that. But it was probably the one thing he failed at—getting past it.”
“The way you’re trying to get past it now.”
He gazes at her in the half-dark, his arms crossed, one finger held up to his smiling lips. She is still, she can see, his favorite student.
“Unlike Anderson,” she goes on, “who’s picked up the torch for your father—even going on from cytogenetics to the genome.”
“Isn’t it almost too—what did you use to say in China?”
“Filial?”
“Precisely—filial. Isn’t it almost too filial? I do love that word. Fili-al.” He laughs. “The sort of translation that amounts to a nontranslation, don’t you think? I mean, what does that mean to a Westerner? It was good to see you at Dad’s burial, by the way, even if you left without saying hello.”
She grips the soft saddle.
“Most un-Confucian of you.”
“Well, you know, I was never the Confucian you all made me out to be, to begin with,” she ventures casually.
More interest than surprise. “Did we push you?” He cups his knees with his hands.
She shrugs and swivels some more—the stool squeaking in one direction but not the other, she notices.
“Of course, our brains have a tendency to sharpen contrast, as you know,” he begins, and she knows what he is going to say next before he says it: Witness lateral inhibition. The way the eye neatens up the edges of things. The way it suppresses any blurring data it may be receiving—any contradiction. And of course, it’s all true—how the mind seeks clarity, how the sharpening goes down to the cellular level. And, more, how the brain makes “sense” of the cleaned-up data—how it constructs a “world” out of the world using certain rules of thumb. She hears him out. But then she says, “No one wants to be boxed up, Carter,” and that’s that. “Anyway, I survived.” And it’s true, of course. Whatever anger she once felt about this is distant and wavery now. Edgeless, as if some lateral inhibition for emotion’s been turned off. “It was just plain rude to leave your father’s burial the way I did. I’m sorry.”
“You were avoiding me and ambivalent about my father.”
There’s no denying it.
“As were many, by the way,” he says. “Legions, even, we might say.”
A fly promenades down one of the boat’s ribs; she shoos it away.
“But as you were saying.”
“As I was saying. Yes. Meredith used to say, you know, that I worked on the eye in order to avoid seeing.”
“Seeing what?”
“Any number of things. For example, that I didn’t really care about science.”
“But of course you cared about science.”
“ ‘Happy is the man,’ she used to say, ‘who can wrap himself in his web of significance and die in it.’ She said I was a man who didn’t even make his own web. That I wrapped myself in my father’s web, like Anderson. That I wanted my picture hung in the same hall as my father, because that was what mattered to him. She became a judge, you know.”
“Meredith?”
“Appellate. Which she always said was the most boring kind, but if I ever knew why, I can’t remember now.” It’s getting dark; he stands to pull the light cord, which is weighted at the bottom with what looks to be his old wooden pocket knife. “When she left me she left the bench, too, and became a Buddhist. Said she was becoming too compassionate to be a good judge anyway.”
“Poor Meredith always was so helplessly kind.”
He laughs again, his bald head lit up now, his shadowed face ghoulish. “Precisely. The Dalai Lama came to her school, and she became just fascinated—started going from one retreat to another. As if Buddhism isn’t a web of significance? I don’t know. She gave a lot of money away, saying she didn’t see how there could ever be justice as long as we had capital accumulation. Possessions.”
Hattie’s toes kick against the inside of her walking shoes. “Do you think she was right?”
“I think she had the makings of a totalitarian,” says Carter. “Then she died without asking for me once. As if I were this Terrible Mistake. This guy who refused to confront what his own research showed. You know the drill.”
“ ‘Vision is a tool geared toward action, not truth.’ ” She straightens her back.
Carter lifts his chin. “Precisely. It distorts as much as it presents, giving but a most partial understanding of reality in toto. And so on.”
“First lecture of the semester.”
“I obviously don’t disagree with her. Her take, though, was that we will do anything to maintain the illusion that the world we apprehend is reality. For example, I might believe myself to care about truth and the advancement of knowledge, but that would only be my self-serving illusion, beyond which lay a deeper truth. To wit—”
“Uh-oh.”
“—that I wanted to be the brother with my picture in that hall.”
“How kind.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you Buddhism breeds patsies.” He sets his feet on a low rung of his stool. The knees of his yoga pants gleam yellow; the stitching of the raised seam has come undone here and there.
“How do you know she never asked for you?”
“Our kids were there.” Carter looks out the window, though there is hardly anything left to see now—no individual trees, just movement. Shifting; the wind’s picked up.
“I’m sorry.”
“That was after our older daughter married a carpenter and didn’t invite me to the wedding.”
“Maisy.”
