Free You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin Page A

she hadn’t mentioned, a night we had a terrible row. I was home late from work and Sara confronted me in the front hallway with a simple question: “Why do you ignore me?” She’d been crying. It was midnight, she was wearing an old Chicago sweatshirt of mine with rips in the underarms. It had been a terrible, arresting shock. She walked away and I stood in the hall fiddling with some mail in the key basket, wondering a storm of thoughts. It took me a few weeks to recover and then grasp how I needed to change, which seemed pathetic now in retrospect, but I’d dedicated myself afterward to a plan of evolution: engaging, listening, spending more time at home; being better about leaving work behind when I locked up at school; worrying fewer nights away in the lab or on the phone from home, and stopping weekend work altogether; being a better husband.
    But it must have been around the time that Sara started writing Woman Hits Forty . Because just when I changed to be more of a home-body, it seemed as though she didn’t want a husband at all. I thought I’d simply read her wrong. How else to explain the short temper, her lack of interest in sex or conversation? And then the play took off, Sara rocketed up to Broadway, and soon it was she who wasn’t coming home after work, leaving messages saying I should order take-out.
    A change of direction for me, not for her.
     
     
     
    The airline representative said Russell’s plane was late, due to rain. A thin fog was drifting through the meadows surrounding the tarmac. I went back to my car and put in a John Dowland CD and turned up the volume. Sixteenth-century lute songs to wake the drifting dead.
    The night I met Regina was foggy, too, at a party of Soborg people where I’d snuck out to escape the band. When Regina appeared, I was leaning on a railing, remembering how it had always been Sara’s job to lead at parties, particularly after The Hook-Up was in the works: Sara tugging me behind her, like a teddy bear, her husband the “famous” scientist, hadn’t they seen the latest issue of Nature ? But whoever it was, whether some agent or producer, he’d often seem more pleased than I expected, as if here was a chance to be normal, show off he’d once taken a science class. “The genome project, now, that’s real magic,” one would say, and then we’d leave for the next group of strangers, our chain of hands yanked by Sara’s agent, Mark, who was constantly whispering, “But you must meet Arlo, you must know Thaddeus, you must know Jude.”
    Except Victor, who needed to know Victor?
    “You should shave it,” Regina had said from somewhere behind my left shoulder. Her voice was bored, affected to sound worldly. “Like the way Bruce Willis does,” she said. “It would be more imposing.”
    The party was held in honor of Soborg’s president, the man who’d recruited me in the first place. Almost the entire institute had gathered to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, Dr. Solomon Low’s, a former Dart-mouth dean and renowned biologist, well known for his crotchety temper and his humpback, hence his nickname, Toad.
    I was not Toad’s favorite. Academics demonstrated status by hoarding information, displaying that behind their peacock feathers they owned something no one else possessed (and thus our fields of study had over time become more specialized, more competitive, and less able to communicate with one another), and in the same fashion, academic institutions prized notable names, the better to flaunt their standing. Basically, Toad would have liked me more if I were cited more frequently in The Boston Globe . He was an old-guard New England aristocrat who took his favorite employees sailing. The time I went, I was seasick in the hold, and when we docked he was still laughing about it.
    “I met him, actually, Bruce Willis,” I said to Regina. “At a party in New York.”
    “Nice guy?”
    “Nice enough.”
    “Wouldn’t you want to look like Bruce