The Liar's Wife (5 page)

“That's for sure,” Linnet said, snorting, and patting his knee.

“And what about you, Jossie? Are you still working? Still the mad scientist following in the footsteps of Madame Curie? Or is it just that you're about your father's business? The science business, I guess it was a natural for you; if he'd been a cobbler you'd have spent your life mending shoes.”

“Johnny said you were a real career gal,” Linnet said. “He said you were real devoted to your work. It must have been real challenging, being a scientist and all.”

She knew that people only used the word “scientist” in that way when they really knew nothing about it. “I've been retired for six years now. And I wasn't really a scientist. I was more a high-level technician.”

Those were the words her daughter, Erika, had used once, in a daughter's anger: “You're nothing but a high-level technician.”

She had felt her daughter's words flung like sharp pebbles against a window that would not break, but might be pocked. “You're like one of those people in the ads you see on the subway,” Erika had said, “for places like Voorhees Tech.
Love animals? You could be a veterinarian's assistant.
Meaning you can clean up shit while other people do the real work and get the real money. You are allowed to breed mosquitoes and feed mice so that the real scientists can get on with their work, and love you, and tell you how grateful they are. Call you the mother of the lab. Whereas if you'd had any guts or gumption you'd be doing what they do.”

Useless to tell her daughter, “But I didn't want to.” Sometimes it was painful to examine why it was that she was telling the truth when she said, “I didn't want to.”

She didn't want to because she didn't want the struggle, the push, the hardening over that would be required if, as a woman of her generation, you wanted to protect yourself from the insults, the slights, well meaning or not, patronizing or malicious. And she didn't want a life like her father's—late nights, the sense that your work is never enough and never done. She did not want to be the only girl. It had been hard enough at Cornell, a major in animal physiology. “You're such a pretty girl, why do you want to be fooling around with rats and mealworms? Or don't you ever feel bad taking up a place that should go to a man, who really needs it to support a family? You'll just do this as a game, then marry a doctor and stay home with his kiddies.”

Her years at Cornell: 1958–1962. Ten years later it would have been different. Twenty years later, unrecognizable. But she had been born when she had been born. She could only be of her time. It was all anyone could be. Except the unusually gifted, the unusually courageous. And she had known that she was neither of those things.

And after she came back, after “that year,” it was easier for her to take a job in Stanley Probst's lab. Stanley Probst, a colleague of her father. Working with mosquitoes, working in an infectious disease lab. Dealing with terrifying illness. Malaria. Dengue fever. Even now, she couldn't hear the words without an accompanying sense of doom.

And yes, Erika was right. She was a high-level technician in a way, B.S. Cornell, the servant of her betters. But she'd liked her work.

Lately Erika had been kinder about it, understanding now that she herself had children and was rubbed raw with exhaustion. “I think you made the wise choice, Mom, particularly for the time. Why get involved in that macho rigmarole? For the glory. Well it's true, you never got the glory, but you made important work possible and that's the real thing, isn't it? Maybe we need to start questioning ‘what price glory.' ”

Jocelyn wished she could have been entirely pleased with what Erika had said. But she knew that underneath her daughter's loving words there was a brackish stream of condescension that in its turn activated Jocelyn's shallow stream of cynicism. Erika had begun meditating and taking yoga. She talked a lot about compassion. In many ways, Jocelyn preferred the older, harsher version of her daughter. She wanted to say to Erika, “Why are you saying things like ‘what price glory'? It sounds like a movie starring Victor Mature.”

She'd never liked to talk to anyone about her work, and Johnny and Linnet were the last people she would have wanted to talk to about it. It had always been difficult, even when people were genuinely interested, which she was sure these two were not.

“I work with mosquitoes.” The minute she said that, whatever the season—it could happen in a dinner party in January, at a formal dance in March—the sentence would cause the people across from her to reach under their protective clothes and scratch.

No, she couldn't possibly say what she really felt. That she loved mosquitoes. Found them beautiful. The delicate wings. The complicated mouths. The fragile, articulate legs. The multiple sensitivities. And yet, along with rats, they were the most despised species in the world. A pest. Responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. How could she explain what she felt when she went on the Internet looking for popular sites about mosquitoes when an expert opined, “No one would mourn the complete disappearance of the mosquito from the face of the earth.”

