A Regular Guy, Page 4

  For the first time, Jane wondered who built the roads and if there was one person sprawled somewhere, as she had on the floor with her crayons, and drawn the whole world, plotting the highways, and then how that one person got the people to build them and where would the money come from and was that person God when he made the lakes and the dry land or was it the President. They were still building new highways all the time. That was what those striped mixing trucks were that you sometimes got stuck in back of at a traffic light. One of them had dropped a glop on the road where she went to school and kids ran up to write their names with sticks and put their handprints forever in the sidewalk. There in the mountains was an uneven corner with the imprint of Jane’s smaller hand.

  When she finally saw the town, it was alive with order. A flock of children walked in sunlight to their everyday school. Men sat outside a tobacco shop, reading newspapers. It had all been going on without them.

  Then, at a corner, she saw the man she recognized from the picture long ago, wearing a brown uniform. Against all orders, she stopped the truck and jumped out.

  He seemed to be delivering a dolly of milk crates, cartons of different whites and a few chocolate.

  “Do you know me?” she said.

  He shrugged, smiled and said, “No hablo inglés,” then walked on.

  After her drive, when she became a passenger again, she always buckled her seat belt without being asked. Danger had little allure for her, no music. In fact, she seemed to retain almost no desire for her earlier life: the whisper of a dawn wind, the cold promise of an autumn moon over the High Sierra, when all the tourists have gone home and woodsmoke spikes the air and the ones who are left are those you will know your childhood with. Her only remnant of nostalgia seemed to rise with inclement weather. Storms reminded her of the years when she inhabited a larger region. Less than a forest but in every way different from a home.

  Then she would find herself—no coat, no umbrella, soaked shoes—running across roads, darting and slanting, daring cars, gauging the density and smear of headlights. She yearned to live unsheltered again and to recognize: This rain is the voice of the world. When teeth chatter and the body shivers beyond control, this is the real cold, the real hunger.

  In the mountains, she had eaten her scabs. It was a habit she could never quit.

  Here, she vowed to become normal. She would walk right up to her father’s door and knock.

  The Proposal

  Noah Kaskie was not satisfied with his musical education. He wished he’d paid more attention in elementary school when his music teacher had played Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor. Her heels had lifted out of her shoes as she conducted along with the record.

  Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Owens had told him that. He probably also knew who made the compact disk.

  Noah shook his head. Even in fifth grade, it seemed he was supposed to know more than he did. He’d been afraid to ask the simple questions. And opera. Noah knew almost nothing about opera.

  He always meant to take a music appreciation class, but he was busy right now and life was life, so when Noah bought a new tape, he listened to it eight or ten times until he could whistle the melody. He vaguely remembered the music teacher doing this, lifting the needle back to the same passage to identify theme and variations. She played the same recording for the entire spring; at the end, the class took a bus to hear it at a concert. The Alta Concert Hall had two beautiful curving stairways. Worried, Noah’s parents had wanted to send his older sister along with him. But Noah had insisted on going alone. His same friends who gave him a lift every day in school carried his chair up the grand stairs. Dressed up and scrubbed, though, for the first time they seemed solemn, like little pallbearers, as if only here they realized he was different.

  Noah felt better when he was teaching himself something. Now he was listening to the clarinet concerto for the eleventh time while he checked over a graduate student’s dissection. “Caviar,” he said. “Now I’m going to filet it. Watch.”

  A zebra fish egg was only slightly larger than a pinhead. Kaskie pulled out a hair from his eyebrow. He attached the one hair to a tool the rough dimensions of a matchstick and proceeded to cut the embryos with this homemade knife. Under the microscope, the mutant cells were elegant, like winter trees.

  The next thing Noah knew, Owens was filling the doorway. It was nine o’clock in the morning. Owens seldom called ahead. He liked to just drop in. Noah suspected one of the things Owens found comforting about him was that he was so easy to find. He hovered over another minute dissection, and Owens seemed happy to wait. Owens liked the atmosphere of the lab. Its equipment and cheap furniture and productive messes made him think of an artist’s loft. Mozart, was it? Mozart.

