My Favorite Midlife Crisis (29 page)

Maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to make my farewell address to someone wielding a sharp instrument, but I’d fortified myself with two and a half beers and the time had come.

“You’re a good man, Harry,” I began.

“Yup.” He concentrated on sucking a sliver of crabmeat from his thumb. “And you’re a fine figure of a woman.” He looked up. “What’s wrong?”

Here was someone who could read my thoughts. A rare find. Every woman’s dream.

“Wrong?” I quickly swallowed a spoonful of crab soup hoping the pepper might sharpen my senses.

“Well, we haven’t gotten very far with this relationship, but something tells me you’re about to give me the old heave-ho.”

I wondered when he’d mastered that mind-reading trick. After his divorce, I figured, because he told me once that he’d been oblivious to his wife’s diddling her politician girlfriend for the last six months of their marriage.

He whomped a crab. “Ah, well,
de gustibus non est disputandum.
” He registered my blank look. “No accounting for taste.”

On the money. In Latin, yet. So much for my thinking of him as an overgrown leprechaun. In my dither over Simon, I hadn’t given Harry the credit he deserved. This was a person who’d traveled the world. A crack scientist, probably as well respected in his field as Simon was in his. And on the personal level, Harry was empathic.

I put down my spoon. How do you explain a
coup de foudre
? And not explain to Harry that with
him
there was no zap of lightning, not even the sound of distant thunder.

“You’re a fantastic person,” I began again.

“Wow. First I was good. Now I’m up to fantastic. When you get to spectacular, sell, right?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “Do you want to talk about him?”

It was like trying to break up with Houdini.

“Come on. If I’m so fantastic and you’re still not buying, there has to be someone else. No, honestly, I’m okay with it. And I can tell you need to vent.”

That was all it took to launch me into a ten-minute monologue about my feelings for Simon, feelings that were, somehow, easier to lay out for Harry than for Kat or Fleur.

So I told him how I’d surprised myself by falling, no
plunging
in love with the guy. Then I kvetched about how tough it was to maintain a long-distance romance. That we had to work at finding time to see each other. “I’m busy. He’s busier.”

“You say he’s tops in his field. How do you think he got there?” he asked.

“But he warned me he’s not very good at relationships.”

“Credit his honesty.”

“He’s in Florida for Thanksgiving. And I haven’t heard from him since Wednesday.”

“So call him, if you’re worried. But come on. He’s our age, right? We’re not like these kids on their cell phones every minute. He’s busy down there. He’ll catch you up when he gets back. Women obsess over the craziest things.”

“You’re right.” Leave it to Harry to uncomplicate what I’d complicated into a restless night. “And the thing is, I’ve got so much respect for him. And admiration. He’s brilliant, and charming. And cultured.”

Harry raised an eyebrow, which could have meant he was impressed or maybe he was just registering the chef’s heavy hand with the Old Bay seasoning. “Culture means a lot to you, huh? You a Dundalk girl?” He named the blue-collar area where my father used to work for Bethlehem Steel.

“East Baltimore, Patterson Park,” I replied, feeling a non-menopausal flush rising.

“Ahhh.” Harry had my number. “Still, I’m a little surprised. You’re a physician. And I’d think being married to Stan, you would have hobnobbed with the rich and famous.”

“Not really. The business magazine only took off in the last ten years. Before that it was strictly a Baltimore enterprise.
Berke’s Law
still is. By the time
Business
made it big, we had our own circle of friends. Most of them are successful. A lot of them have money, but Baltimore isn’t D.C. or New York. The major players don’t live here.” I whacked the last crab. “I’ve been to a few Washington parties. But I’m not that impressed with the business crowd. My peers are another story. In my field, Simon is one of the golden boys. National Academy of Sciences. President’s Commission on Cancer.”

“Which means he’s a good doctor, but doesn’t mean squat about him as a person.” He concentrated on buttering his roll. “Ah, pay no attention to me. If you think he’s Superman…”

“I’m not saying he’s perfect. He’s got a hefty ego. All the powerhouses in science do. But there’s something vulnerable about him, too, that touches my heart. And I love the cleft in his chin.”

