Intuition

by Allegra Goodman

  “I don't need everyone to like me,” Robin retorted. “I just miss my friends.”

  “They couldn't have been real friends,” said Nanette.

  “They were,” Robin said sadly. They had been real friends, but she had offended their deepest beliefs. She was a heretic, for she'd lost her faith in the natural selection of ideas.

  “Two for The Witches of Eastwick,” said Nanette, and then, to Robin, “Who are you kidding? You can't move; you've got a rent-controlled apartment.”

  “I don't know if I'm going to have a job much longer, either.”

  “What, Uppington's firing you?”

  “No, but I don't think he can come up with a full-time position for me.”

  “Didn't he promise?”

  She shook her head. He'd hinted, he'd suggested—he'd apologized, of course. “I'm terribly sorry, Robin,” he'd told her. “But I just don't have the funding for you right now.” And she was beginning to understand that he never would.

  “Stop moping,” Nanette ordered. “One large popcorn,” she told the kid at the candy counter. “Of course with topping. Do you want a drink?” she asked Robin, and then, “Do you have any cash?”

  Carrying their popcorn, icy drinks, and straws, they padded down red-carpeted passageways into the underground theater and found two seats close to the screen.

  “Why don't you just wear glasses?” Robin grumbled as they sank down into their chairs.

  “Why don't you just apply for a new position and get it over with?” Nanette retorted. “And by the way,” she added, “I don't need glasses. I prefer to sit close so that I will be enveloped by the picture.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Robin.

  “Ginsburg has a job opening,” Nanette said. “Akira told me he's looking for a new postdoc.”

  “Do you get all your information from Akira?”

  “Well, he should know,” said Nanette, eyes on the screen as she watched the trailer for Raising Arizona. “Let's go see that.”

  “What do you mean, he should know?”

  “Well, he lives with the man. He should know if he's hiring.”

  “He lives with him? He lives with Ginsburg?”

  “Shh! You didn't know that?”

  “No, you never told me that.”

  “Oh, Robin.” Nanette sighed. “Do I have to spell it all out for you?”

  “I'm sorry, I thought he was just—”

  “Hey, keep your voice down,” whispered Nanette, who had great reverence for the movies. “It's starting.”

  “He is so creepy,” Robin whispered back. “I could never work for him.”

  Nanette shook her head and reached for more popcorn. She adored Robin, but her friend had a deficiency—she lacked a certain cynical gene. She couldn't just laugh or excuse people for what they'd done. Of course, this cynical deficiency had enabled Robin to bring an entire laboratory to its knees. Nanette highly respected and enjoyed her for that. Robin's judicial experiments were brilliant, and they wouldn't have worked for a normal person. A researcher with an ordinary tolerance for absurdity, injustice, and dissembling never could have pushed her case so far. But how Nanette wished she could supply Robin with some cynicism, how she wished she could just help Robin lighten up and laugh.

  “Oh, don't be ridiculous,” she told Robin now. “No one ever said you had to live with him too.”

  That fall, whispering ruffled Cliff everywhere he went. Of course, there had been whispering before, but the jealous talk was latent. Now, in the aftermath of the ORIS inquiry, without confirmation of his findings in other labs, dry rumors and withered expectations brushed him at every turn. There was trouble with R-7 at Stanford and Cornell. In other labs, in other hands, his glorious results were just not panning out. Surely there was something wrong. Weren't his results supposed to be the next big thing? Or had there been a grain of truth in Robin's accusations? Beth had heard some people speaking snidely about his work. Prithwish nearly came to blows defending him against a couple of guys from the second floor.

  “How's the paper coming?” sniped one of the postdocs as they unlocked their bikes from the racks in front of the building.

  “Just wait,” Prithwish shot back.

  “Don't answer them,” Cliff warned.

  “Wait for what?”

  “How long?”

  “You'll see,” Prithwish shouted, and got a little tangled in his tenses, as he did when he was angriest. “And we will see who will be laughing now.”

  If only “now” would finally arrive. Cliff longed to silence all his critics with some new success. He was miserable with his need for new results, but he could not produce them from thin air; he could not solve every problem instantaneously.

  He willed himself success even greater than he'd had before, but suddenly every aspect of his work was problematic, from the new cell line he was using to the size of his needles. The woman who had replaced Billie was young and inexperienced, and he continually did her work over again. When he complained of Francesca's incompetence, however, Marion responded with stony silence.

  She and Sandy no longer treated him like a junior colleague. They rarely called him into their office to discuss R-7 anymore. Their public loyalty had been unflagging, but the two of them were weary now, and far less generous in private than they had been during the hearings. Marion was particularly cold, and he suffered from her terse commands. She asked him to do myriad small tasks, even while she expected him to continue and somehow solve all the open questions raised by his past research.

  “If the mice are relapsing,” she snapped, “it's up to you to find out why.”

  “I realize that,” he told her, “but it's going to take time. My cells aren't ready, I've had almost no support for the past six weeks—”

  “I don't care,” she said. They were standing together next to a microscope and she spoke in a low voice so that Francesca couldn't hear. “I don't want to hear excuses.”