  A young man of indeterminate European origin stood in the corner, staining pieces of embryo with an antibody that recognized proteins expressed when the cells began to turn into a brain. Europeans generally intrigued Owens. This one turned out to be from Denmark.

  “I’ll make you coffee in a sec,” Noah said. Though he often wanted to do things for Owens, he seldom let you.

  “Or we could walk to the Pantheon.”

  “I’ll make it here. And even breakfast.” Noah rubbed his hands. “Caviar. Sweetbreads upstairs. No, seriously.” In the lab and at home, he had elaborate setups for coffee, all the paraphernalia, the apparatus of an addiction. His cups and tin measure were not fancy. But he bought his dear beans from Switzerland, at seven ninety-nine a pound. A luxury, but one he’d long ago deemed essential to his daily contentment. He measured the beans and then measured the water. Precision, Noah believed, made all the difference in both cooking and science; the difference between the mediocre and the sublime was often a matter of proportion. Coffee involved a whole chain of procedure, and every day it came out a little different, with new complexities. In a life without sex, you had to guard your few pleasures and relish them.

  Noah had been told many times that he had good hands, the highest compliment for a young scientist but revealing the paradox of the career, for the further you go in biology, the less time you spend doing experiments with your own hands. He was already thirty-one and had been doing this job for three years.

  “Smell,” he said, holding the grinder up to Owens’ face.

  “Good,” Owens conceded.

  Kaskie began his measurements for the oatmeal. But Kaskie was never completely Kaskie with Owens there. He was a Kaskie minus or a Kaskie added to. Possibly because Owens had the air he often carried of being either in a hurry or bored or not particularly happy doing what it was you were causing him to do, Noah, who’d made this same breakfast every morning for six months, now dutifully read the instructions on the side of the tin. They called for salt, which he never used, but he grabbed some sodium chloride and added it. He made the oatmeal on a burner and heated up maple syrup over another flame, putting the whole glass jar in boiling water. In his own way he was hospitable. He had two mugs, which he used when alone for oatmeal and coffee, and so, with Owens here, he would serve oatmeal first, wash the mugs, and then make coffee.

  Noah believed he’d discovered the breakfast he would eat for the rest of his life and serve his wife and children, when he had them.

  When he served the cereal at last, after stirring the dented pot for half an hour, Owens flustered him by refusing maple syrup. The whole secret of Noah’s oatmeal depended upon hot maple syrup.

  Owens took a bit of the oatmeal on the end of his spoon, closed his mouth around it, testing. “This is very salty,” he concluded. His eyebrows formed the broken line they often made in judgment. He was a man used to judging.

  Probably he judged in bed, Noah thought, moving a-jitter in his mistake, realizing at that moment that the combination of salt and hot maple syrup was noxious.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Owens said, setting his mug down on the counter. “Let’s walk to Café Pantheon.” For Owens, walking formed a necessary element of conversation between friends
. He liked seeing the land, smelling it, appreciating trees. The other kind of talking, across a table, sitting down, with its inherent filterings and concentration—that to him was business, and it was impossible not to negotiate, to somehow want to get more. He understood this, so with his friends often suggested an activity to put him in motion. Owens was tall, long-legged, and his pace exceeded most people’s. But he and Noah in his chair were evenly matched.

  “I’ll take you out for some breakfast.” Owens’ voice lowered, kind but authoritative. He seldom restrained himself from clearly stating his desire, regardless of its intensity. In his life, he hadn’t seen many reasons to defer. And it was probably a pleasure, however minor, to convince others to follow his whims.

  On the way out, Noah stopped to give instructions to the young Dane. They were not yet trying to find the gene that caused their mutant but were still tracing the signals to find the tissue next door. Louise would do an in situ hybridization, with fish that had no eyes, if she wasn’t too busy with her damn flies. The amount of DNA from the four-hour-old embryo was so small it would have to be amplified, using a procedure called PCR.

  PCR changed the world, Noah thought.

  Outside, they had to pass a row of animal rights protesters. “Did you get the polio vaccine?” Noah shouted, a taunt particularly jarring, he noticed, for the dumber ones, whose eyes flickered as they wondered if he had polio. Oops, he just remembered that Owens’ girlfriend, Olivia, was involved with animal rights now, something to do with Latin American parrots.

