Nora Jane (28 page)

* * *

The storm was moving very slowly across the chaos of disordered rocks that is the Coast Range of Northern California. The
birds pulled their wings over their heads. The panthers dreamed in their lairs. The scraggly vegetation drank the water as
fast as it fell. When the sun came back out it would use the water to grow ten times as fast as vegetation in wetter climates.
Tammili and Lydia held hands. Freddy slept. An infinitesimal part of the energy we call time became what we call history.

“Six thousand and one,” Nieman counted. He wanted to stop and wipe his glasses but he could not bring himself to waste a second.
Some terrible intuition led him on. Some danger or unease that had bothered him ever since the night before. He had come to
where he was needed. It was not the first time that had happened to him. That’s why I hated those movies, he told himself.
When no one believed what they knew. When no one learned anything. The beginning of Karate Kid was okay. The beginning of
it was grand.

He had come to a creek bed that was now a torrent of rushing water. I know this, he remembered. But how the hell will I cross
it now? He stood up straight. He pushed the hood back from his parka and reached for his glasses to wipe them. A huge bolt
of lightning shook the sky. It illuminated everything in sight. By its light Nieman saw the pile of tent and figures on the
ground on the other side of the water. “Freddy,” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “It’s me. It’s Nieman. Freddy, is that
you?”

The rest was drowned by thunder. Then Nieman saw a small figure rise up from the pile. She came out from under the tent and
began waving her hands in the air.

“I’ll get there,” he yelled. “Stay where you are.” The rain was slacking somewhat. Nieman found a flat place a few yards down
the creek and began to make his way across the rocks. Lydia met him on the other side. “Dad’s broken his arm and foot,” she
told him. “We need to get him to a doctor.”

* * *

The medic spotted the Jeep and the truck. “There they are,” he yelled at the driver. “There’re the fools. Let’s go get them.”

An hour later Freddy was on a stretcher being brought down the mountain by four men. The clearing was filled with vehicles.
The brown cape was thrown into the back of an EMS van. It would end up at the city laundry. Then on the bed of a seven-year-old
Mexican girl who had been taken from her mother. But that is another story.

Ten days later a party gathered at Chez Panisse to eat an early dinner and discuss the events of the past week. There were
nine people gathered at Freddy Harwood’s favorite table by the window in the back room. The young man who had seen the flares,
the medic, the driver, Nieman, Freddy, Nora Jane, Tammili, Lydia, and a woman biochemist who was after Nieman to marry him.
Her name was Stella Light and this was the first time Nieman had taken her out among his friends. It was the first time he
had taken her to Chez Panisse and the first time he had introduced her to Nora Jane and Freddy and the twins. Stella Light
was dressed in her best clothes, a five-year-old gray pantsuit and a white cotton blouse. She had almost added a yellow scarf
but had taken it off minutes after she put it on.

“We had this magic cape we found under the bed,” Lydia was telling her. “The minute we say something’s magic, it is magic,
that’s what Uncle Nieman says. It’s probably his cape but he can’t remember it. He leaves his stuff everywhere. Did you know
that? He’s absentminded because he is a genius. Do you go to school with him? Is that how you met him?”

“Well, I teach in the department. Tell me about the cape.”

“It kept us warm. Dad thinks it was synchilla. Anyway, it was raining so hard it felt like rocks were falling on us.”

“It was lightning like crazy,” Tammili added. “There was lightning so near it made halos around the trees.”

“Tammili!” Freddy shook his head.

“You don’t know. You were incoherent from pain.”

“Incoherent?” Stella laughed.

“She always talks like that,” Lydia said. “It’s Uncle Nieman. He’s been working on our vocabularies since we were born.”

“I’m having goat cheese pie and salad,” Nieman said. “I think he wants to take our orders. Menus up, ladies. Magic cape, my
eye. Magic forest rangers and volunteer distress signal watchers.” He stood up and raised his glass to the medic and the driver
and the young man. “To your honor, gentlemen. We salute thee.”

“To all of us,” Freddy added, raising his glass with his good hand. “My saviors, my family, my friends.”

