My Favorite Midlife Crisis (3 page)

I needed to speak to his caretaker Sylvie
again
about her going to bed earlier so she could be with him when he woke at 4:30. Weeknights, she stayed up until midnight watching a TV show in which a medium communicated with the spirits of the departed. Then she was so socked in sleep she didn’t hear my father prowling the house in Alzheimeric zigzags before dawn. We’d had this conversation before, Sylvie and I. She made promises, but the lure of the dead was stronger than the big bucks I paid her to look after the living.

I would not put him in a nursing home.

Chapter 3

I’d been hoping, but by Sunday Harry hadn’t called.

“Well you can’t just sit there moping over an imaginary lover,” Kat said, hovering over my paper-strewn desk like a seagull over a landfill.

“Believe me, this look of desperation you see has nothing to do with Harry Galligan,” I said as I shuffled through grant application forms.

“Those proposals can wait.” Kat tugged them from my hand. “You need to take a break.”

“Yeah, well the patients can’t wait,” I sighed. “When I think of these women falling through the cracks, it’s just terrifying. STDs are going untreated. Cancers aren’t being diagnosed. Women are going to die needlessly.”

On mostly my own time, with grant money and some donations I’d scrounged up, I’d operated the Women’s Free Clinic in West Baltimore for seven years. Then the previous spring, the Clinic had come to a grinding halt when its funding dried up. For two months, I’d pumped my personal savings into the project. But it took on water faster than I could bail it out and in June, it sunk. Now hundreds of women from the poor, mostly black Baltimore neighborhood it served were without basic GYN care because they were uninsured or underinsured and couldn’t afford to see a doctor. I was determined to find the money to start it up again.

“How many grant applications have you sent out?” Kat asked.

“I’m working on the eleventh. So far, I’ve heard from seven. Out of those, six declines. One foundation managed to spare $2,000. That won’t even buy surgical gloves.” I sunk my head in my hands.

Kat peeled my fingers from my forehead one by one. “Enough for today. You’re drowning in black and white. You need color, people, something to lift your spirits. Come with me to the exhibit opening. I promise it will be fun. And don’t you want to be able to discuss contemporary sculpture when you go out with someone who knows about art?”

“Please, I have no prospects of going out with someone who wears his baseball cap backwards.”

“Exactly. No prospects. Time to go prospecting,” Kat said.

So I gave in.

But an hour later I really wished I hadn’t because as Kat and I made our altogether innocent way across the gallery floor, from behind a sculpture labeled “Sleeping Python” constructed of knives, forks, and ladles, my ex-husband Stan appeared with (they were actually holding hands) Brad, the decorator, who would have been the other woman had he been a woman. Both wore jeans. Stan had lost weight and he’d tucked in his black T-shirt to show off his Scarlet O’Hara waist. His jeans were varnished on, so tight you saw every lump and bump. He’d worn Levi’s casual cut when we were married. With a dress belt.

Brad spotted me first and nudged Stan who nodded.

“Move it,” I hissed at Kat, who did a little bewildered two-step in the wrong direction.

Too late. “Ladies,” Stan said as they oozed over. “Enjoying the show?”

“Interesting,” I said. “Seminal. Highly original.” I glanced down at my program while Kat presented a frozen half smile. She’d disliked Stan even in his heyday. When we were in college, he used to call her Hippie Dippy Katie and Lucy Liberal, and she once threw a plate of waffles at his head. He’d been doing an imitation of Jane Fonda making a pro-Cong speech, a nasty takeoff in falsetto with a hand on his hip. We should have known.

“Oh, I can’t stand it,” Brad said, eyeing a metal fish sculpture. “The halibut. He’s done it with spoons for scales. It’s perfect, Stan. If it’s under a thou, I’m buying it for the store.” With Stan’s financial backing, Brad had opened a gourmet shop in Rehoboth not far from the beach house. Preciously named The Cook’s Tour, it carried imported foods and overpriced kitchen tools. “Visualize it in the spot right next to the counter where the light pours in.” He marched off.

“I like your new hair, Kat. It’s very becoming,” Stan said.

