“You know the reason, of course,” she said, her eyes downcast. “That business with Cristina. It was bound to get out that you pulled the paper. Somebody probably figured out why.”
Frank nodded, recalling the way Margit had reacted when he’d first told her the news, her reproachful silence eloquent beyond words. In general she was not easily shocked. He remembered, a few years back, a particularly juicy cycle of Grohl gossip: an emeritus professor busted in a cathouse in the Combat Zone; a male postdoc stopped for speeding in bustier, pumps, and wig. When Margit heard that story from Betsy Baird—who saw all, heard all—she reacted with a kind of amused tolerance: I too drive faster in high heels. There is less weight on the accelerator. It is natural to overcompensate. But when it came to scientific integrity, she was a moralist of the first order. When it came to science, Margit was a prude.
“You were the PI on the paper,” she said. “What else could it be?”
“Sure,” Frank said. “But it was an internal matter, and Grohl had every reason to keep it quiet. Even Steve Palumbo didn’t know anything about it. So who could it have been?”
“Frank.” She took his hand in both of hers. “This is a terrible injustice, and I understand why you are upset. But in the end, does it really matter who challenged you? Regardless of who it was, the outcome is the same.”
“Trust me,” he said through clenched teeth. “It matters.”
“Well, let’s think, then. There is the staff in your lab. And anybody else they might have told.”
Frank’s mind raced. Morale had been so bad recently that any of the staff might have grumbled about the situation.
“And Cristina,” said Margit. “Don’t forget Cristina.”
“I haven’t.” He’d heard from Betsy Baird that the girl had returned to Greece. “But I can’t imagine she’d have much to say on the matter.”
“Well, the editors at Science know about it,” Margit added. “And possibly the reviewers.”
Frank nodded. He had no idea who’d reviewed the paper—the process was confidential, in theory, but it was sometimes possible to find out. Driving home, he came up with a handful of likely names, half of them affiliated with Harvard or MIT He knew them all in a distant way, from conferences and colloquia. But that was all.
I figured it was a personal thing, Steve Palumbo had said. Someone with a grudge against you.
Frank parked in front of the house, his stomach squeezing. A cold sweat trickled down his back. Jesus, what was the matter with him? He was unused to heartburn, backaches, rashes. He hadn’t been sick to his stomach in twenty years.
Inside he stripped naked and crawled into bed, pulling the covers around him. The days were getting longer; the last dusky light peeped through the blinds. He had left a window open, and a cool breeze rattled the shade. He thought of Cristina Spiliotes and her falsified data, the lame-brained hoax that had kept him out of the Academy, cast aspersions on the career he’d worked a lifetime to build. Stupid, stupid: the idiocy of it boggled the mind. Yet in a perverse way, didn’t the artlessness of her deception argue in her favor? She was no huckster. She’d dissembled like a novice, a girl who’d never told a lie in her life.
He ought to have seen it, and in a sense he had: he’d understood all along that the paper wasn’t ready, that Cristina, exhilarated by her early results, dazzled by the prospect of publication, had rushed to the finish line. For a kid like Cristina, a paper in Science would have been a career-making event. Even for a veteran like Frank, it was no small achievement. He hadn’t had a publication that significant in several years.
So the girl had cheated; she had lied about her results. Frank, with all his past accomplishments, had survived the fracas: withdrawing the paper, the displeasure of Steve Upstairs. The stain on his reputation would be temporary. And hadn’t Cristina paid for her skullduggery? Now that the whole debacle was over and done with, why couldn’t he let it rest?
The deception had been Cristina’s responsibility. But Cristina herself—there was no escaping this fact—had been his. There was a reason the system functioned as it did, a reason postdocs toiled under more senior scientists: to be counseled and guided, fostered and trained. Frank thought uneasily of the weekly meetings he’d canceled, always with a good excuse: he was needed at Protogenix; he had a grant proposal due. But wasn’t the real reason something darker? That he wanted her and couldn’t have her. Like a petulant child, he had withheld his attention, punished her for not desiring him.
