I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (2 page)

He’s typing in codes and waxing on about which cities have the best infrastructures and I am fantasizing about his possible Wikipedia entry:
After AuDum Genius met Annabelle Gurwitch
[we have the same initials—we can share monogrammed luggage and towels],
he
began his innovative and transformative design work
. But I know that’s a stretch. I don’t have the money to become his patron. I would love to be his Peggy Guggenheim; alas, the best I can aim for is to be his Mrs. Robinson.
*

This idea has nothing to do with my actual marriage, though I have started to suspect that the timbre of my husband’s burp has been specifically calibrated to annoy me. More than half of our communication revolves around who will volunteer first to pick up our kid, our dinner, or our sex life. If you were to catch a glimpse of my face during the throes of passion, you might mistake my expression for that of a bartender at four a.m., shaking her last martini—one who enjoys her work and wants to please every customer, but is also relieved her shift is ending soon.

All of which is to say that we’re in the middle of our marriage. I have come to appreciate that there are some great things about
the middle of a marriage. The way neither of us understands flavored coffees or movies where people exchange bodies, and no matter how angry we are, we’ll stop in the middle of an argument to watch our cats do something cute. But middles can be thankless. Beginnings are always exciting, even if in a car-crash/impending-disaster way. Endings, even heart-wrenching ones, can be energizing. Friends who have gotten divorced go on diets and dates. Even when those end badly they make for good stories.

The historical precedent for the kind of female May-December fling I’m considering isn’t great, especially if you’re looking for something long-term. In fiction, it doesn’t end well for Emma Bovary, Countess Olenska, or Mrs. Robinson, for that matter. Even Samantha’s infamously tireless libido in
Sex and the City
couldn’t forestall the inevitable breakup with her hunky blond boy toy Smith.

I also hate the term “cougar.” There isn’t a name for men who date younger women; it’s just considered normal. I do have girlfriends who have booty calls with younger men, and one friend who, after two divorces and three children, is happily dating a woman ten years younger. Another, also divorced with kids, leads sex tours of Paris for women who, as she advertises on her website, have already “married, divorced, cut our hair off, and reinvented.” All of that sounds positively exhausting to me. I had plenty of random sex in my twenties and thirties.

I have held a special fantasy for one of my exes. He’s the path not taken. A tall, remote, Italian Catholic heartbreaker, the polar opposite of my five-six, adoring Jewish husband. That he dumped me unceremoniously, by all accounts is happily married with kids
and has never once in twenty years reached out to me hasn’t stopped me from daydreaming about the call or email imploring me to run away with him. That is, until I ran into him in a restaurant this year. He looked weathered but still had his rakish swagger. We embraced, but before the shock of this reunion could even register as sexual tension, he began recounting the details of his recent hip-replacement surgery.

Dear God, I just want one night of Genius sex before I hit the half-century mark.

But where would we do it? At his apartment? No. There might be hairs of unknown provenance on the soap, black towels, and sheets that haven’t been changed recently. Plus, one of his roommates might be there, and no one can witness this act.

My house? No. What if he accidentally puts on one of my kid’s T-shirts, strewn around the house as they are? We also have kid artwork hanging everywhere and it just seems wrong that we would sneak by the watercolor rendering of a dinosaur pooping as we head into the bedroom. On top of that, my menopausal brain fog makes it impossible to keep schedules straight, so there is a good chance I would pick an inopportune moment to hook up and AuDum would arrive just in time to witness our nightly ritual of haggling with our teenager over homework versus Internet time. But there’s another big problem, and that’s the “ick” factor of having sex in the bed I share with my husband. That didn’t seem to bother California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he had an affair with his housekeeper, whom he probably asked to make said bed afterward. Plus, at any given moment, a pair of Spanx might be crumpled in a ball at the foot
of our bed, a tube of hormone replacement cream on the nightstand, or one of the many pairs of tweezers I hide around the house might have migrated under a pillow. Our bedroom is a minefield of erection killers—just ask my husband.

Cannot go to a cheap hotel. A cheap hotel does not figure into this or any other fantasy I have at this age. It will need to be pricey. I really can’t afford an expensive destination, but it’s the only way. Yes, I’ll need to dip into our savings. Hopefully, I can write it off as a business expense, which it technically is. The business of getting old. Once I find the correct establishment, I’ll go up to the room first, and AuDum will need to wait for a brief interval to avoid being spotted by anyone I know. This will give me time to get ready, and I need it.

