The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  An hour later Freddy was on a stretcher being brought down the mountain by four men. The clearing was filled with vehicles. The brown cape was thrown into the back of an EMS van. It would end up at the city laundry. Then on the bed of a seven-year-old Mexican girl who had been taken from her mother. But that is another story.

  Ten days later a party gathered at Chez Panisse to eat an early dinner and discuss the events of the past week. There were nine people gathered at Freddy Harwood’s favorite table by the window in the back room. The young man who had seen the flares, the medic, the driver, Nieman, Freddy, Nora Jane, Tammili, Lydia, and a woman biochemist who was after Nieman to marry him. Her name was Stella Light and this was the first time Nieman had taken her out among his friends. It was the first time he had taken her to Chez Panisse and the first time he had introduced her to Nora Jane and Freddy and the twins. Stella Light was dressed in her best clothes, a five-year-old gray pantsuit and a white cotton blouse. She had almost added a yellow scarf but had taken it off minutes after she put it on.

  “We had this magic cape we found under the bed,” Lydia was telling her. “The minute we say something’s magic, it is magic, that’s what Uncle Nieman says. It’s probably his cape but he can’t remember it. He leaves his stuff everywhere. Did you know that? He’s absentminded because he is a genius. Do you go to school with him? Is that how you met him?”

  “Well, I teach in the department. Tell me about the cape.”

  “It kept us warm. Dad thinks it was synchilla. Anyway, it was raining so hard it felt like rocks were falling on us.”

  “It was lightning like crazy,” Tammili added. “There was lightning so near it made halos around the trees.”

  “Tammili!” Freddy shook his head.

  “You don’t know. You were incoherent from pain.”

  “Incoherent?” Stella laughed.

  “She always talks like that,” Lydia said. “It’s Uncle Nieman. He’s been working on our vocabularies since we were born.”

  “I’m having goat cheese pie and salad,” Nieman said. “I think he wants to take our orders. Menus up, ladies. Magic cape, my eye. Magic forest rangers and volunteer distress signal watchers.” He stood up and raised his glass to the medic and the driver and the young man. “To your honor, gentlemen. We salute thee.”

  “To all of us,” Freddy added, raising his glass with his good hand. “My saviors, my family, my friends.”

  Nieman caught Stella’s eye as they drank. A long sweet look that was not lost on Tammili and Lydia. We could be the bridesmaids, Lydia decided. We never get to be in weddings. None of Mom and Dad’s friends ever get married. Pretty soon we’ll be too old to be bridesmaids. It will be too late.

  “Stop it,” Tammili whispered to her sister, pretending to be bending over to pick up a napkin so she wouldn’t be scolded for telling secrets at the table. “Stop wanting that woman to marry Uncle Nieman. Uncle Nieman doesn’t need a girlfriend. He’s got everything he needs. He’s got Mom and Dad and you and me.” When she sat up she batted her eyes at her godfather. Then, for good measure, she got up and walked around the table and gave him a hug and stood by his side. Oh, my God, Stella was thinking. Well, that’s an obstacle that can be overcome. Children are such little beasts nowadays. It makes you want to get your tubes tied.

  “Go back to your chair,” Nora Jane said to her daughter. “Let Uncle Nieman eat his goat cheese pie.”

  The Affair

  Nieman Gluuk was finally going to be taken to bed. Not that he hadn’t had love affairs before. He had had them but they hadn’t meant to him what they mean to most of us. They hadn’t thrown him to the mat. They hadn’t given him a taste of what men kill and die for, dream about. One Stella Light of Salem, Oregon, was going to be the one to do it. Thirty-seven years old, five feet six inches tall, dark haired and dark eyed, a physicist, a biochemist, and a distance runner. A control freak. An expert on viral diseases of poultry. The only child of a high school science teacher and a librarian. A small-breasted woman who had dyed her hair platinum blonde the week before she met Nieman and begun wearing a devastatingly expensive perfume called Joy. Her clock was ticking and her hours staring at photographs taken by electron microscopes had not given her any reason to put off doing anything she wanted to do.

