by Wild (lit)
“Why don’t you sleep a little? I’ll wake you when something changes.”
She shook her head.
“No, I should stay here. She might get scared when she wakes up.”
I wasn’t sure whether I should feel hurt or relieved about her comment. Did she think I was such a scary figure or did she just want to stay in the room with me? Neither made sense. She herself hadn’t been scared of me when she had woken up, and suddenly she was concerned about her ex-roommate? It looked like she had different standards for her friends than for herself.
“Up to you,” I said and shrugged my shoulders. My throat felt dry.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I was surprised at her perceptiveness.
“A glass of water would be good.”
My eyes followed her as she got up and left the room. She was back a short while later, handing me the glass. I gulped it down. I wanted to make conversation.
“Is her roommate going to give us any trouble?”
She shook her head. “No, not tonight anyway. She’ll complain to Carmela tomorrow and most likely move out.”
“Ah, just as well. Then I guess you can move in with Carmela again.”
I needed to know whether she was planning on staying in San Francisco.
“I’ll be leaving for Des Moines as soon as Carmela doesn’t need me anymore.”
Her words felt like a sword through my heart. I looked away and pretended to feel Carmela’s pulse so she couldn’t see the disappointment in my eyes. I was right. Nothing had changed for her. She still wanted to leave and I would never see her again.
“How’s the pulse?”
I had no idea. I hadn’t been listening to her pulse. It took me a few seconds to get a reading.
“Slowing down.”
The night dragged on. Carmela was still feverish and I gave her something to reduce it. I could tell Annette was getting tired. She leaned against the headboard and suddenly her eyes fell shut. I watched her while she slept. It reminded me of the first night she had slept in my bed and I had watched her sleep all night. The thought filled me with desire.
“Oh, I feel like crap.” Carmela’s voice suddenly pierced the silence.
Annette awoke instantly.
“Carmela, we were so worried about you.” Annette told her.
She looked back and forth between Annette and me trying to figure out what was going on. She recognized me.
“What are both of you doing here?”
I let Annette explain. “You got very sick,” she started. “I think you had a …” Annette didn’t know what to say.
“You had an allergic reaction. Annette told me you took part in a clinical trial yesterday. I suspect the injection they gave you didn’t agree with you.” I sugar-coated the truth. Only I knew how close she had come.
“Vince is downplaying this a little. I think he saved your life.”
I shot Annette a disapproving look. There was no need to tell her the whole truth and scare her. Carmela looked at me.
“Thanks, Vince. I appreciate it. I still feel like crap though, and I’m thirsty.”
Annette jumped up. “I’ll get you some water.”
My eyes followed her automatically as she dashed out of the room. As soon as Annette was out of earshot, Carmela sat up in bed.
“Are you going to ask her to come back to you?”
“Excuse me?” I felt I hadn’t heard right.
“Cut the crap. We don’t have time for that. I might be sick, but I’m not blind. So, are you?”
“It’s complicated.” I was stunned at how direct Carmela was.
She waved me off. “That’s original. That’s what she said too. She’s worth it.”
I knew she was, but it wasn’t up to me. She was the one who didn’t want me anymore.
I could hear her footsteps outside the door and seconds later she was back. I shot Carmela a warning look.
“Vince was just telling me that somebody should look after me for a few days,” Carmela told Annette as she took the water. She drank, then sat the glass down. “Do you think you could stay for a few days, please?”
Annette agreed immediately. “Of course. If you need me, I’ll stay.”
I gave Carmela a hidden smile. She had just bought me some time.
I took out my stethoscope.
“Let me listen to your heart.”
It sounded strong and had an even rhythm.
“Good.” I prepared to take her blood pressure. Annette watched me intently and I wondered what she was thinking of. I couldn’t interpret her expression.
“I think you’re over the worst, but as I said before, somebody should stay with you to keep an eye on things.”
“Thank you again. I didn’t know doctors still made house calls,” Carmela grinned.
“Well, we don’t normally, but sometimes there are extenuating circumstances.” I looked at Annette. She caught my look and almost instantly looked away as if she didn’t want to be reminded. In that instant I felt crushed. She couldn’t even stand looking at me anymore. I threw Carmela a doubtful look but she gave me no sign.
I got up. There was nothing more for me to do to justify staying any longer. I packed my instruments into my bag and closed it.
“Annette knows how to reach me, in case you get worse again.” I didn’t look at Annette. “And promise me, no more clinical trials, ok?”
“Sure thing,” Carmela answered, but I wasn’t sure if she meant the clinical trials or something else.
Annette walked me to the door.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“There’s no need to thank me. I did what had to be done.”
I turned around and walked away. It seemed to take forever until I reached my car and threw myself into it. I barely noticed the early morning rush hour traffic on my way home. In the garage I kept sitting in the car staring into thin air.
Seeing her again had confirmed to me what I already knew: that I couldn’t be without her. I had to get her back.
