A Nearly Perfect Copy

Elm




On a rainy Friday, a week before she gave birth to Moira, Elm took Ronan to the Morgan Library & Museum. “Is that the house one?” he asked. She wasn’t sure if he was talking about the Frick or the Morgan.

They rode in the first car of the 6 train, so that Ronan could pretend he was driving it. “If we’re going to Thirty-sixth Street,” Elm said, “where do we get off the train?”

“Thirty-third,” he said, as though anyone on the planet could answer such a simple question. He was turning an imaginary steering wheel, yelling out the stops when they slowed. The subway car found it cute; people were laughing behind her as she held his belt buckle while he tried to peer out the window. Elm couldn’t lift him anymore.

A black man in a doorman’s uniform came over and, without asking, picked Ronan up so he could see out. Elm was startled—a sudden rush of adrenaline made her extend her arm as though she might snatch him back—but the man was totally benign, just trying to help, and Ronan squealed with delight.

After Forty-second Street Ronan said, “We get off here,” to the man, and he set him down.

Elm took Ronan’s hand in the crowded station as they moved slowly up the stairs. The baby was heavy, resting on her pelvis, and picking up her legs was difficult. She had woken up that morning with swollen ankles. The only shoes that fit were her sneakers.

Ronan’s hand was slightly sticky while hers was sweaty. They walked down Thirty-fifth Street. Usually she let him walk on his own, but today he held her hand the entire way. He walked slightly behind her, as though afraid she’d fall down.

In the museum, she found him a children’s guide to the exhibition “From Bruegel to Rubens: Netherlandish and Flemish Drawings,” and gave him the first item to find within the intricate drawings, a dog with a curly tail. He stood far back so he could see them. Elm had come to study the exhibit, a sort of continuing education session, which she had left until the last minute, but instead she watched Ronan taking his task so seriously. She could read the triumph on his face when he found the dog, rushing back to tell her, almost running into a middle-aged Italian couple. “I got it!” he screamed, and when Elm put her finger to her lips he whispered it again.

“Now you have to find a horse,” she said, and he resumed his scrutiny. Elm stood in front of Cossiers’s portrait of his son Guiliellemus. The nose was too large for the small head, but Cossiers had exactly captured the child as his attention was drawn to something else, that moment between focus and excitement that she loved to watch in her own child. Moira kicked inside her and Elm rubbed the spot.

“Babies, babies, everywhere,” Ronan said next to her, reciting a children’s book. “There”—he pointed to the drawing—“and there”—pointing to her belly.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Girls,” he observed.

“Actually,” Elm said, “that’s a picture of a boy with long hair.”

One of his pant legs was tucked into his sock, and it was time for a haircut. Knowing it was likely the last time they’d spend real time together before the new baby was born, and knowing that everything would change, she held him to her and clung, perhaps a bit too tightly.

“Ow, Mom, she kicked me,” he said, pulling away.

“You two are fighting already?” She had felt it too, a little foot wedged between them.

“I just hope she likes trains,” he said, sighing.

“Me too,” Elm said.



She was staring at what would have been a window if she’d had a decent office; she answered the phone only half-paying attention. “Young lady,” the voice on the line said, “I am Indira Schmidt.”

The name triggered a memory of her afternoon sobbing in the woman’s living room.

“Young lady,” the woman said. “I would like you to come over.”

“Now?” Elm asked.

“Whenever it is convenient for you. I have something to show you.”

“It’s difficult right now,” Elm said. “Maybe Ian, the young man that was with me before, can come take a look?”

“It is for your eyes only,” Indira said. “Is that dramatic enough? I want your opinion. If I had wanted that young man’s, I would have called him.”

Elm sighed. “How about I come by after work tonight?” She considered. She would have to get across town and then up to Columbia. She was committing herself to at least an hour commute each way, though it wasn’t more than a couple of miles.

“That would be fine,” Indira said. “I’ll expect you then.”

As Elm waited for Indira to answer the door, she noticed a dead cockroach. She wondered why cockroaches always died feet up, and how they managed to do so. The welcome mat was frayed on the edges. She rang the bell again, heard it loudly on the other side. Was it possible that Indira wasn’t home? That she had forgotten? That she couldn’t hear the bell? Dead? Elm considered what to do if Indira didn’t answer the door. Ring the next-door neighbor’s bell, she decided, and ask them to call the super. Elm was imagining the conversation with the super when the door’s chain began to rattle.

