Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  Robin hesitated. There was only one other chair, and it was Sandy's. The office was not set up for visitors.

  Marion went around to Sandy's desk and dragged his chair out herself. “Sit down,” she ordered, and Robin obeyed. “Now tell me what you want.”

  “I want my time back,” Robin said. “I want to work on my own project without Cliff . . .”

  “I imagine you can continue your bone tumor work,” Marion allowed. “In the next few weeks there will be more time for that.”

  Robin sat back, thrilled with this promise, dazzled by the very thought of her own days and hours.

  Marion was not done, however. “What do you want for yourself professionally, in the future?” she pressed. “How would you like your career to develop? What do you think would be your ideal situation?”

  Robin's eyes widened. Was Marion actually planning to get rid of her? The development of her career? The future? What euphemisms were those?

  “The thing about Cliff—” Robin began to explain.

  “I don't want to hear about Cliff,” Marion snapped.

  Robin flinched.

  “I want to hear about you.”

  Robin gazed into the air. “I would like,” she said slowly, “to make some progress—and to feel as though my work actually made a difference. I would like to be part of a community where resources aren't so scarce, and it doesn't have to be a choice between my work or his, or now or later. I'd just like to be part of something where I don't always have to follow, I could also lead.”

  Marion nodded as she listened to all this; she listened carefully to every word. As a spelunker pokes gingerly into a dark underground passageway, Marion tried to think her way into Robin's narrow, self-pitying position: unpublished, unappreciated. Marion cared enormously about her postdocs; they were her academic children, and she only wanted to give the best advice. But she said something just then that devastated Robin. “It sounds as though what you'd really like to do is teach.”

  2

  THERE WAS a hidden room at the Philpott. Newcomers walked right past the door where it stood, counterintuitively, kitty-corner to the stairs. The cleanup crew sometimes mistook it for a janitor's closet and unlocked the door, only to find a large room stuffed with scientific equipment instead of buckets and brooms. This was the institute's kitchen, where the scientists placed their orders for rich red media, chemical broth for growing cells.

  The room had no windows. A large freezer and four refrigerators stood shoulder-to-shoulder against two walls. Thousands of dollars' worth of ingredients were kept in the refrigerators: liters of fetal calf serum the color of maple syrup; pen-strep (a solution of penicillin and streptomycin); Fungizone; and other antibiotics that the researchers mixed into media to fight off bugs and mold. A desk topped by a bookcase, the laminar flow hood, and two large carts on wheels took up the rest of the space. The room was packed to the ceiling with supplies: plastic funnels; cardboard cases of filters; test tubes with orange and white caps; dozens of foil-topped beakers standing up in rows, waiting to be filled. There were rolls of labeling tape—white, yellow, pale green, robin's egg blue—jars of powdered chemicals, and scores of books; fantasy and quilt-making books were shelved together with scientific catalogs: GIBCO BRL 1986, The Quilter's Guide to Rotary Cutting, VWR Scientific Products. The space was cluttered but entirely organized. This suited Nanette Klein, who ran the place.

  Nanette was part tech, part cook, part witch, part dorm mother, certainly chief gossip at the institute. She might have been chief bottle washer, except she had other people to autoclave the glassware for her, thank God. She appreciated having the support staff, although she deemed them lazy. “They do nothing,” she exclaimed. “I've seen them, and they spend half their time drinking tea!” Nanette herself was always busy, always scooting in her swivel chair. She was a kindly, scolding sort of person, unafraid to call a senior scientist a slob, happy to spend hours counseling a new postdoc from Pakistan, equally willing to scream at anyone who came in behind her back and left supplies and chemicals in disarray. She'd posted signs on her cupboards and refrigerators: CLOSE THE DOOR!!!! and DO NOT USE MY NaOH!! STOP!!!!

  Despite her name, she was not French. As a girl in Wisconsin, she'd always dreamed of traveling to Paris and going to the Louvre, and sitting on wrought iron benches in the Tuileries. And when she finally arrived there as a young woman, the city was as cobbled and misty and elegantly stuffed with statuary and impressionists as she'd imagined. The city was magnificent, but the Parisians laughed when they heard Nanette's name. This was not a real name, they told her. This was, at best, a nickname, not a proper name at all. And Nanette laughed with them, although the laughter hurt. She still made light of her visit, and liked to tell the story. Her own mother had never been to France, of course. She'd loved the movie No, No, Nanette and thought the name was pretty. How could she have known?

