Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  The discovery shocked and saddened him, and yet with the newfound understanding of his limitations, he also felt profound relief. Young as he was, Jacob had been exercising his mind since babyhood. And now, suddenly, he saw that he could stop. He could simply get a job, and read and play. He could abandon his prodigious expectations and begin to live.

  His parents were baffled by this turn of events, and some of his Cincinnati professors were heartbroken, but Jacob did not waste much time pining for what might have been. He was busy now with growing up, and he had just fallen in love with Marion.

  They'd met in Applebaum's lab when she arrived from Barnard to do her initial crystallography research. He was a postdoc, and she a freshman in college, but they were just the same age. Jacob saw in Marion everything he was not. He saw the way she pursued her work, taking her own direction in the lab. She was small, with curly brown hair and snapping black eyes, and she worked with a baggy lab coat thrown over her dress. The sleeves were too long on her, so her fingers just peeped out. Jacob had hardly noticed women before, but in his eighteenth year, when he gave up being a genius, he gave his heart to Marion, and more than that, he laid his formidable mind at her feet. When they were twenty he asked her to marry him. She was only a girl, but he believed she would make radical discoveries.

  This was why Jacob dedicated himself to Marion. He was not trying to be a feminist, or to sacrifice himself. He did not particularly resent his teaching career at Tufts. He believed in Marion. He proofread every paper she wrote, and discussed every nuance of her work in the lab. Friends and colleagues thought him saintly and quite strange. Some felt secretly that he emasculated himself in his devotion to his wife's career. He had been a preternaturally gifted boy, and was now a highly unusual man. His mind was still agile, his reasoning frighteningly quick. He was a microbiology lecturer known for his clarity and his passion for the subject. He was famous, as well, for his dedication to those undergraduates who came to him for help. Patiently, during office hours, he tried to explain his course material, even while privately he wondered if some of his students had been mistakenly admitted to college, because they seemed to him mildly retarded. He was a happy man, for he had grown up. Indeed, he had grown out of himself, as many child prodigies fail to do. He was happy because he had discovered early, rather than late, that he would not be winning a Nobel Prize. And he had been granted an insight many of his scientific peers lacked—that when it came to Nobels, he himself did not need one. No, someday that distinction would belong to his wife.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked Marion without looking up from the chessboard. Instead of joining them, she had been standing silently in the doorway of the kitchen. “What is it?”

  “Something strange with the mice,” she said.

  “Cliff's?”

  “Yes.” She described to him what she and Feng had seen.

  “Suddenly the virus is working?”

  “Well, it's probably not.”

  “You'll have to test it out,” Jacob said. “Then you'll see.”

  “Of course.”

  He nodded matter-of-factly, eyes on his queen.

  “I don't know if we should tell Sandy yet,” Marion said.

  “Because he'll put out a press release that you've cured cancer.”

  “I didn't mean that . . .”

  “Check,” said Jacob. “Well, I think you're right not to tell him.”

  “That's the thing.” Marion fretted. “I don't think it's right at all to keep information from him, but I'm worried . . .”

  “He'll go off half-cocked,” said Jacob.

  “Your turn,” said Aaron, extricating himself.

  Unhappily, Marion came over to the table and set down her worn brown briefcase with the small gold initials MJM. The J was for Joyce—a fact that amused Sandy greatly. He'd teased, “Suspicious would be a better middle name for you. Or Doubtful.”

  “You know I'm right,” Jacob said, frowning at the board.

  She did know. Sandy went off half-cocked: that was the danger, but it was also entirely the good of him. You could set him off like a firecracker. She knew no one else so flammable. He was incautious. Imprudent. And yet Cliff, and Prithwish, and Robin—especially Robin—had been working so long without relief. They needed some change, or at least some news. They needed a little of Sandy's excitement.

  “I think sometimes his timing . . .” Jacob began.

  “He has an excellent sense of timing.”

