You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Dammit, will you listen?”

  “What?” I said. I felt tears springing up. I wanted to erase everyone. Remembrances struck of Sara a few years earlier in Blue Sea holding court to a group of my colleagues, the center of bewitched attention as she revealed Hollywood gossip.

  “What I said about Sara, what she was working on,” said Betsy. Her beach hat had become a fedora by tipping forward.

  “Sara what?”

  The table behind us started in on “Happy Birthday.” The waitstaff arrived singing, surrounding them in a huddle.

  “Say that again?”

  “You’re drunk,” Betsy said. “You’re supposed to be driving!”

  “Please, about Sara—”

  The restaurant burst into applause. Betsy shoved away from the table, wobbled off to the kitchen, and poked open the swinging doors. I went to the bathroom, returned, and ordered and drank an espresso alone. Betsy and Joel came out, comrades-in-arm, fifteen minutes later, and Joel escorted us outside and got a cigarette off his mother. The two of them stood under the restaurant’s front awning, speaking quietly between themselves. I could have sworn when Joel looked at me he was gloating. He didn’t let me pay, not even for the wine.

  Faking drunkenness, I didn’t say good-bye. I didn’t want to remember that evening ever again. Wipe the synapses clean with some scotch and a hard sleep. When I dropped her off, Betsy gave me hell for driving tipsy, and also for not taking home the candlesticks. I left her waving them at me from the front porch.

  The next morning I drove to the pond, swam ten laps back and forth, and walked up the road to the beach. White, green, and blue sailboats bobbed on the ocean like ducks, like elaborate wedding hats flung out to sea. I waded in to my hips. No junior, but not so ancient, either. Half a mile out, a tiny island marked where the open water began; people said the island belonged to the Rockefellers. For a moment I thought about swimming that far, just to take a look, but it gave me the shivers even to think about the open ocean.

  I couldn’t figure out why I’d gotten so wound up. I was fine.

  I spent the rest of the day in the lab with Lucy and our postdocs, editing and re-editing the grant application. That night, I caught the late show at the Criterion, but by then I was too tired to pay much attention, something about terrorists in the future. Mostly I replayed my Die Hard moment in my head. “So what’s your focus, doc?” That’s what Bruce Willis had asked me the night we met, and I’d barely been able to respond. We’d been wandering around a rooftop party in Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River, me, Sara, and her agent. The roof was a block long and fully landscaped, and a teenager in a black tie played jazz standards on a grand piano—a grand piano on the roof—while waiters filled our glasses with champagne that matched the color of the lanterns in the trees. It was like something out of a movie. We were there because one of The Hook-Up’s backers owned the top floor, and it was his wife’s thirtieth-birthday party. She’d greeted me silently, holding up her palms and pressing them against mine for a full five seconds, in the Persian tradition, she said. We were wandering around making small talk when Bruce Willis joined us. He seemed to materialize from out of the lemon trees. “So what’s your focus, doc?” he asked me once we were introduced. “Your wife didn’t have time to fill me in earlier.”

  He and Sara had met over lunch that afternoon, as arranged by their respective agents. At that point, The Hook-Up was starting to be screened privately, and the previous weekend Bruce had seen it at his financial manager’s estate in East Hampton. By Monday, he’d ordered his agent to arrange a meeting. He was looking for someone to write him something funny and smart, to help him quit the aliens/ terrorists scene.

  So what’s your focus, doc? Amyloid beta wasn’t an easy party topic, and I said something vague about genetics, but not what was on my tongue: that, pardon my work as a scientist, sir, but you are Bruce Willis. You are John McClane. Were it not for you, our planet might have been destroyed by a comet, the Federal Reserve could have been plundered. If not for you, Cybill Shepherd would be remembered for sitting on a diving board because Peter Bogdanovich liked her breasts. And on and on.

