Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“Rose?” he said. The tone in his voice was pure wonder; they hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years. He was much changed, and yet still himself: the mustache grizzled, the black hair half gray; thicker at the waist and shoulders yet still with the same eyes. She’d changed more, she knew; she’d been a weedy girl when they last met and was amazed that he recognized her.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked.

“Your mother used to sit just like that — remember? With her legs draped over the arm of the couch? And the way you push back your hair with your left hand is so like her …”

The oddest feeling passed over her, as if Suky had breathed in her ear. When she gazed into a mirror she saw only broken shadows of her mother, and it hadn’t occurred to her before that habits of body and gesture might link them, visible only in motion, and only to others.

In the hour they had before Signe arrived and Peter had to catch his flight to Arizona, she was further amazed to learn that they’d been nearly neighbors for the last six years. All the time she’d been at the Institute, he’d been at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge; he lived in Watertown, not far from her apartment in Waltham.

He was on his way to a huge entomology meeting in Tempe, he said; and she, in turn, revealed that she was headed for a gathering so small and prestigious that he raised both eyebrows when she named it. Briefly, she told him about her research, which didn’t seem to surprise him. Although he hadn’t been in touch with Theo in years, he’d heard that she’d gone to graduate school in biochemistry, done a stunning thesis, and set off for a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia when she was still very young.

“But I didn’t know where you went after that,” he said. “I had no idea you’d ended up around Boston.”

She didn’t tell him about the prize she was about to get, nor her grants and her embarrassingly large research budget, nor the fact that she was the youngest Senior Fellow at the Institute. “Is it still beetles with you?” she asked.

“Still. Unfashionable beetles.” They talked briefly about his trials; how the money for whole-animal biology had dried up, and how the molecular biologists who’d taken over at Harvard and elsewhere scorned his kind of science now.

“For a while I thought maybe I’d recruited you into the fold,” he said wryly. “Do you remember how much you liked my beetles?”

She stared, amazed at how little he’d understood of her violent feelings. “Somehow I drifted away from that.”

“It’s a shame,” he said. “You had a real flair for taxonomy. But it’s just as well, I guess — here you’ve ended up working in a hot field, and I’ve been relegated to the sidelines. I didn’t even have enough money this year to fly a graduate student to the meeting with me.”

Rose changed the subject before the difference in their professional lives became more embarrassing. “Are you married?” she said. “Family?”

Peter looked down at his legs and plucked at invisible lint. “I was married,” he said. “You must have known — I got married the year your mother died.”

How could she have forgotten that? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t remember much from those years.”

“Lauren,” he said. “You met her, I brought her to the house. We split four years ago, in ’82. Lauren wanted children, but we were never able to have any.” He looked up here, he looked right into Rose’s eyes. “She lives in Missoula now.”

His hands were still plucking at the cloth on his legs, tenting then releasing the material, and Rose reached over and covered his fingers with hers.

“I am fifty-one years old,” Peter said flatly. “And all alone. How about you?”

“The same,” Rose said. Although this was something she never thought about, which she normally forbade herself to think about. Her life was interesting, and very busy.

“But,” Peter said. “You know …”

And then Signe appeared in the distance, bowed beneath her backpack and struggling with a suitcase; and it was time for Peter’s flight to Tempe. A flurry of introductions and almost simultaneous farewells, an awkward hug, everything left hanging and Peter suddenly distant, clearly embarrassed by what he’d revealed. He rushed away, his stride still that of a young man, bouncy in running shoes.

He called her, though. Two weeks later, after they’d both returned from their meetings, he called her at work and asked her to meet him for dinner. She was on her way to Italy and had to put him off. When she returned he was in Costa Rica with a group of students, gone for the rest of the semester. But finally they were both in town at the same time, and they did get together. He visited the Institute and she toured the Museum; he cooked a mushroom risotto for her and she made a complicated dish with eggplants and pine nuts and goat cheese for him. The first time they went to bed together was in her cluttered apartment, and it was not a bed they shared but a futon. Peter knocked over the lamp. Later he showed her the oval, slanted holes in the slab of tree trunk she used as a coffee table. “Longhorn-beetle larvae,” he said. From the floor the underside of the table was easy to see.

By a stroke of coincidence Rose preferred to ignore, their love affair began in May, just when Peter had always visited her family in Hammondsport and at the height of beetle season. Deadlines for grants and papers loomed, talks for meetings later that summer had to be prepared, her students all had examinations, and in the lab, where she’d always worked far into the night, her research took a surprising turn that ought to have captivated her entirely. Yet still she made time for Peter. Whole Sundays she spent with him, driving into the forests of western Massachusetts in search of specimens. And evenings too, as the days lengthened. The names of the beetles returned to her, and she found pleasure in this — although for some years now she had, like every molecular biologist her age, spoken scornfully of descriptive biology and taxonomy. Peter, she came to understand, was one of the two or three people in the world most expert in the Silphidae; and within that family he knew more than anyone else about the burying-beetles.

That expertise, she thought — it might not be science, but it was something. She couldn’t hold it against him that he didn’t understand her own work: who did, beyond a handful of people in her field? In June she looked up at a dinner party — his friends, not hers; all a generation older and so cultured she felt barbarous — and caught him listening as she tried to explain her research to an elderly cellist.

“I look at a protein called ubiquitin,” she said. A college girl in a crisp white shirt cleared the arugula salad and laid clean plates, making Rose uncomfortable; who was she to be waited on? There were flowers embroidered on the linen napkins, and cushions on the chairs. “It has that name because it’s so abundant, and found in all kinds of cells — in people, beetles, yeasts, everything. And it’s almost identical in every species.”

The cellist cocked his head attentively and touched his salmon with a silver fork. Rose wasn’t sure he even knew what a protein was. “What it does,” she said,”—in your cells, in any cell, proteins are continuously synthesized and then degraded back into their component amino acids. The degradation is just as important as the synthesis in regulating cellular metabolism. Ubiquitin molecules bind to other proteins and mark them for degradation. Without that marking and breaking down, nothing in the cell can work. I try to sort out the details of the protein-degradation process.”

She’d left out everything important but still the cellist looked mystified. She was about to change the subject when she saw Peter eavesdropping across the table. To Rose and the cellist, to the table at large, Peter said, “You see, our research isn’t so different after all. My beetles and Rose’s molecule both break large dead things into smaller bits, so new things can be made.”