A Perfect Life (30 page)

To pass the thirty-six hours until Laurel's concert would be over and I could tell her the good news (as if “good” were an adequate word to describe the news I was bringing), Willie and I went back to my apartment, did crosswords, and cooked our lunch. Every few minutes the reality of Laurel's reprieve gripped my heart. I leaped up and started dancing. I hugged myself, or hugged him. I sighed or started laughing. I was nagged by the sense that I ought to be doing something more important than sitting on the sofa feeling happy. Then Willie asked if I knew a nine-letter word meaning “related to the lungs,” and I told him “pulmonary,” which I knew he knew himself, and he thanked me and kissed me, and I reminded myself that there wasn't any point to giving someone back her life if she didn't know how to use it. When Willie sat on the floor with his eyes shut and meditated, I spent the same hour meditating on him—the deep vertical crease that divided his face, branched above his throat, and rejoined to meet his sternum, that line of bushy hair that descended to his navel, and on below that. I delighted in the details that kept him from being symmetrical: the tornadoes of hair that swirled across each shoulder, but in opposite directions; the brown mole above one elbow; the jagged scar along one hirsute shin, like a road hacked by a machete. I watched the fans of hair open beneath his arms, the
creamy skin rippling down his ribs. I was so glad he was there, sitting on my floor in his boxer shorts and socks, I had to go touch him. I sank to his lap and ran my hands across the skin and hair I had just studied. We made love yet again, and I wondered if I would ever take making love for granted. And later, when we were cooking, I wondered if I would ever chop meat without watching my hands, without thinking of Valentine's, even to think that I was free, that I didn't have it.

I took a second helping of chili. I hadn't thrown up since that afternoon with Laurel, rowing too hard, although my breasts often ached. Willie asked if I wanted to go out and see a movie. In the middle of the day? I said.

“It's not illegal,” he pointed out.

Laurel, too, had accused me of thinking everything except work was illegal. The concert wouldn't begin for another six hours. A movie would pass the time. We studied the listings.

“Anything but
Sophie's Choice
,” I said.

We ended up seeing
E.T.
When we came emerged from the theater the sun was still out, and I felt as disoriented as if I were an alien. We walked arm in arm around Harvard Square, among the other young couples, and I thought:
No, not an alien. I was an alien before. Now I'm a human being.
We passed a furniture store with a display of futon beds in the window.

“What if we decided to live together?” I asked. “I couldn't move to New Hampshire.”

“Of course you couldn't,” he said. “I can do my stuff
anywhere. All I need is a telephone. We could find a place here and use the cabin weekends.”

In another store, we saw a brightly patterned yellow dress.

“That would look great on you,” he said. “Come on, I want to buy it.” He asked the clerk to get the dress, shoved me in a fitting room, and handed it in. I pulled it on. He was right, the dress had been designed for someone like me, with an olive complexion, no hips and no bust. Although even on me the bodice felt snug. And it might only grow snugger.
That doesn't matter,
I thought. I still had my appointment at the clinic.

“We'll take it,” Willie said. “Keep it on, you can wear it to the concert.” He bought a new pair of khaki pants and a flannel shirt for himself. We went back to my apartment to grab a bite and rest. At five o'clock, Honey called from New York to say she and my father had decided not to drive to Boston for the concert. They didn't want to disappoint Laurel, but Herb was coming down with the flu, and with the weather so brutal . . .

Honey must have heard Willie's voice in the background. “Janie,” she said, “don't you dare let him drive back to that awful cabin tonight. They're expecting snow. Tell him I'll pay for a hotel,” and I wondered if she was afraid for her son's safety, or afraid that he would otherwise spend the night in my bed.

We took the Jeep into town. The moon threw eerie shadows of the bridge across the ice. I could think of nothing except the gift I was bringing Laurel. The concert stretched ahead, a two-hour desert I needed to cross.

The performance would be held in a small brick firehouse that had been gutted and rebuilt as an avant-garde theater. An usher with a ring through his nose showed us to our seats. The chairs reserved for our parents sat empty until a boy and girl so thin they could have shared a single seat asked if they could sit there.

