A Perfect Life (3 page)

“Oh no,” I said. “I do this all the time. Really. Enjoy the show. I'll see you Sunday morning.” I kissed my father, then edged out the door and left them standing together, Honey and Herb. Jesus, I thought, they sounded like a salad dressing.

“Hey,” someone called. I turned and saw Willie standing beside a pyramid of lobster traps. There was some
thing touching about his size. He was too big, the way Vic O'Connell was too big. But he wasn't awkward, the way Vic was. Vic carried his body the way he carried that suit—like something he was forced to wear on special occasions but otherwise would have preferred to leave hanging in his closet. Willie carried his body the way he might have supported a drunken friend—tenderly, with some compassion.

He asked if I was sure I was all right.

I assumed he was asking: Was I sure I would be okay riding my bike at night? “I'm sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

He plucked at my blouse. “So then, what's all this red stuff?”

I dropped my head to see.

“Maybe it's ketchup.” He drawled the word so slowly I could see the tilted bottle, the heavy red paste refusing to pour. “Then again, maybe it's not.”

I couldn't understand how Flora's blood had splashed so high. He asked if I'd had an accident. Maybe I'd gotten hurt?

No, I said. I dropped a test tube.

“Don't you wear one of those white coats?” he asked.

No, I said. Only doctors wore white coats.

He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, which were curly and lush. It wasn't fair that a woman couldn't get away with having eyebrows like that.

“You're not a doctor?” he said.

Some researchers were medical doctors, I explained. They saw patients most of the week, then messed around in the lab for a few hours on Friday afternoon and got in ev
eryone's way.
They
wore white coats. Biologists—Ph.D.s.—did their research in jeans.

“So,” he said, “lab coats are for sissies? Like cars? Like accepting rides from friends?”

I apologized. I hadn't meant to be rude. I just got nervous when people treated me like an invalid.

He snorted. “She treats everyone like that. She treated my dad like that, even before he got sick. Brushed his teeth for him, for Christ's sake. He loved it. Don't ask me, some people like to be treated like a baby. She treats me that way, and I'm forty years old! Anyway, I made my peace with it. Doesn't bother me anymore. I hardly pay attention.”

“But my father . . .” I said. In the old days, he had acted more like my mother's father than like her husband. Surely not like her son.

“But I shouldn't let her talk for me,” he said. “I
want
to give you a ride. You need something to eat, and I wouldn't mind getting the taste of that lobster pie I ordered out of my mouth. I don't mean to seem ungrateful, but that wasn't exactly the best dinner I ever ate.” He thrust his hand in one of the traps. “I think I got the last poor sucker they pulled up in this thing.” He tried to get his hand out, but it was tangled in the net. The hand was hairy, pale, soft. Definitely more a mammal than a crustacean. My heart twinged, as if a not-too-bright animal had blundered into danger and couldn't find its way out.

The maître d' looked up from his podium and regarded us suspiciously. Willie freed his hand. “I've never seen anyone feed her cells before.”

“They're not
my
cells. They're cells from other people. Cancer cells. As long as they get fed, they'll keep dividing forever. I feed them fetal-calf serum. It's made by chopping up little fetal calves. Is that weird enough for you?”

“Weird enough?” He leaned toward me. I smelled a familiar smell, the same piney shampoo my sister, Laurel, used. His lips brushed my cheek—just below the spot where I had washed off Flora's blood. “Jane, darlin',” he said, “if you're going to be my new little sister, which, from what my mother just hinted, I'm pretty sure you will be, then you'd better get a whole lot weirder, real fast.”

I unlocked my bike from the anchor in front of Tommie's and lifted it into the back of Willie's Jeep, which was old but immaculate. He tipped the valet with the offhand manner of a man lending a friend a dollar. A Jeep was its own affectation, I thought, but not as ostentatious as a sports car would have been. After all, he had to drive something.

We left the lot, then the pier. He didn't glance in my direction, and I wondered if I had offended him. But the longer I watched, the more I came to think that here was a man who could do only one thing at one time. Right now he was driving. He moved his head back and forth, monitoring each gauge and listening so intently to the engine he seemed to shift gears without using the clutch. I couldn't remember when I had last done one thing at one time. Even as a child, I had kept a book on my lap and read it while the teacher lectured up front. I chose friends for this same quality, this impatience with the limits of what a person could accomplish in a normal life. My first lover enjoyed teaching me about biology almost as much as he enjoyed teaching me about sex.
Do you know, Jane,
he
had asked, guiding my hand up his leg,
if you stretched out the seminiferous tubules in a man's testes, they would be sixteen hundred feet long
?

Willie drove so slowly it took me a while to realize he had stopped in the middle of the bridge. Cars rushed up behind and, honking, surged past.

“Look at it all,” he said, motioning back toward Boston. “How often do I get to see this? I never smell the sea.” He inhaled so deeply I could feel the sky drained of air. “Go on. Try it. You haven't taken one good breath since we met. You pant, you know? Like this?” He panted like a puppy, his fleshy tongue hanging out.

I hated when people told me I was too serious. Besides, telling someone to relax is the least effective way of ensuring she will. I told him if he hadn't stopped in the middle of the bridge, I might be more mellow.

