“Who was that?” Mac asked.
“Oh, a friend.” Laura tried to say it breezily. “Someone from that mother’s group.”
“Asshole.” Mac scowled at a driver to his right.
“So do you mind if I go over there—drop the ladder off after I bring Vievee to Morgan’s house? Miranda’ll be napping—”
“No! No nap!” Miranda wailed.
“Sure,” Mac said over this. “You know what I’ll be doing.”
“What?” Laura asked.
“Building the climbing thing.”
When Laura arrived at number 420 Center Street—a grubby triple-decker in a part of Jamaica Plain she had never been to—Neil was waiting on the steps. The problem was immediately apparent. There was a dog barking hysterically from the other side of the fence to the right of the house.
“Lo!” Neil sprang up immediately. He was agitated, clearly. His eyes barely rested on her before scanning the back of the car for the ladder, and taking it in with obvious relief.
“Is that your dog?” Laura asked doubtfully.
“No, no.” Neil ran a hand over his head. “But I’m taking care of it. Supposedly.”
“I won’t ask how it got in there.”
“Through the apartment—the back door. It lives on the first floor. But I lost the key.”
Together they wrestled the ladder out of the car. In Neil’s wiry arms it looked heavier than it had in Mac’s and for a fleeting moment Laura had the fear that maybe he couldn’t manage it—there was something fragile about Neil in a way that almost embarrassed her. But he proved capable, and in a moment he had disappeared over the side of the solid fence.
There was much excited whining and nail-scrabbling from the dog, whose name, apparently, was Amos (unfortunate, she thought), and gruffly affectionate commanding to sit and chill out from Neil.
It took what seemed to be an unusually long time for him to come back around to the front, crazy-looking spotted mutt straining on its leash ahead of him through the door.
“Sorry,” Neil said, yanking on the dog’s leash to prevent himself from being pulled down the steps. “He threw up all over the rug.”
“How long was he…stuck?”
“Not that long. Since last night.”
“’Not that long’?” Laura bent to pat Amos, who went wild with gratitude.
Neil shifted his weight guiltily. “Want to come for a walk with us?”
Jamaica Pond was particularly beautiful in the weird April heat. The new grass looked suddenly brilliant, and the water pleasant and fresh, inviting enough to swim in. Mothers pushed strollers and pale, winter-skinned young people—so many more of them than Laura was used to seeing in her own sedate, even elderly, neighborhood—lounged on picnic blankets and discarded jackets. A group of Dominicans were setting up a supersized barbecue on some picnic tables and a flock of Canadian geese milled around on the grassy bank nearest busy Jamaica Way, oblivious to the speeding cars.
It was so easy talking to Neil! And so much fun not to talk about children and sleep and husbands or plans or the books she was supposed to be writing up, but instead to talk about people from the past, and the article in the Times about that Pakistani nuclear physicist, and about Africa—Neil had lived in the Congo for a year, had taught English and written for some journal or something. He was not forthcoming about it, but she drew out a few particulars. (He had encountered fleeing Hutu rebels? And spent time in a diamond mine? It filled her with a kind of awe—his connection to this place that was otherwise only a symbol in her mind, a metaphor for disaster and chaos and the evils of global enterprise.)
And then somehow she found herself talking about her secret work, a project she hid and hadn’t talked about with anyone—not even Jenny or Elise: her mother’s tapestry.
The tapestry was what had kept Annabelle Trillian busy during the final, awful year of her life. She was an avid needlepointer and had been from girlhood, but it was unlike anything she had worked on before: a giant, fabulous, and unlikely depiction of a monk in battle with a unicorn. And it remained unfinished—its threads hanging off the shelf in Laura’s guest room closet—a status that weighed on Laura more and more as the years passed. But for it, and the existence of her daughter, Annabelle would be remembered only obscurely as the sickly but supportive wife of Sir Adam Trillian, world-renowned economist and academic. And this would be a betrayal, not only of Annabelle, but of herself. Laura had been ten when her mother died of bone cancer, and her own memories of Annabelle were limited, but internalized—consecrated, even—as the deepest, truest part of herself. And so finally, after all these years, Laura had dug it out and was trying—ineptly—to finish it.
