My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet)

by Toby Devens

  “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.

  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.