Appetite

by Sheila Grinell

  “How can you be so arrogant? Haven’t you noticed therapy’s making her better?”

  “Maybe she’s getting better on her own. Healing is built into the system. Maggie, I’m tired, I don’t want to argue.”

  “And I don’t want a biology lesson.” She got up and walked into the dark living room. She leaned against the mantelpiece and absently fingered the soapstone talisman Sarah had sent from a business trip to the Pacific Northwest. She would tell Jenn yes; she could go to California if she passed all her classes and continued therapy. Not because her father approved of the trip but because her mother honored her desires. Because her mother paid attention to her heart as well as her mind and body.

  That night, in the hours she was able to sleep, with Paul oblivious beside her, she dreamed again about finals week at college. She had forgotten to study and misplaced her books, and no one would answer her questions about where to take the test, and a lake appeared between the buildings and so on and so on, one obstacle after another. Waking, she recognized the state of mind her dream reflected: guilty, afraid of not meeting her obligations. She would beat back the dream. Above all else, she would keep Jenn safe.

  Paul snorted and rolled toward her. She suppressed the urge to shake him. Why was he being such a damn know-it-all about therapy? He had no precious data from which to extrapolate, and no expertise. He acted as if no opinion mattered but his. In this arena, he was inadequate. He deeply disappointed her. She felt a coolness toward him spread from her head to her heart. She turned away from him and closed her eyes.

  Jenn came home from California slightly tanned and calm. She resumed her schoolwork without a hiccup. After another couple of months, she began bringing friends home for grilled cheese sandwiches and music in her room. In January, the shrink told her “Good-bye and you can always call me if you need me.” It turned out that Jenn didn’t need the shrink anymore; nor did she talk about her recovery with her parents. Maggie stopped inquiring, reluctantly. Paul treated Jenn “business as usual.”

  But everyone had changed; each had moved one degree away from the others. Maggie tried to restore harmony to the household. Until Jenn left for college, she cooked lovely dinners for the three of them, on the nights Paul came home, so they could communicate. But she could not bridge the gap that had emerged between herself and Paul, to which his increased absences contributed. Goodness knows she had tried.

  FIFTEEN

  The summer Jenn spent in California, Paul reacted badly. At first, he wanted to kill the kid who had raped his daughter. Then, since no permanent damage had been done, he insisted that she be left alone to heal. He said that he didn’t want a shrink filling her head with doubts. In truth, he felt powerless to help, clumsy in the face of her silence, afraid his anger would alienate her. And Maggie’s constant carping pissed him off.

  All summer he phoned Jenn once a week—from the office, because he didn’t want Maggie to see how unsatisfactory the conversations were. Each time he’d ask a question, he could practically see Jenn roll her eyes. She’d say she was fine, but her voice was flat: data-entry work was okay; the beach was okay the couple of times Sarah took her; Sarah was okay because she left Jenn alone. Her voice brightened when she mentioned her shrink; they were talking twice a week. No, she did not want her parents to visit; yes, she’d be home before Labor Day to get ready for school. Bye, Dad. He supposed this was par for the course, but he would’ve preferred to hear more words, friendlier words.

  He phoned at eleven in New York, eight in Los Angeles, to catch them before they left for the bank—crazy Sarah had actually come through with a summer job. He wondered if Jenn could see how nutty Aunt Sarah was. Usually Jenn could read people like a pro, but maybe not now. He told himself to be grateful that Sarah had taken Jenn in and that, so far, they were getting along. But he missed Jenn’s sparkle, and he resented Maggie’s gloom.

  One day after the eleven o’clock call, he decided he had time enough before lunch to read an article on prostate cancer imaging in the latest Science. Might have nothing to do with his work; might connect somehow later on. There were too many journals to read, so he’d divided them among the junior researchers in his lab, asking them to report on anything connected to their various projects. He wanted to scoop up any bit of information that might advance the research, and he wanted to know if anyone, anywhere, was closing in on the idea he’d been pursuing for the past decade. Of course he had to keep up with discoveries in genetics and immunology as well as his own field, but it made him antsy. He wanted to turn over all the stones necessary to stay ahead of the cancer biology curve.

