The Immortality Factor (3 page)

“We could cure paraplegics,” I said out loud.

“Huh?” Elise mumbled drowsily.

I don't get many flashes of inspiration like that. Usually Jesse's the intuitive one; I tend to be more methodical. A plodder, in Jesse's estimation.

I sat up in the bed. “That's the great thing about sex. It dissolves the barriers in your mind. It's the most creative act a person can do.”

“Thank you.”

I was so excited that I got up from the bed and padded naked into the sitting room of the suite. I closed the door so I wouldn't disturb Elise. The room was lit only by the street glow coming through the window. A siren wailed past out there, its pitch Dopplering down as it yodeled along the avenue. Two in
the morning and still the city growled and hummed. New York, New York: the town so big they had to name it twice.

I fumbled around in the semidarkness, banged my shin against the damned coffee table before I found the lamp on the end table beside the sofa and clicked it on. The sofa felt cold and a little rough on my bare bottom, but I ignored that, looked up Jesse's number in my notebook, then grabbed the phone and punched it out.

I heard the phone ring once, twice . . .

“Hullo?” Julia's voice. Even after all these months her voice stabbed straight into my heart. I hadn't expected her to answer. I guess I hadn't wanted to think of her in bed with my brother.

“Um, sorry to wake you, Julia. I need to talk to Jess.”

“Arthur? Lord, I thought it was the hospital.”

“No, it's just me.”

“We haven't heard a word from you in a year and you phone at two a.m.?”

“It's important,” I said.

“Can't you wait until morning?”

I wanted to apologize to her, I wanted to tell her how much I still loved her and missed her and how deeply she had hurt me, but instead I only said, “By morning he'll be off and running and it'll take me another two days to track him down. Let me talk to him now, will you?”

Something muffled, then Jesse's voice. “Arby? What's the matter? What's wrong?”

“I've got an idea.”

“An idea? You're calling about an idea at two in the morning?”

“I know where you are at two in the morning,” I snapped. “Most mornings, anyway.”

“I don't believe this.”

“It's an important idea,” I insisted.

“Great. Go back to sleep and maybe it'll go away.”

“Dammit, Jess, this is serious! We can repair the spinal damage that causes paraplegia.”

“Sure we can.”

“How soon can you get up to my lab?”

“Arby, it's two in the morning, for Chrissakes!”

“I know what time it is, dammit! Are you interested in curing paraplegics or not?”

Despite himself, Jesse was interested. I started explaining my idea and Jesse stayed on the phone, listening. Soon he was commenting, making suggestions, adding his own ideas. I heard my brother's voice go from irritation to reluctance to enthusiasm as we batted concepts back and forth just the way we used to do in the old days, before Julia.

“You thinking of using stem cells?” Jesse asked. “That's asking for trouble, Arby.”

“Adult stem cells, Jess, not fetal cells. And maybe we won't even need that if—”

Elise swept past, fully dressed, her hair glistening from the shower. She gave me a pitying smile and blew me a kiss. I barely waved to her while I continued to talk with my brother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H
umanitarian of the Year. And you know what? I deserved it. As much as anybody in the city, I guess.

I wouldn't have thought so before I met Julia. Never even would have thought about it at all, really. I just did the work I wanted to do and never gave a hoot about awards and honors. That was my brother's kick. Arby always took himself very importantly. Hell, he was talking about winning the Nobel Prize back when I was still in high school and he was a sophomore at Columbia.

Must have hurt him like hell when they threw him out of Columbia. But he landed on his feet, no bruises. Started up the lab in Connecticut and started making tons of money. Me, I just plugged away at med school and then went into practice.

It was Julia who saw the importance of honors and awards.

“It will bring more attention to the hospital,” she told me. “It will help to attract more donations. And larger ones, too.”

She was right, of course. The bigger my name got, the easier it was to raise big bucks for the hospital. And the medical center. Julia saw to it that when we
went to Brazil we got plenty of media coverage. Translated into several million in donations.