  “You told me Feng was going to help me,” Cliff protested. “Where is he?”

  He hadn't meant to anger her, only to defend himself, but when he mentioned Feng she turned on him. “This is your work,” she hissed. “This is your project, and you had no trouble acknowledging that when the work was going well. This is your discovery, and your career.”

  “I realize that.”

  “And therefore . . .”

  He stood before her in confusion. Did she mean for him to finish her sentence? She left him hanging, but he dared not speak.

  “Therefore,” she said, “you are responsible.”

  “He has not been all he could have been,” Marion told Sandy. They were walking again, up and down Oxford Street. The sky was overcast on that November day, and Marion had insisted on bringing her umbrella, which, as Sandy said, never failed to ward off showers. “He has not done everything I might have hoped.”

  Sandy shrugged. “Well, could have been, should have been—it's no use wasting time on that.”

  “No, I don't think you understand,” she said slowly. “I've given this a lot of thought. I've considered all the problems and confusions and ambiguities in his work. I've gone over everything in my mind—and I think Cliff's results were rushed, and that our conclusions were aggressive. We published too soon; there wasn't enough there. His findings were too thin to support such an ambitious research program.”

  “His findings got us major funding,” Sandy reminded her.

  “And given the current situation, I'm not sure they deserved a federal research grant.”

  “Well, the NIH thought otherwise,” Sandy said. “Even if they'd like that money back again.”

  “Maybe we should give them the money back,” said Marion.

  “What are you talking about? This is a research grant for open-ended work, not a government contract for manufacturing widgets. Research means risk; it means exploration, not delivery of specified results. We presented Cliff's work as an example of the kind of thing we might achieve.”

&
nbsp; “But we didn't know enough—he didn't know himself how much R-7 could do. There were too many questions.”

  “Marion, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you try to answer every question before presenting your work or publishing or applying for funding, you will get absolutely nothing done.”

  She prodded the sidewalk with the tip of her umbrella. “This was too quick, Sandy. We were opportunistic in our approach.”

  “Marion.”

  “I blame myself for putting so much pressure on Cliff to produce.”

  “He put pressure on himself,” Sandy countered.

  “He lied.”

  At last she'd said it. She'd said the words aloud. She and Sandy stood face-to-face with the accusation between them. She knew he would object and chide her for losing faith. She knew he'd think she was a coward, and dreaded his reproach for caving to the forces arrayed against them. She hated to leave him standing alone in support of a research program increasingly unpopular and unworkable. Still, she had to speak. He was her closest friend, her partner, and if they were to work together, she could not keep ideas from him. They could not strategize or collaborate at all if she did not confess her change of heart. “I think he may in fact have suppressed some data,” she said, “and exaggerated in other cases. He may have cut corners in his procedures, and particularly his dissections. I think his record keeping might have been poor because at times there was nothing there to record.”

  “It's all possible,” Sandy conceded coolly.

  She studied his face. She imagined this was one of his rhetorical gambits, and waited for him to continue and tell her how in fact this could not have been the case. But he paused, and she realized to her surprise that he was not far from agreeing with her. “We have to let him go,” she said.

  He nodded, and she sighed with relief. He was with her, then. The tension left her face as she allowed herself her beautiful, rare smile.

  “But,” he added, “he will not leave until we win our appeal.”

  “You aren't serious,” she said.

  “I'm completely serious. How do you think it would look if we let him go now? We'd be conceding everything to ORIS—allowing them to ride roughshod over our good name, and those of any other researchers that take their fancy.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Marion, Redfield doesn't care for subtleties. He doesn't make distinctions between one misleading postdoc and wholesale fraud. He wants us as his test case for scientific corruption in America, and he won't have us. We don't deserve it. We won't be punished for being lied to.”

  “We are responsible for what happens in our own lab,” said Marion.

  “Maybe our postdoc was unworthy of our trust. Maybe he didn't deserve our defense,” Sandy told her. “Those are still open questions. The point is, he stays until the end of the inquiry. After that, the decisions we make about him are our business.”

  How cold he was. His pragmatism stunned her. Had he always been so single-minded and calculating? She could not help thinking less of Sandy to hear him talk this way. But then she thought less of herself, as well, for engaging in such a conversation, for listening to him and scarcely arguing. She wondered how much she'd ever truly argued with him. She'd always enjoyed their debates, but in the end, who dominated their decisions? Hadn't he used her all these years? Hadn't he appropriated her research program? If that was true, she confessed to herself that she had used him as well. She'd depended on him to do the dirty work she wouldn't deign to touch herself: the politics, the scientific skirmishing, and ultimately, the ambitious overreaching for hot topics and newsworthy results. Agnostic that she was, she'd leaned on him for his scientific faith. She had never considered how pure that faith had been, flaming so strong with such scant data to support him.

  “Don't look at me like that,” he said.

  He knew she disapproved of him for speaking frankly, and he was sorry, but abandoning ship was not an option. He simply could not allow Marion an admission of defeat. She was impractical—and this was both her strength and her weakness. She never considered appearances. She was angry at him, but he was the one who had to make the best of the situation. He was the one who would salvage what they had and prepare the lab for future work.

