My Favorite Midlife Crisis (2 page)

Elaine lifted the picture of my boys and interrupted my monologue. “Having kids really ages you. All the worry.” She turned to appraise me from under scaffolded eyelids. “You could get rid of those forehead wrinkles of yours. Botox. Or a peel. Nothing drastic.”

That stung. I thought I’d done a nice job of hiding my accordion forehead under wispy bangs. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it in mind.”

When she left, I headed for the powder room to peer at my reflection, which hadn’t been giving me “you’re the fairest in the land” lately. Still, what I saw wasn’t so bad, even with the forehead pleats. Blonde hair kept glossy by weekly trips to Melik at the Istanbul Salon. Many little highlights to suggest sun streaks. Cream-and-roses skin inherited from my mother, which, alas, tended to fretworks of wrinkles. But I plumped it up with stuff that ran me eighty dollars a jar at Nordstrom’s, and I calculated that at fifty-four I could pass for forty. Okay, forty-five. Maybe.

I noticed a bit of eyelid droop on the left side. And a shadow of a wattle under my chin. The sad truth is that women of a certain age must choose between face and body. Enough fat to keep your face youthfully plumped is enough to make your thighs porky. Go for the slender body, and neck up you’re drawn and sunken. My personal trainer and I opted for steel biceps and a tight ass, at some cost to my face.

Hank Fischman, one of the top plastic surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was a former colleague. Maybe I’d give him a call. They used to peel your entire face back from your forehead for a face-lift. Ugh. I can roll an ovary around in my hand and slit into a belly while humming Mozart, but I couldn’t do plastic if my life depended on it. Still, there had been recent advances in the full-face procedure. Before I made an appointment with Hank, I’d go online and see what was new in the Ponce de Leon business.

I couldn’t believe how shallow I was becoming.

Chapter 2

To compensate for all this meditation on my aging exterior, I decided to subject myself to something that would plumb the very depths of my emotional being, something that would Roto-Rooter out any residual gunk of guilt, shame, and self-loathing. I drove up to Annapolis for a meeting of FRESH, a support group for discarded husbands and wives of recently out gays. FRESH is an acronym for Former Rejected Ex-Spouses of Homosexuals. At my first meeting, I’d mentioned to the president of the Maryland chapter that I thought the use of Former and Ex might be a trifle redundant. “Intentional,” he’d said, smiling gently. “What is more redundant than the heterosexual spouse of a homosexual?” Point taken.

Unlike AA or Overeaters Anonymous, FRESH provided wine and cheese and permitted smoking on the frequently correct assumption that most of us had tailspinned back into former vices after the revelation. Also, the disclosure of last names was encouraged since it was a FRESH assertion that none of us had anything to hide; we were the innocent victims of circumstance. Also we might want to date each other.

The idea of FRESH members coupling had, at the beginning, smacked of the cast-banging of two broken-armed lovers. But then, Harry Galligan piqued some interest. My favorite uncle had been called Harry and so far the FRESH Harry had been just that, avuncular. That night, he winked at my entrance, patted my back as I walked by, and whispered, “Glad you made it, Gwyn,” but that was it.

A half hour in, with the wine flowing, Mark Silva, the chapter president, clapped his hands for attention and shouted, “Let’s get seated for Sharing.” Sharing was the FRESH term for the open-heart surgery that bares your inner pain.

We gathered in a supportive circle around a man whose wife dumped him the previous week for
his
secretary. “To be honest,” he said, “I always had a little sneaky for my secretary. Never acted on it, of course. Then Brenda and Alison met at the company picnic. The next week they had a date for drinks and began the affair. Last Wednesday, they called me into the conference room to break the news. I’m still reeling.”

“Of course you are. Very understandable. And so recent. This is the worst time, Fred. Time and friendship heal, believe me.” Mark Silva was also the resident clucker and tsker. And he was given to hugs, gender neutral, which freaked out a few of the men. “Correction. Not just me. Believe
us.
” Applause.

