Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  Plus, whatever had transpired between Paul Murphy and me in the past, he had once been a friend. And something was obviously bugging the guy.

  “So, Murph, what’s up?” I asked for the third time.

  “I got some questions, Nate. You have time?”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “I was hoping we could get together. Not over the phone.”

  “No problem. I have a wide open schedule next week—”

  “I was hoping to see you today. It’s kind of important.”

  “Uh, okay. I have some things later this morning—”

  “Perfect. How’s three o’clock?”

  “I have a couple appointments in San Francisco—”

  “Great. I have to drop my son off at a soccer game in the city. Sorry to push, Nate, really, but you know…You deal with this stuff all the time.”

  “I don’t really know since I don’t know, you know?” I said. Red flags were springing up all over the place—the odd nature of the conversation, Murph’s edginess, the fact that he’d called me, despite our history.

  “Three o’clock, right?” He gave me the address of a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Haight district.

  “Sure. Three o’clock.” I was about to hang up, when something struck me. “Hey, Murph, how’d you know I was at CDC?”

  “That Chimeragen thing last year, Nate. It was all over the papers here. Man, you sure had your fifteen minutes.”

  3

  THAT CHIMERAGEN THING.

  It was, as Murph said, all over the papers a year before. Fifteen minutes of fame and fanfare, a lot longer than that in physical therapy. My scars are still there. So are Brooke’s.

  After I hung up the phone, I opened and closed my left hand, still somewhat stiff, still crisscrossed with glossy scar tissue.

  “Another apartment?” Brooke asked. She stood in the doorway, hair wet, a towel wrapped around her. I smelled moisturizing lotion. Normally, this would unleash a tsunami of desire, but Murph’s call had unsettled me and I wasn’t feeling particularly Lothario at the moment.

  “Old friend from med school,” I said. “We’re having coffee later today.”

  “Good,” she said, too enthusiastically. “See, things might not be so bad here after all.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. But I didn’t believe it.

  So, perhaps I should explain why I hate the Bay Area—a place that every other person on the goddamned planet seems to love so much. First, I went to med school here for an MD-PhD and got kicked out. Second, my heart was broken here. Third, everyone constantly says how idyllic the place is and I must be nuts not to be gaga over it. Fourth, the price of real estate. Fifth, the traffic. Sixth, the lack of seasons. Seventh, the fact that Brooke wouldn’t let us go elsewhere to start anew and every day reminded me she had some deep-core selfishness in that athletic body of hers. Eighth, that Chimeragen thing.

  But I made the choice to be here. A big boy has to live with his decisions.

  Anyway, I can bitch about the Bay Area, but the place was easy on the eyes, especially in September. Brooke and I were driving up the 280 toward SF in her red convertible BMW, top down. The morning fog had burned off to the top of the Santa Cruz mountains—a blanket of white drawn back over the dark green hills. I swung the car to the left lane and settled in at about eighty, looked over to Brooke. She wore sunglasses and a scarf around her hair. It wasn’t hard to picture her as a fifties movie star. Lauren Bacall, maybe. My hand went to her knee; her hand went on top of mine. We drove in blissful coupledom. Well, almost.

  “You should call Ann,” Brooke said. “Apologize for treating the lawyer that way, if you want.”

  I loved that: if you want. There was no if you want about it.

  “I did her a service.” Ann—hostess of last night’s infamous party, good friend of Brooke’s—was a lawyer herself and could probably have held her own. But she had been drinking, and I’m kind of a knight-in-shining-armor type, always ready to rescue the damsel in social distress, whether or not she wants it. I can also bench-press a thousand pounds and shoot lasers out of my eyes.

  “A service? How do you get that?” Brooke asked.

  “I demonstrated what a dumbass he was. She should thank me.”

  Brooke shook her head as if to say, You just don’t get it. Then she actually said it.

  “Don’t get what?” I asked.

  “You think she doesn’t know what he’s about?”

  “No. If she did, she’d have clobbered him with a wine bottle.”

  “Okay, Nate. First of all, you don’t know the guy. Second, you met him when he was sloshed and spouting off.”

