I started working on this right after the brilliance of "Fight," and kept returning to it, so there are spoilers here and there from later in season two. I've never read Masters of Sex the biography, so the details about Virginia's life are imagined or gleaned from the show. Inspiration from Jeannine Hall Gailey (below), Margaret Atwood (always), and the music of Banks.

Peel back my skin:
reveal hard fibers, bite marks,

scars from wind and rain.
Life is pain—I won't tell you

any different. Just that sometimes,
avoiding what you fear

isn't the answer. See? All these years
my branches sang with birds

and my leaves drank sunlight—
I haven't missed much.

My heartwood hardens slowly
over time—first, to the music, then, to the light.

—Jeannine Hall Gailey, "Daphne, Older"

i.

This was the place: Wind-tossed symphony of summer-green surrounding her, legs dangling in a free and weightless space. She used to climb this tree when no one was there to tell her to stop. On this day, the fears about the blight that shriveled too many crops to be a blessing in disguise kept her parents in the kitchen, her father pacing, her mother hunched over the books at the table, both running numbers, muttering back and forth, tense and determined. Up there, money wasn't anything compared to the scratchy grooves that ran over the bark, the veins that fanned across the leaves, the featherweight dance of ants along her arms. And she was faceless, not beautiful, not waiting for the better life that awaited her through marriage and property; her mother's hopes evaporated like water, reshaped into pillows of cloud she could rest her head on, and not worry over.

Years later, she visited the art museum in St. Louis, and came across Kandinsky's Winter Landscape. A tree shivered and dissolved, cold blue and purple, into a background of smoke and snow. Kandinsky painted color and shape that expressed a kind of wordless, soundless music, the reverberations of the aching universe. She stood riveted in that frigid world.

These impressions all return in the peaks and valleys of the charts they read, the spools of graph paper etched with heartbeats and nerves. How chilly this all could be, the clinical posturing and steel-coated laboratory. And yet there is this movement, this progress, these human renderings of passion and survival. Thin lines of ink that contain the melody of it all, calling with delicate insistence to be heard.

ii.

When they hold on after, she is in that place again, suspended high above the world, unfurling and forgetting. Any disturbance, any noise, could knock her loose. She allows these brief, precarious moments, when she embraces him without missing him, resenting him, believing he is already lost. She doesn't glimpse the end—always the same end, dressing, rearranging, leaving—but sinks into the rhythm they've created, ignited by an urgent need to understand its shapes and tensions. Perhaps their undoing is written into this illusion, but it's real, nothing but real, in the way his lips brush against her throat, his arm wraps across her stomach, her hand traces patterns along his skin there, light as an ant scurrying by.

Earlier, he asked her, in an arch tone that belied the wonder in his eyes, about ambition—what was she seeking, and how did she ever hope to find it in this life filled with dread and tumult? She raised an eyebrow, said, "Darling, couldn't I ask you the very same?" She hears his question again, and, yes, there had been a note of desperation, his shaded desire to know her. He tries to hide this need of his, but it doesn't repel her. He's lit his past for her, and she holds it safe again in the dark, without hesitation. She only wants him closer. Soon the hotel room will dissolve away, the fog on separate roads home will set in thick between them, and she won't have the words.

Softly, then, she says, "When I was a girl, I thought: there had to be more."

He shifts up the bed. "More…"

She speaks up to the ceiling, but he's looking right at her. "More than what my parents had. Their reliance on nature's every whim, their constant worries about enough food, enough money, enough. Their daily routine, up at sunrise, off to bed early, with little time for—for laughter, or storytelling, in between. Of course, I know they loved us and were doing their best, and things improved for them as I got older, but I never forgot that feeling they seemed to have, of life as drudgery, a monotonous struggle to be endured. And then I… well. I grew up, and I suppose, like most adolescents, I thought I would turn away from everything that came before." She tilts her head to the side, meets his gaze. He tugs her a little closer, and she shuts her eyes.

"I thought I was quite the original. My mother had plans for me, but I couldn't make her ambitions my own. I—" She stops short. This hurts, the telling, pulling her from the peace of minutes before, dragging her toward him and the truth of who they are. Her fingers have somehow made their way to his temple.

"Go ahead." He's intent, and he presses gently against her ribcage.

