by Toby Devens
This was Fortunespeak. Not my style, but, God knows, it worked for her.
“You’re a natural for television and you’ll be great on my show. No, wait, let me finish.” She cut off any possible protest. “Around the holiday season, we’re planning a series on making and keeping life-changing resolutions. And of course, at the top of the list is health. You’d cover the gynecological angle. I’m not sure of the format yet. My producers can work it out with you. You’ll be doing the women of America a great service.”
I envisioned Bethany McGowan wracked with envy, Seymour Bernstein incredulous and awed in that order.
I said, “Since you put it that way, how can I decline?”
“Wonderful.” She laid on the glorious Fortune smile. “We pay scale. But I’ll personally make a donation to that Baltimore clinic you manage.”
“That’s very kind of you. But we had to close the Clinic for lack of funding.”
“Really? Well, that’s a damn shame. How much would it take to reopen?”
“At least a half a million.” I hadn’t just tumbled off the turnip truck. Fortune Simms’s pockets were unfathomably deep.
Before I could get on with my pitch, my fellow panel member Peggy McGrory wiggled her way into our duet. She carried a copy of Good Times, Good Fortune, Fortune’s guidebook through the perils of middle age. The books were stacked near the bar, gifts to the Forum officers and the panel.
Peggy offered up her copy as if it were an animal sacrifice. I peered over as Fortune signed it, Dear Peggy McGrory: You are in charge of your life. Fortune Simms. You’d have thought that Peggy, a full professor at Yale, winner of a National Book Award, and a former member of the U.S. Olympic Women’s Luge Team, might have drawn that conclusion for herself. But no, she read the inscription with the same reverence she would have accorded the Dead Sea Scrolls and simpered her thank-yous as she backed away, nearly bowing.
I handed over my book. It was intended as a gift for Sylvie so there wasn’t going to be a “Take Charge of Your Life” inscription, which might prematurely launch her out of my father’s cockeyed universe in East Baltimore.
We did a little negotiating and ended up with To Sylvie, a caring woman. Thank you for being there, which Sylvie could read as being in front of the old RCA every day watching Fortune or being there for me and my dad, keeping him out of a nursing home.
“Then we’ll see you in December.” Fortune handed my business card off to the man in the headset.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I answered.
***
That evening, still wound up, still full of myself, I called to check on my father. After going nowhere with our standard opening mishmash, I said, “Today I met someone you see on TV every day, Daddy. Fortune Simms. You know Fortune Simms. The tall African American lady on channel 11. ‘Take charge of your life.’” Who knew which memory was sharp enough to break through the Alzheimer’s membrane?
“Who is this?” he said, his agitation mounting.
Sylvie commandeered the phone. “He’s okay?” I asked.
“Mr. Harald needs to drink more water. But he shoves the glass away.”
“Give him tea and orange juice. Sylvie, I met Fortune Simms today. I had her autograph her book just for you.”
“Is that right?” Unenthusiastic.
I barreled on. “She wants me to be on her show next year.”
“We don’t watch it anymore. Too much talk of health problems. We’ve got enough of health problems around here. Why do I need to hear about how my bones are going to crumble when I’m old and gray? We watch Maury Povich. Now that’s an interesting show. Today was about girls who fell in love with their stepbrothers.”
Which helped put everything back in perspective.
Chapter 21
Sunday morning, as I got ready for breakfast with Simon, my hands, always steady in surgery, jiggled applying makeup, skidding my eyeliner on a landscape of fine wrinkles.
I still hadn’t decided whether to let Hank Fischman smooth out my eyelids and lift my brows. A couple of hours in his surgi-center and I’d have twenty-year-old eyelids in a fifty-four-year-old face. Ah, the hell with it. I smudged the kohl and told myself smudged was the latest style and that Simon, a cerebral man, wouldn’t care anyway. He’d be focused on what I said and not on how I looked. He’d be interested in my endothelium, the lower cells where the real work takes place, not my epithelium, the topcoat that is vanity, all vanity.
