All I Ever Dreamed

by Michael Blumlein

  She blinked, as though she hadn’t heard me right, as though I were now the one speaking in tongues. “That hurts my feelings.”

  Her tone was careless, almost mocking, and slowly, seductively, she pulled the edges of her cape apart and struck an incredibly sexy pose.

  “How about now?” she asked. “Do you like me better now?”

  I didn’t answer. The point was made. She took my hand as if I were an errant child.

  “I do love you, Martin. Even if it sometimes seems I’ve outgrown you. I haven’t. You care for me. You put up with me. When I’m ugly, you always take me back.”

  “You’re not ugly,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Marry me, Vexing.”

  She laughed. “You’d take a woman like me?”

  “And a child. Let’s have a child too.”

  The laughter died. “A child?” She shivered at the thought. “That would ruin me. A child would be my doom.”

  The Fertile Moon

  smiles on some, but it didn’t on us. Despite her initial refusal and deep misgivings, Vexing agreed to give motherhood a try. But conception was not in the cards. Although she denied it, I’m sure she was relieved, as the prospect of pregnancy had from the outset filled her with dread. Models bearing children were, by and large, models on the way out. In the industry, motherhood was tantamount to retirement. But beyond the threat to her career, children, it seemed, were not to her liking, just as short people were not, as if in some other life she had had her fill. Paradoxically, she was able to convey the maternal role with stunning conviction. The covers she did for Family Living, Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal were some of her best ever: they literally glowed with that competence, contentment and love that epitomize motherhood. It broke my heart to see that look and know it was manufactured.

  I wanted children. Always had. There was never a doubt in my mind. We went through all the tests, and the finger pointed at Vexing. Not infertile exactly, but “challenged.” Her eggs seemed to kill any sperm that came close to them. Not just mine, but anyone else’s (this confirmed in test tubes), a quirk of nature for which she expressed regret, though once again I suspect that secretly she was glad. She didn’t want a family, except for once or twice a year, when the idea would take hold of her, and for a brief time she could think of nothing else. I took these rare opportunities to make my case for alternative solutions to our infertility problem. On one such occasion I broached the subject of artificial insemination.

  “We’ve tried that,” she said. “A million times.”

  “I was thinking of something different.”

  “Like what?”

  I hesitated, then blurted it out. “A surrogate mother.”

  It was a gaffe. I meant to say “egg,” and I corrected myself, but it was too late.

  “No way.”

  “You choose her, Vexing. Any woman you want. We’ll do it all in a test tube. I won’t come near her.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it offends me.”

  “That’s the furthest thing from my mind.”

  She regarded me with suspicion. “What if no woman agrees?”

  “You’re world-famous. You get hundreds of letters and emails a week. Who wouldn’t agree?”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “For one.”

  “Think about it. Please.”

  “This makes me sad, Martin. Are you tired of me? Have I ceased fulfilling your precious needs? Are we drifting apart?”

  I knew the tone. Foolishly, I told the truth.

  “All of it. Yes. A little.”

  She looked at me with death in her eyes and threw a hairbrush. It missed my head and broke a mirror.

  “Seven years bad luck,” I said under my breath.

  “I don’t believe in luck,” she replied coldly. “You know that. I believe in preparation and vigilance. And loyalty, Martin. If the thought of leaving me continues to enter your selfish little brain, I suggest you squelch it. Because while you might have a child with another woman . . . heavens, you might have a hundred . . . darling, you won’t have me.”

  She could be cruel, yes. She could be heartless. But she was other things too, and in the broken mirror she looked like a broken woman. But then, when I looked at her straight on, directly, she was nothing less than she ever was, beautiful to me.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said. “All I want—all I ever want—is for us to be happy.”

  “How nice of you to say. How sweet. Me, too. That’s what I want. Let’s see if we can make it happen. Let’s try.”

