You Lost Me There (20 page)

“Will you stop fidgeting, please?”

“Whatever. You want more wine?”

How much better never to want again!

“Hello? More champagne?”

“Look, I think I’m going to call it a night,” I said.

“What? But this is my celebration dinner!” She’d just pulled the champagne bottle out of the ice bucket. I laughed and gave her a kiss on the forehead and said good night.

From my window in the dark, I watched Cornelia smoke and finish off the champagne, drinking straight from the bottle. I reread Sara’s cards about
The Hook-Up
and replaced them in the drawer.

Cornelia came inside. I listened to her clean. When she went to her bedroom to watch television, I crept outside and lay down in the grass. I stared at the blue light of Cornelia’s TV through her window. Between cricket songs, I could hear dialogue and gunshots. I stared at the fragile constellations, thousands of stars ghost white, white like crystals’ cores. Memories rose on two flanks and erected their battle flags, fled back to their supply column, and re-entrenched. I found a rock in my right hand and tried squeezing it hard enough to make it crack.

Picture entering the brain with the smallest of tweezers, picking out the correct dendrites and giving them a twist.

Regina must have been on the computer because she responded right away.

The next day, I worked at home. When I left, Cornelia was out tanning in the backyard, reading fashion magazines and wearing a yellow bikini. She’d shown up for breakfast refusing to speak to me, but when I made pancakes she wolfed them down.

“How do you not have wireless around here?” she asked.

I sped to Otter Creek through the forest, up the gravel hill. I ignored every inclination to hold back. I called out from the foyer. A sweet smell of marijuana hung in the air. I stood in the bedroom door, seeing Regina in bed in sweats. No makeup, no costume, no music playing. “Did La Loulou retire?” She didn’t answer, just stared at me. I stooped down to kiss her. She smiled slightly and lay back, avoiding my lips. I sat on the side of the mattress and arranged my shoes. The bed creaked as I lay down beside her, wondering if some password was required, some sign someone younger would have known.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

I touched her arm. Light streamed in through the windowpanes, framing her cheeks.

“Show’s canceled,” Regina said. She looked at me with her eyes wide open.

“Okay.”

“So, you
need
me,” she said, sitting up, her cheek against one shoulder. “Define this need.”

“What is this?”

She notched her eyebrows and said it flatly. “What you see is what you get.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Exactly. It’s not what you get, it’s not what you want.” She lay down again and stared at the ceiling.

“Why does it feel every time you come here that it may as well be our first time together?”

“Regina, I had to see you. I care about you.”

“Right now you do. At this moment. At your convenience.”

She covered her face with a pillow. We lay there a couple minutes, the seconds piling up one on top of another. I felt my head fill with pressure. I couldn’t stand it. Regina pulled herself up to a sitting position and whipped a blanket over her legs.

A moment later my focus broke, like a cable splitting. “What do you want from me?” I put on my shoes. “What do you want me to do?” But the shouting just made her more placid, watching me unravel. I stared at the poster of the Japanese singer and scraped it off the wall, actually digging up wallpaper under a fingernail.

A voice came through the door, “Hey, are you okay in there?”

I went out past the green-haired roommate, lost for a moment. From the doorway, before rushing in, the roommate stared back at me, watching me out.

See Regina crying in bed.

See Victor in his car, driving down the gravel.

See Victor parking in a public campground, crying at the steering wheel.

See the perfect human hiking. See the perfect human hiking Pemetic Mountain at a steady pace. He never tires. He is comfortable in the woods, a man with long legs good for hiking, an experienced boy scout.

He is always prepared. He doesn’t fail. He doesn’t ask for much.

He has a pleasant appearance. You would trust him.

See the perfect human reach the top of the mountain. He doesn’t pause for the view. He proceeds back down the trail, carefully following the markers back to his car.

The perfect human never considers why he climbed the mountain.

He is neither thirsty nor hungry. The perfect human wants for nothing.

He does not want at all.

