My Favorite Midlife Crisis (14 page)

Both his hands were full of my retrieved things. These he presented to me one by one like a cashier counting change, laying on a dazzling smile throughout the transaction. “And finally your passport. You need to keep a better eye on that. They won’t let you in without it, you know. And it would be a shame to miss England in September. It’s a very pretty time of year. We only get rain every
other
day in September.”

“Very kind of you,” I said, clutching my passport.

He said, “Not at all.”

I glanced at his left hand and noted no wedding band, looked up, and caught him staring at my left hand. We both laughed.

I was juggling two bags so I couldn’t manage a handshake, but I worked the dimples inherited from my mother, not that she’d ever used them. “Gwyneth Berke,” I said, pausing to let the name sink in. “You’re attending the IAGSO meeting?”

He seemed surprised. “Yes,” he said and waited a beat too long to introduce himself, because the passport control officer raised his voice impatiently, “Next. Next, please. Shall we keep the queue moving, please?” The woman behind my anonymous Englishman glared. I shrugged hopelessly and scurried.

But all is not lost,
I thought,
because he has to be behind me and if I walk slowly enough, after his passport is duly stamped there is only one hall out and he will catch up to me and finish the introduction.

“Madame, do not tarry please. This is a security area. We ask that you step briskly.” A uniformed airport officer waved me along.

And then, suddenly, my Englishman was next to me and past me, whizzing by without even a glance in my direction, but headfirst, like a bull, charging three men who were waiting just beyond the security gate, one waving, the other two nodding genially. The waving man I recognized. Harris Jance, MD, PhD, inventor of the famous Jance scissors that slice through tissue like butter, and president emeritus of IAGSO. A Scotsman of grand years and grander repute. The two men with him were middle-aged, Asian, both bow-tied and blazered, the standard successful-doc uniform that crosses all borders.

“Simon, good to see you,” Jance said as I traversed the cement floor parallel to them, moving as if the air were liquid and I was
verrrry
slowly swimming through it. “You know bleh-bleh”—couldn’t make it out—“Tashiki, of course.”

“Yes, yes,” Simon said, bowing over the handshake. “So kind of you to come.”

“But I don’t think you know bleh-bleh Phan. Bleh-bleh Phan, Simon York.”

“A pleasure, sir,” Phan said. “I read your paper on bleh-bleh-bleh...”

Simon York.

Ahh. Simon York.

So that was my cavalier. The famous, infamous Simon York of New York’s Kerns-Brubaker Medical Institute which, along with Sloan-Kettering, was one of New York’s crown jewel cancer centers. I’d seen Simon York before, but only from a distance. On the podium. Across the vast plains of a meeting room. A first-rate surgeon, he was also a biochemist who’d studied under Nobel laureate Georgi Popovich years before Popovich copped the Nobel Prize for medicine. Contender for the Lasker Award for achievement in medical research a decade ago, edged out by a colleague of mine at Hopkins, the ophthalmologist Al Sommer, York was supposed to be brilliant, but ferocious to work with. Charming but difficult in the clinches. He was so out of my league, it took my breath away.

Ah well, it had been a lovely moment. It was nice to know my hormones still had the power to frazzle me. I tucked away the
coup
experience like a lace handkerchief, reassured to know it was around but something I didn’t have much use for anymore.

***

As it turned out, I attended the two sessions in which Simon York was participating. I’d checked them off the preliminary program back in Baltimore. He was doing some amazing science that I thought might eventually benefit my patients.

I had a question, but after the first session, before I could approach him, the panel disbursed and he vanished.

I did run into an old friend, Davis Standish, who’d practiced in Baltimore before moving to Southern California. Davis is what Fleur would call a player. He had his hands (and, some of my colleagues implied, another skillful appendage) up some very famous snatches. With his wife languishing at home with MS, he was the perfect extra man to escort his movie star patients to premieres and charity events. I’d kept up with him in the magazines as he grew older, richer, and more recognizable with his silver hair pulled back into a ponytail and his gymed-up muscles straining the sleeves of his tuxedo. I’d always liked Davis. I gave him credit for bucking the old guard and living his life with gusto, but the pompous academicians who made up the golden inner circle in IAGSO shunned him.

