The Immortality Factor (33 page)

But Arby could do strange things sometimes. I never thought he'd leave Columbia, but all of a sudden he up and quit and started this research laboratory of his. Moved out to Connecticut, for chrissakes. Maybe he really was getting old enough to want to settle down.

So there we were, the four of us: Arby and his fiancée and me and my date—a buxom Latino X-ray technician from the hospital named Gloria who claimed she was into channeling and reincarnation. And oral sex, if the rumors were right.

Julia was the quiet type, but those dark eyes of hers could look right through you. I felt almost uncomfortable when she studied me from across the dinner table.

Arby was bragging about how many Nobel Prize winners he had hired as consultants for his lab. Gloria was fascinated with him, maybe because he looked so well off and sure of himself. The silver hair gets them, I think; gives Arby a fatherly look. But although Julia was smiling in all the right places of Arthur's stories, every now and then she looked at me as if she were X-raying my mind.

My beeper went off, and it turned out to be an emergency back at the hospital. I had to leave Gloria with Arby and Julia and grab a taxi outside the restaurant. It was past dawn by the time I got back to my apartment. I pulled my clothes off and flopped on the unmade bed. I dreamed of Julia; nothing erotic, I was just talking to her in some kind of an office. Arby's office, I recognized it, at his lab up in Connecticut.

I didn't see Julia again for more than two weeks. Then Arthur insisted that I come up to his house for the weekend.

“Bring a date with you, if you like,” Arthur said. “Julia's going to be here. We can make it a foursome.”

I didn't bother with a date. I couldn't get away for the entire weekend, anyway, only Saturday night.

It was midafternoon when I got there. Autumn, at last. Football weather, crisp and clear after months of heat and humidity. We always had more violent crime injuries in the emergency room during the hottest part of the summer. But now leaves were falling on Arthur's vast lawn and tempers were cooling in the ghettos. We could play football out on Arby's lawn, I thought as I looked out the window at the green expanse and the drifting leaves. Hell, the National Football League would have room enough to play a game on that lawn.

Arby looked happy and perfectly relaxed in a green velour pullover and chocolate brown slacks. The country squire at his leisure, I thought, smiling to myself. Julia wore a pale yellow turtleneck sweater and light blue skirt. Very pretty. I had come in my Saturday jeans and the shirt that had been at the top of my bureau drawer.

Arby was showing off again. He had bought new furniture, redecorated the house, and he was like a real estate agent showing the damned house off, room by tedious room. I thought maybe Julia had picked out the furniture. Maybe Arby's just trying to make her happy. Who the hell knew?

A phone call from the lab took Arthur to the den he had built next to the living room. He closed the door, leaving Julia and me standing next to the picture window, drinks in our hands, looking like a couple from the pages of the
New Yorker
: rich, sophisticated, slightly hostile.

“You see,” Julia said, “you're not the only one who gets called away for emergencies.”

I made a smile for her. “On a Saturday afternoon, yet. I guess Arby doesn't have everything under control, after all.”

“What makes you say that?”

I shrugged. “He's always in charge of everything. Always calculates all the angles before he moves ahead. Arby's always been the organized one.”

“And you?”

What is this, I wondered, an interrogation? So I answered, “I'm the baby brother. I don't have to be organized.”

“Arthur thinks the world of you, you know,” said Julia.

“I know.”

An uncomfortable silence fell between us. She was waiting for me to tell her how much I adore my big brother.

Before I could make up my mind to speak, Julia took a step closer to me. “You have this peculiar little smile on your lips, you know.”

“I do?”

“It's almost a smirk.”

“I wasn't aware of it,” I said.

“I've noticed it before. Perhaps it's your natural expression.”

“A smirk?”

“As if you know something that no one else knows. It gives you this slightly superior, slightly bored look.”

She was smiling. Not a big smile, just enough to show that she wasn't trying to pick a fight.

“Well, I certainly don't feel superior,” I said.