  It is dawn. Stella gets up and makes the bed. She puts on a white T-shirt and a pair of cutoff blue jeans and some high-tech Nike running shoes. She rubs sunblock lotion on her arms and face. She pours a cup of coffee that was made automatically at five o’clock by her combination clock radio and coffeemaker.

  She walks out onto her porch. She surveys the mist that has come in the night before. She imagines the coast of California swaying on its shaky underpinnings. She goes down the stairs and begins to run. In five minutes the endorphins kick in. In five minutes the blood is in her legs instead of her cerebral cortex, and for the only time during the day she is free of thinking, thinking, thinking.

  She runs uphill for a mile, then cuts over to the Berkeley campus. She runs the length of the campus three times, back and forth, and back again. She stops once to pick up a curled leaf that has fallen from a tree. It has been infested with a bole. She scratches the bole open and squints at it, then puts it in the pocket of her shorts. She has been inspecting leaves since she was three years old.

  Nothing surprises Stella. And everything interests her. Of late, she has found herself musing on reproduction more than she thinks is healthy. Leaf, bole, tree, nuts, seeds, eggs. Not to mention the terrible viral splittings on the screens of the microscopes. As Stella runs through the campus she forces her mind to stay in the realm of vertebrates. I should use one of my eggs, her mind keeps repeating. No one else carries Grandfather Bass’s genes. No one else carries Mother’s or Aunt Georgia’s. I am the last. I should go deeper into life. Life is dangerous and awful. Still, it is all we have. I am tired of being perfect. Perhaps I am tired of being alone. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is a trick the hormones play.

  Nieman had been laid before. He had slept with prostitutes and he had slept with a girl from Ohio for five months in 1973. He had slept with a French girl one summer when he and Freddy went to study French at the Sorbonne. What he had not done was fall in love. All he had seen around him were the ruins of love. His parents’ marriage had been a disaster. He barely knew his father. The hundreds of movies he had reviewed and all the books he had read taught him that love was a wasteland, a tornado, an earthquake, a fire. Men and women in love were like children, given over to childlike jealousies and self-loathing and despair.

  When he ran into Stella late one afternoon as they were both leaving the biochemistry building and knocked her papers out of her hand, he had no idea that his life was being changed. He had a premonition, a terrible sense of déjà vu, and so did she, but Nieman thought it was the weather and Stella thought it was because she was about to begin her period.

  “They weren’t numbered,” she said, as she knelt to pick up the papers. “Well, that’s not your fault, is it?”

  “Oh, God, oh, please let me pick them up. Don’t do that. I’m so sorry. Let me help you?”

  “Have we met?” She was kneeling only feet away from him. She was wearing a blue denim skirt, a soft blue shirt, little blue sneakers like you see on sale at the grocery store. She smelled of some heavenly perfume, some odor of divinity. Underneath the shirt was a soft white camisole with lace along the edges. In the center of the camisole was a small pink flower. “I’m having a déjà vu,” she added. “It’s such an odd sensation. I’m probably hungry. I get crazy when I don’t eat. Blood sugar. Oh, well.”

  “That’s dangerous. Let me feed you. Please. Come with me.” He had gathered up the rest of the papers. He stood up. He took her hand and pulled her up beside him. “Please. Come have dinner with me. I’ll help you straighten up the papers. I’m hungry too.”

  “Well, if you’ll go someplace near. How about the Grill across from the library?”

  “Great. I like i
t there. I go there all the time. I’m Nieman Gluuk. I’m a student.”

  “I know who you are. You’re the talk of the department. Did you really quit the paper to study science?”

  “I wish that story hadn’t gotten out. I’m a neophyte. A bare beginner. It’s pitiful how far I have to go.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a booth at the Grill eating French fries and waiting for their omelets. They were telling each other the stories of their lives.

