You Lost Me There (12 page)

“Hey, fuck you, all right?” A second later he laughed, then stopped short. “Fine, I’ll do it. For you, right when I get back.”

“Stick it in an envelope. Send it to me.”

“You’ll let that shit go?”

“Swear to it?”

“Done.”

“Fantastic,” I said wearily, and we both laughed. Already I was wondering if I could put him on a midnight plane. “Tell me more about Cornelia.”

Russell slugged back his wine. “Well, we have a problem. She’s searching. You’re not going to believe this. Of all things.”

“What?”

“She wants to cook.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Russell cupped my neck with his hand, like he was back to wrestling. “Have you ever seen,” he said, leaning in, “what their lives are like? Half ex-cons, the rest are from Guatemala. There’s not a one who’s not on drugs, and this is where my daughter, my only child, Victor, she wants to work like a servant so rich fucks can eat foie gras?”

His eyes fell to the remaining wine in the bottle.

“Hey, so
The Hook-Up
, that’s still paying out?”

So what
was
it, I was about to say, about my wife’s proportions?

“Now, see, that’s where Connie was going for a long time. Screenwriting. Movies somehow. Connie idolized Sara, you know that.”

What I knew was that I wanted to be home eating a sandwich, watching a DVD of Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock Holmes
.

“You remember that premiere they went to at the Ziegfeld? Connie still talks about it. Best night of her life.” Russell’s hand was on my forearm. His face was flushed. “We miss her, Victor. You know that.”

“You’re drunk.”

He shook his head: maybe yes, maybe no. “One time Sara told me this story, three guys in Los Angeles are trying to take a piece off her contract. They ambush her with the news over lunch. All smiles. Apparently, Sara picks up one guy’s Perrier and dumps it in his salad bowl.”

I laughed. “You’re making that up.”

“Fuck you. It was that fall, she told me herself.”

“What fall? What?”

Russell wasn’t listening anymore. An attractive woman our age had sidled in, wearing a low-cut top. “Great memory, you know,” he continued, eyes glued elsewhere. “That was the thing about Sara. Soup to nuts, she could retell any conversation. Something you said a year earlier, she could still go word for word.”

“Seriously,” I said, grabbing his elbow. “Which fall are you talking about?”

“What? In California.”

“You and Sara talked on the phone?”

“Jesus.” Russell laughed, and turned back to me. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and folded it along the seam. “She just called, you know. Old friends. One time or something, when she was stuck.”

“Stuck,” I said. I was going blind.

“Her writer’s block. What’s the big deal?” He pecked his fork around the plate. “I don’t remember what it was called anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“The movie.
The Perfect Husband
, that’s it. Christ, this bottle’s gone. Outstanding, though, you’ll admit. You want I should order?”

“No,” I said truthfully. I dumped the wine I hadn’t drunk into Russell’s glass and asked to see a menu.

 

 

 

The main movie theater in Bar Harbor was called the Criterion, a white flat-top on Cottage Street. Sara and I used to go there twice a week. Competitive research, she called it, when we’d meet after work and sit up in the balcony for the eleven-twenty show and watch whatever had come to town, but it was more than that: we were happy. We were movie people, we’d watch anything, all it took was Junior Mints to set the mood. Outside afterward, we’d listen to the manager in his suspenders talk business, about how surely this would be the year he up and moved to Arizona with his sister. Then we’d go home. And if we still weren’t tired we’d pull a DVD down off the shelf.

The September before the accident, before California, Sara went four times in one week to see the same film. A festival was in town, and they were screening a movie by some Scandinavian director called
The Perfect Human.
The print came up twice in the schedule, but Sara got the Criterion’s manager to run it two more times in private. She invited me to join her late one weeknight, a midnight special. It was a weird little movie, without a plot I could put into words—as if one of Sara’s old art buddies had filmed one of his flashbacks. There’s a main character and presumably his girlfriend. Mostly we’re with the guy, always in a white room where our character exhibits his perfection. A voice-over tells us again and again, “This is the perfect human. Look at the perfect human dance. See the perfect human eat.” And he dances, he eats, he goes through daily rituals, but we don’t know why. He wears black tie, but he doesn’t go anywhere. For the most part he’s alone. He lacks everything, but wants for nothing, existing in oblivion. “See the perfect human shave.”

