Prizes

by Erich Segal

  Her heart melted. “I’d like that,” she whispered. “I’d like that very much.”

  “You damn well better. I’m giving up eccentricity for you. Can you imagine the embarrassment? And I’ll cease to be known as ‘Pracht the dropout.’ ”

  “They’re not going to call you that anyway,” Isabel responded. “In a week they’ll be calling you ‘Pracht the Wimbledon champion.’ ”

  He looked at her with surprise. “Are you serious?” he asked softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you for one minute believe I’m going to get on that plane tonight and leave you with a father in intensive care?”

  “Jerry, don’t be stupid. I’ve got lots of friends—your father, for a starter.”

  He shook his head and said quietly, “No, Isa. We’re going to play this by the book. I’m going to be your man and I’m going to stick by you when you need me.”

  “But what about—”

  “Bouncing a ball on a grass court? Eating strawberries? I don’t think that outweighs leaving you on your own. Besides, my beating Boris was sheer luck. Cinderella only happens once.”

  When he took her to her apartment, he saw the look of helplessness on her face as she opened the door.

  “Isa, please don’t mistake what I’m about to say. But I think we’d both feel better if I didn’t leave you alone tonight.”

  For a moment she did not know how to react. Then she whispered, “Thank you.”

  And felt immensely relieved that she had found the courage to say it.

  53

  SANDY

  “Tell me the truth, Dr. Raven, do you have a sex problem?”

  Sandy was caught off balance. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well then, maybe it’s me. I always thought I turned men on.”

  “Denise, you’re an extremely beautiful girl, but … you’re a colleague.”

  The woman gave a throaty laugh. “You make it sound so formal. Anyway, it never seemed to stop anyone before. Actually, I thought you’d be flattered that I find you so attractive.”

  “Please …” Sandy held up his hand, almost like a boxer blocking a punch. “This is starting to embarrass me. I am flattered, but—”

  “Cool, cool.” She backpedaled. “That’s okay, Sandy. I’m sorry I came on to you. I didn’t mean anything. I guess you haven’t got a sex problem—as such.”

  “Oh?”

  “No, I think you just have a problem—about sex.”

  In truth, though the young researcher’s attempt at seduction had been exceptionally crude, it was not the first instance of its kind. Ever since he appeared as an eligible bachelor on the university scene, women had set their sights on him. Yet the fact that he sidestepped every opportunity and retreated into a cocoon of monastic abstinence had begun to worry his father.

  Sidney could understand that his son had been burned badly and was still too injured to brave emotional involvement with the opposite sex, but earthy sensualist that he was, he believed religiously in the value of “a regular, healthy roll in the hay.”

  He had for years frequented a veteran concubine—as he referred to her—in Santa Monica. Out of affection for her client and concern for his son, the woman prescribed a friend of hers for what she felt was ailing Sandy.

  But the younger man was firmly evasive. “I know you won’t believe this, Dad. But I get complete satisfaction out of my career.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe you. You know what they say about all work and no foreplay?”

  Sandy tried to smile at his father’s homey witticism.

  As he approached his fortieth birthday, Sandy found himself leading two separate lives.

  His public persona was the distinguished scientist at Cal Tech, running his institute, organizing seminars, and directing dissertations.

  This was the personage frequently invited to address meetings of his professional colleagues, who were all anxious to hear about the latest findings in his exciting research.

  Yet he did not enjoy these appearances, mainly because he felt—and often rightfully so—that many in the audience were whispering about the unhappy “MIT scandal” he was trying so vainly to forget.

  At these functions there were always women aplenty. But Sandy managed to reject all temptations, which, ironically, seemed to multiply exponentially with his every refusal. After all, he was a star. And for a variety of reasons, many of the young female scientists just beginning their upper climb in his field were anxious to know him better. But he was so numbed, he was unable to perceive his own loneliness.

  Once, in desperation, he forced himself into an adventure in hopes of recharging his interest in romance.

  He spent a weekend with a vivacious blond from Solvang, a transplanted Danish village located on the outskirts of Santa Barbara.

  Their sex was joyful and uninhibited. Sadly, their conversation was less so.

  It was reassuring that Sigrid Jensen was a tenured chemist at USC and did not need Sandy for anything but himself. She even knew his history. Naively, she hoped to help exorcise his demons.

  “For heaven’s sake, Sandy,” she urged, “why can’t you believe that I don’t want to steal anything from you—I just want to share your thoughts.”

  Sandy shook his head. “I know, Sigrid,” he said. “You’re very nice. And believe me, I appreciate what you’re saying.”

  She grasped him by the shoulders. “Listen, Sandy, you’re a wonderful man. I can’t apply for the job of your psychiatrist—but I hope you’ll call me if you need a little human contact. For what it’s worth, I really like you.”

  He smiled warmly, “It’s worth a lot, Sigrid.” He touched her hand and whispered, “Thanks.”

  Yet he never could bring himself to call her again. Perhaps because he feared that if he did, she might get too close to his bruises.

  On the weekends, however, the hermit became a hunter. Sandy spent all his waking hours stalking the explorations of others.

