The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  LATER, AFTER teaching his first-period class, he returned to his office and found the red message light flickering on his phone.

  Hi, Hon. Ian’s school called again. They need his fall tuition tomorrow. They were really bitchy about it too. So don’t forget, okay?

  Ian’s tuition.

  He hadn’t forgotten about it, not remotely. The phrase “twenty thousand dollars” came to mind approximately three times per hour. The number twenty thousand haunted his dreams. His dream self wandered the towering aisles of Builder’s Depot panicked and perspiring. He needed twenty thousand nails, or twenty thousand gallons of primer. This dream recurred two, three times a week, supplanting his usual Stirling dream, the flashback of academic panic. Scott lived in dread. Someday soon Penny—and perhaps even his mother—would discover what he’d done. As in the past, his dread paralyzed him. He hadn’t yet progressed to planning, for example, how he would break the news to his wife. The money’s gone. Ian can’t go to Fairhope.

  The bell rang loudly, startling him. He had another class to teach. He took a stack of weekly quizzes from his desk drawer and shoved them into his briefcase.

  “McKotch.” Rick O’Kane stood in the doorway in a pale, expensive-looking suit. His tan had deepened. He looked like a million bucks.

  “Slow down, fella.” O’Kane sat in the chair opposite Scott’s desk, hiking up his trousers to preserve their crease. “What’s your rush?”

  “I have class this period,” said Scott.

  “You don’t, actually. I got Mary Fahey to cover for you.” He reached into his jacket and produced a long envelope.

  Scott stared at him dumbly.

  “You have been selected for drug testing,” O’Kane recited. “This selection is random and, as you will recall, a condition of your employment.”

  Scott felt suddenly light-headed. His mind raced, trying to calculate how many weeks had passed since his trip to St. Raphael. “When?” he asked.

  “Now.” O’Kane handed him the envelope. “You’re to report immediately to the testing center on Quinnebaug Highway. Standard procedure, McKotch.”

  Scott frowned. For his last drug test, he’d driven to a medical complex near the hospital. “Not the other place?”

  “We use a different company now. The address is in the packet.” O’Kane rose. “It’s a ten-minute drive from here. Go directly to the testing site. Don’t stop for doughnuts,” he said, eyeing Scott’s Styrofoam cup. “If you haven’t reported in half an hour, they’ll call me. Have a nice day.” He watched Scott levelly. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Then what?” said Scott.

  “I’ll have your results in twenty-four hours. Oh, and don’t worry about your classes,” O’Kane said over his shoulder. “You’re covered for the rest of the day.”

  DASHIELL BLODGETT was right about one thing: ineptly, perhaps unconsciously, you forged your own destiny. Fate was a child’s fingerpainting, a macaroni hut, a drunken calypso song improvised in the shower. Even in that final moment, as O’Kane handed him the packet, Scott could have talked his way out of it. He had a cold, a backache, a toothache; he was taking cough syrup, decongestants, massive doses of ibuprofen, which might skew the results of the test. Jordan Funk had pulled this very stunt a year before, a move Scott had reluctantly admired.

  Nice strategy, he’d whispered to Jordan later.

  I really do have a cold. I don’t do drugs, Jordan insisted, so primly that Scott knew he was lying. Yet O’Kane had fallen for his story, or pretended to. He might have done the same for Scott, if Scott had even tried.

  Why hadn’t he tried?

  Idling in traffic on Quinnebaug Highway he saw the truth clearly, elegant in its plainness. He didn’t want to keep his job. Ruxton had been misery from the beginning. As a boy he’d been a surly, reluctant, and underachieving student. Now he was a surly, reluctant, and underachieving teacher. School had been the great torment of his life, the scene of all his shames and rages. He was an adult now, free to choose where and how to spend his precious years on earth. And where had he chosen to spend them?

  In school.