It’s been eighteen years since I’ve taken my clothes off in front of anyone other than my husband, my gynecologist and women in the locker room at the gym. I’ll really need two or three weeks, if not months, to get my body affair-ready. I will also need to purchase new undergarments. I own bras and panties that are nice enough for fifteen years of marriage, but fall under the category of “underwear,” and for an affair it will really need to be “lingerie.” Plus, I will need to get the full Brazilian, which I tried once when I was pregnant but it was so painful, I left it half done. My single friends tell me that bare is the new black for men, so I hope the computer gets repaired quickly, as I will need to start acclimating myself to the hairless penis through pornographic Internet surfing.

What will AuDum Genius and I talk about? Best not to let it slip how pissed off I am that my son is getting a C in PE and that
he’s definitely not going to Ming-Na Davydov’s bat mitzvah if he keeps it up. Or that I need to get a mole that’s changed shape checked on a part of my back that I can’t see, and would he check it? Safe topics might include movies or books, but not films about senior citizens falling in love at resorts in India, or anything with Meryl Streep, and no mentioning that I am currently reading a book titled
Why Men Die First
. I could suggest a late-night supper from room service, but he’d have to read the menu to me or I’d be pulling out my reading glasses. Note to self: Don’t say, “In my day” out loud. Also avoid “nowadays.” “Nowadays” is a touchstone used by aging persons to describe things that happened “in my day.” The word “touchstone” is also a touchstone for AARP territory. Talking is out. Drinking is better.

While I wait for him, I’ll put on mood music. Since he’s about the same age as my nephews, I should put on some dubstep, only I hate its incessant thumping sound. I’m sure it sounds good if you’re sucking on an Ecstasy pacifier at a rave in the desert, but I would rather have my spleen removed and filleted in front of me than be high in the middle of a sweaty crowd ringed by porta-potties. But if I put on something like Fleetwood Mac or, God forbid, Marvin Gaye, I risk dating myself. I’ve got it:
jazz
. Jazz has always been the perfect soundtrack for doing stupid things. But my son and his middle school band play all the standards, so jazz is off-limits.

A more pressing issue is, what’s the right position? I’m not comfortable with someone ogling my ass if I can’t observe the reaction, so doggie gets a thumbs-down. Missionary seems too same-old, same-old. It has to be something where I can achieve
maximum attractiveness and get the most bang for my buck, so there’s really only one choice. Movie sex. Up against a wall.
Glamour
magazine calls it “Stand and Deliver,” while in the Kama Sutra it’s “Climbing the Tree.”

He leans into me, pressing my back hard up against the hotel wall. I tilt my face slightly upward, always a flattering angle, while his tongue traces the arc of my neck. The wall can be the perfect excuse for not completely disrobing; in fact, a wrap dress would be ideal, providing easy access while covering my posterior. He pushes the layers of my dress open and moves his hand up my thigh. I order him to take my panties off slowly so, as he kneels down, I’ll have time to reach for the small tube of vaginal lubricant I’ve hidden in the folds of the wrap dress and quickly insert a dollop. Balancing on my good ankle, I wrap my leg around his body as I reach for him, but I’ve forgotten about a condom. We could take the half-hour AIDS test and forgo it, because there’s no way I can get pregnant, but he can’t know that; it would take away an element of danger, so I hope he’s got one or the hotel can send one up quickly.

The only thing is, it’s really tough to get the up-against-the-wall thing to work—our heights have to be just right, and he’ll need a certain amount of upper-body strength, which he might not have developed working at the Apple store. I’ll also need to keep my right leg aloft. If I can find a hotel room that has a rock-climbing wall—we are in Los Angeles, after all—I could anchor myself on a foothold. Yes! I wedge my heel into a foothold a few feet off the ground and pull him inside me.

“You’re good to go.”

“Yes,” I whisper. “I mean, yes?”

His voice is louder than I expected. I look down and see that I’m gripping the counter tightly. My mouth feels dry and my heart is pounding when something soft brushes my arm. It’s a strand of hair. I snap my head to the right and see a girl with long straight brown hair. She is standing next to me at the counter. She’s dressed in typical California fashion: sneakers, tight gym pants, and hoodie. She’s a bit fleshy. She might even be pregnant. Her face is unmistakably young and fresh. Her skin is tan, tight, and creamy. She smells fertile.

“My next customer is here,” he says, rotating my computer so I can see the folder he’s created for my retrieved documents. He has named it “Old Annabelle.”

“What?”

“Listen, if you need anything else,” he says as he motions to another Genius, “Logan can take care of you.”

“But, but . . .”

He points to the Apple screen and then to the luscious girl. “I’ve got to move on.”

