Someone Else's Life Page 2

  Chapter Two

  Hollywood, 2006

  Nathan was pitching for New York then. He always said he liked coming to play the Dodgers, because of all the parties.

  She never forgot his opening line: “Hey, you want to meet someone?” He tilted his head endearingly.

  “Who, you?”

  “Yeah!”

  She hadn’t seen him before and assumed he was just one of the hordes of Hollywood hopefuls. He didn’t look nerdy enough to be a screenwriter or a producer. They talked all evening and Suella wondered where all his quiet, cocky confidence came from. At least a couple of times during their conversation, he said “I know people.” She avoided asking him directly what he did, and she liked the air of mystery he gave by refusing to volunteer the information.

  At the end of the night he said “I think we should get together sometime.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “Gimme your address.”

  “My email address?”

  He shook his head. “No, silly, your snail mail. Just give it to me. You won’t be disappointed.”

  A couple of days later a package arrived for her. When she opened it, she found a handwritten note and an expensive looking cell phone. The note read “You’ll love this phone! It can do everything except give you a massage (nudge nudge wink wink). My number’s already programmed in there. Call me!”

  Whoever this guy was, she thought, he was unbelievable. She called him later.

  “Hey!” he said. “Wanna come to New York?”

  Nathan arranged a ticket for her on the next flight from LAX to LaGuardia. He was going to be busy that afternoon, he said, so would she mind terribly if he had someone from his organization pick her up and bring her to his workplace? Well, so far the man had dropped a lot of money to her. “Sure,” she said. Suella was a freelance systems analyst who could work from anywhere as long as she had one of her MacBook Airs with her. While on the flight she tried to do some code work for a client but she kept stopping and looking up.

  What was she doing? She had dropped everything to fly, cross-country to be with a man she’d only met once, at a party. She knew nothing about Nathan, other than that he was gorgeous and charming. Her heart told her it was the right thing to do. A clean-cut, well groomed gentleman sat beside her on the flight. He looked all around.

  Rather than do his own work or tap into the plane’s electronic entertainment system, he took in all that was around him during the long flight. On the third time that Suella stopped working and glanced upward, he stirred.

  “Is everything okay?” he said with a soothing baritone.

  She shrugged, closing the Mac, knowing that she was too distracted to get any real work done, anyway. “Yes, fine,” she said.

  “You’re on business, I take it?”

  She slid the Mac into her sleek carry-on. “Well, not exactly.”

  “Going to see friends and family? On vacation?”

  She sighed. “Yes, I’m going to see a friend.”

  “I’m on the way home,” he went on. “It’ll be great to see my wife and daughter again.”

  Suella’s shoulders dropped with relief. When she looked at his hands she saw the thick gold band on his finger. “Actually, I’m flying all across the country to meet up with a guy I met once, at a party.” For the rest of the plane trip they discussed whether she was taking a risk or not.

  “You only get to go around once in life,” the man, who had introduced himself as Russell, said. “If you’d stayed back in Santa Monica, you might always wonder if you gave up on something special.”

  Their conversation made the rest of the trip fly by for her. They discussed business, the internet, and movies. Before long, the captain announced over the intercom that they would be landing soon, put all tray tables in the locked and upright position. As they landed in LaGuardia, at the dinner hour Suella turned to Russell. She thanked him.

  Once they both exited from the collapsible corridor, Russell disappeared into the crowd while Suella scanned the sea of faces and signs populating the arrival gate. She saw a jacketed employee holding up a sign reading “Suella Langenfeld.” Happy, she strode up to the gentleman to identify herself. He was a friendly looking guy in his late fifties or early sixties, with a tuft of brown curly hair and big glasses. When she reached him she realized that he was wearing a royal blue satin baseball jacket with the NY insignia in orange on it. His nametag read “Gerald Conway, equipment manager.” They introduced themselves. As Gerald took both of her bags and started walking in the direction of the airport lot, they talked.

  “So you work with Nathan?” she asked him.

  He chuckled. “Yes, you could say that.”

  It suddenly dawned on her. “Nathan is a baseball player?”

  Gerald stopped and turned slowly, to regard her. “Yes. He’s a pitcher.”

  He put her in one of the official fleet cars of the team and drove her to the ballpark, which turned out to be only a couple of miles from the airport.

  When they entered the stadium parking lot, one uniformed guard after another waved Russell through until they reached a ramp that tunneled down into an underground garage. Suella had seen two baseball games in her life, both at Dodger Stadium, and both in the cheap seats, with her friends. When Russell helped her out of the car, she saw the underground beehive of activity for the stadium, with receiving trucks arriving and television vans setting up. People walked briskly back and forth in all directions, most of them squawking into cell phones or two-ways.

  Russell brought Suella all the way through the clubhouse and the executive offices and into the field level corridors. “It’s not safe to go on the field now because they’re still taking batting practice,” Russell said. “He told me to take you straight to the bullpen.”

