A Perfect Life (6 page)

Cesar, the janitor, was mopping the floors. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could go home. But Willie was planted in the middle of the hall, and I knew he wouldn't move until I had asked him the same question he had asked me. “Were you ashamed? Of your father, I mean. Of Dusty.”

He stroked his big chin. “I don't know,” he said. “We would be out somewhere, and I'd see all these people staring. I thought it was because he was so famous. You know, ‘There goes Dusty Land and his son.' Then I realized they didn't have the faintest idea who this old geezer was. They thought he was a drunk. So yeah, I guess I was a little embarrassed. But my mother—”

“You talk someplace else.” Cesar shook his mop in our direction. I always got in his way. I would wait outside the lab while he worked, but I was usually so impatient I came back in too early and tracked up his shiny tiles.

Cesar swabbed his mop between us and carried on down the hall, leaving us stranded on two islands of dirt. Willie laughed. “My mom's just like that guy. She'll be sweeping the crumbs off the tablecloth while you're still eating.” He tucked his hair behind his ears. “That's part of why she married my dad. When they met, he was, you know, this shabby cowboy. Sometimes he'd go off on these benders, thumb his way to L.A. or Alaska. Then he'd show up on her doorstep. He'd have this six-week-old beard. Calluses. Lice. She'd carry on, but she was enjoying herself. You could tell
by the way she'd get him in a tub and soap him. She'd take a razor to his face. She'd kneel down and cut away the dead skin on his heels.”

I wondered what it was like to be on such intimate terms with a man's body. In the year I had nursed my mother, I had grown maddeningly familiar with the mole on her left buttock, the bramble of hairs reforesting her thighs, the puckered skin around her nipples. But I had never been that familiar with a man. Not even the bodies of the few men I had slept with.

Willie seemed to regret having spoken at length on such a gloomy subject. “So where's the maternity ward?” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Paging Dr. Weiss, paging Dr. Weiss, mouse in labor on four.”

It occurred to me that I would be an idiot to show Willie our mouse room. Buddhists were so squeamish they avoided stepping on ants. Or maybe that was Hindus. All I knew was he wasn't going to like what he saw. “This isn't for people with faint hearts,” I warned him.

“Faint hearts? You're talking to a man who helped his wife give birth in a cabin with no running water.”

Again I felt a pang of jealousy, although I couldn't figure out if I was jealous because I had vowed to remain single, or because Willie had been married to a woman who wasn't me. “Well,” I said, “don't complain,” although already I could tell he wasn't the type to complain.

“Look,” he said, “if you really don't want me to come, I won't.”

But the idea of him leaving saddened me. “All right. Just don't give me a hard time,” I warned him.

He followed me to the mouse room. The odor was strangely appealing—pungent and sweet—even as it made you want to throw up. I flicked on the light, and the mice rustled in their shavings.

“Which of the poor bastards have Valentine's?” Willie asked.

I could see he pitied these mice. His father had died of Valentine's, yet he considered me cruel to breed these mice and study them. I yanked a cage from a shelf. In one corner, an emaciated white mouse stood with its head cocked and its hind legs rooted to the floor. Every part of it trembled. The mouse kept wringing its paws.

Then, as we watched, it sprang up in the air. The other mice shrieked. It leaped about, flailing. Then it froze in midtwirl. I waited to see how Willie would react. Some people were offended to share a disease with a mouse, to watch it parody an illness that had killed someone they loved. I felt that way myself. But mostly I regarded these mice as a gift.

He set the mouse on his huge palm and stroked it. The mouse seemed to thaw. It took a few tentative steps. To keep it from falling off, Willie pinched its tail. But by then, the mouse had frozen again.

“If they're so messed up,” he asked, “how do you force them to breed?”

“We don't force them,” I said. “The mice that are just coming down with symptoms, they'll jump on anything.”

He laughed that awful bray of his. The mice skittered in their cages. “Yup,” he said. “That sounds like my dad.”

I was appalled that he could joke about his father's illness, although I might have been better off if I could have joked about my mother's. “Actually,” I said, “we're not sure what these mice have. The symptoms look like Valentine's, but we're only guessing it's a mouse version of the disease.”

Willie patted the mouse. “Are two Valentine's genes worse than one?”

Again, I felt the urge to kiss him. “That's it,” I said. “That's the million-dollar question. If the mouse gets two shots of the gene, maybe the symptoms will be so bad we'll be able to see what's going on, what's responsible for killing all those brain cells. The thing is, most of the homozygotes are so screwed up they die at birth.”

