The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  What a transformation, the estrogenization of the brain.

  In the kitchen he opened a bottle of wine—a cheap red, not bad for the money. A wine rack in the corner held the good Cabernet he saved for company. He’d discovered the Cab at a wine tasting with Rabbi Kleinman, and had bought the case to impress her. Now, with a lonely Christmas looming, he was glad he had.

  Screw it, he thought, recorking the cheap stuff. It’s Christmas Eve.

  He opened a bottle of the Cab.

  In the living room he flipped through a wire bin of DVDs, looking for something to watch. Many were gifts from Deena or Margit, who shared his taste for Bergman. What about Hour of the Wolf? He read the helpful summary on the back of its case. Troubled artist Johan (Max von Sydow) is haunted by past memories.

  Er, perhaps not.

  Autumn Sonata? Wild Strawberries? Scenes from a Marriage?

  Dear God, no.

  In the end he settled in with the television. It sat on a low table in the corner, where, if a family lived there, a Christmas tree would likely go. The thought did not depress him. He’d never had much use for Christmas. Maybe at first, when the kids were small. But as they grew older, Paulette’s insistence on tradition irritated him: the cloying carols, the Drew family ornaments, most of them ugly, all more trouble than they were worth. When Christmas was over, it was Frank who had to take down the tree, while Paulette wrapped the goddamn things in layer upon layer of newspaper. One year, when she was pregnant with Scott, he’d had to put away the ornaments himself. Hanging over his shoulder, she had instructed him endlessly: so persnickety, so picayune, that he had lost his temper. What would she do if the house caught fire? he demanded. Save the goddamn ornaments? Then maybe, if she had a chance, come back for Billy and Gwen?

  He drained his glass, came back from the kitchen with the rest of the bottle. He hadn’t eaten, and wine always hit him on an empty stomach. He felt a little drunk, and he intended to get drunker still.

  Seeing Paulette had unnerved him. She looked younger, somehow, than the last time he’d seen her, while he had aged dramatically. Back then—three years ago?—he’d been with Deena, and felt full of youthful vigor. When Paulette invited him to Concord to welcome Scott back from California, he had brought Deena along. It wasn’t Frank’s idea. Deena had been clamoring for years to meet his family, and he’d run out of excuses. Predictably, the evening went badly. Deena pouted for days afterward. And Paulette hadn’t spoken to him since.

  He’d believed at first that divorce would end his marriage. Later he understood that it wasn’t so simple. For twenty years he and Paulette had lived a few towns apart, their lives running on separate tracks that had, when the kids were younger, occasionally intersected. At holidays and birthdays and graduations, Frank’s presence was sometimes required, sometimes forbidden, seemingly at Paulette’s whim. Over the years he’d fallen in and out of her good graces, for reasons he couldn’t always discern. Not always, but often, he was banished after acquiring a girlfriend. The prettier the woman, the more protracted the ban.

  Now, of course, he ought to be in the clear: he was completely, perhaps permanently alone. And Paulette? Was she alone too? He had no idea. For a time she’d kept company—the phrase she would use—with a wealthy antiques dealer. To Frank it sounded about right: a rich man who loved shopping for expensive junk. When the old boy keeled over, he’d left Paulette some dough, according to Gwen. Did Paulette miss him? Were women so different in that way? After all these years, all the women he’d known long and intimately, Frank hadn’t a clue.

  Maybe she was perfectly happy living alone in the drafty old house, where the drama of their marriage—comedy, then tragedy—had unfolded. He had a clear memory of the first time they’d seen it. He’d had doubts about buying such an old place, but Paulette had loved it immediately, enchanted by its history. She had a sentimental attachment to Concord, where her Drew grandparents had lived. In the end Frank left the decision to her, and not merely because her father had supplied the down payment. Frank’s mind was elsewhere, on his troubled PhD thesis; he couldn’t afford the distraction of an argument. Pregnant with Gwen, Paulette was moody, strangely volatile; flushed and plump and swollen. He’d known by touching her that she was pregnant. As she’d been with Billy: warm, always, to the touch.

  Jesus: Billy. Frank thought of the Mercedes idling at the driveway, the driver’s hesitation before slamming on the gas. Surely Gwen was right; the car was not Billy’s. The alternative—that his son had fled at the sight of him—was unthinkable.

