My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet)

by Toby Devens

  At first, the audience response was a shocked silence. Then a flurry of whispers spun through the hall.

  Clutching the microphone, Claire swung to face the crowd. “I’m aware that what I’m doing here breaks precedent. But I also know you’re men and women of science to whom the truth is sacred. And for the sake of truth, it’s imperative that you see what I’m about to show you.” I fidgeted, worried that Bitti’s arrangement with the AV guy got botched somehow and Claire’s PowerPoint wasn’t ready to roll. I clenched my teeth as I saw her thumb press the remote. Relaxed when on the screen behind her, under the letterhead of the Kerns-Brubaker lab, the smoking gun appeared huge and impressive. She turned to read aloud:

  Claire,

  I’m sorry I raised my voice to you yesterday. But I cannot seem to impress upon you strongly enough that your insistence on pursuing experiments regarding the CA-gene test is misguided to say the least. There is no promise of success here. Therefore, I see no value in continuing this line of inquiry.

  Consider this an official notice that this project is cancelled as of today. Let’s get together Monday to discuss in person the best use of your considerable talents.

  Simon

  Claire gave that a moment to sink in, then addressed Simon. “Do you deny writing that memo, Dr. York?”

  The room quieted to the absolute stillness of suspended breath.

  Unaccountably, Simon’s eyes rested on me. Pleading. As if I could save him. I gave him a thin smile and a shrug. He shook his head in lamentation.

  “That is my memo,” he acknowledged softly. Then louder, “Yes, yes, of course. I wrote the memo.” He was vamping, buying time. “But,” he held up a finger whose tremor was obvious even from where I stood, “it was written in the early stage of the project and we had further discussions that reversed my earlier opinion.”

  Claire was bouncing on her toes as if she could barely restrain herself from vaulting to the stage to throttle the speaker. Nice and easy, Claire, I soothed. You’ve got him by the short hairs. Don’t blow your cool.

  I mentally willed her to remember Fleur and Kat’s instructions about staying on message. They’d relentlessly coached her almost up to the moment we left them downstairs in the hotel bar where they were waiting for us, nursing a merlot and an orange juice, to celebrate or pick up the pieces when this was over.

  Claire did them proud. “That’s not true, Dr. York. The truth is you reversed your opinion only after I came to you with the data that proved my theory. Only after,” she came down hard on after, “I worked on the project for months without your knowledge or approval. Only after,” she jabbed her own finger at him, “I brought to you incontrovertible proof that the experiments had been successful beyond even my expectation. That’s when you said I’d done it. Proved you wrong. You told me you were happy to have been proven wrong. That I’d grabbed the brass ring. ‘Job splendidly done,’ were your exact words.” Claire’s voice fell to a whisper. “I cherished those words.”

  It seemed to me the entire room squirmed.

  “Do you recall that conversation, Dr. York?”

  “Claire,” he began, as if he’d forgotten where he was, that he wasn’t next to her in bed. At the far end of the stage, Angela Barola’s head snapped up. “Dr. McKenna,” he amended. “This is absurd. Ridiculous. You had my support, my cooperation, my input every step of the way.”

  “That’s a damned lie and I have my lab notebook to back me up.” Cheeky lass, our Dr. McKenna. She flashed the next slide displaying pages from her notebook dated weeks after his memo. Then another slide with more pages from months later. I knew everyone in the audience was scanning for Simon’s signatures against the dated entries, looking for any scribble indicating he, as supervisor, had been aware of, involved in her work. Nothing.

  “As removed from this as you were, you know I didn’t have a problem sharing the credit with you.” Claire was playing to the crowd. “I observe the rules. But you were my mentor. I trusted you. You never even told me you were giving this paper today. Your betrayal is a breach of…”

  For a moment, I thought she’d choked. But, no, someone had pulled the plug on her microphone. This set off a skirmish near the outlet that sent me sprinting toward the fray. Then I saw the tug-of-war had been won by Carolyn Dean, a pal of mine from the Hopkins lab, a woman built like Fleur but with more muscle, who held up the electrical cord in triumph before jamming the plug into the socket. Back at the mike, I managed to catch her eye and send her a thank-you smile. She gave me a knowing look along with a thumbs up, then assumed a belligerent spread-legged, hands-on-hips position at the outlet to let potential miscreants know she was standing guard against further sabotage.