It falls to Logan Genius to move the items from the “Old Annabelle” folder into a new one that I’ve suggested we name “Vintage Annabelle.” With a swift click, the offending word disappears. I am careful not to engage Logan in any small talk.

As Logan wraps up with tips on how to keep my computer as good as new, I catch sight of AuDum heading toward the exit. His shift must be over. The Apple shirt is gone, a nondescript T-shirt in its place. Out of his uniform, he looks different. His pants taper down his calves and stop just above his ankles in a
way I find unflattering on someone past puberty. He has a slight lilt to his gait, as if his feet aren’t solidly touching the ground. He gives me a little wave. It has a slightly reluctant quality to it. AuDum has sorted the clutter on my desktop, skimmed my documents and scanned through my most private emails. He knows everything about me there is to know without being intimate, but I can tell by the wave and his red high-top Keds that we will not be hooking up. AuDum leaves. I feel a bit sad but also extremely relieved.

AuDum goes home, heats up some ramen and takes out his sketchbook. He lies on his bed and starts to draw a woman. It’s a woman with brown hair. The brunette in the hoodie. He’s captured her inner glow. I have also made the picture. The side of my head hugs the corner of the frame, just out of focus. They will meet tonight for a drink. If that goes well, in two weeks they’ll be at a rave, dancing to dubstep, somewhere in the desert. I hope they don’t go and fall in love. After all, she might be pregnant and he really should move to Norway.

“Since you went away the days grow long, and soon I’ll hear old winter’s song.”
I hear the sound of the walking jazz bass line coming from my son’s room.
“But I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

I’ve gotten dressed up. Dressed up to walk into a store.

I’ve assembled my most fashionable outfit to ensure that I will be treated with deference by people who are being paid to take my money. I’m wearing one of my corporate board meeting ensembles: a pinstriped wool skirt in chocolate, paired with a coffee-colored cashmere sweater. I purchased these investment pieces back when brown was going to be the new black and money was lubricated, back before everyone in America was vying for minimum-wage jobs just to stay underemployed. Two
holes in the sweater are located at the waist, a small conciliatory gesture, perhaps, from the closet moths that are waging a war against my wardrobe. I have cleverly placed a belt over the offending area and am striding past the alluring displays of expensively packaged products hoping that the Krazy-Glued soles of my decade-old Miu Mius will hold for the brief amount of time it will take to run this errand. I have an entrance and exit strategy planned. It will be surgical, just like the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

I’ve come for a concealer. I’ve written down the manufacturer, product name and number so I don’t make a mistake and purchase the incorrect shade. This product not only promises to restore the under-eye area to a refreshing brightness, but dotted across my chin, it will serve to cover the stray broken capillaries and little bumps that I am loath to admit are, in fact, hair follicles. Hair has fallen out of the top of my head, but its cousins have migrated lower, taking up residence on the lower part of my face. It’s so unfair. But I know it’s not personal. Facial hair is an equal opportunity offender. I have, on more than one occasion at a red light, looked across traffic lanes and seen women driving BMW SUVs and Honda Accords alike checking for chin hairs. I’ve taken to hiding tweezers in handbags, in my husband’s car glove compartment, and in our earthquake emergency kit. My sister and I have also made a pact: if either of us should fall into a coma, we’ve pledged to pluck each other’s stray chin hairs while awaiting implementation of our DNRs.

I approach the least intimidatingly attractive salesperson on the floor. She has a sweet, open, honest face, and she’s either
Mexican or Eastern European. I can’t place her accent, because it’s hard to hear her voice over my inner monologue.

“I’ve got a list,” I repeat to myself like a mantra. “Stick to the list, stick to the list.”

But before I can stop myself, I’ve announced to her that I am turning fifty this year. The admission of my age is an invitation for her to tell me how great I look. This is terrible, because I know that she knows that the better she tells me I look, the more she’ll be able to sell me. This is a directly proportional equation that has played out with increasing frequency in recent months. Somehow, the phrase “You look great,” offered with a convincing amount of enthusiasm laced with a tone that suggests “. . . but it might not last,” is the currency that gains entry into my bank account.

Marte, maybe her name, tells me she’s forty-five. She confides that she has been using an amazing fruit exfoliant
*
that makes her skin glow and that she always gets compliments when she uses it.

“The one thing I don’t need is a scrub,” I say firmly. “But you look great.”

Now we’re the best of girlfriends, we compare diets, and although I regularly lie awake wondering whether the hormones I’m taking are speeding me toward an early demise or just slowly poisoning my inner organs, I’m speaking with authority when I say, “You really need to be taking both estrogen and progesterone, as well as massive doses of vitamin D and calcium.”

