My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet)

by Toby Devens

  “Which means he’s a good doctor, but doesn’t mean squat about him as a person.” He concentrated on buttering his roll. “Ah, pay no attention to me. If you think he’s Superman…”

  “I’m not saying he’s perfect. He’s got a hefty ego. All the powerhouses in science do. But there’s something vulnerable about him, too, that touches my heart. And I love the cleft in his chin.”

  “Your heart. His cleft.”

  The waitress dumped another dozen crabs on the table.

  I giggled and Harry emptied the rest of my beer into his own glass.

  “Hey, to each her own,” he said. “The man with the cleft is obviously what you think you need. So go for it. As long as you’re sure you’re finished processing Stan. Because your feelings for this Simon could just be a diversion if you’re trying to escape old pain.”

  “I’m past it,” I said. “All ready for new pain.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” He took a swig of his Sam Adams. “If it makes you feel any better, I knew what you and I had was just a friendship. Now I’m not saying that at the beginning I wasn’t hoping it would catch. You know, turn into something more. But I didn’t have to be a genius to notice you weren’t burning with desire for me. And, not to hurt your feelings, but I didn’t fall out of my shoes when we kissed either. Look, if you really like Simon, he must be a good man.”

  Over cheesecake he took on an earnest look. “This may sound like a cliché, but I hope we can continue being friends. We have a lot in common, and you’re easy to talk to. I know you’ve got your girlfriends, but you might want a man’s take on the new guy. And there might be a time when I need a woman’s perspective on another woman.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” No wonder my romantic revelation hadn’t sent him into paroxysms of grief. He had other irons in the fire.

  “In time, my girl, in time. Right now, all I have is wishful thinking. When I have more, you’ll be the first to know, believe me.”

  He laid his hand—big and hairy as a paw—on mine. “I wish you luck, you know that. I’m cheering for you. And for this Simon fellow, even if he is a bloody limey.”

  “I know you are, Harry,” I said, gazing into my mug, trying to read my future in the swirls of Coffeemate, and wondering if I’d just made a major mistake.

  Chapter 31

  Monday

  Back to work. The week after Thanksgiving is traditionally chaos—patients trying to jam in appointments before the holidays. One more “to do” entry checked off their pre-Christmas list. We were swamped.

  Our docs handled the punishing schedule in their own special styles. Seymour, his head buried in a chart, barged into anybody in the vicinity. Neil, a darter, snapped at the staff. Ken ran around with an open can of Diet Dr. Pepper sloshing in the pocket of his lab coat. Bethany...now that was an interesting study in how the aspiring mighty can fall. Vanished was the uppity preppy-peppy bounce, the in-your-face nuisance of a presence. In its place, a wisp of gray wool, an apparition, disappeared around corners or slunk hunchbacked, eyes on the floor like Inspector Clouseau sniffing for clues. Very mysterious.

  Maybe she was trying to get the goods on Seymour and Mindy, who had the look of thickly applied innocence, like Raphael cherubim, even as he nibbled kisses (Hershey’s out of a Precious Moments cup) at her desk. As I walked by, he boomed words like “organization” and “Xerox” which he probably jammed into the middle of sentences about how he liked to lick her ear.

  All right, my antennae may have been oversensitive due to Seymour’s escapade with Bethany, and his business with Mindy could have been all business. Still, in spite of our being rushed, on the first day back I spotted him parked at her desk three separate times, which is excessive. And if I saw him, Bethany saw him. You had to wonder what she thought. Felt. How nuts this made her. Even if it was all in her head.

  Apropos of nuts, Seymour had complained a few weeks before that the cleaning staff was moving papers on his desk. Then he found his beloved Jaguar XJ with a long, deep scratch along the driver’s side door. He was positive the scratch hadn’t been there when he parked in the garage that morning. Random or creepy? Accident or Bethany or one of his patients exacting retribution for a Seymour Bernstein ham-handed pelvic exam? Seymour is notorious for jamming his jumbo-sized fingers into narrow spaces with the finesse of King Kong romancing Fay Wray.

