“I’m sorry I said that stuff about brain surgeons,” she said then, feeling that she should be nice to the plain little man with the magic kisses. “I’m sure plastic surgeons do good work too.”
“I do a lot of community-service stuff,” he agreed. “You know . . . reconstructive work for those that can’t afford it.”
“Like harelips?”
“Or old scars . . . even regrettable tattoos,” he said. “It would be cool if you could vote at home every night. Just turn your smart TV to the political choices channel and make your mark.”
“Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?”
“Every time I ask about you, you say one thing and then turn the subject back to me. Is that one of the ways you try harder?”
“I guess it is. I mean, I know that people like talking about themselves, and there’s not much I have to say.”
“You seem interested in the brain.”
“Yeah, but whenever I start talking about it, people always point out that I’m a plastic surgeon.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Marilee said.
“It’s OK. You’re right. I should be more, um, revealing.”
“You said you were married once?”
“To Sonora Simonson,” he said, sitting up with the words.
“That’s an odd name.”
“Yeah. Her mother named her but never said why she chose it. They’d never been to Mexico, and no one in the entire family spoke Spanish. I asked them all one Christmas.”
“Why did you two split?”
“I was conferring with an intestinal-tract expert, Philip Landries. He’d come to our apartment quite often. Sonora made dinner for us whenever he stayed late. One day I came home and found a note from her saying that she was out with a girlfriend at a movie. Philip was supposed to drop by, but he didn’t. Sonora didn’t come home, and Philip was gone for good. I got a letter from them nineteen months later. He’d gotten a job in Amsterdam and asked her to go with him.”
“And they left, just like that?” Marilee asked. “Didn’t even say anything?”
“Not to anyone. The police investigated me for over a year. They were sure that Phil and Sonny were having an affair and that I killed them. There was credit-card evidence of them staying in a Midtown hotel.”
“Oh my God. Did they arrest you?”
“Not formally, but I was called down to the local station six times. Once they questioned me for over eight hours.”
“Did you get a lawyer?”
“No. I knew I hadn’t killed them, and so I just continued with my work.”
“You don’t sound like you were very broken up over their betrayal.”
“There was a kind of a, of an unconscious trade-off,” Martin said, frowning and allowing his head to tilt to the side.
“A trade-off?”
“Phil was in research,” the plastic surgeon explained. “The intestines of all living beings are rife with various kinds of parasites. Many of these creatures, these parasites, are symbiotic. They live in harmony with the systems they inhabit. You gotta love that Darwin.”
“What does that have to do with your wife running off with your friend?” Marilee asked.
“Phil wasn’t really my friend. I paid him to consult with me about the more exotic intestinal parasites. That’s where I learned about the hydra-monotubular-tridacteri.”
“The what?”
Martin repeated the name and said, “It’s a microscopic parasite that can be bred and altered in a fairly simple controlled environment. You can suppress its reproductive cycles and implant it with differing forms of DNA, which it, in turn, blends into the host system. Those traits make it one of the greatest possible biological and genetic delivery systems.”
“And the man that gave this to you was fucking your wife.”
“Painful,” Martin admitted. “But in the grand scheme of things a minor indiscretion.”
“Minor? A woman does that to you and you aren’t devastated?”
“No, no,” Martin said, though he wasn’t really denying her implied accusation. “I mean, I felt bad, but three days before they went off, Phil brought me a rare specimen that I dubbed hydra-monotubular-tridacteri-1.”
Unable to think of a response or even a question, Marilee sat up too.
“It’s what they call a microsite, almost exactly the same as the original HMT but mutated, with a slightly different DNA count,” Martin Hull continued. “I realized that by crossbreeding the species, you could, theoretically, create an HMT hinny.”
“A what?”
“It’s like a mule. A creature that exists but cannot reproduce, making it a perfect biological delivery system, because after it does its job it dies.”
There was now a kind of ecstasy in Martin’s smile. Marilee felt moved by a deep passion, even if she didn’t understand the ramifications. Years later, after Martin had been sentenced to 117 years in prison, she was still aroused by the memory of his fervor.
She reached out with both hands and pinched his nipples —hard.
Martin bent sideways and tipped over, pretzel-like, in the bed.
“You like that, don’t you, Mr. Mad Scientist?” Marilee asked on a heavy breath.
Martin tried to say yes but couldn’t manage the word.
Marilee kissed and nipped, rubbed and tickled her new friend, and so their talk about lost wives and barren parasites came to an end.
3.
Through the summer months, Marilee and Martin got together every couple of weeks or so. Martin discontinued his subscription to the dating service; Marilee did not. Twice every other week, Marilee went on PFP-provided dates; every week between, she saw Martin once and went on one PFP date. She didn’t feel guilty because Martin was preoccupied with his research and charitable and profit-making surgeries. He was often out of town, in Detroit, Tijuana, or Oakland, doing facial reconstructions, scar and tattoo removals, and more delicate operations. He never asked what Marilee did when they weren’t together; neither did he talk about love, long-term commitment, or children.
