My Favorite Midlife Crisis (10 page)

On my way out, I checked my eye in the mirror. It would need a steri-strip to minimize the scar, but compared to the gouges my mother left me, it was a nick. When it healed, it would be hardly noticeable.

***

I must have sounded desperate when I called for an appointment because by Monday I was at Covenant Hospital’s Gerontology Department sitting across the desk from Dan Rosetti while my father tried to recite the alphabet for the psychologist in the next room.

“His shoving isn’t unusual,” Dan said. “Some of my gentlest patients lash out from time to time. We don’t know exactly why. It could be that this acting out marks a further decline. Which is a damn shame. Harald is a sweet guy.”

Dan Rosetti was also a sweet guy. His eyebrows knit with empathy when he gave me the news that wasn’t really news, and when he talked to my father, it was man to man, not doctor to patient, or worse, doctor to disease. My father adored him and always struggled to climb out of his illness when they conversed. He may have flunked the cognitive tests, but Dad could still manage formulaic small talk with Dan. The superficial patter is the last to go. Dan always seemed touched by the show and he would either ruffle what was left of my father’s hair or rub genial circles on his back as he listened. Geriatricians know that most of their patients don’t get enough physical contact, but Dan was more hands-on than is recommended for physicians in our currently litigious society. Fleur said that was the warm Mediterranean in him.

It was Fleur who’d suggested we see Dan when my father began showing signs of befuddlement. She liked the way he managed her mother’s osteoporosis. In a trick of fate, Fleur had inherited the big frame and the padding that upholstered it from her Grandmother Broussard. Mother Talbot, on the other hand, was a trim little number who’d never weighed more than a hundred pounds and, now that she had the bends, measured all of five feet. But if her bones were porous, her brain was dense with fully functional cells. “Daniel Rosetti may be Italian,” she’d told Fleur recently, “but he’s not like one of those crude gangsters on HBO saying that awful F-word all the time.”

“The old girl thinks he’s God and he’ll keep her alive forever,” Fleur said.

Now Dan scrawled the name of a new drug on his prescription pad and slid it over to me. “This might calm him down, but I can’t guarantee it won’t make him lethargic.”

“No, let’s just let it go. Next time I’ll remember to duck.”

“You all right, Gwyn?” he asked. “I know this can’t be easy. There are support groups you might find helpful. If you’re interested, I can give you a few phone numbers.”

No, no, not another FRESH
, I thought. All I said is, “I think we’re okay for now.”

“If it’s any comfort, they’re onto some really promising leads in the research. One of these days there’s going to be a major breakthrough. Probably too late for Harald, but...” he shrugged and I filled in the blank,
maybe in time for you. Otherwise, you too may wind up fingerpainting with your mashed potatoes and thinking Eisenhower is president.

Alzheimer’s. Worse than the F-word.

Chapter 10

A few days later, on a mockingly vibrant autumn afternoon, I said good-bye to one of my patients. Twenty-nine, mother of a toddler, lovely, accomplished, she’d come into the office with Stage 3 ovarian cancer and pleaded with me to buy her time.

Together we fought the crab for twenty months, a tug-of-war I thought I weighted for victory with chemotherapists and radiologists and experimental protocols. Wrong again.

With everything we know, with all our science and our technology, our data and our skills, clinical medicine can still be a crapshoot. The slip-on-the-banana-peel school of medicine teaches you not to take the credit for a save and not to hold yourself entirely responsible for a patient’s loss. Which doesn’t make it any easier to lose one.

I sat at her bedside and let my dying patient console me. “You did everything you could, Dr. Berke. I couldn’t have asked for a better doctor.”

She whispered this final benediction even as I was powerless to do anything more than increase her painkillers, wrap her glacially cold hands in my warm ones, and not turn away when my eyes filled.

Which is why I decided to fix myself a martini on a weeknight.

I came home early, changed into sweats, turned on the news, and headed for the vodka. I bent over the wet bar to pour myself two fat fingers of Smirnoff. Therefore, my back was turned when Bethany McGowan plunged the knife deep between my shoulder blades.

