Babylon and Other Stories (31 page)

He looked to work for relief from the problems of home. This was essentially the reason work was invented, as far as Hank was concerned. That and to pay the child therapy bills, since Erica had quit work to spend more time with Max, not that it was helping, which was another subject that had been gone over time and time again. In the office, crammed with fish tanks and filing cabinets and scientific journals and old posters for talks his graduate students had given at regional conferences, Hank felt at ease. He was working on a manuscript that summarized his recent research into sexual courtship and predator behavior in
Poecilia reticulata.
He had crunched the data into graphs and tables and believed that he could clearly demonstrate the truth of his hypothesis that the male guppy showed a constant interest in appropriate females regardless of the presence of potential predators. The male guppy was oriented to risk-reckless behavior, and Hank could prove it. It was a sheer joy to work quietly at the office all by himself; the place promoted a sense of relief so strong that it almost felt physical—like blushing, or being drunk—and that's why it was so extremely annoying when Purdy strolled in
to his office yet again, without even knocking, his cowboy boots scuffling, his jaw working away at a stick of jerky, to say, “Hey, how's it going, dude?”

Purdy was from California. He was in his forties and used the word
dude
without irony. For this alone he couldn't be forgiven, in Hank's considered opinion.

He clenched the stick of jerky between his large white teeth— which Hank suspected were caps, incidentally—and offered Hank another one, wrapped in wax paper. “Got this baby myself,” he said, for the umpteenth time. The deer were always
baby
to him. “It was a large buck, a handsome animal. I had it made into partly sausage and partly jerky. Jerky's great to take to work. They make it for me in a mom-and-pop place on the East Side. You want some?”

Hank said no thanks without looking up from his monitor, which he was pretty sure constituted the international sign for
leave me alone.
Didn't everybody know this? For someone who studied patterns of human interaction, Purdy could be pretty oblivious.

Instead of leaving, he strolled around Hank's small office, chewing audibly on his wizened piece of meat. “Hey there, buddies,” he said to
Poecilia reticulata.
“You guys want some jerky?”

Hank put his hands on the sides of the chair. “You know not to feed them, right?” he said. There was, he couldn't help noticing, an undignified squeak in his voice.

“Relax, man.” Purdy tapped the stick of jerky against the glass pane of a tank. “Give me some credit.”

Hank clenched his teeth.

Purdy was the star of the department, with an endowed chair. He appeared on news shows and was the subject of feature articles in newspapers. He'd made a name for himself, in scientific
circles and in larger ones, by stipulating that there was a biological basis for a lot of skanky male behavior.
Men Suck: Scientific Fact
was a typical headline for a piece about him. Dumping your girlfriend because she got fat, cheating on your girlfriend, lying to girls you met in bars, putting Rohypnol into their drinks—it was all just biology, Purdy said, steps on the quest to get ahead in this Darwinian world. Cultural critics said his work was a justification of the basest parts of human culture. Confronted by these remarks, Purdy smiled cagily at interviewers and said, “I just go where the science takes me.” The controversy served him well; he brought in millions of research dollars to the school and had lunch with the dean once a month.

Ordinarily, Hank dealt with Purdy like everyone else in the department—by smiling to his face and making fun of him behind his back. But today Hank was a little more on edge than usual. Okay, a lot more. The week had been a swirling mess of anxiety and tears at home, of Erica refusing to talk and then talking in the middle of the night when Hank, needless to say, was not at his best in terms of providing the listening, the holding, the
reassuring
that Erica wanted. In fact he hadn't had a good night's sleep since Sunday night, when she told him, in a quiet, desperate-sounding blurt, that she was pregnant. He stared at her. Under the fluorescent light of the kitchen she looked haggard. Erica had once had a perfect complexion—an English rose, her parents had called her—but it was marred now by dark circles beneath her eyes and flakes on her dry skin. Max was aging her; life was aging her.

She was waiting to see what he would say. There was no right thing to say, he knew.