  Who knows what mayhem any of us is capable of when manhandled? The Harvard-educated, silver-spoon-fed Bethany. Me. Do my Turnbull Prize, my guest column in GynoToday, my painful absorption of the art of the fish fork and the Renaissance poets override the wild-assed genes of Helen Kohl Swanson? As I watched the Bethany-Seymour breakup drama unfold, I found myself wondering what atavistic gene might surface, what monstrous deeds I might stoop to if scorned.

  In the afternoon, a reporter from the Baltimore Sun, interviewing me about my upcoming appearance with Fortune, posed questions I could answer.

  ***

  Tuesday

  As it turned out, the Sun article was well written and the photographer really did know how to light cheekbones. I came off a Tahari-suited, Mikimoto-pearled monument to trust. My colleagues congratulated me and someone even tacked the clipping to the coffee room bulletin board where I was rereading it for the ninth time when my pager sounded an urgent signal.

  Seymour’s big hands had gotten him into a major jam this time. Generally, delivering babies doesn’t take much finesse. You learn the technique in medical school, but you could learn it as easily at the World Wrestling Federation. Just grab around the neck, fingers supporting the head, and pull. It’s not a particularly delicate business.

  C-sections take more skill, but after hundreds you get the hang of it. Once in a while, though, it can get tricky. You have to maneuver. And sometimes, it’s a tug of war between life and death.

  The call was from Seymour’s circulating nurse who said, “Mrs. Garland is trying to bleed to death in OR 1. We need some help stat,” and I took the stairs two at a time.

  Mrs. Garland had to be Sherry Garland, whom I met when I removed her mother’s cancerous uterus a few years back and who’d stopped, mid-waddle, to chat with me in the hall after her checkup with Seymour the day before. She had a husband and two other kids at home. Lots of people needed her.

  In my field, you get an occasional bleeder. I’ve never lost one, but I’ve had a few close calls. The worst was a decade before. Removing a pelvic mass from a patient with lymphoma, I found myself wading up to my wrists in blood. With some fancy finger work and thirty units of AB positive, we pulled her through. After that, the word spread that I was adept at snatching bleeders out of the maws of death and I started getting calls from surgeons lacking that peculiar talent.

  This time, I hit the OR trotting. Seymour, who never looked anything but overconfident, looked under. Above the mask, his eyes—showing too much white—widened even more for me. Beads of sweat popped on his forehead. This was a C-section. He’d lifted the baby safely out, but the mama refused to stop bleeding. The cause was placenta accreta in which the placenta grows into the uterine muscle. The procedure to separate took more delicacy than Seymour’s huge hands were capable of and now we had a fountain. He bobbed a bow as he backed out of the way and I plunged in. You don’t even think at this stage, it’s all reflex and heart, and you have it or you don’t.

  This is what I love. The combat. It doesn’t have to be mortal, just perilous. When the dragon breathes fire, you slay the dragon. The closer he gets, the steadier your nerve, the better the sword play.

  I knew the topography by heart, but Mrs. Garland’s internal landscape had been rendered murky and slippery by hemorrhage and for a split second, when the anesthesiologist calmly stated a tumbling blood pressure, I felt my heart lurch with the possibility of failure. I blocked it and focused on envisioning the internal iliac artery, the on
e that feeds the pelvis. I imagined precisely where it was and exactly how it felt and pushed myself to move swiftly but cautiously.

  Found. Then my trusty instruments and I manipulated and clamped and, twenty units of blood later, stemmed the great tide.

  After mama got shipped off to recovery, Seymour and I convened outside the OR to strip our scrubs. “That was a bastard of a bleeder. Thank you, Gwyneth.” He said respectfully, “You’re good.” Not still good, which would have earned him a curled lip. Just straight, unqualified good.