I started hormone replacement therapy after noticing changes in my physiology. Over a six-month period, not once but twice a month, I couldn’t leave my house. It was like my vagina had slaughtered something.

Then there were the hot flashes. Nothing can really prepare you for the suddenness and completeness of the blood-boiling sensation except maybe a bout of dengue fever or listening to hour one of Rush Limbaugh’s daily radio show.

But neither of those things was the worst symptom of perimenopause. I was regularly morphing from my usual bitchiness into a raving bitch. I wanted to kill everyone in my house, the people who live next door, in neighboring counties, and in countries whose names I can’t pronounce. As I recall, the exact words that sent me to a pricey Beverly Hills doctor were spoken in response to my son when he mentioned he hadn’t begun his homework yet: “Fine, don’t do your homework, if you don’t mind being a MORON.”

It also felt like the inside of my vagina was being sandblasted during any form of sexual activity. “Dry vagina.” Two words that should never be in the same sentence.

On my initial visit to a Beverly Hills hormone specialist, the doctor handed me a compendium of supplements she deemed essential for menopausal wellness.
*
Complete with diagrams, maps, and intersecting circles, it was so complicated, I thought it was a
schematic drawing of the Large Hadron Collider. She also suggested a regimen of lasers, lightening and tightening, injectables and fillers. It was so overwhelming, I went home and curled into the fetal position on the chance that the effects of gravity on the aging process might be retarded if I ceased all movement.

When inertia was no longer possible (it was time for the afternoon carpool), I slathered on my bioidentical hormone creams and started downing supplements by the fistful.
*
After a few days, I did feel less homicidal and suicidal. However, this new routine dovetailed with yet another perimenopausal symptom, brain fog, to create a perfect storm. I couldn’t always remember to follow the regimen, and once you start outsourcing your endocrine system, you’ve got a hormonal monkey on your back.

A month into the protocol, I set off on a book tour. I arrived in New York but my hormones stayed in California on my bathroom counter, where I’d left them. I sobbed for two days straight while staying in a hotel room
other people were paying for.
Months later, just as I was starting to feel good about mastering my routine, the
Wall Street Journal
and
New York Times
published front-page articles on the very same day about the relationship between cancer risks and hormone therapy but came to diametrically opposing conclusions.

But standing at the department store counter, I feel compelled to pass along my limited and flawed understanding of the subject to Marte because my do-gooder humanitarian streak, coupled
with what might be considered an elitist condescension, assumes that she might not have access to the caliber of doctors I go to—or
have
gone to, as I’ve right-sized my budget and now score synthetic hormones at a health clinic located under a freeway overpass in the dusty San Fernando Valley. Marte, maybe, dutifully nods as I fill her in.

I pull out my list and read off the product number I’ve come to replace. The liquid concealer I’ve come for is so expensive it costs the exact same amount per ounce as beluga caviar. Clé de Peau’s silky cream foundation, B20 “GLO,” runs $120 an ounce. Clé de Peau roughly translates to mean “key to skin,” but it might be more accurately labeled “key to your wallet.” For that price, you’d think they could afford the “W.” While she reaches to retrieve it, I notice a second number on the label—“3500.” Could that be the dollar amount they predict users will spend over a lifetime? Probably. But there’s no time to do the math because Bobbi Brown’s Sunburst lip gloss really does have a warm glow. Her Tropic of Nectar blush is so peachy, and its name might even be a nod to Henry Miller, and Laura Mercier’s Terra Cotta lip pencil perfectly complements my fading lip line and it might be the key to my looking, if not younger, then just the best version of myself.

And 6,906 miles away, the Greek economy is collapsing; and 5,457 miles away, 20,000 public sector workers are protesting for a living wage in London; and 16.3 miles across town, my son is ordering a three-dollar public school lunch whose ingredients most of the mothers in my zip code would never allow inside the bodies of their precious offspring but that my child will eat
because I cannot afford a private middle school where sushi is being served in individual bento boxes.

I shouldn’t be shopping like this because I’m on the declining side of my earning capacity. It’s possible that in the remaining part of my life, I will earn less money than I have made up until this point altogether. I am earning less, I have less time in which to spend it and yet I need more money. Much more money.
*
Besides the kid expenses, not to mention the essentials, like shoes and shampoo, after a lifetime of perfect vision, I need glasses. Root canals, colonoscopies, and regular osteoporosis screenings are required as well. There’s also the money I have spent on age-related sports injuries incurred while trying to get the amount of exercise recommended for a woman of fifty. And although I am an atheist, the only way I can afford the longer life span that the supplements I can’t afford are supposed to afford me will be to find gainful employment in the afterlife.

