I rose from the table. I kept them in my bureau, wrapped in a sock: Liz’s glasses. I had put them in my pocket that night on the beach and forgotten all about them until I was in the cab, by which time it was too late to return them. Now I put them on; they were a little small for my face, the lenses quite strong. I sat back down at the window and watched the man smoke in the alleyway, the image distorted and far away, as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope or sitting at the bottom of the sea, gazing upward through miles of water.
20
Here I must leap ahead in time, because that is what time did. I finished my degree at a quickstep; this was followed by a postdoc at Stanford, then a faculty appointment at Columbia, where I was tenured in due course. Within professional circles, I became well known. My reputation increased; the world came calling. I traveled widely, speaking for lucrative fees. Grants flowed my way without difficulty; such was my reputation, I barely had to fill out the forms. I became the holder of multiple patents, two purchased by pharmaceutical concerns for outrageous sums that set me up for life. I refereed important journals. I sat on elite boards. I testified before Congress and was, at various times, a member of the Senate Special Commission on Bioethics, the President’s Council on Science and Technology, the NASA advisory board, and the U.N. Task Force on Biological Diversity.
Along the way, I married. The first time, when I was thirty, lasted four years, the second half that. Each woman had, at one time, been my student, a matter of some awkwardness—chummy glances from male colleagues, raised eyebrows from the higher-ups, frosty exchanges with my female co-workers and the wives of friends. Timothy Fanning, that lothario, that dirty old man (though I had not turned forty). My third wife, Julianna, was just twenty-three the day we married. Our union was impulsive, forged in the furnace of sex; two hours after she graduated, we attacked each other like dogs. Though I was very fond of her, I found her bewildering. Her tastes in music and movies, the books she read, her friends, the things she thought important: none made a lick of sense to me.
I was not, like many a man of a certain age, trying to prop up my self-esteem with a young woman’s body. I did not mourn the years’ unraveling, or fear death unduly, or grieve my waning youth. To the contrary, I liked the many things my success had brought me. Wealth, esteem, authority, good tables at restaurants and hot towels on planes—the whole kit and caboodle that history awards the conquerors: for all of these, I had time’s passage to thank. Yet what I was doing was obvious, even to me. I was trying to recapture the one thing I had lost, that life had denied me. Each of my wives, and the many women in between—all far younger than I was, the age gap widening with every one I took into my bed—was a facsimile of Liz. I speak neither of their appearances, though all belonged to a recognizable physical type (pale, slender, myopic), nor of their temperaments, which possessed a similar brainy combativeness. I mean that I wanted them to be her, so I could feel alive.
That Jonas and I should cross paths was inevitable; we belonged to the same world. Our first reunion occurred at a conference in Toronto in 2002. Enough time had gone by that we both managed to make no reference to my abrupt severing of the relationship. We were all “how the hell are you” and “you haven’t changed a bit” and vowed to keep in better touch, as if we’d been in touch at all. He had returned to Harvard, of course—it ran in the family. He felt himself to be on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, though he was secretive about this, and I didn’t press. Of Liz, he offered only the bare-bones professional data. She was teaching at Boston College; she liked it, her students worshipped her, she was working on a book. I told him to say hello for me and let it go at that.
The following year, I received a Christmas card. It was one of those photograph cards that people use to parade their beautiful children, though the image showed only the two of them. The shot had been taken in some arid locale; they were dressed head to foot in khaki and wearing honest-to-God pith helmets. A note from Liz was written on the back, penned in a hurried script, as if added at the last second: Jonas said he ran into you. Glad you’re doing well!
Year by year, the cards kept coming. Each showed them in a different exotic setting: atop elephants in India, posing before the Great Wall of China, standing at the bow of a ship in heavy parkas with a glacial coastline in the background. All very cheery, yet there was something depressing about these photos, a mood of compensation. What a great life we’re having! Really! Swear to God! I began to notice other things. Jonas was the same hale specimen he’d always been, but Liz was aging precipitously, and not just physically. In previous pictures, her eyes had been distracted in a manner that made the photo seem incidental to the moment. Now she looked at the camera dead-on, like a hostage made to pose with a newspaper. Her smile felt manufactured, a product of her will. Was I imagining this? Furthermore, was it fancy on my part that her darkening gaze was a message meant for me? And what of their bodies? In the first photograph, taken in the desert, Lear was standing behind her, wrapping her with his arms. Year by year, they separated. The last one I received, in 2010, had been taken at a café beside a river that was unmistakably the Seine. They were sitting across from each other, far out of arm’s reach. Glasses of wine stood on the table. My old roommate’s was nearly empty. Liz had touched hers not at all.
