You Lost Me There (3 page)

None of my relatives ever had a head shot of FDR above the fireplace, signed,
“Dear Betsy, who ever swam with more grace? Adoring, Franklin.
”

From her end of the dining table, Betsy related the scoop of the week: A famous fashion designer was whispering about dredging Bass Harbor so that he could park a yacht off his backyard. Fishermen were outraged and neighbors were bearing arms. It would be the scandal of the summer once it broke in the newspapers, Betsy said, with town, gown, and sea rights in a single basket.

And all I heard was, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?” as if Regina were throwing out a clue for a crossword puzzle.

More than cartoons, more than an addiction to diet soda, most researchers I knew shared a knack for submerging into musing—or worrying, to be honest—at the cost of social graces. We were well-trained minds, but poor dinner guests.

Betsy shouted, “You must know Martin Filsberger, Victor, for Christ’s sake!”

“What?”

“The
Washington Post
reporter? No, you’re too busy with a microscope up your fanny.” Betsy threw her napkin down and lit a cigarette. “See here,” she said, “now, Martin was married to Jane Paul. Sort of a canine girl, Jane, with a snout. Martin and Jane used to summer in Pretty Marsh until Martin started running the Jerusalem office. But listen”—she blew smoke across the phone—“one afternoon I ran into Martin at the post office. Now, remember, this was the year of Monica Lewinsky, so I said, ‘Martin, what is the
story
here? Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. The man was an
Eagle Scout
. What in God’s name’s happening?’ And Martin took my elbow, we walked outside, and he said, ‘Betsy, I am forced to swear you to secrecy or my editor will have my neck,’ and I said, ‘Martin, if anyone can keep a secret, it’s not me.’ And he liked that, he gave me a nice smile, he leaned down, and whispered in my ear, ‘It wasn’t just a blow job. It was
one hell
of a blow job.’ And oh, I was dying, Victor, what a card, what a
card
!”

Betsy made off for the liquor cabinet. A boat horn tootled from the harbor down the road. Outside, through the window, the night was full of fireflies and searchlights, children running around the street playing flashlight tag. I did the dishes while Aunt Betsy paced the kitchen, stamping the tiles with her cane.

“So why don’t you come out to Cranberry this summer?”

“What? You know I can’t do that.”

Little Cranberry was a smaller island south of Mount Desert, where Betsy kept a cottage.

“The camp is just to pieces,” Betsy said. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t go out this summer, is that what you think?” She stopped by my elbow. “But you must come, Victor, visit for a week. You could commute by ferry.”

“I’m working all hours as it is. Plus, I have a conference in New York.”

“New York isn’t going anywhere. Oh, listen to me for once. You promised.”

I stared down at my hands.

“When? Exactly when did I promise?”

She ashed her cigarette into the sink. “Anyway, you work too much as it is. You’ll be reminded that Uncle Bill worked too much, too. Aside from work, Victor, what have you got? Just look at your forehead.”

“What’s wrong with my forehead?”

“Dear, you are inhumane.” Betsy sat down and folded her arms in her lap like two mannequin limbs. She’d won, but the fight had drained her spirit. I wondered if one of her spies had told her something about Regina. Was this how she’d exhibit jealousy, by nagging?

I finished the dishes, poured a scotch, and escorted Betsy out to the screened porch. We watched TV on a wheelie cart, an hour with the great Belgian detective Hercule Poirot while he investigated murders on public television. At a scary point, Betsy grabbed my hand.

“Tell you what,” she said when the program finished, “I found an old draft of Sara’s movie that she gave me. You should have it. That one I saw at the Criterion.”

This was a new habit of Aunt Betsy’s, giving away things she’d unearthed around the house.

“The Hook-Up,”
I said.

“Shame she never wrote another.”

“She wrote several, you know that. They just weren’t produced.”

“Well, I never saw them,” said Betsy. “I’ll give it to you with Bill’s poem. Remind me.”