Arby was as uptight as a Mormon in a cocktail lounge all through the dinner at the Waldorf. We hadn't seen him since our wedding. I'm sure he didn't want to come to the dinner but Ma made him. She's tough. Too bad she couldn't come herself. I had wanted her to, but her doctors said she couldn't travel and Arby sided with them.

Anyway, he was stiff as a totem pole with us. Shook my hand, of course, and took Julia's. Mumbled a couple of words. And then he got as far away from us as possible. Even rearranged the seating at the head table so he wouldn't have to be between Julia and me. Sat himself next to some big blond dish. That's my brother Arby: no matter what happens he comes out okay.

I was awfully uncomfortable in that damned tux. I don't even own a tie. Julia had to do the bow tie for me, and I went all through dinner with it strangling me but when it came time for my little speech I just had to undo it. Got my picture in the
Times
that way, with the tie hanging loose and my collar undone. They didn't see that I was wearing nice comfortable running shoes. They were black and if anybody noticed they didn't say anything.

Anyway, we get through the dinner and the speech and Arby disappears with the blonde on his arm. Julia and I taxi back to our apartment.

“Do you realize,” she said as we were undressing, “that this is the first time this month that you've been home before midnight?”

I hadn't realized it.

“Have I been neglecting you?” I asked her.

“You most certainly have.” She had that mischievous grin on her face, the kind that said fun and games.

So I gave her my utmost attention. And she did likewise for me. It was terrific.

We're drifting off to sleep, around two or so, when the phone rings. Julia grabs it because she wound up on that side of the bed. I'm thinking it's some kind of disaster at the hospital, who the hell else would call me at two in the morning?

It's Arby. He's got some big cockamamie idea about regenerating spinal neurons in paraplegics. I can't believe it. He hasn't said a word to me in a year, and now he's bubbling over with enthusiasm, just as if he had never been sore at me at all.

And he just wouldn't let me off the phone. I mean, the idea was interesting enough, but he kept rattling on and on about it and telling me he wanted me to help him with it, just like we worked together years ago before he founded his big-time lab, before Julia came into our lives.

Julia sat there in the bed beside me, pressing close so she could hear what Arby was talking about. I got maybe six words in every fifteen minutes or so.
Arby kept yakking and yakking. About science. About us working together to cure paraplegics and allow them to walk again.

After more than an hour of this, Julia gets up from the bed and starts rummaging in the night table on her side. She looked like she was posing for
Playboy
or something, in the nude like that. I started thinking that I ought to hang up on Arby and grab her again.

But she pulls out a pad and ballpoint pen and scribbles a note for me.

He wants to make up with you,
her note said.

I looked up at her, Arby's voice still chattering in my telephone ear. Julia sat beside me again and nodded, with a really happy smile on her face. Then she wrote some more on the pad.

This is Arthur's way of getting together with you again,
it said.
Don't brush him off.

Like she was a mind reader, at that precise instant Arby asked, “Can you make it over here tomorrow for lunch?”

“You mean have lunch at your lab?” I asked.

Julia nodded so vigorously it made her breasts bob up and down. I damn near dropped the phone.

“Yes,” Arby was saying. “At the lab, tomorrow. Well, later today, actually.”

I grinned at my wife and said into the phone, “Okay, Arby. I'll be there around twelve-thirty. How's that?”

“Wonderful!” he said. And at last he hung up.

I put the phone back in its cradle and then pulled Julia to me.

“He wants to get together with you again,” she said, all smiles. “He wants to end this separation.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
had never intended to come between Arthur and Jesse. I had never meant to cause hurt or pain.

As a matter of fact, I had never intended to fall in love or get married or live in America. I had a very nice career going with British Airways, thank you, and I was quite the self-possessed modern woman, making ready to shatter the glass ceiling of corporate chauvinism to become the first woman chairman of BA's board, eventually. I had it all planned out, you see.