At the same time, rumors began to swirl about Jonas. I had always known him to be a man of ardent if somewhat outlandish passions, but the stories I heard were disturbing. Jonas Lear, it was said, had gone off the deep end. His research had drifted into fantasy. His last paper, published in Nature, had danced around the subject, but people had begun to use the V-word in connection to him. He hadn’t published anything since, or appeared at the usual conferences, where a good deal of barroom hilarity transpired at his expense. Some of his colleagues even went so far as to conjecture that his tenure was in jeopardy. A certain amount of schadenfreude was built into our profession, the theory being that one man’s fall was another man’s rise. But I became genuinely worried for him.
It was not long after Julianna tossed in the towel on our ersatz marriage that I received a call from a man named Paul Kiernan. I had met him once or twice; he was a cell biologist at Harvard, a junior colleague of Jonas’s, with an excellent reputation. I could tell that the conversation made him uncomfortable. He had learned of our long association; the gist of his call was his concern that his tenure case might be adversely affected by his connection to Jonas. Might I write a letter on his behalf? My initial instinct was to tell him to grow up, that he was lucky to even know such a man, gossip be damned. But given the ignominious workings of tenure committees, I knew he had a point.
“A lot of it has to do with his wife, actually,” Paul said. “You’ve got to feel for the guy.”
I practically dropped the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew, being such good friends and all. She’s very sick, it doesn’t look good. I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’ll write your letter,” I said, and hung up.
I was completely at a loss. I looked up Liz’s number at Boston College and began to dial, then put the phone back in its cradle. What would I say, after so many years? What right did I have at this late date to reinsert myself into her life? Liz was dying; I’d never stopped loving her, not for a second, but she was another man’s wife. At a time like this, their bond was paramount; if I had learned anything from my parents, it was that the journey of death was one that spouses took together. Maybe it was just the old cowardice returning, but I did not pick up the phone again.
I waited for news. Every day I checked the Times’s obituary page, in a grim death watch. I was short with colleagues, avoided my friends. I had turned the apartment over to Julianna and sublet a one-bedroom in the West Village, making it easy to disappear, to recede into the fringes of life. What would I do when my Liz was gone? I realized that in some drawer of my brain I had kept the idea that someday,
somehow, we would be together. Perhaps they would divorce. Perhaps Jonas would die. Now I had no hope.
Then one night, close to Christmas, the phone rang. It was nearly midnight; I had just settled into bed.
“Tim?”
“Yes, this is Tim Fanning.” I was annoyed by the lateness of the call and did not recognize the voice.
“It’s Liz.”
My heart crashed into my ribs. I could not form words.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” I managed to say. “It’s good to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“I’m in Greenwich, at my mother’s.”
I noted that she did not say “my parents’.” Oscar was no more.
“I need to see you,” she said.
“Of course. Of course you can.” I was madly fumbling in the drawer for a pencil. “I’ll drop everything. Just tell me where and when.”
She would be taking the train into the city the next day. She had something to do first, and we planned to meet at Grand Central at five o’clock, before she returned to Greenwich.
I left my office well ahead of time, wanting to arrive first. It had rained all day, but as the early winter darkness fell, the rain changed to snow. The subway was jammed; everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. I arrived at the station and took my position beneath the clock with minutes to spare. The heedless crowds streamed by—commuters in raincoats with umbrellas tucked under the arms, the women wearing running shoes over their stockings, snow clinging to everyone’s hair. Many were carrying shopping bags brightly decorated for the season. Macy’s. Nordstrom. Bergdorf Goodman. Just the thought of these happy, hopeful people irritated me more than I can say. How could they think about Christmas at a time like this? How could they think about anything at all? Didn’t they know what was about to happen in this place?
Then she appeared. The sight of her nearly undid me; I felt as if I were awakening from a long sleep. She was wearing a dark trench coat; a silk scarf covered her hair. She threaded her way toward me through the hurrying mobs. It was absurd, but I was afraid that she would never make it, that the crowds would swallow her, as in a dream. She caught my eye, smiled, and made a “move along” gesture behind the back of a man who was blocking her path. I pushed my way to her.
“And there you are,” she said.
What followed was the warmest, most deeply felt hug of my life. Just the smell of her drowned my senses in joy. Yet happiness was not the only thing I felt. Every bone, every edge of her pressed against me; it was as if I were holding a bird.
She pulled away. “You look great,” she said.
“So do you.”
She gave a little laugh. “You’re such a liar, but I do appreciate the sentiment.” She removed her scarf, revealing a scrim of pale hair, the kind that grows back after chemo. “What do you think of my new holiday ’do? I’m guessing you know the story.”
I nodded. “I got a call from a colleague of Jonas’s. He told me.”
“That would be Paul Kiernan, that little weasel. You scientists are such gossips.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Never. But I could use a drink.”
We climbed the stairs to the bar on the west balcony. Even this small effort seemed to enervate her. We took a table near the edge with a view of the grand hall. I ordered a Scotch, Liz a martini and a glass of water.
“Do you remember when you met me here the first time?” I asked.
“You had a friend, wasn’t it? Something awful had happened.”
“That’s right. Lucessi.” I hadn’t said the name in years. “It meant a lot to me, you know. You really took care of me.”
