My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet) Page 3

  I wondered if Neil Potak had told her I was the one who tried to blackball her at the new-hire conference.

  I should have stuck to my guns.

  ***

  On Thursday, I kept my appointment with Hank Fischman. I hadn’t seen Hank since we’d done a pediatrics rotation together at Hopkins. He’d been handsome then and he still looked good. Better maybe, with the Antigua vacation tan and the silver sideburns. His skin was smooth, which could have been an advertisement for his partner’s skills or just proof of the natural male aging advantage.

  Hank examined my face under the ultraviolet light. He tugged the skin under my chin. Took a digital portrait. Then he escorted me out of the exam room to his office and motioned me to a chair across from him.

  “So, how long have you been divorced?”

  I raised my eyebrows, then quickly lowered them before my surprise dug three new crevices in my forehead. “Actually divorced? Final papers? Seven months. I didn’t know you kept up.”

  “I don’t. Call it educated guesswork. You do it all the time with your patients, I’m sure.” He steepled his fingers, a major doctor gesture. “It’s my experience that women who have recently been divorced or widowed and who are ready to get back into the social swim come to me for a lift. It’s more than surgical, of course. It’s emotional. They think they’re in competition with thirty-year-olds and they want a fighting chance.”

  “Can you blame us?” I quickly corrected myself. “Them?”

  “No, of course not. What they don’t realize is it doesn’t work that way. Men who are interested in thirty-year-olds aren’t interested in fifty-year-olds looking thirty. They want the real deal. It’s more than just physical. It’s all wound up with mortality.”

  “You did Elaine Markowitz. She doesn’t look thirty.”

  “Elaine needed it for her work. The young fry were nibbling at her sales. And she’s been divorced seven years. One year is my absolute minimum. You need to get the emotional stuff worked out first so your expectation for the surgery is realistic. I’m not saying that if you want it badly enough, you won’t find a surgeon to take your money. But your skin is entirely age appropriate. You have very nice fifty-year-old skin. Would a lift help? Sure. It would refresh your look. Come back to me in a year or two.”

  “Okay,” I agreed with an eagerness that surprised me. Up to that moment, I’d thought I wanted the surgery.

  “You could use a little help around the eyes, though. The left one is a drooper. Droopy lids make you look tired. Blepharoplasty is an outpatient procedure these days. You’d be surprised what getting rid of that sag and that pocket of fat can do to improve your appearance. Here’s a brochure.” He pushed over a pamphlet featuring on its cover a gorgeous female who appeared to be a college freshman. The headline, in twenty-point boldface type, read, “Look Younger, Sexier, and More Competitive.”

  “I’ll think about it.” I heard myself sighing.

  As I got up to leave, I made departing patient chatter à la Elaine Markowitz. From the gallery of personal photos lined up behind him, one especially caught my eye. Hank with a darling toddler in his lap. “Your granddaughter’s adorable,” I said. “They’re so cute at that age.”

  He swiveled. “Ah, my pumpkin Carolyn. Yeah, she’s cute but a handful. Actually, Carolyn’s my daughter. That’s her mother. Tiffany.” He pointed to the largest frame. Within its gold borders, a stunning brunette smiled a perfect “I have everything” smile. The absolutely straight teeth had not yet begun to shift back into their pre-orthodontic positions. She was, stretching it, thirty-five.

  “Lovely,” I murmured, wondering if my wince would etch a new line. I couldn’t help myself; I said, “I remember Linda. Laura? From back at Hopkins.”

  “Lisa. She went into dermatology. Damn fine physician. We divorced a few years ago.” He smiled sheepishly. “You know. You grow apart.”

  “And Lisa, did she remarry?”

  “Still at liberty.”

  Of course.

  He moved behind me as I bent to pick up my handbag. He tapped my chart against my shoulder. “No charge for the visit,” he said. “Professional courtesy.”

  I should charge you, I thought, for pain and suffering. For making me even more self-conscious about my drooper, for introducing me to the beauteous young Tiffany, every menopausal woman’s nightmare. “Well, you just stop by and I’ll be glad to return the favor,” I said. He gave me a quizzical look, then the lightbulb zapped on and he laughed.