But I would, she had wanted to write in to the chat room. How
relieved she'd been when an entomologist asserted that the disappearance of mosquitoes would be disastrous to the ecosystem.

Her mosquitoes made her feel protective, maternal, as if someone had suggested that her juvenile delinquent son be sent to the electric chair.

And yet she could never forget that they were responsible for the deaths of millions, and had always been. She had read somewhere that our primate ancestors were recognizably malarious before they were recognizably human.

Malaria. The labs she worked for had concentrated on studying malaria; she was faced daily with its devastations. Once a conference speaker, an epidemiologist, had appeared onstage standing before a blank screen. “I am now going to show you,” he had said, “the image of the person responsible for more African deaths than any dictator.” He pressed a button, and on the screen appeared the face of Rachel Carson. Because of her campaign to ban DDT, he said, the number of deaths from malaria in Africa had increased tenfold.

This was the kind of thing that made Jocelyn glad she had decided to retire. She often wondered if most people were tormented by these thoughts as she was, or if she was unusual. Because these weren't the kinds of things people talked about. And while she was doing her work, breeding the mosquitoes, providing their food, or their blood meal from the rats she also tended, recording their movements—she wasn't thinking about these ideas. But when she wasn't directly performing the tasks connected to her work, and when the labor of tending young children was over, she had become, for many years, almost obsessed with what her poor, beautiful, murderous mosquitoes suggested about life.

They supported life; they destroyed life. They could cause the death of some splendid person and then minutes later die themselves, replaced by indistinguishable millions of their species. They were the necessary food of songbirds. She had often thought, after that conference, of the face of Rachel Carson, who, when Jocelyn was a young girl, she had thought of as a hero. But was that wrong; was the right thing to consider her a villain? And who was right, the environmentalists who
said it was wrong to grant the human species a privileged position in the civilization and so opposed DDT and other large-scale measures to extinguish the mosquitoes, or the epidemiologists, with their images of the stricken dead, of suffering children? Nothing, they insisted, nothing should get in the way of preventing this.

“So because I'm retired and Richard is sort of semiretired, we kind of divide our time between this house and his family's house on Nantucket and our place in New York.”

She felt ashamed of her own prosperity. Deeply ingrained had been the Yankee sense of thrift. There was no luster now to being a WASP. She was all too aware of the horrors perpetrated by her forebears. But if there was something admirable in the stock, it was a horror of waste, a commitment to keeping your word. Well she had flown in the face of both of these. Holding on to the house was an extravagance.

She, or she and Richard, was the owner of three abodes. The apartment on East Sixty-Seventh and Lexington. The house on Nantucket—Richard's, left to him by his stepmother; it had been in her family for years. Richard was clear that no Jew would have owned a house on Nantucket before quite recently. But it had been wonderful for the children, and Richard loved to sit on the deck and read, watching the light on the ocean. He'd majored in philosophy, and now, not quite retired, but almost, he reveled in the difficult large questions he had given over when he'd taken up the law. His secret, shared only with her: he was writing a book on the Renaissance philosopher Giambattista Vico. His ideas of time.

One of the great pleasures of their marriage was sitting next to each other, each absorbed in reading. Perhaps occasionally saying, “May I read you this?” He was interested in Renaissance philosophy, she, increasingly, in the nature of language, its acquisition, its implications. But five years ago, she had had to have skin cancers removed; from her forehead, her shins. They had returned; she'd had them removed again. So she didn't feel quite safe on Nantucket anymore; she felt protected by the trees in the backyard here that had been her place of safety in childhood. But Richard loved the ocean, and she felt ridiculous saying, “Can't you come to New Canaan so we can read under my trees?”

She could say to herself that actually two of the houses had been
inherited: they hadn't actually gone out and bought anything, except the apartment, which they needed, because New York was where they worked. So it was not a luxury, nothing to have to explain. People had to live near where they worked.