  “Hey, why don’t you ever get any women biologists from Denmark in your lab?” Owens asked. Because he was seldom outside at this time of day, he associated morning hours outdoors with love. In the first few months with Olivia, he’d snuck away from the office for picnic lunches in the hills. Not many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, he thought, made love on the ground before noon.

  There was a particular smell of bark the ground released when, later, it was going to be hot. Owens walked through the fields of palm and live oak in the hiking boots he’d been wearing whenever he wasn’t in a suit for the last five years. Kaskie wondered how he kept them clean. A strange thing they had in common. One thing about a chair: shoes stay new.

  “Or do you know any French female scientists? Sort of like Madame Curie?”

  “I haven’t met many Marie Curies.”

  “Have you ever seen a picture of her? Oh, Kaskie—God, she was beautiful.” Owens’ voice had reverence and heartbreak, as if he was talking about a whole era of life from which he would be forever excluded: mothers seen from outside windows, bending down over tables, cleaning for love. “You’ve got to see her. I’ll show you a picture.”

  “Not my type.” Noah smiled. It was like Owens to want to show you things. This impulse led to some graces. He was always willing to see a movie again, if he could introduce you to it. As Owens often told the same stories without remembering, Noah thought it was interesting that his opinions didn’t change. But he and Owens never agreed on women. Except Olivia, who, as luck would have it, happened to be Owens’ girlfriend, since Owens had the corner on luck.

  “Well, Olivia’s pretty pretty,” Noah said.

  Owens sighed. “I wish she’d do something with her life.”

  Though Olivia was undeniably beautiful, Noah tried not to envy Owens. He’d known her for years and secretly believed she wasn’t that smart. This didn’t prevent him from being half in love with her. It was distinctly possible to be in love with a woman and also find her faintly stupid. But it enchanted him that Owens would choose Olivia and then expect her to have some sort of heroic career. Even among friends as close as Noah and Owens, it was important that each man be able secretly to prefer his own life. This small and unacknowledged snobbery allowed Noah to flatter his friend, trying to make it easier for Owens to bear the life Noah himself would not truly want.

  “I just don’t know if, in the end, Olivia’s really smart enough.”

  “Smart enough for what?” Noah asked, privately agreeing.

  “You know how sometimes you’re with someone and stay up all night talking? Well, we never do that.” Owens shook his head.

  Noah was celibate, though he would have been disturbed to hear himself described as such. His condition, in all its aspects, embarrassed him, and while he relished and craved intricate discussions of love, he became vague and abstract about his own circumstances.

  Years ago, in college, a girl sat on his lap at a party. She’d ridden with him later on the uneven sidewalks and they’d kissed. Their kissing seemed important to him, as if she were lifting a curtain he always had assumed was the real world and shown him something behind, a secret party where others were already laughing and sighing, even the trees. It seemed for this once easy, as if all he had to do was relax. She kept telling him he had a beautiful face. Like a fat person, Noah thought. “She has such a pretty, pretty face,” his mother and sister were always saying of fat women. It was very late when he finally stopped at the girl’s dorm and she jumped off his lap and sprinted inside. She was beautiful running. There were more nights, less than a dozen in all, and Noah remembered each in preserved detail. But she’d told him the first night she thought she might be gay. He’d seen her afterwards, riding on a bicycle seat holding the waist of a taller girl, who stood pedaling.

  Noah still thought about this girl often, but he didn’t mention her. It had ended so long ago, and anyway, not much had happened.

  Noah didn’t think it was impossible that he’d find love. In fact, he usually felt in love with someone. He needed to think of a woman in order to fall asleep at night. And to work as hard as he did. He told himself if he worked hard enough, work would win him love. He had a hunch that the woman who could love him would not be like Olivia. More the pretty-for-a-smart-girl type. She herself would look down, in a slight way, on women like Olivia. And, as if in deference to his future wife, Noah adopted this mild prejudice. Certain women did go for him, like the X-ray crystallographer upstairs. Rachel was motherly, and he could picture her large body in an apron even though she knew more about hydrogen bonds than anyone in the world. “I’ll marry you in five years,” she’d joked, “if you don’t find anyone else.” He was intimidated by her size.