  “Same old Gwyn,” he said. “Still the comedian.”

  Years ago, when we were doing that pediatric rotation together, Hank dressed me down for wearing a hat shaped like a duck to make the kids laugh before I stuck them. Quack, quack, jab. This was the seventies when such behavior was considered unprofessional.

  “You’re a doctor,” he’d scolded. “They need to trust you. If they laugh at you, how can they trust you?”

  “Since when are trust and laughter incompatible?” Or pain and laughter.

  “All right, Gwyn,” he said now, his hand on the door. “Call me if you want to do the eyes. Otherwise, here’s the prescription: stay out of the sun, drink lots of water, and eat salmon. There’s some very interesting research going on with fish oils and skin elasticity. And don’t work too hard at it. Your skin is fine. You’re a good-looking woman. Some nice man would be lucky to have you.”

  “You don’t happen to have his name, do you?”

  Hank laughed uncomfortably. He never had known when I was kidding.

  Chapter 4

  When I opened the door to Waterview’s first floor workout room the following Saturday, I saw Fleur Caldwaller Talbot, all 275 luscious pounds of her, on the treadmill. Not sitting on its rubber tread finishing off a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra. Not hanging her hot tub towel on its handlebars. Not stretched along its length, her head pillow-propped, watching HBO on the wall-mounted TV because she was too cheap to subscribe.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Languishing was walking a treadmill that was rolling at 1.9 miles per hour as ’70s soft rock pumped through the ceiling’s speakers.

  “Well, now I’ve seen everything. This must be what they mean when they say when donkeys fly. Donkeys are honest-to-god flying.”

  “And...assholes...are honest to...puff...god...running their mouth.”

  I could hardly keep a straight face. Fleur was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt inscribed “Born to Triathlon,” a sweatband holding her chestnut hair off her damp, pink forehead, a small towel draped around her neck, and the wild-eyed look of a hamster on an exercise wheel gone haywire.

  “Well, I’m very impressed. But sweating to the oldies isn’t exactly your thing, Fleurie. You want to tell me what this is about?”

  She reached into the basket hooked to the treadmill, withdrew a folded section of newspaper, and tossed it at me. “Make yourself useful. Read,” she commanded. “Aloud. So I’ll really hear it and can close this fucking chapter in my life once and for all.”

  I sat down on a bench and read. “Bambi and Jack Bloomberg of Baltimore City—oh, Jesus—are proud to announce the birth of their son Mason Saul, August 23, Sinai Hospital, seven pounds four ounces, twenty inches long. Ah, Fleurie.” I halted. It was just too painful. Around the same time he started to collect social security, Jack Bloomberg, Fleur’s boyfriend of fourteen years, left her for a thirty-four-year-old Hooters waitress. Now, eleven months later, he was a daddy.

  “Go on, dammit.” Fleur said, and I heard tears behind the voice. Fleur? Tears? Extraordinary for a Baltimore Talbot whose family crest reads Nunquam Demonstrate Dolorem: Never Show ’em It Hurts.

  “Mason Saul is named in loving memory of his late grandmother Minnie Selma. Paternal grandfather is the late Louis Irving Bloomberg. Maternal grandparents are Lucille and Duane Tuttle of Lusby, West Virginia.
” I dropped the paper on the bench. “You didn’t know she was pregnant, right? You must have almost passed out when you came across this.”

  “I didn’t. Quincy did,” Fleur said, swiping her nose as the treadmill slowed to a halt. “He brought it in to me. He wanted me to see it. He said, and I quote,” Fleur swung into her shop manager’s effeminate yet earthy singsong, “‘Woman, you need to know that Jack Bloomberg’s new life is signed, sealed, and dee-livered and you’d better get your shit together and get yourself one of your own because it’s getting a little late to be a big-assed, purple-dressed bridesmaid and never a bride.’” She scowled on the emphasis. Her never-married status was a sore point with her.

