Richard Powers - Generosity

On his way off to bed, the happy boy asks Russell, “You staying over again tonight? Whatever. My dad says he’s cool with it.”

In bed, Russell and Candace reprise the argument they’ve been rehearsing all day. “The stress is getting to her,” he says. A second look at the show convinces him. “I’ve never seen her like that. She was this close to losing it.”

Candace, meanwhile, has recovered. Her own little worm of fear has put out wings and become some beautiful gadfly. “Russell. It’s over. She won’t have to do it again. So she hit a shaky patch. Rough edges, same as anyone. I don’t think she was in real trouble, even for a minute. Look how she ended!”

But all he can think about are those thirty seconds when Miss Generosity lay pinned under a boulder as heavy as any that has ever crushed him. He sees something new in her, something better than he ever expected.

“Leave it,” the woman in bed next to him says. “Stop worrying. She was fine.”

He rolls over and straddles her. He presses his body down across her length, cupping her shoulders, pressing his mouth between her breasts. How wrong can this counselor be? The girl wasn’t fine, not by a long shot. She was susceptible. Desperate. Magnificent. Exhilarating.

The note from Dennis Winfield reached Weld two days later. A note, not a visit: trouble. Weld knew what it had to be about. The only mystery was why it took so long in coming. Perhaps the counseling center needed time to make an airtight case.

At least Dennis showed the decency to reprimand her privately before convening the whole tribunal. She could work with Dennis one-on-one. He had a thing about her. She didn’t even need to play him; he played himself, whenever the two of them sat in a room together.

She came to his office at the appointed time, all sails trim and ready to navigate any accusation.

Dennis opened conventionally enough. “You’re in a relationship with this man? Sleeping together?” He sounded more than professionally hurt.

Weld reminded Dennis that she’d consulted him. Both he and Christa Kreuz had green-lighted her dating Russell Stone.

“We did not give you license to violate ethics.”

She fell back in her chair. “Violate ” Dennis fended off her glance with his chin. She no longer recognized him. She tried to slow her heartbeat and take stock. “I have never violated professional ethics in my life.”

She’d blurred a boundary once or twice. Let clients need her more than was good. But that was early on, before she graduated from her own temperamental weaknesses. “How dare you, Dennis. I’ve done nothing that you and your morals policewoman didn’t sign off on. Just what are you accusing me of?”

“Inappropriate emotional intimacy with a client.”

She jerked forward, indignant. “He’s not a client. We’ve been all over this-”

“Not your boyfriend,” Dennis said. “Your boyfriend’s girlfriend.”

Candace slumped back into her chair. Panic plumed through her chest. Someone held her head underwater. Even before Dennis spelled out the accusation, she saw it, complete. And indisputable. She sobered horribly, like she’d been on a jag with some wild, five-minute party drug and she was just now coming to, witnessing her sluttish behavior from a distance.

“She isn’t a client,” Weld said, pathetic even to herself.

“She’s a student at this college. She was in your office for an appointment last week.”

“That wasn’t an appointment,” Candace bleated. “That was ” But all she could think to say was personal .

“You’re in a severely impaired position here.” Dennis examined a legal tablet full of evidence.

Candace looked away to the window, into the dappled sunlight of the west. No objection possible. How had she managed to hide the truth from herself for so many months? It had all seemed genuine, legitimate. In truth, she’d backslid massively into her own worst trait, sought the love and approval of someone she should never have been more than professionally considerate to. She’d fancied herself the girl’s big sister, her guide and protector. What had she been, really? Her flatterer. Impaired. Years’ worth of self-correcting effort, and Weld had gone nowhere. Her character had her chained, forever complicit.

“Dennis?” she said, finding his eyes. “Yes. You’re right. I need to go back into counseling.”

He kept his gaze on his legal pad. “You need more than that. This is license-threatening stuff. This student is on national television, on the edge of emotional disaster, and she’s sleeping over at your house? She’s your pal ? And all the while you’re dispensing advice like some kind of fairy godmother, setting her up with private research outfits ”

Candace Weld sat and watched as the future stripped her of meaningful work. Everything she’d struggled to become would be held against her. She cast about for pr n y ma , but her lungs were crushed. She dropped her head, cupped her hands around her engorged throat, and dissolved in tears.

Dennis studied his notes, pretending composure. “You will go into therapy,” he said. “Christa will get you referred.”

She almost stood up then and walked out of the office. Only the mortgage prevented her.

“And of course you’ll have no contact with Thassadit Amzwar.” He pronounced the name like something from Iowa. “If she approaches you for advice of any kind, you will refer her to Christa and curtail any further interaction.”

Neither bearable nor possible. She fully granted the wrongness of her action and the validity of every reprimand that Dennis threw at her. But she did not merit punitive action. Not reprimand for what she’d fought so hard to correct.

“And my relationship?”

Dennis looked at her at last, his eyes narrowed in what any student of human psychology could only call disgust. “That’s between you and him. You think he’s willing to give her up for you?”

I always knew I’d lose my nerve in the end. Kurton set free by his data; Thassa turning brittle; Stone an easy mark in the crosshairs of love. Now Candace, on the auction block. A part of me wanted to love this woman since she was no more than the sketchiest invention. I thought she would be my mainstay, and now she’s breaking. I don’t have the heart to learn her choice.

All I want is for my friends to survive the story intact. All the story wants is to wreck anything solid in them. No one would write a word, if he remembered how much fiction eventually comes true.

The genomicist, too, has a rough night. I’ve said so little about him that you may not care. That’s more cowardice on my part. In the absence of detail, you’ve been seeing him as an uncle, an old biology teacher, some more solid scientist you recently came across in another book or film. You might feel anything toward him-curiosity, hatred, attraction. The world’s two camps of readers, split by inborn temperament, need two inimical things, and each has long ago decided to love or loathe this man according to those needs.

But feel this much, anyway:

Thomas arrives back in Logan on the flight from Chicago, mystified as to why Thassa Amzwar would lash out at him on national TV. The audience outcry also baffles him. He’s satisfied enough with his own performance: hopeful but accurate. He’s confident that public controversy can’t hurt science. Nothing, really, can hurt science. All the Luddites in the country turning out with torches and pitchforks would succeed only in sending research abroad. Everything discoverable will be discovered; he’d bet his lab on that. And every truth that research turns up simply becomes more environment, part of survival’s calculus, no less than air, food, climate, or water.