A Perfect Life (4 page)

I told him there weren't any answers. Not short ones, at any rate.

“I didn't ask for a short answer. Just give me a second.” He gestured toward the men's room. “When I get back, I want you to explain what you do in that lab of yours all day.”

I slid to the edge of the booth. Once, at a party, I had met a painter who claimed to be enthralled by my doctoral thesis on the cell-by-cell development of a worm called
C. elegans
. Spurred by his interest, I reached a height of eloquence I had never before attained.
Maybe,
I thought
. Just this once.
But later, in his loft, he lit a cigarette and told me he had a question. “Here's my question,” he said. “Were you saying ‘D
and
A,' or ‘D
N
A'? It's always kind of bugged me, not knowing which it is.” I was aware that other women didn't require their lovers to understand the subjects they were studying. Foreign students at MIT courted American women without either one knowing how to say much more than “I love you” in the other's language. They married on trust, believing love to be a matter of emotions rather than of ideas. But what if you had nothing in common with the
man you married? What if he cared nothing about what you did?

Willie returned from the men's room. “Hey,” he said. “You know what someone wrote on the wall in there? ‘The only women at MIT are the men who've worked their balls off.'”

I felt raw and exposed, the way I had felt when that truck driver shouted his obscenities. “Well, I have to go work my balls off, if you'll excuse me.”

“Wait.” He took my wrist. If anyone else had done that, I would have shaken him off. I was unsettled by how much I wanted that hand around my wrist. “This disease killed my dad,” he said. “I'm not going to drive myself nuts over it. But that doesn't mean I'm not, you know, curious. I like to understand things. Come on. Sit back down.” He leaned across the table with those bushy eyebrows raised. And I had to give in. At that moment, he seemed the only person on the planet to whom my research mattered.

“Do you know how genes work?” I asked.

Now he rolled his eyes. “What do you think? You think I believe these tiny little people come ready-made, all curled up inside a guy's sperm?”

I started to apologize.

“You know,” he said, “according to the Buddha, there are only twenty truly difficult things in this world. Number eleven is: ‘It is difficult to be thorough in learning and exhaustive in investigation.' You're doing a heck of a job with number eleven. Number thirteen, though, number thirteen is how difficult it is not to feel contempt toward the unlearned.”

“I don't feel—”

“Yeah. It never crossed your mind that I didn't finish college. You never thought, Oh, jeez, I've got to sit here and explain the secret of life to an ignorant old hippie who's got seaweed for brains.”

It surprised me how much I regretted losing the good opinion of a man I had just met.

“Come on,” he said. “Even little kids today know about genes. Go ahead and just talk. If I don't understand something, I'll ask.”

Every table in the deli came equipped with a soup can filled with pencils. By the end of most meals, the deli's patrons had scribbled formulae and graphs on every square inch of their place mats. I took one of those stubby pencils and drew a chain of DNA. Willie reached in his shirt pocket and took out the kind of reading glasses you buy at a dime store. His pair had heavy black frames and narrow lenses; they made him look like a kid who was pretending to be a grown-up.

“Let's assume this is part of your DNA,” I said. I tried not to put on the professorial voice that annoyed my sister. “Most of the bases on your chromosome will be exactly the same as the bases on my chromosome, because they code for genes we share. They code for the basic stuff that makes us human. But a few of our genes won't be the same. You have curly hair; my hair is straight. Your eyes are blue and mine are brown.” I was afraid he would think I was fishing for a compliment, or maybe giving him one. But he stared at the place mat as if the only thing he cared about was the chain of DNA that I had drawn there.

Encouraged, I explained that there were these other stretches of DNA, and no one knew what they coded for. It wasn't eye color, or hair color, or anything that obvious. Maybe some piece of his DNA read AGCC
G
TC, and my chromosome at that same spot read AGCC
C
TC. At that one spot, that one letter, our chromosomes were different. The useful thing was, there were a lot more of these random differences than the kinds that coded for, say, eye color. Scientists didn't used to know this. Now, suddenly, we had all these new markers to work with. It was the difference between giving someone directions on how to get around a desert, and giving someone an address in New York.

