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.But the thing is I have this feeling with her which is very much the way I used to feel in here with you.”“So are saying that you never cared about science, you just—”“No,” she said.“It wasn’t all you, don’t get excited, man.What I liked was the fact that two women, two of us, could work together like that.I liked that, Prof.I liked the work and I liked the idea of the two women.So what you said about cholos hurt me—but let me tell you, not as much as it hurt me to go into the graduate admissions office, where they looked at me like some kind of little puta! And I thought to myself in there, Why do I need to borrow forty thousand so I can go to grad school in biochemistry or molecular biology and end up working in a paint factory? Who’s gonna hire me afterwards?”I rubbed my sleeve across my runny nose and felt tears starting up again.“You would not end up.”She folded her arms in front of her and snapped her gum with authority.Her look silenced me.“I’m not you.Harvard connections and all that.If I do this, it’s just gonna be the way I say.That’s all.”The tears ran down my face and I put my head down.After a bit she got up and knelt beside me and put her arms around me.She smelled like gardenias and Doublemint.I put my head on her shoulder and we held each other.Then she sat back on her heels and pushed her long hair out of her eyes.“I found your note to me in here.The night guard let me in and hey, there it was.”Gum snap.“Thanks for writing it.”I’d forgotten the notes I’d left; I’d forgotten everything, it seemed.Centuries ago (a sharp but muffled pain) I’d found out I’d been scooped by L.R., standing in this room.I covered my face with my hands again.Gum snap—I felt her shake her hair.“You want me to kidnap Ollie back from Jay?”I laughed into my hands—it felt odd to laugh.I looked up.“I want you to come back here to work.”“You know, I can’t do that right now.I gotta think.”There was another pause.She stared at me, cracking her gum, thinking.We were still kneeling.“You ever see a scientist with an ass like this?” She turned around and waggled her rear end.“And hey, so help me, they can kiss it, man!”“You were born to be in science, Rocky.”She laughed.“I was born to cause trouble.Like you.”She leaned over again and kissed me on the lips.Then she pulled away, a little frightened.I reached for her and hugged her.“I love you,” I said.“I need you to help me.”She shook her head dazedly and smiled.“You mean you’re coming back here?”“I don’t know.” I stood up.Rocky stood up too.“I need a ride home.Can you drop me?”“Sure,” she said.“You’re on my way.”As we turned up my block, I saw that all the lights were burning inside my house.I couldn’t remember if I’d left them on when I’d taken off for Jay’s.I saw a silhouette moving inside.My heart moved—Ollie? Had Jay reconsidered and brought her back?I leapt out of Rocky’s car, beckoning to her to follow, ran up the steps, and jammed my key in the door.Someone was in the hallway; a large shape stood there as I opened the door.I pulled my key free of the lock and stared.It was Q.Chapter 25I DON’T KNOW who was more shocked.We stood staring without speaking.Then Rocky came up behind me and then my mother, wearing a blue silk bathrobe, appeared in the entryway behind Q.Then everyone spoke at once.I was asking them what they were doing there and they were carrying on about the way I looked, and where had I been, and where were Jay and Ollie? Rocky was trying to say good-bye to me, having sensed family weather.Finally everyone stopped talking and Rocky hugged me, once, hard, and loped off across the lawn.They pulled me into the house, where, despite the enormous distraction of their presence, a tidal wave of grief overtook me.Her dragon still sat in the red chair where I’d put it the other night.Her yellow rain boots stood side by side near the umbrella stand.Her “TV” box in the corner.Her dreamy, startling little face looked out from photographs everywhere: on the walls, the coffee table, everywhere I turned.Sobs rose in my throat, but I caught them, one by one.I pulled myself back up straight.They were staring at me.My mother stepped forward.She had that resolute I-can-fix-it look on her face that I remembered from childhood.It was a look that I’d come, over many years, to understand never existed in pure form.It always appeared in combination with a swift glance of accusation; so it was really the I-can-fix-it—you-did-it-again-didn’t-you-you-hapless-jerk look.“Esme, my God, what’s wrong with you?”We went into the living room together and sat down and I told them the story, or stories: the breakup, my suspension from UGC, the custody battle, Jay’s kidnapping of Ollie.They listened sympathetically, exclaiming in the appropriate places, but once again, I felt the stubborn alarmed judgment of me going on just below the surface of their concern—what had happened to me, the protégée, the postdoc star? How had I done this to myself?Q’s eyes flickered over me again and again: the torn, still-soaked jeans I’d had on for three—four?—days now; the ratty plaid shirt; my damp dirty hair hanging in my face; my filthy fingernails and sandals.He breathed sonorously, filling the room, a sound I remembered well.He looked older to me, but he’d acquired a kind of ruddy gleam, a patina of well-being.They’re good for each other, I thought, startled, and I stared for a second at them as a unit, as if they’d been placed behind glass in a museum: Last Happy Marriage on Earth, Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge.He stared back at me.God, I remembered those deceptively mild, inquiring eyes: How do you confirm this hypothesis, Ms.Charbonneau? or How do you explain the discrepancy here between your results and the results in the textbook? What an intriguing theory, Esme, but even Mendel does not support you here.I looked back into those eyes, trying to remain unshaken.He wanted to know, I supposed, the exact nature of my pathology.And more important, how could he have miscalculated? He’d bet on me, he’d put faith in me.“But what I don’t understand clearly,” he said, inhaling noisily through his nose, “is why you stopped going to your lab.”“I’m going to make some hot cocoa for everyone,” Millie announced gaily.She stood up and hurried out to the kitchen.I noticed that she wiped a tear away with the back of her hand as she rose.“Professor Quandahl,” I began, and he held up his hand.For one awful moment, I thought he might ask me to call him Dad, and I froze.“Ken,” he said, “please.”“How about ‘Q’? I mean, I’d like to call you Q, OK?”He nodded indifferently.He didn’t care what I called him, he just wanted an answer.“I stopped going to the lab because I was sick of the pressure on me to perform some goddam miracle for funding.And.there was another reason.Over the last couple of years, I’ve turned to theory.And theory began to obsess me, I mean, to the exclusion of my other work.I developed, with”—I paused; it was hard for me to say this name—“Lorraine Atwater, a theory of everything, a TOE.And it flew, Q, I’m serious.I’m serious,” I repeated to his amazed expression [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]