The Same River Twice (56 page)

“But surely you would agree,” said Katty, who seemed to feel her story slipping away from her, “that a great deal of money will be made from Dr. Tregobov’s discoveries.”

“Money will perhaps be made, yes. But it will go to the patent-holding party, not to StemTech. Profit is not a factor in this instance.”

“Then why patent these processes in the first place? Shouldn’t they be available to anyone who needs them?”

“This is not for me to say. But as previously mentioned, it has become common practice in recent years to patent such discoveries.” Kukushkin could not suppress a laugh. “You know, Katty, there are genes in the bodies of all of us sitting here tonight that have been patented by the people who first identified them, people we will never meet and who will put them to uses we will never hear about. Whether, in future, this practice will stand up to legal challenge, I do not know. Is simply current situation.”

“A brave new world, by any standard,” said Katty, glancing quickly at the
studio clock. “Ms. Moreau, in the few seconds left to us, is there anything you would like to add?”

“Only this,” said Gabriella, her eyes flashing satisfaction. “That Dr. Tregobov’s discoveries will save countless lives and can only be cause for celebration. Yesterday we were without these tools, which now will help so many. Today we have them. It is a kind of miracle.”

“Indeed it is,” said Katty, bringing the interview firmly to an end. “Nikolai Kukushkin, Gabriella Moreau, thank you for being with us.”

“Thank you, Katty,” replied Gabriella. Kukushkin, looking deeply into the camera, nodded once in grave farewell.

“In today’s other top stories,” said Katty, swiveling back to fill the screen with her indomitable presence, “mudslides in Indonesia have left more than three hundred dead or missing, as monsoon rains—”

Max hit the remote, and the screen went black.

Odile slowly disengaged her body from Max’s. Getting to her feet, she walked over to the glass wall, arms folded across her chest, looked out past the pool, and brooded over what she’d just learned. Max remained where he was.

“It’s a story of which we each must know quite different parts, isn’t it?” she said, after awhile.

“No doubt,” Max replied. “But you definitely know a lot more of it than I do.”

A silence.

Then Odile said, “That night, the night of the auction and everything that happened after, you said you’d just come from having drinks with Kukushkin. At his private club, you said. Was that true?”

“Yes. I’d gotten to know his fiancée a little, more or less by accident, and when I ran into her at the auction, she introduced us.”

“His fiancée,” Odile repeated thoughtfully. “She wears a floral perfume, maybe? Gardenia?”

Max laughed. “That’s right.”

“I wonder what happened to her.” Odile’s thoughts drifted idly for a moment before she corrected course. “What’s her name?”

“Véronique.”

“Véronique.” She mused over this answer, half aware of her own reflection in the plate glass in front of her even as she stared through it at the shimmering pool. “So I suppose Gabriella—” But she stopped herself in time. “My God, Max. All that seems so very, very long ago. Almost,” she added, “as if it happened in another lifetime.”

“It
was
another lifetime. Anyway, don’t brood. It’s bad for the baby.”

Odile turned around, a wan smile on her face. “You’re right. And it’s completely useless. So I think I’ll go take a bath, if anything so mundane can be had in a place like this.” She kissed him in passing and went off in search of a tub.

“Keep an eye out for Allegra, will you?” Max called after her. Then, to himself, in a voice from an old movie: “It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

IN HER BATH
, amid billowing steam, Odile found herself thinking about her father. Predictably, he’d refused to see
Bateau ivre
or comment on its success. But she thought she’d lately detected a softening in his attitude toward Max, perhaps because she herself had grown visibly happier over the past year. Soon she would inform the old Trotskyite of her pregnancy, for once telling him something he didn’t already know, and Bastien would come around at last, accepting Max as his worthy son-in-law, co-custodian of the Mével genes. The thought pleased, but also amused her. In the end, she’d proven more stubbornly ascetic than Bastien, and now that she was sure of her victory on this score, she was content to let the competition fade away unacknowledged. Life required no less.

