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He was incautious. Imprudent. And yet Cliff, and Prithwish, and Robin—especially Robin—had been working so long without relief. They needed some change, or at least some news. They needed a little of Sandy's excitement.
    “I think sometimes his timing . . .” Jacob began.
    “He has an excellent sense of timing.”
    Jacob moved a piece and slapped his time clock. “He's a terrific publicist. He's a great fund-raiser. But I'm not talking about how well he speaks at conferences, or how he can charm money from NIH.”
    “Don't you think those are important qualities?”
    “No question.” Jacob's dark eyes darted over the chessboard. “I give him all the credit he deserves. Particularly when it comes to charming money. But those aren't scientific qualities, are they?”
    “That's not entirely fair.”
    “Why not?”
    Aaron looked up, curious. His parents kept no secrets from him, but they seemed at times to speak in private code, hiding their meaning in plain sight.
    “Look,” said Marion, “you know how he is.”
    “Yes, I know exactly how he is.”
    Distracted by their serious, almost sparring, voices, Aaron made a careless mistake.
    “Aha!” His father pounced. “Check.”
    Aaron stopped eavesdropping instantly; now he had to scramble to find a way out again.
    “You'll have to use your own judgment,” Jacob told Marion.
    He liked Sandy. He would say that to anybody. Sandy was a wonderful storyteller, and had a great ear for satire. He loved to argue—argued brilliantly about everything from global warming to Reagan's Star Wars defense system—and often took a contrarian's point of view, a great virtue in Jacob's mind. Sandy was musical, literate, and a mean Scrabble player. He was almost everything one could ask. And yet, Jacob did not entirely respect him.
    He did not begrudge Marion her friendship. When Sandy had first approached Marion, Jacob had encouraged her to collaborate with him. He had immediately appreciated the money and publicity that the doctor would bring in. Nor did Jacob resent Marion's loyalty to Sandy, and her increasing closeness to him over the past ten years. Perhaps some husbands would be jealous, but Jacob found nothing interesting in the idea that jealousy is a natural counterpart to love, or that when men and women work together there inevitably are sexual undercurrents. These sentimental notions—reductive, clichéd, ingrained in the cultural fantasies of romance—were utterly foreign to him, and had no relevance, as far as Jacob saw, to anyone offscreen, or offstage, or outside the pages of books.
    Jacob's reservations about Sandy were scientific, and thus, far more profound. When it came to science, Sandy's motives were not entirely pure. True, Sandy was excited by discovery. Captured by a research program, no one touted that program so well. But Sandy was not Marion. Sandy's work was not about giving of himself, but about building up himself, his ego, and his persona. Sandy lacked humility; he lacked respect for the complexity of the problems before him, and attacked research with evangelical zeal. Given any encouragement, Sandy would go off rampaging for bold new results, sometimes forgetting what might be small and diffident, and difficult to describe—the truth.
    “I wouldn't tell him anything yet.” Jacob couldn't help warning one last time.
    “But I should,” Marion concluded, in such a decided voice that Aaron looked up again.
    “The less he knows, the better.”
    “That's not true,” said Marion.
    “It's mostly true.”
    “It's a
little
true,” she conceded.
    But now Jacob was back in the game, eyes sparkling with competitive fire. “Checkmate.”

4
    S ANDY HAD a trick, honed from the earliest days of residency, of waking without an alarm clock. Right before he went to sleep, Sandy told himself what time he wanted to wake up. Then he closed his eyes and settled back onto his pillow. The next day, sometimes to the minute on the clock, Sandy's eyes would