My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet)

by Toby Devens

  “Here,” I said. “Ducky Franzblau. What kind of person is named Ducky?” I rescanned the paragraph, getting zapped by small shocks each time I hit a key phrase. “You were pasted to her,” I read. “You had stars in your eyes. You were an item. Jesus, Simon.”

  “We weren’t. It’s all rubbish. A gossip column. Made up whole cloth. No better than those supermarket tabloids. This woman is the head of my foundation. ”

  No comment. I used my doctor strategy. Just listened.

  “The photographer posed us, inching us together. I suppose I should have been more aware of the consequences but I didn’t think anyone would misinterpret what was a congenial gesture. And you can’t exactly tell your benefactor you don’t want to stand next to her.” He paused, then threw what he must have thought was his best punch. “What happened to the trust issues you were going to work on?”

  Not smart to get aggressive in the middle of a weak defense. Someday, if there was a someday, I’d trounce him in chess. “You want to talk trust? While I was out combing the streets for my father in twenty-degree weather, you were warming up to Ducky Franzblau. This was the meeting you left me for. So much for trust.”

  “Not true. There was a meeting on Saturday. The tea dance was Sunday. You’re not making sense here. This isn’t like you, Gwyneth. So over the top.” He sighed. “Look, this is no good over the phone. We have to see each other. Talk this through. You need to be in my arms where those doubts of yours will vanish, I promise.” I heard a frantic rustle of paper in the background. “This Friday you’re in Manhattan for that television program, right?”

  Right. The first of my two appearances with Fortune Simms.

  “I know I told you I have to be in California this weekend for an editorial board meeting.” Simon was listed on the masthead of one of our specialty’s most prestigious journals. “But I don’t leave for San Francisco until midday Friday—ah, here we go—December eleventh. So why not come in early and stay over Thursday. We can put your fears to rest.”

  “Thursday?” I took a long pause. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said, with a proper reluctant edge.

  “Wonderful.” He was instantly cheerier. “Sweetheart, we’ve something special here. Let’s give it every chance.”

  With that, I didn’t slam, but did hang up the phone.

  Then I wiped my sweaty palms on my lab coat and read the paragraph a third time. Slowly. For nuances. Chewing a nail. And considered all possibilities, like the scientist I was. My conclusion: if you microscopically examined the context, Simon’s comment could have just as easily been interpreted as the response of a grateful beneficiary to a donor’s largesse.

  Which made me feel a lot better. The problem was, if you’re bullshitting yourself, how do you know?

  ***

  At eight that evening a floral delivery arrived. Fleur spotted Luann, our concierge, signing for it and called up for me to come claim it.

  “Flowers. So exciting!” Luann crowed, beaming behind the lobby desk.

  “Ducky and Doc Sailing the Pond?” Fleur said. She’d read the Post item and for once hadn’t given me her uncensored opinion. So far. But she eyed the flowers suspiciously.

  I opened the card. “We’ll work this out. Together. With love.” I handed the card to Fleur. “You can’t tell me that’s not sweet.”

  She blew a Bronx cheer. We all stripped down the green and white paper.

  “Holy Casanova,” Fleur muttered as we stared at three dozen long-stemmed red roses. She gave a wolf whistle. “This must have cost him a pretty penny. I’m impressed. He pulled out all the stops for you. You’ve got to wonder, though. Is it love? Or is it guilt? Real or Memorex?”

  “Well,” Luann said, “I think your flowers are gorgeous. And your Englishman—the doctor?—is very distinguished. But I have to tell you, in my humble opinion, the one with the beard, that Mr. Galligan who used to come by? Now he’s a real charmer.”

  “My sentiments exactly. Harry Galligan. He da man,” Fleur managed to get out before I turned on my heel and headed for the elevator lugging my roses.

  Chapter 35

  Subj: Good Fortune

  Date: Sunday 12/6 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

  From: Fortune@FortuneSimms.net

  To: gsberke@md.com

  Dear Gwyneth,

  Time to energize for your Friday, December 11, appearance on Good Fortune! Our other guest will be Dr. Prasad Rao talking about taking stock of your relationships as an end-of-year exercise. A copy of his new book, Men Are Coconuts, Women Are Pomegranates, will be in your mailbox by Monday. I suggest you read it before your appearance. It will give you the courage and confidence to own your feelings and speak your mind.

