Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [54]
After her talk many people, mostly men, clustered around her with what seemed to Frank a more-than-scientific interest. Turning to answer a question she saw him and smiled. “I’ll be just a minute.” Tiny rush of pleasure at that; ha ha, I get to take the beauty away, ooooop!
Her voice was low and scratchy, indeed it would be nasal if it weren’t so low. A kind of oboe or bassoon sound, very attractive. Some kind of accent, maybe Boston Italian, but so faint it was impossible for Frank to identify.
Then the others had been dealt with, and he was the only one left. He smiled awkwardly, feeling alert and on edge.
“Nice talk.”
“Oh thanks. Shall we go outside? I could use some coffee and maybe a bite.”
“Sure, that would be nice.”
They walked out into the bright sunlight on the Charles. Francesca suggested a kiosk on the other side of the Mass. Ave. bridge, and Frank followed her onto it happily; Boston’s river was full of light, open to the wind. It had good feng shui.
They talked about the dedicated institutes that NSF was planning, and Francesca said she had done a post-doc at the Max Planck in Bremen and been impressed. Then they reached the kiosk, bought lattes and scones, walked back onto the bridge. Frank stopped to look at a women’s eight, sculling underneath them like a big water bug. He would have liked to linger there, but Francesca shivered.
“I get cold out here,” she said. “It’s like Byrd said—the coldest he ever got was on the bridges over the Charles.”
“Byrd the polar explorer?”
“Yes. My husband did work on the Greenland ice cores, and he likes to read the polar classics. He told me Byrd said that, because I was always complaining about how cold I get.”
“Well okay, back to land then.”
“There’s some benches in the sun just over there.” She pointed.
“Didn’t Byrd fake getting to the poles?”
She laughed. “Maybe that explains why here is the coldest he ever got.”
“No, but didn’t he?”
“I don’t know, but he definitely wintered on the Ross Ice Shelf.”
“You couldn’t do that now.”
“Sure you could. There are people living on the big pieces of it still floating around. That’s what Jack tells me. Icebergs as big as Massachusetts, and so people have settled on them.”
“Fun. What does he do?”
“Paleoclimatology. He’s been studying the Younger Dryas for a long time now.”
“Really! That’s the climate we’re dropping into again, I hear.”
“Yes. He’s often away giving talks about it. It’s quite a scramble with the kids.”
“I bet. How many do you have?”
“Two. Angie is eight, Tom is five.”
“Wow. You must be busy.”
“Yes, it’s totally crazy.”
They sat on a bench looking out at the river, eating their scones and talking. She was a beautiful woman. Frank had not fully noticed this during the panel meeting at NSF. Of course he was well aware of the famous experiment in which an attractive woman approached men on a bridge with some question that allowed her plausibly to ask the men to call her later, after which seventy percent of the men on the bridge had called, as compared to only thirty percent accosted in the same way in a park. So, very possibly this was another example of the bridge effect. But whatever. She looked good. Black tangled curls framing sharp Mediterranean features; neat intilting teeth; all of a piece, stylish and intelligent. If you were to play the game of choosing which movie star should play her, you’d have to go right to one of the ultimate Italian exotics, a middle-aged Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale.
A joy even to watch her eat; and at this observation Frank could not help remembering another paper, on human female sexual