I told her that the man Yosef had seen me with was going to be my new stepbrother.
“Stepbrother?” Maureen said. “Oh, sweetie. There are plenty of real brothers I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw them. You think this stepbrother of yours asked to see the lab because he’s interested in fruit flies?”
I didn’t want to believe her. I thought—I knew—Willie’s interest in my work was sincere. Besides, didn’t she realize that with our combined chances of carrying the gene for Valentine’s, Willie Land was absolutely the worst possible choice for any man I could get involved with?
“You’re not going to tell me anything?” Maureen pouted. “I guess you won’t be needing these.” She took out a pair of fishnet stockings and laid these across her lap. Then she lifted her wineglass. The arthritis had gnarled her knuckles and her wrists, but she had learned to get by, to accomplish what she had to. In the lab, she lifted beakers by cradling them between her in-turned hands. This gesture seemed exotic, the way a movie star might smoke a cigarette in a more sophisticated manner than an ordinary woman. She held her fountain pen slanted awkwardly between her thumb and first finger, but the script in her lab journal was elegant and precise. She lifted her glass and took a sip, then asked me when I was going to be seeing this stepbrother of mine again.
The next morning, I said. For brunch.
“Brunch?” The word must have sounded as strange from my own lips as it had from my father’s. “I hope I’m not standing in the way of your plans for tonight.” Maureen sniffed. “I mean, if you’d rather go dancing with your stepbrother.”
Maureen and I went dancing all the time. The first time she had asked me to go with her, I had assumed she needed company. The nightclub might have some stairs, or the bathroom might be inaccessible. But later I came to think she was using her disability to force me to leave the lab.
“Don’t be silly. Of course we’re going dancing. Just wait here and I’ll go in and change.”
“Nothing too risqué!” Maureen shouted from the kitchen.
She made the same joke every week. “Aren’t you ever going to give up?” I shouted back.
“I’ll give up when you start having sex on a regular basis.”
“What’s the point of having sex if it can’t lead to anything?” I yelled. I knew I was putting her at a disadvantage by making her shout, but I stayed in my room.
“You don’t have to marry every guy you sleep with!”
I went back to the kitchen.
“Why, jeans and a T-shirt, what a surprise.”
“Listen,” I said, “it’s not so weird the way I act. A lot of people at risk for Valentine’s decide not to get married.”
“That doesn’t mean they have to give up sex. It isn’t healthy.” Maureen fiddled with an earring, which she always did when she talked about sex.
I reminded her that she was a biologist. What did she think was going to happen if I didn’t have sex? Would all those sex juices get bottled up inside me and explode? What I didn’t admit was that my own theory was equally bizarre: the less often a person had sex, the more she thought about having sex, and, since sexual obsession was one symptom of Valentine’s, it was best for a woman in my position to have sex with someone she didn’t really care about every few months. “Besides,” I said, “the last thing I need is to get pregnant.”
“Ever hear of birth control?”
I reminded her it didn’t always work.
“Ever hear about abortions?”
That’s all I needed, I said. To have an abortion.
“So have a kid!” she said.
Have a kid. I nearly cried. From the moment I had learned that every baby mammal grew inside its mother, I was amazed by the prospect that one day I, too, would be granted this privilege. Once, when I was young, I had glimpsed my mother nursing my newborn sister, and I couldn’t take away my eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about the miraculous idea of feeding someone from my own body. I never lost that image. Sitting in a classroom, studying in the library, running blots in a lab, I would slip into a daydream in which I was sitting in a field nursing a newborn. I imagined taking a toddler for a walk, listening to all the strange, garbled ideas he or she thought to say. The truth was, I had loved taking care of my baby sister, and I wanted more than anything to have a child.
Well, Maureen said, why didn’t I just assume that I didn’t have the disease and get on with my life? It was a gamble, she said. Like whether God exists. If you led your life being good and then found out God didn’t exist, you would kick yourself for having missed all those exciting times.
“You call that logic?” I said, then started to explain why her argument made no sense.
