Perfect People (14 page)

6.47, the clock told him.

Naomi stirred. ‘Wasser—?’

Who the hell was ringing at this hour? Sweden, probably. Even after eight years here, his mother never could figure out the time difference. Several times when they had first come out to LA she had called at two and then at three in the morning. Three more rings and the answering machine kicked in.

He closed his eyes and was back asleep in moments.

At five past seven the phone rang again.

‘Jesus, mother, we need to sleep!’ he yelled.

‘It might be important,’ Naomi slurred.

‘I don’t care.’

The answering machine picked it up. Was it his mother? Some problem? It could wait, it would have to wait, whatever it was. He had a nine o’clock faculty meeting at the college and desperately needed a bit more sleep. He’d set the alarm for seven fifteen. He closed his eyes.

Moments later, it rang again. He lay there with his eyes shut against the bright daylight in the room. Felt the bed move. Naomi getting up. The ringing stopped.

‘I’ll see who it is,’ she said.

‘Leave it, darling, just leave it!’

She went out of the room. Moments later she came back in. ‘KTTV,’ she said. ‘Three messages from some woman called Bobby.’

‘Bobby? I don’t know anyone called Bobby. What do they want?’

‘She didn’t say – wants you to call. Says it’s urgent.’

KTTV was a Fox affiliate, one of the Los Angeles television stations. He had done an interview with them a few months back for a show they were doing on evolution. ‘What the hell time of day is this for them to call?’ he said, wide awake now, despite his brain feeling leaden from tiredness and the pills.

The phone began ringing again.

‘I can’t believe this!’ he said, and grabbed the cordless that was right by the bed.

A breezy male voice said, ‘Hi, this is Dan Wagner from KCAL, is that Dr Klaesson?’

‘Do you know what time it is?’ John said.

‘Well – ah – sure, it’s early, but I was just hoping you might do a quick interview for our morning show—’

John hit the button, ending the call. Then he sat up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Naomi, draped in a towel, was looking at him in bewilderment. ‘Some breaking news story – maybe they’ve got a big new discovery in your field. This could be a chance to get publicity – you’re acting crazy, come on!’

John got out of bed and went through to the bathroom. He pulled on his dressing gown and stared into the mirror. Some deranged, sheet-white face, with dark rings beneath the eyes and hair sticking up like freshly harvested straw, stared back. He had about an hour to get himself together, to shower, shave, swill down some coffee, throw himself in the car and haul his ass over to the campus.

And now the damned phone was ringing again.

‘LEAVE IT!!!’ he bellowed at Naomi.

‘John—’

‘Leave it, I said!’

‘John – what’s the matter with—?’

‘I didn’t have any sleep, that’s the matter with me, OK? I didn’t have any sleep, I haven’t made love for three months, and my wife is pregnant with God-knows-what child. Anything else you want to know?’

The phone stopped and immediately began ringing again. Ignoring John, Naomi answered it.

‘This is Jodi Parker from KNBC news. Is that the Klaesson residence?’

‘This is – can I help you?’

‘May I speak with Professor John Klaesson?’

‘Can I tell him what this is about?’ she asked.

‘Sure, we’d like to send a car over, bring him into the studio – we just need a quick interview.’

‘I’ll pass you over to my husband,’ she said.

John gave a cut-throat sign with his finger.

Covering the receiver with her hand, Naomi hissed, ‘Take the phone.’

He shook his head.

‘John, for God’s sake—’

John snatched the phone from her hand and hit the disconnect button.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Naomi demanded.

John looked at her, exasperated. ‘Because I’m tired, OK? I’m very tired. I have a faculty meeting on campus at nine o’clock, which I have to be at, compos mentis. There will be at least two senior staff members at this meeting who will have a lot of sway over whether or not I get tenure. And as of this moment, if I don’t get tenure, then in a year’s time I’m going to be out on the streets, playing a banjo or washing car windshields at stoplights to pay for our baby’s food. Any part of that you don’t understand?’

She put her arms around him, her throat sore from vomiting when there was nothing more to vomit, worn out herself from barely sleeping all night, and worry.

After all they had been through, all the pain of the injections, all the discussions, the choices, the indignity, the heartache, the cost, the death of Dr Dettore, she was more scared than she could ever remember.

Everything was changing. This life she and John had together, this little home, this world they had created, all the good things they had together, this wonderful love between them, it was all different, suddenly.

John seemed like a stranger.

The baby inside her, this creature, growing in her womb, tiny arms and legs, so frail, so utterly dependent on her, was she going to turn out to be a stranger, also?
I saw you inside me, saw you through the scan, wiggling your cute little arms and legs. I don’t mind if you are a girl, not a boy. I don’t mind. I just want you to be healthy.

She sensed, although she knew it must be her imagination, the tiniest sensation of movement inside her. Like an acknowledgement.

‘John,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let this destroy us – this thing – this baby of ours – don’t—’

The phone was ringing again.

John held her tightly. ‘We have to be strong, darling. You and I. Wagon train, remember? Wagon-train circle? I love you, more than anything in the world. Please, ignore the phone, take the damned thing off the hook, just for ten minutes. I can’t be late for this meeting. Please, there’s no damned interview that’s as important as this meeting.’

Naomi took the phone off the hook. John showered and shaved, gave her a peck on the cheek, grabbed his car keys and his laptop bag, and hurried out of the front door.

