The Immortalists

  “Frida,” repeats Varya, louder now, but soothingly. “Stop, Frida—please.”

  When the monkey hears Varya’s voice, she turns her face to one side. In profile, her eyelid is glossy and lavender, her mouth an open half-moon. Then she grimaces. Slowly, she turns, but when she comes to face Varya, she does not stop: she continues to rotate, favoring her right limb, dragging the left. Two weeks ago, she bit her left thigh so badly it required stitches.

  How did it happen? When Frida was young, she had more zest than any of the other monkeys. She could be Machiavellian in her social behavior, forging strategic alliances and stealing the more submissive animals’ food, but she was also charming and impossibly curious. She loved to be held: she reached through the bars for Varya’s waist, and Varya would occasionally let Frida out and carry her around the vivarium on one hip. The experience of being so close to her made Varya feel both frightened and ecstatic—frightened because of the fact of Frida’s contamination, and ecstatic because Varya could briefly, through layers of protective clothing, feel what it was like to be close to another animal, to be an animal herself.

  A knock on the door. Johanna, Varya thinks, or Annie, though Annie rarely comes to the lab on weekends. Like Varya, she is both childless and unmarried. At thirty-seven, it’s hardly too late, but Annie does not want these things. “I lack for nothing,” she said once, and Varya believed her. Annie’s populous Korean American family lives just over the bridge. She seems always to have a lover—sometimes male, sometimes female—and she executes these liaisons with the same confidence she does her research. Varya feels a motherly appreciation for Annie, as well as a motherly envy. Annie is the kind of woman Varya hoped to be: the kind who makes unconventional choices, and who is satisfied by them.

  The knock comes again. “Johanna?” calls Varya, rising to open the door.

  But the person who faces her is Luke. His hair is tangled, dark with grease. His lips are chapped, and his face has a strange yellow cast. He wears the same clothes he did the day before. He must have slept in them, too. The sheet of calm Varya assembled this afternoon cracks down the center and falls.

  “What,” she says, “are you doing here?”

  “Clyde let me in.” Luke blinks. One of his hands is still on the doorknob, and the other, she sees, is trembling. “I need to talk to you.”

  Frida has turned to face the wall and resumed her rocking. Varya hates her rocking, and she hates that Luke is here to see it. She turns away from him to lock the door of the isolation chamber. The process takes no more than two seconds, but before she is finished she hears a dull click and seizes. By the time she whips back to face him, he is stuffing his camera back in his bag.

  “Give that to me,” she says, savagely.

  “No,” says Luke, but his voice is small, like a young boy with a treasured belonging.

  “No? You weren’t authorized to take that photo. I’ll sue you.”

  Luke’s face is filled not with the professional glee she expected but with fear. He clutches the backpack.

  “You’re not a journalist,” Varya says. Her dread is acute, it is ringing. She thinks of the marmosets’ alarm calls. “Who are you?”

  But he does not answer. He is fixed in the doorway, his body so still it would be statuesque if not for the still-quaking left hand.

  “I’ll call the police,” she says.

  “Don’t,” says Luke. “I—”

  But he does not finish, and in that pause a thought rises in Varya unbidden. Let it be benign, she thinks, let it be benign, as if she is staring at the X-ray of a tumor and not into the face of an utter stranger.

  “You named me Solomon,” he says.

  And the pitch into darkness. At first she feels confusion: How? It isn’t possible. I would have known. Then the full impact, the flattening. Her vision smears.

  For she stopped outside the Bleecker Street Planned Parenthood, those twenty-six years ago, and stood rooted to the ground as if by lightning. It was early February, dark and freezing at three thirty, but Varya’s body seared. Inside her was an unfamiliar flutter. She looked at the flatiron building in which the clinic was housed and wondered what would happen if she did not quash that flutter. She could make the choice she had planned to make; her life could continue on as it had been before the aberration and so remain symmetrical. Instead, she unbuttoned her coat to a flush of cold air. And then she turned around.