  “Shame!” From the center of the audience, a white-haired man rose to shout, and I thought for a moment we’d won over the old bowties. But he was railing against Claire. He was shaky on his feet and his voice quivered with outrage. “We must not allow this session to descend into anarchy. I insist that the moderator put a halt to this disgraceful display and Dr. York be allowed to continue.”

  No one told Angela Barola what to do. She noted the outburst with a frown, then flapped one hand to calm the rustle that followed. “Quiet, quiet,” she said. “Come to order, please. Everybody settle down.” In the back of the room, a Good Samaritan had commandeered the light switch and flicked the house lights on and off for quiet.

  So this was the crossroads. Now everything depended on Angela, whose activism for justice was equaled only by her veneration for science. In our case, the cause was just, but the methods were extreme. She could go either way. I stroked the Latrobe public speaking medal I’d worn for luck. My neck under the chain was moist with flop sweat. I said a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, who protected against shipwrecks. The Good Samaritan flicked light, darkness, light, darkness.

  When the room hushed, Angela said, “I agree with my esteemed colleague that Dr. McKenna’s challenge to Dr. York in an open session is highly unorthodox, but my feeling is that airing of differences is healthy for the scientific community. I say we proceed and hear both sides of the issue.”

  Against a chorus of protests, she turned to an old ally. Bitti was known for calm under fire. “Professor Karnikova, you have the floor.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Barola,” Bitti’s husky, accented voice cut through the melee. “I ask us all not to lose sight of the big picture. If what my colleagues,” she nodded toward Simon, then Claire, “have indicated is true, this work is of overwhelming importance. So let us return to it.”

  Someone called out, “Hear, hear.” There was a scattering of applause.

  “One question, Dr. York,” Bitti threw her fast ball. “I’m not sure I understand the data on your third slide.” And, well-rehearsed by Claire, she rattled off a question that involved specific genetic germline mutations. Greek to me. Evidentially Swahili to Simon.

  He stared at her. I’d never seen that brilliant face look dim before, its light reduced to a flicker. “If you give me a minute to find that reference,” he muttered as he desperately wheeled through his PowerPoint.

  “Of course,” she said. She waited politely, fingering her jade ring while Simon fumbled fruitlessly through the notes on his slides and the murmur of the crowd rose. Finally, he looked up wide-eyed.

  Now, Bitti, before we lose control, I begged her silently.

  Maybe she heard me because, God love her, she pronounced with just the right note of solemnity, “In the interest of time, we must move on. Dr. McKenna, perhaps you can enlighten us?” The audience hushed. Claire clicked her PowerPoint and pulled a slide to the screen.

  “Here you can see that I used a denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis for the BRCA1,” she began and then hit them with slide after slide—data recited from memory, details of her methodology, analyses of her findings. Not everything, but enough to show them she knew th
is project as only its creator could. Yay, Claire, I cheered as she finished to a respectable round of applause.

  “Another question.” That was my voice, strong, unwavering, from the middle aisle. Leaning into the mike, I announced, “Gwyneth Swanson Berke. Johns Hopkins Hospital.” An affiliation that went back thirty years to my residency, but who was counting. Hopkins scored major points with this crowd.

  A sea of curious faces turned to me. I could feel my carotid pulse throb. The beat was irregular but not life threatening.

  “This woman isn’t even a GRIA member,” Simon grumbled from the stage.

  I nailed him with my eyes. Ah, my love, that it had to come to this, I thought. But you forced my hand, all our hands, with your arrogance, your hubris. Welcome to payback time. Which felt damned good. And at that moment, I realized that underneath it all—the education, the MD, the beach house, and the cashmere—I was an East Baltimore girl after all. Street smart, street tough, and, for the first time in my life, proud of it.