Indira seemed more resigned to see her than happy. She drew back the door slowly and grimaced. Elm was immediately infused with anger. She had come all the way across town for this woman. The least Indira could do was acknowledge her effort.

Indira’s apartment looked even darker than it had before, if that were possible. The heavy curtains were still shut tight.

“I’m sorry,” Indira said, as she limped down the hallway. “Some days are not so good, and this is one of those days.” She collapsed into an armchair, out of breath.

Elm’s anger melted into pity and guilt. “Can I get you something?” she asked.

Indira waved her off, her hand crooked like a skeleton in the air. Elm sat down in the armchair opposite her. Between them stood a footed table, a dingy lace runner just slightly larger than the tabletop’s circumference resting on top. There sat an ashtray, its sole contents a dead fly, curled into itself. “Do you know about my family?” Indira asked.

“The Holocaust, isn’t that right?” Elm said. She placed her hands in her lap, sat up straight.

“Yes. I was married. They do not know that.” Elm wasn’t sure who “they” were. “He was taken almost immediately: Jew, Communist, student.”

Elm wasn’t sure what to say. She took advantage of the brief pause to say she was sorry.

Again, the skeletal hand. “I am telling you this for a reason. You’ll have to trust me. This is not just the ramblings of an old woman. No, it is the ramblings of an old woman, but one who is coming to a point. Young lady, can you please bring me that box there by the lamp?”

Elm stood and picked up a small curio box. It was plain, the top held by a latch. Elm wondered what was inside it. A broach of some kind that she wanted to show Elm? A portrait on a napkin by Picasso? Indira took the box and opened it. Elm couldn’t see inside it as Indira moved her hands. Then she brought out a small cigarette and a lighter.

She placed the cigarette in her mouth and handed Elm the lighter. It was antique, and it took Elm two or three tries before she got it to light. When the cigarette caught, Elm realized Indira was smoking pot, and she had to fight to stifle a laugh.

“Laugh, laugh,” Indira said. “It’s funny to see an old lady get high. I will join you in laughing in a minute.” She took a drag and held it in. Then she flicked it into the ashtray. Indira held out the joint to Elm. “Do you smoke?”

Elm shook her head. “I have other bad habits.”

“I know it’s silly, but I turned ninety and thought, what the hell, might as well, and now I keep Columbia’s pot dealers in business.”

Indira stubbed out the joint in the ashtray on the side table. Elm now saw that what she had thought was a fly was actually a piece of ash.

“I have been criticized,” she said, “because my work is not political. It doesn’t reference the Holocaust. Why should it? Art is about beauty and balance, nature, and by nature I mean God. If I want to make a statement I use my mouth. We leave politics for the politicians and historians to make up whatever they want.”

Elm stared at Indira’s profile. Her face was turned toward the painting above the sofa, an abstract that Elm didn’t recognize. But Elm could see that her gaze was soft; she was looking elsewhere.

“I lived the politics. I don’t have to be reminded.” Indira paused, but Elm sensed she wasn’t supposed to speak. “I had friends in France, and when the Nazis took Jacob my friends insisted I come. When it looked like France would be occupied, they arranged for a U.S. visa, impossible to get at that point, but my friends were … important. I say this because it explains why it happened. I met him when I attended a state dinner at the White House. He talked to me in German, and he understood. And he wasn’t like the others. His guilt was quiet, like mine. He emigrated. He didn’t have to walk across the Alps or hide in chicken feed or get smuggled out like contraband. He was smart, and he hated himself for it. That was the connection. I’ve never told anyone, but now he’s dead.”

Elm wasn’t sure who Indira meant. She wondered if the woman wasn’t a little off. “Who?” she asked softly.

Indira looked at her as though she had just asked her own name. “Blatzenger, of course.”

“Nixon’s guy?” Elm knew Blitz-Blatz, as everyone called him, had had many affairs, but she hadn’t known that Indira was one of his conquests.

