You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Like a Nazi?”

  “Well, you had skinheads, you had gangbangers, straight-edge, the crunchy kids, the dirtbags. Whatever, it was about music, not politics. Not that my parents saw that, either. He was just trying to belong to something, to attach himself. So they prayed harder. I told you my parents are Christian Scientist? This is after the Communism period.”

  “No.”

  “Right, well, pseudo at least, in a Whole Foods kind of way.”

  “Organically.”

  “One time they got a healer who hooked Eric up to a car battery. Anyway, they don’t trust doctors, the government, public works. So my mother now was convinced by TV that his school was at fault, the influence of his social group, so she should start homeschooling Eric. Great, well, then came the overdose. On Tylenol. My mother found him, she called the ambulance, they got him to the hospital, he came out okay. But now my parents were terrified, we all were. Eric especially. He called me into his room one night. He was really skinny by that point, and pale, like I could see through his arm. And he was so angry, but embarrassed more than anything. He tried to explain to me how he carried this burden not only of failing in life, but now with the suicide attempt, he’d failed at being a failure, so there was a double humiliation. Now he was nobody. We listened to Radiohead; he fell asleep with his head in my lap. So we started talking three times a day. I’d call him from the pay phone at the school gym. At night we smoked pot and watched Frank Capra movies. But nothing was improving. Then my parents decided Eric needed to go away, on their terms.

  “They used me as bait, basically,” said Regina.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I was the only person in Eric’s world, besides Thom Yorke, he believed was on his side. They found this home outside Chicago where he was supposed to go stay for a year, a psych ward with nice landscaping, like a schizophrenic summer camp. First they had to get him there, though, so my parents pitched a trip: we would take a family vacation to the Art Institute.”

  “In Chicago.”

  “I’d been pleading for months how I badly wanted to see this Viennese show they’d just opened, but we had to go as a family, they said. Eric couldn’t stay home alone. So I worked on my brother: needling him, goading him. It took every chit I had, but one morning we got in the van and drove to Illinois, even stayed the night in a schmancy hotel near Michigan Avenue, which definitely was not our style. I mean, my parents don’t even like beds. But the next morning, I’m twitching I’m so thrilled, and my brother has caught my excitement; they had this big breakfast buffet at the hotel with salmon and bagels and an omelet bar. Then we come out on the sidewalk, and there’s these two big dudes and some woman, the three of them are talking to my parents, and Eric and I are only just at that point sensing something’s up when the guys appear, take up either side of my brother, carry him into a Suburban and Eric’s screaming, staring at me, yelling at me to help him, stop them, so then I start screaming, but then they’re gone. The Suburban drives away. Everyone’s crying, my parents included, my dad later thanks me ‘for playing my part.’ He says this, you know, for playing the role I would never have agreed to perform had I been apprised of the plan, as I’m sure they knew. That was our last family vacation. My brother stayed eighteen months, got on phenelzine, now he’s a reasonably functioning mattress salesman and proto-rocker. He doesn’t speak to my parents, though, and I don’t have much reason to, either. They tried taking me to the museum that afternoon as a reward.”

  I fell asleep listening to Radu Lupu play Schubert. In my dream, Regina was a projection dancing far away in a forest. I shouted at her to leave me alone. A fog came up from the ground, so I couldn’t see where I was going, and I ran straight into a tree, sticking up in the middle of a highway. The tree was coated with tar. I couldn’t move. Headlights from a car pinpointed me and flashed Morse code. Then the forest became a desert in New Mexico: infinite yellow sand, infinite black sky. But no stars. The driver in the car was a girl I’d dreamed about going down on when I was in the eleventh grade. I could see her face above the steering wheel, and I imagined her vagina as I used to in class, trapped between her legs, yearning to be exposed and kissed.

  I was filled with the certainty that she’d run me over with her car and keep driving, leaving me to die.

