Marker

  Once the light had changed, Jack crossed Central Park West and rode along 106th Street. As he came abreast of the neighborhood playground, he stopped. Without taking his toes from his toe clips, he grasped the high chain-link fence and looked out onto the basketball court. It was illuminated by a series of mercury vapor lamps that he had paid for. In fact, Jack had paid to have the entire playground rehabbed. Originally, Jack had only offered to redo the basketball court, thinking the neighborhood would be overjoyed. To his surprise, he was forced by an ad hoc neighborhood committee into considering doing the whole park, including toddler area, if he was to be granted the privilege of upgrading the basketball section. It took Jack just overnight to decide to do the whole schmear. After all, what else was he going to do with his cash? That had been six years ago, and Jack had more than gotten his money’s worth.

  “You coming out and run, doc?” one of the players called out.

  There were only five men, all African-American, casually warming up at the distant basket. In deference to the cold, they were all dressed in multiple layers of trendy hip-hop gear. One of them had stopped when he’d caught sight of Jack. From his voice, Jack knew it was Warren, a man with whom Jack had become close over the years. Warren was a powerfully built, gifted athlete as well as the de facto leader of the local gang. He and Jack had come to share a great mutual respect. In fact, Jack even gave Warren credit for having saved his life.

  “That’s my intention,” Jack yelled back. “Anybody else coming out, or is it going to be three-on-three?”

  “We got rained out last night, so the whole gang’s going to show up. So get your kicks and get that white ass of yours out here on the double. Otherwise, you’ll be standing around holding your dick. Catch my drift?”

  Jack flashed back a thumbs-up. He’d caught the drift all right. There would be a lot more than ten guys, meaning the first ten would get to play while the others would be forced to jockey to get into subsequent games. It was a complicated system that had taken Jack a couple of years to comprehend. By most people’s standards, it wasn’t democratic or fair. Winners was taken by the eleventh guy to show up, who then chose the other four he wanted on his team. At that point, the order people arrived didn’t matter. In fact, sometimes one of the members of the losing team would get selected because he was a particularly good player. Back when Jack had just moved to the neighborhood, it had taken him months to get into his first game, and that was because he finally realized he had to get out there early.

  Motivated by not wanting to stand around on the sidelines in the cold, Jack quickly pedaled across the street, snatched up his bike on his shoulder, and ran up the steps leading to his building’s front door. Skirting some large, green trash bags, Jack pushed open the inner door. Just inside were two derelicts sharing a bottle of cheap wine. They got out of the way as Jack charged up the stairs. He was careful because of the debris that sprinkled the steps.

  Jack lived in the rear unit on the fourth floor. He had to put his bike down while he struggled with his keys.

  Without even bothering to close his apartment door, Jack stashed his bike against the wall in the living room, then kicked off his shoes and stripped off his jacket, tie, and shirt, and tossed them over the back of his sofa. Clad only in his boxer shorts, he ducked into the bathroom to get his basketball gear, which normally hung over the shower curtain.

  Jack stopped in his tracks. Instead of his shorts and sweatpants, he was looking at a pair of Laurie’s pantyhose. He had forgotten that he had not played the previous night, and Laurie had folded his gear and put it in the closet.

  Jack snatched the pantyhose off the curtain rod and held them in his hand. Slowly, his eyes rose to look at himself in the mirror. He was alone, and his slack face reflected the reality he’d been actively avoiding all day: Laurie wouldn’t be there when he’d finished his basketball game. There wouldn’t be the usual intelligent banter. There wouldn’t be the inevitable laughter. They wouldn’t be heading down Columbus Avenue for a bite to eat at one of the many Upper West Side restaurants. Instead, he would be coming back to an empty apartment just like he had for all those years after he’d first arrived in the city. It was depressing then, and it was depressing now.

  “You basket case,” he voiced with derision. He looked back down at the pantyhose, feeling a mixture of emotion that included anger at himself and at Laurie. At times, life seemed too complicated.