  “I’m registered,” I countered with exquisite calm. I’d paid my conference fee online that morning. “I have every right to be here. This is an open session.”

  “An open circus,” Simon croaked.

  “Dr. Berke is a respected gynecologic oncologist with a specialty in ovarian malignancies,” Bitti said.

  Angela Barola rolled her eyes. “Continue, Dr. Berke,” she commanded over Simon’s breath hyperventilating into his microphone.

  “Dr. York…” I launched into a question based on new data Claire hadn’t shared with him, material so complex, so esoteric that I knew if I stopped mid sentence, I would never find my way back. So I barreled through. And for my reward was treated to what we had come here for—Bitti, Claire, and I—the utter and complete demolition of Simon York, research scientist and first-rate scumbullion, before a jury of his peers. From coup de foudre to coup de gras in three months. That had to have set a new record.

  Simon didn’t wait for me to finish. He was already making tracks as I wound down. Face apoplectically crimson, hands flying, he snatched his notes from the podium, grabbed his briefcase from the side of the stage, and took off. Claire was blocking his path up the right aisle. Bitti owned the left. I suppose he thought I was the least menacing of his tormentors. He headed dead center, directly toward me.

  As he approached, ignoring the astonished, muttering crowd on both sides, he drilled me with a look of such profound loathing that I knew it was meant to stagger me. Not this time, darling. I stood my ground. Didn’t flinch. Glowered back, and before he could circle around me, pulled off my jade ring and held it out to him.

  “I believe this is yours,” I said sweetly.

  “Bitch,” he spat, loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. Someone booed.

  “Better a bitch than a lying dog,” I responded, and watched his right hand jerk reflexively and draw back, palm flattened. I could feel the heat of his desire to make contact. But in the end, he clenched a fist, swallowed hard, and pushed past me.

  An ancient doc seated on the aisle blared, “Nasty business. Well, York can say good-bye to his Nobel. He’s a tainted man.”

  I was sure Simon heard it. Hell, it was loud enough to be heard in Stockholm. But he continued his furious march to the exit as two hundred people strained to follow him with their eyes. After the door slammed, they tugged their gaze back to the living the way mourners do at a funeral when the coffin lid has been lowered.

  “Now,” Angela Barola said in a tone that would brook no dissent, “would you like to proceed with your presentation, Dr. McKenna?”

  Claire razzle-dazzled them.

  Chapter 41

  She was still presiding over a rousing Q and A when I decided I’d had enough of arcane biochemistry for one day and slipped from the Colonial Room to report the news of Simon’s rout to Fleur and Kat. Claire and I—Bitti was chairing a panel at the next session—were supposed to join them in the Clay-Madison bar, but as I crossed the lobby I spotted them at the far end, Kat stretched out on a plush sofa, Fleur seated in the club chair across from her.

  Fleur raised a hand in weary greeting. “Kat wasn’t feeling so hot. So I figured maybe we ought to find someplace she could put her feet up.”

  Oh, shit. I’d warned Kat. I’d practically begged her not to come with us that morning. At 9:30 she was under a linear accelerator getting bombarded with x-ray beams and only an hour later we picked her up at the hospital for the drive to D.C. Then two hours sitting in a bar drinking orange juice and picking at a veggie burger. What were we thinking? As a doctor, as a friend, I should have vetoed her insistence on coming with us. If anything happened to her, I’d kill Simon York. Such was my reasoning.

  Kat opened her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said. “Fleur’s such a wuss. All that talk about her ancestors braving stormy seas in sixteen-o-whatever. She would have been tossed overboard around the Cape of Good Hope for pussyness under fire.”

  “You had chest pain,” Fleur snapped.

  Kat sat up. “Breast pain. I had breast pain. Which the radiologist said to maybe expect. Some shooting pains that a few Advil took care of. That and I was tired. Fatigue is a common side effect of daily radiation; tell her, Gwynnie. She wanted to call 911. Jellyfish. All I needed was a little power nap. Shortwave sleep is very refreshing. I’m totally rejuvenated.” She swung an arm and snagged my sleeve. “Now tell us what happened in there.”