The violence of the image Annabelle had chosen was surprising, and the physical dimensions were enormous—it filled a six-by-six-foot square. Most outrageous were the colors she had selected. These were not the subdued reds and greens and golds of the famous Metropolitan Museum tapestries, but instead the loud, garish, and beautiful colors of Mexican weaving. The unicorn was not white, but electric blue. The monk was wearing brilliant red, his face and arms were orange. The crown of hair on his head was yellow. For a sweet, soft-spoken, and conservatively raised English girl these were radical choices.
“Wow.” Neil nodded when Laura described the image. “A unicorn doing battle with a monk. That’s pretty heavy.”
Laura glanced over at him. He seemed genuinely impressed, not mocking.
“It’s weird, isn’t it? You think of them as friends, right? Unicorns and monks and maidens and all that.”
“But this was an evil monk, maybe.”
Again Laura darted a glance at him. “Maybe.”
A shirtless man on Rollerblades whizzed by, leaving a trail of aftershave smell. “I wonder why she chose it,” Neil said, and something in Laura leapt at this. He understood.
“I don’t know—that’s why, I guess, I want to finish it. Even though it seems so…silly.”
“Silly?” He looked at her. “It’s not silly. You should. You have to finish it.”
They were silent for a moment and Laura groped for some sort of segue. Something that would take the conversation out of this place she harbored an age-old, childish sense of apology for. The sadness of it, she felt, was awkward for others. “It’s made me think about unicorns, you know,” she said cautiously. “I mean, they’re so silly to us now—they got so co-opted by sixth-grade girls with purple bedrooms and rainbow T-shirts, but they’re interesting, if you can get past that. They’re sort of the first chimeras—half horse, half rhino or narwhal or whatever.”
“Which idea is older, the unicorn or the centaur?”
“The thing is, they’re not like centaurs—they’re the opposite because they’re supposed to be so innocent. Centaurs are scary. Or corrupt. They’re always making off with maidens and all that. But the unicorn, it’s like the fact that it’s a fusion, that it’s a genetic freak of nature—that’s what makes it so pure.”
She half expected Neil to look at her as if she were crazy. She had never shared this train of thought with anyone else.
“Like it’s innocent because it’s not pure. Because it’s mixed.”
“Exactly!”
A new flock of geese landed, squawking, at the edge of the pond beside them, honking and fussing.
Neil nodded thoughtfully. “You think she was thinking about that?”
“My mother?”
He nodded again.
“I don’t know.” Laura frowned. “I don’t know what she was thinking.”
She could feel Neil’s eyes glance over at her, but she kept her own focused straight ahead.
“You’ll get there,” Neil said, shoving his hands deep in his pockets, and for a moment, Laura loved him.
It was nearly four when they arrived back at 420 Center Street. Mac would be leaving soon; Genevieve would be arriving back home. Miranda would be hungry. Kaaren, their Danish au pair, would be earnestly, stubbornly even, preparing some s
ort of health food the girls would reject at dinner.
“Can I just grab a drink of water quickly?” Laura asked, aware suddenly that she was desperately thirsty. Amos had settled down and ascended the stairs calmly beside Neil, panting.
Neil opened the door to his apartment and started down the hall toward the kitchen.
“Not mine,” he said, gesturing at the poster of an outrageously clad, white-fur-boot-wearing George Clinton.
“Not mine,” he repeated, passing the grubby Tibetan Tonka scroll. “Nothing’s mine.”
Laura followed, thinking of her own house filled with things, her things, all at some point selected or inherited or given. Things she was on some level judged by. Here was Neil, free as the college student he had once been, able to shrug off worldly associations. Laura, on the other hand, was tangled up in objects. Diffused by ownership. Was she really someone who owned an electric bread-maker and floor-to-ceiling drapes?
In the kitchen, Neil poured her a glass of water, and Laura gulped it down—she was so thirsty! How had she gotten so dehydrated? It felt as though there wasn’t enough water in the world to quench this thirst. She drained the glass.