“I attended a state dinner at the White House. That’s where I met him. We were together for twenty years, until his death.”

“I didn’t know,” Elm said.

“No one does,” Indira said. “We were very careful. Toward the end it was an affair without the physical, but we believed in the same God, passionately.”

“Wow,” Elm said, realizing as she said it how ugly and inadequate the word sounded. How American.

“There is one more piece that I haven’t shown you. One more. I was supposed to meet him in the Netherlands, but there was a crisis. During the cold war there was always a crisis, and his trip was cut short. Still, he bought this for me, a Connois pastel.”

“I would love to see it,” Elm said.

“It’s there.” Indira pointed but her fingers were so crooked it was impossible to tell which way.

Elm noticed that behind the dining table, leaning against the dark, stained wallpaper, was a large square, undoubtedly a frame, covered by a dropcloth that had the same stained dark green color as the wallpaper, camouflaging it.

“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.

Elm pictured Ronan’s pink face when they brought him home from the hospital. He had been overdue, and his skin was wrinkly and peeling like a tiny bird. What would they name a clone? They couldn’t call it Ronan.

A tease, Elm thought. A crock of shit. She felt stupid for even looking at the site. Were they going to bring Ronan back from the dead? With their magic potions, their “patented scientific process”? Who fell for this? The same people who actually thought they were helping a Nigerian prince or the Russian czarina in response to an e-mail request.

Was it possible that this site intrigued her because she was secretly interested in cloning Ronan? It was ridiculous, science fiction. She went back to the FAQ section; she imagined Colin asking her: Wouldn’t it result in defects? Wasn’t it dangerous for the mother? Was it ethical? Was it legal?

Most of the ethical arguments seemed to hinge on the slippery-slope philosophy. First you start cloning, and then what? This didn’t apply to her, Elm thought. She didn’t want to make a clone assembly line; she wanted her child. She wasn’t fiddling with nature; she was replacing what nature had stolen from her. There were no larger implications of her actions. She just wanted her little boy back, with all his imperfections intact—his stubbornness, his slightly awkward run, his teeth that would inevitably need braces.

And couldn’t she do a better job raising him this time, having raised two children already? She knew that he was allergic to cherries, that he didn’t like chocolate ice cream, that he would be bad at soccer but excellent at baseball. He had had trouble spelling; she could start him earlier. Elm felt a small hope begin to flutter, a minor lessening of the contraction that was her grief. If she could just hold him again, for a minute, it was worth any amount of money. Surely Colin had to see that.

Before she knew what she was doing, she had the phone in her hands and was dialing an international number. For kicks, she told herself. Just to see. The phone rang in that non-American click that always screamed to her: “Expensive call! Don’t talk too long!” Then she realized that it was evening in Paris—likely no one would answer the phone and she could put this nonsense behind her. She was surprised when a voice greeted her in rapid French.

“Bonjour,” said Elm in her college French. “Je voudrais de l’information, s’il vous plaît.”

“You are American?” The voice was clogged with accent. “I have someone to speak to you.”

Elm was transferred. The phone played generic hold music until a man answered. Hang up, Elm told herself. This was ridiculous. Just hang up.

“You are the American woman who would like information?” He was French too, but his English was smooth, fluent.

“Yes, I was wondering—”

“Excuse me, but on the phone we speak in generalities, yes?”

“Of course,” Elm said. “I’m so sorry.” She felt as though she were investigating a crime, pretending to be someone she was not in order to glean information.

“You are a member of a government agency?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“You must by law identify yourself if you are a member of a government agency. It is both EU and American law.” Was that true? Elm wondered. Or was that just something people got from the movies?

“I’m just a citizen,” she said.

“And you are calling from your home?” he recited.

“My place of business.” Elm began to worry. She hadn’t realized what she was doing. She was just calling out of harmless curiosity. She didn’t want to start an international incident. “Look,” she said. “Maybe I should hang up.”

“I suggest the same thing,” said the man. “You give me a number at your home and I will call you this evening so we can both talk freely.”

