Easter Island (27 page)

Thomas laughed. “Work calls you too.”

Greer smiled. They understood this in each other, what they were driven by.

“You know,” said Greer, “the magnolia had something no other plant had.”

“What’s that?” asked Thomas.

Greer couldn’t help but smile at the thought. “A yearning to exist.”

They were married in a small ceremony at the university’s arboretum. Bruce Hodges and Jo Banks and Professor Jenks were in attendance.

For a wedding present, Thomas gave Greer the seed of a magnolia in a Venetian apothecary jar.

“For your work,” he said. “You’ll be just like Darwin now. He tested all sorts of seeds in jars of salt water to see how long they could survive in the ocean. It’s perfect for you.”

Greer gave Thomas her father’s microscope, the one he had kept in his basement lab for years, the first microscope she had ever used.

Thomas examined the brass knobs, the thick ocular. “Thank you for trusting me with this.”

On their honeymoon in Tuscany, they spent two weeks driving through the Apennine Mountains to collect sandstones and marls. The Magnolia Project was stalled, and needed samples of greater geographical diversity. Greer and Thomas managed a few elegant dinners in Florence, a brisk walk through the main galleries of the Uffizi; they had their photograph taken on the Ponte Vecchio, but the rest of the trip was work, hunting down Cretaceous and Jurassic outcrops. They tried to make the most of it, stealing kisses between procedures, calling each other “Husband” and “Wife” as they hammered at the rocks and lugged their heavy packs from site to site. In the evenings, when they returned to their hotel room, they peeled off their soiled clothes, climbed into the bathtub, and scrubbed each other’s back and arms, shampooed mountain dust from each other’s hair. And when they were both pink-skinned from the bath, they climbed into bed and made love.

Shortly after they returned from Italy, Greer developed a bad neck cramp and had to see a chiropractor, who told her to limit microscope work to five hours a day.

“We’ll get you a nice cot so you can lie down when you start to cramp,” Thomas said in bed one night. They had just moved into an apartment on Madison’s West Side, on the edges of the arboretum. He was massaging her neck. “And one of those special neck pillows.”

“Why don’t we just get someone else to do some of the counting? Another grad student. Then I can do some unknown IDs. Or help with the analysis. You’re gone too often now. You’re overextended. Someone needs to check the results, the math.”

His hands stilled. “Listen, don’t be angry, Lily . . .”

“Uh-oh.”

“Bruce is going to help with the analysis.”

“Bruce?”

“He’s sharp.”

Greer flipped on the light and turned to face him. “So am I. Why not have him keep counting? He doesn’t have any neck problems.”

“Lily, I’m not asking you to aggravate your injury. Take a rest. I’m just saying that Bruce is going to help with the analysis.”

“What about me? Or Jo? We’ve both been in that lab longer than Bruce. Jo, the longest.
She’s
sharp.”

“Bruce was the top of his class at Harvard. Listen,” he sighed. “I can’t have him transfer here to work in a lab under my wife. Or under Jo. I’m sorry, Lily. It has nothing to do with my feelings. He wouldn’t stay and you know it.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Lily, please, don’t be naive.”

“Fair isn’t naive.”

Thomas looked helpless. “It’s just not the way things work.”

“One year, Thomas. He’s been here one goddamned year.”

“Please. If you care about the project, and if you care about me, you’ll understand. Besides, you still have your dissertation. There’s no way for you to do a good job on that and work on my analysis.”

“There’s no way for me to do a good job on that and spend eighty hours a week here at a microscope trying to help you count pollen faster than anyone else in the world!” She could feel anger heating her face.

“I never asked you to neglect your own work.”

“But what did you think would happen? When exactly do you think I work on my research?”

“You know what I think of your abilities. I wouldn’t have you in my lab if I didn’t think you were capable.”

“
Capable
?”

“Lily.”

She turned out the light.

“Lily.” His hand touched her shoulder. “Please.”

“Bruce? I’m sorry, Thomas. I just can’t believe it.”

“Don’t think about Bruce. Focus on your dissertation.
Your
work. Think of your career. You’re going to have a great career, Lil. This is nothing in the scheme of things.”

Perhaps it was nothing. Greer wasn’t, after all, interested in fame. The spotlight in which Thomas basked held little appeal for her. The attention no longer seemed to flatter him, but had become an awkward weight he had to carry, a strain that slowly drew his attention from the work.

So Greer did focus on her dissertation. She spent less time at the microscope, and more time reading about biogeography, dispersal patterns, islands, and continents. What she liked were the patterns; over and over again, nature displayed the same urge. The story never changed. Each species was just a variation in the king’s name, or the color of the princess’s hair. The moral was always motion, and life.

She used the magnolia data she’d gotten in Thomas’s lab and applied it to her dissertation. How had the magnolia gone from a solitary bloom in the middle of nowhere to a tree that grew on all continents? Working in a small library carrel, she studied numbers, graphs, and curves. She liked her research, but missed the camaraderie of the lab. To work there, though, or to stop by while Bruce was in charge would seem like surrendering. Thomas was still traveling and lecturing, preparing his next paper. So Jo was her ambassador; Jo found Greer in the library a few times each week and let her know what was happening in the lab.

“If I have to listen to one more touchdown metaphor, I’m going to ram a football down that guy’s throat.”

“He’s that bad?”

“Worse.”

“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m sorry I haven’t been around.”

“Hey, I’m sorrier for you. . . . The lab needs you.”

“Well, I need to be working on my dissertation.”

Greer hadn’t told Jo about her discussion with Thomas. She had pretended Bruce’s new role was a joint decision, but wasn’t sure if her misrepresentation had been out of loyalty to Thomas, or to simply save face. From Jo’s expression, it was clear she knew Greer was unhappy. But Jo played along.

