A Perfect Life (23 page)

“Sure, I go in order,” I said, neglecting to mention this only meant I tested probes in the order in which we had received them in the lab. “Yosef got a tip that the gene might be on chromosome three. He's trying probes from there.”

“You think he's right?”

“No.”

“So, basically it's random.”

I admitted it was.

“I thought so. Those blots you showed me that night, all those little lines, they're like the patterns the sticks make when you throw the
I Ching
.”

“You're suggesting I use a bunch of sticks to find the gene?”

The Boston skyline rose up before us. The light atop the old Hancock tower blinked red.
Steady blue, clear view. Flashing blue, clouds due. Steady red, rains ahead. Flashing red, snow instead.
I liked knowing the code. I liked thinking of all those satellites and radar devices, all those gauges on top of Mount Washington, all of humankind's accumulated knowledge of the winds and tides reduced to a simple red light flashing
snow snow snow snow.

“What you're doing is guesswork,” Willie said. “Why pretend it isn't? You know how it is—you toss a coin and it comes up tails, but you see you're disappointed that it didn't come up heads, so you forget the dime and do what you wanted to do all along. The
Ching
's the same way. You interpret the patterns the way your intuition says to interpret them.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why don't you throw the sticks for me and let me know what they say.” I hadn't meant to sound snide; I was only tired. We pulled up to my apartment. “Are you all right driving back to New Hampshire?” I was afraid he would have an accident. With the mood he was in, he might go home and start drinking. “You're welcome to stay on my couch.”

There was a moment's delay, in which he seemed to be deciding if he wanted to sleep with me again. “Remem
ber, you were going to let me know about this forgiveness thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll call you.”

But he was the one to call me. I had been dreaming of Ted, who was sitting on that bus, growing older and older the farther west it rolled. I kept yelling,
Turn around and come back home,
but his ears were plugged with earphones and he just waved and smiled that dopey grin.

“Try chromosome thirteen,” Willie said.

“Isn't thirteen an unlucky number?”

“Try it, okay? As a favor to me.”

“Fine,” I said. “I'll try it.” Anything to get off the phone and close my eyes.

Looking back, I'm relieved that he wasn't right. I didn't go into the lab the next morning, hybridize a blot with a probe from chromosome thirteen, and find a pattern that revealed the gene. In fact, when I went in, the first thing I did was have a fight with Susan Bate.

“Why, Jane Weiss,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise. I think I found what you've been looking for.”

“Oh?” I said. “You did?”

“Don't worry, I'll be sure to put your name on the paper. You should thank me. You've been out partying while I've been slaving in this shit hole.”

Yosef sidled up between us. “Don't worry,” he said. “She didn't find your gene. She is reading the blot upside down. You squint at those little lines long enough, you see what you want to see.”

“You can't stand it that a woman found the gene before you did,” Susan told him. “Just wait until Vic gets back from D.C. We'll let him be the judge.”

I knew she hadn't found the gene. Not a week went by that Susan didn't claim she had made a great discovery. She wasn't that bad a scientist. It was just, as Yosef said, she too often saw what she wanted to see rather than what her experiments really proved. “I'll stop by later,” I said. “Just let me set up some gels.”

Grumbling, Susan went back to her bench. Yosef blew me a kiss and went back to his.

There was no putting it off. I walked across the hall to the freezer to collect my probes for the day. Shivering, I reached for the Eppendorf tube that was next on my list, a probe from chromosome six. Willie's voice said:
Thirteen
. I stopped and said:
No
.
It's on chromosome twenty
. I had no real reason to choose that tube. We had received only one probe from that short, misshapen chromosome. But something about the Eppendorf seemed to glow.

I thawed the tube at my bench. I set up a rack of samples from a family in New Jerusalem, cut the DNA with enzymes, and pipetted each person's fragments into a separate lane on a gel. When the gel finished running, I would transfer the fragments to a nitrocellulose blot and hybridize the whole thing with a radioactive probe from chromosome twenty. In the meantime, I set up a second gel, with a different pairing of fragments and probes. A third gel, then a fourth. I got so caught up in the rhythm of the experiment that I was able to ignore everything else—Willie's flip-flop intentions, my sister's reluctance to visit me, my own ex
haustion and excessive hunger, the period I had missed, and the fetus that I suspected was growing in my womb.

I worked for six days. Then I sat down at my desk, trying not to listen to Susan's TV battling with Yosef's boom box, and I scrutinized the blots I had developed that week. One line in particular caught my notice, near the bottom of the first blot, the one with the probe from chromosome twenty. Three of the lanes showed a certain pattern of bands. The other lanes didn't. I deciphered the code on the tubes of DNA. The first pattern corresponded to DNA from the three members of the family who shared the disease, while the other lanes belonged to those members who had been given a clean bill of health. It was probably a coincidence. I had tested only twelve samples. Afraid to jinx the result, I said nothing to anyone. Slowly, I poured gels with DNA from two other families and biked home for the night. I tried not to get excited, like someone who has discovered a suitcase full of cash but expects the rightful owner will show up to claim it.

Later that week, I tried to analyze the data from all three families. The computer I was using was little more than a toy. The keys were sticky with Coke and doughnut grease. Vic wandered by the cubicle in which the computer was crammed with reference books, broken cameras, and an IBM Selectric that hadn't worked in years. He paused above my shoulder. Unlike the other postdocs, I never played computer games.
Don't tell him,
I warned myself. If the linkage turned out to be a mirage, Vic would think I was too desperate to judge my results objectively.

