by Ben Bova
Olivia Hayward—Livvie—was a head shorter than I and forty pounds overweight. She often said ruefully that she got her only child (me) from her second husband (of four) and I got my tall, slim genes from the sneaky, smooth-talking sonofabitch.
“How was your day?” Livvie asked. She sat in her usual recliner, a plastic tumbler in her hand and the vodka bottle at her elbow.
“Pretty interesting,” I said. I started to tell her about Grenford Lab and Arthur Marshak while I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a glass from the jug of white wine in the refrigerator.
I sat down beside my mother and told her about my day while the sun went down. Neither one of us made any attempt to begin dinner. I sipped slowly at my wine. Livvie drained her tumbler and poured herself another healthy slug of vodka.
“This scientist guy sounds nice,” Livvie said. “He makes a bundle, I bet. Is he cute?”
He’s as handsome as they come, I thought. But aloud I answered, “What’s that got to do with anything? I interviewed him, Mom. It’s work, not romance.”
“You never can tell,” Livvie said, almost dreamily. “I met your father when he came to the house to fix the bathroom sink.”
And divorced him two years later, I added silently.
“Don’t you even think about marriage anymore?” she asked me.
“Let’s not start that again.”
“You’re not getting any younger.”
I gritted my teeth, then leaned forward toward her and said, “Tell you what, Mom. You find somebody who is getting younger and I’ll write a story about her and win the Pulitzer prize. Okay?”
Livvie gave me a puzzled look. “Just because you made one mistake shouldn’t turn you off marriage forever.”
No, I said to myself, I should go on like you did and make four mistakes. Or the same mistake four times, really.
To change the subject, I asked, “Did I get any calls?”
My mother frowned with concentration for a moment. “Yeah, the phone did ring. Not too long ago, either.”
I got up and went to my bedroom, which doubled as my office. There was only one message on my phone machine:
“This is Arthur Marshak. I hope you don’t mind my calling, Pat, after spending a pretty intense afternoon at the lab. I just thought that it might be fun if we had dinner together some evening soon. Maybe tomorrow night, if you can make it. Get to know each other a little better, without the lab around us. Please give me a ring as soon as you can. Thanks.”
I plopped down on my bed, grinning foolishly, all my weariness and irritation vanished. The man must really be a mind reader, I thought. Really!
“Anybody important?” Livvie called from the front room.
My grin evaporated at the thought of bringing Arthur Marshak home to meet my mother.
ARTHUR
The next afternoon, the day I was supposed have dinner with Julia and Jess, I drove from the lab to Omnitech’s corporate headquarters in lower Manhattan. I stuck to the Bronx River Parkway; I never took the Deegan Expressway if I could avoid it. Superstition, I suppose. Still, I never willingly drove on the highway that had killed my father and maimed my mother.
Find a date, Momma told me. Three o’clock in the afternoon and I’ve got to find a date for seven-thirty. It had been stupid to call Patricia Hayward. Desperate. Just met her and I phone to invite her to dinner. I must have sounded like an idiot. No wonder she hadn’t called back. I began to think seriously of calling a professional escort service.
As a corporate vice president, I had my own office in the headquarters building. It was not as large as my office at the lab but decorated much more richly. The corporate officers know how to spend money on themselves: gleaming walnut paneling and thick luxurious carpeting. Nancy Dubois, one of the more ambitious junior executives, informed me that the carpet’s color was pale ecru. At the lab the walls were plain painted plasterboard or cinderblock and the carpeting was industrial heavy-duty gray.
My office had floor-to-ceiling windows, too. Seventy-eight stories up, it was a little scary. The building had been awfully close to the World Trade Center. When the terrorists struck, the police kept us out of the building for weeks until they determined that it was structurally unharmed. Still, it was scary standing there looking out those windows. I imagined an airliner hurtling straight at me.
Ground Zero was on the other side of the building. From my office I could see the harbor far below, and in the distance the small green figure of the Statue of Liberty. My desk was solid walnut. Its gleaming surface was almost always clear of papers or anything that looked like work. I worked at the lab. I came to the corporate office for politics. All the chairs were covered in bottle-green leather, including the big swivel chair behind the desk. I had to insist that they put in a credenza alongside the desk and get me a personal computer. Hardly any of the other corporate vice presidents had computers in their headquarters offices; they requisitioned secretaries to type for them.
Soon as I got in, I phoned Phyllis back at the lab. She assured me that all was well, no emergencies that could not wait until I returned the following morning. Then I phoned Elise Hauser at her UN office. But she was out of the country and would not return for a week.
Through the computer’s modem I called up my address book from my database at the lab. I was getting desperate. Maybe Nancy Dubois would be available. We had had a brief fling last year, when I was trying to get over Julia. But she might think I wanted to renew our romance, and that was certainly not what I had in mind.
I was busy scanning the lists for a possible last-minute date when I heard:
“Do you have a couple of minutes, Dr. Marshak?”
I looked up and saw Patricia Hayward standing at the doorway.
“What’re you doing here?” I blurted.
“Working.”
I waved her into the office as I killed the address list and shut down the computer. “I thought you freelanced out of Old Saybrook.”
