Saving St. Germ (13 page)

“J-just one m-more question. R-really.”

“Shoot.”

“I
know
you’ll g-get
this
one. H-Hedy Lamarr!”

“Of course
I
know Hedy Lamarr.”

“Well, w-what do you know?”

“She was a legend.”

“So what are your f-favorite films of hers? You like
Ecstasy
?”

“Ecstasy? What’s that? Hedy Lamarr was a great scientist
—
she invented an anti-jamming device to block Nazi radar during World War II. You didn’t know that? Her real name was, honest to God, Hedwig Keisler Markey. She never got credit though. The War Department, the dumb jerks, turned down her offer and eventually her patent on this thing ran out. Now Sylvania or somebody has adapted it and it runs satellite communications all around the globe.”

Jay stared at me, put back his head, and started to laugh.

“Y-you mean to t-tell me that Hedy Lamarr isn’t kn-known to you as a
movie star,
you know her as a ... what?”

“Scientist, inventor, whatever.”

“I have to go s-sit down somewhere and h-have a b-beer. I’m l-losing it.”

So we tried to compromise. I actually visited film museums and read ghostwritten or “as told to” biographies; he came to my lab. But I couldn’t help it, I had little natural interest in the subculture and it was hard to pretend that I did. I mean, sometimes I walked into the kitchen seeing bubble universes twisting themselves free like glassine blossoms, I saw great vibrating strings twisting helically, I saw and heard four-dimensional harps playing Mozart. I was a heretic, a dinosaur: television and film both struck me as tedious mediums—paradoxically, because they moved so fast. Their speed and flattened dimension reduced them to banality, plus I had trouble with L.A. movie audiences. In what other town did people sit grimly through the long roll of end credits, commenting on names of friends or foes—in the fields of Lighting, Makeup, A.D.-ing? In what other movie theaters in the world would you overhear a breakdown, sotto voce, of every
camera angle
, or a bitchy discourse on
casting
? And why was it that despite the fact that I can break down Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for you, I am incapable of grasping what it is that a
producer actually
does?

All of this made Jay defensive about his enthusiasms, this made me exasperated, but oddly willing to continue being with him. In the past, I’d have left him without a qualm. But there was something still on my conscience about Jesse, something bothering me about myself and how I screwed up when I loved people. And it was undeniable, in some way, that Jay and I were oddly suited
—
his stutter was the physical embodiment of my emotional reluctance. We were to each other (had we only noticed) a reminder of the necessity of perseverance in love. I stayed with Jay, I tried hard with Jay, and slowly acquired a life with him. It was no longer exhilarating, because we’d doubted each other so early on, but we kept staying. One night, then the next, then the next. We stayed, we got used to each other. Ollie, listen. We learned to love each other.

At UGC, I ended up in an odd position. I began taking it slow, for the first time. I was spending time seeing Jay’s Los Angeles, learning Jay’s Los Angeles. Perhaps that was it. If I couldn’t learn to love the movie culture, I learned to appreciate the city, its rhythms. But there was something else. I met my classes, put in my hours in the lab, but this fire I’ve always stoked inside me was burning low. I was setting up a lab—funding was going to come through from Derridex, a sci-tech corporation, for my work on Alpha
₁
Antitrypsin—and I was asked to lecture to the biochemistry and molecular-biology faculties, but sometimes I caught myself sitting still at the bench, in the lab, dreaming. I sorted through my days with Q, I called up my mother’s face as she looked first at Q, then at me. I conjured Jesse: I watched him from above as he bounded up the narrow steps of our brownstone toward me, his jacket and hair covered with snow, a scraggly pine tree cradled in his arms like an adopted stray, shedding needles all the way. “Some guy selling pot on the corner offered me
this
instead of a lid! We can
smoke
it or string lights on it!” He stopped on the fifth step from the top, leaning back, looking up at me, snow in his eyelashes. “You tell me, Ez,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I w-watch TV because it comforts me,” Jay said once. I hadn’t asked him a question, we hadn’t been speaking, just sitting quietly in his living room. He was slouched in a lounger, wearing only Jockey shorts and red socks, and I was actually trying to sew something: a loose button on my lab coat. It was taking me a while, but it lent a kind of cheery pseudo-domesticity to our scene.

