“Well, yes, you could, but it’s my project.”
“But it’s not your name, Wallace, on the paper, is it? It’s not your thesis.”
“My name is on the paper.”
“As third author.”
“Yeah, well, it’s still my name. It’s still my work.”
“But you don’t really . . . you aren’t really . . .” Katie isn’t exactly frowning at him. She isn’t exactly glaring at him. Wallace knows she is trying merely to get to the heart of something that is confusing to her, that she cannot understand. It’s the look of someone sifting through their thoughts, turning things over. What she wants to say, he can tell, is that he isn’t working hard enough, that his dedication is lacking in some way. She is trying, in her own way, to say this as gently and kindly as possible.
“It’s my work,” he says. “It’s my work, Katie. And I’m doing my best. And if that isn’t fast enough for you, then I’m sorry.”
“Right, that’s fine, but you can’t just take your time when other people’s work is on the line, Wallace.”
“I’m not taking my time. I’m doing my work,” he says. “I’m doing what I can.”
“Well, I think sometimes you have to step aside when your best isn’t enough. Like, objectively, if you aren’t cutting it, then it’s selfish to stay in the way.”
“Am I in your way, Katie? Is that how you feel?”
Katie does not say anything to him. She does not look at him. She is leaning fully against the bench now and has crossed her feet. There is a repetitive banging in the other part of the lab, the rattle of glassware. Water running. Wallace feels cold. His fingers are stiff.
If he is in Katie’s way, then he will step aside. If he is in Katie’s way, then he will give her what she wants. But she knows as well as he does that the fact that she can perform the experiment better and faster does not mean she has time to do his work in addition to her own. There was a reason the larger project had been divided this way, Wallace taking on the technical work while Katie performed the more rigorous line of experimentation: because she could not do it all. There comes a time when you have to acknowledge your limitations, that the capacity to do something is not a mandate to do it. She is frustrated by this. It’s all over her face, the irritation. She sighs.
“Let’s just get this shit done—I’m tired of waiting,” she says, turning. “Get it done, Wallace.”
“All right,” he says. Her words sting. His head hurts. The lab is piercingly bright. What to do? He scarcely has time to think before Simone emerges from the small break room. When she sees him, she turns and approaches him.
“Wallace,” she says, voice raspy and inexplicably southern, “do you have a moment?”
“Sure,” he says. “Sure.”
“Perfect,” she says, smiling now. “Let’s go to my office.”
Simone’s office is on a corner. It has a view of the bridge in the distance and a row of small but robust trees. There is a juniper bush too, and from this height the tennis courts and even a sliver of lake are visible. The office itself is open and white. There are books and papers scattered over her desk, but it feels tidy, neatly arranged, everything sorted into its particular order. Simone is tall. She has a fondness for crisp lines. Her hair is a stylish bob, and her glasses are prim, like those of a librarian in a cartoon. She pulls a chair aside for Wallace, and she takes one opposite him, crossing her legs.
“So, Wallace,” she says, opening her arms a little. “I hear it’s been rough.”
He takes his time answering that opening gambit. If he agrees too quickly, she will thrust it into his chest. If he deflects it entirely, she will call his bluff, conjure up covert intel from Dana and Katie and others in the lab, or from peers or professors, an unseen army of spies observing his every move. She’s wearing a look of sympathetic grace, waiting.
“It’s been a time,” he says, smiling, trying to match her breezy concern.
“Tell me all about it. I’m sorry I’ve been gone.” Where has she been? Copenhagen, or London. She has an apartment in Paris with her husband, Jean-Michel, who is American but French by birth. There are long parts of the year when Simone is absent from his life. She travels often, giving seminars and talks both on her research—the research of the lab—and on the nature of science itself. She is a bit of an evangelist in this way, and Wallace can certainly understand why. She is good at making you feel like the center of the world, like your concerns, no matter how trivial, are worthy of consideration. The problem, however, is that the same gravity is given to your flaws, no matter how minor. Except for Dana, he thinks, who seems immune to the flip side of Simone’s attention.
“It’s just been pretty messy, I think. My experiments—”
“Yes, your stocks were contaminated.”
“Right. And I lost the summer’s data.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” she says, frowning. “I’m so sorry to hear that it’s been hard for you.”
“It’s okay,” he says reflexively. She puts her hands around her knees and nods slowly several times.
“I got an email from Dana last night, and it raised the hair on my neck, I must say, Wallace.”
“Oh?” he asks. “What kind of email?”
“Please do not do that, Wallace. Please do not pretend that you don’t know what the email was about.”
“I see,” he says. “I see. Okay.”
Simone frowns, flexes her jaw. She continues, “I just worry that the two of you are butting heads and it’s creating a toxic environment.”
“I understand why you have that impression,” Wallace says. “That’s not my intention.”
“I cannot have a misogynist in my lab, Wallace,” she says sharply, directly, looking into his eyes, which makes him want to cry, suddenly. The wave of stinging tears comes to the brink of his eyelids, but it holds steady. He breathes deeply, slowly.
“I am not a misogynist,” he says. “I am not.”