“It’s Saturday night,” she said. “I am not going to sit here listening to a lecture on logic.”
But I wouldn’t give up that easily. “Here’s an analogy,” I said, although I usually hated when scientists used analogies. Nothing was enough like anything else to warrant such comparisons. Nothing important, at any rate. I asked Maureen what she would do if her doctor said she had cancer. You would go nuts, I said, wouldn’t you? But eventually you would come to terms with it. You would get on with your life. Now, imagine if you felt perfectly fine, but you knew that any minute someone was going to jump out from behind a bush and kill you. Wouldn’t you think about dying all the time?”
“No! I would just make sure I didn’t walk by any bushes!”
I glared. She stuck out her tongue. “What am I going to do with you?” I asked.
She batted her eyelashes. “You could take me dancing.”
The tights she had brought me lay crumpled beside our plates. I stretched them across my hands. The silk was thin and webbed, with fake pearls sewn into the pattern like dewdrops.
“Oh, all right,” I said. I went back in my room and found a denim miniskirt I hadn’t worn since high school—I could swear it still smelled of pot—and a stretchy black top puckered with elastic. Rolling around in my desk was a tube of lipstick Laurel had left behind; I smoothed some on my lips and rubbed the rest on my cheeks. Then I slipped on a pair of platform sandals I had bought for my college graduation eleven years earlier.
“Wow,” Maureen said. “Madame Curie meets the Mod Squad.”
“I told you it was no use.”
“I was kidding,” she said. “You look great.”
I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t face the thought of putting on those jeans and that T-shirt again. I carried her down the stairs, taking every step carefully, uncertain in those sandals, and set her back in her wheelchair. The motorized lift on her van levitated us noisily inside. Maureen couldn’t turn her head, so I sat in the passenger seat and warned her of approaching cars. The way people drove in Boston, I was afraid she might get killed. But I couldn’t go everywhere with her, could I?
We found a handicapped spot just outside the club, then got in the line and waited. The bouncer didn’t seem to notice us, even when Maureen was sitting right in front of his beery gut. The club was in a basement, and Maureen told him that we would need his help getting down the stairs.
He shook his head no.
“No?” Maureen said. “What do you mean no?”
“No wheelchairs.” He stamped the next couple’s hands.
“You have a law against wheelchairs?”
“No law,” he said. “I just don’t want to get a hernia.”
The couple behind us pushed past us. I wanted to seize the wheelchair and carry it down myself, but I had tried this once, at an entrance to the T, and nearly dropped Maureen down the longest flight of stairs in Boston. Most of all, I wanted to punch the bouncer. What a relief it would be to get angry on someone else’s behalf. For all her feistiness, Maureen rarely showed anger. “How can I?” she told me once. “I never know whose help I might need.” This was true of my own life as well. I couldn’t show anger toward my father, or Susan Bate, or Yosef or Vic. If Laurel came down with the disease, I would regret any harsh wo
rds I had ever said to her.
I told the bouncer that if he didn’t help me carry my friend’s chair down the steps, I would report him.
“Yeah?” he said. “To who?”
“Just tell me this,” Maureen said. “If I were inside the club, and I drank too much, and I picked a fight with someone, you would throw me out, wouldn’t you?”
The bouncer shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Okay, so why not throw me in.”
He narrowed his eyes. Then he grabbed the wheelchair, spun it roughly backward, and bumped it down the steps as if Maureen were a load of beer.
“You creep!” I yelled, wishing I’d had more practice cursing. I ran down and yanked his vest.
He turned and raised his fist. “Fuck you and your ugly friend,” he said. He plucked his vest from my hand and lumbered back up the steps.
“Don’t you want a kiss?” Maureen shouted up to him.
He shot us both the finger.
“That does it,” I told Maureen.
Never mind, she said. She had gotten us in, hadn’t she? She tried to straighten her stockings, but her hands were shaking.
“He shouldn’t be able to get away with that,” I said.
“Jane,” she said, “if I stopped to report everyone who was a jerk to me in the course of a day, I would never have any fun. Let’s go in. I’d rather spend my time dancing.”
