“The point is,” Lucy said, pacing beside my whiteboard while she dug her fingertips into her arms, “what are we looking at? Too many holes. Gaps and flaws. If you make a mistake, just let somebody know. Copy me on the e-mail. Put up a red flag. We’re gathering an enormous data dump here, of course slips occur. But if Dr. Aaron and I aren’t warned to catch them, we’ll have big trouble downstream.”
Recently we’d experienced quality-control problems. Crammed around my office, sitting on folding chairs or perched on the radiator, our team of fourteen was more than half composed of recent additions, many to leave in the next year or two for other labs, med school, further training. Listening to Lucy, I tried to concentrate on the milestones rather than the headaches. I knew too many researchers who’d been undone by the pressure to publish, raise more money, swim faster. And what was lost was the satisfaction of knowing truth: the thrill of discovering an answer to the question each experiment posed.
Each airtight, flawless, beautiful experiment.
Half an hour later, I thanked everyone, proposed a revised schedule for incorporating new data, and called it a day. Five minutes later, Lucy was back in my doorway. She said calmly, “Tell me, why do we have to go through this every time?”
“Just the way it goes.”
“We hire too many gunners, is what it is, not enough plain-Jane control freaks. But why?”
“Why what?”
“Do this,” said Lucy. Her features and shoulders sagged. “All of this.”
“Listen, I’m late picking up a friend.”
Lucy stretched her forearms on the doorframe. “You should see yourself. You look like three bucks.”
“I’ll take it that’s not a compliment.”
“What I would give, Victor,” she said, turning away, “for the NIH people simply to magically appear and say, Yes yes, take the money, have fun.”
Ten minutes later, I was stuck in a line of cars. I nearly slammed on the horn several times out of frustration. A few years earlier, they’d built a Walmart in Ellsworth, and now it caused traffic jams for miles along the one-road concourse off the island. I stared at the wipers, wondering if Regina was burlesquing somewhere miles behind me.
Years in the past, someone thought my wife was a knockout, one night long ago in a restaurant. A night I didn’t remember.
Since Wednesday I’d kept some of Sara’s index cards in my shirt pocket, her notes about how we met, how I’d neglected her apparently just when Broadway called. I’d stayed up nights rereading them. One night I tossed them in the kitchen trash with the tangerine peels and coffee grounds, only to run down to retrieve them the next morning. Having them on me meant I could avoid going back to Sara’s office to read the rest.
And she was right: in some cases, I didn’t agree with how Sara remembered things. I remembered celebrating her success in our little living room by the fireplace with champagne. I remembered lovemaking, late-night conversations, snuggling in bed. Our unspoken signals: the hand-squeezes to silently say I love you. Me playing the bleary-eyed bulwark when Sara was overcome with anxiety and couldn’t sleep. I remembered her nerves, and how I took care of her. How I went to the drugstore at two a.m. because she’d broken out in hives, worrying about that play. And if I had been neglectful, balanced against Sara’s enormous need for attention, for regular, escalating affirmations, then surely there was a good reason we both were forgetting: a grant, a paper, something at the lab.
But about that dinner she described, I drew a blank. Which didn’t necessarily mean much. We probably had dinner with Russell a hundred times in New York. But for this one night to have mattered so much to Sara that she chose it as a point when our marriage turned a corner, and yet to figure so lightly in my own recollections?
There was a moment in New York that she hadn’t mentioned, a night we had a terrible row. I was home late from work and Sara confronted me in the front hallway with a simple question: “Why do you ignore me?” She’d been crying. It was midnight, she was wearing an old Chicago sweatshirt of mine with rips in the underarms. It had been a terrible, arresting shock. She walked away and I stood in the hall fiddling with some mail in the key basket, wondering a storm of thoughts. It took me a few weeks to recover and then grasp how I needed to change, which seemed pathetic now in retrospect, but I’d dedicated myself afterward to a plan of evolution: engaging, listening, spending more time at home; being better about leaving work behind when I locked up at school; worrying fewer nights away in the lab or on the phone from home, and stopping weekend work altogether; being a better husband.
