by Toby Devens
At five past twelve, my bedside phone woke me. The lighted ID spelled out only an area code and a location, New York City. Simon, I figured, sozzled on too much Glenfiddich at some black-tie party, calling to tell me off. Or—you never knew with Simon—to declare undying love. I am proud to report that not even for a moment did I consider lifting that phone from its caddy, although I did spend the next three hours churning the bedclothes and cursing his cheating soul.
The next morning I listened to the midnight message on my answering machine. It had been Claire calling from her apartment. She was wine giddy, dateless, fine with that, and just wanted to wish us all better times. The first joke of the New Year was on me.
Chapter 43
The following Thursday at ten past six, I broke from the freezing, nose-numbing cold into the warm, wine-scented air of the Bentley-Zindell Gallery to join the chattering crowd gathered for the opening of Kat’s show. I planned to be at the reception no more than forty minutes so I could train to New York, hit the hotel around eleven, and be fresh for my New Year’s appearance on Good Fortune! the next day.
I grabbed a drink, scanned the gallery for a familiar face, and found Kat circulating among her guests, taking compliments with her signature skeptical smile. She’d tweezed her eyebrows for the occasion and they curved like the tops of question marks when she said, “Really?” in response to everyone telling her variations on, “Wonderful. Seminal. So vital. We just love your work.”
“So glad you could come,” she repeated again and again, extending her hand from under the heathery cashmere cape she’d woven for her fiftieth birthday and wore on special occasions. Fleur and I had treated her to the wool as a birthday gift.
“She looks gorgeous. It was worth every penny,” Fleur said, sidling up, drink in hand.
When she spotted us, Kat pulled us into her caped embrace like Wonder Woman. “I love you both. I’m so glad you’re here. Can you believe the size of this crowd? We pulled it off.” She floated off, a cumulus cloud of silvery purple, to greet the art columnist for the Washington Post.
Kat and the gallery guys had conspired to schedule her opening reception to coincide with First Thursday in Baltimore, a monthly tradition for the galleries along Charles Street, the main downtown drag. They stay open late, offer wine and cheese, and the cognoscenti drift from exhibit to exhibit. I’d been there when Joel, Gallery Guy A, told her, “We’ll invite them for five thirty, get everyone in first while they’re still hungry and sober, wow them with your magnificent fiber art, and rake in the moolah. We’re not underpricing this time, Kat. Your work is to drool over.”
In fact, Fleur stopped to salivate in front of a huge tapestry titled The Healing Earth, which she renamed, “German chocolate cake. No really. See the nibbles at the edge and the coconut flakes on the top? You can almost taste it.”
“You’ve been on that diet too long,” I said.
“Not long enough. I’ve got six months and fifty pounds to go and then maintenance.”
“But you can see the difference now. It’s really noticeable.”
“I still want to get rid of my second chin. Please note that the third one has vanished.” She lifted the elegant Talbot profile to show me, squinted, and said, “Oh my stars and whiskers, look who just rolled in. Do you see what I see? Well, somebody swallowed a watermelon.”
Summer, in a navy maternity jumper and plaid headband, waved at us from across the room, but made no move in our direction. “Let her come to us,” Fleur sniffed, shooing the air with the most insincere flutter in the history of hellos. “Let her pay her respects. She can kiss my ahh...ring. Anyway, I want to see her walk with that Graf Zeppelin attached to her front. She’s only what, four months in and she’s huge. Is she giving birth to Koko the gorilla?”
“She’s carrying all belly, which isn’t unusual for a first baby.”
“Ladies,” a familiar voice crept over my right shoulder and I turned into the cologne-drenched microenvironment of my ex-husband.
Now this is tough to confess because it reveals my bitter almond of a soul in the post-Treachery months, but I used to dream of Stan looking the way he looked at Kat’s opening.
He was the picture of Dorian Gray out of the closet, every wrinkle revealed, with an insomniac’s gray pallor and pouches under the eyes, sagging chin, scrawny neck, leftover gobbler skin draped in folds above his cable sweater. He’d lost so much weight that his scalp slumped forward and you could see—I knew Fleur was staring at—an artificially straight stretch of coastline plugged with tufts of wiry transplanted hair. Which he dyed. Which I knew because they were black at the tips, white at the roots, and fading in between.
