Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  Back at his own car, for an instant he imagined himself running up the stairs and embracing Rosemarie, holding tight to her forever.

  But he saw the bicycle on her front lawn and how dark, how dark her house was, and he turned away.

  ARTIFACT

  For Jo

  She did not want to disturb the rats. Breathing “Lullaby, and good night,” trying to keep the wire cage in her arms steady, she walked down the dimly lit hall. The lab equipment was turned off for the weekend and there was no sound except for the soft, slapping noise of her slippers and her low song. Occasionally a rat lifted his head and sniffed the air.

  Lottie worked in a pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt her gross anatomy class had given her, which showed the muscles of the chest and back labeled in Latin. Her hair was piled up on top of her head with a lab clamp.

  The radio said it was the hottest August night since 1983. On the highways to Long Island and the Jersey Shore the traffic had been bumper to bumper all day, the cars bulging with sun umbrellas, baby carriages, bicycles tied to roofs. After dinner when she took a break to walk toward Central Park in search of a breeze, the close streets seemed to her vacant and forlorn. The charged life of the city dimmed in August. Most of her colleagues were on vacation; during the day a few technicians came in, the department secretary, occasionally a worried graduate student.

  She liked being alone in her lab in the hushed city, undisturbed by the rhythms of others, a pleasure she didn’t experience often now that she had small children again. Simon was two and Davy was six, and they were wild bucking things. Her eighteen-year-old, Lila, usually had friends over; they sat in Lottie’s study working on her computer or making clothes for college on her sewing machine. Her husband, Jake, had private music students weekday afternoons and on Saturdays. And in August his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, blew in from LA like a small high-pressure front. She danced and cooked for her dad, ignoring the boys and taking jabs and pokes at her stepmother. Lottie tried to schedule a major experiment every August.

  On the counter the caged rats shifted restlessly in the moonlight.

  She switched on the tensor lamp at the dissecting table and the light above the sink, tied herself into an old surgical gown, drew on a workman’s glove, and ran the cold water. She slipped open the lid of a cage, gripped the nearest quivering animal, and lifted it out. She raised the paper-cutter blade and positioned the animal’s head on the platform, his squirming body just off the edge. His pink feet kicked the air. He began defecating black pellets, urinating in spasms on her glove. She brought the blade down, crunching through the bottom of his neck. The head lay on the platform. Lottie held tight to the body, which continued to struggle, spraying blood through the open neck. Her cheek was suddenly wet. Thrusting the body under the cold water, she held on until it quieted and stopped. Then she dumped it into a plastic bag and laid the head on the dissecting table. She shook the glove off and, taking up the scalpel and forceps, dissected out the sublingual and submandibular salivary glands, easing them into a beaker of fixative. She washed her face and reached into the cage for the next rat.

  She liked to set a rhythm, do what had to be done steadily and speedily. The smell of blood was in the room now and the rats knew. They squawked even before she reached for them and no matter how firmly she held on, they wouldn’t lie still. In the air-conditioned room she was sweating.

  Lottie had been intermittently irritable the last few months, ever since a microscopy journal that had solicited a paper from her had sent it back for extensive revisions. She had developed new techniques for spotlighting each organelle of a particular cell in the salivary gland, the function of which no one understood, although it was implicated in several diseases, one of them fatal.

  The journal’s referees had savaged her paper, from the typing to the heart of the work: she was not describing the actual cell at all, nor the real components of the mucus, but only the distortions created by the very techniques she was advocating. One critic finished up:

  This paper is not acceptable for publication since it is replete with accidental and random findings. It is no more than a collection of artifacts.

  She read the lines twice, then crushed the reports into a ball and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of her desk.

  A month later a small grant proposal of hers was rejected. A colleague said, if only she’d cited a few of the committee members’ papers, or had had key people and their wives over for drinks …

  The following week her chair phoned her. He had heard about the grant and thought it was unjust. She was one of the most productive people in the department, with a bibliography second in length and quality only to his own. The graduate students stood on line for her seminar. She was innovative, she was creative. Unfortunately, he had bad news for her himself.

  “No raise,” Lottie said.

  He was terribly sorry. She must be aware she was on a frozen budget line. Actually they were all small animals caught in a glacier, if he could speak for a moment from the paleontological point of view. The city was cutting back, the NIH was tightening its belt, there was nothing he could do. Next year it would be a different ball game; she could rest assured he’d go to bat for her then.

  It was the third year he’d handed her that wilted bunch of metaphors and her husband told her to sue. “It’s discrimination against women and you’re just sitting back and taking it.” He cited a well-known microbiologist, a woman, who’d said in a recent New York Times article, “Women scientists have two choices: bitterness or foolishness.”

  Lottie said she wasn’t famous enough to make resounding judgments, and if she let herself get involved with lawyers, she wouldn’t get her work done.

  Jake said, “At least go to the grievance committee. There must be a grievance committee. We need the money.”

  “I’m not licking ass.”

  “Who asked you to lick ass? Go in and yell. You’re not yelling, you only yell at me.”

