How Do I Love Thee? (6 page)

‘My father was real,’ I went on, jabbing a froth-smeared spoon at Julia. ‘He left my poor mother in the lurch for a woman cricket umpire and now he’s a serial divorcee. My brother has already messed up one marriage because he bumped into a girl on the beach when he was surfing. Before I even dip a toe into reality again I want some good, solid facts about a man.’

‘Or at least avoid sportsmen,’ Julia murmured. She put her glass down suddenly. ‘Solid facts? Please tell me you won’t be pilfering used tissues and smeared wineglasses at Martin’s party.’ She studied me with suspicion. ‘You wouldn’t get Martin to do any surreptitious lab tests for you, would you?’

I protested too heartily. It had occurred to me, I confess. Martin probably did the odd test for friends. After all, he was part owner of the lab. ‘Of course not. That’s DNA theft. It goes on, of course, but I’m not about to risk my job. And no way could I talk Martin into doing something like that.’

Julia gave a shrug. ‘Oh, I think you could talk Martin into just about anything.’

I wondered if that was a judgement on Martin’s laid-back attitude or on my persuasive charm. ‘Anyway,’ I said, gulping my caffeine before it grew lukewarm. It was such a short distance between hot and lukewarm. ‘Now that I’ve seen Keith, I’d be disappointed in anyone else.’

‘You
haven’t
seen Keith, Cass.’ Julia was as earnest as I’d seen her. ‘You’ve seen a lab report called Keith.’

Her firm tone made me feel prickly. Julia had soothed me through the various stages of betrayal and the what’s-wrong-with-me? phase that still lingered. She’d shared champagne with me as I officially tore up the diagrams of my wedding dress, applauded the elevation of my Buffy DVDs (despised by Simon) from a box under the bed, to the living room.

She’d provided tissues at all the small endings that follow a big one. Like the discovery of a Simon-scented sweater left behind, and a note he’d scrawled on the back of an electricity bill and left for me when I’d been working late—‘Gone running. Lasagne in oven.’ The note finished with a heart and xxxx, which I’d supposed were kisses at the time. Julia had encouraged me to tear the note into fragments and to forget that Simon made a great lasagne. ‘You’ll find another man who has a way with pasta,’ she’d said at the time to make me laugh.

So I had expected her to show some enthusiasm today when I felt up-beat about something at last. And it
was
the monogamy gene, after all.

Stubbornly I pursued Keith’s merits. ‘He also tested high on intelligence and low on addictive behaviour,’ I said, getting down to the base of my coffee cup with the spoon as Julia gave all the signs of getting down to serious tactics.

‘Okay. So why’s he having his genetic profile done?’ She finished her coffee and checked off points on her elegant fingers. ‘One, he’s married or committed and checking out his genes before he and his wife-stroke-partner make a baby. Two, he’s trying to wriggle out of a paternity claim because he’s too generous-stroke-careless with his DNA. Or three, he’s got some horrendous family history of disease and needs to know how long he’s got before the rot sets in.’

She’d touched on the one thing that puzzled me. It was a very comprehensive kind of profile and nothing I’d seen at the lab could account for it. Still, I was no scientist and the genetic testing field was changing rapidly. ‘One and two, a paternity or hereditary test would be more specific and, three, he tests low on all the diseases that involve early mortality or oxygen tanks.’ I felt a glow of pride in my man.

‘Feel the romance,’ drawled Julia. ‘“Let me count the ways …”’ She gave a flourish with a hand made for poetic sarcasm.

My mood, always changeable these days, had required Julia’s amazement or consolation—something—to remain elevated. Now it nosedived. I made one last frugal sweep of the cup.

‘Life’s a bit like a cappuccino, when you think about it,’ I mourned. ‘You start off with a rich brew, all steam, chocolate on top, and mouth-watering aroma, then halfway down you
find it’s mostly froth and you end up avoiding the gritty bits on the bottom while you scrape at anything that looks like a fleck of chocolate.’

Julia sighed. ‘Cass, things will change. Trust me. I’m in fashion and I know.’ She scribbled some contact numbers on the back of her business card. She would be in Singapore and New Zealand for a month or so, working with designers and the factory on next year’s range. ‘Promise you’ll call or text me if you need to talk.’

