A Perfect Life (5 page)

“Sweetheart,” Yosef said, “I just came over to tell you. Those two researchers in Utah, the Polish guys who are studying that big Mormon family? Well—” He tried so hard not to let his
w
's come out as
v
's that “well” came out
whhhhel
. “This friend of mine, he saw the paper they sent to
Genome
. And those two Polish guys in Utah, they think they found a polymorphic locus on chromosome five that is linked to your gene. Maybe it is nothing. They have this very little family, this very shitty linkage. It is probably a wishful thought. But when that paper comes out, everybody is going to be all over chromosome five like flies on a piece of you-know-what.”

Yosef was supposed to be working on Valentine's, too. In reality, he scorned the project as hopeless and spent most of his time working on experiments whose nature he never divulged, even to Vic. Every few days, Yosef would stop by my bench and ask, “So, sweetheart, how is it going?” If the Valentine's project started to move, he would hop on the bandwagon. In the meantime, he had his secret research to occupy his time.

He swirled smoke through his nose. “This news doesn't mean anything? You don't care if you get scooped?”

I knew those Poles in Utah. Their work was sloppy and rushed. If their data had been stronger, the paper would have been accepted by
Nature
or
Cell.
And how sad could I be if someone else found the gene for Valentine's?

“Yosef.” I patted his sandpapery cheek. “If you spent as much time worrying about your experiments as you worry
about getting scooped, you would have your own lab by now.” I slid from the booth and stood.

Yosef called, “Sweetheart!,” assuming, no doubt, his news had upset me. Willie followed me outside, asked me to wait, then ran back to get the place mat. “Please,” he said. “I really do want to see your lab. I've been trying to avoid thinking about any of this for a long time. But now, well, I want to know all about it.” He folded the place mat, then folded it again, then slipped it into his shirt pocket with his glasses, patting it as if it truly did hold the secret of life.

Most people who take a tour of a genetics lab aren't that impressed. I had a friend who taught English, and when I showed her my lab at MIT, she said it wasn't Gothic enough; I think she was hoping to find Dr. Frankenstein and Igor creating new life. The businessmen my father brought there for tours expected to find a machine that could manufacture a child. Bunsen burners and test tubes—how could anything important be discovered with those? I wished I could have said:
That's what I love about being a biologist. You don't need telescopes in space or supercolliders to study a cell.
Vic sent our technicians to Star Market to buy rolls of Saran Wrap to mummify our gels, paper towels to wick them, toothpicks with which to transfer bacteria from one plate to the next. We ordered Seal-a-Meal bags from the company that made them for the Jolly Green Giant. Every six months, the labs on our floor held a Tupperware party, at which we badgered the hostess about whether her trays were resistant to formamide and whether or not they would buckle when autoclaved at 120 degrees.

But I couldn't tell a potential donor his money would be used to buy Tupperware and Saran Wrap. I might mention that the numbers clicking on a centrifuge didn't represent one rotation per second, but rather one thousand. But this rarely fazed anyone. What was a centrifuge except a big spinning drum?
This microscope allows us to isolate a single egg from a mouse ovary, pierce the wall with a needle as thin as a hair, and insert DNA right inside its genes.
But a microscope was only a microscope, it seemed. And what was so hard about poking an egg with a needle? Any housewife could do it, if her hands were steady enough.

Even my father showed surprisingly little patience for what went on in that lab.
When?
he would ask. Rarely,
How?
Never,
Why?
He liked to find out how many pipette tips the lab used in a year, how many rubber gloves. Later, when he dropped these statistics, I was amazed to see the businessmen take notes, as if the numbers were proverbs they could quote later on.

Only my mother appreciated what she saw. She died three years before I started my postdoc at MIT, but I managed to show her the lab in Harvard Yard where I studied for my doctorate. I was forced to wheel her through a service door near the Dumpster. The iron-grilled cage that carried us up was so small it scraped the armrests of her wheelchair. She was trembling too violently to put her eye to a microscope, but I explained what I had done, how I had figured out the paths by which each of this tiny worm's two hundred cells had grown and divided from that first single egg. My mother's powers of speech already had de
cayed, but she managed to bark, “Oh! Yes!” I would have felt proud, but she was blinking back tears. How could I take satisfaction in accomplishing what she hadn't been allowed to accomplish, first because she was a woman, and later because she had fallen ill with Valentine's?

The night I met Willie, we rode the elevator to the fifth floor of my building, and I was surprised by how much I hoped he would find what I did to be interesting and important. I noticed him staring at the poster above the buttons (
SEMINAR TODAY: MATING HABITS IN YEAST
), and I cringed with embarrassment. The halls were lined with bikes. I leaned mine beside the rest, hoping he would think I wasn't so odd for riding one.