  Tips to maximize your power this week:

  Be healthy: Avoid alcohol, eat well. Try a juice fast for 24 hours before the show to rid your body of toxins.

  Be brainy: Practice yoga, which increases blood to the brain and keeps your thinking cells shipshape.

  Be zippy: Rejuvenate your momentum with good sex.

  Be centered: Meditate to enrich your spirit. Bless each day with a promise to take charge of your life.

  Monday: Reap the rewards of being your highest self.

  Tuesday: Take pleasure from work and special talents.

  Wednesday: Give freely without expectation of return.

  Thursday: Love is negotiable. Bargain from the heart.

  Friday: Trust the lightbulb moment—the Great Aha!—when it all comes together in a flash.

  See you Friday in the Green Room for a final briefing.

  With love and joy,

  Fortune

  “A juice fast? Have sex? That woman is six feet four of high-quality chutzpa. What a control freak. Do you think she lets that husband of hers pee standing up?” Fleur read over my shoulder, shedding pork rind crumbs onto my computer.

  Kat appeared in the doorway holding a tray with steaming mugs of ginseng tea and a plate of fruit and cheese. “You can make fun of Fortune Simms, Fleur, but she’s supposedly studied Eastern philosophy at an ashram in Tibet. Personally, I think she has some interesting things to say. About not blaming yourself for life choices, but taking responsibility for them. And Gwyneth, it might be helpful to practice that attitude as you’re working out your problems with Simon this week.”

  Fleur swiped all of the Gouda, sniffed the tea, and waved it away. “Good luck.” She gave me a skeptical look. “I just don’t know about this guy. Maybe Simon York is brilliant with bacteria or cancer cells but the man tells you he stinks with more advanced life forms and you fall in love with him. I mean really, why don’t women believe men when they confess their faults? Why do we think we’re the one who will finally change him? Even after parades of women have gone down like ten-pins thinking the same thing.”

  “People can change,” Kat countered, eyes firing. “It sounds like he’s already done some work and is open to more. As for this Ducky person, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean, can we really trust the media to get the facts straight? Everything is so sensationalized these days. And say he did go a little overboard in buttering up his benefactor. It’s not helpful to blame him exclusively. Gwyn has to take some responsibility for not setting down ground rules for the relationship early on. Responsibility, not blame. Fortune says blame is a brick wall. Responsibility is an open window.”

  “And I am a door that will slam shut behind me if you don’t stop spouting this feel-good drivel. Honestly, Kat, you are so gullible. Fortune Simms is no philosopher. She’s a marketing machine. She’s zeroed in on every woman’s doubts and fears and she makes millions plastering them with these verbal Band-Aids that—”

  “Hush, Fleur,” Kat, ever polite, cut her off. “I’m not saying you have to sw
allow this woman’s philosophy whole cloth. But she didn’t get where she is without touching some universal chord. Why not just extract what you need from what she offers?”

  Why not indeed.

  ***

  “Love is negotiable.” Fortune’s Thursday quote had been lifted, I discovered, from Men Are Coconuts, etc., the 244-page jumble of pop psychology, Eastern mysticism, and off-the-wall horticulture I thumbed through on the train to New York.

  I figured if I was going to share Fortune’s guest couch with its author, Dr. Rao, the next day, I’d better bone up on his fruity theory. It might also give me some tips for my upcoming powwow with Simon.

  The gist of it was that men are coconuts—a simple organism, tough skinned, hairy on the outside, blandly pleasant within. Women are pomegranates—complicated, compartmentalized, in part unpalatable, and difficult to get to the heart of. But when you do, ah the rewards—the seeds of Nirvana, sweet, tart, and juicy. Coconut-men want relationships to be simple and uniformly sweet. When there are problems, hack them open, lay them out. Pomegranate-women pick, pick, pick, suck and spit, suck and spit, which drives the coconuts crazy. Dr. Rao’s book counseled women to achieve their relationship goals by coconut-negotiating: slicing to the heart of the problem and presenting the meat of their concerns quickly and directly.