 

 

 

Wednesday afternoon at the lab. Outside, the sky looked scraped clean but for clouds in oatmeal clumps. Inside we had nothing but gray. An ecosystem for artificial, modified life, the lives of Lucy’s mice with genetic code the earth had never before seen.

We’d been checking frequently online for our grant’s priority score, the number that would determine its status. Normally we would’ve gotten the skinny through back channels by that point, but no one had heard anything. Then that afternoon it appeared: a 110, a golden ticket on the grading scale. We’d receive our $2.5 million. We could breathe again. Lucy went out and bought champagne. Word got around and colleagues stopped by with congratulations. Toad, Dr. Low, Soborg’s president, called at the end of the day. “Not easy when purse strings are tight. A job well done, all of you. Now I glanced over the application,” he said, and paused for air. “Wasn’t bad. What I’ll do is stop by this week, I thought perhaps I spotted a few things you may want to consider.”

“You just let me know,” I said, and hung up. I pictured him in his office, reading Viagra offers in his junk mail. Toad was famous around campus for still putting in a regular workweek at age ninety, but he also had horrendous eyesight. He worked at a special computer monitor that made each word the size of a candy bar.

The team celebrated that night at a fancy Italian restaurant in Bar Harbor, my treat. Lucy kept glancing at me from her end of the table, concerned about something, but I didn’t find out what. I picked up the check and went home.

Early Thursday morning, I woke to the sound of breaking glass. At first I thought it was a dream. I looked around in the dark. Then I ran to Cornelia’s room. She was dead asleep, with a fan blowing loudly beside the bed. The sun was just rising. I grabbed a tennis racket from a closet and crept downstairs. The house seemed empty. No sounds. All the windows looked intact.

The Audi’s windshield was resting in two solid pieces on the front seats, held together by some internal glue. Sticking out was a rack of antlers, like conjoined hands of bone. I stood staring at them for half a minute, then wrenched them out and squeezed them into the trunk. I found work gloves and extracted the windshield fragments, stowing them under a tarp in the garage, and brought out the vacuum cleaner.

Half an hour later, I left early, dropped the car off at a garage in Bar Harbor, and walked up to Soborg. The town was just coming to life. Dogs were being walked, squatting to pee.

Kneel, mute animal
, I thought, walking up the hill to campus. I felt especially earthbound all the way to my desk.

Two hours later, I shouted for Lucy and pointed out some mistakes I’d found in a paper we were to publish soon in
Nature
. If she’d been the last person on the edit, I said, why were these errors still slipping through? There was such a thing as lab blindness, I reminded her, where the vision goes dark to what it doesn’t want to see. How many times did we need to go through this?

Lucy didn’t disguise the hurt on her face, but said nothing, took my highlighted pages down from the windows, and walked out, and what I saw in her glance I ignored. I knew her technicians had been going through hell recently with their design experiments, and I could see she was hoarding their anxiety, trying to preserve a calm atmosphere and project confidence.

Lucy wasn’t the best writer on the team, maybe I’d been too harsh.

That afternoon, I went back down into town, picked up my car with its new windshield, drove to Seal Harbor, swam out to Rockefeller Island, came back, then did it again, carving through the water. I dived at the end to see how long I could hold my breath. Not long.

After my second slog, lying on my back, drip-drying on the swimming dock, it occurred to me: Sara wanted me to find those cards.

She’d left them behind as clues.

And yes, I had been hurt, I could admit, when success struck in New York. To be left behind in the apartment, home alone without her in my bed or in my life, right when I was striving to be a better partner. It was no fun, being abandoned at parties where I knew nobody, except I knew who everybody was, because everybody there except me was well known. Sara would say, “Don’t mope, go introduce yourself, look that’s so-and-so from such-and-such.” Of course it wounded me when she no longer sought my counsel, when I was edited out of her creative life. When Mark, and not me, was the one who read her first drafts. When someone else saw her photograph in a magazine before I did, since I hadn’t been told. To be unsure what good I was, and in what capacity as a husband?

And why, when the one job I’d thought I’d done best, better than anyone, was taken away from me, why wasn’t I informed?

Secrecy before discovery. Ambition rather than collaboration.

