Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  “Wow,” Elise said. She had never been good at lying. “I hadn’t realized how big it was going to be when I saw it before.”

  “You think it’s too big,” Jenny said, unconcerned.

  “No, it’s good to have—”

  “It’s not your style, I know.” Jenny walked over to check the label on a large wardrobe box and frowned.

  “You’ll have plenty of room for parties,” Elise said, and in saying it, she remembered Jeremy. The thought seemed to strike them both at the same time, and for a moment they were silent.

  “Let’s eat outside,” Jenny suggested, leading the way back to the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Elise began. “I’m sure you’re not thinking about parties right now. I didn’t mean—”

  “No. It’s fine. We will have parties here,” Jenny said with determination. “We just have to get through this next piece.”

  “Right.”

  Jenny opened some French doors at the bottom of the back stairs and led Elise out onto a flagstone terrace, ringed by a wide two-foot-high stone wall.

  “And this next piece involves…?” Elise let her voice trail off.

  “Ugh.” Jenny shook her head and took the bag from Elise’s hand, began setting the salads and sodas and wax-paper-wrapped cookies on the wall. “I don’t know yet exactly. We have an appointment on Monday to see the surgeon and the medical oncologist…”

  As she spoke, Elise nodded along and tried to absorb and understand the information. It was not good. It did not sound good. But Jenny was “staying positive,” as they say. Her voice had a clipped can-do tone with an edge of warning to it. Do not press me on this, she seemed to say. Do not offer me your pity or your grief. Elise tried her best to oblige. That’s good, she said from time to time, or That makes sense. But she could see that she was not the right woman for the job. Laura, sympathetic, teary Laura, who was such an adept chameleon, so immanently able to pick up cues and adapt herself to fit them, was the one who should be here. Elise herself was too solid, too steadfast. She had inherited too much of her mother’s reserve and social gracelessness. She could not fall into step with Jenny’s necessary optimism with ease.

  Behind them, on the freshly unrolled sod that spread up the hill to the woods, there came the chirp of a cricket. Already this artificial recreation of nature was being accepted by the world of insects, animals, and microorganisms. A squirrel darted across the green expanse from one patch of woods to another. All around them the grass was coming alive.

  Jenny finished explaining the various treatment options and they both sat looking out over the lawn. The passing of time suddenly struck Elise in all its weirdness. Who would have thought, at age twenty-one, hanging out in their dorm room rehashing some drunken party or putting themselves through one of the quickly neglected exercise videos Jenny introduced to the room, that they would find themselves here one day, behind this McMansion, talking about the prospects of Jenny’s husband’s cancer? It felt for a moment as if they should have known. As if their innocence of the future had simply been stupid. And a little endearing. She wanted to say this to Jenny, but looking at her friend sitting there on the stone wall, knees pressed to her chin, she couldn’t. What good would it do her? It was not practical or reassuring. If anything, it was tragic.

  Jenny lifted her head and turned to face Elise squarely. “As a scientist, you see aberrations all the time, right?” There was a determination in her voice that Elise recognized.

  “Of…?”

  “Whatever. One freak molecule that doesn’t behave as predicted. Or one experiment that gets out-of-whack results. One, I don’t know, goat whose milk for some reason refuses to express human proteins.”

  Elise frowned. Ordinarily, as a scientist, she did not really believe this. Even exceptions happened for their own logical, explicable reasons—some variable in process or makeup that would, if further studied, be revealed to have its own predictable, logical framework. But there was Ula, in whom, so far, Elise could detect no reason for her aberration. “Well, for the most part, there is order,” she said. “And predictability. But it’s true, there are exceptions.”

  “That’s what I told Jeremy,” Jenny said. “You can’t just boil it down to numbers and averages. It’s each individual case on its own.”

  Elise nodded.

  There was a pause.

  “I haven’t been a very sympathetic wife, you know,” Jenny surprised her by saying.

  “That’s not true,” Elise protested, although of course it was true—she and Laura had often remarked on this.

  But Jenny did not seem to be listening for any answer. “I have been selfish,” she said.

