The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  He had an idea about it, or maybe it was just a feeling. He kept his feeling to himself.

  Now Billy parked his bike outside the shop and went inside. He looked for the pirate clerk but found a different one on duty, a suntanned girl in a halter top. He locked his bike to a lamppost and went down the street to the restroom, which smelled even worse during the day. The doors of the stalls were all closed. A pair of feet was visible beneath one of the doors: a man sitting down, his trousers around his ankles.

  Billy washed his hands.

  The man came out of the stall. He was old and fat, wearing red pants. Billy stepped aside to let him use the sink. When the man left, Billy examined his face in the mirror, thinking how the clerk had thought him older. Sixteen, old enough to drive.

  Again he washed his hands.

  He was drying them on his shirt when a man entered the restroom. He was wearing a policeman’s blue uniform, and Billy thought of the postcard he had stolen from the store.

  The man stood at the urinal and unzipped.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked Billy.

  “Nothing.” In his nervousness, his voice had cracked. He felt his face warm.

  The man finished and gave himself a shake. “Aren’t you a little young to be hanging around here?”

  “I’m sixteen,” Billy said, his heart racing.

  The man gave him a hard look. “I could get you into a lot of trouble. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

  It was bedtime before Frank could get his wife alone. By then he had eaten dinner with the children, coated his sunburned shoulders with Solarcaine, and thrown a Frisbee to Scotty for what seemed an eternity. (“Tire him out,” Paulette had instructed him. “For heaven’s sake, Frank, the child will not sleep.”) He had endured hours of his brother-in-law’s conversation: sailing stories, fishing stories, tales of masculine adventure in which Roy Drew emerged, always, as the hero. Frank knocked back four gin and tonics and moved his chair periodically, to stay upwind of Roy’s cigarette smoke. Finally he excused himself and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Paulette was in her nightgown. She had just turned back the coverlet and was climbing into bed.

  She gave him a wary look. Once a day is plenty, it seemed to say. Don’t think for a moment it’s going to happen again.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Her whole body relaxed, as though she’d been spared a punishment. Frank tried not to notice her relief. She listened closely as he spoke. Then, to his astonishment, simply shrugged.

  “Oh, Frank. You know she’s always been small for her age.”

  “It’s more than that. Haven’t you noticed? Seeing her with Roy’s girl, I couldn’t believe they’re the same age.”

  “All Gwen’s school friends are taller than she is.” Paulette said this lightly; maybe she meant nothing by it. Maybe it was Frank who supplied the subtext. You would have noticed that if you were a better father. If you were ever at home.

  “Doesn’t that concern you?” he demanded.

  “Not at all.” She smiled tightly. “I was the same way, at her age. I’m still petite. Like my mother, and Martine. All the women in my family are small.”

  “She’s almost thirteen. Shouldn’t she be starting puberty by now? Breast development, pubic hair. Something.”

  “Can you please lower your voice?” Paulette’s cheeks were scarlet, her voice a heated whisper. “Frank, I know a bit more about this than you do. I was a girl once. And it just so happens that I developed on the late side.” She smiled grimly. “Maybe she’ll end up like me. Wouldn’t that be terrible?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You prefer voluptuous women. I know that. I’ve always known that. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rest of us. Some men actually appreciate a slim figure. For heaven’s sake, it’s not a medical condition.”

  “Jesus, what’s the matter with you?” He stared at her, dumb-founded. “I prefer you. I married you, didn’t I?” As he said it, he knew it was hopeless. Hopeless to say he loved her, wanted her, had chosen her over numberless other girls. Hopeless to point out that she was the one who always said no, who regularly pushed him away.

  He took a deep breath. “Listen. We’re not talking about you. We’re talking about Gwen. Something could be wrong. Medically.” He waited a moment for this to sink in. “I think she should see a doctor. Just a checkup, to make sure everything is okay.”

  “She goes to the doctor every year. I’ve been taking her since she was a baby.” Paulette’s voice was perfectly even, a trick of hers: the further she pushed him, the calmer she became. “And Billy. And Scott. Frank, they are perfectly healthy children. And I am a good mother.” She paused. “Lately, as it turns out, I am even a fairly good father.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Really, Frank. How many mothers have to teach their sons to shave?”

