A Nearly Perfect Copy: A Novel Page 15

  “Please, Moira,” she said. Then: “Don’t you dare kick me. You love baths.” She tried to strip her daughter, who had turned her body to stone in protest. Finally, she wrestled Moira into the bath still wearing underwear and a T-shirt.

  “Mom! You forgot to take this off. Now it’s all wet,” she said with an accusatory and slightly teenage inflection. She removed her shirt in disgust.

  Elm sat on the closed toilet while Moira splashed and sang. She both hoped the man from the institute would call her back and dreaded that call. She rubbed her eyes, worried again that she was going crazy. Crazy like those people with the dog. Would a sane person believe her son could be cloned? The dog’s name popped into her mind, Dishoo, and got stuck like song lyrics. She repeated it as a mantra: Dishoo, Dishoo, Dishoo, Dishoo.

  “Mom?” Moira interrupted her reverie. “Can we get a cat?”

  “No,” Elm said.

  “You didn’t even say maybe, or we’ll see.”

  “That’s because there’s not the slightest glimmer of hope that we’ll get a cat.”

  “But why?” Moira whined. Elm wondered if Moira was entering one of those phases through which Elm wished she could fast-forward.

  For a while, in a bathroom humor phase, Moira had finished every sentence with “in your butt.” As in, “Where’s your jacket?” “In your butt.” “How was school?” “In your butt.” Elm wasn’t sure if she should say something or just let Moira get over it. In the end she decided to ignore it and it wore off within the week.

  It was terrible, she knew, to compare children, but Ronan hadn’t been this difficult. She recognized that she was looking back at the experience, and the past was always gossamer and preferable to an uncomfortable present. Maybe she’d been more involved then. She remembered looking at him in the bath and thinking, I created this. His smooth small arms pushed a rubber duck around, creating small swirls of water. “Duh-key,” he said slowly, his first word after “Mama” and “Dada.” He grabbed her hand, wanting her to touch it too; he always wanted her to share his experiences, as if to maintain the closeness they had when he was part of her body. “Duh-key.”

  She’d been finishing up her dissertation then; really it was all finished except for the formatting, and she was home with him constantly. Everything he did was miraculous and amazing to her, because he was her first. Then Moira came and did the exact same miraculous things at nearly the same rate (or faster) and Elm simply couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm.

  Her guilt was so repressed—she couldn’t bear even to think about her children in this manner. But the truth was that Ronan had been her child, while Moira was Colin’s. Colin had had little to do with Ronan’s first months—the processes by which he might have bonded with the infant were opaque to him, plus it was a particularly busy time at work. Colin would stare at Ronan, the baby’s legs windmilling while Colin changed his diaper, as if he were looking at an exhibit in a museum. Maybe Elm had made it difficult for him to spend time with Ronan; she was so protective. By the time Moira was born, the bond between Ronan and Elm had been cemented, and babies were a known quantity: Colin wouldn’t inadvertently drop her, or do some irrevocable damage with his neophyte parenting skills. Since then Moira had been Daddy’s little girl.

  While Elm never speculated or wished that Ronan had survived and Moira had been taken from them, she did admit to her psychiatrist that she felt it wasn’t fair that “her child” had been taken, while “Colin’s child” remained. She refused to elaborate on this line of thought, though Dr. Schultz had prodded and pried. Some things said in the throes of grief should not be reuttered.

  Now she asked Moira, “Do you miss your brother?”

  “Yes,” Moira answered automatically. She rang out a washcloth over her head and blinked to get the water out of her eyes.

  “Do you remember him?” she asked, leaning forward.

  “Yup,” Moira said. “His name was Ronan and he died in the su-mommy.”

  “Tsunami. But do you remember anything else?”

  Moira thought. “Umm, no?” she asked, not sure if this was the right answer to Elm’s question.

  Elm sat back. She wouldn’t be able to get a straight answer out of a kindergartner. Today Moira might not remember, tomorrow she would, twenty years from now, who knew?