I barely noticed the three women who performed the first dance. Laurel wasn't among them, although, according to the program, Laurel Weiss and Cruz Martin had choreographed the piece. One dancer was black, another Hispanic, the third woman was Chinese, but each of the three wore a peach-colored leotard and a lacquered blond wig; with no pubic hair or nipples, they seemed like plastic dolls. They danced on high heels, arms and legs working with mechanical stiffness. The accompaniment consisted of popular love songs from the past several decades. I recognized the songs from the sixties and early seventies, but few from the eighties. If Willie moved in, we could buy a stereo. Maybe he could teach me to play the guitar.

Then the music stopped, and the doll-women snapped in two and flopped forward. The audience applauded. I glanced at the program. The next number, which Laurel had choreographed herself, was called “
Myxomycetes.
” I assumed myself to be the only member of the audience who knew this to be the name of the group to which the slime molds belong. I sat up and waited. The light turned blue-green. A convoluted ball of dancers in many-colored leotards rolled out onstage. To a drumbeat, the ball split down the middle, and these halves split again, again and again, until the floor writhed with cells, each a different color, flowing like
amoebae on their bellies or on their backs, scraping food bits in their mouths.

Then the drumbeat grew faint. The cells twisted in hunger. A violin shrieked. The amoebae stopped writhing and began to grope toward one another. As the violin played—I recognized the melody but couldn't think where I had heard it—the dancers linked themselves like the segments of a caterpillar, the legs of the first looped about the shoulders and neck of the second, as Laurel and I had once played on our parents' lawn; “inchworm,” we called the game. Now, with fifteen people, the worm inched across the stage toward the one patch of floor on which the spotlight glowed red. The dancers at the rear formed a base while the others climbed atop them, higher and higher, a slender stalk, a filament. This wasn't the same species of slime mold I had shown Laurel that day, walking in the woods, but another, more common species—
Dicto
-
something,
I thought. I imagined my sister in some library in Vermont, poring over biology texts until she found the slime mold whose reproductive cycle would provide the best dance.

The pillar grew tall enough to reach the colored lights above the stage. The woman on top curled herself tightly, then burst into space. The next dancer did this, then the next below, until fifteen spores lay scattered about the bare floor. They remained dormant, then began to writhe and feed. The violin shrieked. The cells came streaming together as the violin played the melody Laurel had practiced on her cello all those evenings years before, in Mule's Neck, when we both were young girls. Four times the slime mold
went through its cycle, the lights fading as the fifth stalk of spores reached full height.

The applause for this piece was stronger and more approving. Pride clotted my chest. Maybe my sister would go on to accomplish great things.

“That was pretty good,” Willie said. “What was it supposed to be? Was it some kind of mushroom?”

I had just enough time to read the name of the next piece on the program—“Valentine's Dance”—before the theater went dark. The sort of discordant modern music I had never liked squalled from the speakers. Laurel came on. She was dressed in a flowered shift and the white shawl she had worn to our brunch at the Ritz. She darted this way, then that, hurried and confused and overwhelmed by the tasks she needed to accomplish, all the choices she faced, around and around in ever-tighter circles, until, like a skater, she drew in her arms and spun so quickly she blurred. There was scattered applause, but the dance wasn't over. Laurel started to dance in circles so small her feet barely moved. I saw our mother trapped in that spotlight, shaking so furiously no body could bear the stress.

She erupted in a seizure, eyes rolled back in her head. If she had acted that way three centuries earlier, she would have been taken for a witch. “Shit!” she screamed. “Fuck you! Up! Your dirty! Arsehole!” Since she didn't name a target, she seemed to be cursing everyone around her, or cursing life itself. I thought I couldn't force myself to sit still another moment, but just then, Laurel froze with her arms extended straight out, hands cupped, head thrown back in
an attitude the Shakers would have interpreted as:
I accept whatever gifts the Lord chooses to give
.

Then the music started again. Other dancers appeared, the original members of Six Left Feet. Each dancer performed his or her own imitation of a Valentine's victim, although with so many people performing the dance it became something everyone was prey to, the way the king of Sweden had put on a yellow star and so protected the Jews.