He pointed to a sign:
BICYCLES MAY NOT BE LEFT IN HALLWAYS, BY ORDER OF CAMBRIDGE FIRE MARSHAL.
“Glad to see you people take safety rules so seriously.”

I understood that he was only teasing me. He couldn't have known what it had felt like a few years earlier when the Cambridge City Council held meetings to debate the dangers posed by scientists like me—the mutant microbes we might unleash through the sewers, the plague for which no cure could be found. I had stopped attending parties to avoid the hush that fell over the room when someone asked me what I did. The council had passed a moratorium on any research involving recombinant DNA, which had forced us to abandon years' worth of progress and switch to other projects. Then, just as suddenly, the council revoked the ban and we raced to catch up with geneticists in other cities. But we knew from then on we would always be sus
pect, like criminals who have been frisked and tossed in jail, then released with the warning they will be tossed in jail again at the merest hint of wrongdoing.

“We're careful about things that matter,” I said, then led Willie inside the lab.

Achiro, our postdoc from Japan, was slicing mouse brains as thin as a butterfly's wings and using chopsticks to mount the samples on glass slides. Some of the world's most ambitious biologists worked on that floor, but Achiro and I put in the longest hours. He had arrived from Tokyo the year before, leaving behind a wife and two daughters. If he didn't produce a result important enough to secure him a position at a Japanese university, he would spend the rest of his life working at a company that made artificial sweeteners or deodorants. He wore a surgical mask and didn't raise his eyes when we came in. But I could tell he was pleased that I had come back. Even if we didn't talk to each other much, we enjoyed each other's presence, the way two deaf, lonely widows might knit side by side on a nursing home porch.

“Hey,” Willie said. He stood above Achiro, peering down at the mouse brains. Achiro's shoulders went rigid, as if he feared Willie might thump him on his back. But all Willie did was murmur, “Oh, man, if that isn't Zen, what is.”

Achiro looked startled by the word “Zen.” Once, when I told him that Vic had dropped out of graduate school to study at a seminary before returning to complete his degree, Achiro had asked, “This means Christian?” I nodded, it did. “And you?” he said. “You also are a Christian?” No, I said,
I was Jewish, at which Achiro stared blankly. “And you?” I asked. “What religion are you?” “Ahh,” Achiro said. “Since little boy, I think all religion is, how you say, nonsense?”

Now, with Willie behind him, Achiro let his eyebrows rise above his mask. He sucked in air, which dimpled the cotton mask. “Ahh,” he said. “I forget to tell you. Someone call, mmm, two, maybe three time. She says she wants to talk to you about Valentine disease. I tell her you be back soon.” He rubbed his mouth beneath the mask, as if the exertion of speaking all those English words had left his lips sore. Then he motioned with his eyes. On a pink Post-it by the phone he had written “MIRM BURN” and a ten-digit number. I wasn't in a hurry to return the call. People phoned the lab all the time, hoping to find some miracle to save a relative's life. Whatever Vic told them in that soothing, overly sincere voice of his left them feeling less hopeless. Often, he would persuade them to donate their DNA. I couldn't bring myself to confess that I didn't have some elixir or pill to give them, that their relative would be dead before a cure could be found.

Vic wasn't in his office, but his Boston Marathon windbreaker was hanging from his chair and his ratty backpack crouched beside his desk like a faithful dog.

“Your boss,” Willie said. “He's supposed to be a big deal. I'll tell you, folks in Hollywood may have swelled heads, but there aren't many of them as puffed up as these scientists my mother introduced me to. Like that one at Harvard, Summer . . . Sumner . . . ?”

No, I said, Vic wasn't like Sumner Butterworth. The only time Vic let his ego peek through was once a year, in
October, when the Nobel Prizes were announced. On those days, he would show up later than usual, eyes bleary, face drawn, as if he had been sitting up all night waiting for the phone to ring. Then he would summon us for a pep talk. “We've been worrying too much about what other labs are doing. Prizes are fine, but the important thing is whether or not you're doing good science.” And I loved him for that, for thinking what we did was a calling and not a race. “All right,” he would say, “let's start everything fresh,” and he would order a cleanup. We would spend the rest of the day kneeling in the cold room, throwing out plates of moldy bacteria and bottles of reagents left by grad students who had cracked up and gone home to Louisiana or Darjeeling. And this made us feel pure, as if those fuzzy orange spores had been rotting our souls.