Nieman caught Stella’s eye as they drank. A long sweet look that was not lost on Tammili and Lydia. We could be the bridesmaids,
Lydia decided. We never get to be in weddings. None of Mom and Dad’s friends ever get married. Pretty soon we’ll be too old
to be bridesmaids. It will be too late.

“Stop it,” Tammili whispered to her sister, pretending to be bending over to pick up a napkin so she wouldn’t be scolded for
telling secrets at the table. “Stop wanting that woman to marry Uncle Nieman. Uncle Nieman doesn’t need a girlfriend. He’s
got everything he needs. He’s got Mom and Dad and you and me.” When she sat up she batted her eyes at her godfather. Then,
for good measure, she got up and walked around the table and gave him a hug and stood by his side. Oh, my God, Stella was
thinking. Well, that’s an obstacle that can be overcome. Children are such little beasts nowadays. It makes you want to get
your tubes tied.

“Go back to your chair,” Nora Jane said to her daughter. “Let Uncle Nieman eat his goat cheese pie.”

N
IEMAN GLUUK
was finally going to be taken to bed. Not that he hadn’t had love affairs before. He had had them but they hadn’t meant to
him what they mean to most of us. They hadn’t thrown him to the mat. They hadn’t given him a taste of what men kill and die
for, dream about. One Stella Light of Salem, Oregon, was going to be the one to do it. Thirty-seven years old, five feet six
inches tall, dark haired and dark eyed, a physicist, a biochemist, and a distance runner. A control freak. An expert on viral
diseases of poultry. The only child of a high school science teacher and a librarian. A small-breasted woman who had dyed
her hair platinum blond the week before she met Nieman and begun wearing a devastatingly expensive perfume called Joy. Her
clock was ticking and her hours staring at photographs taken by electron microscopes had not given her any reason to put off
doing anything she wanted to do.

It is dawn. Stella gets up and makes the bed. She puts on a white T-shirt and a pair of cutoff blue jeans and some high-tech
Nike running shoes. She rubs sunblock lotion on her arms and face. She pours a cup of coffee that was made automatically at
five o’clock by her combination clock radio and coffeemaker.

She walks out onto her porch. She surveys the mist that has come in the night before. She imagines the coast of California
swaying on its shaky underpinnings. She goes down the stairs and begins to run.In five minutes the endorphins kick in. In
five minutes the blood is in her legs instead of her cerebral cortex, and for the only time during the day she is free of
thinking, thinking, thinking.

She runs uphill for a mile, then cuts over to the Berkeley campus. She runs the length of the campus three times, back and
forth, and back again. She stops once to pick up a curled leaf that has fallen from a tree. It has been infested with a bole.
She scratches the bole open and squints at it, then puts it in the pocket of her shorts. She has been inspecting leaves since
she was three years old.

Nothing surprises Stella. And everything interests her. Of late, she has found herself musing on reproduction more than she
thinks is healthy. Leaf, bole, tree, nuts, seeds, eggs. Not to mention the terrible viral splittings on the screens of the
microscopes. As Stella runs through the campus she forces her mind to stay in the realm of vertebrates. I should use one of
my eggs, her mind keeps repeating. No one else carries Grandfather Bass’s genes. No one else carries Mother’s or Aunt Georgia’s.
I am the last. I should go deeper into life. Life is dangerous and awful. Still, it is all we have. I am tired of being perfect.
Perhaps I am tired of being alone. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps it is a trick the hormones play.

Nieman had been laid before. He had slept with prostitutes and he had slept with a girl from Ohio for five months in 1973.
He had slept with a French girl one summer when he and Freddy went to study French at the Sorbonne. What he had not done was
fall in love. All he had seen around him were the ruins of love. His parents’ marriage had been a disaster. He barely knew
his father. The hundreds of movies he had reviewed and all the books he had read taught him that love was a wasteland, a tornado,
an earthquake, a fire. Men and women in love were like children, given over to childlike jealousies and self-loathing and
despair.

* * *

When he ran into Stella late one afternoon as they were both leaving the biochemistry building and knocked her papers out
of her hand, he had no idea that his life was being changed. He had a premonition, a terrible sense of déjà vu, and so did
she, but Nieman thought it was the weather and Stella thought it was because she was about to begin her period.

“They weren’t numbered,” she said, as she knelt to pick up the papers. “Well, that’s not your fault, is it?”