“That’s right, Maisy, very good. She said she didn’t think I would want to be invited. That I considered weddings bourgeois and wouldn’t approve of her choice, either, given that he didn’t go to college. And of course she was correct about the latter.”
“But still.” Hattie turns her palms upward.
“Precisely. Her data were correct, but her conclusion was wrong. Influenced as it was by things Meredith told her.”
“Divorced people will say anything.”
“They should really warn you of that when you get married.” He grimaces. “She told Maisy I was perfectly capable of grilling her intended at the rehearsal dinner. That I thought all young men were grad students.”
“Aren’t they?”
He laughs his big laugh. “She said that if she were Maisy, she would marry a carpenter, too. She loved that Einstein quote about how all knowledge just leads to further obscurity. But is that right?”
“What would life be if we didn’t have knee surgery, you mean.” Hattie works her shoes off.
He nods. “And doesn’t Buddhism have limits? The Tibetan nomads have no antibiotics, but the tombs in the Potala Palace are solid gold. I saw them when I was in Llasa—
one of them weighed thirty-seven hundred kilos. Can you imagine? A regular behemoth.” He scratches his nose with his pinky—his digit moving with precision, almost elegance. “I don’t mean the Tibetans should be oppressed, of course. I just mean I myself am not converting anytime soon.”
“You mean, here you are. You got your work done and are now conducting a personal experiment.”
He looks at her sheepishly—embarrassed to have been set back on track like a grad student, maybe. “Yes.”
“Trying to live like an Inuit. And coming here to Riverlake to do it—to start over. As people will.” She nods a little to herself. “You’re here to spin your own web—get out of the rat race. See what there is to live for besides having your picture in that hall.”
“Where it isn’t going to hang anyway, by the way.”
“You can’t let that bother you, Carter.”
He shrugs—his look not hard, the way it can be, but almost inquiring.
“You’ve done good work. You have,” says Hattie.
“I was slipping by the end.” His gaze drops to his lap. “I know you won’t believe that, Hattie, but I was. I was making mistakes. At night—I was making mistakes at night.”
So she was right about why he retired.
“Could you have just been exhausted? You’ve never gotten enough sleep.”
“It’s more than that.”
“I’m sure you were functioning better than you thought.”
“I was holding my e-mails until the morning, Hattie. So I could look them over before sending them.”
The insistence.
“Make sure they weren’t junk,” she says finally. Gently.
“Precisely.” There is something like relief in his voice. “In the daytime, I digressed.”
Wandering after the wraith of an idea.
“And I was out of new ideas.” He looks out the window. “I’d run out.”
“You’ve done good work, all the same, Carter,” she says again. “You have. And say you really have had a drop-off in invention. Say your grasp of detail isn’t what it was or that you’re slower or make little processing errors. You still have experience to make up for it. Judgment. You can still contribute.” And wasn’t his web just a web, as Meredith said? Something that served him for a while but was finally just a web, to be put aside when it no longer served him, like a boat? “Who knows what else you know, now that your left hemisphere’s kicking in more,” she goes on. “You can’t only have become stupid.”
“I’m becoming wise.”
“Now there’s a tragedy.” She smiles. She’s always been the older of them, but until now has never felt older. Though is she the more enlightened of them or can she simply not appreciate what this moment means to him—what it is, even, having never flown at his altitude?
“Anyway, the work will go on.” He sets his hands on his thighs as if preparing to move out of its way.
“One cock dies, and others crow.”
“As the Chinese say.” He pauses. “If that’s a consolation, to know how replaceable one is.”
“It’s good to change gears, Carter.” She hears tenderness in her voice and wonders if he hears it, too—wonders if he’d want to hear it. “And you knew all along this moment would come.”
“Did I?”
“You said it about your father. That a moment comes when you’re past your prime—when your challenge is to accept it with grace.”
“I said that?”
“That and ‘The greater the man, the greater the fool he can make of himself at the end.’ ”
“Ouch.” With his head bent, he is all shining scalp. “I do feel I at least did all the science I had it in me to do,” he says, finally. “What I didn’t do was simply beyond my capacity.”
“And isn’t that something? To be able to say that?” She is trying to help.
“If only everyone could, you mean.”
“I didn’t say that, Carter.” She says this firmly.
Still, he plunges on. “You know, Hattie, I’m sorry about what happened. That we had that misunderstanding.”
That misunderstanding.
“And that you left academia in the end,” he goes on. “Left research.”
It’s the knees of her own yoga pants that catch her eye now—blue. “You knew. You saw me go.”
“Yes and no. I knew, but I couldn’t watch.”