“Where's your place in New York, then?” Johnny asked. She was grateful that neither of them had remarked on what they must think of as excessive real estate holdings.

“East Sixty-Seventh Street.”

“Oh, East Sixty-Seventh Street,” Johnny said. “That's very posh.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised, Johnny. When we were young the Upper East Side was the big thing. Now it's considered rather dowdy, a grey lady. All the young people want to be downtown. They have all these new names for places you'd never have heard of, Johnny. Soho. Noho. Dumbo. And young people all want to live in Brooklyn.”

She knew she was babbling. It was because she was ashamed. These were people driving loads of potato chips across the country, who couldn't afford proper dental care.

“And have you children, Jocelyn? That is to say, are you a mother?”

“Yes, I have two,” she said, not wanting to give details of her children's lives for fear of exposing more prosperity.

“Boy, girl?” asked Linnet.

“One of each.”

“The king's set,” said Johnny.

“That's not an expression we use in America, Johnny,” Linnet said. “We don't have a king. What would you say, that's the president's set?”

Jocelyn wondered if children were a sore subject between them.

“I have only the one, a daughter,” Johnny said. “I'm afraid I had not much to do with her rearing. Her mother didn't want me to have anything to do with her after we split. We weren't a good match, Ashley's mother and myself. She was a woman with no sense of humor. Now Linnet here is a woman with a fantastic sense of humor. Fantastic.”

“Oh, Johnny,” Linnet said, with a girlish tone Jocelyn found mortifying.

“No, I'm afraid I hadn't much to do with Ashley's bringing up. But then a miracle happened. Just two years ago, she found me. She friended me on Facebook. Are you on Facebook, Jossie? I'd like to friend you.”

What could it mean, she wondered, to friend someone, to use “friend” as a verb? Did it mean the same thing as “befriend”? No: friending meant nothing, or it meant that what happened seemed to happen with no one taking the lead, just some sort of vague mutuality, housed in cyberspace.

“No, I'm afraid I'm not.”

“You must, Jocelyn, you really must. You never know who'll turn up, like me and Ashley. So Linnet and I visit her whenever we're on the West Coast. She lives in San Francisco. She and her husband are both in computers. I have three grandchildren, Jocelyn. Can you imagine? Three little girls.”

“Mine are two boys,” Jocelyn said.

“Ah well, we must arrange a betrothal before too much more time is lost,” Johnny said.

Grandparents. They were grandparents. They had been young lovers.

Her eyes fell on Johnny's hands. They were battered, damaged. The nail on his left middle finger was split down the middle; the others were ridged and cracked. His knuckles were overlarge—was it arthritis? They were not the hands of a young man. She remembered his hands, hairless, girlish even, how they had given her pleasure that had astonished her; she'd learned on her skin, from his hands, the meaning of the word “swoon.”

Were these the same hands now? Was her body the same body? The skin had been long ago sloughed off. Many times. Was it every seven years you got a new skin? Or was that an old wives' tale? She should know better than this, with her training; she should know better than even to entertain such a thought.

They were grandparents. They'd been young lovers.

And at once, like the seven skins she'd shed in fifty years, the past fell from her and she was back again in that first summer, twenty-two years old, in love with Johnny. In love with Johnny and his miraculous hands.

It wasn't possible that in that summer they had never been indoors, but that is how she remembered it. He met her every day for lunch;
they walked west to Central Park; he brought sandwiches, every day the same, ham on white bread with butter. Never had any food seemed so delicious to her, sweet and salty, the thick yellow butter, the soft gluey bread, and they would lie in the grass after they'd eaten their sandwiches, quickly, very quickly, and then kiss for forty minutes straight until it was time to go back to work. Now work was a trial to her; only an enforced waiting, four hours to be lived through till she could see him again, when there would be more kissing and then parting in Grand Central, her body sluiced with pleasure, dreaming of him the whole way home. Unless he was performing somewhere that night and then she would stay to see him sing. But never once had she spent the night with him. She actually had no idea where he lived. When she asked him where he lived, he said only “here and there,” and gave no particulars. Soon he was spending the weekends with her family in New Canaan. Her parents were delighted with him. Or her father was.