My Favorite Midlife Crisis (40 page)

I thought I actually saw Fleur’s ears twitch as they perked up. “An Israeli doctor? Gwyn knows a darling Israeli doctor. Could it be one and the same?”

“Dvora Garon?” Claire asked.

“Dvora is a female name,” I reminded Fleur with a smug smile. “No, I don’t know her. But it sounds like you’re not going to be on the unemployment line, Claire. Big decision. Choose carefully,” I advised. “You’ve got a great career ahead. I see a Lasker on the horizon.”

“A Lasker? Why not the Nobel? We’re talking cancer here. Countless lives saved,” Fleur said. “Does it come with money, the Nobel?”

“Ten million Swedish kronor, which is over a million dollars,” I said.

“Well, don’t forget your old friends.”

“Fleur!” Kat exclaimed.

“Jesus, I was only kidding. Kat’s losing her sense of humor. Time to go.”

We all rose. Claire, her eyes cloudy, said, “Have I told you I love you all? Because I do. You are wonderful women. You’re like sisters to me. Better than my sister, who lives in Oregon and doesn’t speak to me. Everyone has everyone’s email address, right? Bitti’s, too? You’ll keep in touch, promise? Not just Christmas cards.”

We promised, we exchanged kisses, and she scurried back to her interview leaving a plume of Escada behind her.

In the garage, Fleur said, her voice tinselly, all innocence, “Maybe Claire will take the job in Israel. The climate’s good. And you could go visit her, Gwyn. Spend a little time. See old friends.”

Served me right for confiding in Fleur.

“Why not?” she asked. “With Simon out of the way, the coast is clear. You said this Ben-Gurion guy was a sweetheart, that he thought your shoulders were like two smooth mountains in the moonlight or some equally fatuous bullshit. And he was fantastic in bed. Plus he’s eight thousand miles away so you don’t have to pick up his socks. What more could a woman want? Hanukkah’s next week. Give him a call. Wish him many crispy latkes.”

“You’re
meshuga,
Fleur,” I said, stealing one of her favorite words. “Why don’t you just hand me a loaded gun, trigger cocked? Men and I are a lethal combination. They make for pain and suffering.”

“I’m with Gwynnie on this one,” Kat said. “She needs to take a break. Figure out why she keeps choosing such toxic partners. Take some time to explore her gestalt.”

“Like forever. No more men. I learned my lesson with Simon.”

“Ari Ben-whatever is not Simon. He’s a white hat. All right, a white yarmulke,” Fleur pressed. “Look, all I’m saying is think about it. Is it not worth a few of your superior brain cells to consider the possibility of contacting him?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. But just to get her off my back, because the idea was so preposterous.

Chapter 42

Giving up Simon, I decided, was going to be like giving up smoking, which I had managed to do twenty-seven years before. What I remembered from that struggle was that the physical wasn’t nearly as bad as the psychological withdrawal. The physical cleaned your clock for the first week or two but the psychological took much longer and niggled away at your resolve like water torture.

To help with the psychological part, Kat went out and bought me another book by Fortune’s guru Dr. Prasad Rao, the author of
Men Are Coconuts, Women Are Pomegranates.
This one, titled
When the Fruit Rots: A Guide to Organically Ending a Relationship,
had me drinking pots of green tea, practicing meditation—I absolutely drew the line at the high colonics he recommended—and wearing a rubber band around my wrist to snap whenever thoughts of Simon intruded. All I had to do when the gorgeous Simon surfaced was snap! and substitute an image of him on his long march, eyes bulging, spittle bubbling at the corner of his mouth.

But there were deeper issues. Why I chose such toxic men. First Stan, then Simon. How I turned seriously flawed men into my ideal of perfection, down to the cultivated accents and the designer underwear. Even if I never dated again—which seemed like a brilliant idea—according to Kat my self-knowledge could map and maybe redirect my inner emotional river. And she had a life coach who could be my Lewis and Clark. I took another route.