I pacified myself with this thought while smoothing on a shimmer of lip gloss. The label claimed to “add the plumpness of youth to thinning lips and prevent the lipstick feathering that arrives with age.” Arrives with age. As if there were a party. As if anyone would invite it.
At a quarter of ten, the hotel phone rang. Simon said, “Am I too early? I caught an earlier train,” sounding a bit nervous. Which I found sweetly disarming.
Emerging from the elevator, I spotted him rocking on his heels, biting his lip.
“Simon?”
He laid eyes on me and broke out a smile. I’d been wrong about the cerebral. He measured me like any man, took my hand, and backed me off to get the whole picture. “You’re worth the trip. You really are worth traveling to bloody Philadelphia. I’m starved. Are you hungry? Let’s get some breakfast.”
He wore a V-neck sweater that appeared to be cashmere and carried a camel-hair jacket and tweed cap, its Harrods label visible. His shirt glowed a genteel blue above pleated chinos. His feet were shod in obviously Italian loafers fashioned from the hide of unborn piglet. Disgustingly beautiful. The shoes. He was just knock-out handsome.
We talked about safe things at first. My survey. His research. I’d steered the seating so he was positioned on my left, my better profile, and between bites of scrambled egg I remembered to keep my head high, which hoisted up the neck slack. The Marriott had considerately bathed the room in warm, peach light.
“I really do think you’re on the right track with your study. With proper care, you should turn out a respectable piece of work.” I reeled from the backhanded compliment, but he was smiling impishly. “Now, let’s talk about what really matters. I think people are more important than ideas, don’t you?”
We presented our lives. I censored my history, transforming my mother into an eccentric who died of unstated causes when I was twenty-one. Nor did my divorce suffer from a burden of detail. Something about a divergence of paths. We were all very civilized. If not for us, then for the sake of our twin sons, the brilliant Whit, the artistic Drew. Simon seemed satisfied with this vague bio, as washed in flattering light as the dining room. I spouted these white lies with only the most fleeting discomfort. He didn’t ask a single question.
And then he floored me with his honesty.
His marriage had been complicated. It had produced a son, a teenager now, with “issues.” The divorce hadn’t been pleasant. Then again, few are. Cynara, the ex, was a decent woman, but, according to Simon, “had never really grown up. She’s forty-six going on sixteen.”
My first thought was: forty-six. Eight years younger than I. Argh. Bad start. Second was forty-six going on sixteen sounded like a nifty trick to me.
I sipped my coffee, trying to look sympathetic.
“The truth is I was less than the perfect husband and father. Far too involved with my work. And so in the last few years Cynara found someone who would give her the attention she craved.”
“‘Cynara. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion,’” I quoted the poem I’d learned in high school, not unaware of the irony of the line, and saw his eyes light. He chimed in so we chanted together, “‘And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea hungry for the lips of my desire.’”
The hovering busboy stopped fiddling with our water glasses and looked at us, first at Simon, then at me. Had he hea
rd the walloping beat of someone’s heart?
Simon covered my hand with his. “My word, you are a find,” he murmured. Then his eyes clouded. “You need to know something, Gwyneth. And this may all seem very premature to you, but best lay it all out in the open at the outset is what I believe, so you’ll know what you’re dealing with.”
“I see,” I said. Of course I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine what dark secret Simon York was about to confess. Was he practicing gynecology without a license? Fudging research data? Sniffing reagent chemicals under the fume hood? Cross-dressing in a mere PhD’s lab coat?
I waited, breath trapped in my lungs.
“Well, the truth is, I’m not all that successful at my personal relationships,” he said, and my breath came whooshing out. That was it? He was confessing that he was as fucked up as 90 percent of the dating world? I couldn’t help it, I laughed. And then I protested.