  The Search for Happiness

  was not a great success. Our marriage had its moments, but for a match seemingly made in heaven, it felt an awful lot like hell. Frank was continually on me to take a mistress, while Carol brought me books on separation and divorce. Mother was the only one who was unaffected by our marital discord, chiefly because she forgot us from one visit to the next.

  The years went by. Mom died, Carol took an advertising job in New York, Frank finally found it in his heart to marry Shirley and father a couple of kids. Vexing grew older, and her star fell. Not by any means completely, but to a person at the top, any movement is apt to be down. She became increasingly insecure in her looks and as a result, increasingly vain. She got back in the habit of popping pills, which made her even more difficult than usual. She was, by turns, restless, aimless, grandiose, desperate and mean. She had spasms of possessiveness, where she craved everything both within and beyond her reach, followed by crashing fits of despair. She went on binges and purges, lost weight, composure, hair. Mirrors, which had always been allies, became enemies. She would stiffen at the sight of herself, and her eyes would narrow. At other times they would fill with suffering and longing, and she would stare for minutes on end, as though lacking the strength to turn away.

  I pitied her, though perhaps I should have saved some pity for myself. I also lacked strength, in my case, to turn away from her. My dear, beloved Vexing. I longed for something too, something that seemed lost to us.

  I took to spending time in the cottage, which had become a refuge for me. The trees and birds and sunlight could still work their magic, and for short periods of time I was able to stave off despondency and hopelessness. I had never seen fit to decorate the inside, but now the bare walls, as if metaphors of our barren marriage, became oppressive. I had to do something, and one day in a fit of nostalgia the answer came.

  It took a week to cull through the magazines and another to cut, arrange and tack up. When I was done, every surface, including the ceiling, was covered with pictures of her. Vexing the ingénue, the vixen, Vexing the girl-next-door, the starlet, the fresh-scrubbed housewife. Vexing the princess, radiant and happy. Vexing the athlete, racquet in hand. Vexing the pin-up. The dreamboat. Vexing my lover, my queen, my wife.

  I should have known better. More to the point, I should have been a better man. On the other hand, bombs exist to explode. After a terrible fight one morning I fled to the cottage. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Vexing stood on the porch in tears.

  “I need help, Martin. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry, and I took her inside and held her, feeling a closeness that had long been missing, a warmth and a fledgling hope. Gradually, she calmed down, and by degrees became aware of her surroundings. At first she was puzzled by what she saw. Then shocked. Then outraged.

  “Jesus. Look at this. How dare you!”

  Instinctively, I defended myself. “It’s my scrapbook of you. My photo album. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s a tribute.”

  “It’s sick,” she said. “I don’t believe this.”

  She walked the length of the room then back, halting at this or that photograph, shaking her head.

  “So,” she said at length. “This is what you want.”

  “What I want is for us to
be happy again.”

  “Such happiness,” she said. “You’re a cruel man, Martin.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to see this.”

  “You loved me then. Why not try to love me a little more now?”

  I swallowed hard. “I’d love you more if you loved yourself.”

  She took that in. “If I loved myself, I wouldn’t be who I am. But if I wasn’t who I am, you would never have found me. Leaf and branch, sun and moon, cock and cunt. We were made for each other, Martin.” She glanced around the room, and a gleam came into her eye. “Perhaps there’s life to this marriage yet.”

  The next six months were the most extraordinary of my life. Vexing made an appointment with Dr. Aymen, whom she had seen for various nervous conditions through the years, to get a referral to a reliable plastic surgeon. She planned to do the whole works, starting at her legs and working up to her face, bottom to top, the natural direction, she said, of all regenerating things. She wanted a good technician but also someone with taste and style.

  “I want the whole nine yards,” she told Dr. Aymen. “Veins, butt, belly, boobs, face. Stem to stern. I understand they can do just about anything these days.”

  Dr. Aymen agreed that this was true. There were surgeons eager to do this work. “Technicians, as you say. I suppose some consider themselves artisans. To me it seems a drastic approach.”