Pat took the chair at the side of my desk. “I’m spending the day on the company files, doing more research for your backgrounder.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I know enough now to ask some relevant questions,” she said.
She was really good-looking in a coltish, almost aristocratic way. I could picture her in a riding outfit or a form-hugging maillot, outswimming the boys at summer camp. At the moment she was wearing comfortable light gray slacks and a pale blue silk blouse that complemented her reddish hair very nicely.
“Do you have a few minutes?” she asked again. Her voice was a soft purr. Like a cat. I wondered if she liked to be stroked like a cat. But this is no time for that kind of thinking, I told myself. This is business.
“Did you get my phone message last night?”
Her green eyes slid away from mine, slightly. “I was going to call you—but a lot of other things got in the way.”
“Well, will you have dinner with me?” As romantic as a dump truck, that’s me.
“Dinner? Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“I really can’t tonight. I’ve got to drive back to Connecticut.”
“The traffic will be lighter after dinner.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like to drive in the dark, especially alone.”
I thought about that for a moment.
Before I could say anything, Pat added, “I’d love to have dinner with you, but some other night.”
“I could get the company to put you up here in Manhattan for the night,” I heard myself saying. “We keep a set of condo suites for visiting VIPs.”
She smiled. “I’m not a VIP, just a working gal.”
“I can bestow VIP status on you.”
“For the night.”
I saw what was bothering her. “Look,” I said, leaning slightly toward her, “I’ve got to have dinner tonight with my brother and his wife. I need a date. Honestly. I know it’s a lot to ask, especially on such short notice, but I really c
an get the company to let you stay in one of our condos and you can drive home tomorrow in the daylight.”
She looked at me, and I could see the wheels working in her head.
I raised both my hands. “My intentions are purely social. Honestly.”
“I’m not dressed for anyplace fancy.”
“You look fine to me. Jesse said the restaurant’s just a neighborhood place down near Gramercy Park.”
Pat took in a breath, then answered, “Okay. But I still need the answers to these questions I’ve come up with.”
I relaxed and leaned back in the swivel chair. “Of course. Fire away.”
She started asking her questions, but I answered them automatically, like a kid spitting out answers to a school quiz. My mind drifted to Julia and what it would be like to see her again.
It happened after a visit to Momma, a little more than a month before Julia and I were to be married.
I had never been in love before. Oh, I had the usual flings when I’d been a student, plenty of them, in fact. Later, there were more adult affairs at the university. And when I became a successful corporate executive it was actually easy to find women. But once I met Julia all that stopped. I fell in love, just like a moonstruck kid. We were going to be married.
Julia was everything I had ever dreamed of: warm, beautiful, loving, intelligent. She was quiet, understated, but always made her point. She never disappeared into the background, whether we were at a corporate cocktail party or attending a Broadway opening. She had opinions, she had ideas, she made me proud to have her standing beside me. And despite that cool facade, she was fiery with passion in bed. She was an executive with British Airways; I met her on a transatlantic flight. Our courtship was a whirlwind: within a month I had taken Julia with me to see Momma at Sunny Glade. Two months after that I proposed.
I had introduced Julia to my brother, of course. Jesse seemed faintly amused by it all.
“You’re really going to settle down to married life?” Jesse asked me, a few weeks before the wedding date.
“I certainly am.”
Jess was not smiling. “Are you sure she’s the right woman for you, Arby? You’ve only known her a few months.”
“She’s the one.”
“You don’t know much about her, do you? I mean—”
“I know enough,” I said.
“You think you do.”
“I know I do.”
Jesse shook his head. “Take it slow, Arby. Don’t be in such a rush. Maybe she’s not right for you.”
I laughed at him. “For god’s sake, you’d think you’re the one who’s getting married instead of me!”
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Jesse said, very seriously.
But I ignored him. “You ought to find a woman like Julia and settle down yourself.”
“I wish I could,” Jesse said.
Momma had been as happy as she could be. She thought Julia was terrific. And she was right, of course. The day it happened, Julia and I had just spent an hour with Momma, me making lists of wedding guests and all the details that had to be taken care of, Momma pecking away at her keyboard with her one good hand. Then they shooed me out of Momma’s room; they wanted to be alone for some woman talk, I figured.
When we left, Julia suggested we take a walk around the nursing home grounds before returning to the city. It was a chilly gray afternoon. I remember the wind knifed through my sports coat and it looked like a cold autumn rain was on the way.
“Don’t you feel cold?” I asked Julia. She was wearing a light sweater over her short-sleeved dress.
“Arthur, I have to tell you something,” she said. I saw that she was somber, grim. The look in her dark eyes was sheer misery.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Jess.”
I felt myself go tense with sudden anger. “Has he been bothering you? Saying things he shouldn’t?”
“No, not at all.”
“He’s been telling me to think twice about marrying you,” I blurted. I hadn’t intended to tell Julia about that. I wanted her to like my brother.
“That’s because he’s in love with me,” said Julia.
I wasn’t really sure that I heard her. Or if I did, I didn’t understand what she was saying.
“Jesse’s in love with me,” she repeated.