The total running time was about fifteen minutes. To Sara it may as well have been
Casablanca
.

“Because it’s a perfect movie,” Sara explained afterward, at home in the kitchen. Her voice was young with excitement. “The only perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d found it pompous and silly, but didn’t want to say so. I said I wouldn’t have predicted her liking it. That perhaps it was a little pretentious.

“No, you’re not seeing it,” she said. “The thing is, it’s anti-pretentious. Because it’s so clear. There’s nothing to ‘understand.’ ”

“Now
you
sound pretentious,” I joked, but it didn’t reach her. Sara was looking out the window over the sink. I was reminded of Sara back in her early days, transfixed by some idea she’d overheard at a party. But this was different. I couldn’t help sensing that she was deceiving me for some reason.

“The director is putting everything on the line,” she said to herself. “He’s saying there’s no one you can pin down. Even the perfect ones we can’t know completely.”

“Well, it was way over my head, obviously,” I said.

Due to a recent incident at a party where I’d embarrassed her, we hadn’t spoken in several days, and this was our first attempt at extended conversation. We’d been sleeping apart, a first for us, and I was loath to upset her. Part of me, though, was annoyed. Confused at the very least. I didn’t see where all the pain on her part came from.

Maybe Sara thought I was pandering.

She dropped her head. She looked exhausted.

“What is it?”

“I want that faith.”

“You want what?”

Her voice was the flattest plane: “Whatever is inside him. Whatever makes him create films, Victor, this is what it looks like. That movie. What permits him to work.”

“I don’t get it.”

“No,” she said, “I know.” She finally turned around. “So I was coming out of yoga this afternoon, I thought, perhaps I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of things. Maybe Dr. Carrellas has it wrong.”

Sara had been seeing Carrellas since the previous year, when she couldn’t work. Couldn’t write. For her follow-up to the blockbuster, she’d caught a writer’s block she couldn’t break through.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t see her anymore.”

“See, you don’t even hear what I’m saying.” Sara was looking at me so hard now I glanced away. “It’s like as soon as we begin talking, we’re standing in separate rooms.”

Dumbly, I looked around. Everything about the house was new. I hated new things. I preferred to buy my clothing at secondhand shops, at least when Sara wasn’t looking. In the new house, all of our old furniture seemed out of place, and the new chairs and tables we’d bought felt like loaners, waiting to be returned.

I was staring at one of them. “You know how sorry I am.”

“Yes, you’ve said.”

Sara left for California two days later, for six weeks without contact. I didn’t know when she was coming back, if she was coming back. I bought a ticket to Los Angeles but never used it. I worked and swam my laps. At night, in the house my wife had built, I dreamed about divorce papers fluttering around the hallways like trapped birds.

I wondered, wasn’t the house enough to call her back?

Wasn’t I?

Russell sat beside me in the Criterion in the dark. We watched a new action movie and digested our dinners. At home, Russell went right to sleep, bear-hugging me on the way to brush his teeth.

So she’d been writing, I thought. I remembered how, a week after the funeral, Sara’s agent, Mark, had called, asking if I knew anything about a new script. He thought maybe she’d begun one in California, but he hadn’t been informed, barely a word those six weeks.

“Could you look around?” he asked. “Check her laptop, it’s probably in a folder somewhere.”

Problem was, I didn’t know the password to her computer. As far as I knew, Sara never wrote it down. The tech guys at Soborg said the best they could do was reinstall the system software, but probably that would erase the hard drive. I stalled. The next time Mark called, I told him the IT department had gone through her computer with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing found.

