Dead End

Ten

Rebecca insisted it was her decision how they spent the weekend, although it was limited to Sunday. She arrived early at Washington Circle and told Parnell to dress in jeans and a work shirt. She refused coffee, which she’d already delayed herself by making in Bethesda. As usual she refused to start the engine until he fastened his seat belt.

‘Now I’m strapped in, tell me where we’re going.’

‘Out into the great big country that you’ve never seen,’ said Rebecca.

‘What if I don’t like it?’

‘Too bad. You’re being kidnapped.’

She drove him, in fact, to Chesapeake Bay to eat the in-season, bite-sized soft-shelled crabs with a pitcher of beer. Despite the jeans and work shirt, Parnell got glued and dirty from the shakers of glutinous salt and herb flavourings and couldn’t properly clean himself up, even in the washroom.

Rebecca said: ‘You think any clean-living, respectable girl would get into bed with someone looking like you do?’

‘No,’ said Parnell. ‘But the food would be worth the abstinence. And you’ve got grunge all around your face, too. I’ll try to develop a treatment for it.’

‘I’ve beaten you!’ Rebecca declared, triumphantly.

‘I’m getting accustomed to it,’ acknowledged Parnell, in weak protest. ‘Beaten me to what, exactly?’

‘The guided tour. You know your way from Washington DC to McLean, North Virginia, and from Washington Circle to Georgetown, and that’s it. Until today. Congratulations! You pushed the covered wagon out beyond the stockade, and hostile Indians aren’t firing arrows.’

‘They didn’t three hundred years ago. Our settlers fired on them first.’

‘Book learning!’ she refused. ‘This is your first great step for mankind.’

Parnell scrubbed his face with a gritty, crumpled paper towel, but didn’t feel any improvement. ‘So, I’m not much fun, eh?’

‘Severely limited.’

‘Why’d you stay?’ He felt safe with the question because the conversation was light, unendangering, although embarrassingly he recognized that Rebecca was making a deserved complaint.

‘We crossed the boundary. Made the commitment we always held back from. Which we still seem to be holding back from.’

‘I could blame work. But I won’t.’

‘Good. You changed your mind?’

‘No. I wasn’t sure if you might have done.’ That wasn’t entirely true, he admitted to himself.

‘You could have asked.’

‘You keep nagging and I will blame work.’

‘You do that and I’ll know you’ve changed your mind.’

‘You ever think of studying law rather than science? You’d have made a great prosecuting attorney.’

‘That how it sounds to you, a prosecution?’

The lightness was going, as he’d feared it would. ‘No, that’s not how it sounds at all. I’m sorry and I’m wrong and I have put work before anything else, before you, and that’s badly wrong, too.’ It was at Rebecca’s urging that he’d imposed a permanent Sunday-off edict and a seven-at-night finish, despite which people still often remained later at their benches, Parnell the latest stayer of all.

Silence encompassed them in a restaurant that was no more than a bare, trestle-tabled shack with a pier that thrust out into the bay and in which they sat with hands and faces tightening with the glue of the flavouring salt. They laughed, unprompted but simultaneously, reached out sticky fingers and Parnell said: ‘How the hell did that build up!’

Rebecca said: ‘I planned it. Angry at me?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got to go on now. I don’t have any words.’

Parnell wasn’t sure he had, either. ‘Are we talking marriage…?’

‘No!’ The quickness – and vehemence – of the rejection visibly startled him and Rebecca said: ‘This really isn’t the place to have this sort of conversation.’

Parnell wasn’t sure what sort of conversation they were having. ‘Your choice. You take it.’

Rebecca slid her hand away from his, holding both of hers tightly before her, staring down at them as if they held some message. ‘Yes. It is my choice.’

Aware of her tension, he said: ‘I don’t want to go on with this, not here, not now. Not if you don’t want to.’

She said: ‘This was supposed to be a day out! How the fuck did it get to this?’

‘Let’s stop,’ he said.

‘No!’ Rebecca refused again, still vehement, but just as abruptly stopped.

Parnell waited.

‘You want to go on: us, I mean?’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t decide that yet.’