Still, he was a very good surgeon and he came to all the meetings to keep current. We greeted each other warmly once a year. Today, I got a Euro-Hollywood kiss on both cheeks. The mild flirtation we’d cultured but did not act upon went back to serving on the same Med Chi committee in Maryland in the eighties. We used to lunch occasionally to discuss committee business, nothing more.

“You look wonderful, Gwyn.” He backed up. “And it’s not plastic either. It has to be good genes.”

You should only know
—I thought of my mother, the nutcase, and my father with Alzheimer’s. But he was right, the skin genes were pretty good.

We chatted about old times and at the end I said in farewell, “I think I’d better get going. I’m heading for Simon York’s paper two floors up.”

“Ah, Simon. A few years ago I sent him a patient with a nasty papillary serous carcinoma that, frankly, I had no experience dealing with. I thought she was a goner, but he pulled her through and as a thank you gift she planted two million in his lab. There’s no doubt the guy’s brilliant and obviously he can turn on the charm.”

Oh yes
, I thought, remembering our encounter at Heathrow.

I sat in the third row for Simon’s presentation and allowed myself to be thoroughly impressed. Good work, well presented, and you could hear the buzz from the audience when he finished.

By the time I got to the front of the room, the crowd around him was large and I paced its fringes. Simon spotted me while talking to Marv Feller from Liverpool. Our eyes caught. His narrowed, then sparkled with recognition. He kept talking but he never lowered his stare and suddenly he smiled right at me. When Marv backed off, a German woman I remembered from other meetings pushed forward. Big, blonde, and insistent, she must have seen that Simon was distracted, lifted one hammy arm, and placed her hand on his shoulder to get his attention. This made him smile wider, and he actually shrugged at me as if to say he was helpless to escape. I shrugged back and moved away from the crowd.

So much for our brief encounter of the third kind. So much for Simon York.

***

“I can’t believe you’re taking estrogen. You must have a death wish.” Alicia Griffith, MD, FRCP, gestured menacingly with her fork. “You’ve read the recent findings. Might as well take cyanide.”

I sipped the last of my coffee as I defended myself. “I tried going off last year and by the end of the third week I was lighting up like Times Square. And I’m lethargic without it. Even on the lowest dose, I’m getting hot flashes, but at least they’re manageable. Please don’t dish up the Boston study about adverse effects. We all know the literature flip-flops every three days.”

Fedora Croscetti, the youngest of our group at forty-seven, shook her tousle of dark curls and clicked her tongue at me.

For the past two decades, five of us colleagues and friends have held an annual reunion at the IAGSO meeting. We communicate the rest of the year by email, trading professional opinions and personal chitchat. That night, we were up to dessert at Wordsworth, a tony nouveau Brit restaurant designed to counter all the stereotypical trashing of English cooking. Isabelle Rousseau leaned over to trade me some treacle tart for a dollop of my toffee pudding. “Don’t be so hard on poor Gwyneth,” she said in her charming French accent. “I couldn’t live without my little estrogen pill. I take it unopposed, without the progesterone which gives me a mustache and acne. I know, I know, I’m risking uterine cancer. This is why I get cleaned out every summer with a D and C. It’s worth it. Without estrogen
le vagin
is so dry.” She flicked a glance at me.

Alicia jumped in. “Did you say
le
vagin? Don’t tell me vagina is a masculine noun. The French are so perverse. Ugh. As for taking unopposed estrogen, that’s daft,” she said, sniffing like the highborn English lady she was. Sometimes her superior Oxbridge tone irritated me. “I assume you’re not recommending such a regimen for your patients.”

“I tell my patients it is roulette, the entire hormone replacement issue,” Isabelle responded.

“Funny,” I said, “I tell mine it’s a crapshoot.”