  Jacob moved a piece and slapped his time clock. “He's a terrific publicist. He's a great fund-raiser. But I'm not talking about how well he speaks at conferences, or how he can charm money from NIH.”

  “Don't you think those are important qualities?”

  “No question.” Jacob's dark eyes darted over the chessboard. “I give him all the credit he deserves. Particularly when it comes to charming money. But those aren't scientific qualities, are they?”

  “That's not entirely fair.”

  “Why not?”

  Aaron looked up, curious. His parents kept no secrets from him, but they seemed at times to speak in private code, hiding their meaning in plain sight.

  “Look,” said Marion, “you know how he is.”

  “Yes, I know exactly how he is.”

  Distracted by their serious, almost sparring, voices, Aaron made a careless mistake.

  “Aha!” His father pounced. “Check.”

  Aaron stopped eavesdropping instantly; now he had to scramble to find a way out again.

  “You'll have to use your own judgment,” Jacob told Marion.

  He liked Sandy. He would say that to anybody. Sandy was a wonderful storyteller, and had a great ear for satire. He loved to argue—argued brilliantly about everything from global warming to Reagan's Star Wars defense system—and often took a contrarian's point of view, a great virtue in Jacob's mind. Sandy was musical, literate, and a mean Scrabble player. He was almost everything one could ask. And yet, Jacob did not entirely respect him.

  He did not begrudge Marion her friendship. When Sandy had first approached Marion, Jacob had encouraged her to collaborate with him. He had immediately appreciated the money and publicity that the doctor would bring in. Nor did Jacob resent Marion's loyalty to Sandy, and her increasing closeness to him over the past ten years. Perhaps some husbands would be jealous, but Jacob found nothing interesting in the idea that jealousy is a natural counterpart to love, or that when men and women work together there inevitably are sexual undercurrents. These sentimental notions—reductive, clichéd, ingrained in the cultural fantasies of romance—were utterly foreign to him, and had no relevance, as far as Jacob saw, to anyone offscreen, or offstage, or outside the pages of books.

  Jacob's reservations about Sandy were scientific, and thus, far more profound. When it came to science, Sandy's motives were not entirely pure. True, Sandy was excited by discovery. Captured by a research program, no one touted that program so well. But Sandy was not Marion. Sandy's work was not about giving of himself, but about building up himself, his ego, and his persona. Sandy lacked humility; he lacked respect for the complexity of the problems before him, and attacked research with evangelical zeal. Given any encouragement, Sandy would go off rampaging for bold new results, sometimes forgetting what might be small and diffident, and difficult to describe—the truth.

  “I wouldn't tell him anything yet.” Jacob couldn't help warning one last time.

  “But I should,” Marion concluded, in such a decided voice that Aaron looked up again.

  “The less he knows, the better.”

  “That's not true,” said Marion.

  “It's mostly true.”

  “It's a little true,” she conceded.

  But now Jacob was back in the game, eyes sparkling with competitive fire. “Checkmate.”

  4

  SANDY HAD a trick, honed from the earliest days of residency, of waking without an alarm clock. Right before he went to sleep, Sandy told himself what time he wante
d to wake up. Then he closed his eyes and settled back onto his pillow. The next day, sometimes to the minute on the clock, Sandy's eyes would pop open. He loved to get up early. At five in the morning, he slipped from bed while Ann still slept, dressed in running clothes, and padded downstairs. Then off he ran. Up and over the hilly streets, breathing hard, watching for ice, he took his route past brick houses and treacherously steep driveways. He ran and ran, drinking in the cold air. This was his preparation for Monday clinic. Up earlier than anyone, fueled by morning energy, this was Sandy's secret time before he went to see his patients. He was girding himself with all his skill and cunning and humor. As he ran, he wrapped himself in his cloak of invincibility.

