by Toby Devens
Anything but go on Lovingmatch.com.
***
An hour later, Ethan Greenfield’s voice answered Kat’s phone. She really needed to change that answering machine message. Ethan had made Kat a widow when he took the full force of ten tons of steel piping rolling off a flatbed truck in front of him on I-95. It was very disconcerting to hear his voice from the grave talk about being unavailable and promise to get back to me.
“Have a peaceful day!” Ethan said genially. You too, Ethan, I thought. Wherever you are. And tell Kat to call me.
When she did, I invited her to join us the next day for the photo session.
“Sure. But if I’m a few minutes late, start without me.” Small pause. “I’m having brunch with Lee at 10:30. Four hours should be enough time to eat an omelette.”
“Lee? Lee, the sculptor? The forty-year-old very good- looking sculptor?”
“Well, he prefers to be called a construction artist,” Kat said. “And he’s forty-three.”
I would not be diverted. “Katrina, you are having a certified date. Yay for you. But why brunch? Why didn’t he ask you out for tonight? He’s not married, is he? Married men don’t do Saturday night.”
“He’s not married and he did ask me out for tonight. I told him I had other plans. I don’t really have any but it seemed so date-y, you know, Saturday night. I’m having second thoughts now that I’m actually on the brink. I’m not sure I’m ready for this dating business.”
“Kat, Ethan’s been dead for a year and a half. If not now, when? Now listen, don’t order onion soup with the gooey cheese. And no fettuccini. You don’t want to battle fettuccini on a first date. And no sushi, promise me. Because you have to cram a whole piece into your mouth and it makes you look like a blowfish.”
“It’s brunch, Gwyn. Do I have your approval for a mushroom omelette?”
“Perfect.”
Chapter 5
That evening I attended a dinner party at the home of my accountant Lenny Shapiro and his wife Faith. Lenny and I go back thirty-three years, before his comb-over and my cellulite. Stan retained him when we were young and then, about the time he started sending back wine in restaurants, dumped him for some arrogant kid from a large Episcopalian accounting firm.
After Stan dumped me, I rehired Lenny to oversee my assets. Our relationship had never been more than “sign on the dotted line, please,” though since my divorce maybe he’d added an extra dollop of gallantry for the poor maiden set adrift in the stormy sea of singlehood, but never anything sexual.
So at the party, when Lenny started rubbing my back as he discussed the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and then when his hands slid below my waist to cop a quick feel of my behind, I mean, really, if all this was intended as a political statement, it whizzed by me.
“Jesus, Lenny.” I spun on my heel to dislodge him and nearly crashed into Faith Shapiro who had popped in unexpectedly with a tray of miniature knishes and caught the tail end of the episode. She sent a withering look in her husband’s direction, gripped my shoulder with hands of steel, and steered me out of the living room.
“How tall are you?” She stopped midway and backed off, assessing. I am a shiksa for goddsakes with a German mother of Wagnerian proportions.
“Last time I was measured, five nine,” I said.
“And I used to be five three. You’re five seven. But if you wear three-inch heels you’ll be five ten and that’ll be perfect. The guy I had in mind—”
“What guy?” Were we in a new soap opera? I was still trying to figure out whether I was going to remove my assets from Lenny’s surveillance first thing Monday morning or wait until after tax season.
“His name is Jeff Feldmacher. Not Jewish,” in a whisper. “A retired ballplayer with the Orioles, but very smart. Would I fix you up with a dummy?”
“Are you fixing me up?”
“That’s the idea.” And the light dawned. Get me hitched and I would no longer lure certified public accountants into acts of wild sexual abandon.
“He’s very rich, an entrepreneur. I don’t know what business, but he does very well. Verrry well. Handsome. With hair. Also, he’s tall.”
“Yeah, I figured. How tall?”
“Six six, I think. So you’ll wear high heels and be up to his shoulder, which is nice. I’ll give him your number.” For which act of kindness, you are to keep your ass to yourself was the unspoken addendum. Sold.