  I broke into a laugh. “You really do have him down pat.”

  “Yeah, well he said to tell you that in regards to getting a life, the same goes for y’all.”

  I stopped laughing.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later Fleur was out of the shower, into a robe, and toweling her hair. “The thing is,” she resumed, “I decided Quincy had a point about getting a life. Actually, I’ve got most of what I want, but there’s still a piece missing. With luck, it’s not too late to find it. At least according to that study of yours, there are women out there getting laid and more at our age.” She ran a comb through her hair. “I want the more part.” She watched my eyes widen with surprise. “What’s the big deal? I just want to get married.”

  Her reasons, she assured me, didn’t have all that much to do with Bambi and Jack. Though marrying well might make a pretty piece of revenge. Down deep, she just wanted what Kat and I had, even if we didn’t have it anymore. Someone to put her first, to walk hand-in-hand with her into the sunset.

  Fleur reminded me she’d always thought she’d get married. She had a hope chest as a teenager and a boyfriend in college but he went off to drop bombs in the Mekong and when he returned home, he brought a Vietnamese wife with him. Fleur was just about over that when the women’s movement made marriage unfashionable, and she got distracted with grad school and building the business.

  “By the time I looked up from my desk, my waist was gone and my Aunt Ellen’s wedding dress wouldn’t have fit me anyway even if the best men hadn’t been snapped up in the first round. I felt lucky to find Jack. You know I loved him. I was pretty sure he loved me, at least for the first ten years. But I guess he loved his mother more and then when Minnie died, he was free to do what would have killed the old biddy: marry a thirty-four-year-old gum-chewing hottie whose hillbilly family thought Jews had horns.”

  “Jack’s in the past, baby.”

  “I’m only using him as an example of someone who got what he wanted. So now it’s my turn. But I figure no one’s going to hand it to me, right? I’ve gotta make it happen. So I came up with The Plan.”

  “A plan?”

  “Yes, Gwyneth. To get myself married.” I must have looked dubious, because she said, “Why not? I have an MBA from Wharton. How hard can it be?”

  Fleur was something of a business genius. Her family was old Baltimore money and she could have spent her time on volunteer boards and the ladies-who-lunch circuit. But she put together Madame Max and made it the most profitable plus-size apparel shop in the Mid-Atlantic. Charm City magazine named her one of its “Best and Brightest.”

  “And it’s not a plan,” she corrected. “It’s The Plan.” She climbed on the scale, peered at the numbers, groaned, and stepped off. “Which in my case means losing seventy-five pounds to even get me in the running. Beginning with the treadmill. Fifteen minutes a day for a start. And as of Thursday noon, I am officially on a diet. Yesterday I had yogurt for lunch and a Lean Cuisine for dinner. Total: four hundred and eighty calories and nine grams of fat. This morning for breakfast I ate Kashi, which tries to pass for cereal but really is an indigestible paper product and should be stocked in the aisle with the Charmin. The worst is I’ve given up regular Coke for Diet. Ugh! It tastes like it’s processed in Chernobyl and whatever they sweeten it with gives me gas.”

  “You and I have talked about dieting before. I’m all for your losing weight for the right reasons and in the right way but this crash dieting doesn’t work and it’s—”

  “Speaking of crash, do you know you can be a crashing bore? Let me tell you, it’s unwise to lecture a woman who has given up chocolate. She will chew you up and swallow you for lack of something high in cocoa butter.”

  “Fine. Do it your way,” I said. “Not that I think you have to be thin to attract a man. There are millions of women out there who are overweight and married—”

  “To men they met when they were twenty and looked like Calista Flockhart.”

  “—and many women of our age who are pleasantly plump and attractive to men.”

  “I am not pleasantly plump. I am obese. I am also fifty-five years old, which is handicap enough. I need to have a fighting chance.” She grimaced as she pulled up fresh sweatpants.

  “You’re right. Good for you. And one of these days you’re going to land a combination of Wolf Blitzer and Zubin Mehta and live happily ever after in the Waterview penthouse with your own private manicurist.”