  They’d always been close, in Frank’s judgment, despite the divorce and the inevitable complications it caused. Away at Pearse, Billy had been spared both his mother’s theatrics and the awkward weekend visits with his father. Frank had dragged Gwen and Scott to museums and zoos and ball games, suddenly conscious of the need to entertain his children, something his own parents had never dreamed of doing, something Frank himself had never done. Sunday nights, exhausted by the effort, he drove them back to Concord, careful to avoid Paulette and her strained silence, her baleful stare. Later, at home, he phoned Billy for an update on his classes, his soccer season, his plans for the future. The kid seemed well adjusted, serious and studious, too busy succeeding in his teenage life to miss tramping around a smelly zoo with his father. Frank had assumed, then, that Billy felt as he did, that family relationships ought to happen naturally, without contrivance, father and son each going about his business in mutual affection and regard.

  He shook his head to clear it. Unsteadily he got to his feet, kicking over the empty bottle. The Cab had ignited a pleasant fire in his stomach. A fire, he thought. On a snowy Christmas Eve, it seemed the very thing. He examined the ashy hearth, the bricks white with creosote. He opened the damper and stared up doubtfully. The flue hadn’t been swept in years, since before Deena left.

  He went down to the basement, searching for firewood. He found a Duraflame log still in its wrapper. Deena had loved to screw by the fire, and they’d bought Duraflames by the half dozen. The fake logs didn’t smoke or throw off sparks. They burned just long enough for what Deena called one coital event.

  He brought the log upstairs, along with his snow shovel. At some point—after another glass of wine—he would clear the walk. He took matches from the mantelpiece and lit both ends of the log. The Duraflame ignited promptly, its chief virtue. In a moment the flame spread from end to end.

  Frank sat back in his chair and watched it critically. No smoke, maybe, but neither was it much of a fire. He wished he’d thought to pick up firewood. Then a thought occurred to him: his whole house was full of kindling. He could—he really should—undertake an early spring cleaning.

  He reached for the Newsweeks piled behind the sofa. One had a cover story on the new Mrs. JFK Jr. Another trumpeted the headline “The Mystery of Prayer.” He tore into them vigorously, ink staining his fingers. Briefly the fire flared.

  He swept a pile of paper from the hall table. He was drowning in junk mail. Have Your Carpets Professionally Cleaned. The Penny Saver. Have You Seen This Child? Gleefully he tossed them onto the fire.

  He reached for another magazine, then realized what he was holding. The new issue of Nature. He’d flagged with a yellow Post-it note the article Neil Windsor had written. Neil and Kevin Cho.

  He clutched the journal in his hand. It would give him enormous satisfaction, really, to toss it into the fire. To incinerate his envy, his ancient rancors, his own failure to produce. He would torch the last few limp, underachieving years of his life. He recapped, briefly, the grave mistakes he’d made in those years.

  Not marrying Deena.

  Not getting Gwen to the doctor.

  Not hiring Kevin Cho.

  He flung the journal into the fire. The flame responded with enthusiasm, filling the room with light.

  Frank settled back into his chair. His open briefcase sat on the coffee table, overflowing with paper. On top of the pile was a thin sheaf of manuscript pages
, neatly stapled. Cristina’s paper, nowhere near completion. Publication—if it happened at all—was many months, perhaps a full year away.

  His lie at the bar came back to him in a rush. We’re getting positive signals from Science about our paper. I can’t imagine it won’t go through.

  Shame filled him. Under normal circumstances, he was closemouthed about ongoing projects. The field was competitive, wildly so: scientists borrowed, appropriated, stole outright. Grohl had invested heavily in Cristina’s work, years and precious research dollars. Now that she was finally producing, Frank lived in fear that they’d be scooped.

  Goddamnit: with the best minds in the world grinding away, racing to map the human genome, oncogenetics was set to explode. We’ll be picking cancer genes out of our teeth, he thought. Scientists Frank’s age were quickly becoming dinosaurs; his colleagues, more and more, looked like kids. Some, like Kevin Cho, really were kids, and they were the ones making the biggest finds. Frank—why deny it?—was nearing the end of his productive years. He wanted more than anything in the world to do what Neil Windsor was doing: to knock the field on its ear. A few times he’d come close; but the big discovery had somehow eluded him. And that—it was suddenly clear as day—was his own goddamn fault.

