A Perfect Life (18 page)

If only he would stop talking! If only he would lift his hand another inch!

“Don't you want to give up that other half, the half that keeps watching?”

“I think I would miss it,” I said.

“That's only because it's been with you for so long. You're used to driving yourself crazy.”

I told him I would stop driving myself crazy if I knew I didn't have it.

Nah, he said, that wasn't true. “Everybody's like that. Everybody except a few Buddhists who've attained satori.”

I told him that despite what he might think, I wasn't the type of person who was going to spend her whole life sitting around trying to become perfect. I had too much to get done.

He pulled away. “You think
I'm
trying to lead the perfect life? You don't see me planning who I'm going to fall in love with according to a bunch of statistical formulas and graphs on a place mat. You don't see me spending my life trying to make sure I have this perfect kid.”

“He doesn't need to be perfect.”

“Yeah? Tell me you wouldn't marry me right now if I could guarantee that I don't have that damn gene. That you don't have it. That we could have ourselves a one hundred percent grade-A certified healthy kid.” He pressed his hands against my head. “You know what nirvana is? I'll tell you what nirvana is. It's watching your kid eat Cheerios. You ever seen a kid eat a bowl of Cheerios? The way he dips the spoon in the bowl? The way he brings it up to his mouth and makes sure he gets everything in? The way he chews? He's not thinking about anything except those Cheerios. That's nirvana. And making love is nirvana. Here, on this ledge, on the darkest night you've ever seen, and not thinking about anything else but making love.”

He unbuckled my watch. Then he burrowed in my trouser pockets and took out my radiation badge and a calculator marked, though there wasn't enough light to read it,
BELONGS TO S. BATE.
He made a pile beside the cliff, like a cairn.
Don't think,
I kept thinking. It occurred to me that
neither of us had brought a condom.
Don't think
, I thought again.
Put your hand around his neck. Lie back. Don't say no.

My foot hit a can; it clattered down the cliff. Willie started kissing me, and I couldn't think of anything except how lucky I was, because in the midst of so much nothing I had been allowed to exist, to think everything I had ever thought, learn everything I had ever learned, feel everything I had ever felt. I had seen chicks in their shells. I had seen burning bushes and rotting deer. And I had been allowed to fall in love with someone as completely as I now loved this man.

The morning I got home from Spinsters Island, I discovered a Seal-a-Meal bag on my lab bench with a mouse corpse inside. Lew had managed to keep alive a runty mouse we thought might be homozygous for the Valentine's gene, and I had put Maureen in charge of watching him. A note in her meticulous hand was inscribed on the label: “So sorry! Things with Paul got pretty intense. I tried to preserve the remains for dissection.” I found myself weeping. It wasn't only that the organs would have deteriorated too badly for an autopsy, or even that the mouse hadn't lived long enough to reproduce. I composed myself enough to slice open the bag. The corpse was oddly mummified. I touched the skin. “Maureen!” I yelled. “Get over here!”

“Just a sec-ond,” she sang. I heard the wheelchair whir.

I tossed the mouse in her lap.

“Ew!” she said. “Poor little mousie. Is that any way to show respect for the dead?”

“You creep. I've had it up to here with your jokes.”

“How could I resist? Paul and I were at a pet store—he wants to buy a sheepdog to keep him warm when I'm not
around.” She stroked the body. “Admit it, you were furious. You thought Paul and I were fucking so hard we couldn't be bothered with a mouse.”

“I wasn't angry,” I lied. Then I saw her disappointment. People never got mad at someone in a wheelchair. “You're right. I was furious. I still am.” I twisted my hands around her neck.

“Help!” She crossed her eyes. “Murderer! Help!” She spun out of reach. “We put the toy mouse in the cage with the real homozygous mouse, to see what he would do.”

“And?”

“He humped the bejeezus out of the thing. You better put a girl mouse in with that little guy soon. Even cripples have sex drives.”

I knew she was dying to tell me about Paul. “All right,” I said. “What happened?”

She shut her eyes. “What's to tell? The handsomest, kindest guy in the universe comes to spend the week. An hour after he gets here he's kissing my hands, telling me they're beautiful. He picks me up in his arms like I'm Scarlett O'Hara, we spend ninety-six hours without leaving my apartment, I come every which way, he misses half his conference on fish-meal by-products, and then, before he leaves, he invites me up to his place in Maine for a week.” She patted her cheek. “Pinch me.”

“Maureen, I don't want to pinch you.”

“Pinch me!” she insisted.

I tugged her left earring, which was shaped like Ronald Reagan.

“Ow! Good. Now pull Nancy.”

I tugged the other earring.

“Ow! That's great, I'm not dreaming. I mean, Jane, it's not only Paul. I think I have this blindness thing figured out.” She indicated I should lean closer. “Snails. It's the snails. Paul and I are making love, and suddenly I'm thinking about this one family I stayed with. I smelled this really vile smell, and I asked the woman what she was cooking. She was too embarrassed to tell me, but then she finally did. She was stewing these snail things. They're supposed to get her pregnant. This woman and her husband were trying to have a baby, so she was cooking up these snails. Lots of people do it, but they don't go around broadcasting the fact. The husbands don't want anybody to think they're having trouble getting their wives knocked up. Nobody wants to be known as a snail eater. But God knows what sorts of parasites those snails they have down there carry.”