  “All I want to know is Claire got hers and Simon got his, right?” Fleur asked.

  “Is the Archbishop of Canterbury Anglican?” I said.

  “Let me pee first,” Kat rustled to her feet, “and then I want to hear it down to the most minute detail. Boxers or briefs?”

  “Boxers, the last time I looked,” I said with a half smile, aware I’d never be privy to such info firsthand again. “Simon wears Ralph Lauren fitted boxers, black.”

  “The fact that you know the brand says it was a sick relationship,” Fleur muttered. “I am so glad you’re out of it.”

  Twenty minutes later, the story in all its glorious gory detail had been told and we were helping Kat into her coat when Claire emerged from the elevator speaking earnestly to a young man with a press tag pinned to his pocket. She spotted us at the same moment we saw her and her eyes lit up. She whispered something to the man and raised a signal for us to wait.

  Then she strode over, very self-contained and professional until the last few feet when she broke into a samba and, fingers snapping, sang sotto voice, “Wediditwediditwedidit!” There were hugs all around and she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the bar, but I kept getting waylaid by attagirls and horrible Simon stories and job offers. What an afternoon. Thanks to you all. Did you tell them about it, Gwyn? You look a little washed out, Kat. Sit. Let’s all sit. You okay?”

  “She’s fine. We’re dandy,” Fleur said briskly. “Enough of the polite chitchat. Gwyn’s already told us about how fabulous the three of you were back there. Congratulations. That’s out of the way. Now we want to hear the horrible Simon stories. Unless you have to get back to your new boyfriend.”

  “He’ll wait. His name is Steve Something from the conference newspaper. Can you imagine, the project and I,” she tried to look modest and failed miserably, “are going to be the lead article in tomorrow’s issue. Which is delivered to the hotel room of every attendee.”

  “Simon’s going to pass out when he gets his copy.” I savored the image of him reading about Claire’s triumph, our triumph, over his room service coffee.

  “Don’t I wish. But apparently he’s not waiting around to read it. I understand he’s checked out. One of my well-wishers saw him getting into a cab with his weekender bag and his computer case.”

  “Now that’s kind of sad,” sensitive Kat said. Then in the same sweet tone she added, “But fuck him. He deserves it.”


  We all broke up.

  “Come on, tell us the stories about the bad, bad man,” Fleur prompted.

  “Well,” Claire leaned into our circle and said in her most intimate voice, which, it occurred to me with an ouch, was probably also her pillow-talk voice with Simon, “this one woman told me that York ruined the career of her friend, a microbiologist from Atlanta. Bumped her from a paper they were writing together. His board hushed it up, but the poor girl tried to kill herself.”

  “He’s pond scum,” Fleur said.

  “In another case, he attempted to horn in on a patent where he didn’t belong. Which reminds me,” she dug around in her handbag and produced a business card, “a biologist from Sloan-Kettering gave me that. His brother-in-law’s a patent attorney. Oh God, I almost forgot the best news. One of the docs on the editorial board of Ovary Today stopped to tell me they’re definitely rejecting Simon’s paper and they invited me to submit mine.”

  “So this means he slinks back to London with his tail between his legs?” Kat asked. “I have visions of him working in a fish and chips shop, getting all greasy.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “He’ll still have his clinical work. He’s a cash cow for Kerns-Brubaker and he’ll keep raking in the bucks for his high-end surgeries. And I doubt they’ll pull the lab from under him, though they’ll be watching him more closely, right, Claire? In a couple of years, if he comes up with something big, he could be back on top. But I don’t think he’ll ever get his Lasker Award, not with this smear on his reputation. And no Lasker, no Nobel. Or highly unlikely. So we did some damage.”

  “And don’t forget, you put a major crimp in his willy,” Fleur said. “You know that he’s going to think twice before lining up his next harem.”