He moved on, and I relaxed. The printer squealed and spit out paper, the answer in ink so faint I could barely read it. According to the computer, the odds were fifty to one that the linkage I had discovered between the marker and the gene couldn't be accidental. Good but not great. With such a low score, the “pattern” I had found was most likely a fluke. I needed to test other families. It was even more complex than I had led Willie to believe. To find out if a certain person carried the gene for Valentine's, you needed to test not only that person, but his entire extended family. This was because the marker for Valentine's chorea manifested itself in a slightly different pattern in each family with the gene. It was as if, long ago, God had handed out a set of colored handkerchiefs, two to each person. Some handkerchiefs were red, others were green, or yellow, or blue. In one family, everyone who had inherited a red handkerchief might carry the gene for Valentine's, while those members of the family with other colors did not have the gene. In another family, the green handkerchief might be the lethal marker. In healthy families, a red or green handkerchief meant nothing at all, because no one had the gene.

I tested the DNA from a third family in New Jerusalem, but there seemed to be no correlation between the pattern on the blots and Sumner's judgments as to who did or did not show symptoms of the chorea. I kicked the cabinets beneath my bench, then stomped to the bathroom, punched the stall, and swore. I splashed cold water on my face, kicked the stall, and swore some more. Composed
now, resigned, I went back to the lab and cleared the samples from my bench. Glancing at the labels, I saw that I had misread the code on one tube. In Yosef's spidery script, the
N
's looked like
M
's. I retested the data. The correlation had shot up to a hundred to one.

Still, that wasn't good enough. You couldn't publish a paper with a correlation of less than one thousand to one. If I tested a family that wasn't related to the family from Maine, and if the test worked for them, I would be sure I had found a pattern
.
I waited until midnight, when everyone except Achiro's replacement had gone home. I was hybridizing a blot of the Drurys' DNA with the probe from chromosome twenty when someone came in. I turned my head to see who it was and spilled the probe.

“That sucks,” Susan said.

I looked down at the puddle.

“Sorry I've been giving you such a hard time. I shouldn't have said I found the gene when I hadn't. Those assholes get me so angry, I forget this is your life we're talking about. It must be awful, having so little chance to find the marker.”

I restrained myself from saying:
Oh yeah? You think I have no chance to find the marker?

“We girls should stick together.” Susan sashayed to the water bath and scrutinized the dials. “Maybe you want to come over to my apartment? There's this drink I make with ginger beer and vodka. We could get plastered and talk.”

I felt sorry for her then. She was lonely and afraid. I wanted to wrap my arms around her. If only she had tried to make friends earlier. But the last thing I wanted now was
to sit in Susan's kitchen, get drunk, and gripe about Lew. “Some other time,” I said. “Thanks. I mean it. Really.”

“Right. Some other time.” She stood there, legs bowed, ballet slippers turned out, and I was seized by the desire to twirl her around the room in a mad pas de deux. Maybe next week, when Maureen and I went dancing, we would ask Susan to go with us.

She dropped her right ear to her shoulder, swung back her head, then pressed her other ear to the other shoulder. “If you want to reject my offer of friendship,” she said, working her head the other way, “I won't take it personally. But if I were you, I'd join Workaholics Anonymous. There's a group that meets at the Cambridge Y. If you don't fight these obsessions, they can kill you.”

I nodded. “I'll look into it.”

“You think I'm being weak for admitting I have a problem. Not all of us can tough it out like you and your bionic friend in the wheelchair. Some of us, the pressure starts to get to us. It squeezes our brains and makes our eyeballs pop. So excuse me for thinking you might need someone to drag you out of this dungeon for a while. It won't happen again.” On her way out she kicked a box, which snowed Styrofoam pellets across my bay. They would be squeaking beneath my feet until Cesar swept them up. He would think I had made the mess, but I didn't have time to care. As soon as Susan left, I prepared a new probe and set the Drurys' blot to soak. The telephone rang.

“I've been missing you,” Willie said. “Anything special going on? Or is it just another late night?”

Don't tell him,
I thought.
Not yet
. “Nothing special,” I said. “Just another late night.”

“What've you been up to? How many of those little marker things you tried?”

“About nine,” I said, trying to keep my heart from beating so loud.

“Nine's not so many. Have you tried chromosome thirteen?”

“No,” I said. “I will.”

“You do that,” he said, although he sounded as if he didn't have much faith that I would. “How's everything else?”

Well, I thought, I'm pregnant. At least, I think I might be pregnant. I haven't had time to buy a test. I might be pregnant with a child who has a horrifying disease for which there is no cure and raising that child with a husband who might also get sick and die. “Fine,” I said. “The usual.”

“Jane, is something wrong?”

“Wrong? There's nothing wrong.”

He tried another tactic. “I got a postcard from the folks. It showed this beautiful full moon over the Eiffel Tower. It's her
Honey moon
. Get it?”

“Sure,” I said. “I get it.” If I didn't tell anyone about the correlation, it might turn out to be real. If I didn't take the pregnancy test, I might not turn out to be pregnant.

“I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself laughing too hard.”

I was startled by his anger. He had just caught me at a bad time, I said. I would call him in a few days. I might have something to tell him then.

“What?” he said. “What is it? Why can't you tell me now?”

“No,” I said. “Not now.” And I hung up before I could break my promise to myself and blurt out the news that I had found the probe.