A Woman Named Drown

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Six months ago a friend of mine and I left doctoral programs in chemistry under certain different circumstances. Tom, a true scientist, got a letter at Oak Ridge, where he was finishing up his degree, informing him he had a job for the taking in Alabama-a high-level, nuclear police-chaperon affair, to judge from what he gleefully told me. I, scientist by default, by process of elimination, got a letter from my girlfriend in Norway letting me know in the subtlest, happiest way imaginable that I would not be joining her there as we had planned upon completion of my degree. When you are told that your fiancée, a promising post-doc to an internationally famous crystallographer expatriated from Brooklyn, finds that sagacious mentor "a cute little guy (only five three!)" who "eats eggs on his hamburgers!" — you can read all the handwriting on the wall you ever need to read. I called her up, twice (once, as the rhyme puts it, for the money-$300; and once for the show-a considerable theater of her releasing, in a two-hour transatlantic tear burst, from the gunny sack of our entire six years off-and-on together, every crime of impassion I committed, and these transgressions I admit were endless, ranging from birthdays forgotten to old lovers not forgotten), and got a picture, as you can only on a telephone costing you a month's stipend, of her veritable sainthood for having put up for so long with the entire sham she convinced me I was, and was certain, as I reluctantly hung up the second time, that I had lost the finest, purest girl ever there would be for me. The starch in my doctorate will, which had not been much to begin with, vanished.

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