Preethika Patel delicately sipped tea, her face screwed up with concentration. A slender, serious-looking woman of sixty with a thriving Delhi practice, she’d worn the white widow’s sari the year before. Tonight, her sari was blue and silver, a flattering complement to her dark hair streaked with gray.

Now she said, “In India, the upper classes, those who can afford it, take hormones. The others treat with herbs, like saffron and Shatavari and aloe gel to rub on the genitals. In the villages, they are probably safer than we are. If you believe the latest breast cancer findings.”

“So you don’t take estrogen?” Alicia, the boldest of us, pressed. Preethika was reserved. Not shy. Just a soul comfortable inside herself and not banging at her own doors.

“Well, I don’t get hot flashes. I sleep no better or worse than any widow. I do worry about osteoporosis. And the verdict isn’t in for Alzheimer’s. So your answer, Alicia, is no, I don’t take estrogen, but you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

A pondering silence washed over us. I thought,
We are all in the same boat, some of us riding the waves, some of us bucking them.

We paid our check and were making our way out of the dining room when Alicia slowed down and arched back to hiss, “Power table.” She cocked her head toward the far corner. “The big guns are breaking bread. Bedell and the entire governing board. And isn’t that your friend David Standish?”

“Davis,” I said distractedly. “Davis, not David.” I was looking elsewhere at the same table. At the back of someone in a Harris tweed jacket. Not sure. Maybe. Probably not.

“How did Standish get to sit among the anointed? He’s a certified pariah. Much too Hollywood for those old farts.”

“You didn’t hear?” Fedora’s lip curled. “He put up half a million dollars to underwrite the Arlis R. Bedell Prize for gynecological research.” Diverted for a moment from the tweed jacket, I was speechless.

Alicia was never at a loss for a crack. “Add money, a pinch of arse kissing, and stir. Voilà, instant respectability.”

By the time we reached the cloakroom, we were a jumble of voices. But one stood out. Isabelle saying, “And who was that sitting next to Simon York? The redhead.”

So I was right. My heart gave a little leap on “Simon,” then on “redhead” sunk not quite like a stone, more like a pebble.

“She was very close. She had her cheek almost against his cheek. And her hand was on his shoulder, did you see that?”

I had. “His wife?” I ventured, despite the absence of a wedding ring.

“That was not the gesture of a wife,” Fedora said dryly.

“The redhead is Beata Karnikova from Prague. You know her, Isabelle. You served on the policy committee with her.” This from Preethika.

“Ahh, Bitti, the Iron Maiden. She is very intelligent and
verrrrry
ambitious.”

“Young?” That was me again.

“The far side of forty,” Alicia said. “But not very far. And well preserved.”

“Are they an item?” It was a casual question.

“Bitti and Simon York? Well, I never thought so until now. Anything is possible, I suppose.”

“Personally I think he’s
un bourreau des cours,
trés
sexy,” Isabelle said. “I like a man with a strong jaw.”

“Oo la la. Very practical of you,” Alicia said, which set us giggling like schoolgirls as we walked through the lamp-lit London streets.

London was balanced on the cool cusp of autumn. The air was thin, clear, and ginger-smelling. A moon, one day short of full, hung high and to the right of Big Ben. I thought again how lucky I was to be here. How much fun dinner had been. How grateful I was to have friends like Alicia, Preethika, Fedora, and Isabelle, even if I didn’t see them more than once a year.

I loved that these very accomplished physicians could gossip and giggle with the best of them. I cherished the silly stuff. And if it was childish, well, the hell with that. I’d missed a real childhood, so I took it when I got it.

Back in my room, I called my father and pried Sylvie away from
Judge Judy
. He was doing fine, she assured me. Mrs. Parente, his friend from the senior center, had dropped off a box of cannoli. He’d wolfed down two. He hadn’t asked for me, but he’d talked to my message machine at 5 a.m. and seemed content with just the sound of my voice. Sylvie put him on and I listened to him babble about someone he saw in the bathroom mirror. The best I could make out was that he thought he saw his sister, Margrit, in the reflection of his own face. My Aunt Margie died in 1993.