A Perfect Life

by Eileen Pollack

  Then again, I might have fallen in love with Willie Land for the same reasons most women would have fallen in love with him. He was generous and strong, so solid I could lean against him, but not so well defended I had no room to crawl in. He was a handsome man. And famous—at least his father had been famous. He was rich, but not self-serving. He tried to do good. He cared about the same bizarre beauties of the world, in a way that made me feel they weren’t bizarre at all. My intelligence didn’t scare him off. It seemed to make him love me all the more.

  And maybe every woman falls in love with the man who is both the worst and best for her. The worst provides the friction, the rub, the heat. Given a test to overcome, you feel twice as strong for winning. And maybe your heart refuses to fall in love with the person that your instinct—your very DNA—commands you to fall in love with. Maybe, as Vic believes, the rules of evolution don’t quite explain as much as we think they do. Maybe our DNA commands us to do the opposite of what makes the most sense. Maybe, when we jump in a river to save a drowning man, what we are trying to do is to save ourselves.

  As Willie drove me to New Hampshire, I tried not to think about any of the many reasons I shouldn’t have accepted his invitation. All I knew was that being in his company allowed me to relax. For months, I had been tracing the same self-enclosed route from my lab bench to the tissue-culture hood, to the cold room, to Vic’s office, to the mouse room, to the freezer, to the vending machines. Every few weeks, I would drive with Rita Nichols to western Massachusetts to collect a patient’s blood. But these detours were brief. I could calm myself by thinking they were demanded by my work. Driving along the highway in Willie’s open-topped Jeep, the wind beating against me, I was forced to remember how immense the world really was. The road curved, and curved again, slicing through jagged rock. I wanted to demand that he take me home. But returning to the lab seemed even more frightening. I would keep running my experiments, and those experiments would fail, as they had failed in the past.

  The Jeep’s tires hit a rhythmic thuck thuck against the road. I leaned back and closed my eyes. I barely remember waking when we parked and Willie led me up the trail to his cabin. We went in and climbed the stairs—the air was shadowy and cool—and I settled on the window seat while he went to the kitchen to fix some tea. Then I don’t remember anything more until I woke to find myself nestled beneath a stack of quilts so musty they brought to mind the leaves in which I used to play with Laurel on our parents’ lawn. I lay inhaling the smoky scent of the quilts and recalling the feel of Laurel squirming beneath me. A branch scratched a window. I willed myself to fall deeper into sleep. This was the reason I so seldom left the lab—I was frightened I wouldn’t go back.

  When I couldn’t force myself to stay asleep any longer, I opened my eyes. In a corner of the room stood a red leather armchair with a kerosene lamp above it. I could hear the approach of a breeze—a faraway gathering of breath, a holding in, the presence of something as it passed, the shuddering of trees and leaves. I looked out the window and saw a bee crawl headfirst into a crab-apple blossom. A moment later, the bee crawled out. When it sprang from the pistil, the petals quivered.

  On a chair beside the window seat stood a lopsided pitcher and a ceramic bowl some amateur potter—it turned out to be Willie’s ex-wife, Peg—must have fashioned by hand. Beside the bowl lay a washcloth and a bar of soap. I pulled off my top—it smelled of almond cake and smoke—and rubbed my skin. I bent above the basin and washed my hair, then brushed it until it lay sleek against my scalp. I slipped on the shirt and jeans I had brought from home. Then, arrayed for new beginnings, I climbed the stairs.

  There was only one room, a sort of loft. Sunlight filtered from the skylight and splashed the bed. On each wall hung a grainy black-and-white photo of a boy with a Cupid’s bow mouth. In one photo, he toddled toward a woman’s outstretched arms. In another, he puffed his cheeks to blow out the candles on a cake. In his teens, the same boy posed with Willie, their startled expressions leading me to think that the camera had been snapped by an automatic timer.

  On the floor beneath this photo, Willie sat cross-legged, eyes shut, ankles hooked above his knees. I sighed and stepped back. Even if our genes hadn’t made us incompatible, our temperaments would have. Why would anyone meditate?

