Playground, page 11
“Thanks for your honesty, eh?” She patted his cheek and stumbled into her interview.
The office of the dean of admissions was also a working lab. Six-hundred-gallon saltwater tanks formed a U along three walls around Edward Michelson’s desk. He stood to shake her hand. The force of his grip baffled her. Was she making him nervous?
She sat in the hot seat in front of his desk and pleaded her case. The facts were unassailable. “My grades and test scores are strong. My letters of recommendation . . . are even better. I am a first-rate candidate.”
Having to say so made her sick. Failing to say so would have made her sicker.
“We get many first-rate applicants. The best in the country.”
“Yes. But none with more dive experience than I have.”
Dean Michelson leaned back in his chair, studying some crib sheet on the ceiling. “Tell me what you know about Langmuir circulation.”
She suppressed a scream. She had applied to study marine biology, not physical oceanography. But after counting to three in silence, she leapt into the complex math of rolling vortices and their effects on plankton and nekton. Her interviewer cut her off just as she was warming to the topic.
“Where do you come down on continental drift?”
The snare was obvious, even before it was sprung. The most controversial topic in all the earth sciences had been a hot war long before her lecture-hall shoot-out back at Duke. In the two years since then, her suspicions about consensual wisdom had only deepened. But any answer she gave would be wrong to half the people in the field. Edward Michelson himself might be in the grip of old ignorance. She took a breath and plunged.
“The evidence is stronger, every year. Those who can’t accept it are going to look foolish, by the time I’m your age.”
The Institute’s designated gatekeeper smiled. “You think it’ll take that long?”
She looked down at her lap, where she held the oilcloth-covered journal she had kept since the age of twelve. It held a decade of meticulous handwritten diving logs. She had accumulated more hours at depths below fifty feet than the most experienced man on the admissions committee.
“Here,” she said, and pushed the journal across the desk. She’d given up thinking that it would make any difference. But she nursed some small hope that it might still shame him.
The dean of admissions smirked at the colorful hibiscus print on the journal’s cover. “What’s this?”
Beaulieu just tipped her head toward the book, daring him.
The decider of lives flipped through the pages as her handwriting changed from French to English, from childish balloon printing to clean collegiate cursive. While he read, the three walls of gigantic tanks filled with fish of all colors gave Evelyne merciful distraction. A reddish brown, misshapen monster caught her eye as it rooted in the sand at the bottom of one tank. She called out before she realized she was talking.
“Gadon ço! Is that Dactylopus? I’ve never seen . . .”
Dean Michelson jerked up from her dive logs. “Yes. From one of our collection trips to the China Sea.”
She did not ask permission to stand and cross behind his desk for a look. Permission didn’t matter anymore. Nor did impressions. She had traveled across the continent for nothing. She could at least look at the remarkable creature, while she was here.
The fingered dragonet was so bizarre, so implausible, so grotesque, so beautiful, she could barely credit it. Shocking blue spots on the leading spikes of its dorsal fin waved above the twin bulge of eyes. Its blood-orange lips were the color of her hair, at least when her hair was clean. Its skin was the perfect, mottled match to the pebbled bed it dragged across. A dragonet, yes, with further blue stripes adding a touch of hideous elegance to its flamboyant tail. She was this fish—a spindly horror in a sweet shirtwaist dress. Beaten down by days of sleepless driving, watching her chance to spend her life among the wildest ravings of nature slip away, she let the burn come up her throat and into her eyes.
A voice at her side said, “It’s really something, isn’t it?”
She turned to see her tormentor bending down and gazing into the tank with the same wonder she felt, as if it were his first time seeing Dactylopus, too. She fought to take control back over her own voice.
“Yes. It’s something.”
Dean Michelson kept his eyes locked on the fish. “Forgive us. We thought you were lying.”
She recoiled from the apology as from a slap. She straightened, and the man straightened, too, repentant but looking her in the eye at last.
“We didn’t think anyone your age . . . any woman . . . could have been diving as long as you claimed you’ve been diving.”
Silence felt like her strongest suit. She tried not to make the silence sound righteous.
“Do you think you could come back at four p.m.? I’d like to make some calls.”
“Yes. I think I could.”
When Evelyne went back into Dean Michelson’s office late that afternoon, he greeted her with the news. “I’m sorry, but I can’t offer you admission into the graduate program for this fall.”
She let loose a whispered stream of joual invective so vile that not even her three days of sleep deprivation excused it.
Dean Michelson regarded her from behind his desk in the U of aquariums. “I won’t ask for a translation. But I will offer you admission for the following fall, providing you agree to serve for five and a half months on a new research dive boat we’re sending out to the Coral Triangle.”
She blinked. Then blinked again. Her eyes would not stop shuttering, like the eyes of a mudskipper transiting from water to land.
“Not much lead time. I’m sorry. The team sails in a month. We’re desperate for experienced divers. There aren’t that many of you, yet. One of our best just backed out, and another slipped and fell on a wet deck and gave himself two compound fractures.”
