Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “J-just one m-more question. R-really.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I know you’ll g-get this one. H-Hedy Lamarr!”

  “Of course I know Hedy Lamarr.”

  “Well, w-what do you know?”

  “She was a legend.”

  “So what are your f-favorite films of hers? You like Ecstasy?”

  “Ecstasy? What’s that? Hedy Lamarr was a great scientist—she invented an anti-jamming device to block Nazi radar during World War II. You didn’t know that? Her real name was, honest to God, Hedwig Keisler Markey. She never got credit though. The War Department, the dumb jerks, turned down her offer and eventually her patent on this thing ran out. Now Sylvania or somebody has adapted it and it runs satellite communications all around the globe.”

  Jay stared at me, put back his head, and started to laugh.

  “Y-you mean to t-tell me that Hedy Lamarr isn’t kn-known to you as a movie star, you know her as a ... what?”

  “Scientist, inventor, whatever.”

  “I have to go s-sit down somewhere and h-have a b-beer. I’m l-losing it.”

  So we tried to compromise. I actually visited film museums and read ghostwritten or “as told to” biographies; he came to my lab. But I couldn’t help it, I had little natural interest in the subculture and it was hard to pretend that I did. I mean, sometimes I walked into the kitchen seeing bubble universes twisting themselves free like glassine blossoms, I saw great vibrating strings twisting helically, I saw and heard four-dimensional harps playing Mozart. I was a heretic, a dinosaur: television and film both struck me as tedious mediums—paradoxically, because they moved so fast. Their speed and flattened dimension reduced them to banality, plus I had trouble with L.A. movie audiences. In what other town did people sit grimly through the long roll of end credits, commenting on names of friends or foes—in the fields of Lighting, Makeup, A.D.-ing? In what other movie theaters in the world would you overhear a breakdown, sotto voce, of every camera angle, or a bitchy discourse on casting? And why was it that despite the fact that I can break down Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for you, I am incapable of grasping what it is that a producer actually does?

  All of this made Jay defensive about his enthusiasms, this made me exasperated, but oddly willing to continue being with him. In the past, I’d have left him without a qualm. But there was something still on my conscience about Jesse, something bothering me about myself and how I screwed up when I loved people. And it was undeniable, in some way, that Jay and I were oddly suited—his stutter was the physical embodiment of my emotional reluctance. We were to each other (had we only noticed) a reminder of the necessity of perseverance in love. I stayed with Jay, I tried hard with Jay, and slowly acquired a life with him. It was no longer exhilarating, because we’d doubted each other so early on, but we kept staying. One night, then the next, then the next. We stayed, we got used to each other. Ollie, listen. We learned to love each other.

  At UGC, I ended up in an odd position. I began taking it slow, for the first time. I was spending time seeing Jay’s Los Angeles, learning Jay’s Los Angeles. Perhaps that was it. If I couldn’t learn to love the movie culture, I learned to appreciate the city, its rhythms. But there was something else. I met my classes, put in my hours in the lab, but this fire I’ve always stoked inside me was burning low. I was setting up a lab—funding was going to come through from Derridex, a sci-tech corporation, for my work on Alpha1 Antitrypsin—and I was asked to lecture to the biochemistry and molecular-biology faculties, but sometimes I caught myself sitting still at the bench, in the lab, dreaming. I sorted through my days with Q, I called up my mother’s face as she looked first at Q, then at me. I conjured Jesse: I watched him from above as he bounded up the narrow steps of our brownstone toward me, his jacket and hair covered with snow, a scraggly pine tree cradled in his arms like an adopted stray, shedding needles all the way. “Some guy selling pot on the corner offered me this instead of a lid! We can smoke it or string lights on it!” He stopped on the fifth step from the top, leaning back, looking up at me, snow in his eyelashes. “You tell me, Ez,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “I w-watch TV because it comforts me,” Jay said once. I hadn’t asked him a question, we hadn’t been speaking, just sitting quietly in his living room. He was slouched in a lounger, wearing only Jockey shorts and red socks, and I was actually trying to sew something: a loose button on my lab coat. It was taking me a while, but it lent a kind of cheery pseudo-domesticity to our scene.