Our second newcomer, a heavy woman with a mustache and a five o’clock shadow (I diagnosed polycystic ovary syndrome from eight feet away) related that her husband’s parting shot had been, “And you need to know that I never really loved you.” Essentially invalidating ten years of marriage. So gratuitous. Need to know? The bastard. I really did want to hug her, beard and all. Instead, I got out my Kleenex.

Pam, sitting next to me, reported on her husband’s phone call of the evening before. He was going to Thailand for a sex change operation and asked her to be there when he told their children. She was anguished. We were anguished for her, with her. Twelve people in a circle murmured sympathetically. Two of us were sobbing. How ridiculous that I was one of them.

Harry Galligan lightened the moment by giving the treasurer’s report. Harry was a pleasing contrast to my wiry, wired ex-husband. A lumbering Irishman with a PhD in physics, Harry worked at the Naval Research Lab in D.C. Not your standard issue scientist, though. He once told me that he spoke six languages and did a mean tango. Not bragging. Maybe flirting. His wife had left him for a famous local politician, a burly Irish woman who looked more than a little like Harry. “Well, she’s lost my vote,” Harry liked to crack. These days he seemed mildly amused and somewhat philosophical about the wife’s defection. But I’d heard from one of the longtime members that he’d shambled into his first meeting with booze on his breath and his tie askew, just about collapsed in the middle of his story sharing, and had to be helped to his seat.

He didn’t come off as a personality prone to surprises, but at the end of his report he said casually, almost as an aside, “You know,” hitching his neck at me across the circle, his eyes soft with concern, and I felt my heart tumble, “Gwyn has never shared with us. She said she wasn’t ready. But she’s been coming to meetings for five months now.”

Had
I? Five months? I always decided to make the drive last minute, so I never marked it on my calendar or entered it in my PDA, which meant it didn’t count. A non-event.

“Gwyn?” Mark Silva prompted in his kindergarten teacher voice. The bearded lady gazed at me expectantly. The transsexual’s wife put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed, so I figured
what the hell, my story isn’t worse than any other,
and I shared. Boy, did I share. Even after two years, I shook telling the story of what my friend Fleur called The Treachery.

I told them how at the housewarming for Crosswinds, our new beach house on the Delaware shore, I’d opened the door to a storage room to see, in a nanosecond flash, a picture that would be branded forever into my little gray cells: my husband of twenty-six years entwined in the arms of his lover, his mouth against the mouth of Brad Ventner, Crosswinds’ decorator whose taste I never liked anyway. Startled, they broke apart and for a ghastly, surreal moment we all stared at each other. Stan, Brad, Stan’s yippy Chihuahua that he always brought everywhere, and me. Then the dog started barking and Stan started babbling something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears. I spun away, the dog leaped, I raced for the stairs, the dog charged ahead and partway up darted under my feet, pitching me forward on the $80 a yard Berber carpeted steps, snapping my ankle. I’m a physician; I’d known immediately it was broken. I’d also known that a lot more than my ankle was broken and that it would take a lot more than a cast to fix it.

“And the next day, Stan came back to Crosswinds to collect some clothing and he stood at the foot of my bed gushing this torrent of confession, details I really didn’t want to hear. But with my foot propped up and my ankle casted, I was trapped. At one point, he shouted at me: ‘Look, I’m fifty-four years old. I don’t have another fifty-four years to get it right. I can’t, I shouldn’t, goddamn it I
refuse
to tamp down my real feelings anymore.’”

“Like it was your fault,” Pam said, shaking her head empathically.

“Well, I suppose I should have known. I mean, yes, the night before he proposed, he confessed that he’d had what he called a dalliance with another Columbia journalism student, a guy in his dorm, when he was a sophomore. But he maintained it was an isolated incident of generic horniness that landed on whatever was close at hand. I thought, okay, a one-time thing. Which can happen. Experimenting.”

I sniffed, holding back the tears. “Then over the years when he spent all those nights out, well, he’s a publisher. He runs two magazines. He took people to dinner. That’s what he told me. Entertaining was part of the job.”

Preoccupied with my work, with my kids, I was clueless that the smooth fabric of our marriage was being ripped all along the seam by Stan’s lust hunts in the streets of Mt. Vernon, Baltimore’s largely gay neighborhood.

