My Favorite Midlife Crisis (8 page)

“Rubenesque it is,” she wrote with a flourish. “So there I am in a hundred words or less. I’ll send it in tonight.”

“Good for you. I’m proud of you, kiddo. You started this project; you’re going to see it through.” I tried to make the question a statement. “I really admire your perseverance.”

“Yeah, well I think perseverance is sexy. As in ‘the woman can really give good perseverance.’”

Brash and bright, but for all the surface toughness and braggadocio, Fleur has a nougat center, soft and sweet. Jack leaving her for the waitress had almost killed her and now he was back, poking his formerly bald head where it didn’t belong. Damn it, I didn’t want to see her hurt again.

“Don’t get sidetracked, Fleur. Not by anything or anyone, okay? Remember your business plan. Your goal is marriage. You want to be married.”

“I do, I do.” She lifted a spoonful of green tea ice cream in a toast. “Well, here’s to getting what I want and you getting what you want which is...what the hell
do
you want?”

I could feel the rice wine smudging me into sentimentality. I took another sip, thinking. “I guess what I want is for the clock to be turned back to when everything was right with the world. Except it never was, was it? So that won’t work.” I was surprised by the sting of tears. “But you know what would be nice? To be able to trust someone again. It would even be nice just to trust myself again. Stan knocked that out of me and I guess that’s what I want, more than a head on the next pillow.” Where did all that come from? I blotted my eyes with the napkin.

Fleur reached over and patted my arm. Then, in typical Fleur fashion, she cracked the emotional moment. “And I thought all you wanted was a subscription to
Twat: The Review of
Gynecology.
No more sake for you.” She moved the sake decanter, poured the last drops into her cup, and hoisted it. “As I was saying, here’s to you and me and getting what we want.”

“And Kat, don’t forget Kat,” I said.

“Oh, honey, she is probably at this very moment getting what she wants. Nevertheless, banzai one and all.”

***

The softshell crab roll must have disagreed with me, because I was up and heading toward the Tums when my father called at seventeen minutes past four the following morning.

“I just wanted to tell you that the captain stole my razor.”

He spoke in a code I was beginning to understand although it wasn’t always consistent. This time I was pretty sure he was trying to tell me Stan had been there. My ex-husband visited my father once or twice a week. Occasionally, he gave him a close shave with a safety razor, unlike the quick swipe with an electric shaver Sylvie gave him. Credit where it’s due, Stan may have walked out on me, but he hadn’t deserted my father.

Before he could tell me more, Sylvie grabbed the phone.

“Mr. Harald came into my room, stuck his hand under the pillow, and stole the phone from where I was hiding it. You can’t keep anything from him. And the other night he got in bed with me. Didn’t do nothing, but it was a fright to wake up with him next to me.”

“You need to lock your room at night.”

“He peed in the rubber plant yesterday.”

“You threw it out, I hope.”

“I didn’t grow up in a shack. Of course, I threw the stinky t’ing out. But tomorrow it will be something else. I’m putting you on fair warning: I don’t know how long I can take this.”

“Are you quitting, Sylvie?” I heard the desperation in my voice.

“Not yet, not until I get me another job. I need the money too bad.” At least she was honest. “But it’s gotten out of hand. If you don’t mind me saying, you ought to start thinking about a nursing home.”

I felt something rise in my throat. It may have been the softshell crab. I thought it was something even less digestible.

“Is he nearby?”

“Standing right next to me. If I turn, I knock him over.”

“No more talk of nursing homes, then. Not in front of him.”

“Well, you’ll have to do something soon. No good you putting your head in the sand. He’s going downhill quick.”

“Well, please give me a couple of weeks, at least. Can you promise me that?”

“He’s pulling on me.”

“Put him on, please.” When I heard him breathing his raspy former-two-pack-a-day wheeze, I said, “Daddy, go back to bed. It’s still nighttime.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“You’ve got it, hon,” he said.