  Elise did not say anything this time. She waited for Jenny to turn back to her with her usual composure and suggest they move on to something else—dessert, maybe, or more unpacking. But she didn’t.

  A bird began to chirp loudly, almost rhythmically, in a nearby tree and the breeze rattled their sandwich paper. Jenny’s gaze remained fixed. The skin around her eyes, Elise noticed for the first time, looked puffy under a layer of powder or concealer or whatever it was, as if she had been crying. It made Elise feel sad. Selfishly, it made her miss Chrissy.

  “We’re all selfish,” Elise said finally. “It’s in our genes.”

  Back on the Pharm, something had happened while Elise was gone. This was clear the moment she saw her research assistant. His round, transparent face was lit up with excitement as he walked toward her down the hall.

  “Ula’s milk is in!”

  “It is?” Elise felt her own heart flip-flop.

  “This morning. Plenty of it. I’m separating it already—I got it ready—”

  “Where?”

  “Over there—in number ten.”

  Elise threw on her lab coat and, trying to restrain her excitement, followed Prakash into the centrifuge room where number ten whirred away just as it was supposed to. There was nothing to see, of course, just the bright electric number indicating time and speed, but all the same, it was tantalizing. Inside the centrifuge, the raw result of her labors was waiting with all its promise and mystery, its complex challenges and particularity. This was what she loved about her work.

  “So we’ll use the same compound to cleave the protein?” Prakash asked, his own heightened interest as palpable as hers. And for a moment Elise loved him—her partner in fascination. A man who could speak the language of chemistry and biology and share her delight in its application. A partner whose unique scrawl of equations and formulas she could recognize a mile away.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in concentration preparing the various particulates needed to begin the purification. And Elise herself handled the sterilized and foil-wrapped beakers, the pipettes, the neat canisters of chemicals at her little-used bench. It felt good to be doing the work herself, collecting the amazing chalky substance at the bottom of the pipettes—it looked like no more than a smear of dried toothpaste!—from which all her work would stem. And she did not think of Jenny and Jeremy, or of Chrissy and their recent tension, and for the first time in ages, she and Prakash stayed at the lab late—watching the daylight fade to twilight and the computer screens begin to glow from the various empty offices like so many nocturnal creatures, opening their eyes.

  When she arrived home the boys were already asleep and Chrissy was in bed. The light had been on in their bedroom window when Elise pulled up outside the house, but when she got to the door, Chrissy had switched it out. This did not deter her. The excitement of her work surrounded her like a bright, optimistic haze.

  “Chrissy,” she said, climbing onto the bed and putting a hand on Chrissy’s hip.

  “Mmm,” Chrissy grunted irritably.

  Elise was undissuaded. “Ula’s milk came in,” she said, and Chrissy rolled onto her back and looked up at Elise.

  “And did it work?” she asked begrudgingly.

  Elise nodded, grinning. “Like gangbusters.”

  “Congratulation
s.”

  “Chrissy,” Elise said, lying down beside her, pressing her cheek against Chrissy’s shoulder and wrapping her arm more tightly around her waist. “I’m sorry about getting stoned. I’m sorry I’ve been irresponsible. It was idiotic.”

  Chrissy was silent for a moment. “It’s not just that.”

  The bright haze of elation surrounding Elise protected her even from this. “What? That I don’t want to be a part of this donor sibling thing?”

  “That you don’t want to be a full part of the boys’ lives.”

  Elise drew back in surprise. This stung. Even through the haze. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “That you make this not-biological-parent thing into a dividing point. Like you aren’t as much a parent as I am. When you are. I would never have done this without you. They would not be here without you.”

  Elise stared up at the ceiling. That’s not true, she wanted to say. It’s not me making it like that. But she didn’t. Possibly because of Ula, because of the hope and goodwill she had entered the room with, she tried to consider this objectively. Was this, after all, an alienation of her own devising? But how could she pretend that the fact of genetics and inheritance didn’t matter, that the shared connection of DNA, of hard-wired traits and predispositions, wasn’t important, when the whole point of the donor siblings was to honor the fact that it was? She was a biologist, for Christ’s sake!