Tracy the manicurist mused while buttering my right hand with Burt’s Bees Milk and Honey lotion, “In my humble opinion, you had this cold and distant mother. Tough as nails, but inside really scared and unsure of herself. And also really unpredictable, right? So, all through your childhood, you tried to do whatever it took to make her love you. But she was a nutcase, so she couldn’t love anyone. Soak the other hand. Still, what does a little kid know? You just keep banging your head against, like, this wall of ice. So now you’re grown up and you find yourself attracted to crazy, unpredictable men. They seem really polished on the outside but are totally insecure down deep so they jerk you around and lie to you. And you can’t trust them the way you couldn’t trust your mother. You’re going to have to keep your hand still or I’ll mess up the base coat. But you think if you only hang in there and do everything right, you’ll make them love you and be faithful to you and stop lying and hurting you. Except they’ll never be able to give you what you need, right. So it’s like you’re doomed from the beginning unless and until you decide you’re worth better. Think about it. Sheer Enchantment or French Cream?”

***

A few days before Christmas I had lunch with Kat to celebrate the completion of her radiation treatments.

She twirled a strand of whole-wheat pasta around her fork. “You doing okay with the Simon thing? I mean, you’re not having second thoughts or doing the standard post-affair obsessing, right?”

“To what end? What’s over is over.” Which was almost true. Occasionally, when I heard the silvery tones of the anchor on BBC News, I had to snap myself.

“See, that’s how I feel about my own cancer,” Kat said, making a sly comparison. “It’s gone. I don’t think about it. What’s the point? I’ve done everything I can. Now I need to concentrate on strengthening my resistance. I’ve found this extract of papaya capsule they say is loaded with antioxidants and ginseng for energy.”

Which she needed because her gallery exhibit was scheduled to open in two weeks.

“I’m weaving like a crazy woman. Joel and Dirk—the guys who own the gallery—are leaving space till the last minute to put up this tapestry. And yesterday, I put in three solid hours on the loom and then Summer and I went to the mall to pick out her layette. Her first sonogram isn’t until mid-January, so we don’t know the gender yet. We bought white and yellow. And purple. They’re making infant clothes in purple now. I love that.”

“You and Summer are getting along?”

“
Comme ci, comme ça.
I’m not sure she’s entirely over my losing my temper with her. I said some pretty nasty things. But bottom line, we’re mother and daughter. And she needs me. Will even more after the baby is born.”

“So no regrets about Lee the Sculptor?”

Kat sipped her orange juice. “Now there’s another ‘what’s the point?’ Lee the Sculptor is probably discoing the night away with a twenty-year-old art student from the Maryland Institute. I was just an interesting interlude. An experiment. Like a trip in the Time Machine.”

“Discoing went out around 1982. And there’s no way that man thought of you as an experiment. Lee isn’t the type to play with someone’s feelings. It was obvious he was falling in love with you. You know he’s got to be hurting.”

Kat peered at me over the half glasses we all use to read menus. “By now I’m sure he knows he’s better off without me. Look, it was it fun while it lasted. But maybe some romances aren’t meant to last forever, right? Lee’s and mine. Your’s and Simon’s. I mean, not every love affair has to go the distance. The ones that flame fast fizzle fast. That’s my theory anyway. So I would have liked more with Lee,” she shrugged. “But I’ll still have something wonderful to think about when I’m older and grayer.”

She fingered her amber necklace. “Can we not talk any more about men? Between my lost love and your loser love, the whole subject is much too depressing. On the other hand, isn’t it exhilarating to know that your recent experience has enriched your self-knowledge and now all you have to do is apply it? The new year is coming. Clean slate. Celebrate. That’s what your pal Fortune Simms says. Which reminds me. Fleur and I are planning on going to Annapolis for First Night. We’ll wander around and get back in time to watch the Inner Harbor fireworks from her balcony. You Waterviewians have the best seat in the house. And now you can join us.”

First Night in our state capital is a big, mostly outdoor New Year’s Eve festival with food, music, and street theater. It attracts families primarily, babies in backpacks, kids running around, snot dribbling in the cold. I sighed.

