The Marriage Plot (41 page)

“So,” Beller asked, “what did you mark for research preference? First choice.”

“Cancer,” Leonard said.

Beller and Jaitly seemed amused by this.

“That’s what everyone marked,” Jaitly said. “Like ninety percent.”

“So what happened was,” Beller explained, “Cancer was so oversubscribed they ended up giving a lot of people their second or third choice.”

“What are we?”

“We’re Genomics and Bioinformatics,” Beller said.

“I put that last,” Leonard said.

“Really?” Jaitly said, sounding surprised. “Most people put Quantitative last.”

“How do you feel about yeast labs?” Beller asked.

“Sort of partial to
Drosophila
, myself,” Leonard said.

“Too bad. Yeast are going to be our world for the next nine months.”

“I’m just happy I’m here,” Leonard said, with genuine sincerity.

“Sure, it’ll look great on our résumés,” Jaitly said, snatching an appetizer from a passing tray. “And the creature comforts are seriously large. But even at a place like this you can get stuck in a research backwater.”

Like all of the other RFs, Leonard had been hoping to get assigned to the team of a well-known biologist, maybe even Dr. Malkiel himself. A few minutes later, however, when their team leader appeared, Leonard squinted at his nametag without recognition. Bob Kilimnik was a man in his forties with a loud voice and a disinterest in maintaining eye contact. The tweed coat he was wearing looked too hot for the weather.

“So, the gang’s all here,” Kilimnik said. “Welcome to Pilgrim Lake Lab.” He waved one arm, indicating the lavish dining hall, the white-coated waiters, and the rows of tables set with bunches of wildflowers. “Don’t get used to it. This isn’t what research is usually like. Usually it’s take-out pizza and instant coffee.”

Administrative assistants began herding everyone in to dinner. After they sat down, the waiter informed them that it was lobster night. In addition to Madeleine, Beller’s wife, Christine, and Jaitly’s girlfriend, Alicia, were at the table. Leonard was gratified to see that Madeleine was better-looking than both of them. Alicia lived in New York, and complained that she had to drive back right after dinner. Christine wanted to know if anybody else had a bidet in their unit, and what was the deal with that. While the appetizers were served and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé made the rounds, Kilimnik asked Beller and Jaitly about various biology professors at MIT, all of whom he seemed to know personally. When the main course arrived, he started explaining the details of his yeast research.

There were a lot of possible reasons for Leonard’s inability to follow a good bit of what Kilimnik said. For one thing, Leonard was a little starstruck by the presence of Dr. Malkiel, who, as Kilimnik was talking, appeared at the end of the room. Elegant, his gray hair swept back from his high forehead, Malkiel escorted his wife to the private dining room already full of senior scientists and biomedical executives. In addition, Leonard was distracted by the elaborate table settings, and by the difficulty of eating lobster with his tremor. With his plastic bib tied around his neck, he tried to crack the claws, but they kept slipping onto his plate. He was scared to use the tiny fork to pull out the lobster tail, and finally asked Madeleine to do it for him, making the excuse that, as a West Coaster, he was used to eating crab. Despite all this, at first Leonard kept up with the conversation. The benefits of working with yeast were obvious. Yeasts were simple eukaryotic organisms. They had a short generation time (from one and a half to two hours). Yeast cells could be easily transformed, either by inserting new genes into them or through homologous recombination. Yeasts were genetically uncomplicated organisms, especially compared with plants or animals, and marred by relatively few junk sequences. All this he understood. But as Leonard put a piece of lobster in his mouth, only to feel sick to his stomach, Kilimnik started talking about the “developmental asymmetry between daughter cells.” He mentioned “homothallic” and “heterothallic” strains of yeast, and discussed two apparently well-known studies, the first by “Oshima and Takano” and the second by “Hicks and Herskowitz,” as though these names should have meant something to Leonard. Beller and Jaitly were nodding.

“Cleaved DNA molecules introduced into yeast promote efficient homologous recombination at the cleaved ends,” Kilimnik said. “Going by that, we should be able to put our constructs near CDC36 in the chromosome.”

