My Favorite Midlife Crisis (9 page)

“What bothered me most was his assumption that I’d be so grateful for the attention at my age, I’d keel over with open arms.”

“And spread legs,” Tracy said. She was a therapist to all her clients. Better than a licensed shrink, too. The psychiatrists I know are badly screwed up. Also, they talk among themselves, which puts your business on the street. Tracy kept it in house.

“Pity fuck,” she said. She motioned for my hand to soak in sudsy water. “You never heard of a pity fuck? Where guys feel sorry for you, you know, and like do it as a favor to you. Like if you have acne or cruddy teeth or something gross like that. Men will fuck a milk bottle, so what does it matter to them anyway.”

“For godssakes,” Fleur waved her wet nails, “this woman is not a pity fuck. Look at her. She’s stunning, elegant. She’s a veritable Grace Kelly.”

“Who has been dead for over twenty years,” I said.

“Who’s Grace Kelly?” Tracy asked.

Fleur and I shook our heads simultaneously and grimaced with the pain of it.

Tracy said, “So you know that Mrs. Greenfield is upstairs being waxed, right?”

Our Mrs. Greenfield? Kat? Who back in college had grown her underarm hair long enough to be braided? Who’d refused to shave her legs as a protest against the war in Vietnam and as a gesture of solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere? That Kat?

“Room four,” Tracy said. “Bikini wax with Grushinka.”

Now, I have had a few bikini waxes in my time. A bikini wax rips stray pubic hair off the margins of the pubis and the upper thigh where bathing suit meets cellulite. It is a procedure Torquemada could be proud of, and personally I would rather go through an unmedicated root canal than submit myself to such medieval torture. But Kat laying her body on the altar of smoothness, a willing sacrifice for a bikini wax, now that was a phenomenon that demanded our attention.

Like teenagers, we abandoned Tracy’s table—my right hand was unpolished, Fleur’s nails were still tacky—rushed the stairs, and broke into the massage room.

We scared the hell out of Grushinka, preparing the waxing strips. Kat, stretched out on a massage table, just blinked at us and sighed. “I was expecting you.”

“Look,” she said after we ragged her about the waxing, “I’m trying to open my mind to new experiences. And it’s not as if I’m going from hair to bare in one fell swoop. My legs haven’t been shaggy for years. I started shaving the day Nixon resigned over Watergate, remember? To celebrate Amerika’s emancipation from that lying bastard.”

Dear Kat of days gone by, for whom every cosmetic renovation had been a political statement.

“Besides, we’re going to the beach tomorrow and I didn’t want to frighten the fish. And Lee was talking about doing a piece called ‘Katrina All at Sea’.”

“Well, he’s not working in marble,” Fleur said. “I mean, if you’re made out of forks, it’s okay if you’re a little bristly, right?”

“You really like this guy,” I said. “Going away with him after knowing him only a few weeks.”

“We’re staying at his sister’s. In separate rooms.”

“You can have the house in Rehoboth,” I offered. “Drew’s using it next weekend, but this weekend it’s empty. It’s big enough so you could have separate wings.”

“Thanks, but I want the sister around. Guaranteed celibacy. No hanky-panky. I won’t let myself get too involved so that when he takes off, I’ll be cool with it.”

“Takes off. That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“There’s an eleven-year difference between us. And his last girlfriend was twenty-nine.”

“And that’s a fourteen-year difference. Which obviously didn’t bother any of the parties involved.”

“It’s not logical, I know. It’s not fair. Double standard. Sexist. Old men play. Old ladies lose. But that’s the way it is. So, I’m determined to have my fling, but with no expectations except to enjoy it while it lasts.” Kat turned her face towards the wall.

“Kat, for godssakes, you’re not in a nursing home.” I worked to swallow a lump in my throat. All this talk of age made me queasy. Until lately, I’d never in my life had a problem attracting men. Even after splitting with Stan, I’d managed five or six dates and not one of them mentioned my age. But last night, Jeff Feldmacher had been set to shtupp me figuring I would be grateful for this act of carnal charity and today Kat, who had always exhibited a radical’s disdain for the superficiality of physical appearance, was having the hair torn from her thighs to hold on to love. Maybe we were all in more trouble than I’d thought.

