“You think about it all the time, don’t you?” he asked.
He had said aloud the most important fact about me, the fact I kept most hidden. Every moment I was alive, I thought about dying. “And you don’t?” I said.
“Sure.” He shook a carton of chocolate milk, then pried open the seam. “Every few weeks.”
I told him that I didn’t believe him. How could he avoid thinking he might have Valentine’s?
“Zen,” he said. “I used to think about it a lot. Then I went to Japan and became a Buddhist.”
I must have rolled my eyes.
“That’s a little arrogant, isn’t it? Dismissing a philosophy that’s been around for a couple of thousand years just because a few flakes in California took it up?”
The last thing I needed was a stepbrother who thought meditating on the sound of one hand clapping would cure my problems. I finished my pastrami sandwich and started on the cake. Willie kept staring at my mouth. I thought he wanted a bite of cake; I held out a forkful.
“What?” he said. “Thanks, why not.”
He reached across the table, and his hand swallowed mine. That’s when I knew I wasn’t safe. No one can predict this, who might cause you to recall you don’t live only in your mind. You know that old cliché about how people use only a fraction of their brains? In my case, it was my body I barely used.
He guided my hand toward his mouth and ate the cake. His tongue scoured his teeth for chocolate. They were such big, square, white teeth. And there was that long vertical crease that ran down his forehead, continued beneath his nose, then cleft his chin in two. I liked that face. I would have stopped in a museum and stood before it, staring.
I asked if our parents were really getting married. When did all this happen?
“You’re not serious,” he said. “They’ve been seeing each other for years.”
“I know,” I said. “The president of the Institute for Valentine’s Research and the chairwoman of the Valentine’s Disease Society getting together to plan their strategy.” That my father was marrying Honey Land as a business arrangement seemed easier to accept than that he had proposed to her for the same reason he had proposed to my mother. “Do they love each other?” I asked stupidly.
He seemed puzzled. “Why would two people get married if they didn’t love each other?”
My eyes began to well. I plucked a napkin from the dispenser. After so many years of being widowed, my father would finally have a woman to keep him company. A woman he could love.
“That’s what this brunch thing is about,” Willie said. “They want to announce their engagement. But your sister can’t make it until Sunday morning. She’s, what, a dancer? Modern? Ballet? She any good?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I had never understood my sister’s dancing, although her take on it was that a dance wasn’t something that needed to be “understood.” Still, I loved my sister more than anyone else. I thought she was the prettiest woman in the world. Her hair was so black and thick it hung around her shoulders like a living shawl. She had the same full lips and broad-toothed smile that had made our mother so attractive, and the same Kirghiz eyes—green and slanted, like a cat’s. Willie, I was sure, would fall in love with my sister. Everyone did. She was beautiful. And tragic. Like me, she had reacted to the possibility that she might be carrying the gene for Valentine’s by swearing never to have a family. But that didn’t mean she lived alone. She slept with a great many men, but only men she couldn’t love, or men who couldn’t love her. I hoped she would see how kind Willie was and spare his feelings. But sometimes she gave in to softhearted suitors she couldn’t bear to hurt, at least at the beginning.
I asked when Willie thought our parents might get married.
“This summer,” he said. “Maybe August.”
It was nearly the end of May!
He pried open the second carton of chocolate milk. I loved watching men’s hands. A good biologist’s hands are like acrobats, flicking the tiny caps from Eppendorf tubes, squeezing pipette bulbs, flaming metal loops over Bunsen burners. Willie’s hands were too ungainly to be graceful, but they knew what they were doing. “That still leaves three months,” he said. “In three months, my mom could have arranged Chuck and Di’s wedding.”
I couldn’t believe that Honey would hold her wedding in Mule’s Neck. But I also couldn’t see my father wasting money on a fancy New York affair. A Valentine’s benefit was scheduled for that July. Maybe he and Honey were planning to combine the events. It bothered me that they derived all the advantages of Valentine’s—the excitement and purpose it gave to a life—with none of the risks. “Doesn’t it upset you?” I asked Willie. “The way they seem to get off on it. On Valentine’s.”