  Elephant manure or brilliant strategy? We’d see when I had my talk with Simon. I was prepared to slice.

  He welcomed me with everything short of a brass band. The apartment was spick-and-span, as if the cleaning lady had left only minutes before. Playing softly in the background was a romantic rhapsody and Simon had actually lit a vanilla candle in the living room. Overkill, I thought. But still, a part of me was touched he’d gone to all the trouble.

  I accepted his kiss, though I didn’t give much back.

  “We have to talk,” I said, as soon as I took off my coat.

  “Of course, but there’s no need to rush. You’ve had a long train ride. Change into your nightclothes. I have tea and biscuits waiting. How about I bring a tray to the bedroom? I’ll give you a back rub, and you can unburden yourself.”

  “No back rub, no biscuits.”

  He looked so stricken I said, “Yes, to bedroom and tea.”

  There was lavender soap in the bathroom next to my towel and on my side of the bed a vase of roses, mixed red and white. “The florist told me red is for passion,” Simon announced, “and white for harmony,” this last uttered softly as if he were making a fervent wish.

  Denied. When I emerged from the bathroom, I found him leaning back on the pillows, eyes closed. He patted the blanket next to him.

  I knew if I got in, if I felt the warmth of that deliciously hairy coconut body against my skin, heard the English accent murmuring sweet everythings, I’d cave. So I stood my ground at the foot of the bed and talked. And he opened his eyes.

  I told him how disappointed I was that we had so little time together. That yes, we had tight schedules and yes, we lived in two different cities, but if this relationship were to continue, we’d have to do better. “If we’re going to make this work we need to invest more into it. Because relationships are built on time spent together and we spend hardly any.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” he protested. “Actually, we’ve seen each other a good deal since we met in September. This weekend was a disaster, admittedly. But let’s review. We missed two weeks because of your friend’s lumpectomy. Surely I can’t be held responsible for that. Then there was Budapest. Unavoidable. And the weekend I spent in Key West. On my calendar before you and I had even met.”

  He’d closed his eyes to count, I suppose, because he said, “We’ve seen each other a total of eight times over three months. Which is laudable, considering.”

  “Two or three were only hours long. Just for sex, it seemed.”

  His eyes snapped open. “That’s beneath you, Gwyneth. Nonetheless, you’ve won the larger point. So let’s make it better. Right now. Chop-chop.” He leapt out of bed, wrapped himself in a silk robe, and cleared a spot from the clutter on the round table parked next to his dresser. He pulled two chairs close.

  We took out our calendars. Mine was a state-of-the-art PDA handheld, which he viewed with distrust. Electronic gadgets weren’t Simon’s strong suit. His calendar was primitive, a little brown leather notebook, probably crammed with his physician-typical chicken scratchings.

  We penned, not penciled, in four meetings over the following six weeks. Two were only half days in Baltimore for Simon, one en route to Slovakia to treat the newly elected woman prime minister, the other a detour on his return from a Miami consult. But we had two full weekends on the docket, New Year’s Eve for me in Manhattan and in Baltimore at the end of the upcoming week after his presentation at the GRIA conference in D.C.

  I could live with that. For the time being. Long term, I wasn’t sure how long distance would hold up. But now wasn’t the time to fret about it. Dr. Rao’s book had a chapter on living in the moment; “the present is a gift,” he called it.

  “There,” Simon said, closing his calendar, “well done. Lots to look forward to. Now,” he gave me a twinkling smile, “any other complaints? This is the time, luv. Let’s get them all on the table and deal with them. No unfinished business to ruin our night.”

  “Well, there’s the matter of exclusivity.”

  “What?” His smile faded.

  In spite of the opening throb of a tension headache, I pressed on. “Exclusivity. It might be we came too far too fast. All I’m asking is that if you want to see other women, you let me know so I can play by the same rules.”

  He gave a mirthless laugh. “Rules? Other women? What are you talking about, Gwyneth?”