  By the time he arrived at the hospital, he had showered and shaved, breakfasted and dressed, donned his dazzling white coat. Presidentially, then, Glass strode down the wide polished corridors while his residents briefed him on the crises of the day. Interns tried to keep up, while a medical student scampered here and there, pushing the wall buttons for the automatic doors so that Sandy could sweep along without breaking stride.

  “Lucia Fiorelli is going home today,” a tiny resident named Asha told Sandy.

  “No she's not,” Sandy said. “She needs her biopsy.”

  “She wants to be discharged,” Asha said nervously.

  “She's got something like fifteen family members here,” another resident piped up.

  “And they're very angry,” said Asha.

  Sandy looked at her quizzically.

  “They are insisting she go home,” Asha said, increasingly agitated.

  Sandy snorted. “Where are they? The lounge?”

  The relatives, arrayed on chairs, had a pallor Sandy recognized, a particular shade of gray that came of desperate fear and too many hours under sickening fluorescent lights. They'd been up all night.

  Sandy saw this, but revealed nothing. He ambushed the family with smiles and handshakes all around. “Mr. Fiorelli! Mrs. Fiorelli! How are you?”

  They had been crying. Their daughter was just twenty-one.

  “And you're Lucia's aunt? Nice to meet you . . . You're Nana! I've heard about you.”

  His warmth threw them off guard; the family roused themselves from the peach upholstered chairs. Brothers, cousins—they all shook off sleep and bagel crumbs. Still, Lucia's father turned on Sandy. “I want my daughter home,” he said. He'd been waiting all night to say his piece. “She's been poked and prodded. . . . She's suffering here. She's in pain from the procedures. She wants to go home, and she needs to go home.”

  “I understand, Mr. Fiorelli. I know exactly what you mean,” Sandy murmured. “She needs to rest.”

  “That's right.”

  “She needs to live without needles. You know, there is nothing like a hospital to make you feel worse. You just come in the door and you feel ten times worse. And you can't get a decent meal here. I'll bet there is nothing Lucia needs more right now than some of Nana's good home cooking. . . .”

  Behind his back, Sandy's residents cringed at the familiarity in his voice. In the hospital Sandy could walk from room to room and pull out language tailored for every ethnic or socioeconomic background. Like the magician's endless chain of knotted handkerchiefs, he could evoke Italian meatballs, baseball statistics, sailing stories, even sentimental childhood memories of the High Holidays. No one could Jew a patient like Sandy Glass.

  “No one can take good care like Nana . . .”

  The Fiorellis were already softening. They were angry, but they were also vulnerable: desperate to do something for Lucia; desperate as well, after their long vigil, for some human contact with a doctor—some normal words, a message from the everyday world.

  “Let's talk about getting Lucia some of Nana's cooking,” said Sandy. “Some pasta, some meatballs, some soup. Red bean soup. Minestrone. What does she like? What does she love?”

  And the family laughed a little. They knew that Dr. Glass had changed the subject, shifting the issue from discharging Lucia to how they'd manage while she stayed. They didn't mind. Giving in seemed a fair trade for speaking about her as a person who still had likes and dislikes and would actually benefit from minestrone. Dr. Glass never spoke of Lucia as a patient, only as herself—their daughter and granddaughter. A young woman still very much alive.

  The residents looked on in disbelief. They did not entirely understand the alchemy of authority, charm, and chutzpah that Glass employed. Clutching their empty notebooks, they followed him out of the lounge. There were few notes to take when Glass rounded in the hospital. He breezed through the corridors; never dwelt too long on patients' charts. He let his residents grapple with medications, doses, side effects—and delivering bad news. They hated him for the way he sent them in with test results—the tumors were back; the cancer had spread; the chemo was not working—while he breezed in later, after the storm. He was nothing if not smooth. The young doctors followed him down the hall in silence, still stunned by how quickly he'd won the Fiorellis over. This was Glass's magic, but unfortunately it was unteachable. As all residents who trained with Glass soon learned, his lessons were of the most ethereal kind.

