Strong Motion (38 page)

“What?”

“You know—a trip. How old are you?”

“I know what the word means.”

“We had an entomologist in here two months ago telling us there were dioxins in a spray the state fights gypsy moths with. He had a nice theory too. The only problem is there aren’t any dioxins in the spray. Last year another academic, from Harvard—Thetford? oceanographer?—talking about mercury on the continental shelf. Malfeasance and conspiracy. I guess I used to think that way myself, a long, long time ago. It’s very satisfying, very romantic. But 99.9 percent of the time it’s not the way the world really works. You might keep that in mind.”

In the street again, Renée held her fold-up umbrella right below its ribs and used her other hand to keep her shoulder bag from slipping off her shoulder as the wind blew and the rain fell. Naturally her bladder was overfull. People dodged irrationally in and out of doors. A young black man loitering at the bottom of the subway stairs pointed at the water on his pants and demanded: “What do you say?”

She skittered sideways.

He pursued her. “What do you say? You say
excuse me
. You say
excuse me, please
.”

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Excuse me, please. I’m sorry I splashed water on you. I’m sorry I got your pants wet
.”

“I’m sorry I splashed water on you.”

“Thank you,” he shouted after her, over the turnstiles. “Thank you for your apology.”

This exchange echoed in her head until a train came.

A
Globe
had exploded in her car, covering the floor and collecting under seats. On the front page a headline stamped with a wet footprint read:
SECOND ABORTION CLINIC BOMBED IN LOWELL
.

At Central Square the local Angry Woman, driven underground by the weather, was cursing the motherfucking men who ruled the world. An old Chinese man carrying two goldfish in a Baggie full of water sat down next to Renée, who smiled at him kindly. “Rain rain rain,” he said.

“Rain rain rain, yeah.”

This exchange echoed in her head all the way to Harvard.

The ground floor of Hoffman Lab was quiet, the large white screens in the Sun room silently spitting up little statements in black as programs ran for students and post-docs eating a late lunch in the Square, the smaller brown screens in the system rooms awaiting log-ons or scrolling in bright green. Renée went straight from the women’s bathroom to a brown screen. While she worked, the phone on the radiator rang itself down several times. Even infrequent users of the computer had been informed by now that human life begins at conception. Nobody answered anymore, but the phone kept ringing.

Towards three o’clock Howard Chun and a Pekingese friend of his returned from lunch, exhaling garlic. Howard in his dripping nylon parka parked himself behind a Tectronix plotter. Renée had last seen him sprawled across her bed, snoring brokenly, when she left her apartment after breakfast.

“Why is this machine so slow,” she said to her screen.

“Disk B’s full,” said the Pekingese, furrowing his broad and remarkably expressive forehead. He was a good scientist and Renée liked him.

“Disk B is full. I see. Disk B that I spent half a night backing up four days ago.”

She entered the Operator directory, became SUPERUSER, and saw that in less than a week, users by the name of TERRY, TS, TBS, NBD1, and NBD2 had backed 375 megabytes onto Disk B and another 65 megabytes onto Disk A. All of these users were Terry Snall. His thesis topic was Non-Brittle Deformation. NBD1, an account feared and hated in the system rooms, single-handedly occupied 261 megabytes; this was four times the space taken up by any other student’s files; it was nearly half a disk.

SUPERUSER became SUPEROP. “Do you know what Terry did?” she said.

In the Tectronix corner, behind partitions, Howard’s keyboard clicked obliviously. The room was becoming murky with garlic vapors. SUPEROP addressed the Pekingese. “He brought back every single one of his program files. There are seventy megabytes of program files on this disk. It’s taking me twenty minutes to run a one-minute program and he has seventy megabytes of program files.”

“Cancel ’em,” the Pekingese recommended.

“I’m going to do just that.”

Program files were needed only when a program was actually being run, and could be re-created in minutes. SUPEROP zapped every one of Terry’s.

“Oh, much better,” the Pekingese said.