“Just look back,” he said. “You won't get turned to salt.”

To humor him, I glanced at the row of brownstones bordering Storrow Drive, and the skyscrapers behind them, glittering against the sky. Maybe he had a point. What could be more spectacular than the Boston skyline at night? And Willie . . . there was something of that outsize quality about him, too. Maybe, if our parents got married, I would be able to lean on him a little, instead of always taking care of everyone else.

It was a great view, I admitted. But maybe we could go now, before someone plowed into us?

“Trust me,” he said. “I'm a very careful driver.” And really, he was. He turned on his blinker and resumed inching across the bridge. We reached the opposite shore. We weren't far
from my lab, but we needed twenty minutes to find a spot to park. Until the late seventies, the area behind MIT had been a wasteland. Now, in the early eighties, offices and labs were springing up like wild, mutant flora. The streets were pocked by craters. Entire blocks were cordoned off.

Willie whistled through his teeth. “How can they put up these suckers so fast? I was in town a few months ago and none of this was here.”

Everyone thought this. Skyscraper skeletons grew concrete skins overnight. Only for me did the changes come too slowly. When my second-grade teacher had asked us what we would want to be if we couldn't be ourselves, one of my classmates had said “a bird,” another had said “a brontosaurus,” another had said “a horse,” and I had said “a mountain.” I didn't want to miss a thing. I wanted to live long enough to know how the human race turned out.

Willie tapped my arm. “Where does a person get some chow around here?”

Even with all the offices going up, there were still surprisingly few restaurants—most people from MIT grabbed a sandwich from a pushcart or a packet of peanut butter crackers from a vending machine. I motioned in the direction of a nearly empty block that until recently had been the site of a florist, a delicatessen, and a shoe repair shop. Only the deli still stood, stripped now of neighbors, braced on either side by wooden struts. The restaurant seemed doomed, but the new Center for Biomedical Research would simply engulf it. The B&B Deli would survive as a symbiont, feeding its host, the way human mitochondria once lived on their own before moving in and becoming part of our cells.

The deli was dark and smoky, with scarred booths and paneled walls. The initials in the name stood for Barney and Bob, but MIT students used to joke that “B&B” stood for “Bed and Breakfast” since so many lab rats ate their dinners there at midnight, then stretched out in the booths and slept until dawn, when the B&B served delicious waffles and eggs.

“What'll it be tonight, Professor?” asked the man behind the counter (both owners wore bushy beards and Red Sox caps, so I never could identify which one was Barney and which one Bob). I flushed with the pride of being called “professor,” even though I knew he called me that only because I looked so much like a kid. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and a knish, then tried to decide between rice pudding and chocolate cake.

“That's great,” Willie said. “I love that. A pastrami sandwich. A knish!” All he took on his own tray were two cartons of chocolate milk.

“I forget to eat sometimes,” I said. “But then I make up for it.”

He nodded. “Sure. Got to build it up. Need that extra layer of fat. Although really, there's no sense trying to stockpile it. How long do you think it would take for you to shake off an extra twenty pounds? My dad could have done it in a week.”

It was like discovering that another person could monitor your thoughts. I didn't know whether to be horrified or relieved. I led him to a booth, trying not to drop my tray or slosh my Coke.

“You think about it all the time, don't you?” he asked.

He had said aloud the most important fact about me, the fact I kept most hidden. Every moment I was alive, I thought about dying. “And you don't?” I said.

“Sure.” He shook a carton of chocolate milk, then pried open the seam. “Every few weeks.”

I told him that I didn't believe him. How could he avoid thinking he might have Valentine's?

“Zen,” he said. “I used to think about it a lot. Then I went to Japan and became a Buddhist.”

I must have rolled my eyes.

“That's a little arrogant, isn't it? Dismissing a philosophy that's been around for a couple of thousand years just because a few flakes in California took it up?”

The last thing I needed was a stepbrother who thought meditating on the sound of one hand clapping would cure my problems. I finished my pastrami sandwich and started on the cake. Willie kept staring at my mouth. I thought he wanted a bite of cake; I held out a forkful.

“What?” he said. “Thanks, why not.”

He reached across the table, and his hand swallowed mine. That's when I knew I wasn't safe. No one can predict this, who might cause you to recall you don't live only in your mind. You know that old cliché about how people use only a fraction of their brains? In my case, it was my body I barely used.

He guided my hand toward his mouth and ate the cake. His tongue scoured his teeth for chocolate. They were such big, square, white teeth. And there was that long vertical crease that ran down his forehead, continued beneath his nose, then cleft his chin in two. I liked that
face. I would have stopped in a museum and stood before it, staring.

I asked if our parents were really getting married. When did all this happen?

“You're not serious,” he said. “They've been seeing each other for years.”

“I know,” I said. “The president of the Institute for Valentine's Research and the chairwoman of the Valentine's Disease Society getting together to plan their strategy.” That my father was marrying Honey Land as a business arrangement seemed easier to accept than that he had proposed to her for the same reason he had proposed to my mother. “Do they love each other?” I asked stupidly.

