He stopped shucking the clams before him and shook my hand limply. In the world of science, Sumner Butterworth commanded far more respect than I did. But my father’s foundation funded Sumner’s lab. I almost wished that he would ignore me, as he would have ignored any other scientist who wasn’t tenured Harvard faculty.
“Doll,” my father said, “I’d like you to meet Franklin DeWitt. Of DeWitt Pharmaceuticals.”
I forced some warmth into my voice. “Hello, Mr. DeWitt. Thank you very much for coming.” Like most of the guests, Franklin DeWitt wore a well-tailored suit, a silk tie, and a fancy watch. I had to fight my instinct to distrust him. If a stranger showed up in a lab wearing a suit and tie, we figured he was there to sell us supplies. The last thing a scientist wants to be taken for is a salesman. If your theories are true, if your results can be verified, you don’t need to sell them. Being a fluent speaker is fine, but only if you have something important to say.
I greeted the other guests, then stood nibbling a pack of oyster crackers and watching my father glad-hand the room. He had this habit of draping one arm across the person to whom he was speaking and whispering confidences to the man. Every few minutes, he would pull his victim closer, as if he were trying to wad him in a ball and tuck him in the inner pocket of his suit. Sometimes, he frowned and jerked his thumb in my direction.
The only woman I recognized I had met a dozen years earlier, when she and my father had gone before Congress begging for funds to cure the disease that had widowed them both. Honey Land’s late husband, Dusty, had been a moderately famous actor. Once, on a sick day from school, I had sat beside my mother watching one of Dusty Land’s earliest films. He was tall and thick-bodied, with a jaw so square it might have been a block glued to his chin. I wasn’t sure he was handsome until I heard my mother comment, “Dusty Land can park his boots under my bed anytime he wants,” a remark that shocked me, given how infrequently she talked about sex before she fell ill. I can’t recall much else about that movie. Back then, I didn’t know or care who Dusty Land was. I didn’t yet understand how our lives would be linked.
“Good!” my father boomed. He was crushing the shoulders of a man even shorter than he was, as round and tan as an acorn. “I knew you’d come through, Syd. Honey, get over here.”
Honey excused herself from the knot of men around her. Years before, as Hannah Nathaniels, she had been a Rockette, and even now, in her early sixties, she wouldn’t have seemed out of place onstage at Radio City Music Hall.
“Syd here’s decided to make a real contribution. A man gives away that much money, he ought to get a kiss from a beautiful dame.”
Honey pecked the man’s forehead. “I only wish I could do a little something more to show you how much I appreciate your generosity.”
“Don’t get ideas, Syd. For ‘a little something more’ we’re talking six figures.”
“You mustn’t listen to a word this man says,” Honey scolded. “Not one single word.”
Despite this feigned fight, I could guess what my father and Honey had in common. Although our family’s trials had been nearly unendurable, the Lands had suffered even more. While my mother had confined her lewdness to comments only we heard (“I bet he’s well hung,” she had said of Henry Kissinger as he was addressing a phalanx of reporters on TV), Dusty Land had been arrested for stopping a teenage girl on the street, unzipping his fly, and asking if she wanted to lick his all-day sucker. The doctors were so certain that Dusty had the DTs they consigned him to Bellevue. Several months later, when an intern informed Honey that her husband wasn’t actually a sex-crazed lush but rather a victim of an obscure disease called Valentine’s chorea, she was seized with remorse. After he died, she flew around the country starting support groups for anyone whose relatives suffered from the disease. She joined my father in trying to raise money to find a cure.
Now, at Tommie’s Pierside, Honey put her hand on my arm. It startled me to see those scarlet nails against my skin. “Oh, Janie,” she said. “You aren’t thinking of leaving already, are you? I want you to meet my son, Willie.” She crossed the room, and I tried to think why she would want me to meet her son. She couldn’t possibly be trying to fix us up. Of all people, Honey ought to know that any son of her late husband had to be the worst choice for me to date.
“Jane,” she said, “this is Willie. Willie, this is Herb’s daughter, Jane.”