Evelyne Beaulieu sat in her supplicant’s chair, slack as a bluefin tuna skewered with a speargun. At last she let belief take hold, and her eyes welled up. Dean Michelson sat gripping the arms of his office chair, wondering if he needed to rescind the invitation. But she rallied and thanked him, trying not to be too pathetically grateful.
“It would be . . . perfect. It will be a dream.”
“It will be neither, I promise you. Some of my colleagues think it’s foolish to offer you this spot. But you seem like you can handle other people’s opinions.”
He held her gaze. He did not look confident. She tried to stare back, willing him to see that she was, in fact, a force of nature equal to this occasion.
“Before we announce this to the public, you’re going to need training in how to handle the press.”
Her sniffling stopped, like a needle ripped from a record player. “I’ll talk to the press?”
“Thirty-seven young male scientists and one redheaded twenty-two-year-old Canadienne, trapped at sea together for half a year? Nothing that the newspapers might be interested in.”
The year was 1957. Pepsi was offering to help the modern housewife with the hard work of staying slim. Alcoa announced a bottle cap that even a woman could open—without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or even a husband!
“Oh,” Evelyne Beaulieu said, and bowed her head. “Yes. Of course. I see.”
EVIE AND LIMPET TOOK egg-salad sandwiches down to La Jolla Cove. A trio of sea lions had come up onto the rocks, and the air was a bouquet of sagebrush, beach aster, and gull guano. The water was the coldest bit of mix anywhere along the whole San Diego coast, but clear enough to see bright orange patches of Garibaldis just offshore. A little farther out, the great upwelling of deepwater nutrients into the photic zone fed one of the greatest nurseries of life on the planet.
Evie pretended she wasn’t euphoric. Bart Mannis pretended he wasn’t morose.
“Will you take it?”
She punched him in the shoulder. “What do you think? Are you insane?”
“No, you should. Obviously. I would, if I were you. But then, if I were you you, not me you, I’d have to face the firestorm.”
“Who cares about the firestorm? The American newspapers are not going to follow an ocean research vessel all the way to East Timor.”
“So . . . what do we do now?”
Her long, narrow frame froze at that syllable, we. She supposed he meant the pact they’d made while on the cross-country drive, to see each other next year. He couldn’t possibly hold her to that. She couldn’t imagine why he would want to.
“What do you mean?”
He studied the sea lions on the rocks below. Mating season was over. No territory needed defending. And yet, agitation still ruled them all. One large cow tipped forward and slid into the ocean, turning from a terrestrial shambling cripple into an aquatic prima ballerina.
“E.B. Don’t you have to go back to North Carolina? What about all your stuff? How will you get back out here in just three and a half weeks? Fly?”
She heard everything that was decent in Limpet struggle not to say out loud what he had every right to say. She had used him. Used his car. Taken advantage of his good nature and the fact that he was in love with her. And now that he could do nothing more for her, she was casting him aside.
Her hands closed around the small change in her jacket pocket. She looked down at the rocks.
“I have an idea. What do you say? Let’s get married.”
THE FIRESTORM WAS WORSE than she expected. The journalists at the press conference were relentless.
“You really don’t think it’s anything special, that you’ll be the only woman on board?”
“Listen. I have a degree from Duke University. I trained for four years in every aspect of ocean science, with a major in marine biology. My father helped invent the aqualung. I have been diving for longer than all but a few people on Earth. I am qualified to collect samples, make identifications, keep good records of location, depth, salinity, current, and sunlight for all the finds, prepare the best specimens for museums. . . .”
“You won’t just be mopping the decks?”
“We’ll be gone for more than five months. I imagine we’ll all do plenty of mopping.”
“How does your husband feel about your going?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
She pointed out Limpet, standing in the back of the room behind the seated members of the press. A grin of wild pride took hold of her face. Life had become great fun. Maybe she did love him.
Another reporter took up the attack. “Some people say that women at sea bring bad luck.”
“Some women say that some journalists’ bait might not be worth taking!”
The scattered laughter changed into applause.
“But . . . almost forty men at sea for almost half a year. . . . You really don’t anticipate any problems?”
The men at Scripps had groomed her with an answer: science and professionalism. But the question had come up with such boring frequency that she finally broke.
“If you want to talk about sex life, ask me about groupers. Ask me about coral sex parties. Ask me about the fish that can change from one sex to the other, depending on what is needed. Insane!”
In the end, the worst headline the expedition had to face was:
LONG TALL EVIE SETS TO SEA
THIRTY-SEVEN MEN IN TOW
FORESEES NO DIFFICULTIES
They sailed, the thirty-eight of them, into the wildest place on Earth. For half a year, from the Philippines to Malaysia to New Guinea, the Research Vessel Ione crisscrossed five million square kilometers of ocean, skirting the world’s largest mangrove forest and hanging suspended above a third of the world’s fishes and three-quarters of the world’s reef-building shallow corals.