  Her paper was never far from her mind. The editor had heard her deliver it at the cell biology meetings in Cincinnati six months earlier. The referees were independent of him; still there shouldn’t be such a disparity in their opinions. Could her oral presentation have been so much better than her written one?

  Her papers were almost always published, but they were invariably sent back for rewriting. Meticulous in conceptualizing problems and running experiments, she was impatient when it came to presenting results, as if to linger over the final draft made her a cosmetician or an interior decorator, not a scientist. In her diagrams she rarely labeled everything that needed labeling; she expected her typists to correct her misspellings and not add any of their own; and she wrote up her conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. Many of her colleagues took some obvious point and polished it up, surrounded it with five or six true but tried ideas that were in the public domain, then passed off this rearrangement as dazzling new stuff. She came with the real thing in a crumpled brown wrapper. And she did it obstinately, insisting to herself that there was virtue in such a presentation.

  One evening in June she took the paper ball out of the drawer she’d buried it in. As she unfolded and smoothed out the sheets on her desk, the sound in the still lab was like a crackling fire.

  There are quite a number of typing errors, etc., which I have marked in pencil … A significant problem with this paper is that the description of the author’s methodologies is far too skimpy. We are not told the source of the glutaraldehyde; the osmolality of the individual fixatives; the length of time these were applied.

  Skimming over the pages, she saw that many of the objections were of this order, but one referee had a major substantive disagreement. Her point had been that different fixatives and buffers preserved different aspects of the cell, just as various experiences brought out various aspects of a human being: with a cell, one could choose a fixative and buffer according to which aspects one hoped to illuminate. The referee wanted her to use other fixatives and buffe
rs, claiming that hers damaged the cell contents while the ones he suggested would preserve them “correctly.” She knew they would just do different damage. It was as if he believed that there was a proper way of looking at a cell.

  Another referee objected to her manner of sacrificing rats. She had killed them first and then dissected out the salivary glands and placed them in fixative. This referee thought that in the few minutes between death and the fixative, the glands underwent permanent distorting changes and hence what she had reported was “mere artifact.” He wanted her to inject the fixative into the living animals. Early on, before deciding on her current method, she had in fact killed a few rats by fixing them alive. The results were no more “natural” and the technique took more time and was more unpleasant.

  To get the paper published, at least in this journal, she would have to run the whole experiment again, probably several times, killing rats in a variety of ways, using a number of unnecessary fixatives. It would be tedious. She was working on another project. Rats didn’t grow on trees, nor did technician time. Her chest tightened as she thought of going to the university treasurer, that cheery bureaucrat, justifying the cost of each rat to him, putting her crumpled referees’ reports in his hands. She felt like punching someone.

  In the end she phoned her chair and cajoled and shamed him into giving her the money out of the department slush fund.

  Then she typed each of the referees’ objections on a separate sheet of paper and taped them up on her lab walls. As the results came in, she posted them in black on the sheets if the referees were right, in red magic marker if she was right. Her handwriting was large and flowery, full of swirls and curlicues, and she often had to add several pages to the original one in order to fit everything in. By the end of July, the walls were festooned with poinsettias and bright clusters of holly berries; the place looked like Christmas. She had two colleagues check her work, although she intended to run the experiment once more in August. Lottie cheered up.

  She found herself imagining bits of letters to the editor who had twice urged her to revise and resubmit. She had her hand in the hot tub water, testing it for her sons:

  I regret not answering earlier but I have been immersed in an important experiment.

  The boys, covered with washable finger paints and standing by with gunboats and water pistols, jumped in and sent the water level over the top.

  I have not answered sooner because I have been flooded with requests for this particular paper and am considering sending it to the International Journal of Cell Research instead.

  As she bathed her boisterous blue-and-yellow sons, she refuted each objection the anonymous referees had made. She scrubbed and rubbed and rinsed them back to flesh color. She toweled them dry and handed them over to her husband, then sat down at the computer and shot off a letter to that editor:

  Beyond all the verification and justification of my techniques are two issues which are fundamental. The first is the whole point of the paper, which the reviewers seem to have missed: namely, that there is no “correct” morphology of the granules in this gland, but rather that the fixative, buffer, and additive combination will determine which constituents will be preserved, which destroyed. The other issue is philosophical and has to do with the concept of artifact. It should be clear to anyone with experience in this business that all one ever deals with is artifact, and that one’s skills in creating and interpreting artifact are largely the measure of one’s abilities as a morphologist/scientist. From my perspective the issue is not, is a given structure artifact? But rather, can the conditions under which a given artifact is produced provide information about the actual nature of a particular organism which cannot be analyzed in its natural form? We are dealing with a biological equivalent of the uncertainty principle, and all fine-structural morphologists and cytochemists should be aware of that.

  Jake brought her a cold glass of seltzer with a piece of lime.

  “Everyone asleep?” she said.

  “You kidding?” He kissed his wife’s damp forehead. “Tell me when you’re done,” he said. “All the stars are out.”

