A Perfect Life (8 page)

I looked around the table, the shock and loss as visible as if a genial thief had lightened us of our wallets, then walked off without anyone attempting to stop him. I laid my napkin across my chair and ran after her.

Luckily, Chuck had gone to get his car and Laurel was still waiting inside the lobby. “Please,” I said, “I don't care if you go sailing with me or not. But you can't jump out of an airplane. Who is this guy, anyway? You barely know him. How do you even trust him, let alone trust this friend of his who runs a skydiving school?”

She glanced out the door, no doubt hoping that Chuck would drive up and rescue her. “Listen, I'm really sorry I forgot about the sailing. It was sweet of you. Very thoughtful. But Chuck rented the plane. And it's not that dangerous. You make it sound as if I'm jumping without a parachute.”

“That's exactly what you said that time you went climbing in Alaska. ‘Dad,' you said, ‘it's not as if we're not going to be wearing ropes.' And you know what it did to him when he got that call? Do you know what it must have cost him to pay for you to be airlifted off that mountain? You can't keep doing this. You can't keep living as if you're sure you're . . . Listen, I know, all we talk about is Valentine's. But we're doing it for you. We're doing it to—”

She cut me off. “Shh,” she said. She put her finger to my lips. “I
know
why you're doing it. And I appreciate it. Really. But I wish you would stop. I didn't ask any of you to do any of this. Not you. Not Honey. Not Dad. You're wasting your life one way, Jane. And I'm wasting my life another way. But at least I'm having fun.”

The trouble was, I didn't believe her. She didn't love Chuck. She didn't really care if she went skydiving, or climbed a mountain. She was sure that she had the gene, and she was determined to die young, before she could come down with the disease. As irrational as this was, I was equally sure that she didn't have the gene. I wanted to give my sister back her life while she was still young enough to stop throwing it away.

“I haven't seen you for nearly a year,” I said. “And you're just going to run out on me? You don't care that Honey and Dad are getting married? You're all I have. I don't want to lose you, too.”

“Oh, Janie.” She spread her arms and wrapped me in that shawl. “You ought to know you can't keep from losing someone. This way, you'll only miss me less when I need to go.”

I felt smothered in that shawl, as if she were wrapping me in the darkness of her thoughts, in death itself. A horn honked. She removed her arms. “Good-bye,” she said. “I really do love you.” And she hurried out so quickly the doorman had to rush to do his job.

When I got back to the dining room, my father was stubbing out his Lucky Strike and calling for the check.
Honey said something to console him. I couldn't make out what it was. If someone had said the wrong thing to me then—
Don't worry, she'll be all right
—I might have started crying. But Willie came up behind me and repeated his offer to drive me to New Hampshire for the weekend. Since he didn't pose this as a question, I didn't feel inclined to turn him down. I couldn't remember the last time I had taken a walk in the woods. “Sure,” I said. “Why not.” It occurred to me that his cabin wasn't very far from the Drurys' trailer in Pittsfield. “Do you mind if we stop at the lab?” I asked. “There's something I need to pick up.”

“Of course,” he said. We waited until our parents had checked out of their hotel, then he drove me back to MIT. We couldn't find a parking space, so he stayed in the Jeep. I could tell he was worried I might not come out. In truth, if he hadn't been sitting there, I wouldn't have gone in. I darted in the lab to fetch a few syringes and was startled to find that Achiro's bench was bare. I didn't dare ask what had happened to him, any more than the inmate of a nursing home asks why a friend hasn't come down to lunch.

“Hi, sweetie.” Maureen pushed the lever on her wheelchair and spun it in my direction. “What happened with that cute boy I saw you dancing with last night?”

I collected some test tubes. If I told Maureen the truth, we would be there all afternoon arguing about why I hadn't told Ché I would see him again. “He asked me out for doughnuts,” I said. “I told him I couldn't go because my sister was coming to town.”

“Where is she?” Maureen turned her head stiffly. “I thought you were spending the day with her.”

The tears came. “I was.”

Maureen pressed her fingers to my hand. “Listen,” she said. “Why don't you take
me
sailing? A few pointers and I'll be casting off the poop deck with the best of them.”

I rubbed my eyes and laughed. “I don't know the first thing about sailing.”

“Then we'll do something else. That guy I met last night, the one with the beard? He's a lawyer, but on weekends he takes people on these wilderness things. He said he could teach me to row a kayak down a waterfall. I'm sure he'd take you with us.”

Why was everyone trying to throw away her life—or throw away
my
life? I told Maureen my stepbrother was downstairs waiting.

She cocked her head toward Vic's office. He was sitting at his desk, reading a journal, but I had the impression he had been staring at me. “Does Vic know about this stepbrother of yours?”

