A Regular Guy (44 page)

He stacked up the dull, beautiful black-and-whites of the team, the automated factory on its first day of operations, the intricate assembly line, every element picked by him, even the corrugated floor. “Maybe it was all better before,” he said.

There were no good pictures of Genesis’ early days. Just snapshots, Polaroids with cluttered backgrounds and thumbs over the lens. Lamb and Shep, probably Frank’s uncles, the ones who didn’t stick around for long, had the real documents in their photo albums, mementos of their youth. “And maybe that’s the way it should be,” Owens said. “Legwork for some historian.” But he’d tried to keep the scraps and pieces of Exodus together, to make one clear book to hand on. And the documents were here, ordered and elegant. Yet this time, maybe no one would want them.

Kathleen supposed he’d have to leave. To imagine staying was unthinkable, but so, at the moment, was doing anything. What happened had been happening slowly for a long time, over a year now. Owens had been staving it off, working days and nights against this, and now he had lost and what he felt most was exhaustion, a temporary relief he was afraid to wake up from.

He called Olivia and asked her to meet him. They’d get a room somewhere. He couldn’t go home because they’d all call there, the reporters; and even if they didn’t answer the phones, enough people knew where he lived.

“Mary and Jane called,” Olivia said. “They’re worried about you.”

“We’ll call later. I can’t think about them right now. Just meet me at—”

“My car’s in the shop again.”

“Oh, Olivia.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take a taxi.”

They arranged to meet in the small hotel where her mother had died and her father had lived. Olivia would check them in. Once in the room, they found their way quickly to the bed. She was all he’d ever wanted then, and he marveled for a moment at how he could have doubted her. He’d asked testing questions a thousand times. He’d once asked if she’d vote for him for president, and her pause before answering told him no. Now her face showed that she already had. She had voted for him with her life.

“Olivia,” he called, when she went to the bathroom. She was too far away.

It was still a bright, dusty afternoon outside, but he felt like nothing but sleep. The cool anonymous sheets seemed clean and tended. Olivia closed the venetian blinds, and they gladly gave up the day.

Lab Nights

N
oah was worried about his hair: his one bounty. His mother had run her hands through it. His sister was jealous. His hair was what he liked about his looks, and now he was beginning to lose it. In his comb, he found a delicate weave. This morning, he lifted out a small web from the bath drain. He always cleaned the drain and remembered to put down toilet seats even though he lived alone: habits from having an older sister. When Rachel came to clip his curls for seeding crystals, he almost asked her to switch to unwaxed dental floss. In graduate school, he’d once heard of someone using cat whiskers.

In the closet Noah had allotted for her fruit flies, Louise showed him her hybrid mutants. Then they went to the microscope. When he lifted his head up from the lens an hour later, his neck ached but he felt convinced. There were enough eyeless flies with his mutation to establish the genes right next door to his gene. If he was right, they were only three or four months away from finding it.

“So what do you think?” Louise wore jeans and high heels. Noah
had never seen, much less been attracted to, a woman wearing high heels in a lab.

“I think I want to marry you,” he said.

Just then—as she had all her life, at the worst possible moment—Noah’s grandmother appeared. Entering the lab with her walker, she was dressed in a royal-blue suit with matching shoes and purse, and a scarf that seemed to be a catalogue of butterflies. The old woman shook with the precise, limited range of certain birds. Noah loved to watch her smile accommodate the involuntary motion.

“I have a granddaughter your age,” the old woman said, when Noah introduced her to Louise.

The old woman took every opportunity to inquire about Michelle. “Ask her yourself, Gramma,” Noah said more than once, and his favorite answer was: “It’s not so easy to get ahold of her in
Africa.
”

Her head swung wider, as the interview went on. The point of the visit finally came out. She wanted both grandchildren present for her ninetieth birthday, in January. Noah’s job was to get his sister home, and he promised he’d try.

As she left, she touched his stubbled chin and said, “Ouch.”

“Oh, she doesn’t like me very much,” he explained to Louise, later. “Or maybe she does now. But she always preferred my sister. Michelle looks a little like her. When Michelle went to college in New York, my grandmother told her, ‘If you go to live back East, you’ll make friends back East. And then pretty soon you’ll fall in love there in the East, and it’ll end up with you marrying an easterner, and you’ll live there and never come back.’ ” He smiled, then shook his head. “But when I was little, she wanted them to put me in a special school in Vermont. She had the brochure with all the prices. She blamed my dad for keeping me home.”

“And you’ve forgiven her?”

“Now she’s worse with Michelle. I’m doing what I’m supposed to. I have a job. But Michelle’s running around the world barely making a living, with no husband and no children.”

“And that’s okay with you, to be approved of like that?”

“I take it how I can get it.” Noah shrugged. “I love her.”

Now, in the vicinity of their gene, Noah and Louise worked with pieces of DNA from a normal fly and from their mutant. They would sequence it by hand.

During lunch, Noah quickly wheeled across campus to see a doctor he’d just called, to find out if he could have children. The fee was eighty dollars; he’d asked on the phone. As in many waiting rooms, Noah suspected the ruffled magazines were read at home, spilled on by many messy children, and only then brought here. Asleep on a plaid sofa, a pregnant woman was sucking her thumb.

A nurse took him to a small room, where she handed him a paper cup. He gingerly touched a worn magazine, very different from the ones outside. The frilled fingered pages made the women seem somehow out of date. He wondered if the nurse was waiting by the door, and if he was in any way being timed. He tried to imagine himself with Louise, as he often had while falling asleep at night; and though he’d invented more than twenty scenes, complete with dialogue, of nights they found themselves alone in the lab, he couldn’t conjure the actual moment of touch. For this he had to imagine other people. Not himself. He imagined Louise with Andy Ruff.

