Intuition by Allegra Goodman Page B

infiltrated and subverted each cancer cell.
    There were only seven people in the room, but, as Aidan said later, Cliff might have been onstage in front of thousands; he had such presence. Cliff spoke with total mastery. This came of his long hours and late nights. This came of his immersion in the data. Prithwish did not doodle. Aidan did not sprawl across two chairs. Cliff was riveting.
    In the silence afterward, Prithwish and Robin stole glances at Sandy and Marion, who sat together enthroned in their chrome chairs. Shrewdly, Sandy examined Marion. The very color of her eyes seemed warmer, a lighter shade of brown. Her features softened, her knitting lay forgotten in her lap. Her lips, usually tight and drawn in concentration, now parted with delight. She turned to him, and for a moment she was so beautiful that Sandy caught his breath. Strangely, he felt as though he were remembering Marion from another time, although he had never known her when she'd been truly young. He felt almost disoriented by the loveliness of the moment.
Now,
she was telling him wordlessly. Now we must collaborate. Now we need to work with Hughes at Stanford, and contact Agarwal at Cornell. We've waited to announce initial results, but now is the time. And aren't you glad?
             
    Jacob was practicing when Marion came home that evening. He stood in the small back bedroom he used as his study and practice studio, and he was working at Bach's Partita in E minor, pouring out the notes and double-stops from his nimble, sweating hands. He had a way of tunneling into Bach that was both expressive and introverted. The theme and variations drew him down distant paths, and he had no sense of the red welt rising on his neck where the violin chafed under his jaw, or the wet patches on his ebony fingerboard. He had no thoughts of these, or bills to pay, or his large and mundane classes, the students with their yellow highlighters and confusion over problem sets.
    He did not notice Marion standing in the doorway until he paused a moment and turned the page. Even then, he didn't acknowledge her until he was done.
    “I think we'll get a paper out of these results,” she said.
    Jacob rocked back on his heels, holding his violin in the crook of his arm, the bow swinging slightly from his index finger. “‘I think we'll get a . . .'” He echoed her words as if they'd fallen far down inside him. Then, surprised: “Oh, really?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “They're that good?”
    “Better than what we had before.”
    “But you'll need to reproduce them.”
    “Of course.”
    He gazed at the music before him. Was it really time to publish? Was Marion entirely ready? Or was the timing her capitulation to Sandy? Silently he posed these questions, but all he said to Marion was “Are you hungry?”
    “Well, that depends.”
    “Aaron and I were thinking about heating up the pot roast.”
    “I could keep you company,” she said.
    He put his hand on her shoulder as he followed her into the hall. The apartment had a stillness about it, as if no wind dared enter. Marion's papers lay exactly where she'd left them, spread over the dining room table and living room sofa. The kitchen seemed empty and unfamiliar. The housekeeper, Philomena, had come and washed the dishes, and put the groceries and chessboard away. Without Jacob's violin, the only sound was the tap-tapping of Aaron typing in his room on his beloved Apple IIe.
    In the kitchen Jacob took the pot roast out of the refrigerator. “Why don't you call Aaron,” he told Marion.
    She felt as though she'd been away longer than a day, as if she'd been gone for weeks and journeyed to far countries. When Aaron came to the table, she thought he might have grown another inch.
    “What did you do at school?” she asked him.
    “We had a math test.”
    “And how was it?”
    He shrugged, surprised she'd ask such a banal question when so much was happening in the lab. He'd seen the change in his mother; she'd