I just gaped at her. She looked back at me almost as if she were frightened, like a child who’s afraid of being beaten. I don’t know how long we just stared at each other like that.
Then Julia went on, “And I’m in love with him.”
It was as if the world stopped revolving. I took in the entire scene, the gray clouds pressing down on me, the pitiful patchy grass of the lawn, the few trees darkened by grime from the highway, the cars growling past angrily, Julia standing bleakly before me, waiting for my reaction. I imagine she expected anger or tears or questions.
“Neither of us wanted it this way, Arthur,” she said, so softly I could barely hear her. “It’s just happened and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
I couldn’t speak. Ten thousand things I wanted to say, but not a word would leave my throat. I wanted to tell her this was wrong, it was all a mistake, it was a stupid terrible treacherous thing to do to me. But I stood there as mute as a stump.
Julia’s eyes were dry, but anguish showed in every line of her face, every tense angle of her body.
“Don’t you see, Arthur? He needs me. He really needs me. You’re so strong, so capable, so self-reliant. But Jesse needs me to look after him, to stand by his side, to help him in his work.”
I wanted to scream, to rage, to find my traitor of a brother and throttle him. Instead I just turned wordlessly away from Julia and walked across the meager lawn to the parking lot, got into my car, and left her standing alone beneath the lowering sky.
I tried to drive those memories, that scene, out of my mind as the corporate limo drove Pat and me uptown from the Omnitech offices to Gramercy Park. I’m so strong and self-reliant, am I? Then why are my guts churning as if somebody were twisting a knife in them?
The restaurant was quietly elegant, not glitzy. Small and intimate, with smoked mirrored walls to make it seem bigger than it was without making it look garish.
Jesse was not there when we arrived. Just like Jess, of course. Never on time. The maître d’ showed us to the table Jesse had reserved and took our drink orders: Pat wanted white wine, I asked if they had any Tavel.
“Yes, of course,” said the maître d’ in a smooth near-whisper.
“What’s Tavel?” Pat asked.
“A French rosé.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Rosés are too sweet for me.”
I was glad of the chance to have something that I could talk about. “Tavels are quite dry. I think you’d like it.”
“I’ll take a sip of yours, okay?”
“Sure.”
She liked the wine, though she stuck to her white. For twenty minutes we sipped wine and made small talk while I fidgeted and eyed the front door, wondering when my brother and Julia would show up. And then they came through the door, Jesse chatting laughingly with the headwaiter, Julia searching the room with her eyes.
My heart lurched at the sight of her. More beautiful even than I remembered. Those soulful dark eyes. She still looked fragile, vulnerable, the kind of utterly feminine woman that made me want to wrap my arms around her protectively. Yet her figure was womanly, and beneath that refined veneer she had the heat of animal passion in her blood. I had known that passion, explored every inch of her responsive flesh.
But no more.
She looked depressingly happy. If Julia felt as anxious or reluctant as I did, she gave no sign of it. She was smiling and bright-eyed, her chestnut-brown hair swept back almost carelessly, her Chinese-red dress with its mandarin collar looking modest and sexy at the same time, the way it clung to her. I bounced to my feet as they approached, searching her eyes for some hint of remorse, some sign that she
regretted the choice she had made. I found only a kind of hopeful expectancy.
“Arthur,” she said, reaching out to touch my cheek.
It was difficult to make my voice work. “It’s good to see you again, Julia,” I finally managed to croak.
“It’s good to see you, Arthur.”
I fumbled through introducing Patricia and dreaded having to make conversation. I knew my brain wouldn’t work right.
But I needn’t have worried. Jesse took over the burden of discourse. He started talking as soon as he sat down and kept right on going through drinks, appetizers, and the main course, his words aimed ostensibly at Pat, although I knew he was showing off for Julia, showing his wife that she had made the right choice.
“So what we’re doing, my big brother and I,” he was saying to Pat, “is inaugurating the Fourth Era of Medicine.” He pronounced it with capital letters.
“The fourth era of medicine?” Pat asked. The expression on her face said that she knew it was just a setup line for Jesse’s next quarter hour of lecturing.
“Yep,” Jesse said happily. “The first era goes back to prehistoric times. Tribal medicine men found out that if you chewed the bark of a certain tree or drank a tea made from some certain herbs you could stop a headache or settle stomach cramps or induce other simple cures.”
“I thought it was the women who did that,” said Pat.
Jesse shrugged. “Women, men, what’s the difference? Medical practice was a kind of cookbook thing for centuries. They knew certain things worked for certain problems—sometimes. But nobody knew why.”
“And they mixed it all up with superstition, didn’t they?” Julia said. She looked radiant, glowing. I wondered if she might be pregnant. The thought startled me.
“Yeah, right,” Jesse went on, undeterred. “Right up into the twentieth century, just about, medicine was cookbook stuff, hit or miss.”
He cocked an eye at me, but I had nothing to say. I was thinking that I’d never seen Jesse looking happier: relaxed, confident, exuding that boyish charm that he used the way other men used money or power to get their way. This is Jesse’s night, I thought. The limelight is all his. Again.