  “So tell me what you’re doing in the lab.”

  Owens asked this same question at least once a month, too short a time for much to change. And these broad questions reminded Noah of his parents’ friends, who knew nothing about science, or of certain girls who assumed everything to do with laboratories was evil. “I told you about progenitor cells?”

  “Mmhmm.” Owens had the uncertain air of someone who didn’t really remember.

  But then, as Noah talked about cell fate, he remembered the article he’d read the night before in Nature, and his own excitement took over. In a bracing way, he was in a race with opponents who were also his friends—one lab in Seattle, another had just moved to New York, and he’d heard that Manloe in Copenhagen had begun using zebra fish. But he was late. As a postdoc, he’d discovered a great, promising mutation, fish that learned things and then forgot them, which got him grant money and the job here. Now, halfway to tenure review, he still hadn’t found the gene. And he’d let Louise, one of his postdocs, talk him into studying the mutation in drosophila, fruit flies, when she’d noticed something in the footnotes of a Caltech paper. The things were supposed to be in bottles all the time, in the one closet he’d allotted her, yet they were constantly in his hair.

  Owens walked with his hands in his pockets, head bent down. He seemed chastised, as if he were ashamed and a little sorry for his own life. He was also, of course, a multimillionaire. Even science couldn’t intimidate him for long.

  Noah was in the middle of saying that surfaces of all cells were extremely polymorphic and that the major histocompatibility complex proteins explained how the cell recognized the difference between self and other, a recognition that thrilled him.

  Owens interrupted. “Wh
at’s your ultimate objective?”

  That stopped Noah, for a moment. Owens, it occurred to him, thought like the people who wrote the essay questions for college applications. But then he blurted, “To see how it all works. To figure out how a heart cell knows to be that and not something in the foot.”

  “Aren’t you interested in sequencing the human genome?” Owens asked this question, too, every time they were together.

  Noah flipped his wrist. “I personally don’t want to. Even if you know the structure, you don’t know how it folds, what it does. It’s too slow for me. It took Rachel seven years to get the structure of her protein. You met my friend Rachel. Rachel’s famous now. Her enzyme’s on the cover of a textbook.” Noah rubbed this in because Owens had once pestered him for a month, wanting to meet the female scientist upstairs. When Noah finally capitulated, Owens had reported back: “I could never fall in love with someone like her.” Noah had found himself babbling, “I think she has a really pretty face.”

  “If I were a biologist,” Owens said, “that’d be what I’d want to do. I’d want to sequence the genome.”

  The two men were odd friends for each other. They both had known Frank. Noah had gone to graduate school with him. Then Frank left academics and started Genesis with Owens, but eventually he left that too. When Owens let himself think about it, which he only rarely did, he felt keenly, and with a flat acceptance, this loss of Frank. The day-to-day quality of his life was lower and there was nothing he could do about it. It troubled him that Frank belonged to a world he’d chosen over theirs. Most people Owens knew worked for Genesis and were, in one way or another, being paid by him. Noah understood that Owens had intended for a long time to make him one of those people and perhaps today he planned to close the deal.

  They walked through the university square, its sandstone arches copied from a four-hundred-year-old mosque in Egypt. Frank and Noah had been graduate students here, partners. Owens stood solemnly, looking over the pavilions, as if he had a problem he couldn’t fully articulate. In the last five years, he had found himself in the odd circumstance of luck. Everything he touched turned to money. Noah had some inkling of what that would be like: for a while, four years back, his experiments were working. Owens probably experienced the strange apperception of momentum and the courage that came from it; his trajectory was going up and up, and if he multiplied the stakes he could only multiply the gains. Before, he’d been poor—so poor, Frank said, that his currency was not cash but apples. At first his prosperity must have been exhilarating. But the more he experimented, the more he proved himself invincible. Nine hundred people worked under him now, maybe a thousand, including men he considered his best friends and, from what he said, women he’d slept with. People always warned that in science, after you’ve made a great discovery, it’s almost impossible to think the way you did before. And of course nobody believes it’s luck when luck happens to them.