My first fix-up in months and the guy had hair. Not bad. For a start.
***
“I can’t go through with this,” Fleur muttered. It was Sunday afternoon and she had spectacularly fallen off the diet wagon at Giuseppe’s Gelato, a tool of the devil conveniently located in the center of the Harbor Mall. Over a triple dip of pistachio, hazelnut, and stracciatella, she gazed at me balefully. “I mean, this putting your picture on the Internet—it runs counter to everything I was brought up to believe. Ladies do not compete for men. Ladies do not put themselves on display. Ladies do not divulge their personal history to people they haven’t even met. Their innermost needs and desires. Ladies—”
“Ladies went out with Bess Truman and white gloves,” I interrupted through my own satanic mouthful of rum raisin. “You cannot observe your grandmother’s niceties if you want to be successful with The Plan. We’re not talking hand-to-hand combat for the last man on earth. We’re talking tastefully admitting a select stratum of highly eligible men into the email version of your parlor.”
“They must have gone really heavy on the rum in your gelato.” Fleur scraped the bottom of her paper cup with her plastic spoon. “But what the hell, it’s worth an afternoon, right?”
Suddenly Kat appeared, shimmering like an angel in diaphanous gray silk and twinkling silver jewelry.
“Well, you’re early,” I greeted her cheerfully. “How did you know where to find us?”
“Just an educated guess,” she said, sinking into a plastic and chrome chair. “It was this or Sharper Image, and this involves calories.”
“Get yourself a gelato and we’ll talk about your date.”
“No gelato, thanks. I’m stuffed to the gills. Why was I so sure this guy was a vegetarian? There you go. Linear thinking. He is an artist, ergo he is a vegetarian. He had bacon and sausage with his cheese omelette.”
“My kind of man,” Fleur said. “Lee the Sculptor.”
“Please stop referring to him as Lee the Sculptor. You make him sound like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler or—”
“The date,” I prompted, licking my lips with anticipation. I was only dating vicariously these days.
“I told you this was not a date. It was just two people interested in art talking about it. Besides, he’s much too young for me.”
“An eleven-year difference. When you’re ninety-one, he’ll be eighty. No big deal.” I wasn’t going to allow Kat to lose steam over a mere chronological detail.
“Oh please,” Kat grabbed my spoon and swiped a mound of rum raisin. “This person wasn’t alive when Frida Kahlo died. We are lifetimes apart.”
“He’s probably dynamite in bed.”
“He probably wants kids. He’s never had kids.”
“Well, it’s not a biologic impossibility. There’s in vitro. Surrogate mothers. The science is rapidly advancing. Soon Medicare will be covering obstetrics.”
“Don’t be absurd, I am not having kids at my age. I did it when I was supposed to. I wouldn’t even consider a long-term relationship with a man young enough to be my son.”
“Only in West Virginia,” Fleur said.
“And I will probably not go out with him again if he asks me.”
All of us heard the probably, and two of us traded smiles.
“Okay,” Fleur said, raising her enormous bulk to standing. She was glo
rious in full height. Like the Titanic before the iceberg hit. “Enough of your problems, Kat. My turn to make an ass of myself. Who wants to watch?”
We all did.
The receptionist at GlamourGal Photo was maybe seventeen years old and what my sons would have called “hot” in a skimpy halter top that should only be worn over young, sprightly boobs, a belly-button ring visible because her jeans were slung to her slim hips, and four-inch platforms upon which she rocked with apparent boredom.
She and Fleur gave each other the once-over. Fleur said, “I have a two fifteen. Talbot. You’re going to make me beautiful, are you not?”
The receptionist answered seriously, “Gavin’s good. He’ll do the best he can.”
I watched Fleur’s shoulders sink.