Elm said, “I don’t think … I mean …”

“Madame,” the man said. “If you will permit. You obviously called here for a reason. You were curious. You might as well satisfy that curiosity. There is reason for subterfuge, but only because there are those who would impede the progress of science. You are seeking information. There is still nothing wrong with that, even with your Patriot Act. Am I not correct?”

“Yes,” Elm said. She began to breathe faster. She felt a horrible sinking in the pit of her stomach; she realized she had made a terrible mistake that was going to reverberate for longer than she had anticipated. What had she started in motion?

She gave him her name and phone number and replaced the headset in the cradle.

She hit her home key and was immediately returned to a cached version of Tinsley’s site: brocade tapestry background, the trademark photo of her great-grandfather in Egypt next to an enormous amphora, links to departments. She stared at the page and permitted herself a small fantasy in which she walked out of a new clinic somewhere on the outskirts of Paris holding Ronan’s hand. But no, she corrected her reverie. He would be a baby. She revised the vision, holding him in her arms, remembering his wrinkled, red hands, the skinny legs that looked too big for his body, the slightly smushed head. Then she shook her head as if to get rid of the image, just as someone walked by her office door. Elm rolled her head on her neck, pretending to be stretching a kink, and not rebooting her mind.

Elm was supposed to be writing a press release, but she was unable to concentrate. Her heart beat fast, anticipating bad news. It was barely noon. Too early for lunch.

Sometimes looking at prints brought fresh language to her cortex, loosened her tongue enough to find new-sounding synonyms for important, major, chef d’ouevre, etc., so she headed down to the print room. She got off the elevator on the mezzanine. She would take the grand staircase, see what was happening on the floor. Emerging from the elevator, she had to appreciate, though it was not to her taste, the new entry, designed by a celebrity architect. The mezzanine floated above the main floor, turning what once had been a cavernous hull, like a high school gym, into a display place for hanging, appreciating, and admiring art.

The mezzanine walkway (or the mezzie, as facilities called it) extended from one side of the building to the other, but was only ten feet wide, so that views of the downstairs were not only unavoidable but the focus. Sculptures, or objets, were sometimes displayed here, but often the space was left intentionally bare. Today facilities had set out small pedestals at regular intervals, but they remained as yet artless, so that the walkway looked like a conceptual graveyard, or the control deck for a spaceship.

The main space was four stories tall, and the front wall of windows extended all the way to the top, their steel supports nearly invisible. The usual East Side traffic of nannies and children paraded by, and the normal array of large delivery trucks was blocking traffic. She stood with her hands on the railing and looked down over the first floor. It could have been the lobby of any enterprise: dark marble floors, receptionists, post-9/11 security measures (less ridiculous than in most businesses when the building’s museum-quality contents on any given day could exceed the gross national product of medium-sized nations). But at Tinsley’s, the air, filtered through the purification system and the tempered glass, was different. It was entitled, cultured. No one walked with the slumped posture of those beaten down by the cruelty of the corporate world, its ladders and pernicious chutes, its denizens who toiled merely for the paycheck to feed the family, to pay the credit card debt, to get the health insurance. Instead, in the art world, there was a tacit rule that everyone was doing exactly what he had always hoped he’d be doing. The fiction stated that proximity to the world’s most beautiful objects was a privilege, and there was a slight pity for everyone else who didn’t get to do this fantastic job.

In this environment, which Elm’s great-grandfather had purposefully cultivated via mandatory monthly all-company meetings-cum-lectures, and a refashioned annual picnic that was more of a gala, including the receptionists, facilities, and the janitorial staff, complaints were not only prohibited but smacked of ingratitude and, frankly, the same uncomprehending troglodism that marked the noncultured. Part of the elitism of Tinsley’s was the culture of secrecy, the mystery of fine art, of its aesthetic possibilities and its inherent value. Yes, one could point to artistic mastery—beautiful composition, or a startling use of color, an elegant line—or the provenance of an objet (Queen Elizabeth’s ivory fan, Edgar Allan Poe’s cloisonné snuff case)—but the best pieces had their own allure, unspoken and magnetic. Part of the value, though, required that no one mention the emperor’s new clothes, for fear of driving down prices or the perceived importance of a work. Therefore, it was wise to play up the aura of mystery surrounding fine art, and this secrecy spread to all facets of the industry. The auction house hid minimum reserves, obfuscated provenances, kept buyers anonymous. Dealers buying for clients sometimes phoned in their bids from the auction room itself, adding an unnecessary layer of intrigue. Rarely were the numbers published, and no one would have dreamed of asking. The less anyone knew the better. And so Elm often felt like she was working inside a burlap sack—light filtered in, but not enough to see by.