  He colored. A few months back, Billy had found one of Frank’s razors and cut himself, trying to remove the peach fuzz from his upper lip. Frank was out of town—the annual meeting at Cold Spring Harbor. Something he would never be allowed to forget.

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully. “I find this really interesting.” She seemed to be waiting for a response.

  “What?” he said wearily.

  “The only time you’ve ever shown the slightest interest in our children’s health, it concerns something sexual.” She said the last word in a hoarse whisper. It would have been comical, he thought, if it weren’t so sad.

  “Who mentioned anything sexual?” I could kill this woman, he thought. He felt his heart accelerating, his arms and legs flooding with blood. No: she will kill me. She is subtracting years from my life.

  “Frank, you’ve always been obsessed with sex.”

  It impressed him that she pronounced the word at a normal volume. He knew his wife, knew the effort that must have cost.

  Exercising heroic self-control, he did not answer. He’d been taught never to hit a girl, and that applied also to the verbal. He didn’t say what he’d been thinking on and off for years: You are the most repressed woman I’ve known in all my life.

  The night is still, and the house sleeps fitfully. In the front bedroom, the couple lie close together in a too-small bed. Each resents the other body, its warm breathing, its radiant heat. The man considers slipping outdoors for a walk, but fears waking his sister-in-law, an ill-tempered sentry at the top of the stairs. His wife feigns sleep, perspires into her cotton nightgown. She is too angry to sleep unclothed.

  Downstairs, in the deep part of the house, their younger son is snoring. He dreams of the surf, the flying Frisbee, the dog they will not let him have.

  His older brother lies awake in the top bunk, remembering boots in a bathroom stall: worn cowboy boots with intricate stitching, the others black leather, shiny and new.

  On the screened porch the girl cousins sleep the deep sleep of children. A cool breeze kisses their cheeks.

  In a year the house will be sold. Frank and Paulette McKotch will communicate through lawyers. It is the last summer for this family. Nothing will ever be the same.

  1997

  the condition

  chapter 1

  Snow was falling fast in Cambridge, small dry flakes, oblique and furious. The first storm of the season, wholly unexpected. Frank McKotch’s topcoat was still at the cleaner’s. Rain had been forecast, and he had dressed accordingly. He crossed the street with a decisive step, swinging his useless umbrella, his trench coat flapping in the wind. The walk took twenty minutes, a significant expenditure of time; but Frank was convinced it enhanced his productivity. Quicken the respiration, he thought. Move the blood.

  His route bisected the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’d spent most of his career. Five years ago, lured by promises—funding, a lighter teaching load—he’d accepted an appointment at the Grohl Institute; but the campus proper, the hulking rectangu
lar buildings arranged around a quadrangle, remained as familiar as his living room. Just beyond it lay the corporate headquarters of Protogenix, where Frank served on the scientific advisory board. He’d spent the entire morning in meetings in the low brick bunker, not removing his jacket. Now, on campus, there was a feeling of holiday in the air. The semester had ended and traffic was conspicuously light. Students loped along in down jackets, drinking tall coffees. Overgrown boys in parkas, yarmulkes, eyeglasses; scrawny kids hauling heavy backpacks. “Professor McKotch!” a boy called from across the street. Frank raised his hand in salute. A number of his old students were still on campus, as grad students or research assistants or postdoctoral fellows, the treadmill of study and academic appointments that a young scientist could run for years.

  They were the finest young scientific minds in the world—from fifty states, a hundred countries; from planets known and not yet discovered, it often seemed to Frank. Over the years, he’d taught Saudi princes and teenage prodigies; the sons of Teamsters, four-star generals, diamond miners, Soviet dissidents. He enjoyed his students and basked in their achievements. At the same time, it exasperated him—struck him as totally unnecessary—that these brilliant young men were such lamentable physical specimens. Bad haircuts, poor musculature, acute cases of cystic acne. By nineteen, half were already paunchy; the rest looked downright starved. Athletes were rare; the hottest contest on campus was the annual Integration Bee, in which young geniuses went head to head, feverishly solving equations. Female students were few, and seemed fewer—plain Asian girls, quietly dressed, in unflattering clothes that nearly hid their gender. It was easy to forget that a couple of miles to the west, Harvard girls modeled sweaters, suntans, tall boots that hugged a bare leg like a leather sleeve. If, like Frank, you’d walked Kendall Square for thirty years, you could almost forget that women existed in the world.