I kept telling Maureen there was nothing between me and Vic, but, like Susan Bate, she never quite believed me.

“Jane?” Vic called. “Do you have a minute?” He was standing in the door, holding out the latest issue of
Cell
. “Have you seen this yet? Fred Dike's thing on retinoblastoma?”

Maureen spun back to her bench. I grabbed a pack of needles and a tourniquet, then I told Vic I was sorry but I had found this new family and they were only around on
weekends, so I had to hustle and draw some blood. If he left the paper on my bench, I would talk to him about it Monday morning after group meeting. Then I gathered my supplies and left.

Willie and I stopped at my apartment to pick up a toothbrush and a change of clothes. This time, he parked the Jeep and came upstairs. He looked around the room. “Nice flowers,” he said.

I had forgotten they would be there, all those bouquets wilting in their beakers, the ripe tomatoes, the bunches of basil and thyme, the delicate white wafers the storekeeper had given me for Laurel. Once, when one of Maureen's dates stood her up, I told her that anyone who would stand her up wasn't worth crying over. But Laurel wasn't a boyfriend. If you broke up with a boyfriend, you could always find another.

Willie tossed a tomato in the air and caught it. “This reminds me of all the times my son, Ted, told me he would come to visit, then didn't show up. Or the times he would come, and after five minutes he would say, ‘Jesus, Dad, isn't there anything except these dumb trees to look at?'”

“It's my fault,” I said. “All of us, all we talk about is Valentine's.”

He took a big bite of the tomato, then wiped the juice from his chin. “Doesn't mean she has to make you feel bad.”

That thought had passed my mind. But it was another thing to hear someone outside the family criticize my sister. “She wouldn't be like this if it weren't for Valentine's.
She wouldn't have dropped out of college. She wouldn't be running around with all these awful men. She wouldn't be avoiding me.”

“People are people.”

No, I thought, they aren't. Knowing you might die from the terrible disease you watched your mother die from made you a different person from who you otherwise would have been. My sister would have been a flighty, narcissistic person no matter what. But she was talented, warm, and kind. If not for watching our mother die, if not for thinking she would die a miserable death herself, she might have been an accomplished musician, a loving, devoted wife, and a doting mother.

“You can't save someone.” Willie licked his fingers. “You can fix them. The way my mother likes to fix them. But it's dangerous to think you can save anybody.”

“So you're fixing me,” I said, “not saving me?” I tried to smile, but I had never felt so serious.

He slipped the tomatoes in a bag to take with us. “You don't need saving,” he said. “You're great the way you are. You just need to take a little time off and rest.”

Even from this distance, I can't figure out why I let myself fall in love with the man who was statistically the worst possible choice I could make. Even for a scientist, numbers and statistics have less power, less reality, than another person's mouth pressed against your own. Or, like Vic experiencing that conversation with God, I got tired of believing I was on my own. Of calculating all the odds. Of controlling everything I did with science. Maybe, like someone who has a terrible fear of crossing bridges, I got so exhausted by my own terror of falling off that I found the highest bridge and jumped straight off. At least I would rid myself of my fear. I could relax and enjoy the fall. Or maybe what I did was to find the one person who feared bridges as much as I did so I could grasp his hand and we could take the great plunge together.

Then again, I might have fallen in love with Willie Land for the same reasons most women would have fallen in love with him. He was generous and strong, so solid I could lean against him, but not so well defended I had no room to crawl in. He was a handsome man. And
famous—at least his father had been famous. He was rich, but not self-serving. He tried to do good. He cared about the same bizarre beauties of the world, in a way that made me feel they weren't bizarre at all. My intelligence didn't scare him off. It seemed to make him love me all the more.

And maybe every woman falls in love with the man who is both the worst and best for her. The worst provides the friction, the rub, the heat. Given a test to overcome, you feel twice as strong for winning. And maybe your heart refuses to fall in love with the person that your instinct—your very DNA—commands you to fall in love with. Maybe, as Vic believes, the rules of evolution don't quite explain as much as we think they do. Maybe our DNA commands us to do the opposite of what makes the most sense. Maybe, when we jump in a river to save a drowning man, what we are trying to do is to save ourselves.

As Willie drove me to New Hampshire, I tried not to think about any of the many reasons I shouldn't have accepted his invitation. All I knew was that being in his company allowed me to relax. For months, I had been tracing the same self-enclosed route from my lab bench to the tissue-culture hood, to the cold room, to Vic's office, to the mouse room, to the freezer, to the vending machines. Every few weeks, I would drive with Rita Nichols to western Massachusetts to collect a patient's blood. But these detours were brief. I could calm myself by thinking they were demanded by my work. Driving along the highway in Willie's open-topped Jeep, the wind beating against me, I was forced to remember how immense the world really was. The road curved, and curved again, slicing through
jagged rock. I wanted to demand that he take me home. But returning to the lab seemed even more frightening. I would keep running my experiments, and those experiments would fail, as they had failed in the past.

