by Toby Devens
“And that’s a fourteen-year difference. Which obviously didn’t bother any of the parties involved.”
“It’s not logical, I know. It’s not fair. Double standard. Sexist. Old men play. Old ladies lose. But that’s the way it is. So, I’m determined to have my fling, but with no expectations except to enjoy it while it lasts.” Kat turned her face towards the wall.
“Kat, for godssakes, you’re not in a nursing home.” I worked to swallow a lump in my throat. All this talk of age made me queasy. Until lately, I’d never in my life had a problem attracting men. Even after splitting with Stan, I’d managed five or six dates and not one of them mentioned my age. But last night, Jeff Feldmacher had been set to shtupp me figuring I would be grateful for this act of carnal charity and today Kat, who had always exhibited a radical’s disdain for the superficiality of physical appearance, was having the hair torn from her thighs to hold on to love. Maybe we were all in more trouble than I’d thought.
The Russian lady bent toward Fleur. “You have little mustache on upper lip. I could take care of in five minutes,” she said. “Is not your fault. Is not you are ape. Just shadow above lip. From not much hormones like when you were girl. I can zip off in four minutes.”
Fleur stared at her, then dropped back to whisper, “How do you say fuck you in Russian?”
“Kat,” I said, touching my friend’s cheek so she turned it to me, “if it’s Ethan you’re worried about, betraying him I mean, one of these days you’re going to need to let go.”
“Maybe we’re just friends, Lee and I. Soul mates. We have similar interests.”
“What happened to the fling? A minute ago you were flinging, now only your souls are mating?” Fleur had her hand on the doorknob, eyeing the Russian lady warily.
“Why is everyone pushing me to have sex with this man? If I want to I will, but when I’m ready and I’m not ready. Anyway, I have to lose ten pounds first. My stomach is disgustingly flabby. And I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to ask him to take an HIV test. These days, you’ve got to plan for these things.”
She was right, but she sounded so prim I thought I was hallucinating. Where was the braless beauty who used to write poetry about the joyous abandoned sex she played out in a sweet haze of marijuana on tie-dyed sheets? What happened to my rapturous flower child of yesterdecade? Turned conventional by time, it seemed.
More than flab, this made me sad.
Chapter 9
On Saturday night, with nothing better to do, I went online to check out Fleur as brighteyes on Lovingmatch.com, sweetstuff on Largeandluscious, and Xshiksa at Jewlove. Gavin at GlamourGal had worked his final computer magic on her photo and the result was a knockout Fleur with cut-glass cheekbones and the jawline of a twenty-year-old. To check out the competition, I browsed the ads of other females fifty to sixty. Everyone was peppy, chipper, trim, fit, emotionally strengthened by life’s adversities, and eager to start over. The courage of these women exhilarated me. Their numbers depressed me.
As I prowled among the lonely hearts, I was stopped by a banner headline offering a free two-month membership on the website Ivydate.com. My Barnard diploma qualified me. All I had to do was fill out a profile.
Not me.
Woman in search of man. Between fifty and death. I slugged in my preferences. Just for the hell of it, because it was this or actually watching Larry King, who droned on in the background.
HighIQutie. That’s the name I entered for my nom d’Internet. Then I wrote a profile in five minutes flat. Love Bach and Telemann, Italian art, Thai food. Looking for honest, trustworthy, cultured man who’s passionate about work and life. Accent—French, Italian, British, Southern—a bonus. Sense of humor/wit essential.
Then I scrambled through the boxes of photographs I’d promised for a decade to sort, and found one to use with my profile. My neighbor Jean Coogan had taken the picture a few weeks before The Treachery. The boys were gone all that July; Drew in Cape Cod as a counselor at an arts and crafts camp, Whit hiking through Bulgaria with a group of like-minded overindulged college kids. I thought I had it made. Everything stretched infinitely ahead. The beach, the ocean, the day, my appreciated life. I was at its sweet center, a pearl layering gorgeous time. Soon Jean would walk on to her own blanket and book and I would be left to the temporary isolation I loved, facing the sheet of linen afternoon hemmed by prospects of sunset with Stan, sipping pinot grigio, watching the sea, and listening to him talk about his day spent hunting down vintage wicker with Brad, the decorator. He failed to mention that he was getting buggered in the new eighteenth-century Italian provincial bed while I was focused on the waves. That detail would emerge in the divorce interrogatories.
