“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.
“I don’t understand what the thing is. I don’t understand what it looks like. What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”
“I can help you understand it.”
She sneered. “I bet you can.”
“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”
She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”
“Yeah, but … who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”
“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”
“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”
She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.
“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you anything.”
As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the answer. When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.
One night in late July he met her outside the chemistry lab, which smelled strongly of pickles, and he almost had to run to keep up with her as she marched to her car and yanked the door open. When they got to his apartment she ransacked his impoverished cabinets and opened his bottle of gin.
“You’re upset,” he hazarded from the kitchen doorway.
She burped rippingly and drank a glass of water. “We were supposed to make aspirin today.”
“I remember making aspirin.”
“I bet you do. But the Clown decided to have a little contest.” She wiped her mouth. “We all got certain amounts of chemicals and we were all going to weigh our yields at the end and whoever had the biggest yield would win. Just win, you know, whatever that means. These teachers, Louis, they set things up to be so good for people like you and so shitty for everybody else. The best person wins, and the people in the middle don’t, and the worst person loses. Well, Jorryn and me, we always finish last anyway. But we’re real careful to follow the recipe, even though we already know we’re going to be the worst because that’s what we’re there for. Meanwhile everybody else is bringing their aspirin up on filter paper—it’s this clump, like a potato after you chew it? And it gets weighed, and the Clown writes the names and percentages on his chalkboard, and things get louder and louder. The guys are all roaring, about, you know, a difference of half a percent: WO-HO! WO-HO!” Lauren savagely mocked the guys. “And there comes this point where you’re supposed to cool the stuff down and filter it, and there you have your aspirin. Well, we do this, Louis. We follow the instructions. And what happens is it all goes through the filter paper. There’s nothing there at all. And so then comes the Inquisition, like what did we do Wrong this time? Everybody’s staring at us, they’re standing there while the Clown reads my notebook. And he can’t figure it out! He goes, Did we observe this temperature rise? And we go, Yes! Yes! And did we scratch the flask to make it crystallize? And we go, Yes! Yes! And I’m thinking he’s going to say it’s all right, he’s going to tell us not to feel too bad. I’m feeling pretty bad already, although Jorryn’s standing there with her hand like this, you know, not my problem, man.” Lauren laughed at the thought of Jorryn. “But you know what he did? He got totally pissed off. He said we must have done something wrong. Because you cannot put these three things together and heat them up and cool them down and not, get, aspirin. And Jorryn and me throw our hands up in the air and we’re going, We did! We did! And there’s no aspirin! It just didn’t work this time! But the Clown he’s getting totally worked up and he goes, You’re going to get an F in this lab unless you redo the experiment and show me at least three grams of aspirin. He says he’s going to keep the lab open till midnight if that’s how long it takes us. Well, Jorryn starts shaking her head, like, fuck this shit—and she walks out. But I didn’t even have the heart to leave. I just sat there while everybody was writing up their final reports at the front, I sat there at the lab table all by myself, just sitting there all by myself being punished because I didn’t get any aspirin. And I followed the instructions. And there was NOTHING THERE.”
Lauren, leaning with both hands on Louis’s kitchen card table, began to cry more loudly than he’d known a person could. Fat staves of grief shuddered up through her chest and left her mouth. The voice was her own, voice the way it is before it becomes words: a bath of red sound. Louis put his arms around her and held her head against his shoulder. It fit in his hands. It was as if this were all there was to her, this crying head. He didn’t know why he loved her so much, he only knew he wanted admittance to her grief, to her whole damaged self, as he’d wanted it since the first time he saw her. He kissed her bristly hair and kissed behind her ear. For this liberty, she slapped him so hard that his glasses were bent and the plastic pad cut his nose and bruised the bone.
He stood there for a while trying to straighten the frames.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” she announced when she came back from his bathroom, her fist full of toilet paper. “But you said you weren’t going to do that. It’s not fair of you.”
She blew her nose.
At midnight they were still watching TV in his kitchen. When Lauren finally turned it off there was a delicious moment when he didn’t know what was going to happen next. What happened was she raised a window and said, “It’s cooled off.”
They went for a walk. Somehow a mild, damp Gulf breeze had banished summer to the north, restoring April. It seemed as if it were the breeze, not the hour, that had emptied the streets and sidewalks of everything but skidding leaves. The cars that did pass were less like cars than like waves breaking gently, like gusts of wind; the humidity sucked them back into itself as soon as they went by. In Houston, a city that accommodated nature, every patch of dirt could smell like beach or bayou. Louis loved the dense live oaks, where purple male grackles and tan female grackles sang irresponsible songs and mewed and moaned and laughed. He loved the squirrels, which were like Evanston squirrels wearing fake long ears; it was an insultingly transparent disguise.
In Hermann Park, he and Lauren climbed the man-made hill and circled the man-made lake with a railing around it. They sat down on some miniature railroad tracks running through a meadow. Lauren lit a cigarette, awakening a grackle that began to speak in tongues.
“Louis,” she said. “Do you really love me?”
“Is