A New Lu (4 page)

4

“I don't want an old man. They smell. Yes, they do. They don't bathe, don't change their drawers. All they see when they look at a woman is a cook and a nurse!”

Marvelle Harrington flashes a toothy seventy-five-year-old smile. Her jewelry, a combination of gold charms and diamond tennis bracelets, jangles as she reaches for her martini. “You get to my age, you look for some fun! Someone who can take you places. Dancing.”

“That's right.” Cleo Watley nods her perfectly coiffed head. “I'm not interested in caretaking some old fart.”

“And about all that farting.” Grace Clifford frowns. “What is that radioactive stuff they produce? Turns my rooms blue.”

Jane Simmons wags her finger. “If you want companionship, you should try a senior cruise.”

“I never would do that.” Marvelle turns to me. “Last time I was down in Florida, Jane talked me into going to a dance at an assisted-living residence. But the only people dancing were women with women. They got all
dressed up to dance with one another! What men there were were sitting in their chairs. When I walked in, a pair of old souls, trying to be gentlemen, started to get up. Now, I said, ‘Don't get up. That's all right. I'm just passing by.' But they were bound and determined. Lu, I had to stop and pat my foot it took them so long. Creaky old men! What am I supposed to do with a man who can't even get out of a chair?”

I'm halfway through my second martini and more than silly with laughter. It feels good, really good to laugh. Aunt Marvelle lives the life of a merry widow, together with a few select friends. For the last six days I've been their guest and their audience.

Cleo sniffs. “Never go to an old folks home. All they do is talk about their ailments.”

Marvelle nods vigorously. “And who died.”

“I don't want to talk about illness.” Grace gives an olive on a toothpick a ride through her martini. “They're half dead, but then we all are. What's to talk about?” Said olive disappears between her coral lips.

We are holding forth before the fireplace near the bar of Maryjanes, an East Hampton restaurant, at two in the afternoon. Ladies in their seventies and eighties don't go out much after dark. It's April, but there are enough fur coats present to keep an Eskimo family happy through a winter. Spring is being coy on the eastern end of Long Island.

“You're so lucky,” Jane says with a wink at me. “You're still young. You have plenty of time for love.”

My smile curls sheepishly when I realize all eyes have turned to me. After only a week in the company of women a generation older, I feel practically like a teenager. This is my going-home party. Tomorrow I return to my real life.

“Jane's right.” Grace smiles benevolently at me. “You're pretty, too. You'll have many lovers. But you may find you're happier single.”

“Speaking of single. Did you see Nicole on
Entertainment Tonight?
All splayed fingers and awkward schoolgirl gestures.” Cleo waves her hands about to demonstrate her point. “Someone should tell her she's too old for that giggly sex-kitten act.”

“Meg Ryan, too.” Marvelle nods. “Used to like her but she seems stuck in adolescence.”

“And, really, has Goldie looked in the mirror lately? There's more collagen in her lips than in her bustline.”

“She never married that guy, right?” Jane chuckles. “Better than a divorce, like Nicole.”

“Now see, I disagree.” Marvelle is in her element. “Tom walking out was the best thing could have happened to her. Look how her career took off. A bad divorce is sometimes better than a good marriage, if you ask me.”

“Maybe. So what about Demi? What happened there?”

“Oh, she acted a fool. Now she's gone and got a full-body makeover—and a young lover. Didn't recognize her on the
Tonight Show.
”

My aunt and her friends discuss movie stars and other celebrities as if they knew them personally, and as if I should.

“So, then, you don't think I should have a little work done?”

“Work done?” Grace looks at Marvelle. “Does she mean surgery?”

“Your aunt was talking about stars. You're not a star,” Jane answers. “You've still got your looks, mostly.”

Marvelle nods vigorously. “I told Lu, join a gym and hire a personal trainer. A male personal trainer. A female, with her perk young butt, will only make you mad, but a male trainer will get you to try things the wildest night of passion wouldn't.”

