in the form of another unexpected phone call.
Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.
Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.
Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.
To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.
“Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”
We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.
Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.
He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”
“ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”
“Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.
“What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”
“You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”
“I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”
“Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”
“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”
Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”
“Well, it’s not for certain, but—you remember Sue Chopra?”
Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”
Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.
It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant
Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.
Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.
Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.
To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.
“Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”
We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.
Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.
He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”
“ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”
“Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.
“What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”
“You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”
“I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”
“Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”
“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”
Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”
“Well, it’s not for certain, but—you remember Sue Chopra?”
Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”
Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.
It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant
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