  I looked over at him.

  “When I was a kid and I came home from school, my parents were never around. I loved the fact that I could turn on the tube and the same people would always be there to greet me. The folks on Gilligan’s Island, the Star Trek crew. My family, if you know what I mean.” He turned back to an HBO movie starring a dog that could fly.

  I stared at him. He was not stuttering at all.

  There was a silence. The dog landed on Mars.

  “My mother drank a lot,” Jay said. “And she was very loud. I was embarrassed by her. I loved the mothers on television.”

  “How’s your mom now?”

  “She still drinks, she’s still loud. And I’m still in love with TV families.”

  “And now you drink, too.”

  Jay turned to look at me.

  “I kn-know why I love TV families so m-much. But e-exactly.”

  My father watched television at the end. I remember him sitting in front of it, smoking, smoking and coughing. I associate those sounds with certain sitcom theme music, the oceanic murmur of baseball games. The sound of disappearing, the sound of never coming back.

  Jay and I stood at the top of Mulholland Drive, looking down on Los Angeles. My hair was blowing in my eyes. “Eighty-one languages spoken in this city!” Jay cried, pointing down excitedly. “C-can you imagine it?”

  I tried to imagine a Babel of tongues rising up to us, where we stood ankle-deep in the brownish iceplant. Jay said something else.

  “What?” I cried. “I can’t hear you!”

  He kissed me. I kissed him back.

  We made love. It was wonderful.

  Then Jay asked me a question. “D-did you c-come?”

  We started to laugh. We c-couldn’t s-stop.

  Ollie, I rented a small house in Hollywood, our house. It had an avocado tree in the backyard that actually bore fruit. I bought it with a low-interest loan from the university. I was overwhelmed by the ease and swiftness with which all this happened.

  I spent time wandering around my little house in the early-morning hours, wearing nothing but a pair of Jay’s boxer shorts and a halter, eating a peanut-butter sandwich, humming. I’d made my peace with Los Angeles. Every once in a while, I would sit on a hassock or lean on a gleaming blond butcher-block island and think: I have a place to live. I have a job. I have a sweetheart. I looked at myself in the hallway mirror. Red red hair, fiery topknot. Strong nose and chin. Big yellow-green cat’s eyes. Looking back, it seems I was under a spell. I wasn’t thinking about science during that whole time, I wasn’t thinking about anything but recovering some part of myself. Certainly I relied on my skepticism; it had always come in handy before, why give it up now? But I still walked from room to room in my new house early in the morning, singing little off-key songs to myself.

  When I got the letter announcing Q’s and my mother’s engagement, I felt relief. Some nights later I sat in my office at school, waiting, listening to two after-hours researchers bang locker doors and call goodbyes. Then I took my lab keys, opened the door, and went to the bench. I lit a Bunsen, pulled a clean tube from the rack. I opened my bag and took out a vial filled with my own urine. Then I put the tube in the spinner, the centrifuge, watched it separate into a colloidal suspension. Then I hung the tube in the rack. I had a wait ahead of me.

  I wandered into another section of the laboratory, where a colleague of mine kept Drosophila flies in bottles for a study of the male accessory gland. She watched t
hem mate, then kept a check on this gland, which lost one third of its protein after copulation. She watched to see how the gland made RNase and remade protein. The postcoital male flies were put in a bottle labeled “Exhausted Males.” The females, tragically, ended up in the Morgue. There were bottles called Monasteries, where celibate males were placed, and a Motel, where the slow-going sex between the flies went on. Then there was a Dim Bulb Division, where mutants, slow-learner flies, bumbled about, bumping into the bottle walls. There was a “hot” area, where she injected the males, after mating, with radioactive isotopes—zapped them, lit them up, then sliced out a cross section to see what was inside. The idea was to mimic in vitro—that is to say, outside of the body—what went on after copulation.

  At three in the morning, nodding with sleep, I went back, held my tube up to the light, and saw the newly formed agglutinate, the antibody clumping reaction in the bottom of the tube, which testified to the presence in my blood of the hormone HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin. The clear conclusion, as I stood there, the tube trembling in my hand in the harsh overhead light, was that conception had taken place. Think of this, Ollie. I saw firsthand, I held in my hand, the chemical message that you had arrived.