“No, of course not. You're rather in awe of Arthur, aren't you? You don't have to live up to him, you know. You're quite a marvelous human being yourself, actually.”

That's how it started. With that conversation. We double-dated a few more times and the more I saw Julia the more I felt like I was being drawn into some kind of a whirlpool. I mean, I couldn't stop thinking about her. I never wanted to hurt Arby or get between him and Julia, but I couldn't help it. It was overwhelming. Like there was some force pulling at me, dragging me in a direction that I knew I shouldn't go.

Not that I did anything about it. I never said a word to her, never even saw her without Arby being present. Oh, okay, so we were alone for a few minutes at a time once in a while, when Arby had to answer the phone or whatever. I tried very hard not to let anything show, but the smile that Julia always gave me—that smile. It seemed to know what was going on inside me, the turmoil, the wanting, the pain that was better than any pleasure I had known before.

So help me, I never took a step toward her. But I made time to go out with her and Arby as often as I dared. Sometimes I brought a date along, but usually the poor kid just sat there, ignored, while I talked with Julia. Arby never
seemed to notice anything. Not a thing. You could have whacked him on the head with a frying pan and he wouldn't have noticed it. Not when he was with Julia.

And then, at dinner one night Julia said, “Your work at the hospital must be fascinating.”

I sort of shrugged. “It's drudgery, most of it. Poor people don't have exotic diseases. They've got parasites or infections or complications from do-it-yourself abortions. AIDS. Women beaten up by their boyfriends. Kids, too; more and more child abuse. Oh, yeah, there's a fair amount of stabbings and shootings, especially on the weekends.”

“And that's your practice?” she asked.

Arby said, “Jesse's a doctor of internal medicine. He's director of research at the La Guardia Medical Center. But he spends most of his time in the hospital in the ghetto.”

I didn't like the way he said that. “Hey, Arby, you know at one time it was our people in the ghetto.”

He looked a little surprised. Then he said, “Our people got themselves out.”

“Some of them did.”

“And those who did helped the others to break out. We didn't get welfare.”

Julia ended the incipient argument. “Would it be possible for me to visit your hospital?”

I felt stunned.

“I'd like to see what it's like.”

“It's not pretty,” I said.

“It doesn't even smell good.”

“I think it's time I saw where you work,” she insisted. My heart was thudding in my chest so loud I was sure that Arby could hear it. But he seemed not to notice a thing.

Julia went on, “We see enough of good restaurants and people who are well off. The poor are rather hidden from us, don't you think?”

I couldn't answer because I had the wonderful fantasy that what Julia was really saying was that she wanted to see where I work, what I do. She wanted to be with me!

Arthur shrugged. “If you want to. I'm sure one look will last you a long time.”

“Perhaps,” Julia murmured.

“Frankly,” Arby said, “I don't see how you put up with it, Jess. Doesn't it ever get you down, all those needy people, day after day, year after year?”

I made the best speech of my life. I said, “They need help.”

So two days later Julia showed up at the hospital. Without Arby, who was busy running his lab. She stuck right beside me all through my rounds. We grabbed a couple of soggy sandwiches in the cafeteria and then I took her
through a typical afternoon of seeing patients and conferences with hospital staff and administrators. The guys on the resident staff all gave me leering grins, that's how great-looking Julia is. The administrators looked flustered that an outsider was listening to them whine about shortfalls of funding and new insurance regulations.

We skipped dinner. There was too much to do, too many sick and bleeding people to deal with. She stayed with me every step of the way until it was past ten o'clock. Finally I signed out and we went out onto the street, surprised that it was dark. I was pretty tired.

And damned depressed. It had been a wonderful day with Julia beside me. But now she was going home. And in a few weeks she'd be married to Arby.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
f there's any blame to it, it's mine. I could sense that Jesse cared about me, perhaps he even loved me, but he wasn't going to do anything about it. I was Arthur's and he wouldn't interfere, no matter how much he wanted me.

