A Perfect Life (2 page)

Tommie's was a tourist trap, but the tourists it trapped were far better dressed than I was. I slipped past the maître d', who kept watch from behind a podium that had a ship's steering wheel on the back and a bosomy figurehead of a woman nailed to the front, then ducked inside the ladies' room, hoping to make myself more presentable. I combed my hair with my fingers, the helmet having flattened it. I wasn't unattractive. But whenever I looked in a mirror, I saw my father's humped nose. I was his daughter, after all. Or so the family myth had it. I was plain, clever, and ambitious, while my younger sister, Laurel, was blessed with our mother's beauty and charm but doomed to die young.

I glanced in the mirror, then took a scallop of soap from a clamshell dish and used it to scrub the flecks of Flora's blood from beneath my eye.

My father raised a wineglass. Then he saw me come in. “Doll!” he said. “Jane!” as if I were the object of the toast he had intended to propose all along.

My admiration for my father always overwhelmed me, it seemed so out of proportion to what a short, unsophisticated man he was. He had never gone to college. His diction was coarse. But he had used his native shrewdness to amass a small fortune—from a single army-navy warehouse in our hometown of Mule's Neck, New York, he had built a chain of small department stores that stretched across several counties. Then, after my mother died, he had funneled every penny he had ever earned into establishing a foundation to find a cure for Valentine's. He had browbeaten scientists into joining his cause, although most of them would have preferred working on diseases whose symptoms were clear—a lump in the breast, too much fat in the heart. Diseases that could strike a senator's wife or a taxpayer's child instead of those few unfortunate souls who had been born to a family with terrible genes. (Even Merriwether Valentine, who had first identified the syndrome in the mid-1800s among his patients in rural Georgia, had mistaken its cause to be vice.)

As long as my mother was well, my father hoarded. Then he hacked down the dam he had built around his money and out it all poured. He established two trust funds—one for Laurel, and one for me. How could he die knowing that his daughters might be consigned to a state institution, tied to their chairs and reeking of piss? How could he live knowing that he hadn't done everything to find a cure for our illness? He was doing this for my sake. And for Laurel's sake. And his own.

He stubbed out his cigar and wrapped his arm around me. “You look good,” he said. “Too skinny, but good.”

I didn't bother to thank him, any more than I had thanked him for all those other inspections I had had to endure in high school.
Baby, can't you do something with those eyebrows? What's it called, tweeze them? You never heard of lipstick? You'd really be some dish if you'd only dress up.
Later, when my mother began her decline, he grew even angrier to see me unkempt, as if her beauty were a religion whose rituals I had profaned. After she died, I got by with the barest attention to appearance hygiene would allow. But by then, my father was inspecting me less for stray hairs than for reassurance that I didn't tremble or twitch, didn't fall into trances or curse without cause. He reluctantly approved anything that would allow me to spend more time in the lab. If I found a cure for Valentine's, I could get married and stay at home, primping and tweezing for the rest of my life.

I apologized for being late but told him that I'd had an experiment I needed to finish. He shrugged—this excused me, as I had been hoping it would. “Come on,” he said. “Let me introduce you.” He led me around the table. My father was a man who only felt complete leading a woman around a room, and it made me happy to think I could be that woman, although it also made me sad, knowing that he would rather have been leading my mother.

One of the few guests I already knew was Sumner Butterworth, a Harvard neurologist my father had persuaded to look for “our” gene. Sumner's approach involved dissecting the brains of people who had been killed by Valentine's. Although my father raved against anyone too sentimental to leave his loved one's brain to science, I couldn't help but
wonder what he would have done if some doctor had asked permission to hack my mother's brain from its stem and freeze it in a Ziploc bag. I respected Sumner's work, but his methods struck me as crude. I had switched from medical school to research in the hope of finding a more elegant cure for Valentine's. But I hadn't had much luck, and for now, we needed Sumner.

He stopped shucking the clams before him and shook my hand limply. In the world of science, Sumner Butterworth commanded far more respect than I did. But my father's foundation funded Sumner's lab. I almost wished that he would ignore me, as he would have ignored any other scientist who wasn't tenured Harvard faculty.

“Doll,” my father said, “I'd like you to meet Franklin DeWitt. Of DeWitt Pharmaceuticals.”

I forced some warmth into my voice. “Hello, Mr. DeWitt. Thank you very much for coming.” Like most of the guests, Franklin DeWitt wore a well-tailored suit, a silk tie, and a fancy watch. I had to fight my instinct to distrust him. If a stranger showed up in a lab wearing a suit and tie, we figured he was there to sell us supplies. The last thing a scientist wants to be taken for is a salesman. If your theories are true, if your results can be verified, you don't need to
sell
them. Being a fluent speaker is fine, but only if you have something important to say.

I greeted the other guests, then stood nibbling a pack of oyster crackers and watching my father glad-hand the room. He had this habit of draping one arm across the person to whom he was speaking and whispering confidences to the man. Every few minutes, he would pull his victim
closer, as if he were trying to wad him in a ball and tuck him in the inner pocket of his suit. Sometimes, he frowned and jerked his thumb in my direction.

The only woman I recognized I had met a dozen years earlier, when she and my father had gone before Congress begging for funds to cure the disease that had widowed them both. Honey Land's late husband, Dusty, had been a moderately famous actor. Once, on a sick day from school, I had sat beside my mother watching one of Dusty Land's earliest films. He was tall and thick-bodied, with a jaw so square it might have been a block glued to his chin. I wasn't sure he was handsome until I heard my mother comment, “Dusty Land can park his boots under my bed anytime he wants,” a remark that shocked me, given how infrequently she talked about sex before she fell ill. I can't recall much else about that movie. Back then, I didn't know or care who Dusty Land was. I didn't yet understand how our lives would be linked.

