The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  Again Scott felt the weight in his jacket. He said, “I’ve got a business proposal for you.”

  chapter 7

  The sun rises over St. Raphael. Gwen wakes first, roused by the slow rocking of the boat, the regular breathing of the water beneath. The same motion that lulls her to sleep can also waken her from it. This is a mystery, one of many lately revealed to her. Another miracle she will never understand.

  She turns toward the man sleeping beside her, and sees him. This is no small thing. For years she woke in a blur, fumbled for eyeglasses on the bedside table. Now she sees with humming clarity. From the moment she opens her eyes, the world offers itself without equivocation, without distortion. The dark smudge of morning beard, the strong bones of his face. His bare skin draws her; it seems to have its own life, separate from the rest of him. Before Rico is awake, Gwen steals these moments with this other part of him, this radiant welcoming skin.

  You are so small, he murmurs as he curls around her. I love how you are small.

  And because he does, she has begun to love this about herself. She is small enough to be lost at the center of a man, every part of her touching him, enrobed completely in his skin. Rico was gentle at first, sensing her discomfort. He loved her with his hands, his hot breath, his mouth. Now the magic pills make all things possible. He moves behind her and inside her, the same wavy rhythm. Wordlessly he lifts and turns her, arranges her above or beneath or beside him. His sureness enraptures her. He seems to know her body in ways that Gwen, who’s lived inside it forever, is only just learning.

  Her body has changed. Her stomach is flat now, her arms muscled. Living on a boat is work. More and more, she forgets to worry about how she looks. In town, around the marina, she is recognized. This does not distress her. She feels important, worthy of notice. Gwen and Rico walk everywhere together; always he keeps a hand on her. Your little woman, the locals say, a title that pleases her. She would always be little, but now she was a woman. She would always be little, but now she was his.

  She watches him rise from the bed, hears him in the galley making coffee. He will walk to town for morning bread, and Gwen will fall into a deeper sleep than is possible with him beside her, the distraction of his skin. She sleeps the trusting sleep of a child, knowing he will return.

  She sleeps less than she used to. Then, which is not so long ago, she hibernated through the long Pittsburgh winter, waiting for the earth to turn, for life to begin. She is living now, not waiting. Now there is a boat to pilot, a business to run, divers to outfit and guide and watch unobtrusively but vigilantly, to save from their own ignorance and panic. Gwen excels at this unseen watching. She has always known how to be invisible.

  With the divers Rico is not invisible. He is a star. The women jockey for his attention. They appear in shorts, in thongs, squeezed into bikini tops. Gwen hides in oversize T-shirts. The voice inside her is small but insistent. Several times a day it asks: Why choose me? Why love me?

  The women are beautiful and willing. Every few days, one will slip him a room key—white women always, Germans or French, Americans or Swedes. The first time she saw this, Gwen was angry. The second time made her cry. Rico touched her face and spoke to her softly. It’s not important. People are lonely. Have confidence in me. They don’t speak of it again, even when the women return a second time, a third; when Rico takes them diving at night. In a week Gwen sees them two or three times. Then, never again.

  It is the never again that matters.

  The night dives are lucrative, and the business is their future.

  Have confidence in me.

  In five days she will return to Pittsburgh, but only briefly, to sign papers and pack boxes. She has already quit her job—a meaningless task, dispatched by phone—but she will stop by the Stott to take flowers to Heidi Kozak, the friend who waited out her silence, who sent her to St. Raphael.

  Her savings she will put into the business. She has quite a lot of money, more than anyone knows. Papa left her a little something. Invested aggressively for ten years, a little something becomes a considerable something. Alone among the Drew grandchildren, Gwen knows how to save.

  I can’t take your money, Rico said, but Gwen insisted. In the end he was convinced. They need a new boat, and Gwen has enough for a large down payment. Debt makes Rico anxious. He has never made monthly payments on anything. It is Gwen’s turn to reassure him: Don’t worry. The money will come.

