And then, thirteen hours later, Nathaniel and I got married. I’ll spare you （most of） the details, but will say that I was, again, unexpectedly moved, and that Nathaniel cried （obviously）， and that I cried as well. We had it on John and Matthew’s back lawn, and Matthew had for unknown reasons built a chuppah-like structure from bamboo. After we’d said our vows, Nathaniel had the idea of jumping over the fence and running into the ocean, and so that’s what we did.
So that was it, and now we’re back to business as usual—the house is still in a terrific state of disarray, and the movers are coming in less than two weeks, and I haven’t even begun sorting through the lab and I have to finish our review of my final paper of my life as a postdoc: The honeymoon （such as it’ll be, with the baby in tow） will have to wait. By the way, he was very happy with your presents, and thank you for sending them—they were ingenious, and the perfect way to reassure him that, although it might’ve been the only day in his short life that wasn’t meant to be all about him, it actually really was. （Before the wedding, he had a tantrum, and when Nathaniel and I, fluttering about him like distressed mother crows, begged him to calm down, he shouted: “And stop calling me ‘the baby’！ I’m almost four!” Well, we started laughing, and that made him even angrier.）
Now off to oversee his thank-you email to his uncle P.
Love, Me
P.S. I almost forgot: the Mayfair incident. Horrific. They keep playing clips of it on the news, again and again. Wasn’t that café just down the street from that bar we went to a few years ago? I imagine it’s keeping you very busy. Not that that’s the worst part of it, of course. But still.
Dear Petey, September 17, 2043
We made it. Phew. Nathaniel in tears, the baby too, and I’m not far behind. More soon. Love, Me
My dear Peter, October 1, 2043
Sorry I’ve been such a bad correspondent: Every day for the past three-odd weeks I’ve thought, I must write Petey a long message of all the things that have happened today, and every night, all I manage to do is our standard How are you, miss you, have you read such-and-such article. So, my apologies.
This email is in two parts: the professional and the personal. One will be slightly more interesting than the other. Guess which.
We are now settled into Florence House East, which is an old high-rise just west of the FDR. It’s almost eighty years old, but, like a lot of buildings constructed in the mid-sixties, feels both newer and older, misplaced in time and also not quite of it. Many of the postdocs and almost all of the principal investigators （a.k.a. the lab chiefs） live on campus in one of these units. Apparently, our arrival has caused some controversy because our unit is （1） on a high floor （twentieth）; （2） a corner apartment; （3） faces southeast （best light, etc.）; and （4） has three real bedrooms （as opposed to most of the other three-bedroom units, which are conversions of large two-bedroom units, which means the third bedroom doesn’t have a window）。 According to one of our neighbors, there was supposed to be a lottery based on family size, tenure, and—as with everything here—volume of publication, but instead the place was assigned to us, which gives everyone yet another reason to preemptively hate me. Oh well. Story of my life.
The apartment is large and well-situated （I’d be bitter, too）， with views of the old smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island that they’re now preparing to use as one of the new refugee camps. If the skies are clear, you can see all the way up the spine of the island, and when it’s sunny, the river, which is normally brown and creamy, instead glitters and appears almost pretty. Yesterday we saw a tiny police boat chugging north, which, I was later told by the same neighbor, is a frequent occurrence: Apparently, people kill themselves by jumping off the bridge and float downstream, and the police have to drag them out. I like it when it’s overcast and the sky turns metallic—yesterday it stormed, and we watched the lightning flicker over the water, and the baby jumped up and down and cheered.
Speaking of the baby, he’s already enrolled in the on-campus school （subsidized, though still not cheap）， which he can attend through eighth grade, after which—barring disaster, expulsion, or failure—he’ll go directly into Hunter for high school （free!）。 The school is open to children whose parents are either professors or postdocs at RU or are fellows or post-fellows at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is one block west and one block south, which means the student body showcases a vast range of racial diversity, from Indian to Japanese, and all the ethnicities in between. There’s a Soviet-aesthetic cement bridge that connects the apartment building to the campus’s old hospital-wing building, and from there you can descend to a series of tunnels that connect the entire campus, which people seem to prefer to, you know, the outdoors, and emerge in the basement of the Child and Family Center. So far, there seems to be little evidence of actual education—as far as I can tell, they spend most of their days going to the zoo and being read to—but Nathaniel claims this is what school is these days, and I defer to him on these subjects. Anyway, the baby seems happy, and I don’t know what else I can reasonably expect from a four-year-old.
I only wish I could say the same for Nathaniel, who’s pretty clearly miserable but also pretty clearly determined not to say anything, which I love him for but which also makes me a little heartsick. There was never any doubt that I’d take this job, but we both knew that there was unlikely to be a curatorial post in New York for an expert in 19th-century Hawaiian textiles and textile art, and this unfortunately has proven to be true. I think I told you that he’d been in touch with a friend from grad school who’s a researcher in the Oceania department at the Met and thought there might be a way to get him in there, even as a part-timer, but it seems it’s not to be, and that was really his best lead. We’d been talking, on and off, for the past year about what else he might do and how he might retrain, but neither of us allowed ourselves to engage as deeply in those conversations as we ought to have: on his part, I think, out of fear, and on mine, because I knew that any discussion would inevitably end up spotlighting how selfish this decision was, how our moving here deprives him of a livelihood and a professional identity. So, every morning, I leave early for the lab, and he drops off the baby and spends the rest of his day trying to decorate the apartment, which I know depresses him: the low ceilings, the hollow doors, the mauve bathroom tiles.
The worst thing is how his unhappiness makes me self-conscious about how much I discuss the lab with him, because I don’t want to remind him of what I have and he doesn’t. For the first time, we’re keeping secrets from each other, and they’re more difficult because they’re so quotidian, the stuff we’d discuss when we were doing the dishes after the baby had been put to bed, or in the morning as Nathaniel made the baby his lunch. And there are so many of them! For example: I made my first hire the day after we arrived, a lab tech who’d been at Harvard and moved here because her husband’s a jazz musician and thought there’d be better opportunities in New York; she’s probably in her early forties and worked in mouse immunology for ten years. This week I hired my second postdoc, a very smart guy from Stanford named Wesley. So I have funding for three more postdocs and four to five grad students, who cycle in and out of labs on twelve-week rotations. Grad students normally wait until a lab’s up and running until they decide whether they want to join or not—it’s a little like rushing a fraternity, I’m sorry to say—but I’m told that, given my “reputation,” I may be able to get some earlier. Promise I’m not trying to brag here. Just repeating what I’ve been told.