“Oh, God, oh, please let me pick them up. Don’t do that. I’m so sorry. Let me help you?”

“Have we met?” She was kneeling only feet away from him. She was wearing a blue denim skirt, a soft blue shirt, little blue
sneakers like you see on sale at the grocery store. She smelled of some heavenly perfume, some odor of divinity. Underneath
the shirt was a soft white camisole with lace along the edges. In the center of the camisole was a small pink flower. “I’m
having a déjà vu,” she added. “It’s such an odd sensation. I’m probably hungry. I get crazy when I don’t eat. Blood sugar.
Oh, well.”

“That’s dangerous. Let me feed you. Please. Come with me.” He had gathered up the rest of the papers. He stood up. He took
her hand and pulled her up beside him. “Please. Come have dinner with me. I’ll help you straighten up the papers. I’m hungry
too.”

“Well, if you’ll go someplace near. How about the Grill across from the library?”

“Great. I like it there. I go there all the time. I’m Nieman Gluuk. I’m a student.”

“I know who you are. You’re the talk of the department. Did you really quit the paper to study science?”

“I wish that story hadn’t gotten out. I’m a neophyte. A bare beginner. It’s pitiful how far I have to go.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a booth at the Grill eating French fries and waiting for their omelets. They were
telling each other the stories of their lives.

“So when they quit the Merry Pranksters, they moved back to Salem and had me. They were worried they had fucked up their DNA
with all the acid they had done so they had me tested all the time. It turned out I test well. Then they decided I’m a genius.
I’m not. I just learned to take the tests. So, out of their relief that I wasn’t an idiot, they turned into the worst bourgeois
you can imagine. They collect furniture. You wouldn’t believe the furniture my mom can cram into a room. Danish modern, English
antiques …Anyway, I like them. They leave me alone, considering I’m an only child. They work for environmental groups and
they have a lot of friends. They’re pretty people. Both of them are a lot prettier than I am. I look like my maternal grandfather,
who invented dental floss, by the way. He was a dentist in New Orleans.”

“You’re very pretty. You’re as pretty as you can be. You don’t think you’re pretty?”

“I’m okay. You ought to see them. They look like early-retirement poster people. So, what set of events made you?”

“An undependable father and an unhappy mother. No wonder I started going to the movies. She’s a frustrated actress. I grew
up thinking the theater was real life.”

“Well, I’m a fan. I always read your column. I loved the things you wrote. I can’t believe you just quit doing it.”

“Twenty years. It got so unpleasant at the end. I couldn’t please anyone. Even people I praised didn’t think the praise went
far enough. Now I want to know the rest. The things you know. I can’t wait to use an electron microscope.”

“They haven’t let you use it?”

“They were supposed to last week, then the class was canceled.”

“Oh, I know what happened. The Benning-Rohrer was down and we had to double up on the SEM. I’ll show them to you. We can go
there after dinner if you like.”

The waiter appeared and put plates of steaming omelets in front of them. This is not what I thought would happen, Nieman was
thinking. Always what you least expect. I already feel the air getting thin. Freddy told me someday this would happen to me
but I thought he was projecting.

Look at that forebrain, Stella was thinking. The cerebral cortex. The verbal skills. I could breed with that, if I am being
driven to breed. She sat very still. She picked at her food. She lifted a hand and touched her mouth with her finger.

“Are you left-handed?” Nieman asked.

“Yes.”

“I am too.”

When they had finished eating they walked back across the campus to the biochemistry building and went up to Stella’s office
and left the papers, which they had forgotten to put in order, on her desk. Then they went into the laboratory and sat down
in the chairs before the scanning electron microscope. “How much do you know?” Stella asked.

“’The scanning electron microscope …a beam of electrons is scanned over the surface of a solid object and used to build up
an image of the details of the surface structure. There are also several special types of electron microscope. Among the most
valuable is the electron-probe microanalyzer, which allows a chemical analysis of the composition of materials to be made
by using the incident electron beam to excite the emission of characteristic X radiation by the various elements composing
the specimen. These X rays are detected and analyzed by spectrometers built into the instrument. Such probe microanalyzers
are able to produce an electron-scanning image so that structure and composition may be easily correlated.’”