  Nanette shrugged and pursed her lips and leaned into her work at the hood. She was short and plump, pale from spending so many hours indoors. She had a large backside but tiny feet. She wore elaborate quilted vests she made herself—wearable art—and pinned her long, graying hair back with old combs. And always, she kept talking, but she kept her eye on the red media flowing from the white plastic carboy on the table, through clear tubing that ended in a protective glass bell, and then down into jar after sterile jar. She filtered the media and she dyed it red for pH testing. With her foot on a pedal, she meted out 450 milliliters into each jar, lifting her foot from the pedal and cutting off the remaining media in the tube at exactly the right moment with her scissors clamp. She knew the proper level in the glass by eye.

  “So what brings you here on this nasty spring day?” Nanette asked Robin, who sat in the smaller gray swivel chair Nanette kept for visitors. “Did you take my advice and kick him in the—”

  “No!” protested Robin.

  “Oh, well, that's a pity.” Though Nanette's voice was sweet, her opinions were acidic. Legend had it that Nanette had been a researcher once herself, that she'd done brilliant work way back and then flamed out and given up on her doctorate. She certainly knew enough, and kept up with the journals. She was proudly overqualified.

  “It's hard,” Robin admitted.

  “Only if you let him get to you.”

  “It's not just him,” Robin said. “It's the whole situation.”

  “You mean, the whole situation around him,” Nanette said with maddening authority. “But I'm not going to say I told you so. I wouldn't be so—”

  “Marion says I should teach,” Robin interrupted.

  “Teach!” Nanette shrieked. “Is she out of her mind? What, stuffy little undergraduates, with their shitty little labs? I'd rather die.”

  “I know.”

  “She, of all people,” said Nanette.

  “I know.”

  “She only came to the Philpott to avoid teaching and to do her work in peace. I mean, why else would anybody come? God.”

  “I was so offended,” Robin said. “And so . . . disappointed as a woman scientist, that she would say something like that to me.”

  “You mean you expected her to offer you support and mentorship and all that stuff?” asked Nanette. “Ha.” She looked over her four dozen glass bottles filled with red media, pumped out all the media remaining in the carboy into one large bottle, then decanted from the large bottle into five small ones. She distributed the media evenly until those final bottles held the proper 450 ml amount. Now she'd used every drop of the precious liquid, and she turned and looked Robin in the face. “Don't you know,” said Nanette, “that women are always meanest to other women? Especially women scientists.”

  “That's not really true,” said Robin.

  “It shouldn't be true, but it is.” Nanette's caramel-colored eyes seemed to dilate slightly, magnified by indignation and her large tortoiseshell glasses. “They're always hardest on each other. It's because there're so few; they hate the young ones coming up. They're threatened.�
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  “Marion Mendelssohn is not threatened by me,” Robin said.

  “She'd just rather see you off somewhere teaching. Off in some small school with no graduate program, no equipment, two courses a semester . . .”

  “No!” Robin protested. “I know her. She would never want me to do that.”

  “Women hate each other in science,” Nanette said. “You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.”

  “You're so cynical,” Robin said.

  “Who, me?” Nanette protested girlishly. “You work here for fifteen years. I still remember when Mendelssohn got here. She barely looked at anyone. She wouldn't even say hello if you ran into her on the stairs. She's actually a lot better than she used to be.”

  “She thinks I should try out teaching part-time at Tufts,” Robin said.

  “Ooh, ooh, let me guess. She wants you to work for her husband as a teaching assistant for free!”

  “No, she said he has funds to pay me,” Robin said. “He hasn't been able to find a second teaching assistant and his class is bigger than he thought it would be.”

  “Oh!” Nanette was genuinely surprised. “Oh, well, that's different. That's not so bad.”

  “What do you mean? You just said she's telling me I should give up on research.”

  “So what?”

