My Favorite Midlife Crisis (26 page)

Me, he motioned aside for a more detailed assessment. The bottom line was he had to take more tissue than he’d anticipated, a major chunk, and Kat might want to seriously consider reconstructive surgery. But the prognosis was good: if her luck held, she’d get five weeks of radiation to prevent local recurrence of the cancer, but she shouldn’t need chemo.

After Fleur went off in search of another Diet Coke and Summer found an alcove to call Tim from her cell phone, I slipped into the recovery room to see the patient. I hadn’t expected her to be awake, but she was—awake and looking beautiful with her crinkly hair spread on the pillow and her face pale but relieved.

“You did great, kid.” I patted her hand.

“Yeah, Dr. Sukkar said. So far. Radiation next. Thank God no chemo.” Her eyes shimmered and I knew she was thinking of her mother and sister who’d endured grueling rounds of chemotherapy, Melanie dragging herself to be dripped long after the doctors had given up. “Thank you, God. Thank you, Ethan,” Kat whispered to her intervening angel. After a sip of water, “Summer okay?”

“Fine. She and Fleur are outside.”

“Together?” Kat grimaced, as if I’d left Dracula to baby-sit Frankenstein’s monster. “Listen.” She motioned me down to her. “Favor. When you go to feed the cats. In my bedroom, on my dresser”—her voice was hoarse from intubation and she slurred, still thick-tongued—“on top, envelopes. Last-minute notes to my lawyer, others, you...you know, in case, something happened in there.” The OR. “Bury them. In a drawer. Don’t want Summer to see them. Doesn’t need to know her mama’s a wimp.”

Some wimp. When I stopped by later that afternoon to check on her, Kat was sitting up, legs over the side of the bed, eyes lasering Summer, who leaned against the windowsill, arms folded defensively across her chest. The patient, five hours post-surgery, was chewing her daughter out one decibel level below a shout.

“No, what you don’t seem to grasp,” Kat curtly nodded an acknowledgement as I entered, “is that at fifty-four I don’t have to justify my actions to anyone. I’m a grown woman, your mother, not the other way around, and you have no right to tell me how to live the rest of my life, however long—or short—that might be.”

“Mama, please,” Summer said. “Don’t talk like that. Dr. Sukkar told me…”

“Dr. Sukkar can’t make promises. Life isn’t infinite, Summer. Your father hadn’t so much as a cold in fifteen years. Then he drives to pick up mulch and gets killed in a freak accident. So you have to use whatever life you have because it can end in an instant.” She winced as she snapped her fingers. I moved forward, about to suggest she might want to take it easy, but she waved me away. “If I get a second chance here, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to do what
I
want to do. And you, my darling daughter, need to back off. Understood?”

“But that man is so much younger than—”

“Lee is not the issue here.”

“Fine.” Summer rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

“Summer Germaine!” Kat’s voice rose menacingly.

“Fine. Yes. Right. Understood, Mama.”

When I caught up with Fleur later, her response was, “No shit? She really laid the brat out, huh? Here you have a prime example of what does not kill us makes us strong. But does this mean she’s back with Lee?”

“I asked the same question after Summer took off. Short answer: no. Lee is too young to be saddled by the likes of her. Kat’s words. He’s entitled to kids. Not that she knows if he wants any. And a girlfriend with no cancer history and a perfect set of boobs. Not that she ever discussed her surgery with him. Or even told him she was
having
surgery.”

“Don’t you think he’d want to know? I have half a mind to call him,” Fleur continued.

“Half a mind is right. Do
not
call Lee. If Kat wanted to, she would have. Stay out of it, Fleur. Just as she told Summer, you can’t live her life for her.”

“Sure I can. And I’d live it better. With Lee.”

“Well, obviously she has other plans. If Kat wants it over, it’s over.”

But maybe not.