“You look spectacular,” he gushed to Fleur.
“You too,” she managed. “Absolutely amazing.”
“You’ve lost weight.”
“You too.”
“Yup. Diet?”
“Atkins. You?”
“Not diet,” he said.
Fleur shifted her uneasy glance into long distance. “Well, what do you know? Isn’t that Summer at the buffet? And no Tim. The little mother is all by herself and I’m sure she doesn’t have a clue how to talk to these artsy fartsy types. I think I’ll just mosey on over and find out whether she’s still throwing up these days. Better yet, I’ll ask about her hemorrhoids. Pregnant women are fixated on their hemorrhoids, aren’t they, Gwyn? There’s a conversation to keep me from hitting the smorgasbord.” She ambled off, abandoning me to the company of Stan, who was swigging his chardonnay.
I took my ex-husband’s free hand. “What’s going on with you?” I gave him not a wife’s but a physician’s once-over. Checked the whites of his eyes. Raised his hand and examined his fingernails. You can learn volumes from a person’s fingernails. Stan’s glowed reassuringly pink, no cracks, no ridges. But his skeletal fingers felt cold and he was going to lose his Columbia class ring if he wasn’t careful. “You’re too thin, Stan. Have you seen Blumenstein?” Our shared internist.
“I’ve seen Blumenstein and he gave me a clean bill of health. It’s not what you’re thinking if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m negative. I know I look like I’m dying and there are days, God knows, I’d like to die, but I’m not.”
Odd, now that we were detached and distanced, I could read him. On a recent visit, my ophthalmologist told me my farsightedness had improved with age. “Brad?”
Bad Brad. A week away from a romantic Christmas vacation in Aruba, Brad told Stan he’d fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old junior college dropout who’d whirled his Tropical Fruit Fantasy at the Arundel Mall.
“Nineteen years old with the brain of a newt. Youth and beauty, how do you fight it?” Headshake with wry smile. “Did you wish this on me, sweetheart? Not that I don’t deserve it.”
I guess that was as close as Stan would ever come to an apology.
“No one deserves it,” I said, which was my sharply pointed shorthand for not quite accepted.
“True. It’s torture. There’s no other word for it.” He plucked a shrimp from a passing platter. “I thought Brad and I had a life together. I honestly thought we’d beat the odds, which aren’t great among, well, people like us, for till death do us part. And what really pisses me off is that I didn’t see it coming.” He said this to me, to me, without a hint of irony. “Where the hell was I when he and Pineapple Boy were...”
As he railed on and on, I realized I was hearing more of Stan’s innermost longings and pain than I had in twenty-six years of marriage. More now than I really wanted to know.
“It’s so damn lonely,” Stan said. “He even took the dog with him. So what do I do now? I’m not looking for just...” he changed directions, perhaps thinking better of discussing one-night stands and bar pickups with his ex-wife. “I want something meaningful. How the hell do you begin again at fifty-six?”
&n
bsp; Was that a rhetorical question? Maybe he was actually asking for advice, and if I were a better person I would have said, “I’m really sorry Brad left you. I’m really sorry you’re hurting and alone and starting over in your mid-fifties. Is there anything I can do? Refer you to a good manicurist for some reality therapy? Lend you Fleur’s list of the ten best places to meet men? Call Faith Shapiro and see if she has a tall, gay ballplayer to fix you up with?”
However, I was still smarting from my trip up the basement steps at Crosswinds a couple of years before. And not totally recovered from two decades of a sham marriage. My stock of sympathy wasn’t high. Oh, God, had I wished this on him? For more than a year, I’d wished him drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, battered and bruised. Now I wanted him to live and be well for the sake of my sons. As for his happiness, let him earn it like the rest of us.
***
Ten minutes before I had to leave for my train, Lee Bagdasarian showed up. Fleur poked me so hard in the ribs I reeled, nearly upending Kat’s radiation-inspired Triumph of the Scavengers: A Study in Scarlet and Blue.
