My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet) Page 11

  Alicia jumped in. “Did you say le vagin? Don’t tell me vagina is a masculine noun. The French are so perverse. Ugh. As for taking unopposed estrogen, that’s daft,” she said, sniffing like the highborn English lady she was. Sometimes her superior Oxbridge tone irritated me. “I assume you’re not recommending such a regimen for your patients.”

  “I tell my patients it is roulette, the entire hormone replacement issue,” Isabelle responded.

  “Funny,” I said, “I tell mine it’s a crapshoot.”

  Preethika Patel delicately sipped tea, her face screwed up with concentration. A slender, serious-looking woman of sixty with a thriving Delhi practice, she’d worn the white widow’s sari the year before. Tonight, her sari was blue and silver, a flattering complement to her dark hair streaked with gray.

  Now she said, “In India, the upper classes, those who can afford it, take hormones. The others treat with herbs, like saffron and Shatavari and aloe gel to rub on the genitals. In the villages, they are probably safer than we are. If you believe the latest breast cancer findings.”

  “So you don’t take estrogen?” Alicia, the boldest of us, pressed. Preethika was reserved. Not shy. Just a soul comfortable inside herself and not banging at her own doors.

  “Well, I don’t get hot flashes. I sleep no better or worse than any widow. I do worry about osteoporosis. And the verdict isn’t in for Alzheimer’s. So your answer, Alicia, is no, I don’t take estrogen, but you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

  A pondering silence washed over us. I thought, We are all in the same boat, some of us riding the waves, some of us bucking them.

  We paid our check and were making our way out of the dining room when Alicia slowed down and arched back to hiss, “Power table.” She cocked her head toward the far corner. “The big guns are breaking bread. Bedell and the entire governing board. And isn’t that your friend David Standish?”

  “Davis,” I said distractedly. “Davis, not David.” I was looking elsewhere at the same table. At the back of someone in a Harris tweed jacket. Not sure. Maybe. Probably not.

  “How did Standish get to sit among the anointed? He’s a certified pariah. Much too Hollywood for those old farts.”

  “You didn’t hear?” Fedora’s lip curled. “He put up half a million dollars to underwrite the Arlis R. Bedell Prize for gynecological research.” Diverted for a moment from the tweed jacket, I was speechless.

  Alicia was never at a loss for a crack. “Add money, a pinch of arse kissing, and stir. Voilà, instant respectability.”

  By the time we reached the cloakroom, we were a jumble of voices. But one stood out. Isabelle saying, “And who was that sitting next to Simon York? The redhead.”

  So I was right. My heart gave a little leap on “Simon,” then on “redhead” sunk not quite like a stone, more like a pebble.

  “She was very close. She had her cheek almost against his cheek. And her hand was on his shoulder, did you see that?”

  I had. “His wife?” I ventured, despite the absence of a wedding ring.

  “That was not the gesture of a wife,” Fedora said dryly.

  “The redhead is Beata Karnikova from Prague. You know her, Isabelle. You served on the policy committee with her.” This from Preethika.

  “Ahh, Bitti, the Iron Maiden. She is very intelligent and verrrrry ambitious.”

  “Young?” That was me again.

  “The far side of forty,” Alicia said. “But not very far. And well preserved.”

  “Are they an item?” It was a casual question.

  “Bitti and Simon York? Well, I never thought so until now. Anything is possible, I suppose.”

  “Personally I think he’s un bourreau des cours, trés sexy,” Isabelle said. “I like a man with a strong jaw.”

  “Oo la la. Very practical of you,” Alicia said, which set us giggling like schoolgirls as we walked through the lamp-lit London streets.

  London was balanced on the cool cusp of autumn. The air was thin, clear, and ginger-smelling. A moon, one day short of full, hung high and to the right of Big Ben. I thought again how lucky I was to be here. How much fun dinner had been. How grateful I was to have friends like Alicia, Preethika, Fedora, and Isabelle, even if I didn’t see them more than once a year.

  I loved that these very accomplished physicians could gossip and giggle with the best of them. I cherished the silly stuff. And if it was childish, well, the hell with that. I’d missed a real childhood, so I took it when I got it.

