Chapter 3 #3
They worked straight through until one o’clock, and did several shots in the exam rooms. The catering truck had already arrived by then and set up food for all of them in the gorgeous black granite kitchen, which was in sharp contrast to the white expanses of the house.
It had been done by a well-known Italian designer.
Dr. Addison had gone all out to staff the shoot adequately.
Right before they stopped for lunch, Zack, Alex, and Mickie, who called herself Michaela for the shoot, went into Alex’s private office, closed the door, and took the close-up headshots that were going to be the essence of his ad campaign and the centerpiece of a very expensive brochure he was having made.
After he took the shots, Zack made several adjustments on his computer and had Alex watch the progression of the image closely.
Mickie wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing.
Alex narrowed his eyes as he watched it, and then held up a hand and spoke sharply, “There! Now! Stop, back up a hair . . . perfect. You got it!” He beamed at Zack and patted him on the shoulder.
Both men were the same age, forty-two, but Alex had an air of command that took over the moment he walked into a room.
He had electric blue eyes, and when he and Mickie looked at each other, she swore she could hear sparks flying and feel them.
He exuded a kind of mesmerizing electricity that paralyzed you for a fraction of an instant, and then energized you.
She could feel it in her bones and so could he.
“You’re a very special woman, Michaela,” he said to her again and again. “You have powers that come from another lifetime, another world, possibly another universe.”
He escorted her into the kitchen to get something to eat.
They put food on their plates and he led her out the back door to a cabana by the pool with a table and chairs, where they could have privacy and eat, while the others ate in the kitchen.
He talked about growing up on an estate in Southampton, living with his grandparents after his parents died in a horrible accident on their yacht.
Boarding school in England after his grandparents died, undergraduate and medical school at Harvard, living and working in New York, five years of practicing in Palm Beach, and needing a more dynamic city to work in.
L.A. appeared to be the perfect place, so here he was, and he told Mickie that she was part of the magic now, the destiny that controlled them all.
He had no wife or children, and said he had put all his love and energy into his medical practice.
“You must think I’m crazy for saying that,” he said gently, “but I felt an incredible connection to you from the first time I met you.” He was mesmerizing, like a magnet she couldn’t pull away from and escape, and didn’t want to.
He wanted to be near her and soak up her energy and combine it with his own.
They lay down on the lounge chairs at the pool, waiting for one of Zack’s assistants to come and get them for the rest of the shots.
Zack was sure that he had already gotten some very important shots, but he sensed that there were others too.
Before they left the comfortable chairs, she asked him a direct question: “How do the treatments really work?” she asked in barely more than a whisper. She called him “Doctor,” and he corrected her immediately.
“Alex,” he said firmly. “The answer to your question is easy. Your skin has a memory, your body, your heart, every part of you. The chemicals I use in the injections waken the memory cells in your skin, and tell them to go back to the way they were twenty years ago, and they do what they’re told.
It’s really as simple as that. I could look twenty now if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.
Those weren’t the best years of my life.
These are, truly helping people to look the way they feel, the way they want to be remembered and remember themselves when they meet someone now.
We can achieve some amazing results, both physically and psychologically.
I’m honored to be a part of it.” Mickie was so taken with him and so in awe of him.
She couldn’t take her eyes from his, as though they had gotten tangled up together, and his gaze on her was like an embrace.
Before they went back to the others to continue the photo shoot, Zack beckoned them both back to Alex’s office.
There was a light box sitting on the desk to view slides, and a computer where Alex wrote his emails and the occasional article to share his discoveries with the world.
Zack had already sent the images to Alex’s computer, and at a mere touch, two faces appeared on the screen.
One looked vaguely familiar and the other was clearly Mickie.
When you looked again, like an unsolved mystery, you saw that the first image was Mickie too.
Zack had advanced it in time, and the technology allowed them to see what Mickie would look like at forty, and then a third image appeared of Michaela at forty-five. She stared at her image.
“Wow, I look like shit at forty-five,” Mickie commented.