Marilee was grateful for Martin’s detachment. She didn’t want to marry him, live with him, or get any deeper into his life. He was extraordinarily knowledgeable and a surprisingly skillful lover. And when they were together, he listened to her every word and remembered everything.
But her other lovers were better-looking, better-heeled, and, well, more normal.
By the first of August, she was thinking that it was time for the relationship with Martin to end. She said to herself that it was because of the mosquito bites she got whenever he stayed over. Martin liked fresh air and was always opening some window. That very morning she decided to send Martin a text saying that she thought they should end it.
Maybe an hour after her decision, Odell Wade came to visit her at Rehnquist, Bartleby, and Rowe.
“Miss Frith-DeGeorgio,” the receptionist, Viola Wright, said over the intercom.
“Yes, Viola?”
“A Detective Wade of the NYPD is here to see you.”
Marilee gasped involuntarily and felt a sudden chill.
“What does he want?”
“He says he needs to ask you some questions about a friend of yours.”
“Tell him that I’ll be right down.”
She spent the next three minutes trying to think whether there was any reason the police would be after her. She had a small stash of marijuana in her medicine cabinet at home, and she’d declared herself as a private business on her tax forms, using her yearly sale of poorly constructed pottery at a street fair as the proof. When her mother died, she discovered a secret bank account of twenty-six thousand dollars that she’d cashed out without telling her siblings . . . Maybe that was it. Maybe the NYPD was going to arrest her for bank fraud.
She tho
ught about running. RBR was on the thirty-seventh floor of a Midtown office building, but there was an emergency stairway. Who could she turn to? Certainly not her brother, Will, or her sister, Angelique—one of them might have turned her in. Her friends wouldn’t shield her from arrest.
Finally she realized that Martin Hull was the only person she knew who might help. He liked her and would probably drive her to another state if she asked.
The idea that Martin was the only person she knew to turn to was sobering. He was the closest person to her, and she was already planning to break off that relationship. What did that mean?
This dose of inexplicable reality somehow steeled Marilee. She decided to go to reception and face the music.
Odell Wade was sitting on one of the three rose-colored sofas across from Viola’s desk in the kidney-shaped room with walls of blue-tinted glass.
“Detective Wade?”
“Miss Frith-DeGeorgio?”
The policeman stood up. Marilee’s first impression was that he was devastatingly handsome. Tall and tan, with sandy hair and auburn eyes; his straw-colored suit hung very well on his lean and probably powerful frame. His smile seemed genuine.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
The policeman glanced over at the dark-skinned, wary-eyed receptionist and said, “Is there someplace where we can talk privately?”
Marilee’s office looked out over Central Park. It was a balmy August day, and they could see all the way to Yonkers.
“What do you do here?” Wade asked, sitting next to her in one of the two chairs designated for clients and visitors. Marilee was appreciating his lips, which formed into the shape of a partly flattened Valentine’s heart.
Seated upon the other chrome-and-orange padded chair, she squirmed a bit, thinking that there was something wrong with the cushion. It was then she realized that her dress was tight.
“Social media for the advertising arm of the firm,” she answered, thinking, Am I getting fat?
“Like Twitter and Facebook?”
“And MyTime, Get It, Lost Treasure, and about a hundred more platforms.”
“You like the work?”
“Not really. I used to run my own business, but now I’m just paying the rent.”
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Ms. Frith-DeGeorgio—”
“You can call me Marilee.”
“Marilee. Do you know a Dr. Martin David Hull?”
“Yes.”
“I’m investigating him, the NYPD is.”
“About his wife?”
“He told you?”
“He said that his wife and some doctor guy ran away and the police were looking into it. But they showed up in Europe somewhere and the case was closed.”
Detective Wade sighed and, with his eyebrows alone, denied Martin’s claim.
“He brought us a letter,” the detective said. “A letter he claimed came in an envelope postmarked from Amsterdam. But he didn’t have the envelope, and there was no fingerprint other than his, nor were there any DNA markers to say that the letter actually came from his wife.”
“Didn’t she write the letter?” Marilee asked. “Couldn’t you check the handwriting?”
“The body of the letter was printed by computer, and the signature was close but different enough to cause concern.”
“And did you look in Amsterdam?”
“We found an address that a Sonora Simonson and Philip Landries had once possibly stayed in. But it was in a transient area, and there was no one who could identify their photographs. We have no evidence that they ever left the country.”
“So you think that Martin murdered them?”
“We don’t know what happened. Has he said anything to you?”
“Only what I already told you,” Marilee said. “Why are you only asking now? I mean, I’ve been seeing Marty for two months. He thinks the investigation is over.”