I looked at Kat. He was right. It was different. She’d colored out the gray and trimmed it a little so it just dusted her shoulders. Subtle changes I’d missed. I was suddenly overwhelmed and angry all over again at the unfairness of it all. He noticed hairstyles now, Stan the Insensitive, Insentient. Back in the marriage, I could have dyed my hair purple and shaved it into a mohawk and he wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. Drew told me the last time his father visited, he’d brought photo albums and wept reminiscing about the twins’ birth. How moving it had been. The highlight of his life. This from a man who when I’d gone into labor asked me if I could hold off a half hour; he had an editorial meeting at four.

For our sons’ sake, I try to maintain a civil relationship with my ex-husband, and that afternoon we managed a few minutes of careful chat about the boys. Just as I was ready to jump out of my skin, Stan drifted back to Brad. I heard them laugh, which in my paranoid state, I decided was directed at me. At my fat ass specifically. Which I knew, intellectually, was as small and hard as a stale biscuit. But my reaction was not intellectual. It was two feet south of my brain, tearing at my heart. Then they moved together to stand hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, their bronze and blonde highlighted heads almost fusing, sharing the program as if it were a prayer book. Brad slipped his free hand into Stan’s back pocket. I wanted to die or to kill. Take your pick.

“You okay?” Kat asked.

I wheeled on her. “What the hell did you do to your hair?” Lots of misplaced hostility. She looked at me with sympathetic eyes, which is why she has been my friend since college.

“I decided Fleur is right. It’s been nearly two years since Ethan’s accident. I can’t go poking around in widow’s weeds for the rest of my life. Dyeing my hair seemed to be a good statement, to me if to no one else. You know, ‘Look at me. I’m not an old lady with gray hair. I’m an old lady with black hair. And I’m back in circulation.’ Do you think this sends the message that I’m available?”

This was interesting enough to distract me from Stan and Brad, now yakking it up with the sculptor of this culinary menagerie—the guy whose face was on the front of the program.

“You’re not old,” I said reflexively. “And yes it sends the message. You’re radiating availability. Men are going to drop like flies.” Suddenly, a wave of vertigo washed over me, the kind that swamps you when you’re losing your bearings. It was disorienting that Kat of all people was paying attention to her appearance, trawling for men. And Stan had exploded out of the closet with Brad. Was I the only one stuck in the muck of my old life? “You look great, I’m just surprised. You haven’t messed with your hair for years.”

“I dyed my hair because I was so fucking cold,” she said. And when she told the story, it made sense. She’d been out Friday night as the fifth wheel with two other couples. They’d gone to Ford’s Theater in D.C. and the air conditioning had been on full blast so that even the sweater she’d brought wasn’t enough. One of the women had whispered about how cold it was and her husband removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Then the other husband had done the same. “And there was no one to drape me,” Kat said wistfully. “If Ethan were alive, I would have had a jacket. But I sat there shivering for two acts. Not just from cold either. I realized how goddamned alone I am. And decided to do something about it. The hair is a first step. What do you think?”

I told her it was a brilliant first step. That I was proud of her. That the restored darkness brought out the violet of her eyes.

“Not violet. Periwinkle.” It was the sculptor, Lee Bagdasarian, who’d come up behind us. “Eloquent eyes.” He was young. Younger, anyway. Early forties. Interesting slash handsome. Roman gladiator nose and a cowlick of glossy hair I wanted to lovingly smooth.

“Eloquent show,” Kat fired back. “I really like your work.” He made a modest demi dip and smiled at both of us. “You’re Gwyn and you’re Kat.” And then the eyes veered off me. For good.

“Stan Berke tells me you’re a fiber artist,” he said to Kat. “That you showed at the Clayton.” They talked weaving for ten minutes while I hung around like a potholder to avoid the Stan and Brad Show. Kat told Lee how she especially admired his hippopotamus made of colanders, strainers, and cheese slicers.

“Have you seen the plate-ypus?” he asked her. Just her. “He’s got a lot of style, this guy. Come on, I’ll show you.” She lifted an eyebrow at me. I inched a tiny nod of approval, like a mom sending her daughter off to the prom. He steered her with a hand on her back. Very intimate for a new friend.