“Eight megabytes free on a 600-meg disk. Doesn’t he
know?
Doesn’t he
understand?
”

Howard stepped out of his corner and moved from console to console, logging onto each. Even when he was working for just a few minutes he didn’t feel comfortable if he wasn’t logged on from at least three or four. Some late nights he logged on from ten of them. All but the one he was using automatically went dim to save wear on the pixels.

In a new log-on announcement, SUPEROP stressed that files not needed immediately should not be backed onto the disk. Everyone knew who wrote these announcements, so she didn’t sign it. She became RS again.

“You get your message?” the Pekingese asked her.

“Somebody actually took a message for me?”

“Charles.”

“Oh.”

Across the hall, beneath her shoulder bag and damp jean jacket, she found a number and the message:
MRS. HOLLAND CALLED. YOU MAY CALL COLLECT.

She dropped the message in the trash and returned to her console. The Pekingese had left the room. “Howard?” she said.

A parka rustled, but Howard didn’t answer. Behind the partition, she found him slouching and staring at a bright green seismic spectrum, his ankles crossed on a bed of cables, the keyboard on his lap.

“Do you still know somebody with a pilot’s license?” she said.

He shook his head and worked the keyboard.

“Didn’t you have a friend who used to take you up?”

A new spectrum blossomed on the screen. He shook his head. Renée frowned. “Are you mad at me?”

He shook his head.

She threw a cautious glance through the hall doorway. “Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t be mad at me. I really need you not to be mad at me.”

He blinked at the screen, resolutely ignoring her. With another glance into the hall, she knelt and put her hands on his chest. “Come on. Please. Don’t be mad at me now. Please.”

He tried to roll his chair away from her.

She took his hand and put her cheek against his chest. It was the first time she’d ever touched him inside the lab, and as soon as she did it she heard a rustle of clothing right behind her. A sense of inevitability enveloped her like dread as she turned and saw Terry Snall spinning around and heading back up the hallway.

She jumped to her feet. “Shit!” She began to follow Terry but came back to the Tectronix. “Shit! Shit!” She pulled on her hair. “What did I do to you?”

Howard typed casually on his keyboard.

“Oh God, this is going to finish me. This is really going to push me over.” She crouched by Howard again. “Just tell me what I did to you.”

He made a hideous face, all gums and stretched nostrils. “What I do to you?” he mocked. “What I do to you? What I do to you?”

“I let you sleep with me,” she whispered fiercely. “I let you sleep with me
a lot
.”

“I let you seep with me I let you seep with me.”

She stared at him, mouth trembling.

“Rouis, Rouis,” he said. “A rill bit pinch me hit me hit me.”

“Oh God.” She backed away from him and looked for a place to run but there was no place. Rounding the corner into the hall, she almost collided with Charles, one of the department secretaries. He was tall and balding and was writing a novel in his off hours. He wore suspenders instead of belts. “Melanie Holland,” he said. “She’s on the phone again.”

“Tell her I’m gone.”

“She wants to know where she can reach you.”

“Tell her to try me at home.”

“She already has been.”

“Tell her I’m out of town.”

“Oh, Renée.” Charles shook his head. “I’m not paid to lie for people. If you don’t want to talk to her, the honest thing is to tell her that. Then she won’t keep calling here and interrupting me and I won’t have to keep coming down two flights of stairs and bothering you.”

Renée pointed at the street door. “I’m leaving.”

“Oh, Renée. I advise you not to. Not if you ever want to use my copier again or have me take messages from other institutions or borrow my paper cutter. Are you interested in ever borrowing my paper cutter again?”

Without a word, she stalked up the hall towards the stairwell. “Don’t think I’m blackmailing you,” Charles said, following her. “This is a matter of courtesy and professionalism. I let you use my paper cutter as a courtesy. I’m not required to let you use it, you know.”

Her voice reverberated in the concrete-clad stairwell. “You are so.”

He followed her up the stairs. “You used to be so courteous, Renée. You used to be the most courteous person in this building. Do you know how many clicks I’ve given you on the copy counter? The copy counter that’s for department business only? Renée? Are you listening to me? Sixty-five hundred clicks!”