I saw tiny worms sinking their teeth into an embryo's eye.

“I called the public health team I work with. It's going to take forever—you know how slow these bureaucracies are. But they promised they would go around and get these families to admit they ate snails while they were pregnant. They'll send the little beasties to their lab, and after they've figured out what they're infected with, I'm going to write this paper and send it to
Nature
, and then I'm going to spend a week in Maine, boffing my brains out.” She rubbed her eyes with her wrist. “I can't believe it, Jane. After everything I've been through.”

I bent down and hugged her. “You deserve it. I'm thrilled for you, Maureen.” And really, I was. It's one of the best feelings you can have, to be genuinely happy for someone else.

She wiped her nose. “And you! How was life among the mutants? Did this Willie jerk apologize?”

“As a matter of fact, he did. He said, ‘I'm a jerk, and I apologize.'”

“I was only asking.” She pouted.

“I'm serious. He apologized. Then we took off our clothes and made love at this place called Thunder Beach.” It felt wonderful to say this. I was telling my best friend about having sex with my boyfriend on an island in Maine.

“Right,” she said. “You go, like, a couple of eons without so much as kissing a man. Then you take off your clothes and have sex with some guy you barely know at a place called Thunder Beach.”

She was talking too loudly. Vic poked his head from his office door. “You're back,” he said. “Come in and tell me what's up.”

“Wait,” Maureen said. “You weren't kidding?”

“I'm coming, Vic,” I called. “Pinch me,” I told Maureen. The rubber mouse hit my back.

“So how'd it go?” he said. “Sorry I couldn't be there. Dianne's still in the hospital. I've got four kids to keep supplied with jelly and peanut butter.” He swung his shoes on the desk. A crescent of hairy skin rose above each sock. “Are you still upset with me? You don't think I'm supporting you enough. But I'm not trying to stop anything. Me, of all people. It's just that there might need to be safeguards.”

He was going to offer an analogy. I still couldn't understand why people thought that comparing any two things made either of the two things clearer.

“It's like driving,” Vic said. “A society can post speed limits and right-of-way signs without prohibiting cars.”

I nodded. But the analogy didn't apply. There was a one-in-two chance I had Valentine's disease, a one-in-two chance my sister had it, and a one-in-two chance the man I loved had it. How could anyone think I would do anything to harm anyone who had the gene?

Vic swung his legs to the floor. “You think of some nice theory, and the next thing you know you're telling people they're going to die without being able to offer them the slightest comfort. If that's what we're doing here, I'll quit and walk away.” He looked down at his shoes, as if, at any moment, they might carry him out of the room of their own volition. “I've been thinking about this a lot. Really, Jane, it's been hounding me.”

I looked out the window. In the lab across the alley, a woman in a lab coat held a beaker filled with a bright blue liquid above her head. She flicked it with her finger, studied it, then poured the contents down the drain.

Susan Bate stalked in. “He's doing it again. I'll kill him, Vic, I'll kill him!” She wore a leotard, sweatpants, and ballet shoes; three mornings a week, Susan biked to the lab from a predawn ballet class. Sometimes, during group meetings, she sat on the floor with her legs in a
V,
bobbing right, center, left. “Can I talk to you? In private?”

I settled on Vic's desk. When she saw that I wasn't leaving, she began to talk anyway.

“I've been running four blots a day. You know, to test the bloods?” She shot me a glance to let me know how much I owed her. “About half the blots have been coming up blank. It's Yosef and Lew. They're afraid I'll find the marker and get the credit.”

Credit? I thought. For what? Susan hadn't conceived the theory or technique behind the experiments. She hadn't collected any blood.

“It took me a while to figure out how they were sabotaging my blots. I keep my reagents locked up. I don't take my eyes off the gels while they're running. Then it came to me. The only time I'm not here is late at night, when the filters are soaking in the water bath. Yosef and Lew must be switching the temperature so the DNA can't hybridize, then switching it back just before I come in.” She paced Vic's office, daintily sidestepping stacks of reprints. “I put a hair on the dial last night. It wasn't there this morning.”

Vic pressed his fingertips together. “Susan, I can understand your frustration. You've been working hard. All of us feel the pressure to help Jane find her gene.”

Susan pirouetted. “
Her
gene? What makes it hers? Who's been running all the blots around here, anyway? I'm the one who's risking my career on this stupid wild-goose chase.”

I had been acting before, pretending to strangle Maureen. It frightened me to think I could have done real violence to Susan. Her behavior seemed intended to provoke people to abuse her, as if she were trying to prove it was her fate to be abused.