Reluctantly, I held the door while she wheeled through. The club was more crowded than usual, probably because spring had finally come. No matter how many times Maureen said “Excuse me,” the people in front of her wouldn’t clear a path. Her only view was of crotches and rears. I could barely see, even when I stood on my toes.
A bearded man in a flowered shirt stopped beside Maureen. “Need a drink?” he said. “I’m on my way to the bar.”
She had met many such men at clubs, just as she had met them at record stores and shoe shops. Often, she dated the same man for six months or a year. But most of these men tended to vanish at the critical point, perhaps for the reasons most men don’t ask the women they date to marry them. Or they didn’t have the courage to ask Maureen.
“Hi.” A boy tapped my arm, then jerked his thumb toward the band. “Want to dance?” His hair was shaved short. He had a delicate skull, light brown skin, and a goatee.
“Sure,” I said. We found an empty space. The music was so loud that all I had to do was move my body with the beat. I hadn’t danced much in high school. Dancing was something my sister did, not me. But now it seemed the perfect way to exorcise the temptation I felt to twitch or drop things or move in unpredictable ways. Since I had started coming to these clubs, I had found that I looked forward to dancing all week. I felt blissfully limp. From the corner of my eye, I saw the bearded man steering Maureen’s wheelchair toward the door.
“Bye,” she mouthed. “Good luck,” as if, despite knowing me, she assumed I was hoping to go home with this boy.
He opened his eyes and smiled. He had a pleasant face and a lithe body. “Want to leave?” he asked.
I suddenly felt so alone, abandoned not only by Maureen but also, strangely, Willie, that I smiled and said, Why not. The cold air made me shiver. “I’m Ché,” he said. “And you’re—?”
“Jane,” I said. He asked where I went to school. I’m a biologist, I said. I’m older than I look.
“Biology?” he said. “That’s cool. I studied anatomy once. And a semester of botany. To help me, you know, paint.” He asked if I wanted to get coffee and a doughnut.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.” A trolley clattered past. “My sister is coming tomorrow.”
“Your sister,” he said. “That’s cool. You can hang out with me tonight. Then I’ll go to my studio and you can hang out with your sister.”
“No,” I said. “She’s coming very early. I need to get some sleep.”
“You make her sound like a test.” The boy snapped his fingers. “Never mind the doughnuts. I have this really amazing almond cake my mom sent. And there’s a pint of Steve’s mint chip in my freezer.”
Ice cream and cake. He seemed so harmless, so young. The light changed, and the trolley rattled up the hill. I said I guessed some ice cream and cake couldn’t hurt.
His apartment was only a few blocks away. He lived in one room, with a hot plate on the floor, a single bed, and a refrigerator the size of a safe. Most of his artwork was at his studio, but a dozen frameless paintings hung on the walls. Each painting showed a fragment of a body. One painting showed a hand—I could almost make out each of the nineteen bones beneath the skin. Another showed a shoulder blade and a knee. Another, a woman’s ear. Each image was composed of a few brushstrokes, as evanescent as the cross sections of tissue that Achiro mounted on his slides.
“I like these,” I said, and Ché leaned over and kissed me. I stroked his boyish cheek. He got down on his knees and slid a foil-wrapped box from under the bed, then went to the sink and rinsed two plates. The freezer was just large enough to hold the ice cream. He sliced the cake with a palette knife and served out two portions. Ché talked about the teachers he liked at art school, and those other teachers, the ones who seemed to find pleasure in destroying kids’ souls. Another trolley rattled past. I felt I had gotten off a train in some city whose name I didn’t know and the train had continued on without me.
“Guess I’m kind of sleepy,” Ché said. “Afternoons, I work this shit job at a furniture store out in Newton.” He stripped off his shirt. I was welcome to stay, he said. His body, the color of tea, looked beautiful against the sheets. The pulse in his scalp throbbed. I pressed my lips to the spot.