She made her way across the mezzie and down the utility stairs to the basement. The corridor was long and painted a glowing white so that the hallway looked like a cinematic version of an endless existential hell. The corridors were monitored by video cameras that downloaded the activity to remote servers in India. Doors along this expanse of hallway were marked only with numbers, either for security’s sake or to propitiate the secrecy gods. Elm punched in her code to the third one, marked 4357, and the green light above the combination pad clicked, granting her access.

Inside, the dim light was such a contrast to the overlit hallway that Elm stopped automatically at the entrance, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Finally, the shelf materialized, traversing three walls, a complicated three-dimensional lightbox. Standing at the one in the far corner was a thin figure poring over a drawing with a loupe, a stack of others at her elbow.

Elm identified the woman before she even looked up. “Hello, El-MEE-ra,” Colette purred. Elm had to admit that her name sounded better with a French emphasis than with the American “El-MY-ruh.”

“I didn’t know you were back in town.” Elm tried to sound chipper.

Colette smiled in response.

“Whatcha doing?” Elm asked.

“Familiarizing myself with our inventory. What are you doing?” Colette asked. Elm wasn’t sure if her tone could be described as hostile or French.

“Making sure everything’s how I left it.” She was unable to disguise the antipathy in her voice. Colette continued to smile. The woman enjoyed sport; intrigue, not art, Elm thought. This was what the art world was coming to. Dealers who acted like businessmen and businessmen who acted like dealers. No wonder Elm’s numbers weren’t what Greer had hoped.

“Where’s …” Elm snapped her fingers, grasping at the intern’s name.

“Franz?” Colette said. “I sent him out for coffee.” She turned back to the drawing she was examining.

“He’s not bringing it in here,” Elm said. It was unthinkable to let liquid anywhere near these drawings.

Colette didn’t even look up and yet that feline smile was unmistakable, mirthless. “I will meet him in fifteen minutes.”

“Ahhh,” Elm said. She put on a pair of white gloves from the basket close to the door. They were scratchy on the inside; she disliked wearing them. She couldn’t feel the drawing, which was, for her, as much a part of identifying it as looking at it. She stepped over and took the top three drawings from Colette’s pile. The first was by Delacroix, undated, unsigned. It was an apparent study, for Christ on the Lake of Gennesaret, of an oarsman, muscled back to the viewer. It was beautiful, and Elm’s heart had sped when she first saw it in the ornate public conference room. The seller was getting divorced (a common, if sad, method by which many drawings and paintings came to sale), and needed to sell his collection as part of the settlement. He was a small man, emotional when handing over the drawings, which he held by their edges like photographs in danger of being smudged. His few strands of hair were combed in concentric circles on the top of his head, and when he looked down to say good-bye to his Delacroix, Elm could see the delicate flakes of dandruff woven like cotton in a bird’s nest.

This was the kind of sale Elm loved. Not that she was glad to profit off someone’s disintegrating marriage, but she rejoiced to see others who felt the same connection to the art that she did. This man was selling more than a ripe investment, more than a decoration. He was selling something that was as close to his heart as his wife must once have been. He had lived with the art, loved it, saw in it the accomplishments of mankind, the sensuousness of nature, the artist’s raw talent and unique vision. That’s what would ultimately separate Elm and this man from the Colettes and the Greers of the world: art could still bring Elm to tears.

It was truly beautiful. She would be sad to see it at auction, but, then, she knew she would secretly root for it as its lot came up. She often grew attached, rejoicing when a piece fetched a higher price than expected, flushed with pride as though she had drawn it herself.

Elm put it aside, assigning adjectives to it for the catalog entry: paramount, influential, emblematic. She watched Colette, who had returned to her loupe, minutely peruse a drawing. This was not the way to examine something, Elm thought. You hold it away from you, judge it as a whole, not scrutinize each individual stroke of the quill or pencil. Unless you were trying to authenticate it. Then you might look for telling details.