  Again and again, he had focused on the wrong data. For years he’d felt superior to Neil, for reasons that now seemed foolish: charm, masculinity, athletic ability, sexual prowess. The first three counted for nothing, and the last had deserted him forever. He saw, now, a deeper disparity between himself and Neil, a single, powerful determinant—the real reason his own career had stagnated while Neil was welcomed into the Academy.

  It all came down to character—forged, no doubt, in those formative years Neil had spent sweating at Harvard instead of pickling and fornicating at Penn State. All along he’d known what was important, and had acted accordingly. Neil had hired Kevin Cho, his secret weapon. And Frank had hired his midlife crisis.

  He sank into his chair, Cristina’s paper still in his hands. He glanced at the title page. “XIAP deficiency inhibits tumorigenesis in mice.” Cristina’s name led the list of authors; Frank’s came last, the power spot. Well, it was the way of the world: Frank had lost count of the old lions—Charlie Stoddard at Harvard, Harry Drucker at MIT—who’d built their own careers and reputations on his hard labor. As a postdoc he’d been as ambitious as Cristina; he’d paid into the system for years. He felt no guilt, none whatsoever, about reaping the rewards.

  He drained his glass and began to read.

  THE PAPER was terrific.

  Frank read it straight through, stopping once to stagger into the kitchen for a second bottle of wine. He spotted the cheap red, already opened, and took it back to the living room. The results were all there, laid out before him: in all three animal cohorts, knocking out XIAP had led to a sharp decrease in tumor growth.

  Frank put down the paper and drained his glass. It always astonished him, the way good reporting could bring the science to life on the page. Cristina was a lively writer, so sharp and persuasive that it would be easy to miss the small holes in her science. To verify that she’d knocked out XIAP, she’d done a Southern blot of cells from the mouse’s tail: the DNA strands were cut into fragments, then transferred onto a gel and probed, to show which fragments contained the altered sequence. So far, so good, except that the diagram in Cristina’s paper showed only a portion of the results, the 3 prime end of the gene. Common practice, nowadays, but Frank was of the generation that disdained shortcuts. WHAT ABOUT 5'? SHOW BOTH BANDS!! he noted in the margin, his handwriting wavy on the page. If Cristina was more stylish than precise, Frank was sympathetic: he’d had the same tendency as a kid, until Charlie Stoddard, his mentor at Harvard, shamed him into thoroughness. Cristina was bright and ambitious; Frank owed her the same rigorous training he himself had received. He saw, now, that he’d denied her the time and attention he gave the other postdocs, that his attraction to her had incapacitated him. He had failed to deliver; but with this paper Cristina would redeem them both. With his guidance, who knew what she might accomplish?

  Relief flooded him. He hadn’t lied to Neil Windsor after all; he’d merely fudged the timeline. True, Science hadn’t accepted Cristina’s paper yet, but might very soon. If Neil pressed him, Frank could blame the editor, the slow-reading reviewers. It’s in the pipeline, buddy. It’s on the way.

  He found, stuck to the refrigerator, a list Betsy Baird had typed, home phone numbers of each member of his team. He dialed. A recording asked him to leave a message—Cristina’s voice, but deeper, weirdly distorted. Jesus, Frank thought. Time to get a new tape.

  “Cristina, Frank McKotch here. It’s Wednesday night”—he squinted at the clock—“kind of late, and, listen, I read this paper and I have to tell you, it’s very strong. The discussion section is dynamite.” He allowed himself an avuncular chuckle. “Of course, you did cut a few corners up front. What happened to the five prime end of the tail blot, for God’s sake?”

  He poured another glass of wine.

  “We need to straighten out those diagrams first thing tomorrow morning.” The lab director’s we, which invariably meant you. “Oh, right: Christmas. Well, Friday then.” He drank deeply. “No reason to drag our feet. Let’s get this baby out the door.”

  chapter 2

  Three days before Christmas, Scott McKotch saw the billboard.

