by Toby Devens
But that was just a down payment. He knew he still owed me.
My father woke up drooling. He rubbed his sleeve over his mouth and said, “Hiya, Doc.” I was Doc again, thank God. It was almost too good to be true, so Doc examined him.
I squatted down to his level and motioned to Stan. “Do you know who this is?”
My father squinted. Then his colorless eyes filled. “That’s the Captain. That’s my Stan the Man, the best damn son-in-law on God’s green earth.”
Stan teared up. Me too.
“Well, this is a gift from God. Let’s pray that it lasts,” Blossom murmured, breaking the spell.
“Be grateful for the moment,” Stan said, and I wondered at this recently revealed tenderness. It had not been a hallmark of his personality during our marriage. Maybe it came out of the closet when he did.
I didn’t love him anymore, but his presence always reminded me that I once did. So when he said, “If you haven’t had lunch yet, I’ll treat. There’s a place in Canton with great burgers,” I backed off.
“I thought you only do chicken and fish.”
“I can slip in a burger. Brad’s out of town. At a spatula show or something.” He smiled sheepishly. Brad ate no meat. Please, did I really want to go there?
“I’m overbooked at the office. Sorry.” I was aiming for pleasant.
“Some other time.” He reached out, then thought better of it. He didn’t dare touch me. “Enjoy London,” he said. “Sylvie told me you’ll be gone nearly a week.”
And didn’t Sylvie have a big mouth. I must have winced because he added, “No really, have a good time. I told her if they need anything I’m a phone call away.”
“Mr. Stan’s number is on the refrigerator,” Blossom said.
“Well, thanks,” I surrendered. I could be gracious too.
***
That night, arriving home late from the office, I found a message on my answering machine: “Gwyn, this is Harry Galligan. From FRESH. What happened to you yesterday? You missed the FRESH picnic.” Hadn’t known there was one. “And we missed you. Hope you’re doing okay and we’ll see you again soon. Take care.”
Before I could plan the repartee or lose my courage, I pressed redial. It was only nine thirty but Harry must have gone to bed early because his voice sounded just roused. He seemed pleased to hear from me and we caught up on the picnic. He told me he’d been traveling a lot, though not to glamorous places. I told him I was leaving for London in the morning for a week. And he said, “Ah, well that’s a shame. For me, not you,” he immediately corrected himself. “Because I was thinking you might want to do dinner this Saturday night.”
My rotten luck.
“I would have liked that.” And decided, why not? “How about next Saturday?”
Harry’s voice inched up a happy notch. “That works for me. I’ll phone you the day before. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Outside of FRESH, I mean.”
After I hung up, I crashed. That call to Harry topped twelve hellish hours at the office. I’d gulped down Dannon’s on the run between examining rooms and my father. Now I discovered in addition to being exhausted, I was starved. The hell with it, I called Domino’s. If indigestion kept me up all night, I could sleep on the plane.
When my house phone beeped, I switched on the closed circuit Waterview TV channel. It was a condo rule to visually confirm the identity of visitors before buzzing them in. “Yo, Domino’s,” the delivery man shouted into the wall mike. He had a thermal pizza box balanced on one hand. Legit. And behind him hovered an apparition that looked sickeningly familiar. Fuzzy in black and white, but unmistakable. The new patent-leather hair, the three-piece suit with the remnants of a gut hanging over the belt, the jacket slung over one arm, and the vest unbuttoned—no one else on the planet made that particular fashion statement. Jack Bloomberg. Visiting Fleur, of course.
He slipped in behind the Domino’s guy, so it was too late to call her. And what would I have said, anyway? And who’d crowned me queen of advice for the lovelorn? It wasn’t as if my romantic life was going to win the Dr. Phil Award for Fully Functional.
Still, for the first time in a long time, it had promise.
Funny though, tonight I’d gotten no thrill from Harry’s voice. No kick. What I did get was a nice gentle feeling from a nice gentle man. Why did that disappoint me? Wasn’t that just what I needed? Nice?