“Comes with the service. But if I remember correctly, it was at least half the other way around. Maybe more than half.” She looked at me. “You really do look good, Tim. Success suits you, but I always knew it would. I’ve kind of kept tabs. Tell me one thing. Are you happy?”
“I’m happy now.”
She smiled. Her lips were thin and white. “An excellent dodge, Dr. Fanning.”
I reached across the table and took her hand. It was cold as ice. “Tell me what’s going to happen.”
“I’m going to die, that’s what.”
“I can’t accept that. There has to be something they can do. Let me make some calls.”
She shook her head. “They’ve all been made. Believe me, I’m not going down without a fight. But it’s time to raise the white flag.”
“How long?”
“Four months. Six if I’m lucky. That’s where I was today. I’ve been seeing a doc at Sloan Kettering. It’s all over the place. His words.”
Six months: it was nothing. How had I let all the years go by? “Jesus, Liz—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say you’re sorry, because I’m not.” She squeezed my hand. “I need a favor, Tim.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to help Jonas. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. They’re all true. He’s in South America right now, on his great goose chase. He can’t accept any of this. He still thinks he can save me.”
“What can I do?”
“Just talk to him. He trusts you. Not just as a scientist but as his friend. Do you know how much he still talks about you? He follows your every move. He probably knows what you ate for breakfast this morning.”
“That makes no sense. He should hate me.”
“Why would he hate you?”
Even then, I couldn’t say the words. She was dying, and I couldn’t tell her.
“Leaving the way I did. Never telling him why.”
“Oh, he knows why. Or thinks he does.”
I was shocked. “What did you tell him?”
“The truth. That you finally figured out you were too good for us.”
“That’s insane. And it wasn’t the reason.”
“I know it wasn’t, Tim.”
A silence passed. I sipped my drink. Announcements were being made; people were hurrying to their trains, riding into the winter dark.
“We were a couple of good soldiers, you and I,” Liz said. She gave a brittle smile. “Loyal to a fault.”
“So he never figured out that part.”
“Are we talking about the same Jonas here? He couldn’t even imagine such a thing.”
“How has it been with him? I don’t just mean now.”
“I can’t complain.”
“But you’d like to.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes. Everyone does. He loves me, he thinks he’s helping. What else could a girl ask for?”
“Somebody who understood you.”
“That’s a tall order. I don’t think I even understand myself.”
I felt suddenly angry. “You’re not some high school science project, damnit. He just wants to feel noble. He should be here with you, not trooping around, where was it? South America?”
“It’s the only way he has of dealing with this.”
“It’s not fair.”
“What’s fair? I have cancer. That isn’t fair.”
I understood, then, what she was saying to me. She was afraid, and Jonas had left her alone. Maybe she wanted me to bring him home; maybe what she really needed was for me to tell him how he’d failed her. Maybe it was both. What I knew was that I’d do absolutely anything she asked.
I became aware that neither of us had spoken for a while. I looked at Liz; something was wrong. She’d begun to perspire, though the room was quite cold. She took a shuddering breath and reached weakly for her glass of water.
“Liz, are you all right?”
She sipped. Her hand was shaking. She returned the glass to the table, nearly spilling it, dropped her elbow, and braced her forehead against her palm.
“I don’t think I am, actually. I think I’m going to faint.”
I rose quickly from my chair. “We need to get you to a hospital. I’ll get a cab.”
She shook her head emphatically. “No more hospitals.”
Whe
re then? “Can you walk?”
“I’m not sure.”
I threw some cash onto the table and helped her to her feet. She was on the verge of collapse, giving me nearly all of her weight.
“You’re always carrying me, aren’t you?” she murmured.
I got her into a cab and gave the driver my address. The snow was falling heavily now. Liz leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.
“The lady okay?” the driver asked. He was wearing a turban and had a heavy black beard. I knew he meant, Is she drunk? “The lady looks sick. No puking in my cab.”
I handed him a hundred-dollar bill. “Does this help?”
The traffic was like glue. It took us nearly thirty minutes to get downtown. New York was softening under the snow. A white Christmas: how happy everyone was going to be. My apartment was on the second floor; I would have to carry her. I waited for a neighbor to come through the door and asked him to hold it open, guided Liz out of the cab, and lifted her into my arms.
“Wow,” my neighbor said. “She doesn’t look too good.”
He followed us to my apartment door, took the key from my pocket, and opened that as well. “Do you want me to call 911?” he asked.
“It’s okay, I’ve got this. She had a little too much to drink is all.”
He winked despicably. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
I got her out of her coat and carried her into the bedroom. As I lay her on my bed, she opened her eyes and turned her face toward the window.
“It’s snowing,” she said, as if this were the most amazing thing in the world.
She closed them again. I removed her glasses and shoes, draped a blanket over her, and doused the lights. There was an overstuffed chair close to the window where I liked to read. I sat down and waited in the dark to see what would happen next.
The City of Mirrors Page 23