“Tight is better than skinny.” Cleo pats her firm round cheeks for emphasis. “Lose too much weight after forty,
you will sag. Wrinkles are worse than pounds. Take Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon. They're aging beautifully. Contrary to what you read in women's magazines, men don't mind a few pounds. Means you're real.”

“And most probably cook!”

“Not that again!”

I laugh and reach for the last of the plump pearly oysters on the half shell we ordered. It goes down cool and salty-sweet.

A waiter approaches, deftly catches my eye and offers a smile meant just for me. “You'd like something more?”

His name's Kiri. He's Serbian. He's got dark and dangerous eyes and a mischievous smile. I'm smitten, for the afternoon.

Grace has noticed our flirtation and leans forward when he's gone with our lunch orders. “Don't be taken in by these local fellows. Any man available this time of year has less than two nickels to rub together. Or he's married. Hausfrau in the old country.”

“That's a truth.” Marvelle drains her glass. “Charm is cheap!”

Each of them has buried at least one husband. Only Jane first lost hers to a younger woman, eight years ago. When the time came to bury him last year, Wife Number Two came to Jane for help. Aunt Marvelle told me the story the day I arrived.

“She didn't know Bruce was Episcopalian. Didn't know his favorite flower. Didn't even know what family he had left. That man-stealer had run through his money, and didn't know his brother's name! Jane said she realized then that she'd had her revenge on Bruce since he left, only she didn't know it. Of course, Jane saw to it Bruce was buried properly. Said it was the least she could do since her children bear his name.”

But this is not a bitter group of women. They appreciate life in a way that is rare. They live it, day by day.

The noise in my own head has subsided in their company. And I've made a few plans.

Later, when Aunt Marvelle and I have returned to her house, I decide it's time we talked. “I am going to sell my house.”

“Oh no, Tallulah.” Marvelle looks stricken. “Not your lovely house.”

“It's too much house for one.”

“But the children?”

“Dallas is living with friends. She and Stephen have found a place to live after the wedding. Davin didn't spend but six weeks at home after his freshman year. He's already got a lead on a job in the Catskills for this summer. He'll be home even less.”

“There's something you're not telling me. But that's fine.”

Aunt Marvelle doesn't have to pry. After five days in her company I want to come clean.

“Jacob and I don't want the children to know. But the months he was out of a job took a toll on our savings that we haven't been able to recoup, thanks to the stock market. Davin is only halfway through school, and we don't want to have to pull him out. But tuition has to come from somewhere. Jacob gave me the house with the understanding that if it became necessary I'd sell.”

“And?”

“My job is in jeopardy.”

Marvelle smiles. “So, come and live with me.”

I smile but shake my head. “I'd be a drag on your social life.”

Marvelle shrugs. “I'm about to tell you this because I don't want you to make the same kind of mistake. I was fond of Jacob. But my fondness stopped the day he walked out. I'm through with him! Don't let a man who hurt you come back. That's what happened to Jane.

“Bruce led her a merry dance! Ever since they met in
college. Could have married half a dozen times, good men, too, with nice jobs. But Jane was a fool for Bruce. And didn't he marry twice before he offered for her hand? She was thirty-five, almost too late for her to have children. Should have heard what her father had to say about that! Bruce was not husband material. We all tried to tell her he'd break her heart. But then… There're a lot of ways to go to the devil.”

I can't argue with that.

In the distance, I hear faint sounds of waves lapping the shore of the harbor. We are sitting on the small patio of Aunt Marvelle's modest bungalow, one of many in the beachfront community of Azurest. Built half a century ago as a summer retreat, this Sag Harbor community has become the retirement place of Marvelle's Marvelous Matrons, as I've dubbed them. The interior furnishings are Danish modern, circa 1950s, a bit worn but more than serviceable. Not much has changed. Amazing to think a house could remain essentially the same for what is my lifetime.

All at once I want to cry. Nothing in my life will ever have this kind of permanence. I envy the Marvelous Matrons the continuity of their lives.

“I may not do anything about the house for a few months. We'll see. But it's April and prime selling time. I can't wait long.”

