Thoughts popped up while I shut down my computer: Why that particular memory? Why that event and those feelings, and why at that precise moment?
Questions like those were our lab’s bread and butter. They stayed with me on my drive to Regina’s house, at least halfway there, until other ideas took hold.
Regina Bellette was a few years out of the University of Michigan with a double major in chemistry and poetry, soon to return to Ann Arbor for her Ph.D. As far as I was concerned, her best assets were her cheeks, two moon pies round and white. Who knows why they did it for me. Probably some association with the girls I remembered from my adolescence, those peach-cheeked chorus singers in the movies.
Regina was a confident, contemporary woman who despaired of her time and place, a girl about town on an island of hikers. She had a crooked nose, curly hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Very little of it was to her liking. She bemoaned her athlete’s arms, the strong cord of her thighs. Regina had grown up on a dairy farm in Shelby, Michigan, the daughter of hippie scientists without a television in the living room. Their chores she escaped with books and magazines: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters,
Vogue
,
Sassy
. In Maine, Regina was a devotee of women’s fashion on a graduate student’s budget, particularly vintage pieces from the 1930s. I’d commented that she was showing signs of obsession, but secretly I admired all that thought put into beauty. Regina was simmering with ambition. She could be haughty, but not for long. She was quick to care and empathized reflexively, a headstrong girl of the midwestern mold and improving upon it: polite and grounded, but also willful, a tempest. Publicly modest but privately, in her bedroom’s half-light, more imaginative.
“How do you afford them?” I asked one afternoon. I was lying on top of her comforter. A pair of shoes, poised in tissue, had caught my eye: two gold high heels studded with costume jewelry.
“Chéri,”
Regina said, and grabbed the box, plopped down next to me, and spun one shoe like a mobile above my chest, “it’s not about the having. It’s about the hunt.”
Regina Bellette, my obsession, and one whom I regularly failed to please. Her rented house was on the outskirts of Otter Creek, one of Mount Desert Island’s smaller villages, with a year-round population approaching six. Not where you’d expect to find the great La Loulou, but then rarely in her bedroom did Regina seem her age. Instead, she was more like a Toulouse-Lautrec dancer transplanted to the sticks: innocence and worldliness slouching in a complex bustier. I never knew where Regina’s interest in burlesque had begun, but as a fellow researcher I admired her dedication to the data, to the vintage Hollywood fan magazines she printed off the Internet and studied closely.
She was Barbara Stanwyck one week, Betty Grable the next.
“Listen to this,” Regina said one night over the phone. “Straight from
The Wall Street Journal
, guess on average how much Parisian women spend on lingerie, what percentage of their clothing budgets?”
“Five percent.”
“Twenty-five percent.
Chéri
, why wasn’t I born in France?”
But La Loulou was a role reserved for our secret Friday afternoons. The Regina I saw more often was at work. In 1936, a rich Danish immigrant, Søren Soborg, donated enough money to the State of Maine to seed a campus on Mount Desert Island, hoping to find a cure for his daughter, who had been blinded and deafened by a mysterious illness, later identified as osteopetrosis, marble bone disease. Over the years, The Soborg Institute broke ground in genetic science, particularly in gerontology, with an emphasis on Alzheimer’s disease. By the time I was being recruited from NYU, Soborg was setting pace with the field’s biggest leaps. Like the rest of academia, though, it hewed to certain standards of professor-student relations. On campus we pretended not to know each other. Regina didn’t work directly for me, but research fellows were occasionally shared between labs and they fell under our collective oversight. Incidents had occurred. Precedents had been diligently constructed by lawyers and administrators. I’d looked it up in the employees’ manual back in April:
Any sexual relationship between instructors and students jeopardizes the integrity of the educational process by creating a conflict of interest and may lead to an inhospitable learning environment for other employees
.
But sex between us, I would have told my jury, was never as vital as La Loulou’s performance. Especially now that I’d lost my erection three times in as many weeks.
It was dusk on a beautiful June Friday, warm and bright. I found Regina propped up on an elbow with her legs fanned out over the yellow duvet. Pouty and dressed in royal blue lace. The curtain was drawn, the lamp shaded with a scarf. After half an hour, we both ignored what hadn’t occurred. Regina poured herself a glass of wine and slid away. Twilight snuck in through the window and brought the forest, the smell of thawing ground. I still had another appointment that evening, but I lay there in my underwear, staring at Regina’s ceiling.