  “So when they quit the Merry Pranksters, they moved back to Salem and had me. They were worried they had fucked up their DNA with all the acid they had done so they had me tested all the time. It turned out I test well. Then they decided I’m a genius. I’m not. I just learned to take the tests. So, out of their relief that I wasn’t an idiot, they turned into the worst bourgeois you can imagine. They collect furniture. You wouldn’t believe the furniture my mom can cram into a room, Danish modern, English antiques . . . Anyway, I like them. They leave me alone, considering I’m an only child. They work for environmental groups and they have a lot of friends. They’re pretty people. Both of them are a lot prettier than I am. I look like my maternal grandfather, who invented dental floss, by the way. He was a dentist in New Orleans.”

  “You’re very pretty. You’re as pretty as you can be. You don’t think you’re pretty?”

  “I’m okay. You ought to see them. They look like early-retirement poster people. So, what set of events made you?”

  “An undependable father and an unhappy mother. No wonder I started going to the movies. She’s a frustrated actress. I grew up thinking the theater was real life.”

  “Well, I’m a fan. I always read your column. I loved the things you wrote. I can’t believe you just quit doing it.”

  “Twenty years. It got so unpleasant at the end. I couldn’t please anyone. Even people I praised didn’t think the praise went far enough. Now I want to know the rest. The things you know. I can’t wait to use an electron microscope.”

  “They haven’t let you use it?”

  “They were supposed to last week, then the class was canceled.”

  “Oh, I know what happened. The Benning-Rohrer was down and we had to double up on the SEM. I’ll show them to you. We can go there after dinner if you like.”

  The waiter appeared and put plates of steaming omelets in front of them. This is not what I thought would happen, Nieman was thinking. Always what you least expect. I already feel the air getting thin. Freddy told me someday this would happen to me but I thought he was projecting.

  Look at that forebrain, Stella was thinking. The cerebral cortex. The verbal skills. I could breed with that, if I am being driven to breed. She sat very still. She picked at her food. She lifted a hand and touched her mouth with her finger.

  “Are you left-handed?” Nieman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I am too.”

  When they had finished eating they walked back across the campus to the biochemistry building and went up to Stella’s office and left the papers, which they had forgotten to put in order, on her desk. Then they went into the laboratory and sat down in the chairs before the scanning electron microscope. “How much do you know?” Stella asked.

  “‘The scanning electron microscope . . . a beam of electrons is scanned over the surface of a solid object and used to build up an image of the details of the surface structure. There are also several special types of electron microscope. Among the most valuable is the electron-probe microanalyzer, which allows a chemical analysis of the composition of materials to be made by using the incident electron beam to excite the emission of characteristic X radiation by the various elements composing the specimen. These X rays are detected and analyzed by spectrometers built into the instrument. Such probe microanalyzers are able to produce an electron-scanning image so that structure and composition may be easily correlated.’”

  “My heavens. How did you do that?”

  “My brand-new Encyclopedia Britannica, Macropaedia, volume twenty-four, page sixty-six. Do you want more?” Nieman was leaned back in the chair. He was smiling. He was almost laughing. He was wearing thin khaki pants. His legs were strong and spread out on the chair.

  “Go on.”

  “‘Fundamental research by many physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century suggested that cathode rays (i.e., electrons) might be used in some way to increase microscopic resolution. Louis de Broglie, a French physicist, in 1924 opened the way with the suggestion that electron beams might be regarded as a form of wave motion. De Broglie derived the formula for their wavelength, which showed, for example, that, for electrons accelerated by sixty-thousand volts, the effective wavelength . . .’ What? Why are you laughing?”

  “Photographic memory?”

  “Of course. It’s selective, and I have to be interested in something to imprint it. I’ve seen movies I can’t remember at all. That was a test. If I couldn’t remember them, I didn’t review them.”

  Stella was looking at his pants. He sat up straighter in the chair. He pulled his legs together. He coughed. “‘The electron image must be made visible to the eye by allowing the electrons to fall on a fluorescent screen. Such a screen is satisfactory for quick observations and for focusing and aligning the instrument. A low-power binocular optical microscope fitted outside the column allows the flower on the screen, I mean the image on the screen, to be inspected at a magnification of about ten magnitudes. . . .’”