“Your heart. His cleft.”

The waitress dumped another dozen crabs on the table.

I giggled and Harry emptied the rest of my beer into his own glass.

“Hey, to each her own,” he said. “The man with the cleft is obviously what you think you need. So go for it. As long as you’re sure you’re finished processing Stan. Because your feelings for this Simon could just be a diversion if you’re trying to escape old pain.”

“I’m past it,” I said. “All ready for new pain.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He took a swig of his Sam Adams. “If it makes you feel any better, I knew what you and I had was just a friendship. Now I’m not saying that at the beginning I wasn’t hoping it would catch. You know, turn into something more. But I didn’t have to be a genius to notice you weren’t burning with desire for me. And, not to hurt your feelings, but I didn’t fall out of my shoes when we kissed either. Look, if you really like Simon, he must be a good man.”

Over cheesecake he took on an earnest look. “This may sound like a cliché, but I hope we can continue being friends. We have a lot in common, and you’re easy to talk to. I know you’ve got your girlfriends, but you might want a man’s take on the new guy. And there might be a time when I need a woman’s perspective on another woman.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” No wonder my romantic revelation hadn’t sent him into paroxysms of grief. He had other irons in the fire.

“In time, my girl, in time. Right now, all I have is wishful thinking. When I have more, you’ll be the first to know, believe me.”

He laid his hand—big and hairy as a paw—on mine. “I wish you luck, you know that. I’m cheering for you. And for this Simon fellow, even if he is a bloody limey.”

“I know you are, Harry,” I said, gazing into my mug, trying to read my future in the swirls of Coffeemate, and wondering if I’d just made a major mistake.

Chapter 31

Monday

Back to work. The week after Thanksgiving is traditionally chaos—patients trying to jam in appointments before the holidays. One more “to do” entry checked off their pre-Christmas list. We were swamped.

Our docs handled the punishing schedule in their own special styles. Seymour, his head buried in a chart, barged into anybody in the vicinity. Neil, a darter, snapped at the staff. Ken ran around with an open can of Diet Dr. Pepper sloshing in the pocket of his lab coat. Bethany...now that was an interesting study in how the aspiring mighty can fall. Vanished was the uppity preppy-peppy bounce, the in-your-face nuisance of a presence. In its place, a wisp of gray wool, an apparition, disappeared around corners or slunk hunchbacked, eyes on the floor like Inspector Clouseau sniffing for clues. Very mysterious.

Maybe she was trying to get the goods on Seymour and Mindy, who had the look of thickly applied innocence, like Raphael cherubim, even as he nibbled kisses (Hershey’s out of a Precious Moments cup) at her desk. As I walked by, he boomed words like “organization” and “Xerox” which he probably jammed into the middle of sentences about how he liked to lick her ear.

All right, my antennae may have been oversensitive due to Seymour’s escapade with Bethany, and his business with Mindy could have been all business. Still, in spite of our being rushed, on the first day back I spotted him parked at her desk three separate times, which is excessive. And if I saw him, Bethany saw him. You had to wonder what she thought. Felt. How nuts this made her. Even if it was all in her head.

Apropos of nuts, Seymour had complained a few weeks before that the cleaning staff was moving papers on his desk. Then he found his beloved Jaguar XJ with a long, deep scratch along the driver’s side door. He was positive the scratch hadn’t been there when he parked in the garage that morning. Random or creepy? Accident or Bethany or one of his patients exacting retribution for a Seymour Bernstein ham-handed pelvic exam? Seymour is notorious for jamming his jumbo-sized fingers into narrow spaces with the finesse of King Kong romancing Fay Wray.

Who knows what mayhem any of us is capable of when manhandled? The Harvard-educated, silver-spoon-fed Bethany. Me. Do my Turnbull Prize, my guest column in
GynoToday,
my painful absorption of the art of the fish fork and the Renaissance poets override the wild-assed genes of Helen Kohl Swanson? As I watched the Bethany-Seymour breakup drama unfold, I found myself wondering what atavistic gene might surface, what monstrous deeds I might stoop to if scorned.