  Back in my room, I called my father and pried Sylvie away from Judge Judy. He was doing fine, she assured me. Mrs. Parente, his friend from the senior center, had dropped off a box of cannoli. He’d wolfed down two. He hadn’t asked for me, but he’d talked to my message machine at 5 a.m. and seemed content with just the sound of my voice. Sylvie put him on and I listened to him babble about someone he saw in the bathroom mirror. The best I could make out was that he thought he saw his sister, Margrit, in the reflection of his own face. My Aunt Margie died in 1993.

  After we clicked off, I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in hand, thinking about calling Harry Galligan. Now that was the man for me. With all the other pressures—my dad, trying to revive the Clinic, the Bethany McGowan–Seymour Bernstein axis of evil—what I definitely did not need was someone demanding, someone as complex as, say, a Simon York.

  In the end, though, I decided against phoning Harry.

  Chapter 15

  Not that I looked, especially, but for the next two days I saw neither hide nor silver hair of Simon York. Leaving the scene of a meeting in progress isn’t uncommon. Your practice pays for your trip to Paris or Maui. You drop in on a few sessions and then take off for more glamorous nearby locales. Such games are played with skill and frequency among my peers.

  Simon could have been fly-fishing in Scotland for a few days or he could have been a guest at a country estate in Shropshire. On his arm and in his bed, Bitti Karnikova. Because Bitti was also nowhere to be seen.

  Well, good for them. The tingle had faded. My circuits were wired for work. The meeting absorbed all my attention.

  I’d planned a self-indulgent evening of room service and relaxation, but when I returned to my hotel room after the second day’s program, I found an envelope slipped under my door. Inside were an invitation and a note on hotel stationery from Davis Standish.

  Gwyneth. I didn’t have a say in the guest list or you would have received this weeks ago. Hoping it’s not too late. I’d really like you to join us. Davis.

  Which is how I wound up with the cream of the gynecological crop at the Tate Gallery reception in honor of Davis Standish, benefactor of the Arlis R. Bedell Prize. This wasn’t a group I’d normally feel comfortable with. The board was comprised mostly of men, outstanding in their specialties, who tended to network professionally and socialize with each other at these meetings. The two women were magnificent specimens of female overachievers who’d given up too much get to the top of their profession. Arlis Bedell’s prodigy Rachel Cohen-Goldberger was fifty, with a biblical face, the figure of a sylph, and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. Her husband and infant son had died in a boating accident twenty-five years before and she took all that pain and fury and channeled it into her work.

  Angela Barola dressed like a drudge and wore a perpetual scowl. Never-married Angela rose through the macho Italian ranks to distinguish herself as one of the most skillful surgeons on the planet. She was legendary for grit under fire and for her work with the Italian feminist movement. Also a research scientist, she was reputed to get by on two hours of sleep a night. She looked it, but she and Rachel were legends, heroes among the community of female physicians. We showed them off to our daughters as proof that if you surrendered your life to your work, you too could stand among the crowned heads of your profession even if you didn’t sw
ing testicles.

  It was a good-sized crowd that wandered through the galleries of the Tate. Rachel stopped to say hello. She carried a glass of water that could have been gin. After she drifted away in her miasma of sadness, I followed the party meandering through the five huge galleries. In the third, while examining a Constable, I heard a voice close behind me. “Gwyneth Berke?”

  I turned to someone who looked vaguely familiar, sounded more familiar, and whom I couldn’t place for the life of me.

  “Hi,” I said vacantly, “I’m sorry, I don’t...”

  “It’s okay,” he answered, in a soft—central European? No. Moroccan? No. Ah, Israeli—accent. Which didn’t help at all. “I don’t expect you to remember me. It was long ago and far away. Ari Ben-Jacob. Hopkins. I was a lowly resident. You were chief.”

  I stepped back. “Ari! It can’t be. What happened to the mustache? And you were so skinny.”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “With the big Adam’s apple. And the tic. You can’t possibly have forgotten the tic.”