  The journals those days talked about developing vaccines against cancer and HIV, hyperactivating the body’s immune system against the pathogen so that the disease couldn’t progress. He thought vaccine research would go nowhere fast because the AIDS virus and cancers mutated too fast to get caught in a T-cell web. Hell, even the relatively simple flu vaccine had to be updated year to year. No, his approach—stopping cancer cells by attacking the mechanisms they use to suck life from host tissue—would pay off far sooner. The detour he had taken when Jenn was a baby had proved wise; within a few years, everyone else had followed, looking at the cancer itself, rather than at foreign genes, for clues to malignancy. His work had moved further: he no longer examined genes but rather the proteins they create that interact with the cancer’s environment. Plenty of other researchers shared his approach, taking their own angles, but he was convinced he’d get results first. He was so close he could taste it. Even fusty Robert Stamford believed in him—hence the invitation a few years back to start a lab of his own.

  Nothing in this issue of Science either threatened or illuminated. Satisfied, he tossed the magazine onto the pile of journals in a cardboard box on the floor next to his desk. Sandi would file them. Sandi, hovering in the background, always on cue, worth her weight in gold, and he told her so at every fitting juncture. He couldn’t pay her well, but she didn’t complain. She got a kick out of fussing at him and bossing the kids, with whom she had a sure touch despite the vast differences in education. He inspired the team; she tended to them. The team hummed along, and he loved it.

  “Going to lunch!” he called to Sandi in the next room. He walked down to the elevator.

  Expecting to beat the lunchtime crowd in the hospital’s second-floor cafeteria, he stepped out of the elevator and into a short line at the sandwich counter. As he waited his turn, the woman in front of him, a big-boned nurse he had noticed before, ordered a Reuben. Wanting to save time, he stepped beside her and told the cook to make two. The woman turned to him.

  “I don’t think I can eat two of those,” she said with a straight face.

  “Neither can I. But we could polish them off together. I’m Paul Adler.”

  “Irene Barnes.”

  He carried the tray holding two Reubens and a bag of chips to a table against the wall while Irene got drinks at the pop machine. They sat and exchanged coordinates as they ate. She told him she was a practical nurse who had recently come to the hospital after the death of a long-term private patient. He told her he ran a cancer research lab on the ninth floor. She said she was glad he wasn’t a medical man—they never listened. He liked the way she held the leaky, squishy sandwich in both hands and talked boisterously with her mouth full. He liked her ample chest and brassy red hair—obviously dyed, but so what?—and her flat midwestern accent. She reminded him of his brother’s first wife, a big, exuberant dame who could fuck a horse, as Lenny used to boast. Irene appeared a little shopworn, but so would Lenny’s ex-wife by now. On impulse he asked her if she’d like to go for a drink after her shift. She looked him straight in the eye and said not tonight, because she had to work a ten-hour shift, but she’d take a rain check. Done, he said, and he meant it.

  “I see you wear a ring. How come you didn’t go home to your family tonight?” Irene wriggled a maraschino cherry at him. They sat beside each other at a bar down the street from her apartment
building, she sipping a Manhattan, he taking bourbon straight. It was after eleven o’clock—she worked late on Thursdays—and he had offered to walk her home after their cheap pasta meal, a meal Maggie would have shunned but that Irene enjoyed as much as he.

  “Because it’s no fun and you are.”

  “Come on, Paul. I have a right to know.”

  He wanted to bed her—that night. “My seventeen-year-old daughter is in California in long-distance therapy for a date rape, and my wife obsesses about it.”

  Irene lowered the cherry. Her voice softened. “What happened to your daughter?”

  “She won’t say. We used to be close. Now she only talks to her shrink. I suspect she did something she doesn’t want me to know about.”