“Why?” he said. “Don’t you?”
I pushed away my tray.
“Wait,” he said. “Why is it all right to get wrapped up in your own disease, but not in someone else’s? It doesn’t take much imagination, does it, feeling sympathy for yourself?”
I had to admit he had a point. All of us had grown obsessed with studying who we were. If you were black, you studied being black. If you were a woman or Jewish or gay, you studied being that. Even scientists fell prey to self-obsession. Except my friend Maureen. She had been crippled as a child by rheumatoid arthritis and people expected she would work to find a cure. I could, but I don’t was all Maureen would say. Instead, she was searching for the cause of a rare form of blindness that afflicted a few remote families in Peru. Her disabled friends acted as if arthritis were a nationality or a religion she had abandoned from shame. But now, listening to Willie, I thought she might be right. What would science be if doctors tried to cure only those diseases they themselves were prone to? I hadn’t intended to study Valentine’s. I had grown up wanting to figure out how an egg became a chick. I had only switched to medicine, and then to genetics, after my mother got sick and I came to understand the threat that hung over my family.
I asked Willie what he did with his time.
He took his last sip of milk and licked his lips. “Truth be told, I don’t do a whole lot.” He had a fair amount of money from his father’s estate, he said. He had bought a little land in New Hampshire, back when hippies like him were doing that kind of thing. He had put up what you might call a house. In the seventies, there was a revival of interest in his father’s movies, and the royalties started piling up. He had quite a bit of moolah to play around with, he said. He invested in new companies, and then, if he made a profit, he found a cause he liked and gave most of it away.
“You play the stock market?” I said. “Are you serious?” Dusty Land had made his reputation portraying working stiffs whose allegiance was to the poor rather than to the fat cats who owned the factories.
“I know,” he said. “Farmer Sinclair’s son growing up to be a venture capitalist scumbag.” His accent grew thicker, as if he felt guilty about being rich. My father did the same thing. Whenever he felt self-conscious about being well off, he ladled on the inflections of a poor Brooklyn Jew.
“You make money,” I said, “then you give it away?”
“Why?” he asked. “You need some?”
The lab always needed money. Enzymes cost a hundred dollars a drop. An ultracentrifuge cost as much as a Cadillac. But my father was the only member of the family who knew how to beg. “Valentine’s is a good cause, isn’t it?”
“Didn’t used to seem that way. More like a lost cause.” He stretched his tongue and coaxed another drop of milk from his glass. “Maybe you could convince me I’m wrong.”
I pretended I didn’t know what he wanted me to do—I hated explaining my work to laymen, if only because I found it so hard.
“I’m not such a dumb guy,” Willie said. “I read the newspaper. But I usually can’t make heads or tails of this genetics stuff. Every other morning you see some headline that says something like, ‘Revolutionary Breakthrough, Scientists Discover Secret of Life.’ You read it, but you can’t
figure out what the hell the reporters are talking about. It’s still a secret, as far as you’re concerned. Here I have a real, live geneticist, and I’m not letting you go until you give me some answers.”
I told him there weren’t any answers. Not short ones, at any rate.
“I didn’t ask for a short answer. Just give me a second.” He gestured toward the men’s room. “When I get back, I want you to explain what you do in that lab of yours all day.”
I slid to the edge of the booth. Once, at a party, I had met a painter who claimed to be enthralled by my doctoral thesis on the cell-by-cell development of a worm called C. elegans. Spurred by his interest, I reached a height of eloquence I had never before attained. Maybe, I thought. Just this once. But later, in his loft, he lit a cigarette and told me he had a question. “Here’s my question,” he said. “Were you saying ‘D and A,’ or ‘DNA’? It’s always kind of bugged me, not knowing which it is.” I was aware that other women didn’t require their lovers to understand the subjects they were studying. Foreign students at MIT courted American women without either one knowing how to say much more than “I love you” in the other’s language. They married on trust, believing love to be a matter of emotions rather than of ideas. But what if you had nothing in common with the man you married? What if he cared nothing about what you did?
