by Robert Roper
“She is dead, Anthony. People will know what she was. That will come out.”
He quoted from a blog, ronniesvaleoftruth, “‘Professor Landau replied to the charges in a document sealed as part of the judgment rendered by the twelve member senior disciplinary panel,’ etcetera, etcetera, ‘Anthony Landau had a similar situation in 1992 when Doctor Afsaneh Khosaddi, of his San Francisco lab, filed a complaint alleging sexual harassment and misappropriation of research materials,’ etcetera, etcetera, ‘but the dispute with Doctor Beevors was much more serious and put in jeopardy a $6.7 million multiyear study financed by the International Fund for AIDS under WHO auspices and CDC supervision,’ etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Oy vey.”
Deena tapped her plate with her takeout chopsticks.
“What, I’m wrong?”
“You must resist catastrophic thoughts. Struggle against self-pity, Landau. It’s always the same with you. Time to grow up.”
“Jesus, who made you such a toughie?”
“Remember, she is dead. You are still living. You know the truth. Now, you may have to tell it.”
That evening, Katherine Emerald of KRON had a five-minute segment devoted to “the death of the beautiful AIDS doctor,” as she described Samantha Beevors’ passing. Someone had filmed them over the fence as they had their tête-à-tête. There he was, dressed in shlumpy khakis and turtleneck, Tweedledee-ish in aspect, what a gut now, bantering with the shy slip of a TV personality, who had bravely bearded him in his backyard. Something commanding in his posture, intimidating. An undeniably rakish way of looking at another person, at a younger female person. God, is that how I present? But I gaze upon male as well as female in that way, with the same cheeky intensity. However, must get rid of the beard. The suggestive Mephistophelian beard.
His phone rang when the segment ended.
“You have done irreparable damage to your cause. I’m calling to say that I’m reconsidering what I told you earlier today, that I would take your case. You owed it to me to mention that you had given this person an interview, good God, what were you thinking? How unbelievably stupid, stupid.”
Landau paused. “I know. I’m very sorry, Cleveland. I told her absolutely nothing. I had no idea that someone would be filming us. Through the fence, I guess it was.”
“You had no idea. Listen, that just doesn’t cut it, all right? From now on assume you’re being filmed wherever you go. We’re going to have to figure out a more secure way of communicating, you and I, assuming that I see a way to go forward. Which I don’t at the moment. I’m just appalled, I’m horrified, blecch, ugh.”
“I’m sorry. Sorry.”
“Listen—this is an international story. These few seconds of tape will be playing everywhere tonight, you’ve handed them a tremendous advantage, and I don’t see how we overcome it, I simply don’t.”
“Look, I’m not even under suspicion of a crime. It’ll blow over.”
“You’re not under suspicion? What, are you mad? And now they don’t have to figure out how to characterize you, since you’ve already done that for them. Today it became twenty percent more likely that you’ll be indicted, no thirty percent. My advice to you is, put your affairs in order. Plan on the worst. When we spoke this morning I would not have said that, I did not say anything like that, did I? Not as I recall.”
All right, all right. Now I’m back on the reservation, Landau wanted to say. No need to scare me further.
“As I said, I’m sorry. It was a harmless bit of nothing. I hadn’t spoken to you before I spoke to her, I’d never met her before. But I won’t be fooled again.”
Didn’t like the lawyer-guy, he decided. Kind of over the top. Might just be his early-stage strategy, to whip Landau into shape. Even if you understood that, it was pas gentil.