Leonard had stopped eating by this point, and just sipped his water. His brain felt as if it was turning to mush, seeping out of his ears like the green lobster guts on his plate. When Kilimnik went on to say, “In a nutshell, what we’re going to do is put an inverted HO gene into daughter cells to see if this affects their ability to switch sex and mate,” the only words Leonard understood were
sex
and
mate
. He didn’t know what an HO gene was. He was having trouble remembering the difference between
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
and
Schizosaccharomyces pombe
. Fortunately, Kilimnik didn’t ask any questions. He told them that anything they didn’t know they would learn in the Yeast Class, which he himself would be teaching.

After that dinner Leonard did his best to get up to speed. He read the relevant articles, the Oshima, the Hicks. The material wasn’t that difficult, at least not in outline. But Leonard could barely finish a sentence without drifting off. The same thing happened in the Yeast Class. Despite the stimulating effects of a plug of chaw in his cheek, Leonard felt his mind glaze over for ten minutes at a time while Kilimnik lectured at the blackboard. His armpits grew fiery from the fear that he might be called on at any minute and make a fool of himself.

When the Yeast Class ended, Leonard’s anxiety quickly turned to boredom. His job was to prepare DNA, cut it with restriction enzymes, and ligate the pieces together. This was time-consuming, but not all that hard. He might have enjoyed the work more if Kilimnik had said an encouraging word or asked his input on anything. But the team leader barely came into the lab. He spent most of the day in his office, analyzing the samples, barely looking up when Leonard came into the room. Leonard felt like a secretary dropping off correspondence to be signed. When he passed Kilimnik on the lab grounds or in the dining hall, Kilimnik often failed to acknowledge him.

Beller and Jaitly got somewhat better treatment, but not much. They began muttering about transferring to another team. The guys next door were working with genetically altered fruit flies, trying to find the cause of Lou Gehrig’s disease. As for Leonard, he used Kilimnik’s absence to take frequent breaks, going out behind the lab for a smoke in the cool sea breeze.

His main goal in the lab was to conceal his disease. Once he’d prepared the DNA, Leonard had to put it through electrophoresis, which meant dealing with the gel casting trays. He always had to wait until Jaitly and Beller had their backs turned before he tried to pull the well combs out of the agarose, because he never knew, from moment to moment, how bad his tremor might be. After he managed to load the gels and to run them for an hour or so, he then had to stain the samples with ethidium bromide and visualize the DNA under ultraviolet. And when he was done with all that, he had to start over with the next sample.

That was the hardest task of all: keeping the samples straight. Preparing strand after strand of DNA, and sorting, labeling, and storing each one, despite his flickering attention and mental brownouts.

He counted the minutes until he could leave each day. The first thing he did, on returning home every night, was to jump into the shower and brush his teeth. After that, momentarily feeling clean, with no bad taste in his mouth, he hazarded to lie down next to Madeleine on the bed or the sofa and to put his big sodden head in her lap. It was Leonard’s favorite time of the day. Sometimes Madeleine read aloud from the novel she was reading. If she had a skirt on he rested his cheek on her super-smooth thighs. Every night, when it came time for dinner, Leonard said, “Let’s just stay here.” But every night Madeleine made him get dressed, and they went to the dining hall, where Leonard tried not to betray his nausea or to knock over his water glass.

In late September, when Madeleine went off to her Victorian conference in Boston, Leonard nearly fell apart. For the entire three days she was gone he missed her acutely. He kept calling her room at the Hyatt, getting no answer. When Madeleine called she was usually in a rush to get to a dinner or a lecture. Sometimes he could hear other people in the room, happy, functioning people. Leonard tried to keep Madeleine on the phone as long as he could, and as soon as she hung up he counted the hours until it was allowable for him to call her again. When dinnertime rolled around, he showered, put on clean clothes, and set off along the boardwalk to the dining hall, but the prospect of sparring with Beller and Jaitly on some technical subject persuaded him to buy a frozen pizza at the twenty-four-hour minimart in the dining hall’s basement instead. He heated it up in his apartment and watched
Hill Street Blues
. On Sunday, with his anxiety increasing, he called Dr. Perlmann to explain how he was feeling. Perlmann phoned in a prescription for Ativan to the pharmacy in P-town, and Leonard borrowed Jaitly’s Honda to pick it up, saying he was getting allergy medicine.

