He didn’t look too impressed.
“It’s natural to hate spiders, but you can get to tolerate them. You can even get to like them a little. Not long ago I was terrified of them. I really mean that. I wouldn’t go to bed at night before I had checked every part of the room — ceiling, walls, floor, under my pillow — to make sure I wasn’t sharing it with a spider. Yet here I am in a dark cellar stopping you from killing one. Isn’t that crazy?”
Henry Dickinson nodded.
Sarah continued talking to the child, trying to make him understand what made this spider’s life indispensable, but with one part of her mind she was listening to herself. Something was wrong and she could not think what it was. “Every living thing abandoned this place. Fire drove out everything. The heat and the smoke and the destruction turned it into a desert. If nature wants to reclaim the place, she has to start over. This web tells us that the process has begun. It means a female spider has decided the cellar is habitable. She has spun her web, and now she waits in that crevice there, between the bricks. She’s a colonizer, Henry. Her instinct — you know what that is? — her instinct tells her that one of these days a fly will come by and get trapped in that web and provide her with food. But something else has happened. This one, you can see, is a male. He has found the web and he knows there is a female here. You see the thread he’s moving along? He built that himself on her web, to interest her. But that’s dangerous work, because if she mistakes him for a fly, she’ll kill him. The moment she appears, he drops down on a thread, just to be sure. If she hangs from the silk bridge he made, he figures he could be welcome, so he climbs up again. I’ve been watching a long time, and she’s already come out once. He won’t give up. And when he gets there, if he’s careful, she’ll let him climb on her back and they’ll mate. That’s nature replenishing itself.”
As if he had not heard a word, Henry Dickinson said, “The counting stopped. It never reached a hundred.”
Sarah felt a tremor of concern. That was what she had dimly perceived through her discourse. The children upstairs had gone silent.
“You can bet they put the bolt down,” said Henry. “Punks!” With the cool of an old campaigner he went slowly up the stairs and leaned against the door. “You can’t trust no one.”
He kicked it twice, shook his head, and rejoined Sarah. “Want to try?”
It was solidly made. The fire had soiled the paint job but left the structure unimpaired. She could not move it. “Maybe if you yelled,” she said, and realized as she spoke how futile the suggestion was. Henry’s friends obviously had gone.
“How long was you figuring to stay, lady?”
She smiled. “Do we have any choice?”
“They’ll be back before dark, I guess. Do you have long-life batteries in that flashlight?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s kind of faint. That’s why I mentioned it.”
“That’s deliberate. The spiders wouldn’t care for a bright light.”
“Don’t get the idea I’m scared of the dark, lady.”
“It hadn’t crossed my mind. Actually, I was thinking of things I should be doing this afternoon.”
Of lunch with Vicky. She wouldn’t fret when no one showed up at the campus cafeteria. Theirs was a casual arrangement, something that had more or less become slotted into Tuesday yet could as well be Thursday, when they both had the same hour free. Vicky had majored in philosophy and was writing a doctoral dissertation they had never discussed except in the most superficial way, because they had so much else to talk about. They shared a healthy contempt for men that Vicky fueled with weekly bulletins on the experiences of the two girls who shared her apartment. Sarah had met one of the girls and knew the other by sight. Privately she believed — and so did Vicky — that they deserved to burn in their emotional hell, but only sympathy and concern was ever voiced over the lunch table. It could wait.
She was scheduled to meet Don Rigden at two o’clock to exchange information on their research. This was of no importance. They had fixed it casually this morning when she had happened to run into Don on the library steps. He had asked if they could meet at eleven, as they had the previous week. She had been glad of the chance to tell him she would be out observing at the East Village site. She refused to be tied to a regular time. It did Don no harm at all to be reminded of her independence.
“He’s ugly,” said Henry Dickinson.
“What do you mean? Oh, yes” — she had seen his eyes on the spider — “I guess that’s true. But you can get used to them. Actually, the males are not as ugly as the females. They’re smaller and better-proportioned.”
“His eyes shine.”
“That’s the flashlight. They wouldn’t shine if I turned it off.”
“Don’t turn it off, lady.”
Sarah shook her head. “Take a close look at him — he won’t move. He’s more scared of the female than he is of us.”
“Why does he have so many eyes?”
“He needs them all. See how his head is attached to his body? He can’t move it like you and me to look at things. So he has four eyes at the front and two on each side.”
“What did you come down here for? Was it just to watch spiders?”
She nodded. “It’s part of a study I’m doing.”
“You’re too old for school.”
“College.”
“They sent you down here? They have a groovy place up near Harlem. Didn’t they tell you down here is dangerous?”
Don had, only this morning. The burned-out buildings on the Lower East Side were no place to be doing Ph.D. research, he had said. She had asked him if he knew someplace else where spiders could be seen adapting their life-style to colonize a habitat where an earlier ecology had been wiped out. He had made some smart-ass remark about modifications in her own life-style if a floor fell in and crippled her, but he knew how important it was to both their projects to monitor what was happening in that cellar. Sarah had a pretty good idea that he was hinting that he should come with her. If so, it was an infringement of their agreement, and she would defend her independence like a tigress.
Henry Dickinson sneezed. He was not dressed for survival in a cellar. Sarah took off her leather jacket.
He backed away, shaking his head. “I’m okay, lady.”
“Not for long in this place. You’ll need this. It’s all right. I have two sweaters on.”
Grudgingly he allowed her to drape it around his shoulders.
Just over a year had passed since Jerry Berlin, professor in the Department of Ecology, had called her into his office to give her the shattering news that Don, who had just begun graduate work, had already been granted approval for a Ph.D. study that substantially overlapped hers — the project she had sweated over for two years. “Isn’t that great?” Jerry had blundered on like the bull elephant he could be when there was something in view. “You two can work together on this. No reason why you shouldn’t set up joint experiments. The trend in research is definitely toward a team approach these days. You do know young Rigden, I suppose?”
She knew him. In each year’s batch of students there is always one whose fame spreads like wildfire among the coeds. Don Rigden was the guy of arrogant good looks who of all things had danced a flamenco at the Amnesty International club disco. Devastatingly serious, he had got away with it and become a legend overnight. It seemed he was born on the West Coast, but his mother was from Córdoba. His people had five Spanish restaurants in Los Angeles, where he had learned to dance and play the guitar. So various coeds went into a Spanish phase. They put up their hair and wore calf-length skirts over white lace petticoats. No one went so far as to use castanets or to fix flowers in her hair, but the effect was sufficient. Up to a point, it worked. He dated numbers of them. As idols should, he betrayed no partiality, except toward his studies, which increasingly claimed him. He had graduated with the highest grades in his class. Sarah was unimpressed. She had put him down as an exhibitionist: she refused to believe that a blond-haired man had Spanish blood and she suspected his name was not Don at all. That was too pat by half.