17. Annette’s Decision
Francesca made a point of being noisy in the kitchen when she had realized I was sleeping on the couch and Carmela’s bedroom door was still shut. Payback time, I thought to myself and ignored her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of letting her know she had woken me after I had only just fallen asleep.
If Carmela could hear her, she ignored her too. Neither one of us wanted to deal with her.
I fell back into an uneven slumber after I heard the loud thud with which she closed the entrance door. With a bit of luck she would be gone all day.
My dreams made no sense to me; they never did, so I tried to ignore those too. They were a mixture of reality, wishful thinking and irrelevant details. I could tell my mind was all mixed up.
Vince had saved Carmela’s life, I was sure of that, but did this also mean he was the good guy? Did one necessarily result in the other? If he had only stolen Entwhistle’s work two nights ago, how would he have had an antidote for it days earlier when he had used it on me?
Nothing made sense. Everything had been so clear before. I had been sure he was a thief and an imposter only the day before and suddenly I had doubts whether my assumptions had been right.
I awoke exhausted. I could hear Carmela tinkering in the kitchen. She shouldn’t be up, so I walked in to reprimand her. She made tea, but was still in her nightgown.
“Carmela, why didn’t you call me? I could have made you some tea …”
“Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly fine. Plus I heard you snoring …”
“I don’t snore,” I interrupted her.
“I meant, I saw you sleeping, so I didn’t want to wake you. You were up all night.” She was surprisingly considerate, which made me put my guard up. What did she want?
She poured two cups of tea, a sure sign she wanted to chat and made signs for me to sit at the kitchen table. She joined me handing me the steaming cup.
“What a lovesick pupp
y!”
I interrupted her immediately protesting loudly. “Hold on. I’m not a lovesick puppy!”
She gave me a sheepish grin. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about him,” she said way too casual for me to believe she hadn’t planned it this way.
“He’s not either,” I put her right.
“Really? I guess then you didn’t see the way he looked at you.”
I was sure she was making it up. “You were probably hallucinating.”
“Trust me, I know what hallucinating feels like, and that wasn’t it.” She referred to her occasional recreational drug use.
“Just drop it, Carmela.” I didn’t want to go over this with her again.
“Fine, if you don’t want him, I’ll take him.”
I shot her a furious look. How could she?
“Ah, now I have your attention! As you’ve just confirmed, you can’t stand the thought that another woman should have him, so I think you should work on getting him back.”
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s original,” was her sarcastic remark.
“What’s it to you anyway? Since when are you a matchmaker?”
“Since yesterday. Come on, don’t be so stubborn. What have you got to lose?”
“I just can’t. The things I said to him are inexcusable. How can I take them back? I called him a liar and much worse. Even if I went back, he’d just throw me out.”
“Well, he didn’t throw you out when you went to ask him for help for me.”
“That’s different. He’s a doctor; he can’t refuse to help people.”
“He could have called 9-1-1 for you. Face it, he did it, because you asked him to. I get the feeling he’ll do anything you ask him to. I’ve never seen a man so pussy-whipped.”
I was shocked.
“You are so crude!”
“I’m right though. It won’t take much to wrap him around your little finger.”
“But there are things about him which don’t make sense. He’s not what he seems.”
“Men aren’t perfect, accept it and get on with it.”
I wanted to give in, but I felt so ashamed about the things I had said to him. It would hurt even more if he slammed the door in my face. I couldn’t take that risk. What if he didn’t want me anymore?
As if Carmela could read my thoughts she said, “There’s only one way to find out for sure.”
I nodded, slowly, still unsure. “What am I going to say to him?”
Carmela laughed. “It doesn’t matter, because once I’m done with you, he won’t even hear what you’re saying. His eyes will keep his brain occupied, and before you know it he’ll be all over you.”
After I stepped out of the shower and saw Carmela rummage through her enormous closet pulling out outfit after outfit, I feared the worst.
“Please don’t make me look like a cheap hooker!”
“There’s nothing wrong with showing a little flesh,” she defended herself.
“It depends on how you define a little.”
She opened her underwear drawer. “I just bought some nice little thing I haven’t even worn yet.” She pulled out a bra and panties which barely had enough cloth between the two of them to act as a doily under a vase.
“I won’t need that,” I protested. She gave me a sharp look.
“You will. Don’t worry if he rips it to shreds. Just let him know later he can buy me a replacement. It’s from Victoria’s Secret.”
“You’re terrible!”
“No, I’m practical. Well, what are you waiting for, put ‘em on.” She handed me the silky threads. “Oh, yeah, and the bra opens in the front, in case he’s a little rusty.”
I knew he was. I remembered how he had told me when he had last kissed a woman and it had been almost a year according to my calculations.
“Carmela, I’m scared,” I said suddenly.
She looked at me. “It’s like riding a bike; you never really forget how to do it.”
I blushed. “Not about that; about him rejecting me.”
She smiled. “He won’t. Trust me.”
She handed me a slinky dress which I thought was way too short and thin. I stepped into it reluctantly.