How many other men had occupied my place? Was there a Thursday date? One who could make love properly?
On the wall was a poster of a young female singer dressed like a Japanese robot, her hair tied up in two buns. I reached out for Regina, but she snorted through her nose and scooted away, slurping her wine.
“So how’s work?” she asked, crawling back.
“Fine. You?”
Truthfully I was thinking about that beach moment in Puerto Rico. I remembered feeling slow to the rescue.
“Oh, please, come on,” Regina said, changing into an old T-shirt with “Kiss Me” scrawled on the front, promising “The Cure.”
“What?”
“At least complain about someone. You never talk.”
“Maybe I’m not the gossip type.”
“Aren’t you high on the hog.”
Regina wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled. “Well, don’t you wonder what people say? Aren’t you curious?”
“Believe me,” I said, “by now I am too old to care.”
Regina stared at me as if she wanted to share something, then turned away. Not many women, I thought, can appear wise and naive simultaneously.
“All right, what?”
“Forget it.”
She unclasped two barrettes and threw them at the wall, one at a time.
“Well, what do you want to talk about?”
“Oh, Christ. You know you sound—” She watched me for a minute while I dressed. “
Chéri
, the least you could have done was clean your wife beater.”
“My what?”
“Your wife beater.”
“What’s a wife beater?”
“Oh, don’t tell me.”
Regina laughed deep in her throat and pulled her T-shirt down against the breeze. Such chubby baby cheeks, I thought, staring from my position by the door, and grabbed my keys off the dresser.
I was leaving when she said, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?”
Out of the blue, just like that.
So flat it could have been her alarm clock going off.
Friday evenings, I had a time-honored date with Aunt Betsy in Northeast Harbor, preceding Regina by several years. Aunt Betsy was virtually my only companion. She was an eighty-six-year-old gossip who shredded other people’s lives between her fingers over breakfast. Her family had long inhabited Mount Desert Island and she knew everyone, year-rounders like me as well as the summer people, and collected our personal affairs not for wampum, but like a pack rat, for the joy of hoarding. No one was beyond her reach. Her dispatch board was a dining table cluttered with newspapers, coffee cups turned into ashtrays, and a large black office phone. In town, she’d pick up tidbits at the post office, the hardware store, and from the owner’s twin daughters at Pine Tree Market, who’d inform her which customers were doing what and to whom. As an amateur anthropologist, Betsy studied misbehavior. She tracked her stories doggedly and did not hesitate to use them. She loved playing vigilante. A few years earlier, when one of her neighbors, Tim Winston, hit the lotto, he’d secretly financed a breast augmentation for his girlfriend, while his wife, Maureen, still worked two jobs. During the winter, Maureen had shoveled out Betsy’s car a few times and helped carry in her groceries. When Betsy got wind of things, Maureen soon was filing for her share, represented by one of the area’s most expensive divorce attorneys.
But Aunt Betsy didn’t know everything about us. If she suspected where I’d been before dinner, I would have seen it in her face. Aunt Betsy rarely blinked. Her eyes behind her glasses were always wet.
“You look terrible,” Betsy wheezed. She patted my arm. “Did you watch the tennis?”
“I have a job,” I said. It came out short. After Regina’s, though, I wasn’t in the mood.
“Not much else besides, I’d say.”
That made me laugh.
“Anyway,” she said, “you’re too skinny, dear.”
We were standing together on the front porch at Cape Near. From Betsy, “dear” was pronounced “dee-ah.” “Work” came out “wairk,” “hard” was “hahrd.” Her accent was a classic mid-Atlantic, a coastal Mainer’s, except with a highbrow, Anglican lilt. “Now, Agassi, the poor boy,” Betsy said, “you should have seen him, up against some Croatian, oh just
awful
, Victor. And this one wears his hair long to rub it in. You know how Andre shaves his head now, just like you, dear, well, poor Andre!” She fluttered her hands around her hat. “He barely squeaked it out. You can tell it’s his final season. Krackalovic, Milokavic, some nonsense. Victor, weren’t your people Croatian?”
They were, but I wasn’t listening. The gin on Betsy’s breath said we wouldn’t be drinking the wine I’d brought. Mixing her liquors, Betsy always said, made her blue.