The Jeep's tires hit a rhythmic
thuck thuck
against the road. I leaned back and closed my eyes. I barely remember waking when we parked and Willie led me up the trail to his cabin. We went in and climbed the stairs—the air was shadowy and cool—and I settled on the window seat while he went to the kitchen to fix some tea. Then I don't remember anything more until I woke to find myself nestled beneath a stack of quilts so musty they brought to mind the leaves in which I used to play with Laurel on our parents' lawn. I lay inhaling the smoky scent of the quilts and recalling the feel of Laurel squirming beneath me. A branch scratched a window. I willed myself to fall deeper into sleep. This was the reason I so seldom left the lab—I was frightened I wouldn't go back.

When I couldn't force myself to stay asleep any longer, I opened my eyes. In a corner of the room stood a red leather armchair with a kerosene lamp above it. I could hear the approach of a breeze—a faraway gathering of breath, a holding in, the presence of something as it passed, the shuddering of trees and leaves. I looked out the window and saw a bee crawl headfirst into a crab-apple blossom. A moment later, the bee crawled out. When it sprang from the pistil, the petals quivered.

On a chair beside the window seat stood a lopsided pitcher and a ceramic bowl some amateur potter—it turned out to be Willie's ex-wife, Peg—must have fashioned by
hand. Beside the bowl lay a washcloth and a bar of soap. I pulled off my top—it smelled of almond cake and smoke—and rubbed my skin. I bent above the basin and washed my hair, then brushed it until it lay sleek against my scalp. I slipped on the shirt and jeans I had brought from home. Then, arrayed for new beginnings, I climbed the stairs.

There was only one room, a sort of loft. Sunlight filtered from the skylight and splashed the bed. On each wall hung a grainy black-and-white photo of a boy with a Cupid's bow mouth. In one photo, he toddled toward a woman's outstretched arms. In another, he puffed his cheeks to blow out the candles on a cake. In his teens, the same boy posed with Willie, their startled expressions leading me to think that the camera had been snapped by an automatic timer.

On the floor beneath this photo, Willie sat cross-legged, eyes shut, ankles hooked above his knees. I sighed and stepped back. Even if our genes hadn't made us incompatible, our temperaments would have. Why would anyone
meditate
?

He opened his eyes. “I was wondering if you were going to sleep through the weekend.”

I imagined him plodding down the stairs and standing over me and staring in the hope I might wake up, as Laurel used to do when she wanted me to play. He glanced out the window. He wanted to take me on a tour, he said, but we had only a few hours of daylight left.

“I'd love to,” I said. Then I followed him down the stairs and through the kitchen, with its pump-handled sink, past a second pump outdoors, and beyond it, the outhouse. The
trail dropped toward the road, so laddered with roots I had to watch each step.

“Here we are,” he said. “Central Operations.” Beyond the Jeep stood a shed. It was connected by wires to a utility pole at the end of the gravel road. “That's as far as they would string the electricity when we moved here. If we had wanted to hook up the house, we would have had to pay a couple of thousand bucks. Peg and I, we didn't have that kind of money. Now I could afford to run the wires up the hill, but I prefer it this way. When I'm working, I'm working. When I'm not, I'm not.”

Inside, on a plank laid across two stacks of milk crates, I saw a phone, a ticker-tape machine, a miniature copier, and a manual typewriter. Some annual reports were fanned out like a poker hand: Electrocar, Citizen's Assets, Sun Foods. He owned the kind of cheap fake-leather pen-and-pencil set you could buy in the gift shop at Weiss's Supply. In the center of the desk lay the blotter that came with the set. Tucked in one corner was a snapshot of a young man in a cowboy hat and boots—the same little boy I had seen on the walls of the bedroom, all grown up.

An ancient Frigidaire with a chrome grille stood behind the desk. When Willie opened it, I saw a bag of groceries and half a dozen quarts of chocolate milk. For a scientist, I had never been very good at making deductions. Startled to find myself making one now, I blurted out, “You used to drink.”

He brayed that laugh of his, and I had to remind myself there was no one there to hear it. Yeah, he said. That was another thing he had learned from his father. He wasn't
a stone-cold alcoholic, like his dad. But he used to drink. One night, while he was still married to Peg, he was so desperate for a beer or a jug of wine he started walking to town in the middle of a blizzard. When he got back, the cabin was empty. Peg had taken their son and left. Willie didn't blame her. There she was in the middle of nowhere with no phone and no electricity and not much in the way of food. She wrapped the baby in Willie's parka and hitchhiked home to her parents on Long Island.

