You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  To prepare for Cornelia’s visit, I’d taken in Sara’s old BMW for a checkup. It came out with new oil and a clean bill of health. The car hadn’t been used in several years, though I drove it once a month around the neighborhood and it still ran fine, despite the accident. At the time, I’d felt compelled to have it repaired.

  Before bed, I handed Cornelia the keys and gave her a Chamber of Commerce map of the island, showing her how to find Blue Sea. As I was leaving, I heard, “Victor, come back” in a little-girl voice. She pulled me down in a hug. Her sleep clothes consisted of black underwear, a flimsy wife-beater, and no bra. I avoided looking too closely. For the right boys her age she was probably intensely desired. The right boys being ones she could control, I thought, who’d relish being charged around.

  There seemed to be a lot I hadn’t considered to my big idea: soy milk, boyfriends. Would I be repelling hippie Romeos through August?

  Normally I wore only underwear to bed, but that night I added an old T-shirt, a freebie from The Hook-Up’sopening night.

  It always amazed me how sharp some memories remained, whittled to their most significant points. The literature was filled with Alzheimer’s patients progressively losing grip on their address, their phone number, the names of their children, but they still could recall a girl from elementary school, as though they’d known her better than anyone.

  In seventh grade, Claire Shore trapped me on the playground after I scored the highest math grade too many times in a row. Flanked by cohorts, she teased, “Victor, do you think you’re perfect? Do your parents call you Mr. Perfect?” Claire Shore with the pale gray eyes, later to be the first in our class fully at ease with sex, the bored queen of us all, the hit maker who shot “Mr. Perfect” up the charts and made the other children believe I desired so badly to be ostracized that I’d written the tune myself, as though I didn’t have enough trouble as Vicky, or Vicky Dicky, or plain Dick. So I flunked the next three tests deliberately, semi-passively: I added extra numbers to the correct answers, or left fields blank. Not that it helped my social status. “Hey, Perfect, what’s happening?” survived until we transferred to high school. But too many forties and fifties, instead of my normal ninety-eights, caused my teacher to request a parent meeting, a fallout I hadn’t anticipated.

  Sitting next to my mother after school, I told the truth, just not all of it. Yes, I’d failed, I said, yes deliberately. But I refused to explain why. They’ll never get it out of me, I thought, and I stared out the window to where a team of boys were running around in gray sweats. First my mother thought it was a practical joke being played upon her perfect little man, someone’s idea of a prank. She drew her finger across the teacher’s grade book: indeed, her son had not been forging his report cards, he did otherwise have perfect grades, so from the pride of his father’s and mother’s hearts to this, without reason? No, the disappointment would be too great. It was impossible her son could conceive of such a thing, much less see it through. Where’s the motive? she wanted to know, playing homicide cop.

  Like I don’t have the balls to pull it off, I remembered thinking.

  My teacher informed my mother that I was going through a stage. There were hormones to consider. Boys will be boys. Then she half stood from behind her desk to let us know there were other students who didn’t have the luxury of failing on purpose. My mother left school clutching her purse below her stomach. Three F’s meant the path she had conscientiously, sacrificially prepared for her only child now was condemned.

  Woman as mourner, I thought. Women who grieve as men don’t know how, who are the ones left behind, like we’d learned about in our Civil War lessons. I followed with my head up, trying to feel proud, like the Union generals, but underneath my sweater I was sick. I was on the verge of willing it out of me, the idea was almost tingling, picturing myself upchucking on the school lawn. Then she’ll see what she’s done.