Then we stood frozen watching him cross the room to an unsuspecting Kat. “How do you suppose he found out about tonight, I wonder?” Fleur said finally.
“It’s not a big secret. It’s got to be all over the art community. And it was announced in Baltimore magazine.”
“Uhm.”
I didn’t like the sound of that uhm. Too musical. Like the warble of a canary who’d mastered Handel’s Messiah. Self-satisfied, as if she’d brought off something big.
“You didn’t,” I accused.
“Moi? Didn’t what?”
“Oh, Fleur, you had no right.”
“Right, shmight, sometimes the world turns on its axis, sometimes you have to give it a little push. She’ll thank me.”
“She’ll kill you,” I said. But what was the use. And maybe Fleur had the right idea. Nudge fate if fate didn’t nudge you toward happiness. And it was comforting to think that, in spite of her frustration with The Plan, Fleur still believed you could manipulate the universe.
“Actually, once she gets over the initial shock, which will not take long, I assure you, she’ll kiss my toes in gratitude. I mean for godssakes, look at him. Is that not yummy? I’d forgotten how yummy he is. All those leftovers on Lovingmatch have dulled my palate.”
Lee was indisputably attractive. Tall and lean, but with brawny sculptor’s arms that flexed muscle beneath the same black turtleneck he’d worn the August day he met Kat at his own show. Maybe he’d pulled it out for luck. Maybe he had twenty black turtlenecks lined up in his closet because he knew they turned him into delectable.
“You keep an eye on Summer and I’ll do the Kat play-by-play,” Fleur said.
Summer was engaged in who could even imagine what kind of conversation with a woman sporting a pierced nose and pink hair. Then she spotted Lee. You could tell from the jerk of her head.
“Six feet...five feet…closer…closer…forget Summer, look, look, Kat is about to turn around.” Fleur fanned herself with her program. My legs melted with sympathetic weakness for Kat. “Touchdown. Oh, nice. Very nice,” Fleur commented as Kat looked up, registered astonishment, pleasure, swayed gently, and finally placed one hand on her neck in an unconscious gesture of delight. Lee bent down to kiss her cheek, then nudged her hand away as he slid his lips down into the hollow of her neck and buried them there. Kat, face flushed, eyes glistening, stroked his dark hair.
“Did you see that?” Fleur fanned a hurricane force wind.
“Beautiful. But I can’t wait for the credits. I’ll miss my train.”
“No, not yet.” She craned her neck. “What happened to Summer? Did you see her face when Lee kissed Kat? All pinched up as if she was about to have a tantrum.” Fleur searched the room. “Where the hell did she disappear to?”
“Well, she’s either tearing up the ladies’ room or she decided to take the high road and get out of here before she ruined her mother’s big night by making a scene.” I found a spot for my empty wine glass. “I’ve really got to get going.”
Fleur swiveled to stare at the reunited couple, who were holding hands and gazing goofily into each other’s eyes. “You can’t leave now.”
“I’ve got to go. Take notes. It will make a nice entry in the scrapbook for the grandchildren.”
In fact, Summer did take the high road. Charles Street at an ungodly speed. She’d parked her Beamer three cars in front of my Lexus. I arrived just in time to see the plaid headband duck and disappear into the interior and hear the door make a rather crude lower-class slam for a $60,000 door. I wasted a minute watching Summer maneuver out and, just as I turned my ignition key, she floored that Big Bavarian and took off up Charles Street, jumping the red light at the Washington Monument, zooming pedal to the metal probably all the way to Roland Park.
Poor Kat, I thought, she’ll have hell to pay.
Chapter 44
Oh, Doctor, you look scads better than the last time you sat in this chair.” Marco, Fortune’s makeup artist, sketched a coral line to amplify my less than naturally luscious lips. He backed up to appraise his handiwork. “Some hinky l’affaire de la heart, as I recall. But you’re positively glowing. I take it you two are back together?”
“Well, I’m back together,” I said.
He tossed his shaved head and hooted. “No wonder Fortune loves you.”