She squeezed my fingers and held on. It was understood but never spoken aloud that our Friday-night dates, figuring out how Poirot could know so much from so little, were our weekly shift at the widows’ walk. Seven years earlier, Betsy’s husband, Uncle Bill, had died from a stroke at the Harbor Club. Four and a half years after that, on January 5, 2004, Sara, my wife and Betsy’s niece, was killed in a car accident on the island, above Seal Harbor. We’d been married thirty-three years. Pipes had burst in a summer cottage and flooded the street, and Sara spun out, crashing her BMW through a metal barrier.

She’d grown up on the island and had known the roads as well as anyone, but this was black ice, impossible to spot.

At the time, Sara had just returned from six weeks in California. Our marriage was going through a rocky patch, and what could never happen became indelible over the telephone. Instant history. Called to the hospital, I cried over her face. I lost my balance in a corridor. Betsy was driving me home that evening when I insisted on visiting the accident site. It was a curve of road with a southern view, where in daylight you might see cruise ships. The full moon made the ocean look frozen.

Back at the house were groceries to be unpacked and Sara’s Ray-Bans by the telephone. Near the answering machine was an envelope from American Airlines. We’d been scheduled to go to Italy in February for a two-month sabbatical. A second honeymoon. She’d thought of it on the return flight from Los Angeles.

According to the police report, Sara’s not wearing a seat belt was a determining factor in her death. It was the kind of detail she might have used in one of her movies. Sara never wore a seat belt. She refused to, all her life, and I let it slide, the way some spouses will tolerate a smoker. But it drove me crazy. A year before the accident, on a trip to Boston, she’d proudly labeled not wearing a seat belt “my thing.”

It remained the clearest thing I could hear her saying.

 

 

 

Regina’s voice played louder than the radio on my drive home from Betsy’s. For our Friday afternoons, I’d been ready to sign over my house and my car, chop off my hands and leave them as offerings, remove my head, extract the calcium from my hips, whatever Regina found of value. Now, driving through the dark, I was prepared to toss it all out the window.

For two and a half months, Regina and I had had our own island. But I’d had that before, for thirty years. She’s twenty-five, I thought, she wears corsets for fun, no wonder she’s moody. She needs a companion who can share her vocabulary. If you call that a vocabulary.

After showering, I gave “wife beater” over to the Internet. A moment later I was running back upstairs, grabbing my undershirt from the laundry basket. On the stomach was a good-sized stain I hadn’t noticed before.

I thought of my grandfather, the wife beater.

Later, I was falling asleep when the telephone rang.

“Remarkably, she knew they’d fit,” Regina said. “And, I quote, it was for the kick of it. Cute, right? I mean, I found them in her closet and she has the balls to tell me first I left them there, my Givenchy pumps? Right, so she goes on elaborately about how she could never steal from me, and who am I to accuse her, my roommate, the victim everlasting. Finally she apologizes, has a heart attack, now she’s weeping in her room.”

Regina called like this once or twice a week. When I was steering the conversation we’d talk about old movies, the antique stars we loved.

Say nothing, I thought.

“About this afternoon,” I said.

“Okay.”

“About what you said when I left.”

“Well?”

I didn’t know how they put it these days. “Regina, you know I’m crazy about you.”

A pause.

“Victor, why not just call it what it is?”

“Which means what?”

“Never mind.”

She hung up.

The poem and screenplay from Betsy lay on the bedside table. I picked up the screenplay and focused on Sara’s name on the cover.
By Sara Gardner
. Losing someone and being left behind were two separate things. Didn’t matter where I was, any room could become a vacuum. A void to precede mania, or nothing at all.

I picked up Uncle Bill’s poem instead and read the first stanza by moonlight.

