My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet) Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2006 by Toby Devens

  Cover and internal design © 2006 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © Albert Normandin/Masterfile

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Devens, Toby.

  My favorite mid-life crisis (yet) / Toby Devens.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-0747-1

  ISBN-10: 1-4022-0747-6

  1. Middle-aged women—Maryland—Baltimore—Fiction. 2. Women gynecologists—Maryland—Baltimore—Fiction. 3. Menopause—Fiction. 4. Midlife crisis—Fiction. 5. Best friends—Fiction. 6. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title: My favorite midlife crisis (yet). II. Title.

  PS3604.E885M9 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2006006325

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to so many for their support in the writing of this book.

  First, Fouad Abbas, MD, gynecologic oncologist, who took time from his grueling schedule to provide detailed information and relate relevant experiences in the operating room—he was of enormous help, as was Dennis Gleicher, MD, always available to answer medical questions. Vivian Goldman also directed me to good medical information. Thanks to Sidney Ossakow, PhD, for leading me over complex scientific terrain. Fiber artist extraordinaire Carol Bodin walked me through the process, actually had me working at a loom—she gave generously of her time and information. Lenne Lipton, audio-visual and conference specialist, helped me figure out the tricky parts in those areas. If I missed the mark on any of the details provided by these experts, it was my error or my choice to shape fact to the demands of fiction.

  Thanks to dear friend Jan Innes whose cushy shoulder and keen editorial eye got me thorough the inevitable rough spots. To Jean Louise Reynolds for decades of advice, insider info, and lots of laughs when I needed them most, and to Candy Cole for her insights into the man/woman dynamic. I am grateful to Linda Hayes who helped reestablish the connection with my talented writer colleagues in Maryland: Ruth Glick, Cronshi Englander, Kathryn Johnson, Binnie Syril Braunstein, Nancy Baggett, Patricia Paris, Linda Williams, Connie Hay, Joyce Braga, and Joanne Settel. They know their stuff and graciously shared it. I’m especially indebted to the remarkable Randi DuFresne who connected me with my agent, Elaine English. Elaine is a skillful and steady champion. And heartfelt thanks to Chassie West whose calm, considered guidance always brought a fresh perspective to my thinking.

  Writer Alan Zendell provided suggestions and comradeship and Toba and Andy Barth and Eleanor Feingold were funds of energy and information. My editor Hillel Black deserves my warmest appreciation for seeing potential in the original and applying his brilliant editorial skills, vast experience, and gentle counsel to shaping the ultimate version of this book.

  My parents Esta and William Devens stood by me in spirit; I cherish the memory of their goodness and humor. My daughter and friend Amanda Schwartz reached out to help: her medical information was spot-on and her eagle eye caught blips along the plot path. Most important, her unfailing encouragement and love were there for me, as always. Starting her on her remarkable life is my proudest achievement. And, finally, my gratitude to Sam Ponzcak whose infinite patience and caring never fail to astound me—I am so blessed to have my own midlife turned sweet and productive by his strong yet gentle presence.

  Chapter 1

  So, how many times last month did you engage in sexual intercourse?”

  Elaine Markowitz, a realtor, fifty-two and tummy tucked, shifted uncomfortably in her chair, disturbing the beige and teak tranquility of my office overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

  “You sure my name isn’t going to be published in this article, Dr. Berke?” she asked. “My mother’s still living. She has cataracts, but she reads.”

  “No names. Just numbers, I promise. And it’s an important study.”

  Elaine raised a skeptical eyebrow. “About sex?”

  We’d been through this once, but now I clicked off my physician voice and turned on my woman-to-woman voice, warmer and more reassuring. “About female sexual interest once we reach menopause. And about our levels of activity and satisfaction. There are so many myths out there. Like Mother Nature flips the switch when we turn fifty and shuts us down. Which I don’t for a moment believe, but I’d like to prove it. With statistics.”

  Better. Elaine settled back in her chair.

  “We need to get the facts out to the general public and to gynecologists, especially,” I pressed. “After all, the more we all know about the women we treat, the better we can meet their needs.”

  “Yeah, right. Okay,” Elaine said. “Let’s get rid of the myths. Sure. Ask away.”

  I’d already whipped out my survey sheet.

  Policy requires that every woman coming into the OB/GYN practice of Potak, Berke, and Bernstein, MDs for her annual physical and Pap test gets five minutes of chat time after we’ve invaded her most private territory with a gloved finger and a warm speculum. I make it ten. I like my patients. Because I’m a gynecologic oncologist and not an obstetrician/gynecologist, most of the women I see are older. Wh
ich provided a handy population for studying the impact of age on sexual activity.