She linked her arm with mine as we left.

‘Forget Mr AVPZ-whatever. He’s just another version of that well-known myth, Mr Right.’

‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘He couldn’t be the perfect man,’ she went on, giving Eros a pat as we passed. ‘There’s no way you could have a perfect man called
Keith
.’

‘He’s probably married, anyway.’

Julia gave my arm a comforting squeeze. ‘Yes, and with genes like that you’d never prise him away from his wife.’

Martin’s parties were legendary. He had inherited serious money from his mother and some dodgy genes from his father, who was a classic adventurer. That was a nice way of saying that his dad had run through millions breaking
world records kayaking on the Amazon and making hot-air balloon flights over cactus country.

What was amazing was that Martin, while doing his share of skiing, mountain climbing and diving, had successfully studied science and set up the lab. Martin, who was also tanned with a sculpted nose and a classic forehead, had occasionally been called the Playboy Prince of Proteins by his staff, but never to his face. He blew every stereotype of the scientist as dull, serious and absent-minded out of the water. I’d known him for more than a year, since I’d begun managing the lab office.

I looked around for him and saw him across the room—in a clinch with a girl I’d never seen before at any of his previous parties. There was always a girl-I’d-never-seen-before. I talked a while with a couple of people I knew, but my low mood must have shown because they melted away. One drink, I decided, and then I’d go home.

I had started on the second when Martin appeared by my side. ‘Cass, you look poetically sad but lovely.’

‘I shouldn’t really do the party thing,’ I told him, wondering how many women he’d called ‘lovely’ this evening. ‘I’m not really in the mood.’

‘That’s what parties are for,’ he said, with a smile. ‘To create good moods.’

‘For couples perhaps. For singles it’s to meet likely partners and I’m not into that.’

So why did I go to Martin’s parties? I used to come with Simon and now I turned up alone as a social failure. I gulped the remaining drink, wondering if Martin found me as pathetic as I felt. Maybe that’s why he kept inviting me. He felt sorry for me. I found that suddenly unbearable.

‘Give it time,’ he said. ‘You can’t get over a relationship in an instant.’

I smiled at that and searched out the girl-I’d-never-seen-before. ‘How would you know?’

He blinked and said lightly, ‘Must be instinct.’

‘Instinct,’ I said, with a snort worthy of Julia, ‘is very overrated. I’m going with evidence in future. As a scientist you’d have to agree with that.’

‘Evidence about—?’

‘About a man,’ I said, feeling the rush of alcohol as a wonderful light-headedness. ‘About a potential life-long mate. People put more research into buying a car than into their choice of partner.’

He grinned. ‘True. But sometimes we just know about another person the way we never can about a car.’

‘Come on, you can’t tell by looking if a man is a risk when it comes to gambling or cheating but you could get a clue from his genes. What about variant 334?’

Martin frowned. ‘What?’

‘The monogamy gene—AVPR1A without any variant 334.’ I enjoyed his surprise that I could say something scientific. ‘You can’t work in a lab office without picking up a thing or two and I do some reading in my spare time.’

‘Remind me to give you something without any media hype,’ he said dryly.

‘In fact the ideal man has just passed through your lab and across my desk.’ I sighed and tipped my glass for the few drops left in it.

‘What? Who?’ said Martin. He took my empty glass and bent to set it on a stone table.

‘Keith Farrar. What a profile. Evolution’s gift to women,’ I said to his back, sure he would laugh at the old lab joke.

Instead he straightened as if someone had inserted a steel rod in his spine. And his jaw. I’d never noticed how square his jaw was because it was rarely set in annoyance or whatever it was.

‘Oh!’ I realised why he was suddenly cast in bronze. I put my hand over my mouth. I had just committed the cardinal sin and named a test subject in a public place. ‘Sorry. Martin, I’m sorry. I don’t usually break confidentiality and talk about test results.’ I swallowed guiltily, thinking of my ramblings about Keith to Julia, albeit without disclosing
his surname. ‘Please don’t sack me,’ I said. ‘I love working for you and—’

‘And that’s what makes this—
Keith
—an ideal man?’ he interrupted. ‘No variant 334 on AVPR1A?’

