THAT, AS IT TURNED OUT, WAS A VERY BIG PARTY.
At that point, of course, most people thought we’d go home. Most people thought we were up on that mesa to build our secret weapon before Germany could do the same thing.
We didn’t know, for example, that a memo had already been sent to the general in charge of firebombing Japan, telling him to spare Hiroshima so that we could be the ones to destroy it. We weren’t even supposed to know it was a weapon we were working on.
But I knew. Jack told me, when we were together. He didn’t give me too many details, but I knew, and so did most of the other women, and we all thought we were racing the Germans.
So in May, when Germany surrendered and Hitler killed himself with that secret girlfriend he married just before handing over the cyanide tablet, most of us went along to that party thinking it might be the last party, and even from outside the lab, Charlotte and Freddy and I could hear people singing. Mike Michnovicz was playing the accordion, and it was clear that we’d gotten there late, because in the hall someone was throwing up in a trash can, and inside the lab it was already too crowded.
Someone had rolled in two GI cans from the barracks and filled them to the brim with Shangri-la punch. Then they’d built a tower of crushed grapefruit juice cans and empty lab alcohol bottles, and they’d chilled the punch with steaming blocks of dry ice. A little clutch of GIs had draped themselves around Mike, who was playing some kind of mournful Sinatra, and I stood there with Charlotte and Freddy and tried to arrange my face to look pleasant.
Then someone gave me a beaker of punch. Later, I lost track of Charlotte. For a while, I listened to some excited little GI telling me about how before he came up to the mesa, he’d been in Utah developing a new incendiary that couldn’t even be doused out by water. He told me they’d built a miniature replica of Tokyo, down to the books on the shelves and the mats on the floor, and how when they dropped those bombs on the actual city the thing went up like it was built out of matchsticks.
He said they didn’t even camouflage the bellies of the planes anymore, because they flew beyond the range of Japanese defenses.
He said not only Tokyo but Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Kawasaki were basically gone at this point, and then I excused myself and went somewhere else, and a scientist with thick glasses regaled me with a story about how he’d got his hair cut at the barber chair by the cyclotron.
It was a story I’d heard ten thousand times. But I nodded and smiled as if I cared very much, and someone else who was listening in said if only the whole world ran as smoothly as our little Shangri-la on the mesa, where haircuts are free, no one is poor, and everyone has such excellent health care.
And meanwhile, I scanned the room and realized Jack wasn’t coming.
He’d never show up, I thought to myself. It wasn’t a party for people like him. It was just a bunch of GIs and WACs and unimportant scientists, and for a while I felt safe and lost and a little bit dead, but then I saw Oppie’s hat over the crowd.
Then I knew Jack was coming. Knowing that, I came to life and felt nervous. Then I went to the GI cans to refill my beaker, and that’s where I was standing when I saw him walking in behind Oppie.
He was wearing a work shirt with his blue jeans, which is what most of the scientists wore, unless of course they’d come from Europe, in which case they wore formal clothes, as if they’d come out west from a funeral.
But Jack was from Princeton, and he’d gotten that tan, and he looked like a hero out of a Western when he crossed that party to shake hands with a group of admiring GIs. Then, suddenly, I was so flooded with such confusing and unreasonable terror that I drank all my punch and passed back my beaker.
And even then, after that extra beaker of punch, that weird unreasonable terror was still tingling in the roots of my stomach. I had to take a deep breath and remember that this was only another lab party, and that was just Jack. But of course my heart had been beating too fast since I saw those baby rats in the armchair, and now, drinking my punch, watching Jack stride through the crowd, everyone else in the room lost their features.
Slowly, the walls started to melt. Then the lab equipment began to float off, and the only thing I could see was Jack’s face, his tormented and unhappy expression, while he nodded earnestly, talking in the corner with a pretty young blond girl.
I could see her as well. She was wearing one of those dumb peasant blouses and a long braid over her shoulder, like she thought she’d taken the train straight from Vassar into the pages of Little House on the Prairie. There she was, with her shoulders bare, smiling at Jack and touching her braid, and even though they were standing on the other side of the room, and the walls were slowly melting around me, I could see his face exquisitely clearly.
I realized how haunted he looked, with his dark eyes and the shadow of a beard on his face, listening to that dumb little girl so intently.
And then I remembered the Dostoyevsky novel he’d assigned me to read, back when the two of us were together. I remembered how on the front page there was an ink drawing of a haunted student-murderer with eyes just like Jack had in that moment. I stood there by the cans of Shangri-la punch and gazed into Jack’s regretful student-murderer eyes, and for a moment, I allowed myself to forget that he might be unhappy because of the weapon we were up on that mesa to build.
I forgot that completely. Instead, leaning on the centrifuge, I thought: It hit him hard, also.
I thought he, too, must have stayed up all night. And maybe he reached for the copy of Crime and Punishment that he’d lent me, which I’d left on his nightstand, with my dog-ears and the passages I so carefully noted.
And maybe it was the aching accordion music, but I managed to stir up a great deal of pity for him, and how much he must have missed me, or how much he must have missed that careful and obedient girl I was in the days when I read beside him. By then the room was swimming in a not entirely unpleasant way, and Charlotte and Freddy had gone off forever, and time slid nicely by until Jack came over and found me.
Then we were together, leaning on the centrifuge, laughing at my clever jokes, alone with each other again, along with a burly new man from explosives.
I DID, IN MY DEFENSE, ASK MYSELF IF I’D HAD TOO MUCH TO DRINK. But it was always so hard, up there on the mesa, to predict how the altitude might affect you.
Once, when I was his young, eager student, Jack explained to me how massive bodies warp time and space, so that time moves more quickly for a person on top of a mountain than it does for someone who lives down below it. And from that point on, I allowed myself to believe that our sea-level lives no longer existed, or that if they did exist still, they did so in a time that was no longer our own, a time we’d left behind when we rode the shuttle up to the mesa, where it was hard, because of the altitude, to predict the effect of all that alcohol.
But I did ask myself if I’d had too much, and I seemed to still have my composure. I hadn’t made any mistakes, standing with Jack and that new man from explosives. I even made a few funny jokes, and kept my face turned to the good side, and overall managed such a compelling performance that the explosives man asked if he could take me to dinner.
I agreed, feeling Jack’s eyes on the side of my face. And when the explosives man went off to fill my beaker with water, Jack and I were alone.
There we were, standing in that wavering room. He fixed me with his troubled eyes.