Chapter 14
The first time I flew to Europe, I was twenty-four years old. I had a few weeks off between medical school graduation and the July kickoff of my Hopkins internship and Stan charged my tickets to his parents’ credit card so I could join him in London. They never squawked about that. He was an indulged only son and there was no denying him anything, including a trip around the world when he finished grad school, and me, of whom his family didn’t entirely approve given my shady background.
I flew a Pan Am red-eye, leaving at six from Baltimore and arriving in London around nine the next morning. People used to dress for flying before air transportation became so proletarian that today it’s like hopping a winged Trailways.
For this exalted occasion, I wore linen pants with a Villager madras shirt and Bass Weejuns, the preppy traveling costume Debutante Barbie would have worn for a transatlantic flight. While the rest of America’s twenty-four-year-olds dressed in torn jeans and scruffy sandals in honor of the Third World, I was doing a hand-over-hand up the ladder and yearned with all my being to pass as top rung.
At sunrise, the captain roused us to announce we were approaching the coast of Ireland. I craned to see that it really was emerald green in the first light and wept at the thought of how far I’d run from Streeper Street and at the miraculous turn my life had taken. Back then, I believed in miracles more than I believed in myself. Hammering my way through a miserable childhood, holding on through a worse adolescence, and all the while getting the grades so I could get out, I didn’t catch on to the cause and effect. All I knew was that somehow I had Stan, I was going to be a doctor, and all my options were open and all of them were good.
As we made our initial approach, I looked down and realized my linen slacks were a wrinkled mess. There was no way I was going to let Stan Berke see me less than perfect. I managed to haul down my carry-on from the overhead rack and quickly change in the tiny bathroom. When I presented myself to an open-armed Stan at Heathrow, it was in a fresh wraparound chino skirt. So many years ago. So many attitudes ago.
***
This trip I traveled business class on British Air, the ticket paid for by the practice, and slept through the flight. Heathrow Airport was a madhouse, as usual. The lines at passport control for British citizens were worse than those for non-Brits. A group returning from Disneyland was noisily cranky and a crowd of pensioners back from holiday in Ibiza made for mass confusion.
So when my line moved faster than expected, I was caught off guard and had to rummage for my passport which turned my handbag into a volcano spewing pens, Tums, business cards, Lifesavers, a comb, and my passport case onto the floor.
“You’ve done it now,” the voice behind me murmured. “Made a dreadful mess, haven’t you? Allow me.”
What I felt next is what the French call a coup de foudre. A lightning strike to the heart. An immediate cardiac shock that doesn’t involve the brain at all. In fact, standing there in the few seconds it took for the yet unseen person behind me to scoop up my scattered stuff, I felt lightheaded, as if my brain had drained from my cranium. We’re not necessarily talking love here. Nothing that arduous. In my case, it was more like walking smack into a force field. Or maybe mainlining high-grade heroin.
It’s not a rare syndrome, this coup de foudre. Dear Abby gets letters about it all the time. “It was World War II, I was a soldier on leave at a USO dance, and this beautiful girl was standing at the edge of the floor...” Songwrit
ers put it to music: “I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do, and then my heart stood still.”
Mind you, this reaction was produced by hearing the gentleman say all of twelve words in what I would have wagered a week’s salary was a London—probably Mayfair or at least Knightsbridge—accent. I know my accents and this one was top of the line.
Had I ever been hit with anything like this before? Not with Stan, the only man I ever thought I loved. The fact is I hadn’t even liked Stan when I first met him. I went out with him to fill in on a double date. Not my type at all. Too pleasant. Too accommodating. It was only after I finally saw him through my mother’s eyes and knew she would have despised him and all he stood for—the background, the promise, especially his desire for me—that I could love him.
