You Lost Me There Read online

  In the shower, I thought about the night when Sara and I had seen The Last Boy Scout in New York. To me, the movie had been garbage, but Sara said she could watch Bruce Willis for hours, preferably bottomless, shot from the rear.

  Given Sara’s success in Hollywood, she’d probably had the chance.

  At lunch, I joined some other investigators for hamburgers and mutual despair. News of budget cuts was plaguing our in-boxes. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), all of our abbreviations were under attack by the administration’s budget decrees. It meant fewer research proposals would receive funding, fewer grants distributed, and more intense competition for federal dollars. Under normal circumstances, forty percent of grant applications were probably worth funding, and twenty percent made the cut (that twenty percent was called the pay line). During a budget-reduction phase, though, the pay line was cut in half. My own salary was partially covered by Soborg, but the rest came from whatever funds I could raise, a several-million-dollar patchwork covering me, most of my staff, our equipment, the necessary experts I brought in, and all our research.

  The mantra for any investigator was “keep the money flowing.” Unfortunately, it seemed as if the White House was trying to turn off the faucet. In particular, it meant the $2.5 million grant my lab had applied for and hoped to hear about soon was no longer so secure.

  It was less a fight than usual over who’d pick up the check.

  I walked the mile back to campus. Normally exercise was my mood stabilizer. I rose every morning around five, drank a cup of coffee, ate a bowl of cereal with blueberries, and swam exactly sixty laps at the university pool, enabling me to reach my desk by eight with a clear mind and enough energy to work steadily through the evening. But recently the effect wasn’t sticking. Though our standing and accomplishments should have been a comfort, only the work we’d do the next day mattered, and that relied on constant progress and new grants: to afford this piece of high-tech equipment, those bioinformatics. The pressure was difficult to bear. At the peak of my career as one of America’s top Alzheimer’s researchers, I spent most of my hours on my knees, soliciting money or formatting PowerPoint slides.

  Ahead of me, two boys were crossing the road, tan college men in flip-flops carrying hiking backpacks. They tossed a Frisbee between them. Half a mile from campus, and my knees hurt.

  But I’d come to Soborg from New York, seeking a second wind. Finally a shop of my own, away from my mentors. I didn’t so much run a lab as oversee a small business, a lug-nut factory, staffed by talented thirtysomethings who left me just when I’d brought them up to speed. It was the nature of the industry, same as during my own training: junior scientists were hired, brought into the fold, aided in their research, and just when they were doing their most cutting-edge work, they earned their cap and gown and moved on. I enjoyed seeing them grow in their work and respond to mentorship, but it was a human-resources nightmare. Recruitment alone took up a quarter of my time: interviewing, reviewing, trawling listservs for CVs. Those true moments of scientific pleasure, when you’re working on an experiment at two in the morning, blasting Bob Dylan, and you realize you’ve hit on something, that the experiment’s a success, and it dawns on you that because no one else has ever posed this question in quite the same way, you now know something that no one has known before—that’s when the blood’s pumping, and all the hours, all the sacrifices, assume a much larger value. Those moments were fewer in recent years.

  Instead, there were banquets to attend, too many banquets. Departmental politics, silent auctions, air travel to foreign conferences. And the environment was colder, less collegial. Colleagues were more frequently in other countries than down the hall. There were a few researchers remaining in our world who had their own lab and two technicians and they wrote their own grants and spent their days ruminating, but for the rest of us, we competed for bread rolls and roll-over funds, we worried about inflation, we got into bed with the wrong partners and had to get out again. It was mechanical and political, and it made accounting sound fun.