  When my mother refused to speak to me, the uncertainty was torment. A few days later, after a loud fight with my father downstairs, my mother walked into my bedroom crying, dressed in high heels to go out, smelling of some overwhelming perfume, like burst-open hydrangeas. I was wretched. The last person I could imagine hurting was my mother, but I knew that I had, and also that I’d enjoyed this new power. The perfume crept up through my sinuses as a pressure inside my head. Did I know, my mother asked, kneeling by my bedside, that she’d once dreamed of becoming a doctor? When she was a girl, she told me, she’d wanted to be like the men her father worked with, her father who had also been a pharmacist, as my father was. But in those days, she said, women didn’t become doctors. She’d learned this when she was about my age: that she could become a teacher or a nurse or a housewife, but never could she become one of the doctors who visited in their shiny black cars, the big men with the soft-hard voices. She said, “Did you fail those tests because you want to be a pharmacist? Nothing would hurt me worse, you becoming like your father.” Her eyes were dry. Both our heads were inside the perfume. I stared at her earrings, blue drops on gold wires. I’d always thought it was exactly what she wanted, me to become a pharmacist like my dad, but now the man was faceless in the dark, dreamless, a nobody. At school the next week, I scored a ninety-nine on a quiz and received stars again by my name: a straight line of red and gold adhesive stars punctured by a three-star gap.

  While Cornelia slept, I unlocked Sara’s office and opened her filing cabinet. Read as many cards as I could stand, ran upstairs, and stuck the rest in the drawer of my bedside table.

  If Victor had a memory—false, in any case—of what we once were like and wanted to preserve it, fine, was my thinking. Let him stand in place.

  I called information and asked for Dr. Sylvia Carrellas, Bar Harbor. I got her answering machine. I left a message. I swallowed two Ambien and chased them with a scotch, which knocked me out cold before I’d gotten more than a few pages deeper into the Admiral’s genealogy, into the history of one George “Starky” Gardner, Betsy’s great-great-grandfather, the family black sheep by way of cowardice, but forgiven because he’d paid for it. Apparently Starky had tried to flee Gettysburg, the battle of Little Round Top, but was shot on his way off the battlefield.

  Whether it was enemy or friendly fire that killed him wasn’t noted. Either it was unknown or it didn’t matter.

  Saturday night, the sky was a scratched plum, purple over gold flesh. I got home around eight and found the outdoor lights on, making the woods in relief seem darker. I didn’t remember leaving the lights on. Getting out of the car, I smelled smoke.

  Behind the garage, there by the grill, was a faerie of the woods dancing, flicking a pair of tongs like castanets. Her siren song was playing from one of my three-thousand-dollar Reynaud speakers, terrifyingly jimmied halfway out an open window.

  “Aren’t the Grateful Dead dead already?” I said.

  “I think Andy Rooney wants his joke back,” Cornelia retorted, looking up, and then went back to nodding her head, her dreadlocks in a beehive bobbing up and down. She was wearing the same camisole as the day before, otherwise barefoot in jeans that were falling off her hips, with a kitchen towel tucked into the waistband. She lifted the top off the grill to show me two thick steaks, my uneaten tenderloins from the fridge, lying side by side.

  “You’re making me two?”

  “Actually, one is for me.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “In about seven minutes, give or take,” she said, “I’ll be off the wagon.”

  I stood there with my hands on my hips while Cornelia disappeared inside the house. She came skipping back with a bottle of champagne I’d kept for years in the vegetable crisper. Foam spilled over her arm after the pop. “See, apparently there’s no point,” she said excitedly, “working in a kitchen that serves everything if you can’t taste half the menu. At least that’s what Chef says—”

  “You mean Joel?”

  “And since it’s local, you know, the ducks are from his friend�
�s farm, the pigs are from a woman somewhere nearby, then at least it’s the best possible scenario, you know, morally I just need to accept that the majority of people eat this way, and if I’m truly to understand as a cook all the varieties of flavors, I mean, Victor, I got the job!”

  Cornelia’s hug spilled my wine. I probably had bruises from all the hugs I’d received in the last two days. I wondered what would happen if Betsy and her cane met my new houseguest. One of them could end up with a broken arm.

  “And it’s such a beautiful restaurant. Chef is like amazing, they cooked this big staff lunch, and I swear he’s doing exactly what I want to do someday, just very Alice Waters, totally in sync seasonally. I mean, you should have seen his baby greens, I’m not joking, I could have died.”

  “With baby greens.”

  “Actually? They’re called mâche.”