And life, as one was always being told, had its reasons of which reason knew nothing. Gabriella, for instance, who’d succeeded after all in having her eggs substituted for those of Kukushkin’s fiancée, this Véronique of whom Odile until now hadn’t heard a word, though she’d caught scent of her perfume on Max that night aboard the
Nachtvlinder
. Obviously, too, Gabriella was now co-holder with Tregobov of the patent rights to the various processes just described on the news, making her quite soon an unimaginably wealthy woman. Whether Thierry had found a place for himself amid these arrangements was hard to say, but Odile thought it unlikely. He’d already been rendered redundant the moment the doctor boarded the boat. Maybe the plan—or the counterplan—had called all along for Thierry to be jettisoned once he’d served his function, and from what Odile had gathered about Kukushkin, she could only imagine the worst. In any case, the Russian would now be getting his share of the licensing fees through Gabriella, whom he had perhaps even married in place of Véronique to give the deal more legal heft. Odile recalled with embarrassment her own envy of Gabriella’s youth as, hiding in Thierry’s closet, she’d watched her undress to try on the lingerie he’d left her as a gift. Folly and foolishness. Odile herself felt far younger now than she had on that day. Or, rather, younger
and
older. Renewed.

She didn’t know how much Max had deduced or been told about all that she’d kept secret from him. It didn’t matter. She didn’t know, either, what or how much he himself had kept from her, nor how their separate silences had intersected to bring them to this new and unexpected place in their life together. But again, not knowing didn’t matter, and she felt no need to find out. They had come this far, she and Max. They would go farther still.

She closed her eyes in weariness. From downstairs came the sound of the TV again, an old movie, American, undubbed. She distinctly heard Cary Grant say, “Yes, I
will
say you do things with dispatch. No wasted preliminaries.” Allegra giggled at something Max said.

Some time later, Odile jerked up out of her own drowsiness, uncertain where she was. The water had gone cold. She got out of the tub and, taking a towel from the rack, stepped out onto the balcony to dry herself. She turned her face to the night sky.

From the southeast, a storm was approaching. Lightning flickered, and thunder followed more and more closely. Along the coast, the lights of Nice, Antibes, Cannes, and Fréjus shone like the precious stones of a necklace cast negligently aside after a long evening. The storm had yet to make landfall.

Putting on her old silk robe, Odile slipped quietly downstairs. She heard Grace Kelly say, “Let me do something to help you.” But instead of joining Max and Allegra to watch the movie, she continued out onto the veranda and sat down on the stone steps. They were still warm from the heat of the day.

Below, along the coast, the storm came in hard and fast, blotting out the stars as far as she could see, from northeast to southwest. Lightning bolts, accompanied by teeth-rattling cracks of thunder, darted from sky to ground, sometimes in multiples or jagged forks, giving the air a pungent ozone smell. Then came the rain, which she could hear falling on the towns below and could feel as a sudden temperature drop rolling uphill like a runaway fog, but which she could see only by lightning flash. Sometimes the bolts were almost constant, but at other moments were separated by intervals of darkness during which Odile grew tense, anticipating the next burst of light.

She sat where she was, too absorbed to move, as the storm continued to roll inland. It came on so fast that there was a period, just before it reached her, when the lights of the coastal towns emerged from darkness, the bad weather already done down there. It cheered her to see the lights again, as if, in some childish game of wishes, she’d come out ahead.

Then, quite nearby, there was a tremendous flash, a shower of sparks and a violent explosion. In that fraction of a second, she saw that lightning had struck one of the rows of electrical pylons that ran up the mountainside like gigantic, narrow-waisted warrior figures, abstractly humanoid in appearance. Knowing what must follow, she turned back toward the coast just in time to see the towns lose their power, each cluster of lights winking out in sequence in less than two seconds.

Then the hillside power failed too, casting everything around her—the villa, its neighbors, the flanking fields of jasmine and tuberose, things she was already trying to visualize—into total, placeless darkness.

She stayed where she was. Inside the villa she heard Allegra’s half-pretend shriek followed by Max’s teasing, coaxing words.

When he came out onto the veranda and sat down silently next to her, Odile rested her head on his shoulder.

The rain arrived, falling in sheets. They watched.

After a time she said, “I almost never think about the past anymore.”

DURING THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK, I was aided immeasurably by the generosity of a number of people, most especially: Betsy Baker, Bertille de Baudinière, Natalie Bataille, Dajana Cesic, Zhenya Edelmann, Gary Fisketjon, Fran Gordon, Bruce Levine, Kathryn Maris, Arthur Perkins, Béatrice Pire, Anne Rochette, Wade Saunders, and Masha Yatskova. My thanks to all of them.

—TM

Ted Mooney is the author of three previous novels,
Easy Travel to Other Planets, Traffic and Laughter
, and
Singing into the Piano
. He was senior editor at
Art in America
for over thirty years and now teaches a graduate seminar at Yale University School of Art. His fiction has appeared in
Esquire, Granta
, and the
New American Review
, and he has received grants from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He lives in New York City.