That joy, however, soon shaded into something else, and although I’m ashamed to admit it, that something else is of course jealousy. Every Saturday for the past two-odd months, Nathaniel has taken the subway down to Washington Square, where Aubrey has an actual house on the park, and I stay home with the baby （the implicit message is that it’s my turn to stay home with him after two years of spending every weekend at the lab while Nathaniel watched him）。 And when Nathaniel returns in the late afternoon, he’s aglow. He picks up the baby, swings him around, and starts making dinner, and as he cooks, he tells me about Aubrey and his husband, Norris. How incredibly deep and rich Aubrey’s knowledge of 18th-and 19th-century Oceania is. How gorgeous Aubrey’s house is. How Aubrey made his money as a manager of a fund of funds. How Aubrey and Norris met. How and where Aubrey and Norris like to vacation. How Aubrey and Norris have invited us “out east” to Frog’s Pond Way, their “estate” in Water Mill. What Norris said about X book or Y play. What Aubrey thinks about the government. The brilliant idea Aubrey and Norris had about the refugee camps. What we must see/do/visit/eat/try, according to Aubrey and Norris.
To all of this, I say, “Wow,” or “Wow, babe, that’s great.” I really try to sound sincere, but frankly, it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t, because Nathaniel is barely listening to me. My life outside the lab has always consisted of two fixed poles: him and the baby. But now his life is （not in order of importance） me, the baby, and Aubrey and Norris. Every Saturday he springs out of bed, gets dressed for the gym （he’s been going more since meeting Aubrey and Norris）， works out, comes home to shower and feed the baby, kisses us both, and leaves for his day downtown. I want to be clear that it’s not that I think he’s in love with them, or that he’s fucking them—you know neither of us is weird about that. It’s that in his fascination with them, I hear a repudiation of me. Not us, not me and the baby, but me.
I had always thought that Nathaniel was content with our life. He’s never been someone who’s been seduced by money or ease or glamour. But after an evening spent listening to detailed descriptions of Aubrey and Norris’s beautiful house, and their beautiful things, I lie awake staring at our low ceilings, at our flapping slatted plastic blinds, at the track light with its blackened bulb that I’ve been promising Nathaniel I’ll change for the past six months, and wondering whether my accomplishments, and my position, have really given him what he wants and deserves. He has always been happy for me, and proud of me, but have I helped make a good life for him? Would he not leave me for another?
And so, last night. When the dinner invitation came, as I knew it would, I at first had the baby for an excuse. He’s been suffering from minor respiratory issues all fall: The days are hot and then cool and then hot again, and the crocuses, which last year bloomed in October, started shooting in September, followed by the plum trees a month later, so he’s been coughing and sneezing for weeks. But then he began to get better, and less physically miserable, plus Nathaniel found a babysitter he likes, and I was out of arguments. So last night we got in a taxi and went downtown to Aubrey and Norris’s.
I hadn’t been entirely sure who I had imagined Aubrey and Norris to be, other than people I needed to be suspicious of and whom I was already disinclined to like. Oh, and white—I had expected them to be white. But they weren’t. The door was opened by a very handsome blond man in his early fifties wearing a suit, and I blurted out, “You must be Aubrey,” only to hear Nathaniel’s hiss of embarrassed laughter beside me. The man smiled. “If only I could be so lucky!” he said. “No, I’m Adams, the butler. But come in: They’re waiting for you upstairs in the drawing room.”
Up a gleaming dark staircase we went, me seething at Nathaniel, who had been embarrassed by me, of me, and as Adams led us through a pair of half-open double doors made of that same satiny wood, the two men inside stood.
I knew from Nathaniel that Aubrey was sixty-five and Norris a few years younger, though they both had that kind of ageless, shiny face that the very rich have. Only their gums gave them away: Aubrey’s were a dark purple, and Norris’s were the gray-pink of a much-used eraser. But the other surprise was their skin: Aubrey was Black, and Norris was Asian…but also something else. He looked, in fact, a little like my grandfather, and before I could stop myself, I was once again blurting: “Are you from Hawai‘i?” Again, there was Nathaniel’s uncomfortable titter, joined this time by Norris’s and Aubrey’s laughter. “Nathaniel asked me that same question when we met,” Norris said, unoffended. “But no, I’m afraid not. I hate to be such a disappointment, but I’m just a dark Asian.”
“Not just,” Aubrey said.
“Well, part Indian,” Norris said. “But that’s Asian, Aub.” And then to me: “Indian and English on my father’s side; my mother was Chinese.”
“So was mine,” I said, stupidly. “Chinese Hawaiian.”
He smiled. “I know,” he said. “Nathaniel said.”
“Why don’t you sit?” Aubrey said.
We did, obediently. Adams returned with drinks, and we talked about the baby for a while, until Adams reappeared and said dinner was ready to be served, at which point we all stood again and went to the dining room, where there was a small round table covered with what I at first, heart-stoppingly, mistook for a piece of kapa cloth. I looked up to see Aubrey smiling at me. “It’s a contemporary weaving, inspired by the real thing,” he said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I swallowed, mumbled something vague.
We sat. Dinner—a “seasonal celebration” of sausage-and-pumpkin soup served from a massive, hollowed-out white squash; veal chops with buttery green beans; a tomato galette—was served. We ate. At some point, Norris and Nathaniel started talking, and I was left with Aubrey, who was sitting next to me. I had to speak. “So,” I began, and then I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Or, rather, I could think of too many, but none of them seemed appropriate. I had, for example, been planning to try to pick a fight with Aubrey by subtly suggesting he was a cultural appropriator, but given the fact that he hadn’t, as I feared, made me take a tour of his collection, and by the fact of his Blackness （later, Nathaniel and I would have an argument about whether Black people could indeed be cultural appropriators）， that idea no longer seemed quite as exciting or provocative as it might have been.
I was quiet for so long that Aubrey finally laughed. “Why don’t I start,” he said, and although he was kind, I could feel myself flushing regardless. “Nathaniel’s told us a little about what you do.”
“I tried to, anyway,” Nathaniel suddenly interjected from across the table, before turning back to Norris.
“He tried, and I tried to understand,” Aubrey said. “But I’d be honored to hear it from the source, as it were.”
So I gave him my short speech about infectious diseases and how I spent my days trying to anticipate the newest ones, playing up the statistics that civilians love hearing, because civilians love to panic: How the 1918 flu killed fifty million people, which led to additional, but less disastrous, pandemics in 1957, 1968, 2009, and 2022. How, since the 1970s, we’ve been living in an era of multiple pandemics, with a new one announcing itself at the rate of every five years. How viruses are never truly eliminated, only controlled. How decades of excessive and reckless prescribing of antibiotics had given rise to a new Family of microbes, one more powerful and durable than any in human history. How habitat destruction and the growth of megacities has led to our living in closer proximity to animals than ever before, and therefore to a flourishing of zoonotic diseases. How we’re absolutely due for another catastrophic pandemic, one that this time will have the potential to eliminate up to a quarter of the global population, putting it on par with the Black Death of more than seven hundred years ago, and how everything in the past century, from the outbreak of 2030 through last year’s episode in Botswana, has been a series of tests that we’ve ultimately failed, because true victory would be treating not each outbreak individually but developing a comprehensive global plan, and because of that, we’re inevitably doomed.