But it must have been around the time that Sara started writing
Woman Hits Forty
. Because just when I changed to be more of a home-body, it seemed as though she didn’t want a husband at all. I thought I’d simply read her wrong. How else to explain the short temper, her lack of interest in sex or conversation? And then the play took off, Sara rocketed up to Broadway, and soon it was she who wasn’t coming home after work, leaving messages saying I should order take-out.
A change of direction for me, not for her.
The airline representative said Russell’s plane was late, due to rain. A thin fog was drifting through the meadows surrounding the tarmac. I went back to my car and put in a John Dowland CD and turned up the volume. Sixteenth-century lute songs to wake the drifting dead.
The night I met Regina was foggy, too, at a party of Soborg people where I’d snuck out to escape the band. When Regina appeared, I was leaning on a railing, remembering how it had always been Sara’s job to lead at parties, particularly after
The Hook-Up
was in the works: Sara tugging me behind her, like a teddy bear, her husband the “famous” scientist, hadn’t they seen the latest issue of
Nature
? But whoever it was, whether some agent or producer, he’d often seem more pleased than I expected, as if here was a chance to be normal, show off he’d once taken a science class. “The genome project, now, that’s real magic,” one would say, and then we’d leave for the next group of strangers, our chain of hands yanked by Sara’s agent, Mark, who was constantly whispering, “But you must meet Arlo, you must know Thaddeus, you must know Jude.”
Except Victor, who needed to know Victor?
“You should shave it,” Regina had said from somewhere behind my left shoulder. Her voice was bored, affected to sound worldly. “Like the way Bruce Willis does,” she said. “It would be more imposing.”
The party was held in honor of Soborg’s president, the man who’d recruited me in the first place. Almost the entire institute had gathered to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, Dr. Solomon Low’s, a former Dart-mouth dean and renowned biologist, well known for his crotchety temper and his humpback, hence his nickname, Toad.
I was not Toad’s favorite. Academics demonstrated status by hoarding information, displaying that behind their peacock feathers they owned something no one else possessed (and thus our fields of study had over time become more specialized, more competitive, and less able to communicate with one another), and in the same fashion, academic institutions prized notable names, the better to flaunt their standing. Basically, Toad would have liked me more if I were cited more frequently in
The Boston Globe
. He was an old-guard New England aristocrat who took his favorite employees sailing. The time I went, I was seasick in the hold, and when we docked he was still laughing about it.
“I met him, actually, Bruce Willis,” I said to Regina. “At a party in New York.”
“Nice guy?”
“Nice enough.”
“Wouldn’t you want to look like Bruce Willis?”
How did she know?
“People here get hung up on not caring about their looks,” Regina said. She leaned on the railing. “It’s like everyone’s deciduous. No one knows how the island repopulates itself.”
Past the lawn, the ocean stewed under the moon, crashing with foam like magnesium bursts. “Maybe,” I said, “it’s because there’s no sex ed in the schools.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s no one to have sex with.”
“Maybe it’s just too cold.”
Now she laughed, a surprisingly sincere laugh, and I felt as if I’d won a prize. I’d never seen anyone like Regina. She wore a black crepe dress and gold shoes, and spoke on the cusp of sneering with a hushed, deep voice. Big legs, broad shoulders, painted lips. Aware of her effects, but not quite in control. Probably too much for boys her age.
Next to the kitchen was an empty sitting room full of plants. We sat on a love seat. Regina told me about her undergraduate years in Ann Arbor writing poetry and organic chemistry papers. Her parents had been free spirits, both trained as biologists but practicing as hippie farmers. They took family trips from Michigan to study marine life in Florida, one summer joining an archaeological dig in Montana. After graduating from college, Regina spent two years working for a pharmaceutical company outside Boston, and then moved to Maine to work at Soborg.
“Now everyone I meet wants to play country bumpkin, to try their hand at the plow. And I want to join the Velvet Underground.”
“Then why here, of all places?” I asked. I had a hard time picturing her in Bar Harbor during the busy months, never mind the winter, when the island emptied out, when the passes filled with chest-high snow, and the forests were more congested than the towns.
“Well, the work.” As though this were a stupid question. “Soborg’s not exactly bush league. Do you know how many people applied for my position?”