  “Zubin Mehta? You really are a nerd. I was thinking more of Jack Nicholson fused with maybe a sixty-year-old Johnny Depp and we live on his yacht off the coast of Cannes where I’m attended by young Greek cabin boys with perpetual hard-ons.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

  “You think I’m kidding but I’m serious. Come on upstairs and I’ll show you how serious. And if you’re real nice to me, I’ll put one together for you. Kat, too. No charge. Don’t shake your head, Gwyneth. Are you not single? Oh, sweetheart, you are the singlest. Stan has moved on. He’s got Brad. You’ve got zilch. It’s time for you, too.”

  “Nonono—”

  “Come on. You can’t tell me you don’t want to do it again. The love part, I mean,” Fleur said as she gave me a push into the back of the elevator. She pressed four.

  “Honestly, I’d be too scared to trust the love part. Look what it got me the first time around.” I winced at the memory.

  “It got you married for twenty-five years, two kids, and a beautiful life.”

  “Beautiful on the surface. But dig down and it was all a big lie. Thank you anyway, but my plate is full. God knows, I have enough on it with my father and trying to revive the Clinic. The boys call twice a week. And I have my work. I love my work.” There it was. My life. All wrapped up in a pretty package. So what if on lonely Saturday nights I felt that what it contained was a little dull. Dull was better than something sharp enough to carve your heart out.

  I sighed. “I’ll admit it might be nice to have someone to read the Sunday Times with. Catch a movie with. No commitment. Nobody’s heart on the line. But really, I’m good the way things are.”

  “Well, good isn’t good enough for me.” Fleur spun around at her condo door and twirled the key on its ring before inserting it into the lock. “Follow me and I’ll show you my key to the future, I’ll show you…” she shrugged her eyebrows à la Groucho, “The Plan.”

  ***

  Fleur had crammed into her study a new four-drawer file cabinet containing hanging files with tabs that read “Internet,” “Personals,” “Matchmaker,” “Clubs and Interest Groups,” and “Networking” which she flourished as if she were displaying a diamond necklace.

  “My strategies. But that’s down the line. Everything begins with this.” She withdrew five stapled pages marked “Business Plan.” I leafed through, from Feasibility Study to Implementation Milestones, as she explained each component.

  “Right now I’m researching Internet dating. You know, like Lovingmatch.com.”

  Well, I didn’t know really. But I was willing to learn.

  On a purely theoretical basis, that is. It’s okay for you, Fleur, I thought. But me
? Not on my dead Barnard-educated ass.

  Which was absurd. This was a brave new world. We needed to be brave new women.

  “All it takes is filling out a profile and a $40 member fee. Are you game?” Fleur stared at me hopefully as I paged through the downloaded application for Lovingmatch.com. My application for medical school had been less complicated, but then I was only trying to qualify for mastering endometrial surgery, not hooking up with some DWM who likes long walks on moonlit beaches and Barry Manilow concerts.

  “You want me to go on Lovingmatch.com?”

  “Well, pardon me if it’s beneath you,” Fleur responded, suddenly haughty and looking very much like that Gilbert Stuart portrait of her umpteenth-great-grandmother hanging over her sofa.

  “It’s not that. Look, if something comes along, I won’t turn it down. But I’m not going after it. That’s not my style.”

  Fleur’s eyes shot evil darts. “Your call. In any event,” she pulled up a folder thick with pages, “I know you’re exceedingly busy.” There was a tang to her tone that might have been sarcasm. “But in your spare time, on the toilet or whatever, I’d be really grateful if you’d review The Plan and tell me if I’ve left anything out. Make suggestions.”

  I was swamped with work. Chart reviews. Grant applications for the Clinic. But I nodded.

  “And will you at least come with me to GlamourGal Photo tomorrow?”

  Now that sounded like a hoot. “The one in the mall with the women all sexy, pouty, and peach-colored like a Playboy centerfold? Of course I’ll go with you. I’ll even call Kat to see if she wants to come.” I was eager to make amends, prove myself, be a friend.