  34.

  She stumbles out of the vivarium and takes the stairs to the first floor. Through the lobby she runs, past Clyde, who stands to ask if she’s all right, and out onto the mountain. She does not care that Luke is inside unsupervised; she wants only to get away from him. The rain has cleared to reveal sun so bright her eyes burn. She walks toward the parking lot as fast as she can without attracting attention, not wanting to waste the time it would take to grab her sunglasses, because she can hear that Luke is following her.

  “Varya,” he calls, but she does not stop. “Varya!”

  Because he has shouted, she turns. “Keep your voice down. This is my workplace.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Luke, panting.

  “How dare you. How dare you trick me. How dare you do it in the lab, my lab.”

  “You would never have talked with me otherwise.” Luke’s voice is strangely high in pitch, and Varya sees that he is trying not to cry.

  She laughs, a bark. “I won’t talk with you now.”

  “You will.” A cloud passes across the sun, and in the new, steely light, he steadies. “Or I’ll sell the photos.”

  “To whom?”

  “To PETA.”

  Varya stares. She thinks of the notion of having the wind knocked out of you, but that isn’t right: it has not been knocked but suctioned.

  “But Annie,” she says. “Annie checked your references.”

  “I had my roommate pose as a Chronicle editor. She knew how badly I wanted to meet you.”

  “We adhere to the strictest ethical standards,” says Varya. Her voice is brittle with useless rage.

  “Maybe so. But Frida wasn’t doing very well.”

  They stand halfway down the mountain. Behind them, two postdocs walk toward the main facility, eating forkfuls of takeout.

  “You’re blackmailing me,” says Varya, when she is able to speak again.

  “I didn’t want to. But it took years to figure out who you were. The agency was no help at all, they knew you didn’t want to be found, and all my records were sealed. I spent everything I had on a trip to New York and I pored over the birth certificates at the county courthouse for—for weeks. I knew my birthday but not which hospital you’d gone to, and when I found you, when I finally found you, I couldn’t—”

  It comes out in a rush and now he inhales deeply. Then he sees her face. He swings his backpack around to reach inside and emerges with a folded piece of white cloth.

  “Hanky,” he says. “You’re crying.”

  She had not noticed. “You carry a handkerchief?”

  “It was my brother’s, and our dad’s before that. Their initials are the same.” He shows her the tiny embroidered lettering, and then he sees her pause. “It’s clean. I haven’t used it since the last time I washed it, and I always wash it in hot water.”

  His voice is confidential. She knows then that he has seen her as she is, in the way she does not want to be seen, and she swells with shame.

  “The thing is I have it, too,” Luke says. “I noticed it in you right away. Mine doesn’t have to do with contamination, though. I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone—that I’ll kill them accidentally.”

  Varya takes the handkerchief and wipes her face, and when she emerges she thinks of what Luke said—that I’ll kill them accidentally—and laughs until he joins in and she begins to cry again, because she understands exactly what he means.

  • • •


  She drives to her condominium in silence while Luke follows behind. As she climbs the stairs, she hears his footsteps behind her, feels the weight of his body, and her stomach wedges in her throat. She rarely brings anyone into her condo, and if she’d known he was coming she would have readied it. But there is no time for that now, so she flicks on the lights and watches as he takes it in.

  The condo is small. Its decoration is a balancing act that aims to reduce her anxiety as much as possible. She chose pieces that both enhance and obstruct visibility: her couch is leather, for example, dark enough that she can’t see every speck of fuzz or dirt, but smooth enough that—unlike a nubbly, patterned fabric—she can easily skim it for anything egregious before sitting down. Her sheets are a dull charcoal for the same reason; the white sheets in hotels are so bare a canvas that she nears hysterics every time she checks the beds. The walls are devoid of artwork, the tables without linens and so easier to clean. The drapes are drawn, as they always are, even during the day.