  I plunged on before I could censor myself. “Ducky, I mean Delores Franzblau. Come on, Simon, it was all there in black-and-white. Look, I don’t want to tie you down. If you’re having second thoughts, I’d understand.” Well, not really. But he didn’t need to know that.

  Simon enunciated very slowly, as if I had a learning disability. Or spoke only Azerbaijani. “This is all in your head, Gwyneth. As I told you, Ms. Franzblau is chair of a foundation that supports my work. She is an amiable woman with very deep pockets. That’s it. You have nothing to be jealous of. No one.” He swallowed hard. “Mind you, if you want to date other men, I’d never trap you against your will. But it’s not what I want. Is it what you want, Gwyneth?”

  “Actually, no,” I admitted.

  The weight in the room seemed to lift. He leaned forward and took my hand. “Then all this can be about is you’re afraid you’re not loved.” Which may have been partially true, but also let him off the hook. “Is that what it is? Because I can promise you, you are. Very much so. Come with me.” He rose, tugged me to my feet, and led me to the bed. He got in, then lifted the sheet so I could slide under and into his embrace. Which was warm, strong, and reassuring. His hands skimmed my skin to shivers. His fingers teased me with pleasure. “Let me prove it to you. There you go. Reassured? How’s that? And this?”

  I thought “this” was going to be an extension of “that”, which had to do with his lips on my… Surprise! He swung an arm over me, pulled out the drawer of the night table on his side, and extracted a small box.

  “For you,” he said. “From me.”

  I stared at a lovely gold and jade ring nestling in velvet.

  “A token of my affection. Here. Try it on. I guessed your size but, see, it fits perfectly. It was meant for you to look at whenever you need to feel close to me. I need to feel you close right now.”

  As I lay entwined in his arms, he murmured, “I’ve been thinking. A few years ago, I had an offer from Johns Hopkins to run a lab there. I turned it down. No reason at the time to make the move to Baltimore.” He caressed a breast. Nuzzled an ear. “But now I have a reason. Perhaps I’ll give the
m a call. See what’s currently open. Explore my options. How does that sound?” He cupped my chin in his hands. Gazed at me with expectant eyes.

  “I love you, Simon,” I said breathlessly.

  “I do you, darling.”

  Talk about foreplay!

  So just when everything seemed to be falling apart, everything came together. Including me, of course. Sandwiched between Simon’s murmuring, “You didn’t mean what you said about seeing other men,” and his assuming the dead pope position for a full eight hours of post-coital sleep, I achieved the Ultimate You Know times two. A first for me.

  Give the juicy pomegranate a great big hand.

  ***

  Next morning, he roused me with a kiss to start our two-hour honeymoon. He was in a jolly mood. I was probably certifiably insane: an undiagnosable mixture of euphoria, relief, excitement, and stage fright. With Simon’s perfectly chosen words, the calendar entries, the jade ring, and some incredible lovemaking, he’d vanquished all my worries.

  He cooked breakfast for me. Okay, only Kashi and soy milk, but he poured. He also handed over the editorial page of the New York Times, which doesn’t sound like a big deal but you have to think of it like a cat leaving a dead mouse at your feet. Not much of a gift at first glance but considered from the cat’s perspective, an offering of great value, enormous sacrifice, and what passes in the species for love.

  By ten, fully charged, he laid out my instructions before heading for the lab. He made me promise I’d be out of the apartment by noon, because the cleaning woman was coming in. He showed me fresh towels and demonstrated how to work his new showerhead. He reminded me twice to check that the door was locked behind me when I left. No key necessary, all I had to do was slam. He asked me so many times if I was sure I’d kept the roundtrip part of my train ticket that I was forced to pull it out of my wallet and let him read it just to get him off my back.

  Overnight case slung on shoulder, Burberry muffler tucked into coat, he left me with a peck on the cheek and a reminder that he was staying with me in Baltimore the upcoming Friday night after the GRIA conference in Washington. As if I’d forgotten. I wished him a safe flight to California and a productive editorial meeting and waved him off at the door.