  The night watchman had come and gone. Lottie took off her gown and put it in a shopping bag along with a dirty lab coat and a pair of thick socks she’d had around since the winter; she would run them through the washing machine at home. She usually did the lab wash late at night or early in the morning when the kids were asleep; she didn’t like them getting a look or a whiff. Although she’d sponged down the countertops twice, the room still smelled of blood and urine and fixative. She washed the counters again. Not cautious by nature, in the lab she was painstaking and unforgiving with those who were not. A graduate student had once left a highly corrosive solution in an open beaker and the janitor had knocked it over and then mopped it up with paper towels; he needed skin grafting on his fingers. The day after she visited the janitor in the hospital, Lottie told the student she wouldn’t work with him anymore, and he had to get a new thesis topic and adviser.

  She carried the plastic garbage bag of rat parts into the cold room. Except for a few cats and a rare monkey, most of the black bags here contained rat corpses—rats who’d had tumors implanted in their heads, who’d breathed in cigarette smoke every hour of their short lives, who’d eaten their weight in saccharin and sodium nitrates, who’d had their fetuses androgenized and estrogenized in utero. She thought what unimaginable, un-rat-like destinies these animals had had—we should build a monument to them in every city.

  Strands of hair escaped from her makeshift upsweep. She tried to blow them away, not wanting to touch her hands to her face. She locked her lab and went to the on-call room, where she showered.

  The clean hot water pounding away at her, she looked at her body with some curiosity and no great sense of familiarity, as if she were a cadaver for the medical students. They’d be lucky to get a forty-year-old woman only a few pounds overweight—five pounds? ten? (fat was the enemy of the anatomist, making the field slippery, infiltrating the organs)—with all the main structures in place, nothing worse than a few burns and discolorations on her hands, some gleaming stretch marks on her (still fairly taut) breasts and belly, one long white caesarean scar from her last-born, Simon, who had gone into fetal distress and had had to be scooped out in a hurry. She still worried about him. He was a lively child, always poking around, trying to be as grown-up as his four-years-older brother, and often ending up in trouble. He probably started some intrauterine exploration and got tangled in his umbilical cord. She worried less about Davy. Very smart, he wasn’t as malleable, as open, as Simon. But perhaps Davy was the more sensitive of the two and it was because his feelings were so easily hurt that he’d become a little impatient and dogmatic. At six he didn’t like ambiguity, he hated not catching on at once, and he clearly preferred teaching to learning. He had lately become very much attached to Jake, imitating the way he walked and talked, and showing a special interest in music.

  Lottie wondered sometimes what would happen to these children of hers—not Lila, who was nearly grown up, but these little ones. Lottie was forty and Jake was forty-one. When you had children in your twenties, it could cross your mind you might not stay together, but you took for granted that you’d both be on earth for all time. Jake’s father had died of cancer at forty-one.

  Outside the night was hot and airless, as if someone had sucked the atmosphere out of the city with a pump. She carried her laundry bag past the sleeping attendant, a black man in his fifties whose wife had died of leukemia a few months earlier. He sat slack in a folding chair on the sidewalk, all bones and dark hollows, like a reamed-out, abandoned mine. As she tried to ease the old station wagon out of the lot without disturbing him, it backfired sharply—an ominous sound in the city night. The man sprang to embarrassed attention and called out “Night, doc,” after her disappearing car. And she cursed Jake, who’d promised to get it fixed, then cursed their finances.

  She drove up Amsterdam Avenue, past the dark build
ings of Columbia University. It was two thirty in the morning and the stores were dark and gated. Turning with relief onto the West Side Highway, she increased her speed, the dense city receding and thinning out, the Hudson River interposing itself between her and the Palisades, giving her a sudden sense of space and view. In the approaching distance the bridge was two blue-studded mountain peaks that sloped to form a valley between them. Wet warm air was forced in the open windows as she continued to accelerate, an automobile-made breeze: her air conditioner had died a month ago. Few cars passed. In the steamy night, alone on the empty highway, she drove a car cluttered with baby bottles, M&M wrappers, animal crackers, a tube of Lila’s candy-pink lipstick, crumpled sheets of music.

  Besides her own sizable family, she was accountable for two technicians and three doctoral candidates who were writing theses under her. One of them she had inherited a few months ago from a colleague who’d died. The young man was an abysmal student from Haiti, that tormented country. He had been eight years in the department without bringing his thesis and defense of it to a satisfactory conclusion. Lottie had had dinner at his dingy flat in East Harlem. All evening his wife and six children had tried desperately to please her. Lottie attempted to engage one young boy in a game of pickup sticks but his hands trembled so that they had to quit.

  Less troubling but equally binding were her obligations to teach the medical students, to sit on various committees, and to publish.

  When all of this had come upon her she didn’t know—slowly, imperceptibly, over time, she supposed, like a pound or two gained every year but overlooked, until suddenly one day, for no apparent reason, she came face to face with herself in an inner mirror and saw with surprise a very substantial figure, responsible, solid, a matron. Who, me, Lottie?