“Pardon me if this is a stupid question,” he said, and that made me doubt it would be. “The holes in the brain? The way a person's speech slows down?” I knew what he was going to ask. Even in his earliest movies, his father had chewed each word as deliberately as he chewed his cigarette. “Was the way my dad talked part of who he was? Or was it part of his sickness?”

I didn't know what to say. My mother had slipped gradually from not talking much to not talking at all. Her tendency to be withdrawn might have been a part of who she was—she had grown up watching her family die. Or her withdrawal had been a warning. To think about the brain—all those tangled neurons, the neurotransmitters carrying messages across all those synaptic clefts, the enzymes breaking down those transmitters, over and over, so the cells wouldn't keep firing—gave me such vertigo I
could barely keep from reeling. What was a human soul if it could be so radically changed by a minuscule stretch of DNA? And how could this one protein make a once-polite woman spout such horrifying invectives, obsess over sex, and lose interest in her own daughters?

“It probably takes more than a single gene to make a person who she is,” I said. I pulled down another cage and rubbed the swollen belly of the pregnant mouse inside. Given the laws of probability, a quarter of her pups ought to be born with two normal copies of the gene for Valentine's. Half would inherit one copy of the good gene and one copy of the bad. And a quarter of the pups ought to inherit two bad copies. If we could save these homozygotes before their mother ate them, we would drop them in preservative and give them to Achiro to dissect.

“So,” Willie asked, “who kills the poor suckers?”

I wanted to say that I hated killing mice. One of our postdocs, Lew Schiff, was an Orthodox Jew who had written a prayer—in Hebrew, no less—which he murmured each time he sacrificed a victim, “sacrificed” being the word we all used, maybe as a euphemism, or maybe because it was the perfect word to describe the solemnity a person felt in performing such an act. I wanted to say that a mouse grew from nothing in a mere nineteen days. Each whisker was a tube with a single nerve cell that allowed the mouse to feel its way in the dark. The fibers in its tongue were a net of fine muscle running this way and that so the mouse could move its tongue in two directions instead of one.

I lifted a mouse by its neck. “You yank them by the tail. The spinal cord snaps. Then you pickle the brain in picric
acid. You soak it in wax. That makes it easier for Achiro to slice.”

He clucked his tongue. “You're one tough cookie, aren't you.”

No, I thought, I wasn't. The question was why I wanted him to think I was. I switched off the light. “I just hope they don't deliver while I'm brunching at the Ritz.”

“So,” he asked, “what's your sister like? You never did get around to telling me.”

Laurel,
I thought. I was so looking forward to her visit. A friend was lending us his sailboat, and I wanted nothing more than to be with my sister in the middle of the Charles, alone. To watch her hands loop a knot. To see her smile that brilliant smile and reveal the little bridge of flesh from her upper lip to her gum, which Laurel thought was repulsive but I thought was so charming it brought a catch to my heart. There wasn't anyone else I would have allowed to interfere with my work. But if taking my sister sailing meant some mouse pups got eaten, I would need to run that risk.

“She can be a real pain in the ass,” I admitted. “But I love her more than just about anyone else on this planet.”

“Sounds like my son,” he said, then rubbed his eyes like a sleepy child.

“There's one more thing I need to do,” I said. “You can leave, if you want to.”

No, he said, he intended to stick around to the bitter end.

Well, I said, if he was sure. And then I surprised myself by telling him that it was nice to have the company.

The entrance to the darkroom was a cylindrical booth with a revolving door. Only one person was meant to go through at a time, but Willie squeezed in behind me. Even in the darkroom, we kept brushing against each other. I busied myself developing a blot. I had chopped up the DNA of a family with Valentine's—not the Drurys, but an Irish family of five who lived in East Boston. If all the diseased siblings showed the same arrangement of lines on their films, but not the same pattern as their healthy sister, I would have a candidate for a probe. The odds that this would happen were one in eight. Still, as I slipped the film in the developer, hope pricked my scalp. We stood there and waited. Willie smelled of chocolate milk. Finally, I slid the blot in a tank of fixative, pulled the string dangling from the bulb, and saw that the film was black. Maybe someone had exposed the paper. Or I had accidentally left out a step. Once before, I had forgotten to tag the DNA with radioactivity.

“I take it that's not the way a blot is supposed to look,” he said.

It was all I could do to keep from crying.