“Are you sure?” he said. She rolled her eyes. They had sex rarely enough these days that he thought he remembered the
night it must have happened. They'd been fighting about Max— Erica wanted to put him in a special school, with other disturbed children, and Hank thought that this would be the end of him ever turning into a normal kid—and they'd gone to bed angry and drunk and resolved the fight with sex, drunk, blotchy-faced, no-eye-contact sex. At thirty-eight, Erica didn't bother with the diaphragm. Standing there in the kitchen, Hank thought sex like that shouldn't bring a child into the world. Then he told himself,
You are a scientist, and you know that has nothing to do with it.
As Purdy would say, sex was sex, whatever the circumstances. “Means to an end,” he liked to say while presenting data on courtship rituals, smiling with his huge Californian teeth. Erica stood with her back to the kitchen counter, her hands clutching the marble rim of the top, and gazed emptily at the tile floor. Finally she said, “I don't want to keep it.”

This hadn't even occurred to Hank as a possibility.

“Max is enough,” she said. “He's more than enough. He's more than we can handle already.”

Hank swallowed. His mouth was dry. He and Erica had met in college, in a stats class, and now he was a biologist and she was a bank teller who'd quit her job to take care of Max. She'd given up whatever career she might have had to follow him where he got work, and then to take care of their son. He never talked to her about
Poecilia reticulata.
The fact that they both wanted a family was what had kept them together so far.

“But,” he said. He could see her hands tighten around the marble countertop. He wanted to say that maybe if they had another child and it was normal, that might dilute the effect Max was having on them. Which would make it sound as if he didn't love Max and was therefore the wrong thing to say. He also thought, but did not say, that he was amazed Erica didn't want to keep a
child when they had a household and the opportunity to raise it. They weren't teenagers; they weren't poor.
What kind of woman are you?
If she could let this go so easily, he thought, there was no telling what she'd let go of next.

“But what?” Erica said.

He realized that she'd been standing there, waiting, for minutes. He opened his arms in a gesture of openness and defeat. “We'll do whatever you want,” he said. Which apparently gave the impression that he didn't care what happened and was therefore, as it turned out, also the wrong thing to say.

For three days Erica wouldn't talk about it. When he tried to bring it up she'd just shut down, literally; she'd leave the room or put a pillow over her head. In the middle of the night he'd wake up to hear her sniffling quietly in her pillow, or sometimes whispering, a string of soft muttered syllables, although it wasn't clear what she was saying or whom she was saying it to. Herself? Him? The fetus? He was a scientist. He tried to confront the situation scientifically. The evidence suggested that the idea of giving up the baby was making her sad. So he leaned closer to her in the bed, took her hand, and said, “You know, we could do this. We could have this child.”

“Fuck you, Hank,” she said.

“What? Why?”

“You get to go to the office all day and stare at your fucking fish. You're not here getting phone calls from teachers and therapists. You're not here when your own son kicks you in the shin because you won't let him play video games for three hours straight and the kicking hurts, it really actually hurts, and you want to
hit
him and you almost do but then stop yourself because
he's your son, but you wonder how much longer it'll be before you give in and smack him across the face.”

At the end of this speech there was silence and then a long, snot-filled intake of breath. She got out of bed to blow her nose, several times in a row, in the bathroom. She hadn't generated snot like this since her first trimester of pregnancy.

“It's okay. It's okay,” he said when she got back into bed.

“No,” she said, “it fucking isn't.”

Also, during the next few days Max did them the favor of being his usual self, which is to say a terror, as if he wanted to remind them the whole situation wasn't going to get any better and they should stop pretending it would, as if he didn't want the situation to be clouded by cheap sentiment arising from his acting like a normal kid. He insisted, to the point of hysteria, on wearing his football helmet to bed, and in the middle of the night he woke them up by banging his helmeted head against the wall. One afternoon, while Erica was in the shower, he went into Hank's study and pulled down all the books from the shelves, then managed to pull the shelf itself down on himself, covering himself in scabs and bruises (though not, thankfully, breaking anything) that made him look like the victim of some horrible household abuse and was only going to earn them more doubting looks from all the various child-care professionals in his life. The doctors concluded that they needed to up his medication.