  “No lectures, Doctor. Please.”

  “You misunderstand me. There is an alternative to the knife. A new drug. I’m involved in the study. It’s reached phase two trials.” He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a folder. “QP 1500. It’s a combination telomerase and anaplastic conjuncticator.”

  We had no idea what he was talking about, but then, before Hiroshima, few knew of the atomic bomb. For the next twenty minutes he regaled us with what, at the time, seemed pure fiction. He used words like cellular senescence, apoptosis, feedback control and defined homeostasis. Telomeric sequencing. Base pair deletion. Cellular immortality.

  Cancer cells, it seemed, had a way of staying alive indefinitely, and it had to do with something called a telomere. They now had a drug that worked on this telomere, as well as on the mechanism of cellular differentiation. It kept cells from growing old, and miraculously, it didn’t cause cancer.

  “It’s been tested in mice, sheep and albino rabbits,” the doctor declared. “We have animals that not only have halted the aging process but have literally reversed it, recovering eyesight, olfaction, mobility and sexual function. These animals are shedding years from their lives before our eyes. In a very real sense, they are growing younger by the minute.”

  He shook his head at the wonder of it. “Do you understand? Do you see what this is? The Holy Grail. The Fountain of Youth. The end, perhaps, of illness as we know it. The beginning of a new age.”

  The thought robbed him of words, and for an instant I saw him in a different light, not as a stuffy professional but as a younger man, a boy, starry-eyed and immersed in a world of the imagination.

  Several moments passed before he continued.

  “We need volunteers. Human volunteers. Would you be interested?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Vexing.

  Recalling the good doctor’s propensity to exaggerate, I remained guarded. “Did you understand anything he said?”

  “Does it matter? Did you?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “How come we haven’t heard of this drug?”

  “You will soon,” said Dr. Aymen. “Once you do, I can’t promise supply will be able to keep up with demand.” He let that sink in, then continued. “You certainly needn’t participate in the study if you’d rather not. The choice is fully yours.”

  Vexing shot me a glance and proceeded to take control of the interview, questioning the doctor at length about the drug’s effectiveness, its risks and expense. Nothing was certain and therefore, nothing promised. The cost of the drug and any treatment necessitated by its use were covered by the study, which was funded jointly by Bristol-Myers, Microsoft, Revlon and the Department of Defense. Weekly blood tests, as well as periodic measurements of bone density, skin turgor and resilience, arterial plaque, dental erosion, and other markers of aging, were required. There would be psychological tests, PET scans, electron microscopy, MRIs, cell cultures and nuclear probes. PCR, RIA, Western blot, Eastern blot, ELISA and GIR. Everything they could think of would be done. The Holy Grail was not a product to go begging.

  “No problem,” said Vexing.

  “Sign here,” said Aymen. “And here, and here, and here. You too,” he told me. “Our witness.”

  “Beneficiary,” said Vexing.

  I told her that was cruel, and she patted my hand. “Now now, dear. That’s only if I die.”

  She didn’t, thank God. On the contrary. The pills actually worked. In a month she looked, felt and acted ten years younger. In two months, twenty. By three, she was, in every way, the creature I had found in the garden, half girl, half woman, all sunshine and beauty and light. It was truly a miracle, and our happiness during this period was marred only by my anxiety that she would keep growing younger, that the process, once started, would somehow continue, with or without the pills, and I would be forced to watch in horror as my beloved went from woman to girl to infant to . . . what? Fetus? Ovum? Nothingness? Was this miracle drug to become nothing more than a new form of death?

  It was a needless worry. She didn’t keep getting younger, and she didn’t die. What did happen was in some ways worse.

  She fell asleep.