  Stars appeared in a few small clusters, but it was too early to pick out constellations. Cornelia lit citronella torches and spiked them in the grass. Eating dinner at the picnic table while she jabbered on about “Chef’s” charms as a teacher and sage, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I sank into myself, staring up at the heavens and nodding at appropriate moments, but I was gone in the star patch, to remote bodies whipped through the universe. To Regina, La Loulou.

  My stomach became a bowl of microbes. A soup of bitter baby greens.

  What I could have taught Cornelia was that people are plastic mysteries. Unknowable and in flux, our cells constantly dying and being replaced. Samsara on the molecular plane. What Newton knew: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

  We the people, we the results of handed-down mistakes and chance, we the equationless, bristling organisms, ignorant of time aside from when’s lunch.

  Not palimpsests, but coal.

  Most likely, I thought, Regina read my belated congratulations about her book as the final straw, a kiss-off “let’s be friends, shall we?” And wasn’t that what I’d wanted? Wasn’t it what I wanted still?

  Cornelia wouldn’t stop moving: tapping her fingers, pulling on her bottom lip. She tucked her bare feet underneath her ass on the bench and hunched forward, craning over her elbows, her camisole falling off her left shoulder as she operated the wine bottle like a derrick and told me about organic farming.

  “Will you stop fidgeting, please?”

  “Whatever. You want more wine?”

  How much better never to want again!

  “Hello? More champagne?”

  “Look, I think I’m going to call it a night,” I said.

  “What? But this is my celebration dinner!” She’d just pulled the champagne bottle out of the ice bucket. I laughed and gave her a kiss on the forehead and said good night.

  From my window in the dark, I watched Cornelia smoke and finish off the champagne, drinking straight from the bottle. I reread Sara’s cards about The Hook-Up and replaced them in the drawer.

  Cornelia came inside. I listened to her clean. When she went to her bedroom to watch television, I crept outside and lay down in the grass. I stared at the blue light of Cornelia’s TV through her window. Between cricket songs, I could hear dialogue and gunshots. I stared at the fragile constellations, thousands of stars ghost white, white like crystals’ cores. Memories rose on two flanks and erected their battle flags, fled back to their supply column, and re-entrenched. I found a rock in my right hand and tried squeezing it hard enough to make it crack.

  Picture entering the brain with the smallest of tweezers, picking out the correct dendrites and giving them a twist.

  I need you. I can’t get you out of my mind.

  Regina must have been on the computer because she responded right away.

  WTF? Whatever. Tomorrow, make it three.

  The next day, I worked at home. When I left, Cornelia was out tanning in the backyard, reading fashion magazines and wearing a yellow bikini. She’d shown up for breakfast refusing to speak to me, but when I made pancakes she wolfed them down.

  “How do you not have wireless around here?” she asked.

  I sped to Otter Creek through the forest, up the gravel hill. I ignored every inclination to hold back. I called out from the foyer. A sweet smell of marijuana hung in the air. I stood in the bedroom door, seeing Regina in bed in sweats. No makeup, no costume, no music playing. “Did La Loulou retire?” She didn’t answer, just stared at me. I stooped down to kiss her. She smiled slightly and lay back, avoiding my lips. I sat on the side of the mattress and arranged my shoes. The bed creaked as I lay down beside her, wondering if some password was required, some sign someone younger would have known.

  “Are you okay? What happened?”

  I touched her arm. Light streamed in through the windowpanes, framing her cheeks.

  “Show’s canceled,” Regina said. She looked at me with her eyes wide open.

  “Okay.”

  “So, you need me,” she said, sitting up, her cheek against one shoulder. “Define this need.”

  “What is this?”

  She notched her eyebrows and said it flatly. “What you see is what you get.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Exactly. It’s not what you get, it’s not what you want.” She lay down again and stared at the ceiling.

  “Why does it feel every time you come here that it may as well be our first time together?”

  “Regina, I had to see you. I care about you.”

  “Right now you do. At this moment. At your convenience.”