  Partially I blamed it on technology. I hadn’t signed up to become a computer programmer. Strong friendships had dwindled in the age of e-mail. Some colleagues had adjusted, but I knew many who refused to read their e-mail at all. Others asked assistants to print out their messages, passing along only ones deemed significant. Some got trapped in loops of responding to people who couldn’t compose logical sentences, and felt compelled to reply, “By saying that, did you mean this, or this, or that?” But we were dying out, those of us who felt encumbered by all the data. E-mail was necessary now that research was distributed globally and then published on the Internet, and my staff was comfortable in the new channels, thrived in them, and claimed that they improved their work. I didn’t say so, but I found it all isolating. Brain science as I practiced it meant studying mental processes in the context of a human’s experience of the natural world, not a virtual one. I longed to return to my graduate days in Chicago, working beside short Austrian men in three-piece suits. Back when our mysteries demanded magnification and the axons of giant squid, not Microsoft Outlook.

  As a full professor at fifty-eight, a tenured graybeard at Soborg’s Aging Research Center, I was to be a master of memory, an expert at our mechanisms for retaining information. And half the time I couldn’t remember the log-in password for my own computer.

  After lunch, I spent an hour reading e-mails, then settled down for an afternoon of grant review. But I couldn’t focus. In the glare of my desk lamp, a vision of youth and lingerie intruded. I could easily dial Regina’s extension. The risks of our affair were gigantic, they might cost me the legacy of my career. But excitement lingered.

  I put my hand over the keypad and noticed the voice-mail light blinking.

  “Victor, it’s Russell. Look, I’ll be in Boston Friday, thought maybe you could put me up for the weekend. Let me know. Oh, and I had a question: What was that restaurant we went to last time, you knew the guy? I think I saw something about him in the paper, figured maybe I could fit in some business. Anyway, call me, dearie, hugs and kisses. And Connie would say she misses you, except she only instant-messages. She has dreadlocks. My daughter the Jamaican, believe you me. Ciao.”

  Russell Caratti, wine dealer, womanizer, I’d known since we were kids. He was my closest friend, by that point probably my last remaining one outside the lab. My schedule didn’t allow for much of a social life. Connie was Russell’s daughter from an earlier marriage, also my goddaughter. Her real name was Cornelia, but Russell insisted on calling her Connie, to spite his ex-wife, who’d named her at the hospital.

  It reminded me, I still needed to thank Russell for his birthday present, an unopened case of wine in my garage.

  My associate director, Lucy, walked in without knocking.

  “If you are not busy at the moment.”

  “I’m yours.”

  “Well, this is potentially groundbreaking,” Lucy said, swinging in, her voice sounding hoarse. “In the big scheme of things?”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “What’s your expertise on dating?”

  I laughed. I’d been expecting a conversation about genetic mechanisms. “What are we talking about?”

  “Say we swim upstream. So, what was your line before you met Sara? For picking up girls. Courting, they would have called it.”

  “You know, I don’t think I had one.”

  Lucy unlatched her watch, some heavy global-positioning machinery, and set it on the coffee table. She’d recently taken up mountaineering.

  “I picture you sweating.”

  “Interesting.”

  “How many, would you estimate?”

  “What?”

  “Women. Dates.” Lucy paused, scanned the room, and pushed her hair back with two hands. “So I would like you to surgically remove my head. Whatever skills you’ve picked up.
Actually, know what, forget it, I’ll work this one out on my own.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lucy collapsed lightly on my couch.

  Lucy Sejung Park was in her early forties, a Ph.D. and senior scientist, my longest-serving employee. She was also my co-principal investigator, a heavy-lidded workhorse who rarely left campus. Lucy was demanding, reliable, quick-witted, and born caffeinated. Generous and considerate to her coworkers, a gifted researcher, but also caustic and sarcastic, the office gossip, and easily wounded when her defenses were down. Neither scientist-as-wonk nor a madcap genius cliché, Lucy was a second-generation Korean-American from Newark who liked horror movies. She was five-seven, with a marathoner’s figure; a health nut; a body-as-a-temple type. Lucy was permanently agitating toward becoming someone new, one of those people who never completely graduated from adolescence. When she did leave the lab, it was usually to train for whatever new sport she’d picked up that season, pursuing it to an expert’s level before abandoning it for something else. Over the winter she’d started rock climbing and gotten a double-helix tattoo on her left biceps, which she liked to show off when we were interviewing job candidates. As far as I’d seen, she kept few friends. Her love life was shaky. She had all the aptitudes necessary for complex analysis, for competing in triathlons or playing violin, just not for human relationships.