  The girl spoke through ESP. She informed me she’d crash into me soon, and then go after Regina, Regina who was starring in a drive-in movie projected onto the side of a mesa. But there’s a condition, the ghost said.

  “Victor, you’re an awful boy.”

  “I can’t say how sorry I am.”

  The windows dripped with rain. Her voice crackling: “A nuisance. A pain to me.”

  “Betsy, I am very sorry.”

  “And you’ll never do it again, say that, Victor.”

  “I’ll never do it again,” I said, coddling the phone.

  “That’s right, you’ll never stand me up again. Why, Joel has never been so awful, Victor, leaving a woman stranded when it was freezing wet last night, you remember? And I cooked both steaks, and not cheap, mind you. The potatoes the way you like. I made a pound cake for dessert, I baked an extra so you could have something nice around that empty house of yours, but now it’s dry, Victor, in the trash. You know how much they charge for filet these days at Pine Tree? Do you?”

  Sara would have pointed out that this was very true to Betsy’s character, to call early in the morning to own the slight.

  “How can I make it up to you?”

  “Too late, I’m going out to Cranberry.”

  “Betsy—”

  “Next Friday, you’ll take me to dinner.”

  “There we go. Of course.”

  “Well, don’t sit too comfortable,” Betsy snapped. “You pick up the check. And no whining about what I drink.”

  “Dear, I am truthfully very sorry.”

  “And we’ll go to Blue Sea.”

  There was a second’s pause and I could hear her considering how I would react. Blue Sea was her son Joel’s restaurant, in Southwest Harbor. It was the island’s best restaurant, not inexpensive but worth the price. It was also open year-round, a rarity come January. Everyone raved about Joel and his cooking. Gourmet had published an article the previous year about contemporary cuisine in New England, singling out Joel in a sidebar: “Organic Prophet Hidden in Tourists’ Mecca.” I found the clipping one day buried inside a book on Betsy’s coffee table, though I don’t think she’d ever set foot in the restaurant.

  In the breezeway came a bang from the door. Russell appeared wearing running shorts and sneakers. He opened the refrigerator and finished off the orange juice.

  “All right, Blue Sea, sounds good,” I said.

  “You eat there all the time, as though I don’t know. They must have something I can stomach. Is there a smoking section?”

  “Next Friday, seven o’clock. I’ll get a reservation, okay?”

  “In fact,” she said, dawdling, “I’ve wondered if I wouldn’t rather begin seeing Joel more often. Make it six-thirty. And that’s right, you will pick me up, and if you don’t then forget it, Victor, you’ll never see me again.”

  At eleven years old, Joel had been shipped off to Uncle Bill’s prep school alma mater in Massachusetts. During the summers, they enrolled him at a boys’ camp in Vermont. Joel had told me about it one evening at the Blue Sea bar: that if his parents ever did see him as a boy, it had been at Christmastime, when Cape Near would be full of people, adults banging on the piano and philandering, a party every night. No wonder, I thought, Joel set fire to his dormitory. A great big burning plea for attention. Then he ran away and disappeared for two years. The Pinkertons and FBI were enlisted, to no avail.

  Betsy once told me she and Bill were devastated at the time, feeling betrayed. “And just when I was becoming interested in him,” she’d said.

  She chirped, “Ta, Victor dear,” before slamming down the phone.

  I remembered Sara’s play going
up on Broadway. I remembered opening night on Forty-sixth Street, applauding from backstage amid the support staff. I remembered how proud I felt. I remembered the conversation backstage: “What did you think?” “Best I ever saw. Best you ever wrote.” We kissed and she said under my nose, “Next time I’m doing a musical, how’s that?” And then, without missing a beat, we both started humming, “Some Enchanted Evening.” It was one of our old tricks.

  The memory was vivid, remaining centered, but that had been Sara’s doing. She’d retold the story innumerable times at dinner parties, how the two of us hummed the same song. She was always her own favorite subject, and we by proxy, but all that subsequent retrieval, telling the story one more time, had reinforced the synapses for both of us, molding our recall, our marriage.