Even then, Willie was no one’s idea of thin. He had his father’s cleft jaw, although on him it looked less glamorous than reassuring. In those days, he wore his hair scraggly and long. Men with long hair usually struck me as vain. But Willie seemed simply to have forgotten to cut his. Maybe that was his allure. He defied the usual categories by which I judged whom I did or did not like.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
“Jane, Willie . . .” Honey seemed uncomfortable. “You two . . . you have a lot in common. You’re going to be . . . Let’s just say it’s high time you got to know each other.” Then she rushed off to greet more guests.
I couldn’t figure out what she meant. From what I knew, Honey’s son spent most of his time on some hill in New Hampshire, consulting his swami and eating brown rice. We had nothing in common other than having watched a parent die of Valentine’s. In those days, friends often fixed me up with men who had diseases. One of my college roommates had introduced me to a lawyer who was legally blind; a classmate from graduate school had given my number to a Vietnam vet with one leg. The one-legged vet in particular was a sweet guy. But why did everyone assume that an illness gave two people more in common than any other trait?
“I’ve sure heard a lot about you,” Willie said. I could hear the twang in his voice, but I couldn’t place the accent. His father had been born in Oklahoma, but as far as I knew, Willie had been raised in Manhattan. As fast as most New Yorkers crammed their words together, that’s how slowly he spoke. “Pretty great news, don’t you think? Although, I guess it’s still hush-hush.”
I smiled, unwilling to admit that I didn’t know what secret he assumed we shared. One by one, the donors left. A busboy in a ruffled shirt cleared away the dishes. I expected my father would want to spend some time alone with me. But he startled me by kissing me on the cheek and telling me he had to go. “Honey got us tickets for some show,” he said. “What’s it called, A Cage of Faygelehs?”
“Shhhhh!” Honey looked around the room. “What can you do with him?” she asked me. I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine how she had convinced my father to pay a hundred dollars to see a show. Even before my mother fell ill, my parents rarely went out.
“Sorry, doll.” My father squeezed my arm. “We’ll have brunch Sunday, right?”
I had never heard my father use that word, “brunch.”
“Nine o’clock,” Honey said. “The early bird gets the worm.” Then she actually added: “I don’t think the Ritz-Carlton really serves worms.”
They started to leave. But Honey stopped at the threshold. “Herb, wait. Janie hasn’t eaten.” Her hand fluttered to her waist, which was smaller than mine. “Call the waitress back and make her order something.”
I waited for my father to say, She’s thirty-three years old. If she’s going to show up late, she can find her own dinner. Instead, he stood with his arm linked in Honey’s, both of them staring.
“I’ve been busy,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping.” But I knew why they were staring. In my mother’s last year, she had trembled so hard she had burned away her flesh at an alarming rate. Sometimes, she had shaken so violently I thought her very bones would ignite. “It’s not Valentine’s,” I said. “That isn’t why I’m so thin.” Except, indirectly, it was. Valentine’s was the reason I so rarely took the time to sleep or eat. “I need to go back to the lab and feed some cells,” I said. “I’ll grab some dinner later.”
“The lab!” Honey splayed a hand across her chest. “Willie, dear, drive her. And make sure she eats something.”
&n
bsp; He was studying a photo of the restaurant’s owner, Tommie Anastasio, shaking the hand of a minor black celebrity whose name I didn’t know.
“Thanks,” I said. “I have my bike.”
“At night? The way people drive in Boston?” Honey wrinkled her nose. “Willie, put this bike of hers in the back of that old thing you drive and make sure Janie gets where she is going.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I do this all the time. Really. Enjoy the show. I’ll see you Sunday morning.” I kissed my father, then edged out the door and left them standing together, Honey and Herb. Jesus, I thought, they sounded like a salad dressing.
“Hey,” someone called. I turned and saw Willie standing beside a pyramid of lobster traps. There was something touching about his size. He was too big, the way Vic O’Connell was too big. But he wasn’t awkward, the way Vic was. Vic carried his body the way he carried that suit—like something he was forced to wear on special occasions but otherwise would have preferred to leave hanging in his closet. Willie carried his body the way he might have supported a drunken friend—tenderly, with some compassion.