The summer when Jimmy Carter said in
Playboy
how he’d committed “adultery in my heart,” Sara was deeply disappointed. It was August ’76. We’d rented a cabin for a week in Connecticut on a lake, me and Sara, two mountains of books, a screened-in porch, an antique black-and-white TV, and two ceiling fans that spun only slightly. We were young, we were dopey with love, we even brought the Kama Sutra, but we never cracked it. The heat was too intense, the humidity oppressive. The only solution was to drink rosé with ice cubes (a French friend of Sara’s said that’s how it was done) and swim as much as possible. Most nights, I’d cook dinner, while Sara narrated the evening news, pronouncing her own judgments on world affairs. For a liberal from the avant-garde, Sara often surprised people with some of her more inflexible positions. She took public events personally, especially when loyalty was involved. She was reading in a wicker chair the night that Cronkite gave his report, sounding more stern than usual:
adultery in his heart many times
. I was in the kitchen, doing something in a wok. Politics were never my thing, but Sara was a junkie. She was among the fallen faithful. The indignation she’d felt after Ford’s pardon for Nixon burned her wick until Clinton took office, and then she was outraged all over again. She longed for honor, for Eagle Scouts. She’d been raised on her mother’s and Betsy’s stories of the Roosevelts coming to dinner in Northeast Harbor and taking the girls out sailing. Bobby Kennedy had been a big hero of Sara’s. She always kept a photograph of him sitting at his desk, in a pewter frame next to her hairbrush, his face half in shadow, seemingly injured. Around the time we got married, as an update to
Goodnight, Icarus
, she wrote a political one-act envisioning Bobby as the boy with wings, undone by the sun and his father’s second-rate engineering, anything that excluded his own culpability.

“I’ve never done that,” Sara said that night at the lake, referring to Carter’s secret infidelities. I remembered looking up from the stove, not sure I’d heard her correctly.

“What?” I said.

“Looked at someone else that way. I haven’t,” she insisted, and put her book down on her knee. “Have you?”

I remembered there were sounds of the neighbor’s children fighting: shrieking geese two cabins over sounding bloodthirsty. Sara was wearing one of my shirts, open three buttons from the top, and cut-off jean shorts. Her hair was in a single, long braid. It was probably her loveliest period, I thought, very easy and natural. Very easy to love.

Never was there anyone else for me.

“No,” I said, “but men look. They’re coded to reproduce. It’s not a wolf whistle.”

“I can’t be married to you if you’re like that.”

I laughed. “Like what, the president? Normal?”

Sara glared at me and turned back to the television, to some soap commercial.

The children next door had been silent for a minute.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come on.”

“I won’t have a normal relationship. That’s not who I am.”

“Of course not.”

“I won’t be dragged down to what other people do.”

“That’s not us, you know that.”

I had my arms around her, but she wouldn’t look at me. Both of us were sweating through our clothes. “Swear to God,” she said, “if you’re just saying that.” We went straight to bed.

More important than children, more important than our careers to Sara was the singularity of our relationship, never compromised. Always growing, never-ending. Its own species, one that didn’t need millennia to evolve.

An unreasonable, unrealistic aspiration that I learned to share.

At home, I composed an e-mail to Regina, apologizing for our last afternoon together, for all the previous afternoons.
Jesus, don’t apologize. You’re always apologizing.
I deleted the text. “Kneeling,” I wrote in the subject box, then left the message area empty and clicked SEND.

An e-mail from the Toad appeared in my in-box, to all Soborg employees, congratulating my group on our grant. “Research thrives on challenge and risk. Victor Aaron, Lucy Sejung Park, and their team continue to be a model for how Soborg can participate in, even lead, the global fight against a vicious disease.”

But what difference did it make that
we
were leading? Lucy might have said. If not us, some other lab on a different campus could develop the same ligands, could offset amyloid-related degeneration, could reach our conclusions by the same paths of reason and late-night insights, and probably pretty quickly. I shut down the computer. I locked up. I turned on the radio, took two sleeping pills with a scotch, and closed my eyes.