“Well,” Anna said, “very interesting. Good luck moving in. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Thank you.” Again he nodded.
Anna did the same and took her leave.
But as she turned to go, something caused her to look back. The young monk still stood there in the doorway, looking across at the pizza place, his face marked by a tiny grimace of distress.
Anna recognized the expression at once. When her older son Nick was born she had stayed home with him, and those first several months of his life were a kind of blur to her. She had missed her work, and doing it from home had not been possible. By the time maternity leave was over they had clearly needed her at the office, and so she had started working again, sharing the care of Nick with Charlie and some baby-sitters, and eventually a day-care center in a building in Bethesda, near the Metro stop. At first Nick had cried furiously whenever she left for any reason, which she found excruciating; but then he had seemed to get used to it. And so did she, adjusting as everyone must to the small pains of the daily departure. It was just the way it was.
Then one day she had taken Nick down to the day-care center it was the routine by then and he didn’t cry when she said good-bye, didn’t even seem to care or to notice. But for some reason she had paused to look back into the window of the place, and there on his face she saw a look of unhappy, stoical determination determination not to cry, determination to get through another long lonely boring day a look which on the face of a toddler was simply heartbreaking. It had pierced her like an arrow. She had cried out involuntarily, even started to rush back inside to take him in her arms and comfort him. Then she reconsidered how another good-bye would affect him, and with a horrible wrenching feeling, a sort of despair at all the world, she had left.
Now here was that very same look again, on the face of this young man. Anna stopped in her tracks, feeling again that stab from five years before. Who knew what had caused these people to come halfway around the world? Who knew what they had left behind?
She walked back over to him.
He saw her coming, composed his features. “Yes?”
“If you want,” she said, “later on, when it’s convenient, I could show you some of the good lunch spots in this neighborhood. I’ve worked here a long time.”
“Why, thank you,” he said. “That would be most kind.”
“Is there a particular day that would be good?”
“Well we will be getting hungry today,” he said, and smiled. He had a sweet smile, not unlike Nick’s.
She smiled too, feeling pleased. “I’ll come back down at one o’clock and take you to a good one then, if you like.”
“That would be most welcome. Very kind.”
She nodded. “At one, then,” already recalibrating her work schedule for the day. The boxed sandwich could be stored in her office’s little refrigerator.
Anna completed her journey to the south elevators. Waiting there she was joined by Frank Vanderwal. They greeted each other, and she said, “Hey I’ve got an interesting jacket for you.”
He mock-rolled his eyes. “Is there any such thing for a burnt-out case like me?”
“Oh I think so.” She gestured back at the atrium. “Did you see our new neighbor? We lost the travel agency but gained an embassy, from a little country in Asia.”
“An embassy, here?”
“I’m not sure they know much about Washington.”
“I see.” Frank grinned his crooked grin, a completely different thing than the young monk’s sweet smile, sardonic and knowing. “Ambassadors from Shangri-La, eh?” One of the UP arrows lit, and the elevator door next to it opened. “Well, we can use them.”
P RIMATES IN elevators. People stood in silence looking up at the lit numbers on the display console, as per custom.
Again the experience caused Frank Vanderwal to contemplate the nature of their species, in his usual sociobiologist’s mode. They were mammals, social primates: a kind of hairless chimp. Their bodies, brains, minds, and societies had grown to their current state in East Africa over a period of about two million years, while the climate was shifting in such a way that forest cover was giving way to open savannah.
Much was explained by this. Naturally they were distressed to be trapped in a small moving box. No savannah experience could be compared to it. The closest analog might have been crawling into a cave, no doubt behind a shaman carrying a torch, everyone filled with great awe and very possibly under the influence of psychotropic drugs and religious rituals. An earthquake during such a visit to the underworld would be about all the savannah mind could contrive as an explanation for a modern trip in an elevator car. No wonder an uneasy silence reigned; they were in the presence of the sacred. And the last five thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the savannah.
Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts. She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island country in the Bay of Bengal.”
“Did they say why they rented the space here?”
“They said they had picked it very carefully.”
“Using what criteria?”
“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF, wouldn’t you?”
Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”
Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless. She said, “I think they’re more together than that. I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”
Homo sapiens is a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. And it’s more than a matter of bodies; the archaeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.
These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down the hall around to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism differentiating them extended to their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude. But she did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought on the contrary, Anna’s scientific work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician smart, quick, competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF, good almost to the point of exaggeration too precise, too interrogatory it kept her from pursuing a course of action with drive. Then again, at NSF maybe that was an advantage.
In any case she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of course at the same time that was all such a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two coexisting at odds with one another.