Willie returned from the men’s room. “Hey,” he said. “You know what someone wrote on the wall in there? ‘The only women at MIT are the men who’ve worked their balls off.’”
I felt raw and exposed, the way I had felt when that truck driver shouted his obscenities. “Well, I have to go work my balls off, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Wait.” He took my wrist. If anyone else had done that, I would have shaken him off. I was unsettled by how much I wanted that hand around my wrist. “This disease killed my dad,” he said. “I’m not going to drive myself nuts over it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not, you know, curious. I like to understand things. Come on. Sit back down.” He leaned across the table with those bushy eyebrows raised. And I had to give in. At that moment, he seemed the only person on the planet to whom my research mattered.
“Do you know how genes work?” I asked.
Now he rolled his eyes. “What do you think? You think I believe these tiny little people come ready-made, all curled up inside a guy’s sperm?”
I started to apologize.
“You know,” he said, “according to the Buddha, there are only twenty truly difficult things in this world. Number eleven is: ‘It is difficult to be thorough in learning and exhaustive in investigation.’ You’re doing a heck of a job with number eleven. Number thirteen, though, number thirteen is how difficult it is not to feel contempt toward the unlearned.”
“I don’t feel—”
“Yeah. It never crossed your mind that I didn’t finish college. You never thought, Oh, jeez, I’ve got to sit here and explain the secret of life to an ignorant old hippie who’s got seaweed for brains.”
It surprised me how much I regretted losing the good opinion of a man I had just met.
“Come on,” he said. “Even little kids today know about genes. Go ahead and just talk. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask.”
Every table in the deli came equipped with a soup can filled with pencils. By the end of most meals, the deli’s patrons had scribbled formulae and graphs on every square inch of their place mats. I took one of those stubby pencils and drew a chain of DNA. Willie reached in his shirt pocket and took out the kind of reading glasses you buy at a dime store. His pair had heavy black frames and narrow lenses; they made him look like a kid who was pretending to be a grown-up.
“Let’s assume this is part of your DNA,” I said. I tried not to put on the professorial voice that annoyed my sister. “Most of the bases on your chromosome will be exactly the same as the bases on my chromosome, because they code for genes we share. They code for the basic stuff that makes us human. But a few of our genes won’t be the same. You have curly hair; my hair is straight. Your eyes are blue and mine are brown.” I was afraid he would think I was fishing for a compliment, or maybe giving him one. But he stared at the place mat as if the only thing he cared about was the chain of DNA that I had drawn there.
Encouraged, I explained that there were these other stretches of DNA, and no one knew what they coded for. It wasn’t eye color, or hair color, or anything that obvious. Maybe some piece of his DNA read AGCCGTC, and my chromosome at that same spot read AGCCCTC. At that one spot, that one letter, our chromosomes were different. The useful thing was, there were a lot more of these random differences than the kinds that coded for, say, eye color. Scientists didn’t used to know this. Now, suddenly, we had all these new markers to work with. It was the difference between giving someone directions on how to get around a desert, and giving someone an address in New York.
“Cool,” he said. “I get it.”
I had the impulse to kiss him. Startled, I told myself this was only because he had understood what I’d said. “Now,” I went on, “suppose we could sort out all the bits of my DNA and compare them to all the bits of your DNA. The patterns your DNA would make would be a little different from the patterns my DNA made.”
His glasses slid down his nose. He left them there, preferring to peer above the tops.