Now I turned to smile my thank you and faced a perfect match to the voice. The man was elegantly handsome with steel-gray hair and a Cary Grant chin cleft deep enough to sink a putt into. He had very even, very white teeth and a smile so jolly it deserved a laugh behind it. Straight nose. Intelligent eyes the gray of Beluga caviar. Tall and solid looking. Neatly packaged in a blue and white striped shirt and khaki trousers. At his feet lay his suitcase. Over one shoulder was slung a black leather laptop case. Over the other, a carryall imprinted with the letters IAGSO followed by Vienna and the dates of the previous year’s meeting. UK and U.S. passports tucked into its outer pocket proclaimed his dual citizenship. When he saw my glance rest on them, he said, “Today, Uncle Sam’s line was shorter. Wasn’t that a stroke of luck? Well, now I think we have all your treasures.”
Both his hands were full of my retrieved things. These he presented to me one by one like a cashier counting change, laying on a dazzling smile throughout the transaction. “And finally your passport. You need to keep a better eye on that. They won’t let you in without it, you know. And it would be a shame to miss England in September. It’s a very pretty time of year. We only get rain every other day in September.”
“Very kind of you,” I said, clutching my passport.
He said, “Not at all.”
I glanced at his left hand and noted no wedding band, looked up, and caught him staring at my left hand. We both laughed.
I was juggling two bags so I couldn’t manage a handshake, but I worked the dimples inherited from my mother, not that she’d ever used them. “Gwyneth Berke,” I said, pausing to let the name sink in. “You’re attending the IAGSO meeting?”
He seemed surprised. “Yes,” he said and waited a beat too long to introduce himself, because the passport control officer raised his voice impatiently, “Next. Next, please. Shall we keep the queue moving, please?” The woman behind my anonymous Englishman glared. I shrugged hopelessly and scurried.
But all is not lost, I thought, because he has to be behind me and if I walk slowly enough, after his passport is duly stamped there is only one hall out and he will catch up to me and finish the introduction.
“Madame, do not tarry please. This is a security area. We ask that you step briskly.” A uniformed airport officer waved me along.
And then, suddenly, my Englishman was next to me and past me, whizzing by without even a glance in my direction, but headfirst, like a bull, charging three men who were waiting just beyond the security gate, one waving, the other two nodding genially. The waving man I recognized. Harris Jance, MD, PhD, inventor of the famous Jance scissors that slice through tissue like butter, and president emeritus of IAGSO. A Scotsman of grand years and grander repute. The two men with him were middle-aged, Asian, both bow-tied and blazered, the standard successful-doc uniform that crosses all borders.
“Simon, good to see you,” Jance said as I traversed the cement floor parallel to them, moving as if the air were liquid and I was verrrry slowly swimming through it. “You know bleh-bleh”—couldn’t make it out—“Tashiki, of course.”
“Yes, yes,” Simon said, bowing over the handshake. “So kind of you to come.”
“But I don’t think you know bleh-bleh Phan. Bleh-bleh Phan, Simon York.”
“A pleasure, sir,” Phan said. “I read your paper on bleh-bleh-bleh...”
Simon York.
Ahh. Simon York.
So that was my cavalier. The famous, infamous Simon York of New York’s Kerns-Brubaker Medical Institute which, along with Sloan-Kettering, was one of New York’s crown jewel cancer centers. I’d seen Simon York before, but only from a distance. On the podium. Across the vast plains of a meeting room. A first-rate surgeon, he was also a biochemist who’d studied under Nobel laureate Georgi Popovich years before Popovich copped the Nobel Prize for medicine. Contender for the Lasker Award for achievement in medical research a decade ago, edged out by a colleague of mine at Hopkins, the ophthalmologist Al Sommer, York was supposed to be brilliant, but ferocious to work with. Charming but difficult in the clinches. He was so out of my league, it took my breath away.
Ah well, it had been a lovely moment. It was nice to know my hormones still had the power to frazzle me. I tucked away the coup experience like a lace handkerchief, reassured to know it was around but something I didn’t have much use for anymore.
***
As it turned out, I attended the two sessions in which Simon York was participating. I’d checked them off the preliminary program back in Baltimore. He was doing some amazing science that I thought might eventually benefit my patients.