“You’re nice,” he said. “Jane.” He closed his eyes, and I propped my head on one hand and studied him as though I might need to paint him later. He was finely made and hairless. I brushed some cake crumbs from the mattress and curled up beside him. But it was Willie I was thinking of. Those big hands and big teeth. The way he had tipped back his head and stretched his tongue to catch the last drop of chocolate milk.
6
The next morning, when I arrived at the Ritz, my father was waiting with a mangled Wall Street Journal beneath his arm and a pile of crushed cigarettes blotting the marble floor by his heel. Even on a Sunday morning, he was doing his job, giving his two unreliable daughters a glowing Lucky Strike at which to aim their arrival, safe and on time.
Honey towered above him, stiff and straight as a hat pin. She took my father’s arm and, for a moment, I thought I saw my mother hovering behind them, looking the way she used to look when she was young, her face alert, her hair neatly cut and styled. It occurred to me that for the rest of my life, I would need to try not to hate my stepmother, which was so unfair to Honey that I already loved her.
Willie had dressed up for the occasion—he wore a decent pair of khakis and a pink-and-white-striped shirt. The day was so warm he had pushed the sleeves above his elbows; the muscles in his arms seemed incongruous on a man with such a soft face. He was grinning down at Laurel with a soppy expression I took to be love, or at least infatuation. She was smiling up at him and tossing her hair in that flirtatious way she’d always had, even as a kid. But then I thought no, they could never be a couple. They looked too much alike. If you had seen them walking down the street, you would have thought they were too much. All that hair, his and hers. The way they smiled so broadly, with those wide, full-lipped mouths. Most people don’t smile much. Some, not at all. For my sister and Willie, a smile seemed the normal shape of their mouths.
Oddly enough, my sister preferred spending time with men who looked pained. Her boyfriend, a young stockbroker named Chuck, stood a little way off, grimacing and checking his watch. A shank of dark hair hung over his eyes; he wore chinos, Top-Siders, and a light blue cardigan. This stranger was the first to notice I had come. He nudged Laurel, glad, no doubt, to have this excuse to divert her from Willie. They turned to me then, and their expressions reflected just how tired I must have looked.
&n
bsp; I hadn’t been able to fall asleep. Ché’s bed had been too narrow, and I was too excited about seeing Laurel. When I finally did doze off, I heard Laurel call my name. Jane! I heard, Jane!, although I knew she couldn’t have been there. I jumped up—and saw that it was after nine. Miraculously, the stockings I had been wearing the night before hadn’t ripped. But what would people think when I showed up at the Ritz in that puckered top and miniskirt?
Honey reached out and traced the shadows beneath my eyes. “Willie,” she scolded, “you promised you would look after her.”
Laurel extended her arms. She wore a lacy white shawl, which hung like a tattered sail. She wrapped those arms around me. “You know,” she said so quietly only I could hear, “I miss you so much sometimes, I think, ‘If only Jane could see this, if only Jane could be here.’ The next time I go to Europe, I’m taking you with me.” She was doling out just enough of what I needed to hear so I wouldn’t finally give up and stop loving her. “You look wonderful,” she said. “You always do. You’re one of those people who can jump out of bed and throw on anything and look terrific.” She liked giving me compliments. And maybe she still saw me through a younger sister’s eyes. “Jane, this is Chuck. Chuck, this is Jane. My brilliant sister, Jane.”
Laurel’s date took his hand from his pocket and extended it like a gift. “We had other plans,” he informed me. “But Laurel insisted we put them off. I finally gave in. I mean, how often do I get the chance to meet a genius?”
“Man,” Willie said, “who invented this brunch thing? If you eat when you wake up, then a few hours later you’re sitting in front of this big old omelet, and you can’t force down more than a few bites. If you don’t eat, you’re cranky as a bear.” He put on those dime-store glasses and peered at the menu. We ordered and made small talk. I tried not to watch my sister the way other people watched me. Was she tossing her head more than usual? Why did the marmalade slip from her knife before it reached her croissant? And why had she stopped playing the cello, as she mentioned she had, after practicing it so many years?
A Perfect Life Page 6