“Did it ever occur to you things might go a little easier if you'd get some sleep?” He drew a breath. “You know, you could come to my place in New Hampshire. I'll be driving after brunch. It's not that far. And, well, it's beautiful out there. Think of it as a little R and R. I could drive you back Monday morning.”

“Oh, I can't,” I said. “I'm taking my sister sailing. And there's this blot . . . I'm going to need to try it again before I go home.”

“I get the idea.” He sounded less angry than sad. “Me, I'm only human. I'm about to fall asleep.” He stepped into the revolving door. “Thanks for showing me around. It's been interesting. I mean that.” Then he spun the door behind him and, like a magician twirling his cape, he disappeared.

The darkroom seemed too big. I went out to the lounge to make myself some coffee, but the grounds missed the filter. My hands weren't steady enough to pour a new gel. Vic's office was dark. Even Cesar had gone home.

Only Achiro remained in the lab. He was talking on the phone in a soft, mournful voice, punctuated now and then by a shrill
hai!
, as if he had been punched in the stomach. The mask hung around his neck, but he was cupping his eyes with one hand. Tears coursed down his cheeks, more tears than I had ever seen a man weep, even at my mother's funeral. Someone in Achiro's family must be dying, I thought. But I didn't want to ask who it was, forcing him to simplify his grief by expressing it in English. I backed out of the room, then wheeled my bike through the harshly lit corridors, the gears clicking hollowly, the tires marking a line down Cesar's clean floor.

I had been disappointed when my father said he planned to spend the next day, Saturday, at a meeting with Honey. “Sorry, doll,” he said. “This merger's a tricky business. Got to get all the IVR board members in the same room as the VDS gals and hammer out the details. This thing isn't done right, there're going to be a lot of ruffled feathers. You understand? You okay with all this?”

I told him I was fine. Do what you need to do, I said.
What you want to do,
I might have added, knowing my father would do what he wanted only if it coincided with what needed to be done.

“You going into the lab today?” he asked, and I told him I was, because it comforted him to hear this. In fact, I stopped by for only a minute to check on my mice. They hadn't given birth, so I climbed on my bike and rode to the open-air produce stalls at the Haymarket. I wandered from one stand to the next, picking the wispiest asparagus, the most densely leafed artichokes, sniffing peaches and melons, choosing cherries one by one and sifting through the green beans to make sure the vendor hadn't slipped in
brown ones at the bottom. I knew all the tricks. The summer I turned ten, I had sat on our lawn in Mule's Neck selling surplus corn and tomatoes from my mother's garden. Nothing pleased me more than my father stopping by on his way home from work. “How much you rake in today?” he would ask, and I would count out the profits, piling cent upon cent and smiling at our secret—that vegetables weren't only something to eat, but merchandise to sell.

Now, in Boston, I ran a thumb along the silky skins of red and yellow peppers in a way that had little to do with mere buying. I spent half a week's stipend on flowers. “My sister loves flowers,” I told the bent Vietnamese grandmother who sold me the bouquets. She wrapped my purchases in paper and I slipped them in my backpack, the blooms bursting from its mouth, then pedaled to a grocery in the cobbled North End.

“My sister is coming to dinner tomorrow night,” I told the woman behind the counter. I chose a thick chunk of milky mozzarella. A pound of Parmesan. Those black olives. That oil.

She wiped her hands on her bosom. “Your sister. That's good. Most Americans, they don't know what it is to have a sister.” She ladled out the cheese—it floated in its tub like the softest white island. She slid the olives and jar of oil in a bag, then tossed in a handful of powdery white cookies. “For your sister,” she said. “She'll like them.”

I rode along the river, avoiding the cracks and bumps so my fruit wouldn't bruise, then stopped at the MIT boathouse to make sure I could borrow my friend's boat the next day. “My sister won a regatta her freshman year
at Cornell,” I told the sunburned young man minding the dock. “She had never even seen a sailboat before she went away to school.”

He helped an overweight older man in a neon pink life preserver climb up from his boat. “Me and my buddy Bosco over there could give you two girls a run for your money. We could have ourselves our own little regatta.”

“Oh no,” I told him. “Thanks. My sister and I haven't seen each other in a very long time. We just want to, you know, drift.”

Back at my apartment, I arranged the bouquets in beakers from the lab. Then I started cooking. In those days, I often cooked dinner for my friend Maureen, who would never admit how much trouble it required for someone in a wheelchair to cook a good meal. Today, I planned to cook fresh fettuccini in my own marinara, made with basil and oregano clipped from the plants I grew on my fire escape. If the recipe was successful, I would serve the same meal to my sister the following night.