The woman in the photo looked blissfully unaware. On the beach under a floppy straw hat, oversized Jackie Kennedy sunglasses hiding my eyes, nose pinked by the sun, I smiled with genuine pleasure at the expanse before me. I was displayed in high menopause with a body ten pounds heavier than before or after. And for all the patients I counseled who were in the same state, the intractable thickening of my waist had infuriated me. The bathing suit, navy with vertical white stripes, was my effort to slim at least what the world saw. I lost those defiant last ten pounds that fall in the melting off that for me always accompanies crisis.
Now I smiled at the photograph, admiring from a distance the feminine curves that frustrated me then. No one but my closest friends and family would recognize me in this photo. Perfect for a lark. I scanned it in. Pressed submit, reassured myself that nothing would ever come of this folly, and promptly—the way I misplaced the names of the new, unfunny crowd on Saturday Night Live now making background mayhem—forgot about it.
***
My father liked to sit on a bench in Patterson Park and watch...what? I wondered if what he saw was just a jumble of fragments, shards of shifting images without meaning but with some beauty. There must have been something out there striking some chord in there, because he sighed frequently and deeply on those outings, I hoped with pleasure. This Sunday, the sun was warm, the grass smelled of scallions, kids kicked up dust with their bicycle wheels and yipped on the bumps. Maybe something broke through.
He ate his ice cream cone like a child below the level of self-consciousness, with a wide flat tongue that I didn’t remember from his good days. Perhaps the small muscles were beginning to slacken. A slight tremor in his left hand plunged his thumb through the cone so the mint chocolate chip ice cream flooded through the hole and dripped down his shirt. I wiped his face with a napkin, dabbing at the green cream on his cheek. He grabbed my hand to stop my fussing, then turned it over, jerked it up, and planted on my palm an unexpected, sticky kiss.
“I need some money,” he said, as I delivered him back to Sylvie.
He said that nearly every week. He was obsessed with money, which is typical for Alzheimer’s patients. There is nothing in the literature about this, but much anecdotal material.
Sylvie had scolded me before. “You keep giving him all this money and then he hides it who knows where and it’s lost forever. Give him play money.”
So I’d stopped at Toys “R” Us and picked up a pack of kiddie cash for the inevitable demand and when he asked this time, I peeled off a fifty, three tens, and two fives, while Sylvie nodded approvingly at my side.
He looked down and scowled. “What are you trying to do to me here? This is fake money. It’s a joke, right?” Very coherent. A flight into lucidity. Then, crash. “I know what you’re up to, Helen. You’ve switched money on me. You’ve got my real money hidden somewhere, right? Piling up so you can run off on me.” Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Thirty years too late, he was telling my mother off. He shouted in my face, “You were born a bitch, you’ll die a bitch. May your soul be condemned to eternal damnation.” Without warning, he reared back and shoved me so hard I careened sideways into the beveled edge of
a china cabinet, which carved a short, deep slice below my eyebrow. Blood gushed. I snatched the crocheted doily off his chair back and pressed hard, but my father saw and recognized the red. His face collapsed. He bawled like an infant, gulping air to fuel his sobs.
“It’s all right, Daddy, it’s all right,” I kept repeating, trying to stanch the blood with one hand and reach out with the other. “Come on, Daddy, I’m fine. See?” I cupped his chin and tilted his head so he could see my forced smile. “It was an accident. I know you love me. You’d never hurt me on purpose.” But the only thing that comforted him was the sucking candy with a honey center Sylvie slipped into his mouth.
When he’d quieted down, she lowered him into the old chair and switched on the television. She talked in front of him, but he didn’t seem to hear. His attention was locked on the Game Show channel.
“I don’t know about this,” she said. “This is a new t’ing. The pushing and shoving. He never did do that before. Oh, I don’t like that. We’re in a new phase here. I tell you, I’m not one to put up with physical abuse. I didn’t let a husband do it; I’m not about to let an old man do it. I don’t like this phase. No indeed, don’t like it at all.”