  I didn’t answer because it really had been a major tic, very distracting. He’d get out two words and his eyes would squint once, then twice. Like Morse code.

  But the tic was gone. The Adam’s apple had receded into his tree trunk of a neck. The impossibly curly red hair had darkened and relaxed into gentle waves. Ari was a nice-looking, broad-shouldered man with an engaging grin.

  “What a change. Look at you! What happened to you?”

  “What happened to me is what happens to everyone. Life happened to me.” He shrugged charmingly and changed the subject. For fifteen minutes we chatted about the fate of former colleagues. As we wound down, he said, “So, I read your paper in the June Archives. It was very interesting to me. I have a relevant case I’d like to discuss with you. If you have the time.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I’ll bet you haven’t eaten anything and you know it’s not good to drink on an empty stomach. Not that I blame you, the hors d’oeuvres are lousy. Will you be my guest for dinner tonight? It would be my pleasure.”

  What could be the harm of it, I thought. The old boys and the two old girls were networking among themselves. Davis Standish was velcroed to the woman he arrived with, a dazzling redhead of maybe thirty-five. And Ari was right, the hors d’oeuvres really were dreadful.

  “I think I’d enjoy that,” I said.

  By ten o’clock, I’d expounded on treating his case, we’d caught up on both our lives, and two bottles of wine had caught up with us.

  “Well, Gwyn,” Ari vamped, his eyes glistening with cabernet and perhaps something else.

  “Well,” I smiled. “I really need to be getting back to my hotel. I want to get to the early morning sessions.”

  “And I am leaving at 6 a.m. for Tel Aviv. It’s my daughter’s eleventh birthday day after tomorrow, and my ex-wife is making a family party. I’ve seen what I came here to see. And I can’t miss Ronit’s birthday.”

  “It’s an early day for both of us.”

  “Yet I don’t want the night to end,” he said, covering my hand with his. “I had a crush on you, did you know that? A schlemiel like me. But I’m not a schlemiel anymore and we’re both free now. Living in Israel, I can’t promise you much more than an evening of pleasure...”

  It wasn’t my heart that caught this time. It was certainly not my brain, given that this man was fifteen years younger than I, he was once a kid under my supervision, and I wouldn’t see him again for a year at least. It was the same thing men are slave to all the time—the siren call of the crotch-stirring moment. And for once in my life, I took the call.

  Who would have thunk it? Ari Ben-Jacob was as sleek and muscled as a dolphin, and he moved in the tangle of sheets as if they were his natural element. He did not murmur love. But he had a very well-developed vocabulary of lust. Oh, he was good at this. He did all the right things without thinking, the way a born dancer moves instinctively and gracefully to the rhythm. And he took pleasure in giving pleasure.

  “Look at you,” he said, presenting naked me to myself in the mirror. “You’re beautiful.”

  I averted my head from the full-length image as I’d been doing for the last decade, and he said, “No, no, look. You have wonderful shoulders.”

  “Shoulders?” I laughed, thinking, Boy, he had to reach for that.

  But he protested, “Shoulders can be very sexy.” He traced around my clavicle with his finger, then kissed inside both hollows. “So sexy, all of you.”

  “Me?” I said, yearning to hear.

  “You don’t know this? The tall, beautiful blonde, so intelligent, so cool on the outside, but one senses the heat beneath the surface. What could be more enticing?”

  He tipped my chin up with one finger, forcing me to see my reflection. “Look at your neck. Like a queen. You should be feeding peacocks in a Jerusalem garden. Your body is so exciting.” He inventoried me head to toe.

  I didn’t let on that what he saw was a conjurer’s trick worked by desire and low lighting. An illusion.

  And then it didn’t matter. Because we were involved in lust for lust’s sake. Which is what I was there for. No more. The adventure tossed me back to my Barnard days when the mantra was “If it feels good, do it.” I’d done it, though not as much as some. So, thank you, Ari Ben-Jacob, I thought as we lay together in post-coital bliss, for a lovely misplaced moment in time that made me feel nineteen again.