  “In vino veritas,” I said.

  “Honey, he called you a self-righteous, arrogant asshole who can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “Never trust a drunk.”

  “Third, Ann just turned thirty-six.”

  “So?”

  Brooke looked at me, then through the windshield, then shook her head again. “Ann’s going through a tough time.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” And I was, actually, sorry to hear it. Welcome to the club, Ann. “Rough birthday, huh?”

  “Yes. Rough birthday.” Brooke kept her eyes on the road, then said, “Society is utterly screwed up.”

  “Whoa. Where did that come from?”

  Brooke began fiddling with the iPod, rummaging through the tracks without settling on anything. “She’s a good-looking woman, right? At least, that’s what I think. I think she’s beautiful. But she’s got it in her head that she’s still single because she’s got wrinkles and bags under her eyes.”

  She settled on a song I hadn’t heard before. Something low and droning.

  “That’s what they make Botox for,” I said.

  Brooke rolled her eyes. “You know what Ann’s birthday present to herself was?”

  I shook my head.

  “Botox and Restylane. There you go, Nate. You’re a genius. You pegged her.”

  “Well, she looked good.” I smiled. Brooke didn’t. I tried again to lighten the mood. “She’ll be married before her next birthday present.”

  “Stop it,” Brooke said.

  I glanced at her, tried to read what was going on. Because of the conversation, I found myself focusing on the fine lines of her brow, around the mouth. They gave her skin a texture I liked, a lived-in mien that I found serious and beautiful. “Let the Botox needle never touch the creases in Brooke Michaels’s face,” I said, then immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “God! How is it that you always manage to say the wrong thing even when you’re trying to say the right thing?”

  Years of practice, I thought.

  Brooke began stabbing her finger into the iPod again. She found an old Cat Power song. Angry and raw. “You know what it’s like watching a friend go through this? Watching her put on a new face, parade herself around like something’s actually changed? Seeing her throw herself at some jerk?”

  I desperately wanted to be done with this conversation. I reached my hand over to Brooke’s knee and said, “So, we’re in complete agreement here: Ann could do better than that fuckwit.”

  “And she probably will. But that’s not the point anymore. The point is you’re making Botox cracks and you don’t even know how not funny that is.” She slid her knee from under my hand. “And if you can’t see that, then you’re the fuckwit.”

  I had a zinger on the tip of my tongue, something about an army of fuckwits, but kept it to myself. Brooke was, obviously, unsettled. Perhaps it was concern for her friend or a true distaste for society. Perhaps it was more than that, and she was, in some oblique way, talking about us. Perhaps she was getting a little restless herself, a little frustrated with having wasted a good year with her current beau, the fuckwit.

  4

  WE SAW TWO PLACES IN the city. Neither fit the bill for the future Maison de McCormick. For someone used to Atlanta rents and real estate, the experience was sobering and shockin
g and depressing. Fourteen hundred for a one-bedroom that was billed “artist-chic,” which evidently meant that the landlord hadn’t done maintenance since Jackson Pollock and his cronies slapped paint onto canvas. Then there was the twelve-hundred-dollar walk-up studio with the bathroom smaller than a casket.

  “It’s one of the hottest new neighborhoods,” the landlord said. She was a gaunt middle-aged woman with hair pulled into a bun so tight it gave her a virtual face-lift.

  I took Brooke’s hand and we descended to the street.

  “Maybe I’ll just buy,” I said. “The yield on my trust fund isn’t what it should be and I’m looking for a place to park a couple million.”

  Brooke smiled. “Why don’t we pool our trust funds and buy a city block?”

  “Or just buy the city. I always wanted to own a city.”

  “I’ll have Daddy call the mayor.”

  Truth be known, Brooke’s daddy was a retired high school teacher in Virginia. And though I always wanted to be landed gentry, I trace much of my lineage through a long line of yeoman farmers and deadbeat dads in Pennsylvania whose investment capital never made it to the next generation. I knew somebody who had a trust fund, though, but I hadn’t talked to the guy since college and thought it unlikely he’d gift me a couple mil.

