Lessons in Chemistry(16)
It wasn’t until Calvin Evans came along that her smile reemerged. The first time was that night at the theater when he’d vomited all over her dress. She hadn’t recognized him at first, but when she did and despite the mess, she bent over to get a better look at his face. Calvin Evans! True, she’d been a little rude to him after he’d been rude to her—the beakers—but between the two of them there’d been immediate, irresistible pull.
* * *
—
“Still working on that?” she asked, pointing at a nearly empty container.
“No,” he said, “you eat it. You could use the extra fuel.”
Actually, he’d planned to eat it, but he was willing to forgo the extra calories if only she would stay. Like Elizabeth, he’d never been much of a people person; in fact, it wasn’t until he’d found rowing that he’d made any real kind of connection with others. Physical suffering, he’d long ago learned, bonds people in a way that everyday life can’t. He still kept in contact with his eight Cambridge teammates—had even seen one of them just last month when he’d been in New York for a conference. Four Seat—they still called one another by their seat names—had become a neurologist.
* * *
—
“You have a what?” Four Seat had said, surprised. “A girlfriend? Well, good for you, Six!” he said, slapping him on the back. “About bloody time!”
Calvin had nodded excitedly, explaining in detail Elizabeth’s work and habits and laugh and everything else he loved about her. But in a more somber tone, he also explained that although he and Elizabeth spent all of their free time together—they lived together, they ate together, they drove back and forth to work together—it didn’t feel like enough. It wasn’t that he couldn’t function without her, he told Four Seat, but rather that he didn’t see the point of functioning without her. “I don’t know what to call it,” he’d confided following a full examination. “Am I addicted to her? Am I dependent in some sick sort of way? Could I have a brain tumor?”
“Jesus, Six, it’s called happiness,” Four Seat explained. “When’s the wedding?”
* * *
—
But that was the problem. Elizabeth had made it clear that she had no interest in getting married. “It’s not that I disapprove of marriage, Calvin,” she’d told him more than once, “although I do disapprove of all of the people who disapprove of us for not being married. Don’t you?”
“I do,” Calvin agreed, thinking how much he would like to say those words to her in front of an altar. But when she looked at him expecting more, he added quickly, “I do think we’re lucky.” And then she smiled at him so earnestly that something inside his brain went haywire. As soon as they parted, he drove to a local jeweler, scanning the selections until he found the biggest small diamond he could afford. Sick with excitement, he kept the tiny box in his pocket for three months waiting for exactly the right moment.
* * *
—
“Calvin?” Elizabeth said, gathering the last of her things from the cafeteria table. “Are you listening? I said I’m going to a wedding tomorrow. Actually, I’m in the wedding if you can believe that.” She gave a nervous shrug. “So we should probably discuss that acid study tonight if that works.”
“Who’s getting married?”
“My friend Margaret—the Physics secretary? That’s who I’m meeting in fifteen minutes. For a fitting.”
“Wait. You have a friend?” He thought Elizabeth only had workmates—fellow scientists who recognized her skill and undermined her results.
Elizabeth felt a flush of embarrassment. “Well, yes,” she said awkwardly. “Margaret and I nod to each other in the hallways. We’ve spoken several times at the coffee urn.”
Calvin willed his face to look as if this were a reasonable description of friendship.
“It’s very last-minute. One of her bridesmaids is sick and Margaret says it’s important to have an even ratio of bridesmaids to ushers.” Although as soon as she said it, she realized what Margaret really needed: a size 6 without weekend plans.
* * *
—
The truth was, she wasn’t good at making friends. She’d told herself it was because she’d moved so much, had bad parents, lost her brother. But she knew others had experienced hardships and they didn’t have this issue. If anything, some of them seemed better at making friends—as if the specter of constant change or profound sorrow had revealed to them the importance of making connections wherever and whenever they landed. What was wrong with her?
And then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing. Whenever she moved to a new town, girls would take her aside at Sunday school and breathlessly confide their crushes on certain boys. She listened to these confessions, faithfully promising she would never tell. And she didn’t. Which was all wrong because it turned out she was supposed to tell. Her job as confidante was to break that confidence by telling Boy X that Girl Y thought he was cute, thus initiating a chain reaction of interest between the two parties. “Why don’t you just tell him yourself?” she’d say to these would-be friends. “He’s right there.” The girls would draw back in horror.