You Lost Me There Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  author’s note

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2010

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

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  (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Rosecrans Baldwin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baldwin, Rosecrans.

  You lost me there / Rosecrans Baldwin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18927-6

  1. Scientists—Fiction. 2. Widowers—Fiction. 3. Alzheimer’s disease—Research—Fiction.

  4. Memory—Fiction. 5. Marriage—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.A595415Y

  813’.6—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at

  the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or

  for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  to R .K .

  prologue

  The first night, obviously. Victor says it was love at first sight, but I was too tired that night to fall in love. It was after one of my little happenings. I remember I was exhausted, I wasn’t out to impress anybody. Then he came up with a drink and I thought, Well, he’s tall. The kind of guy who took himself seriously, straight out of Brooks Brothers, with pens in his breast pocket. Not at all my typical fan. But I could tell he wanted to kiss me. I made him want to kiss me. That was the whole idea.

  New York, August 1971. I was renting a studio on West Eighth Street, back when it was dingy. Men found it avant-garde, the exposed pipes, the working bathtub in the kitchen. Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place to listen to some Chicago blues records and drink whiskey sours (I only drank whiskey sours that year). I probably lit some incense and talked a big game. There was a point, I remember, when we discussed our favorite books. We had three in common—that seemed important. But he didn’t come on to me. I started to worry I’d read him wrong. Then he asked me, after one of those prolonged quiet moments (I never liked quiet moments), “So, what’s your secret?”

  He had this earnest, really lovely look on his face. His seriousness didn’t waver.

  “Deep down, what’s the one secret you don’t share with people?”

  “You first,” I said.

  After a second, he said, “I killed a friend of mine.”

  Not what I expected.

  “Recently?”

  “No, when I was a kid.” He sort of laughed. He wasn’t self-conscious, but it was a big deal. “When I was twelve. I’m not sure.”

  “Whether you killed him?”

  “He killed himself. But I could have stopped him.”

  Well, I scrambled to think of something. “I hit my mother one time. I punched her in the mouth.” After a beat, Victor said, “You might have something there,” and then both of us started laughing, just crazy laughter, and that was that.

  Normally I gave away my love in dribs and drabs, but not this time. As though I’d stumbled into a cause; perhaps not right for anybody else, but all mine.

  Sara’s handwriting covered both sides of the index card. She’d scribbled down to the last empty space. I put the card back where I’d found it on her desk, tucked into a book with dozens more.

  She might have written it just after our counseling appointment, sitting in her car while I pulled out of the parking lot.

  Weeks before California.

  Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that’s never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely.

  But I hadn’t brought this one up in thirty years. And Sara recalled that first evening perfectly: the movie, the music, the whiskey sours.

  What we said. How it felt.

  But I didn’t remember that we’d gone to a movie.

  I barely remembered that evening at all.

  one

  The ghosts of our research labs were old, clipped cartoons. Scientists treated them like Dead Sea Scrolls, as though nature’s mysteries were best explained by Far Side captions. Comic strips were the relics of investigative progress. Scientists more esteemed than myself were probably above such things (if ranked, I would have made varsity within the Alzheimer’s disease community, though not as a marquee player), but from Chicago to Cambridge, New York to Bar Harbor, I’d always carted along my favorites, particularly one that showed two scientists at a lab bench, one of them examining a fuming test tube, saying to the other, “What’s the opposite of ‘Eureka’?”

  The best summary I’d seen of a researcher’s daily life.

  My lab consisted of a half-dozen rooms on Maine’s Mount Desert Island at the Soborg Institute, a satellite campus for the state’s university system. My office’s eastern wall faced a faculty parking lot and featured three large windows, each of them blacked out by papers I was in the middle of editing (the better to see them with). The floor was a no-fly zone of archival boxes, FedEx envelopes, and stacks of journals. Sara used to say I worked in academia because OSHA would have banned my tidying habits from the private sector, but whatever I needed, I could find in twenty seconds.

  Sherlock Holmes once said, “A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” Perhaps my mind, like his, meandered. Other scientists were known for their impressive recall, but I preferred to rely on my judgment.

