Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘She’s just trying to help,’ I told him.

‘We don’t need her help,’ said Walter. ‘We’ll be fine. Once you graduate, you’ll relax and it’ll happen.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That’s probably it.’

I had never told him about the abortion I’d had when I was married to Randy, or about the infection I’d had afterward; and although I dreamed about my lost child each night, more and more sorry for that life I’d rejected, by the time Walter and I were trying to make another life I couldn’t confide in him. I’d lent my past actions so much weight by not disclosing them sooner than now, almost by accident, I had a big secret. Maybe a guilty secret — when I bent double once each month, stabbed by ovarian cramps, I refused to go to the doctor. ‘This is normal,’ I told Walter. ‘It’s just the egg passing through.’ Meanwhile I was sure my insides had been scrambled and fused by my past mistakes, a nest of adhesions and scars and wounds, nothing left pink and shining.

As the spring wore on, I found myself making love by the calendar and not enjoying it at all, my pelvis propped up on pillows to help the sperm swim in. I worried about the thickness of my vaginal secretions and about the tilt of my uterus. I wondered about the patency of my fallopian tubes. All my attention was focused on my physiology, and I couldn’t concentrate on school. My worst class was an upper-level population ecology course — half graduate students, half seniors like myself — which was taught by a pompous fool with whom Walter often collaborated. ‘I ought to drop the course,’ I’d told Walter. ‘It’s making me tense.’ He’d pointed out that this was my last semester, that I needed the credits, and that my classmates would help me acclimate to graduate school. I’d applied, after all, under pressure from him — to his school, to his department. Of course I got in. I had good grades and great recommendations, and I didn’t tell anyone I planned to drop out as soon as I got pregnant.

The only good thing about my bad course — the only good thing about spring — was Page. I met her the day the teacher lectured on cyclic population changes. ‘These are the snowshoe hares,’ he said, drawing a jagged graph on the board. ‘The population peaks every nine or ten years and then crashes.’ He drew another line that roughly followed the first. ‘These are the lynxes,’ he said. ‘Their population peaks about a year after the hares. Then it crashes, as they starve once the hares are gone.’

The woman sitting next to me turned and whispered in my ear. ‘Excited?’ she said. ‘This guy could make sex boring.’

I had been lost in my own eggy thoughts, and when she spoke I was so startled I smiled. Page was a year or two younger than me, blond, sharp-featured, and bright, and when we had coffee together later she told me she was a first-year graduate student specializing in the lepidoptera.

‘I’m only taking this course because it’s required,’ she told me in the cafeteria. ‘That asshole, Tinbergen — he’s never spent a day in the field in his life. Makes me sick, the way he goes on about lemmings and snowy owls like he ever actually saw any … God. This place. Where are you going when you graduate?’

‘Here,’ I said. ‘I guess. Same department as you.’

She groaned and then laughed. ‘Why would you want to come here?’

‘I’m married to Walter Hoffmeier,’ I confessed.

Most of my classmates knew that; it was why they avoided me. Page’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Him?’ she said. ‘No kidding. He’s so much older …’

‘It’s not like he’s ancient,’ I said. ‘You probably don’t know him.’

She laid a placating hand on my arm. ‘I don’t, really,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s nicer than he looks.’

‘He is,’ I said. ‘It’s just that he’s so private. He really only opens up to me — we pretty much keep to ourselves.’

She made a wry face. ‘I bet. I was going to ask if you wanted to come to a party — a bunch of us first-year graduate students get together every Friday, and this week we’re meeting at my place. But I guess you wouldn’t want to come.’

‘I would,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘I’d like to.’

‘With Walter? That might not be so good.’

‘I’ll leave him at home,’ I said. It was true that we kept pretty much to ourselves — Walter kept me so close to him that I’d had no chance to make friends my own age. But I yearned for some company just then, some entry into the graduate-school world I felt I was being forced into.

Page seemed ready to welcome me despite my connection to Walter, and all that week we sat together in class and mocked Professor Tinbergen’s papery voice. ‘Animals associate in different ways,’ he said. He read directly from our textbook, his thin hand fussing with the buckle of his belt. ‘Varieties of association include mutualism, competition, commensalism, parasitism, and predation.’

‘Food and sex,’ Page whispered to me. ‘That’s all he’s saying — who they eat and who they fuck and how and when.’

‘Something you’d like to share with us?’ Professor Tinbergen said.

‘Not a thing,’ Page replied.

While he droned on, Page drew butterflies on a notebook page, fantastic creatures with humanoid eyes and legs and oversize antennae and ridiculous clothes, pompous creatures engaged in silly acts. One was a caricature of Tinbergen. One was the department chairman. One, inevitably, was Walter, a pair of wings drooping sadly from his thorax and scalpels bristling from his feet. I laughed at that, and then felt immediately guilty, but Page was so open and friendly at first that before I’d known her a week I’d told her entirely too much. When she asked me how I came to marry Walter I described our summer in the trailer at the reservoir, cutting up fish and weighing gonads. She contended that I’d been overwhelmed by all that biology, and I couldn’t offer a better explanation.

Page told me tales about our classmates. ‘Stay away from Timmy,’ she said. ‘He gets weird when he drinks. John Webster sleeps in the woods for weeks at a time, watching hawks. Suzanne is married to Lon Brinkman, over in botany, but she’s fooling around with Tony Baker. The one who works in Wasserman’s lab?’

‘I’ve seen him,’ I said; Tony was the student who’d worked with us at the reservoir and who had tried to invite me to the July Fourth celebration. My throat still got dry when I looked at him.

‘They’ll all be at the party,’ Page said. ‘You’ll meet everyone.’

It was easy enough to get Walter’s permission to go — all I had to do was tell him it was a meeting of my fellow students. ‘So I’ll know some people,’ I explained the evening of the party. ‘So I won’t feel lost next fall.’

‘You know all the professors,’ he told me, straightening some piles of paper on his desk. ‘You’ve been having dinner with them for two years.’ Then he checked his calendar and looked at me sheepishly. ‘Tonight’s one of our nights,’ he said, meaning I was mid-cycle. ‘Try not to be late?’

‘I won’t be,’ I said. ‘I just want to meet some of these people I’ll be working with.’

‘Have a good time,’ he said.

I went off to Page’s place alone. All the windows were open in her small apartment, letting in the warm April air. When I came up the stairs, I found only Page and a man in a black leather jacket, who had a beaked nose and a shock of dirty blond hair that fell in his eyes when he moved.

‘Hey,’ this man said, fixing me with a hawk’s predatory glare. ‘Fresh blood. Who’s this?’

I blushed dark red. Before I could answer him, Page came out of the kitchen. Her hair was frizzed from the steam of the couscous she was cooking, and her breasts swung soft and loose under her Indian smock.