Of course, the rest of his team had been aware of his lunacy. It was a lesson Frank had learned early on: there were no secrets in a lab. Had Betsy Baird cackled over his folly—with Guei, or Ursula the lab tech? And Martin Keohane, who’d once idolized him: What must he think of Frank now? The camaraderie of his team, their respect and affection, the warm collegiality he had always fostered—he realized, now, how much those things meant. He had sacrificed all this, and more, to an adolescent crush.
I’m an old fool, he thought.
He rolled onto his side, clutching his stomach. Somewhere in the distance a baby was crying. A baby in Cambridge: odds were good that somewhere in the vicinity of Kendall Square, its father was in the lab.
Frank tried to imagine where his own children were at that moment. He knew so little of their adult lives that this was difficult to do. He pictured Billy wining and dining a beautiful woman; Scott reading to his own children, whose names were Sabrina and Ian and who were…six and eight? Seven and nine?
Truly, he didn’t know.
And what about Gwen?
He recalled, suddenly, the day Paulette had appeared in his office, frantic about Gwen and the new boyfriend, needing his comfort, his counsel, his help. A month ago? Longer? Before the pulling of the paper, the firing of Cristina. The implosion of his reputation, his career, his hopes for the future. In that time he hadn’t given a thought to his daughter. He’d had a few other things on his mind.
He picked up the phone.
“Frank?” Paulette sounded surprised—flat-out amazed, in fact—to hear his voice.
“Paulette, hi.”
“You sound terrible.”
“Something is wrong with my stomach.”
“What did you eat?”
He hadn’t phoned her in years, yet it felt natural to describe the churning miseries of his digestive tract, to curse the treacherous lobster roll curdling his stomach, to be scolded for the lapse in judgment that had put him in such straits.
“Sorry for whining. That’s not why I called,” he said, though this wasn’t entirely true. “I wanted to get an update on Gwen.”
“Oh, Frank, wonderful news. She’s back in Pittsburgh. Scott went down to Saint Raphael and talked some sense into her.”
“Scott talked sense into her? Impossible. Who talked sense into Scott?”
“You’re terrible.” The chuckle in her voice gratified him. He had always enjoyed making her laugh. “Honestly, I have no idea what he said to her, but she seems to have done an about-face.”
“Gwen?” said Frank. “Gwen has never changed her mind about anything.”
“Will wonders never cease.”
Frank learned, then, that his grandchildren were eight and ten years old, that besides rescuing his sister, Scott had singlehandedly rebuilt Paulette’s front porch. That he’d done a wonderful job.
“How’s Billy?” he asked.
She hesitated. “It’s the strangest thing. I haven’t heard from him in nearly two weeks. And he didn’t sound at all well when we last spoke. He said something about taking a vacation.”
“A vacation?” he repeated, mystified. Frank did not vacate. Neither, as far as he knew, did his hardworking son.
Paulette sighed. “There must be a girlfriend.”
Frank lay there listening, his gut seizing. Her voice in his ear affected him strangely. For a moment he felt her next to him, close enough to touch. He squeezed his eyes shut to preserve the illusion. Don’t go, he thought.
He listened to
her talk about the children they’d raised, engaged in activities so unlikely that she might have been speaking of strangers. He had formed, long ago, certain ideas about Billy, Gwen, and Scott; each was a known compound that behaved in predictable ways. This awareness had freed him from worrying about them unnecessarily. There was no need to fret about their futures, to contemplate the ways he had failed them. In spite of his negligence they had turned out—not perfectly, exactly, but they had turned out nonetheless. They were grown, completed; they had achieved their final states. He wondered, now, if any of this were true.
His stomach lurched.
“Frank, are you listening? I asked you a question.”
“I’m sorry. My stomach is killing me.”
“Peppermint tea, dear.”
He smiled. Through all three pregnancies he’d brought home pounds of the stuff from Harnett’s in Cambridge. The dear was unconscious, a habit that had survived the wreckage of their marriage, like a charred treasure found after a fire. Frank knew it was unconscious. Still it moved him.
“I asked you if you’d heard from Neil. He’s in town, you know.”