“This isn't a contest,” Vic said. “Do you really think Yosef or Lew would maliciously turn the dial on your water bath? Isn't it more plausible the hair simply slipped off? Or Cesar disturbed it when he was cleaning? Blots go wrong all the time.”

Susan wasn't buying Vic's defense. “Are you going to confront them or should I?”

The woman across the alley was filling another flask with solvent. I knew what she was feeling, that irrational assurance that the new experiment would go right, even though she wasn't sure why it had failed the first time. Some experiments took weeks or months to try again. You spent all that time hoping, and sometimes you were rewarded with the result you hoped to find. But if my attempt to find the gene for Valentine's failed, I would never find the courage to start over. If Willie and I broke up, I would never find the strength to start loving someone else.

“I'll speak to them,” Vic told Susan. “I'll make sure no one turns the dials on your water bath if I have to sleep here myself.”

Susan studied Vic to see if he was saying this to humor her. But his face held no guile. Even Susan could see that. “All right,” she said. “But if it happens one more time, I'll take an ax to their benches.”

After she had gone, I asked Vic if he ever thought of throwing her out. Just because she had been abused didn't mean she had the right to abuse other people.

“Of course I think about throwing her out. I spend most of my time thinking about doing things I can't do. If
you can
do
something, you don't spend much time
thinking
about doing it.” His telephone rang. “Yes?” he said. “The conference is when? It meets where? I should speak for how long?”

I went back to my bench. I had been away so long my labmates had piled dirty equipment on every surface. I tossed a half-eaten fig bar and a slice of pizza in the trash. Susan darted by with a rack of bloods. “How nice of you to visit us,” she said. “Do you think you'll have a few minutes to run a blot or two before you need to dash out again?”

Yosef slunk through the door in his mirror-lens glasses. Susan hissed at him. Yosef crossed his arms as if warding off a vampire. “What's she been telling you? She doesn't consider maybe her blots are coming out bad because she isn't careful, she hooks electrodes up backward?”

“Vic!” Susan called. “Come out here!”

Vic pointed to the receiver against his ear.

Susan shook a finger at Yosef. “You'll get yours,” she said.

“Oh, baby.” Yosef kissed me on the cheek. “Why can't every girl be as nice as you?”

“Yosef.” I pushed him off.

“I speak this from my heart. You are the only one I think isn't out to get me. You never do anything bad, and what do you get?” He pulled the toy dagger from his coat and dangled it above my head. “You get this terrible sword hanging over you all the time. Is cosmic injustice.” He took off his sunglasses and held up his left hand. “I swear, I stop all my other work, even secret project—which, I have got to admit, is going nowhere fast—and I help you look for
this gene. No matter how long it takes. And I don't want no credits.” He stuck out his bottom lip. “Except maybe I get my name second on your paper.”

“Second name!” If all went well, the second authorship would go to Miriam. That was the least I could do, although I doubted she would care about seeing her name on a paper in a journal she never read.

Yosef affected a wounded look. “Hey, who else brings home a top-secret tip about where we should start looking?”

One of the French scientists had told Yosef his lab had found a deletion on the short arm of chromosome three. When Yosef asked why the data weren't being presented at the conference, the scientist confided that he and his colleagues needed to test another family, to be sure the correlation was high enough. For all Yosef's paranoia, he was convinced the French scientist was telling the truth. I wasn't so sure. What if the man was baiting us with false information to make us waste our time? Let Yosef keep trying chromosome three. I would look elsewhere. I had the feeling Valentine's wasn't caused by a deletion, a lack of something, but rather by an excess, of what I didn't know.

“Whhelll, sweetheart,” Yosef said, “best we get working. Is like one of those riddles: If four eager beavers chop so much wood, how much wood can eager beavers chop before other eager beavers publish same result first? Or this one: How many days will the turkey need to find the needle in that straw stack?” He tweaked my nose. “It's a joke. We will find the needle. Maybe, if we are lucky, it will only take a few years.”

Across the room, Susan turned her miniature TV to a talk show about the sexual misconduct of dentists. Yosef went over to his bench and switched on his boom box; the bottles on my shelf rattled to the beat. I thought of Achiro and how he had managed to work without listening to all this noise. “How can you stand it?” I asked him once
. Only thing distract me is voices from Japan,
he said. At the time, I thought he meant he only paid attention to Japanese words. Now, I wondered if he meant his wife's and his daughters' voices echoed in his ears:
Hurry. Please, come home. If you stay away much longer, when you come home we won't be there.
How long would Willie wait for me? How many times could he and I make love before he asked for something more? I shouldn't sleep with him again. I knew that. But how could I refuse? I couldn't even keep from thinking about having sex with him. I kept telling myself this was different from my mother's Valentine's-induced preoccupation with sex, the way she announced at breakfast one morning that my father wasn't a handsome man but he had a great cock. My own fantasies were normal. Most people had them. Dreaming obsessively about sex wasn't only a symptom of Valentine's disease; it was a symptom of being human. “It's driving me crazy,” my mother had once confided. “But God help me, Janie, I like to think about men.”