  “Time to get out, Mo,” Elm said, smiling to prevent tears.

  “Noooo,” Moira wailed.

  “Yes, come on, the water’s cold.” She reached in to pick Moira up under her arms. Moira began to squirm.

  “Careful, Mo, you’re slippery.”

  Moira splashed Elm with her feet.

  “Goddammit, Moira. Can you just please for once behave?” And Elm, surprising herself, began to cry.

  Moira was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry, Mommy. I didn’t mean it.” I didn’t mean it was child talk for Now that I’m in trouble I wish I hadn’t done it. But still Elm cried, out of frustration, exhaustion, residual grief.

  Moira was not as upset as another child might have been; she’d seen her parents cry innumerable times—so much there couldn’t possibly be any liquid left in their eyes, their bodies. They should be sacks of skin like dehydrated cartoon characters.

  Elm sat back down on the toilet, and Moira wrapped her towel around herself, then hugged her mother around the middle. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “I remember Ronan. I promise.”

  The phone rang twice before Elm picked it up, though it was next to her. She had told Colin she was expecting a call from overseas. “Is anyone awake in Europe?” he asked.

  “Asia,” she said.

  She walked into the bedroom with the phone to her ear, waiting to say hello until she was out of Colin’s earshot.

  “Ms. Howells?” said the voice. Had she given her name? Elm wondered.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I am glad we can speak further. You are interested in seeing Ronan again, am I right?”

  His name, so unexpected, took her breath away. She gasped. “How did—?”

  “The Internet, Madame, is a powerful tool. There is much information about you; for instance, that you took Inside the Slidy Diner out of the public library on Ninety-sixth Street last weekend.”

  “That’s a little disturbing.”

  “That’s the world we live in,” the voice said. He seemed willing to make small talk, speaking rhythmically, hypnotically. “We live in technology. There is no reason to fight the inevitable; it is dissecting clouds.”

  “This seems completely unbelievable,” Elm said.

  “Yes, there is a lot of misinformation about what we do. When I first began here, it seemed like a science fiction story. But I assure you, it is very real.”

  “I thought we were still many years away from … doing what you do.”

  “Governments have an interest in disseminating false information,” he said.

  “I’m really not a conspiracy theorist,” Elm said. “What possible reason would the government have for suppressing science?”

  “You think the government doesn’t keep science from the public? What about the dangers of Vioxx? What about the syphilis experiment with the Negroes of the South? What about how cigarettes aren’t addictive? Even now, they are claiming that the lung problems the people of 9/11 are having are not the result of breathing that air. Ha!” he scoffed. “You should feel surprised your government ever tells you the truth.”

  Elm sat silent, chastised. This was stupid, she thought. This was a joke that had gone on too long. This was crazy. This was abnormal.

  “The next step, Madame, is for you to come to Paris to tour our facility and to submit to medical examination, if you want to be the host.”

  It took Elm a moment to parse this information. If she wanted to carry the baby. “I’m told, my doctor said, I don’t really have any eggs. Follicles. Active ones.” Elm could barely get the words out.

  “It’s very easy to get donated ova.” Elm was astonished. He didn’t seem remotely wo
rried about her infertility. A donor egg, of course. If they were removing the nucleus, all the genetic information, what did it matter where the raw materials came from?

  “Madame?” the man asked into the silent phone.

  “I don’t know if I can come to Paris, fly three thousand miles to meet—”

  “With all due respect, Madame, the process is not inexpensive. Consider the trip a holiday, a deposit on the ultimate benefit.”

  Elm supposed he was right. The process must be tens of thousands of dollars. In comparison, a long weekend to the City of Light was pocket change.

  “Perhaps it could be coupled with a business venture?” he asked. “I see you travel to the Continent not infrequently.”

  Elm nodded, alone in the bedroom, until she realized that he was obviously looking at a record of her transatlantic travels, which made her shiver.

  “Shall we say in two weeks?” he asked. “We can arrange flights and a nearby hotel, transportation from the airport to our facility.”

