Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (23 page)

“Who? Mrs. Shutt?”

Robb Gelder!
It was he who’d appeared in Mariana’s house, and somehow, too, he was the creature who’d frightened her when she’d returned home—
Robb Gelder
—whom Mariana hadn’t seen in more than twenty years . . .

Mariana was astonished. Mariana gripped the arms of the dentist’s chair to keep from falling out. In a faint wondering voice she said:

“A man I knew, Felipa. A young man. I mean—at the time. He was young at the time. But—I was younger.”

So long ago! Mariana would have thought she’d forgotten Robb Gelder as surely Robb Gelder had forgotten her.

She’d known Gelder as a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in biology at Penn—he’d been an assistant in the lab to which Mariana had been assigned, under the direction of a senior professor renowned in his field of biological research and soon to win a Nobel Prize. Mariana had been intimidated by the renowned professor who’d scarcely acknowledged her presence except to stare at her from time to time as if he had no idea who she was.

In the lab, Mariana had reported to Robb Gelder. It was Gelder who oversaw the experimental work of the younger graduate students and Gelder upon whom Mariana had come to depend more than she would have liked.

She asked Felipa what did it mean—“If you see someone who isn’t there?”

“Like a ghost, Mrs. Shutt?”

A ghost? Could Robb Gelder be a
ghost
? Mariana didn’t want to think so.

“Oh no—he didn’t seem like a ghost. He didn’t behave like a ghost. I’m sure he wasn’t a ghost. He was much more solid. He left footprints, he had a—smell . . .” Mariana had begun to shiver, recalling.

“Mrs. Shutt, could be he died. And his ghost was summoning you.”

Felipa spoke somberly, as one who’d had some experience with ghosts.

“Oh, but—I don’t think . . . Robb Gelder is too young to die.”

“Mrs. Shutt, nobody is too young to die.”

Rebuked, Mariana could think of no reply. The airy lightness that had permeated her brain—had been making her laugh—turned cold suddenly.
Nobody is too young to die!

This was true of course. This was absolutely irrefutably true.

As if she’d spoken too harshly Felipa relented, “Could be he’s having some bad time, Mrs. Shutt, in his life, and he’s thinking of you—like sending a prayer.”

Felipa spoke in a gravely poetic way that was very touching.

“I hope Robb isn’t—hurt. He would still be young . . . fairly young.”

In fact Robb Gelder had been a slightly older graduate student, as Mariana recalled. In his late twenties perhaps, when Mariana had known him. Now he would be in his late forties—at least Pearce’s age. Mariana felt a pang in her chest at the prospect of seeing him again.

Felipa asked, “This is a man, Mrs. Shutt? Yes? Someone—close to you?”

Mariana felt her face burn. An airy sort of laughter gripped her, like a swarm of small moths.

Though Mariana was forty-three, she did not feel as if she were forty-three. She did not even feel as if she were twenty-three. (She’d been twenty-one when she’d known Robb Gelder, in her brief and not very happy single year in graduate school.) Absurd, to be thinking of Robb Gelder! Feeling such emotion for a man she hadn’t seen in twenty-two years, and knew nothing about. It wasn’t that they’d lost contact with each other—they’d never really been
in contact
with each other.

Mariana had been the youngest and most inexperienced individual in the biology lab, and one of only two women. She’d felt like a swimmer caught in a riptide—often she couldn’t understand what was being presented in the most matter-of-fact way, and her own presentations were nightmare occasions for her, fraught with anxiety and dread. She’d had the desperate thought that her professors, who were all men, had sized her up within the first week or two, were not impressed and were not about to change their minds.

Though he’d been enormously busy with his own research, Robb Gelder had taken time to meet with Mariana. She’d had difficulty with her experiments—he’d tried to guide her through them. He’d been supportive, patient, kind. At times, his patience had seemed strained—but he’d never spoken sarcastically to her. Unlike the other male graduate students, he’d never made a sexist remark, of which Mariana was aware. He hadn’t been a particularly attractive individual, superficially—often he was unshaven, and his skin was lumpy and blemished; his hair was lank, sand-colored, and likely to be dirty; his clothes were rumpled, and likely to be dirty; when harassed and anxious, he smelled of his body. Addressing the lab he spoke in a stiff, self-conscious manner that undermined the originality and intelligence of what he had to say; a sharp question from the senior professor who headed the lab threw him into confusion, though he knew the answer perfectly well; at his most nervous he breathed through his mouth, and spoke haltingly as if to forestall a stammer. But his eyes were greenish-hazel, and seemed to Mariana beautiful.