  We talked shop for a few minutes, which pumped color back to his face, and right before I sprinted to my own patient, he said, “That article in the Sun this morning? Great coverage. This Fortune thing could be a real publicity boon for us. Try to mention the name of the practice on the show. And see if they’ll flash our 800 number on the screen. I told Barbara to prepare the girls out front for an onslaught of phone calls. Between the TV show and the newspaper article, we’re going to be inundated. You know, in retrospect you were right about that Pap Test Week appearance on WJZ. You’re the pro. I never should have allowed Bethany to do it. She has no media presence.”

  No doubt she’d lost it when she lost her position under Seymour.

  “Actually, I thought she did a decent job,” I responded.

  Look, with my picture up on Fortune’s website and the Sun article, I could afford to be magnanimous. Also, I wasn’t inclined to let Seymour get away with gratuitous Bethany-bashing. You want to evict the woman’s toe from your crotch, fine. But there’s no need to kick her to the curb.

  “She seemed to have done her homework. She was articulate. Maybe she could have been more comfortable with the camera, but that takes time, practice.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Seymour agreed. “She needs experience. Give her a few years.”

  All in all, a very satisfying morning.

  ***

  Wednesday

  In the midst of feeding my acid reflux with a tuna sandwich eaten at top speed, I took an interesting phone call. From my old chum, Hollywood’s gynecologist to the stars, Davis Standish of the silver ponytail and deep pockets. I hadn’t seen Davis since the London IAGSO meeting when we’d spent a total of two minutes at the Tate Gallery reception bullshitting. Now, after the small talk, he sprung a surprise on me.

  “We put an ad in Annals to hire an OB and got bombarded. Everyone wants to live in L.A., right?”

  I didn’t say wrong, although I would have to be declared brain dead before I would consent to as much as my beating heart being shipped to Los Angeles.

  “Anyway, I’m reviewing CVs and I get stopped in my tracks by your office letterhead. I’m not allowed to ask and you’re not allowed to tell according to that ridiculous HHS rule, but screw ’em. What do you think of this ummm...Bethany McGowan?”

  “Bethany? Really?” I blurted. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the gray outfits accessorized with the matching cloud hanging over her head. But I’d thought she’d tough it out to see if the alleged Seymour/Mindy dalliance might explode so she could pick up Seymour’s pieces. You had to give the woman credit; she had too much self-respect to hang around.

  Listen to me, over the brim with sympathy when a few months ago the prospect of Bethany’s moving on would have filled me with glee. But what was to gloat about? It wasn’t as if she were contemplating leaving because I’d racked up a solid win for sweaty maturity over dewy youth. In the grand tradition of women of every age, she’d been trounced by love.

  Davis was saying, “Well, I get the feeling from the cover letter that this is very preliminary. My take is she’s scouting around, getting a sense of what’s out there. But I don’t want to miss an opportunity if she’s really good.”

  “She’s really good. Her patients love her. She’s a workhorse. And she has a first-class brain.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Harvard and Hopkins. Sweet CV. But what about her psychological makeup? Is she self-actualized?” Ah, the land of the fruits and the nuts and the people who treat them. “Is she a team player? I run a happy shop here. She’s not going to screw up my dynamic, right?”

  “Your dynamic is safe.” You, on the other hand, might not be. Bethany’s taste runs to older, libidinous men of influence. This I thought but did not say.

  “And she’s thinking of leaving because?”

  I chewed slowly, trying to come up with something plausible. “I can only guess that she’s fed up with Baltimore winters. That she wants a practice with a little more glamour. We’re kind of East Coast stodgy. And the two other partners are OBs. So there’s not much chance to shine here.”

  “Sounds reasonable.” Even better than plausible. “She’s smart, she’s young. The PC police will cuff me for this, but she’s attractive, right? I mean, she doesn’t have to have movie star looks, but Californians are really tuned into healthy. So she can’t be four hundred pounds or—”

  I cut him off because I was about to gag on my tuna salad. “She’s very presentable, Davis.”

  “Super. Listen, you might not want to share this call with her. The ad promised confidentiality.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “I really appreciate this, Gwyneth. Very generous of you. If she joins the practice, I’ll let her know how gracious you were.”