Is that really what I look like, though? Is that the real me? Landau went upstairs and shaved off the villain’s Van Dyke, saw his bare face for the first time in eighteen years. Ah, so there you are. Broad of cheek, fairly good jaw, no dewlaps yet. Something going on down below, some softening, but no triple chin yet. The face not that of a stranger, more that of a distant cousin forgotten for a generation who appears one night and reminds you of some essential family trait. Something louche, possibly morally weak. Well, there you are, for better or worse. After age sixty, a man gets the face he deserves, as someone once wisely said—as if “deserve” had anything to do with it. And what is a face? An evolving little bit of personal skin-frontage, both revealing and disguising of the nexus of intention/thought/sense-of-the-world that’s knitted up behind the eyes. The part that, for want of something more solid, is proposed as your identity. Your this-not-that. The real, really-real you.
chapter 3
Landau’s routine reasserted itself in the next few days. The press gave up trying to interview him. The lawyer stayed on the case and gave discreet public statements that began to shape a counter-story of hardworking major scientist harrowed by loss of close colleague, old friend, tragedy all around. Landau had not been detained because he’d had nothing to do with the regrettable death, of course, of course. Samantha Beevors, though her lab results were not all in yet, had likely died of natural causes. Heart disease, probably. Landau read on a blog that Beevors had collapsed at the 2003 International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, which he had himself attended, though he couldn’t remember seeing Samantha there and had heard no talk of collapses. Fainted at a public meeting, it was said. Half a dozen doctors had rushed to her aid—a good place to stage a fainting fit, if you had to. The blogger, UdoNarn, had been in the room, he claimed.
Landau sent his lawyer the post. Hopefully, the whole thing would now blow over, the whole legal thing. Four days after the discovery of Samantha in his house, he was back at UCSF meeting with his street-injector study administrators, two crackerjack lesbian women who had organized his investigations for years, managing logistics and training the field staff (referred to as “the field hands”) and basically running the show. He had been tracking a population of teens living on the streets of the Haight as they entered their twenties, as they seroconverted, as they tested positive for hepatitis B and C, as they went from good-looking, smart-assed trick-turners to toothless street wraiths, most of them. A parody in the key of hopeless of normal human maturation. His fancy-Dan career of AIDS-drug testing and globetrotting and CDC consulting now pretty much had boiled down to this, this Lower Depths stuff, which was perfectly fine with him. His strong suit, really.
Georges Vienna, his chiropractor friend, came back from Indonesia where he had been on a long vacation. A trim-and-tanned fellow, Georges had been in Djakarta on the day of the recent Bali bombings, the second attack there in four years. Had spent the next two weeks volunteering on the storied Hindu isle, adjusting the sore-necked natives. Landau never discussed chiropractic with Georges and Georges never questioned the foundations of western science, in return. Instead, they swam together. Georges had a thing for Asian women but Landau’s inspections of whorehouses in Vietnam and Thailand and the papers he had written about HIV rates and the sale of underage girls had amounted eventually to a powerful aversion therapy for amiable Georges, who, in his youth, had traveled often to Southeast Asia, seeking “experiences.”
“I’m trying to remember who this Beevors person was—she wasn’t Audrey, the one you went to Mexico with that time, I know. And she wasn’t the neurosurgeon lady from Canada, the one with the long black hair.”
“No and no,” Landau said.
“Wait a minute. Wait.”
Landau nodded. “Right. Now you’ve got it.”
Georges looked at him commiseratingly. “Ooh, I’m sorry, Anthony. She got to you, I know she did. She was the big romance.”
“No, not so big.”
“You were in love with her. Seriously in love. She was the love of your life, you once told me.”
“No, I never sa
id anything of the kind. Does that sound like me? ‘Love of my life’? Come on.”
“That’s what you told me. That’s what you said.”
Not going to argue about it, Landau decided. Have it your way.
“You were messed up over her for years. I remember it well.”
“I don’t. What is that concept, anyhow, ‘the love of your life’? It makes no sense. It’s incoherent.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Life is movement, perpetual changement. Which life are we having the love of, can you tell me that? You have to solve that problem first.”
Georges liked when Landau got this way: sententious about his own emotions. It fed into Georges’ theory about the uptightness of all Britons, all half-Britons, too, for that matter.
“If you live a fairly busy life,” Landau went on, “as I have, there’s never just one love-of-your-life. There may be three or four. There may be half a dozen. The whole idea’s confused.”
