The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [147]
The lab was empty when he arrived. Jaitly had left him a Post-it that said, cryptically, “Beware the dragon.” Leonard turned on the boom box, got a Pepsi from the fridge, for the caffeine, and got down to business.
He’d been working for about an hour when, to his surprise, the door opened and Kilimnik entered. He bore down on Leonard, glowering.
“What did I ask you to do last night?” Kilimnik said in a sharp voice.
“You asked me to run some gel trays.”
“A pretty simple task, right?”
Leonard wanted to say that it would have been easier if Kilimnik hadn’t called so late, but he thought it wise to say nothing.
“Look at the numbers on these,” Kilimnik said.
He thrust out the images. Leonard obediently took them from him.
“These are the same numbers as the series you gave me two days ago,” Kilimnik said. “You mixed up the samples! What are you, brain-dead?”
“I’m sorry,” Leonard said. “I came over last night right after you called me.”
“And did a sloppy job,” Kilimnik shouted. “How am I supposed to run a study if my lab techs can’t follow the simplest protocols?”
Calling Leonard a “lab tech” was intended as an insult. Leonard noted it.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, futilely.
“Go,” Kilimnik said, dismissing him with a wave. “Get some beauty rest. I don’t want you screwing up anything more tonight.”
Leonard had no choice but to obey. As soon as he came out of the lab, however, he was so furious that he nearly went back in to tell Kilimnik off. Kilimnik was on his case about mixing up the samples, but the truth was that it didn’t matter much. It was abundantly clear—to Leonard, at least—that moving the HO gene to the other DNA strand wasn’t going to change the asymmetry between mother and daughter cells. There were a thousand other possible causes for that asymmetry. At the end of this experiment, two to six months from now, Kilimnik would be able to prove, definitively, that the position of the HO gene had no effect on the asymmetry of budding yeast cells and, therefore, that they were now one stalk closer to finding the needle in the haystack.
Leonard imagined saying these things to Kilimnik’s face. But he knew he would never do it. He had nowhere to go if he lost his fellowship. And he was failing, failing at the easiest tasks.
Back behind his building he smoked up the rest of his Backwoods until the foil pack was empty.
Madeleine was sitting on the couch when he came in. She had the telephone in her lap, but wasn’t talking on it. She didn’t look up at him.
“Hi,” Leonard said. He wanted to apologize, but doing so proved more difficult than going to the refrigerator to get a Rolling Rock. He stood in the kitchen, swigging from the green bottle.
Madeleine remained on the couch.
Leonard was hoping that if he ignored their earlier fight it might seem as though it hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, the phone in Madeleine’s lap suggested that she’d been speaking to someone, probably one of her girlfriends, to discuss his bad behavior. A few moments later, in fact, she broke the silence.
“Can we talk?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You have to do something about your anger. You lost control in the car today. It was scary.”
“I was upset,” Leonard said.
“You were violent.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You were,” Madeleine insisted. “You scared me. I thought you were going to hit me.”
“All I did was throw the magazine.”
“You were in a rage.”
She continued speaking. Her speech sounded rehearsed or, if not rehearsed, supplied with phrases that weren’t her own, phrases supplied by whomever she’d been speaking with on the phone. Madeleine was saying things about “verbal abuse” and being “hostage to another person’s moods” and having “autonomy in a relationship.”
“I understand that you’re frustrated that Dr. Perlmann keeps giving you the runaround,” she said. “But I’m not responsible for that and you can’t keep taking it out on me. My mother thinks we have different styles of arguing. It’s important for people in a relationship to have rules about