  By that point, most of my memories were probably more Sara’s doing, neurologically speaking, than my own.

  And apparently this absence of mine, in her critical career moment, had been pivotal, or so she remembered. It was my neglect that had been the impetus for the play. The hunched shoulders, the earlier morning exits and later returns at night. And yet I didn’t remember feeling excluded, never mind upset. He’ll say I’ve got it wrong. He’ll say my remembering is incorrect, that I’m over-emphasizing , under-analyzing , the typical dramatist’s approach: emoting.

  Our bodies weren’t more than habitats, was my take. How different were people anyway except for the memories we carried? At some level, weren’t Sara and Victor the same, wasn’t that marriage’s implicit guarantee?

  Outside, the clouds were parting, and the sun broke through; the ferns and trees were bright green.

  “What I call Connie eggs,” said Russell. He was stirring sausage around a pan with onions.

  “I thought Cornelia was a vegetarian.”

  “Vegan. Raw foods only. I tell her it’s that tofu bacon she likes, she never notices the difference anyway.” He looked up. “I’m kidding.”

  “So how is Cornelia?”

  “Misguided. Shitty peer group, all kinds of bad advice. Too much time on the phone with her mother, mainly. But I try not to meddle. That she even talks to me is a gold star. Oh, she told me to say, ‘What’s up.’”

  “What’s up.”

  “I’ll let her know.”

  “I’m going to change.”

  “Maybe we discuss later why you’re sleeping in your stereo chamber these days?” he called after me.

  Russell toweled off the picnic table and set out breakfast. I watched him from the bedroom window. The place mats and napkins he put out, Sara had bought them during our trip to Puerto Rico. It rained day and night for a week. Sara bought a rain jacket and would go exploring after breakfast, past the beer and fried-seafood shacks, down the alleys, while I stayed in bed and read mystery novels.

  One napkin would have a purple stain along the trim, I wanted to call out to Russell. Sara had used it to clean up a wine spill once, back in Manhattan. “That’ll stain.” “We’ll wash it.” “It’s red wine, it won’t come out unless you rinse it out now,” I’d said. She announced, “It’s a napkin, Victor.” Then I burst out, “Why don’t you ever think about anything besides yourself?”

  This was when Woman Hits Forty was a month into its Broadway run, when I’d made my big change to be a better, more devoted husband.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she’d said a moment later.

  “So you think they have a corking fee?” Russell asked.

  “Blue Sea?” We were planning to go there for dinner that evening. “I doubt it.”

  “Look, I don’t want to offend local management, not if there’s a deal to be done.” Russell dunked his toast in his coffee. “You know,” he said, “last night, I heard you.”

  “What?”

  “Three in the morning, suddenly Beethoven was performing at Carnegie Hall.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize.”

  “The dancing queen?”

  “Look, not over breakfast.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you don’t just end it, if it’s such a pain, unless it’s the pussy?”

  He was staring at me, my psychologist, my interrogator. Soon he’d ask about the cards in my shirt pocket.

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “Pussy’s always simple.”

  When we finished, Russell cleared the dishes like a waiter, stacking them on his forearm. He looked back at me from the door. “You know, we’re supposed to be talking about me here, concerning romance.”

  I dropped Russell off at Jordan Pond on the way to work. His plan was to climb the Bubble mountains, then jog the five miles back to the house, on top of the five-mile run he had done earlier that morning. He was training, he said, this was nothing.

  In New York, Sara had invented a game called “Who’s Russell Sleeping with Now?” The game would proceed by our guessing the new woman’s occupation, generation, and figure, and only once we got all three right would Russell tell us her name.

  She set him up, twice, with friends of hers, but he cheated on both of them.

  Russell hopped out of the car and ran off, his shorts barely covering his hamstrings, his back pocket stuffed with energy gel packets.

