My Favorite Midlife Crisis (38 page)

“Sorry we’re meeting under such circumstances,” she said, backing off. “A moment,” she held up a halting hand, squatted to peek under the stall behind me, then made her way down the row to check the other five. Finally, she briskly opened, then closed, the door to the handicapped toilet. I was amused by all this Cold War spooky stuff. Then I remembered Bitti had been raised in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. “All clear,” she pronounced. “It is important to be careful. You never know who might be listening.”

As if to prove the point, a woman dressed in head-to-toe black sailed through the door and swept in front of us to adjust her head scarf in the mirror. She wore no makeup, no jewelry. She peered at my reflection as it observed her. “You do not recognize me?” The accent was Middle Eastern with trilled r’s and a phlegmy overlay. “My friends call me Fatima.” She turned towards me and winked.

The wink, a flash of emerald iris, cut through the disguise. “For godssakes, Claire, is that you?”

“None other. But I had you there for a moment, didn’t I?”

“Honestly, I had no idea it was you until I caught your eye color.”

“I figured it would play from a distance. Claire McKenna,” she grinned and extended a hand to Bitti, who gave her the hatchet shake. “I decided in case I accidentally ran into Simon in the hall, I’d better not set off his alarms.”

“Excellent costume. You see more and more head scarves these days. Alia Rashid is a brilliant scientist and she’s draped head to foot in the chador.” Bitti resumed leaning against the wall-mounted tampon dispenser, eye on the door.

“Well, this is just an old Valentino suit and a scarf I dug out of a drawer. And I pushed back the bangs,” Claire said, facing the mirror, examining her teeth. “Simon’s already in the room, by the way. I was behind him in the hall and saw him go in.” She applied a slash of lipstick. “I gave him a few minutes and snuck a look at the meeting room. Nearly every seat is filled. The more the merrier is the way I see it. Let the world know the creep for who he really is.” She grimaced at her reflection. “God, I haven’t slept for days. My face is collapsing from anxiety.”

A teenaged girl entered. Bitti waited until she’d chosen a stall, then stepped into one of the empty ones and flushed the toilet. Noise camouflage.

“Okay. Time is flying. We need to move ourselves,” Bitti said. “Two good things. First, Angela Barola is chairing the session. Which is helpful to us. Because Angela is a past officer of Centro Italiano Femminile. Very involved in the Italian women’s movement. If it comes down to it, she will err on our side.”

“Hurray for our team.” Claire swung around to grab a paper towel, blot her lips. Her gestures, I realized, were too jaggedy. She was pretty revved up. Eyes shining, color high. I wondered if she’d had a shot or three of her favorite Dewars in the Metroliner parlor car to boost her courage. Or something in capsule form. “That’s what I like, a totally subjective scientist.”

Bitti flushed another unoccupied toilet. “Second, I set up everything with the young man in charge of the audio visual components. Multiple inputs are managed by a touch panel control system. For the next session, Simon is at the podium and his PowerPoint gets the screen on the left. The screen right side of the stage—remember
right,
as in we are in the right—has been programmed with your PowerPoint slides, Claire. Simple, yes? So, here is your remote. And a name tag for you.” She slapped the first into Claire’s outstretched palm and pinned the second to her lapel. “And one for you, Gwyneth.” She pinned the name tag to my pocket. Underneath, my heart was running a nervous arpeggio. My mouth was dry with stage fright.

“All set, yes? Let us be off then.”

We trailed after her like ducklings towards the door. Just before exiting she stopped short and spun around. “Do you pray?” she asked, and before we could answer, she crossed herself. “I don’t myself, but it wouldn’t hurt.”

“Dear Jesus,” Claire muttered behind me. And it wasn’t a prayer.

Chapter 40

We fanned out. Claire slipped into the last row far right and hunkered down in her chair. I found a man with a head as big and round as Charlie Brown’s and planted myself behind him. Bitti landed a seat halfway back on the center aisle. She didn’t need to hide.