  He opened his eyes. “I was wondering if you were going to sleep through the weekend.”

  I imagined him plodding down the stairs and standing over me and staring in the hope I might wake up, as Laurel used to do when she wanted me to play. He glanced out the window. He wanted to take me on a tour, he said, but we had only a few hours of daylight left.

  “I’d love to,” I said. Then I followed him down the stairs and through the kitchen, with its pump-handled sink, past a second pump outdoors, and beyond it, the outhouse. The trail dropped toward the road, so laddered with roots I had to watch each step.

  “Here we are,” he said. “Central Operations.” Beyond the Jeep stood a shed. It was connected by wires to a utility pole at the end of the gravel road. “That’s as far as they would string the electricity when we moved here. If we had wanted to hook up the house, we would have had to pay a couple of thousand bucks. Peg and I, we didn’t have that kind of money. Now I could afford to run the wires up the hill, but I prefer it this way. When I’m working, I’m working. When I’m not, I’m not.”

  Inside, on a plank laid across two stacks of milk crates, I saw a phone, a ticker-tape machine, a miniature copier, and a manual typewriter. Some annual reports were fanned out like a poker hand: Electrocar, Citizen’s Assets, Sun Foods. He owned the kind of cheap fake-leather pen-and-pencil set you could buy in the gift shop at Weiss’s Supply. In the center of the desk lay the blotter that came with the set. Tucked in one corner was a snapshot of a young man in a cowboy hat and boots—the same little boy I had seen on the walls of the bedroom, all grown up.

  An ancient Frigidaire with a chrome grille stood behind the desk. When Willie opened it, I saw a bag of groceries and half a dozen quarts of chocolate milk. For a scientist, I had never been very good at making deductions. Startled to find myself making one now, I blurted out, “You used to drink.”

  He brayed that laugh of his, and I had to remind myself there was no one there to hear it. Yeah, he said. That was another thing he had learned from his father. He wasn’t a stone-cold alcoholic, like his dad. But he used to drink. One night, while he was still married to Peg, he was so desperate for a beer or a jug of wine he started walking to town in the middle of a blizzard. When he got back, the cabin was empty. Peg had taken their son and left. Willie didn’t blame her. There she was in the middle of nowhere with no phone and no electricity and not much in the way of food. She wrapped the baby in Willie’s parka and hitchhiked home to her parents on Long Island.

  After he finished telling me this, Willie grabbed a carton of milk from the Frigidaire, tipped back his head, and gulped. “Come on,” he said, “you can see copy machines in Boston.” We left the shed, and I followed him through the woods, his hair swinging this way then that, haloed in gnats. The light at that hour was so expressive I felt something like love, not only for Willie, but for every living thing. As a child, I had spent a lot of time in the woods. I would leave the house early with an army-issued knapsack and a canteen from my father’s store, the grape juice sloshing against my thigh. So many things perplexed me. How a maple tree unfolded from a seed. How feathers had evolved. Whether butterflies thought about where to fly next. All those billions and billions of years of evolution to produce a human being. To produce me, Jane Ellen Weiss.

  Once, I took my sister for a walk. I lifted a rotting log and showed her the slime mold growing underneath, explaining how, after a rain, each tiny, dry spore absorbs moisture and swells until it splits open and expels a mass of cytoplasm—a “swarm cell,” I said, as if I expected her to memorize the words. The cell wriggles away, I said, and when two of these swarm cells bump into each other, their nuclei fuse, then divide, and divide a
gain, in unison at first, then in synchronous waves. Deprive it of moisture and a slime mold turns rubbery. Add water and it starts pulsing again, spreading across the forest.

  “Is it a plant?” I asked my sister. “Or do you think it might be an animal? Can something be both?”

  “It’s a blob,” she said, laughing. “Leave it to my sister to make a fuss about slime!”