Hundreds of people clamored to talk to Vic O'Connell. And yet he spent hours talking to me. He would come into the lab on a Saturday afternoon, pause beside my bench to ask about the gel I was running, and the next thing I knew, it would be Saturday night. People like Susan Bate hinted that Vic's interest wasn't platonic. But Vic was the last person at the university who would have hit on a postdoc. If he had felt those feelings toward me, he would have been painfully shy. Besides, he had hinted to me once that he owed his wife his loyalty for taking him in as an awkward young man with a nerve-racking fear of the opposite sex and supporting him as a nurse while he studied for his degree. So even if she had grown colder and more remote, even if she was concerned with matters of interior decor and social standing, even if she cared about genetics
only enough to ask if their sons would inherit their father's height and thinning hair, he would never divorce her.

No, what caused Vic O'Connell to devote so much of his time to me was the understanding that if I failed at my research, I not only wouldn't get my own lab, I might die a particularly slow and agonizing death. When I had tried to find an adviser for my postdoc, no one would take me in. The approach I was advocating to find a marker was so unpromising that no one wanted to be responsible for my failure. For Vic, the very impossibility of my quest kindled his compassion.

Then again, not many postdocs wanted to work for Vic. Once, when we were at a conference, he told me about the time he had taken a much-needed vacation from graduate school and gone hiking in Yosemite. There, he said, he had been so overcome by the sublimity of what he saw that he had fallen to his knees in gratitude. Science, he thought, couldn't explain how the universe came to be, how such an intricate web of physical laws governed chemistry or evolution, or how the cells in his brain interacted in such a way as to render him conscious of his own existence. The next day, wandering the park in this rapturous awe, he heard a hiker scream that he was drowning, and even though Vic could barely swim, he jumped in to save the man. Luckily, a ranger pulled the drowning hiker to safety before Vic could be swept away by the currents, too. But he had needed to ask himself how evolution could account for his willingness to throw away his DNA to save a man who was even weaker than he was, even less fit for life. Sitting on that rock, warmed by the sun, he felt a connection
to God he couldn't deny. He left graduate school to attend divinity school, but he soon realized he didn't have the temperament to become a minister. No, his calling was to help his fellow humans understand the beauty and complexity of the science by which God's creation worked. Not long afterward, he had made a name for himself developing a brilliant new approach to cloning. And yet, even those scientists who respected his results regarded their discoverer as somehow soft in the head. They were suspicious that at any moment he might stand up and make a case for intelligent design, or claim that God had planted the fossils to test our faith.

Initially, I had been suspicious, too. My parents blamed my mother's disease on genetics, and no amount of prayer could cure her. Better to put my faith in my earthly father and the money he was raising for his foundation, or my own ability to find the gene. And yet, working for Vic, I came to feel I benefited from a double layer of protection. I had Vic's power to provide the equipment and material I needed to conduct my work. And maybe, just maybe, his extra powers of intercession would provide a miracle.

Now, with Willie hovering behind Achiro, I slid my petri dishes out of the incubator and carried them to the tissue-culture hood. After all that talk about feeding my cells, I was embarrassed that Willie should see how simple the task really was. All I had to do was siphon off the old media, then squirt on fresh stock, bright as pink Kool-Aid.

“That's it?” he said.

I slid the dishes back into the incubator. We went out in the hall. “Not quite,” I said. “A few of my mice are ready
to deliver. If you don't catch them right away, the mothers eat the pups. The mutants, that is. And they're the ones we're interested in.”

We were standing in a corridor so narrow that if Willie had stretched out his arms, he could have laid his palms on opposite walls. “Why would the mothers eat their babies?” he asked.

For some reason, I felt the need to pretend the mothers' cannibalism didn't bother me. “They probably don't want to waste all that good protein.”

“Nah,” he said. “You give them mouse kibble. I think they're just ashamed.” He stuffed his shirttail in his trousers. “Were you ever ashamed of your mother?”

People hardly ever asked me about my mother. My friends seemed to avoid the word “mother” altogether. And my family didn't feel compelled to reminisce. Still, the question Willie had just asked had haunted me for years. It was a terrible thing to watch your once-fastidious mother drool juice on her blouse, or roll her eyes backward in her head until the capillaries showed, or tremble so incessantly she stripped her scalp raw against her pillow.

“I wasn't ashamed of her,” I said. “She was a very attractive woman. But after she got sick, we couldn't keep taking all those wool skirts and silk blouses to the cleaners. She couldn't manage buttons, so my father brought home these double-knit pants from his store, and these polyester tent-dresses. I would try to replace the buttons with Velcro. The pamphlets make it sound so easy, but I can't sew. She had to wear these awful nurses' shoes, because it was so hard for her to walk. I wanted to tell people, ‘She wasn't always like
this. She started college at forty and she would have earned her doctorate in biology if she hadn't gotten sick.' But I don't think you could say I was ashamed of her. It was just that I knew she would have been ashamed of herself.”