Not Doc. Hon. We just slipped down a step on the ladder into the abyss.

Chapter 8

On Friday towards evening, I opened the door to God’s gift to women and Faith Shapiro’s gift to me. Jeff Feldmacher, winner of the Cy Young Award, famous for his back-to-back shut-outs in the World Series three decades before, was tall and toothy with a full complement of inert anchorman hair and an appealing fretwork of laugh lines around his eyes. When Faith Shapiro said retired ballplayer, I figured Cracker, but on the pre-date phone call he’d come off charming, a cultivated southern gentleman. In the flesh, well, he had mighty attractive flesh.

Moving with the easy grace of a natural athlete, he paused before my hall mirror to smooth his hair and check his teeth for stray bits of food, then ambled across my living room, his turquoise eyes taking it all in.

“You like art,” he said, looking at the best of what Stan and I had assembled over the years. “I collect Neiman. You know Neiman? He does a lot of sports-related art.”

We rode the elevator down with Lou Goodkind, 14A. Lou took in Jeff, vacuumed him up and down a few times with his eyes, and finally said, “Aren’t you...?”

“Yup,” Jeff said.

“Hey. Jeez.” Lou extended his hand and said, “Thank you for many hours of pleasure,” as if Jeff were his favorite hooker. He nodded at me as Jeff slipped his arm around my shoulder and I could tell I’d picked up megapoints on his scorecard.

Jeff Feldmacher’s silver Mercedes had the license plates BALLS 14, his old Orioles number, and six rounds of country western in the CD player.

“You know anything about baseball?” he asked me as we approached Camden Yards.

I used to. My father, the rabid Orioles fan, took me to games from the time I was six until I lost interest at fourteen. We’d sit in the bleachers at the old Memorial Stadium, higher than heaven, hotter than hell, nosebleed territory where he’d keep score in his program while I stuffed my face with hot dogs. He got us both out of the house in summer for night games, where you could see the soupy air, thick with gnats in the light. Shimmering down below was the field, brilliant, faceted with shadows of the players moving, twinkling, more like an emerald than a diamond, an emerald ocean that could sail you away from someone yelling at you all the time and flailing the air with her hitting hand as you ducked by. My mother eschewed all sports that did not draw blood. She watched boxing on TV, screaming at the fighters to go for the kill, and she loved hockey—not the game, the brawls. To irritate her, and because I had a crush on Brooks Robinson, I memorized the Oriole lineup and pinned an orange-and-black felt “Birds” banner to the bulletin board above my bed. But that was more than forty years ago and I hadn’t kept up.

I told Jeff I’d gone to plenty of games with my father when I was a kid. He said, “That earns you a B+ in my book.” He flicked me an appraising look. “At least you know how the game is played. So I don’t have to start from scratch. I usually have to start from scratch. It’s a bummer.”

I stared at him, wondering what happened to the charm I’d heard on the phone. Who killed Rhett Butler?

At Camden Yards, we sat in a box over third base reserved for Jeff’s business clients. He let me know he owned half an office tower in downtown Baltimore and part interest in two restaurants. He didn’t talk much to me after that. He concentrated on the field, grunting and whooping at appropriate times and chewing gum so hard his jawbones moved like tectonic plates in a Mesozoic shift.

Fans stopped by for autographs. Most of the people who remembered Jeff Feldmacher were over forty, but at the seventh-inning stretch we were rushed by three women in their mid-twenties wearing short shorts, halter tops, and Dundalk hairdos—homemade peroxide streaks in perms half grown out.

Did I ever have breasts that high? I knew for certain I’d never walked out of the house with my nipples outlined like elevator buttons against clingy fabric. As if this weren’t blatant enough, they’d powdered their cleavages with gold dust.