“I won’t give you the gory details,” I said, afraid I would lose even him. “But that’s a fairly easy thing to do. You chop up a person’s chromosomes and let the pieces migrate along a gel. You take the gel and make something called a radioactive blot, and you develop it so you can see all the different pieces of DNA. One person’s blot doesn’t look like anyone else’s. So, suppose we study all the blots for one family. A family where some of the people have Valentine’s and some of them don’t. Suppose everyone who has the disease shows a certain pattern of DNA, and everybody who doesn’t have the disease shows a slightly different pattern. Then we would know—”
“You would know that the Valentine’s gene is hooked up in some way to this pattern?” He took the pencil and sketched a stick-figure man, a stick-figure wife, and three stick-figure kids. I was overcome by an irrational tenderness toward these figures, as if one of them were Willie and another were me. He laid a finger beside the stick man. “Say the dad and one of his sons have the pattern. But not, say, the daughters? Like, the dad passes along the pattern and the gene for Valentine’s to his son? Is that it? But he doesn’t pass either one to his daughters? If one of his daughters doesn’t have the pattern, she doesn’t have the gene?”
“What do you do up there in your cabin all day?” I asked. “Do you lie around reading genetics textbooks?”
He sat taller and beamed. “These blot things? These patterns? Do they correspond to anything you would notice about a person? Like, the two people in a family who’ve both got Valentine’s might look like each other?”
I thought he was asking this because Laurel and our mother looked so much alike—that same full smile, those same green, catlike eyes, both of them so tall, while my father and I were barely five feet two, with dark eyes and strong noses. But there was nothing to support the notion that Laurel had inherited the Valentine’s gene from my mother. On more than one occasion, I had attempted to explain this. Just because you’re pretty doesn’t mean you have any more chance of getting it than I do. But my sister always smiled that sad smile of hers, as if what I had said were nonsense. I was about to ask Willie where he had seen my sister when I realized he hadn’t. He was asking because he and his father shared that cleft chin. “If the pattern were so obvious,” I said, “someone would have spotted it by now. It can’t be that easy.”
“No?” he said. “Things can’t ever be easy?”
“You never know. But it’s not likely.”
He stretched his legs beneath the table. His knee brushed my calf. “How many of these blots do you need to make before you find the right one? The one that means a person has the gene for Valentine’s?”
&nbs
p; That was the question my colleagues always asked. You’re crazy, they said. You don’t even know which chromosome to look on. It could take you ten years. I explained this to Willie, downplaying how long it might take me to find the right probe—if the project seemed futile, he wouldn’t give us money.
He tapped his teeth with the pencil. “Remember that TV show when we were kids? The one with all those great toys in that big treasure chest, and that enormous pile of keys? And some kid had, what, thirty minutes to try all the keys he could before the buzzer went off?”
I was stunned he had mentioned this. Every time my gaze wandered to the list of probes taped to my wall, an image of those keys flashed through my mind. I kept this to myself, not wanting Willie to know how frightened I was that I would never find the key. “If you want to know whether a certain marker travels with a gene, you need to do blots for a really big family. Otherwise, you won’t have enough clues to figure out who’s inherited what from whom. There’s this one pedigree, the Drurys—” I thought with a pang about driving back to Pittsfield. “We’ve got blood from two of the grandparents, and the mother and the father, all four kids, two cousins, and an uncle. That’s the biggest genealogy anyone’s found. If we’re incredibly lucky, some pattern will show up. But mostly we’re using them for practice. We’ve sent out letters to neurologists on three continents, asking for bigger pedigrees.”
“Okay,” he said, “suppose you find this big family. You try a whole bunch of keys, and the right one turns up. What happens then? What’s inside that treasure chest?”
“If we find a marker for the gene—”
“You can tell some guy he’s going to die this terrible death and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Finding the gene doesn’t mean diddly. Am I right?”
I felt my face flush. “Some people are going to find out they’re positive for the gene. But what about all the people who find out they don’t have it? They can get married and have kids and stop worrying every time they trip or drop something. They can tell if the fetus they’re carrying is affected. If everybody did that, we could wipe out this disease in one generation.”
A Perfect Life Page 3