  Usually, I was ashamed to remember that day. But now I did something perverse. “Look,” I said. “Down here.” Willie turned and squatted beside me, balancing on his high-tops. I brushed the pinheads of mold so they burst and sprayed their spores. Then I flipped the log and explained everything I had explained to Laurel.

  He looked at me as if he were about to tell me how peculiar I was. Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. Our lips had barely met when he teetered backward on his heels and stood. He started walking off, which gave me the sense that none of it had happened.

  Back at the shed, we stopped to pick up the groceries. Willie grabbed another carton of chocolate milk and brought that along, too. Not far from the cabin, I spotted a mushroom the size and color of a softball. “You can eat these,” I said. “You slice them very thin, then you sauté them with garlic and salt.” I was testing him, I guess. How many people will take your word that a mushroom is safe to eat?

  He lifted the puffball to his nose and inhaled. “Mushrooms have such wonderful names,” he said. “Angel’s Wings. Wood Ear.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Mushrooms have terrible names. Corpse Finder. Weeping Widow. Dead Man’s Fingers.”

  “Say ‘mushroom’ again,” he ordered.

  Laughing, I shook my head no.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Say ‘mushroom.’”

  “All right,” I said. “Mushroom.”

  But even as he kissed the word from my lips, I was trying not to think Trumpet of Death, Destroying Angel.

  While Willie cooked dinner, I sat watching his hands peel potato after potato, the brown peel curving through the slot until the slick yellow flesh lay exposed in his palm. He talked about the year he and Peg had camped in these woods, building this house. I didn’t know much about window frames or self-composting toilets, but I loved hearing his voice and watching the way the muscles in his back rippled beneath his shirt when he hacked the lamb for dinner.

  Once the food was cooking, he set a few mismatched plates and pieces of silverware on the table. He filled both our plates with lamb chops—two for him and three for me—and dollops of something that turned out to be plum sauce. Precise as a chemist, he apportioned us each a scoop of mashed potatoes. Then lima beans. Biscuits. And slices of the puffball, which, to my relief, tasted ambrosial in its buttery broth. He had baked brownies the consistency of mud for dessert. He guzzled his milk. I sipped my tea. We talked about the giant fungus that recently had been discovered out west, an underground thing fifteen hundred years old, heavy as a redwood or a giant blue whale. And it seemed, as we discussed this fungus, some huge ancient thing was lurking beneath our table and we were pretending it wasn’t there.

  Finally, I found the courage to ask what my sister had whispered to him that morning. He carried our plates to the sink. “If a person whispers something,” he said, “she probably wants to keep the information private.”

  I supposed that Laurel did. It wasn’t Willie’s fault if my sister felt compelled to give away to others what I wanted for myself. What did he think of her? I asked.

  He scraped the leftovers in a pail. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Self-absorbed. Nothing like you.”

  I would have been petty to take offense. The first and last items weren’t meant to be linked.

  We went up to the living room and sat beside the fireplace, staring at the logs. The silence was hard to bear. It was the loudest, most unendurable silence I had ever heard.

  Then we started talking. It was the kind of conversation where both people jump in at once. He would talk about his father, and immediately I would echo with the same story about my mother. I wish now we had never had that talk. I wish we hadn’t kissed. I wish we had been content with the affection and understanding between a brother and a sister. But, as Maureen had said, even real siblings sometimes can’t control their love.

  I was hoping Willie might start kissing me again, but someone pounded at the door. He cursed and went downstairs. I wondered if it might be some girlfriend he hadn’t mentioned. But when I looked down, I saw a hairy little man so poorly clothed—the tie-dyed shirt he wore was little more than holes—I wondered if he had been hiding in these woods since the early sixties, like those Japanese soldiers who lived for decades in caves rather than emerge and learn their emperor had surrendered.