  He had never wanted to be a teacher. Marooned in California, with a baby he hadn’t planned and a woman he wasn’t sure he loved, he’d wanted to be a kid again. His mother had dashed this hope. Finish your degree, she’d begged him. Let me help. Cal State San Bernardino had accepted his credits, the courses he’d selected more or less randomly his three semesters at Stirling: History of the Fertile Crescent, Introduction to Psychology, Shakespeare on Film. He’d been high when he chose these courses, which amounted to exactly nothing. General Studies was the only degree within his reach. He tacked on an extra semester to get his teaching certificate (what else could he do with a degree in general studies? become a general?) and a few months later Scott was standing in front of a classroom.

  He had jumped at the chance to teach at Ruxton, imagining Ruxton would be just like Pearse. He was desperate then, delusional, a stoned amnesiac who’d forgotten that Pearse had been a jail to him. At fourteen he’d felt exiled there, sent up the river for poor table manners and teasing his sister. A convicted serial biter, banished from his family, doing hard time.

  Jesus, he’d hated Pearse.

  As Ian would hate Fairhope.

  This revelation so startled him that he nearly veered off the highway.

  The money wasn’t the point. Suddenly it didn’t matter that he’d handed twenty thousand dollars to a near stranger, that Ian’s tuition check, when Penny wrote it, would bounce into another galaxy. Ian’s not going to Fairhope, Scott would tell her. He’s not a criminal. We’re not sending him away.

  He saw instantly the rightness of this decision. Penny might require convincing, but she would come to see it too. With righteous conviction he pulled into the parking lot of QuineMed Testing associates.

  Oh, and guess what, he thought. I pissed into a jar this morning. And tomorrow I’m going to lose my job.

  THE HOUSE looked dead at ten in the morning. Scott got out of the car, breathing deeply. His shirt smelled of formaldehyde, an odor he’d acquired in the offices of QuineMed. His experience there had been less humiliating than he expected. For his last drug test, a male nurse had followed him into the restroom and stood outside the stall, ear cupped, no doubt, to hear his piss fall into the sample cup. QuineMed’s operation was lackadaisical by comparison. Scott had watched another testee take his sample cup into the washroom. The nurse on duty seemed not to notice that the guy wore a battered Carhartt jacket too heavy for the balmy weather, voluminous enough to hide ten containers of clean urine. Scott wondered, briefly, if O’Kane had chosen this slapdash outfit for a reason. If he expected the guilty to cheat; if he was, in fact, inviting deception. Scott could have beaten the test with minimal effort, if only he’d wanted to.

  The garage was open, Penny’s van parked inside, as though resting from the ordeal of getting the kids to school.

  “Penny,” he called, stepping into the living room. “Pen, I need to talk to you.”

  He glanced around the room. The usual disorder: junk mail, the random sneaker, the Diet Coke can on the coffee table. (Penny drank several cases a week.) The smell of toast hung in the air. All this was normal, perfectly usual. Yet something seemed very wrong.

  He realized it then: someone had turned off the television.

  “Honey?” he called, slightly alarmed. He headed down the hall toward the bedrooms, rubbing at his stubbly chin. Pen, I have something to tell you, he practiced. Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.

  Their bedroom door was open, the bed unmade. The bathroom, Ian’s room: both were empty. Only Sabrina’s door was closed.

  “Penny?” He pushed open Sabrina’s door and stopped short. On the pink carpet, his wife sat on the floor in her underwear, her back against the bed. Beside her, his arm around her shoulders, was a blond-haired man in head-to-toe denim: jeans, vest, shirt. They did not stand. They cowered like misbehaving children.r />
  “What the hell?” he said, his heart hammering.

  “Scotty.” She got to her feet, looking stricken. She wore bikini panties and the bra he liked.

  “Who the fuck is this?’

  The man got up slowly. He was bigger than Scott, but oddly graceful.

  “This is Benji,” Penny said.

  “Benji,” Scott repeated.

  “From Idaho,” Penny said. “Benji, my brother.”

  Life prepared you for certain calamities. With practice, it was possible to condition oneself for loss, abandonment, failures of every stripe. Scott had been arrested and insulted, suspended and fired and put on probation, cold-cocked and sucker-punched and kicked in the groin. His sanguine nature had been beaten out of him; from Concord to Pearse to Stirling to California, he’d left a sticky trail. He’d believed himself inoculated against disappointment, readier than most to meet the maimed gaze of ruin. He believed this right up to the moment when Penny told him she was in love with her brother.