  I washed out the glass beaker and tubes, cleared away some notes, checked the burners and other equipment, took my keys, and left. I got into my car and drove out to the beach. It was close to dawn. As I pulled off the Pacific Coast Highway into Temescal Canyon Beach parking lot, the sky was lighting up. I found a jacket in the trunk, shrugged into it, and walked across the flat terraces of sand to the breakers. There was no one else on the beach. The roar of the breaking surf was tremendous and my jeans got soaked when I walked too close to the waves. I walked for miles. At around seven A.M., I noticed a food trailer parking. I bought a cup of black coffee and found a pay phone. I placed two long-distance calls. The first was to my mother. The second, a much longer call by far, was to Q.

  UGC was not happy about the maternity leave, but they’d already become somewhat philosophical about me. The six-month leave really only applied to tenured professors, but they agreed to interpret the policy broadly. They were still edgy about bad publicity, and I sat sphinxlike in the chairman’s office, wearing a BABY INSIDE T-shirt and twirling my hair. No one in the department had a clue as to what I was about, and I didn’t mind keeping it that way. I frightened them to a man, I thought.

  I told Jay that he didn’t have to marry me—and I meant it. We sat in my backyard at a little wooden table under the avocado tree, drinking lemonade. His glass had gin in it.

  Jay was laughing at my refusal to marry him. From the day of the earthquake, I’d loved his laugh. I rode it over and over in my mind like a surfer shooting the curl.

  “C-come on, Ez,” he said. “Look. We met. The earth m-moved.”

  “We don’t share a sense of humor,” I said.

  “So ? M-marry me and I’ll acquire your scientific sense of the absurd, I promise.”

  “I’d say that my sense of the absurd has almost peaked in this town. Sometimes I long for a little humorlessness: I want a quiet person, say, a Presbyterian.”

  “But,” Jay said, “I’m your j-jujube, tootsie—I’m transparent and I have staying power.”

  He told me that he knew I thought I didn’t love him. “B-but you do,” he said. “You j-just think you d-don’t.”

  We argued for a long time about marriage, but Jujube was inexhaustible and Tootsie was not. I gave in. We flew to Las Vegas, to the Chapel of Ceaseless Trickling, and flew back to L.A. one night later, husband and wife.

  We stayed in my little house. We continued living there after you, Olivia—Jay’s name, for some movie star I can never remember— were born. You were a very easy delivery and very healthy. You cried a lot, though, and wanted to be held all the time. Jay began to say that I was spoiling you, because I always held you, always picked you up when you cried in the night. We began to fight about how to handle you. Then we began to fight about how to organize our lives, now that we had a child. We were tired all the time, and irritable, and we could not calm you sometimes. When my six-month leave was over, the fights got worse, because we needed sitters for you and we could never agree on whom to hire.

  We both began to notice that you were unusual, Ollie. Wonderful, but just not following the so-called normal patterns of development. A doctor agreed with Jay that you might need therapy—or drugs. I thought they were both wrong. You and I always communicated very well.

  Jay was gone all the time. His technical-directing work started early and ran late. And then he had his stand-up gigs. The industry: It eats up your life. I hired sitter after sitter, rushed home from UGC.

  Then, one day, amazingly, it all changed. The theory came back to me. All the excitement I used to feel working with Q suddenly returned to me. I was standing in the hall outside the biochemistry lab at UGC at eight A.M. with my second cup of coffee in my hand, and I felt— just like that—that I was ready now to start over again. I wanted to change my research plans; I’d been rethinking my theories. This is not to say that I was born again. I was exhausted, dazed; I was wounded.

  But I was going to do real work again. If I was falling apart, well, then, maybe I could use the information I gathered, falling. Maybe I could use the exhaustion, the stand-up, the late nights, the arguments with Jay, money problems, broken promises, the hopeless sitters, Jay’s bottles in the trash. I could use them like the elements of the periodic table dancing before me. Ollie, I got a little ethereal: I could put them in the mind’s centrifuge and fly them around into suspension. I could alter them, name their new names as they combined and recombined in the burning alchemical blaze: like poetry, I thought. I felt cleansed now, I could drink my coffee up, then walk into the lab, for the first time since I’d come to the University of Greater California, as if it were mine, as if I belonged there.