The Russian lady bent toward Fleur. “You have little mustache on upper lip. I could take care of in five minutes,” she said. “Is not your fault. Is not you are ape. Just shadow above lip. From not much hormones like when you were girl. I can zip off in four minutes.”

Fleur stared at her, then dropped back to whisper, “How do you say fuck you in Russian?”

“Kat,” I said, touching my friend’s cheek so she turned it to me, “if it’s Ethan you’re worried about, betraying him I mean, one of these days you’re going to need to let go.”

“Maybe we’re just friends, Lee and I. Soul mates. We have similar interests.”

“What happened to the fling? A minute ago you were flinging, now only your souls are mating?” Fleur had her hand on the doorknob, eyeing the Russian lady warily.

“Why is everyone pushing me to have sex with this man? If I want to I will, but when I’m ready and I’m not ready. Anyway, I have to lose ten pounds first. My stomach is disgustingly flabby. And I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to ask him to take an HIV test. These days, you’ve got to plan for these things.”

She was right, but she sounded so prim I thought I was hallucinating. Where was the braless beauty who used to write poetry about the joyous abandoned sex she played out in a sweet haze of marijuana on tie-dyed sheets? What happened to my rapturous flower child of yesterdecade? Turned conventional by time, it seemed.

More than flab, this made me sad.

Chapter 9

On Saturday night, with nothing better to do, I went online to check out Fleur as brighteyes on Lovingmatch.com, sweetstuff on Largeandluscious, and Xshiksa at Jewlove. Gavin at GlamourGal had worked his final computer magic on her photo and the result was a knockout Fleur with cut-glass cheekbones and the jawline of a twenty-year-old. To check out the competition, I browsed the ads of other females fifty to sixty. Everyone was peppy, chipper, trim, fit, emotionally strengthened by life’s adversities, and eager to start over. The courage of these women exhilarated me. Their numbers depressed me.

As I prowled among the lonely hearts, I was stopped by a banner headline offering a free two-month membership on the website Ivydate.com. My Barnard diploma qualified me. All I had to do was fill out a profile.

Not me.

Woman in search of man.
Between fifty and death.
I slugged in my preferences.
Just for the hell of it, because it was this or actually watching Larry King, who droned on in the background.

HighIQutie. That’s the name I entered for my
nom d’Internet
. Then I wrote a profile in five minutes flat. Love Bach and Telemann, Italian art, Thai food. Looking for honest, trustworthy, cultured man who’s passionate about work and life. Accent—French, Italian, British, Southern—a bonus. Sense of humor/wit essential.

Then I scrambled through the boxes of photographs I’d promised for a decade to sort, and found one to use with my profile. My neighbor Jean Coogan had taken the picture a few weeks before The Treachery. The boys were gone all that July; Drew in Cape Cod as a counselor at an arts and crafts camp, Whit hiking through Bulgaria with a group of like-minded overindulged college kids. I thought I had it made. Everything stretched infinitely ahead. The beach, the ocean, the day, my appreciated life. I was at its sweet center, a pearl layering gorgeous time. Soon Jean would walk on to her own blanket and book and I would be left to the temporary isolation I loved, facing the sheet of linen afternoon hemmed by prospects of sunset with Stan, sipping pinot grigio, watching the sea, and listening to him talk about his day spent hunting down vintage wicker with Brad, the decorator. He failed to mention that he was getting buggered in the new eighteenth-century Italian provincial bed while I was focused on the waves. That detail would emerge in the divorce interrogatories.

The woman in the photo looked blissfully unaware. On the beach under a floppy straw hat, oversized Jackie Kennedy sunglasses hiding my eyes, nose pinked by the sun, I smiled with genuine pleasure at the expanse before me. I was displayed in high menopause with a body ten pounds heavier than before or after. And for all the patients I counseled who were in the same state, the intractable thickening of my waist had infuriated me. The bathing suit, navy with vertical white stripes, was my effort to slim at least what the world saw. I lost those defiant last ten pounds that fall in the melting off that for me always accompanies crisis.