  Science in school was horrible, though, a boot camp of memorization drills, except with one teacher, Mrs. Gill. Her hero was Charles Darwin, the garden explorer. She taught us about species evolution by lugging in her own butterfly crates. Our task, she said, w
as to assemble the world, to develop wondering points of view, even in the grass around a baseball diamond. I remembered a moment from that year when I was standing at the end of my parents’ driveway while my friend Russell shot by on his bicycle, no hands, and I’d had an idea that seemed to make the trees shimmer: Was how I thought about things, the way things happened in my mind, the same as how Russell thought about things? If so, how could he ride no-hands when I was too scared? If not, then why not, and which one of us was the odd one out? What did it sound like inside his head? Was everyone’s consciousness different? Were all of us equally full of thoughts, or some more than others?

  I probably would have ended up reading Kierkegaard if there’d been a philosophy club, but instead there was Mrs. Gill’s biology class, dissecting cow brains. And if my career since hadn’t been Keplerian in magnitude, didn’t rival Mendel’s or Crick’s, at least it reflected a life spent pursuing what had interested me for as long as I could remember.

  Our lab’s subject was Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, we were trying to develop neuroprotective strategies for sufferers, aiming to help their neurons fight back against or even prevent the disease. Unfortunately, our success was measurable among peers, not the public. Alzheimer’s disease was still an excruciating illness for millions. It lacked a cure, and the popular spin on our genes as so many on and off switches didn’t help. “Which one is the Alzheimer’s gene? Which one causes cancer?” Even for experts, understanding gene expression was a shadows game, a spelunking mission where thousands of caverns were still dark. We simply didn’t know much about genetics, and the ways both scientists and civilians behaved with uncertain information had led to straw men popping up. This misconception that humans were so many toggles was to my mind the new phrenology, and scientists themselves were responsible for bad marketing and spreading rumors, attempting to explain our mysteries with little data.

  We certainly couldn’t map memory function to a switchboard. Riddles abounded. I couldn’t recall what I’d eaten for dinner the previous Sunday, but all the pretty girls from high school remained vividly in storage. Their figures, their hair color, their venomous voices.

  Just that afternoon, a week before I discovered the index cards on Sara’s desk, we’d wrapped up our Friday conference call and the team had cleared out, and I was checking my e-mail when my wife appeared: Sara the innocent, stepping out of the summer light to comfort a stranger. We were near San Juan, during a vacation in the seventies. We’d wandered a couple miles past the tourist beach and I was tired, but Sara wanted to keep walking. She left me in a concrete pavilion to catch my breath. I fanned my head for a few minutes. Far away, a young man was jogging toward her. I watched while he tripped in the sand, fell forward, and didn’t get up. Imagine, I remembered thinking, if he died, just like that. Sara, in a skimpy white bikini, ran to him and stopped to help. I was shielding my eyes when he grabbed her and pulled her down to the sand, as if ripping a shirt in half. I ran out, shouting threats. He looked up and saw me just as Sara kicked him in the stomach; he fell backward, then ran over a dune toward some apartment buildings. When I got there, I turned to give chase, but she stopped me with a look: all her fury redirected at the notion that I would leave her. As if by being a man, I couldn’t be trusted. That whatever genes were expressed in that boy had produced me, too, ready to stick my neck out.

  Thoughts popped up while I shut down my computer: Why that particular memory? Why that event and those feelings, and why at that precise moment?

  Questions like those were our lab’s bread and butter. They stayed with me on my drive to Regina’s house, at least halfway there, until other ideas took hold.

  Regina Bellette was a few years out of the University of Michigan with a double major in chemistry and poetry, soon to return to Ann Arbor for her Ph.D. As far as I was concerned, her best assets were her cheeks, two moon pies round and white. Who knows why they did it for me. Probably some association with the girls I remembered from my adolescence, those peach-cheeked chorus singers in the movies.

  Regina was a confident, contemporary woman who despaired of her time and place, a girl about town on an island of hikers. She had a crooked nose, curly hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Very little of it was to her liking. She bemoaned her athlete’s arms, the strong cord of her thighs. Regina had grown up on a dairy farm in Shelby, Michigan, the daughter of hippie scientists without a television in the living room. Their chores she escaped with books and magazines: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Vogue, Sassy. In Maine, Regina was a devotee of women’s fashion on a graduate student’s budget, particularly vintage pieces from the 1930s. I’d commented that she was showing signs of obsession, but secretly I admired all that thought put into beauty. Regina was simmering with ambition. She could be haughty, but not for long. She was quick to care and empathized reflexively, a headstrong girl of the midwestern mold and improving upon it: polite and grounded, but also willful, a tempest. Publicly modest but privately, in her bedroom’s half-light, more imaginative.

