My Favorite Midlife Crisis (37 page)

She hugged me and shook hands with Fleur and Kat, who’d dressed and descended for the occasion. Within minutes, Claire was leaning back in the club chair in front of a blazing fire in the family room hearth sipping the scotch she chose over wine.

“Before you show me yours, let me show you mine,” she said with a wry smile. Gathered around like kids at summer camp, we listened to her spooky story.

It went back more than a year.

First of all, she told us, we needed to understand that Simon ran one of the major-league labs in his field. Staffed with top people. She’d been lucky—especially as a woman, even these days—to have him take her on. Fifteen months ago, she believed she was on the fast track to discovering the elusive test that would detect ovarian cancer in its earliest stages. Hundreds of researchers around the world were hunting for the same prize. At first, Simon encouraged her experiments. They were in a race with at least two other labs and he thought she might be riding a winner. But when her first experiments didn’t produce good data, he pulled her off the project.

“Do either of you do science?” she asked Kat and Fleur.

“Kat is a brilliant artist,” I filled in. “Fleur is a very successful businessperson.”

“I run a dress shop for fat ladies,” Fleur said.

“Well, Fleur, you could have done the meaningless shit he shifted me to. And what pissed me off was I knew—the way you know, Kat, when something works in your art—I was sure I was on to something. I begged him to let me continue. He gave me the song and dance about limited resources. That he couldn’t play favorites. Even though he loved me.” We looked at each other with mutual sympathy. “Finally, he just ordered me to stop. But I couldn’t. I knew I was hot. I just needed a few more months. So I did it anyway.”

Fleur had been stoking the fire. She turned now, her jaw in exaggerated drop.

Claire said, “Simon works on his hospital cases in the mornings. He gets his patients out of the way first. Then between ten and noon, he comes into the lab and, I’ll give him this, he goes sometimes into the night. But I had a window of opportunity in the very early morning when he wasn’t there and neither were any of the other staff. I hit that lab every day at 5 a.m. so I could put in three hours before even the early birds got in.” She grinned at the memory of her own cunning. “And I pulled it off. No one knew. A couple of months ago, I got the data that clinched it.”

She pulled a book from her handbag. “My lab notebook. All the details are in here. Of course, it’s going to take trials and human studies. But the basic material is sound. My conclusions will hold up.”

“And Simon’s response when he found out you’d done it behind his back?” I asked, imagining how enraged he must have been.

“Deliriously happy. Overjoyed. He forgave me everything. Simon is the most ambitious human being I ever met. And I was part of his lab, after all. If I get a Lasker, odds are the chief gets a Lasker.”

The Lasker Award, I explained to Fleur and Kat, is like an American Nobel Prize. “In fact, many Lasker recipients go on to win the Nobel.”

Claire nodded. “It’s
that
big. So Simon told me not to tell a soul. Not even our own lab staff, who might leak it. We couldn’t chance other labs getting a whiff that we were onto this.”

“And then he stole your work out from under you,” Kat said, shocked. She’d always given Simon the benefit of the doubt in our relationship. But something so unethical, so immoral that affected millions of women? I doubted she could forgive that.

“I understand he wanted to beat the other labs to the finish line.” She poked at the ice in her scotch. “But to preempt me, to shaft me in public. And it’s deliberate. He’s giving it as a post-deadline paper.” She explained to Fleur and Kat, “Those are the ones that come in just under the wire, too late to appear on the conference website. I checked. It’s not up there. Don’t you think that’s—”

“Unconscionable,” Kat finished for her. “And I assume there’s also money involved. Patents. Royalties.”

“With something this significant, for the primary scientist it could be like winning the lottery,” Claire said.

“So he’s a romantic terrorist. And a credit thief. And if you figure in the money, a common pickpocket,” Fleur fumed. “He’s got to be stopped. You’ve got to expose him. Pull his trousers down around his knees and let the world see his shriveled dick.”

“Wow,” Claire laughed. “I like your style. Is that what you had in mind, Gwyneth?”

“Hypothetically,” I said. I paused before pounding out the punch line. “I want to take him down at the GRIA meeting. In front of everyone! Well, not exactly me. Us.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Claire leaned forward in her chair, scotch sloshing. “In front of the whole GRIA gang, the cream of gynecologic research?”

