Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“So?” Rosenblum said, as Andy delivered a stack of graded papers—papers he’d graded painstakingly with his uninjured left hand. “You want me to find her for you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s got a boyfriend.”

“So that’s it? You let her go?” Rosenblum was sitting amid the educated squalor of his office, files everywhere like the aftermath of a ticker tape parade, books on every surface, dead plants, a dead terrarium, an empty aquarium, an empty ashtray, and the detritus of his life as a celebrity: T-shirts, posters, and pins emblazoned with his face over the title of his most recent bestseller, Religion’s Dangerous Lie.

Andy leaned back against Rosenblum’s doorframe. He was already itching under his cast, and the thing was supposed to stay on for six more weeks. “I don’t think I ever had her, Hank. I don’t see how I can let her go.”

Rosenblum raised his crazed eyebrows. “Well, for chrissakes, Andrew, sit down. Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s rude to stand in people’s doorways? Or don’t people know that in Ohio?”

This was part of Rosenblum’s cosmology—that Andy was a fatherless rube from the sticks (greater Cleveland) who needed a sophisticate like Rosenblum (who hailed from the most Jewish precincts of Brooklyn) to show him the ways of the world. Andy was one in a line of students to whom Rosenblum had taken a liking, cooked dinner for (“You ever try ahi tuna? No, idiot, it doesn’t come from a can”), poured wine for, tried to train not only as a biologist but as a certain kind of bon vivant, one attuned to the pleasures of the world as much as the wonders of the microscope. Andy had proven himself a keen student—Rosenblum’s major requirement, in a mentee, was that he be both bright and a touch sycophantic—and the fact that he was from Ohio, of all places, made Rosenblum that much more interested in Andy’s transformation. “Ohio!” he would hoot, apropos of little. “Is there any state more depressingly nowhere than Ohio ? Has anything great ever happened in Ohio? To anyone from Ohio? In the whole history of Ohio?”

“Paul Newman?” Andy would offer. “Neil Armstrong?”

“Hollywood!” Rosenblum would counter, self-righteous. “The moon!”

Rosenblum liked to take Andy out to eat on occasion at the finest restaurants in central New Jersey (“Which of course is like swimming on the finest beach in Siberia, but what can we do?”) and took him to J. Press for a decent suit to wear to the Gene and Genome convention in Chicago (“We’ll charge it to the department,” Rosenblum said, rakishly, although Andy suspected he’d paid for it himself).

And of course, amid all this Pygmalion bustle, Rosenblum oversaw Andy’s biology training. Andy was interested in gene theory, and Rosenblum, one of the premier American evolutionary biologists of his generation, guided Andy’s research through generations of mice and endlessly revised papers. It was with Rosenblum that Andy published his first research, and it was under Rosenblum’s careful supervision that Andy devised his dissertation thesis around the relationship between specific brain structures and specific degenerative conditions. And it was under Rosenblum that Andy became an avowed and devoted atheist, seeking out, like his mentor, the superstitious gaze of the Believer wherever it roamed and staring it down in an unlosable game of chicken.

“Listen, my young friend,” Rosenblum said, flicking something invisible from his cuff before turning his attention back to Andy’s pathetic figure slumping into the seat opposite him. “Don’t be a schmuck. This beautiful girl gives you an opening, you can’t just let her go.”

“It really wasn’t such a great opening. And anyway, when I left the ER she was gone.”

“So? You can’t get a nurse to give you her records? Find out her address?”

“Hank, come on.”

“You said she’s a nurse in Philly. Did she tell you where?”

“Obviously if she had I would know where to look for her.”

“Then we’re going to have to go through the boyfriend,” Rosenblum sighed. He’d put on weight in the years since Andy had met him, sat like a half-bald Buddha behind his rosewood desk. “This boyfriend’s in math, you said? Okay, we’ll start with math.”

“We?”

Rosenblum couldn’t help himself—so loving, so pushy. “I can see who’s administering the bastard’s orals. Maybe we can fail him. You want me to fail him? A few people in math owe me favors.”

“Jesus, Hank.” Rosenblum was like that too—sneaky and morally unhinged. “I can ask around myself.”

“Fine,” he said. “Be that way.” He shifted the stack of papers Andy had delivered, the ones he would never read. “But don’t let her go, Andrew. How old are you, twenty-four? I had been married twice by the time I was twenty-four.”

“That’s not true.”

“I was a father several times over.”

“That’s not true either.”

“Get out of here,” Rosenblum said. “I’m sick of you. Men like you, sensitive men. Really, you make me sick.” But Rosenblum was smiling.

“Thanks, Hank. That’s good of you.”

“I mean it,” said Rosenblum. “Get out of here. Go find your girl.”

Which turned out to be much easier than snooping around the math department, not that Andy didn’t snoop around the math department and its rose bushes, or dream up ways of stealing her ER records, or imagine combing Princeton’s colonial avenues in search, Rapunzel-like, of a flash of that beautiful hair.

But none of this was necessary, because two weeks after first crossing her emergent path, there she was, in front of the Record Exchange, bending down to tie a shoe. He realized that since he’d been expecting to see her everywhere, he wasn’t surprised when he finally did. She was wearing a jacket but a bandage peeked out from under it, enclosing her left hand. His own wrist itched madly. There she was, his girl, a fellow veteran from an imaginary war.

“Hey!” he said. “Hey!” He tried to tone down his grin but it was impossible, he was too happy, she was too lovely—and standing right there.

“Mr. Waite,” she said. “Hello.” She remembered his name! And she was smiling too. She gathered her hair back in her good hand and pushed it off her shoulders, but it immediately breezed back around her face. “I was wondering if I’d bump into you again.”

“Visiting your boyfriend?”

“Walking to the train.”

“You’re going to walk?”

She sighed, kicked one of the bags at her feet. “He failed his orals. He’s moving to New Mexico. I’m not going with him.” She looked embarrassed. “So I think,” she said, “that’s the end of that. And therefore,” grandly, “I walk.”

“Ah,” Andy said. He wanted to take this in but again that lunatic desire to plunge his hands into the depths of her hair (and this time, now, to cradle her face, to kiss her pillow-soft lips. Man, he was itchy). Had Rosenblum fixed this for him? The boyfriend’s failure? He’d send him a box of cigars. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” she said. She had a huge duffel bag and a roller suitcase. A lot of stuff. “It’s probably fine. I mean, I think we’ll both end up fine. And I need to spend more time in Philly anyway. Not that there’s anything so great about Philly. But it is, you know, where I’m supposed to be working.”

“I like Philly,” he said. They grinned at each other again, stupidly. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“I’m Louisa,” she said.

“That’s pretty.”

“It is,” she said. “But you should call me Lou.”

AND FROM THERE, it was easy. He felt, in fact, that the ease was his reward for everything that had been so hard from the beginning: escaping Ohio, finding a place at Princeton, finding a few friends, finding Rosenblum. Putting together a life for himself, learning to cook and clean and look after himself and live like a grown-up with no one but Rosenblum to show him the way, to help him figure out what mattered. He walked Lou to the train, hefting her duffel bag with his good hand down the bumpy side street to the jitney.