  Irene swiveled on her stool to face him. “I’ve seen so many kids in trouble. They’re wracked with guilt, even when they’re innocent. If your daughter is talking to anybody at all, that’s good.”

  He saw something in her face: eyes narrowed as if watching those sorrowing kids, mouth like Mona Lisa’s. She must be good at her job, a dirty, gutsy job he could respect. “Why did you come out tonight with a married man?”

  She laughed, leaned against the bar. “I like sex. Married men are less trouble. They don’t want you to keep house for them; they leave you alone when you want.” She clapped him on the shoulder, as a man would. “You seem like a stand-up guy. Want to come upstairs?”

  “You bet.” Unusual broad. There had to be a story there. He would find out later.

  They fell into a pattern of Thursday-night sex. He’d work late, or go to an evening seminar, or use his perks at the hospital’s gym while she finished her shift. He’d wait for her in the bar and they’d grab a bite and go to bed. He’d stay over, telling Maggie he was sleeping on the couch at Tim’s place to save himself a long, late commute. She didn’t question it.

  Except for Irene’s one peculiarity—she insisted he wash his parts before sex, not his body, not even after a sweaty handball game, just his parts—she was a terrific lay. Instantly hot, playful, accommodating, and, eventually, deeply satisfied. No work on his part, all pleasure. So much more exciting than relations with his wife or the other women he had nibbled in the last little while. Irene was lusty; Maggie was willing. Irene was coarse; Maggie subtle. Irene threw polyester leopard skins over her chairs; Maggie favored pillows with needlepoint roses. Irene celebrated the masculine; Maggie personified the feminine.

  He would never have married Irene.

  And at first it seemed Irene made few emotional demands. She told him she’d been married once, to a guy who turned alcoholic and left her with a pile of debt it had taken years to clear. Hubby brought her to New York, and when they split, she didn’t have enough money to go back to Chicago. Now she had a good job and a rent-controlled apartment, so in New York she stayed. She said she didn’t want to marry again, and she didn’t need an exclusive relationship. She made the perfect mistress. Except that, sex aside, he was a little bored. For one thing, Irene loved her doggie and assumed he would too. She liked to chat about the characters in her favorite television shows or celebrities in the news. She lived in the concrete and the local; he got no traction when he brought up science or politics. On the other hand, he could rely on her opinion about personalities—she did a great Pompous Robert imitation—and, for some unknown reason, she was interested in Jenn. When he vented frustration about Jenn’s noncommunication, she counseled patience. She advised him to reach out to the shrink together with Jenn’s mom—Irene’s sympathy extended that far. When he asked her why she cared about his daughter, she laughed and said she’d fallen for him because he talked about Jenn on their first date. Jenn was part of the package, and she liked what she saw. With Irene, he could relax completely. He felt so comfortable at her place that little bouts of boredom didn’t interfere.

  Nor did little bouts of guilt. Maggie became crabby and distant after Jenn went away. She no longer went to bed when he did in the evening, staying up to read or sew. It was easy to rationalize looking elsewhere for warmth. Soon his qualms faded away.

  Later that summer, another woman assumed significance in Paul’s life. One day at the lab, reading a memo, he decided to give Alicia, his new hire, an important role. The memo contained a notice for yet another convocation on the promise of personalized medicine. The usual suspects would meet in another stuffy room to make the usual promises that, the world didn’t realize, couldn’t be kept.

  His peers wanted people to think that because cancer susceptibility has a genetic component, your doctor would soon be able to sequence the tumor genome and concoct a drug specifically targeted to your particular cancer’s vulnerabilities. Totally irresponsible, he thought. So much more goes into a tumor’s genesis and defense than can be read in a chart of A-T-C-Gs. The truly important discoveries would leap over an individual’s genetics and address the central fact that all successful cancer cells, unlike normal cells, never die. People develop mutations in their genetic code every day, and those cells die or get wiped out by the immune system. But every so often one cell manages to evade extinction and succeeds in colonizing normal tissue, like an embryo implanting in the womb. How does the resulting tumor turn off the immune system around itself? How does it convince blood vessels to supply it? How does it develop the ability to break away and colonize altogether different tissue types? Why do some external toxins help and others hurt? For years, his work had focused on a particular set of conditions in the biochemistry of the microenvironment that, his gut told him, served as the gatekeeper to cellular immortality. He was gambling, striking out alone on a path with few signposts. It had better pay off.