  From where I stood, above the door, all I could see of Willie were his hands. “Hey,” the guy said, “what gives? You pissed at me again?” He told Willie he intended to repay the bread he’d borrowed, but he needed another loan. There was some chick he had met in town—Willie knew the one. She worked at Frank’s Spa? She wore those crazy rubber gloves with the fingertips cut off so she could handle the frozen food and still punch numbers on the register? She was coming to see his pad, but he hadn’t scored any dope, and he had promised to turn her on.

  Willie told him that he had a visitor.

  “That’s cool,” the man said. “I can take a hint. I’ll come back tomorrow morning. Have a groovy time.”

  Willie closed the door and trudged back upstairs. Even I could feel his sorrow. Of all the hopeful hippie kids who had built cabins in these woods, only these two remained.

  By then, any chance I might have had of getting a kiss had vanished. Willie asked what time he should wake me the next morning. I said I didn’t need to be back in Cambridge until the middle of the day, for group meeting, and I would just as soon miss that—I had been scheduled to give a talk for months, but I never had any new data, and I kept having to persuade Vic to let me skip my turn. I asked Willie if he would mind stopping at the Drurys’ trailer. The family didn’t have a phone, but I guessed Flora would be there.

  “You want to draw this woman’s blood?” He seemed to suspect me of breaking some law. “I thought you weren’t a doctor.”

  “I’m not,” I said. But I had gone to medical school for a year before I dropped out and switched to research. And it wasn’t as if you needed a license to stick a needle in someone’s arm. At least, I didn’t think you did. Then I realized it had been nearly a decade since I attended medical school, and the idea of sticking Flora’s arm again and again while her husband and kids looked on began to distress me so much that I asked Willie if he would let me practice.

  He needed a few moments to take this in. I wanted to draw his blood?

  Instantly, I understood how crazy this sounded. I started to take back the request.

  He cut me off. “I guess you can,” he said. “Why not? I’ve got plenty to spare.”

  “You sure?”

  He shrugged. “No. But you might as well do it anyway.”

  I laid out a clean syringe. A needle. A few vials. Some gauze. Willie pushed up his sleeve. I tied his arm with the rubber tube. His veins bulged—they were so thick, I could have stabbed him anywhere and been sure to strike blood. I laid his arm across my lap—it was heavy and warm—and swabbed a spot with alcohol. The needle pierced his skin. Our eyes met. He seemed frightened. I drew back the plunger and the syringe filled with blood. Reluctantly, I withdrew the needle from his arm, then jabbed it through the rubber cap of a test tube. The vacuum in the tube sucked blood from the syringe—I loved to see this happen, an invisible force performing work. Then I wrapped my hand around the vial and rocked it so the blood wouldn’t clot. I had told him the truth—I had drawn the blood for practice. But holding it in my hand, I vaguely thought I might want it for something else. I started to put the tube in the Styrofoam container I had brought for Flora’s blood.

  Willie snatched it back. “Hey,” he said. “Give that here.” He wrenched my fingers open
—not enough to hurt, just enough to free the vial. Then he walked to the window, pulled the stopper, and spilled the blood. He turned back to me then, and I didn’t know if he was going to scold me or take me in his arms. “All right,” he said, “sleep well.” He handed me a flashlight and climbed the stairs to his room.

  I lay back against the window seat and tried not to listen to the swish of his belt snaking through its loops, his trousers crumpling to the floor. I heard his quilt rustle, heard the mattress sigh and give way. To keep myself from climbing those spiral stairs I needed to remind myself that there was a three-in-four chance that within the next decade one of us, if not both of us, would be paralyzed in a wheelchair. I couldn’t watch yet another person I loved die of that disease. All I could think about were the statistics. If I carried the gene for Valentine’s, then any child I might conceive with a man who wasn’t at risk ran a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease. That was bad enough. But if Willie and I both carried the gene, any children we had would run a 75 percent chance of contracting Valentine’s. Maybe, if the child received two copies of the gene—that is, if it was a homozygote—it would develop the disease even earlier, in its twenties, or in its teens, with more severe symptoms. No one had studied a human homozygote. I saw an infant as small as a newborn mouse, saw that child twitch and moan.