“But you’ll do your Ph.D. somewhere else.”
“Sure, I’m hoping for Michigan. I mean, I love the work, I just don’t know if it’s my life’s ruling passion. Maybe I’ll make out for Broadway. You know I played Ophelia once; I still remember the lines.”
She laughed at herself, and then her eyes lit up; she turned toward me, pulled her feet underneath her, and asked about my favorite movies. I mentioned
The Blue Dahlia
. She slapped me lightly on the leg.
“Come on, you’re lying.”
“Why would I lie?”
“Whatever, it’s one of my favorites, too. George Marshall? Veronica Lake?”
“No, you’re teasing,” I said. “You’re too young to appreciate it.”
“I’m not so young.”
Twenty minutes later, Regina stood up, smoothed her dress with both hands, and excused herself. “E-mail me sometime. Or don’t.” She smiled. She pronounced, “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
Decisions have multiple origins, neurologically. If we used only our brain’s rational side, we’d analyze without stopping, dissect our options into ever smaller pieces, and follow out their logical options, step by step, until we were so distant from the original impulse that we’d forget why we began. Without our emotional voices, without the gut, without sentimental gales and whatever mute instinct governed (or not so mute, considering the loudness of hunger, a sex drive’s roaring static), there’d be only dithering.
I spent the weekend composing a letter in my head. I found Regina’s e-mail address in the Soborg directory. I e-mailed her Friday morning, a week later, surely too late.
Dear Miss Bellette
. I wrote that I had enjoyed our meeting. Perhaps we could have coffee sometime in the Soborg cafeteria. Or not. Yours sincerely, Victor Aaron.
She responded after lunch.
Try again. Write this. Dear La Loulou, I’ll be by at five, see you then.
I laughed from shock. I read it and couldn’t believe what I was reading. I sat back, then lurched forward and did as she commanded. I clicked REPLY and typed through a daze,
Dear La Loulou, I’ll be by at five, see you then.
The same reply I’d send the next nine Fridays in a row.
Try again. Write this.
I stared out through my windshield at a low band of trees. A plane was just landing in the mist, bouncing down the wet black strip.
Russell and I got back to the house around ten. The answering machine in the kitchen said I had a new message. I pressed the wrong button and a voice shouted,
You have selected Daylight Saving Time.
Betsy wanted to know how I’d forgotten about our dinner date. At least, why didn’t I call? “Never call me again, Victor,” she said. There was a long pause. “Good night.” Another pause. “This was Betsy.”
One of my regular Friday dates I hadn’t been invited to, the other one I’d failed to please.
“Was that the aunt?” Russell asked. He had big arms but small hands, the frame of a lineman squeezed into a gymnast. He looked like he might tumble off the counter stool. “Wait,” he added, “I remember. The nut-job.”
“Be nice,” I said. “She’s eccentric.”
“Eccentric, right.” He got his thumb under the peel of a tangerine. “Like putting a beanie on a serial killer. I mean, when it’s my time, call me crazy, please. People respect crazy.”
Russell bounced off the stool and took his suitcase upstairs to the guest bedroom. I put a Post-it note on the refrigerator reminding myself to call Betsy in the morning. I heard the shower running and then a squeaky tenor, out of tune, screeching through “Satisfaction.” I went outside and collected kindling.
Russell had begged for a fire. One of Sara’s best ideas when designing the house had been to install an outdoor fireplace, this pit contraption from a gardening catalog that stood next to the deck. Now that the rain had blown away, the night was cloudless. I was shuffling out to the log pile when Russell called from his window, “Check that shit out!”
Stars covered the black distance: Ursa Major, Virgo, Hercules, the names came swiftly back to me. I’d been bonkers for my telescope when I was ten. I loved knowing where to draw the edges and shapes. In school that year we’d been forced to memorize the state capitals, and I’d approached the task by reassigning them as dots in the sky, simply more stars I should remember. Lessons I learned on my own about differentiation, about the comparative scale of my desires. The idea being that if I was so extremely small, then I could do almost anything, because what impact would I have, really? What damage could be done, being so puny in the big scheme?