“I'm not sure she should have done that,” Willie said. The audience whistled and clapped. They seemed to feel Laurel's frenzy as their own, although few of them could have known much about Valentine's chorea, if they even knew what it was. “She shouldn't have made it so pretty.”

I was surprised to understand something he didn't. I would explain all that later, after I talked to Laurel. The usher led us to a shabby brick room with flaking pipes. I pushed my way between bodies still slippery with sweat.

“What did you think?” Laurel asked. She swabbed her neck. Her lipstick had bled in tiny lines around her mouth.

I told her I loved it. “Laurel, really, I've never . . . The one about the slime mold!”

“You knew? You remembered?”

“Of course! I didn't think you were paying attention.”

“And the one about . . . you know.” Laurel flinched and closed her eyes. “I wasn't sure what you would think about that last one.”

I wanted to tell her how affected I had been, how moved. But Laurel's friends and fellow dancers were talking too loudly and crushing too close.

“You didn't like it?” She seemed ready to cry.

“No. It isn't that. I have something else to tell you.”

Her smile dissolved.

“You don't have it,” I said. “Your test turned out negative. You're all right. You'll never get it.” I meant to add:
I won't either. We'll both live long lives. Let's take that trip to Europe.
But Cruz came between us. He grasped me by both shoulders and demanded to know why Laurel was so upset. He let me go and shepherded her to a corner of the dressing room. He gestured to her angrily, pointing to his palm as if some rule she had sworn to abide by was written there. Laurel's friends crowded in. I pushed my way toward her, but Cruz kept himself between us.

“Cruz, darling,” Laurel said, “could you find my shawl? Please? I'm very cold.”

He dodged sideways to Laurel's dressing table, one eye trained on me. Laurel gnawed at the skin around her thumbnail, a habit I thought she had broken in grade school. “Jane, I can barely . . . Does this mean? I can't even get the words out.”

“No,” I said. “I don't have it either. Neither of us has it. I swear, we're both fine. Neither of us is going to get Valentine's. Ever.”

She pulled back to see my face. The ragged sound she uttered was part sob, part laugh. “Jane! I can't believe it. Jane!” Still crying, she laughed and laughed and clutched me to her chest. I knew I couldn't keep holding her forever, but I intended to hold on to her as long as I could. This was the moment everything had led to, the moment I thought I would remember for the rest of my life.

“Jane, it's all so . . .” She drew away abruptly. “I don't know what to think.”

She didn't know what to think? She wouldn't die. She wouldn't get sick.

“This was going to be my last dance. I was going to retire. I couldn't have done that piece if I didn't think I . . .” Laurel rubbed her own bare shoulders. “I couldn't have been a dancer in the first place. It was all because I didn't care. All my energy . . . If I'd thought any of it mattered, if I'd had to be careful, you know what I would be?” She fluttered her hand like a movie star dismissing her hairdresser. “I would be someone's spoiled wife.”

“Baby,” Cruz said. He wrapped the shawl around her. “Whatever she's been telling you, don't pay attention. You can do anything you set your mind to. Isn't that what all this proved? You're free now. Hear me, free?”

“Free?” Laurel said.

A bony Asian woman in a black silk dress nudged me aside. She introduced herself as the
Heral
d
's arts reporter. “If you aren't too busy now?” she said to Laurel.

Laurel reached to take my hand, but we were already too far apart. “It's too crazy,” she said. Another surge of well-wishers backed me toward the door. “I'll see you later!” Laurel called across the room. “I'll stop by at your apartment!”

I held up two fingers in a
V
. I wanted to tell her how important it was, what she had done, all those years she had spent dancing. But she was too far away, and I was too self-conscious to shout.

Willie and I left the theater. The wind bit our faces. Christmas decorations bobbed from the trees on the Com
mon. I felt deflated and wrung out. I hadn't expected Laurel to kiss my hand with gratitude. But to be blamed? To be told that I had robbed her of the inspiration that allowed her to work?