“Oh, what a load of crap.”
Landau decided to take a different tack. “There she was. Dead in my bed. I was shocked, deeply shocked, and then I was very sad. It has to do with the body, the actual physical body. How thoroughly it’s been stilled. The loss of all that capacity. She was a vital person, Samantha, a large and fascinating person, and whatever else she was, she was immensely capable.”
“Yes, that’s all she was—capable.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Look, Anthony, I know what she meant to you. I was there. I held your hand. I took you to the desert when you were half out of your mind. I even tried to get you to go to Chiang Mai with me, for a little vacation. You were beside yourself. You were so fucking dark in those days, so fucking…”
“If I was dark, it was because she sabotaged me professionally. She brought that complaint against me, that spurious complaint, hoping it would ruin me. I would never do that to anybody, let alone a former lover. That’s not cricket, you know. Not playing by the rules.”
“You got to her, Anthony, and she had to get back at you.”
“No, don’t justify her, please. I did nothing to her, nothing. She went to war simply because it helped her professionally. That’s despicable. It’s beneath notice. And after me, it was down the black chasm of fame. She was never herself again. They had to stick her off in her own institute finally, with nothing but toadies around. She couldn’t play with the other children, couldn’t stop biting, scratching, destroying.”
Here was the funny thing about Georges: the feeling-ful Californian, all impulse and intuition, a dissenter from Cartesian rigor if anyone was, was nevertheless a close reader of Landau’s papers. The more dense and mathematical, the better he liked them. He aimed to have a whole collection of them.
“She claimed you’d taken her Monte Carlo numbers, misappropriated data sets, something like that. Am I right? Then buried her name on the paper. Didn’t show it prominently, insulted her.”
“I really don’t remember what she claimed, Georges. She conjured up a whole stew of lies. She was deranged, completely deranged at the time.”
“That was mid-nineties. Right?”
“Possibly. From a reputation-smashing point of view, it was convenient that I had been accused of something similar long before. You see, there was an earlier feminist harridan smashup, with another knife-wielding monster careerist. Someone who I should never have taken under my wing, but I was foolish, overconfident. I thought that generosity and fair dealing could tame her.”
“Which one was that?”
“You don’t know her. Afsaneh Khosaddi. Sometimes called herself Abigail. I took her on as a postdoc, and she filed a complaint saying that I had raped her. When that didn’t wash, said I’d raped her psychologically, bad atmosphere, workplace talk of women’s backsides, that kind of thing. Quoting chapter and verse out of the talk-show blather of the time. It was all about her tearing off a piece of my research territory. And the terrible accusations of soul-murder disappeared as soon as I let her get away with it.”
“Okay.”
“My point is, Samantha knew about that. We used to laugh about it together. Then one day she’s put together a complaint of her own. Using the same terminology, the same type font practically. Makes me look like a serial abuser, you see, a predator. Again, when I ceded her a great chunk of research terrain it went away. She took control of the whole bloody grant for all intents and purposes. After that, she fell silent.”
Georges asked Landau about the research he had done with the first woman, this Abigail person. Landau had to think hard.
“It was drug treatment stuff, about AZT and other early meds, because they had to be administered in sequence, and people doubted that junkies would stick with the program till it did them good. One of the first studies of that kind. High HIV-rate street injectors.”
“I’d like to read that one.”
“No you wouldn’t, Georges. It’s not like the brothel papers, not that they were so fascinating. Although, the central issue, maybe we got on to that before the others did. I suppose you could argue that if you wanted.”
“No, I want to read it, I want a copy.”
“Look it up on BioMed.”
“Well, did you, Anthony? Did you have your way with her?”
“Did I what?”
“You know—did you screw her. Were you intimate.”
“Now, that’s private territory, Georges, even you know that. And a gentleman never tells.”
“Come on. I won’t think the worse of you if you did.”