  As coworkers, though, we had an unusually close bond, and one I treasured. Lucy was my vault, my institutional memory. No one else had worked for me so long or knew me better. New hires were always surprised by how we teased each other, which some around Soborg found off-putting, even flirtatious. But Lucy was a daughter to me. Technically she was under my direction, though she had earned a high level of autonomy and ran her own projects. Her name someday would be better known than mine, especially if her most recent experiments played out.

  Our work at that point concentrated on isolating the protein fragments that nurtured brain cells. The hope was that we could prevent the loss of brain function caused by Alzheimer’s with a medication based on those isolated pieces. But we were a long distance from our goal, and we’d run into a problem: the fragment we’d isolated was obese. On a molecular level, the resulting drug would be too large to pass through the fine mesh of a human’s blood-brain barrier.

  Basically, our pill could work, but it was too big at the moment for the brain to swallow.

  Lucy, on the other hand, had struck a eureka moment the previous autumn in her own research. The current thinking in the Alzheimer’s community held the disease to be caused by a knotty protein called Abeta. Because Abeta was sufficiently complicated, we assumed there to be multiple and complex Abeta mechanisms involved in causing Alzheimer’s. But Lucy had isolated a single mechanism, a sole receptor in mice that prevented them from developing the disease. Treating Alzheimer’s therefore could become relatively simple: Design a drug that would block the identified mechanism, and all would be well. Since then, Lucy and her technicians were pulling all hours, figuring out exactly how such a drug would work. For that type of achievement, though, whether or not it panned out, Lucy deserved her own lab, her own glory. But she’d yet to show any interest in establishing herself. When I’d moved north from New York, NYU had said they’d find her space if she locked down a grant. Instead, Lucy packed up and drove to Maine.

  Also, Lucy had known Sara. They hadn’t been close, but friendly enough. And no one had been more supportive after the accident, no one more hands-off.

  “Fine, try me,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, attempting to block out an image of Regina dancing. “But tell me it’s not Deke.”

  “Deke?”

  Deke was Lucy’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, a radiologist at Maine Coast Memorial Hospital. He’d proposed to her back in January, without success.

  She laughed lightly with a scratchy voice, humorlessly. “No, it is not Deke. Enter Terry, stage left.”

  “Tell me about Terry.”

  “Terry is a senior-grade ranger with the Acadia park service. He has a name tag that will explain this to you. He is thirty-seven. I met him online three weeks ago. Turns out, Terry is a musician of considerably mediocre talent. Also, he has a lip ring.”

  I laughed. “Very interesting.”

  “No, because Terry is neutered, except he’s able to compose twenty songs about his ex-girlfriend.” Lucy picked through a bowl of cashews. “‘Amy slim as grass, sweet as cream,’ that’s one of his lyrics, about Amy the perfect girlfriend until she left him for some ski bum in Idaho. Now Terry plays the orphaned lover anytime there’s an open-mic night. How do I know? Because that was our first date: an evening featuring Terry and his guitar, and all the chai tea I felt like buying for myself.”

  “There won’t be a second date.”

  “He has a song called ‘O Death.’ Victor, tell that to your mother, next time she calls wondering when you’ll be married.” Lucy stood up and stretched her hamstrings. “So, what about you, how are you, I haven’t seen you all day. You talk to that guy from Chemistry yet?”

  “Me, with a dozen evaluations to complete?”

  You try not getting an erection, I wanted to say.

  “Fine, run your scorecards,” Lucy said. “You know, for a genetic sample, the middle-class single male? This could be a fire sale for research. I mean, as a consortium, progressing from Neanderthal to, what, passive-aggressive North American. You should see Terry’s MySpace page, it’s like an Elliott Smith memorial.”

  Lucy picked up her watch.

  “Tell you what, I will leave you to your assessments. Some of us have real work to muddle through.”

  A minute later, I heard her on the phone in the hallway, bawling out Soborg’s IT department about another PC on the fritz.

