Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

A man emerged from the primate room holding a clipboard down at one side. As I’d later learn, he had a Purple Heart from Vietnam, a GED he’d earned while recovering at Walter Reed, and a technician’s license from the American Association of Laboratory Animal Sciences.

“You must be our latest victim,” he said.

He wasn’t much older than me, but already he moved like a fearsome old mariner. His right foot swung out at his side as if to follow the rounded edge of a protractor. There was a little play in his right pant-leg as well. The fabric pushed in against the metal rod that had replaced his flesh and bone from foot to knee. My manners failed me twice: first when I stared at his prosthetic limb, and then again when I looked up from it pretending not to have done just that.

“Charles Hithenbottom,” he said, extending his hand.

“David,” I answered, smiling with my teeth thrust forward in my mouth like something too hot or too large to swallow, this the sad consequence of an otherwise welcome English birth. “David Leveraux,” I said, pumping his hand.

John Rogers threw his arm around me and whispered in my ear, “People call him Hickey.” Then he slapped me on the bottom and threw his voice out to my new lab-mate. “Leveraux’s the biophysics of brie, Hickey!”

“Oh?” He’d been sweating; here, he began patting his face and neck dry with a handkerchief. “You raised some very interesting questions about surface-enhanced Raman scattering.”

“You read my thesis?”

Roger Johns goosed me in the side. “Hope you don’t mind if we passed it around.”

“No. No, of course not.”

They said a few more things then, but I was lost to the thrill of it all, smiling like a blind man at a concert. You must understand: this was the end of a very gratifying period in my life, one that had begun when my thesis adviser met with me to discuss my completed research. “You’re going to cause a bidding war,” he’d said. “Do you know that?” And he was grinning so widely I thought the corners of his mouth might dislodge his ears. “If only I could be in your shoes, a young man again with the whole world of flavor still in front of him. Oh, Leveraux, I envy you!”

Roger Johns sent a wet fingertip into one of my ears. “Now listen, you ever have a problem”—he hiked up his belt—“come see me.”

“Yes, sir.”

He ran two fingers around inside his collar, then pointed to the ceiling. “I’m on four.”

“You mean five,” Hickey said.

“Right.” He chuckled and went again for his belt. “Five. Or is that six from the basement?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

We laughed and nodded some more, and then, after another playful slap on my cheek and a final poke in my ribs, John Rogers was disappearing behind a door that eased shut on a hydraulic hinge.

Hickey crossed to a stool at one of the island table-tops, the oversized shoe of his artificial leg squeaking against the polished epoxy floor. He leaned into the lens of his microscope then and addressed me in a way that was both distracted and firm. “Don’t touch the monkeys.”

“Pardon?”

He looked up, his expression no less unyielding. “Don’t touch my monkeys. You’re working with the rats.”

“Oh, yes.” I looked to the rodent room. “Splendid.”

EACH DAY AFTER HANGING UP my lab coat, I rushed off to my beautiful young wife, who like me dreamed of a large family and a home that wasn’t graced by that saddest of residential digits, the fraction. Our life at 345¾ West Orange Avenue was very simple: we ate and had sex, and I worked so we could continue to do this again and again. Though it was a routine, it was far from monotonous, because while it was a baby we were after, it was a male fantasy that was taking us there. Betty met me at the door each night wearing heels and a frilly pink baby-doll negligee. “There’s my hubby,” she’d say, pushing up on her toes to give me a kiss, and then off she’d go, making a quick orbit of the living room — dropping a Mantovani record on the hi-fi, fixing a drink at the bar trolley — before catching up to me at the mouth of the hall, where I’d accept my stinger while pulling at the knot of my tie.

Some evenings, after leading her into the bedroom in back, I’d lie with my arm around her and stare up at the cottage cheese ceiling wondering how it could possibly get any better. A post-coital cigarette? Since college, I had liked to imagine my life as a French film, but I knew I couldn’t fill my days with smoke, no matter how romantic the image might be. Cigarettes damage your organoleptic senses, and a flavorist is nothing without his nose.

That I could find such happiness at the cramped Lido Village apartment complex was likely a consequence of my early troubles at the state university, where only two years previously I had feared my loneliness was a terminal condition. Since arriving on campus in 1967, I had walked the streets of Battle Station wanting nothing more than a pretty young girl on my arm, someone I could pass a fork to at ethnic restaurants and practice French with from beneath the tangles of my musty bed-sheets. But despite these longings, or perhaps because of their strength, I remained a virgin on into graduate school. It was so very disheartening. The more I looked at women, the more they reacted to me like a shortstop to a throw from center field; they were all instinct and motion, turning from me as if to gun down a runner racing for home.

But then there she was, Betty Lynne Elliot Webb, standing beside me in the co-op bookstore. It was January of 1972, and she was a freshman reaching across me for a thesaurus, while I was a first-year grad student going the other way for a hardcover dictionary. Our skin touched in the crossover, my elbow to her forearm, and as it did we shared a brief smile. I dropped my eyes to the cover of the dictionary in my hands, as if hoping to find an instructive blurb, but I couldn’t focus. Her scent dizzied me. It was a jasmine-imbued fragrance — Chanel No. 5, I knew — that was so thick and heady, so exotic and sultry, it all but roared, “I am woman!” So powerful was the scent that when I turned to the holder of it, I realized she was already gone, moving off toward the far sign that read FAMILY/CONSUMER SCIENCES.

I walked to the front register with halting steps and while in line flipped open my book. One word jumped out at me bolder than all the rest: “ fuck(fŭk) Obscene. v. fucked, fucking, fucks.” I widened my eyes to sharpen my focus. “-tr. 1.To have sexual intercourse with.” The young woman in front of me glanced back over one shoulder, a black patch obscuring her eye. The words in my dictionary seemed to vibrate and glow. “ 2.Used in the imperative as a signal of angry dismissal.” Fuck! What was I doing? I glanced to Family/Consumer Sciences, but I couldn’t see her; I might as well have been alone. “ -fuckn. 1.An act of sexual intercourse. 2.A partner in sexual intercourse.” The man at the register called me forward. “-phrasal verbs. fuck off.” I had to find her. I had to reach for her elbow and speak to her with hushed, insistent tones, to persuade her to leave with me and conjugate, to conjugate, that most natural of acts. “ 3.To masturbate.” I couldn’t leave alone. Not again. But the man at the register called out to me insistently, saying did I want anything or not, so I stepped toward him, reading one last entry before handing over the book. “ fuck up. 1.To bungle. 2.To act carelessly, foolishly, or incorrectly.”

The register dinged. I paid my money. And then I was out beneath the bruised and battered clouds, carrying so many empty and unused words in a bag that banged against my leg.