Now I smiled at the photograph, admiring from a distance the feminine curves that frustrated me then. No one but my closest friends and family would recognize me in this photo. Perfect for a lark. I scanned it in. Pressed
submit,
reassured myself that nothing would ever come of this folly, and promptly—the way I misplaced the names of the new, unfunny crowd on
Saturday Night Live
now making background mayhem—forgot about it.

***

My father liked to sit on a bench in Patterson Park and watch...what? I wondered if what he saw was just a jumble of fragments, shards of shifting images without meaning but with some beauty. There must have been something out there striking some chord in there, because he sighed frequently and deeply on those outings, I hoped with pleasure. This Sunday, the sun was warm, the grass smelled of scallions, kids kicked up dust with their bicycle wheels and yipped on the bumps. Maybe something broke through.

He ate his ice cream cone like a child below the level of self-consciousness, with a wide flat tongue that I didn’t remember from his good days. Perhaps the small muscles were beginning to slacken. A slight tremor in his left hand plunged his thumb through the cone so the mint chocolate chip ice cream flooded through the hole and dripped down his shirt. I wiped his face with a napkin, dabbing at the green cream on his cheek. He grabbed my hand to stop my fussing, then turned it over, jerked it up, and planted on my palm an unexpected, sticky kiss.

“I need some money,” he said, as I delivered him back to Sylvie.

He said that nearly every week. He was obsessed with money, which is typical for Alzheimer’s patients. There is nothing in the literature about this, but much anecdotal material.

Sylvie had scolded me before. “You keep giving him all this money and then he hides it who knows where and it’s lost forever. Give him play money.”

So I’d stopped at Toys “R” Us and picked up a pack of kiddie cash for the inevitable demand and when he asked this time, I peeled off a fifty, three tens, and two fives, while Sylvie nodded approvingly at my side.

He looked down and scowled. “What are you trying to do to me here? This is fake money. It’s a joke, right?” Very coherent. A flight into lucidity. Then, crash. “I know what you’re up to, Helen. You’ve switched money on me. You’ve got my real money hidden somewhere, right? Piling up so you can run off on me.” Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Thirty years too late, he was telling my mother off. He shouted in my face, “You were born a bitch, you’ll die a bitch. May your soul be condemned to eternal damnation.” Without warning, he reared back and shoved me so hard I careened sideways into the beveled edge of a china cabinet, which carved a short, deep slice below my eyebrow. Blood gushed. I snatched the crocheted doily off his chair back and pressed hard, but my father saw and recognized the red. His face collapsed. He bawled like an infant, gulping air to fuel his sobs.

“It’s all right, Daddy, it’s all right,” I kept repeating, trying to stanch the blood with one hand and reach out with the other. “Come on, Daddy, I’m fine. See?” I cupped his chin and tilted his head so he could see my forced smile. “It was an accident. I know you love me. You’d never hurt me on purpose.” But the only thing that comforted him was the sucking candy with a honey center Sylvie slipped into his mouth.

When he’d quieted down, she lowered him into the old chair and switched on the television. She talked in front of him, but he didn’t seem to hear. His attention was locked on the Game Show channel.

“I don’t know about this,” she said. “This is a new t’ing. The pushing and shoving. He never did do that before. Oh, I don’t like that. We’re in a new phase here. I tell you, I’m not one to put up with physical abuse. I didn’t let a husband do it; I’m not about to let an old man do it. I don’t like this phase. No indeed, don’t like it at all.”

I was going to London for the conference I’d hijacked from Bethany McGowan. I couldn’t leave my father without coverage and there was no time to find a suitable fill-in.

“I’m sure you can handle him, Sylvie. I’m sure this is an isolated incident. But just to let you know how much I appreciate the way you care for him. Wait...” I dug through the junk in my handbag, found my wallet, and placed a fifty-dollar bill in Sylvie’s palm, an obvious bribe. I was buying time. Sylvie eyed it suspiciously, then held up to the light. To make sure it wasn’t play money, I presumed.