And sure, given all of that, I should not be handing over my credit card, but I am not alone. No, I’m just further statistical confirmation of “The Lipstick Effect.” The worse economic times get, the more women splurge on small luxury items. Which is why, as I reach for the card, I review the list of things I do not and will never have the money for, now that I am a slave to my face.

I have never owned a second home; I don’t really own my first home, mortgaged as it is. Never flown in a private plane, never
holidayed in Turks and Caicos (had to look up the spelling of Turks and Caicos), and the likelihood that I will travel there is so remote that I’m not even sure where they’re located, though I am aware that they’re a spectacularly tony destination where vacationers’ effluence gets whisked swiftly away but flows untreated into the surrounding waters, causing degradation to endangered coral reefs.

I’ve never purchased a designer handbag, never hired an interior designer or eaten at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant when I was paying. I also have never lived through a genocide, walked across Africa, or licked newspapers for nutritional value like Frank McCourt, although I was once tempted to lick a positive review in the
New York Times
. I have first-world problems, I know this, but they are still
my
first-world problems. It’s not that I want any one of these extravagances or that I think these things will make me happy, but there’s something about knowing I will probably never have them that’s not unlike how devastatingly sad I felt when I realized the window for having children had closed forever.

I also kept buying tampons long after the periods ended, eyeing them wistfully in the bathrooms of younger women, until I contrived an actual justification to purchase. I reasoned that I should stock our bathrooms with tampons in case one of my son’s friends needs one. I’m sure I appeared deranged, strolling down the aisle, gleefully plucking the package off the shelf, triumphantly plunking it down at the checkout counter. “No, thanks, I don’t need a bag,” I chirped and sashayed out of the store clutching my totem of membership in the lady community. At home, I carefully opened the package, removing a few so the girls
wouldn’t feel self-conscious about taking one. If I spend any more money today, it will threaten my Tampax budget.
*

So as I hand over my credit card and Marte repeats that she really wants to show me that scrub, I am holding the line at the outermost layer of my epidermis. It’s like Vietnam. Must not cross the seventeenth parallel. “No, I’m fine, but do you have any samples of moisturizers?” I say, as the realization sinks in that I have spent over two hundred dollars in less than five minutes. I must not leave without receiving something free, and moisturizers are the Holy Grail of all facial products. The sheer quantity of them on the market is astounding. Promising everything from age-defying renewal to tightening, toning, repairing, rejuvenating and stimulating, the descriptions alone can restore your faith in the value of a liberal arts degree. The dramatically depicted ingredients range from the oceanic (seaweed, algae and fish oil) to the botanical (lavender, jojoba and
maracuja
).

Many of the products on the market advertise under the moniker “cosmeceuticals,”
*
a term that conflates cosmetics with pharmaceuticals. Often this refers to “biologically active ingredients,” and despite the fact that the FDA does not recognize any such category, it has a ring of authority, but means nothing in this context. A frog contains biologically active ingredients; so do lima beans. So go figure.

The saddest unguent on the counter has to be the tub of goop whose label is simple and to the point: Hope in a Jar. I have never purchased that one. It seems like the last stop on the line before I start making animal sacrifices and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. But I am not immune to the seductive powers of the adjectives and adverbs that promise miracles, and I have spent so much money, I deserve samples, damn it.

But she doesn’t want to just give me a sample. No, Marte is personally going to make a sample for me. As she scoops a minuscule amount of a vanilla pudding–like substance into the smallest plastic container in the known world, I shudder picturing the factory that produces these miniature pods. I say a silent prayer that they’re not sorted by the tiny hands of child workers, and I promise myself I will reuse them when traveling. I try to make my features appear interested when she recites the antiaging qualities of this particular elixir, though I know perfectly well I have no intention of ever purchasing it. Depositing the teeny treasure into my purse, I move toward the door, but she is following me and subtly blocks my exit, positioning herself by another counter, manned by a slightly more mature version of herself. Marte tells me that her colleague Older Marte will show me that fruit exfoliant. Cornered. Matronly Marte takes my right hand and begins rubbing a fruit exfoliant on my skin. It’s mango, or pomegranate, or watermelon, and she’s massaging and massaging this cucumber, or papaya, or was it sweet potato? I have no idea, because the circular motion is starting to make me feel nauseous. She stops scrubbing and for some reason the skin on my hand looks brighter, shinier, whiter—how did she do that? “It’s
only fifty dollars,” she tells me with an inflection that suggests that she is handing me fifty dollars.