Outside, it’s dark enough now that, though she can still see woods, the room is reflected in the window, too, so that she and Carter look for all the world like forest spirits, superimposed on the moving tree mass. How companionable they look! Chatting with no particular animus, it seems, about something the blue jays said.
“I don’t blame you for what happened,” she says. “You did what you had to do. What you were trained to do.”
“You blame me for other things.”
The floor is cold.
“You might have asked what happened to me,” she says, finally—trying not to be testy, but the words are what they are. “Once you turned around.”
“I thought you’d be in touch.”
“You mean you assumed you’d stay in my picture whether or not I stayed in yours.”
“I was in a position to help.”
“And didn’t you always help when you could.”
“So you do blame me for what happened. That I didn’t go to bat for you when that job came up.”
Her chest tightens; she cannot respond.
“In any case, I did wonder, you know—my father, too. Where you went.” He looks at her as if to keep her from disappearing again. “You joined Amy Fist’s lab, didn’t you?”
“So you knew.” She wills herself to breathe.
“You guys were pretty hot for a while. Beat us out for a few grants, if I recall.”
“Until Guy LaPoint told that review board that Amy was running a women’s shelter, not a lab. That we were more about Title IX than about science.”
“Good old Guy LaPoint Blank, as we called him.”
“Your enemy turned hit man.”
He shrugs. “Whom you confronted at a conference, I heard.”
“I did.”
“The Fist must have loved that.”
“She said it had nothing to do with justice. She said an interest in justice showed itself in one’s judgment. Of which I showed none. She said I showed indignation, which was something else altogether.”
He laughs. “Leave it to Amy to eat her own young. And then what? Didn’t she leave science?”
“She did. Saying it was a boys’ club and always would be.”
“A fine Fist jump from unsupported assertion to groundless speculation.”
“Carter.”
“All right, all right. It was a boys’ club.”
“Is, Carter. Is.”
“Is. All right. Though there’s been progress, you know. You and Amy were ahead of your time.”
Hattie’s turn to shrug; she tries. “She left to write a screenplay about Barbara McClintock. And I left to help her.”
“But let me guess. No one in Hollywood knew what a transposon was or much cared, either.”
“It was before Barbara got her Nobel.”
“Bad timing.” A nod. “And then?”
“Then I went to teach at a private school and married and had Josh.”
“You dropped out.”
“Got myself a new web of significance.”
He clears his throat. “My mother would have gone hunting for you, I’m sure,” he supplies, “had she not gotten depressed.”
“It didn’t by any chance depress her that hunting down missing foreign students was her job, did it?”
A pause. “I don’t know if you realize this, Hattie, but she was hospitalized on and off for years.”
Hattie stops. Sweet Mrs. Hatch? With her symphony work and her four-handed piano music and what Dr. Hatch used to call her maddening equanimity?
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” says Hattie. “No, I didn’t
know. I’m sorry. And how is she now?” If she’s even alive—Hattie’s braced to hear that she’s missed, not just Reedie’s death, but Mrs. Hatch’s, too.
“Better. It took the docs years to get her meds right, but they finally did. Of course, it’s been hard for her, watching her friends die. For a while there she was going to two funerals a month. But now they’re all dead, so that’s over with. And people do make a fuss when you hit ninety-eight. She’s finally a celebrity in her own right, now that she’s losing her marbles. Her skin cracks in the winter like a dairy farmer’s.”
“Your poor mother. I’m so sorry—I’ve been remiss. I …”
“You were young and confused.” He waves his hand, and this, too, comes to seem like a distant past with no real power now. “Never mind, Hattie. We lived. Though you really think we should’ve gone looking for you. That I should’ve.”
She thinks of Lee and Joe—what she would have done. Come back. Come back. “You don’t?”
He clears his throat again. “I suppose it’s not clear to me what the point would have been, Hattie. Forgive me for saying so. But it’s not as though we had a spare professorship for you.”
“And that would have been the point, of course.”
“Didn’t you need a job?”
“What’s more, you assumed, as you said, that I’d be in touch.”
“If you needed something. Yes.”
“Help, you mean—career help. If I needed career help.”
“Yes.”
“I was an associate of yours.”
“Weren’t you?”
His reply is quick, but he does not seem surprised that Hattie’s is not. She runs a finger along an unlashed rib.
“You’ve wasted time in such a concerted fashion,” she says finally.
He stands.
“You know who you remind me of?” she says. “My mother. Religiously getting rid of her religious past.”
“You can’t be angry with me still.”
“Am I angry?”
“It was impossible, Hattie.” He leans on the shallow sill.
“I’m delighted to see how you reached your conclusion,” she says. “Whatever you’re talking about. Which I’m sure I don’t know.”