  “How do you afford them?” I asked one afternoon. I was lying on top of her comforter. A pair of shoes, poised in tissue, had caught my eye: two gold high heels studded with costume jewelry.

  “Chéri,” Regina said, and grabbed the box, plopped down next to me, and spun one shoe like a mobile above my chest, “it’s not about the having. It’s about the hunt.”

  Regina Bellette, my obsession, and one whom I regularly failed to please. Her rented house was on the outskirts of Otter Creek, one of Mount Desert Island’s smaller villages, with a year-round population approaching six. Not where you’d expect to find the great La Loulou, but then rarely in her bedroom did Regina seem her age. Instead, she was more like a Toulouse-Lautrec dancer transplanted to the sticks: innocence and worldliness slouching in a complex bustier. I never knew where Regina’s interest in burlesque had begun, but as a fellow researcher I admired her dedication to the data, to the vintage Hollywood fan magazines she printed off the Internet and studied closely.

  She was Barbara Stanwyck one week, Betty Grable the next.

  “Listen to this,” Regina said one night over the phone. “Straight from The Wall Street Journal, guess on average how much Parisian women spend on lingerie, what percentage of their clothing budgets?”

  “Five percent.”

  “Twenty-five percent. Chéri, why wasn’t I born in France?”

  But La Loulou was a role reserved for our secret Friday afternoons. The Regina I saw more often was at work. In 1936, a rich Danish immigrant, Søren Soborg, donated enough money to the State of Maine to seed a campus on Mount Desert Island, hoping to find a cure for his daughter, who had been blinded and deafened by a mysterious illness, later identified as osteopetrosis, marble bone disease. Over the years, The Soborg Institute broke ground in genetic science, particularly in gerontology, with an emphasis on Alzheimer’s disease. By the time I was being recruited from NYU, Soborg was setting pace with the field’s biggest leaps. Like the rest of academia, though, it hewed to certain standards of professor-student relations. On campus we pretended not to know each other. Regina didn’t work directly for me, but research fellows were occasionally shared between labs and they fell under our collective oversight. Incidents had occurred. Precedents had been diligently constructed by lawyers and administrators. I’d looked it up in the employees’ manual back in April: Any sexual relationship between instructors and students jeopardizes the integrity of the educational process by creating a conflict of interest and may lead to an inhospitable learning environment for other employees.

  But sex between us, I would have told my jury, was never as vital as La Loulou’s performance. Especially now that I’d lost my erection three times in as many weeks.

  It was dusk on a beautiful June Friday, warm and bright. I found Regina propped up on an elbow with her legs fanned out over the yellow duvet. Pouty and dressed in royal blue lace. The curtain was drawn, the lamp shaded with a scarf. After half an hour, we both ignored w
hat hadn’t occurred. Regina poured herself a glass of wine and slid away. Twilight snuck in through the window and brought the forest, the smell of thawing ground. I still had another appointment that evening, but I lay there in my underwear, staring at Regina’s ceiling.

  How many other men had occupied my place? Was there a Thursday date? One who could make love properly?

  On the wall was a poster of a young female singer dressed like a Japanese robot, her hair tied up in two buns. I reached out for Regina, but she snorted through her nose and scooted away, slurping her wine.

  “So how’s work?” she asked, crawling back.

  “Fine. You?”

  Truthfully I was thinking about that beach moment in Puerto Rico. I remembered feeling slow to the rescue.

  “Oh, please, come on,” Regina said, changing into an old T-shirt with “Kiss Me” scrawled on the front, promising “The Cure.”

  “What?”

  “At least complain about someone. You never talk.”

  “Maybe I’m not the gossip type.”

  “Aren’t you high on the hog.”

  Regina wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled. “Well, don’t you wonder what people say? Aren’t you curious?”

  “Believe me,” I said, “by now I am too old to care.”

  Regina stared at me as if she wanted to share something, then turned away. Not many women, I thought, can appear wise and naive simultaneously.

  “All right, what?”

  “Forget it.”

  She unclasped two barrettes and threw them at the wall, one at a time.

  “Well, what do you want to talk about?”

  “Oh, Christ. You know you sound—” She watched me for a minute while I dressed. “Chéri, the least you could have done was clean your wife beater.”

  “My what?”

  “Your wife beater.”

  “What’s a wife beater?”