  But I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Mark and I wandered away to the roof’s edge and let them talk. Not that I liked Sara being alone with Bruce Willis, or knowing they’d shared a bottle of wine at lunch. Bruce Willis must get jealous sometimes, I remembered thinking. What were superheroes anyway? Half divine, but also half mortal. Able to halt a speeding train, but still expected to pay taxes. Superhuman was never meant to mean suprahuman.

  Classically, the type stayed consistent: Wagner knew if you stabbed in the right spot, down fell mighty Siegfried.

  Which explained Willis’s endurance, I thought, staring at him, as opposed to those on the big screen with no Kryptonite to fear. Willises were never perfect. They paid child support, but grudgingly. They drank too much, they wore rubber tank tops. McClane in Die Hard may have run across broken glass, but his feet bled like everyone else’s.

  What is a perfect human? Who is he? What does he look like?

  Does he look like Bruce Willis, oozing charm and self-confidence, he who possesses himself so completely?

  The Perfect Husband, I remembered, was the title that Russell had suggested at dinner.

  At home after the movies, I went straight to Sara’s office and flipped through her Rolodex until I found Mark’s card. There was a single number, scribbled next to “cell.” I called twice. Both times a computer voice said the number was disconnected. I dialed information in Los Angeles, but the closest Mark Koster they had was in Healdsburg, and when I called, I got a woman who said she’d take a message, since her father was at the YMCA for his water aerobics. I called information again and got the number instead for Mark’s old agency. A voice message said the office was closed, but I could press zero for a directory. They no longer had any listing for Koster.

  I searched on the Internet. A few mentions in newspapers and magazines, citing Mark at his old agency again, but nothing leading me to a phone number or where he was working currently.

  I spun the Rolodex by the wheels. I couldn’t think of anyone else Sara had worked with closely, not by full name.

  I riffled the papers on her desk. Finally, I sat down. The chair, an extinct species Sara had carted up from New York, grated against the floor. I turned on her laptop. I’d tried this before and failed, shortly after the accident, but maybe I missed something. The password-entry screen appeared and I punched in her birthday. I tried her name, my name, my birthday. I tried “hook up,” I tried “Betsy.” I tried “password.” Eventually the screen said I’d made too many attempts, that it would now shut down, and if I had any further questions, I could contact a network administrator.

  Remarkable how loud a silent house sounds.

  I remained sitting through a crying episode. The other index cards were in the filing cabinet where I’d left them. I picked them up and for a moment held them in both hands, and dropped them back inside.

  A week later, two days before my New York trip, I should have been exhausted. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in two weeks. None of us could see clearly anymore. Three in the morning, I was just home from the lab, and a heavy rain fell outside. The ferns below my window, hit by the rain, made me think it was hailing.

  The phone ringing cut right through the noise.

  Regina sounded drunk. She launched into a story about her uncle Mitch, her father’s brother. How Mitch was a stutterer, a published poet, a university librarian in California who grew his own marijuana. Apparently he’d FedExed Regina some new books in the mail that afternoon, accompanied by a film canister containing some illegal reading assistance.

  She recited to me from Mitch’s gifts of underlined Rimbaud (“Our bodies are invested with an amorous new body”), Sylvia Plath (“To make up for the honey I’ve taken”), Jean Valentine (“Anyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive”), Frank O’Hara (“You were
the best of all my days”). It was Mitch, she explained, who had first inspired her to write poetry, the one trustworthy, decent adult in her life who showed her that being older than seventeen could be cool.

  “You should hear how he uses poetry, it’s how he escapes his stutter. I mean it’s amazing how useful it is to him,” said Regina. “Like lithium for the autodidact. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really,” I said resignedly.

  “So he’ll be in a conversation with someone and there will be a moment when his stutter is about to strike. And he senses it, that he’s about to run out of options, but then right in that opening where his tongue should trip, out pops something he’s read, like ‘riotocracy.’”

  “Riotocracy?”

  “Or ‘masticates.’ He’s written them down for me. ‘Tatterdemalion.’ Some word that’s so oldfangled, yet it saves him, it lets his tongue relax and then he can speak normally again. You know? Check this out, ‘dendroglyphs.’ I mean, these are lifelines. Imagine if words meant that much to you or me, to be a saving grace.”