  “Stepbrother,” she corrected, flushing mightily. The flush reminded Scott of a time years ago, sleeping beside her on a secluded beach in Baja, stoned on new love. They had awakened with wicked sunburns, their bodies filled with strange heat.

  “I was going to tell you,” said his wife in the sheer panties that hid nothing. “Soon. I just didn’t know how.”

  Scott was familiar with this problem.

  “How did this happen?” he asked calmly, as though he and Penny were chatting over coffee. He was showing polite interest in his wife’s activities, the useful errands that filled her day. He did not look at the guy, the denim presence behind her. Under no circumstances would Scott meet his eyes.

  “I was in a chat room one day, and Benji found me. My screen-name is PennyCherry,” she explained. “And he thought, you know, how many could there be?”

  Scott nodded thoughtfully, grasping too late the value of the patriarchal tradition, why for centuries women had taken their husbands’ names. To guard their virtue in online chat rooms. To keep away horny long-lost stepbrothers, lovelorn since childhood, lying in wait.

  “So he found you,” Scott said encouragingly. Sunlight bled through his daughter’s pink curtains. He felt as though he’d wandered into a lung.

  “Yeah. And we started chatting, and then the phone. Then last month he came out here.”

  “Last month?”

  “When you were on the island,” she said. “How long ago was that?”

  “Twenty-four days,” said Scott, who’d recently done the arithmetic. He remembered calling her from the Mistral Inn, the breathless way she’d answered the phone. Naked, he’d pictured her; dripping from her bath.

  “And you hadn’t seen him since—how long? Since you were kids?” Scott enjoyed pretending Benji wasn’t in the room with them. He understood that it was the last fun he would ever have.

  “Twelve years, I guess. Not since that camping trip in Yellowstone. Remember?”

  Blood rushed him, then, roaring like the ocean, a hot tidal wave of blood. With a heroic expenditure of will he looked at the guy, the ghostly presence in the corner. The ghost who’d been there all through his marriage. Benji tall and lean like a cowboy, a young Henry Fonda, his long face brown from the sun.

  “You were there?” Scott said.

  Benji nodded. He had pushed back his denim sleeves, showing his paisley tattoos. Scott felt a stab of recognition, shrill and alarming, like a siren in the distance.

  “You were…together then?”

  “We were trying not to be,” Penny said, with the flush that now seemed permanent. “And then I met you.”

  Scott nodded thoughtfully, as though he understood.

  “And we lost touch for a long time. It was hard for him, you know? Me getting married. And then the kids.”

  Jesus, the kids.

  “Tell me the kids don’t know.”

  Penny looked away. “It was kind of an accident. Sabrina came home early one day. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Scott looked around the room, at his daughter’s pink girlhood, the piles of toys she’d already outgrown. In this room, surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals, his wife and Benji had undressed each other.

  Penny seemed to read his mind. “Not in our room,” she said softly.

  It was a measure of Scott’s desolation that he felt grateful for this.

  “Benji’s great with Ian,” she added. “They went camping last weekend in the Whites. Ian had a blast.”

  Scott felt his pulse in his ears. “You let him take Ian? Where the fuck was I?”

  “Concord.”

  “Overnight?” Scott said, nearly shouting. “You let him take Ian overnight?”

  “Well, he is Ian’s uncle,” she pointed out, without a whiff of irony.

  Someday this conversation will be over, Scott reflected calmly. The next thing that’s going to happen will begin to happen. The thought comforted him like lightning, cracking open a humid day in summer. He was desperate to leave this room, the walls papered with pop stars, the pubescent boys who leered at his sleeping daughter, seeing what they should not see. His life would continue along its lurching path, but a part of him would stay here forever. Himself, his wife, and her lover facing off for all eternity, in the pink and girlish chaos of Sabrina’s room.

