Syndrome Part 17

Chapter 6

_Sunday, April 5

11:43 P.M.

_

Winston Bartlett put the newly glazed creme brulee, still warm from his preparation in the kitchen below stairs, on the bed tray in front of Kristen, next to her untouched champagne flute. She used to love it and he was trying everything he knew to jog her memory. He'd cooked her favorite supper, eggs Florentine, with barely wilted spinach topped by prosciutto, had taken her to bed and now there was champagne and her favorite dessert.

But she still seemed distracted and distant. Yes, it was a good idea to get her away from the inst.i.tute, but that was merely relocating the problem, not fixing it. If it could be fixed. In the meantime, she had to be kept here, out of the public eye.

"Thank you," she said and gingerly took a small bite. She had been almost lucid earlier this evening and was leaning against the antique headboard wearing a soft blue nightgown. Her long blond hair was tousled and down over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her memory might now be a sometime thing, but her libido was still going strong.

"Do you remember how much you used to like that?" he asked, trying to make eye contact.

She nodded her head dumbly. Did she actually remember? Increasingly, he had no idea.

He had brought her here to stay in this five-story nineteenth- century mansion on Park Avenue. He'd purchased it a year and a half earlier for 23 million and he was intending to have it renovated and converted into a museum. That renovation, however, had been put on hold awaiting a decision by the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Museum. He wanted the building to be a Park Avenue adjunct to the Met, and he also wanted his definitive a.s.semblage of j.a.panese implements of war to be known as the Bartlett Collection.

The tax write-off would be monumental, but that was not nearly so important as the prestige.

It was clear now that this project would not have any momentum until he first got himself appointed to the board of the Met. Unfortunately, money alone wasn't adequate. Major-league politics was involved.

He was working on it, with a lot of Upper East Side lunches and targeted charity events. He was also taking his time and getting designs and estimates for the renovation. The way things were at the moment, he didn't have the cash to actually start construction anyway.

For the moment, the place was furnished but unoccupied except for a security guard, a part of Bartlett's personal staff. Now, with Kristen here, discretion was his uppermost concern.

He had sent the security guy home this evening, so he and Kristen could have privacy. In the morning two nurses would come on duty, one to look after her and another to cook.

Over the past year he'd brought her here most weekends. It was like having their own Shangri-la. Best of all, unlike his official residence on Gramercy Park, he didn't have a wife upstairs, like some mad (in every sense of the word) aunt in the attic.

He had hoped that bringing Kristen back here might do

something for her memory. He still hoped, but he wasn't sure. In bed tonight she had been as lithe and enthusiastic as ever. Possibly even more so. Did she know who he was? He couldn't really tell. But he still loved being with her. The soft skin and the voluptuous curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs: it made him feel young again.

Since she had been out at the Dorian Inst.i.tute and away from him, he had begun to feel older and older.

Winston Bartlett was sixty-seven and--increasingly--felt it. To begin with, his prostate was enlarging itself, in spite of all the special, expensive medicines he used Surgery was increasingly looking like a possibility. And his memory was nowhere near what it once was. He wolfed down ginkgo and ginseng capsules by the handful but was finding it harder and harder to remember people's names, particularly the new wave of donation-hungry politicians who fawned over him.

And then there was the matter of teeth. He'd just gone through major periodontal surgery, a sign of aging gums. How long before his ivories would be replaced by ceramic choppers? Oh, and the heart. His cardiologist was talking more and more about stents to alleviate the two constricted arteries in the left ventricle. They were already down to 40 percent. Face it, his whole d.a.m.ned body was falling apart.

Probably worst of all, the Johnson was far from what it used to be; not long back, it was a daily triple threat. Soon he might be resorting to v.i.a.g.r.a as more than a discretionary recreational drug, something he was still joking about less than a year ago.

The dirty secret about living this long is, after you've seen everything you ever wanted to see, done everything you ever wanted to do, bought everything you ever wanted to buy, you gradually lose the only thing really worth having.

Youth.

To try to hang on to it, he had been through clinics as far- flung as Phoenix and Lucerne. He had undergone regimens of antioxidants and injections of human growth hormone. He'd tried testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone, better know as DHEA. Maybe it had made a difference, maybe not. Sometimes he thought he had more libido and energy, but other times he wasn't sure. Maybe it was just that he'd begun working out even harder, playing handball an extra half hour every other day. He did know his body was continuing to deteriorate.

s.h.i.+t, the Beta had to be made to work

"I don't want to stay here alone," Kristen said, putting down her spoon. "I want to go back to work."