  Robin blinked, shocked at how quickly Nanette had changed tack.

  “TA for Jacob Mendelssohn? It's practically free money! And the semester's half over! Just grade a few problem sets . . .”

  “But symbolically.”

  “Oh, so what about the symbolism. You could probably make twelve, fifteen hundred dollars! Take the money and run!”

  Robin could use the money. Still, she was baffled by Nanette's advice. “And what about how women hate women in science?”

  “That's exactly my point,” Nanette told Robin. “Women scientists do hate each other. Mendelssohn's never gonna nurture you. Therefore, it is incumbent on you to take whatever shitty opportunity comes your way. It's a gift!” She loaded her jars of media onto the cart.

  “You just said teaching is a fate worse than death.”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “Practically.”

  “Well, but working for Jacob isn't exactly teaching. He's so obsessive he wouldn't let you actually teach anything. You'll grade a little bit. That's it. A few problem sets. Lots of people have done it.”

  “Like who?” Robin asked.

  “Lots of people . . .” Nanette said, searching her memory of postdocs in years past. “Akira.”

  “Akira?” Robin had never known Akira O'Keefe, although she'd heard about him. “Akira tried to commit suicide,” Robin said.

  “And others,” said Nanette. “There were others too.”

  “I can't believe you'd use him as an example.”

  “Well, he suffered from depression,” Nanette said. “And he had terrible luck with the mice—you know, the outbreak in the colony. He lost two years' work, and he was miserable. I mean, no one really understood how miserable he was. But it wasn't the teaching that got to him.”

  Slowly Robin took the stairs back to the third floor. She knew that in her own way, Nanette had tried to cheer her up. She'd tried all her best tricks—reminiscence, humor, sympathetic disgruntlement, even practical advice, but none of it helped.

  In the incubator, Robin's cells were dividing wildly. She didn't care. They would not contribute in any way to her future. They were all part of the grand effort to reproduce Cliff's results. She hated working with those cells, but she hated it more that no one considered how she felt about the matter. The grant proposal was out, long gone to NIH, and Mendelssohn and Glass were pushing ahead. The two of them were preparing the R-7 paper to submit to Nature, and this was all they thought about. But now, undermining her very thoughts, Sandy Glass was rushing toward her in the hall.

  “Robin! Robin! I've been looking all over for you,” Glass exclaimed.

  Startled, she wondered if he had some good news for her, or some idea. She hated herself for the way her heart pounded.

  “You didn't buy your ticket to Aidan's concert.” Glass shook his finger at her.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I've got the tickets in an envelope on the office door, and you can leave the—” He interrupted himself and looked at her. “You are coming, aren't you? You know he's singing Jesus. I've got us a block of seats, front and center of the mezzanine.”

  She'd been to Aidan's concerts before. All the lab went because, as Glass said, they were family, and because Glass happened to love early music. Aidan was terrific with the mice, but there was no doubt his singing had helped him get the lab tech position. While Mendelssohn didn't care about such extracurriculars, Glass was entranced by people who enriched the lab with music or photography or famous relatives, or at the very least, new languages: Tagalog, Burmese. When Aidan came along with his sweet, crisp baritone, Glass managed to get the lab to most of his performances. They'd sat through ballads and cantatas, and airs on period instruments: citterns and viols, lutes, krummhorns and sackbuts—or fat butts, as Cliff dubbed them. Robin liked classical music better than most, but she was hardly in the mood for a lab outing. “I'm going to try to be there,” she said.

  “Robin, you will be. This is Jesus in St. Matthew's Passion.” Sandy rocked forward on his toes, as he always did when he was most excited. “This is a milestone in Aidan's career.”

  In addition to his love of music and pride in Aidan, Sandy had a political motive for the evening. The lab had fourteen tickets to the Passion, and Sandy had invited the Philpott's director and his wife along. Sandy needed support just now from the institute: publicity and as much internal money as the director could spare. As always, promotion was essential, but in this case, he and Marion had produced real, live results. Work in their own lab could bring heaps of attention to the Philpott from the outside world, showers of gold from the granting agencies in Washington.