“When he became obsessed with the beach house, I figured it was just a midlife crisis. But still, all that time with the decorator.” I sang the same old heartbreaking tune in a tremulous voice, “I should have known.”

“No. That wasn’t your responsibility. You’re the victim here,” Mark Silva shouted from the drinks table. “Just remember that.”

“And then Stan apologized. Sort of. He said, ‘I really am sorry I lied to you. But I thought if I got married, I wouldn’t feel the way I felt about men. I thought the marriage would cure me.’ That’s what he said. Cure him. Thank God there was the length of the bed between us, because I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been able to reach him. Especially when he said, ‘I love you. I always will. You’re the mother of my children. But this thing with Brad, this is different, this is
in
love.’” My voice failed. I was grinding my Kleenex to dust.

Mark Silva, tisking, came up behind me to refill my wine glass. My hand was trembling so badly I splashed merlot on his fine white shirt.

What I didn’t say was that I fell off the deep end after that. Thank God the HIV tests turned out negative, but I felt sick, looked sick, lost thirteen pounds in three weeks, and drove to the Safeway in the middle of the night to buy a pack of Marlboros. Me, a doctor. And I cried myself to sleep for six months straight.

“I’m fine now, though,” I said, tears streaming. “I’m doing well. Really.” At which point, Harry stood up, nearly knocking over his chair, bisected the circle with his ursine lumber, and handed me his handkerchief. Folded. Clean.

Later, during the socializing part, he brought me a plate of cookies. “You must think I’m a real shit for pushing you into sharing. Not that it wasn’t necessary for you, but still…”

“You didn’t,” I assured him. “I should have shared months ago.”

“You were processing,” he said.

“Am I processed now? Like cheese?”

Harry laughed. I had the feeling he liked me.

When it was time to go, he walked me to my car, gave me a hearty hug, and kissed my forehead. No one had kissed my forehead in forty years. Maybe he was taking my emotional temperature.

“You had a milestone night tonight. You should be proud of yourself, Gwyn. But don’t be surprised if you get some rebound from the release. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. I’ll check in with you during the week. Just to see how you’re doing.”

He watched until I pulled out of the lot. It was midnight when I put my key in the lock. Five past when I called my friend Kat Greenfield who was widowed and a fiber artist, so she was up weaving at odd hours. Not my other friend and neighbor Fleur Talbot who got to Madame Max, the dress shop she owned, at 8 a.m. and went to bed, alone, around ten.

Kat and I talked for eight minutes about Harry Galligan and twelve minutes about her not being able to take over the whole bed. Her late husband Ethan’s side was still sacrosanct. She wouldn’t even roll there in her sleep. When I hung up the phone, I stroked the back of the receiver.
Nice phone. Give me some good calls this week. Someone with a deep voice who wants nothing more of me than a little attention.

My prayer was answered. Sort of. God has a demented sense of humor.

The next voice I heard was my father’s. He roused me from a deep, dreamless sleep shouting, “You need to telegraph your sister and tell her the birds arrived.”

“Dad,” I said, “the sun isn’t even up. Go back to bed.”

“Fine. But you’ll call your sister.”

I have one brother, no sister.

“And tell her about the birds. Sure, Dad. Does Sylvie know you’re up?”

“Sylvie who?”

Oh God.

My father woke me around five nearly every morning. “I just saw your mother in the mirror,” he’d say. “She was stark naked and playing around with some old geezer I never saw before. I think she’s lost her mind!” Or: “I just wrote a check for $10,000 to the All American Aluminum Siding Company. They’re starting tomorrow.” Or the telegram about the birds.

Why couldn’t I bring myself to put the phone on answering machine mode? He probably wouldn’t know the difference. His tangled ganglions didn’t register the distinction between reality and electronically reproduced reality. But I wouldn’t do that to him. He was the parent who’d stayed up with me through my chicken pox for four nights running. The parent who’d run interference on the crazy other one. My protector. A sweet little gnome of a man whom I loved with all my heart although I wasn’t sure who was currently inhabiting his body.