  He arrived at Grohl in eighteen minutes, a new record; he bypassed the elevator and climbed the three flights of stairs to his lab. It was a small discipline he’d maintained for years, part of his daily regimen for keeping fit. Push-ups and sit-ups, weekends on the bicycle. A chin-up bar hung in the doorway to his study. He was fifty-nine, and his waist had not thickened. No excess flesh hung over his belt.

  From the landing he watched one of the secretaries, Betsy Baird, step out of the elevator, a grocery bag in her arms. She was a small, energetic woman with lacquered hair and a wide painted mouth.

  “Booze,” she explained. “It’s Christmas, remember? Your team is thirsty.”

  He followed her through the reception area, which a few of the younger staff—there were five grad students and eight post-docs—had decorated with red lights and tinsel. In Frank’s own office Margit Lindgren sat perched on the desk, beer bottle in hand. She was too tall to perch gracefully—six feet, the same as Frank. Margit ran her own lab on the first floor, but made frequent visits to the fourth.

  “We started without you,” she said. “Where have you been?”

  He pulled up a chair. “Progen. Meeting with the board.” In the distance a telephone rang. “Jesus, now what?”

  “Poor Frank,” Margit said. His foray into commercial science had provided them with hours of conversation. Based on all he’d told her, Margit viewed the management team at Protogenix as a band of marauding Huns, a conclusion with which he agreed. Her response to his tales—ardent sympathy and quiet horror—satisfied him deeply.

  Betsy Baird stuck her head in the doorway. “It’s Neil Windsor again.”

  “I’m still at Protogenix.”

  “He called over there. They told him you’d already left.”

  “Tell him I’m not back yet. You don’t know where I am.”

  Betsy disappeared, and Margit took a pull on her beer. “Neil Windsor?”

  “Old friend. Classmate, really. He’s in town for a couple of days.”

  “You don’t want to see him?”

  Frank shrugged. “Theoretically I do. But Gwen is coming tomorrow. I have a lot to do.” It was a thin excuse. His daughter’s visits required no preparation. They ate their meals in restaurants. His seldom-used guest room was tidy as a laboratory.

  “Windsor. That name sounds familiar.”

  “He’s at Stanford,” Frank said nonchalantly.

  “Oh, that Windsor. You saw his paper in Nature?”

  “Sure,” said Frank. The new issue had arrived yesterday. The timing was obviously coincidental—the paper would have been submitted months ago—but seemed calculated to cause him maximum distress.

  “And of course,” said Margit, “the Academy.”

  Frank nodded grimly. That April, like every other, he’d waited eagerly for the National Academy of Sciences to announce its new members. They were the anointed few, the top guys in mathematics and engineering, astronomy and physics, biology and medicine. From its ranks, every few years, came another Nobelist. Frank had had his share of successes, been awarded and endowed and fellowed and fêted. At MIT his position was secure; but for some reason, the Academy had eluded him. The elections process was lengthy and cumbersome: scientists were nominated by their individual sections, then voted upon by class. Frank had been asked, a few years back, to supply a curriculum vitae and a list of publications; year after year, he imagined his name working its way up the list of nominees. He’d been certain that this would be his moment. Instead it had been Neil Windsor’s. Margit, who knew all this, gave his arm a squeeze.

  “When does Gwen arrive?” she asked.

  “Gwen and Billy.” He grinned, pleased at the change of subject. “He managed to tear himself away a day early. They land tomorrow afternoon, and I have them for the evening. They’ll drive to their mother’s on Wednesday.” The visit was an annual tradition for Frank and his daughter. Billy hadn’t joined them in years. Scott, Frank’s younger son, had never come.

  “Bring them by the lab,” said Margit. “I’d love to see Gwen again.”