I looked over at him.

“When I was a kid and I came home from school, my parents were never around. I loved the fact that I could turn on the tube and the same people would always be there to greet me. The folks on
Gilligan’s Island,
the
Star Trek
crew. My family, if you know what I mean.” He turned back to an HBO movie starring a dog that could fly.

I stared at him. He was not stuttering at all.

There was a silence. The dog landed on Mars.

“My mother drank a lot,” Jay said. “And she was very loud. I was embarrassed by her. I loved the mothers on television.”

“How’s your mom now?”

“She still drinks, she’s still loud. And I’m still in love with TV families.”

“And now you drink, too.”

Jay turned to look at me.

“I kn-know why I love TV families so m-much. But e-exactly.”

My father watched television at the end. I remember him sitting in front of it, smoking, smoking and coughing. I associate those sounds with certain sitcom theme music, the oceanic murmur of baseball games. The sound of disappearing, the sound of never coming back.

Jay and I stood at the top of Mulholland Drive, looking down on Los Angeles. My hair was blowing in my eyes. “Eighty-one languages spoken in this city!” Jay cried, pointing down excitedly. “C-can you imagine it?”

I tried to imagine a Babel of tongues rising up to us, where we stood ankle-deep in the brownish iceplant. Jay said something else.

“What?” I cried. “I can’t hear you!”

He kissed me. I kissed him back.

We made love. It was wonderful.

Then Jay asked me a question. “D-did you c-come?”

We started to laugh. We c-couldn’t s-stop.

Ollie, I rented a small house in Hollywood, our house. It had an avocado tree in the backyard that actually bore fruit. I bought it with a low-interest loan from the university. I was overwhelmed by the ease and swiftness with which all this happened.

I spent time wandering around my little house in the early-morning hours, wearing nothing but a pair of Jay’s boxer shorts and a halter,
e
ating a peanut-butter sandwich, humming. I’d made my peace with Los Angeles. Every once in a while, I would sit on a hassock or lean on a gleaming blond butcher-block island and think: I have a place to live. I have a job. I have a sweetheart. I looked at myself in the hallway mirror. Red red hair, fiery topknot. Strong nose and chin. Big yellow-green cat’s eyes. Looking back, it seems I was under a spell. I wasn’t thinking about science during that whole time, I wasn’t thinking about anything but recovering some part of myself. Certainly I relied on my skepticism; it had always come in handy before, why give it up now? But I still walked from room to room in my new house early in the morning, singing little off-key songs to myself.

When I got the letter announcing Q’s and my mother’s engagement, I felt relief. Some nights later I sat in my office at school, waiting, listening to two after-hours researchers bang locker doors and call goodbyes. Then I took my lab keys, opened the door, and went to the bench. I lit a Bunsen, pulled a clean tube from the rack. I opened my bag and took out a vial filled with my own urine. Then I put the tube in the spinner, the centrifuge, watched it separate into a colloidal suspension. Then I hung the tube in the rack. I had a wait ahead of me.

I wandered into another section of the laboratory, where a colleague of mine kept Drosophila flies in bottles for a study of the male accessory gland. She watched them mate, then kept a check on this gland, which lost one third of its protein after copulation. She watched to see how the gland made RNase and remade protein. The postcoital male flies were put in a bottle labeled “Exhausted Males.” The females, tragically, ended up in the Morgue. There were bottles called Monasteries, where celibate males were placed, and a Motel, where the slow-going sex between the flies went on. Then there was a Dim Bulb Division, where mutants, slow-learner flies, bumbled about, bumping into the bottle walls. There was a “hot” area, where she injected the males, after mating, with radioactive isotopes
—
zapped them, lit them up, then sliced out a cross section to see what was
i
nside. The idea was to mimic in vitro
—
that is to say, outside of the body
—
what went on after copulation.