“I think maybe forty-five is too much,” Alex said critically.
“Forty is better.” The changes in her face at forty were noticeable.
She was still a ravishing woman, but her face had lost some of its definition, the spark in her eyes, the glow of her skin.
It was a realistic view of Mickie in twenty years, twenty-one years, to be exact.
Alex looked across at Zack then, and nodded. “It’s perfect. We got it. That’s done. Freeze it,” he said with an intense tone in his voice that shook Michaela to her core.
“What are you going to do with those?” she asked him innocently, and he smiled at her. She felt as though she had won the lottery when he did.
“Those are our before and after pictures,” he answered simply. Mickie looked puzzled.
“Which is which?” He pointed to the digitally aged photograph of her at forty.
“That is when you first came to see me, isn’t it, my dear,” he said, looking deep into her eyes.
“And this one,” he pointed to the real one of Mickie as she looked now, “this one is after treatments. The after picture.” She looked shocked for an instant, as though she was trying to compute it in her mind, and it didn’t.
“It’s what they will understand. And it’s true, really.
I could make you look twenty years younger, if I chose to, right now.
But at your age that would be a bit silly, wouldn’t it?
They’d be looking at a newborn baby. So we fast-forward to now, and then up ahead at how you will look, and the photograph today is the after picture.
” He said it so smoothly that it was like watching an expert of the shell game move the shells swiftly around the table until you were no longer sure what you had seen or where the pea was.
“Is that really honest?” she asked him.
“Yes, it is. It’s a projection of reality and there is nothing wrong about that.
This will be very helpful to people trying to make the decision about whether to proceed with our treatments.
” Even Mickie knew they wouldn’t look like her at nineteen, if they already looked like the older version.
But somehow she wanted to believe him and broke into a broad smile.
“That’s genius!” she said. He nodded at Zack and they went to find the others to continue the shoot, but he had what he wanted for his ads, gorgeous photographs of Michaela now and later. He whispered to her as they went back to the crew.
“Don’t say anything to the others. This is just between us. People get funny about things like that. Small minds.”
“When will the center be open?” she asked him.
“In two weeks. We have some carpentry to put the finishing touches on, the rest of the art is arriving in a week, and we’re done. I’m giving a little opening party,” he said, speaking close to her. “I hope you can come.”
The rest of the day slid by effortlessly and ended with champagne and some informal portraits of the two of them. Then an Uber drove her back to West Hollywood, and she drifted up the stairs, feeling as though she had been in a magical place all day with a genius.
She tried to tell Billie about it when she got home, but it was all hard to put into words.
She had forgotten all about the before and after pictures, which didn’t seem important.
It was just a little sleight of hand, and the way he explained it made perfect sense.
She had no problem with it. She was the perfect partner for him.
She had never had a strong attachment to the truth.
The end had always justified the means since her earliest childhood and she still felt the same way about it.
Billie’s first day at work had been more mundane, and she had enjoyed it.
They had a wonderfully efficient pathology lab at Cedars-Sinai.
She liked the people who worked there. The equipment was spectacular, thanks to enormous donations.
She wasn’t doing research as she had hoped to.
She was performing tests, but it was good experience, and a pleasure to work for such a well-run institution.
She needed the salary and it would look good on her resume for a first job.
She was grateful that they had hired her.
Michaela went back to the house in Bel Air every day that week.
Zack took gorgeous photographs of her. The house was coming together rapidly, and Alex was already living there.
And being within the aura of Alex Addison was an extraordinary, almost out-of-body experience.
She had never known anyone like him. Mickie felt as though he had cast a spell on her, but if it was true, she liked it.
By the end of the week she had made twenty thousand dollars.
She wasn’t sure if she had sold her soul to the devil, or if he had.
But Michaela had figured out that their ambitions were similar and dovetailed nicely, and Alex thought so too.
Mickie was exactly the woman he wanted, with a brain and without a conscience, and with a gorgeous, flawless face.