  He could not cure his patients. He rarely changed a prognosis in the long term. Perhaps, in the end, he would not save lives, but he always knew what tone to take.

  “Look, we're all terminal,” he told one breast cancer patient. “We're all predead.”

  “Time? What is time?” he opined to an elderly man, a professor emeritus from MIT who demanded to know how much time he had left. “Who knows how much time any of us has?” Sandy shrugged. “Haven't the physicists been bending time for years? Isn't it true the Hopi Indians think time is space? See, that's why I don't like the question. I could give you a number—but then you'd have to call me a liar later on.”

  “Give me a ballpark,” the professor growled at Sandy from his bed.

  “That's my point,” said Sandy. “Once you start talking about ballparks—there's no difference in life expectancy between you and anybody else. We're all in the same ballpark together.”

  Sandy conned his patients, but he also spoke the truth. He embraced the truth of mortality, along with the deep-held fallacy that you and I are exceptions to the rule. He acknowledged that the idea of death would be terrifying, if life itself were not so absorbing. He implied that, moment to moment, even time in the hospital might bend and stretch into something longer, better, happier. He demonstrated this in the huge impact he made in just a few minutes with each patient on rounds. A direct look in the eye, a warm handshake—he always treated the deathly ill as if they were still among the living. This above all: he never looked away as though his heart might break.

  By noon, Sandy was powering out of the hospital and across BU Bridge. He'd had a productive morning, given Asha and the rest their marching orders. But now, driving into Cambridge, as the winter sun was silvering the Charles, Sandy could only think about the lab and Marion. She'd called and told him about Cliff's mice.

  He parked his white Mercedes tenderly in the pocked and muddy Philpott lot, and hurried up the front steps of the Victorian building, its arches and turrets faced in ruddy stone. Could this be the day they'd been waiting for? He looked for Marion in the office, but she wasn't there. After years of slow progress and false starts, had they finally found a better path?

  He burst into the lab, which was gloriously lit with afternoon sun. The arching tops of two great windows graced the space, along with part of an inscription that had been painted in 1887: KEEP BACK THY SERVANT ALSO. The building had once been the Cambridge Manual Training School for boys, and it was full of such vermilion words, fragments of scripture selected to inspire and at the same time chasten the vocational students, to raise and reform the spirit. Years later, however, as the Philpott subdivided each floor, and hanging ducts and light fixtures multiplied, the biblical inscriptions had been broken up as well, so that cryptic partial phases popped up in offices and passageways: WETH HIS, or THE GLORY OF GO
. No one at the institute read the writing on the walls.

  “Marion,” Sandy said.

  She looked up, startled, from the microscope. She hadn't expected him so early.

  “Come on.” He motioned her into the hall.

  “What was that about?” Robin asked, after the two disappeared.

  Feng shrugged, although he had a fairly good idea.

  “He seemed so secretive. Didn't you think that was strange?”

  “No,” said Feng.

  “Maybe he was looking for Cliff,” Natalya said.

  Cliff drifted in an hour later. Mechanically, he opened the door of the incubator, opened the second glass door, took out his petri dishes, studied his breast cancer cells under the microscope, their irregular clumps like clustered sesame seeds. He stared at each batch of cells, took his notes as usual. He did his time.

  He sensed Feng standing at his shoulder, but Cliff did not look up from the microscope.

  “Cliff,” Feng said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I came in yesterday. Marion and I came to look at your mice.”

  “Great.”

  “The ones injected with R-7 . . .” Feng said. “It looks like maybe something happened there.”

  “What was that?” Cliff asked.

  “Maybe something is going on,” said Feng.

  If Cliff hadn't been so down and so detached, if he had not been cultivating a Zen calm, he might have recognized this statement for what it was. He might have copied Feng's words into his lab book as a classic Fungi:

  “Maybe something is going on” = sudden, life-changing event.