  “Don’t go too hard,” he shouted, waving good-bye. “It’s Saturday, remember.”

  In Boston, I was in the right place at the right time: I was one of several researchers connecting Alzheimer’s disease with its molecular correlates, and our success became the foundation for my career. Afterward, though, I didn’t know where to turn. For the first time in my working experience, after years of application, I was burned out. I had little interest in doing anything. I’d sit up at night, turning pages in a book without grasping a sentence. I was certain I wanted to continue research on AD, I knew I wanted to make a greater, more individual mark, but how, exactly?

  During the evenings I took to walking around Cambridge, I went back to Mrs. Gill, to her butterflies and her lectures on Darwin, out near the utility sheds on a trail behind the school baseball field. He’s not telling us what it’s like to be an ant. He shows us what it’s like to be a human. One of those evenings, a damp Boston dusk, I picked up a student edition of The Origin of Species and reread it in a sequence of coffee shops. Boiled down, what struck me was Darwin’s key early insight: that species changed. Rare for his time, he understood that species weren’t deposited on the earth finished by a higher hand, unchanging. Species evolved, though at first Darwin couldn’t say how exactly.

  A mentor of mine, Dr. Ernst Schranz, phoned one evening from Manhattan, just as I was hanging up my coat. He sounded as if his mouth were full of washcloths, but he was customarily curt: Victor, why have you not called, you should be here in New York, Boston is for beans. I could picture him in a bow tie, sitting with one of his dachshunds on his lap. He’d recently landed at NYU after an era in Chicago, apparently someone had found a mattress stuffed with money to establish a center on aging and had picked Schranz to lead. If you are looking for direction, may I suggest to you south. When Sara got home, once I mentioned Ernst’s invitation, she started jumping up and down, but I needed more time. It was like when we were courting, I hadn’t known I wanted to marry Sara until I worked it out on paper. One afternoon, going through Central Park on a long walk uptown from her apartment, I was so brimming over I had to sit down and decipher my feelings, and on the back of an old concert ticket I wrote a list to parse my thoughts, headed “About Sara.” Item one: “She is endlessly interesting.” Item two: “I am happiest when I’m around her.” Item three, which was a surprise to me as soon as the pen stopped: “Get married.” Two weeks later, I proposed.

  So over a long week, I walked the river and snuck around Cambridge and made notes, like a homeless poet. There was a pragmatic side, I figured out, lacking in my work to that point. Human genetic research was an austere, cloistered discipline. From further phone conversations, I had the voices of Ernst and his wife, Trude, in my ear, imploring me in their Austrian ac
cents to follow my instincts, yes, my gut, yes, but also to ground that hard thinking not only in the service of my career and science, but suffering, the human experience. You will remember there are unique rewards from therapeutic angles. And Ernst was right: most times, scientific labor was monotonous seed-counting, a series of such tasks as putting auto parts together, accomplished amid the din of refrigerator banks. But to believe that during the waiting, throughout the long night, the work might someday connect from lab to life, that it was more than factory procedures, meant a lot.

  The molecular mechanisms we’d uncovered at Harvard provided specific targets to take aim at. Accepting that amyloid beta (Abeta) was the main component in the plaques in our sufferers’ brains, there had seemed to me three solutions during those walks. I wrote them down one afternoon on a bar napkin: one, to immunize the brain against Abeta, so that the body could mount a defense; two, to stifle the production of Abeta in the first place; or three, to work at protecting neurons and their synaptic connections from Abeta, to repair or regenerate neurons under attack. It was the third tactic that appealed the most to me, realizing my childhood science-fiction fascinations: the idea that there was a way to lodge into a brain some neuroprotective assistance. Not to interfere, but to boost. To collaborate and shield. Soon after, I returned Ernst’s phone call, and Sara and I went out to celebrate over cheeseburgers at a grim diner in Davis Square, our haunt, toasting with a red wine that tasted like sherry.