Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

He was beginning to talk like Walter already. He looked at Walter for confirmation and Walter nodded happily and said, ‘The botany students can analyze the buds and seeds in their crops. Page can check out the insects they’re eating. Bob Jenkins says we can use his instruments for the pesticide analyses and the calorimetric data. And Tyler’s going to follow the larval hatches while I’m working on the fish.’

No mention of me at all. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Since Hank’s new to this, why don’t I start by helping him? It sounds like he could use another pair of hands.’

Walter looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘I thought you’d help me,’ he said.

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Later. But you’ll be busy coordinating everyone else at first and trying to make sense of the data. I’ll just get Hank started.’

‘That’d be great,’ Hank said, before Walter could object again.

I told myself Hank said that because he wanted me. I ignored every twinge of common sense I felt, every flash of reality, and I began to spend all my time tromping around with Hank. I traded in my silk dresses and linen jackets for old chinos and rubber boots and long-sleeved shirts, and I followed Hank like a faithful dog, my knapsack weighed down with binoculars and topographic maps and notebooks and specimen bags. Hank, who’d been uneasy at first, seemed to grow used to me. We established a rhythm and worked in circles as Walter had suggested, from the pond with its herons and ducks and geese to the marsh surround with its bitterns and snipe and then the thicket with its warblers and hawks. Hank made the sightings and called out the numbers and species to me, and I recorded whatever he said.

I might have grown bored if I hadn’t had Hank to watch. Or to listen to — when we weren’t slinking through the reeds, Hank amused me with bits of local lore, which he probably didn’t mean to be funny. He called the least bitterns thunder-pumpers, from the weird noise they made. Great blue herons were shitpokes, from their habit of poking through garbage, and pied-billed grebes were water witches, sinking slowly beneath the surface when startled and vanishing like submarines. He seemed to take particular pleasure in crows.

‘My grandfather kept a crow as a pet,’ he told me one afternoon. We had taken a break so I could strip off my boots and patch my blisters, and three crows near us were arguing over a gum wrapper. ‘Corvids are cool,’ he said.

‘Crows, ravens, jays,’ I said. ‘Is that right? Those are the corvids?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, pleased. ‘But crows are the best. They’re smart. They’re monogamous. They court. Some of them get to be twenty years old. My grandfather swore his was twenty-two.’

‘I like crows,’ I said; I would have said anything to please him.

We’d spent four weeks together by then, and the closest I’d been to him was this. Our whole group often gathered on evenings and weekends, but then Hank was glued to Walter’s side with the other students, listening wide-eyed as the conversation tumbled from computer modeling to evolution and reproductive strategies. One night I listened, tired and bored, as Page and one of the botanists argued over the relative energy costs of viviparity and oviparity while Tyler made a case for parthenogenesis.

‘Gall midges, weevils, aphids,’ Tyler said. ‘Who could be more successful?’

I remembered why I’d dropped out of school.

‘That’s one strategy,’ Walter said. He sat in the rocker his students always reserved for him, which was quarter-sawn oak with fluted spindles and an oval back and carved, curved arms. A nice chair; I’d bought it myself. Somehow it had turned into Walter’s throne. ‘The most generations in the least time,’ Walter continued. ‘But then consider the other extreme. Semelparity.’

Hank blinked. The others nodded; they knew what Walter meant. Walter leaned down and explained this bit of jargon to Hank. ‘Living long,’ I heard him say. ‘Breeding only once, enormously — the organism’s entire energy budget goes into this one reproductive fling. Then dying. Pacific salmon.’

Those evenings made me frantic, but Walter was happier than he’d been in years. The swamp was teeming with his people, working on his project; Hank applied to Walter’s department for graduate work and asked for Walter as his advisor. Page was furious — she’d lost whatever hold she’d had on Hank, and now she’d lost him as a student as well. She drew away from the project, claiming she had a paper of her own to write, and Hank was so caught up with the work and with Walter that he hardly seemed to notice.

Sometimes I let myself think that he didn’t miss Page because he had me instead.

I should have understood, if anyone did, that it was Walter who was pulling Hank. I’d been through the same thing, falling into the field of Walter’s excitement like a rabbit falling down a hole. Walter knew that he had Hank charmed, and he thought he had me as well — I was working for him again, neglecting my own business while I cooked huge dinners for everyone, and he was as smug as a cat because the change was so clearly good for me. Everyone remarked upon my new shape: I was slowly, steadily losing weight, which Walter attributed to clean living and exercise and lots of fresh air. Privately, I thought the cause was much simpler; I had no time to eat. Between working outside all day and collecting data at night, then lying sleepless in bed and plotting how I could get Hank to touch me, I was melting away.

One day in September I took drastic action. I’d already tried everything else I knew — I’d spent all the time I could alone with Hank. I’d flattered him and been helpful to him and listened to him. I’d sat next to him on rocks so small that they crowded us together. I’d baked special treats for our field lunches and watched him eat them; I’d unbuttoned the top of my shirt and then bent low over broken nests on the ground. Nothing had worked. Hank’s idea of getting personal was to ask me about Walter.

‘You worked on the Quabbin project with him?’ he said. ‘You were so lucky.’

‘I was just a girl,’ I said.

‘That’s what’s so amazing. Even when you were an undergraduate you got to be around him all the time, watch him work, hear him think. You must have been so excited. Did you work with him in graduate school?’

‘I quit,’ I said, wondering how to explain why I’d left the charms of Walter and science for a career that was bound to sound frivolous to Hank. I tried to make the change sound accidental. ‘I was sick for a while,’ I said. ‘And afterwards I wasn’t in any shape to do field work. And then my great-uncle died and left me his things, and I had to do something with them …’

So I stretched the truth a little. I stretched the truth, I changed my clothes and adopted the student uniform as shamelessly as Tyler had; I wore my hair long and flowing again; I stopped wearing jewelry and makeup. After years of trying to look older I tried to look twenty-two again, and it didn’t work. Nothing did.

The day I chose was unseasonably hot. Hank and I were both wearing shorts, and while my legs were not nearly so wonderful as Hank’s, I thought I didn’t look too bad. We climbed up a limestone outcropping at the swamp’s far end, searching for evidence of hawks, and when we reached the top I sat down and spread our lunch on a cloth. Below us I could see the transects the botany students had laid from the edge of the water through the reeds, stakes hammered at one-meter intervals. I gave Hank the cans of beer I’d smuggled in and he drank them gratefully. When he was done he took off his shirt and stretched himself out on the rocks.

‘God,’ he said. ‘This weather’s the best.’