"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 smiled patronizingly. "Such an old hag, I know. We'll just have to find a way to make you happy."

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 frightening. She had spasms of possessiveness, where she craved everything both within and beyond her reach, followed by crashing fits of despair. She lost weight and hair. Her face became pinched and drawn. Mirrors, which had always been allies, became enemies. She would stiffen at the sight of herself, eyes filled with condemnation and longing, lacking the strength to turn away. I, too, lacked the strength, to turn away from her. My dear and once beloved Vexing. As her star fell, so did mine.

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 hopelessness and resignation. 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 it came to me what.

It took a week to cull through the magazines and another to cut and tack. When I was done, every surface, including the ceiling, was covered with her picture. Vexing the ingenue, the vixen, Vexing the girl next door, the starlet, the fresh-scrubbed housewife. Vexing the princess, radiant and happy, athletic, sultry and gay. She looked upon me wherever I turned. Vexing the pinup. 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 been missing, a warmth, a 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 furious.

"Jesus. Look at this. You're worse than I am."

I knew I'd done wrong and lamely tried to cover up. "It's my scrapbook of you. My photo album. Aren't you even a little flattered?"

"Flattered?" She was appalled. "Was that your intention? To flatter me?"

I pawed at the floor. "No. Not really."

"You're sick, Martin. I don't believe this."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you? Are you really?"

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

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

"What I want is for you to be happy again."

"Such happiness," she said. "You're a cruel man, Martin."

"I'm stupid," I said. "And careless. Some secrets are best kept secret. Maybe I'd love you more if you loved yourself."

"If I loved myself, I wouldn't be who I am." She let that sink in. "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. I do believe 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 on and off for 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 hear there is hardly anything they can't do these days," she told Dr. Aymen, who clearly had reservations.

"Certainly there are surgeons who 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. 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 telomerase."

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 science 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. 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, an ageless age."

The thought robbed him of words, and for an instant I saw him in a different light, as a younger man, a boy, starry-eyed and utterly self-absorbed, lost in a world of dreams, imagination and wonder. Slowly, he came back to his senses.

"We need volunteers. Humans. 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 register, 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 the like, 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 sense, 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 wouldn't stop 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 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 at all. She simply lay wherever she was put, still, quiet, suspended.

I cared for her night and day, bathing her, dressing her, doing her hair, rubbing lotion on her skin. Sometimes I read to her, sometimes told her stories, often simply sat. The years passed. 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; 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, if only for the time it took to raise enough money to live on, was profane, as the idea of her having to alter herself at all should have been in the first place. I had been wrong, and in loneliness and guilt I was paying the price.

What I did do was move her from the house to the cottage, which was quieter and more detached from the world at large, as I myself had become. I tore down the photographs and in their place hung four of her favorite gowns, one on each of the four walls. 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.

He clapped 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. I don't want to."

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

"Who does? 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."

"Sometimes five minutes is all it takes." With a wink he suggested we pay a visit to the cottage. It had been quite a while since he'd seen the wife.

"So what have you tried?" he asked. We were standing on either side of her bed.

"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 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."

"This is embarrassing," I said.

"You've got to be bold, Marty. Nothing's going to work if you don't believe in yourself."

My big brother. Giving me a pep talk. I was touched. "So what do you suggest?"

"I want you to kiss her. On the lips. Like you mean it. Like you care. Like it matters what happens next."

"She's asleep," I said.

"So?"

"It seems wrong."

He threw up his hands. "She's your wife, for chrissake. Kiss the woman, before I do it myself."

I did. I kissed her.

"Thataboy," said Frank. "Breathe some life into the old girl."

I tried. First tentatively, then with more passion. Life, heart, soul-whatever I had I tried to breathe into my Vexing.

Nothing happened.

Frank was undaunted. "Now kiss her tittie."

I looked at him.

"Her tittie," he repeated. "Trust me on this, Marty." With trembling fingers I undid the first button of her nightgown. And the second. Then I stopped.

"I don't think so, Frank. Maybe later."

For a moment I thought he was going to ridicule me. But he didn't.

"Sure," he said. "In private. No problem."

I led him out of the cottage.

"You did good," he told me. "Keep it up. Every day. Don't just tell her, show her you love her. Show her what she's worth. What she's missing. You do like that, no girl in her right mind is going to stay asleep."

So that was Frank. Carol was next. in honor of my birthday, she flew in from New York that weekend. She had put on weight, which was a relief. All her life she tended to run thin, due, I suspected, to the same chemistry that made her such an indefatigable go-getter, but thinness at fifty, or even sixty, is not the same as thinness at seventy, which was when I'd last seen her. At seventy thinness becomes frailty, or worse, the specter of some horrible wasting disease. But now her face was fleshed out, and her cheeks had the blush of health. Business was prospering, as was her marriage, her third. She asked after mine, and in reply I took her to the cottage. Upon entering, she had a quick look around, frowned briefly at the sight of the gowns on the walls, then approached the love of my life.