“Gwyn has a seriously demented brain. We’re very proud of our girl.” Fleur reached over and patted my arm.

I ignored her. “We’re going to play stump the scientist,” I said to Claire. “I assume since this project is your baby, you’ve got questions he can’t answer?”

“Absolutely,” she said, nostrils flaring. “Simon knows the basics, but I know the nuances. And,” she let go a final volley in rapid New York rhythm, “I have evidence he hasn’t even seen. Analyses I’ve been working on the last few weeks that I can put it up there in PowerPoint. Unequivocal proof I’m the one who should be giving that paper. Plus,” she licked her lips like a starving woman at a buffet, “I’ve got a smoking gun. A really big gun. With a tremendous amount of smoke. We do this right, Simon York is toast!”

She popped to her feet and hauled me to mine. While I stood there, smiling indulgently, she danced a celebratory salsa around me. At the end, she pirouetted and planted a kiss on my cheek. “He’ll never see it coming. Not in a million years. Gwyneth, you’re a genius. I’m so indebted.”

Across the coffee table, I could see Kat fluttering her fingers in a high sign, my cue to say the right thing.

I let Claire collapse in the club chair, still grinning. I leaned against the mantle and assumed my best mentor frown. “Well, I think we’ve got a shot to get you what’s yours, but I hope you appreciate the risk involved. Not to me. This meeting is all researchers, not my crowd. They won’t even recognize me up there. Besides, I’m in private practice, so I’m safe if they do. You, on the other hand, are risking your career by going up against Simon and the heavy hitters in public. That’s just not done. There’s a good probability this crowd will turn on you and you’ll be persona non grata among your peers.”

Claire waved a napkin to cool her flushed face. Maybe it was the dance in front of the fire that made her cherry-red, neck up. Or at forty-four she could have been peri-menopausal. Late to take such a big chance with her career.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Especially if Simon’s done this before. There’s some untapped resentment out there from other researchers he’s screwed. Worst-case scenario,” she gulped the last of her scotch, “I’ve got a job lined up in Finland. This pharmaceutical company has been after me for years. Mucho euros. If I can get credit for this discovery, I can write my own ticket. Besides, we owe this to all the women Simon York’s trashed over the years. Like Jordan Conrad.” She let that sink in before she said, “On my way to the airport, I called her.”

“Ah, the Key West cutie,” Fleur muttered.

“Actually,” Claire said quietly, “she seems like a nice kid. Yeah, I know she’s a board certified plastic surgeon, but she sounds so young. She sobbed when I laid out Simon’s screwing around for her. At our age, Gwyneth”—oh hell, I knew she was buttering me up with the “our”—“with our bank of experience, we only got dazzled. Jordan got bamboozled. He told her he was trying to get her a staff position in the plastic surgery clinic at Brubaker so she could move to New York to be near him. He’d been stringing her along with that for more than a year.” Claire rolled her eyes.

I was too embarrassed to confess I’d fallen for Simon’s line about relocating to Baltimore. He was so slick. And some women are so gullible.

“Jordan thought Simon was going to marry her. Like that crappy jade ring was a four-carat diamond from Tiffany’s.” Claire reached in her pocket. “I assume you got one.”

Fleur was turning lavender to purple holding her breath.

I fished around in my handbag. “Just last week.”

We lay the rings side by side. I said, “He must buy them by the gross in Hong Kong. Every size.”

Claire had a musical laugh. Then she sobered. “As long as we’re comparing, I have kind of a personal question?”

When I hesitated, Fleur whined, “Come on, Gwyneth. We’re all good buds here. And think of it as being on the other end of one of your own nosy scientific surveys.”

I nodded to Claire.

“With you, did he come with his eyes open?” she asked, pink flooding her face.

“Oh, sweet mamma-jamma,” Fleur rocked in her chair, “is that anatomically possible?”

I nodded again. “A trick to create an instant, powerful connection,” I speculated.

“Bullshit,” Fleur roared, “with all those women, he was checking to see who he was fucking at the moment.”

When the laughter died down, Claire said, “What I don’t understand is why. Why did he do this? Have all these women?”