  “It’s just hard for me…” she sighed.

  And to her surprise, this seemed to be enough. For the first time in what seemed like ages, Chrissy wrapped herself around her with real warmth. “I know, Beanie,” she said. “But they really need you.”

  And in the relieving wash of Chrissy’s forgiveness and the thrill of excitement over Ula, Elise managed, somehow, not to think again of Jenny and Jeremy. Her brain spun with thoughts of proteins and transgene expression vectors, of the DNA she had tampered with before Ula was ever born, the tiny, glassy egg she had injected and fertilized, dividing, replicating, and building according to plan. And what a plan it was: a whole creature! Warm body full of blood and bones and covered with a lovely glossy coat of hair, a whole intricately fashioned brain with its own set of imperatives and desires, and now, finally, milk—that perfect, mysterious substance from which life sustained itself. A distillation of the body’s most basic needs.

  When suddenly she remembered the role Ula had played in her conversation with Jenny. She had, in Elise’s mind anyway, exemplified the possibility of scientific exception, deviation, that was so hopeful to Jenny: for example, the goat injected with hormones to bring on lactaction who didn’t lactate. Except now she did.

  16

  IT HAD BEEN A WEEK since Neil had shown up outside Laura’s house, when Laura and Mac went on a date. Mac had lost a deal in the Philippines and was around more than usual—home for breakfast and dinner. Yesterday he had even left work in time to go to Genevieve’s weekly (and much-neglected) soccer game.

  This evening, in a rare burst of creative—even romantic—direction, Mac had made a dinner reservation at the new restaurant of a swanky hotel downtown. Climbing out of the car and handing the keys to the valet, Laura had something like a flutter of nervous anticipation—it had been almost immemorably long since she and Mac had gone out together, just the two of them, to anywhere that could be even remotely described as romantic. And the unfamiliarity of the event coupled with the roaring sense of guilt it stirred up served as some weird proxy for excitement.

  The restaurant was long and narrow and flatteringly lit with a sort of rosy, smoked-glass lantern light, the tables carefully choreographed and covered with heavy, expensive-looking linens. Focus-group-tested, Laura could hear Neil say. But she pushed the thought off—she was not going to think about Neil tonight. This was imperative. And the urgency with which she resolved this was actually quite relieving: an escape from that dark, creeping monster of guilt and confusion that seemed to be dogging her lately, running its chilly tentacles down her spine.

  Mac arrived a little late, and watching him enter the place, Laura noticed the way people looked at him—men and women alike. He had an impressive dark head of hair that so many men his age envied, and the thickening square of his jaw and features hinted at satisfaction, even opulence; in the last five years or so he had acquired that particular solidity of form that comes with success in the field of money. It was as if the very substance of his body had changed from blood and flesh and bones to something more permanent.

  “They have our table?” he said, giving Laura a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “I think. I told her we were here.”

  Mac walked over to the maître d’ and leaned forward in communication. The woman nodded rapidly and gestured at two available tables. How funny that this businessman in the expensive suit and Hermès tie was her husband. She was not dressed the part, she realized, looking down at the worn black flats she was wearing, and the cheap Banana Republic skirt she had bought last year. He was leaving her behind. The thought was actually kind of titillating.

  Once they were seated across from each other, though, Laura’s standby irritation at Mac stepped back in.

  “A bottle of the Château Gloria,” he told the waiter, without consulting Laura. Then he took out his handkerchief and blew his nose in that honking, graphic way of his that Laura felt was akin to farting.

  “Actually, I’ll have a glass of the Pinot Grigio,” she told the waiter, who looked confused, but Mac just shrugged.

  “We’ll get the bottle too—you’ll have a glass, won’t you?” he asked.

  He was so oblivious—it was impossible even to be passive-aggressive. The waiter scurried off to procure their drink order.

  “I’m having the salmon,” Mac said, shutting the menu after about two seconds.