“First Night will be fun,” Kat insisted, looking pained for me. “Come on, it will be. I can’t deal with your disappointment on top of Fleur’s. She was hoping to have a date for New Year’s. Did she tell you she went out with a new man the other night?”

“No. Not a word.” I was stung that Fleur hadn’t shared. We three were best friends. I felt a surge of junior high angst. Left out again.

Kat must have sensed my hurt and hastened to explain, “She’s not sure it’s going anywhere, so she’s not talking about him. It slipped out with me on her third glass of merlot. Anyway, from the little she said, this one is a winner, someone she really likes. And of course, Fleur being Fleur, she thought he was going to ask her out for New Year’s after a few dates, but he didn’t. So now she’s stuck with us. Poor Fleurie. If he doesn’t call her again, she swears she’s going to give up on The Plan. For good this time. All that effort she put into it, and it’s not exactly working out.” Kat’s violet eyes crinkled above a wry smile. “Then again, what plans ever do?”

***

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the best time for a surgeon to take off. Given the option, most people postpone surgery until January, so ORs across the country are underbooked and a lot of docs check out for the holidays.

Some vacation. Everything I’d been shoving aside during the time I was preoccupied with Simon jumped out and bit me in the behind. Among the holiday cards, regrets from the final funding source considering my grant application, the proposal Dan had helped me revise. So that put an end to my dreams of the Clinic. And God knows there was a need for it. In spite of a protest demonstration—my own patient, Freesia Odum, carrying a Cure Covenant sign, got interviewed on WJZ—the decision was final. The hospital doors would be locked April first. And then there was my father. Christmas was over. No more excuses. I couldn’t close my eyes to it any longer. He
had
to be in a nursing home.

Which meant that every day I got up at seven to haul ass around Baltimore with Dan’s social worker, the very competent Michelle Isaacs. We drove from Seven Oaks to Birchwood to Maple Grove, the tree houses I called them, outrageously expensive nursing homes with brightly colored Alzheimer’s units where my father could play out his second childhood. The best of them were monumentally depressing and Michelle’s grip on my arm got progressively tighter as she felt my fight-or-flight response kick in.

“I can’t do this,” I said, halfway through the first day.

Michelle swiveled her gaze to me. I must have looked the way I felt.

“I’m turning around at the next exit,” she said. “You’re right. Maybe it’s too much all at once. It’s kind of hard to take in, you know, in big doses.”

“I mean I can’t send my dad to one of those places.”

“You don’t want to send your father to any of the facilities we’ve seen today,” she fed my line back to me, with a twist. “I get it, but honestly, it’s just a matter of finding a perfect match for him. Let’s take tomorrow off and try again Wednesday.”

She didn’t get it at all. But I nodded wearily. What was the use? And by Thursday, we’d seen a few decent places. Michelle was in high spirits.

“Okay, we’re on the waiting lists. Now there’s nothing to do until a bed opens up.”

She said that at three o’clock New Year’s Eve afternoon. At six, Fleur and Kat pulled the blanket off me.

“Oh, no, Gwyneth,” Fleur growled. “There’s no way you’re spending New Year’s Eve by yourself. We leave you here, you’ll sob in your pillow all night. It’s not an option. You’re coming with us.” She actually dug her nails into my arm and tugged.

So under duress at first, I shuffled along through the festive, freezing streets of Annapolis, where musicians performed, costumed actors teased, bagpipers played, and crowds jostled. Light from the eighteenth-century electrified lanterns broke like confetti over the crowd, but I must have looked glum because a mime in whiteface scampered up to me, hooked her fingers to the ends of her scarlet mouth, and pulled as if to say “Smile.” I smiled and after a while I felt, well, maybe I was part of the human race again.

Then a surprise. We were walking down Main Street sipping cups of hot chocolate when Fleur stopped so short she splashed some of hers down the front of her coat. “Quick. Across the street. With the plaid muffler. Kat, you’ve never seen him. That’s Dan Rosetti, Gwyn’s and my favorite gerontologist and my mother’s heartthrob.”

It was indubitably Dan, elbow locked to a blonde in a down jacket and boots.