Within minutes, the room was packed and you could feel the anticipation. Word had got round that Simon York was about to unveil a groundbreaking advance in the early detection of ovarian cancer. This was a major event. Bitti had said they’d let out the expandable walls to handle the overflow.

It took a few minutes for Angela Barola, the moderator, to calm the buzz. Dressed in a drab suit and a prim white blouse, Angela glared at the crowd under eyebrows that had never seen tweezers. She really did look the part of a science nun, one of that breed of women who channel all their passion into science, which they worship like a religion. I took heart from the fact that her introduction of Simon was not as reverent as he might have wished. Angela didn’t seem the type to fall for Simon’s charm. Unlike a certain three women of Simon’s acquaintance who were, however, currently uncharmed and ready to rumble.

As I slouched in my chair trying to duck behind the big-headed man, a wave of menopausal heat rolled over me, leaving me drenched and breathless. A hot-flash ambush, not unusual under stress. I peeled my cashmere sweater away from my chest, mopped my face and the back of my neck, then stared at the wet tissue balled in my hands. And kept staring. I hadn’t laid eyes on Simon since the deli debacle in New York and I’d been stalling since sitting down.

Now I counted to ten before forcing myself to look at him.

Deep breath and there he was, crossing the stage, wearing his favorite navy suit and a new tan he’d probably picked up on who knows what California beach with who knows what California girl. Simon York. My Simon. Every woman’s Simon. Which I realized, as I palpated all my emotions, didn’t hurt anymore. I was pain free. My jaw was tight and there was some tension in my shoulders. But no real pain.

I watched Simon fussing with his laser pointer. With the silver hair and the cleft in his chin, he was still, on a handsome scale of 1 to 10, a solid 15. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. The rich baritone, the Knightsbridge accent was, as always, velvet.

Simon clicked to the title of his presentation. I searched for Claire behind me and found her. She curled her lip, mouthed “mine” at the slide, and pantomimed slitting her throat. He nodded towards the back of the room. The lights dimmed. Simon began to recite.

Claire let him get through the introduction: five slides laying out the objectives and the preliminary data. For a moment, when he referred to the work as “our” work and the problem as the challenge “we” saw, I thought,
Oh, my God, we’d pegged him wrong,
he was going to cite Claire McKenna, the real hero of this breakthrough. But Claire’s name never surfaced and as soon as he began describing the methodology of the experiments, he slipped into the omnipotent I.
I
calculated this,
I
extrapolated that. I, I, I. Ay, ay, ay…. Claire was out of her seat, heading down the right aisle towards one of three microphones set up for questions and answers. Bitti, I saw, had already positioned herself at the floor microphone far left. I felt a new heat wave simmering around my cleavage.
Come on girl
, I roused myself,
no faltering now
. I trotted to the third mike.

The hijacking happened too quickly for the audience to react. Not that practitioners of science generally move faster than the speed of osmosis. But they did shift in their seats. And you could almost hear a collective crick of two hundred necks craning to see who was speaking as Claire said and the microphone amplified, “Dr. York, I’m going to need to interrupt you here.”

Claire whipped off her head scarf. I cleared my throat. Bitti tapped her microphone to make sure it was working.

On stage, the speaker was in a dither. Frankly, it was a joy to watch the always unflappable Simon York lose it in public. It was obvious he couldn’t quite take in the implications of the panorama before him. His eyes darted from woman to woman to woman. Claire. Bitti. Gwyneth. Together. What the hell could that mean? From the dazed smile and the hunted look, I could see he knew he was in deep trouble.

Swaying slightly, he gripped the podium for balance. And then, like a marionette chinking parts into place, he visibly pulled himself into a reasonable facsimile of together. But not in time to override Claire’s announcement that she was Claire McKenna of the Kerns-Brubaker Medical Institution, a senior scientist in the laboratory directed by Simon York. And she felt she must protest this presentation.

At first, the audience response was a shocked silence. Then a flurry of whispers spun through the hall.