  Just as some people made a hobby of browsing for antiques at various country locales, Sandy would tour the unique backyard emporiums dotting the Bay Area. The all-pervasive technosphere of northern California—especially Silicon Valley—had engendered a spate of cottage industries. Dozens of young geniuses were working in their parents’ garages, all trying to develop newer biotech wonders.

  Sandy would hear about their work on the student grapevine, and actually seek them out. These adolescent dynamos were fired by a confidence bordering on recklessness. They shrank from no challenge, however outwardly daunting. Moreover, such was their enthusiasm that they focused their efforts more on the sheer joy of finding the end of the rainbow, all but ignoring the attendant pot of gold.

  Their predecessors were men like the legendary Dr. Herb Boyer, who made history with a little company called Genentech.

  At least, it was little at the beginning.

  Once upon a time—in 1978, to be exact—Boyer and his staff were working out of a modest lab on the San Francisco docks. Their breakthrough was the synthesizing of insulin—a protein essential for the metabolism of blood sugar and especially vital to sufferers of diabetes, whose bodies cannot manufacture it on their own. This had been a pipe dream for so long that its success, though spectacular, was not surprising. It sold like hotcakes.

  Two years later his company, Genentech, was floating on the stock market. On the very first day of trading, Boyer’s share of the enterprise had risen to a value of eighty-two million dollars. Quite an act to follow, yet they were not short of emulators. There are at least a hundred thousand genes in the body, all with different base pair sequences. There were numberless new worlds for these young Columbuses to find.

  Sandy was excited. He felt in his element as he drove from one garden shed to another, marveling at the un-discovered scientific potential of the younger generation. He would sometimes spend hours with the ecstatically honored teenagers, running through their demonstrations, looking over their data and
making suggestions.

  They were flattered that someone of his eminence took an interest in their projects. Sometimes, Sandy also bought an interest.

  On the surface, he was looking for a new Herb Boyers. In another, deeper sense, he was also trying to find himself before the fall. For his own intellectual curiosity had remained almost as limitless as the youngsters’.

  By the late 1980s the university was paying him a basic six-figure salary plus a share of royalties in anything they might jointly patent. So the outlay of a few thousand dollars to buy half the shares of some fledgling’s scientific dream seemed like a fantastic deal for both parties.

  Yet Sandy was scrupulous in all his dealings with them. He was not about to visit the sins of the previous generation on the next.

  Despite everything, at the still-unsullied core of his soul Sandy believed in professional integrity. Though he could easily have demanded a share of the credit as well, he had no desire to usurp their glory and enhance his reputation at the expense of theirs. He could never hurt another human being as he had been hurt. Which, in a way, explained the deepest emotion he felt toward these young scientists—that of a protective father.

  Although he was deeply involved in many of his own projects, he nonetheless remained in close contact with the progress of the group he affectionately referred to as “his kids.” And they were among the privileged few who possessed his unlisted home phone number.

  This was in fact the only area of his life that resembled something like emotional involvement.

  Sandy had always been enthusiastic about NeoBiotics. In this tandem operation, Francis, nineteen years old, and his “senior” partner James, twenty-one, were devising an AIDS test so simple and swift that it could be administered in the privacy of any doctor’s office, and yield accurate results in less than five minutes.

  When it appeared that they would be the first to get FDA approval, Sandy put them in the hands of a good lawyer, who proceeded to negotiate for the initial public offering for the company. Their stock came out at five dollars. By the time the green light came from Washington, it had increased tenfold.

  The younger partners sent Sandy a jubilant fax, “Thanks a million!” An hour or so later, a normally diffident Francis, emboldened by his very first taste of champagne, called to correct his mistake. “I guess we should have said thanks a lot of millions, huh?”

  Sandy, for whom seven-digit checks were now almost a mundane occurrence, merely smiled. “It’s only money,” he philosophized.

  “Yeah,” the boy replied euphorically. “But it feels nice, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” Sandy said obligingly. He had long wondered why wealth was not everything it was cracked up to be.

  But he was genuinely happy. For them.

  There were other pleasures.

  Vectorex was a husband and wife enterprise. It was so small at first that its founders not only worked in a garage—they lived over it. But Jennie and Doug Wilson thought big—and ultimately succeeded in perfecting a technique for delivering the retroviral repair man to the exact location of the genetic damage.

  When they reached the market eighteen months later, their vectors—coming from the Latin “to carry”—instantly became the geneticists’ favorite medium of delivery. This was a real gusher. The Wilsons bought a car for the garage—and the house attached to it.

  The couple’s subsequent achievement brought Sandy even more joy: they named their firstborn son after him.

  “Hey kid. You really know how to pick winners,” Sidney enthused. “I oughta take you to Vegas for a weekend.”

  “Don’t bother, Dad. Those six-foot showgirls aren’t my type.”

  “What makes you so sure—I mean, that’s not what I mean,” Sidney protested, finally organizing his thoughts and urging, “Come on Sandy, isn’t this a dream come true? Don’t you want to buy anything?”