  Not until she sees the condo through Luke’s eyes does she remember how dark it is, and how ugly. The furniture is not aesthetically pleasing, because she does not choose it for aesthetic reasons. And if she did? She hardly knows what her taste would be, though once she passed a shop in Mill Valley that specialized in Scandinavian décor and saw a dove-gray sofa with rectangular pillows and slender, walnut legs. She stared for thirty seconds, a minute, before she remembered that the fabric would be terrible to clean, that she would be able to see every hair and stain, and that, most of all, it would be grossly painful to get rid of it if she ever became convinced of its filth.

  “Can I get you something?” she asks. “Tea?”

  Tea is fine, Luke tells her, and sits on the couch to wait for her, dropping his backpack at his feet. When she returns with two mugs and a ceramic pot of Genmaicha, he has his knees pressed together and the tape recorder in his lap.

  “Can I record us?” he asks. “So I can remember this. I don’t think I’ll see you again.”

  He knows the trade-off he has made; so he accepts it. He has caught her and will make her speak but has earned her resentment in return. Still, she has made a bargain, too: she chose to be his mother, and so she’ll answer him.

  “Okay.” Her face is dry and the fury she felt at the lab has been replaced, for the moment, by resignation. She is reminded of the monkeys, the ones who have screamed themselves hoarse and give their bodies over to be studied with vacant acceptance.

  “Thank you.” Luke’s gratitude is genuine: she can feel it reaching for her, and looks away. “Where and when was I born?”

  “Mount Sinai Beth Israel; August 11th, 1984. It was eleven thirty-two in the morning. You didn’t know that?”

  “I did. Just checking your memory.”

  She brings the mug to her mouth, but the tea is scalding, and her eyes water.

  “No more tricks,” she says. “You’ve asked for my honesty. I deserve yours in return. You don’t have to be suspicious of me; you don’t have to try to catch me in a lie. I could not forget this—any of this—if I spent my life trying.”

  “Fair enough.” Luke’s gaze drops. “I won’t, anymore. Forgive me.” When he looks at her again, his cockiness has been peeled away. What remains is sheepish, shy. “What was it like, that day?”

  “The day you were born? It was sweltering. The window of my room looked out over Stuyvesant Square, and I could see women walking by, women my age, in cutoffs and crop tops, like it was still the seventies. I was enormous. I had a rash down my front and sweat in every possible crevice. My feet had swelled so much I wore slippers in the cab to the airport.”

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “My mother. She was the only one I told.”

  Gertie by her side, murmuring. Gertie with a washcloth and a bucket of ice water; Gertie who bellowed at the nurses every time the air conditioner stopped working. Gertie, who has kept her secret all these years. “Mama,” said Varya, wildly, after she gave the baby over. “I can’t talk about this again, not ever,” and since that day Gertie has not raised the subject. All the same, they talk about it constantly: for years, it was the lining to every conversation, it was a weight they carried heavily in tandem.

  “What about the father?”

  She notices that he says “the father” instead of “my father,” which relieves her. She does not want him to think of the professor that way.

  “He never knew.” She blows on her tea. “He was a visiting professor at NYU. I was in my first year of graduate school, and that fall, I took his class. We slept together a couple of times before he said he thought we shouldn’t. By the time I realized I was pregnant it was early January, the winter holiday, and he’d flown back to the UK, though I didn’t know that then. I called him over and over—first at the department and then at the number they gave me for his office in Edinburgh. In the beginning I left messages, and then I tried not leaving them. It wasn’t that I was in love with him. I wasn’t, not anymore. But I wanted to give him a chance to raise you, if he wanted to. Finally I understood he didn’t deserve it, and that was when I stopped calling.”