  “English peas?” Laura mused, still staring at the elaborately described list of entrées. “As opposed to what? American? Cob-smoked bacon? Why does everything have to be so precious—who really cares if its cob-smoked bacon or wood-smoked bacon or whatever? It’s bacon.”

  “Mm,” Mac grunted disinterestedly. “Silly.” He seemed to be scanning the room for people he knew.

  It was a very Neil-type of thing to observe. The realization ushered in a whole line of Neil-influenced thought that she would have done well to push away. But it was irresistible—or, holding it up to Mac, like a test of sorts, proved irresistible anyway.

  “Doesn’t it just seem so crazy sometimes that we live in a society where we can eat at a restaurant like this—with a fifteen-dollar mini–corn cake on the menu,” she asked, leaning forward, “when you think about all the people in the world who would feel like they won the lottery if they got fifteen bucks? I mean, it would pay for, like, a year’s worth of food and school for their kids and a new house or something.”

  “Where’s that?” Mac asked, tearing off a hunk of the expensive “twice-milled” multigrain bread.

  “I don’t know—plenty of places—I don’t have some particular place in mind, I just mean the idea—”

  Mac shrugged. “So? Better that fifteen dollars go out into the world than sit in my pocket.”

  “Is it, though? I mean going out into the world—from here? I mean, doesn’t it just do that much to make the price of corn more expensive and less available to whoever we’re talking about in Rwanda or Bangladesh or wherever?”

  “Ha!” Mac let out an insulting laugh. “I like that take on global markets, babe.”

  Laura frowned.

  Mac leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “I’m not making fun. It’s just, why are you trying to spoil a nice dinner? We can donate money to UNICEF or whatever. It won’t make any difference to the starving kids in Ethiopia if you eat a fifteen-dollar corn cake.”

  There was nothing to say to this. She was being childish, in a way—she could see this. Here, in Mac’s presence, the vast global discrepancies and her own privileged position in the spectrum of them seemed not so much unequal
as incomparable—apples and oranges. And there was a surprising relief that came with this.

  Since she had seen Neil, his voice, and his cynical, even jaundiced views, had risen to an almost deafening roar in her mind. It was as if the less she actually saw of or spoke to him, the louder he spoke in her mind. Washing the spinach for supper, she was aware of the sheer waste of potable water running down the drain; and changing Miranda’s diapers, she was overcome by the guilt of creating so much waste for her own personal convenience—the convenience of throwing smelly toddler poop into a trash bag that could be cinched shut and carted off by men whose job it was to whisk unsavory things out of sight!

  This afternoon, getting a facial at a fancy spa Jenny had given her a gift certificate to, Laura had been struck by the sense that the very existence of such a vain and unnecessary service was a sign of imminent apocalypse. Lying in the darkened room, her face slathered with expensive lotions, her fingers stuffed into what looked like giant heated oven mitts, Laura had been gripped by panic. The facial was an excess, just like the ridiculous, elaborate wigs and decadent balls that characterized the court of Louis XIV, or the fountains of wine and toiling slaves of ancient Rome. Here she was, having her very pores coddled by some poor Slovakian immigrant, while elsewhere in the world people subsisted on a handful of rice a month. Wasn’t this a symptom of an imbalance that would surely be leveled by the equilibrium-loving sands of time? At least there were no slaves, she had tried to reassure herself, but Neil’s retort occurred to her immediately. There were slaves! The distant, unseen slaves of the global economy, toiling in Chinese factories, splicing electrical wires, and melting plastic to make these ridiculous finger-warming mitts! They were probably living on lead-poisoned fish, raising children in shacks with no running water or electricity, facing a life expectancy of forty years and a high risk of succumbing to AIDS or malaria or some mutant new interspecial flu.

  She had left the spa feeling chastened. And when she went to pick her children up from school she hugged them close, smelling their warm sweaty heads and exclaiming over their bizarre and fragile artworks with a feeling of nostalgia already for the easiness of this world they lived in, the unsustainable beauty and peace and abundance that they had so far known. She needed to prepare them for a rougher reality. For a time when Americans would know hunger and want and disease. But how?