  It loomed at the junction of Highways 8 and 61, fourteen feet high and forty-eight across, the size of four garage doors laid side by side. Scott squatted in the breakdown lane, just behind the guardrail, and stared up at it. His own face, enlarged to the diameter of a bicycle tire, stared back. It was the sort of moment that comes blessedly seldom in most lives, a moment of reckoning. He had grown adept at fleeing such occasions, but this time he’d had no warning. The evidence had ambushed him on his way to work, leaped into his field of vision across eight lanes of highway traffic. There was no ignoring such evidence. No denying what he had become.

  The photo had been taken three years ago at soccer practice. In the grassy foreground, in navy-and-white Ruxton jerseys, were two teenage boys jogging across the field. Behind them stood Scott in shorts and a navy windbreaker, his hair windblown, his square jaw handsomely set. The photographer had caught his hands in midclap. In his first and final year of coaching Ruxton soccer, clapping was the one skill Scott had mastered. With palms cupped for maximum resonance, he clapped when his team took the field and when they left it, when goals were scored and, especially, when they weren’t, at which point he would shout in his deepest voice, “Good effort!” Coach McKotch clapped his palms raw. Coach was a clapping fool.

  He took a step back from the guardrail. A cold rain had soaked his shirt collar. Rush hour traffic whizzed past him, crashing through puddles, spraying filthy water over his chinos. The two boys, he recalled, were brothers, now graduated. The older had been accepted at Brown, the kind of school to which Ruxton students were encouraged to apply. The younger was at Ohio State, the kind to which they usually went. Both kids were tall and lanky, with the blond and pink-cheeked look of English princes. Next to them Scott looked broad shouldered and powerful, his legs impressively muscled. Above the three heads was a caption in gorilla capitals: RUXTON ACADEMY. And then, crossing the boys’ shins in bold italics: Where Success Is the Goal.

  Scott got into his car, a twelve-year-old Volkswagen Golf with one windshield wiper and no hubcaps, and weighed the likelihood that anyone he knew, while speeding along Highway 61, might recognize the clapping dolt in soccer shorts, a pathetic pitchman for a third-rate prep school.

  The likelihood was pretty freaking high.

  Each day between seven and eight thirty, Route 61 was backed up for miles, the whole population of Gatwick on its morning run southward sucking coffee out of travel mugs, listening to inane radio chatter or improving books on tape. In the last twenty-four hours, every one of his neighbors and coworkers had already seen the billboard. There was no question in
his mind.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. “Okay. So what?”

  His neighbors and coworkers didn’t matter. Anyone who lived in Gatwick existed at the sad margins of civilization, living a life as doomed and irrelevant as his own. These people were neither movers nor shakers. Their opinions counted for shit. But what if somewhere in the sea of cars, some graduate of Pearse Upper School (class of 1985 and the overlapping ones, ’82 through ’88) happened to pass through town? Driving northward from New York City, perhaps for the annual Christmas visit, one of his old classmates might glance out the passenger window and recognize the guy voted Class Clown and Rebel Without a Clue, known in the middle grades by the nickname Biter, come to this sorry end. (Alumni of Stirling College, which Scott had briefly attended, might also drive through Gatwick; but he was probably safe there. He hadn’t been at Stirling long enough for anyone to remember his face.)

  He ran a hand through his wet hair, checking his reflection in the rearview mirror. He raked the hair back from his forehead and glanced again at the billboard. Three years later, the difference was astonishing.

  On top of every other indignity in his life, he was losing his freaking hair.

  GATWICK, CONNECTICUT, was a town of forty thousand, built on what had been dairyland. When Scott and Penny moved there three years ago, Main Street was newly paved; a rich, bovine smell still hovered over the fields. Now Gatwick had matured into a sprawling bedroom community of cheap land and easy access to strip malls, its wide central artery lined with a small but spreading cluster of fast-food franchises and electronics emporia and video stores, their bright signage recognizable even to small children, the Big American Brands. Gatwick’s adult citizens commuted, in equal proportions, to Hartford, Providence, and New Haven; a smaller share drove two hours each way to Boston. Gatwick was an exurb without an urb, a diffuse nowhere that looked, increasingly, like everywhere, a thought that filled Scott with despair.