  With unnecessary care, he folded the pantyhose and carried them into the bedroom. He opened one of the now-empty drawers that Laurie had been using and carefully put the lingerie inside. He closed the drawer and felt a modicum of relief with the painful reminder out of sight. He then ran to the closet to get his athletic gear.

  To Jack’s relief, he got back out onto the court before ten people had arrived, and Warren selected him to be on his team. Jack warmed up by shooting a series of perimeter jump shots. He felt ready when the game began a few minutes later, but unfortunately, he wasn’t. He played poorly, and he was a significant factor in the loss. With another team ready to run, Warren and Jack and the rest of Warren’s team were relegated to standing on the sideline, shivering in the cold. None of them were happy.

  “Man, you were shit,” Warren said to Jack. “You were killing us. Wassup?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m distracted, I guess. Laurie wants to get married and have a kid.”

  Warren knew Laurie. Over the previous several years, he and his girlfriend, Natalie, double-dated with Jack and Laurie almost once a week. They had even gone on a wild trip to Africa together seven years ago.

  “So your shortie wants to get hitched and have a kid?” Warren said derisively. “Hey, man, what else is new? I got the same problem, but you didn’t see me throwing the damn ball away or letting a perfectly good pass bounce off my forehead. You got to pull yourself together; otherwise, you’re not going to be running with me. I mean, there’s a question of getting your priorities straight, you know what I’m saying?”

  Jack nodded. Warren was right, but not quite the way he was implying. The trouble was, Jack didn’t know if he was capable of getting his priorities straight, since he wasn’t quite sure what they were.

  With her ankle holding the insistent elevator door open, Laurie managed to get her suitcase onto the fifth-floor landing. It was a bit of an effort, since the floor level was a few inches higher than the elevator’s cab. She then stepped out herself and let the door close. She could hear the whine of the elevator machinery on the roof as the cab immediately descended. Someone had obviously been pressing the call button.

  Taking advantage of the suitcase’s wheels, she got it over to her door without having to lift it again. The more she had struggled with it, the heavier it seemed to have become. She knew the culprit was the stash of cosmetics, shampoo, conditioner, and detergent she’d had to bring over to Jack’s. None of it was travel-size. Of course, the iron didn’t help, either. She went back to get the bag of groceries.

  As she fumbled to extract her keys from her shoulder bag, she heard the door to the front apartment open as its securing chain reached its limit with a definite clank. Laurie lived in a building on 19th Street that had two apartments per floor. While she occupied the rear apartment that looked out onto a warren of postage-stamp-sized backyards, a recluse by the name of Debra Engler resided in the front. Her habit was to open her door a crack and peer out every time Laurie was in the hall. Most of the time, her nosiness had irritated Laurie as an intrusion on her privacy, but at the moment, she didn’t mind. It was a reassuring familiarity welcoming her home.

  Once inside, Laurie activated every one of the locks, bolts, and chains that the previous tenant had installed. Then she looked around. She hadn’t been there for over a month and couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept there. The entire apartment needed a good cleaning, and the air smelled slightly stale. It was smaller than Jack’s but a quantum leap more cozy and comfortable, with real furniture, including a TV. The colors
of the fabrics and paint were warm and inviting. A group of framed Gustav Klimt prints from the Met hung on the walls. The only thing missing was her cat, Tom 2, whom she had boarded a year ago with a friend who lived out on Shelter Island. She wondered if she’d have the nerve to ask for her pet back after such a long time.

  Laurie dragged her suitcase into her tiny bedroom and spent a half hour organizing things. After a quick shower, she donned her robe before making herself a simple salad. Although she hadn’t had any lunch, she still wasn’t particularly hungry. She brought the salad and a glass of wine out to her desk in the living room and turned on her laptop. While she waited for it to boot up, she finally allowed herself to think about what she had learned from her father. It had taken effort to avoid thinking about the issue, but she had wanted to be by herself and have access to the Internet as well as be more in control of her emotions. She knew she didn’t know enough to be able to think clearly.