For the rest of that afternoon I chopped, peeled, and stirred, glad this one day to be able to see my ingredients, to be reasonably sure that if I followed all the steps the procedure would work. I thought of nothing more profound than the way the seeds spilled from a just-cut tomato or the poignant, bitter taste of garlic when my finger touched my lips. Just as the sauce was thickening, the intercom buzzed. My apartment could be reached only by a steep set of stairs. I loved the privacy and the view, but whenever Maureen came to visit, I felt selfish for living in such an inaccessible place.

I raced down the two flights.

“Hi,” she said, “what's cooking?”

“Spaghetti,” I said, though that wasn't what she meant. I scooped her from her chair and carried her up the steps. It wasn't hard—she weighed thirty pounds less than my mother had weighed when I used to carry her. But unlike my mother, who was stricken mute by her illness, Maureen kept up a constant chatter, pretending that being carried by a friend was an everyday thing. Which, for her, it was.

“So tell me,” Maureen said. “Yosef saw you in the B and B with some hunk no one knows. I called you at one in the morning and you didn't answer. Isn't this something I should know about? Don't I tell you everything?”

The fact was, she did. Maureen talked about sex more than any woman I had ever met. Her hair was spiky and short, the color of a goldfish. She was the first person I knew who wore more than one earring in each ear. She collected glitzy shoes—the pair she had on that night were ruby red, like Dorothy's. I set her in a chair beside my table, hoping the stuffed artichokes would divert her from asking more questions. But all that happened was she asked those same questions with her mouth full of crabmeat. “Didn't I predict this? All that crazy talk about never getting involved with anyone.”

I told her that the man Yosef had seen me with was going to be my new stepbrother.

“Stepbrother?” Maureen said. “Oh, sweetie. There are plenty of real brothers I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them. You think this stepbrother of yours asked to see the lab because he's interested in fruit flies?”

I didn't want to believe her. I thought—I knew—Willie's interest in my work was sincere. Besides, didn't she realize that with our combined chances of carrying the gene for Valentine's, Willie Land was absolutely the worst possible choice for any man I could get involved with?

“You're not going to tell me anything?” Maureen pouted. “I guess you won't be needing these.” She took out a pair of fishnet stockings and laid these across her lap. Then she lifted her wineglass. The arthritis had gnarled her knuckles and her wrists, but she had learned to get by, to accomplish what she had to. In the lab, she lifted beakers by cradling them between her in-turned hands. This gesture seemed exotic, the way a movie star might smoke a cigarette in a more sophisticated manner than an ordinary woman. She held her fountain pen slanted awkwardly between her thumb and first finger, but the script in her lab journal was elegant and precise. She lifted her glass and took a sip, then asked me when I was going to be seeing this stepbrother of mine again.

The next morning, I said. For brunch.

“Brunch?
”
The word must have sounded as strange from my own lips as it had from my father's. “I hope I'm not standing in the way of your plans for tonight.” Maureen sniffed. “I mean, if you'd rather go dancing with your stepbrother.”

Maureen and I went dancing all the time. The first time she had asked me to go with her, I had assumed she needed company. The nightclub might have some stairs, or the bathroom might be inaccessible. But later I came to think she was using her disability to force me to leave the lab.

“Don't be silly. Of course we're going dancing. Just wait here and I'll go in and change.”

“Nothing too risqué!” Maureen shouted from the kitchen.

She made the same joke every week. “Aren't you ever going to give up?” I shouted back.

“I'll give up when you start having sex on a regular basis.”

“What's the point of having sex if it can't lead to anything?” I yelled. I knew I was putting her at a disadvantage by making her shout, but I stayed in my room.

“You don't have to marry every guy you sleep with!”

I went back to the kitchen.

“Why, jeans and a T-shirt, what a surprise.”

“Listen,” I said, “it's not so weird the way I act. A lot of people at risk for Valentine's decide not to get married.”

“That doesn't mean they have to give up sex. It isn't healthy.” Maureen fiddled with an earring, which she always did when she talked about sex.

I reminded her that she was a biologist. What did she think was going to happen if I didn't have sex? Would all those sex juices get bottled up inside me and explode? What I didn't admit was that my own theory was equally bizarre: the less often a person had sex, the more she thought about having sex, and, since sexual obsession was one symptom of Valentine's, it was best for a woman in my position to have sex with someone she didn't really care about every few months. “Besides,” I said, “the last thing I need is to get pregnant.”