“Let me put it this way. She was a ravishing young woman, ‘a type more Greek than Italian,’ if you know what I mean. Endlessly seductive, a little unhinged. Family got out just before the revolution. Father close to the Shah, his personal urologist, actually, with SAVAK connections. Over here he couldn’t get a license to practice medicine so he became a caretaker in an apartment house, became a real estate agent, put four kids through school, one to Stanford, one Princeton, one Berkeley, Afsaneh went to Swarthmore. Oh, America, give us your tired, your poor! I love these splendid immigrant stories. By the time she was on my projects she was an MD-PhD, but with a bad reputation, known for manipulation. I didn’t care. I like dames with a screw loose. So, did I have my way with her? One never has one’s way with such a person, Georges. One serves her purposes, then hopes to staunch the bleeding.”
“Well?”
“No, I don’t think I did. I don’t recall that.”
That led him, later that afternoon, to reflect upon his career. Not his science career, his romantic one. The realm that had opened up so promisingly to begin with, as an arena of pure fun. As a complete whale of an aging man now, a beluga whale, he was hors de combat, an inoffensive old duffer, sexless, useless, and the idea that he had had a romantic life would have shocked the other swimmers at the pool that afternoon. Georges two lanes over, briskly chopping through the lucent eau. Georges had had his many adventures, had been a prostitute-procurer, massage-parlor adept, before he got religion, and more power to him, if that was what he liked. Some men were able to be aroused by the purchase of favors, but Landau not. He froze up around prostitutes—he had interviewed hundreds in the old days, had studied tens of thousands, but as far as doing business, no, that was hopeless. If I am paying you for these intimate acts, then where is the interest for me? If you’re pretending, nut-rolling or not even bothering to, well, I would rather read a book. Rather pare my nails.
That left women out in the world, collected in the wild, the ones that Fate gave you. Colleagues of one kind or another, quite often. Those who spoke his mumbo-jumbo were easier to chat up. You had to take care not to poach on inferiors, and he had been mostly honorable about that. Inferior-superior relations being no ingredient of his excitement. One might say that he had gone about looking for an equivalent of dear old Mum most of his life—soli
d person, decent enough person, intellectually his equal or better, caring but not too fussy, good legs. Was that asking too much? For the moon and stars? Okay, he had never found her, life had not delivered her, so, just push on. Swim harder.
A few laps farther along, he achieved the modest endorphin raise that made everything seem solvable. Life had not turned out for him? He was disappointed? Look—at least you’re not dead. At sixty-four you have a few friends, you’re still tottering about, you have a house and a bursting IRA, and you wrote some scientific papers that some people will remember for a brief period. You’re lonely, you big baby, that’s all, but so what. In your idiot heart you still thought you and Samantha would get together again. That there would be a third act, despite the lapse of a full ten years. Shows what a dry spell you’ve been living through, that you nursed that absurd fantasy. You never accepted the truth, the truth as someone sensible would see it: Deena, for instance. Deena’s take on Samantha Beevors, based on a single encounter at a dinner party, had been that Landau was in trouble. She had maintained a diplomatic silence throughout the mad affair.
His son, Jad, had not called, kind of remarkable considering Landau’s presence on the Web and in the papers. Smelling of chlorine and with that glow of full-chested well-being that follows a swim of sixty lengths or so, Landau dialed his son’s work number, left a gruff message, then, back home, he was puzzled by something he saw in his library/den—a slim gap in a bookshelf. He realized that an item had gone missing. He thought first of Elfridia, of the fun-loving Chiapas maids who dusted and fussed in here. He knew what was where on his shelves, and this gap was in the modest pornography section, that part of it that included a bit of classic French filth sent him by an old London friend, Joseph Maxie, another academic-science worthy, a yeast geneticist, to be exact. Joe was a buddy from the deep diaper time, from St. Paul’s and the whole musty-fusty British past. Friend with whom he had first explored Paris, had first teenagerishly smoked Gauloises, viewed the odd Jean-Pierre Melville film. They had bought dirty books together down on the quai, then smuggled them back across the Channel. Little devils that they were.