He asked if I was sure I was all right.
I assumed he was asking: Was I sure I would be okay riding my bike at night? “I’m sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
He plucked at my blouse. “So then, what’s all this red stuff?”
I dropped my head to see.
“Maybe it’s ketchup.” He drawled the word so slowly I could see the tilted bottle, the heavy red paste refusing to pour. “Then again, maybe it’s not.”
I couldn’t understand how Flora’s blood had splashed so high. He asked if I’d had an accident. Maybe I’d gotten hurt?
No, I said. I dropped a test tube.
“Don’t you wear one of those white coats?” he asked.
No, I said. Only doctors wore white coats.
He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, which were curly and lush. It wasn’t fair that a woman couldn’t get away with having eyebrows like that.
“You’re not a doctor?” he said.
Some researchers were medical doctors, I explained. They saw patients most of the week, then messed around in the lab for a few hours on Friday afternoon and got in everyone’s way. They wore white coats. Biologists—Ph.D.s.—did their research in jeans.
“So,” he said, “lab coats are for sissies? Like cars? Like accepting rides from friends?”
I apologized. I hadn’t meant to be rude. I just got nervous when people treated me like an invalid.
He snorted. “She treats everyone like that. She treated my dad like that, even before he got sick. Brushed his teeth for him, for Christ’s sake. He loved it. Don’t ask me, some people like to be treated like a baby. She treats me that way, and I’m forty years old! Anyway, I made my peace with it. Doesn’t bother me anymore. I hardly pay attention.”
“But my father . . .” I said. In the old days, he had acted more like my mother’s father than like her husband. Surely not like her son.
“But I shouldn’t let her talk for me,” he said. “I want to give you a ride. You need something to eat, and I wouldn’t mind getting the taste of that lobster pie I ordered out of my mouth. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but that wasn’t exactly the best dinner I ever ate.” He thrust his hand in one of the traps. “I think I got the last poor sucker they pulled up in this thing.” He tried to get his hand out, but it was tangled in the net. The hand was hairy, pale, soft. Definitely more a mammal than a crustacean. My heart twinged, as if a not-too-bright animal had blundered into danger and couldn’t find its way out.
The maître d’ looked up from his podium and regarded us suspiciously. Willie freed his hand. “I’ve never seen anyone feed her cells before.”
“They’re not my cells. They’re cells from other people. Cancer cells. As long as they get fed, they’ll keep dividing forever. I feed them fetal-calf serum. It’s made by chopping up little fetal calves. Is that weird enough for you?”
“Weird enough?” He leaned toward me. I smelled a familiar smell, the same piney shampoo my sister, Laurel, used. His lips brushed my cheek—just below the spot where I had washed off Flora’s blood. “Jane, darlin’,” he said, “if you’re going to be my new little sister, which, from what my mother just hinted, I’m pretty sure you will be, then you’d better get a whole lot weirder, real fast.”
3
I unlocked my bike from the anchor in front of Tommie’s and lifted it into the back of Willie’s Jeep, which was old but immaculate. He tipped the valet with the offhand manner of a man lending a friend a dollar. A Jeep was its own affectation, I thought, but not as ostentatious as a sports car would have been. After all, he had to drive something.
We left the lot, then the pier. He didn’t glance in my direction, and I wondered if I had offended him. But the longer I watched, the more I came to think that here was a man who could do only one thing at one time. Right now he was driving. He moved his head back and forth, monitoring each gauge and listening so intently to the engine he seemed to shift gears without using the clutch. I couldn’t remember when I had last done one thing at one time. Even as a child, I had kept a book on my lap and read it while the teacher lectured up front. I chose friends for this same quality, this impatience with the limits of what a person could accomplish in a normal life. My first lover enjoyed teaching me about biology almost as much as he enjoyed teaching me about sex. Do you know, Jane, he had asked, guiding my hand up his leg, if you stretched out the seminiferous tubules in a man’s testes, they would be sixteen hundred feet long?