“Windsor?” He sat up in bed, ready to hurl. “I didn’t know you kept in touch.”
“Oh, he calls once in a blue moon. On my birthday. That sort of thing.”
Frank frowned. Paulette’s birthday was in…September? Or was that Gwen’s?
“We’re having lunch tomorrow, as a matter of fact. At the Harvest.” She paused. “Frank, where on earth can I park at that hour without a Harvard sticker? Honestly, I have no idea.”
He named a side street off Mass Ave, another south of the square. His GI tract thrummed like a cement mixer. An eruption of one kind or another seemed imminent.
“Paulette,” he said. “I have to go.”
THE PAST IS always with us.
He had fallen hard for Paulette, immediately and completely. She was a child at nineteen—Frank saw that instantly—but the child could sail and play the piano and ride horseback, skills he was too much of a rube even to wish to possess. She had traveled through England and Scotland and Spain and Italy; he would learn on their honeymoon that she spoke French like a native. She had a memory for names and faces; charming strangers was her gift. Men, especially, were enchanted by her attention. Frank knew exactly how they felt. From the beginning he’d believed she hung on his every word, that she’d remember them for the rest of her life and quote them in his eulogy, weeping prettily, wearing a stunning hat.
Neil had seemed startled when Frank asked her out.
Really, fella? I wouldn’t have said she was your type.
They’re all my type, he’d joked, a little insulted. Neil’s tone suggested Paulette was out of his league. She was, of course, but who was Windsor to say so? Frank was accustomed to his deference in all matters romantic. Neil the humble disciple, desperate for guidance; Frank the oracle, a role he’d come to enjoy.
It was obvious to him that Neil was jealous. He’d known Paulette first, and Frank had taken her out from under his nose. Frank understood this and didn’t care. More than that: he took pleasure in Neil’s resentment, accepted it as his due. He saw Paulette every weekend, phoned her nightly from his and Neil’s apartment, not caring what his buddy overheard. His flirtations with half a dozen Radcliffe girls withered from neglect. He returned from dates to Neil’s questions—those probing, scientifically curious questions—and answered them in rich detail. Paulette was a virgin, but playful; she would let him touch her anywhere, passive in his arms. Frank had encountered such females before and knew how to handle them. With the right approach, her resistance could be overcome.
Neil let him blather on this way until he began to feel ridiculous.
Well, then what? Neil asked finally. Say she gives in. You’re her first. What happens when someone else catches your eye?
The question startled him. Tapeworm had always applauded his conquests.
That won’t happen. Frank knew it a moment before he said it: I’m going to marry her.
Their wedding at Holy Cross Cathedral seemed to him a scene from a movie, a complicated pageant to which he’d been invited as an afterthought, a last-minute guest. Neil was his best man, the only familiar face in the crowd. He produced the ring at the crucial moment; at the reception he danced dutifully with the bride. Neil was a stand-up guy, a gentleman, Frank’s closest friend since Blaise Klezek, the surrogate brother of his childhood. He believed this for years, right up until the bloody final month of his marriage, when Paulette savaged him with the truth.
They’d been arguing over Gwen, fights that had become habitual. We should have her hearing rechecked, Frank said. It’s been nearly a year. I want to make sure there’s no change.
It seemed to him a reasonable request. Hearing abnormalities were common in Turner girls. Paulette knew this as well as he did. But to his astonishment, his wife had exploded. As usual, there was no predicting what would set her off.
Her hearing is fine! Don’t you think I’d notice if she weren’t hearing properly? And then, her usual refrain: Why are you always looking for trouble? Why can’t you let anything be okay?
Finally she’d exhausted his patience.
For Christ’s sake, Paulette! I just want to know what we’re dealing with. That’s the difference between you and me. You hide your head in the sand. I want to know the truth.
It was this phrase that had set her off. Oh, really? she said, with a smile that made him nervous. I beg to differ. There’s plenty you don’t want to know. You’ve never shown much scientific curiosity when it came to me.
And what was that supposed to mean?
You weren’t my first, she said. Neil was. He loved me.
