"What in hell are you doing in my brother's clothes?"
For a moment I was confused, thinking he was yet in the charade and referring to some ecclesiastical brother. Then; he did not mean, did he, Stump?
"I'd know those clothes anywhere."
I sat down and we had a talk, the result of which was my concluding that there is room in this world for either a whole lot of coincidence or a whole lot of design, call it what you will. The short of it was that Tunkie and Stuart (Stump) Friedeman were wild men and Connie Baker a wild woman (they all called her Connie, as had Hoop; only I, her no-bio boy, had used the formal Mary) and they were in love and Stump won." At least he had for a time.
Now, it would seem, Tunkie was the one to claim spoils, though I did not learn, or care to know, any of it. I was still, it seemed in his office, as now, on no-bio status, and I thought it certainly best he remain specifically so with respect to Mary and me.
"I have a year."
We discussed my research-his research-and I was surprisingly clear about where I'd left off, and we concurred that we should be able to determine the particular boron-lithium mechanic we sought well within a year and that I would go free with a signed degree.
"Tunkie," I said at the end, still incredulous that a Dr. Friedeman could become a fast-car teenager named Tunkie before my very eyes.
"Time is a marvel," he said, standing, concluding our intimacies. "I know full well you are enough of a scientist." We were back to science. It was nice to have struck a gentleman's agreement as we had in a world of spin accelerators and Fourier analyzers and computers called NERDS.
* * *
So that is how I came finally to take notes again, and again notes of science in a blue-gridded engineering notebook, on a heavy slate lab bench, down which I sight a tiny army of test tubes in white polypropylene racks taking aliquots from an automatic pipette. It is a tiny induction into service: the stiff fellows at glassy attention taking their inoculations like the best of soldiers. I will march them into chromatographs, fire electrons at them, freeze them. Some will step back and some will step forward. Together we will answer a question about a structure so small the ink of this word could insulate it against the light of day for a thousand years.
Titration (that is what the aliquots are about) is precisely the model for my conclusions about loss and gain. This came to me immediately after I talked to Friedeman and that afternoon set up a run. It is precisely a series of excesses and shortages that determines the resting point-I have been on a tour of titration, admiring the true titrators of life as I found them. I was in this rumination, deciding it was a bit forced to carry further, that it was better to conclude my investigations somewhat less speciically, after the fashion of, say, the Nose Chemist, when an extraordinary thing happened. Minnie, the building's maid, came in and counted out change and asked if I'd go get her a bottle of wine.
"Ain't seen you in a time," she said. "You been sick?"
"No, Minnie. Took a trip."
"That's nice."
I took her change and left for the wine. This was not unusual. Minnie-a black woman, but so lightskinned students debate her race-is a long story herself. Among the pleasures she affords folk, besides her speaking nicely and well to you as she sweeps under your very stool late at night, is that of stopping the nonsense you are about and sending you to the campus bar ostensibly to get her some wine. I am probably one of four or five trusted wine couriers. After her order, at this time of evening-after talking to F riedeman and setting up, it was late-I could expect to meet her on the roof for a drink.
What is extraordinary is what happened in the bar. I saw a fellow student, alone, and joined him with my beer and Minnie's bottle. He and I were peripherally acquainted, I did not know him well. He was known chiefly for his hair, which is red and wild, visible at a half mile-a hirsute monument to 1969. He is also known for his participation in a scandalous ménage a trois involving two other graduate students, and for his generally pleasant demeanor (he is sometimes referred to as the Pacifist). I sat down.
We simply drank-Men at Science-after the initial greeting. He was watery in the eye; I concluded his pitcher of beer might not have been the first. As I finished my own mug, he refilled it, generously washing the table with suds. The spill floated a folded card on the table advertising a new product called Wine without Alcohol.
"Wine without alcohol!" the Pacifist shouted.
"That's like-like women without sex!" Suddenly I knew him from somewhere, knew more about him than I thought. He was a Veteran! He was a drunk, academic, foot-stomping Veteran. As one would with the Veteran himself, I held my cards.
I recalled once standing with him on a fourth-floor balcony watching students come and go, and we happened to witness his girl leaving campus with the other corner of the notorious triad. My man appeared to be the afternoon man. The other fellow, who resembles less a hippie than a young athletic coach, had her, as the mill had it, for the night. We stood on the balcony and watched Coach and the shared lover leave campus.
"Looks rough," I said.
"You can say that again," he said. He said it with such fidelity to its customary comic use that I nearly laughed. He was not about to laugh, though. Now, in the bar, I was sure his condition was owing to the Coach and the Devoted being home together. I did not dare broach it. In the noise of darts and jukebox I and pizza orders he started telling me about doing acid.
"I was in Matagorda, Texas, man. I dropped some acid and got in my tent and ate an apple. These crabs came up to the tent. I started feeding them pieces of apple. They ate the apple, man. They were huge. Claws like Japanese monster movies. It was wild."
"I bet."
"They'd run up, you know, grab the apple, and run away!" He laughed. Despite his momentary laugh, I still thought he looked as wrung out as the Veteran.
"Wine without alcohol!" he yelled again, noticing the card as if for the first time.
"No human sorrow," he suddenly intoned, "ever stopped the world."
I looked at him. I was right, then, apparently, about his preoccupation, but I still did not know what to say. He poured me another beer.
"Thanks."
"You need it."
"I need it?"
"Man, it's okay. The word's out about-" He stopped. He meant Dr. Eminence in Norway.
"That?" I said. It-she-truly felt a million years ago and a million miles away. "Shit." I dismissed it all with a gesture which he smiled at, as if he thought me bluffing. I realized we had a bit more in common than I'd thought. We'd both hung up on bright schoolgirls, at the least. And to, it looked, no profit. The next thing is what stunned me.
"You going to drink that?" he said, referring to Minnie's bottle.
"It's for Minnie."
"Hey! Minnie is a quality person!
"
I could not respond. It was not simply that I had not impugned her in any way to provoke his defense, and it was not that I could not have agreed more with him and so felt doubly strange being accused of impugning her. It was that he was regarding Minnie, in his present lovelorn straits, exactly as I had come to regard Mary and Hazel and Wallace, and even my own mother, and Minnie indeed was one of them, and, indeed-it was too much-he was, it looked, on the brink of a plunge identical to my own. The events were duplicable. I could prove my results. The interlude had necessity, was not random, was not lunatic.
"She's a what?" I said.
"She's a quality person!" he shouted again, and I thought he was going to come over the table. I shouted at him, "You can say that again!" and started laughing, and he, after a minute, did, too. I left him there, no doubt in my mind that he was launched in his own series of titrations against and away from a certain sort of preoccupation.