  Before the performance, as the audience swirled around under the vaulted ceiling of Harvard's Memorial Hall, Sandy stood as the evening's impresario, with the elderly and rather austere institute director, Peter Hawking, on one side, and Peter Hawking's plump, stentorian wife, Barbara, on the other. Marion and Jacob completed the inner quintet, beyond which floated Ann, shepherding Kate, the only daughter who'd agreed to come, Feng and Mei, and Cliff, Prithwish, Natalya, and her red-bearded cryptographer husband, Ivan—and where was Robin? At the moment Sandy was far too busy to think of looking for her. He was telling Hawking about the new paper for Nature and speculating on the chances it might be published sooner rather than later. Of course, Sandy had several ideas about facilitating this.

  “Yes, I'm sure you do,” murmured Peter Hawking.

  Barbara put her hand on Peter's arm and laughed, as though he'd said something witty. But no one beyond Sandy's inner circle could hear the joke in the cathedral-like hall, with concertgoers and student ushers swarming all around. Laughter echoed against marble plaques cut with the names of Harvard's young Civil War dead: Nathaniel Saltonstall Barstow. Thomas Bayley Fox. Charles Redington Mudge. Name upon name and arch upon arch. All conversation was swallowed up in the vaulted space, its polished wood tracery, its stained glass allegory dark against the outside night.

  Cliff strained to hear. He tried to move in closer. This was his research, after all. But the crowd was too thick, the lights already blinking. He followed the others up the carved staircase and into Sanders Theatre with its curtainless stage, the blond wood covered with risers and chairs for the choristers. Glass's party took two rows of seats, and unapologetically Sandy ushered Hawking and his wife into the front to sit between him and Marion. Kate and Ann took the seats to the left of Sandy, and Jacob took the seat to the right of Marion, and then the postdocs arrayed themselves in the row behind. The seats were on great wooden benches like pews in chu
rch, and when Robin rushed in, Natalya and Ivan scooted over for her. She'd arrived just in time.

  Sandy was speaking earnestly to Hawking, and still Cliff couldn't hear. He longed to join the conversation himself. He was just one row back and two seats away from the great man, who had a Sputnik-era buzz cut, his bow tie, and a laconic, gentlemanly manner. If it were polite, Cliff might have reached out across Mei and Feng and tapped Hawking on the shoulder, but instead he could only look on wistfully. He could not see Hawking's difficulties—his troubles trying to negotiate a future for the Philpott with its giant neighbor, Harvard. In these modern times, the Philpott was a poor principality ripe for annexation, and Peter Hawking had long realized that the question was not if, but on what terms, the institute would affiliate with the other schools and programs under Harvard's crimson umbrella. In Cliff's eyes, Hawking was all-powerful. He had achieved everything Cliff had ever dreamed of: the Nobel Prize, scores of patents, and membership in the National Academy of Science and every august organization you could name. Beyond all this, Hawking was famous for his witty presentations, his earnest delivery of sly jokes. He reminded Cliff of a biologist he'd admired at Stanford, the elderly Professor Carmichael, who taught Introduction to Microbiology. How funny he had been in lecture, and how good-humored about his fame. He'd written a textbook for his course, a classic in the field, and begun each chapter with an epigraph from Shakespeare, or Robert Browning, or Lewis Carroll. He would stand at the board and awe his students with every squeak of chalk. And how Cliff had wanted to be like him. How he wanted to hear the conversation now between Glass and Hawking. Wanted and wanted and wanted.

  The lights dimmed, the small period orchestra finished tuning; conversation hushed. The double chorus took the stage in solemn black, and their conductor, Jim Marvin, was all business, with his game face on. At last the six soloists trooped to the front where they had chairs. The postdocs craned their necks. There was the alto, encased in crimson velvet; there, the soprano, draped in midnight silk with startling décolletage and a stole she shook out and straightened as she walked, as a white-breasted bird might settle her blue wings. The solo tenor and the baritone filed to the front, and then the Evangelist. And then at last, Aidan. Glass led the applause, but they all clapped with joy to see Aidan up there as Jesus, so clean and elegant, dressed in white tie instead of animal-facility lab coat, sparkling black dress shoes instead of blue booties.