FOURTEEN
Cypress Cove, where Lily Warren lived, was a cluster of clapboard town houses built into a hillside overlooking downtown Half Moon Bay and, beyond it, the Pacific. The flowering vines that climbed over the second- floor balconies gave the place a Mediterranean feel, except for the bite in the air and the fog just now beginning to roll in off the water. A faint mineral smell of seaweed, kelp, and wrack wafted past Seeley as he stood at Lily's door, a bouquet of spring flowers in his hand.
Seeley had thought to break the date, but then Steinhardt refused to meet with him to review tomorrow morning's testimony, leaving the evening free. “I'm not some actor who has to rehearse a part,” the scientist said. Seeley wished that he were. Not only could the scientist's arrogant narcissism undo all that he and Palmieri had accomplished with Cordier, Chaikovsky, and Kaplan, but Seeley still didn't know what secrets lay behind the neat grids of Steinhardt's laboratory notebooks.
Lily's flustered half curtsy when Seeley handed her the flowers made him wonder how often she entertained. She led him up a narrow stairway and went off to find a vase. The furniture had the matched look of what someone might acquire on a rushed visit to a rental outlet, but a brightly colored pillow here and there, a couple of bulky art books on the coffee table, and some framed black-and-white photographs on the living-room wall redeemed the monotony. Just inside the glassed-off balcony, a dining table was set with good china and silver and a single gardenia in a crystal flute. Exotic aromas came from the small open kitchen where Lily fussed with the flowers.
She came into the living room carrying a tray with an imported brand of sparkling water, a frosty canister of ice, and two tall tumblers. Her eyes smiled at him. “I have wine or beer if you'd like. But I thought you might prefer this.”
Seeley remembered how at lunch she had caught his lingering glance at the line of beer bottles along the restaurant wall, and he wondered how much about him she had already deduced. Everything, he decided.
She took the corner of the couch across from him and filled the two glasses. In her own home, her posture still as erect as a dancer's, she seemed less confident, more vulnerable, than at lunch.
“I'm sorry, but there's no dim sum. I had to work at the lab all day so I picked up some takeout at a Thai place on the way home.”
“I didn't come for the dim sum.”
“It's my favorite restaurant. I promise, you'll like it.”
She crossed a leg, and an unseen slit in the floor-length skirt momentarily revealed a long graceful leg, then magically concealed it again.
“Did you have any trouble finding me?”
“Why do you live all the way out here?”
“The suburbs? You think a single woman would be happier in the city.”
“No, I-”
“It's convenient. The lab's just fifteen minutes away. Some days I have to be there eighteen, nineteen hours…” She stopped, her thoughts elsewhere. “And, when I get lonely, the ocean's a wonderful companion.”
Seeley wondered whether it was the ocean or the thought of home, six thousand miles away, that consoled her. As when she told him of her affair with Steinhardt, Lily's openness surprised him.
“Do you ever think about going back?”
“I think about China all the time, but not about going back.” Again, the expressive eyes smiled. “Every Chinese graduate student who comes to the States says that after she gets her degree she's going back. But when the time comes, not even half of them do.”
“China's going to be a great scientific power.”
“But not for a long time and, even then, the important things won't change, especially if you're a woman. You work for months, years, every day of the week, praying for results. Then the day comes when everything you've done, every one of your intuitions turns out to be right. You've made a major discovery.”
“And you can't claim it as your own.”
She shrugged, but Seeley felt the heat. “Calls are made. Papers arrive. You're assigned to a different lab. Some party bureaucrat who never in his life spent an hour at a laboratory bench gets to put his name on your discovery.”
“It sounds like corporate America,” Seeley said. “Or Switzerland.”
She instantly saw where his thoughts were going, and a rueful smile warned him off: No, not tonight; I don't want to talk about St. Gall or Alan Steinhardt. “I'm famished,” she said. “Let's eat.”
Seeley excused himself to wash up. The guest bathroom, on the other side of the stairway, looked barely used. Another fragrant gardenia was in a narrow vase above the sink. The hand towels could have been starched, they were that stiff, and Seeley wiped his damp hands on his trousers. In a straw basket beneath the towel rack were four or five women's magazines- Vogue, French Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and, on top, Glamour. Next to the photograph of a pouty-lipped starlet, the cover promised articles on “Seven Tips for Overcoming Shyness” and “Ten Special Treats to Give Your Man in Bed.” Seeley asked himself what he had expected. Well-thumbed copies of Immunology?
When he returned, Lily was setting down a platter on which glistening shallots, crinkly dark mushrooms, and chive flowers surrounded a whole crispy fish. She described the other dishes to him: steamed wontons filled with ground spiced pork, stir-fried noodles with chives, and shrimp-and-olive fried rice.
“Another thing,” Lily said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “in your country anyone can eat like a party official or a big-time industrialist even if he isn't one.”
The food was good. It might have been the variety, or the complex flavors, or the hour, but they ate more slowly than they had at lunch, talking less and with more comfortable pauses. The tuning fork still hummed, but at a lower pitch.
“What was it like for you growing up in China?” The question, Seeley knew, could spoil the mood but, as in the taxi with Palmieri, it was the question he asked of anyone who interested him; for him, it was the single great mystery.
Lily clapped her hands as a child might. “Oh,” she said, “I had a wonderful childhood.”
“What were your parents like?”
“I never really got to know them. My father's a physicist and my mother's a chemist, but when I was growing up they were either in prison or on a farm hoeing beans and being politically reeducated. I came to America before they got their lives back.”
She spoke of this so lightly that Seeley was certain that he misunderstood.
“My grandparents-my mother's parents-raised me. They were wonderful people and they spoiled me terribly.”
She described trips with her grandfather to a local zoo populated with a weird assortment of animals, and of toiling side by side in her grandmother's small vegetable garden, offering the stories as gifts that implicitly asked for Seeley's memories in exchange. To Seeley's astonishment, he found himself talking about adventures of his own: bicycle excursions to places like the Ellicott Square Building that he'd only read about in the newspaper or seen on television; the long solitary hours he spent in Buffalo's wondrous art museum. He had grown so accustomed to thinking of his childhood as a single, unremittingly dark passage that, as when he remembered building beerbottle castles with Leonard at the Germania, the memories were like bright windows opening.
Seeley said, “Besides being able to eat like a party official, what else do you like about America?”
“The independence.” She pronounced the word carefully, as she had “relationship” the other day, as if the very word was a treasure to be handled gently. “Young Chinese women come here, they find good work and, for the first time in their lives, they have financial independence. Sexual independence, too. That's another reason they don't go back.”
Which Glamour article had she turned to first, Seeley wondered, the one about overcoming shyness or the one about ten bedtime treats?
“It must be hard,” he said, “balancing relationships with independence.” It was his last attempt to get her to talk about Steinhardt.
“You're a good listener,” Lily said.
“I liked the stories about you and your grandparents.”
