But that was natural. Few aspects of life affect the postgrad quite as much as the faculty committee. Your fortunes, fun, fury, and future rotate on the whim and judgments of this arbitrary posse of pedagogues. Given a sympathetic tribunal, life can be worth living. But let one or two be petulant prima donnas, and you may be screwed, regardless of scholarship. Mead had heard of committees that greased the skids, others that gummed up the works, but never one that failed to put up a few hoops to jump through. Along such runnels ran the conversation of James Mead and Noni Blue on their first date. “Committees!” Mead croaked again an hour later, trudging up the steps of the tower. “Couldn’t I have thought of something more romantic?”
So the next time, he spoke of hissing roaches and their marvelous courtship rituals. That hadn’t been quite right either.
On their third date, over coffee, Mead let out much more than he’d intended. They’d been getting to know each other, and Noni said, “Tell me about your family. And where you’re from, besides just New Mexico.”
“I was born in Las Cruces,” Mead began. “Dad worked on rockets at White Sands—nothing nuclear, but they were getting ready. We moved to Albuquerque a few years ago when he got a job at the university. Mom’s spent her whole life so far on me and my two brothers. Wants to paint, but never quite gets the brushes out, you know?”
“Or gets the lead out?” asked Noni. “My mom was like that—until she left.”
“My mother would never do that.”
“Any woman will, if she’s had enough. Or maybe not enough.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, she’d be an emotional cripple on her own.”
“You sell her pretty short, don’t you?”
“Never mind. Anyway, UNM waives tuition for faculty brats, so I stayed there. Then returned to Las Cruces for my master’s.”
Noni tried again. “So what do you mean about your mother? I don’t mean to pry, but what you said was provocative. Why is she so emotionally dependent?”
“Well, nuts,” he said, running his long fingers through his brown hair. “All right—you want to know? You might not like it.”
She kept on nodding, if only just.
“Okay. My mother always wanted a girl; Dad too. They got us three boys—I’m the oldest, Lance and Roger are eighteen and fifteen. So eight years ago—Mom’s fifty-four—she got pregnant again.”
“Wow! And, yay for her—so she got her girl?”
“Don’t cheer yet. They got their girl, all right. She was born with spina bifida.”
“Oh, James, I’m sorry . . .”
“That’s not the bad part,” he continued. “The surgery was good, she was coming along, and we all loved her very much. But she took a lot of care.” Mead was staring straight ahead, into his cooling cup. “It wore us out sometimes, but Molly got and gave all the love any kid could have.” He paused, and Noni said nothing. “Then, two years ago, she died.” Mead went pale. “And that’s still not the worst of it,” he said with a small, mirthless laugh. “Mom and Dad never got out anymore, what with the demands of Molly’s care. One day I talked them into going hiking with us boys. For the first time, they consented to leave Molly with a respite worker from the county. Everything seemed fine. We all had a good time, almost like before, when we hiked all the time. Then we got home to find an ambulance in the driveway. The respite helper had fallen asleep, and Molly drowned in the bath.”
Noni took his hand.
James snorted. “If only we hadn’t gone hiking . . .” He let his head fall onto her shoulder, feeling way too close to blubbering. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I’ve never told anyone before.”
Noni shoved him. “James, I am sorry, that’s a horrible story. And my shoulder’s yours if you want it. But you really carry guilt about this, don’t you?”
“I know it’s not my fault. And I can’t say I saw a great future for Molly. But it’s what it did to Mom. She’s been very brittle ever since. Therapy doesn’t work, and she’d never take pills.”
“But James, tens of thousands of mothers have lost healthy sons, not to mention lovers and husbands and fathers, in Vietnam in these past few years. Like my aunt, when my cousin Charlie was killed in Khe Sanh. Most of them get on with it, as she does.”
“You’re right. And so does my mother, in her way. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Well, I almost think she blames me. The outing was my idea, after all, and I talked them into it. We were exceptionally close, always—great pals. But ever since Molly died, she’s been stiff, even cold toward me. I guess that haunts me more than Molly’s loss itself. That must sound incredibly selfish. Oh, shit.”
Noni gave her shoulder back.
Later, as Noni spoke softly, trying to comfort him, James considered her face as well as her words. She flicked her long, dark brown hair, glinting red in some lights, black in others. Mead knew he was supposed to respond to what he thought she had said, but he let himself lose track in the flickers and sparks of her hair. That night it was hellishly hard to return to his lab, the roach room, and the lonely, chilly turret. Eventually he fell asleep, for once with more than randy roaches and western ramblers in his dreams.
More dates followed. When weekend weather permitted, they walked the trails of the traprock ridges outside of town. Or they caught a bus to some salt marsh village, dined on crab cakes and Schaefer beer in little beach bistros, and walked back on long-abandoned trolley lines that once served the university. When the snow closed in, they prowled weedy winter fields, stark with the heads of dried asters.
The day came at last when Mead kissed Noni’s mouth and licked her teeth. And one night, sealed in her warm room by the bewitching glaze of a Connecticut ice storm off Long Island Sound, beside a little Christmas tree they’d fashioned from snapped-off boughs of pine, they became lovers. Afterward, Noni’s almost negative weight buoyant across his belly beneath the sheets, Mead lay in a state of happy disbelief.
Lifting her hand to stroke his long side and his short brown beard, Noni said, “I was beginning to wonder whether we’d ever get here.”
“I know,” said Mead. “God, I’ve needed this.”
“Need more?” she asked.
So the two of them, young and lithe and randier than the roaches from too much bookwork and too little life, wrapped themselves together again. Then, sweaty and laughing like mockingbirds, they slept into the morning. When Mead awoke, Noni’s bedside candle burned low and bright as her grass-sweet breath lisped on in slumber.
Mead looked around him at Noni’s books, records, prints, posters, family photos, and artifacts from a privileged and cosmopolitan upbringing. A field hockey stick angled across one corner while another supported a generous spiderweb unmolested. On a corner clothesline, a trio of pastel blouses danced with a pretty array of panties and bras. Mead worried that she was much more sophisticated than he in her background, and he mumbled something to himself. Just then she stirred, turned her warm front against his side, and asked, “What did you say?”
“You have a lot of books,” he said, and then he crushed her petal lips, doing them no harm whatever.
One day about a week later Mead was working in the main museum collection, placing some butterflies of the brushfoot subfamily Satyrinae into unit trays. His eyes were arrested by the label on a tray of stunning black velvet butterflies: Erebia magdalena, read the label. “Eureka!” he erupted. The