A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Read online

  “I had it brought up from the storage unit.”

  Elm walked to the other side of the room. She felt like a magician’s assistant; when she pulled off the cloth, what would be underneath? She was dizzy, not like she was going to be sick or fall over, but as if the room had become untethered and she was floating above it, looking down on the scene from on high. She wondered if the secondhand pot smoke was going to her head.

  She put her hands on the dropcloth and it felt damp, or cold. She felt a stab of worry—if it had been stored like this there would be little of it left. Carefully she pulled the cloth off.

  It took her eyes a second to adjust. The lighting conditions were far from ideal, dull gray diluted further by the heavy curtains and the dust, but quickly the bright colors resolved into a market scene, the swirling texture became stalls, baskets, a dog. The background was a dull blue, the flat light off the dusty ground as it fell away to the sea. Elm remembered light like this from her backpacking days in Europe, when she still thought she was going to be a painter, how drastically the light shifted once you went inland enough that the ocean fell away from view, that the sparkling off the water was absorbed into the dirt and no longer shimmered, but rather made the vista murky, like looking through unwashed windows.

  It was amazing, that Connois could do this with mere pastels. Here was that same blue, almost gray in places, aqua in others. There were the typical market stalls, an oddly shaped dog. This pastel featured an older woman, face lined, one eye slightly lazy or palsied, a strange detail that she registered.

  “It’s Mercat,” Indira said.

  “Excuse me?” Elm asked.

  “Mercat, ‘market’ in Catalan. The title.”

  Elm remembered vaguely, from art history class, that there were several inventories of group shows of the Hiverains, advertisements and handbills, for paintings, pastels, watercolors, and drawings that had since been lost. Some of these, as described in newspaper accounts of the time, had been masterworks. Elm remembered this because of the sense of loss she had felt when she read about it. Like the library at Alexandria, burned, and all the knowledge it contained destroyed. She had just been dumped by a sophomore-year love (sophomore year, for some reason, had been full of heartbreak), and the idea of these paintings, spoken about so admiringly in the newspaper, and even in a letter written by Édouard Vuillard to his Parisian gallery, felt unbearably tragic.

  Could this be one of those lost pieces? Possibly, she supposed. She pulled it away from the wall. The frame was new, but that didn’t mean anything. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “He must have cared about you very much.”

  Indira made a grunting noise that may have been agreement, derision, or just clearing her throat.

  “Do you have the bill of sale? A certificate of authentication?”

  Indira shook her head. “It was for me,” she said, “not for resale. But sentimentality will only feed you so long, yes? Before you get too old. So sell it with the rest. I have no children; that way I can live to be one hundred and afford to have young male nurses wave palm fronds to cool me.”

  Elm felt a quick stab of pity. She didn’t usually consider herself lucky compared to other people. Indira’s loneliness, though, made her suddenly grateful, for Colin, for Moira, and even for getting to live with Ronan for the short time he was here. It felt strange, like the first sting of lust in a newly pubescent teenager, foreign but not bad necessarily.

  “Why not display it?” Elm set the frame carefully back up against the wall and sat down across from Indira.

  “It hurt, to look at it, especially after he died,” she said. “I put it away and didn’t think about it until the other drawings …”

  “Do you know where he got it?” Elm asked. She didn’t want to seem pushy, but unless the provenance was solid, it would be hard to get its maximum value.

  “He bought it in a gallery, he said.”

  “Any more surprises lurking in your storage unit?” Elm asked.

  Indira smiled. “I don’t think so. But, then, an old lady’s memory is not what it used to be, so you never know what will turn up, do you?”