And that is how Kat met Lee on the day she sent out her first signal and why I slogged home by myself through the wet streets of Baltimore.

***

I live eight floors up in Waterview, a condominium building in downtown Baltimore. Stan and I moved here after the boys left for college. It was perfect for the two of us. Light-filled and low-maintenance, it has a huge living room window that sweeps over a panorama of the Harbor. I always close the curtains before I leave the apartment just so I can open them to the magnificent view when I return. The dazzling sunsets make my eyes water with pleasure. Even on that rainy August Sunday, just beyond my terrace, gulls lifted into an opalescent sky. So calming. Like a Japanese painting. I watched for a few minutes before turning to the winking red light of my answering machine.

Message 1. Sylvie, my dad’s companion. No hello. She barreled right into “Your father thinks he’s back in Norway. He thinks he’s seven years old and I’m his sister Margrit. He’s been pulling my hair all day. We need to talk, Dr. Berke.”

Message 2. Dan Rosetti, my father’s geriatrician, telling me Dad’s newest symptom, leg cramps, might be a side effect of his Alzheimer’s medication. “Let’s cut him down from ten milligrams to five and watch him.”

Dan was my age, a Yale grad, up on the latest advances, but at heart a physician of the old school, caring and hands-on. Literally. In the office, he’d hold my father’s bony hand or wind an arm around his fragile shoulders while talking with him in his gentle, soothing baritone.

“If we get more agitation going down to five mgs, then we’ll have to tweak,” Dan continued. I sighed. My father was pulling Sylvie’s hair, the first sign of dementia-related aggression, and we were reducing his meds. No wonder I felt we were teetering on a tightrope.

“I also want to start him on something new, ArCog. The studies look promising. Just keep an eye out for muscle weakness.”

A tightrope without a net.

Message 3. Just what I needed, the nasal drone of Summer Greenfield Ellicott, Kat’s married daughter, making a surprise, unwelcome appearance in my kitchen.

“Gwyneth, I’m looking for my mother,” Summer drawled in that grating whine she’d found at two and perfected over the next twenty-five years. “Tim has come down with a stomach bug and I need her to stop at the Rite Aid and pick up a prescription.” She inhaled an exasperated breath. “If she’d only get a cell phone. Anyway, if you connect with her, have her call me.” Click. God forbid a please or thank you.

Poor Kat. I didn’t blame her for pleading a technology phobia and refusing to carry a cell phone. She’d be at the beck and call of Summer and her husband, Tim the Dim, 24/7.

Message 4. My son Drew just to catch up.

Message 5. My friend Fleur asking when I saw the plastic surgeon would I please find out if he liposuctioned double chins.

Message 6. My service. Which was unusual since one of our junior associates, Bethany McGowan, was covering that weekend. I returned the call to my patient Freesia Odum, dispensed soothing advice, and squeezed her in for an emergency appointment. Since the Free Clinic’s closing, Ms. Odum took two buses to get to my office. She had no health insurance. I saw her gratis to the increasing irritation of my partners in the practice and the outright hostility of the hired help, the younger docs. Especially Bethany, who had a sharp tongue and no respect for her seniors. Especially me.

I wondered if Neil Potak had told her I was the one who tried to blackball her at the new-hire conference.

I should have stuck to my guns.

***

On Thursday, I kept my appointment with Hank Fischman. I hadn’t seen Hank since we’d done a pediatrics rotation together at Hopkins. He’d been handsome then and he still looked good. Better maybe, with the Antigua vacation tan and the silver sideburns. His skin was smooth, which could have been an advertisement for his partner’s skills or just proof of the natural male aging advantage.

Hank examined my face under the ultraviolet light. He tugged the skin under my chin. Took a digital portrait. Then he escorted me out of the exam room to his office and motioned me to a chair across from him.

“So, how long have you been divorced?”

I raised my eyebrows, then quickly lowered them before my surprise dug three new crevices in my forehead. “Actually divorced? Final papers? Seven months. I didn’t know you kept up.”