“Ever hear of birth control?”

I reminded her it didn't always work.

“Ever hear about abortions?”

That's all I needed, I said. To have an abortion.

“So have a kid!” she said.

Have a kid.
I nearly cried. From the moment I had learned that every baby mammal grew inside its mother, I was amazed by the prospect that one day I, too, would be granted this privilege. Once, when I was young, I had glimpsed my mother nursing my newborn sister, and I couldn't take away my eyes. I couldn't stop thinking about the miraculous idea of feeding someone from my own body. I never lost that image. Sitting in a classroom, studying in the library, running blots in a lab, I would slip into a daydream in which I was sitting in a field nursing a newborn. I imagined taking a toddler for a walk, listening to all the strange, garbled ideas he or she thought to say. The truth was, I had loved taking care of my baby sister, and I wanted more than anything to have a child.

Well, Maureen said, why didn't I just assume that I didn't have the disease and get on with my life? It was a gamble, she said. Like whether God exists. If you led your life being good and then found out God didn't exist, you would kick yourself for having missed all those exciting times.

“You call that logic?” I said, then started to explain why her argument made no sense.

“It's Saturday night,” she said. “I am not going to sit here listening to a lecture on logic.”

But I wouldn't give up that easily. “Here's an analogy,” I said, although I usually hated when scientists used analogies. Nothing was enough like anything else to warrant
such comparisons. Nothing important, at any rate. I asked Maureen what she would do if her doctor said she had cancer. You would go nuts, I said, wouldn't you? But eventually you would come to terms with it. You would get on with your life. Now, imagine if you felt perfectly fine, but you knew that any minute someone was going to jump out from behind a bush and kill you. Wouldn't you think about dying all the time?”

“No! I would just make sure I didn't walk by any bushes!”

I glared. She stuck out her tongue. “What am I going to do with you?” I asked.

She batted her eyelashes. “You could take me dancing.”

The tights she had brought me lay crumpled beside our plates. I stretched them across my hands. The silk was thin and webbed, with fake pearls sewn into the pattern like dewdrops.

“Oh, all right,” I said. I went back in my room and found a denim miniskirt I hadn't worn since high school—I could swear it still smelled of pot—and a stretchy black top puckered with elastic. Rolling around in my desk was a tube of lipstick Laurel had left behind; I smoothed some on my lips and rubbed the rest on my cheeks. Then I slipped on a pair of platform sandals I had bought for my college graduation eleven years earlier.

“Wow,” Maureen said. “Madame Curie meets the Mod Squad.”

“I told you it was no use.”

“I was kidding,” she said. “You look great.”

I didn't believe her, but I couldn't face the thought of
putting on those jeans and that T-shirt again. I carried her down the stairs, taking every step carefully, uncertain in those sandals, and set her back in her wheelchair. The motorized lift on her van levitated us noisily inside. Maureen couldn't turn her head, so I sat in the passenger seat and warned her of approaching cars. The way people drove in Boston, I was afraid she might get killed. But I couldn't go everywhere with her, could I?

We found a handicapped spot just outside the club, then got in the line and waited. The bouncer didn't seem to notice us, even when Maureen was sitting right in front of his beery gut. The club was in a basement, and Maureen told him that we would need his help getting down the stairs.

He shook his head no.

“No?” Maureen said. “What do you mean no?”

“No wheelchairs.” He stamped the next couple's hands.

“You have a law against wheelchairs?”

“No law,” he said. “I just don't want to get a hernia.”

The couple behind us pushed past us. I wanted to seize the wheelchair and carry it down myself, but I had tried this once, at an entrance to the T, and nearly dropped Maureen down the longest flight of stairs in Boston. Most of all, I wanted to punch the bouncer. What a relief it would be to get angry on someone else's behalf. For all her feistiness, Maureen rarely showed anger. “How can I?” she told me once. “I never know whose help I might need.” This was true of my own life as well. I couldn't show anger toward my father, or Susan Bate, or Yosef or Vic. If Laurel came
down with the disease, I would regret any harsh words I had ever said to her.

I told the bouncer that if he didn't help me carry my friend's chair down the steps, I would report him.

“Yeah?” he said. “To who?”

“Just tell me this,” Maureen said. “If I were inside the club, and I drank too much, and I picked a fight with someone, you would throw me out, wouldn't you?”

The bouncer shrugged. “I guess so.”