He seemed puzzled. “Why would two people get married if they didn't love each other?”

My eyes began to well. I plucked a napkin from the dispenser. After so many years of being widowed, my father would finally have a woman to keep him company. A woman he could love.

“That's what this brunch thing is about,” Willie said. “They want to announce their engagement. But your sister can't make it until Sunday morning. She's, what, a dancer? Modern? Ballet? She any good?”

I didn't know how to answer. I had never understood my sister's dancing, although her take on it was that a dance wasn't something that needed to be “understood.” Still, I loved my sister more than anyone else. I thought she was the prettiest woman in the world. Her hair was so black and thick it hung around her shoulders like a living shawl. She had the same full lips and broad-toothed smile that
had made our mother so attractive, and the same Kirghiz eyes—green and slanted, like a cat's. Willie, I was sure, would fall in love with my sister. Everyone did. She was beautiful. And tragic. Like me, she had reacted to the possibility that she might be carrying the gene for Valentine's by swearing never to have a family. But that didn't mean she lived alone. She slept with a great many men, but only men she couldn't love, or men who couldn't love her. I hoped she would see how kind Willie was and spare his feelings. But sometimes she gave in to softhearted suitors she couldn't bear to hurt, at least at the beginning.

I asked when Willie thought our parents might get married.

“This summer,” he said. “Maybe August.”

It was nearly the end of May!

He pried open the second carton of chocolate milk. I loved watching men's hands. A good biologist's hands are like acrobats, flicking the tiny caps from Eppendorf tubes, squeezing pipette bulbs, flaming metal loops over Bunsen burners. Willie's hands were too ungainly to be graceful, but they knew what they were doing. “That still leaves three months,” he said. “In three months, my mom could have arranged Chuck and Di's wedding.”

I couldn't believe that Honey would hold her wedding in Mule's Neck. But I also couldn't see my father wasting money on a fancy New York affair. A Valentine's benefit was scheduled for that July. Maybe he and Honey were planning to combine the events. It bothered me that they derived all the advantages of Valentine's—the excitement and purpose it gave to a life—with none of the risks.
“Doesn't it upset you?” I asked Willie. “The way they seem to get off on it. On Valentine's.”

“Why?” he said. “Don't you?”

I pushed away my tray.

“Wait,” he said. “Why is it all right to get wrapped up in your own disease, but not in someone else's? It doesn't take much imagination, does it, feeling sympathy for yourself?”

I had to admit he had a point. All of us had grown obsessed with studying who we were. If you were black, you studied being black. If you were a woman or Jewish or gay, you studied being that. Even scientists fell prey to self-obsession. Except my friend Maureen. She had been crippled as a child by rheumatoid arthritis and people expected she would work to find a cure.
I could, but I don't
was all Maureen would say. Instead, she was searching for the cause of a rare form of blindness that afflicted a few remote families in Peru. Her disabled friends acted as if arthritis were a nationality or a religion she had abandoned from shame. But now, listening to Willie, I thought she might be right. What would science be if doctors tried to cure only those diseases they themselves were prone to? I hadn't intended to study Valentine's. I had grown up wanting to figure out how an egg became a chick. I had only switched to medicine, and then to genetics, after my mother got sick and I came to understand the threat that hung over my family.

I asked Willie what he did with his time.

He took his last sip of milk and licked his lips. “Truth be told, I don't
do
a whole lot.” He had a fair amount of money
from his father's estate, he said. He had bought a little land in New Hampshire, back when hippies like him were doing that kind of thing. He had put up what you might call a house. In the seventies, there was a revival of interest in his father's movies, and the royalties started piling up. He had quite a bit of moolah to play around with, he said. He invested in new companies, and then, if he made a profit, he found a cause he liked and gave most of it away.

“You play the stock market?” I said. “Are you serious?” Dusty Land had made his reputation portraying working stiffs whose allegiance was to the poor rather than to the fat cats who owned the factories.

“I know,” he said. “Farmer Sinclair's son growing up to be a venture capitalist scumbag.” His accent grew thicker, as if he felt guilty about being rich. My father did the same thing. Whenever he felt self-conscious about being well off, he ladled on the inflections of a poor Brooklyn Jew.

“You make money,” I said, “then you give it away?”

“Why?” he asked. “You need some?”

The lab always needed money. Enzymes cost a hundred dollars a drop. An ultracentrifuge cost as much as a Cadillac. But my father was the only member of the family who knew how to beg. “Valentine's is a good cause, isn't it?”

“Didn't used to seem that way. More like a lost cause.” He stretched his tongue and coaxed another drop of milk from his glass. “Maybe you could convince me I'm wrong.”

I pretended I didn't know what he wanted me to do—I hated explaining my work to laymen, if only because I found it so hard.

“I'm not such a dumb guy,” Willie said. “I read the newspaper. But I usually can't make heads or tails of this genetics stuff. Every other morning you see some headline that says something like, ‘Revolutionary Breakthrough, Scientists Discover Secret of Life.' You read it, but you can't figure out what the hell the reporters are talking about. It's
still
a secret, as far as you're concerned. Here I have a real, live geneticist, and I'm not letting you go until you give me some answers.”