“God, you girls are a sight for sore eyes,” Jeff said, as if I weren’t sitting next to him nibbling on my barbecue sandwich. He looked down only long enough to sign one exposed hip, one patch of smooth, tight skin below a belly-button ring, and one front triangle of a satin thong. For this last, Terri tugged down her jeans while executing a mini bump and grind. Jeff’s voice was wet with suppressed drool. “Nothing more beautiful than a beautiful woman. And I got me a triple here. To Chris, To Denise, To Terri with an i. With love, Jeff Feldmacher.” He poked his tongue through the o of his lips as he wrote. He drew a little baseball next to his name.

On the drive home, Jeff said, “Faith Shapiro tells me you’re divorced. Twelve years out for me. She’s about your age, my ex. Very wrinkled though. Lives in Florida. A sun worshipper and a smoker. You look good for...how old are you? Faith said she thought late forties, maybe fifty.”

Faith Shapiro knew damn well how old I was. Her husband did my taxes.

“I’m fifty-four.”

“No kidding. I wouldn’t have guessed. You’re an eyeful. Really well maintained. Money helps, right?”

At my door he said, “I told Faith I usually don’t date women over forty or under five foot nine, but she said to broaden my horizons—you were a special lady. And she was right. You’ve got lots of class, and class makes up for just about anything. What do you think? Should we do this again?”

“Sure,” I said. Hating myself. I’ve addressed a thousand gynecological surgeons about para-aortic and pelvic lymphadenectomies for staging purposes in ovarian cancer, yet I still could not bring myself to say, “Look, we are not a match made in heaven. Have another wonderful twelve years chasing twenty-five-year-old amazons with enough saline in their tits to float the USS
Constitution
. But count me out.”

“That would be nice,” was what I croaked, wanting to bite my tongue clear through so the tip landed on his $300 Bruno Magli loafers.

“Great. Think about where you want to go next week.” He pulled me into an awkward hug.

Five minutes later, while I was reading my email in my underwear, my doorbell rang.

“It’s Jeff,” the voice through the door said. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“I’m ready for bed,” I answered. “There’s a restroom on the first floor, next to the workout room.”

“I’ll never find it. Come on, it’s urgent,” he wheedled.

The man could have irritable bowel syndrome,
I thought.
Or horseshoe kidney. Or more likely at his age, prostitis.
How could I deny an ailing man access to the facilities? I’d taken the Hippocratic oath.

I threw on a robe, opened the door, pointed, and watched him dash to the powder room, though not so fast that he didn’t take in my robe.

Standing in the hallway, I finally heard the toilet flush, the faucets gush, and then Jeff was in front of me, all six feet six of him, bare from the waist up, shirt slung over his shoulder.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I was beyond stunned. “Put your shirt on.”

“You sure?” He held out his arms so that he looked like a hairy-chested, well-muscled Jesus.
Come unto me.
“I took a Viagra back there. It will only take a half hour, and we can put the time to good use. It would be a shame to waste it.”

“Get your goddamn shirt on. And get out of here. Now.”

“You’re missing out on some wonderful sex. I bet you don’t get a lot these days.”

“Out!” I shouted loud enough to wake 8B.

“Okay, okay, your loss, sugar.”

I gave him a final push across the threshold.

“I’ll phone you,” he called back over his hairy shoulder.

***

When my father checked in at nine the next morning—Sylvie having hid the phone in the oven overnight—I said, as thanks for those salvation games he took me to at Memorial Stadium, “I have regards for you, Dad. From someone named Jeff Feldmacher. Do you know who that is?”

And my father, who didn’t know his own name, said, “Go Birds!”

***

The following afternoon, I sat next to Fleur at the Istanbul Style and Day Spa while her nails, painted Bitchin’ Red, dried and Tracy the manicurist ground an emery board against mine.

“I actually shoved him out the door,” I concluded my Jeff Feldmacher story. “Now he’ll probably sue me for assault.”

“He deserved it. He was a real asshole,” Tracy said. Twenty-three, college educated, she took no guff. She had what she proudly called “a potty mouth.” All of the female staff at the Istanbul were young and American. They peppered their conversations with foul language. The men were Muslim and looked the other way.