Jennifer Haigh

by Condition

  Maybe she was perfectly happy living alone in the drafty old house, where the drama of their marriage—comedy, then tragedy—had unfolded. He had a clear memory of the first time they'd seen it. He'd had doubts about buying such an old place, but Paulette had loved it immediately, enchanted by its history. She had a sentimental attachment to Concord, where her Drew grandparents had lived. In the end Frank left the decision to her, and not merely because her father had supplied the down payment. Frank's mind was elsewhere, on his troubled PhD thesis; he couldn't afford the distraction of an argument. Pregnant with Gwen, Paulette was moody, strangely volatile; flushed and plump and swollen. He'd known by touching her that she was pregnant. As she'd been with Billy: warm, always, to the touch.

  Jesus: Billy. Frank thought of the Mercedes idling at the driveway, the driver's hesitation before slamming on the gas. Surely Gwen was right; the car was not Billy's. The alternative—that his son had fled at the sight of him—was unthinkable.

  They'd always been close, in Frank's judgment, despite the divorce and the inevitable complications it caused. Away at Pearse, Billy had been spared both his mother's theatrics and the awkward weekend visits with his father. Frank had dragged Gwen and Scott to museums and zoos and ball games, suddenly conscious of the need to entertain his children, something his own parents had never dreamed of doing, something Frank himself had never done. Sunday nights, exhausted by the effort, he drove them back to Concord, careful to avoid Paulette and her strained silence, her baleful stare. Later, at home, he phoned Billy for an update on his classes, his soccer season, his plans for the future. The kid seemed well adjusted, serious and studious, too busy succeeding in his teenage life to miss tramping around a smelly zoo with his father. Frank had assumed, then, that Billy felt as he did, that family relationships ought to happen naturally, without contrivance, father and son each going about his business in mutual affection and regard.

  He shook his head to clear it. Unsteadily he got to his feet, kicking over the empty bottle. The Cab had ignited a pleasant fire in his stomach. A fire, he thought. On a snowy Christmas Eve, it seemed the very thing. He examined the ashy hearth, the bricks white with creosote. He opened the damper and stared up doubtfully. The flue hadn't been swept in years, since before Deena left.

  He went down to the basement, searching for firewood. He found a Duraflame log still in its wrapper. Deena had loved to screw by the fire, and they'd bought Duraflames by the half dozen. The fake logs didn't smoke or throw off sparks. They burned just long enough for what Deena called one coital event.

  He brought the log upstairs, along with his snow shovel. At some point—after another glass of wine—he would clear the walk. He took matches from the mantelpiece and lit both ends of the log. The Duraflame ignited promptly, its chief virtue. In a moment the flame spread from end to end.

  Frank sat back in his chair and watched it critically. No smoke, maybe, but neither was it much of a fire. He wished he'd thought to pick up firewood. Then a thought occurred to him: his whole house was full of kindling. He could—he really should—undertake an early spring cleaning.

  He reached for the Newsweek s piled behind the sofa. One had a cover story on the new Mrs. JFK Jr. Another trumpeted the headline "The Mystery of Prayer." He tore into them vigorously, ink staining his fingers. Briefly the fire flared.

  He swept a pile of paper from the hall table. He was drowning in junk mail. Have Your Carpets Professionally Cleaned. The Penny Saver.

  Have You Seen This Child? Gleefully he tossed them onto the fire.

  He reached for another magazine, then realized what he was holding. The new issue of Nature. He'd flagged with a yellow Post-it note the article Neil Windsor had written. Neil and Kevin Cho.

  He clutched the journal in his hand. It would give him enormous satisfaction, really, to toss it into the fire. To incinerate his envy, his ancient rancors, his own failure to produce. He would torch the last few limp, underachieving years of his life. He recapped, briefly, the grave mistakes he'd made in those years.

  Not marrying Deena.

  Not getting Gwen to the doctor.

  Not hiring Kevin Cho.

  He flung the journal into the fire. The flame responded with enthusiasm, filling the room with light.

  Frank settled back into his chair. His open briefcase sat on the coffee table, overflowing with paper. On top of the pile was a thin sheaf of manuscript pages, neatly stapled. Cristina's paper, nowhere near completion. Publication—if it happened at all—was many months, perhaps a full year away.