If she had made a lifelong study of his neurology, she couldn’t have placed the hit better. Traffic halted along his neural pathways. A flood of hostile chemicals bathed his brain. She watched him intently as she said it, her eyes blazing. God knew how long she’d been waiting. Through every late return, missed dinner, forgotten anniversary; every time he’d insulted her brother or disparaged her father or ogled a waitress in a restaurant, she must have held the words in her mouth, savoring them, waiting for the optimal time.
His face burned; blood pulsed in his hands. Windsor, he said.
She nodded once, resolutely.
And in that moment, Paulette freed him. Their marriage was a sack of miseries he’d thought never to escape. She was insecure and jealous, vain and neurotic. Unmoved by logic, she judged him guilty of offenses he committed only in dreams. For years this had been their unhappy baseline, an unfortunate set of givens that Frank had accepted completely—so blind, so foolish was his love for her. He had watched her fail their daughter in critical ways, crippled by her own shame. For months their marriage had dangled by a thread. Now Paulette—he saw this clearly—had handed him a knife.
Frank slashed the thread.
He had never cared about marrying a virgin. A woman’s past didn’t trouble him; before they’d met, Paulette could have serviced the entire Harvard crew for all he cared. But she had given herself to only two men, and this implied a similarity between them. In her eyes, he and Neil Windsor were peers, equals. Not merely interchangeable; they had, in fact, been interchanged. It was a notion Frank could not tolerate. For years he’d watched Windsor soar—the top-drawer publications, the big finds. Envy gnawed at him. What had saved him, always, had been Paulette—the one achievement Windsor couldn’t top, the ultimate prize.
THE HARVEST was crowded at lunchtime, beards and tweeds, wool skirts and pearls, a few decent suits—the business school—and students on good behavior, their parents picking up the check. At the bar Frank saw Otto Mueller from the med school and gave a cursory wave. Normally he’d have stopped to chat, poke around a bit—Mueller was on the SAB of Protein Therapeutics and loose lipped when he’d had a few. Not today, though. Not today.
He spotted them at a table near the window, his wife and Neil Windsor, Paulette in a cream
-colored suit, like a midlife bride. He watched her a moment, the sun catching her necklace. It was the sort of delicate jewelry she’d always favored, a plain gold chain fine as a nerve. She hadn’t seen him, and it felt luxurious to watch her unobserved. Her face lit at something Neil said and the smile cut Frank like a scalpel, in its precision nearly painless, but not quite.
He approached the table. Paulette noticed him over Windsor’s shoulder. “Frank! What are you doing here?” She looked puzzled, a little alarmed.
“Look at what the cat dragged in.” Windsor stood, beaming, and shook Frank’s hand. “Pull up a chair.”
Frank eyed him levelly.
“What’s the matter?” said Windsor. “You look like hell.”
“He hasn’t been feeling well,” Paulette explained.
Because he felt like it, Frank bent and kissed her, his lips grazing her cheek. He had not touched her in twenty years. She still wore the perfume whose name he couldn’t remember, though over the years he’d bought her bottles of it. It smelled like nothing in nature, no flower he recognized. It smelled only like Paulette, a thought that nearly reduced him to tears.
Frank noticed the leather folder at Windsor’s elbow. He had paid the check, of course. As though he and Paulette were on a date.
“I’m sorry to run, Frank, but I have an appointment downtown.” Paulette glanced at her watch. “Hair,” she explained.
Windsor rose. “Dear girl, it was a pleasure to see you,” he said, taking her in his arms.
Their embrace was brief, socially appropriate. There was no reason for Frank to burn. No longer any marriage or family, any friendship or youth or love or innocence, any honor or sentiment left to justify it. There was no reason to stand quickly, knocking back the flimsy chair, and chuck Neil Windsor on the shoulder, with the false friendliness of an angry bully. But Frank did this anyway, and Jesus, did it feel good.
Heads turned in their direction. Frank, smiling, bent to retrieve the overturned chair. “Bring my friend a cup of coffee,” he told the waiter. “Sit,” he told Windsor. “Let’s catch up.”
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