The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [90]
“Who took my saliva?” Leonard said, as the buildings, where they were to live for the next nine months, appeared. “Do you have my saliva? Because I can’t find mine right now.”
During their quick visit the previous spring, Madeleine had been too preoccupied with her new relationship to notice much more about Pilgrim Lake Laboratory than its beautiful beachfront location. It was amazing to think that legends like Watson and Crick had worked or stayed in the former whaling settlement, but most names of the biologists at Pilgrim Lake now—including the lab’s present director, David Malkiel—were new to her. The one actual laboratory they’d toured during that visit hadn’t looked much different from the chemistry labs at Lawrenceville.
Once they’d moved up to Pilgrim Lake, however, and started living there, Madeleine realized how wrong her first impressions of the place had been. She hadn’t expected that there would be six indoor tennis courts, or a gym full of Nautilus equipment, or a screening room that showed first-run films on weekends. She hadn’t expected that the bar would be open twenty-four hours, or that it would be full of scientists at three in the morning, awaiting test results. She hadn’t expected the limousines ferrying pharmaceutical executives and celebrities in from Logan to eat with Dr. Malkiel in his private dining room. She hadn’t expected the food, the expensive French wines and breads and olive oils hand-selected by Dr. Malkiel himself. Malkiel raised huge sums of money for the lab, lavishing it on the resident scientists and luring others to visit. It was Malkiel who had bought the Cy Twombly painting that hung in the dining hall and who had commissioned the Richard Serra that stood behind the Animal House.
Madeleine and Leonard arrived at Pilgrim Lake during the Summer Genetics Seminar. Leonard had to take the famous “Yeast Class,” taught by Bob Kilimnik, the biologist to whose team he’d been assigned. He went off every morning like a frightened schoolboy. He complained that his brain wasn’t working and that the other two research fellows on his team, Vikram Jaitly and Carl Beller, both of whom had gone to MIT, were smarter than he was. But it was just a two-hour class. The rest of the day was free. A relaxed atmosphere prevailed at the lab. A lot of undergraduates were around (called Urts, for undergraduate research technicians), including a lot of women close to Madeleine’s age. Almost every night there was a party where people did slightly queer, science-nerd things, such as serving daiquiris in Erlenmeyer flasks or evaporating dishes, or autoclaving clams instead of steaming them. Still, it was fun.
After Labor Day, things grew more serious. The Urts left, radically decreasing the female population, bringing an end to the summer parties and the whiff of romance in the air. In late September, The Sunday Telegraph began publishing the odds from Ladbrokes on the upcoming Nobel Prizes. As the days passed and the other prizes in science were awarded—to Kenneth Wilson in Physics and to Aaron Klug in Chemistry—people began to speculate, at dinner, on who would win for Physiology