  “You want to see the AIDS virus?” Stella asked. She pulled a box of slides from a drawer and inserted one into a locked compartment at the base of the instrument. “This is the virus on a human T-cell. I really hate this slide.” She pushed a button and the lights came on the screen. Then an image appeared. Long tubular cells covered with watery stars of death.

  “I’ve been to one hundred and seven funerals since this thing started,” Nieman said. “Have you been tested?”

  “Dozens of times. This job has its drawbacks. I essentially hate viruses. I’m not one of those biologists who love nature. Nature is not on our side. It’s always trying to take us back. I’m for the higher mammals straight out. How about you? Have you been tested?”

  “My dentist tested me. He never called me back so I assumed I was all right. How accurate do you think the tests are?” Nieman leaned forward to study the screen. It was terrible to behold. “Cut it off,” he said and went back to looking at the flower in the center of the camisole under Stella’s blouse.

  Stella pressed a button. The screen went blank. The room was quiet. The overwhelming sense of déjà vu returned.

  “I keep thinking I’ve been here before,” Nieman said. “In this room with you. It’s the damnedest thing.”

  “I feel it too,” she answered. “I’m thirty-seven. I keep thinking about breeding. It’s probably hormonal. We are primates, don’t forget that.” She turned around on the swivel chair and looked at him.

  “Should we resign ourselves to that?”

  “We could welcome it.”

  “You think so?” Nieman stood up. “There it is again,” he said. “It’s the damnedest thing. Déjà vu, it means already seen. Of course we must have met somewhere. Then, of course, the gene pool is wide. These things might be chemical. See, I’m beginning to think like one of you.” He smiled down at her and she reached up and touched, first his sleeve, then his hand. She didn’t take his hand or grab it. She brushed her fingers across the back of his hand, then left them only inches away from him. “I don’t have much experience with women, sexually, that is.” Nieman kept on smiling at her and at himself, at the strangeness of the moment, the silliness and divinity of it. “But I haven’t given up on myself. I’d like to have an affair with someone, something that mattered, that might matter to them also. Am I out of line here? You can hit me or dismiss me.”

  “I haven’t had a lover in three years. If I had a love affair I’d be the inexperienced one. I always
start thinking what I’m doing is funny. Not the sexual part, per se, you know, but the thing entire, as it were. Well, what are we talking about here?”

  “I think we are saying we like each other more than ordinary. I am saying that. I am saying, would you imagine some day, in your time, on your terms, having me as a candidate for a lover?”

  “We could get an AIDS test in the morning and have the results back in a day. Then, if we still wanted to, we could explore this further. I have some time after my nine o’clock class.” She went on and put her hands on his hands. “I’ll admit this is partly about your verbal skills.”

  “For me it’s the flower on your undershirt and your Ph.D.” Nieman laughed. “Or the electrical systems in this building are affecting our brains. Tell me where to meet you. I’ll be there.”

  “Would we really do this?”

  “I think we are doing it. In my old life I always maintained that thought was action. So the question is: Would we actually carry it out?”

  “It’s what the young people do, but not the first time they knock the papers out of someone’s hands.”

  “How long do they wait?”

  “I think three days. I heard three days from someone who was confessing something to me. I’m a student adviser part time.”

  “Then grown people only have to wait one day because we have a shorter time to live.”

  “That’s a theory? Shall we leave now?”

  “I suppose we should. Let me help you turn things off.”

  “All right. The switches are on the wall.” They turned off the lights in the laboratory and walked to the elevator holding hands. They went down on the elevator and Nieman walked her to her car. “What time in the morning?” he asked.

  “You’re serious?”

  “More than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “Do you know where the student health center is now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meet me there at quarter past ten.” It was very still in the tree-bordered parking lot. The earth smelled like birth and death and love. There were stars in the sky and a new moon above the physics building. Luckily they were both intuitive, feeling types. A sensate might have swooned.