She stepped into the office of the absent department chairman and closed the door in Charles’s face. The office was dark and cool and agreeably odorless. She always enjoyed being here. The shelves held bound volumes of all the major journals dating back to the forties. There were file cabinets bursting with reprints, softcover proposals for interesting and useful multinational research initiatives, whole unbroken packages of colored pens and other scarce office supplies. In a few years she too would have an office like this, and some young fool like herself would run a computer system for her, and people would have to include her whenever major seismological doings were discussed. It would matter that she’d studied with X, Y and Z at Harvard—a university which, as she always remembered when she entered this office, could boast of a small but outstanding program in geophysics. Bad memories of the system rooms would fade. Trees would sway outside her window.

“Renée? Melanie Holland. Listen, I don’t want to take up your time while you’re at work, but I’m very interested in talking to you again and I wonder if you’d let me take you to lunch tomorrow. It being a Saturday. There’s a lovely restaurant in the Four Seasons, I’d love to take you there.”

“What for?” Renée said rudely. “I mean—that’s very nice of you.”

“Wonderful. You’ll come.”

“No. No, I won’t come. I mean, I can’t.”

“Oh, well, I’m not wedded to the day and hour, if you had other plans. We could brunch on Sunday, have dinner tomorrow night. Tonight even. It would be
so
nice if you would.”

“What is it that you want to talk to me about?”

“Everything and nothing. I think it would be very good for both of us to get acquainted. I’m calling you as a friend. Please have lunch with me, Renée.”

She frowned so hard it hurt.
“What for?
”

“Oh, really, let’s not be silly. Can I take you to lunch tomorrow or can’t I? Yes or no. It would mean a great deal to me. Tell me one good reason why you shouldn’t let me.”

Melanie could make her voice beautiful when she chose. It was like a brook in a valley running in and out of the sunshine and pooling among willows, the clear kind of brook you want to plunge your hands into and drink from and forget about the deer carcasses and feedlots upstream, which may not even be there anyway.

“Let me get back to you,” Renée said.

“I know. You’re busy busy busy. Do I need to be blunt? There is no one in the world more interested in seeing you than I am. No one in the world. Please come to lunch with me.”

Renée wandered dizzily around the chairman’s office, gripping the telephone. “Won’t you tell me what this is about?”

“Tomorrow. Is twelve-thirty fine with you? The restaurant’s called Aujourd’hui.”

Beyond thin lines of rain joining and breaking apart and descending on the window, a knot of Japanese tourists beneath identical umbrellas approached the entrance to the Peabody Museum, whose gorgeous collection of glass flowers, created a hundred years earlier by German glassblowers to reveal the structure and variety of the world’s flora to Harvard botany students, was the most popular tourist attraction in Cambridge. Renée had never seen it. The Japanese umbrellas stooped to the level of the sign on the museum door; rotating uncertainly, they conferred and scattered. Others surged up to the sign, which said that owing to recent earthquake damage the glass flowers were in storage until a safer means of displaying them could be found. To console themselves, the Japanese photographed one another by the sign, the white of their flashes lighting the wet asphalt and nearer trees. Two lung-shaped patches of breath and above them a fainter fog outline of a forehead stayed on the chairman’s window for several minutes after Renée had gone back downstairs.

♦

For three semesters she’d shared her apartment with a seismologist named Claudia Guarducci, a thin, pouty, bored, and very smart Roman doing postdoctoral work for pay at Harvard. They cooked together, saw movies together, deplored colleagues together, accepted or declined dinner invitations together. Claudia bought a motorcycle and gave Renée rides to work on it. They never shared secrets.

When Claudia returned to Italy they kept in touch with laconic postcards. Missing the smell of her Merit Ultra Lights, Renée went out of her way to stand near smokers. She inquired about postdocs in Rome, thinking that if she went there she could call up Claudia and mention, merely mention, her current whereabouts. The future she wanted would begin in good earnest if she could live in Italy and be best friends with a Roman woman.

In hindsight it would seem as if all she ever did in life was lay foundations for future towers of shame and self-hatred. Some trusting, autonomous part of herself kept constructing uncool mid-western dreams: European evenings with Claudia Guarducci; domestic tranquillity with Louis Holland; a big pat on the back from the EPA and the citizens of Boston.