I heard the nasal voice first. It whirled me around, showering martini on my blouse. Oh, it was her, all right. In living color, the weaselly face magnified by the TV set. I must admit someone had done a creditable job with her makeup. And her shiny dark hair, which she usually wore sleek against her skull, had been fashionably tousled. From beneath the white lab coat peeked a pale blue spread-collar silk shirt. Expensive looking. If I were a woman concerned about precancerous uterine dysplasia, I’d think Bethany was a reliable resource. Except that every September for the past decade,
I’d
been the one facing the camera during National Pap Test Week.
I’d
been the gynecological talking head on WJZ-TV urging Baltimore’s women to get their cervixes swabbed.

But this year, the commemorative week had slipped my mind, and the health reporter hadn’t called me. Whom did she call? Not Bethany certainly. Potak? Bernstein? One of the seniors who passed the call to Bethany? The bastards. I fumed as Bethany explained the difference between regular and thin prep Pap smears and described cell changes in cervical cancer. You’d have thought oncology was her specialty when 90 percent of what she did was obstetrics. She knew from first trimester vomiting and last trimester hemorrhoids. She was a mommy-sitter and a baby-tugger, for godssakes.

By the time Bethany’s sermon gave way to coverage of a five-car pileup on I-70, I was punching numbers into my phone. Neither Potak nor Bernstein, alerted by caller ID, would pick up. Fine. I’d ambush them tomorrow before I’d had my caffeine. While I was still a madwoman.

At eight the next morning, Seymour Bernstein leaned back in his leather chair looking desperate to press a button that would project him beyond my fury. “The truth is, they asked for Bethany. Well, not exactly for Bethany. But they wanted a younger face. Not my words, Gwyn.” An artificial smile exposed twenty thousand dollars’ worth of oversized dental implants. Since divorcing his comfortable high school sweetheart wife, he’d been dyeing his grayish hair a one-dimensional beaver color and worn a perpetual ersatz tan. Some members of our junior staff had spotted him dancing spastically at nightclubs around Fells Point, frantically hunting the younger gazelles.

“That’s ageism, grounds for a lawsuit,” I said, steaming.

“Against who? The station? Bullshit. It’s just demographics. They’re trying to capture the eighteen-to-thirty-four market, where the money is. The big spenders.”

“Mature doctors give off an aura of authority and confidence,” I persisted.

“I couldn’t agree with you more. But I don’t schedule for WJZ. They wanted young, but experienced. It was going to be Ken Dempsey, and he stutters, or Bethany. I thought she did pretty well. Photographs nicely and she has a calm, understated presence.”

That was a shot. As was his next volley. “And I thought it was a nice consolation prize after you pulled London out from under her. I got a mailing from IAGSO. I didn’t see your name on the faculty. Typo, I assume.”

The s.o.b. He’d probably called Don Iverson, who was in charge of the program for the Academy. And I’d neglected to cover my tracks.

“Well, you could have had the courtesy at least to tell me about Bethany’s appearance,” I countered, sounding as lame as I felt.

“And you’d have reamed me a new one and we’d have had to call a meeting and take a vote and God knows what while the reporter would be on the phone to Frank Lustig over at Union Memorial and we’d have lost the coverage. Sometimes it’s best to just get the job done and deal with the consequences later.”

He sighed and reached for his Palm Pilot, then turned mournful eyes on me. “Look, I’m sorry you’re fifty-four. Hell, I’m sorry I’m fifty-nine. But it’s the reality. We’ve got plenty of good work left in us, Gwyn. That’s not the issue. But they’re nipping at our heels, the young turks. So cede them a little space graciously. Do a little mentoring. Teach them the craft, not just the skills. You’re a good doctor; pass it on.”

“And then go gentle into that good night,” I said, turning to the door.

Behind me, he expelled a groan of exasperation which slid into a higher key as he sang out, “Ahh, Bethany, come in, come in.”