She turns around, glances at the clock. "Bill, it's late."

He surprises her. "Please stay," he says. "Just a moment longer."

iii.

She sang to herself in the sky, invented lyrics about the cows' sad eyes, the long grass that tickled like butterflies' wings, and the red berries patterned in bunches on her mother's dress. She never wrote down her verses, and now her childhood words for these recollections have an unknown shape. Youth, she thinks, has its own language, all impulse and instinct, no doubts and no revisions.

In seventh grade, she earned the lead in the student recital. It was nothing like the pageants, no painted face or hairspray fog. Her mother took only mild interest, didn't scold or cheer, beam or scrunch up her face in disappointment. She performed in front of the teachers and other parents in the audience without nerves. No pounding heart, sweaty palms, or distracting jitters. Without the twirls and scorecards, she still had an innocent's undaunted confidence and energy. And, after rehearsal, it felt simple, familiar: the fresh paint smell of the auditorium, the cold metallic of the microphone, the faint spotlight shining from the rafters. She sang, loud and clear, for herself.

She grew up. Then there was the nightclub, where she sang for hazy faces, red and rapturous with drink. Carousing folks surrounded her, greedy for a good time, but it was tenuous, and wouldn't stick. The bartenders packed up for the night, the conversations trailed away, and she was left with her marriage, built around that show of easy entertainment, nights to be consumed, enjoyed, and forgotten. Her children, with their new, searching faces, looked to her to make sense of it all. She fought with him, and this time she left before she even felt the puncture deflate the bubble they'd created, knowing its frailty from the start. She was not yet where she needed to be. In her voice, there was no defeat.

iv.

As it turns out, though, she isn't so different from her parents. Does she not crave the insecurity, the thrill of existing on the precipice of some kind of ruin? She thrives when required to pool her energies to scrape by, to push though one barrier or another. She couldn't stand the quiet of the farm, but in the bustle of the hospital, under the fluorescent lights, she is energized and calmed. Tapping across the linoleum floor, rushing to the phone, sifting through patient files, her mind is active, but she doesn't have a bit of time to think about the heaviness pressed against her chest.

Home at night, she sits up in the dim lamplight with a pad and pencil, and runs the numbers, tapping the eraser against the page, biting nervous marks into the sides of the wood. Tessa's nearly worn through the soles of her saddle shoes, needs a new pair. The man sleeping beside her barely stirs, murmurs half-words, donkeys or dumplings. At times, it's a comfort, this nonsense lullaby, and it draws her back to sleep. But many mornings, she rises to sit at the kitchen table, brew coffee, read yesterday's paper back-to-front. Companionship is one thing, and she chooses it over solitude, but it's not all.

Love sounds like a religion to her these days, something people believe in, glorify and worship. There are deities of love, St. Valentine and Rock Hudson and Elvis Presley. These icons, with their sighs, hearts, and kisses, fail to move her. They resemble nothing of her experience, the uncertainty even in bliss, and the scarring scent of honeysuckle left behind.

The purest form of love she knows exists between pouring rain and dry earth, an effortless and long-awaited saturation. She recalls the rich mineral smell well. It came back to her, that night in her house, when he sank against her, enfolded her in his arms, kissed his way down her stomach. He stared up at her like she was his only source of nourishment, and she soaked into him, found a place to land in his parched, fractured ground. Their experiment was never meant to uncover this complication, this immeasurable variable, which no amount of scientific precision can control. But now, now they cling to their discovery like it's all they were ever searching to learn.

On the farm, the heavy storms flooded plains, drowned flowerbeds, and ruined harvests. Afterwards, when the dark clouds receded, the drenched world blinked awake, startled at the transformation.

v.

She sat in a waiting room earlier. Her boss, her friend, is dying a slow and silent death. Science might afford delays, but, this time, there's no faint hope the train will return. All around her in their plastic chairs, people were anxious, eyes glimmering bright with the desire to live—not to have perfect, blameless lives, but to live, to shatter and rebuild and decide again, for themselves, what to do next.

She stays, just a moment longer.

Their talk fades, words whispered to shade and protect the space between the sounds, to keep each other afloat. Soon, she thinks, she will be discovered, and that voice will call from below. This branch can only carry so much weight. She will climb back down to the dry earth.