Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“It’s not …” he said. Of course he had insulted her. “It’s just that I’m so tired, and I’m still jet-lagged, and …”

Could he ask her where he was without sounding senile? Somewhere north of Philadelphia, he thought; but he knew this generally, not specifically. When he’d arrived two days ago, his body still on London time, he had fallen asleep during the long, noisy drive from the airport. Since then he’d had no clear sense of his location. He woke in a room that looked like any other; each morning a different stranger appeared and drove him to the institute. Other strangers shuttled him from laboratory to laboratory, talking at length about their research projects and then moving him from laboratory to cafeteria to auditorium to laboratory, from lobby to restaurant and back to his hotel. The talk he’d given was the same talk he’d been giving for years; he had met perhaps thirty fellow scientists and could remember only a handful of their names. All of them seemed to be gathered here, baring too much skin to the early July sun. Saturday, he thought. Also some holiday seemed to be looming.

“Do forgive me,” he said. “The foibles of the elderly.”

“How old are you?”

Her smile was charming and he forgave her rude question. “I am seventy-nine years of age,” he said. “Easy to remember — I was born in 1900, I am always as old as the century.”

“Foibles forgiven.” She— Bianca, he thought. Bianca —held out her hand in that strange boyish way of American women. Meanwhile she was looking over his shoulders, as if hoping to find someone to rescue her. “Bianca Marburg, not quite twenty-two but I’m very old for my age.”

“You’re in college?”

She tossed her hair impatiently. “Not now. My sister and I were dreadful little prodigies — in college at sixteen, out at nineteen, right into graduate school. Rose already has her Ph.D. — how else do you think she’d have a postdoc here?”

Would he never say the right thing to this bristly girl? “So then you … what is the project you are working on?” Americans, he’d been reminded these last two days, were always eager to talk about themselves.

“So then I–I should be in graduate school, and I was until two months ago but I dropped out, it was seeming stupid to me. Unlike my so-successful sister Rose, I am at loose ends.”

She moved a bowl of salad closer to a platter of sliced bread draped with a cloth, then moved it back again. “Which is why I’m driving you around. Why I’m here. I’m sort of between places, you know? I got a temp job typing for an Iraqi biophysicist — see the short guy near the volleyball net? He hired me because I can spell ‘vacuum.’ I’m staying with my sister until I get enough money together to move. I might go to Alaska.”

“That’s nice,” Krzysztof said helplessly.

“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested. Go talk to the other famous people. Constance collects them, they’re everywhere.”

She huffed off — furious, he saw. At him? In the battered leather bag that hung from his shoulder he felt the bottle he’d carried across the ocean as a special gift for his hostess. But his hostess was nowhere to be seen, and no one moved toward him from either the pool or the round tables with their mushroomlike umbrellas. Already the top of his head was burning; he was all alone and wished he had a hat. Was it possible these people meant to stay in the sun all afternoon?

Bianca made a brisk circuit through the backyard, looking for someplace to settle down. There was Rose, leaning attentively toward Constance’s camel-faced husband, Roger, and listening to him as if she were interested. Entirely typical, Bianca thought; Rose submitted herself to Roger’s monologues as a way of pleasing Constance, who was her advisor. Constance herself was holding court from a elegant lawn chair beneath an umbrella, surrounded by graduate students and postdocs — but Bianca couldn’t bear the way Constance patronized her, and she steered wide of this group. She considered joining the two students Constance employed, who were trotting up and down the steps bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; at last week’s reception, though, Constance had rebuked her for distracting the help. The knot of protein chemists at the volleyball net beckoned, Rick and Wen-li and Diego stripped of their shirts and gleaming in the sun, but she’d slept with Diego after that reception, and now they weren’t speaking. Perhaps Vivek and Anisha, easing themselves into the shallow end of the pool just as Jocelyn, already cannonball-shaped, curled her arms around her legs and launched herself into the deep end with a splash?

No, no, no. Vivek was charming but Jocelyn, impossible Jocelyn, was already whaling down on her young squire. Everywhere Bianca looked there was laughter, chatter, the display of flesh — much of it, Bianca thought, better left hidden — flirtation and bragging and boredom. A standard holiday-weekend party, except that all of these people were scientists, and many were famous, while she was neither. And had, as Rose reminded her constantly, no one to blame for this but herself.

Off by the fragrant mock orange tree, she spotted the institute’s two resident Nobel laureates side by side, looming over the scene in dark pants and long-sleeved shirts. She drifted their way, curious to see if they were clashing yet. Arnold puffed and plucked at his waistband; Herb snorted and rolled his eyes: but they were smiling, these were still playful attacks. Last week, during Winifred’s seminar on the isozymes of alpha-amylase, she’d watched the pair shred Winifred in their boastful crossfire. Arnold, sitting to her left, had favored her with a smile.

“Nice to see you gentlemen again,” Bianca said.

The men stared at her blankly, Arnold’s left foot tapping at the smooth green grass.

“Bianca Marburg,” she reminded them.

“From Jocelyn’s lab?” Arnold said now.

“Rose Marburg’s sister,” she said, grinning stupidly.

Herb frowned, still unable to place her. “Didn’t I see you … were you typing ? For Fu’ad?”

She held her hands up like claws and typed the air. “C’est moi” she said. What was she doing here?

“Ah,” Arnold said. “You must be helping Constance out. It’s a lovely party, isn’t it? So well organized. Constance really amazes me, the way she can do this sort of thing and still keep that big lab working … ”

“But that last pair of papers,” Herb said. “Really.”

Bianca fled. From the corner of her eye she saw the man she’d driven here, that Polish émigré, physical-chemist turned theoretical structural-biologist, Cambridge-based multiply medaled old guy, standing all alone by the bamboo fountain, watching the water arc from the stem to the pool. Pleasing Constance inadvertently, she thought; Constance fancied her home as a place conducive to contemplation and great ideas. Krzysztof raised his right hand and held it over his head, either feeling for hair that was no longer present or attempting to shade his array of freckles and liver spots from the burning sun.

Quickly Bianca traversed the yard and the patio, slipped through the glass doors and across the kitchen, and ran upstairs to the third and smallest bathroom. The door closed behind her with expensive precision: a Mercedes door, a jewel-box door. On the vanity was a vase with a Zenlike twist of grapevine and a single yellow orchid. She opened the window and lit up a joint. Entirely typical, she thought, gazing down at Krzysztof’s sweaty pate. That Constance and Arnold and Herb and the others should fly this man across the ocean to hear about his work, then get so caught up in institute politics that they’d forget to talk to him at their party. Had it not been for the lizardlike graze of his eyes across her chest, she might have felt sorry for him.