  They work hard together. Six days a week they run dive excursions—from Pleasures and Bimini Bay, the largest of the resorts. In the morning, and again in the afternoon, they host divers; in the evening a little supper, the never-ending repairs on the boat. Every few days Gwen drives Rico’s truck to the market, to buy provisions—fruit, bottled water—for the divers, and flowers and wine for themselves.

  The aged truck is full of surprises. One evening as Gwen drives away from the marina, the glove compartment springs ajar. She slams it shut, and again the door falls open. Inside is a pair of sunglasses, a tube of her sunscreen, the notebook where Rico records his mileage. And a bulging manila envelope.

  She doesn’t hesitate, has no reason to. She and Rico sleep in a compartment eight feet square. They prepare dinner side by side, close enough to hear each other breathe.

  Thoughtlessly, guiltlessly, Gwen opens the envelope. The East Caribbean bills show birds and fish and mountains, a young queen of England, her neck ringed with jewels.

  The bills are all hundreds. Quickly Gwen counts. There are five thick stacks, and one thinner one. Five hundred and forty bills.

  She has never been good at arithmetic, but this conversion has become automatic. Keeping books for the business, she does it many times each day.

  Fifty-four thousand Caribbean dollars equals twenty thousand American dollars.

  Overhead a seagull screams.

  WHERE WOULD Rico get twenty thousand dollars?

  For a day, two days, Gwen broods on this question. They have discussed the future, the best way to pool their assets. Rico has no savings account, no investments—at least, none he’d admitted to. She has access to his checkbook, the ledger he keeps for the business. No large sums have been recorded—recently or ever, as far as Gwen can tell. So where did the cash come from? Had it simply fallen from the sky?

  There is one evil possibility. In St. Raphael drug smuggling is rampant. Every month or two inspectors descend on the marina, searching for contraband. Just recently they’d searched a boat two slips over, a massive power yacht called Island Girl. Her owner was a white man of indeterminate nationality, a—friend? acquaintance?—of Rico’s. The marina gossips said he made trips to Jamaica. Island Girl was impounded, her owner taken away in handcuffs.

  The man was arrested a week ago. Ten days at the most.

  Is Rico involved with drugs? The very thought is a betrayal. Gwen is appalled by her suspicions, rendered mute by shame.

  Unable to speak, she watches and waits. She believed them cemented together. Now she begins to see the gaps, the places where the seal is bubbled.

  Have confidence in me.

  For two days she monitors the glove compartment, to make sure the money is still there. On the third day she takes the envelope and hides it in her purple backpack, crammed into a corner of the V berth.

  That evening Rico returns from town looking sweaty, panicked. His distress is obvious. But if she weren’t looking for it, would she have seen it? Exactly how blind has she become?

  “Everything okay?” she asks. Her voice is clear and innocent. She is horrified by her ability to dissemble, and strangely proud.

  Rico squeezes her shoulder, his smile so disarming that her heart breaks a little. What am I doing? she wonders.

  She will realize later that this is the wrong question. Better: What have I already done?

  ANOTHER DAY passes. They dock at Pleasures to pick up a crew of divers. Gwen watches Rico help them onto the boat. His welcome speech—the same one he always delivers—sounds false and
facile, a hollow performance. He is an actor, she thinks. His easy banter with the divers, his warm smile: none of this is genuine. She sees him with new eyes.

  That night she feigns sleep when he reaches for her. She lies awake a long time listening to him breathe.

  Finally, the morning she is to leave for Pittsburgh, she takes her backpack from the V berth and sets about packing. She removes the manila envelope and places it at the center of the bed. Rico is expecting to drive her to the airport. “Gwen, are you ready?” he calls from on deck.

  She zips shut the backpack. Her dive gear is already packed. The purple duffel waits, in plain view, on deck. Hasn’t Rico noticed? His little woman is ready to go.

  The moment is painless; she will ache later. She has always known that she would lose him. Now that the loss is nearly behind her, she feels a curious relief.

  He comes down into the hold. She keeps her back to him, gives him a moment to notice the envelope on the bed. Her heart is racing. She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t meet his eyes.