Parnell saw that Rebecca’s knuckles were whitening, so hard was she gripping one hand against the other, and there were shudders rippling through her. ‘Don’t, darling. Whatever it is, don’t.’

Rebecca’s words came out in spurts. ‘I have to. Everything has to be clear, out in the open. I had a relationship. Two years ago. Got pregnant. He wasn’t sure, so I had a termination. That’s why I have to be sure now. I’ve done all the pushing and I wish I hadn’t now and today is a total fucking mess and I’m sorry I ever started it and I…’

‘… wish you’d shut up,’ interrupted Parnell.

Rebecca did.

He stretched across the table and took her clenched hands once more, prising them open, stroking them. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

‘I wanted you to know.’

‘Now I do.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’ Now he was talking child-talk.

‘Say something! Anything!’

‘I’ve been selfish about us. I’m sorry. There’s life beyond – far beyond – Dubette. I’m angry at myself for getting ensnared in their system.’

‘It’s insidious.’

‘I was the guy determined not to get caught up in the spider’s web, remember?’

‘So you forgot for a moment.’

‘Do I get out of the stockade every weekend?’

‘You haven’t said anything about…?’ she started but trailed off, unable to finish.

‘I’m sorry to say it if you loved him, but I think he was an idiot. But I’m glad because I met you.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

Parnell did his best to fill the silences on the drive back to Washington, falling back upon exaggerated anecdotes from Cambridge and England, intentionally avoiding any references to Dubette but recognizing as he did so how blinkered he had become in his total absorption with work. They finally washed away the salt residue at his apartment and decided they didn’t want to eat again. Parnell suggested a movie but Rebecca said she didn’t feel like it, and when Parnell asked if she was staying, looked down at her stained shirt and said she hadn’t brought a change of clothes for the morning.

‘As it seems to have been a day for decisions, perhaps another one should be where we’re going to live,’ he declared.

She remained looking at him unspeaking for what seemed a long time. Then, almost in a whisper, she said: ‘You asking me to move in?’

Parnell supposed he was, although he hadn’t intended the words to come out quite as they had. ‘They say you don’t properly get to know a person until you live with them.’

‘Bethesda’s bigger than here. And there’s the garden. The commute’s about the same.’

Parnell wasn’t sure he wanted to move away from the convenience of the city. ‘Why don’t we try both places, see which we prefer?’

‘Starting when?’

‘Whenever.’

‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Here first? Maybe Bethesda at the weekends, to keep the place lived in.’

‘Fine.’

‘Help me move my stuff in tomorrow, right after work? With two cars we could probably manage it in one trip.’

He really had made a commitment, Parnell realized. ‘Let’s do that.’

Rebecca left Washington Circle promising to start packing that night, and Parnell was glad to be alone, wanting to think, although he didn’t exactly know about what. At last he told himself to stop being stupid, because he knew exactly what it was. It was being permanently with, living with, sharing with, Rebecca. Which came down, quite simply and logically, to loving her. So, did he? He didn’t know. Or wasn’t sure. That was better. He wasn’t sure. He enjoyed being with her and wasn’t attracted to anyone else, and he actually liked the idea of their living together. But did that amount to being in love: was it sufficient for them to be together? It was a commitment. But it wasn’t irrevocable. In fact, what they were doing was probably the best thing, the sensible thing. It would give them both the time and the opportunity properly to decide if there was enough between them to make it permanent. To marry. Perhaps he should change the way he was thinking, selfishly rather than objectively. What about how Rebecca felt? Or would feel? Among a lot of other things today, there had been some long overdue self-awareness.

If he hadn’t already become a work-obsessed bore, he was certainly running the risk of doing so. Rebecca might easily tire of him. He had adjustments to make, Parnell accepted: positive changes, even. Starting the following day by leaving McLean at a sensible time to help Rebecca ferry her stuff into the apartment. Not just a sensible time, he determined – early, so that after she’d moved in they could go to Giorgio’s restaurant, to celebrate.

With everything firmly planned in his mind – assuring himself it wasn’t work-obsession to compensate for leaving early – Parnell got to work before seven the following morning and had been at his bench for four hours when the secretary at Rebecca’s section came hesitantly into the pharmacogenomics department.

‘Burt Showcross says can you come,’ the girl said.