  “Surprise!” Nathan said when he saw her. He had been sitting on a bench with a few of the other pitchers, watching one of them throw to a catcher. “Did you have a nice flight?” They hugged, and he rocked her back and forth.

  “Yes! Nathan, how come you didn’t tell me?” she asked, pulling away from him. The uniform he wore, with the tight fitting blue nylon underneath, accentuated his lean, v-shaped physique very well. She wondered if she was blushing.

  “Well shucks,” he replied. “I wanted you to know I was a regular guy. I just have kind of a strange job. I get to fling baseballs for a living.”

  Nathan introduced her to his friends and took her to a quiet room in the clubhouse, where he said they did “after the game” interviews. “I’m so glad to see you!”

  They were playing a weekend series against Washington. He was scheduled to pitch on Sunday afternoon, but since Saturday’s game was at night, they would have lots of time in the morning and afternoon to explore and enjoy New York together. While he kept a co-op in Manhattan, she would stay at the Hilton near the airport.

 

  When she thought about their first date years later, she shook her head, grinning. As time wore on, she would learn over and over just how many onion peel style layers of secrecy Nathan would reveal. How late would he stay out that night? While he’d said “just awhile,” she could still be waiting for him at two in the morning. To pass the time she picked up the wand and turned the screen on.

  She at first kept in split mode as she both checked her stocks and her mail along with surfing past channels. A rocket kept lifting off at the lower right quadrant of the screen, distracting her like a fly buzzing around her ear. Would it be better to close out the net or the channel grid? Four choices appeared in the upper left corner. The first three looked like the “let’s embarrass a celebrity” fare that oozed out of the digital maze like slime. A straightforward looking program to the left caught her eye. A calm looking auburn-haired man in a white lab coat held up a DNA helix. Many moons ago, when she had been in school, she had actually
enjoyed science. All the other windows blinked off at her command until only the scientific guy looked out at her. She turned up the sound.

  “Several advances have been made in genetics and yes, cloning over the years,” he said. A picture of Dolly the Sheep flashed onto the screen, and Suella remembered hearing about that in high school, about twenty years ago. Next, they discussed cells.

  Stem cells from cord blood instead of aborted fetuses had ended the arguments from the religious right, the announcer said. While still in its infancy, cloning could produce a viable duplicate of another human being. Suella wondered, with all the freak shows on television, why she’d never heard of parents coming forward with a cloned child. Then again, she hadn’t watched any of those types of shows since Jerry Springer retired five years ago. And even if someone had come forward with a cloned baby, would she have believed it?

  A series of animated images showed the cell, the nuclei, and something called “telomeres.” In the past, cloned offspring produced short telomeres, which brought on genetic problems such as premature aging and weakened immune systems. The next segment of the show discussed scientific details of artificially stimulating the telomeres during the birthing process, which theoretically would produce more viable offspring.

  Her eyes glazed over. She reached for the wand but stopped when the announcer said “This is a breakthrough which will help couples unable to conceive.”

  Usually, the news shows approached things from the other angle, about the government’s attempts to curtail the population. In the wrong company, “mandatory sterilization” could still bring about heated, passionate arguments. Yet, in California, with certain ethnic groups multiplying like rabbits it became the only way to balance the state budget. None of it affected her, of course. Suella was thirty-seven and still childless.

  Meeting with the other wives always caused her to sigh, however. On dates before she married Nathan, many men had asked her one question. “If you were able to have a baby, would you want to?”

  “Of course,” she would say. But she would have to be exactly like her, though. Cloning. There was an idea. That was how she could do it. Her mind ran through a whole series of coming attractions, such styling the little girl’s hair with pretty bows and putting her in adorable baby doll dresses. They would play together, sing together, laugh together, and love together. A daughter would love her unconditionally.

  The door swished open, jarring her from her reverie. Nathan stumbled a bit as he entered the room, smirking at her. When he saw the images on the screen, he squinted. “What the hell are you watching? The “boring” channel?” Nathan tossed his jacket onto the couch and shuffled across the condo toward the refrigerator.

  “I had to do something while you were gone.” She flipped the screen mode back to split, cursing herself for letting him intimidate her.

  Nathan picked up his own wand from the slot near the kitchen doorframe and started paging through his stocks and the headlines. He still stood, concentration locked on the flashing numbers and images, causing Suella to feel as if she were invisible.

  “Hey babe, let me ask you something.”

  Still gazing at the screen, Nathan said “Uh huh.”

  “You know how you’re always saying that you ‘know people?’”

  Still looking. “Yeah.”

  She shifted around on the couch below him. “Do you know anyone who does cloning?”

  “Cloning?” His eyes narrowed, and he glanced down at her for a second. “What, do you want to dig up your dead cat and see if you can make a carbon copy of her or something?”

