Lost, Almost Read online

  It was a cold day in November, by desert standards, with a dry wind and an early sunset, Halloween long gone but not yet Thanksgiving, when Celine walked out the door of my new house, and turning the powers of analysis of which I had always been so proud upon myself, I finally understood what the problem was: I was not a strong person. I could fight my whole life but I was never going to win.

  It wasn’t a question of desire; I wanted to stop her. I stood there forming the precise words I would say, shaping my mouth into the slight pucker needed for the “w” at the beginning of “wait,” lifting the back of my tongue for “yes,” but could not manage to generate the sounds. I wasn’t even thinking of the consequences, what it would mean for my career, whether my family would be able to accept me if I put love so foolishly ahead of all else and threw away the work, the money they’d invested in bringing me back here, what it would do to poor Melanie, left behind here in a life we had only barely resumed together—I had already calculated that the prize was worth the price, that what I wanted was to go with Celine. But I could not speak. My father would always think I had made a terrible mistake, and knowing that, I could no more have chased after her than I could have lifted that house from its foundation with my own two hands.

  He had sent a letter to our home in Somerville. It arrived on a Tuesday. Celine had set it on the little table that served as my desk, and though she said nothing, she kept peering over at me, looking up from the stack of papers she was grading, then looking over her shoulder while she stirred a pot of soup, waiting for me to tell her what it was. Later, I wondered if he had intended for her to see it first, if he somehow thought it was more likely to work that way, the wedge positioned between us before I had a chance to understand my choices.

  He had found a place for me at the lab. His lab, in Los Alamos. The Human Genome Project was expanding, hiring microbiologists with experience in genetics. He had told some colleague on some committee that I was on the market, had provided a nutshell version of my CV, and on his recommendation, it was as good as mine. No teaching, no marketing, no FDA. I could start within three months.

  Rather than explain all this, I handed his letter to Celine. She stood by the stove, her feet planted wide apart, holding it in both hands as she read. “Well I guess that’s it, then,” she said. “Should we say goodbye right now, or wait for three months?” I looked down at the letter in her hands, wondering if it said something I hadn’t seen or understood.

  “I didn’t say I was taking it.”

  “No?” she said. “You’re not? Your father summons you home and you’re not going?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t even had a minute to think this over. I don’t know what else is out there. I—”

  “It’s a desert town with no university,” she said.

  “I don’t need a university.”

  “Not for you,” she said. She let the letter fall from her hand and it fell hard, without fluttering, to the linoleum. I felt like my throat was closing up, the thick smell of her broccoli soup making me queasy. We had not discussed our next move, studiously avoiding the subject, our love too young to face the test of that question.

  “Don’t be angry,” I said. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

  “You thought we’d just go our separate ways? A little company while you do your fellowship and then off you go?”

  “Of course not. I thought we’d have another six months before we had to sort this out. That’s more than a third of the time we’ve been together, and at the rate our relationship has changed in that time—”

  “Jesus Christ. This isn’t calculus.” She pulled the cork out of last night’s wine bottle and took a good slug.

  “Easy,” I said. “I just need to think.” I tried to imagine it, and at the same time to imagine turning it down, traveling back for a visit some years hence having declined the offer, having, perhaps, some position that, whether I was happy in it or not, was less prestigious. I imagined traveling home from Madison, or Irvine, or wherever we landed, for Thanksgiving dinner with the McElhaneys, my parents’ oldest friends in Los Alamos. Isn’t it a pity, they would murmur to each other when I got up to use the bathroom, and what a silence there would be when I returned.

  “I’m not holding my breath,” Celine said.

  “Give me a little credit,” I said. “I can make my own choices.” I believed it then; truly I did. I thought the strength was in me, that after all those months with Celine, with 2,200 miles between my father and me, that I was my own man. The choice, when I made it, would be the rational one, a job to be envied, a chance to contribute mightily to the field, and in a place to which I was not a stranger. It was my choice, and a good one.

  “I give you a lot of credit for a lot of things,” she said. “But Curt, I’m not blind. I’ve never seen you say no to him.”

  “You have, too!” I was furious with her for saying that. I had worked hard, the previous year, at her urging, to be independent.

  “You’re a smart man, Curt, but you’ve got a blind spot the size of Canada. You’re going. I’ll get over it.”

  “Are you trying to hurt me?” I asked.

  “Just tell me I’m wrong,” she said, “and I’ll apologize all day and all night.”

  I’d only been back in Los Alamos four days when I saw Melanie. I wasn’t sure it was her. Of course, I recognized her immediately—it’s almost instinctual, with someone you’ve been that close to, even across decades, some kind of deep vibration not accessible to the mind, triggered, at first, by the smallest things, a car of the same model and color in some parking lot, someone in the news with the same initials, and then, as years go by, less, until nothing short of the woman herself would trigger it. I felt it when she appeared at the end of the aisle in the pharmacy where I’d come for a few basics I no longer wanted to borrow from my parents.