“And how
is
the opus coming?” Jo asked.

“Not to pollinate my own stigma—”

“Oh, jeez.”

“But I’m pretty happy with it,” said Greer.

“You’ll let me read it?”

“I’ll force you to.”

“I’m sure it’s brilliant.”

“Blossoms. Beetles. Something for everyone.”

Jo gave Greer’s shoulder a slight squeeze. “I can’t wait.”

By February, Greer had completed a first draft she was happy with. It focused more on theory than data, but the data had been gathered in Thomas’s lab, under Thomas’s direction, and she felt it was important to step back from his project. Her paper was thick with evolution and dispersal theory, graphs relating populations of flowers to pollinators, the time lapse between plant dispersal and pollinator dispersal. It was nontraditional, something at which she knew her committee would raise their eyebrows, but it was a risk she was willing and eager to take.

She gave a copy to Jo and a copy to Thomas, who had already removed himself from her committee. Both said the paper was wonderful, each recommending a set of revisions and adjustments, Jo, in the end, taking more time than Thomas, because Thomas was busy finishing his own paper, and was gone for weeks at a time with Bruce Hodges.

She went back to her carrel and spent another month reworking her material. In March, Thomas concluded the final revisions on his own paper, and offered—a late concession—to let Greer read it before publication. But if he hadn’t wanted her help in the beginning, she wasn’t going to offer it now. She said she was busy. Marriage, she had decided, was more important than professional collaboration.

It was May when she finally submitted her dissertation to the committee, and after a few weeks of waiting around the house, Greer decided to distract herself with a short trip back to Mercer. She wasn’t sure why then, of all times, after six years, she wanted to see her hometown. She and Thomas had spoken of visiting; perhaps she was tired of putting it off, waiting for a break in his schedule. Thomas was once again traveling, this time presenting the paper about to be published, with Bruce Hodges coauthoring. It was a warm day, and she drove slowly through the town, looking at the familiar names on the mailboxes—Feyenbacher, Simpson, Gertz. When she finally made her way down the road to her parents’ old house, it was smaller than she remembered, but the same shade of yellow, with the same wraparound porch. She parked the car and knocked on the door. A woman appeared, her hair in a loose bun, wiping her hands on the fraying hem of a pale blue apron.

“You must be Maria Compton. I’m Lillian Greer. I grew up here.”

“Ah, yes, Miss Greer. Please, come on in now. I’ve some lemonade if you’d like. And there’s a cake in the oven. Double fudge.”

“No, thanks. I was just wondering if it would be all right if I wandered up the hill to where my parents are buried. It’s been a while.”

“Sure thing, you go right on ahead. We ain’t touched a thing. The stones are still there, and Harold trims the grass ’round them quite regular. Our girl Becky asks who’s there, ’cause she likes to sit on that hill, and we just tell her it’s nice folk.”

Greer smiled. “I won’t be long.”

“Long? Nonsense. Take your time. I got tissue if you want.”

“No, thank you.”

Greer walked up the hill and lay down between the two simple headstones, staring at the slightly overcast sky. The ground was cold and moist beneath her and soaked the back of her blouse. She let her hands wander the grass, remembering how years before she’d come up here to pluck wildflowers, carrying them back to the house in the bib of her shirt, hoping that under the microscope she would find something that would explain where her mother had gone. Greer wondered if it was really any different from what she was doing now, lying by their graves, because she believed, or wanted to believe, that life was somehow bound to matter, that spirit lodged itself in land.

She felt a spider inch across her ankle, and she sat up and let it walk onto her hand, examining it closely. Whitman’s verse came back to her:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren / And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest . . .
The spider, too, should have been equally perfect. It roamed her skin, wandering the peninsula of each finger, until she set it gently back in the grass.

But Greer worried she was losing her belief in the journey-work, that nature was becoming a speck on a glass slide in a sanitized room. Investigating to produce publishable answers—this was what had filled her days for the past six years. Was she now less moved by science? Or was she simply feeling the exhaustion of finishing her dissertation, years of work officially surrendered. She got up, brushed the dirt off her back, and walked down the hill.

“Thanks,” she called out to Maria Compton, who was just then stepping onto the porch with a cake in hand.

“Double fudge!” she sang. “That’s fudge plus fudge.”

“I want to make it back before dark.”

Greer had plenty of time, but the sight of the house depressed her. Its memories seemed out of reach.

“I have a big meeting tomorrow,” Greer said.

“Well, you stop by anytime. Hear me? Anytime. We’ll keep them stones clean.”

“Thank you,” she said, and drove down the dirt road that once seemed the longest road in the world.

The next day, Greer awoke early and dressed for her committee meeting. She had bought a black suit for the occasion and looked, as she glanced in the mirror, surprisingly professional. She fastened her hair with two tortoiseshell combs; she applied some lipstick. She fixed herself coffee, a bowl of cereal, and opened the sealed envelope Thomas had left her:

        Remember. No fear, my love. You’ll be great. I miss you.

        Home soon.

Your husband
        

She was disappointed he wasn’t there; this day was the culmination of all her work in the lab. But she knew he couldn’t get out of this conference, or at least felt he couldn’t.

As Greer walked slowly over to Birge Hall, she reviewed in her mind the details of her paper. They could ask about anything, try to trip her up on the smallest of details, though she had a feeling they would be less aggressive than normal. After all, she’d been to cocktail parties at all their houses, had helped their wives clear plates from the dinner table, had sat with them into the night, sipping port and brandy to the sounds of Bach. It would be difficult for them to attack her, and in a strange way, this was disappointing. Greer felt good about her work, and didn’t mind a scuffle.