  The problem was that medical science was racing ahead at breakneck speed. Laurie had been to medical school in the mid-eighties and had learned a significant amount about genetics, since that was the time of the heady breakthroughs in recombinant DNA. But since then, the field had mushroomed geometrically, climaxing in the sequencing of the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome as announced with great fanfare in 2000.

  Laurie had made it a point to stay reasonably current with her genetic knowledge, particularly as related to her specialty of forensics. But forensics was only interested in DNA as a method of identification. It had been discovered that certain noncoding areas, or areas not containing genes, showed dramatic individual specificity such that even close relatives had differing sequences. Tests taking advantage of the specificity are called “DNA fingerprinting.” Laurie was well aware of this and appreciated it as a powerful forensic tool.

  But the structure and function of genes were other issues entirely, an area where Laurie felt unprepared. Two new sciences had been born: medical genomics, which dealt with the enormously complex flow of information within a cell; and bioinformatics, which was an application of computers to such information.

  Laurie took a sip of her wine. It was a daunting process to try to make sense of what she learned from her father; namely, that her mother carried the marker for the BRCA1 gene and that Laurie had a fifty percent chance of having the same marker. She shuddered. There was something unsettlingly perverse about knowing that she might have something potentially lethal hiding out in the core of her body. Throughout her life, she’d always felt that information was good in and of itself. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe there were some things that were better not to know.

  As soon as Laurie was connected to the Internet, she googled “BRCA1 gene” and got five hundred and twelve sites. She took a bite of her salad, clicked on the first site, and started reading.

  five

  WHOA!” CHET MCGOVERN murmured in appreciative homage to the female form he was watching out of the corner of his eye. It was the woman he’d mentioned to Jack that afternoon, and she was dressed in the black bodysuit he’d described. He guessed she was in her late twenties, but he couldn’t be sure. What he was sure about was that she had one of the best figures he’d ever seen. At the moment, she was lying prone on a bench, using a machine to work her hamstrings and buttocks. The accentuated curve of the small of her back and the rhythmical rippling of her butt as she did her repetitions gave Chet a shiver of delight.

  Chet was about twenty feet away, craftily using free weights in front of a mirrored wall so that he could get close without arousing suspicions. He’d seen her in body-sculpting class, as he had on Friday, but this time, spurred on after having mentioned her to Jack, he’d followed her into the weight room, where there was still a handful of people even though it was after nine P.M. It was Chet’s intention to connect with her and ask her to have a drink in the hope that he could get her phone number. Most of Chet’s dates were women he’d met at one of the multiple health clubs he frequented. For him, ogling women was not just a spectator sport.

  The woman finished with the machine she’d been using. Wasting no time, she got up, glanced up at the wall clock, and then hustled down to the next machine to work the pectorals. Seemingly in a hurry, she started right in. Chet had watched her in the mirror, and in the background, he caught sight of one of the club’s employees entering the room. Chet knew him reasonably well from pick-up basketball and sensed that he was a savvy dude, especially since he had some kind of supervisory role. His name was Chuck Horner. Stepping up to the free-weight rack, Chet deposited the weights he had been using and walked over to the employee.

  “Hey, Chuck,” Chet said sotto voce, “do you know that chick using the pectoral machine?”

  Chuck craned his neck to see around Chet. “The looker? The one with the pixie face and a body to beat the band?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Yeah, I know her. I mean, I know her name, since she comes in here all the time, and I happened to sign her up for membership.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jasmine Rakoczi, but she goes by Jazz. Quite a body, wouldn’t you say?”

  “One of the best,” Chet admitted. “What kind of name is ‘Rakoczi’?”

  “It’s funny you should ask, because I asked the same thing when she joined. She said it was Hungarian.”

  “Is she tight with anybody that you know?”