  Finally he touches her shoulder, and she turns to look at him. I was going to clean out my bank account, she thinks. All my savings. The money Papa left me. I was going to buy us a boat. She says none of this. For the first time in months, Gwen adopts the Silence. She waits for him to speak.

  “You found it,” he says finally.

  She thinks, Apparently so.

  “Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

  She thinks, Why didn’t you tell me? Why should I have to ask?

  “It’s a lot of money,” says Rico.

  She thinks, Where did you get twenty thousand dollars? Are you selling drugs?

  “You are angry,” he says.

  She thinks, You used me, and I let you. You would have taken me for everything I have. Yes, genius. I am angry.

  He stares at her, mystified. “Gwen, say something.” His voice breaks a little, and this is the thing that unglues her.

  “You weren’t going to tell me,” she says finally, choking on the words.

  “I couldn’t. It’s complicated.”

  She thinks, I’m so stupid. I thought you loved me. And then: My mother was right.

  Outside a horn sounds.

  “That’s my taxi.” Gwen hoists the backpack to her shoulder. “I have to go.”

  As a child in Pennsylvania, Frank McKotch had seen a boy trapped inside the trunk of a tree.

  This happened in springtime, the year he and Blaise Klezek were ten. Blaise was his best friend, nearly a brother—Frank’s own brothers, nine and twelve years older, had never been much good to him. It was late March, damp and leafless, the first sunny day after a week of soaking rain. The boys spent the morning in church, the interminable hymning and incensing of Palm Sunday. They sat through chicken dinners in uncomfortable clothing. Finally, gratefully, they roared into the forest with Indian whoops, a great stream of pent-up boyhood rushing to escape.

  They lived on a hill scored with rows of company houses; behind the hill were acres of dense poplar, oak, and beech. In buck and doe season these woods were off-limits—some years before, a boy had died there, hit by a hunter’s stray bullet—but in springtime the boys owned the forest. The stream was alive with frogs, water skippers, small snakes that wriggled but didn’t bite. The oaks—their low, spreading branches—made easy climbing. The poplars were less accommodating, stretching indifferently, magnificently toward the sky.

  For a long time the boys had eyed a certain tree, a mighty poplar sitting atop a ridge, the tallest tree for half a mile. The poplar’s bark was crenellated and silvery, its trunk wide as a barrel. Its branches were unreachable, but close beside it was a tall beech to which someone had nailed crude scraps of two-by-fours, spaced like the rungs of a ladder. Midway up the beech was a wooden platform, a hunter’s lookout. Standing on the platform, a boy might reach across to the lowest branch of the poplar.

  It was Frank who pointed this out, Blaise who shinned up the makeshift ladder. But when he reached the platform, he hesitated.

  “Can you reach it?” Frank called.

  “I don’t know,” said Blaise. “It’s farther than it looks.”

  Frank held his breath as Blaise reached and swung into the poplar’s bottom branch. After that it looked easy. Blaise crabbed toward the poplar’s trunk, where the branches were thicker. He reached up to a higher branch, and then a higher one. For a gasping moment he lost his footing. Quickly he righted himself.

  “Slippery,” he called.

  “Careful,” said Frank.

  “I can see the schoolyard,” Blaise said. “I can see the Twelve!”

  “Are you sure?” The tipple of Mine Twelve, nearly a mile away, was the tallest structure in town.

  By now Blaise was twenty feet off the ground. “It’s wet,” he shouted. A moment later he let out a tremendous yell. Then he was simply gone.

  “Blaise?” Frank circled the tree, craning his neck, but there was no trace of his friend. It was as if a passing angel had snatched him in midair.

  He heard another shout that seemed far away. Then, Blaise’s voice, curiously muffled: “It’s hollow! I’m in the tree!”

  Frank rushed to the trunk. The sound seemed to come from above his head. “Are you okay?” he shouted.

  Another muffled cry.

  “I can’t hear you,” Frank shouted.

  “My leg,” Blaise said, louder this time. “I hurt my leg.”

  “Can you see anything?” said Frank.

  “It’s dark.” Blaise’s voice sounded choked.