  “No need.”

  “Next time I get into Baltimore…”

  “Yeah, lunch,” I said. And after we hung up, I dropped the remains of mine into the wastebasket.

  ***

  Driving home that night, my cell phone rang. It was Fleur. “Are you sitting down?”

  “I’m driving. So, yes, I’m sitting down. Are you all right? Kat’s not having problems is she?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Everyone’s fine. Okay, slow down or I’m not responsible.”

  I was caught in traffic. There’s always construction around the Harbor to snag you at rush hour. “Consider me slowed. Now what’s this headline news?”

  “Oh, baby,” Fleur said. “Stop the presses. You remember we were talking about Dan’s wife’s picture on his desk?”

  “Yup.” Months ago. A sudden, ominous feeling made my stomach lurch.

  “He’s not married.” She paused, I guess to listen for the sound of metal crashing.

  I pulled myself together and called on all my acting skills. “Wow! Dan’s not married, huh? That is a surprise. I’m stunned.”

  “Me, too. Imagine, no wife. Well, there was a wife, of course. Melinda Pringle Rosetti, one of the Roland Park-Captiva Island-rolling-in-it Pringles. She died three years ago. Back before he started treating my mother. It was very quick. Some kind of stroke.” Here Fleur’s voice struck a somber note.

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Terrible. And my mother knew. The Pringles are in her crowd. She went to the funeral. Can you believe that osteoporotic little vixen never said a word all this time? I think she was worried if I found out Dan was single, I’d go after him myself and screw up her fantasy of waltzing off with him to Sicily or wherever.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “How did you find out?”

  “Not from my mother. Her friend Bettina, the retired nurse, usually schleps Mother to her doctor’s appointments, but Bettina’s down with the flu so I had the pleasure. Well, after Mother’s exam I got some one-on-one time in Dan’s office to discuss her condition. I just happened to comment on the photo, ask after his pretty wife, and boom, the bomb goes off. Widowed.”

  I felt myself withering under a sudden onslaught of hormonal heat. Literally in a flash, the implications of Fleur’s prying became sickeningly clear. Dan was going to think I told her about our encounter in his office the week before, about my turning him down for a date. He’d be mortified. No more than I was already. Good Lord, how was I going to face him?

  “I’m
giving him Connie’s number,” Fleur said.

  “What? No. I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I heard myself babbling. I unbuttoned as many buttons as I could get to on my coat. I was dripping.

  “It’s a brilliant idea. Look, I’d go for him myself, if I didn’t think my mother would commit daughtercide for screwing with her dream lover. Kat’s dealing with cancer, she doesn’t need any more excitement. Plus I haven’t given up on her and Lee yet. And you, my pretty, have the terminal hots for Simon York, and are therefore out of the running. But I refuse to let a man of Dan Rosetti’s caliber go to waste or get scooped up by some floozy like Jack’s Bambi.”

  I leaned on the horn. The colorblind idiot in front of me was sitting at a green light as if he’d rented the space, and I had a SUV growling behind me.

  “So we have Connie who’s Italian and fabulous and Dan who’s Italian and incredible. It’s beshert. Fated to be. I’ve already left a message on his machine,” Fleur said.

  Dan wasn’t the fix-up type, I told myself, struggling to shed my jacket while seatbelted. Fleur’s plans for him wouldn’t get off the ground, I decided, all the while wondering why I wasn’t rejoicing at the possibility of another happy couple. Because no one was good enough for the wonderful Dr. Rosetti, last of a dying breed. That’s why. Not even Constanza deCrespi, Fleur’s kick-ass aristocratic attorney.

  “Hold on,” she said, “I’ve got another call.”

  I peered into the Honda ahead. The driver was wearing a headset and gesticulating wildly. No sign he was about to move. Fucking cell phones. Making people crazy. I began to inch my way around him.

  Fleur was back. “Listen, that’s Dan on the other line. I’ve got to talk to him about Connie. Back to you later.”