“Cool,” he said. “I get it.”

I had the impulse to kiss him. Startled, I told myself this was only because he had understood what I'd said. “Now,” I went on, “suppose we could sort out all the bits of my DNA and compare them to all the bits of your DNA. The patterns your DNA would make would be a little different from the patterns my DNA made.”

His glasses slid down his nose. He left them there, preferring to peer above the tops.

“I won't give you the gory details,” I said, afraid I would lose even him. “But that's a fairly easy thing to do. You chop up a person's chromosomes and let the pieces migrate along a gel. You take the gel and make something called a radioactive blot, and you develop it so you can see all the different pieces of DNA. One person's blot doesn't look like anyone else's. So, suppose we study all the blots for one family. A family where some of the people have Valentine's and some of them don't. Suppose everyone who has the dis
ease shows a certain pattern of DNA, and everybody who doesn't have the disease shows a slightly different pattern. Then we would know—”

“You would know that the Valentine's gene is hooked up in some way to this pattern?” He took the pencil and sketched a stick-figure man, a stick-figure wife, and three stick-figure kids. I was overcome by an irrational tenderness toward these figures, as if one of them were Willie and another were me. He laid a finger beside the stick man. “Say the dad and one of his sons have the pattern. But not, say, the daughters? Like, the dad passes along the pattern
and
the gene for Valentine's to his son? Is that it? But he doesn't pass either one to his daughters? If one of his daughters doesn't have the pattern, she doesn't have the gene?”

“What do you do up there in your cabin all day?” I asked. “Do you lie around reading genetics textbooks?”

He sat taller and beamed. “These blot things? These patterns? Do they correspond to anything you would notice about a person? Like, the two people in a family who've both got Valentine's might look like each other?”

I thought he was asking this because Laurel and our mother looked so much alike—that same full smile, those same green, catlike eyes, both of them so tall, while my father and I were barely five feet two, with dark eyes and strong noses. But there was nothing to support the notion that Laurel had inherited the Valentine's gene from my mother. On more than one occasion, I had attempted to explain this.
Just because you're pretty doesn't mean you have any more chance
of getting it than I do
. But my sister always smiled that sad smile of hers, as if what I had said were
nonsense. I was about to ask Willie where he had seen my sister when I realized he hadn't. He was asking because he and his father shared that cleft chin. “If the pattern were so obvious,” I said, “someone would have spotted it by now. It can't be that easy.”

“No?” he said. “Things can't ever be easy?”

“You never know. But it's not likely.”

He stretched his legs beneath the table. His knee brushed my calf. “How many of these blots do you need to make before you find the right one? The one that means a person has the gene for Valentine's?”

That was the question my colleagues always asked.
You're crazy,
they said.
You don't even know which chromosome to look on. It could take you ten years
. I explained this to Willie, downplaying how long it might take me to find the right probe—if the project seemed futile, he wouldn't give us money.

He tapped his teeth with the pencil. “Remember that TV show when we were kids? The one with all those great toys in that big treasure chest, and that enormous pile of keys? And some kid had, what, thirty minutes to try all the keys he could before the buzzer went off?”

I was stunned he had mentioned this. Every time my gaze wandered to the list of probes taped to my wall, an image of those keys flashed through my mind. I kept this to myself, not wanting Willie to know how frightened I was that I would never find the key. “If you want to know whether a certain marker travels with a gene, you need to do blots for a really big family. Otherwise, you won't have enough clues to figure out who's inherited what from
whom. There's this one pedigree, the Drurys—” I thought with a pang about driving back to Pittsfield. “We've got blood from two of the grandparents, and the mother and the father, all four kids, two cousins, and an uncle. That's the biggest genealogy anyone's found. If we're incredibly lucky, some pattern will show up. But mostly we're using them for practice. We've sent out letters to neurologists on three continents, asking for bigger pedigrees.”