  Elm wasn’t sure if she was teasing or not. She felt like there was a joke being played on her, like the time she was sure that Colin had planned her a surprise party for her fortieth birthday a couple of months before Ronan died, and she spent hours getting ready each morning for the two weeks surrounding her birthday, just in case (it was her pet peeve that everyone knew about surprise parties except the guest of honor, who then appeared in every photo in what was potentially the worst outfit in her closet on a terrible hair day). But when on the big day Colin presented her with a pair of earrings, a babysitter, and a nice dinner not too far from their apartment, she finally relaxed. How had she thought him capable of deceit, even for her own benefit? A full week later when they went for their regular date-night dinner, all her nice clothes were at the dry cleaner’s, so she threw on a pair of slacks from the previous decade (pleats, a little snug in the hips), and put her hair up in a ponytail. Sure enough, when she walked into their local pizza joint, forty people yelled “Surprise” and the flashes lit.

  Was it possible that Indira didn’t know she was storing major masterpieces, even though she was an artist herself? It was illogical, considering the woman still lived alone and seemed to forget nothing at all. Elm looked at her; she was wearing foundation. Foundation that exactly matched her skin tone, none of the clownlike myopic mess many older women adopted.

  Elm considered: Pastels lurked in a murky space between drawing and painting. As the Hiverains were theoretically Impressionist, Elm wondered if she shouldn’t notify Claudio in nineteenth-century painting. But the Impressionists always filled their “quota” and Elm needed the boost. She decided that if it came back authenticated she would enter it in an auction under her supervision. Indira was a respected artist; surely that was provenance enough.

  Indira stared back, waiting for Elm to challenge her. Elm opened her mouth to speak, but Indira’s foamy eyes wandered past Elm, unable to focus on her face, and Elm saw that she was indeed old and frail, blind as a newborn, incapable of guile.

  Elm spent too long in the shower, and was late to drop Moira off, which made her late for her doctor’s appointment. She calculated—the office was ten blocks downtown. She could walk it in fifteen minutes, or she could grab a cab. But a cab down Second Avenue at this time of day could be a disaster, plus she would either have to catch one going uptown and go around the block or walk crosstown, which would eat up time. She decided to walk, and arrived overheated and frazzled. She stripped and put on the flimsy gown and then sat, increasingly frustrated at the passing time, in the chilly exam room with its view of a brick wall.

  Finally the doctor came in. Elm had changed ob-gyns in the wake of Ronan’s death; she just couldn’t imagine explaining to her former doctor what had happened. When Dr. Hong took her history, she asked how many times Elm had been pregnant. “I have one child,” she answered.

  Dr. Hong didn’t speak much during the exam, for which Elm was grateful. She hated having to make small talk with doctors. The nurse was silent as well. Soft music drifted in from a different office. Below, a truck backed up shrilly.

  “Well,” Dr. Hong said, “everything looks fine.”

  Elm had waited until the last moment. She and Colin hadn’t discussed it any further, but she said, “I was thinking about having another child.” Elm wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or if she saw the nurse raise her eyebrows. Dr. Hong looked at her chart again. “Well,” she said, slowly. “I won’t lie. You’re almost forty-three. You’re still getting regular periods?”

  “Yes,” Elm said. They weren’t regular, necessarily, but they were not infrequent.

  “There are two things we can do,” Dr. Hong said, resting her clipboard on her hip. “First, we test your FSH level, your follicle-stimulating hormone.”

  Elm felt her annoyance rise. She wasn’t stupid, and yet doctors always
explained biology as though she were completely uneducated, as though they were reading from a book about talking to patients. “Right, on day three,” she said.

  “Yes. So you can come back in. Additionally, I’d perform a transvaginal ultrasound, that’s an ultrasound of your uterus.”

  Elm’s patience ended. “Yes, I know what my vagina is.”

  The doctor continued as though Elm hadn’t interrupted. “We do an antral follicle count where we, well, we count the follicles. That’s a pretty good indication of fertility. Would you like me to do that now?”

  “Yes, please,” Elm said. She lay back down, her heart racing. Please, she begged silently, please let there be follicles. She tensed as the ultrasound wand entered her, and Dr. Hong pressed lightly on her abdomen. “Okay, three right,” she said to the nurse, placing her hand on the other side. “And four left.”

  She removed the wand and took off the protective condom, placing it and her gloves in the bin. She immediately washed her hands. Elm sat up, nails thrumming on her thighs.