In the afternoon, a reporter from the
Baltimore Sun,
interviewing me about my upcoming appearance with Fortune, posed questions I could answer.

***

Tuesday

As it turned out, the
Sun
article was well written and the photographer really did know how to light cheekbones. I came off a Tahari-suited, Mikimoto-pearled monument to trust. My colleagues congratulated me and someone even tacked the clipping to the coffee room bulletin board where I was rereading it for the ninth time when my pager sounded an urgent signal.

Seymour’s big hands had gotten him into a major jam this time. Generally, delivering babies doesn’t take much finesse. You learn the technique in medical school, but you could learn it as easily at the World Wrestling Federation. Just grab around the neck, fingers supporting the head, and pull. It’s not a particularly delicate business.

C-sections take more skill, but after hundreds you get the hang of it. Once in a while, though, it can get tricky. You have to maneuver. And sometimes, it’s a tug of war between life and death.

The call was from Seymour’s circulating nurse who said, “Mrs. Garland is trying to bleed to death in OR 1. We need some help stat,” and I took the stairs two at a time.

Mrs. Garland had to be Sherry Garland, whom I met when I removed her mother’s cancerous uterus a few years back and who’d stopped, mid-waddle, to chat with me in the hall after her checkup with Seymour the day before. She had a husband and two other kids at home. Lots of people needed her.

In my field, you get an occasional bleeder. I’ve never lost one, but I’ve had a few close calls. The worst was a decade before. Removing a pelvic mass from a patient with lymphoma, I found myself wading up to my wrists in blood. With some fancy finger work and thirty units of AB positive, we pulled her through. After that, the word spread that I was adept at snatching bleeders out of the maws of death and I started getting calls from surgeons lacking that peculiar talent.

This time, I hit the OR trotting. Seymour, who never looked anything but overconfident, looked under. Above the mask, his eyes—showing too much white—widened even more for me. Beads of sweat popped on his forehead. This was a C-section. He’d lifted the baby safely out, but the mama refused to stop bleeding. The cause was placenta accreta in which the placenta grows into the uterine muscle. The procedure to separate took more delicacy than Seymour’s huge hands were capable of and now we had a fountain. He bobbed a bow as he backed out of the way and I plunged in. You don’t even think at this stage, it’s all reflex and heart, and you have it or you don’t.

This is what I love. The combat. It doesn’t have to be mortal, just perilous. When the dragon breathes fire, you slay the dragon. The closer he gets, the steadier your nerve, the better the sword play.

I knew the topography by heart, but Mrs. Garland’s internal landscape had been rendered murky and slippery by hemorrhage and for a split second, when the anesthesiologist calmly stated a tumbling blood pressure, I felt my heart lurch with the possibility of failure. I blocked it and focused on envisioning the internal iliac artery, the one that feeds the pelvis. I imagined precisely where it was and exactly how it felt and pushed myself to move swiftly but cautiously.

Found. Then my trusty instruments and I manipulated and clamped and, twenty units of blood later, stemmed the great tide.

After mama got shipped off to recovery, Seymour and I convened outside the OR to strip our scrubs. “That was a bastard of a bleeder. Thank you, Gwyneth.” He said respectfully, “You’re good.” Not
still
good, which would have earned him a curled lip. Just straight, unqualified good.

We talked shop for a few minutes, which pumped color back to his face, and right before I sprinted to my own patient, he said, “That article in the
Sun
this morning? Great coverage. This Fortune thing could be a real publicity boon for us. Try to mention the name of the practice on the show. And see if they’ll flash our 800 number on the screen. I told Barbara to prepare the girls out front for an onslaught of phone calls. Between the TV show and the newspaper article, we’re going to be inundated. You know, in retrospect you were right about that Pap Test Week appearance on WJZ. You’re the pro. I never should have allowed Bethany to do it. She has no media presence.”