The newly celebrated Dr. McGowan poked her head around the doorjamb. How long she’d been standing within eavesdropping distance was anybody’s guess. The hazel eyes lit on me for the briefest moment, all blank innocence, then bounced over to Seymour Bernstein where they acquired a smoky light.

“Hope I’m not intruding, Sy,” she said. Her voice was nauseatingly melodic. I backed up to catch the panorama of the exchange.

“Always time for you, Beth,” he began, then added for my benefit, “...any.”

And I got it. Or thought I got it. His delight in seeing her could have been the relief of a drowning man spotting a lifeboat. After all, she’d interrupted a conversation that reduced him to tearing his dyed hair. Then again, she was leaning forward in a peach silk duplicate of the shirt she wore for her TV appearance, lab coat unbuttoned, bezel-set diamond pendant swinging in the shadow of her cleavage, one shapely leg—ending in a very unprofessional three-inch tapered pump—extended. Her lids lowered. His lips moistened. Seymour and Bethany, a couple? Beth and Sy, on the sly? She was thirty. He was fifty-nine. Mentoring? Teaching her the craft? Was I paranoid? Or was I, once again, the last to know?

The following morning at nearly the same time in nearly in the same place, I almost crashed into Kat emerging furtively from Neil Potak’s office.

She could have been in for a routine check, so why, when she saw me, did she look as if the pulse in her forehead was about to strum “Nearer My God to Thee”? Her eyes met mine and she jumped back like a crane readying for flight, arms flapping, string handbag swinging.

“Hi,” I said. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

I paused. It’s a physician’s trick. Wait a beat and even the shyest patient will feel compelled to fill the silence, sometimes with helpful information.

“I just needed to get something checked out.”

“Good. And everything’s okay,” I made it a statement. We were walking in rhythm now and she followed me into my office.

“It’s just a urinary tract infection. I kept getting up all night to pee. I had a little blood in my urine this morning. So I figured why play around. I called and Marie said Dr. Potak had an opening and could fit me in. He gave me an antibiotic and something that will turn my pee orange. No big deal. Could be from anything, from the air.”

Honeymoon cystitis. Too much intercourse in too short a time irritates the urethra. Common among newlyweds. Evidently, Kat and Lee had quite a weekend, in spite of the sister in the next room.

“All right,” she conceded, as if we were arguing. “I slept with him. God.”

“Well, that’s nice. It’s been a long time for you. I hope it was a good experience.”

My placid tone disarmed her. “Not a great move, huh? Too soon? It just happened so naturally. I think it would have been
un
natural to deny ourselves.” Kat recited the litany of the free-for-all seventies.

“Well, you always had good instincts. Obviously, you feel you know Lee. And trust him. And he’s not made any noises like the sex has scared him away, right?”

“Just the opposite. He’s been calling three times a day.” Kat smiled a wicked smile, leaned forward, and morphed before my eyes into my college roommate, the wild-haired, pot-smoking, placard-waving, bead-shaking Kool Kat I loved. “My God, Gwyn, it was like I was in my twenties. I was popping orgasms like bubble wrap. The most I ever had at one time. Oh, and we watched porn.”

“In his sister’s house?”

“No, I was afraid we were too loud, so we went to a hotel the second night. Porn! Me! Maybe I was wrong about porn. About it being another capitalistic tool for the oppression of women. Even though the women were wearing seven-inch heels and going down on two guys at once, they were getting as much as they gave and it was stimulating. Except...”

I held my breath.

“Ethan. I feel I betrayed Ethan. I know it’s illogical and ridiculous. He’s dead and I’m alive and he would have wanted this for me. To be happy...”

Well, yes,
I thought,
but maybe he wouldn’t have cheered for the multiple orgasms.

“...and our sex life in the last few years before he died was beginning to slow down. He smoked all that weed when he was younger and he thought maybe that had something to do with it. But you get used to the slowing down and I thought, well, I’m into menopause so I wasn’t exactly burning with desire. At least before the estrogen. And now with Lee, I feel reborn. But Summer thinks I’ve lost my mind. She’s absolutely livid.”