Willie drove so slowly it took me a while to realize he had stopped in the middle of the bridge. Cars rushed up behind and, honking, surged past.
“Look at it all,” he said, motioning back toward Boston. “How often do I get to see this? I never smell the sea.” He inhaled so deeply I could feel the sky drained of air. “Go on. Try it. You haven’t taken one good breath since we met. You pant, you know? Like this?” He panted like a puppy, his fleshy tongue hanging out.
I hated when people told me I was too serious. Besides, telling someone to relax is the least effective way of ensuring she will. I told him if he hadn’t stopped in the middle of the bridge, I might be more mellow.
“Just look back,” he said. “You won’t get turned to salt.”
To humor him, I glanced at the row of brownstones bordering Storrow Drive, and the skyscrapers behind them, glittering against the sky. Maybe he had a point. What could be more spectacular than the Boston skyline at night? And Willie . . . there was something of that outsize quality about him, too. Maybe, if our parents got married, I would be able to lean on him a little, instead of always taking care of everyone else.
It was a great view, I admitted. But maybe we could go now, before someone plowed into us?
“Trust me,” he said. “I’m a very careful driver.” And really, he was. He turned on his blinker and resumed inching across the bridge. We reached the opposite shore. We weren’t far from my lab, but we needed twenty minutes to find a spot to park. Until the late seventies, the area behind MIT had been a wasteland. Now, in the early eighties, offices and labs were springing up like wild, mutant flora. The streets were pocked by craters. Entire blocks were cordoned off.
Willie whistled through his teeth. “How can they put up these suckers so fast? I was in town a few months ago and none of this was here.”
Everyone thought this. Skyscraper skeletons grew concrete skins overnight. Only for me did the changes come too slowly. When my second-grade teacher had asked us what we would want to be if we couldn’t be ourselves, one of my classmates had said “a bird,” another had said “a brontosaurus,” another had said “a horse,” and I had said “a mountain.” I didn’t want to miss a thing. I wanted to live long enough to know how the human race turned out.
Willie tapped my arm. “Where does a person get some chow around here?”
Even with all the offices going up, there were still surprisingly few restaurants
—most people from MIT grabbed a sandwich from a pushcart or a packet of peanut butter crackers from a vending machine. I motioned in the direction of a nearly empty block that until recently had been the site of a florist, a delicatessen, and a shoe repair shop. Only the deli still stood, stripped now of neighbors, braced on either side by wooden struts. The restaurant seemed doomed, but the new Center for Biomedical Research would simply engulf it. The B&B Deli would survive as a symbiont, feeding its host, the way human mitochondria once lived on their own before moving in and becoming part of our cells.
The deli was dark and smoky, with scarred booths and paneled walls. The initials in the name stood for Barney and Bob, but MIT students used to joke that “B&B” stood for “Bed and Breakfast” since so many lab rats ate their dinners there at midnight, then stretched out in the booths and slept until dawn, when the B&B served delicious waffles and eggs.
“What’ll it be tonight, Professor?” asked the man behind the counter (both owners wore bushy beards and Red Sox caps, so I never could identify which one was Barney and which one Bob). I flushed with the pride of being called “professor,” even though I knew he called me that only because I looked so much like a kid. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and a knish, then tried to decide between rice pudding and chocolate cake.
“That’s great,” Willie said. “I love that. A pastrami sandwich. A knish!” All he took on his own tray were two cartons of chocolate milk.
“I forget to eat sometimes,” I said. “But then I make up for it.”
He nodded. “Sure. Got to build it up. Need that extra layer of fat. Although really, there’s no sense trying to stockpile it. How long do you think it would take for you to shake off an extra twenty pounds? My dad could have done it in a week.”
It was like discovering that another person could monitor your thoughts. I didn’t know whether to be horrified or relieved. I led him to a booth, trying not to drop my tray or slosh my Coke.
A Perfect Life Page 2