  It hit first in my mouth, a numb vibration, as though all my teeth were about to fall out, and then in my toes and fingertips, dissipating and spreading as my mind caught up and I realized what I might be seeing. She hadn’t seen me, and that gave me a minute to observe. Her hair was long, pale brown, uneven at the ends. She was the right height, about five foot seven. Her face was somewhat more angular, the bone structure more pronounced, but I knew it well. Yes, it was her, of course it was.

  It had not occurred to me that she might be here, in all my endless mulling over whether I should come, and once I’d chosen, whether it was the right choice. That seems silly now; I don’t know how I could not have thought of it.

  Neither of us spoke for what seemed a long time, perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, until she rescued us from the growing silence.

  “And I was so sure you’d never be back,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. She was still perhaps eight feet away. I took three steps toward her.

  “My dad died last year,” she said. “My mom can’t live on her own.” There was no one else in the aisle, just the racks upon racks of toothpastes and mouthwashes, dental floss and denture cream, the vaguely blue fluorescent light. “Are you visiting? Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s great. I came to work at the lab. The genome project.”

  “You’re staying? You live here now?”

  “I just got here. I haven’t even found a house yet.”

  “I’ve only been here six months,” she said. “Come on, let’s go somewhere. Do you have time? Are you rushing off somewhere?”

  “I don’t start work until Wednesday,” I said. “I’ve got time.”

  We paid for our purchases and I followed her to a coffee house that hadn’t existed the last time I’d been home. In the car my mind was blank, the physical shock of seeing her there mostly worn off; I couldn’t have said whether this was going to matter or not. A lot of time had passed since Mel and I had been together, years that really matter in the course of one’s life, and I had never expected I’d see her again; I had neither longed for nor dreaded it.

&
nbsp; The basic details were these: she, too, had found a job at the lab, though for her the move had come first and the job second, not a perfect fit, her skills underutilized. She was not married, nor dating anyone. It seemed awkward to ask, though I couldn’t say why, all these years having passed, so I was grateful when she volunteered the information. She was living in the house her parents had moved to after she left for college, on the other side of town from the street where we had both lived as kids, which explained how I had been in my childhood home for three days without seeing her.

  When we had said goodbye all those years ago—a dozen years, I calculated—we had meant it. There were to be no late-night phone calls from a dorm room in Massachusetts to one in California, no tearful, awkward reunions on holidays, no dangerous, lingering hope. I had never once asked my mother, when we spoke on alternate Sundays, if she had seen her, or heard anything about how she was doing. I knew, vaguely, that she had gone on from Bryn Mawr to the University of Wisconsin, but that had happened seven years ago, and it was the last I’d known. I hadn’t even known for sure that it was, as planned, chemistry that she had pursued.

  We parted at the end of the first cup of coffee. I sensed in myself the ability to stay a long time. Her company was easy; I did not need to explain to her the way things had been, and the way they were. But there would be time; here we both were, with jobs that did not expire at the end of some set term.

  Now my mind was not so much blank as paralyzed. My life had doubled back on itself; everything I had wanted at the age of seventeen was suddenly before me again. I replayed the encounter as I drove down familiar streets. Was it ordinary friendliness, or did she sense possibility? Perhaps sense was the wrong word; perhaps all she had to do was to see the concordance, to marvel at the perfection in the timing, our incredible luck.

  “That was a long outing for a pretty limited haul,” my mother said, eyeing my drugstore bag.

  “I ran into someone,” I said. “We had coffee.”

  “Did you, now.” She was rummaging in the pantry, lining up a row of ingredients on the counter, a bag of pasta, two little packets of seasoning. She turned around and looked at me expectantly.

  “Melanie,” I said. “Melanie Driscoll.”

  “And how is she?”

  “She looks good. She’s working at the lab.” I paused. “Did you know she was back?”

  “I’d heard.” She opened the refrigerator and leaned in, searching the back of a shelf. “I haven’t laid eyes on her,” she added, her voice muffled by milk cartons and wilted celery stalks. “That must have been a nice surprise.”

  “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to discuss it with her as a teenager, and I didn’t want to now. I felt nervous, the way I’d felt when I mailed off all my college applications and was watching the mailbox every day. It was a private suffering; even as a child, I’d been unable to bear my mother’s sympathy for my failures.

  “Well, I think it’s nice,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to come all this way, with your father luring you away from the life you had, and end up on your own.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  Her brow furrowed; I’d upset her.

  “I’d be happy to help with dinner,” I said, invoking a foolproof strategy from my youth.

  “Wouldn’t you like to rest? You must be tired.” And I was; we’d spent a long morning, she and I, looking at houses without seeing anything that felt appropriate.

  My childhood room was about how I’d left it. My mother had bought a new set of sheets for my narrow bed. They were nice, and must have been expensive, pale blue and smooth. On the sturdy wooden desk there still sat a jar of the pencils I had used in school. In the closet were a few items of clothing I had abandoned, corduroy pants with worn knees, a wool scarf and a couple of sweaters I hadn’t wanted in Pasadena, though if I’d remembered they were there, they might have served me well during my years in Cambridge. I hadn’t been much for posters on the walls, but I’d lined up a number of record albums facing out along the top of the bookshelf: Revolver, and Crosby Stills and Nash. They were still there, along with the dusty turntable. It was Melanie who had given me that second one, and we had lain on this bed, listening for footsteps audible over the harmonies of “Helplessly Hoping,” while we pressed our faces into each other’s necks, her hand slipping, impossibly, up the back of my shirt. It was at her house, next door, that we had later discovered the rest. Her house was two stories, her mother frequently in bed with a migraine.