  She covered her face with a pillow. We lay there a couple minutes, the seconds piling up one on top of another. I felt my head fill with pressure. I couldn’t stand it. Regina pulled herself up to a sitting position and whipped a blanket over her legs.

  A moment later my focus broke, like a cable splitting. “What do you want from me?” I put on my shoes. “What do you want me to do?” But the shouting just made her more placid, watching me unravel. I stared at the poster of the Japanese singer and scraped it off the wall, actually digging up wallpaper under a fingernail.

  A voice came through the door, “Hey, are you okay in there?”

  I went out past the green-haired roommate, lost for a moment. From the doorway, before rushing in, the roommate stared back at me, watching me out.

  See Regina crying in bed.

  See Victor in his car, driving down the gravel.

  See Victor parking in a public campground, crying at the steering wheel.

  See the perfect human hiking. See the perfect human hiking Pemetic Mountain at a steady pace. He never tires. He is comfortable in the woods, a man with long legs good for hiking, an experienced boy scout.

  He is always prepared. He doesn’t fail. He doesn’t ask for much.

  He has a pleasant appearance. You would trust him.

  See the perfect human reach the top of the mountain. He doesn’t pause for the view. He proceeds back down the trail, carefully following the markers back to his car.

  The perfect human never considers why he climbed the mountain.

  He is neither thirsty nor hungry. The perfect human wants for nothing.

  He does not want at all.

  Wednesday afternoon at the lab. Outside, the sky looked scraped clean but for clouds in oatmeal clumps. Inside we had nothing but gray. An ecosystem for artificial, modified life, the lives of Lucy’s mice with genetic code the earth had never before seen.

  We’d been checking frequently online for our grant’s priority score, the number that would determine its status. Normally we would’ve gotten the skinny through back channels by that point, but no one had heard anything. Then that afternoon it appeared: a 110, a golden ticket on the grading scale. We’d receive our $2.5 million. We could breathe again. Lucy went out and bought champagne. Word got around and colleagues stopped by with congratulations. Toad, Dr. Low, Soborg’s president, called at the end of the day. “Not easy when purse strings are tight. A job well done, all of you. Now I glanced over the appli
cation,” he said, and paused for air. “Wasn’t bad. What I’ll do is stop by this week, I thought perhaps I spotted a few things you may want to consider.”

  “You just let me know,” I said, and hung up. I pictured him in his office, reading Viagra offers in his junk mail. Toad was famous around campus for still putting in a regular workweek at age ninety, but he also had horrendous eyesight. He worked at a special computer monitor that made each word the size of a candy bar.

  The team celebrated that night at a fancy Italian restaurant in Bar Harbor, my treat. Lucy kept glancing at me from her end of the table, concerned about something, but I didn’t find out what. I picked up the check and went home.

  Early Thursday morning, I woke to the sound of breaking glass. At first I thought it was a dream. I looked around in the dark. Then I ran to Cornelia’s room. She was dead asleep, with a fan blowing loudly beside the bed. The sun was just rising. I grabbed a tennis racket from a closet and crept downstairs. The house seemed empty. No sounds. All the windows looked intact.

  The Audi’s windshield was resting in two solid pieces on the front seats, held together by some internal glue. Sticking out was a rack of antlers, like conjoined hands of bone. I stood staring at them for half a minute, then wrenched them out and squeezed them into the trunk. I found work gloves and extracted the windshield fragments, stowing them under a tarp in the garage, and brought out the vacuum cleaner.

  Half an hour later, I left early, dropped the car off at a garage in Bar Harbor, and walked up to Soborg. The town was just coming to life. Dogs were being walked, squatting to pee.

  Kneel, mute animal, I thought, walking up the hill to campus. I felt especially earthbound all the way to my desk.

  Two hours later, I shouted for Lucy and pointed out some mistakes I’d found in a paper we were to publish soon in Nature. If she’d been the last person on the edit, I said, why were these errors still slipping through? There was such a thing as lab blindness, I reminded her, where the vision goes dark to what it doesn’t want to see. How many times did we need to go through this?