‘Well,’ I said weakly, noticing that the confidentiality rule hadn’t induced him to lower his voice. ‘Not just that.
All
the indications were good—fantastic even, if you—’

‘And that’s all they are.’ He was curt. ‘Just indications, not guarantees.’

My loyalty to Keith was rekindled by this brusque dismissal. Would no-one share with me the beauty of his profile? ‘If you remember that profile though, you’d have to admit that he’d be hard to beat as a potential partner—from a woman’s point of view.’

‘That’s garbage, Cass,’ he said forcefully.

I didn’t know what to say. This was a Martin that I’d never seen. His face was averted, his jaw clenched. What had always appeared as dimples had morphed into clefts. Suddenly he turned back to me. ‘I need to straighten out some misconceptions you have about genes and behaviour, Cass.’ And he added almost as an afterthought, ‘Over dinner.’

Another bump in my heart rhythm. Relief, I suppose. ‘You’re not going to sack me, then?’

‘Friday night? I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty?’

I didn’t feel I could afford to argue on any point so I tamely said yes, and yes again.

I’d had dinner with Martin before. He liked talking about work over food, mainly because he worked through lunch and was ravenous by evening. His business account favoured an Italian place close by the lab, but this time we dined at an upmarket place with views of the Yarra River.

We talked about a lot of things.

What subjects was I choosing to paint in my spare time? Still life, because it had been too windy to paint on location.

What adrenaline sport was he pursuing at present? Parasailing, because the winds had been from the right direction. We laughed at that, and touched wineglasses.

He did as he promised and spent some time correcting my ‘misconceptions’ about Keith’s profile.

‘What you’ve seen is a
genotype
,’ he told me, turning his wineglass in a tight circle on the tabletop. ‘That’s the sum total of all the genes he has, okay? Some of them stay dormant in him but might pass on to his kids. See?’

I leaned my chin on my palm and paid attention. A jazz quartet played old popular classics. The restaurant was a throwback, too, beyond the current craze for marble, metal
and big, bare expanses of wall. It had carpet, fabric on the chairs, paintings on the walls and mellow lighting that lingered on Martin’s rather nice cheekbones and struck bronze highlights in his hair. His eyes were very dark blue.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘But his
phenotype
is what he actually is. For instance, he might have genes for blue
and
brown eyes in his genotype but the man you see, the phenotype, has brown eyes.’

‘Or blue,’ I said.

‘Possibly, depending on his parents’ eye-colour coding,’ he said seriously. ‘And depending on where and how he was raised, someone—
Keith
—’ he loaded the name with derision, then paused as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, ‘could be a deadbeat in spite of all those indicators you fancy. He might bet on horses, or gamble on the stock exchange with other people’s money. He could be drinking himself into an early grave. He could be a crook.’

‘Or a bad dresser,’ I teased. He really had it in for Keith. But then you would hardly expect a man to appreciate a near-perfect male genotype. It brought out the competitive male spirit.

‘I’m just making the point that a profile isn’t the person.’

‘I get it,’ I assured him, feeling a slight loosening of my attachment to Keith. ‘In spite of AVPR1A with no 334, Keith could be a rampant womaniser.’

Martin looked as if he was about to argue with that. But he looked down instead and spun his wineglass around a few times before he drank its remaining contents. We ate and finished the wine. We even danced. Not the energetic party stuff but slow and old fashioned while a vocalist sang about being romantic.

Martin smelled nice. I’d never been close enough to notice how nice. I closed my eyes to identify the different parts of his scent. Sea salt with a hint of lemon and matured cheddar with grapes … I love matured cheddar. I stifled a laugh at the comparison and felt obliged to say something when Martin held me a little away from him and conveyed inquiry.

‘Do you believe you can identify your ideal partner from their smell?’ I asked. For some reason I thought this was less embarrassing than telling him he smelled like a cheese platter.

He stared at me. ‘What?’

‘I’ve read that some labs specialise in matching up people by comparing their body odours. They send in their sweaty T-shirts and get them analysed to find out if—’

‘Cass, you’re looking for certainty. It doesn’t exist.’ He gathered me in a bit closer. ‘Let’s just dance.’