It was tremendously flattering, of course. Very romantic. Even dangerous. Here I was, making arrangements with Arthur for a big wedding bash and fantasizing about his brother. I told myself a thousand times that I was being a foolish little girl. Arthur offered the kind of world that a woman could only dream about: a posh lifestyle and social position and considerable wealth. It was all right to fantasize about the romantic, forbidden brother, but I had no intention of allowing those fantasies to rule me.

And yet . . .

No matter how I tried to avoid it, I was drawn to Jesse. I found myself asking to see his hospital. I wanted to see where he worked, I told myself. Truth to tell, I wanted to be with him. Alone. Without Arthur.

Most of Mendelssohn Hospital was grubby. The buildings were old and
dingy, the staff harried, the patients poor and dark-skinned and desperate. It was huge, of course, taking in several city blocks. Inside, it was quite confusing, a haphazard conglomeration of wards and offices and waiting rooms, the painted walls faded and worn-looking. Pitiful families wandering through the labyrinthine corridors, trudging along the scuffed floor tiles, looking confused or worried or frightened. Patients moaning in their beds or calling for a nurse or just lying there resigned and helpless. In some wards they had filled all the beds and had patients on gurneys out in the corridors.

There was one modern section, however: a surgery that looked quite futuristic, with big electronic display screens all around the operating table, surgeons wearing strange goggles as they manipulated tiny lasers instead of scalpels. I watched, fascinated, from the observation room behind a big window, as they cut away at the patient's abdomen.

“Cancer of the pancreas,” Jesse muttered as he stood beside me.

“It looks like an absolutely up-to-date facility,” I whispered. Silly, whispering like that when we were safely behind that thick window.

“Took four years of my life to raise the money for this facility,” Jesse said. “We needed it, but it was tough as hell to find people willing to put up the money for it.”

“Do you operate there often?” I asked.

He looked shocked. “Me? I couldn't be a surgeon. Cut up people day in and day out? Not me!”

“But they're curing that cancer patient, aren't they?”

“They're cutting out the tumor. That's not a cure.”

Jesse turned away from the window and I followed him out toward the corridor.

He put that knowing smirk of his back in its place and said, “Surgery's an admission that you don't know enough about medicine.”

“You don't approve of surgery?”

“Only when nothing else can be done.”

“You never do it yourself?”

He shrugged. “I can sew up a slashing if I have to. I've done my share of stitching in the emergency room.”

He walked me to the cardiac intensive care ward, where patients were waiting for angioplasty and bypass operations. Most of the patients were elderly, confined to their beds, although a few were shuffling along the corridor in their baggy green hospital gowns, pushing their rickety IV holders along with them, plastic tubes leading from the dangling bags to their bandaged arms. They looked weary, frightened.

“A heart attack is scary,” Jesse said. “Makes you realize how close to death you can be.”

“They're all going to have surgery?” I asked.

“Wish we knew enough to cure them without surgery,” Jesse told me. “I wish we could give them new hearts.”

Gradually, several other doctors started to walk along with us. Younger men and women. Even some nurses began following us. Jesse knew them all, bantered back and forth with them. He stopped here and there, chatted up some of the patients, looked at their charts, squinted at the monitor screens that showed their vital signs, leaned across their beds to examine them, held brief discussions with the younger staff people who clustered around him.

It was an entourage, I realized. These young men and women gathered about Jesse; they were drawn to him. He was their leader. They followed him and watched him and hung on his every word. They idolized him.

He could be a great man, I thought. With the proper backing, the proper drive, he could make this hospital into the finest medical center in the city.

“It must be a heavy responsibility,” I said as he led me out of the ward.

He stopped and looked back at the patients, the staffers, the patients and doctors and nurses and orderlies who were all looking at him. Depending on him. With a boyish grin and a wave, he pushed open the big door and we headed for the elevators.