Identify Variables
When you see a person smoking, does the smoking: a) increase the person’s attractiveness to you; b) decrease the person’s attractiveness to you; or c) have no impact on the person’s attractiveness?
When I call in for smoking studies, I like to ask the first question: “Have you filled your control group?” It may give away that I’m a regular, but researchers are always looking for people to compare their data to; and they prefer to fill the control group with intelligent people who they know aren’t just trying to score or get off.
Do you have any tattoos? Screws or metallic implants?
Have you ever worked in a metal shop or done any welding?
Have you ever come in contact with shrapnel?
I sit in the white tube of an MRI machine, which clanks and bangs around me for forty-five minutes, strapped down and wearing large headphones through which the research assistant speaks to me. They show me photographs of people holding pens, pencils and other objects in ways that one would typically associate with holding tobacco products.
How much do you want to smoke? 1) Very much; 2) A little bit; 3) Neutral; 4) Not really interested; or 5) Not at all. Please push the button corresponding to your answer.
The research assistant tells me that she wants to take a brain scan while I’m holding a cigarette, and I prop it with one end against the tip of my index finger and the other end against the tip of my thumb.
“Nobody’s ever held it like that before,” she says when the scan is done, then as I gather my shoes and metallic objects, she hands me a money order and a grocery store gift card. As I walk unaccompanied into the waiting room, there she is: Matthews. I see the top of her head. She is filling out the same questionnaire I went through an hour ago. She is a myriad of colors. She is wearing a dark blue skirt, peeking out under a huge yellow sweater, her pale legs drawing a long line down to the floor. She is wearing that bulky black bracelet from the alcohol study.
She says, “Harwood, right?”
“James.” I sit next to her to put on my shoes. “I saw you at Brown last week. Didn’t peg you as a smoker.”
She puts the blue pen down on the clipboard and leans on her knee, smiling a few inches away from my face, and says, “Yeah, and neither are you.” When I uneasily pull away and bend to tie my shoes, she goes back to writing. “It’s okay. Our little secret.”
“Well, I’m sure you can only have so many addictions,” I say, standing up, coat in hand.
“Don’t be so sure about that,” she says; and in a whirl of color and movement, she snaps the pen into the clipboard, jumps to her feet, tucks the clipboard under her left arm, and extends her right hand directly in front of her chest, looking me square in the eye. “I’m Victoria.”
“I’m finished,” I say. There are a good eight inches between the tips of our noses. “See ya, Matthews.”
She laughs. “See ya, Harwood.”
experiment
I keep seeing Victoria, whether intentionally or otherwise. We are in the lobby at the Brown facility again, a few days later.
“Hey, if you’re going to be doing any more of these alcohol studies, maybe we could go for a drink sometime,” she says.
I am prepared for this, having spent the night hooked up to monitors in my assigned bed at a hospital in Boston, eyes glued to the ceiling, thinking about what I would do if she ever suggested something of this sort.
“I don’t know,” is my planned response.
“Look, James, you can ignore me or dismiss me all you want,” she says. “I’m just figuring that if we’re gonna end up in all the same places all the time, maybe we could, you know, plan on it.”
I stare at the elevator doors, waiting for one to open and save me from a decision. When it doesn’t open, I realize that she is standing next to me, looking at the left side of my face.
“Maybe I have somewhere to be after this,” I say.
“Another study?”
“Maybe,” I say as the elevator squeaks open and the research assistant looks to Victoria, who smiles that bite-the-bottom-lip smile at me and pivots toward the elevator. “I thought I was first,” I say to no one in particular.
Would it really be so bad? I think as she moves onto the elevator, and the doors close. I am alone in the lobby. I haven’t had a one-on-one with a woman in three years, and it was usually disastrous at best. Half an hour later, the chime comes and the doors open. Victoria doesn’t say anything but walks right toward me. The research assistant says my name.
“Yeah, stick around,” I say to Victoria. “If you’re still-”
“Yeah, I’m still.”
When I finish upstairs and have waived all liability and given back the device, they hand me the money order and release me. Victoria is waiting in the lobby, sitting on the floor against a wall, her skirt riding up her thighs, and I can see her panties if I try. She jumps up.
“That was quick,” she says. “Some reason, I thought you’d be longer.”
We find a coffee shop a few blocks away, the Cable Car. The back room of the place is an ancient movie theater, where they’ve replaced all the traditional seats with ratty old couches and recliners. It’s a good place to be groped by a stranger in the dark. Victoria suggests that we could see a movie, but it’s clearly a joke. Seeing a movie at the Cable Car is always a joke. We order coffees and they come quickly. I take mine black, she goes to the condiment bar and pours in a little bit of cream before pulling a bottle of honey out of her bag.
“A woman who brings her own honey,” I say when she comes to the table I have chosen.
“Is it not that common?”
“It is rather uncommon.”
We get the formalities out of the way.
Where are you from?
Do you participate in many studies? If yes, please list the types of studies you participate in.
The conversation is amicable and discomforting. Very question and answer, back and forth, as if we are just digging information out of one another. I remain somewhat stoic; Victoria has a disturbing tone to her line of questioning, as if she wants to dig into me.
“Are both of your parents still alive?” she asks.
“I’d rather not talk about that right now.”
“Which one was it?” She pauses and I don’t respond. “Or was it both?”
“Both of them died when I was in college,” I say. “I wasn’t really that close to them anyway. They were back in Oregon and I was out here.”
“Still, they were your parents.”
“Yeah.” I hesitate. “But what about you, where’s your family?”
“They’re not far away, just over the Connecticut line,” she says. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.” She bends under the table and pulls her bag up to her lap, withdrawing from it a small laptop computer, which she opens and begins to click and tap at the keys. “I’ve only been looking at studies at Brown and in Providence. You say you’ve been doing stuff in Boston. Maybe show me a few of the places you look?”
Over the next few weeks, we make it a habit to meet at the Cable Car; she brings printouts of advertisements boasting “Participants Needed” for alcohol studies, for a few anti-depressants, for sleep clinics. Once, she even brings one in for bulimics, and I am sure she is joking about it.
“I’m skinny enough to get away with it, right?” she says, serious as I have ever seen her. She laughs and shoves the ad in her bag.
We go on like this, finding different studies to go to, sometimes together and sometimes apart. It is strange spending so much time with a single person. She is getting to know me in a way that I have never really opened up to anyone. Before Victoria, my closest friends were bound by confidentiality and HIPAA codes; people with no sympathy for my shortcomings, no joy for my success, just a stolid nod and a check on a list.