Typical of the neighborhood and of Maine’s coastal resorts, Cape Near was an oversize shingled cottage, a musty and disjointed Victorian with cedar siding. The name, coined by Betsy’s father, referred to a cove past the front yard. In August, the smells turned rank indoors. A cigarette was always burning somewhere. The area’s heyday dated back to Aunt Betsy’s teen years, when Mount Desert was able to peer down its nose at Newport or Tuxedo Park as an enclave for the wealthy. Now the house just felt deserted.
I fixed drinks and went outside to the terrace, where the lawn was overgrown, rolling down a hill wild with beach plums. Sounds of summer rang through the dusk: children playing a few yards over, somewhere behind the hedgerow. And then I sat down, covered my eyes, and slipped back to that bedroom in Otter Creek, halfway across the island, to the late-afternoon revue starring Ms. Bellette, twenty-five, and her headlining question: Did I or did I not “give a fuck” about her?
It was all a bit too much.
“So how have you been feeling?” I called out.
“Stuff it, Victor,” Betsy shouted. “You’re a medicine man now? Why, poor Agassi, think how he’s doing.”
“Isn’t he married to Steffi Graf?”
“Who’s no Brooke Shields.”
Betsy turned up huffing through the screen door. “Who would you pick?”
“Brooke Shields.”
“Now to be fair, Graf was a
marvelous
player.” Betsy paused to reflect. “In the modern game, Graf was best, bar none. Review any numbers you like, I don’t care if she lacked rivals. Now this was before the Williams sisters powered through,
n’est-ce pas
, but Graf really played like the men did, you know, and very much to her credit. But that nose of hers, imagine waking up to that in the morning.”
Regina’s nose was crooked in the middle from a childhood break. I unconsciously rubbed the stubble on my head, where it prickled around the crown. It had been Regina’s suggestion that I start buzzing my hair, a younger look for an older man. “Time to ditch the power doughnut,” she’d said.
Betsy settled herself in an upholstered patio chair.
“So how are you, really?”
“You know,” I said, “busy.”
She puckered her lips. “One day it will be important to surprise me.”
“I have a grant due soon, on top of one we just submitted.”
“You’ve had a grant due since you were twenty.”
“Well, you asked.”
She picked her teeth with the side of a fingernail. “And how’s the swimming?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Are you worried about something?”
“Be honest, dear, am I all you’ve got?”
“For what it’s worth.”
“Oh, I’m nosy, I know,” she said a moment later, gazing down the lawn, like we’d been lying out tanning all afternoon. “Now, Victor, did I
tell
you about Margaret’s David? So, apparently David ran his Mercedes into the picnic table again.”
Behind the trees, the sunset was really something, going from hibiscus to rose. Someone should take a picture, I thought. Sell a postcard to the tourists. As a destination island, we attracted four million visitors a year to smell the lupine. It was Aunt Betsy who’d told me how, around the end of the nineteenth century, a planning committee had renamed the town Bar Harbor, to attract rusticator money and sound more resortlike.
Previously, the town was called Eden.
Betsy reached out and pinched me.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you, I found a poem of Bill’s you’ll like. Remind me, I’ll give it to you when you leave.”
“That hurt, you know,” I said, and massaged my hand.
“You’re a fart. Now go inside and set the table.”
Funny thing was, Betsy Gardner was Sara’s aunt, not mine. Yet I was the chauffeur to Betsy’s doctor appointments, her lunch date on Mother’s Day, her every-week Friday-night special.
The Gardners had been some of Mount Desert Island’s earliest settlers. They’d gotten a head start on tourism by planting hotels on bedrock, and then turning enough profit so they could bet on steel. Come another generation, the family focused on their daughters: socializing in higher circles, breeding with Hookes and Pughs. There’d been an admiral, Betsy’s father, whose portrait hung above the guest toilet. He was also the author of a family genealogy he’d self-published in four volumes, a Social Register for the extended Gardner clan of which Betsy had recently bequeathed me a copy. My own story wasn’t much to note, just a chain of Long Island pharmacists and roofers trailing back to the Balkans. I was named Victor after my mother’s father, a wife beater no one liked to sit near during holidays. My last name, Aaron, was incidental: it had been assigned to an ancestor by an immigration clerk, since Cikojević didn’t sound much like baseball.