Science historically supported Renaissance and monastic types. I was neither. Research in my experience was less a devotion than a small business, a type of farm-league baseball where most of our work was keeping together a decent team and raising money for new uniforms. As a career, it offered little instant gratification. Science was marriage: once the sizzle faded, there needed to be a long-standing love for the discipline to keep you going. Those who worked in academic research for ego fulfillment didn’t last. Without an ardent love for the job, the work was too discouraging. Generally there were three possible outcomes for an experiment: one, the experiment worked and the results were consistent with your hypothesis, occurring about ten percent of the time; two, the experiment worked, but not really, since the results were contrary to the hypothesis, about twenty percent of the time; or three, the experiment didn’t work, and you started over, about seventy percent of the time. Meaning nine times out of ten our experiments didn’t work at all.

Also, the money was better in the private sector, as long as you didn’t mind working on an assembly line. Or so I’d heard.

Monday morning, following a weekend in the lab, I woke up from a dream in which I was begging Bruce Willis for help. Normally my dreams took place in deserts, but this was in my yard, and Bruce Willis was ordering me to start a garden. And Regina was there. Or maybe Regina was the one who said it, playing mistress of the grounds, and Bruce Willis was the gardener. I wasn’t sure.

In the shower, I thought about the night when Sara and I had seen
The Last Boy Scout
in New York. To me, the movie had been garbage, but Sara said she could watch Bruce Willis for hours, preferably bottomless, shot from the rear.

Given Sara’s success in Hollywood, she’d probably had the chance.

At lunch, I joined some other investigators for hamburgers and mutual despair. News of budget cuts was plaguing our in-boxes. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), all of our abbreviations were under attack by the administration’s budget decrees. It meant fewer research proposals would receive funding, fewer grants distributed, and more intense competition for federal dollars. Under normal circumstances, forty percent of grant applications were probably worth funding, and twenty percent made the cut (that twenty percent was called the pay line). During a budget-reduction phase, though, the pay line was cut in half. My own salary was partially covered by Soborg, but the rest came from whatever funds I could raise, a several-million-dollar patchwork covering me, most of my staff, our equipment, the necessary experts I brought in, and all our research.

The mantra for any investigator was “keep the money flowing.” Unfortunately, it seemed as if the White House was trying to turn off the faucet. In particular, it meant the $2.5 million grant my lab had applied for and hoped to hear about soon was no longer so secure.

It was less a fight than usual over who’d pick up the check.

I walked the mile back to campus. Normally exercise was my mood stabilizer. I rose every morning around five, drank a cup of coffee, ate a bowl of cereal with blueberries, and swam exactly sixty laps at the university pool, enabling me to reach my desk by eight with a clear mind and enough energy to work steadily through the evening. But recently the effect wasn’t sticking. Though our standing and accomplishments should have been a comfort, only the work we’d do the next day mattered, and that relied on constant progress and new grants: to afford this piece of high-tech equipment, those bioinformatics. The pressure was difficult to bear. At the peak of my career as one of America’s top Alzheimer’s researchers, I spent most of my hours on my knees, soliciting money or formatting PowerPoint slides.

Ahead of me, two boys were crossing the road, tan college men in flip-flops carrying hiking backpacks. They tossed a Frisbee between them. Half a mile from campus, and my knees hurt.

But I’d come to Soborg from New York, seeking a second wind. Finally a shop of my own, away from my mentors. I didn’t so much run a lab as oversee a small business, a lug-nut factory, staffed by talented thirtysomethings who left me just when I’d brought them up to speed. It was the nature of the industry, same as during my own training: junior scientists were hired, brought into the fold, aided in their research, and just when they were doing their most cutting-edge work, they earned their cap and gown and moved on. I enjoyed seeing them grow in their work and respond to mentorship, but it was a human-resources nightmare. Recruitment alone took up a quarter of my time: interviewing, reviewing, trawling listservs for CVs. Those true moments of scientific pleasure, when you’re working on an experiment at two in the morning, blasting Bob Dylan, and you realize you’ve hit on something, that the experiment’s a success, and it dawns on you that because no one else has ever posed this question in quite the same way, you now know something that no one has known before—that’s when the blood’s pumping, and all the hours, all the sacrifices, assume a much larger value. Those moments were fewer in recent years.