Lesje, in a grubbier than usual lab coat, sits in the downstairs lab beside the corridor of wooden storage racks. She’s drinking a mug of instant coffee, which is all she intends to have for lunch. Ostensibly she’s sorting and labeling a tray of teeth, small protomammal teeth from the Upper Cretaceous. She’s using a magnifying glass and a chart, though she knows these particular teeth backwards and forwards: the Museum has published a monograph on them which she helped to edit. But she’s having trouble concentrating. She’s sitting here instead of in her office because she wants someone to talk to her.
There are two technicians in the room. Theo is over by the sandblasting machine, digging away with a dental pick at a semi-embedded jawbone. In Mammalogy, where the bones are real, they don’t use dental picks. They have a freezer full of dead carcasses, camels, moose, bats, and when they’re ready to assemble the skeleton they strip most of the meat off and put the bones into the Bug Room, where carnivorous insects eat the shreds of flesh remaining. The Bug Room smells of rotting meat. Outside the door, several pictures of naked women are Scotch-taped to filing cabinets. The technicians in that department work to rock and country music from the radio. Lesje wonders if solitary Theo would rather be there.
Gregor, the department’s artist, is applying daubs of clay to a bone, some sort of ornithopod femur, it looks like. Though Gregor probably doesn’t care that much what it is. His job is to make a mold of it, then take a plaster cast from the mold. Thus slowly and part by part, whole skeletons reproduce themselves. In the nineteenth century, Lesje knows, Andrew Carnegie cast and recast his own personal dinosaur, Diplodocus carnegiei, and presented the replicas to the crowned heads of Europe. No one can afford to do that any more; even if there were any crowned heads left.
Lesje tries to think of something to say to the technicians, not about Diplodocus carnegiei, that wouldn’t do it; some way of opening a conversation. But she doesn’t know what might interest them. They do their jobs and leave at five every night for their other lives, lives which she finds unfathomable. She knows though that the Museum is not essential to them the way it is to her. Gregor could just as easily be working in an art store, Theo could be cleaning cement from bricks or paint from old brass drawer handles. Perhaps they want to Scotch-tape pictures of naked women up in here, too.
Nevertheless, she very much wants one of them, either of them, to say, “Come out for a beer.” She would watch baseball games on television with them, eating potato chips and drinking from the bottle. She would hold their hands, roll on the carpet with them, make love as an afterthought, attaching no more meaning to that than to any other healthy exercise, a swim, a jog around the block. It would all be friendly and without any future. She wants actions, activities, with no significance and no hidden penalties.
She thinks with nostalgia of her life with William, which she sees now as having been simple-minded and joyously adolescent. The beauty of William was that she hadn’t seriously cared what he thought about her. Once she wanted something less two-dimensional. Now she has it. It’s true that she didn’t love William, though she had no way of knowing this at the time. She loves Nate. She’s no longer sure she’s cut out for love.
Perhaps it wasn’t even Nate himself that attracted her at first, but Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Chris. She’d looked at Elizabeth and seen an adult world where choices had consequences, significant, irreversible.
William never represented such a choice, William was open-ended. She must have thought she could live with William for a million years and nothing in her would really be changed. Obviously William hadn’t felt like this. William, like a miser with a sock, had invested things when she wasn’t looking, so that his outburst of violence had taken her by surprise. But she’s beyond William now, even his rage. William was only momentarily painful.
Nate, on the other hand, is painful almost all the time. Holding her two hands he says, “You know how important you are to me.” When she wants him to say he would kill for her, die for her. If he would only say that, she would do anything for him. But how important invites measurement, the question: How important? For her Nate is absolute, but for him she exists on a scale of relatively important things. She can’t tell exactly where on the scale she is; it fluctuates.
In the evenings she sits at their newly acquired table, beside the stove and the wheezy fridge she paid far too much for at the Goodwill store, and broods. When she lived with William he did most of the brooding.
“What is it, love?” Nate says. She does not know how to answer.
• • •
She prolongs her cup of coffee for as long as possible, but the technicians say nothing. Gregor whistles under his breath, Theo merely picks. Defeated, she carries her tray of teeth upstairs to the office. She has a school tour at four, once more into the dusky push-button Cretaceous, round and round the cycad trees with a thousand children, her voice unreeling. Then she will go back to the house.
She has to be there early, since this is the first weekend Nate’s children are going to spend with them. She’s been dreading it all week.
“But there’s nowhere for them to sleep,” she said.
“They can borrow sleeping bags from their friends,” Nate said.
Lesje said they didn’t have enough plates. Nate said the children would hardly expect a formal dinner. He would do all the cooking, he said, and the children would wash the dishes. She wouldn’t have to do anything extra at all. Lesje then felt she was being excluded, but did not say so. Instead she counted the silverware and agonized over the baked-in grime on the floors. When she lived with William she would have hooted with scorn over such scruples. The truth was that she didn’t want the children to go home and report to Elizabeth that she had no silverware and the floors were dirty. She hadn’t cared what William thought of her, but she cares desperately how she will appear to two young children she doesn’t even know and has no special reason to like. They have no special reason to like her, either. They probably think she’s stolen Nate. They probably hate her. She feels condemned in advance, not for anything she’s actually done, but for her ambiguous position in the universe.
• • •
On Thursday she went to Ziggy’s and bought a bagful of delicacies: English shortbread in a tin, two kinds of cheese, chopped liver, fruit buns, chocolates. She almost never eats fruit buns or chocolates, but she’d snatched them off the shelves in desperation: surely this was what children liked. She realized she didn’t have any idea of what children liked. Most of them liked dinosaurs, which was all she knew.
“That’s not necessary, love,” Nate said when she was disgorging the contents of her Ziggy’s bag onto the kitchen table. “They’ll be just as happy with peanut butter sandwiches.”
Lesje ran upstairs, threw herself onto their mattress and cried silently, breathing in the smell of old cloth, old stuffing, mice. That was another thing: the children would see this mattress.
After a while Nate came in. He sat down and rubbed her back. “You know how important it is to me that you should all get along,” he said. “If you had kids, you’d understand.”
Lesje’s belly clenched: she could feel it, a wall of muscle around a central hollow. He’d placed himself and the children, and Elizabeth too, in a tight verdant little oasis where such things as understanding were possible. In the desert without, isolated, single, childless and culpably young, she was made to stand in penance, watching a pantomime she could not decipher.
Nate had no idea he was being cruel. He thought he was being helpful. He stroked her back; she could imagine him looking at his watch to see if he’d done it for the required length of time.
• • •
Multituberculata, Lesje murmurs to herself. A soothing word. She wants to be soothed; she is not soothed. She dreads this evening. She dreads the thought of sitting at her own rickety table, with its inadequate silverware and cheap plates, feeling her jaws move, making awkward conversation or staring at her hands while two pairs of eyes watch her in judgment. Three pairs.