Jocelyn reached over and touched the water. “Can you get across the lake in the winter?”
“Usually,” Claire said. “If not, well, we have a lot of food stored.”
“Must be a long winter.” When Claire didn't answer, Jocelyn added, “But beautiful.”
Inwardly, Claire rolled her eyes. Of course it was beautiful, but beauty had little to do with it. She had come here not just to be with Carson but to prove she could live here. Putting up food, trying to get Bob and the rest of the village not to look at her as one of the “summer people,” insulating the cottage, chopping wood, all the other chores — the chores had everything to do with it. “My parents built the house,” she finally said. “We were always working on it. They never intended it to be lived in year-round. But Carson needed a quiet place to work. And I can work from anywhere.”
“Lucky for him,” Jocelyn said.
“Not lucky. Just something I was able to do,” Claire said. She felt Jocelyn's gaze on her. “I was glad to be able to offer it.” She was speaking unwillingly but couldn't stop, the words being reeled from her as if the other woman held a line. She felt she had to explain, to give Jocelyn the correct impression of her life, the necessity of it bearing down on her with a pressure like physical weight. “This isn't a sacrifice for me,” she said. “I like living here. I don't just see to Carson's needs. It's not like he's the, you know, reclusive man of genius and I'm the handmaiden.”
“The handmaiden?” Jocelyn started to laugh, shaking her head, then clamped her hand over her mouth. “I'm sorry. I'm not making fun of you. I've just never heard anybody use that word in conversation before.”
“Oh, God,” Claire said, “you're right.” Her tension cracked and she could feel laughter breaking the surface of her skin, bubbling up through it as if it were water. “I don't know where that came from.”
At the store Bob handed her the mail.
“Got a visitor with you, eh?” he said, looking at Jocelyn, who stood at the pay phone frowning at an open engagement book and making notes in it.
“That's summer for you,” Claire said, and shrugged. She bought a chicken and some bread, then crossed the street to the vegetable stand. When she came back Jocelyn was still standing next to the phone, no longer talking, just standing, her face tilted to the sky. She had removed her glasses, and her pale skin, exposed to the sun, seemed doubly naked.
As if she'd recognized Claire's steps, she opened her eyes with a smile already present in them. “Ready to go, handmaiden?” she said.
“You stop,” said Claire.
They took the boat back in silence. It was late afternoon, the sky changing to gray, and the water they passed through was planed in shadow, alternately clear and opaque, plants rising up from the deep into occasional visibility. As she docked, Claire looked up and saw Carson moving past a window, his silhouette dark in the light, the line of his neck, the curve of his shoulders. For one instant she didn't recognize him, didn't feel the familiar jolt of his presence. A blankness swept inside her. When she met him she memorized those outlines, raptured by the shape of him, a desire she could not ignore. Now she stood on the dock and looked at him and some emotion drained from her in a trickle like grains of sand marking the passage of time. Jocelyn walked up the hill in front of her, and Claire thought of the woman's questions and her own answers. Whatever she'd said to Jocelyn, she had changed her life because of him, her drastic desire for him. It wasn't possible — or was it? — that after making such a change, the feeling could dissipate, could disappear.
It made her wonder if she knew just what that feeling was. From the moment she met Carson she knew there was a part of him that she could never reach, the part devoted to an abstraction she would never touch. And then the move to the cottage, the distance and isolation and cold. She hadn't been coerced into anything. But what she had chosen was difficult, in fact was chosen for its difficulty. If she'd made a mistake, it was to believe that things struggled for — the cottage, Carson, their life here — had to contain more value than things fallen into with the simple force of the inevitable. A belief engineered by pride.
That night she lay awake, Carson breathing heavily beside her, Jocelyn inaudible in the guest room. She tried to remember as much as she could about his work, her thoughts circulating in a dull frenzy, as they would the night before an exam. All she could think of were the examples from the textbook. Dye dissolving into a glass of water; a dense red drop issuing a cloud of pink. Picture a truck crashing into a wall, she remembered. This is the world in spontaneous action, growing in disorder. Picture a mirror shattering on the floor.
They were almost finished, Jocelyn and Carson, with the final chapter, framing the conclusion. Claire could feel their exhilaration. She made a pot of coffee and joined them at the table with a cup.
“I think that we have an opportunity to extrapolate here,” Jocelyn said. “From the level of chemical processes, the ones you've established, to larger ones.”
Carson shuffled the papers of the manuscript on the table, then ran his hands over his face up to his forehead. From repetition of this gesture his eyebrows had risen into unruly tufts, adding to his look of worry. “I'd like to resist leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he said.
Jocelyn exchanged a smile with Claire. “I appreciate your caution,” she said, “but this isn't a scientific paper. You don't have to worry about peer review. This is the time for you to make wild claims about the potential of your model to explain biology, economic and social phenomena, the very nature of human existence. Say that the second law of thermodynamics has been forever broken. You can be speculative. Be sexy.”
“Listen,” he said. “You must know by now that physical laws can't be broken. I only uncovered them a little further. They were always there.”
“Come on, Carson,” Claire urged. “Have a little fun with it.”
“Claire.”
“What?”
“I'm a scientist, not a comedian,” he said, sounding stricken. This made both women laugh, and Jocelyn wiped a tear from her eye. Carson shook his head. “You two,” he said. “Ganging up on me.”
She remembered when, in a bar near the university, a colleague of Carson's, an older man, wheezy and red-faced and drunk, rambled on about great discoveries in science, the leaps and bounds of thought. This was a popular subject among scientists, Claire had noticed, as if by discussing the personality of genius they could associate themselves more closely with it. This man said there were two kinds of thinkers, those who led — who thought the new, the fully original — and those who followed in the existing tracks. The searchers and the followers, he called them.
Carson had snapped, “It's true there are two types of thinkers: people stupid enough to believe there are two types of anything, then everybody else.”
“Sore subject, Carson?” his colleague said.
They finished the final edit at seven o'clock, so Claire fixed a late dinner. She lit candles and set a bouquet of wildflowers in a jelly jar on the table.
Carson lifted his wineglass and declared a toast. “As Claire and many undergraduates can attest, I've never been successful in spreading my ideas outside of a narrow group of scientists,” he said to Jocelyn. “I know it's been like pulling teeth to get this book out of me, and I thank you for it. And I'm very glad it's over.”
Though he was smiling, Claire sensed how strongly his relief tugged him: that tomorrow Jocelyn would leave, silence would return, and he would retire to his office with three months left of his leave from school. Three months completely devoted to real work. He lapsed into quiet, and a general exhaustion seemed to spread from him across the table. By nine the candles had burned low and the talk had dribbled to nothing.