  “I’d feel better if I could be on my own,” Elm said, imagining an international kidnapping scandal.

  “As you wish,” the man said graciously. “You may e-mail to let us know when you’ll be arriving, and we will send a car for you. Our location is within an hour of Paris.”

  Elm hung up the phone, and tried to stop imagining herself getting off the plane, being whisked away in a limousine to some estate with voluptuous nurses and sterile Swiss hospital beds. Maybe she should look at it the way she used to encourage herself to look at dating: as a social experiment, with an anthropologist’s permanent interest and detachment. Then she could laugh about it, about going to a secret medical facility in France. She wandered back out into the living room. Colin was sipping from a scotch.

  “I have to go to Paris,” she said. “For work,” she added, realizing the detail was more suspicious than its omission. Tell him, her conscience urged. Tell him you went to the doctor and you have poor follicle reserve and then there was this website … Don’t, it said. Check it out first. If it’s real, then you can discuss it. She made a bargain with herself. If he remembered her doctor’s appointment, if he asked her about it, about her day, about anything at all, she would tell him. She waited anxiously for him to respond.

  “Hmmm,” he said. The light from the television fell unflatteringly across the stubble on his chin, giving him a pallor that puttied his soft features.

  Gabriel

  Gabriel’s roommates, curiously, were all out. He lived with a gaggle of Scandinavian students who were completing degrees, or avoiding the completion of degrees, in various subjects. Two in particular were studious, often sitting at their communal desk until early in the morning. The walls were so thin in the flat that he could hear the computer keys clacking at night.

  The apartment had once been a garment factory, and the landlord got a tax incentive for renting to students. It was one room cordoned off by makeshift walls. The kitchen/living room was furnished with found furniture; when sat on the sofa gave a sigh and belched dust.

  Gabriel took out the paper to examine it. It was dotted with wormholes, as all old paper was. The holes would soak up his ink and betray the fact that though the paper was of the proper age, the drawing was not.

  Gabriel silently thanked his first-year drawing instructor at the École. He had insisted the students prepare their rag paper à la the old masters. Gabriel had learned to make ink, to size paper evenly.

  He mixed gelatin and hot water. While it dissolved, he emptied the boxes that were stacked on his floor. Here they were: his notes from those sessions with the professor. He continued to paw through the boxes. Gabriel had spent hours in the rain visiting various Chinese herbalists until he found the jet-black ink he was looking for. He over-watered it, so he mixed it with gum arabic. It had been labor-intensive; Gabriel had cursed him. At four a.m., stoned nearly unconscious, he was shaking a mustard jar of turpentine and walnut oil. Now, leaking into the box below it, but still useable, the old mustard jar was full of ink. He was in business.

  He took a wide brush and spent more time cleaning it than usual, meticulously paring each bristle, trimming the ones that seemed to point in errant directions. He was ready.

  The sizing would determine how authentic the drawing looked. He knew he could draw like his ancestor, but if the sizing was uneven, darker in patches or streaked, then the forgery would be obvious. He took a deep breath, steadied his hand, and bathed the paper in glue. The professor had explained that artists should relax their wrists when sizing paper.

  “It is like you are on a swing,” the professor had said. “No, it is like you are pushing your lover on a swing, back and forth, with care and force equally.” Gabriel found that the French compared most things to sex. Spanish analogies mostly had to do with food or body functions.

  The sizing complete, Gabriel took the page into his room; it would take a few hours to dry. He went back into the kitchen and cleaned the brush again. Then he dumped the rest of the sizing out into the garbage and scrubbed the bowl. He was probably being too clean. His roommates would be suspicious of the washed dishes and the wiped counters. So he made himself a coffee, making sure to let some grounds linger.

  Sitting in his kitchen, listening to the sound of the coffee bubbling and waiting for the paper to dry, he remembered being a first-year student. His first few months in Paris were simultaneously exciting and disorienting, tinged with worry for his mother—justified, as it turned out, as she was diagnosed just a few months later. She didn’t tell him, didn’t want to worry him, until the very end, and he went to see her, taking the bus twenty-six straight hours until he was at her bedside holding her hand.