  All that cold, drizzling month Sandy went about his business, meeting with Houghton-Smith, soothing Peter Hawking, waiting busily for the results of the appeal. He was good at shielding himself from unpleasant emotions, but not from Marion. They'd been too close, and he admired her too much; he was devastated to lose her good opinion.

  A chill came over them. When they were alone, they had trouble speaking to each other. They had worked together so long and survived so much, that they had never imagined anything would change. Now this conflict over Cliff finally estranged them. Silently they opposed each other: Marion insisting they confront Cliff, Sandy insisting that they wait. Their partnership was such that neither openly struck out at the other. Sandy never chastised Marion publicly, and Marion did not castigate Cliff in private. Their position was already precarious, and Sandy and Marion knew their strength as a united front. They would not betray the rift between them. They were so careful with each other that their new postdocs scarcely noticed anything was wrong. Only the old hands, Cliff and Feng and Prithwish, Aidan and Natalya, felt the stiffness and the strain.

  At home, their families sensed a sea change. Marion spoke bitterly to Jacob of Sandy's admonitions, his Machiavellian approach to science, his pettiness, his constant focus on funding and politics and presentation. “He's never considered content important,” she told Jacob. “He's never valued research for its own sake—only for the publicity the lab can get. It's a game for him. Science is just his game—and I was a fool not to understand that.”

  And Jacob listened to her rant, and shook his head, and poured her coffee, but never smiled or said I told you so.

  Ann noticed the estrangement too, because Sandy would not talk about Marion at all. He refused to speak of her, or even to hear her name. When Ann asked how Marion was, he ignored the question, or answered pettishly, “She's just the same as she's always been.”

  At Thanksgiving, Kate was surprised to see there were no places set for Marion, Jacob, and Aaron.

  “They've gone to Florida,” Louisa said.

  “To Florida? Why?”

  “Cousins,” said Louisa.

  “They never went to see cousins before,” said Kate.

  “She and Dad had a falling-out,” Louisa told her.

  “She and Dad?” Kate asked.

  “I know,” said Charlotte mischievously. “How could they ever have a falling-out?”

  The table was set, the butter melting on their squares of corn bread, and Sandy had just finished carving the turkey, when his beeper went off and he was called to the hospital for an emergency. Then they'd helped their mother put away the perishables and wrapped the platter of turkey in foil. He was supposed to be back in an hour, and it would probably be longer, but the food would keep. They were all used to such delays.

  The afternoon was long and quiet. Ann retreated to her study, desperate to get a little work done. In the living room, the girls spoke softly so she wouldn't overhear.

  “They might lose the appeal,” Louisa told Kate. “It's not going well. That's why the two of them aren't getting along.”

  “But they won't lose,” said Kate.

  “It's possible,” Charlotte said. “Cliff's work isn't standing up.”

  “Who told you that?” Kate challenged Charlotte.

  “Mom,” said Charlotte.

  “I don't believe it.”

  Charlotte stretched out on the couch. “So now Dad thinks Cliff probably did do some things wrong.”

  Kate shook her head. “But that's not true,” she said.

  “Why? Because you have such a crush on him?” Charlotte teased.

  “I do not have a crush on him! I never did. I never liked him,” Kate lied, but to no avail. They were both laughin
g at her, throwing pillows at her from the couch and leather reading chair, and Kate could only cover her head with her arms and plead with them to stop. Ducking down, she closed her eyes in embarrassment and confusion. She had never imagined Cliff as anything but innocent, and certainly never dreamed he'd do anything to deceive. She remembered the first time she'd met him—how charming he had been, and how miserable. How he'd said he really, really liked research. She remembered his eager interest in John Donne's poetry, and his request for a literary quotation for his paper. She remembered every word he'd ever said to her, and every smile he'd bestowed. But particularly she remembered his quiet desperation. He'd been like a soldier that way—a handsome soldier of the First World War, desperate to escape the trenches, questioning the very meaning of the conflict. She was abashed to think how she had enjoyed him for that, for his pain, for the agonizing drudgery of his work, for suffering in the lab under her father. And suddenly, to her horror, she could imagine him cheating his way to great results. He'd wanted to escape and to transform himself; he hated his work; he'd hated the sameness of it all and had come to think there was never any end. He'd despaired of succeeding the hard way, been bored to death by the realities of his position. Always, he'd been flirting with giving science up and choosing art.

  Marion could not work like this. She'd held her fire for two weeks, thought carefully about everything Sandy had said, and considered every cost. She could not continue to work with someone dishonest, nor could she let her suspicions build without allowing Cliff an opportunity to defend himself. She knew that confronting Cliff would further damage her partnership with Sandy, and she knew that any actions she took against Cliff now could damage the appeal irreparably. Even so, she would test her hypothesis. She would speak to him alone.

  She plucked him out of the lab one morning long before Sandy was due in, and she sat him down in her office and said, “I want to know what happened.”