Jennifer Haigh (43 page)

"Who the fuck is this?'

The man got up slowly. He was bigger than Scott, but oddly graceful.

"This is Benji," Penny said.

"Benji," Scott repeated.

"From Idaho," Penny said."Benji, my brother."

Life prepared you for certain calamities. With practice, it was possible to condition oneself for loss, abandonment, failures of every stripe. Scott had been arrested and insulted, suspended and fired and put on probation, cold-cocked and sucker-punched and kicked in the groin. His sanguine nature had been beaten out of him; from Concord to Pearse to Stirling to California, he'd left a sticky trail.

He'd believed himself inoculated against disappointment, readier than most to meet the maimed gaze of ruin. He believed this right up to the moment when Penny told him she was in love with her brother.

"Stepbrother," she corrected, flushing mightily. The flush reminded Scott of a time years ago, sleeping beside her on a secluded beach in Baja, stoned on new love. They had awakened with wicked sunburns, their bodies filled with strange heat.

"I was going to tell you," said his wife in the sheer panties that hid nothing."Soon. I just didn't know how."

Scott was familiar with this problem.

"How did this happen?" he asked calmly, as though he and Penny were chatting over coffee. He was showing polite interest in his wife's activities, the useful errands that filled her day. He did not look at the guy, the denim presence behind her. Under no circumstances would Scott meet his eyes.

"I was in a chat room one day, and Benji found me. My screenname is PennyCherry," she explained. "And he thought, you know, how many could there be?"

Scott nodded thoughtfully, grasping too late the value of the patriarchal tradition, why for centuries women had taken their husbands' names. To guard their virtue in online chat rooms. To keep away horny long-lost stepbrothers, lovelorn since childhood, lying in wait.

"So he found you," Scott said encouragingly. Sunlight bled through his daughter's pink curtains. He felt as though he'd wandered into a lung.

"Yeah. And we started chatting, and then the phone. Then last month he came out here."

"Last
month
?"

"When you were on the island," she said. "How long ago was that?"

"Twenty-four days," said Scott, who'd recently done the arithmetic. He remembered calling her from the Mistral Inn, the breathless way she'd answered the phone. Naked, he'd pictured her; dripping from her bath.

"And you hadn't seen him since—how long? Since you were kids?" Scott enjoyed pretending Benji wasn't in the room with them.

He understood that it was the last fun he would ever have.

"Twelve years, I guess. Not since that camping trip in Yellowstone. Remember?"

Blood rushed him, then, roaring like the ocean, a hot tidal wave of blood. With a heroic expenditure of will he looked at the guy, the ghostly presence in the corner. The ghost who'd been there all through his marriage. Benji tall and lean like a cowboy, a young Henry Fonda, his long face brown from the sun.

"You were there?" Scott said.

Benji nodded. He had pushed back his denim sleeves, showing his paisley tattoos. Scott felt a stab of recognition, shrill and alarming, like a siren in the distance.

"You were . . . together then?"

"We were trying not to be," Penny said, with the flush that now seemed permanent."And then I met you."

Scott nodded thoughtfully, as though he understood.

"And we lost touch for a long time. It was hard for him, you know? Me getting married. And then the kids."

Jesus, the kids.

"Tell me the kids don't know."

Penny looked away. "It was kind of an accident. Sabrina came home early one day. I didn't have a choice."

Scott looked around the room, at his daughter's pink girlhood, the piles of toys she'd already outgrown. In this room, surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals, his wife and Benji had undressed each other.

Penny seemed to read his mind. "Not in our room," she said softly.

It was a measure of Scott's desolation that he felt grateful for this.

"Benji's great with Ian," she added. "They went camping last weekend in the Whites. Ian had a blast."

Scott felt his pulse in his ears. "You let him take
Ian
? Where the fuck was I?"

"Concord."

"Overnight?" Scott said, nearly shouting. "You let him take Ian
overnight?
"

"Well, he
is
Ian's uncle," she pointed out, without a whiff of irony.

Someday this conversation will be over
, Scott reflected calmly.
The next thing that's going to happen will begin to happen
. The thought comforted him like lightning, cracking open a humid day in summer. He was desperate to leave this room, the walls papered with pop stars, the pubescent boys who leered at his sleeping daughter, seeing what they should not see. His life would continue along its lurching path, but a part of him would stay here forever. Himself, his wife, and her lover facing off for all eternity, in the pink and girlish chaos of Sabrina's room.

The list came out the third week in April, just after the annual meeting. For two days Grohl's most eminent scientists had been absent from the corridors: Steve Upstairs; Ira Babish, the computational biologist; Malcolm John Liddy, whom a sarcastic postdoc had nicknamed
Dr. Genome.
Frank regarded these men as equals; how galling, then, that they were off discussing the most important scientific issues of the day while he was left behind to babysit his mournful staff.

Since Cristina's departure, a pall had settled over the lab. The door to the postdocs' office was always closed. Martin Keohane came and went in silence, like a dour young priest.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Betsy Baird knocked gently at Frank's office window. He knew by her gentleness that the news was bad.

"The list is up," she said. All day she'd been monitoring the Academy's Web site.

Still he looked at her with hope.

"I'm sorry," she said.

At lunchtime he slipped out through the back door, like the Garbo of Grohl. He drove across the bridge for a late lunch, in no mood to run into colleagues in Kendall Square. Afterward, feeling too feeble to climb six flights of stairs, he got into the elevator and found himself shoulder to shoulder with the other Steve—the immunologist Steve Palumbo, also known as Steve Downstairs.

"Frank." Palumbo clapped him hard on the back. "I just heard."