  I’d been administering this survey for six months. I worked from a sampling base of a hundred. Excluding the single women in their eighties and nineties who have vaginas like prairie dog tunnels, nearly impenetrable, 30 percent of single women fifty and over in my practice reported dating at least once in the prior month. Twenty percent had been laid in that time frame. About 12 percent noted a significant other with whom they lived or an exclusive relationship with a longtime lover.

  Preliminary conclusion: don’t count us out. Which was supported by my clinical observation. At least half of the women I treat are divorced or widowed, and I was handing out enough samples of Astroglide and KY Jelly to slide the entire East Coast into the Atlantic. So I knew my single patients were sexually active.

  By the time I got to the second page of my checklist, Elaine Markowitz was happily sharing with me the details of her relationship with her forty-one-year-old boyfriend. “He’s the stage manager at the Fells Point Dinner Theater. And, I’m not exaggerating here, he looks like a young Brando and screws like a young Bugs Bunny. Five times a week at least. But, honestly, I could go every day. He makes me feel thirty-five.”

  She did seem to have a dewy freshness about her as if her corpuscles were boogying through her veins and I told her so, though in more clinical terms.

  “Part sex, part Dr. Fischman. Look closer.” She leaned in. “This is so wonderful. You’re a doctor and you can’t tell. The man is a miracle worker.” I proffered a noncommittal smile. Bland. Bland was good. Lessens those cartoon parentheses around the mouth. “I had a full face lift,” Elaine chortled. “The whole shebang all at once. Eyelids, brow, chin.” She stroked the adolescent tautness of her neck. “I felt like shit for two weeks, but it was worth it. Kevin never would have looked at the old me. Men look through fifty-year-old women, not at them, right?”

  I gave her a how-would-I-know stare and changed the subject to estrogen patches.

  As I droned on, Elaine actually strolled behind me to get a better look at a photo of Whit and Drew taken when the twins were five, bundled in snowsuits and mounted on kiddie skis. One of our family Christmas trips to Squaw Valley. Now Whit was in med school in Chicago with a law student girlfriend and Drew was pulling straight A’s at the Art Institute of Boston. Whit looks like me, but takes himself very seriously. Drew is my ex-husband Stan all over. Nicer than Stan, though. A better person than Stan.

  Elaine lifted the picture of my boys and interrupted my monologue. “Having kids really ages you. All the worry.” She turned to appraise me from under scaffolded eyelids. “You could get rid of those forehead wrinkles of yours. Botox. Or a peel. Nothing drastic.”

  That stung. I thought I’d done a nice job of hiding my accordion forehead under wispy bangs. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  When she left, I headed for the powder room to peer at my reflection, which hadn’t been giving me “you’re the fairest in the land” lately. Still, what I saw wasn’t so bad, even with the forehead pleats. Blonde hair kept glossy by weekly trips to Melik at the Istanbul Salon. Many little highlights to suggest sun streaks. Cream-and-roses skin inherited from my mother, which, alas, tended to fretworks of wrinkles. But I plumped it up with stuff that ran me eighty dollars a jar at Nordstrom’s, and I calculated that at fifty-four I could pass for forty. Okay, forty-five. Maybe.

  I noticed a bit of eyelid droop on the left side. And a shadow of a wattle under my chin. The sad truth is that women of a certain age must choose between face and body. Enough fat to keep your face youthfully plumped is enough to make your thighs porky. Go for the slender body, and neck up you’re drawn and sunken. My personal trainer and I opted for steel biceps and a tight ass, at some cost to my face.

  Hank Fischman, one of the top plastic surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was a former colleague. Maybe I’d give him a call. They used to peel your entire face back from your forehead for a face-lift. Ugh. I can roll an ovary around in my hand and slit into a belly while humming Mozart, but I couldn’t do plastic if my life depended on it. Still, there had been recent advances in the full-face procedure. Before I made an appointment with Hank, I’d go online and see what was new in the Ponce de Leon business.

  I couldn’t believe how shallow I was becoming.

  Chapter 2

  To compensate for all this meditation on my aging exterior, I decided to subject myself to something that would plumb the very depths of my emotional being, something that would Roto-Rooter out any residual gunk of guilt, shame, and self-loathing. I drove up to Annapolis for a meeting of FRESH, a support group for discarded husbands and wives of recently out gays. FRESH is an acronym for Former Rejected Ex-Spouses of Homosexuals. At my first meeting, I’d mentioned to the president of the Maryland chapter that I thought the use of Former and Ex might be a trifle redundant. “Intentional,” he’d said, smiling gently. “What is more redundant than the heterosexual spouse of a homosexual?” Point taken.

