“You’ll go to high school too,” he said. “So don’t worry.”
She looked up at his calmness. This was the first time he’d said that. “Oh, good.”
They stood watching the horse and the mountains beyond. “It’s really nice here.” His profile tilted, as he breathed in. Then he shrugged, an apology in movement. “It was a love affair. Family didn’t come into it.”
At least now he’d said she was family.
The Hard Way
Noah worked underground, at a desk with a window at street level, and seeing legs all day had made him a connoisseur. He liked smaller legs, refinement. And those men’s lace-up shoes women wore now with just bare legs were cute. The one thing Noah couldn’t stand on a woman was cowboy boots.
He recognized Mary and Jane as they passed above, Jane’s small hurrying steps to catch up, her mother’s good legs, unshaved and unproud, slamming into downtrodden sandals. Jane’s sneakers somehow stayed white and her turned-down socks perfectly even. He wondered where they were going, then Jane hurried into the lab, balancing a tall cake.
He was so happy somebody had remembered his birthday besides his family. And everyone in the lab, including Louise, would see. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” he teased, then realized from her face that he’d said exactly the wrong thing.
“I don’t go to school, Noah. I want to go, but they won’t let me.”
“I meant the good tutors. I hear you’re halfway through Middlemarch with them.”
Jane stamped her foot. “But I don’t like Middlemarch. All I get to do is old. The old math. Old reading.” As Jane set the tall cake on a counter, Mary whispered, “Is this an okay time?”
“Sure,” he said. “We’re just sitting around doing what we always do.”
“So this is a lab.” Jane tentatively walked towards a shelf of beakers, all containing transparent liquids. In addition to the standard laboratory benches, Noah’s lab included a fish room and, now, the fly alcove.
Just then, Olivia rushed in and handed him a wrapped book. “This is from Huck too. He’s in class.”
Mary bent over the cake, inserting candles. Men and women younger than she was slowly neared, awkward with their hands free, unhinged from equipment. The lab people were waiting, looking at her, and she hadn’t thought to bring forks. She didn’t even have a match to light her candles.
“Can I borrow a light?” she said. A young woman with white hair lit one of her candles on a Bunsen burner, and Mary used it to light the others.
“Make a wish, Noah,” Jane commanded. “A big one.”
“Wonder what he’s wishing for?” a lab woman said. Everyone laughed, as if they knew his wish.
“What?” Jane said.
“Results,” the white-haired woman mouthed to her.
They sang “Happy Birthday” and he blew out all the candles. The woman with white hair handed around rough brown paper towels, and everyone stood eating the cake. It didn’t seem much like a party, because people didn’t know what to say to each other. Several of them asked Jane what grade she was in.
“I’d be in seventh,” she mumbled, and that seemed to satisfy them.
For a while everyone was silent, eating the delicious cake. Mary and Jane and Noah each had two pieces. After the scientists finished, they went back to their benches and started working again.
“Noah.” Jane touched his shoulder. “I want to tell you something.”
Watching her daughter standing next to Noah’s chair, whispering in his ear, Mary felt, as she often did, that she shouldn’t be here. She had a vague suspicion that Noah tolerated her only to get to Jane. And while Jane had chattered happily as they baked, she didn’t think about the cake one second before, not like Mary, pushing a metal grocery cart at ten at night to buy baking soda, and shaking the wildflowers dry. Sliced, the cake was beautiful, lapidary, flecked with confetti color.
Jane was asking Noah to talk to her father about school. It was as if she understood that he’d helped Owens over some crucial hurdle with her before, a hurdle Owens himself no longer remembered and certainly hadn’t told her about. “Just try, okay?” she whispered. “I have a present for you. But don’t tell my mom.” She pressed the ring into his hand. “Look at it later.”
Olivia stood reading the bulletin board, where Noah hung copies of articles from recent journals. “Noah, you never went to that place in New York, did you?”