And so there he was, three and a half weeks into his fellowship, taking his lithium and Ativan, spreading a dollop of Preparation H between his buttocks every morning and night, drinking a glass of Metamucil with his morning O.J., swallowing, as needed, an antinausea pill he forgot the name of. All alone in his splendid apartment, among the geniuses and would-be geniuses, at the end of the spiraling land.

On Monday afternoon Madeleine came back from the conference shining with enthusiasm. She told him about the new friends she’d made, Anne and Meg. She said she wanted to specialize in the Victorians, even though Austen was Regency, technically, and wouldn’t qualify. She gushed about meeting Terry Castle, and how brilliant Terry Castle was, and Leonard was relieved to discover that Terry Castle was a woman (and then less relieved to discover that she liked girls). Madeleine’s excitement about the future seemed all the more vibrant against Leonard’s sudden lack of it. He was more or less sane now, more or less healthy, but he felt none of his usual energy or curiosity, none of his old animal spirits. They went walking on the beach, at sunset. Being manic-depressive didn’t make Leonard any less tall. Madeleine still fit perfectly in his arm. But even nature was messed up for him now.

“Does it smell out here to you?” he asked.

“It smells like the ocean.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Sometimes they drove into Provincetown for lunch or dinner. Leonard tried, as best he could, to take things one day at a time. He did his work at the lab and soldiered through the evenings. He tried to keep his stress levels to a minimum. But a week after MacGregor’s Nobel was announced, Madeleine told Leonard, during their evening walk, that her sister, Alwyn, was having “a marriage crisis” and that her mother was bringing her to the Cape to talk things over.

Leonard always dreaded meeting the parents of a girl he was dating. If there had been a blessing to Madeleine’s breaking up with him last spring and his ensuing breakdown, it had been the removal of the obligation to meet Mr. and Mrs. Hanna on graduation day. Over the summer, none too eager to be seen in his bloated, shaky state, Leonard had managed to put off the meeting by hiding out in Providence. But he couldn’t put it off any longer.

The day started off memorably, if a little too early, with the sound of Jaitly and Alicia going at it in the upstairs apartment. The building they lived in, Starbuck, was a refurbished barn and had absolutely no sound-proofing. It didn’t just sound as if Jaitly and Alicia were in the same room with them. It sounded as if they were in the same bed, scrumping right between Madeleine and Leonard, showing them how it was done.

When things quieted down, Leonard got up to take a piss. He swallowed three lithium tablets with his morning coffee, watching dawn spread across the bay. He felt pretty decent, actually. He thought it was going to be one of his good days. He dressed a little better than usual, in khakis and a white button-down shirt. At the lab, he fired up some Violent Femmes on the boom box and started preparing some samples. When Jaitly came in, Leonard kept smiling at him.

“How did you sleep, Vikram?”

“Fine.”

“Any mattress burns?”

“What, were you like—you asshole!”

“Don’t blame me. I was just lying in bed, minding my own business.”

“Yeah, well, Alicia only comes up on the weekends. You’ve got Madeleine here all the time.”

“That I do, Vikram. That I do.”

“Could you really hear us?”

“Nah. I’m just giving you shit.”

“Don’t say anything to Alicia. She’d be so embarrassed! Promise?”

“Your operatic secret is safe with me,” Leonard said.

By ten o’clock, however, the mental fog began to move in. Leonard got a headache. His ankles were so swollen from water retention that he felt like Godzilla stomping back and forth from the 30-degrees room. Later, taking a well comb out of a tray, Leonard’s hand trembled, creating bubbles in the gel, and he had to throw the tray out and start all over.

He was having GI troubles, too. Taking his pills with coffee on an empty stomach had been a bad idea. Not wanting to stink up the lab bathroom, Leonard went back to his apartment at lunchtime, relieved to find that Madeleine had already left to pick up her mother and sister. He shut himself in the john with
The Atrocity Exhibition
, hoping to be quick, but the propulsive session made him feel so befouled that he stripped down and took a shower. Afterward, instead of redonning his nice clothes, he put on shorts and a T-shirt and tied a bandanna around his head. He was facing more time in the 30-degrees room and he wanted to be comfortable. He stuck a can of Skoal into one tube sock and heavy-footed it back to the lab.