Gavin worked with her for more than an hour. He draped her like a Greek goddess in a swathe of champagne-colored satin revealing just a hint of cleavage, he turned up her collar to slenderize her neck, he brought out the red feather boa which Fleur snaked around her shoulders like Mae West (“I’m molting here”). He posed her head-on, three-quarters “to bring out your angles,” and from the back with her head twisted around for a come-hither look.
He laid out the digital proofs for us to select from. “You look perfect. A little bit DAR, a little bit rock and roll. We’re going for seductive but not someone who looks as if she might eat her young.”
Fleur examined the proofs with a scowl. “I look like a water buffalo with this fat hanging under my neck.”
“Honey, forget your neck. With that smile, do you really think anyone will look at your neck?”
Right on, Gavin. He managed to elicit a tighter version of the dazzling smile Fleur produced for the camera. Fleur chose three poses and handed over her Visa card to the receptionist who said robotically, “I hope you have enjoyed your GlamourGal Photo session. Would you like to apply for our GG Discount card that entitles you to five years of studio sittings at 10 percent off?”
“No, I would not. I plan on becoming a nun in an order that prohibits photographs,” Fleur deadpanned.
“A nun,” the girl said breathily. “My great-aunt is a nun. That is so cool.”
Outside in the brighter lights of the mall, Fleur said, “I must have been crazy to think this was a good idea. There is no way in hell I’m going to put any one of those pictures on the Internet.”
“But you have to,” Kat said. “People want to see what they’re getting into. Would you buy a pig in a poke?”
I slid her a lacerating look. Kat is splendid with visual images, not quite as adroit with words.
“Then I’m not going on. Forget the Internet. Forget The Plan. Fuck The Plan.”
I’ve seen this sudden stalling out in patients before they’re wheeled into surgery. Second thoughts before undergoing the experience that might save their lives. “Fine, but if you don’t do the project, it will be the only thing being fucked. Think about it.”
“Think about this.” Fleur shot an elegant, well-bred middle finger at me.
The final word. For now.
Chapter 6
“Hello, Doc,” my father said to me at six o’clock that evening as I let myself into his tiny East Baltimore row house. He waved at me from the hollow of his chair, a behemoth of a brown corduroy La-Z-Boy that nearly swallowed him up.
I leaned over to kiss his forehead, and he reached out a bony hand to stroke my hair. Dark and small, he was the antithesis of your typical Scandinavian stereotype although he came from unadulterated Norwegian stock. He used to brag he never weighed more than 135 pounds in his life. For the last few years, he’d been tipping the scales at 115. He hadn’t cared for red meat when red meat was in favor, had no taste for sweets back then, and so, I thought, eyeing him sadly, he will live on forever, his heart ticking merrily, his brain slowly but inexorably disintegrating.
Sylvie was the latest in a succession of round-the-clock caretakers, Caribbean ladies of infinite patience who did the job that should have, by rights, and would have, in another era, fallen to me.
“He’s been very good today,” she reported, putting down her copy of the Caribbean Voice. “Not agitated at all. And he cleaned his plate for lunch. He does like that chicken I do.” She talked about him in front of him as if he weren’t there. I wanted to pretend he was, so we had discussed this, Sylvie and I, but to no avail. “It don’t matter I tell you,” Sylvie had insisted. “He don’t know. And if I have to take you in another room to tell you t’ings, you lose your time with him.”
“Dad,” I said, “it’s Gwyn.”
“I know who you are.”
“Who am I?” I challenged him to repeat it. Numbers were still remembered. Phone numbers. Bank balances. But names disappeared as they were uttered.
“You’re Doc,” he said.
“And who is this?” I pointed to Sylvie, hoping the new medication Dan found for him might have kicked in, kicked away some of the tangles.
“Ah, that’s my hon.”
All women, except for me, were “hon.” All men were “captain.”
