Laz said, “People take years over a Ph.D. You’re not scared of Jerry Berlin? He won’t make waves.”
How could she explain the intricacies of university politics? “My position in the department isn’t too secure. If Professor Berlin got the idea I was putting other things first—”
“I told you, Jerry won’t make waves. This isn’t a back-door operation. He knows we’re seeing you. You know we arranged this lunch through Jerry himself. Did he give you one word of discouragement?”
“Well, no, but—”
“It has his backing, that’s why. He’ll be mad if you don’t take it.” Laz turned to Sloane. “Havelock, will I be breaking a confidence if I tell Sarah—”
“Go ahead.”
“Sarah, we plan to spend up to fifty thousand dollars on the sets alone for this production. Havelock just told you about the giant webs. We’ll build examples of each of the best-known structures — the orb, the sheet, the tube, the triangle, and so on — six or seven nylon webs big enough to fill a room. There will also be scale models of the stages in building the things. Jerry has been told that in return for the technical help his department is giving, we intend to present the sets to the university. They’ll make a nice exhibit. Good publicity all around.”
“The department is helping with this?”
“You’re kidding. Our designers will be in your spider lab all next week taking pictures and making sketches. It’s all arranged. So you see,” — he spread his hands — “it’s a cooperative venture. No one’s going to blow the whistle on your research if you take part.”
A waiter had arrived with the phone.
“You still want to call Professor Berlin?” asked Sloane.
She shook her head.
Without looking at the waiter Sloane said, “Thanks — the lady changed her mind.”
“Okay,” said Laz, “let’s talk schedule.”
So Sarah gave in. After what had been said, the other escape hatch she had in reserve — that she was an ecologist and not a trained biologist — was not going to cut any ice either. She decided she had better accept her new role as TV performer with good grace. That settled, she began seriously to think about herself as a new face on NBC-TV. It was a little frightening, but she believed she could handle it. Deep inside, she was churning with excitement.
Don had called Meg on Wednesday night to apologize for missing their dance rehearsal. He admitted it had gone clean out of his mind when the red alert for Jerry’s research paper came up. He told her about the drive to Lake Pinecliff to collect it from Sarah. He mentioned he had watched her hang-gliding.
Meg let him know she had waited over an hour in the flamenco dress, but she was not as angry about being forgotten as she had the right to be. It seemed she was impressed by his explanation. She repeated her opinion that Sarah was dangerous to get involved with, and left it at that. They arranged to meet for a rehearsal Friday evening, and Don said he would take her afterward for a Mexican meal at Fonda Los Milagros, on Fifty-Fifth Street.
He was generous about her dancing. She had mastered the steps and she moved with the music, but really she had plenty to learn about flamenco. From somewhere she had picked up the idea that it was all about hip mobility. The effect from the rear was absurd — buttocks jiggling like maracas. He even said so, though less crudely. By stages he helped her correct the fault. She never discovered how totally inelegant she had looked.
For dinner they had pollo tapatio, seasoned chicken with onions. Meg wanted to dance to the mariachi music, but Don managed to distract her by talking about his parents’ restaurants on the Pacific Coast. After coffee he walked her back to her dormitory. He could see she was disappointed not to be invited back to his place. She must have counted on this becoming a repeat of the weekends they had spent together earlier in the year, and without doubt the screwing would have been sensational, but Don didn’t want the complications. Meg was his dance partner now. For more intimate coupling he had another partner in prospect.
She asked him in for a coffee, but he pleaded work and kissed her in a way that signaled the end of the evening. She held him and pressed her thighs against his and made a remark about the strains put on people by the absence of body contact in Spanish dancing. He asked when she could meet him next week for another rehearsal, and she suggested Wednesday at lunchtime. He agreed, then remembered he had a date to go hang-gliding with Sarah. He asked if Meg could manage Thursday instead. She said she couldn’t, and what was the matter with Wednesday?
For the first time, he lied to Meg. He said Jerry had arranged a tutorial for Wednesday.
She swallowed it. They agreed to rehearse Friday evening.
7
When Sarah walked in, her mother was serving Sunday lunch. She had on that old shirt of Daddy’s she wore over her respectable clothes when she was cooking. A period of chaos followed as the steaming saucepans were abandoned so that the place settings could be removed from the kitchen to the oak table in the front room.
Sarah protested that she wanted to be treated like one of the family. Her father, in the vest and trousers of his Sunday suit, complained that the meal was getting cold. He was in the chair by the window. He did not look up from the portable TV.
The air was thick with recrimination when they finally were seated around the table. Was it too much to have picked up a phone and said she was coming? If she had called, there would have been a roast instead of hamburger from the freezer. Sarah made apologetic noises. It was no use explaining yet that she had news for them. Before they were ready to listen to one word she said, she was required to make reparation for failing to come home on the anniversary of Marty’s death. She had to listen to an account of the service at which prayers were offered for his immortal soul. Her mother, despite the distress she had felt at the remembrance of her son and the inexcusable absence of her daughter, had a precise recollection of who was in the congregation and which of them had made remarks, after the service, implying that Sarah should have been there.
While they served up more rebukes with the cold apple pie, Sarah asked herself why she was here. She could have been at Lake Pinecliff, where the conditions would have been ideal, the sun warm enough to create thermals oceans wide. Her parents assumed that her conscience had brought her home, but they were wrong. She had come home to tell them she was going to appear on TV. She didn’t want them to hear about it before she told them herself. She wanted to get their reaction firsthand.
Her achievements at school and college had not made much impression at home. At the stage when she started getting good grades in high school, her brother was officially categorized as a child with an exceptional IQ, and there were meetings with teachers and educational psychologists to see that he was given an intellectually demanding program of study. When Sarah announced that she was majoring in ecology, her father commented that it was a pity she had to get involved with a subject no one in Cherry Hill knew anything about, but presumably professors kept thinking of newfangled subjects to keep up the enrollment. The year she graduated, Marty was accepted at Yale. She got her graduate fellowship while everyone was in shock at the news of his fatal accident.
TV had taken over her parents’ lives. They watched it all day long. The commercials fortified her mother’s belief that there was still the superior style of life that her brothers and sisters in Boston were enjoying and that she was denied. Her father watched anything at all. He didn’t need to go out anymore to escape.