Bitter Business

dancing with my little sister, Beth, in a silver frame in the music room of my parents’ house, though I honestly don’t remember seeing him there. So much of what happened that day is a blur. What is clearer in my memory is the first night, just after Russell was admitted to the hospital after being diagnosed with cancer, when
    Stephen appeared unbidden at his bedside to offer whatever help he could.
    And now? Stephen is the CEO of Azor Pharmaceuticals, the company he founded straight out of medical school and which has been streaking across the high-tech heavens ever since. I am his lover and his lawyer. Beyond that I can’t be sure of anything.
    After Russell died I was horrified by how quickly well-meaning colleagues began circulating word of my “availability.” I reacted by asking Stephen to be my escort whenever I had an unavoidable social obligation. It worked. There is something about Stephen that tends to discourage competition.
    Stephen Azorini is handsome the way that professional basketball players are tall. Women actually stop to stare at him in the street. They want to run their fingers through the luxuriant waves of his dark hair, to stare deeply into the smoky blue of his eyes, and, I suppose, to have his babies—or at the very least have the fun of trying. When he’s in my office Cheryl is visited by a steady stream of secretaries with invented excuses who come in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I honestly have no idea how he stands it.
    Tonight Stephen was looking tired, but it suited him. He had spent the last several months trying to organize a joint venture between Azor Pharmaceuticals and Gordimer A.G., the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, in order to speed development of a new immunosuppressant drug. Stephen’s scientists had laid the groundwork for the creation of a new compound that could potentially prevent organ transplant rejections.
    While their scientific achievement was nothing short of dazzling, Azor lacked the financial muscle to make the arduous journey from discovery to drug development. Stephen, who was relentlessly pushing the deal toward closure, had entered what he referred to as his “full-sell mode”: flying between Chicago and Geneva alternately begging, threatening, and cajoling; granting the concessions and making the promises that would sustain a project that he believed in with a fervor approaching mania.
    Stephen knew that something was bothering me. I didn’t often feel the need to hide out at the bottom of a bottle. But I was grateful that he didn’t ask.
    All the time that Russell was dying we never talked about it. We had endless discussions about tests and treatments, of course, drug choices and surgical options, issues of morbidity and mortality. Stephen even helped me choose the clothes that Russell would be buried in. He stood beside me at the funeral, filling in for my absent older brother and a father who did not share my sorrow. But we never talked about feelings, what it was like to walk with full knowledge into a pit of unspeakable grief.
    Since then we seem unable to grasp the vocabulary of emotions. Perhaps we never had it in the first place. Tonight I was just grateful for the scotch and the companionship, the familiar rumble of Stephen’s baritone as he filled me in on the progress he’d been making with the Swiss.
    I didn’t tell him about Cecilia Dobson until I was ready and then I barely touched on the desperate scene on the floor of Dagny’s office.
    “It’s just an accident that I was there when she was found. We didn’t say ten words to each other and now I feel like I’m going to be carrying her around with me for the rest of my life.”
    “You will,” Stephen answered simply. “It happens to doctors and nurses. Ask anyone who routinely deals with death. They all have one that stays with them.”
    “The worst part is not that it happened but that no one seems to have any idea why.”
    “She probably overdosed on something.”
    “That’s what the paramedics think. But when will they know?”
    “They’ll probably do the autopsy in the next day or so, but if it was drugs it’ll take longer—a week to ten days to get the toxicology results back.”
    “Ten days?” I wailed, surprised at how much the thought of waiting bothered me. I wanted it all to be over, her death explained, her body buried.
    “I think I’m going to have to start shopping around for another lawyer,” Stephen chided. “You can’t be as tough