“Dana’s email was . . . I have never read something so horrible in my life, Wallace. And I thought, that can’t be right.”
A flicker of hope, a minor reprieve. Wallace nods.
“But I have to take this very seriously. I have to think about what is right for you and for Dana and for the lab. I’m retiring soon, as you know, and I can’t have this kind of dysfunction.” She holds her hands up, separates them, as if to say on one hand she wants him to stay, and on the other hand, well.
Wallace feels a chasm opening up beneath him. He could say what Dana said to him. He could say that she is racist, homophobic. He could say any of the things he has wanted to say since he came here, about how they treat him, about how they look at him, about what it feels like when the only people who look like him are the janitors, and they regard him with suspicion. He could say one million things, but he knows that none would matter. None of it would mean anything to her, to any of them, because she and they are not interested in how he feels except as it affects them.
“I see,” he says again, blankly.
“I don’t want to ask you to leave the lab, Wallace. But I do really want to encourage you to think about what you want.”
“What I want?”
“Yes, Wallace. Think about this really hard. Is this what you want? To be a scientist? To spend your life in academia? I must be honest; I really, truly must be honest. I like you. I do. But when I look at you, I don’t think you want this. Not like Katie. Not like Brigit. Not like Dana. You don’t want it.”
“I do,” he says. “I do want it. I want to be here.”
“Do you want to be here or do you . . . do you just not want to be somewhere else?”
Wallace looks down at his hands, which are cupped in his lap. His lips and throat are dry. He thinks of that bird again, lying on its back, eaten by ants, eaten as it dies, as it lies dying. His shorts are blue co
tton, faded from too many washes. He digs a finger into his knee. What does he want, after all?
“I don’t know,” he says.
“I thought not. Why don’t you take some time to think about it?”
“All right,” he says. “Okay.”
“Okay?” She puts a hand on his shoulder. He isn’t crying or anything like that, but he feels blasted a bit, shaken. The world is shifting again, as if realigning itself to some new axis. Her touch is firm and warm. She runs her hand down his arm and up again. It’s meant to be a comforting gesture, he supposes.
“Is that all?” he asks.
“That’s all,” she says, and she smiles again, showing her imperfect teeth, the discoloration that comes with age and coffee and life lived, if only briefly, outside this charmed circle.
* * *
• • •
AT THE LAKE’S EDGE, he can hear the train coming. Wallace always stops, wherever he is in the city, to listen to the sound of the train passing. It’s a lonesome cry, like the baying of dogs in the woods, a sound to which he is especially attuned. There was a time when, very young and very impressionable, he believed his grandfather’s stories about spectral dogs that would come and spirit him away if he dawdled when playing out in the trees. The sound of any dog howling or yipping in the distance would send a chill through him, and he’d run straight ahead, no matter if he were going away from or toward home, because he knew, sure enough, that he’d arrive on either side of the woods and be safe with his aunts on one end or his grandparents on the other. But on days when his courage did not fail him, he would stand perfectly still among the shifting pines, put his shoulders back, and howl into the clear blue sky. Something in him was wild and wanting to be free, to be loose, and he howled at the top of his lungs, his little voice flattening, then fraying at the edges, until there was no more air in his chest and he was hollow.
After a few moments, the train passes.
Wallace is on the lakeshore path again, though this time he’s turned right and walked past the boathouse, where the boys are out oiling their boats again. Their swim trunks hang low on their hips, and their skin is tan and clear and slick with sweat. Together they are the picture of health. Occasionally one of them snaps a towel, leaving a streak across another boy’s back. There are fat ducks sleeping at the ends of the docks. Wallace walks past a dorm. He sees people dancing on a balcony, enjoying the weekend. A big white flag with the university’s mascot is hanging down the front of their house, and men are throwing a Frisbee on the little lawn. Wallace watches one of the men, tall and pale, reach back and fling the yellow disc from a grotesque position. It flutters at first, then settles into a clean arc that takes it over the heads of people sitting on a floral upholstered couch on the lawn, until another man, squat and dark, leaps up and snatches it from the air. Watching them, Wallace feels a kind of peace.
The noise inside him quiets. He feels as though he can think clearly now. He’s standing in the yellow gravel of the trail with his back to the lake. There are bicyclists swooping by, dark with motion. The bramble is filled with staccato animal calls, and out on the water there are people sailing. His friends might be out there, he realizes. That was their plan for the day, after all, to spend the last bright hours of the weekend on the lake together.
He imagines Yngve and Miller piloting a small, compact boat out to the center, where they’ll drift for a while, letting the others take small sips of whiskey or beer, letting them get drowsy and hot and drunk. The peace Wallace feels deepens as he imagines this scene, circling its completeness, Emma in the back of the boat, legs crossed, hair wild with wind. Thom reading or trying to read, getting seasick, flimsy and delicate. And Miller, looking out over the water, always looking out into the distance. Yngve would be sitting with Lukas tucked up against him, the two of them conjoined. And a wind, smooth and clear, warm with summer heat pressing down on them, nudging their boat farther and farther out, perhaps to the distant shore, where they might get out and have dinner in the rich part of town. And then their coming home, stumbling upon the pier, bronzed and raw, chapped from the sun and the wind, the air cooling as it does this time of year. Where will they go then—somewhere on the square, maybe? Or to Yngve and Miller’s, to drink more and smoke? They will scarcely think of him, Wallace knows, except for Miller. They will not consider his absence conspicuous, but he only has himself to blame. He should have said something at brunch.