“Really, Simon,” I said. “I can’t believe—”
He laid his finger against my lips to shush me. “No, I want you to hear the unvarnished truth straight away. The fact of the matter is I’m just not very skilled at the human give-and-take. For which I take full responsibility, but it’s also true that I didn’t have many positive role models. My father died when I was six, in another woman’s arms, my mother made sure to tell me. She wasn’t much of a mother either. Packed me off to boarding school right after Papa’s funeral. So I never had any training in that area.” He shoveled a forkful of scrambled eggs, never taking his eyes off me, as if he had more to say. So I took a bite of toast.
“My record on that score is not something I’m proud of.” As he wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin, he looked genuinely pained. Then he brightened. “Still, I’m not a bad chap, really. And I’m working on it. Learning how to develop caring relationships. I’ve been reading all the latest self-help books you Americans are so good at writing. I’m taken by the quickness of the process, the efficiency. And I really do want to do better. I know I can do better if I just find the right person to do it for. With.”
That dumped us into an uneasy silence for a minute filled by piano music as a tuxedoed man played Cole Porter circa 1935 behind us.
Fortunately, before too long the waiter arrived with Simon’s tea. A pot of it. With a plate of lemon slices. Which broke the mood.
“Lemon, oh, no, no. Milk, please,” he sent him off briskly. To me, back in his cheery mode: “I never understood this American penchant for lemon with tea. Don’t you find it barbaric?”
“I drink iced tea with lemon,” I said. It was a patriotic statement.
“Iced tea is an abomination. But let’s not squabble.” His eyes twinkled. “We have so little time. In fact,” he glanced at his watch, “it looks like I’m going to have to be on my way if you’re to get to your session. But we’ll do this again very soon, won’t we? See each other. Do you want that, Gwyneth?” He creased his forehead as if the answer were in doubt.
“Yes,” I said. Well, croaked more than said.
In the lobby, he swung his jacket over his left shoulder and with a single, well-executed yank surrounded me with his arms, his scent. He kissed me. A strong yet tender kiss. I was too astonished to put any muscle behind my return. “I’ll be in touch,” he murmured.
“Good,” I said, with just the right touch of confidence. And the warmth I felt climbing from chest to cheeks as he sent me a chipper last wave from the backseat of his cab, I decided wasn’t a hot flash. Not this time. It was a happy, youthful glow.
***
He called the next morning at six, Haydn in the background, the rustle of papers in the foreground. “And how is Gwyneth this morning?”
“Too early to tell,” I ventured, which elicited a chuckle, but registered.
“Apologies. But this is really the best time for me to call. I do all my clinical work in the morning, just stack up the surgeries. That way I can be in the lab by noon. So I need to get an early start. And once I swing into action, I get so busy, it’s difficult to extricate myself.”
“I didn’t mean...” thinking, Great, you’ve torpedoed him before he’s even set sail. But no.
“I’ve got a miserable day ahead so I figured I’d give myself a shot of sunshine before tackling it,” he said as we both heard the distant beep that signals callus interruptus. “Whoops,” Simon said. “That’s mine I think. Probably my nurse. Got to go.”
“Yes, of course. Me too.”
***
Simon liked to keep in touch. He called mostly in the morning before he went off to the hospital. But sometimes at bedtime, just to say he was exhausted and couldn’t talk much but wanted to hear my voice. I looked forward to those calls. We laughed, shared bits about ourselves. Occasionally, he made suggestions. A book I might like to read, a CD I should own. He was into geopolitics and chamber music. “What’s that playing in the background?” he asked one night during the first week.
“Dinah Washington.”
“Is she one of those rock and rollers?”
I saved that one for Whit, my jazz aficionado. He got a kick out of it.
We made a date, Simon and I, not for the coming weekend, but for the following. He laid out the plans. He’d fly to Baltimore and stay at the Harbor Place Hotel within walking distance of Waterview. “I’ll try to get away for two full days. We’ll have fun,” he assured me. “I wish it could be sooner. We’re busy people, you and I. But now that we’ve found each other, we need to find time for each other. Don’t you agree, Gwyneth?”