“That disposes of the house and the children. What is in your future?”

I blink hard. Aunt Marvelle doesn't approve of emotions on display. “Oh, I don't know. A dalliance with a gigolo?”

“Serbian waiters are for women of a certain age. You are too young.”

My face creases into a wide smile. “I came here feeling a hundred.”

“Pooh! Nothing some color in your hair won't put
right. The salt air is good for you. Stay another week and you will have your choice of men, good men. City men.”

A hiccup escapes me. And then another. The pitch from the pleasant dizziness of the afternoon into the maudlin affairs of my future has taken a sickly turn. “I think…I think…I'm going to be sick!”

“I don't need a doctor. It was the martinis. Or the oysters.” Just the thought of them makes me wobble as I'm sitting cross-legged in bed.

“You look about as green as a scallion. You were up three times at night, heaving and retching. I counted.”

Aunt Marvelle is right. Now the sky is a washed-out pinky gray. I feel about the same, clammy and sticky besides.

“I'm calling my clinic, soon as they open. They know me—they'll work you in.”

“No, really, I'll see my own doctor if I'm still sick when I get home.”

Aunt Marvelle gives me a look that would back down a drill sergeant. “You think you can drive three hours when you can hardly walk a straight line to the bathroom? I'm driving you to the clinic.”

I want to protest, but I've gotten a whiff of bacon. Who's cooking pork at this hour? It's enough to send me sprinting again for the porcelain throne, though there's nothing left to come up, unless my toenails count.

5

The waiting-room walls at the Bridgehampton Geriatric Clinic are a warm, inviting coral. Roman shades are raised to matching height so as not to disturb a mind that has substituted compulsion for neatness. Brass rails at chair level steady a hesitant step and prevent a stumble. The playful sound of a waterfall soothes with the universal code among mammals: this is a life-giving oasis. The tightly woven carpet with bold shell designs won't snag a walker, wheelchair or heel. It takes only a moment to realize that the coral scallops lead to the receptionist's station, the turquoise whelks to the door to the examining rooms and the gold starfish to the handicap rest rooms. “Helpful hints” for the faulty memory.

No wonder Aunt Marvelle dropped me off out front as if I were a dope delivery. I'm sure the car did not come to a full stop. She knew what I would find inside those deceptively benign double doors.

Some are Fifth Avenue habitués. Others are clearly blue-collar townspeople in stretch tops and pants, gimme
caps and jeans. I'm mildly surprised at this mix-and-match patient list in an area of Long Island known above all else for its class distinctions. I recognize a couple of those high-profile profiles. Rene Panek, the writer who's been working on a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize play for, what, eight years now? And there's Jaime Kronenfeld, the Manhattan restaurant maven. Three seats away sits the owner of Aunt Marvelle's favorite Chinese take-away place. Same business, worlds apart.

Then I realize that they have something in common. In one form or another, the illness of decay has brought them together.

“I distinctly said, not before noon!” A wizened woman in a Chanel suit waves a gnarled hand weighted with a yellow-stone ring the size of a doorknob at the uniformed chauffeur who has just entered. “Noon!”

All eyes turn instinctively to the wall clock, the size of a harvest moon. It is 11:57 a.m. The townies snigger and exchange knowing glances. The upper crust continues conversing in voices that carry their requisite name-dropping.

The door to the office interior opens and a spry gentleman in a gray suit with green bow tie hobbles out, a grin shoving his trim white mustache up to his nose. “Polyps are gone!” he announces to the room.

I recall what the Marvelous Matrons said about growing old.
“We're all half dead. What's there to talk about?”
Plenty, it seems.

During the hour and a half I've waited, I've heard more than anyone should about impacted bowels, drained abscesses and shunts. There has been plenty of time to notice other things, too. Like the fact that a good face-lift can make Ms. Kronenfeld appear astonishingly youthful, until you glance at her hands. They are like chicken feet, the creped skin shrink-wrapped to ropy blue veins and knotty joints.