“Okay,” he said, “suppose you find this big family. You try a whole bunch of keys, and the right one turns up. What happens then? What's inside that treasure chest?”

“If we find a marker for the gene—”

“You can tell some guy he's going to die this terrible death and there's not a thing he can do about it. Finding the gene doesn't mean diddly. Am I right?”

I felt my face flush. “Some people are going to find out they're positive for the gene. But what about all the people who find out they don't have it? They can get married and have kids and stop worrying every time they trip or drop something. They can tell if the fetus they're carrying is affected. If everybody did that, we could wipe out this disease in one generation.”

He slapped his palms on the table and leaned forward, leering over his glasses like LBJ. “Yes, sir, my fellow Americans, we can wipe out a whole generation to save it. Heck, if they'd had this little handy-dandy test a generation ago, they could have wiped out you and me. Is that how you feel? You'd rather not have been born?”

The more I heard such questions, the less I believed them. The fact that people had become intelligent enough
to shape their own evolution frightened me less than leaving my fate to chance.

He asked again if I would have wanted to be wiped out as a fetus.

Yes, I said. If it meant wiping out Valentine's. Although as soon as I said this, I wondered if I meant it.

“Whew. At least you're consistent. Got to hand you that. So you'd take this test?”

“Wouldn't you?”

“What if you found out you had it?”

“It couldn't be worse than this.”

“No? A zero chance is better than fifty-fifty?” He gnawed the pencil. “Call me a jackass, but so long as there's nothing you can do about it, then no thanks, I'd rather not know. I'd rather just go on telling myself I probably don't have it.”

“Then why do you care about all this?” I gestured toward the place mat. “Why do you want to see my lab?”

He removed his glasses and slipped them in his shirt pocket. “I didn't say I never think about it. Besides, I have a kid. My son, Ted. I wouldn't have
not
had my kid just because he might get sick. But I wouldn't mind knowing he wasn't going to have to go through what my father went through. I don't much care for this test of yours. But maybe if you find the gene, you can figure out what it does. What causes all that weird stuff to happen. The shaking and the cursing. You could keep that from happening to Ted.”

That was the first I had heard about Willie having a son. He must have been married before, I realized. I might have asked if he still was married, but a colleague of mine
stopped by and interrupted. Yosef and I hadn't known each other long, and I still had my doubts about whether I could trust him. Or maybe it was only that Yosef didn't trust anyone else. He suspected that everyone in the lab was plotting his downfall. Biologists talk all the time about collaborating on experiments, but to Yosef the word “collaborate” carried the connotation of betraying your neighbor to the KGB. He leaned against our booth in his ratty leather jacket, sucking on a Camel and straining to see what was written on the place mat. When he had taken in how simple the diagram was, he smiled at me and winked.

“Hi there,” he said, giving the
h
that guttural rasp, so the word came out
chai
. He nodded to Willie. “You got to be some helluva guy, this one leaves the lab for you.” Yosef was one of those people who rebuked me for being too serious. “I can understand a person doesn't drink,” he had told me once. “Even not sleeping. But not making love? You think some guy would not marry you because you have this sickness? Pretty girl like you? You Americans think everybody has to be perfect. In Russia, you wait around for someone who doesn't have some kind of disease, or crooked teeth, or this big red birthmark on the head, you end up mighty lonely Russkie.”

But Yosef dated only women who had no visible flaws. Waiting beside him was a postdoc named Monique. She wore short skirts and high heels—even though, like the rest of us, she stood on her feet ten hours a day. She and Yosef seemed unutterably foreign to me then, not because they were Russian and French, but because they could spend a Friday night at the deli, flirting and cursing and gossiping
about who had stolen ideas from whom, then go out to a club, make love, and sleep until noon.