  ***

  The next day, Fedora and I were having a pre-dinner drink in the hotel bar when Bitti, walking through the lobby, spotted Fedora and lifted a limp wave.

  “Poor Bitti.” Fedora hunched over her wine glass. “She looks so washed out. Redheads lose color so quickly. But of course, vomiting and diarrhea for twenty-four hours will drain you of color whatever your complexion.”

  “Bitti was sick?”

  “Horribly. She thinks it was from something she ate at Wordsworth the other night. I saw her this morning at breakfast. All she had was tea and toast and to me she looked still a little wobbly on her feet, which is normal after two days in bed.”

  Two days in bed. Not with Simon York in Shropshire or wherever. Not that it mattered, but it warned me I needed to stop jumping to conclusions about men. Stan had done that to me. Eroded my trust, made me a touch cynical. Time to let that go and give all God’s children the benefit of the doubt.

  ***

  The XXVI IAGSO Annual Congress was gavel-pounded into history and by eight the next morning the hotel lobby swarmed with attendees awaiting airport transportation. My flight was scheduled to depart at eleven. Preethika’s flight to Delhi left at around the same time. We shared a taxi to Heathrow.

  The bellman was loading our baggage on his trolley when a group of four men emerged from the lobby door to stand next to us under the hotel canopy. Then Jai Prasad, one of the IAGSO board members, removed himself to chat with Preethika. That opened a direct line of vision between Simon York and me.

  Simon nodded, looked puzzled, then it seemed the light dawned. “Back in a moment,” I heard him say to Arlis Bedell.

  Before I could catch my breath, he was at my side. “We never got to complete our introduction at the airport. But the program did that for us, didn’t it? I did see you after my session and I wanted to talk to you, but Inger Schroeder pinned me down. Formidable woman. One doesn’t cross Inger. And then by the time I extricated myself, you’d vanished. Did you have a question?”

  “I did, but I can’t for the life of me dredge it up right now.” I was having either an inconvenient hot flash or I was blushing, something I hadn’t done since second grade. In any event, the sudden burst of heat temporarily wiped out my memory. I sucked my lower lip trying to remember.

  He tugged his gaze from my mouth to my eyes where it locked, very intense. In sunlight, my Nordic blue eyes go sapphire. I flashed him the
bling.

  “Not to worry,” he said, taking my hand. I wasn’t imagining it—his thumb was massaging the soft flesh between my thumb and forefinger. Then he did that thing with his mouth attractive men do, that twist of a smile that turns a woman’s center to soufflé. “If you think of it, jot me a note. I’m in New York, at Kerns-Brubaker.”

  “Simon, Jai, the car is here,” the man standing next to Arlis Bedell called out. A black Rolls limousine had pulled up to the porte cochere.

  “Coming!” he didn’t turn away. “Oh, yes, I want you to know, I read your bit in Issues last winter. Impressive stuff. You’re working on a follow-up, I presume?”

  “Simon!”

  “Sorry. I’m being summoned, Dr. Berke. ” He remembered my name. “By the way, I like your perfume.” He leaned in. “Tuberose. Very sensual. But subtle. It suits you.” Backed off. “Got to go.”

  “Bon voyage,” I said on a gasp. With a wave he was off.

  The last I heard of him, he was instructing the bellman, “Take special care with that one,” pointing to a black leather laptop case. Then he scrambled into the limo, the driver closed the door behind him, and that was that.

  Except if there was one thing I’d learned in my fifty-four years on this unruly and unpredictable planet, it was that that is hardly ever that.

  Chapter 16

  The office, my first day back, was a happy shambles. Marie Lansing, our chief appointments secretary and office manager, announced she was getting remarried and moving to Boston. Everybody was thrilled for her. Including me. Though I felt as if my right arm had been lopped off at the elbow.

  “We’re going to miss you, Marie.” I couldn’t contain a sigh.

  “You’re all going to be fine. I trained Barbara to take over as soon as I had an inkling I was leaving. And there are three gals coming in for interviews this week to fill the empty place.”

  Seymour was going to handle the interviews. Based on his hiring of Marie ten years before, he fancied himself an expert on human resources.