  I looked at my watch. Just before two o’clock. I turned to Brooke. “Coffee?” I asked her.

  5

  ON THE WAY OVER TO the Haight, I brought Brooke up to speed on Paul “Murph” Murphy. Twelve years before, when I was grinding away in the lab in hot pursuit of my PhD, Murph rolled into the Dunner Building, a brand-new doctoral student in cancer biology. His lab was next to mine, and we shared a microtome—a machine for cutting thin slices of frozen tissue. Back then, Murph sported a Grizzly Adams beard and the laid-back attitude of someone who’d always been big man on campus. Murph had played football at Iowa and then went pro for a season with the Colts before a knee injury sidelined him for life. Wasn’t a big deal, he said, he was second-string anyway. But one night he and I were drinking after a couple of his experiments failed and we got to talking. And suddenly, there was none of the “aw shucks” bonhomie anymore. “You know that old phrase? An athlete dies twice?” he asked. I hadn’t known that old phrase, but it stuck with me ever since: An athlete dies twice. There was tragedy and poetry in there somewhere.

  Anyway, we became friends. Maybe it was the shared misery of the lab, the nightly bitch sessions about the life scientific, or that I had drifted away from classmates who had not decided to pursue a PhD. But for a while, at least, Murph became my closest friend in school.

  Things went sour between us when I had my troubles in the lab, that whole “massaged data” fiasco. Murph, I assumed, would be on my side through the process, despite my side being relatively indefensible. I hadn’t expected him to be quite so goddamned Boy Scout about things. I’d hoped for a letter from him to the disciplinary committee, talking up my character, how I’d been a stand-up guy except for one teeny-tiny transgression. What I got was an e-mail, back in the days when e-mail was just a bunch of ASCII text. It went something like this: “Nate, you’re a liar and a fraud and a discredit to the science that goes on here. I can no longer associate with you, you morally corrupt hack.” Okay, those weren’t Murph’s exact words, but that was the gist.

  And so that’s how Paul Murphy became a symbol to me of moral inflexibility, of self-righteous hooey, of holier-than-thou Science with a capital “S.” I was done with it and done with him.

  After they threw me out of school, I never spoke to him again—I made it a point never to speak with him again. My friend, my buddy, my pal. The fucking Boy Scout.

  When I finished regaling her with the tale of Murph’s betrayal, Brooke was quiet for a while. “You never told me this before.”

  I could say I kept the story tucked away because I didn’t think it was important anymore, but that would be a lie. I didn’t talk about it because I hated that part of myself. The weak parts, the lying parts. I’d spent ten years trying to erase what I’d done and who I’d been. But as Cain knew, some marks are impossible to scrub clean.

  “But I had to tell you sometime,” I said. “I had to come clean.”

  We were in the coffee shop, and Brooke sipped at a big cup of green tea. “I’m glad you did,” she said, ever the budding shrink. Her face was softer now, kinder.

  I softened my look, too, though I couldn’t be sure if I had done a brave thing by airing my dirty laundry, or had just manipulated my girlfriend with a little Nate-shows-some-vulnerability gambit. Honesty is not always honest.

  “Anyway,” I said, “we’ll see what good ol’ Murph has to say about things. If he brings a rope or handcuffs, flash some leg, distract him so I can escape.”

  I leaned back in the creaky wooden chair, took in a mise-en-scène that was one hundred percent San Francisco—the pierced and inked couple sitting near the window, the graybeard in a rock concert T-shirt reading Sartre, the four people in opposite corners batting away on laptops, working on business plans or the next Great American Novel. And the place had about a billion different types of tea and coffee, from Gunpowder to Panyong Needle to Sumatra Mendheling.

  “Why is he calling you now?” Brooke asked suddenly.

  “CDC-type question, I think.”

  “Ah. And you’re a famous disease hunter.”

  “Yeah, the one who drives an ’88 Corolla.”

  Brooke purred. “What more could I want than a man who whines constantly about his car but who wears it like a badge?”