Hank escaped to the fish. Starting in college, fish had been his calm and his succor, and once he'd married Erica and had Max— both of whom he loved, and never wanted anybody to think otherwise for a single second, and he was grateful he had them and would die if anything happened to them, okay?—the fish had mattered even more, because they were
quiet.
They swam around quietly, they ate quietly, they developed patterns of sexual selection quietly. The occasional splash or ripple was all you ever
heard, and you had to love them for that. When your home was full of falling bookshelves and indeterminate midnight whispering, the quiet of fish was a blessed thing.

What he'd been studying was the relationship between predator presence and sexual behavior in
Poecilia reticulata.
Purdy, he knew, thought of this as dating in the fish world: the males were trolling the aquarium for dates, their orange spots standing out like unbuttoned shirts and gold chains on chests. The females were hanging out at the bar, eyeballing the available options, waiting for the flashiest candidate to pick them up. To Purdy, fish were interesting only insofar as they provided corollaries to similar patterns of behavior in humans. Mere ammunition for his theories about sexual competition and male hierarchy, they provided the biological context that proved (so Purdy thought) that humans were exceptions to no rules.

Whereas Hank, not that he was some starry-eyed undergrad, thought the fish mattered in their own right. In fact, some wiseass in the lab had plastered a bumper sticker to the side of a tank that said FISH MATTER. These were the kinds of jokes that made Erica dread department parties, and Hank couldn't blame her— but still. When Purdy, on the day in question, came in and tapped on the glass with his jerky, it obviously annoyed him. So Hank asked him, very politely, very calmly, if he could please not do that anymore, and then mentioned that he was trying to finish a paper for the upcoming meeting of the ichthyological society and it was going slowly and that he'd really appreciate some peace and quiet.

“You bet, guppy man,” Purdy said, cheerfully as always. And this, for some reason, was
the last thing Hank wanted to hear.
Guppy man.
He basically just could not stand those two words coming out of Joe Purdy's mouth. And Purdy, incredibly, was smiling at him as he said this, even waving his jerky good-bye as he started for the door, and Hank knew
guppy man
was code for a lot of things that weren't related to guppies at all. That, in sum, is why he stood up, crossed the room, and smacked Purdy square in the jaw, causing him to stagger backwards, hand on his chin, jerky flying across the room—though even in his expression of shock Hank couldn't help noticing that there remained a kind of smirk, as if yet another hypothesis about male dominance and hierarchical behavior had just been substantiated by real-world observations. Then Purdy, from the floor, said, “Whoa, Jesus, Hank,” and blood streamed out of his nose, thick and red as if in a drawing by Max.

The next few minutes passed in a kind of a blur.

Hearing Purdy cry out and fall to the floor—actually, he fell against a filing cabinet, knocking off a stack of journals on top of it, and
then
fell to the floor with a clatter and violence that, admittedly, gave Hank no small amount of satisfaction—two of his grad students came in and took him away, apparently to the hospital, although it seemed unlikely to Hank that he personally could generate enough force to put someone in the hospital. He wasn't exactly brawny. But the grad students were shaking their heads and clucking almost maternally over their fallen leader and stage-whispering things like “What the hell's the
matter
with that guy?” and “We'd better get to the emergency room right away,” which Hank, sitting back in his chair, acted like he couldn't hear. They left him alone in the office, the fish still swishing quietly, and he could hear mutters and whispers outside in the hall, and no doubt everybody in the department already knew about this behavior, which, though it might confirm Purdy's research, could still potentially get him fired. Which would mean no more escaping to the fish. Which would be the last thing he
needed just now. Which is how he came to be alone in his office as day turned to night, afraid to go home and face Erica and Max, unwilling to face even the hallway outside; instead he was sitting there typing this analysis of some recent troublesome behavior.