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I can't shake the reality of looking my future in the face. The journey from thirty, the real age of modern adulthood, to fifty was a luge ride of excitement and achievement. Fifty to seventy looks more like downhill skiing. Even if one manages to maneuver past the tree line and boulders of injury or wipeout, the reward is the bottom of the valley. Is Tai right, that we should fight aging with every yellowing tooth and nail? Or is my mood just the result of a lousy oyster?

The doorway to the doctors' inner sanctum opens again. This time two people are framed there, a nurse and a doctor.

Now I remember why a part of my brain thought this might not be a totally terrible experience. Dr. William Templeton.

Aunt Marvelle swears he single-handedly pulled her through her heart attack. I was there and know it took a handful of specialists to do the job. Yet Dr. Templeton made it his business to come see her every day she was in the hospital, to answer any of her questions and concerns. By the end of the week, the Marvelous Matrons were timing their visits to his. What I remember best about him is that no matter how outrageously they flirted, trying to tease out details about the private man, he humored them without revealing a thing. Except that he was married.

Now, wait. What was Aunt Marvelle saying about him on the ride over? Things were still touch and go with my stomach.

Oh, yes.

“William's had a lot of tragedy in his young life. That pretty wife of his was killed in a boating accident last year. Then his only child, a lovely girl, married a hellion, one of the townies. Poor sweet man. He keeps it all to himself. You know how people like to talk. We'd know otherwise. Stoic, that's what he is.”

He doesn't look stoic to me. In fact he looks really good, better than I remember. Big and solid with an easy grin and a hint of gray at his temples—exactly the sort of smart mature man a
Five-O
woman would have a lech for.

When he finishes conversing with her, the nurse turns back to the waiting room and briskly inquires, “Mrs. Nichols?”

Another half hour drags by while I sit in a paper robe and nothing else, in a space the temperature of a meat locker.

A quick knock and then the door opens with the briskness of a man on a mission. “Hello, Mrs. Nichols. Long time no see.”

Yes, that's the voice, the gentle baritone that says everything's going to be all right. Close up he's even more attractive. And it's not just because he remembers me.

“Hello, Dr. Templeton.”

He smiles. “How are you?”

“Pretty well.” Better by the second.

“And your children. You have two, right?”

Oh, this man is unbelievable. Or, he actually read the paperwork I filled out before he came in.

“Yes, Dallas and Davin. And you, a daughter, right?”

He nods. “Married last year.” I don't detect a single trace of emotion other than fatherly pride. That's nice.

“Dallas is getting married, in September.”

“You and your husband must be very proud.”

“We are. Separately.”

He lifts a brow.

“Common story. Divorce.” Oh, damn! Now he'll think I'm coming on to him. “How's your wife?”

His fractional start is enough to ignite a furious blush that stings my face. “Oh, that's right. Aunt Marvelle told me. I'm so sorry.”

“Thank you.” That is a period to a subject if I ever heard one!

He must be still grieving. Of course he is. He's left-handed, and his wedding band can't be missed as he flips open the chart he carries. “Why don't you tell me what's wrong today?”

I go through my complaints and then answer questions about my medical history, repeating most of what's on the form in his possession. He stops me occasionally to ask a question, really listening to the answers. He's got a big head, a strong, wide face like a lion or a bull that seems to demand one's full attention. He's also got brown eyes, and a nose that's pitched slightly to the right, a sign that it was once broken.

While answering, I try not to think about the fact that he is going to examine me. For while I know he's free and I'm free, it's still not okay to let him know where my wayward thoughts are taking me. This is a professional situation. I don't usually react this way to men, even handsome, flattering ones.

At last he puts the chart aside. “Why don't we take a look?”

“I always get a bit nervous in an examining room.” I need a cover story for when he listens to my heart. “Probably why my blood pressure's up.”

He
umm-hmms
me and, as the nurse enters, sets to work examining me.

The natural reserve of the physician is in place when he returns to the room after the preliminary exam. He's holding the same clipboard. I try not to notice his hands. I've just banished the sensation of those warm fingers gently probing my abdomen. But the look on his face makes me take a deep breath. Something is not right.