That night, with Mama Cass and Denny purring and scouring my legs, I kept my promise to Kat and hiked up to her bedroom. On the dresser, she’d built a shrine, probably inadvertently, but she was an artist so who knows? I picked up her silver-framed wedding picture and looked at it closely for the first time in thirty years. She and Ethan had been married in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which they’d tried to turn into Katmandu with incense sticks planted in the spring earth and lanterns strung in the trees, unlit because they couldn’t get a permit from the NYFD. The bride, in a gauzy caftan, appeared light as a dragonfly. The bearded groom looked like the rabbi’s twin. Right after Kat’s sister snapped that picture, a panhandler made his stoned way through the wedding guests, a good omen Kat had said, lifting all-embracing arms. “Faith,” she’d cocked her head toward the rabbi-guru. “Hope,” she’d nodded toward her new husband. “And charity.” We broke into applause and showered the stoned guy with coins. A happy day so long ago.

Next to the picture, Kat had arranged a vase of flowers—apricot mums from her garden—a small jade Buddha, and the fan of envelopes. One for the lawyer, one for me, one each for Fleur, Summer, and Tim, and one marked in Kat’s Picasso scrawl, “Lee.” I did what she instructed me to do. Buried them deep in a drawer under the bras she’d get to wear again.

When I arrived home, I found three voice messages.

Sylvie: “Mr. Harald acted up in the barbershop today. Should I call Mr. Stan and ask him if he can cut Mr. Harald’s hair next time he comes?”

That one I returned. “No, do not ask Mr. Stan to do anything. I will take Mr. Harald to the barber myself on Friday. Don’t worry, I’ll be able to handle him, Sylvie.” I didn’t have to see her to know, without doubt, she was screwing up her mouth in disbelief.

The second message was my son Drew informing me he was coming home next month for Thanksgiving, which was a surprise. Drew, who’d always been closer than his twin to my dad, these days avoided occasions where he’d have to confront what was left of his beloved grandpa. Just couldn’t deal with it. So this seemed like a breakthrough. His cooler medical student brother, Whit, planned to have dinner with his girlfriend’s family in Virginia.
And why not
, I thought,
let somebody have a joyous celebration
. We would be a pitiful three at the Waterview table: Drew, the sensitive son, his insensible grandfather, and his not-so-sensible mother.

The third message featured the amiable growl of Harry Galligan asking how I was doing since it had been a while and, by the way, how was that woman who was having medical problems when we last spoke? Typical Harry. The man deserved better than he’d been getting from me and even in my Simonized state I felt guilty about it. Calculating that I could work my schedule of tending to Kat to free me for a few hours Saturday night, we made a date. It turned out to be a nice evening. No pyrotechnics, but lots of warmth, which I appreciated as the autumn weather turned chill.

Chapter 28

The next month zipped by. Now that Ibrahim Sukkar had plucked the family heirloom out of her right breast, Kat’s natural optimism resurfaced. She started her radiation therapy, floating through the sessions on a waft of serenity, visualizing her cancer cells as lotus petals being crushed by Buddhist monks and scattered to the winds. Which was so Kat. I say do whatever works for you, even the alternative stuff as long as it doesn’t lure you from top grade western medicine, even if the vote’s not in on imagining your way to good health.

Fleur, in her own spurt of energy, ran through four of Hannah Pechter’s video studs: one schmuck, two schlemiels, and a schlimazel. But there was a mensch on the horizon. She penciled in Victor, the Chinese-cooking high-end raincoat salesman, for the following week.

At the office, it was obvious Bethany McGowan had taken Seymour’s discarding of her very hard. Back to her pre-affair bluestocking fashion style—flat shoes and Puritan blouses buttoned so tight and high up her neck that I feared for her carotid artery—she sulked and skulked around, growing thinner and more dispirited daily, while Seymour—like a vampire sucking every ounce of joy from her soul—grew fatter and more beamish. I kept my eye on Mindy, the new hire, for signs she was being illicitly boinked, but Seymour seemed to have learned at least one of two important lessons: don’t play around in the office or if you do, don’t get caught.

Apropos of boinking, Simon visited three times. Quick visits, in and out. Literally, figuratively, sexually. But sheet-scorchingly good. And then
finally,
I found a weekend free to make my long postponed visit to him on his home turf.

He owned a two-bedroom co-op in a pre-war building on the Upper East Side which must have cost him a bundle. But unless you knew how inflated Manhattan apartment prices are and the cachet cost of the best neighborhoods, you would think he lived much below his salary. Which had to be way, way up there.