At three in the morning, nodding with sleep, I went back, held my tube up to the light, and saw the newly formed agglutinate, the antibody clumping reaction in the bottom of the tube, which testified to the presence in my blood of the hormone HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin. The clear conclusion, as I stood there, the tube trembling in my hand in the harsh overhead light, was that conception had taken place. Think of this, Ollie. I saw firsthand, I
held
in my hand, the chemical message that you had arrived.

I washed out the glass beaker and tubes, cleared away some notes, checked the burners and other equipment, took my keys, and left. I got into my car and drove out to the beach. It was close to dawn. As I pulled off the Pacific Coast Highway into Temescal Canyon Beach parking lot, the sky was lighting up. I found a jacket in the trunk, shrugged into it, and walked across the flat terraces of sand to the breakers. There was no one else on the beach. The roar of the breaking surf was tremendous and my jeans got soaked when I walked too close to the waves. I walked for miles. At around seven
A.M.
,
I noticed a food trailer parking. I bought a cup of black coffee and found a pay phone. I placed two long-distance calls. The first was to my mother. The second, a much longer call by far, was to Q.

UGC was not happy about the maternity leave, but they’d already become somewhat philosophical about me. The six-month leave really only applied to tenured professors, but they agreed to interpret the policy broadly. They were still edgy about bad publicity, and I sat sphinxlike in the chairman’s office, wearing a
BABY INSIDE
T-shirt and twirling my hair. No one in the department had a clue as to what I was about, and I didn’t mind keeping it that way. I frightened them to a man, I thought.

I told Jay that he didn’t have to marry me
—
and I meant it. We sat in my backyard at a little wooden table under the avocado tree, drinking lemonade. His glass had gin in it.

Jay was laughing at my refusal to marry him. From the day of the earthquake, I’d loved his laugh. I rode it over and over in my mind like a surfer shooting the curl.

“C-come on, Ez,” he said. “Look. We met. The earth m-moved.”

“We don’t share a sense of humor,” I said.

“So
?
M-marry me and I’ll acquire
your
scientific sense of the absurd, I promise.”

“I’d say that my sense of the absurd has almost peaked in this town. Sometimes I long for a little humorlessness: I want a quiet person, say, a Presbyterian.”

“But,” Jay said, “I’m your j
-jujube,
tootsie
—
I’m transparent
and
I have staying power.”

He told me that he knew I thought I didn’t love him. “B-but you
do,”
he said. “You j-just think you d-don’t.”

We argued for a long time about marriage, but Jujube was inexhaustible and Tootsie was not. I gave in. We flew to Las Vegas, to the Chapel of Ceaseless Trickling, and flew back to L.A. one night later, husband and wife.

We stayed in my little house. We continued living there after you, Olivia—Jay’s name, for some movie star I can never remember— were born. You were a very easy delivery and very healthy. You cried a lot, though, and wanted to be held all the time. Jay began to say that I was spoiling you, because I always held you, always picked you up when you cried in the night. We began to fight about how to handle you. Then we began to fight about how to organize our lives, now that we had a child. We were tired all the time, and irritable, and we could not calm you sometimes. When my six-month leave was over, the fights got worse, because we needed sitters for you and we could never agree on whom to hire.

We both began to notice that you were unusual, Ollie. Wonderful, but just not following the so-called normal patterns of development. A doctor agreed with Jay that you might need therapy—or drugs. I thought they were both wrong. You and I always communicated very well.

Jay was gone all the time. His technical-directing work started early and ran late. And then he had his stand-up gigs.
The industry: It eats up your life.
I hired sitter after sitter, rushed home from UGC.

Then, one day, amazingly, it all changed. The theory came back to me. All the excitement I used to feel working with Q suddenly returned to me. I was standing in the hall outside the biochemistry lab at UGC at eight
A.M.
with my second cup of coffee in my hand, and I felt
—
just like that
—
that I was ready now to start over again. I wanted to change my research plans; I’d been rethinking my theories. This is not to say that I was born again. I was exhausted, dazed; I was wounded.