  Just do it already, I told myself.

  “I mean, because what’s left afterward,” Regina went on, “except what we’ve written down? This is fascinating to me: how the body decomposes, they stop the clocks, but if you can find means to get something recorded first, if you make your consciousness into words written down somewhere and preserved, well, that’s the imperative. That’s the fucking imperative. Otherwise we are, what, just mute animals, kneeling before the victor.”

  “Are you still there?” she said a second later.

  Kneeling before the victor. I wondered if that last part came from one of her poems. Regina had never shown me any of her poetry, not that I would have known what to do with it. Poetry was one of those things I’d never understood. Sara’s province, not mine.

  Try again. Write this. Dear La Loulou.

  And I thought of Regina’s brother trapped inside his head, writing his sister’s address on an envelope with the simple trust that she’d receive it, read it, and understand not only what he’d said, but what he meant.

  I thought of Sara, a discussion we’d had one time about people who talk to themselves, Sara saying, “I don’t see why it should be a sign you’re psychotic, talking to yourself. I talk to myself all the time. Fine, it implies two, not one. Speaker and audience, therefore the unified self divided, schizophrenic, okay. But we don’t say the same thing about people who keep diaries, right? Look, as someone who works alone, whose job it is to work out what she’s thinking, to bring my thoughts out and see what they mean and then follow them through, is it so wrong to keep oneself company? Don’t you do it in the lab? Isn’t it less isolating, less lonely, to live with your thoughts aloud rather than keep them trapped inside your head? Don’t you ever sing in the car?”

  Regina hung up.

  The island was foggy the next morning, Thursday, fog so thick the backyard was a cold gray moor. When I left the house, there were deer in the driveway, snacking on my blueberry scrub. They stared at me for a moment, then popped away into the mist.

  The phone was ringing when I walked into my office.

  “Buddy, I have a computer filled with God knows what,” Russell said. “Manure, probably. The whole thing just crashed because I forgot my password.”

  “Trust me, I’m familiar with the idea.”

  “So I call some number, now there’s a kid in a blue uniform on his hands and knees under my desk. Like he’s the new class of plumber, except he’s got a Ph.D. Seriously, he’s probably buying a Porsche with my credit card as we speak. So look, I’ll see you Saturday night.”

  “For dinner, right. Sorry, I’m under the gun here.”

  Did I really want to see Russell? Maybe to see Cornelia, but that was it.

  “I won’t keep you. I’ve got a new Italian place I’ve been working with, you’ll love it. Lower East Side, it’s happening. I’ll ring up for the royal treatment. Hey, I wanted to mention, Connie wants to see you for coffee.”

  “Ah, great, I’d love to.”

  “She says she wants career advice.”

  I laughed. “She wants to be a scientist now?”

  “Tell me about it. No, it’s a direction thing, she says. Get this, now she wants to go to cooking school. The Cordon Bleu. Paris. This is two days ago. I tell the daughter who will barely look her father in the face, one, you don’t speak French, two, you try working in a kitchen first, see how hell on earth compares to Iron Chef, then maybe you can say ‘Paris’ in my house. But Connie pouts. What do I know? My daughter, who smokes cigarettes in my living room, screaming how she doesn’t want my connections, she loves her mother more than me, loves Fucknut the most, and that’s it, either Paris or she’s out of my life. Buddy, those are my negotiation skills I taught her, now she turns them on me? Then she says, out of the blue, good old Uncle Victor, how come we never see him anymore?”

  Russell exhaled a thick sigh. “So do me the favor, talk to her. As long as it’s not going north to grow Christmas trees, I’ll give you top honors.”

  “Sure,” I said, “sounds fine.”

  “First Connie wanted you to text her. I explained, Uncle Victor doesn’t text.”

  “Well, I’ll call you Saturday.”

  “Hey, Vic,” Russell said before hanging up, “so how are things with tiny dancer working out?”