How easily he might be among them had he not severed the connection and said he was going home, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be, that he would be going to lab the moment he left them, walking all the way there, stopping only to collect his bag. How easy it would have been to be with his friends if he hadn’t taken pains to ensure that he couldn’t. This, too, he has predicted, though, hasn’t he? The moment he hugged Miller good-bye on the corner, he knew he would regret leaving; still, he thinks, better to be here now, regretting not being there, than to be there and regret not being here. Better to imagine his friends happy than to see their unhappiness up close. And unhappy they certainly would be—that has been the lesson this weekend, hasn’t it? The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school.
Wallace takes a seat on a bench under a couple of trees on a sandy patch adjacent to the running trail near the lake. He tucks his legs under him. The metal slats are hot, but pleasantly so. The view of the water is stunning. Blue and gray bands of water all the way out to the dark figure of the peninsula, which juts, sphinxlike, into the lake. Boats in the distance. The low, mossy branches of the tree overhead provide shade. Some clouds coming in out there, yes, darkening. There will be rain, he knows, and then the great cooling. Fall is so close he can almost taste it in the air.
He is seized by the urge to call his brother. They have not spoken since those frenzied weeks when his brother called him every day to communicate to him the facts and figures of his father’s death. The first prognosis, which had been good, his voice light and full of hope. The dwindling prospects, the tumor refusing to stop growing, the insignificant victories, a successfully installed feeding tube running through his father’s body, then the collection of water in the lungs, the swelling, the failing of the organs, one by one, each organ getting its own phone call—first kidneys, then liver, then finally the heart. His brother’s voice was like those old boyhood prayers they used to say before they went to bed, nonsense words to Wallace even then, and yet somehow necessary to get through it. Wallace knew early on how it would go, that the hope in his brother’s voice was a matter of self-deception, and yet when the end came, he found that he was surprised, despite what he knew, because his brother had somehow convinced even a small part of him to hope too, to believe too, that things might turn around.
The desire to call his brother, then, is another urge toward self-deception, about the end of something, the dwindling hours of his life here in this city by this lake. He could call his brother down in Georgia, where he works as a carpenter for the state, call him and tell him the facts. It would be easy. And his brother might have some hope for him too, a belief in the goodness of things, in the capacity of the world to turn around and change its mind. Wallace takes out his phone and stares down at it. He could do it. He could make himself less alone just by calling.
“How stupid,” he says to himself. “How stupid, Wallace.” He puts the phone away, gets off the bench, and takes the lakeshore path back to the pier, where the people are already gathering for the evening. It’s only late afternoon, but here they are, snagging the famous multicolored tables. This is the site of the city’s greatest confluence of university students and what Wallace and his friends call real people; that is, locals who are not affiliated with the university. It amazes him to think how quickly he has forgotten how to move among such people, who seem rough and ugly when th
ey look at him, all bloated faces and missing teeth. They move through the world with a kind of clumsy ease, as if they don’t care how the next day will unfold because it holds so few possibilities for them. These are not people who spend their lives contemplating the minute shifts in their fortunes; they are like the happy, well-fed fish that grow in fisheries, hatched and grown to adulthood in tiny, controlled spaces. And then farmed for food.
Wallace climbs the gray steps from the lake’s edge onto the platform and looks around. He is close to his apartment. It would be nothing to go back there now, but he doesn’t like the idea of it. He’s too wound up to stay at home. The library is nearby. He could go there and read for a few hours, spend time in a quiet, cool corner, watching the water. A boy and a girl run by him, holding hands. They’re seven or eight, he thinks, small and white and fast. They’re laughing, their little blond heads bobbing as they go. Their parents bring up the rear, an attractive middle-aged man—Wallace has seen him on the app, he thinks—and a woman with a tight, mean face, dark hair, green eyes, lots of freckles, skin like an aging banana peel.
On the lower level of the platform a band is setting up, pudgy white college kids in dark sweatshirts and ratty jeans. The equipment looks expensive. There are a couple of black people, scattered throughout the tables, though not together, separate. One of them, a young woman with long braids and skin so smooth and dark that he gasps when his eyes light upon her, turns to him and smiles. There is a flicker of recognition, an easing of some tension inside him. She is with a group of white girls, all of them wearing sundresses in bright floral colors. The black girl is wearing yellow. She is the prettiest among them, but they are all talking over her, around her, and at a group of white boys standing on a platform below them, in casual khaki shorts and sweatshirts. One of the boys has his leg up on the platform where the girls are standing, his fingers tucked inside his belt loop, nodding aggressively. The black girl smooths her dress, flips her braids over her shoulder, and laughs, though there is boredom on her face.
Real Life Page 21