 

 

 

The next morning we drove to the airport in silence, except for the sounds of Russell checking his BlackBerry. Under the land bridge, low tide made the channel into a mud flat drying in the sun, an airstrip for piping plovers.

We said quick good-byes in the parking lot, promising to see each other when I came to New York.

“Look, man, thanks for the distractions,” Russell said. “I needed a little R-and-R, get my head straight about that girl.”

“Which girl?”

“The PR woman. The one we talked about.” He laughed. “You really are a charity case.”

“Well, give my love to Cornelia,” I said.

“And mine to the dancer.”

Russell squeezed my arm and gave me a light hug. While he strode toward the airport, compact and hustling, his suit bag like a shadow on his back, I thought, I don’t care if I never see him again.

 

 

 

Days zipped by and the world shrank back to our lab’s small proportions. I didn’t think about Russell or Sara or Regina, there was only me and Lucy and the rest of the team arriving each morning for meetings and conference calls, shouting down the hallways, and eating candy by the bucketful. One morning it was someone’s birthday, Lucy remembered, and she brought in doughnuts spiked with candles. We had the tempo of an umbrella factory. Of course there was also my anxiety about our grant under review and the next ones I needed to write to patch some funding holes, but that was normal. As Darwin had pointed out, anxiety was paramount for survival, it signaled a threat. An adapted response was required. A typical grant was only about seventy-five pages long, but I’d write at least fifteen drafts and sweat every punctuation mark. And then add to everything the constant locomotive rhythm beneath my thoughts—
keep it coming in, keep it coming in
—with dollar signs floating around my vision.

Work was everything as it was in the beginning, now and forever. One evening, flipping through my calendar, I figured out I’d taken less than ten nights off in the previous two years.

The big New York conference was approaching. I needed to look good and talk pretty. It was a sales conference and I was peddling the latest appliance to a crowd I knew personally. I’d sat with them in lecture halls from Greece to Colorado, but I couldn’t rest on my laurels. Some of them might be judging my grants, and they needed to be brought up to speed with some razzle-dazzle.

Dr. Low, aka Toad, Soborg’s president, left me a voice mail at three in the morning one night, saying he wished he was still burning the midnight oil on something other than his digestive tract. He sounded like a ghost trapped between walls: a mind still sharp and flexible, and a body falling apart.

Sixteen-hour days became pleasurable. We were hunting again, closing in, until a miniature crisis turned up: Lucy figured out that in several databases, columns of figures had been accidentally swapped sometime in the winter, invalidating an entire chain of results. Human error, but error nonetheless, and one that had gone unreported for months. Conclusions, previously solid, were in the wind. A lot of work would need to be reanalyzed before it could be made public.

Panic swept through the team. Late one night, dizzy from exhaustion, I couldn’t remember how Alzheimer’s was spelled, and when I asked one of my M.D. fellows to see if she could find a
Webster’s
dictionary, she told me to use my computer’s spell-check tool. I nearly threw an “Institute for Brain Aging” mug at her head.

But come the following Friday, when our new data charts should have distracted me, I still clicked CHECK MAIL—every five minutes, every minute, every thirty seconds.

Regina as I remembered her from the beginning, coy and funny and new.

I forced myself up to take a walk. The quad was full of students sitting in clusters, draping their arms over one another, so that I couldn’t tell which ones were couples, which were friends. One boy wore eye makeup and a white ruffled shirt over a black dress. A girl dancing reminded me of Cornelia, Russell’s Cornelia, twirling around barefoot in a skirt made from corduroy patches. But who was I to judge? She was probably an M.D./Ph.D. candidate with an IQ of 140. The boy would be the next Nobel Prize winner in applied mathematics, doing his best work with a cell phone.

On the phone a few weeks earlier, after she was done complaining about her roommate, Regina had asked me, “So when did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That you wanted to be a scientist.”

“No idea, really.”

“It just fell into place.”

“Same story as everybody else, a great teacher. She showed me that people actually got paid to do this stuff. Weren’t your parents biologists?”