Uniformed in her lab coat Lesje descends, winding around the totem pole on her way to the basement. She isn’t doing lab work today but she wears the lab coat anyway. It makes her feel she belongs here. She does belong here.
She remembers the way she once followed with her eyes those others she used to glimpse on her Saturday excursions, men and women but especially the women, walking purposefully along the corridors or whisking through the doors marked STAFF ONLY. Then she’d seen their lab coats as badges, of nationality, membership of some kind. She’d wanted so much to be able to go through those doors: secrets, wonders even, lay beyond. Now she has keys, she can go almost anywhere, she’s familiar with the jumble-sale pieces of rock, the fragments, the dust-covered bundles of unsorted papers. Secrets perhaps but no wonders. Still, this is the only place she wants to work. Once there had been nothing equally important to her, but there is still nothing more important. This is the only membership she values.
She will not give it up. Fists jammed into her lab-coat pockets, she paces the basement floor, among the cases of mannequin Indians in their stolen ceremonial clothes, the carved masks, joyous, fearful. She walks briskly, as if she knows where she’s going; but in fact she’s soothing herself, running the Museum through her head once more, room by familiar room, a litany of objects. How soon will it be before she will never see it again?
Sometimes she thinks of the Museum as a repository of knowledge, the resort of scholars, a palace built in the pursuit of truth, with inadequate air conditioning but still a palace. At other times it’s a bandits’ cave: the past has been vandalized and this is where the loot is stored. Whole chunks of time lie here, golden and frozen; she is one of the guardians, the only guardian, without her the whole edifice would melt like a jellyfish on the beach, there would be no past. She knows it’s really the other way around, that without the past she would not exist. Still, she must hold on somehow to her own importance. She’s threatened, she’s greedy. If she has to she’ll lock herself into one of these cases, hairy mask on her face, she’ll stow away, they’ll never get her out.
• • •
Will they ask her to leave? Resign. She doesn’t know. A pregnant paleontologist is surely a contradiction in terms. Her business is the naming of bones, not the creation of flesh. The fact is that she’s missed her period twice in a row. Which could be what they call strain. She hasn’t yet gone for tests, for confirmation, she hasn’t thought past the fact. She will be an unwed mother. Of course that is becoming more common, but what will Dr. Van Vleet, a gentleman of the old school who demonstrably does not live in the year 1978, do then?
And what will Nate do, what will she do? It’s hard to believe that such a negligible act of hers can have measurable consequences for other people, even such a small number of them. Though the past is the sediment from such acts, billions, trillions of them.
She’s not used to being a cause, of anything at all. On her office wall the tree of evolution branches like coral towards the ceiling: Fishes, Amphibians, Therapsids, Thecodonts, Archosaurs, Pterosaurs, Birds, Mammals and Man, a mere dot. And herself another, and within her another. Which will exfoliate in its turn.
Or not; she’s thought about that. She could have an abortion, stop time. She knows it’s easier than it used to be. She hasn’t yet told Nate, she doesn’t need to tell him. Everything could go on as before. Which is not what she wants.
She can’t tell whether he will be delighted or angry or despairing; possibly, considering his feelings about his two other children, he will be all three. But whatever his reaction is, she knows her final decision will not be based on it. Nate has been displaced, if only slightly, from the center of the universe.
• • •
She climbs the back stairs and walks forward through European Costumes, skirting the Chinese Peasant Art Exhibit, which doesn’t much interest her. As she rounds the corner towards the main staircase, she glimpses a square dark figure on the floor above. It’s Elizabeth. Elizabeth doesn’t see her. She’s looking over the balustrade, out over the rotunda. Lesje has almost never seen Elizabeth like this, unconscious. It’s as if she’s seeing her on the last day of her life. Lesje isn’t used to this; she’s used to thinking of Elizabeth as permanent, like an icon. But Elizabeth standing by herself, unconnected with anyone, is shorter, worn, ordinary; mortal. The lines of her face and body slope down. Even though she knows her own pregnancy will cut no ice with Elizabeth, may even make her delay the divorce as long as possible, to prove something — what? That she’s first wife? — Lesje can’t remember why she has been afraid of her.
Will they still be doing this in twenty years? Older women, old women, wearing black and not speaking; ill-wishing; never seeing each other, but each keeping the other locked in her head, a secret area of darkness like a tumor or the black vortex at the center of a target. Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.
Still, she doesn’t feel like going through the charade of nodding and smiling; not right now. She ducks into the open elevator and is carried up.
She enters the Gallery of Vertebrate Evolution the wrong way, past the EXIT sign. She’s feeling slightly dizzy, probably because she hasn’t eaten all day. Too much coffee. She sits down on the padded ledge that separates the pedestrians from the dinosaurs. She longs to smoke a cigarette in the soothing Cretaceous dusk before walking out into the blast-furnace of the afternoon, but she knows about the fire hazard. Instead she’ll just rest. It’s warm here also, too warm, but at least it’s dark.
Here are her old acquaintances, familiar to her as pet rabbits: Allosaurus, the carnivore, parrot-beaked Chasmosaurus, Parasaurolophus with its deer-antler crest. They’re merely bones, bones and wire in a scenery of dusty plastic, and she’s an adult; why does she continue to think of them as alive?
When she was much younger she used to believe, or try hard to believe, that at night when the Museum was closed the things inside it carried on a hidden life of their own; if she could only find her way inside she would be able to watch. Later she abandoned this daydream in favor of a less extravagant one: the things were silent and unmoving, true, but somewhere there existed an implement or force (a secret ray, atomic energy) that would bring them back to life. Childish plots, based no doubt on the odd science-fiction comic book or on that Christmas matinée of The Nutcracker Suite she’d been dragged to when they’d decided, so disastrously, that she should take ballet.
Now, however, looking up at the immense skulls towering above her in the dim light, the gigantic spines and claws, she almost expects these creatures of hers to reach down their fingers in friendly greeting. Though if they were really alive they’d run away or tear her apart. Bears, however, dance to music; so do snakes. What if she were to press the buttons on the filmstrips and, instead of the usual speeches or the cries of walruses and seals used to simulate the underwater voices of the marine reptiles, some unknown song were to emerge? Indian music, droning, hypnotic. Try to imagine, says the brochure she wrote, a guide for parents and teachers, what it would be like if suddenly the dinosaurs came to life.
She’d like to; she’d like to sit here for an hour and do nothing else. She’d close her eyes and one after another the fossils would lift their ponderous feet, moving off along the grove of resurrected trees, flesh coalescing like ice or mist around them. They’d dance stumpily down the stairs of the Museum and out the front door. Eight-foot horsetails would sprout in Queen’s Park, the sun would turn orange. She’d throw in some giant dragonflies, some white and yellow flowers, a lake. She’d move among the foliage, at home, an expedition of one.
But she can’t do it. Either she’s lost faith or she’s too tired; at any rate she can no longer concentrate. The fragments of new images intrude. She looks down at the pebbles, the bark chips, the dusty cycad trees on the other side of the ledge, a thousand miles away.
In the foreground, pushing in whether she wants it to or not, is what Marianne would call her life. It’s possible she’s blown it. This is what they mean when they say maturity: you get to the point where you think you’ve blown your life. She should have learned more, in advance, she should have studied more before jumping in; but she isn’t sorry.
True, there’s a chance she’s done a stupid thing. Several, many. Or she may have done a wise thing for a stupid reason. She will tell Nate today, this evening. Will he forgive her?
(Forgiveness is not what she needs; not, anyway, from Nate. She would prefer instead to forgive, someone, somehow, for something; but she isn’t sure where to begin.)