  “I’ll be honest, Ms. Howells,” Dr. Hong said. Elm looked at her, her eyebrows so thin, barely visible. “I counted only three follicles on the right and four on the left. That’s consistent with poor ovarian reserve.”

  Elm felt the nervousness evacuate her body. It was replaced by nausea, the precursor to a wave of grief. “So I’ll have to take a fertility drug.”

  “Well,” Dr. Hong said. Elm thought that if the woman said “well” one more time she might throttle her with her stethoscope. “The fertility drugs stimulate the follicles. If there’s nothing to stimulate, then it won’t really work. You’re not a good candidate.”

  “What about IVF?” Elm demanded.

  “In vitro has the same problem,” Dr. Hong said. “I won’t tell you absolutely not, because you hear these stories about spontaneous pregnancies, but it appears very unlikely.”

  “How unlikely?”

  “With these follicle levels there’s a less than one percent chance of spontaneous conception,” Dr. Hong said. “I’m very sorry.”

  Elm fought the lump that was condensing in her throat. “I see.”

  “I’ll send you to a specialist, to do more tests,” Dr. Hong said. She made a note on Elm’s chart. “I’m sure you’ll want to exhaust all the options. And we do have the best-ranked fertility clinic here in the hospital.”

  Elm had stopped listening. She made a mental inventory of her clothing—pants, trouser socks, blouse, belt. Don’t forget your sunglasses, she reminded herself. Don’t forget to fix that bra strap that was bothering you this morning. She didn’t dare look at herself in the mirror above the sink, sure that her reflection would make her cry.

  She charged her copay and left the office, walking to the East River. The air had switched directions; coming off the water it was cool, almost sharp, and she let it blow her hair back as she walked. She imagined that it blew right through her, getting rid of all the liquid that troubled her: her blood, which kept her heart pumping and aching, and the tears, which were threatening now.

  She held back until she got to her office, then closed the door and collapsed on the small couch sobbing like she hadn’t since Ronan’s funeral. It felt, in that moment, equally as painful, as wrenching, as the day she said good-bye to her son. This was it, then, no more children. No sibling for Moira, no feeling of fluttering kicks in her belly, no first steps, first words, first haircuts. From now on, only lasts.

  The phone rang, a conference call that required none of Elm’s attention. She hit mute and put the phone on speaker while she worked on the breathing exercises her doctor had shown her to help her calm down. Soon her breath and chest regained their rhythm, and only the occasional sharp intake betrayed the magnitude of her disappointment. Next to her phone was the notepad with the web address of the cloning center. All week the website had been calling to her, and Elm had tried to ignore it, but as she half-listened to the phone, she traced the URL bold, then serifed. She drew a box around it, stars, vines snaking up the side of the page. And then she could deny herself no longer. She told herself it was out of curiosity that she typed in the address. It would be a laugh, as Colin would say. It took awhile to load, and Elm puffed her cheeks out with impatience. She threw a quick look toward the door of her office. Not that there was anything for people to be suspicious about. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was looking at a website, not porn, and there were plenty of people who looked at porn on the job. This was a scientific website, sort of.

  Pictures formed in horizontal stripes. The top was monochromatic: sky, wall, and then the beginnings of heads, the round edges of cells, of letters. The background was a light robin’s egg blue, patterned with faint fleur-de-lis. Finally, the page paused, then refreshed itself, forming fully.

  The Institut Indépendant de la Recherche sur la Réplication Génétique had spent a lot of money on its website. There was a picture of a sheep—Dolly, presumably—and the “camera” swooped into her mouth and down into her DNA spiral, which replicated itself in a new frame, twirling independently. Clicking on either strand brought you to the home page, a slideshow of happy smiling people. Elm clicked on the Union Jack, which took her to a menu.