The morning newspaper lay where it had been chucked, on the damp lawn. John picked it up, unrolled it and glanced at the front page. His eyes were drawn to a photograph of someone familiar. Incredibly familiar. An attractive woman, in tight close-up, with sunglasses pushed back on her head. She had a confident, rich-bitch-without-a-care-in-the-world expression on her face. Then he realized why she looked so familiar.

It was Naomi.

And his own photograph, twice her size, was above. His face, staring at the camera with a DNA double helix superimposed behind.

The newspaper was the one he received every morning.
USA Today.
The front page headline said:

Four news vans were parked outside the university entrance as John approached, hurrying for his meeting. In front of them stood a gaggle of people, some holding cameras, some microphones. He heard his name called out. Then again, more loudly.

‘Dr Klaesson?’

He heard a different voice say, ‘Are you sure that’s him?’

‘That’s Dr Klaesson!’

A short, dark-haired woman he vaguely recognized, with an attractive but hard face, thrust a microphone in front of him. Then he remembered why she was familiar: he saw her face often on a news show. ‘Dr Klaesson, could you tell me why you and your wife made the decision to have a designer baby?’

Another microphone was thrust in his face. ‘Dr Klaesson, when actually is your baby due?’

Then a third microphone. ‘Dr Klaesson, can you confirm that you and your wife have preselected the sex of your child?’

John weaved through them and, more politely than he felt, said, ‘I’m sorry, this is private, I have nothing to say.’

He felt a moment’s relief when the elevator doors closed behind him in the lobby. Then he began to shake.

We still retain many of our primitive instincts, he thought, arriving in a harassed state ten minutes late for the meeting. Before man had learned to speak, he relied so much on his eyes, observing body language. The way people held their bodies, shifted in their seats, positioned their arms and hands, moved their eyes, told you everything.

He felt like he’d just entered a room that had been skewed ever so slightly out of kilter. The ten colleagues with whom he had worked closely for the past two and a half years, and thought he knew reasonably well, all seemed to be in a very strange space this morning. He felt like an intruder who had entered a private club.

Mumbling an apology for being late, John sat at the conference table, dug his BlackBerry out of his pocket and his laptop out of his bag and placed them in front of him. His colleagues waited for him in silence. John didn’t want to be in this meeting at all right now; he wanted to be in his office and on the phone to the reporter.

Sally Kimberly
.

Wow! I must give Naomi a call, have lunch with her!

He was almost beside himself with anger at the woman.

Off the record.
It had been
off the bloody record.
She’d no right to print a word of what he’d told her.

‘Are you OK, John?’ Saul Haranchek asked in his nasal Philadelphia accent.

John nodded.

Nine pairs of eyes flashed doubt at him, but no one commented and they got on with the business of the meeting, which was to review their current curriculum. But after only a short while, as had become the norm these past few months, the meeting turned to the more pressing question on everyone’s mind: what was going to happen to the department collectively, and to themselves individually, at the end of the next year? Saul Haranchek had tenure, but for the rest the future was still bleak. None of the government funding agencies, institutions, charities, companies or other universities they had approached had yet shown any interest.

John contributed nothing to the discussion. With the newspaper headline this morning, and the expression on his colleagues’ faces, he wasn’t sure he had any kind of a future in academic research.

He wasn’t even sure he had any future in his marriage either.

At half past nine he pocketed his phone, picked up his computer, grabbed his bag and stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me, I—’ he hurried out of the conference room without finishing his sentence.

He walked down the corridor towards his office, his eyes brimming with tears, hoping to hell not to bump into any of his students, unlocked the door and went in, closing it behind him.

There was a pile of mail on his desk, and thirty-one new messages on his voice mail.

Christ.

And fifty-seven new emails.

His phone rang. It was Naomi, sounding livid.

‘I’m being bombarded with calls here. Your new lover’s done a great job circulating my office number.’

‘Jesus, Naomi, she is not my bloody lover!’ he yelled, then immediately felt terrible. This wasn’t her fault, she had done nothing to deserve this; it was his own stupid goddamn fault. No one else’s. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I—’

She had rung off.

Shit.

He dialled her direct line number but it was busy.

He looked despairingly at the phone, at his computer screen, at the bare walls of his office. His secretary had stuck this morning’s post on his desk and near the top of the pile was a handwritten Jiffy bag with something hard inside. Curious, he ripped it open with the silver letter knife Naomi had given him for Christmas, and pulled out the contents, two stiff sheets of card held together by elastic bands, protecting something.

Inside was the photograph of Naomi that had been missing from his desk, the one of her taken in Turkey. The photograph that was on the front page of
USA Today
.

A folded slip of paper was also in the envelope. A short, handwritten note, with no address and no phone number. It said:

Hi John! It was great meeting you. Thanks for lending me this! All the best. Sally Kimberly.

You bitch! My Christ, you bitch!

His door opened. Saul Haranchek came in. ‘Can I – er – bother you for a moment, John?’ He hovered, rocking on his beat-up trainers, wringing his hands as if he bore news of the end of the world.

John looked at him and said nothing.

‘You’re a dark horse,’ he said. ‘I ah – we – I mean – like – none of us – you know – we didn’t have any idea that you and—’ He wrung his hands again. ‘Look – your private life is your affair but I – someone showed me the newspaper –
USA Today.
’ He shook his head nervously. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine – just tell me?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ John said.