And yet everything around him that night seemed to argue that he was. Dinner, when it was at last served, was as ill-organized and haphazard as the house itself, as if assembled from whatever had been found in the refrigerator ten minutes before. There was tomato soup, thick as gravy and tasting strongly of ketchup; game hens, so undercooked that I could see the red arteries marbling the flesh; carrots and onions, so overcooked that they overflowed the tines of my fork with the gentlest press; another soup, this one seeming to consist purely of boiled onions and leeks and topped with a wet, suggestive coil of mustard; and for dessert what Smythe proudly told me were persimmons, sitting prim and Oriental on their blue-and-white chinoiserie plates but as hard as green plums — they tasted, when I was finally able to saw off a bite, like grass but sour, and it would be many years before I would be able to correct this impression.
It was only the two of us at the table. Smythe sat at the head, nearest the kitchen, and I sat to his right. With each new course, he popped to his feet, disappeared through the pocket doors behind him, and came back bearing two plates in triumph. It had occurred to me, walking up the path to his house with a bottle of wine I’d thought to buy at the last minute, that he might be interested in interrogating me, that this might be a test of some sort. I was not worried about passing, but the thought of sitting down with Smythe — and, I assumed, his family — and being interviewed about my thoughts on various scientific quandaries of the day did not exactly fill me with excitement. But these had been wasted worries, for Smythe spent the entire evening speaking, from the time I entered the door and he took my coat with one hand and handed me a juice cup of brandy with the other (I have never cared for the taste of brandy, so flannelly on the teeth, and I tossed it into the shedding ficus in the foyer when Smythe went to fetch himself another cupful), throughout dinner, and over the glass of sherry he placed before me afterward, which I drank although I was longing for something cakey to neutralize the persimmon. The sherry glass was cut crystal and heavy, and I rotated it slowly in my fingers, watching the spangles of light it made against the wall opposite, which was a sickly, parchmentlike yellow.
The evening began with small talk, which I was unaccustomed to and for which I had no talent. When I realized I had to say nothing, only to smile and nod from time to time, I was relieved. When we sat at the table — after standing for some time in the entryway, the two of us holding our plastic cups of brandy, while to my left lay a parlor, darkened and unused — he began to talk instead of his work. You would think, would you not, that in the more than two hours I listened to Smythe speak of his work I would learn something interesting, or that he would say something thoughtful, or at the very least provocative? But this was not to happen. He had the ability to talk at length on interesting subjects while somehow rendering them not only intensely uninteresting but completely opaque. “Sir,” I’d interject as Smythe cut eagerly into his fowl — he ate the entire meal with vigor and apparent satisfaction, but failed to notice that I had left most of mine untouched—“will you tell me a little about your research into viral mutation?” This was, after all, the basis of his entire theory, his life’s work. But he did not want to speak of his research; instead he spoke of the people who had impeded it. There was the dean, and the associate dean, and this colleague and that — he listed dozens of names, detailing to me what each had done and how now they had been humbled and made to look at him anew. The dean, he had heard, had rolled his eyes upon hearing about the Time magazine story. The associate dean had initially refused to give him the space he had wanted in Chase Hall, had tried to shunt him into a darker, inferior, smaller lab on the fifth floor. But he had prevailed, hadn’t he? He was without rancor, even jolly, as he told me these stories, onion-and-leek soup dripping from his spoon. He was not interested in discussing science. Still talking, he excused himself to the kitchen and came back with more soup, this time a blend of the two, which he swirled together with the handle of his spoon until it achieved a strange pasty consistency, and then he tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt to protect his tie. He held it flat against his shirt with one hand and spooned up the soup with the other, murmuring his appreciation.
Watching him, I wondered what the Turks would think of this display or if perhaps they already knew what Smythe was truly like, and if so, why did they remain with him, and how could they respect him? Had I underestimated the limits of their tolerance? Or was this an act that Smythe was performing only for me? Were the Turks and the junior residents crouched in the darkened parlor, their faces tight with held-back laughter, watching this bit of theater in which I was an unknowing and unwilling participant? Was this even Smythe’s house? Where was his wife — I knew he had one, and on his left ring finger he wore a thin golden circle — and wasn’t there something unnaturally still about these rooms? I kept thinking that if only I could find a reason to walk through the doors into the kitchen or cross the foyer into the living room, I would find the real house, one in which Smythe held forth articulately and behaved like the Great Man we all thought he was, and his pretty wife would serve a good meal, and his life would make sense to me and I would cease to feel like such an anthropologist in my own town, with the man who had hired me and invited me to dinner at his house.
After we had drunk our sherry, he was silent for a moment, and I was able to speak at last. “Sir,” I asked, “why did you hire me?”
“Ah,” he said, after a silence. “Why indeed.” He sighed and spun his glass in his fingers, and the reflections it made moved across his face like firefly light. “You are not a good student — you are dreamy and arrogant. Your professors find you ungovernable.” He said this all cheerfully, in the same pleasant tone in which he had recounted his enemies’ many failed plots against him. “But when they told me about you”—and here he turned and looked at me, and I could see for the first time his eyes, the pleats of skin that hung beneath them, his scleras as pink as those of the mice whose organs I harvested and shaved through sieves every day—“I suppose I remembered myself when I was your age. How desperately I wanted to escape, how little I felt I belonged, how much I craved my freedom, how much I craved my fame. We are alike, the two of us.”