  “About us: We are a group of physicians and researchers dedicated to exploring the exciting new field of genetic replication since 1997. With the highest regard for ethical considerations, we are discovering the ways in which science can help us live fuller, better lives. Have you been devastated by the loss of a loved one? DNA replication may be the answer to your problems. All consultations are kept strictly confidential and thus we are forbidden to present testimonials. However, our clientele include diplomats, moguls, CEOs, royalty, and other important world figures.”

  “Devastated by the loss of a loved one.” The phrase struck Elm as particularly apt. She was devastated; utterly laid to waste. She had to admit she was impressed. The introduction, stilted though it was, took exactly the right tone. It was sympathetic without being sentimental, informative without providing detail, and reassuringly professional.

  She turned to the other pages, which were not translated, but she could read French decently, and with the help of the diagrams she could tell they were explanations of the various types of cloning or the mechanisms used. One involved, apparently, removing the anchovy from a cocktail olive. Others involved volleys of arrows emanating from an eyeball, a snake fighting with a beach ball, and two M&M’s fused together. Another page was FAQs, this one translated into English. Do you replicate from nonanimal subjects? “The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the genetic replication of humans. For an explanation of the implications of this regulatory policy, please contact us.” Elm paused. What did that mean? It sounded like it might be possible to clone human beings, like the legalese meant the opposite of what it said. At the bottom was a Paris phone number and a disclaimer: “We regret that we are unable to respond to electronic mail inquiries.”

  Elm was disappointed. This site was not the comedy she had predicted. It didn’t have cartoon dancing sheep or pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. Instead, it looked like a real medical establishment. And Elm knew that if she even remotely believed that it was possible to bring Ronan back, or to re-create him, the thought would obsess her. The conference call demanded her attention. She unmuted it, thanked the participants, and ended the call.

  She stared at the same particle (of food? of lint?) that had been there for months, too close to the corner to be sucked up by the vacuum. Colin would not feel the same way. Though agnostic, he called himself a spiritualist. “Twelve years of having the nuns beat it into you, some of it has to stick.” What happened to Ronan, according to Colin, was no one’s fault, not theirs, not God’s. It was just a cruel twist of destiny. It was fate.

  “That makes you a fatalist,” she had said. Colin had shrugged.

  He would not want to explore bizarre and probably illegal ways to reincarnate their son. It was ridiculous. Elm wouldn
’t be able to tell anyone, if it happened. She imagined herself as she was nine years ago, pregnant with Ronan, swollen, her belly drawing her hands to it like a magnet. She would have to say that it was a new baby.

  This was insane. This was magical thinking, something her grief counselor had told her to watch out for. “It’s not that it’s harmful,” her therapist had said. “But it’s unproductive, backward. It doesn’t help you move forward.”

  Elm had experienced this minor psychosis in small ways. There were signs that Ronan was attempting to communicate with her from the beyond: sticks arranged in an R shape on the playground, subliminal messages encoded in television commercials and billboards, certain precocious statements by Moira. Elm was even temporarily convinced that Ronan’s ghost was visiting his sister at night. All those, she saw now, were signs of the early stages of grief. She hadn’t experienced them in a while.

  When the experts referred to grief as a cycle, they neglected to mention its vortex effect. It was more like a series of concentric circles, and she was merely orbiting around again, returning to the early stages, like aftershocks that do more damage than the earthquakes themselves.

  The institute’s website felt like an indulgence, like napping at the office, or eating a brownie while dieting. She knew she shouldn’t, but the gratification was so intense that she couldn’t stop herself. She clicked through the various pages again, stopping at the illustrations of the technical process. Elm had a solid grounding in chemistry, necessary for an art history Ph.D. with a concentration in restoration. But she rarely used her scientific training for anything other than helping Moira build a volcano for the science fair. The cloning process was beyond her powers of comprehension.

  Colin would probably understand it. He’d picked up a fair amount of biology at his job; holding his own at medical conferences and extolling the benefits of Moore’s drugs required a working knowledge of biochemical processes. But Elm knew she couldn’t ask him. He knew her too well, knew the way her mind spun, and he would divine that she was interested in cloning for reasons that exceeded mere curiosity.