  A knock on the open door: Alicia stood pale on the threshold, notebook in hand. He had taken her on a few weeks back as a favor to a former professor who now sat on the NIH panel that funded research like his. Although well qualified for the research assistant job, she moved slowly and took constant notes, as if afraid to forget a word. She wore her hair in a severe ponytail and hid her figure in a dingy lab coat. Even her makeup looked tentative, a pale pink smudge on her lips. He couldn’t look at her any length of time without wanting to shake her, to propel her into higher gear. Maybe she reminded him of his mother, powerless to protect her children from the drunkard she had married and powerless to leave him.

  “Dr. Adler, Sandi said you wanted to see me?”

  “Have a seat. I have an idea for your thesis.”

  She sat on the chair next to his desk, slow as molasses, her moon face registering what he took for puzzlement. She murmured, “I have a topic. I already did the lit review and the first experiment with Professor Blumer.”

  “Yes, and he sent you to me for a reason. You’re doing good, basic work on breast-tumor tissue, but you can do something innovative using my analysis of the microenvironment. It would give you a leg up. And it would be good for the rest of the team.” He paused to let the implication sink in.

  Her brow wrinkled. “I don’t think I can start all over again.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Who said start over? Build on what you’ve got, just adjust the parameters.” “But the data don’t warrant it.”

  “Alicia, everything is subject to interpretation. I’ll help you set up.”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll revise your protocol and send it back to you to look over. Then we can talk. You’ll understand and you’ll be glad. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She looked dubious. She clutched the notebook to her chest.

  “You can go now. I’ll come find you in a couple of hours.”

  She rose with the speed of a three-toed sloth and walked out.

  With Alicia churning away in parallel, he’d confirm his hypothesis all the sooner. This was one female he could control, and she’d love him for it. He reminded himself to send a note to Blumer, thanking him for recommending her and letting him know how far along the lab had come. His prospects looked good. So good that he could
forget about his daughter’s troubles and ignore his crabby wife.

  That fall, after Jenn returned from California, the routine in Pelham almost returned to normal. Maggie calmed down and tried to make it up to him, but he saw no need to give up his hot Thursday nights. Jenn seemed content to prepare for college, but she rejected his help. Meanwhile, at the office, Alicia became more involved in the work and more valuable. If he’d thought about it, he would have realized that the office had defaulted to home. And when he thought about sex, it was Irene’s person, not Maggie’s, that stirred him. The marital bed had irreversibly chilled.

  SIXTEEN

  Paul stood directly behind Hope, leaning forward to watch her hands adjust the microscope slide, smelling the lemony scent of her hair. Not perfume, perhaps shampoo or a gel of some kind—something clean, as befitting the horsewoman he imagined she was. He supposed she had bought it at a Madison Avenue boutique with a foreign name. Or maybe she’d picked it up last summer in the Hamptons. Graduate students never had that kind of money. Hope proved the rule in so many ways. It was only week three, yet she had been amazingly productive, mastering the protocols and running more trials successively than any other technician the lab had employed. He knew he could stop double-checking her, but he liked watching her work. Competence pleased him.

  Sandi walked in and he straightened. She said, “It’s Friday. You have the administrative meeting at four.” He nodded. “Don’t be late again.” She left the room.

  Hope replaced the slide in its holder with all due care. Making a note in her computer, she said, “Will your meeting last long? I’d like to invite you to an opening at my parents’ gallery tonight. Cocktails start at five thirty. The artist is one of my favorites.”

  “I’m not a connoisseur. And I don’t have a tie.” He was intrigued. Where was she going with this? She’d been flirting with him since day one.