  Part Two

  Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

  ...

  She died a famous woman denying

  her wounds

  denying

  her wounds came from the same source as

  her power

  —Adrienne Rich

  “Power”

  Chapter 9

  I RATHER LIKED the lab I’d been given at UGC, in which I was to pursue my gene-splicing and (it was clear) do something flashy, fund-attracting—find a cure for a congenital disease, invent an artificial gene for genius, analyze a dead president’s DNA. But as time passed, I grew reflective; I sat in my laboratory lost in thought. I hunched over in my chair, twirling my hair—in those well-equipped rooms in the one-story prefab building (OBERMAN HALL) next to the Physics Lecture Hall Building. Maybe theory was in the air. What was I thinking about? Electromagnetic particles, the sidereal shifts of stars. One step, two steps: out into the universe. I lusted after a TOE, what scientists call a Theory of Everything. I herded my chiral molecules shyly, like chicks, into the huge incubating light of this desire.

  I found some extra funds to hire Rocky as my assistant. She and I had a long talk about women and science. Then we talked about men. “I’ve broken up with Troy,” she said, and smiled her beautiful, untrustworthy smile. “I’m not promising nothing, Prof, except, you know, a real crack at change. This is it, man. I’m taking a very tough look here at my self-destructive behavior.” She shook her hair into her eyes, peering out at me through the dark seductive tangle: an absolutely irresistible and completely unconscious liar.

  “Put a lab coat on,” I said, “and would you mind sparing me the bullshit?” I was looking at a crayon drawing Ollie had done on graph paper while sprawled on the lab floor. She was spending time with me at work now—Jay was around less than ever. Because of certain chemical-splash risks and low-grade radiation levels in the lab, she was restricted to the entry area, where there was more circulating air and less cookery. She’d been slowly drawing everything she observed. Her drawings were quite realistic except for sudden distractions urgentl
y sketched in: a great winged blue monkey, arms crossed, slowly spinning atop a centrifuge—or a shower of watching eyes poured from a suspended pitcher into a rack of Eppendorf tubes. And who’s to say these visions weren’t scientific? Didn’t Einstein imagine elevators free-falling in deep space, people traveling in trains at the speed of light? He looked people straight in the eye and told them that if you moved a clock through space, it lost time. And it was true. Why did Einstein throw a clock out the window? Somebody saw angels spinning the planets with puffs of air from their beating wings; they saw the universe mounted on the back of a giant tortoise; they saw black holes, baby universes, bubble worlds, big bangs, superstrings, event horizons, and oh yes, microwave background radiation from the glowing of the hot early universe, red-shifted ... He wanted to see time fly. Ollie pulled at my lab coat and gently took back her drawing of the centrifuge with the giant blue monkey on top. “Mom, I’m going to put in the ambulance birthday cake,” she said gravely. “At this minute, not the next minute.”

  “Man, I hate these lab coats.” Rocky shook back her hair, bent down, and tweaked Ollie’s nose, then smiled up at me again. “Those slits they got instead of like, real pockets? They keep getting caught on doors and hooks and stuff. They’re dangerous!”

  “We’re going to be working with some organic solvents and hot tracers later—that’s dangerous. Put on a lab coat.” Ollie looked up at me and Rocky frowned a little—I was feeling pressured and my tone was annoyed.

  “Just try it,” I added in a gentler voice. Rocky saluted and went off to find a coat. Earlier, she’d been fitted with a “hot” badge and a ring. These were protective devices; they recorded radioactivity levels in the human body. When the bit of film got developed in the badge or the crystal structure altered in the ring, it was time for Time Out: You were getting a little too cooked. The lab levels weren’t high compared to, say, working in a nuclear reactor, but I was weirdly proud of the fact that I, like my lab peers, could stutter a Geiger counter to life with a wave of my hand.