  His lie at the bar came back to him in a rush. We're getting positive signals from Science about our paper. I can't imagine it won't go through.

  Shame filled him. Under normal circumstances, he was closemouthed about ongoing projects. The field was competitive, wildly so: scientists borrowed, appropriated, stole outright. Grohl had invested heavily in Cristina's work, years and precious research dollars.

  Now that she was finally producing, Frank lived in fear that they'd be scooped.

  Goddamnit: with the best minds in the world grinding away, racing to map the human genome, oncogenetics was set to explode.

  We'll be picking cancer genes out of our teeth, he thought. Scientists Frank's age were quickly becoming dinosaurs; his colleagues, more and more, looked like kids. Some, like Kevin Cho, really were kids, and they were the ones making the biggest finds. Frank—why deny it?—was nearing the end of his productive years. He wanted more than anything in the world to do what Neil Windsor was doing: to knock the field on its ear. A few times he'd come close; but the big discovery had somehow eluded him. And that—it was suddenly clear as day— was his own god damn fault.

  Again and again, he had focused on the wrong data. For years he'd felt superior to Neil, for reasons that now seemed foolish: charm, masculinity, athletic ability, sexual prowess. The first three counted for nothing, and the last had deserted him forever. He saw, now, a deeper disparity between himself and Neil, a single, powerful determinant—the real reason his own career had stagnated while Neil was welcomed into the Academy.

  It all came down to character—forged, no doubt, in those formative years Neil had spent sweating at Harvard instead of pickling and fornicating at Penn State. All along he'd known what was important, and had acted accordingly. Neil had hired Kevin Cho, his secret weapon. And Frank had hired his midlife crisis.

  He sank into his chair, Cristina's paper still in his hands. He glanced at the title page. "XIAP deficiency inhibits tumorigenesis in mice."

  Cristina's name led the list of authors; Frank's came last, the power spot. Well, it was the way of the world: Frank had lost count of the old lions—Charlie Stoddard at Harvard, Harry Drucker at MIT—who'd built their own careers and reputations on his hard labor. As a postdoc he'd been as ambitious as Cristina; he'd paid into the system for years.

  He felt no guilt, none whatsoever, about reaping the rewards.

  He drained his glass and began to read.

  The paper was terrific.

  Frank read it straight through, stopping once to stagger into the kitchen for a second bottle of wine. He spotted the cheap red, already opened, and took it back to the living room. The results were all there, laid out before him: in all three animal cohorts, knocking out XIAP had led to a sharp decrease in tumor growth.

  Frank put down the paper and drained his glass. It always astonished him, the way good reporting could bring the science to life on the page. Cristina was a lively writer, so sharp and persuasive that it would be easy to miss the small holes in her science. To verify that she'd knocked out XIAP, she'd done a Southern blot of cells from the mouse's tail: the DNA strands were cut into fragments, then transferred onto a gel and probed, to show which fragments contained the altered sequence. So far, so good, except that the diagram in Cristina's paper showed only a portion of the results, the 3 prime end of the gene.

  Common practice, nowadays, but Frank was of the generation that disdained shortcuts. WHAT ABOUT 5'? SH
OW BOTH BANDS!! he noted in the margin, his handwriting wavy on the page. If Cristina was more stylish than precise, Frank was sympathetic: he'd had the same tendency as a kid, until Charlie Stoddard, his mentor at Harvard, shamed him into thoroughness. Cristina was bright and ambitious; Frank owed her the same rigorous training he himself had received.

  He saw, now, that he'd denied her the time and attention he gave the other postdocs, that his attraction to her had incapacitated him. He had failed to deliver; but with this paper Cristina would redeem them both. With his guidance, who knew what she might accomplish?

  Relief flooded him. He hadn't lied to Neil Windsor after all; he'd merely fudged the timeline. True, Science hadn't accepted Cristina's paper yet, but might very soon. If Neil pressed him, Frank could blame the editor, the slow-reading reviewers. It's in the pipeline, buddy. It's on the way.