As she put the glass down, a sudden shyness overwhelmed her. They were alone and silent for the first time—no more fellow pedestrians and joggers and Dominican picnickers to keep them company. Even Amos had left to flop down, panting, in the living room. Under the whirring of the refrigerator, she could hear the rapid tap-tap of his tags against the bare floor.
“Thanks,” she said. “Whew—”
And she was about to continue, remark on the thirst that had so suddenly overwhelmed her, and bid him adieu, when she looked at Neil. With a sudden electric jolt of realization somewhere between terror and delight, she saw where all this was headed—the heady conversation, the happiness, the freedom, the thirst. It froze her against the counter, mute, eyes wide, heart careening dangerously in her chest.
Neil took the glass out of her hand, which was still, unwittingly, wrapped around it, and pushed it across the counter. And then he bent toward her, one hand somehow behind her, on her neck, trembling slightly—or was that her? And his lips met hers—dry, a little scratchy, an awkward connection that gave way with a rush that reminded her perversely of nursing, the sensation of milk letting down—the body suddenly rising and catching a rapid, commanding current. She felt herself give in to the thrill of being taken over, not by Neil, but by this. She bobbed headlong downstream on it, into an unknown future of shipwreck or salvation, spared for the moment at least, from her mind.
And then Amos barked.
Laura jumped, and the edge of the counter dug into her back. Neil pulled away, startled. The barking escalated.
“Jesus Christ.”
Neil went down the hall toward the living room and shouted at the dog. Laura stood frozen, heart pounding; the place where Neil’s hand had been at the nape of her neck tingled.
From the other room came the sound of Amos’s frightened whining: what was Neil doing—killing him? And then Neil reemerged. He looked disheveled.
“Fucking dog,” he said.
“What was it?” Laura asked. And for a moment it seemed as though the current was lost. But Neil ignored the question and kissed her again. And with determination, single-mindedness, they jumped back in.
Lying on Neil’s bed afterward, Laura felt suddenly awkward—more than awkward. Terrified almost. The afternoon sun was bright. Her skin was pale. She was aware of the stretch marks on her stomach, the hair on her arms, the lines around her eyes.
Neil, lying on his back beside her, looked good despite his T-shirt tan and the awkward in-between growth of straightish hair on his chest. He was thin, his hips were shockingly narrow, and he was muscular—taut in a way that defied aging. His arms were folded behind his head and the hair in his armpits was dark. Men’s bodies were allowed so much freedom! She felt envious of his abandon. There was nothing to be ashamed of, no effort at containment.
She sat up and pulled on her bra—a clean one, thank goodness, blue and reasonably sexy—and then quickly followed it with her T-shirt.
Laura tugged her skirt up over her hips.
“Are you okay?” Neil sat up.
Looking at him, Laura had a flash of strangeness. Who was this man? Did she even know him? What had she just done? She was married. She had children. She felt like throwing up.
Instead, she nodded.
“Shit! Are you freaked out?” Neil pulled on his own clothes: boxer shorts and jeans, no shirt.
Laura did not move from her place at the edge of the bed. She felt frozen.
Neil crouched in front of her. “Lo,” he said, trying to peer up into her downturned face. “Lo Lo.” He put his hands on her knees. “I’m sorry—I didn’t realize—”
“Don’t—there’s nothing to apologize for. I wanted…” She lifted her eyes. “I’m not doing anything I didn’t want to do.” Saying it was somehow a great relief. It was true. It was bad, maybe. Terrible, even. What a terrible mother! What a terrible wife! But true. The self-recrimination bounced tinnily in her mind. She would make it up to her children. She would do something special tomorrow—take them to the museum, or the ice-cream shop, be a fun, energetic mother. But her children seemed a million miles away. And Mac—Mac—She drew a hard wall down over the thought.
Neil’s hands dropped down to her ankles. He was still looking into her face with concern and tenderness, and in this he became once again Neil, her old friend, the least strange person she knew.
She began to laugh, just a little bit, and then more.
“What?” Neil looked confused.
“You look so worried!”
“Me?”
She nodded, still laughing, aware she must seem a little hysterical.