The Ione was just over two hundred feet long and crammed with wet and dry lab space alongside the cramped quarters. So many people confined to so small a floating hamlet for so long were sure to have problems. But these three dozen capable men—and one competent woman—were on the voyage of their lives, out on the open ocean, skirting the most fantastic coasts, making daily discoveries, engaged in activity as meaningful as any of them could need. Keeping the ship in shape and doing the daily science left little time and energy for drama.
There had been romance and sex and love on research voyages since before the Phoenicians. The enlistment of a woman added little to the mix. If anything, Evie’s presence on the Ione kept the rest of the crew on better behavior than they might have shown otherwise. Plenty of the men fell for her and wanted her, and maybe a couple blurted poetry at her or brazened out a cheeky proposition or two, in rare private moments. Evelyne handled these as she saw fit, and there were no lasting consequences.
But mostly the scientists onboard the Ione treated her as one of the gang. They laughed and ate and drank with her, split her shifts and worked her into all rotations, gave her shit, patronized her, were fiercely protective in their awkward male ways, and spent long days side by side, diving, collecting, and analyzing finds, often forgetting her sex for hours at a time.
For Evelyne, shipboard life sometimes resembled Duke field trips. She’d had years of experience remaining docile in the face of mannish explanations, suffering male banter with a smile, doing twice the work for half the credit. She had no trouble playing by the rules until the rule-makers weren’t looking.
The RV Ione had been built as a private yacht before the Navy bought it to use as a patrol boat in the war. After decommissioning, the ship was refitted for ocean study. The initial plan was for an old-school oceanographic vessel outfitted for blue-water science conducted with salinometers, chemical testers, gauges, cables, dredges, drift and Nansen bottles, Secchi discs, samplers, nets, and water-column profilers—the kind of science where the scientists only got wet in high seas and wild weather. But, overhauled for the long voyage, the Ione became one of the first boats kitted out for the brave new world of scuba, where at last humans could thrive for a while in the world they were studying.
Most of the seas the ship explored had never seen an aqualung. Each time Evie, still just twenty-two, slipped into one of these virgin spots she felt a pressure greater than the water. Hers was often the first good look any human had ever gotten. She had to get it right.
Wherever she dove in the Coral Triangle, fish of every shape and stripe and color schooled around her. Curious, they came from distant neighborhoods of the reef to investigate this novelty that had come to visit. It took no imagination for Evelyne to understand: these beings were doing their own research.
At times she treaded in place, swarmed by the wildest assortment of Dr. Seuss creations—indigo, orange, silver, every color in the spectrum from piebald nudibranchs to bright, bone-white snails sporting forests of spines. The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs. She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see. At night, with underwater lights, when the coral polyps came out to feed, the reef boiled over with surreal purpose, a billion different psychedelic missions, all dependent on each other.
On a dive in the Raja Ampat archipelago, off the islands of the Four Kings, she forgot entirely that she was doing science. She felt like a babe in Toyland, set loose in the greatest playground any child had ever seen. She played hide-and-seek with octopuses and tag with pygmy seahorses. She reeled from the surreal stripes of colonial anemones. Her fingers teased the spreading nets of gorgonians. She did headstands to peer into the cracks and ledges at the base of corals, the hideouts of action-painted mandarin fish and elegant green eels.
The prurient journalists were proved right. That voyage did descend into one spectacular orgy, and half the crew enjoyed it together under the water’s surface. On the one night of the year when the moon’s cycle and the temperature of the water both declared their undecodable now, the whole reef exploded in a heave of joyous sex. All the colonies in every direction for as far as Evie could see shot their trillions of sperm and egg into the sea at once, and a handful of humans with dim lights watched the sea turn into a swirling blizzard of yellow, orange, red, and white. As the flecks eddied all around her, something in Evie whispered, I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end.
SHE WROTE TO LIMPET—Bart, her husband—and posted the letters from scattered ports of call:
It’s almost stupid to count species. The cnidarians alone are probably a thousand kinds, and so many that none of us have ever seen. How many species still to discover? As many as you want. I could spend the rest of my life naming things after you and me!
He could not write her back, there being no way to reach the wandering boat, and his questions about moving and garage sales and storage and house rental options and deferred education and emergency stopgap employment and their entire improvised future went unanswered.
No one, of course, ever discovered a new species. But when Evelyne did commit to documenting her own large, unknown creature, it was an unearthly amphipod that she named after her father, that tinkerer with the soft laugh, an unearthly man who pitched her into this unearthly place and who left the Earth in the fourth month of her first expedition: Ingolfiella emilea.
FIVE MONTHS ON, she returned to land. She and Limpet fell into each other’s arms in a cheap hotel two blocks from Harbor Drive in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego. It was only the tenth time they’d slept together. The bed pitched and rolled beneath them, for him on account of his long-deferred passion and for her because her seagoing brain did not yet believe in solid land. It took two full nights and two slow days of laughter, play, and room service before Bart Mannis realized that the sources of their respective excitement were not fully aligned.
Life back on land left Evie in a low-grade depression. The months of terrible food, cramped quarters, pitching decks, sleepless nights, and a ship’s head from hell were over, taking adventure and camaraderie with them. But news had cut through her every despair.