  After my seventieth PowerPoint slide, I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Outside, the fog was moving in, starting to shroud cars, a plaque turning each car gray and shapeless, indistinguishable from the rest.

  I thought of Sara’s first card, about our swapping confidences the night we met.

  I wondered if by that night I’d been waiting for the right person to confide in, to confess to. Perhaps that’s what love was, when finally a secret found its rest. But didn’t that imply it could have been anyone, that Sara was simply in the right place at the right time?

  The afternoon Ben Lemery showed me his father’s gun was about a week before he died. We’d just come in from the pool, a Saturday afternoon in September. Both of us were dripping wet and freezing cold, our teeth were chattering, but we didn’t know where to stand. The newness of the house set the protocol. The fruit in a bowl on the counter, apples and oranges, was made of wax. It was warm to the touch. The Lemerys’ house was a sparkling white set piece built to spec, flanked by empty homes, the first to be purchased in a new development near the interstate. It had taken me fifteen minutes to walk over from my parents’ house, through what I’d always considered the bad part of town: run-down, the lawns wild.

  Rumor was, when Ben’s parents divorced, his mother gassed herself in the garage, back where they’d lived, outside Philadelphia. But no one knew. We’d only seen Ben’s father, a big quiet fat man who wore granny glasses, who never said a word. Passing by one day running errands, weeks before the incident, my mother let me know she found the Lemerys’ house unseemly: designed for people too blind to know their position or decent taste. I’d rolled up the window and decided to gradually lose Ben as a friend. That Saturday was the last straw. Above the garage, Ben was holding the gun in his lap, explaining his plan in boastful tones, as though I’d be impressed. He dared me to say he wouldn’t do it. I made up an excuse and walked home a few minutes later.

  Ben became my charge the day he arrived at Roosevelt High School. A teacher asked me to mentor him, to help Ben adjust, and I invited him to sit at lunch at the table for the overachieving and underappreciated. Quickly, though, none of us liked him. It seemed a great insult to be saddled with Ben Lemery, as though in the Roosevelt social world, as we watched him drop from one social pool to the next, falling closer to ours, we had to admit when he reached us there’d be nowhere lower he could go. But he wasn’t one of us. He broke into the school at night and stole things from teachers’ desks. Once in the parking lot, he picked up dog shit with his bare hands on a dare. But he’d latched on to me. He smirked if we passed in the hallway, would
whisper conspiratorially at lunch about schemes he’d engineered to prank the faculty. A week after the gun episode, I convinced myself he was joking. Ben Lemery couldn’t be that crazy. Then he called. I was watching Men into Space. Would I come over to help him with his math homework? Ben was the best student in trigonometry. I said no to a fifteen-minute walk in the dark, no to the vibrato in his voice that scared and embarrassed me into staying put. I hung up first. In the kitchen, my mother was listening to opera, preparing dinner, frying green peppers in butter.

  We’d never had anyone in our school kill himself, and no one knew the drill the next morning in homeroom when the intercom clicked and the principal asked for a moment of silence. He said, “Ben Lemery was a boy we will always remember in a special place in our hearts,” and someone snickered. A girl in flared trousers started crying and I was on the verge. A refrain sank in, one that would reaffirm itself for years afterward, that I could have done something.

  “This is becoming ridiculous,” Lucy said, striding in. Her laptop was in her arms, along with a coffee mug the size of a thermos, a rock climber’s carabiner clipped to its handle. “I keep discovering another section, there’s a technology part, a biomarkers clinical kind of thing—and exactly how am I supposed to manage people who won’t admit to making mistakes?”

  She put her laptop down on my desk. “I’m sorry, but I cannot troubleshoot problems downstream that I’m given two weeks late, when the crucial intervention moment was at least ten days ago.”

  “Lucy, breathe,” I said.

  Lucy stared at the wall behind my head.

  “I was the one who messed up those reports,” she said. “This is my fault.”

  “It would be no one’s fault but mine. Do I look upset?”

  “You’re asking me that.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Are you even listening?”