I was going to London for the conference I’d hijacked from Bethany McGowan. I couldn’t leave my father without coverage and there was no time to find a suitable fill-in.
“I’m sure you can handle him, Sylvie. I’m sure this is an isolated incident. But just to let you know how much I appreciate the way you care for him. Wait...” I dug through the junk in my handbag, found my wallet, and placed a fifty-dollar bill in Sylvie’s palm, an obvious bribe. I was buying time. Sylvie eyed it suspiciously, then held up to the light. To make sure it wasn’t play money, I presumed.
On my way out, I checked my eye in the mirror. It would need a steri-strip to minimize the scar, but compared to the gouges my mother left me, it was a nick. When it healed, it would be hardly noticeable.
***
I must have sounded desperate when I called for an appointment because by Monday I was at Covenant Hospital’s Gerontology Department sitting across the desk from Dan Rosetti while my father tried to recite the alphabet for the psychologist in the next room.
“His shoving isn’t unusual,” Dan said. “Some of my gentlest patients lash out from time to time. We don’t know exactly why. It could be that this acting out marks a further decline. Which is a damn shame. Harald is a sweet guy.”
Dan Rosetti was also a sweet guy. His eyebrows knit with empathy when he gave me the news that wasn’t really news, and when he talked to my father, it was man to man, not doctor to patient, or worse, doctor to disease. My father adored him and always struggled to climb out of his illness when they conversed. He may have flunked the cognitive tests, but Dad could still manage formulaic small talk with Dan. The superficial patter is the last to go. Dan always seemed touched by the show and he would either ruffle what was left of my father’s hair or rub genial circles on his back as he listened. Geriatricians know that most of their patients don’t get enough physical contact, but Dan was more hands-on than is recommended for physicians in our currently litigious society. Fleur said that was the warm Mediterranean in him.
It was Fleur who’d suggested we see Dan when my father began showing signs of befuddlement. She liked the way he managed her mother’s osteoporosis. In a trick of fate, Fleur had inherited the big frame and the padding that upholstered it from her Grandmother Broussard. Mother Talbot, on the other hand, was a trim little number who’d never weighed more than a hundred pounds and, now that she had the bends, measured all of five feet. But if her bones were porous, her brain was dense with fully functional cells. “Daniel Rosetti may be Italian,” she’d told Fleur recently, “but he’s not like one of those crude gangsters on HBO saying that awful F-word all the time.”
“The old girl thinks he’s God and he’ll keep her alive forever,” Fleur said.
Now Dan scrawled the name of a new drug on his prescription pad and slid it over to me. “This might calm him down, but I can’t guarantee it won’t make him lethargic.”
“No, let’s just let it go. Next time I’ll remember to duck.”
“You all right, Gwyn?” he asked. “I know this can’t be easy. There are support groups you might find helpful. If you’re interested, I can give you a few phone numbers.”
No, no, not another FRESH, I thought. All I said is, “I think we’re okay for now.”
“If it’s any comfort, they’re onto some really promising leads in the research. One of these days there’s going to be a major breakthrough. Probably too late for Harald, but...” he shrugged and I filled in the blank, maybe in time for you. Otherwise, you too may wind up fingerpainting with your mashed potatoes and thinking Eisenhower is president.
Alzheimer’s. Worse than the F-word.
Chapter 10
A few days later, on a mockingly vibrant autumn afternoon, I said good-bye to one of my patients. Twenty-nine, mother of a toddler, lovely, accomplished, she’d come into the office with Stage 3 ovarian cancer and pleaded with me to buy her time.
Together we fought the crab for twenty months, a tug-of-war I thought I weighted for victory with chemotherapists and radiologists and experimental protocols. Wrong again.
With everything we know, with all our science and our technology, our data and our skills, clinical medicine can still be a crapshoot. The slip-on-the-banana-peel school of medicine teaches you not to take the credit for a save and not to hold yourself entirely responsible for a patient’s loss. Which doesn’t make it any easier to lose one.
I sat at her bedside and let my dying patient console me. “You did everything you could, Dr. Berke. I couldn’t have asked for a better doctor.”