I had a question, but after the first session, before I could approach him, the panel disbursed and he vanished.
I did run into an old friend, Davis Standish, who’d practiced in Baltimore before moving to Southern California. Davis is what Fleur would call a player. He had his hands (and, some of my colleagues implied, another skillful appendage) up some very famous snatches. With his wife languishing at home with MS, he was the perfect extra man to escort his movie star patients to premieres and charity events. I’d kept up with him in the magazines as he grew older, richer, and more recognizable with his silver hair pulled back into a ponytail and his gymed-up muscles straining the sleeves of his tuxedo. I’d always liked Davis. I gave him credit for bucking the old guard and living his life with gusto, but the pompous academicians who made up the golden inner circle in IAGSO shunned him.
Still, he was a very good surgeon and he came to all the meetings to keep current. We greeted each other warmly once a year. Today, I got a Euro-Hollywood kiss on both cheeks. The mild flirtation we’d cultured but did not act upon went back to serving on the same Med Chi committee in Maryland in the eighties. We used to lunch occasionally to discuss committee business, nothing more.
“You look wonderful, Gwyn.” He backed up. “And it’s not plastic either. It has to be good genes.”
You should only know—I thought of my mother, the nutcase, and my father with Alzheimer’s. But he was right, the skin genes were pretty good.
We chatted about old times and at the end I said in farewell, “I think I’d better get going. I’m heading for Simon York’s paper two floors up.”
“Ah, Simon. A few years ago I sent him a patient with a nasty papillary serous carcinoma that, frankly, I had no experience dealing with. I thought she was a goner, but he pulled her through and as a thank you gift she planted two million in his lab. There’s no doubt the guy’s brilliant and obviously he can turn on the charm.”
Oh yes, I thought, remembering our encounter at Heathrow.
I sat in the third row for Simon’s presentation and allowed myself to be thoroughly impressed. Good work, well presented, and you could hear the buzz from the audience when he finished.
By the time I got to the front of the room, the crowd around him was large and I paced its fringes. Simon spotted me while talking to Marv Feller from Liverpool. Our eyes caught. His narrowed, then sparkled with recognition. He kept talking but he never lowered his stare and suddenly he smiled right at me. When Marv backed off, a G
erman woman I remembered from other meetings pushed forward. Big, blonde, and insistent, she must have seen that Simon was distracted, lifted one hammy arm, and placed her hand on his shoulder to get his attention. This made him smile wider, and he actually shrugged at me as if to say he was helpless to escape. I shrugged back and moved away from the crowd.
So much for our brief encounter of the third kind. So much for Simon York.
***
“I can’t believe you’re taking estrogen. You must have a death wish.” Alicia Griffith, MD, FRCP, gestured menacingly with her fork. “You’ve read the recent findings. Might as well take cyanide.”
I sipped the last of my coffee as I defended myself. “I tried going off last year and by the end of the third week I was lighting up like Times Square. And I’m lethargic without it. Even on the lowest dose, I’m getting hot flashes, but at least they’re manageable. Please don’t dish up the Boston study about adverse effects. We all know the literature flip-flops every three days.”
Fedora Croscetti, the youngest of our group at forty-seven, shook her tousle of dark curls and clicked her tongue at me.
For the past two decades, five of us colleagues and friends have held an annual reunion at the IAGSO meeting. We communicate the rest of the year by email, trading professional opinions and personal chitchat. That night, we were up to dessert at Wordsworth, a tony nouveau Brit restaurant designed to counter all the stereotypical trashing of English cooking. Isabelle Rousseau leaned over to trade me some treacle tart for a dollop of my toffee pudding. “Don’t be so hard on poor Gwyneth,” she said in her charming French accent. “I couldn’t live without my little estrogen pill. I take it unopposed, without the progesterone which gives me a mustache and acne. I know, I know, I’m risking uterine cancer. This is why I get cleaned out every summer with a D and C. It’s worth it. Without estrogen le vagin is so dry.” She flicked a glance at me.