  Unlike AA or Overeaters Anonymous, FRESH provided wine and cheese and permitted smoking on the frequently correct assumption that most of us had tailspinned back into former vices after the revelation. Also, the disclosure of last names was encouraged since it was a FRESH assertion that none of us had anything to hide; we were the innocent victims of circumstance. Also we might want to date each other.

  The idea of FRESH members coupling had, at the beginning, smacked of the cast-banging of two broken-armed lovers. But then, Harry Galligan piqued some interest. My favorite uncle had been called Harry and so far the FRESH Harry had been just that, avuncular. That night, he winked at my entrance, patted my back as I walked by, and whispered, “Glad you made it, Gwyn,” but that was it.

  A half hour in, with the wine flowing, Mark Silva, the chapter president, clapped his hands for attention and shouted, “Let’s get seated for Sharing.” Sharing was the FRESH term for the open-heart surgery that bares your inner pain.

  We gathered in a supportive circle around a man whose wife dumped him the previous week for his secretary. “To be honest,” he said, “I always had a little sneaky for my secretary. Never acted on it, of course. Then Brenda and Alison met at the company picnic. The next week they had a date for drinks and began the affair. Last Wednesday, they called me into the conference room to break the news. I’m still reeling.”

  “Of course you are. Very understandable. And so recent. This is the worst time, Fred. Time and friendship heal, believe me.” Mark Silva was also the resident clucker and tsker. And he was given to hugs, gender neutral, which freaked out a few of the men. “Correction. Not just me. Believe us.” Applause.

  Our second newcomer, a heavy woman with a mustache and a five o’clock shadow (I diagnosed polycystic ovary syndrome from eight feet away) related that her husband’s parting shot had been, “And you need to know that I never really loved you.” Essentially invalidating ten years of marriage. So gratuitous. Need to know? The bastard. I really did want to hug her, beard and all. Instead, I got out my Kleenex.

  Pam, sitting next to me, reported on her husband’s phone call of the evening before. He was going to Thailand for a sex change operation and asked her to be there when he told their children. She was anguished. We were anguished for her, with her. Twelve people in a circle murmured sympathetically. Two of us were sobbing. How ridiculous that I was one of them.

  Harry Galligan lightened the moment by giving the treasurer’s report. Harry was a pleasing contrast to my wiry, wired ex-husband. A lumbering Irishman with a PhD in physics, Harry worked at the Naval Research Lab in D.C. Not your standard issue scientist, though. He once told me that he spoke six languages and did a mean tango. Not bragging. Maybe flirting. His wife had left him for a famous local politician, a burly Irish woman who looked more than a little like Harry. “Well, she’s lost my vote,” Harry liked to crack. These days he seemed m
ildly amused and somewhat philosophical about the wife’s defection. But I’d heard from one of the longtime members that he’d shambled into his first meeting with booze on his breath and his tie askew, just about collapsed in the middle of his story sharing, and had to be helped to his seat.

  He didn’t come off as a personality prone to surprises, but at the end of his report he said casually, almost as an aside, “You know,” hitching his neck at me across the circle, his eyes soft with concern, and I felt my heart tumble, “Gwyn has never shared with us. She said she wasn’t ready. But she’s been coming to meetings for five months now.”

  Had I? Five months? I always decided to make the drive last minute, so I never marked it on my calendar or entered it in my PDA, which meant it didn’t count. A non-event.

  “Gwyn?” Mark Silva prompted in his kindergarten teacher voice. The bearded lady gazed at me expectantly. The transsexual’s wife put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed, so I figured what the hell, my story isn’t worse than any other, and I shared. Boy, did I share. Even after two years, I shook telling the story of what my friend Fleur called The Treachery.

  I told them how at the housewarming for Crosswinds, our new beach house on the Delaware shore, I’d opened the door to a storage room to see, in a nanosecond flash, a picture that would be branded forever into my little gray cells: my husband of twenty-six years entwined in the arms of his lover, his mouth against the mouth of Brad Ventner, Crosswinds’ decorator whose taste I never liked anyway. Startled, they broke apart and for a ghastly, surreal moment we all stared at each other. Stan, Brad, Stan’s yippy Chihuahua that he always brought everywhere, and me. Then the dog started barking and Stan started babbling something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears. I spun away, the dog leaped, I raced for the stairs, the dog charged ahead and partway up darted under my feet, pitching me forward on the $80 a yard Berber carpeted steps, snapping my ankle. I’m a physician; I’d known immediately it was broken. I’d also known that a lot more than my ankle was broken and that it would take a lot more than a cast to fix it.