“Nope. I’m staying here.” He’d turned down two eastern job offers for no reason other than sanity. Things were set up enough for him here, and for his new ambition, beyond fish embryos or flies, it might help to stay put.
Olivia sighed. “I’m not going anywhere either, for a little while.” They both knew that she was staying for Owens, who was to her what science was to Noah.
“I’ll think about what you said,” Noah told Jane as she left. By the time they were gone, everyone was working again. And it had been hardly an hour.
Science didn’t seem like that much fun, Jane decided. They didn’t even get to wear lab coats.
Noah worked the rest of the morning on his fish embryos.
On birthdays, it was hard not to think about where he was and how far he’d come or not. He tried to concentrate on signal transduction, pathways, discerning the moment the cells had started becoming a brain.
In his small way, Noah had had a success too, and he was acutely aware of it. His mutation had earned him a measure of fame and gotten him the job here. At that time, he was one of the promising young scientists people were watching. And he liked his mutation personally, not only for what it brought him but for its closeness to the real mystery of knowledge, which ran the fine edge between matter and soul. Science now, however basic, pitched itself into the soap operas of disease and cure. Because, of course, that’s where the money was. But his success, however small, had not come easily. He’d worked relentlessly, morbidly. He believed he had to work harder than other people, and he figured that was okay, he could and would. But now he didn’t want to lose what he’d gained, and at the same time he recognized an expansion in his sensibility, an openness to the things of leisure and even, after the black-tie night, to clothes.
In this way, he supposed, the plots of his and Owens’ early careers were parallel, except, of course, that he still worried about money. Noah’s great-great-grandfather Josiah had brought the bees to California; and though bees had populated western skies ever since and Noah’s relatives considered honey to be a family contribution, the enterprise didn’t make him rich. Josiah’s brother came for the gold rush and never made his fortune either. There’d now been five generations of Kaskies who never got rich. Once, for a year, Noah’s father had taken night classes in landscape architecture, with the hope of changing careers. But it was too much money and too much time, and he resigned himself. He’d worked all his life as an insurance salesman, never liking it, loosening his tie with a sharp gesture when he came in the door at suppertime. He left ties on doorknobs, on the stairway banister, all over the house.
Maybe he’d end up like them, Noah thought, resting his head on his arm, listening to his blood tick. He wasn’t poor, but he wondered what he had to offer anybody. He’d been willing to throw his life away for the girl in college; she hadn’t wanted it, and no one had come close since.
To make matters worse, while Kaskie plugged along every day, two of his friends had up and got results. Rachel had become out-and-out famous. Her molecule, HLA, turned out to be important for organ transplants, and if there was any fairness, she probably had a chance for the Nobel Prize. It depended on how much of a pig her adviser tried to be.
Noah’s bench partner from graduate school, who was working on mice now at Caltech, had an article in this month’s Nature. At noon, Noah shut himself in his office and read it. When he finished, he threw up his arms and wheeled outside to announce to his students that the paper was brilliant, much better than what he was doing.
“You mean what we’re doing,”
Louise said dryly. “Let me see.” For once, he welcomed her skepticism and handed her the journal. Some days she looked quite plain to him, and other days, like today, she seemed almost beautiful. At least I’ve joined the world’s problems, he thought.
She edged herself into Noah’s office and closed the door. No other postdoc had ever done that; there was, after all, a meeting room. Since taking Louise to Owens’ party, he was pretty sure the others in the lab assumed she was his favorite. They might even think they were having an affair. He wasn’t sure how to stop it.
While Louise read, he decided to take a piece of cake upstairs to Rachel.
“Oh, no! I’m on a diet,” Rachel protested, beginning to eat. “My one leg is as big as your waist.”
Women, in Noah’s experience, were relentlessly self-deprecating about their bodies. How do you think I feel? he was thinking.