She hadn’t fallen in love with Robb Gelder, she was certain!—there were other men she found much more attractive, who were attracted to her. One of these was Pearce Shutt.

Abruptly in the spring of her first year Mariana’s graduate studies were terminated. She could not have been surprised when her advisor summoned her to speak with him, to inform her that the graduate committee wasn’t recommending that she continue in the program; yet she’d been crushed, terribly hurt. For all that she’d known she was having trouble, and couldn’t seem to compete with other graduate students, she’d somehow hoped that—she’d wanted to hope that—some allowance might be made for her, because she’d tried so very hard; some sort of suspended judgment . . . But in an instant in her advisor’s office, as the older man stared coldly at her as if waiting for her to leave, she’d felt that all she had worked to establish—the days, weeks, months of assiduously studying, her experimental work and her effort of presenting herself publicly—being
positive, feminine, sweet
—had been swept aside like the petals of a Japanese tulip tree in a violent rainstorm.

She’d left her advisor’s office stunned as if the man had slapped her face. She would come to think that he’d spoken to her in this way because she was a woman—an attractive young woman with long thick pale-blond hair to her shoulders, who didn’t dress like the other female graduate students in tattered jeans and pullovers; men didn’t want to take her seriously. Nor did women scientists want to take her seriously. There was, in the most seemingly neutral of circumstances, a distinct sex-consciousness, a prevailing sexual rivalry. For all of biology—all of
life—
was about sex: sexual attraction, sexual intercourse, reproduction of the species. That was all that life
was
.

In the corridor of the biology building she’d encountered Robb Gelder and before Gelder could speak—even as he smiled at her, and prepared to say hello—Mariana told him bluntly that she’d been dropped from the program. She wouldn’t be working with him that summer—(as she’d planned)—and she wouldn’t be returning in the fall. In Gelder’s face she saw—she would fix upon this, afterward—not quite so much surprise as she might have expected to see. She thought
Of course! He’s one of them.

He’d been consulted about her. He’d been frank about her. He hadn’t shielded her from the others. In a sudden fury Mariana cut him off as he was expressing sympathy for her, suggesting that maybe she could try another school, or maybe, if she wanted to teach biology, she could enroll in the school of education and get a teaching degree, she’d interrupted saying that really she didn’t care, she’d come to dislike the program at Penn, she’d come to almost dislike science, the life of a scientist, if the scientists at Penn were representative. Robb Gelder stared at her in surprise as she said, with a bitter twist of her mouth, “Well—I’m going to be engaged anyway. I’ll be getting married and moving away from here. This is really for the best.”

Rudely she’d turned away from Gelder before he could say anything further. She wasn’t hurt so much as she was angry, furious. She hadn’t wanted to see Robb Gelder again. He’d been her only friend yet she felt that she hated him, for he’d betrayed her—he hadn’t helped her, and so he’d betrayed her. It was a male-female thing, a sex-thing. She was the weaker of the two, it had been incumbent upon him to help
her—
and he had not. She never wanted to see Robb Gelder again, nor had she wanted to think about him. She would seek out men like Pearce Shutt who took for granted their superior strength, and would protect her.

It wasn’t equality Mariana wanted—except nominally. In truth it was dependency, and an acknowledgment of dependency. A woman is loved precisely because the man is strong enough to love her. A man who was a woman’s equal would be a weak sort of man—because he was her equal.

Robb Gelder hadn’t tried to contact Mariana after their final encounter. All that had been between them had vanished as if it had never been. She’d become engaged to Pearce Shutt, and she’d married Pearce Shutt, and hadn’t given a thought to Robb Gelder except when she’d seen references to his work in the newspaper—in the
New York Times
science section she’d read about the Gelder experiments involving animal behavior and animal “languages” and she’d felt a pang of something like envy, and regret; but only in passing. Once, Pearce said, “What on earth are you reading, Mariana?”—curious that Mariana was reading anything in the paper with such concentration; and Mariana told him she was reading about “animal communication”—a series of experiments conducted by a biologist she’d known in graduate school.