“There it is. I was wondering what happened to it,” Carmela exclaimed as she pulled out some outfit from the back of her closet.
The outfit was hideous. The outrageous color combination of oranges, greens and blues didn’t detract from the awful pattern and overly broad collar. I stared at her in disgust.
“You are not honestly going to have me wear that?”
She laughed. “Of course not. It’s an original. I’ll wear it at the party on Saturday.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Monica is throwing a 70s party. You should come. It’s going to be fun dancing to seventies tunes, wearing outrageous clothes.”
A seventies party. I remembered the photos I had seen of Vince at a seventies party. Looking at Carmela I just couldn’t picture him as the guy who would go to a seventies party. It didn’t sound like him at all. It was Carmela’s kind of gig, not Vince’s.
Carmela seemed to have noticed that I had suddenly gone quiet.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can you imagine Vince at a seventies party?”
I could tell she found the question strange.
“Vince? In hideous flares and awful colors? No way. But if you want to bring him, I’m sure Monica won’t mind.”
I stared blankly into the room.
“Can I use your internet?” I heard myself ask Carmela.
“Sure, but don’t you want to get ready?” She seemed perplexed.
“Later,” I told her as I walked over to her computer and booted it up. It seemed to take forever until the screen came up and I was able to log into the internet. I typed in only two words: Vincent Mesaros.
The search came back with a long list of hits. I didn’t know where to start, so I started from the top.
The first was a newspaper article titled Promising researcher wins Young Investigator Award. The picture in the article was too grainy for me to recognize anybody. I looked at the date: March 1976. It had to be his father, I concluded after a short calculation in my head.
I went onto the next. It was a list of graduates from a high school in Boston. I found his name, but the date was in the sixties: again his father. The third hit was a medical research paper and I skipped it. It was too much medical jargon I couldn’t understand.
Four more research articles later I started to get frustrated. It appeared as if Vince just didn’t exist. All I could find was information about his father.
The next search result was a newspaper articles from the San Francisco Chronicle. It looked promising – finally something local. The headline screamed Researcher disappears after lab burns out. A large photo of UCSF’s campus was shown. I scrolled further down to read what had happened.
The article reported that a laboratory at UCSF had burned down and all records had been destroyed and the researcher whose lab it was, had disappeared right after the fire. As I scrolled to the end of the page, there was another photo. It was undoubtedly Vince. The caption read Vincent Mesaros MD disappeared in the wake of the fire and has not been heard of since.
The article indicated that the cause of the fire was arson. What had he done and why? I scrolled back up to reread the article for any clues and froze when my eyes locked in on the date of the paper: October 12, 1978.
My heart stopped beating for an instant. I held my breath. How could it be? It had to be wrong. But I knew instinctively that it wasn’t.
Class of ’71. Suddenly the graduation diploma from medical school flashed back into my mind. It was his, not his father’s. The photos weren’t photos of a Seventies party, but of a party in the Seventies.
I went back to the research papers and read through them, understanding less than ten percent. However, the little I did understand was what his research was about: aging,
or how to turn off the gene which controlled aging. There was no doubt now that he had told me the truth about one thing: the research was his, not Entwhistle’s.
I went back to the graduation records of the Boston high school and calculated. He was sixty-three or sixty-four. I had passionately kissed a man who was ready to collect his Social Security check!
I gasped. I desperately needed some air. I was glad Carmela had decided to take a shower while I was busy on her computer.
I had been ready to jump into bed with a man forty years my senior! In fact, I had tried to seduce him at every turn.
I knew from the few things Vince had told me about his lab mice, that he had found the switch as he had called it. He had to have found it back in seventy-eight just when he had disappeared.
The whole setup of his home now made sense: no windows, elaborate security, the lab downstairs. The lab: I remembered the mouse he had euthanized and what he had explained about the side effects, but wondered whether he had told me the full story about those effects. I guessed he hadn’t. There was more to the side effects than he would let on.
A heightening of the senses: did this mean he felt my kisses much more intensely than somebody else would? Was that why he had tried to take things slow? I didn’t see what was so bad about those side effects.
I switched off the computer just as Carmela came back into the room.
“You look a little pale. Maybe you should wear some makeup,” she suggested as she looked at me.
“Yes,” I said as if on autopilot, and got up. My legs buckled and I had to hold on to the foot of the bed, so I wouldn’t collapse.
Carmela rushed toward me to support me. She helped me onto her bed.
“You haven’t eaten, have you?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll make you some soup.”
I wanted to protest. “No, you’re not supposed to be the one looking after me. I’m supposed to help you.”
“I’m perfectly fine, thanks to your boyfriend. So, just lie down for a minute.”
She got up and seconds later I heard her in the kitchen.
It hit me like a ton of bricks: I was in love with a man in his sixties. All of a sudden a terrible thought struck me: what if the reason why he didn’t want to have sex with me was because he couldn’t? What if he was too old for it?