After he finished telling me this, Willie grabbed a carton of milk from the Frigidaire, tipped back his head, and gulped. “Come on,” he said, “you can see copy machines in Boston.” We left the shed, and I followed him through the woods, his hair swinging this way then that, haloed in gnats. The light at that hour was so expressive I felt something like love, not only for Willie, but for every living thing. As a child, I had spent a lot of time in the woods. I would leave the house early with an army-issued knapsack and a canteen from my father's store, the grape juice sloshing against my thigh. So many things perplexed me. How a maple tree unfolded from a seed. How feathers had evolved. Whether butterflies thought about where to fly next. All those billions and billions of years of evolution to produce a human being. To produce me, Jane Ellen Weiss.

Once, I took my sister for a walk. I lifted a rotting log and showed her the slime mold growing underneath, explaining how, after a rain, each tiny, dry spore absorbs moisture and swells until it splits open and expels a mass of cytoplasm—a “swarm cell,” I said, as if I expected her to memorize the words. The cell wriggles away, I said, and
when two of these swarm cells bump into each other, their nuclei fuse, then divide, and divide again, in unison at first, then in synchronous waves. Deprive it of moisture and a slime mold turns rubbery. Add water and it starts pulsing again, spreading across the forest.

“Is it a plant?” I asked my sister. “Or do you think it might be an animal? Can something be both?”

“It's a blob,” she said, laughing. “Leave it to my sister to make a fuss about slime!”

Usually, I was ashamed to remember that day. But now I did something perverse. “Look,” I said. “Down here.” Willie turned and squatted beside me, balancing on his high-tops. I brushed the pinheads of mold so they burst and sprayed their spores. Then I flipped the log and explained everything I had explained to Laurel.

He looked at me as if he were about to tell me how peculiar I was. Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. Our lips had barely met when he teetered backward on his heels and stood. He started walking off, which gave me the sense that none of it had happened.

Back at the shed, we stopped to pick up the groceries. Willie grabbed another carton of chocolate milk and brought that along, too. Not far from the cabin, I spotted a mushroom the size and color of a softball. “You can eat these,” I said. “You slice them very thin, then you sauté them with garlic and salt.” I was testing him, I guess. How many people will take your word that a mushroom is safe to eat?

He lifted the puffball to his nose and inhaled. “Mushrooms have such wonderful names,” he said. “Angel's Wings. Wood Ear.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Mushrooms have terrible names. Corpse Finder. Weeping Widow. Dead Man's Fingers.”

“Say ‘mushroom' again,” he ordered.

Laughing, I shook my head no.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Say ‘mushroom.'”

“All right,” I said. “Mushroom.”

But even as he kissed the word from my lips, I was trying not to think
Trumpet of Death, Destroying Angel
.

While Willie cooked dinner, I sat watching his hands peel potato after potato, the brown peel curving through the slot until the slick yellow flesh lay exposed in his palm. He talked about the year he and Peg had camped in these woods, building this house. I didn't know much about window frames or self-composting toilets, but I loved hearing his voice and watching the way the muscles in his back rippled beneath his shirt when he hacked the lamb for dinner.

Once the food was cooking, he set a few mismatched plates and pieces of silverware on the table. He filled both our plates with lamb chops—two for him and three for me—and dollops of something that turned out to be plum sauce. Precise as a chemist, he apportioned us each a scoop of mashed potatoes. Then lima beans. Biscuits. And slices of the puffball, which, to my relief, tasted ambrosial in its buttery broth. He had baked brownies the consistency of mud for dessert. He guzzled his milk. I sipped my tea. We talked about the giant fungus that recently had been discovered out west, an underground
thing
fifteen hundred
years old, heavy as a redwood or a giant blue whale. And it seemed, as we discussed this fungus, some huge ancient thing was lurking beneath our table and we were pretending it wasn't there.

Finally, I found the courage to ask what my sister had whispered to him that morning. He carried our plates to the sink. “If a person whispers something,” he said, “she probably wants to keep the information private.”

I supposed that Laurel did. It wasn't Willie's fault if my sister felt compelled to give away to others what I wanted for myself. What did he think of her? I asked.

He scraped the leftovers in a pail. “She's beautiful,” he said. “Self-absorbed. Nothing like you.”

I would have been petty to take offense. The first and last items weren't meant to be linked.

We went up to the living room and sat beside the fireplace, staring at the logs. The silence was hard to bear. It was the loudest, most unendurable silence I had ever heard.