After Noah had been shown to his office, the bearded doctor asked, “How long have you been trying?”

“Oh, I’m not trying yet. But I hope to. And I want to know. Being in a chair and all, it seems the least you could tell a person. If I can’t.”

“Mr. Kaskie, as I’m sure you know, your disease does not express itself in infertility. Your kid’s chances of being affected are about fifty-fifty. So if you are infertile, it would be a coincidence.”

Noah’s own doctor had never talked to him about this or anything like it. Noah felt the burden of a long and seldom-looked-at fear slowly lifting.

“But I still want to know for sure. To me that’s worth the lab fee.”

He and Louise would be in the lab all the time now, for at least a month or six weeks. Working this way was oddly relaxing. Since they were always here, they never had to hurry. He loved working while she slept in the next room.

How much more do we have to do on fish after the flies? Noah wondered. Of course, like every scientist, he wanted to get the results out for publication. He had to, if he was going to have a career.

It was August now, and everything was ripe: the corn had a deep scent, and for dinner tonight, he and Louise and the Danish postdoc ate ten newly picked ears. Noah loved corn, especially white corn, fresh and tangled with translucent silk. Near where he grew up, there were miles of corn. He ate it raw, right off the cob. He took Louise to those fields just after the sun went down, and they filled a brown paper bag. He showed her how to cook it in the lab, for only a minute at a high boil. Noah could do these things with her, things there’d never been time for with the girl in college. He made up a greater part of the composition of their friendship; with the girl in college, he was hardly in it at all. Perhaps for that reason, it was harder to feel in love with Louise every minute. He kept slipping in and out of the spell.

At two in the morning, Louise shuffled into his office. “You know what I’m afraid of?” she said, flopping into the old chair. She smelled of fish viscera and fixative, as she usually did these days. “I don’t want to be one of those women scientists who are forty and living alone. Maybe having a sperm-bank kid. And then, every once in a while, they have an affair and suffer.” She shivered. “I want to get married. Have a normal life.”

“Then you will,” Noah said, “if you want to. But not with guys like Andy Ruff.”

Louise folded her arms. “I would never marry him.”

Wind and rain of eucalyptus buttons drew their attention to the window. That night, it seemed to Noah he loved this life more than she did. He imagined he would attend her wedding years from now, after she left science, and that by then it would seem beautiful to her, children growing up haphazardly in labs with takeout cartons, knowing the periodic table like an alphabet.

“What do we have to eat?” She wandered over the kitchenette, bending down to check the cabinets. “Want a Pop-Tart?”

“Sure.”

His eyes sketched across the lab, at the work, building like an abstract
city, at different benches. Cell archaeology. Archaeology of a past that was still alive. Someday all this would be known. A billion nucleotides were in a fish, and nobody knew the sequence. Bacteria—
E. coli
—had just been sequenced, but they had only a million—a difference of three zeros, and in science, three zeros probably equaled about fifteen years. “Do you sometimes wonder how far it’ll go in our lifetime? What we’ll get to see and what we’ll miss?”

“Yeah. Who was it who said, ‘Biologists don’t have their bomb yet’? And still no cure for the common cold.”

“Not to mention leukemia or hay fever.”

“Hey, Noah, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” Did his heart beat this loudly all the time; and if so, why didn’t he hear it?

“How’re you going to sign this paper?”

“Me first, you second. Then Arne.”

“Mmn. Okay.” She had a swallowing look of pleasure, studying the toaster oven. “No, I’m sorry to ask, but I think you have to, if you’re a woman. Look at Rosalyn Franklin.”

“What about her?”

“Well, they stole her data. It’s clear Watson had her X-ray photographs. She was dead by the time they got the prize. I was just checking. I wanted to be in the top three.”

Only three scientists can share the Nobel Prize. Noah felt miffed. “I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here. And I’m offended you think I’d steal your data and not credit you. Franklin’s pretty much acknowledged for her work. Nobody thinks of her as some bimbo. Not that you
could.
”

“But if she was prettier you could believe she’d done nothing?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“You know,” she said, “I always wanted to ask you why you didn’t stay in Matt’s lab.” She handed him the warm crumbling tart in a napkin. “Here.”

“My wheels were always crushing bugs in Boston. I had to wash the treads every couple hours.” He shrugged. “Then it got to be winter, and I was cold. These tiny little balls of snow were blowing up my sleeves. And I’m not a good shopper. My sister used to sew; she’d buy
me things and tailor them. I’m asymmetrical, like Mondrian. You know he used to trim his mustache an inch longer on one side to even out his face?

“So anyway, I went to this department store. The third floor was all coats, and for a while I just rode between aisles, smelling. Sleeves brushed my cheek. There was every kind of wool. ‘I need a coat,’ I said, and that’s how I met Maria. She was a sales clerk. I really liked this cape, but she said, ‘No. Not for you. You have to be tall to wear that.’ And she was too short herself. But we finally settled on a gray coat. All told, I spent about six times what I expected.”

“But then you never expect to spend anything.”

“I know, thanks. And when the tailor took my jacket away, Maria rubbed my shoulders. I admired her for that. In retail, it’s probably smart to find a way to touch people. People don’t get touched enough.”

Noah blushed. He was saying too much. He also remembered the woman who’d washed his hair when he’d had it cut the last time; rubbing her knuckles into his scalp, she told him he had beautiful curls. Those touches, which seemed to open the body to caving sparks, did they sound dirty out loud—like an old man copping feels off sleeping girls?

“So did you ever see Maria again?”

“No. I was lucky. When I picked up the coat, they told me she’d quit. I didn’t even know her last name. If she’d stayed, I’d probably still be back East. Deep in debt.”