She whispered this final benediction even as I was powerless to do anything more than increase her painkillers, wrap her glacially cold hands in my warm ones, and not turn away when my eyes filled.
Which is why I decided to fix myself a martini on a weeknight.
I came home early, changed into sweats, turned on the news, and headed for the vodka. I bent over the wet bar to pour myself two fat fingers of Smirnoff. Therefore, my back was turned when Bethany McGowan plunged the knife deep between my shoulder blades.
I heard the nasal voice first. It whirled me around, showering martini on my blouse. Oh, it was her, all right. In living color, the weaselly face magnified by the TV set. I must admit someone had done a creditable job with her makeup. And her shiny dark hair, which she usually wore sleek against her skull, had been fashionably tousled. From beneath the white lab coat peeked a pale blue spread-collar silk shirt. Expensive looking. If I were a woman concerned about precancerous uterine dysplasia, I’d think Bethany was a reliable resource. Except that every September for the past decade, I’d been the one facing the camera during National Pap Test Week. I’d been the gynecological talking head on WJZ-TV urging Baltimore’s women to get their cervixes swabbed.
But this year, the commemorative week had slipped my mind, and the health reporter hadn’t called me. Whom did she call? Not Bethany certainly. Potak? Bernstein? One of the seniors who passed the call to Bethany? The bastards. I fumed as Bethany explained the difference between regular and thin prep Pap smears and described cell changes in cervical cancer. You’d have thought oncology was her specialty when 90 percent of what she did was obstetrics. She knew from first trimester vomiting and last trimester hemorrhoids. She was a mommy-sitter and a baby-tugger, for godssakes.
By the time Bethany’s sermon gave way to coverage of a five-car pileup on I-70, I was punching numbers into my phone. Neither Potak nor Bernstein, alerted by caller ID, would pick up. Fine. I’d ambush them tomorrow before I’d had my caffeine. While I was still a madwoman.
At eight the next morning, Seymour Bernstein leaned back in his leather chair looking desperate to press a button that would project
him beyond my fury. “The truth is, they asked for Bethany. Well, not exactly for Bethany. But they wanted a younger face. Not my words, Gwyn.” An artificial smile exposed twenty thousand dollars’ worth of oversized dental implants. Since divorcing his comfortable high school sweetheart wife, he’d been dyeing his grayish hair a one-dimensional beaver color and worn a perpetual ersatz tan. Some members of our junior staff had spotted him dancing spastically at nightclubs around Fells Point, frantically hunting the younger gazelles.
“That’s ageism, grounds for a lawsuit,” I said, steaming.
“Against who? The station? Bullshit. It’s just demographics. They’re trying to capture the eighteen-to-thirty-four market, where the money is. The big spenders.”
“Mature doctors give off an aura of authority and confidence,” I persisted.
“I couldn’t agree with you more. But I don’t schedule for WJZ. They wanted young, but experienced. It was going to be Ken Dempsey, and he stutters, or Bethany. I thought she did pretty well. Photographs nicely and she has a calm, understated presence.”
That was a shot. As was his next volley. “And I thought it was a nice consolation prize after you pulled London out from under her. I got a mailing from IAGSO. I didn’t see your name on the faculty. Typo, I assume.”
The s.o.b. He’d probably called Don Iverson, who was in charge of the program for the Academy. And I’d neglected to cover my tracks.
“Well, you could have had the courtesy at least to tell me about Bethany’s appearance,” I countered, sounding as lame as I felt.
“And you’d have reamed me a new one and we’d have had to call a meeting and take a vote and God knows what while the reporter would be on the phone to Frank Lustig over at Union Memorial and we’d have lost the coverage. Sometimes it’s best to just get the job done and deal with the consequences later.”
He sighed and reached for his Palm Pilot, then turned mournful eyes on me. “Look, I’m sorry you’re fifty-four. Hell, I’m sorry I’m fifty-nine. But it’s the reality. We’ve got plenty of good work left in us, Gwyn. That’s not the issue. But they’re nipping at our heels, the young turks. So cede them a little space graciously. Do a little mentoring. Teach them the craft, not just the skills. You’re a good doctor; pass it on.”