“While you’re here, let me get a curl.” Rachel came down every week or so, to harvest his hair. She claimed its texture was perfect for seeding crystals. “What are you doing to celebrate your birthday?”
“Work, probably.”
“You should go out. You look nice in your new clothes.” But there was a plaintiveness in her voice.
She knows I took someone else to the party, he thought. And she was right about the clothes. He’d bought two new pairs of trousers, three shirts and the first tie he’d ever owned. Today he was wearing mostly black. Thank God for the goddamn Gap—you could buy the same thing in any size from baby to giant. When he thought his worst about what he looked like, he pictured some Vietnam guys, wobbling in their chairs. But now he tried to think of a baby in a stroller. Some you saw looked dirty, food all over them; others were like miniature adults.
Kaskie thought he might need a new apartment too. He had some money in the bank. He’d been saving vaguely for years, and all of a sudden, he decided it was for precisely this.
There were two messages on the machine in his office. The first was from Owens, who sounded happy. “I have Olivia here in my arms,” he said, and Noah fast-forwarded.
“You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Julie Carradine’s. I’m calling because I have a thirteen-week-old baby who’s been diagnosed with Sillence Type Three O.I. And I was wondering if you might talk to me. My friends say it may help me to talk to somebody with O.I. who’s having a”—she paused—“a happy life.”
Noah jotted the woman’s number in pencil. He didn’t feel like calling her today but shoved the scrap of paper into his pants pocket. He was Type Four, but in the jumbled system of categories, that was better. And just being born had broken two of his ribs.
Louise walked in. “What’s this?” she said, pushing a letter from his desk at him.
Noah was endlessly behind on mail, invitations and conferences. This was a job offer he had no intention of considering, and one of the many things he wanted to improve about himself was how long it took him to say no. “Oh, that’s nothing real. Charlatans.”
“Lot of money for charlatans.”
“Charlatans are the only ones who have money.”
“What is the Miami Project?”
“Oh, some kid, a quarterback on a football team.” He didn’t like talking about this with her and didn’t realize until just now that there was a whole realm he talked about only with other disableds. “He was out playing one day and got a spinal cord injury. His father happened to be some millionaire, and on his deathbed he promised his son he’d make him walk again. So they have this big endowment and they hire all kinds of doctors and scientists, anybody whose stuff can be remotely construed as having anything to do with neural cells.”
“So they want you for signal receptors.”
“They want me because I’m a crip.”
“Kind of a touching story, the father and son.”
“It’s pretty controversial. I don’t consider it touching, actually. All this money just to make smoke, and meanwhile people wait ten or twenty years to walk again. There’s better things to spend your time on.”
“Was it ever a big deal for you to walk?”
“I used to try all the time. They had to strap me in chairs. I knocked out my four front baby teeth.”
“How old were you?”
“One, two. Whenever you started walking. It’s hard-wired into us, wanting to. I could never even stand for more than a second. I had too many fractures. But I liked the sensation, so I kept trying. Now I couldn’t tell you what it feels like.” But that was a lie. He did remember the teetering sensation, the breeze, the light fleeting moments before he fell again. It felt natural, the way being with the girl was in college. “For years, all I wanted was to walk. Now I’d trade it for knowing I could be a good—no, not just a good; walking’s something—a great scientist.”
“Just that?” She touched the point of his elbow. “Maybe that’s the trade that’s already been made for you.”
“I’ve still got scars from trying.” He thought to himself, And I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to shit in a bag.
The only real job he’d had before science was in the run-down place that put people into schools and jobs. People who worked there tended to be pretty impaired. The furniture was cheap and old, the walls scuffed with wheel marks. The paras hated the quads, the deaf hated the blind, and everyone disliked the DDs, who used to be called retarded. My agency days, Noah thought. I really should call them. He was a kind of hero at the center, but so was anyone with a halfway decent life.
And some of his friends there wouldn’t think so well of his hidden hope to marry out. There was always one couple married, a polio and a para, with their own kids.