Before I could answer, he got beeped for another call.
***
The entire week turned out…well, interesting, as I’d taught my sons to say when faced with Grandmother Berke’s cooking. Life is a stew—sometimes it’s palatable, sometimes it triggers the gag reflex.
Midweek, my father had a flight into health and we managed a two-minute rational conversation about my brother Rolfe rarely coming to see him. Nothing new. Although I was the main target for my mother’s temper, from the time he was around three, my kid brother developed skills to duck the family drama. He’d burrow in a closet or dive under a bed, preferring even darkness and dust bunnies to the white hot fury of Mama on a rampage.
These days Rolfe visited for Easter and once in the summer, which was all his wife would allow. Nadine and Rolfe had known each other since fifth grade, so she’d been exposed to the Swanson family soap opera in prime time. I didn’t blame Nadine for wanting Rolfe to keep his distance from his crazy clan.
“So it all falls on you,” my father said. “It’s not fair that you carry all the burden.”
“You’re no burden.” I kissed his paper dry cheek.
“I know what I am. Sometimes I don’t know who I am, but I know what I am.” Which made both of us laugh, but my father brushed away tears and I swallowed mine.
On the Stan front, boyfriend Brad asked to borrow a cut crystal punch bowl he had Stan cede to me in the settlement. I wasn’t only gracious during the conversation with a man I detested, I arranged to leave the bowl for him at the lobby desk with a recipe for Stan’s favorite champagne punch.
I returned Seymour Bernstein’s curt hello with a cheery one and complimented Bethany on her picking up an early stage ovarian cancer from some vague symptomatology. I asked after my patients’ families and made sure the speculum was warm. I tiptoed through each universe trying to be a better person, more loving, forgiving, understanding, in hopes that God or nature or whatever wielded the power over my fate would continue to smile down on me. A lot of this was Simon-inspired, of course. And I hadn’t even slept with him.
“You’re putting me on,” Fleur accused, after I caught her up. “All that hearts and flowers phone porno but no real sex?”
“Good God, when? Between the eggs and the scones? We only had breakfast.”
“You wer
e in a hotel. Okay, the restaurant. But you had a room. Was the elevator broken?”
“It was a first date, Fleur. And not even a real date,” I protested.
“Oh, please. Should I sing a few choruses of ‘Havah Nagilah’ to remind you of a recent toss in the hay?”
“This is different.”
“This has the potential to be serious, right?”
“Could be.”
“Which means Harry Galligan is definitely out of the picture?”
She surprised me by remembering his last name.
“I’m not sure. Maybe. No.”
Which might not have been fair to Harry given my initial attraction to Simon, but it was early in the game and I wasn’t quite ready to count the Irishman out. My brain told me he was a better match for me than the Englishman and I was pushing for my brain to take over from my heart or my gizzard or whatever was driving this initial rush of feeling for Simon York.
Chapter 22
Thursday afternoon, Neil Potak popped into my office. Which alarmed me even before he opened his mouth because this particular partner, unlike the gregarious Seymour Bernstein, wasn’t big on socializing. Neil’s last pop-in had been the year before to tell me something had exploded in the autoclave in Examining Room Four.
“Any news on funding for the Clinic?” he asked now, gazing through my window where thunderclouds crowded the sky over the Inner Harbor.
I’d heard from the last prospect on my list. I said, “The Pearlmutter Family Foundation isn’t funding startup projects. I’m still digging, but there’s not much out there I haven’t approached. Still,” I tried to catch his eye, “I’m telling myself the pressure’s off a little with UltaMed buying Covenant. Maybe they’ll pitch in and get those patients on board.”
Neil examined his very clean fingernails. “Listen,” he said. “This is just a rumor so far, but I just got a call from a friend of mine at Covenant. The buzz over there is UltaMed is closing down the hospital. Giving it six months. They’ve called a staff meeting for,” he checked his watch, “about now.”