  He found, stuck to the refrigerator, a list Betsy Baird had typed, home phone numbers of each member of his team. He dialed. A recording asked him to leave a message—Cristina's voice, but deeper, weirdly distorted. Jesus, Frank thought. Time to get a new tape.

  "Cristina, Frank McKotch here. It's Wednesday night"—he squinted at the clock—"kind of late, and, listen, I read this paper and I have to tell you, it's very strong. The discussion section is dynamite."

  He allowed himself an avuncular chuckle. "Of course, you did cut a few corners up front. What happened to the five prime end of the tail blot, for God's sake?"

  He poured another glass of wine.

  "We need to straighten out those diagrams first thing tomorrow morning." The lab director's we, which invariably meant you. "Oh, right: Christmas. Well, Friday then." He drank deeply. "No reason to drag our feet. Let's get this baby out the door."

  chapter 2

  Three days before Christmas, Scott McKotch saw the billboard.

  It loomed at the junction of Highways 8 and 61, fourteen feet high and forty-eight across, the size of four garage doors laid side by side. Scott squatted in the breakdown lane, just behind the guardrail, and stared up at it. His own face, enlarged to the diameter of a bicycle tire, stared back. It was the sort of moment that comes blessedly seldom in most lives, a moment of reckoning. He had grown adept at fleeing such occasions, but this time he'd had no warning. The evidence had ambushed him on his way to work, leaped into his field of vision across eight lanes of highway traffic. There was no ignoring such evidence. No denying what he had become.

  The photo had been taken three years ago at soccer practice.

  In the grassy foreground, in navy-and-white Ruxton jerseys, were two teenage boys jogging across the field. Behind them stood Scott in shorts and a navy windbreaker, his hair windblown, his square jaw handsomely set. The photographer had caught his hands in midclap. In his first and final year of coaching Ruxton soccer, clapping was the one skill Scott had mastered. With palms cupped for maximum resonance, he clapped when his team took the field and when they left it, when goals were scored and, especially, when they weren't, at which point he would shout in his deepest voice, "Good effort!" Coach McKotch clapped his palms raw. Coach was a clapping fool.

  He took a step back from the guardrail. A cold rain had soaked his shirt collar. Rush hour traffic whizzed past him, crashing through puddles, spraying filthy water over his chinos. The two boys, he recalled, were brothers, now graduated. The older had been accepted at Brown, the kind of school to which Ruxton students were encouraged to apply. The younger was at Ohio State, the kind to which they usually went. Both kids were tall and lanky, with the blond and pink-cheeked look of English princes. Next to them Scott looked broad shouldered and powerful, his legs impressively muscled. Above the three heads was a caption in gorilla capitals: RUXTON ACADEMY. And then, crossing the boys' shins in bold italics: Where Success Is the Goal.

  Scott got into his car, a twelve-year-old Volkswagen Golf with one windshield wiper and no hubcaps, and weighed the likelihood that anyone he knew, while speeding along Highway 61, might recognize the clapping dolt in soccer shorts, a pathetic pitchman for a third-rate prep school.

  The likelihood was pretty freaking high.

  Each day between seven and eight thirty, Route 61 was backed up for miles, the whole population of Gatwick on its morning run southward sucking coffee out of travel mugs, listening to inane radio chatter or improving books on tape. In the last twenty-four hours, every one of his neighbors and coworkers had already seen the billboard.

  There was no question in his mind.

  "Okay," he said aloud."Okay. So what?"

  His neighbors and coworkers didn't matter. Anyone who lived in Gatwick existed at the sad margins of civilization, living a life as doomed and irrelevant as his own. These people were neither movers nor shakers.

  Their opinions counted for shit. But what if somewhere in the sea of cars, some graduate of Pearse Upper School (class of 1985 and the overlapping ones, '82 through '88) happened to pass through town? Driving northward from New York City, perhaps for the annual Christmas visit, one of his old classmates might glance out the passenger window and recognize the guy voted Class Clown and Rebel Without a Clue, known in the middle grades by the nickname Biter, come to this sorry end. (Alumni of Stirling College, which Scott had briefly attended, might also drive through Gatwick; but he was probably safe there. He hadn't been at Stirling long enough for anyone to remember his face.)