“There's a problem?” I can't take the suspense.

“Not at all.” He looks at the board again and then at
me, a bemused expression on his face. “I haven't had a chance to say this since I left general practice. Congratulations, Mrs. Nichols, you're pregnant!”

“I'm
what?”
It's a reflexive answer. Then I start to laugh. “Good one. You had me going.”

He tilts his head to one side, watching me. “I assure you, I would not kid you on such a matter.”

I start to speak but suddenly I can't think of any words. Instead, laughter yowls forth from my open mouth; it's loud and off-key, like a cat pulled backward through a screen door. I don't blame him for the half step back. Me? Pregnant? Funniest line I've heard since…since…

Gulping air, I try for control. “Jacob's gone. Walked out a year ago. The divorce was final a week ago. So you see, it's not possible.”

He frowns and strokes his upper lip with thumb and forefinger. “I don't know quite what to tell you, Mrs. Nichols.”

Mrs.
Nichols!
Mrs.
Nichols! The appellation mocks me. I'm not Mrs. anybody anymore.

Then it hits me. The awful truth! Morning sickness and the overpowering sleepiness. My last period was in January. Sex for the very last time, February!

I don't cry often. I'm terrible at it. But the laughter is gone and tears are rising fast. “But I can't be pregnant! I can't!”

He breaks into a tolerant smile. “I assure you, you can be.”

“No, you don't understand.” Awful, lurching panic seizes me. “Yesterday. At lunch. It was at a going-away party. I drank three mar-
tinis!
” I'm so ashamed, but I can't stop myself. “Oh! And I ate raw oysters. There's the potential for botulism poison.
Ohhh!
Poor pickled poisoned baby!”

I'm crying, in open-mouthed gulps. Tears race down my face and dribble onto my chest. A reasonable person would back off from the rabid-dog image I invoke.

Dr. Templeton does the most extraordinary thing. He plucks several tissues from a box and begins dabbing at my chin. Mortified, I snatch them from him and try to muffle my crying.

To his everlasting credit, he smiles and opens his arms.

To my everlasting shame, I go into them and sob until his green lab coat has a three-inch soggy patch just above his name tag.

“Feeling better?”

“Quite. Thank you.”

When I ran out of tears, Dr. Templeton left me to dress and collect myself. Then a nurse led me to his private office, a woman of my years whose manner told me she knows all too well what's wrong with me. I've had a strong cup of real coffee while I wait. Now he's here, smiling that imperturbable smile.

As I perch on the edge of the chair before his desk, I am so sober and self-contained my eyes ache, and my head feels so hot and tight it may explode.

“I'm very sorry for my earlier behavior. Truly. I can't think—” Well, maybe I can. “I am deeply embarrassed.”

“Don't be.” He sits down and leans forward, the desk safely between his fresh lab coat and me. “I understand how this news could come as a shock…at this time.”

“You mean because I'm about to be fifty.”

He takes his time. “Among other things. Yes. It's rare but not unprecedented.”

“You've had other cases?” Okay, the “fool factor” may be mitigated if he delivers this kind of news occasionally to other hysterical women.

But instead of an easy reply, he blushes beneath his cedar tan. I wonder what accounts for that particular shade? Italian? Jewish? Portuguese? “Actually, we don't see cases of this kind here. Collapsed uteruses, yes. Ripe ones, no.” His smile edges back. “To be perfectly frank, Mrs.
Nichols, I had to send across the street to the pharmacy for a pregnancy-test kit.”

“One of those over-the-counter do-it-yourself job-bies?” I can just imagine what the nurse had to say about that errand!

He nods. “We're not equipped here for that sort of testing.”

“So you could be wrong.” Lifeline, thank you! “This isn't your field. It could be a false positive. A menopausal thing.” That last statement drives me to my feet, giddy with the possibility.

“See a specialist.” His expression is meant to be reassuring as he stands and offers to shake my hand. But the tender amusement playing at the edges of his smile says he knows he's right.

If so, I'm screwed. Twice.