The Chinese scientists had murmured among themselves then as if Walter were prophesying. I knew how they felt – we’d been married for six years and I’d felt that power before. When Walter explained how the acid rain altered the lakes’ pH, killing first the snails, then the tadpoles, then the bacteria, then the fish, hands shot up and questions flew in frantic, fractured English. Something in Walter’s presentations had always made the possible probable, the probable certain, the future cataclysmic, and I could understand his listeners’ concerns. Walter’s predictions were often right.
Walter stroked his nose as a small man with an overbite introduced him in Mandarin. I heard the name of the university where we were; I heard Hoff-er-meierr; I heard some astonishing polysyllabic that may have been the Chinese rendering of Quabbin Reservoir, where Walter had done his first, best work. That was all I could catch – despite my best efforts with my great-uncle Owen’s old language books and the new ones I’d bought, I’d learned hardly any Mandarin. All week long, listening to the crowds, I’d heard only a rising, falling, yowling sound, like a river tumbling over broken glass. When I’d struggled to respond with a few words, everyone had laughed.
As the small man rattled on I scanned the room. Food, great lovely heaps of it; I’d been starving all week. The table to my left was crowded with bottles of sweet pink wine, which women in homemade jumpers were pouring into glasses for a toast. The table to my right was dotted with large green bottles of beer and smaller ones of orange soda. The table directly in front of me was spread with food, dish after dish, and behind a whole fish drenched in brown sauce I saw a chocolate layer cake on which my name was written in icing. How had they known? I looked again – the icing said ‘Greetings,’ not ‘Grace.’ Across the room, the small man sat down and a pretty young woman moved to the microphone and clapped her hands twice. The shrieking and laughing and chattering stopped as if she’d thrown a switch.
‘I would like to make a toast, please,’ said the woman in her careful English. She rolled her Rs with a Beijing buzz, almost a Scottish burr. ‘To our var-ry distinguished guest of honor, var-ry far-murz Doctor Professor Wal-ter Hoff-er-meierr.’
Everyone stood and clapped and cheered. Walter bowed and gave a speech, while I sat on my folding chair and felt my thighs overrunning the seat like a river. The head of the university spoke, some government official spoke, a visitor from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology spoke – all spoke and offered toasts, while I kept my eye on the chocolate cake. Someone kept filling my glass with sweet pink wine, and I didn’t notice until the third or fourth toast that I was the only one draining my glass each time. I think I already had the fever then.
‘Doctor Professor Hoff-er-meierr has agreed to allow pictures,’ the young woman said. A tidal wave of students and scientists flowed around and between the tables, leaving me more or less to myself. The German couple behind me mumbled; the Belgians talked to the Swiss. A young man with a bushy gold moustache was nattering on about some limnological problem. Katherine Olmand, a British ichthyologist I’d come to dislike for her prim aloofness, spoke to one of the waitresses in Mandarin and watched to make sure the rest of us had noticed. One Chinese woman sat alone, a few feet to my left; she exchanged a few phrases with Katherine and then with another woman scientist, but didn’t seem able to strike up a lasting conversation with either of them. When she saw me watching her, she slid across the folding chairs and smiled nervously.
‘Good evening,’ she said, with a heavy accent. ‘I may practice my English with you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, wondering if this was how she’d approached the other women. I was lonely enough to want a conversation with anyone, and I was also flattered. At the meeting, the Chinese usually shunned me in favor of Walter.
‘Dr Yu Xiaomin,’ she said, tapping her chest. She had a small, sweet, delicate face, finely creased about the eyes. Her blouse was dove-colored silk, figured with small birds; her skirt was tan and apparently homemade. Her stockings were flesh colored and almost opaque and her shoes, black and clunky, might have come from my grandmother Mumu’s closet. But she wasn’t old – she was forty, maybe forty-five, no older than Walter.
‘I am a lake ecologist, like your husband,’ Dr Yu said. A worried look crossed her face. ‘Walter Hoffmeier is your husband?’
‘He is,’ I agreed.
‘Mrs Walter Hoffmeier, then,’ she said. Her temples were damp, and I suddenly realized she was too shy to fight the crowd surrounding Walter and so had settled for the two women near me, and finally for me instead. I felt mildly insulted to be her last choice, but my curiosity was stronger than my hurt pride and I had no one else to talk to.
‘Grace Hoffmeier,’ I said. ‘I used to be a lake ecologist too. Sort of.’
‘Yes?’ Dr Yu said. Her face relaxed. ‘What does that mean, “sort of”?’
‘I worked as my husband’s assistant,’ I told her. ‘Years ago. Helped with his projects, gathered data, drafted papers …’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Dr Yu said, nodding energetically. ‘That is nice for a wife. You have children?’
I fell into a fit of coughing and then said, ‘No.’ How had we gotten so personal, so fast? I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and there seemed to be no point in telling her the whole history of our not having children, no point in going into who was to blame and why.
Dr Yu’s face fell and I softened my answer. ‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘No?’ she said. ‘You’re so young, you could have many …’
‘Not so young,’ I told her. ‘Thirty. How about you? Do you have children?’
‘Three,’ she said proudly. ‘Two boys and a girl – was before the rule of one child only. Do you know this rule? My father had ten children, but now …’
‘Sure I know it,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to miss.’ All over Beijing, I’d seen posters exhorting couples to sign the one-child pledge. ‘One Couple, One Child,’ the most striking poster had said. ‘Eugenical and Well-Bred.’
‘Hard to miss?’ said Dr Yu.
‘That’s an idiom,’ I said, already tiring of this conversation. I looked over at Walter and saw him lean toward a group of Chinese students whose faces were upturned toward his like hatchlings waiting for their pellets. Loving every minute, as he used to love it when I’d listened to him, when he couldn’t teach me fast enough and couldn’t believe how fast I learned. If I’d wanted to catch him I couldn’t have planned a better way. As I watched he raised his right hand and, with a gesture that still wrenched my heart, smoothed and smoothed again the thinning hair at the back of his head. His fingers were as gentle as if a child lay under them; as if, by his own touch, he could bring himself to life again. I could still hear his voice, teaching me in the old days: There are two laws of ecology, he’d said. The first is that everything is related to everything else. The second is that these relationships are complicated as hell.
Dr Yu cleared her throat and I finished what I’d been saying. ‘Short for “hard to miss seeing,” I think – you use the phrase for something very obvious, right there in front of your eyes.’
Dr Yu nodded sharply. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. Her large earlobes were threaded with small pearls. ‘That’s a good phrase. I will use in a sentence: “Hard to miss that you are younger than your husband.” Is that right?’
‘It is,’ I agreed; this woman didn’t seem to miss much. Walter, lean and balding and lined, looked ten years older than his forty-two.
Someone gave a signal