  “It anchors me in a world of rampant materialism. It’s my way of subverting the paradigm.”

  “Oooh. You are so Marxist. I love it.”

  “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your cable subscription.”

  “Don’t stop. Revolutionary zeal gets me hot.”

  “Reality TV is the opium of the masses. The gears of capitalism are greased with the hand cream of high-tech workers…”

  “My God, Nate. You should write these down.”

  “My agent’s peddling the manifesto to Hollywood as we speak.”

  Brooke laughed and ran her hand up my leg.

  I liked where this was going, and I thought about inviting Brooke into the bathroom to sublimate her politics into some quickie sex. As it turned out, I didn’t even get a shot at foreplay under the table. In the doorway to the coffee shop stood seventy-five inches of scientist. No beard this time, no faded flannel. Paul Murphy had come a long way, baby. He wore a polo shirt under a butter-colored suede jacket, jeans, his feet shod in those expensive “dress sneakers” that everyone seemed to be wearing that year. Murph had clearly arrived, in more ways than one.

  He didn’t recognize me, so I held up two fingers in a little wave. He saw the gesture, smiled, then saw Brooke. The smile faded as he walked over to us.

  “Nate,” he said, and clasped a huge paw around my hand. Even now, even though I could see the beginnings of a paunch splaying the sides of the jacket, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the other side of a line of scrimmage from the guy.

  “This is Brooke Michaels,” I said. Murph reached across the table; Brooke’s hand disappeared into his. “Also late of CDC. Dr. Michaels works with the Santa Clara Department of Health.”

  Murph sat and we did the requisite catching up: kids, house, career. Murph, though, didn’t seem to have much patience for the small talk. He picked at his fingernails, he bounced his knee. He barely looked at Brooke.

  Abruptly, she said, “I’m going to do some shopping, guys. Let you catch up.” She stood. “Need a new navel ring.”

  Brooke didn’t have an old navel ring.

  She didn’t look back as she punched through the door. Uh-oh, I thought.

  “Sorry, man,” Murph said.

  I watched the door swing shut behind Brooke, turned back to the giant in front of me. Paul Murphy was screwing up my life for a second time.

  “It’s sensitive,” he
said.

  “What is?”

  Murph huffed in a breath, held it, then blew through pursed lips. “You deal with stuff all the time, right?”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Sensitive things.” He looked like he’d just robbed a bank. “You get what I’m saying?”

  “Not really. You’re in trouble?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. But there are some things going on…” His head jerked back and forth, then he got up and sat in Brooke’s seat, which, I noticed, afforded him a clear look at the café door.

  “I might be in a little bit of a…tough situation,” he said.

  “Okay…”

  He reached across the table and gripped my wrist. “I figured the public health people were where I should go to first.”

  “I’m not public health people anymore. Not for the time being, anyway.”

  “Oh,” he said, taken aback. “Where are you working?”

  “I’m sort of between jobs.” As Murph loosened his grip on my wrist and receded into his chair, I had this burning feeling of being judged by him again. This time for not having a job. “You knew I didn’t work for CDC anymore. You think I just popped out here and picked up another gig in some county department?”

  “I assumed…”

  Yeah, I thought, you assumed. And you were so self-absorbed you didn’t ask me about it on the phone. Could have saved me a trip, asshole.

  Murph looked down at the table; his knee bobbed like a sewing machine needle. Some internal battle was being waged to which I was definitely not privy. It was like watching an opera with the sound turned down.

  I gave him a few more minutes, stirred my Ethiopian Harrar with a spoon, first this way, then that.

  “How are your parents?” I asked. Maybe some more small talk would break the logjam.

  “Doing better than they’ve been in a long time.”

  “Still in Iowa?”

  “Still there.”

  This was going nowhere. I glanced at my watch. “Look, I should go find Brooke. Do some relationship maintenance.” I scanned his face to see if maybe that would get Murph off his butt. It didn’t. “Give me a call when you’re ready to talk. Or not to talk. Whatever. We’ll grab a beer, shoot the breeze about old times.”