  I should have foreseen it. If I’d had even an ounce of intelligence, I would have known. It happened quite suddenly: one moment she was animated and gay, the next in a deep swoon from which I couldn’t wake her. I immediately stopped the medication. I called Dr. Aymen, who, over the course of the next few months, tried everything he could think of—drugs, shock, plasmapheresis, peri-cochlear stimulation, pulsed GHB infusions. Nothing worked. She didn’t so much as stir. Nor age. Nor change in any fashion. Day in and out she stayed the same, as if suspended.

  I cared for her night and day, bathing her, dressing her, doing her hair as I thought she’d like it, rubbing lotion into her skin. Sometimes I read to her, sometimes told her stories, often simply sat. Months passed.

  Years.

  I turned sixty, then seventy, birthdays I celebrated in solitude. I ceased thinking of Vexing as a lover or a wife; my feelings for her became more those of a father for his daughter. I began to worry what would happen to her after my death.

  I looked into nursing homes, but we were poor now and couldn’t afford them. The drug study, which by rights should have covered the expense, had long since been terminated because of an untoward number of “adverse outcomes.” The lawsuits had been settled, but because Vexing remained technically alive, we received nothing. I thought of setting up a foundation—there were certainly people who would sympathize with her plight and more who would pay to see the formerly famous model in state. But the idea of putting her on display was both repugnant and profane to me, just as the idea of her having to alter herself for my benefit should have been in the first place. I had been wrong to have asked it of her, wrong to have wished it. Guilt and loneliness dogged my days. Perhaps if she could have spoken, she would have forgiven me. But what would it have mattered if I couldn’t forgive myself?

  At a certain point I moved her from the house to the cottage, which was quieter and more detached from the world at large, much in the way that I had become. I tore down the photographs and in their place hung her favorite gowns. This was an improvement. The walls glowed with their rich fabrics, and in the sunlight, which reflected off all the tiny mirrors, they glittered and danced.

  On the day I turned seventy-five, Frank paid me a visit. He was as spirited as ever: despite two hip operations, he still found a way to walk with a swagger. His face, like mine, was creased with age, and like me, he had hairs sticking out his nose and ears. Unlike me, he seemed to be
enjoying life.

  The first thing he did on entering the house was clap me on the back. “Happy birthday, old man. How’re you doing?”

  “Struggling along, Frank, thanks for asking. You?”

  “Doing fine, Marty. Couldn’t be better. And the little lady? How’s she?”

  “The same,” I said. “I’m worried.”

  “You’re always worried.”

  “Well excuse me, but now I happen to be more worried. I’m seventy-five. How many years do I have left? What’s going to happen to her when I’m gone?”

  “I’d say that’s out of your hands, buddy.”

  “I can’t just leave her.”

  Frank, bless his heart, seemed to understand. He squeezed my arm.

  “It’s a tough one. But look, Marty. As long as you got breath, you got life. You got time. The point is, you got to make the most of what you got.”

  “I want her to wake up, Frank. Even if it’s just for a day. An hour. Jesus, I’d take five minutes.”

  He gave me a wink. “Sometimes five minutes is all it takes.”

  Good old Frank.

  He asked to see her. It had been quite a while since he’d paid his respects.

  I led him to the cottage, where we stood, aptly it seemed, on opposite sides of the bed.

  “So what have you tried?” he asked.

  “Tried?”

  “To wake her up, Marty. What?”

  “Everything,” I said. “I’ve tried everything.”

  “Lately,” said Frank. “What have you tried lately?”

  “I don’t know. I talk to her. I move her arms and legs so she doesn’t get stiff. I read to her.”

  “Reading puts people to sleep, Marty. Maybe that’s the problem right there. You need to get more involved. More active. Give the lady some stimulation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell her you love her. Tell her she’s wasting time. You got something for her, but you’re not going to be around forever. Kiss her.”

  “I have kissed her,” I said. “I do.”

  “Sure you have,” said Frank. “Where? On the forehead? The cheek? Little get well pecks. I love you, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right kisses. Like I used to do to the kids.”