  “She’d like that.” Frank hesitated. “She’s the same, I guess. Nothing ever changes with her.”

  Margit shrugged. “Why should anything change? She loves her work. She likes her life.”

  “I worry that she’s lonely.”

  Margit looked at him a long moment. “Being alone is not the same as being lonely. Billy is also single. Do you worry about him?”

  Frank grinned. A good-looking kid, Billy had never wanted for girlfriends. At Princeton he’d dated a real thoroughbred, Lauren something or other, the kind of statuesque blonde you saw on magazine covers. Billy no longer brought women home—Paulette had seen to that—but a New York cardiologist with his looks would have his pick. “I doubt Billy’s ever lonely,” he said, a touch of pride in his voice.

  “Silly man. I don’t mean sex. I mean companionship.” Margit drained her beer and set the bottle aside. “Billy is working all the time, just like Gwen. They are both doing what they love.”

  “I suppose,” he said, though of course it wasn’t the same. Billy saw patients five days a week; he had plenty of human contact, while Gwen was spending her young womanhood in the basement of a museum, cataloguing relics. What kind of life was that? Gwen had never been gregarious, and her work had made her even more antisocial. Strangers found her awkward. Even among family she was reserved and stubborn, prone to long silences. About her personal life she volunteered nothing. She maintained an air of strongly held opinions kept quiet; at times Frank sensed her studying him in a distinctly anthropological way. All in all, his daughter was not easy company; when she left Cambridge Wednesday afternoon, he would feel guilty relief. But Margit truly enjoyed Gwen, found her many eccentricities perfectly comprehensible. Frank only pretended to. And Gwen, who was not easily fooled, could tell the difference.

  “You’re right,” Frank said. “Gwen is fine. Keep reminding me of that.”

  He took the bottle Margit offered, and they drank in companionable silence. They’d been close for years, since Margit’s arrival at MIT. On the surface it was an unl
ikely friendship. Frank was a natural teacher, charming and extroverted in the classroom, beloved by the students, generous with his time. He kept in touch with dozens of former postdocs, wrote reference letters, dispensed advice. A few years back, his team had thrown a surprise party for his birthday, a sort of raucous celebrity roast highlighted by clever toasting, fond ribbing at Frank’s expense. It was just the sort of gathering he liked. For the first time in years, he had felt like a father.

  His enthusiasm for teaching mystified Margit. To her the classroom was a trial. The students’ demands exhausted her. Even her postdocs had to jockey for her attention; she sneaked out of the lab each day like a star ducking the paparazzi—the Garbo of Grohl, Frank often joked. They were the same age; both divorced, with grown children. They favored the same movies, the same books. Half the volumes in Frank’s study had Margit’s name on the flyleaf. Each year they shared season tickets at the Huntingdon Theatre. Once, at a performance of Miss Julie, they’d run into a student Frank fancied, a pretty Indian girl he’d taught the semester before. She’d assumed Margit was his wife. The two women had laughed at the mistake; but Frank was speechless. My wife? he’d marveled silently. But she’s so old.

  He’d heard it said—by Betsy Baird, or Ursula the lab tech—that Margit was attractive. Those who said this were always middle-aged women. They admired her leanness, her runner’s legs; they didn’t care—why would they?—that her behind was flat, her breasts nonexistent. Margit’s gray hair was cut short as a man’s; she wore distinctive eyeglasses, red or purple, with angular frames. At the theater she dressed dramatically, long skirts and silky shawls. Heads turned at the rustle of all that fabric; but Frank’s was not among them. If pressed, he would describe her as handsome.

  His ex-wife, Paulette, was not handsome. As a girl, a young woman, she’d been a fullfledged knockout. Back then, in the early sixties, she was often compared to Jacqueline Kennedy, another dark-eyed beauty who exuded elegance and privilege. In Paulette those qualities had become brittle with age. When he’d last seen her, three years ago, her skin looked fragile and crepey. Her face reminded him of a crushed flower. But her presence still had a sexual quality, something enervating and deeply feminine. At Billy’s medical school graduation, Frank had watched their son introduce her to a few of his professors, and the old coots had come to life in her presence. Even past her prime, Paulette had that effect on men.