“Good!” my father boomed. He was crushing the shoulders of a man even shorter than he was, as round and tan as an acorn. “I knew you'd come through, Syd. Honey, get over here.”

Honey excused herself from the knot of men around her. Years before, as Hannah Nathaniels, she had been a Rockette, and even now, in her early sixties, she wouldn't have seemed out of place onstage at Radio City Music Hall.

“Syd here's decided to make a real contribution. A man gives away that much money, he ought to get a kiss from a beautiful dame.”

Honey pecked the man's forehead. “I only wish I could do a little something more to show you how much I appreciate your generosity.”

“Don't get ideas, Syd. For ‘a little something more' we're talking six figures.”

“You mustn't listen to a word this man says,” Honey scolded. “Not one single word.”

Despite this feigned fight, I could guess what my father and Honey had in common. Although our family's trials had been nearly unendurable, the Lands had suffered even more. While my mother had confined her lewdness to comments only we heard (“I bet he's well hung,” she had said of Henry Kissinger as he was addressing a phalanx of reporters on TV), Dusty Land had been arrested for stopping a teenage girl on the street, unzipping his fly, and asking if she wanted to lick his all-day sucker. The doctors were so certain that Dusty had the DTs they consigned him to Bellevue. Several months later, when an intern informed Honey that her husband wasn't actually a sex-crazed lush but rather a victim of an obscure disease called Valentine's chorea, she was seized with remorse. After he died, she flew around the country starting support groups for anyone whose relatives suffered from the disease. She joined my father in trying to raise money to find a cure.

Now, at Tommie's Pierside, Honey put her hand on my arm. It startled me to see those scarlet nails against my skin. “Oh, Janie,” she said. “You aren't thinking of leaving already, are you? I want you to meet my son, Willie.” She crossed the room, and I tried to think why she would want me to
meet her son. She couldn't possibly be trying to fix us up. Of all people, Honey ought to know that any son of her late husband had to be the worst choice for me to date.

“Jane,” she said, “this is Willie. Willie, this is Herb's daughter, Jane.”

Even then, Willie was no one's idea of thin. He had his father's cleft jaw, although on him it looked less glamorous than reassuring. In those days, he wore his hair scraggly and long. Men with long hair usually struck me as vain. But Willie seemed simply to have forgotten to cut his. Maybe that was his allure. He defied the usual categories by which I judged whom I did or did not like.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said back.

“Jane, Willie . . .” Honey seemed uncomfortable. “You two . . . you have a lot in common. You're going to be . . . Let's just say it's high time you got to know each other.” Then she rushed off to greet more guests.

I couldn't figure out what she meant. From what I knew, Honey's son spent most of his time on some hill in New Hampshire, consulting his swami and eating brown rice. We had nothing in common other than having watched a parent die of Valentine's. In those days, friends often fixed me up with men who had diseases. One of my college roommates had introduced me to a lawyer who was legally blind; a classmate from graduate school had given my number to a Vietnam vet with one leg. The one-legged vet in particular was a sweet guy. But why did everyone assume that an illness gave two people more in common than any other trait?

“I've sure heard a lot about you,” Willie said. I could hear the twang in his voice, but I couldn't place the accent. His father had been born in Oklahoma, but as far as I knew, Willie had been raised in Manhattan. As fast as most New Yorkers crammed their words together, that's how slowly he spoke. “Pretty great news, don't you think? Although, I guess it's still hush-hush.”

I smiled, unwilling to admit that I didn't know what secret he assumed we shared. One by one, the donors left. A busboy in a ruffled shirt cleared away the dishes. I expected my father would want to spend some time alone with me. But he startled me by kissing me on the cheek and telling me he had to go. “Honey got us tickets for some show,” he said. “What's it called,
A Cage of Fa
ygelehs
?”

“Shhhhh!” Honey looked around the room. “What can you do with him?” she asked me. I shrugged. I couldn't imagine how she had convinced my father to pay a hundred dollars to see a show. Even before my mother fell ill, my parents rarely went out.

“Sorry, doll.” My father squeezed my arm. “We'll have brunch Sunday, right?”

I had never heard my father use that word, “brunch.”

“Nine o'clock,” Honey said. “The early bird gets the worm.” Then she actually added: “I don't think the Ritz-Carlton
really
serves worms.”

They started to leave. But Honey stopped at the threshold. “Herb, wait. Janie hasn't eaten.” Her hand fluttered to her waist, which was smaller than mine. “Call the waitress back and make her order something.”

I waited for my father to say,
She's thirty-three years old. If she's going to show up late, she can find her own dinner.
Instead, he stood with his arm linked in Honey's, both of them staring.

“I've been busy,” I said. “I haven't been sleeping.” But I knew why they were staring. In my mother's last year, she had trembled so hard she had burned away her flesh at an alarming rate. Sometimes, she had shaken so violently I thought her very bones would ignite. “It's not Valentine's,” I said. “That isn't why I'm so thin.” Except, indirectly, it was. Valentine's was the reason I so rarely took the time to sleep or eat. “I need to go back to the lab and feed some cells,” I said. “I'll grab some dinner later.”

“The lab!” Honey splayed a hand across her chest. “Willie, dear, drive her. And make sure she eats something.”

He was studying a photo of the restaurant's owner, Tommie Anastasio, shaking the hand of a minor black celebrity whose name I didn't know.

“Thanks,” I said. “I have my bike.”

“At night? The way people drive in Boston?” Honey wrinkled her nose. “Willie, put this
bike
of hers in the back of that old
thing
you drive and make sure Janie gets where she is going.”