  Gradually the rest of the team left, and Lucy and I ordered pizza and revisited our recent grant. The application had already been submitted, but considering the new budget cuts, we wanted to amend a few pages. Around eleven I called Russell and left him a message saying he was welcome to visit for the weekend. At one in the morning, we smelled chimneys from the parking lot. Bar Harbor was quiet. The mountains behind us were transformed by clouds into pillars of black salt. And suddenly there was Regina. Under the phosphorus lights, wearing a puffy down vest, walking to her car beside an older woman on crutches, her lab director, the two of them laughing in conversation. Regina as the opposite of La Loulou: a modest acolyte in glasses, striding by her director’s side, jogging to reach the car first, to unlock and open the door and sweep her arm out, fully stretched, like a valet’s, my Regina, the amicable junior scientist, leaving work after a long day’s slog.

  But actually not mine at all.

  “The young ones always are eager,” said Lucy in my ear.

  Regina was startled to see me, but she masked it. Her large eyes didn’t change, except to intensify behind her glasses. Not here, they messaged to me silently across the parking lot. She rapped her knuckles on her boss’s window and I kept walking.

  Why not just call it what it is? I watched through my windshield, listening to Ravel, as Regina waved good-bye to her boss.

  I turned the key, but left the headlights dark. The other cars pulled out and drove away. I put in a Schumann CD, his Piano Concerto in A Minor. It had been a favorite of my mother’s: my mother, for whom music supplied the passion lacking in her marriage.

  Regina: now somewhere driving, heading home, listening to Japanese robot rap. What did we have besides a standing sex date? One no longer involving sex, that wasn’t quite so eager? A few telephone calls where I rarely spoke?

  No wonder she wasn’t sure if I cared.

  I shifted into reverse, then a secret cave opened inside my chest, and I was about to cry. I re-parked the car. My body went liquid. I punched the steering wheel. There was nothing I could do. By that point I knew what to expect: the comic waves of sobs, a pit in my stomach, and the craven hope that no one had seen me.

  The first episode had s
truck in February, two months before I met Regina, the morning of my birthday: fifty-eight, lying in bed in tears.

  Pathetic.

  Night frogs were still singing at three in the morning. I pulled on sweatpants, uncorked one of Russell’s bottles, and returned to the music room, where I slept most nights. From floor to ceiling, I had a wall of records, LPs I’d collected since high school and stored in pristine condition, plus a few thousand CDs and a couple of old cassettes. As a boy I’d hoarded bugs, toy metal soldiers, postcards from foreign capitals. Perhaps scientists were necessarily collectors first: Darwin with his favorite beetle, Fleming with his bacteria. I considered Schumann again, but picked Graceland. Better Paul Simon to treat my insomnia than a composer who’d been kept awake by visions of his own concertos.

  When Sara and I met, she’d never seen a stereo receiver that cost more than a car. Nor had I, except in audiophile magazines that promised pleasures like I’d never experienced, which became a party joke of Sara’s, whether I preferred aural to oral.

  Certain memories persist.

  In 1971, I was pursuing my graduate work in New York and not much else. I swam at the university pool in the morning, worked through the night, returned late to my apartment, and played records until I fell asleep. Pretty much the same schedule I’d keep for thirty years. Sara at the time was much more active. She had a circle of friends and lovers downtown whom she saw in the evenings, the most out-there individuals from New York’s avant-garde. For a day job, Sara was a copy editor at Macy’s, fleshing out the circulars. The first time I saw her, it was in the men’s department. She floored me. I was trying on a marked-down blue plaid jacket when Sara walked by with a girlfriend and said in my direction, “’It’s tough to match plaid.” But she stopped. Perhaps she felt bad about the comment. She was wearing cowboy boots and a buckskin jacket, her hair fell straight down, the blackest black. She was beautiful, like Joan Baez, with olive-colored skin and dark eyes tuned to an intense focus. She hesitated, about to say something, then thought better of it, and reached out and slid a flyer into my jacket’s right hip pocket.