  “No, silly. But that’s what the show was about. The one I was watching when you came in. They were talking about cloning. We could have the daughter we always wanted.”

  “That you always wanted. You know, babe, that shit still ain’t perfected yet. You’d end up with a kid like in the old time Picasso paintings. You know, with an arm on top of its head or something.”

  Suella bit her lip. Damn his jovial nature! “That’s not what they said.”

  Nathan waved a hand dismissively at the screen. “You can’t believe everything you see or hear on there.”

  “Besides, even if that were to happen, she would still be a child, right? Someone to love.” She kept looking into his eyes.

  He put the wand down and looked at her. For a few moments they stood silently, and then Nathan walked around the couch and sat down next to her, gathering her into his arms. They held each other silently for awhile, and Suella allowed herself to meld into him the way she always did.

  Nathan leaned away from her first. He gazed at her appraisingly for a moment, as if he was seeing her for the first time. “Now I want you to tell me something. Does this talk have to do with your ‘seven year’ paranoia, or is it the other wives in the clubhouse?”

  Suella felt a twinge inside. She paused a moment, knowing that her next statement had to sound good. “Honey, I trust you. And just us is enough.”

  Nathan nodded.

  “But still, I always wanted a child. It would be us. It would be fun.”

  He kept his arm around her. “But isn’t a clone a carbon copy of just you? You wouldn’t even need sperm for that. IVF on the other hand…”

  “Nathan, let’s not go there.”

  He laughed. “Okay, okay. I’ll ask around. I’ll see if anyone knows anything about making robots, I mean clones.”

  She kissed him.

  The next morning she reflected on her independence. She could work anywhere, at any time. It allowed her to explore things on a whim. Even though she had a videocon at one o’clock, she stayed in her lounging pajamas after she showered and fixed her hair. For the entire morning she researched cloning on the web, and at 11:30, her friend Jillian knocked at the door.

  Jillian was an artist who worked out of a studio in an older complex further down the hill. They met when Suella went alone to her one-woman show at one of the galleries. She liked Jill’s use of color and emotion in her renderings of expressionistic street scenes and domestic snapshots. After she bought two of Jillian’s paintings she invited her over for coffee, to discuss art. It would be nice to have a friend in the strange city, after all.

  Her artist friend looked like a character out of a seventies movie, with her faded jeans, smock with huge flowers, and hippie sandals. Absolutely no makeup, hair pulled back. Suella brewed jasmine tea for them, using the delicate china she loved so much. Moments later the two women sat across the coffee table from each other, delicately sipping from the dainty porcelain cups. “Have you ever wanted to have kids, Jill?”

  She sighed. Jillian was a few years younger than Suella. “I love kids, I really do. But no man could ever put up with all my quirks. And I don’t have the time or patience to do it on my own.”

  “Don’t say that, hon. There’s someone for everyone. Right now there’s probably this gorgeous bearded sculptor somewhere pining for someone exactly like you to come along.”

  Jillian laughed. “An artist? We’d starve!”

  “But you do pretty well.” Suella had been to Jillian’s condo, which was a lovely loft with lots of gleaming, shellacked hardwood.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to end up raising both a kid and a husband.” She paused for a moment, glancing at Suella with a serious glint in her eye. “Any particular reason you’re asking?” Normally, they discussed ideas and events.

  “Well, I’m not pregnant.”

  Jillian nodded. “I know. You can’t.”

  That surprised Suella, since she wasn’t aware that she and her friend had ever discussed anything so personal. “Well, I just saw an intriguing program last night. It was about cloning.”

  Jillian bowed her head a little, to ponder this. “Cloning, cloning. “

  “They said that they’ve come up with lots of new advances in it. That the success rate
is a lot higher.”

  Jillian got that faraway look she did whenever she thought something over deeply. Suella knew her well enough just to let her go until she snapped out of it. “Do you suppose a cloned human being has a soul?”

  Suella shrugged. “I never thought about that. It would have to, wouldn’t it?”

  Jillian cleared her throat. “Well, they say we all choose our parents. And, that we make up this whole big mission before we’re born. Now, could you imagine that you’re your soul or your higher self on the other side. And you want to get born again, give a whirl at living a life on earth again. Would you say ‘gee, I’d like to be a clone this time.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” Suella said.

  The tea hour ended shortly after that, and Suella thought about what Jillian had said while she made herself a sandwich and avoid going into the telecon on an empty stomach. Would a cloned human being have a soul? One cloned from her definitely would. Besides, it would still be a part of her. She wasn’t sure if she agreed with the other part of Jillian’s theory: that we all arrange a mission for ourselves while we are on earth. Wasn’t that awfully fatalistic and limiting? She resolved that after the videocon, she would research cloning some more, possibly even make a few phone calls.