  “I’ve no idea. But I can tell you she’s a pistol. She drives around in a black Hummer. I should warn you: She doesn’t do much socializing, at least not around here. Are you thinking of trying to make a move?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Chet offered casually. He turned around to look at Jazz working her pectorals. She wasn’t fooling around. Perspiration glistened like little diamonds on her tanned forehead.

  “Five bucks says you can’t get to first base.”

  Chet turned around to look back at Chuck. A wry smile appeared on Chet’s face. Getting paid for what he wanted to do was a good incentive to overcome his hesitation. “You’re on!”

  Back at the free-weight rack, Chet lifted off several more weights. He was now committed to approach Jazz, but it wasn’t without a certain amount of anxiety, especially with the daunting tidbits he’d learned from Chuck. In truth, Chet was not quite as bold as he liked to portray himself.

  While standing in front of the mirror, doing curls with the free weights, Chet tried to think of some way to approach the woman that would leave him an out if he needed it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anything clever, and fearing she might suddenly finish and disappear into the women’s locker room, he made his move.

  In reality, it wasn’t much of a “move” at all. He merely walked over when he thought she was almost done with her current machine. By now, his mouth was dry and his heart was thumping in his chest. Encouragingly, he managed to time his approach just about right. As he stepped in front of her, she stopped her repetitions and took her arms off the machine’s grips. Taking the towel from around her neck, she wiped off her forehead using both hands, covering her face and breathing deeply from exertion.

  “Hi, Jazz!” Chet said cheerfully, trusting she’d be instantly curious how he knew her name.

  Jazz didn’t respond except to slowly lower the towel to progressively reveal her features. She skewered Chet with her burnt umber, deeply set eyes. Up close, she wasn’t pixie-like. Beneath a helmet of dark hair that was damp from her workout, her features had a hint of the exotic. What Chet had thought was tan was naturally dark skin that made her teeth appear particularly white. Her eyes were slightly almond-shaped, and her nose had an almost imperceptible aquiline bend. All this would have been acceptable to Chet, except for the mildly hollow cheeks and her expression. Those cheeks made her look mean, while her expression was intimidatingly brazen, like those he’d seen in photographic portraits of marine recruits.

  Chet wasn’t encouraged, especially when Jazz didn’t respond.

  “I th
ought maybe I’d introduce myself,” Chet said, trying to maintain nonchalance, which was difficult, considering her stare. The free weights were also bothering him, dragging down his shoulders. Chet had taken some heavy ones in the hope of impressing this well-muscled woman. Besides her nipples, he could even see her well-defined abs beneath her spandex.

  Jazz still did not respond. She didn’t even blink.

  “I’m Dr. Chet McGovern,” Chet added. He used his doctor status as a trump card in his approach to meeting women, although he never mentioned what kind of doctor unless pressed. In his dating experience, the medical-examiner role didn’t have the same cachet as that of a clinical physician.

  The situation was quickly becoming critical. Not only hadn’t Jazz said anything about his being a doctor, but also her expression had morphed from brazen to contemptuous. Chet tried to shrug but found it difficult with the free weights in his hands. Feeling desperate, he said: “I was hoping maybe, if you’re not too busy, we could have a drink or something at the bar when you’re finished with your workout.” Unfortunately, the pitch of his voice came out higher than even he expected.

  “Do me a favor, dickhead,” Jazz said venomously. “Buzz off!”

  What an ass!” Jazz thought as she watched Chet’s face fall after she cut him off at the knees with her acerbic remark. He then slunk away like a dog with his tail between his legs. She’d seen him in the body-sculpting class on Friday and again today. On both occasions, he had acted as if he thought he was being slick with his furtive glances in her direction. As if that wasn’t bad enough, today he’d followed her into the weight room, pestering her to death by watching her either in the mirror or out of the corner of his eye as she went through her routine, all the time pretending he was using the free weights so he could stay in relative proximity. He was such a pervert, and a dork to boot. She couldn’t believe anyone in his right mind would prostitute himself by wearing trendy workout clothes with designers’ names emblazoned across them. Polo! Good grief! In her mind, it was so tacky that it was gross.