  The list came out the third week in April, just after the annual meeting. For two days Grohl’s most eminent scientists had been absent from the corridors: Steve Upstairs; Ira Babish, the computational biologist; Malcolm John Liddy, whom a sarcastic postdoc had nicknamed Dr. Genome. Frank regarded these men as equals; how galling, then, that they were off discussing the most important scientific issues of the day while he was left behind to babysit his mournful staff. Since Cristina’s departure, a pall had settled over the lab. The door to the postdocs’ office was always closed. Martin Keohane came and went in silence, like a dour young priest.

  It was a Thursday afternoon when Betsy Baird knocked gently at Frank’s office window. He knew by her gentleness that the news was bad.

  “The list is up,” she said. All day she’d been monitoring the Academy’s Web site.

  Still he looked at her with hope.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  At lunchtime he slipped out through the back door, like the Garbo of Grohl. He drove across the bridge for a late lunch, in no mood to run into colleagues in Kendall Square. Afterward, feeling too feeble to climb six flights of stairs, he got into the elevator and found himself shoulder to shoulder with the other Steve—the immunologist Steve Palumbo, also known as Steve Downstairs.

  “Frank.” Palumbo clapped him hard on the back. “I just heard.” He was a sturdy, compact guy with intense dark eyes and an unruly mop of hair, always wet from the shower. Palumbo spent mornings and lunchtimes running or sculling; for a couple of years back in the ’80s, he and Frank had played weekly racquetball. Scientifically speaking, Palumbo was a lightweight; but Frank had a healthy respect for physical prowess. Grohl was run by moribund old turds. In any sort of physical contest—push-ups, arm wrestling—only he and Palumbo would be able to hold their own.

  “Man, it’s got to hurt,” said Palumbo. “Coming so close. Maybe I should be grateful they don’t know who the hell I am.”

  “Ah, but you’re just a youngster,” said Frank, in his new role of doddering has-been. As he said it, he realized that Palumbo was nearing fifty. Wifeless, childless, he seemed inoculated against aging. The guy spent every spare moment watching sports or playing them. His interests mirrored the average twelve-year-old boy’s.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be that guy when you find him,” said Palumbo. Then, seeing Frank’s look: “You didn’t know? You made the final list. Somebody challenged you.”

  Frank stared in disbelief. The Academy spent months winnowing down the list of nominees. Hundreds of eminent scientists were considered and rejected. The final list—men and women so distinguished that any one might be a future Nobel laureate—wa
s voted on by the entire membership, and usually passed without a hitch. Only once, in Frank’s long memory, had a nomination been challenged.

  “I heard it from my old mentor as USF. He was there, Frank. Said it was like a bomb went off in the room.”

  “Someone challenged me?” said Frank. “You’re sure?”

  The elevator arrived at the top floor; Frank had forgotten to press the button marked 4. Now he hit the Doors Close button. “Well, who was it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “No clue,” said Steve.

  On what grounds? Frank nearly asked, but stopped himself. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with Palumbo. With anyone at Grohl. Here, especially, on the top floor of the institute, ten yards from the office of Steve Upstairs.

  “You don’t know either?” Steve gave a low whistle. “I figured it was some kind of personal thing. Someone with a grudge against you.”

  Frank’s mind raced. In thirty-five years he’d racked up some rivalries—didn’t everybody? But until now there was nobody he’d have called an enemy.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I’m going to find out.”

  After work he met Margit at their usual haunt, a Thai restaurant on Mass Ave. Her hair looked freshly mown and had been dyed a deep burgundy, a rich color not found in nature, at least not on women’s heads. She wore new eyeglasses, small rectangular frames that matched her hair, her lipstick, the silk scarf draped across her shoulders. She had gone to great effort to achieve—not beauty, exactly, but an organized sort of handsomeness.

  They ordered their usual appetizer, a double plate of chicken satay; but Frank’s guts were in a knot. His hasty lunch, a lobster roll slick with mayonnaise, sat heavy in his stomach, right where his gullet had dumped it. He couldn’t eat a thing.

  “My God,” she’d said as he approached the table. “What happened to you?”

  He told her the story in five sentences, barely stopping for a breath.