One Sunday afternoon, he’d made chili for everybody. They ate by the back of the building, where the tall tomato plants smelled like weeds along the railroad in the dusk. He felt close to the people there, but he was luckier. He was an O.I., osteogenesis imperfecta. He had sensation, a working bladder and bowels. He had a good family. He could choose. For most of them, this was the only choice. It was funny, this center for mainstreaming. A lot of the people inside didn’t really believe in it, so they had their own everything. Dances for kids in chairs. Contests. Miss Wheelchair America. But Noah wanted to enter the regular contests. And win.
“Okay, this article your old friend wrote,” Louise said. “I don’t think it’s so amazing. He’s got a structure, but no one knows what the protein actually does. Did you read about about Bernie’s flies? ’Cause I think we can make some interesting hybrids. I’ll show you.”
“Wait. I’ve already made a library. You have a probe. It’s your job to find the one-in-a-million bacteria with the one plasmid I care about.”
“Before I start entering the lottery, could you at least look at these mutations?”
After an hour studying Louise’s hybrids, Noah felt optimistic. At the rate drosophila bred, they were bound to find at least the gene’s neighborhood before Christmas.
“Yoo-hoo,” Owens called into the lab.
Noah slapped at the fruit flies glittering at the edges of his curls—he’d have to live with them now—and decided to go for a walk with Owens.
Once outside, he asked how Exodus was doing. He was genuinely curious. According to a lab assistant whose cousin worked for Genesis, fresh juices were replaced every three days in the E Teams’ refrigerators, and expensive sushi and pasta were delivered late every night. When they chipped in for pizza at midnight, Noah’s students joked about defecting.
“I fired this guy,” Owens said, “and now he’s suing us for age discrimination. To tell the truth, until he served us papers, I’d never had any idea how old he was. But I’ve kind of always wanted to see a trial.”
Noah laughed, remembering that Owens hadn’t responded to the last three summonses he’d received for jury duty. Noah had once found them stacked on his kitchen counter; Owens had shrugged and claimed he was too busy. “How old is the guy?”
“He was forty-nine last year when he was fired, and n
ow he’s trying to say we’re all young. That was true once,” he said.
A yanking breath of cool air lured them to the open doors of the old church. Inside, girls were singing and playing hopscotch on the wide aisle. Jane was, at that very moment, bending to pick up the rock, but neither of them recognized her voice in the song, and they drifted down the street.
“You know,” Owens said, “I’ve been thinking: Love is very rare. We might just get one or two shots in a life. And if you blow those, that’s it.”
Listening to Owens talk about love was easier today. Noah might not have a girlfriend, but it occurred to him that he had at least some talent for love. He was constant. The last time he’d seen the girl in college, she’d left his house in the rain, tying a silvery coat at her waist. Her perfection remained, like a small portrait inside a locket, and she had been gone now for a very long time. In a way, he couldn’t blame Louise for not seeing him as sexual. The last thing he would fantasize about was a disabled person.
Owens looked at him intently. “I wonder if you and I will ever get married. That’s the million-dollar question.”
All of a sudden, Noah wanted to call the mother of the O.I. baby. He felt in his pocket for the number, but it wasn’t there. His mother had always said she’d had to learn how to touch him. One of her first hugs had fractured him. He’d have to search his desk drawers.
By the time he returned, though, Louise had the architecture for the experiment lined up. She’d called the purchasing department to put a rush order in with Sigma, the Sears catalogue of small molecules, and he forgot all about the mother.
At seven, Rachel stopped down to see if she could take him out to dinner. She’d obviously gone to the rest room, brushed her hair and put on mascara. But Noah had to tell the truth, that he was expected at his parents’ house for dinner and already late.
His sister was on the phone from Togo when he walked in. She told him about a guy she met there, bald with cancer, who’d put a personal ad in a Chicago newspaper. He had a girlfriend now, a blond actress.