Clutching the microphone, Claire swung to face the crowd. “I’m aware that what I’m doing here breaks precedent. But I also know you’re men and women of science to whom the truth is sacred. And for the sake of truth, it’s imperative that you see what I’m about to show you.” I fidgeted, worried that Bitti’s arrangement with the AV guy got botched somehow and Claire’s PowerPoint wasn’t ready to roll. I clenched my teeth as I saw her thumb press the remote. Relaxed when on the screen behind her, under the letterhead of the Kerns-Brubaker lab, the smoking gun appeared huge and impressive. She turned to read aloud:

Claire,

I’m sorry I raised my voice to you yesterday. But I cannot seem to impress upon you strongly enough that your insistence on pursuing experiments regarding the CA-gene test is misguided to say the least. There is no promise of success here. Therefore, I see no value in continuing this line of inquiry.

Consider this an official notice that this project is cancelled as of today. Let’s get together Monday to discuss in person the best use of your
considerable
talents.

Simon

Claire gave that a moment to sink in, then addressed Simon. “Do you deny writing that memo, Dr. York?”

The room quieted to the absolute stillness of suspended breath.

Unaccountably, Simon’s eyes rested on me. Pleading. As if I could save him. I gave him a thin smile and a shrug. He shook his head in lamentation.

“That is my memo,” he acknowledged softly. Then louder, “Yes, yes, of course. I wrote the memo.” He was vamping, buying time. “But,” he held up a finger whose tremor was obvious even from where I stood, “it was written in the early stage of the project and we had further discussions that reversed my earlier opinion.”

Claire was bouncing on her toes as if she could barely restrain herself from vaulting to the stage to throttle the speaker.
Nice and easy, Claire
, I soothed.
You’ve got him by the short hairs. Don’t blow your cool.

I mentally willed her to remember Fleur and Kat’s instructions about staying on message. They’d relentlessly coached her almost up to the moment we left them downstairs in the hotel bar where they were waiting for us, nursing a merlot and an orange juice, to celebrate or pick up the pieces when this was over.

Claire did them proud. “That’s not true, Dr. York. The truth is you reversed your opinion only after I came to you with the data that proved my theory. Only after,” she came down hard on
after,
“I worked on the project for months without your knowledge or approval. Only after,” she jabbed her own finger at him, “I brought to you incontrovertible proof that the experiments had been successful beyond even my expectation. That’s when you said I’d done it. Proved you wrong. You told me you were happy to have been proven wrong. That I’d grabbed the brass ring. ‘Job splendidly done,’ were your exact words.” Claire’s voice fell to a whisper. “I cherished those words.”

It seemed to me the entire room squirmed.

“Do you recall that conversation, Dr. York?”

“Claire,” he began, as if he’d forgotten where he was, that he wasn’t next to her in bed. At the far end of the stage, Angela Barola’s head snapped up. “Dr. McKenna,” he amended. “This is absurd. Ridiculous. You had my support, my cooperation, my input every step of the way.”

“That’s a damned lie and I have my lab notebook to back me up.” Cheeky lass, our Dr. McKenna. She flashed the next slide displaying pages from her notebook dated weeks after his memo. Then another slide with more pages from months later. I knew everyone in the audience was scanning for Simon’s signatures against the dated entries, looking for any scribble indicating he, as supervisor, had been aware of, involved in her work. Nothing.

“As removed from this as you were, you know I didn’t have a problem sharing the credit with you.” Claire was playing to the crowd. “I observe the rules. But you were my mentor. I trusted you. You never even told me you were giving this paper today. Your betrayal is a breach of…”

For a moment, I thought she’d choked. But, no, someone had pulled the plug on her microphone. This set off a skirmish near the outlet that sent me sprinting toward the fray. Then I saw the tug-of-war had been won by Carolyn Dean, a pal of mine from the Hopkins lab, a woman built like Fleur but with more muscle, who held up the electrical cord in triumph before jamming the plug into the socket. Back at the mike, I managed to catch her eye and send her a thank-you smile. She gave me a knowing look along with a thumbs up, then assumed a belligerent spread-legged, hands-on-hips position at the outlet to let potential miscreants know she was standing guard against further sabotage.