  Celine was Dr. Celine Garçeau of the English Department at Harvard University, an elegant woman, thin but not frail, five foot eleven, with skin that stayed impossibly pale in the summer, bright blue eyes, and smooth dark hair, her father French and her mother from New York City. My advisor had introduced us, though I’ve forgotten now just how precisely they were connected—somebody’s cousin knew somebody’s father, something like that. That was nineteen months ago. Fourteen months ago, I had as good as moved from my studio apartment on Garfield Street into her university-subsidized rooms overlooking Mass Ave, and seven months later, we had rented a place of our own.

  We were both on two-year fellowships. On our first date, so paralyzed by her combination of poise and unfamiliarity, I had stumbled badly, leaving long awkward silences, stepping on her foot. I’d thought for sure all was lost.

  But somehow, impossibly, eight days later, she called. She was sorry for the delay; she had been out of town for a conference. She had enjoyed the dinner we’d had, and she would like to get together again. In fact, she wondered if I might be willing—if it would be appropriate—to show her my lab. And so she arrived, in high-heeled boots with a silk scarf knotted at her throat and listened as I explained to her the concept of an oncogene, as I showed her the freezers and the incubators and the sequencer.

  “It’s fascinating,” she said. “It’s unsettling.”

  “Unsettling how?”

  “Well, when you think about it, everything about us comes from these little, what do you call them?”

  “Molecules,” I said.

  “Yes, molecules,” she said. “That we get from our parents and can’t do anything about, and you’ve got this little machine in here the size of a small refrigerator that can unravel them and read them.”

  “That’s about the size of it, I suppose,” I said. “If you zoom out to the macro level. But we don’t know what most of them do. I don’t spend much time on all of that. It’s all about what we can learn about one particular individual gene that causes a lot of trouble.” Celine took my hand. She was trembling slightly. I asked her if she was all right.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s just a lot to think about.” I had never seen someone react this way to my work before, but she was right; in a way, it was unsettling. Everyone I’d discussed it with before Celine had been accustomed to these ways of thinking. Even my father, who continued to insist that biology was not a true, hard science, had understood the basic questions of my work for as long as I could remember. Celine had a bit of a wild look in her eye, the way I felt at a party full of strangers, overwhelmed, searching for an exit.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said. “Let’s take a walk. Let’s get away from here.” I took her to a bar across the square where we could sit in a cozy booth and drink beer; I went there occasionally with labmates, and only after she had settled into a rickety chair did I see how out of place she looked, with clothes that surely had to be dry-cleaned. I should have taken her to the cocktail bar inside a fancy hotel. But she didn’t seem to care as she gamely tucked her long legs out of the way and set her expensive-looking handbag right on the dirty cement floor beside her.

  “Really,” she said, “when you come down to it, in the long range, one could say that your work is to find a cure for cancer. Isn’t that what you mean by the, the—”

  “Oncogene?” I said. “I don’t know. I suppose. Yes. But it isn’t really—”

  “And here I am,” she said, “sitting in a
little office tapping on a typewriter, words about words. I write words about words and I talk about talking.”

  “And people listen,” I said.

  “And then,” she said, “they drink wine, and they sleep with one another, and drink some more.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ll get us some drinks,” I offered.

  “Yes,” she said. “This particular sorrow really ought to be drowned.” I realized my mistake and opened my mouth, sure that I needed to apologize but unsure how. “No,” she said, “I’m teasing. Relax. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  A warmth grew in me as I stood at the bar. I had never thought of my work as heroic, and no one had ever told me that it was; it was simply what I had always done, what everyone around me did, the same way we ate breakfast or rode bicycles. We had not, at some tender age, locked ourselves in towers to consider how we might make ourselves maximally useful to the human race and emerged with a plan. If anything, my work was small, confined, more or less, to the topic of humanity or at best mammalian life, nothing beside the great laws that governed every action in the ever-expanding universe. I explained this when I returned with a pitcher of dark beer, but it only seemed to interest her more. Two beers in, I began to be unsure which was which, my longstanding romance with research or my unfamiliar attraction to her. They had started to blend, my work appearing as it did through her eyes, her, a collection of organs made of beautiful cells made of molecules that were doing their jobs in the most extraordinary way.

  I sat with Melanie in a Mexican restaurant out near the high school. She was wearing jeans, and her hair was pulled back tightly from her clean-scrubbed face in a way that made her look young and old at the same time, young because she’d worn it that way as a girl, because women I’d never known as anything other than adults, like my mother, like Celine, wore makeup, wore earrings, old because the changes are so much more obvious when the context is constant. I felt that I could have touched her, that there was no particular boundary keeping me from cupping the back of her head in my hands.