“I’m not,” he said, rocking back on his heels.
And Laura fell backward against the mattress, feeling the warmth of his hands on her knees.
“It’s so strange,” she said. And Neil pulled himself up, sat on the mattress beside her, looking down.
“Is it?” he asked.
Looking up at him, his strange/familiar face, the almost eerie blue of his eyes and the stubble along his jaw, she felt suddenly completely calm.
She wanted him to kiss her. Silently she willed it. With every piece of her brain and body. Had she ever wanted something so simple?
5
ELISE OWED HER GENERAL MIDLIFE HAPPINESS to Chrissy, her true love, soul mate, and liberator from the unrewarding confines of her scant relationships with men. But second to Chrissy as a catalyst for her sense of fulfillment was her work as a biochemist.
Elise had always been weirdly good at math and science and, growing up as a St. Anne’s School for Girls field hockey player in a Detroit suburb, this aptitude had been a dirty secret rather than a source of pride. It was not encouraged by the St. Anne’s school culture or by her mother, who was determined that Elise be a popular, social young lady, at home in the provincial middle class of Farmington Hills in a way that she, as the seventh child of a strict and humorless German minister, had never been herself. And as a quietly compliant girl, Elise had tried to quash the satisfaction that came with her aptitude. But it had always been there for her—the secret pleasure of studying the intricate double helix of DNA, of fathoming the crazy infinite order and predictability hovering everywhere inside the messy confines of life. So when Elise finally gave in to her own natural inclination and began PhD coursework in molecular biology at Boston University, she felt freed. Dormant nooks and crannies of her brain suddenly buzzed with energy and life.
And now here, six years later, she had found, for all intents and purposes, the perfect job in which to apply this excitement. The Pharm, as the transgenics lab where Elise worked was known, was owned by Genron, a giant pharmaceutical corporation, but the Pharm’s task lay in the very earliest stages of drug development—the exploration of possibilities rather than the execution of market strategies, which made th
e science relatively pure. Elise owed her job at the Pharm to Jenny, who worked in product marketing at Genron, and who had put Elise in touch with Harold Rangen when he was looking for bright young scientists to pluck from university labs.
The specific mandate of the Pharm, and of Elise as a staff scientist there, was to develop pharmaceutical-grade human proteins in the milk of its herd of fifty transgenic goats—goats born of unfertilized eggs that had been harvested and injected with human genes, fertilized, and then implanted in surrogate mothers. The proteins, once successfully expressed in the milk of the lactating goats, were then extracted, purified, and readied for use in various drugs. It was a brilliant process, really—so much neater and cleaner than the traditional method of growing pharmaceutical proteins in bacteria or fetal cow serum. So much less icky and so much more sustainable.
For Elise, there was a great thrill in watching a human gene be so efficiently and calmly swept up into a goat embryo’s developmental process. She was a pioneer in the age of biology—that ever-nearer time when the intricate workings of life itself would drive the bulk of innovation and progress. Just as the borders of the sociopolitical world had broken down already and a child growing up in Moscow could listen to music made in California and wear clothes made in India and eat rice grown in China, so the boundaries of the animal world would break down too. Already goats could have human genes, humans could have pig hearts, corn could have bacterial DNA. What was next? The possibilities of borderless biology were thrilling to Elise.
The ability to make this work, to predict exactly how the goat’s biology would shape itself around the introduction of a human gene, was so satisfying. Like dumping flour, water, and yeast into a bread machine and having bread in the morning, Chrissy had said glibly when Elise first described the process to her.
There was another way to look at it, of course, which was, as Laura had so innocently put it when Elise had first described her work, taking the miracle out of the miracle of life. The comment had deflated Elise, although Laura had certainly not meant it to. Elise was not a religious or spiritual person. But the sanctity of miracles crossed into the realm of her secular belief. Wasn’t it beautiful—and even necessary—to leave some things unexplained? So she saw the miraculous in the very nitty-gritty of the predictable—the fact that somehow the equations she and her coworkers came up with matched what actually happened. The sheer incredibleness of the cellular order that again and again made a + b = c.
Perfect Life Page 9