  He ran a hand through his wet hair, checking his reflection in the rearview mirror. He raked the hair back from his forehead and glanced again at the billboard. Three years later, the difference was astonishing.

  On top of every other indignity in his life, he was losing his freaking hair.

  Gatwick, Connecticut , was a town of forty thousand, built on what had been dairyland. When Scott and Penny moved there three years ago, Main Street was newly paved; a rich, bovine smell still hovered over the fields. Now Gatwick had matured into a sprawling bedroom community of cheap land and easy access to strip malls, its wide central artery lined with a small but spreading cluster of fast-food franchises and electronics emporia and video stores, their bright signage recognizable even to small children, the Big American Brands. Gatwick's adult citizens commuted, in equal proportions, to Hartford, Providence, and New Haven; a smaller share drove two hours each way to Boston. Gatwick was an exurb without an urb, a diffuse nowhere that looked, increasingly, like everywhere, a thought that filled Scott with despair.

  When he accepted the job at Ruxton Academy, he'd pictured himself living in nearby Dumfries, a quaint Revolutionary War town twelve miles to the south. Built along the Quinebaug River, Dumfries had made its name in textiles; for exactly one year, 1818, it had the largest cotton mill in Connecticut. In the 1920s, the firm of Lipscomb and Blore opened four shirt factories within its limits, and Dumfries became known as Shirttown U.S. A. Those factories had long since closed, leaving Dumfries with no industry to speak of, only monuments to its former wealth: handsome Greek Revival architecture, a white Congregational church. The U.S. Post Office, a former blacksmith shop, had been a stop on the Underground Railroad; it, town hall and the old Lipscomb mansion had been designated historic landmarks. The local Heritage Society mowed and watered the town green. To Scott's eyes, accustomed to the barren newness of inland California, Dumfries looked enough like Concord to prompt an aching nostalgia, a feeling that he'd finally come home.

  Accompanied by the only realtor in town, a brisk Yankee named Tom Harwich, Scott and Penny had toured every available house in Dumfries: a few creaky Victorians, some cramped Capes. Scott had a small inheritance from his grandfather Drew, most of which they'd piddled away on rent and utility bills, minimum payments on their maxed-out credit cards, the dreary monthly expenses of a couple with two children.

  What remained would cover a skimpy down payment; but these houses were at the upper end of their price range. Worse, all cried out for costly remodeling or, in Penny's view, a kiss from a wrecking ball. They'd nearly given up when Tom Harwich showed them a stone gamekeeper's c
ottage at the edge of town."A little snug for a family," he admitted, "but the price is right." The house was tiny but graceful, with French doors opening into a walled garden. Charmed by the phrase "gamekeeper's cottage," with its literary and lascivious associations, Scott lobbied hard. He pointed out the random-width pine floors, the heirloom roses in the sunny garden. Penny was not impressed. The ceiling showed water damage. The appliances looked fifty years old. The place had no air-conditioning and only one bathroom. Oblivious to the stiff presence of Tom Harwich, she wondered aloud how people could live this way.

  Scott started to explain that air-conditioning was unnecessary, that New England summers were nothing like the six-month human barbecue they endured in San Bernardino. He noticed in midsentence the sweat running down his forehead, his shirt plastered wetly to his back.

  "Window units," he said, changing tactics. "We'll put one in each bedroom."

  Penny sighed. Her sigh told him that arguing was futile. For all its decrepitude, the cottage was nearly as expensive as the much larger Victorians. Making it livable would require not just carpentry skills—which Scott had—but long months and vast sums of money, which he had not. There was no getting around it: the cheapest property in Dumfries cost more than they could afford.

  Crushed, he settled into one of the black funks that had haunted his childhood, a rich, satisfying blend of outrage and self-pity that, once unleashed, overtook him completely—for hours or sometimes days, until somebody noticed and wheedled him out of it. Back then, his mother had wooed him with gifts or candy. Penny usually offered sex or ganja, but this time she was in no mood. He watched miserably as, disgusted by his wallowing, she took over the house search. She scanned the newspaper. She picked a new realtor out of the yellow pages, one with offices in nearby Gatwick. The agent, a perfumed blonde named Misty Sanderson, took them on a tour of the town, which at that time resembled a vast construction site.