  “Yeah,” his son responded sardonically. “As Groucho said, ‘I’d like to buy back my introduction to Greg Morgensteen.’ ”

  Sandy did his best to please his father and derive some enjoyment from his newfound wealth. He voluntarily increased the child support he paid to Judy, and established a very substantial trust fund for their daughter—which he never mentioned to Sidney.

  And when Olivia came out to visit in the summers, he insisted that she fly first-class.

  But what about himself?

  Mostly out of inertia, he was still living in the same apartment he had taken when he first moved to the West Coast. Now he needed more space—if only to display the many awards and trophies he was receiving.

  When he walked into his local up-market real estate agency, the branch manager—an elegant brunette in her mid-thirties—was breathless with excitement.

  For Elaine—as she immediately insisted upon being called—could not believe the good luck that had brought Sandy—as she immediately insisted upon calling him—into her life. It was not simple avarice, for she met well-heeled clients every day.

  But Sandy was so unspeakably eligible—cleanly divorced, self-sufficient, warm and friendly. And a professor.

  So determined was she not to let this one slip through her fingers that she invited him to dinner that very evening at her home, “for an in-depth discussion of your needs.”

  Normally Elaine took potentially lucrative clients to one of the fancier eateries, but she did not want to risk meeting a friend and possible rival who might demand an introduction.

  Among her many talents was cordon bleu cookery, and she whipped up a meal that was close to perfection.

  Sandy was genuinely pleased.

  “I’d never believe you could get this type of food outside Paris.”

  “That’s where we went on my first honeymoon,” she remarked. “Do you go often?”

  “I had a congress there once.”

  Elaine blushed. “Oh Sandy, you naughty boy. You shouldn’t be telling me that.”

  He politely laughed at what he assumed was her attempt at humor.

  And pleased that she’d seemed to find favor, she smiled back.

  Elaine was sure she’d reached first base. Moreover, her profession licensed her to ask innumerable personal questions. She had succeeded in putting Sandy so at ease that he not only discoursed at length about his family situation, but was almost lulled into narrating the story of his downfall at the hands of Gregory Morgenstern.

  “What about you, Elaine?” he inquired.

  “Usual Hollywood scenario,” she answered, forcing an insouciant smile. “Husband a producer, married twelve years, turned me and his Jaguar in for newer models. Then she divorced him and he went bankrupt, so I became the breadwinner. I was lucky. Now, every so often, I write him a check.”

  “Oh, that sounds very generous,” Sandy said gallantly. “Do you have any children?”

  “Two teenage girls. Lovely, lively, and exhausting.” Before he could ask, she offered, “I, uh, they’re sleeping at a friend’s.”

  No sooner had she spoken these words, than she realized her miscalculation. How could she have foreseen that Sandy was one of those rare men who would have actually welcomed dinner with a family? For his part, he suddenly felt claustrophobic, and after a short but decent interval for coffee, excused himself to return to the lab.

  Elaine consoled herself with the fact that she would have many other opportunities. She politely commented on Sandy’s dedication to his work, and promised to call him the next day with a list of possibilities.

  It seemed to be the story of Elaine’s life: she won the commission but lost the man.

  In the end, she found Sandy an unlisted gem—a seventeen-acre estate just south of Santa Barbara, with an almost overbearing twenty-room, Spanish-style house. Not an easy commute, but worth it for its privacy and European atmosphere.

  She could not help but sense that part of the attraction of this property was the fact that in its distant past, when California was Spanish, it had been a monastery. In any case, it needed a l
ot of renovation—which explained its “bargain” price of two and a half million—but Sandy fell in love with it. And Sidney—whom he had of course consulted—pressed him to buy, hoping that his son’s emotional life would expand to fill the rooms.

  Sidney put up only token resistance when Sandy urged him to move into what his father grandiosely referred to as the “Raven Compound.” “Without you, we can’t be a family,” Sandy insisted.

  How could Sidney Raven refuse the lure of an entire wing of his own, with a separate pool and patio for entertaining his own guests? Not to mention a twenty-seat screening room.

  “Holy moly,” he exclaimed. “Now all I need is something to screen.”

  At which point he turned to his son again and demanded, “Now, how about you, sonny boy?”

  “I’ve got a pool too,” Sandy countered.

  “Nah, you know what I mean. When are you gonna splurge on yourself?”

  “What do you call this whole deal?”

  “Basic, sonny boy, basic. Like a gal’s black dress—you gotta buy some diamonds to go with it.”

  “A tennis court?” Sandy suggested.

  “Sure, why not.”

  “Neither of us plays.”

  “There are teachers. And Olivia would really like it.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy agreed. “I’ll get in a builder this week to give us some quotes.”

  “Okay,” Sidney pursued. “That takes care of your daughter’s treat. Now, back to you. What have you always dreamed of but never thought you could ever have?”

  Sandy thought for a moment and then answered half jokingly, “A Nobel Prize.”

  “No. That you can’t buy—at least I don’t think so. But dream up something crazy—something really wild.”

  Sandy obliged his father and attempted to let his imagination run amok. Finally, almost as a capitulation perhaps, he answered, “What would you say if I built my own lab?”

  “You mean right in the compound?”

  “Yeah. A kind of mini-institute. I could transfer some of my work here and even have lab assistants on duty day and night. Well?”