He was a sturdy, compact guy with intense dark eyes and an unruly mop of hair, always wet from the shower. Palumbo spent mornings and lunchtimes running or sculling; for a couple of years back in the '80s, he and Frank had played weekly racquetball. Scientifically speaking, Palumbo was a lightweight; but Frank had a healthy respect for physical prowess. Grohl was run by moribund old turds. In any sort of physical contest—push-ups, arm wrestling—only he and Palumbo would be able to hold their own.

"Man, it's got to hurt," said Palumbo."Coming so close. Maybe I should be grateful they don't know who the hell I am."

"Ah, but you're just a youngster," said Frank, in his new role of doddering has-been. As he said it, he realized that Palumbo was nearing fifty. Wifeless, childless, he seemed inoculated against aging. The guy spent every spare moment watching sports or playing them. His interests mirrored the average twelve-year-old boy's.

"Well, I wouldn't want to be that guy when you find him," said Palumbo. Then, seeing Frank's look:"You didn't know? You made the final list. Somebody challenged you."

Frank stared in disbelief. The Academy spent months winnowing down the list of nominees. Hundreds of eminent scientists were considered and rejected. The final list—men and women so distinguished that any one might be a future Nobel laureate—was voted on by the entire membership, and usually passed without a hitch. Only once, in Frank's long memory, had a nomination been challenged.

"I heard it from my old mentor as USF. He was there, Frank. Said it was like a bomb went off in the room."

"Someone
challenged
me?" said Frank."You're sure?"

The elevator arrived at the top floor; Frank had forgotten to press the button marked 4. Now he hit the Doors Close button."Well, who was it, for Christ's sake?"

"No clue," said Steve.

On what grounds?
Frank nearly asked, but stopped himself. This wasn't a conversation he wanted to have with Palumbo. With anyone at Grohl. Here, especially, on the top floor of the institute, ten yards from the office of Steve Upstairs.

"You don't know either?" Steve gave a low whistle. "I figured it was some kind of personal thing. Someone with a grudge against you."

Frank's mind raced. In thirty-five years he'd racked up some rivalries—didn't everybody? But until now there was nobody he'd have called an enemy.

"I'll tell you one thing," he said."I'm going to find out."

After work he met Margit at their usual haunt, a Thai restaurant on Mass Ave. Her hair looked freshly mown and had been dyed a deep burgundy, a rich color not found in nature, at least not on women's heads. She wore new eyeglasses, small rectangular frames that matched her hair, her lipstick, the silk scarf draped across her shoulders. She had gone to great effort to achieve—not beauty, exactly, but an organized sort of handsomeness.

They ordered their usual appetizer, a double plate of chicken satay; but Frank's guts were in a knot. His hasty lunch, a lobster roll slick with mayonnaise, sat heavy in his stomach, right where his gullet had dumped it. He couldn't eat a thing.

"My God," she'd said as he approached the table. "What happened to you?"

He told her the story in five sentences, barely stopping for a breath.

"You know the reason, of course," she said, her eyes downcast.

"That business with Cristina. It was bound to get out that you pulled the paper. Somebody probably figured out why."

Frank nodded, recalling the way Margit had reacted when he'd first told her the news, her reproachful silence eloquent beyond words.

In general she was not easily shocked. He remembered, a few years back, a particularly juicy cycle of Grohl gossip: an emeritus professor busted in a cathouse in the Combat Zone; a male postdoc stopped for speeding in bustier, pumps, and wig. When Margit heard that story from Betsy Baird—who saw all, heard all—she reacted with a kind of amused tolerance:
I too drive faster in high heels
.
There is less weight on the accelerator. It is natural to overcompensate
. But when it came to scientific integrity, she was a moralist of the first order. When it came to science, Margit was a prude.

"You were the PI on the paper," she said."What else could it be?"

"Sure," Frank said."But it was an internal matter, and Grohl had every reason to keep it quiet. Even Steve Palumbo didn't know anything about it. So who could it have been?"

"Frank." She took his hand in both of hers. "This is a terrible injustice, and I understand why you are upset. But in the end, does it really matter who challenged you? Regardless of who it was, the outcome is the same."

"Trust me," he said through clenched teeth."It matters."

"Well, let's think, then. There is the staff in your lab. And anybody else they might have told."

Frank's mind raced. Morale had been so bad recently that any of the staff might have grumbled about the situation.

"And Cristina," said Margit."Don't forget Cristina."

"I haven't." He'd heard from Betsy Baird that the girl had returned to Greece."But I can't imagine she'd have much to say on the matter."

"Well, the editors at
Science
know about it," Margit added. "And possibly the reviewers."

Frank nodded. He had no idea who'd reviewed the paper—the process was confidential, in theory, but it was sometimes possible to find out. Driving home, he came up with a handful of likely names, half of them affiliated with Harvard or MIT He knew them all in a distant way, from conferences and colloquia. But that was all.

I figured it was a personal thing
, Steve Palumbo had said.
Someone with a grudge against you.

Frank parked in front of the house, his stomach squeezing. A cold sweat trickled down his back. Jesus, what was the matter with him? He was unused to heartburn, backaches, rashes. He hadn't been sick to his stomach in twenty years.

Inside he stripped naked and crawled into bed, pulling the covers around him. The days were getting longer; the last dusky light peeped through the blinds. He had left a window open, and a cool breeze rattled the shade. He thought of Cristina Spiliotes and her falsified data, the lame-brained hoax that had kept him out of the Academy, cast aspersions on the career he'd worked a lifetime to build. Stupid, stupid: the idiocy of it boggled the mind. Yet in a perverse way, didn't the artlessness of her deception argue in her favor? She was no huckster. She'd dissembled like a novice, a girl who'd never told a lie in her life.