The two women stared in silence. Colette straightened and said, “You have not contacted Monsieur Klinman.”

“I’m so sorry, I’ve been busy,” Elm said.

“Well,” Colette said, reminding Elm of her high school French teacher, whose disappointment when Elm didn’t complete her homework hurt worse than the F she’d receive for the assignment. “Unfortunately, the drawings I mentioned have been dispersed, but he has acquired other artists: Canaletto, Piranesi, some contemporaries of the Impressionists. I will forward you the PDFs. I think you will like what you see.”

Elm said, “I’ll take a look.”

“Well,” Colette said, after a pause. “I’ll say good-bye.”

Before Colette left the room, she rolled her skirt up and put on another coat of lipstick, smoothing her hair in its bun. The sight of her primping disgusted Elm. Her willingness to use sex to further her ambition, the strength of that ambition, reminded Elm that she had entered a different age. An age where having children was no longer possible. The light, when Colette closed the door, was an odd brown shade, nearly ochre, thrown up either from the play of light against the dark carpet or, more likely, from the palimpsestic echoes of the brown wash lingering in Elm’s visual cortex.



By the time Elm got back to her office, Colette had sent the PDFs from her contact, Augustus Klinman. Did she forgo her coffee with Franz? Elm wondered. She opened up the file.

The images were actually quite interesting. The first seemed to be a Piranesi. The subject matter was typical Piranesi—blueprintlike attention to architectural detail. An arch, in ruins, with Romans strolling nearby. And the line was spontaneous in the manner of a study for an etching. And certainly, the wash and ink, the exaggerated shading, and the lack of interest in nature all suggested that the famous artist had created this with his own hand.

There was also a gouache by that artist who was a contemporary of Connois, that Greek guy, what was his name? Elm could never remember. It was of a little girl, a bow in her hair, petting a white dog whose tongue lolled out of its mouth, giving it a rather dumb appearance.

The third was by Connois, a market scene, a sketch that looked to be a finished drawing in its own right, which was curious, because Elm wasn’t aware that Connois ever finished his drawings. Two Connoises so close together—Indira’s pastel and now this sketch? How strange, their popping up like toadstools. But, then, coincidence was commonplace, and this was rather lovely.

Klinman’s web page said he dealt primarily in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pieces, especially French, Italian, and Flemish artists, maintaining offices in London and Paris. Working in conjunction with museums, restorers, and master framers, he presented the art in its best possible condition.

Other Google entries quoted Klinman in articles about stolen Nazi art, specifically the faking of provenances. “Ruthless dealers and incompetent experts abound, sadly, in the art world. The temptation to verify that which is not verifiable is strong.” “Art stolen by the Nazis should be returned to the family of the original owner whenever possible. When not possible, the families should be compensated. Descendants of murderers should not be allowed to profit from their grandparents’ marauding.”

Another entry was a press release announcing the highest price ever paid for a Raphael sketch, $48 million, sold via Sotheby’s in London by a family who wanted to be known only through their representative: Augustus Klinman. The purchaser’s name was also kept anonymous.

The uneasy feeling that started the second she dialed the clinic hadn’t subsided all day. It remained through the rest of the afternoon, following her on the bus up First Avenue, to the grocery store, and home, where she was distracted.

Colin was involved in his own drama. “It won’t be inked for thirty days, the deal,” he said tersely in response to her automatic How was your day? “I don’t want to discuss it before then.”

“Fine,” Elm said. She slammed the door to the microwave. She was planning on telling him about her visit with Dr. Hong, but his hostility made her want to keep it to herself.

Moira must have sensed the tension. She refused to eat the spaghetti Elm made for her, and then, after Elm microwaved some chicken fingers, refused to eat the middles, or even touch the single stalk of broccoli alongside them.

“Just eat it,” Colin said with uncharacteristic harshness. Moira sat up as straight as if he’d thrown a glass of water in her face. She began to cry. Elm frowned at him. She picked Moira up and carried her to the bathroom for her bath. Moira began to cry louder, in a whining, overtired way that grated on Elm.

“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 worried 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.