“Because he can,” Fleur fired off. “He’s high-and-mighty Simon York. At the top of the food chain. Women are just perks to him, like flying first class.”

“It’s got to be more than that,” Kat said thoughtfully. “Because not all who can,
do.
Maybe he was weaned too early.” To Fleur’s disparaging hoots she insisted, “Well, it’s possible. He had a lousy childhood, right? So maybe he’s looking for the warmth and love he missed as an infant. And now that he’s grown up he can never get enough.”

“Kat’s close, I think.” I’d been giving the topic some thought. “My sense is Simon has all these women to keep from getting close to any one of them. Really close, I mean. He talks a good game, but playing it scares the crap out of him. So he moves from one to another…”

“…avoiding intimacy. I think you have it,” Kat said.

Claire had been quiet while we batted this around, listening, fussing with her bracelets. Now she said, “The thing is, I really was in love with him.” She looked up at me. “You?”

“I was in something,” I said.

Fleur broke the moment of mournful silence that followed with a brisk handclap. “Okay ladies, funeral’s over. We have work to do.”

“Right,” Claire said. “I’m going to call Beata Karnikova. I’ve heard she takes no prisoners. I know the three of us, plus you guys of course,” she swept Fleur and Kat into her field of vision, “can bring this off.” She grabbed my hand, squeezed hard, and looked deep into my eyes with her emerald green ones. “This is more than revenge,” she said, pupils firing. “This is justice.”

“Close enough to revenge for me,” Fleur said. “Death to the infidel! Hang the bastard!”

Kat simply nodded encouragement.

“Let’s do it,” Claire said.

Chapter 39

The next four days blurred by. Everyone had an assignment. Fleur finessed Claire’s PowerPoint presentation and chatted with the conference manager at the Clay-Madison Hotel, who had a final list of the post-deadline papers—which included, yes, one by Dr. Simon York about early detection of ovarian cancer. And the Colonial Room, venue for the post-deadline session, did indeed have two screens and a sophisticated audio visual system.

Over the phone, Kat, who’d been on the debate team in college and I, the public speaking champion of Ferdinand C. Latrobe Junior High School, rehearsed Claire in confronting Simon and coached her in parrying every possible outraged response.

I got hold of Beata Karnikova just before she departed for America.

“Z
kurvysyne!
” she cursed him out after I let her know she’d been another victim of Simon’s worldwide love-scam. The lying z
asranec
had even booked a suite for them Thursday night at the Clay-Madison. “Of course, the idea of sleeping with him makes me physically sick.” Which turned out to be the perfect excuse for changing her plans and arriving just in time to get in on our act.

“Weren’t we all a bunch of dunces to fall for his duplicity? But his day is coming,” she said. “Tell the others I’m foursquare behind this. Just email what you want me to do.”

Claire phoned Jordan Conrad and asked her to keep the lid on it for another week—if Simon phoned, she was to play it cool. She sniffled a lot, Claire reported, but she agreed. On another front, Claire put in a call to an attorney girlfriend in Kerns-Brubaker’s legal department, who poked around and confirmed that Simon had, in fact, engaged in preliminary discussions about applying for a patent on a novel ovarian CA test. Claire’s name hadn’t been mentioned.

And, regarding phone calls, I got one from Casanova himself on Tuesday night. All lovey-dovey. My performance was Oscar worthy. Butter could have melted. Ten minutes after we cooed good-bye, Claire called to inform me she’d just hung up on
her
call from Simon.

He really was a low-down dirty
zkurvysyne.

***

Friday, December 18, 1:45 p.m. Bitti Karnikova and I arrived almost simultaneously for our planned reconnoiter in the mezzanine ladies’ room of the Clay-Madison Hotel. She shook my hand in a single chopping motion, then surprisingly drew me to her for a kiss on each cheek. She was a woman I’d characterize as handsome rather than pretty. Mid-forties, shoulders broad as an ox yoke, with generous Slavic features arranged symmetrically under a practical cap of glossy auburn hair. Interesting choice for Simon. I could see her slinging him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carrying him off to have her way with him. Somehow I didn’t figure her as his type—then again, who wasn’t Simon’s type?