  “I’m going to go get my dad,” Frank said into the tree.

  “No!” Blaise shouted, so loudly that the bark vibrated next to Frank’s cheek. “Don’t go!”

  “I can’t reach you,” said Frank. “My dad has a ladder.” The only way in, as far as he could see, was the way Blaise had gone, through a soft rotted spot in the trunk, maybe twenty feet up. Frank saw, now, that the spot was blackened. The tree had been struck by lightning. It had died from the inside out.

  “I’ll be right back,” he called.

  He ran furiously to his house, and came back with his father and Blaise’s; when their rope and ladder proved too short, Frank raced across town to the firehouse. When Blaise was finally extricated two hours later—leg broken, shoulder dislocated, face and hands scraped raw—he seemed stunned and disoriented, still bewildered by the fall.

  Frank hadn’t thought of Blaise Klezek in a long time—he’d died ten years back in a drunk-driving accident—but the episode came back to him vividly in the spring of 1998, as he walked the streets of Cambridge muttering to himself. His mind, ever the athlete, raced like a star rebounder between two hoops. One, Cristina Spiliotes. Two, Blaise in his narrow prison: stunned, immobile, with no window to the outside. It was a prison nature had made; by following his instincts, Blaise had fallen in. Reaching for the next branch was a boy’s imperative. Boy took what tree offered. He did this because he could. What pulled the boy down was likewise a force of nature. The laws of the universe bent for no one.

  Humans had mass. Humans fell.

  FRANK FELL to earth on a Monday morning. He returned from an early meeting at Protogenix to find Betsy Baird on the phone.

  “Frank, where have you been? I’ve been calling all over town looking for you. Steve Upstairs wants to see you. As soon as possible, he says.”

  Upstairs, Frank knocked at the door of the corner office, where Zeichner was eating his lunch. He was white haired now, short and pugnacious, with a low, swollen belly. He resembled an army cook or perhaps a baker, rather than a geneticist who’d won the Nobel Prize.

  “Frank, I’m glad you’re here. Have a seat.” Zeichner pushed away his sandwich and licked his fingers. “I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll cut right to it. We have a situation on our hands. It concerns one of your postdocs.” He folded his hands. “Cristina Spiliotes.”

  “Cristina,” Frank repeated.

  “Talk to me about the paper, Frank.”


  Immediately Frank felt the winds change. Like many athletes, he fed on adversity, consequence. Crisis fired his blood. He did a quick inventory of his body, inhaled courage, shored up the reserve.

  “Well, as you know, it’s been accepted at Science,” he said cautiously. “Scheduled for the first week in April.”

  Zeichner closed his eyes a moment. He looked slightly ill. “That’s what I thought. Frank, if you’re aware of any irregularities in the data, now is the time to tell me.”

  “Irregularities,” he repeated slowly. “What are you talking about?”

  Zeichner paged through the paper on his desk. “This.” He handed Frank the paper. A line diagram had been Xed out in red ink, a fine line the color of blood.

  “The tail blot?” Frank frowned. “What’s the problem? It shows clearly that she got the knockout. It’s there in black and white.”

  “So it is,” Zeichner said.

  “What exactly are you suggesting?” Frank paused. “Steve, she showed me the gel from the tail blot. I saw it.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “I mean, I scrutinized it. Many times. There was nothing wrong with that gel.”

  Zeichner met his gaze. “Listen, I don’t doubt that she showed you a gel, and I’m sure it looked fine. But that DNA didn’t come from the tail. She lied, Frank.”

  Frank blinked, not comprehending.

  “She did the tail blot,” Zeichner continued. “She just didn’t like the results. That gel showed that she didn’t get the knockout, so she faked it. This gel”—his fat finger stabbed viciously at the page—“didn’t come from the tail blot. It came from the stem cells.”

  Frank’s mind raced. Was it possible?

  “This is crazy,” he said. “She’s a bright girl, Steve. I haven’t seen a postdoc this promising in years.” As he said it, Frank realized it was true. “Who’s making these allegations?”