  Luke’s face is constricted, his throat ridged with veins. How did she not recognize him? She has imagined it—coming face-to-face with a strange but familiar man in an airport or a grocery store—and thought an animal awareness would rise within her, some sense memory of the nine months they shared a body and the breathtaking, anguished forty-eight hours that followed. She would not have been surprised to hear her pelvis shattered during the birth, but it had not: her experience was utterly normal, the birth so routine a nurse said it boded well for Varya’s second. But Varya knew there would not be a second and so she clutched the tiny human, her biological son, and said goodbye not just to him but to the part of her that had been brave enough to love a man who thought so little of her and carry a child she knew she would not keep.

  Luke takes off his shoes and brings his socked feet to the sofa. Then he wraps his arms around them, letting his chin rest on his knees. “What was I like?”

  “You had a shiny pelt of black hair, like an otter, or a punk kid. Your eyes were blue, but the nurses said they might turn brown—which, of course, they did.” Varya kept this in mind when she scanned sidewalks and subway cars and the background faces in other people’s photos, looking for the blue- or brown-eyed child that had been hers. “You were sensitive. When you got overstimulated, you shut your eyes and pressed your hands together. We thought you looked like a monk, my mother and I, annoyed and trying very hard to pray.”

  “Black hair.” Luke smiles. “And blue eyes. It’s no wonder you didn’t know who I was.” Outside the window, it is six o’clock and drizzling, the sky a luminous periwinkle. “Did your mom want you to give me up?”

  “God, no. We fought about it. Our family had been through a lot of loss. My father died, very suddenly, when I was in college. And two years before you were born, Simon died of AIDS. She wanted me to keep you.”

  Varya had her own apartment by then, a studio near the university, but during the pregnancy, she often slept at 72 Clinton. Sometimes she argued with Gertie past midnight, but she still went to bed in her old top bunk. Ten minutes or two hours later, Gertie joined her, taking the bottom bunk that Daniel used to occupy instead of her own bed down the hall. In the mornings she stood on the bottom rung of the ladder to brush the hair away from Varya’s face and kiss her fatly on the forehead.

  “So why didn’t you?” asked Luke.

  Once, while driving through Wisconsin in the depth of summer—she was en route from a conference in Chicago to a second conference in Madison—Varya stopped to stand knee-high in Devil’s Lake. She was desperate to cool off, but the water was warm, and dozens of tiny minnows began to peck at her ankles and feet. For a moment, she could not move; she stood in the sand, so full of feeling she thought she might burst. Of what feeling, exactly? The un
bearable ecstasy of proximity, of symbiotic exchange.

  “I was afraid,” she says. “Of all the things that can go wrong when people are attached to each other.”

  Luke pauses. “You could have gotten an abortion.”

  “I could have. I made an appointment. But I couldn’t do it.”

  “For religious reasons?”

  “No. I felt—” But here her voice becomes rough and drops off. She picks up her mug and drinks until her throat relaxes. “It’s as though I was trying to compensate—for the fact that I was inward. For the fact that I didn’t engage in life, not fully. I thought—I hoped—you would.”

  How had she been able to do it? Because she thought of them: Simon and Saul, Klara and Daniel and Gertie. She thought of them in her second trimester, when she was often disabled by panic, and during her third, when she felt huge as a walrus and peed more than she slept. She thought of them with every push. She held them in her mind so that she could feel nothing else—she loved them and loved them until they disarmed her, made her strong and broke her open, gave her powers she did not normally have.

  But she could not sustain it. As she rode home from the hospital with her arms folded over her stomach, she wondered what kind of a person she was to give up a child for no better reason than her own fearfulness. The answer came to her immediately: the kind of person who did not deserve that child. Her body, which had been full to bursting with life, which had burst with life, was now hollow, the way it had been before—the way it had always been. At this she felt sorrow but also relief, and the relief inspired such self-loathing that she knew she was right. She could not bear that kind of life: dangerous, fleshy, full of love so painful it took her breath away.

  “So what’s happened since then?” asks Luke.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you have another kid? Did you ever get married?”

  Varya shakes her head.

  He frowns, puzzled. “Are you gay?”