  They’d brought her home from the hospital, and the neighbors, who were as much an extended family as any he knew, had arranged for a hospital bed to be placed in the kitchen, so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. As it was, she never left the bed again. He sat with her and petted her hand, smoothed the hair off her dry, shrunken forehead. She had always been plump, but in her last days she was as thin as a paintbrush, brittle and desiccated. He gave her sips of water through a straw, fed her ice.

  She stopped eating two days after he got there and lived for three more. He sold all of her possessions and earned just enough to bury her and pay his rent for a year. The copied Connois he gave to neighbors before he returned to France. He wasn’t sorry to have left it there; it would have been a constant reminder of his duplicity.

  Would the pueblo feel different to him now? Look different? Smell different? It felt strange to think of a Spain without his mother in it. The world would never again taste her croquetas or the bread she baked and sold at market. He had not gone back since then because he had no money, nor anyone to visit. If he didn’t return, then his mother was still alive, still in her kitchen. Spain was like a photograph, perpetually frozen in his memory.

  He missed his mother. He sighed, finally able to put a name to the knot of anxiety in his stomach. He was lonely and scared that he might disappear from this life and no one would remember him. An image came to him unbidden of Lise’s child burying his face in Gabriel’s neck. The fantasy was so strong he could even feel the moist heat, smell his baby odor. And then it was Lise in his arms, her body pressed close to his, her heartbeat sounding on his chest. She was telling him she was there, would always be there. His eyes suddenly welled with tears, and he lay back on his bed and stared at the juncture where the plasterboard wall met the old tin ceiling until the urge to sob had passed.

  He drew in his studio with his headphones on. There was nothing suspicious about his actions. He just had to make sure that no one from the studio would later recognize the drawing as his. But artists deserved the stereotype of being notoriously self-centered; he doubted anyone would even see his drawing, so involved were they in their own work.

  It was a disaster. His lines were hesitant, as if the value of the page weighed his hand down, made it sluggish, scared. And it didn’t feel l
ike modern paper. It was unexpectedly rough and yet pillowy, like drawing on a piece of toilet paper. The ink was blotchy, alternately thick and reed-thin where he was unable to adequately control the nib. Gabriel wished he’d thought to bring alcohol to the studio. He wondered if Marie-Laure had any. He hadn’t heard her complain, so she was most likely not working tonight. He could just sneak into her space, grab a nip, replace it the following day. Or maybe he just needed to clear his head.

  Outside, it was raining, but he didn’t go back in. How would he explain his failure to Klinman, who would be angry with him for ruining the paper? He was furious with himself, as usual. He’d fucked up again.

  He snuck out of Édouard’s early the following day, complaining of a stomachache. He did have one; his innards were tied in knots with the knowledge that Klinman might murder him. He had to go back to his studio to retrieve the failed drawing. Then he had a five p.m. appointment with Lise for a tour of Ambrosine’s. His earlier fear that she was embarrassed to have him come to the gallery proved to be unwarranted. Gabriel found that was often the case; he imagined that people were embarrassed by him, disliked him, designed elaborate schemes to get rid of him. Only afterward did he realize that not only did people not think of him in that way, but most often, no one was thinking about him at all. He was glad he had been wrong about Lise’s intentions, if not about her bourgeois life. He was glad to have her as a friend.

  Few were the artists who had their own studios that doubled as storefronts. Among these elite, even fewer had the staying power of Ambrosine. He had capitalized on his real estate and fame to serve as a high-end market for contemporary art. But not the avant-garde post-postmodern installations that interested Gabriel. Rather, he was a purveyor of big names, little talent, like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emins. Gabriel felt simultaneously envious and dismissive of these sellouts. He knew, even as he looked down on them, that he would trade places with them in a heartbeat. It had become his habit recently to check biographies for birth dates. More often than not, those written about in art magazines or shown in the windows of Marais galleries were younger than he.