“My father had a stroke in Denver,” Odell Wade said. “I went to take care of him until he died. Another detective had the case, but he didn’t do much.”
“I’m sorry, Detective Wade, but I don’t know anything.”
The policeman gave her a slightly pained look and said, “Are you going to see Dr. Hull again?”
“Is it safe?”
“I really don’t know. But if you do talk to him or he calls you, I’d appreciate it if you would contact me.”
4.
“Marty,” Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio said to her lover at 3:03 in the morning. “Are you asleep?”
“I never sleep.”
“Never?”
“Now and then I close my eyes and stop thinking for ten minutes or so, but life is very short, and we have a duty to future generations to make this a better world. So I stay awake as much as possible trying to finish my work before the dictum of mortality claims my soul.”
Before, when Marty made pronouncements like this, Marilee found them fetching, the thoughts of an awkward little man thinking too much of himself. But this time she got nervous. He might be a murderer; that’s what the handsome homicide detective, Odell Wade, had said.
After her meeting with the detective, Marilee cancelled her subscription to PFP and began seeing Martin almost every day. Her fear enhanced their sex life, and now she listened to him as closely as she used to heed her father when she was a little girl. The intensity with which she paid attention to the plastic surgeon brought about a feeling akin to love.
“What did you want?” Martin asked.
“Do you have a laboratory where you do your neuronal studies?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Can I visit it?”
“I’d love that.”
“You would?”
“Yes.” Martin sat up in half lotus, looking down on his naked lover. “A couple of weeks ago I thought that you were going to drop me. I mean I’m not much to look at, and brain surgeons make a lot more money.”
“Can you tell me something?” Marilee asked.
“What?”
“Would you have killed Sonora if you knew that she was having an affair with the gut doctor?”
“Philip,” Martin said, obviously pondering the question. “No. Given time I would have fixed her.”
“You mean hurt her in some other way?”
“Not at all. Sonora is an unhappy woman. When I met her she was fat and shy. When we got together, I paid for a personal trainer, and she turned her physical life around. She lost weight and looked great. But she was still unhappy. She will always be dissatisfied.”
“How could you fix something like that?”
“Long-term unhappiness is mostly a chemical and glandular imbalance. I mean, you might be unhappy on any particular day, because you lost a job or a favorite pet ran away, but continual sadness is something else. Most of us cannot live up to our potentials because there’s a biochemical war going on in our bodies—that and the fact that our knowledge of the world in which we live is usually subpar.”
“What’s the connection between sadness and knowledge?” Marilee asked. She enjoyed these talks with Martin, even though she was spying on him, trying to discover what had happened to his wife and her lover.
“Why would you put yourself in danger like that?” Angelique asked. Marilee had called to tell her sister to get in touch with Detective Wade if she went missing.
“I’m not really sure,” Marilee replied. “When we were just together, I liked him, but it wasn’t serious. I wanted to leave. But after talking to Detective Wade, the fear I feel gets me excited . . . in the bed.”
“That’s perverse.”
“And,” Marilee said, reaching for some knowledge she’d not yet articulated, “and for some reason his talk is making more and more sense. I don’t know . . . sometimes when we’re talking about his
work I feel like we’re colleagues.
“The only problem is that I have less time to exercise and I’m putting on weight.”
“Knowledge is a form of culture,” Martin said that early morning, answering his informant’s/lover’s question. “Not what we know but how we perceive the forms of knowledge brings us closer together. And belonging almost always trumps sadness. Why, I don’t think I’ve had one sad moment since I met you.”
“But that’s love,” she said, feeling ashamed of using the word. “Knowledge comes from education.”
“That was once the case, certainly, but less so, and soon—no more.”
“But the only way you can learn is by applying your mind to that task,” Marilee said with conviction.
“But there are two types of learning,” Martin said, showing his gapped teeth. “One is just the simple concatenation of facts, data. But there is a part of the brain that contains geometric forms that are designed to prepare the mind to apply the endless list of facts. One day we will be able to stimulate these forms intravenously.”
“What are you talking about?”
Martin stood up and walked off of his low platform bed.
“You’ll see when you come to my lab,” he said. “I’m going down there now to get ready for your visit.”
“It’s three in the morning.”
“I’ll take a cab. I’ll leave the address on the kitchen table. Come by around eleven. I’m sure you’ll be amazed.”
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said over the phone at 4:09.
Marilee had waited as long as she could, but finally she just had to call.
“May I speak to Detective Wade?” Marilee asked.
“Who is this?”
“Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio.”
“And why are you calling my husband in the middle of the night?”
Marilee wanted to say that it was morning but didn’t. She suddenly imagined the entire globe of Earth dancing through the plane of sunlight, an intangible but still physical thing joining in that dance.
“I’m, what do you call it? I’m an informant, and he told me to call when I had information.”
The receiver banged down, and Marilee waited. A few minutes later he answered.
The Awkward Black Man Page 9