There were about twenty students in the auditorium, a normal crowd for one of these lectures. Waiting for events to begin, I couldn’t help coveting agri-business’s new ergonomic seats, not to mention the sound system and splashy modern-art panels on the walls. I sat in the rear of the hall and endured a long introduction from some lame department head before Dr. Yulia Terrasova Nivitski came to the lectern. She carried a sheaf of paper, a wad of tissue, and a bottle of water as she strode before us in a charcoal suit that was all business, except for a V of ultrawhite skin that plunged deep into her num-nums.
But her hair! The endurance of a Russian perm seemed limitless.
“Good morning,” she said when she’d adjusted the microphone. “I am many times asked how is it I became interested in paleobotany, and today I thought I will open with a humorous anecdote.”
Julie spoke as if she were addressing a group of children, and you could hear people shift in their seats, settling in for the long haul. “As a little girl in Vlotovnya,” she continued, “I suffered terrible allergies. Always my nose was running. A new specialist came to town. This man was very dashing. Who was more excited, my mother or I, I could not tell. Always when we are walking to the specialist for our visit, Mother is telling me, ‘Smile, smile.’ Behind the specialist’s office was a greenhouse where he cultivated the botanicals, even when the snow was deepest. My mother admired this handsome doctor. She would praise his work as he held me firmly and abraded sores into my skin with a file he wore like a thimble. Then he would rub a different compound in each little wound.
“After these tests, I would be sent to the hothouse while my mother and the specialist waited for the inevitable results: rows of welts that rose and spotted my body. My limbs would inflame. There was the inevitable wheezing. Week after week, the specialist could not believe it: I was allergic to everything. Soon I ran out of skin to make his abrasions. Then he ran out of compounds to rub in them. There was no point, anyway, he said: You are allergic to everything. Yet, after all the experiments were over, I kept coming to this hothouse. I finally knew the names of the things that had been hurting me. I began to recognize their forms. As I realized we were bound together, these plants and I, I became fond of them.”
Julie went on, cataloguing those plants in botany-talk before moving on to the lecture’s topic of plant domestication. I didn’t need a bunch of Latin names to feel I was there, in Russia with Yulia, surrounded by aromatic botanicals destined to touch her skin. I could smell them — I was there! Before me were milkweed, columbine, horehound, and aster. I pictured feverroot, foxwort, myrtle, and brax. Then there was mandrake, nux vomica, cattail, and all the conifers. The students around me were taking notes on the fourth millennial diaspora of Mesoamerican starches, but my mind wouldn’t leave that Russian hothouse.
Sitting in my ergonomic chair, I heard an occasional moan from the Missouri outside, straining under a new load of ice, and I pictured this hothouse on the banks of a great river, the Volga maybe, a place where the glare of a short-lived sun made glass and ice indistinguishable. Here a girl moved through rows of green, and I clearly saw the copper watering can she touched, heard the rustle of coat sleeves as she combed all the leaves. It felt like my secret, this atrium by the river where a girl was banished once a week by her mother and some doctor of debonair. I bet Ivan didn’t even know about this place. If he’d ever pictured it the way I had, he’d have understood Julie better, and maybe she wouldn’t have left him. Was this “specialist” a witch doctor or a man of science? Was Julie’s mother sleeping with him? Was either of them really interested in Julie’s well-being? For the moment, I didn’t care. I only saw panes of Siberian light illuminating a young woman as she learned to love the thing that caused her grief.
When the time came for Q&A, I raised my hand.
Julie tentatively pointed my way, though I doubted she recognized me in the back row. I wanted to ask, Did Ivan both thrill you and hurt you, too? Is that why you were drawn to him?
But that’s not what I asked. “Dr. Nivitski,” I said as I stood, “most grains and starches from the Pleistocene era survive today, do they not?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged, though I could tell she smelled a setup.
It didn’t deter me, though. I needed to wow her with a couple of my ideas.
“And yet,” I concluded, “the animals which fed on those plants do not survive. Wouldn’t you see this as evidence for the hypothesis, articulated in my book, The Depletionists, that the extinction of North American mammals was caused by Clovis hunting, rather than starvation due to climate change?”
I leaned forward, waiting for an answer.
“I must say this is not my field,” she said. “But I was just reading a new article by Hatitia Wells in which she speculates that if Clovis had brought just one diseased animal with them from the Old World a virus could have decimated North American mammal populations.”
Everyone turned to look at me. For effect, I removed my glasses and twirled them once. “Well,” I said, “I’d just point out to Stanford’s Hatitia Wells that South Dakota is pocked with the skeletons of young, healthy animals that bear the marks of some big ol’ spear points.”
“Hatitia Wells is at Harvard now,” Julie said. Instead of waiting for a response, she scanned the room, as if to say, Next question?
Some idiot agri-biz major asked the difference between corn and maize.
I sat back down, gripping the leather armrests for support. Had I ever been cut off like that before? I watched Julie take question after question, treating all comers with equal gravity. Why did my blood boil for her? And why did my mind keep wandering to Ivan? I saw him clear as a bell, sitting on a stool in a room fashioned from Siberian slump block, above him a buzzing electric wall clock. Where has everything gone? he asked himself. Outside his window was another brown building, just like his. Beyond that was another town, just like the one he was in.
Those ergonomic seats weren’t so great, I decided. The fabric was terribly itchy.
When the Q&A was over, I waited for the usual circle of sycophants to clear. The smart students wandered off first; the sticky new teachers hung on a little longer, trying to glad-hand their way toward tenure. Last to leave were a couple downtrodden administrators I recognized only from their filibusters in the faculty senate.
I approached Julie, strolling down an aisle. I tried to act cool, like I was chummy with all the famous anthropology professors. Julie was reaching for a carry-on suitcase stashed behind the curtain. When she saw me, she extended its handle with a snap.
“Dr. Nivitski,” I said, climbing the steps, then strolling onstage.
“You,” she said.
I leaned an elbow on the podium, casually, as if my guts weren’t made of soup. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say, but I needed to straighten her out about me. I needed to make her understand some things.
“Now, hear me out,” I told her.
But Julie cut me off. “First you are rude to me?” she asked. “Then you accost me at a casino? Then you follow me here and use my discussion time to plug your book? Now you make demands.”
I couldn’t stop looking at that V of skin. I was not normally a breast man.
She tossed up an arm. “Unbelievable,” she said.
“I’ll have you know,” I said, “that I happen to personally know Hatitia Wells. We were on a panel together at Harvard.”
Julie just glared at me. I started to cave.
I said, “I do apologize if I dampened your discussion, however. That, perhaps, was less than professorial of me.”