‘Me? I don’t think so. What do you mean?’
‘Talking to Charlie Quibler, maybe?’
‘Oh, no. I mean, of course I’ve talked to Charlie about some of our stuff, generally –’
‘And he’s been Chase’s environment guy.’
‘Well yes, but you know, Charlie’s just part of a large staff, and he’s been staying at home with Joe, so he hasn’t been a major factor with Chase for some time, as I understand it. Mostly just a voice on the phone. He says he doesn’t get listened to. He says he’s kind of like Jiminy Cricket was to Pinocchio, when Pinocchio’s nose was at its longest.’
Diane laughed. ‘Yeah sure. Let’s meet over at Optimodal, shall we? Let’s say seven instead of six. I want to run some of this off.’
Now that was something he could understand. ‘Sure. See you there.’
Frank sat in his chair feeling his chest puffed out: another cliché revealed to be an accurate account of emotion’s effects on the body. Everyone was the same. It occurred to him that maybe Charlie had had something to do with it, after all. Someone had to have advised Chase whom to choose for this post, and as far as Frank knew, Chase and Diane had never met. So – that was interesting.
Frank went over to the Optimodal Health Club just after six, waved to Diane on the elliptical in the next room, and stomped up the stairmaster for the equivalent of about a thousand vertical feet. After that he showered and dressed, getting into one of his ‘nicer’ shirts for the occasion, and met Diane out in the lobby at the appointed time. She too had changed into something nice, and for a second Frank considered the possibility that she lived out of her office and Optimodal, just as he had contemplated doing before building his treehouse. What evidence did he or anyone else have to disprove it? When they arrived in the morning she was there, when they left at night she was there. There were couches in her big office, and she went to Optimodal every morning of the week, as far as he knew.…
But then again, she certainly had a home somewhere. Everyone did, except for him. And the bros in the park. And the fregans and ferals proliferating in the metropolis. Indeed some twenty or thirty million people in America, he had read. But one thought of everyone as having a home.
Enough – it was time to refocus on the moment and their date. It had to be called that. Their second date, in fact – the first one having occurred by accident in New York, after discussing the North Atlantic project at the UN. And now they were in a Lebanese restaurant in Georgetown that Diane had recently discovered.
And it was very nice. Now they could celebrate not only the actual salting itself, but its subsequent success in restarting the thermohaline; and now, also, Diane’s invitation to become the new Presidential science advisor.
She was pleased with this last, Frank could see. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said to her when they were settled into the main course. ‘Is it a good position? I mean, what does the science advisor do?’ Did it have any power, in other words?
‘It all depends on the President,’ Diane said. ‘I’ve been looking into it, and it appears the position began as Nixon’s way of spanking the science community for publicly backing Johnson over Goldwater. He sent NSF packing out here to Arlington, and abolished his science advisory committee, and established this position. So it became a single advisor he could appoint without any consultation or approval mechanism, and then he could stick them on the shelf somewhere. Which is where these people have usually stayed, except in a few instances.’
That didn’t sound good. ‘But?’
‘Well, in theory, if a president were listening, it could get pretty interesting. I mean, clearly there’s a need for more coordination of the sciences in the federal government. We’ve seen that at NSF. Ideally there would be a cabinet post, you know, some kind of Department of Science, with a Secretary of Science.’
‘The science czar.’
‘Yes.’ She was wrinkling her nose. ‘Except that would create huge amounts of trouble, because really, most of the federal agencies are already supposed to be run scientifically, or have science as part of their subject, or in their operation. So if someone tried to start a Department of Science, it would poach on any number of other agencies, and none of them would stand for it. They would gang up on such an advisor and kill him, like they did to the so-called intelligence czar when they tried to coordinate the intelligence agencies.’
This gave Frank a chill. ‘Yeah, I guess that’s right.’
‘So, now, maybe the science advisor could act like a kind of personal advisor. You know. If we presented a menu of really robust options, and Chase chose some of them to enact, then … well. It would be the President himself advocating for science.’
‘And he might want to do that, given the situation.’
‘Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it? Although Washington has a way of bogging people down.’
‘The swamp.’
‘Yes, the swamp. But if the swamp freezes over’ – they laughed – ‘then maybe we can iceskate over the obstacles!’
Frank nodded. ‘Speaking of which, we were supposed to be going to try iceskating down here, when the river froze over.’
‘That’s right, we were. But now we’ve got this so-called heat spell.’
‘True. Return of the Gulf Stream.’
‘That is so crazy. I bet we will get freezing spells just like before.’
‘Yes. Well, until that happens maybe we can just walk the shore then, and see where you could rent ice skates when the time comes.’
‘Sure. I think the Georgetown Rowing Club is going to do it, we can go check it out. I read they’re going to convert to a skating center when the river freezes over. They’re going to put out floodlights and boundary lines and everything.’
‘Good for them! Let’s go take a look after dinner.’
And so they finished the meal cheerfully, moving from one great Levantine dish to the next. Even the basics were exquisite: olives, hummus, dill – everything. And by the time they were done they had split a bottle of a dry white wine. They walked down to the Potomac arm-in-arm, as they had in Manhattan so very briefly; they walked the Georgetown waterfront, where the potted shrubs lining the river wall were lit by little white Christmas tree lights. All this had been overwhelmed in the great flood, and they could still see the high water mark on the buildings behind the walk, but other than that, things were much as they had been before, the river as calm as a sheet of black silk as it poured under the Key Bridge.
Then they came to the mouth of Rock Creek, a tiny little thing. Following it upstream in his mind, Frank came to the park and his treehouse, standing right over a bend in this same creek – and thus it occurred to him to think, Here you are fooling around with another woman while your Caroline is in trouble God knows where. What would she think if she saw you?
Which was a hard thought to recover from; and Diane saw that his mood had changed. Quickly he suggested they warm up over drinks.
They retired to a bar overlooking the confluence of the creek and the river, on the Georgetown side. They ordered Irish coffees. Frank warmed up again, his sudden stab of dread dispelled by Diane’s immense calmness, by the aura of reality that emanated from her. It was reassuring to be around her; precisely the opposite of the feeling he had when –
But he stayed in the moment. He agreed with Diane’s comment that Irish coffee provided the perfect compound of stimulant and relaxant, sugar and fat, hydration and warmth. ‘It must have been invented by scientists,’ she said. ‘It’s like made to a formula to hit all the receptors at once.’
Frank said, ‘I remember it’s what they always used to serve at the Salk Institute