He didn’t know us, but he did appreciate us. Some days he stood for hours in front of the wall my mother had decorated with family photographs, a documentary of our survival under her demented dictatorship. At least pinned to the wall, we were still and quiet which was all she’d ever asked of us. In spite of her, or because of Dad or who knows what interplay of forces, my brother and I grew up to stay out of jail and pay our taxes. Rolfe, who looked stunned until adolescence and then stoned in his portraits, managed to become a chemical engineer, marry Nadine, and father three kids. He moved to California decades ago and made it east to see Dad twice a year. My father’s maintenance fell to me. Fair enough. I’d sopped up most of his attention as a child.
While Rolfe stayed under my mother’s radar, I was the thorn in her side, the bee in her bonnet, the fly in her ointment. I looked like her which for some reason galled her, and from the time I was four I talked back to her in polysyllables she didn’t understand. She hammered away at me with everything she had.
I was eight when she went into Springfield State Hospital for the first time. Eleven when she made her first suicide attempt, by overdosing on Thorazine. The shrinks diagnosed schizoaffective disorder. There were short pre-hospitalization periods when she heard voices and spun delusions. But most of the time she was just dreadfully depressed and over-the-top angry. Principally with me who, in her muddled mind, was always out to get her. So of course I deserved every slap, every pinch, and in adolescence, the occasional slug.
Dad did what he could to protect me, and when the opportunity presented itself for my escape, he made sure I got out. Rolfe went to the University of Maryland for its low tuition. To pay my way at Barnard, Dad drove a cab at night in addition to his day job working a furnace at Bethlehem Steel. Three hours after I called home to report my acceptance to medical school, my mother took a bus downtown and leapt off the top of the Bromo-Seltzer tower.
Up and out of his chair, remarkably sprightly for an Alzheimeric eighty-two-year-old, my father shuffled over to stand beside me. He clasped my hand. We stared together at these pictures that took up so much space in his minuscule living room, and I realized they were as meaningless to me as they were to him.
“Who is this?” I pointed to my mother. Dan said to keep pushing him to remember. Every cell retrieved is a small victory.
“That,” my father said confidently, “is the USS Arizona. A grand battleship before they sunk her in Pearl Harbor. Terrible tragedy.”
Indeed. What a fabulous place, the human cerebellum.
“You know what?” I stroked his hair. “I’m in the mood for a Big Mac, how about you? A nice fish sandwich?” We did this nearly every Sunday, a treat for him. “McDonald’s. What do you say?”
“Oh, my. That’s a good one,” he laug
hed. “McDonald’s.” That name he remembered.
At dinner, he tore off pieces of the fish and cheese sandwich and fed himself while keeping a careful eye on his dessert, a fried apple pie. After my mother’s suicide, he’d developed a sweet tooth.
“Eat your fries,” he instructed me, briefly lucid. “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”
Not so crazy.
When I dropped him off, I reminded Sylvie to hide the phone so he couldn’t call me at five o’clock in the morning.
Then, feeling guilty since he asked so little of me, I changed my mind. “Let him call,” I told her. “I can always go back to sleep. It’s no big deal.”
She shrugged at me as if I were just another neurotic American white lady, which I am, and steered my father toward the La-Z-Boy. Two steps in, he shook her off and turned to me.
“Okay, Doc,” he tipped an imaginary hat. “Give my regards to Broadway.” A song he used to sing to me when I was nine or ten and couldn’t fall asleep because of some hissy fit my mother had thrown earlier in the evening. “And remember me to Herald Square.”
I had already kissed him good-bye when I handed him over and I was just going to wave from the door, but now I ran back and kissed him again on his soft, paper-dry cheek. For my reward, he returned the kiss, the first kiss from him in a long time. Then he patted my cheek, moved back a step, and surveyed me, his nearly colorless eyes sparking with some emotion. As if he were really seeing me.
Two years before, the American Association of Gynecological Oncologists had awarded me the Turnbull Prize for my work at the Women’s Free Clinic. A great honor.
This was better.
I arrived home to find a message on my answering machine. Harry Galligan, finally making good on his promise. He was at a conference in Topeka, but he didn’t want me to think he’d forgotten me. He hoped I was doing okay after my FRESH sharing.