The Westwood was virtually indistinguishable from two other Woody Allenesque drab-chic apartment buildings on a block that also housed a newsstand, a jewelry shop, and a Vietnamese greengrocer. Across the street a row of brownstones gave way to a deli, a florist shop, a tapas bar, and an antique store specializing in czarist treasures, which was probably a front for the Russian mafia. Maybe that’s why the neighborhood was so quiet on a Friday afternoon. And why The Westwood didn’t need a doorman.

I nodded maternally at a young man flashing his electronic resident’s pass and he flourished me into the handsomely refurbished art deco lobby. The elevator took its sweet time getting to the sixth floor.

“Yes, yes,” Simon called through the door in that impatient British manner that made me hot when Jeremy Irons laid it on. A few seconds passed during which I assumed he was checking me out through the peephole and then he opened the door with the security chain latched in case some six-foot-five 280-pound miscreant was posing as “Gwyneth, it’s me, Gwyneth.”

He unhooked the chain, popped me a kiss, and said, “Hello, my beautiful houseguest.” After he hung up my coat, he took me into his arms. “I’ve missed you terribly. I’m so delighted you’re here. Moment,” he said, as the phone rang. He checked the caller ID. “London. I’m doing a phone consult. They were supposed to call this morning. Sorry. This is a must take.”

He said into the phone, “Martin. Where have you been? Ah. Well, I’ll need to make this short. Hold on.” Turning to me, he said. “Ten minutes. No more. Promise. Meanwhile settle in. Place is a bit cluttered, I’m afraid. But there’s plenty to read and tea’s on the boil.”

So I made myself a cup and looked around. As for clutter, he wasn’t one of the Collyer Brothers, the two old coots who, back in the 1940s, had piled up newspapers and magazines and a hundred tons of junk around them in their Fifth Avenue apartment until the cops found their moldering bodies under heaps of garbage. Not that bad.

Someone had made the beds, cleaned the bathrooms, and swabbed down the kitchen. On its counter sat a spice carousel, a sign or memory of a woman’s touch. The contemporary teak dining table shone clutter free, but skyscrapers of magazines rose from the carpet beneath it—
Science, Popular Science, Theoretical Science, Esoteric Science, Incomprehensible
Science.
Simon’s study must have been designed as a maid’s room. Now it was crammed with a computer, file cabinets, academic publications, papers in wild disarray, even half a blueberry muffin that looked like it had been baked around the time McArthur invaded Korea. There were reading glasses scattered in every room. Sticky reminder squares attached to every flat surface. Simon, it seemed, was your classic absentminded scientist, but sexy.

A half hour after he left me, he found me reading the
New York
Times.
“A very productive ten minutes,” he said. “Now with that behind us, I can think of a wonderful way to spend the next, say, forty-five.” He was nuzzling my neck. “Unless you’d rather an early dinner?”

“Hungry for something else,” I said, wondering at the deep vein of sensuality this man had unearthed in me. My quickie with Ari Ben-Jacob had given me a shot of confidence, a reminder that I was still attractive to men in spite of my ex-husband’s preference. But I hadn’t been inclined to hop a plane to Tel Aviv for more. Simon was different. Just the thought of him stirred desire. And no shame at that. Amazing. Fifty-four and hot at last!

“Not here. Bedroom,” I murmured. He had to relocate books and papers from the comforter to the floor to make a place for us on his bed. But we had more than enough room and finally enough time as he undressed me, talking to me all the while, telling me what he was doing as he was doing it, that Mayfair accent making every lusty syllable sound like Shakespeare. Very steamy Falstaff. Then no more talking as he worked his wicked tongue brilliantly in other ways. And I was pretty brilliant, too, much better than I’d been at nineteen when all I had in my repertoire was a single repetitive tongue-flick. Susie Lemberg back in college had us practice on popsicles. No wonder I’d left my dates cold.

When Simon groaned he couldn’t take it anymore, I climbed atop so I could look down on that gorgeous face, look into those gorgeous eyes as they turned to molten steel which, once again, tripped me over the edge.