Actually, I wasn’t sure how much Fortune loved me. I noticed she stopped at the makeup chair across the room to hug the other guest, a former porno star who was pushing her new diet book. “Ate herself out of a job,” Marco snickered. “Debby Does Dairy Queen. Gained seventy pounds. Can you imagine? With all that fucking horizontal exercise? Then she claimed to have invented this diet. Some diet. She’s been to the loo three times in fifteen minutes.” He made a retching sound behind his hand. “What goes down must come up. Oh, here comes Fortune.”
But she never did approach, just walked past me with a cool smile and the slightest wave, like her fingers were tickling the air.
In front of the camera, though, she was her buoyant self. Standing center stage in her six feet four caftanned glory, she whipped the audience into a frenzy with the announcement that she was here and now personally restamping the ticket that empowered them to take charge of their lives. Then, seamlessly, she led the porno queen through her diet, which sounded like an awful lot of root vegetables to me.
I had the second half all to myself. When she introduced me exuberantly as her very own Dr. Diva, I must have winced because she said, “Look how appalled she is, audience. Listen, ladies, a diva is any woman on top of her game, that’s all. And isn’t Dr. Gwyn one of those?” Loud applause. “Now tell us what we have to do to keep ourselves fit and healthy for the next twelve months and forever.”
After I ran through my list of medical New Year’s resolutions, she said, “Now, catch us up on the Clinic. The last time you were here, you described how all these women were going to be without health care when their local hospital shut down. Tell us what’s going on in the moment.”
So I spoke of the Clinic, of the desperate need for it, how a colleague and I had come up with an expanded version for everyone in the area, but how, in spite of our best efforts, lack of funding ended that plan. By the time I’d finished, voice breaking, she’d taken my hand.
“No money for such a worthy project? Do you think that’s fair, audience?”
Unanimous “Nooo.”
“Well,” leaning forward for that intimate pas de deux with the lens that has made her the most popular woman on television, “neither do these people. Here’s what some of Dr. Gwyn’s supporters have to say. First, one of her patients.”
As the screen behind us filled with a huge image, Fortune whispered to me, “Don’t try to talk to her. She’s prerecorded.”<
br />
Dear Lord, it was Freesia Odum, decked out in a very stylish sweater set, granddaughter squirming in her lap. “Dr. Berke,” Ms. Odum said into her close-up, “hello from Baltimore. You’ve been there for me when I had no medical insurance and no way of paying for a doctor and I just want to say we know how hard you’ve been working on the Clinic and we’re praying for you. God bless you and God bless you, Fortune.”
Before I had time to process that, Fortune said to me, “And now a colleague, Daniel Rosetti, MD, a respected geriatrician, has something to say directly to you.”
Dan materialized on the screen, smiling a quirky, semi-amused, semi-embarrassed smile. He’d been filmed in his office. Behind him, I could see the photo of little Chrissy on her mother’s lap.
“Hi Gwyn, hi Fortune,” he said with his easy grace. “This Clinic is a life-giving project. It worked once and it should be given the chance to work again. We’re all proud of what Gwyneth Berke has given to the community throughout her medical career and we’re hoping she’ll get that Clinic up and running soon.” He waved a salute to the camera. “We’re here for you, Gwyn.”
“There’s a lot of love out there,” Fortune said when the screen went to black. “You doing okay?”
“Just in shock,” I said, tethered to reality only by Fortune’s warm hand clasping my chill one and the scent of her sandalwood perfume. I was still not quite getting it, not quite putting the pieces together.
She pulled me to my feet and towed me with her as she strode to the edge of the stage like some elegant, exotic giraffe to the watering hole. “So what do you think, audience? Don’t those people in that neglected community deserve a break?”
“Yesssssss.”
“Doesn’t Dr. Gwyn deserve to realize her dream?”
The audience was on its feet and cheering. She hollered over them, “I couldn’t agree more. So let’s do something about it. Let’s take charge of this. And to kick things off, I’d like to present to you, Dr. Gwyn, my personal check for….one!....million!....dollars!”