In the meantime I was having great fun, traveling the world and advancing my career. I had a few flings here and there, always very cautiously, of course. It wouldn't do for an ambitious woman executive to get the wrong kind of reputation. And there was always AIDS to worry about.

But Arthur simply swept me off my feet. Here was this handsome silver-haired man with an absolutely deadly smile, intelligent as the devil, successful, quite well-off financially, who just happened to sit beside me on the Airbus flight I was making to New York. And he exuded this kind of animal heat without even realizing it.

This was something I hadn't planned on; not at all. In fact, within two weeks my plans were completely demolished and I was suddenly living in a different world. Truth to tell, I allowed Arthur to sweep me off my feet. It was enormous fun and tremendously exciting. I transferred to the New York office and told myself that the glass ceiling could remain unshattered a while longer because I was going to add romance and marriage to my life plan.

Looking back on it, I realize that I never actually loved Arthur. I was in a whirl and we certainly shared wildly passionate times in bed, and when he asked me to marry him I said yes without hesitation. I was living life in the fast lane, the kind of life I could only dream about before meeting Arthur, and I never even thought of what could happen to us in the long run. It was foolish of me; vain and selfish and foolish. That's what happens when one acts without thinking.

Arthur introduced me to his younger brother, whom he obviously felt very proud of and protective toward. Jesse seemed at first disdainful, aloof, and rather surprised that Arthur could fall so hard for a woman so quickly. At first I thought Jesse suspected me of being an opportunist, an English adventuress who was taking advantage of his big brother. I began to fear that he was right. I told myself that he was jealous of Arthur. And I found that he was, but not in a mean, selfish way.

Jesse was in love with me! Beneath that rigid New Yorkish shell he kept around himself he was a sensitive, vulnerable man who loved me. And I was shocked to realize that I had fallen in love with him. Deeply, truly in love. The calculating part of my mind told me that I was going to ruin everything. But my heart overwhelmed my head; I fell in love with Jesse and there was no remedy for it.

You see, Jesse needed me and Arthur didn't. It was almost as simple as that. There wasn't very much that I could give to Arthur that he didn't already have. I began to realize that I would be a sort of trophy for him, a wife to show off after board meetings. But Jesse and I could share a life together. I could help him become the man he wouldn't even dream of being without me. Jesse would make a fine father, too, I was sure of that.

Once I realized that I was thinking about children, there was no turning back. The smug career woman who had allowed herself to be swept into the fast lane disappeared. Jesse was my life. His career became my prime focus.

It was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life to break that news to Arthur. I didn't want to hurt him, and I knew that Jesse didn't want to, either. I dreaded the thought of coming between them. I even asked their mother what I should do, a very painful and draining afternoon in her room at the nursing home where she lay waiting for death to overtake her.

There was nothing for it except to tell Arthur the unvarnished truth. It was my own fault, of course. I should never have agreed to marry Arthur so quickly.

His reaction stunned me. He said absolutely nothing. He went rigidly silent and walked out of my life—and Jesse's. Literally. He simply walked away. I felt miserable about it. But Jesse and I were in love and we got married soon afterward. Arthur came to the wedding but said not a word to anyone, certainly not to either of us. In fact, the first words I heard from his mouth came at the Humanitarian of the Year dinner, when he more or less had to say hello as he came through the reception line and took my hand briefly.

That's why I was so glad that Arthur had broken the ice at last and invited Jesse to work with him on this scientific idea of his. I had asked Jesse, now and then, to make some overture to his brother, but Jess wouldn't do it.

“You don't know him as well as I do,” he would tell me. “I could stand on my head and turn blue and he'd just stare right past me.”

So that night—or that morning, rather—when Arthur called I was overjoyed. Perhaps the two men could start behaving like brothers again. It would be an enormous burden of guilt lifted from my shoulders.