Pearce asked to see the paper, laid it down beside his TV chair and never again touched it so far as Mariana knew.

“ ‘Robb Gelder.’ He can’t not be alive.”

Merely out of curiosity Mariana looked up
Robb Gelder
on the Internet. She had no intention of contacting him. It was a surprise—a pleasant surprise—to discover that Robb Gelder had had so productive a career: after getting his Ph.D. from Penn he’d had a post-doc appointment at UC–Berkeley; he’d taught at UC–San Diego, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge University (England); he’d had countless fellowships, awards, and grants from the National Science Foundation, and elsewhere; he’d spent years in Africa, studying the behavior of “social carnivores”; at the present time he was a senior associate at the Bangor Institute for Advanced Study in Maine where he headed the Bangor Field Station for the Study of Ecology and Animal Behavior. He’d become a specialist in spotted hyenas.

Spotted hyenas! These were native to Africa. Yet, when Mariana researched
spotted hyenas
on the Internet, she saw that they closely resembled the creature she’d seen in the shadows outside her house.

She thought
Robb has been thinking of me. That’s it!

She sent an e-mail to Robb Gelder at the Bangor Institute asking if he recalled her, saying she was traveling to Bangor soon to visit a relative, and would like very much to visit his famous hyena farm.

Almost immediately she received an e-mail reply—

Dear Mariana—

Please come to Bangor whenever you can. I will take you on a tour of my spotted hyenas. I think you will find them beautiful animals that have been ignorantly disparaged and “demonized” by humankind. Of course I remember you! In fact—it’s very strange—I was thinking of you just the other day—not sure why.

Sincerely,

Robb Gelder

Gelder set up dates for Mariana to choose, and she chose. She was intrigued by her own brashness, which wasn’t like her; and when she told Pearce that she was going away for a day or two, not asking his permission but simply telling him, she was surprised at her own equanimity in the face of his astonished disapproval.

“You’re going away? To Maine? Without telling me? To see a cousin?—who is this cousin? Have I met her?”

Yes, Mariana said. He’d met her cousin Valerie a long time ago—at their wedding.

“Don’t you remember, Pearce? You said you’d liked her—you thought she was ‘sensible.’ ”

Pearce frowned. Pearce was not one to readily admit that he’d forgotten anyone, or anything; he could not bring himself to admit that he didn’t remember Mariana’s cousin Valerie.

“I didn’t know that you have relatives in Maine.”

“I don’t have ‘relatives’ in Maine—just Valerie. She’s divorced, and she teaches high school biology, and she’s just recovering from breast cancer surgery, and I think I should go see her. For just a day or two.”

The syllables
breast cancer surgery
were subtly repellent to Pearce, she could see. He asked why would Mariana want to visit her, if she scarcely knew her—“Does she want you to come?”

“Of course she wants me. She invited me.”

“But why?”

Mariana was beginning to feel anxious, agitated—as if her husband were in fact mocking her relationship with a cherished girl cousin.
Of course
men were doubtful of such intimate bonds since they had so few themselves . . .

“Because Valerie is lonely. She needs me. She says—‘I’m thinking of you, Mariana. Please come see me.’ ”

To this, Pearce could make no reply.
Breast cancer surgery
had unmanned him.

Mariana kissed her husband’s cheek that was hot with indignant blood. She would be back, she promised, by Thursday—or Friday at the latest. And she would call.

“You’ll ‘call’! Isn’t that thoughtful of my wife.”

With bitter amusement Pearce spoke as if knowing—suspecting—that
my wife
would betray him. But in what way, he could have no idea.

Of course I remember you! In fact—it’s very strange—I was thinking of you just the other day.

Alone—it was the longest trip by car she’d ever undertaken alone—Mariana drove to Bangor, Maine. She stayed overnight in a motel somewhere in Massachusetts, her dreams were confused, tumultuous, rife with exertion. In dazzling bright November sunshine she made her way to the Bangor Institute for Advanced Study which was two miles north and east of Bangor and there she was directed another mile along a hilly rural road to Professor Gelder’s field station—low-lying buildings, chain-link enclosures, several pickups and vans and unmistakably in the air a pungent odor of animal urine.