My Favorite Midlife Crisis (17 page)

“What?” Fleur exclaimed. But Summer said “Mud-ther!” at exactly the same time and that took precedence. “Mud-ther, I can’t believe you!” Summer’s nostrils flared. She was finally open for business. “This is a private matter, a family matter. I can’t believe you would spread it around to the immediate world.”

“Gwyneth and Fleur
are
my family since your father died.” Kat gestured us to come closer.

“Oh, please. This is between us. You have no right to bring them in on this.”

“Why? Are you ashamed? Because you ought to be.” Circling her daughter, Kat picked up speed. Gutsy Kat was making a comeback. “Forcing me to choose between someone I care about and my grandchild. You ought to hang your head in shame.”

“No,
you
ought to hang your head in shame. My father isn’t dead two years and you’re running around with that Armenian—”

“Summer!” Kat put up with a lot from her daughter, but she would not tolerate prejudice from anyone. “His name is Bagdasarian. Lee Bagdasarian.”

“Whatever. For godssakes, the man is ten years younger than you. You’re like one of those old ladies you read about who get swindled by these con men, the young gigolos, on cruise ships and like that. I mean, think this through. Do you really believe he’s going to marry you? Well, he’s not. You’ll see. You’ll come out of this Bag-whatever thing with a broken heart. I suppose in the end, that’s your choice. My choice is I’m not going to let my child see his grandmother sleeping around like some kind of, I don’t know...slut or something.”

A moment of silence followed. We were paralyzed into a shocked tableau, even Summer who suddenly looked as if she were about to cry.

I broke the silence. “You know, Summer, this room is very toxic. There are all kinds of fumes in here. Dyes and turpentine to clean brushes...”

“I use only natural dyes. No chemicals,” Kat corrected.

I ignored her. “You’re in the very early stages of your pregnancy. Your fetus and you have a lot of growing to do.” I’d used the same soothing voice when I was an intern doing my psych rotation. “And you really don’t want to expose either of you to the toxicity in this room. It’s my professional opinion that you really ought to leave now. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Yeah, if you want to be safe, you’d better get out now,” Fleur said. She was seething.

“Is that what you want, Mud-ther, for me to leave with nothing settled?”

Kat nodded. I didn’t think she could speak.

“Then I’ll call you tomorrow. When we can talk in private.” Summer gathered her handbag, swung the cardigan half of her heather-colored sweater set over her shoulders, and with that flouncy walk she’d had since childhood—“The Princess Snotty Walk,” Ethan used to call it with pride and fondness—sashayed past us, shaking her head disgustedly all the way.

Of course, she slammed the door behind her. So hard a shower of yarn cones flew down from their pegs on the wall and bounced in her wake.

We never did get to choose the show pieces that afternoon. Kat required comfort and counsel.

“Even with grown kids, when a parent dies, they know they can’t exhume him, but they can tend the shrine,” I told her.

“So I become what, a nun? I’ll always love her father. I explained that to her. Nothing will change that. But she wants me to stop my life.” She rubbed her eyes as if that could clear her vision. “I don’t even know where this is going with Lee, but I’d like to find out.”

“Then do,” Fleur said. “Don’t let yourself be blackmailed.”

“I’m going to have a grandchild, Fleur.” Kat uttered this slowly as if she had to spell it out for Fleur, who’d never had a child. “Can you imagine if I can’t see it?”

Fleur looked hurt, but she said, “Summer will change her mind.”

“She might,” I agreed. “She’ll really need you through the pregnancy and when the baby is born. I’ve seen it happen even when there’s been a longtime estrangement. The new mamas need their own mamas and that wins out in the end.”

“You may be right. I hope you’re right. But what if you’re not? You know Summer,” Kat’s voice cracked. “Can I take the chance?”

Oh, yes, I knew Summer. She’d hold her mother’s heart to the fire. I had a feeling that Kat would, in the end, have to make a choice.

***

“I just hope she doesn’t buckle under the pressure,” Fleur said, as we walked together to our cars. “That brat of hers really knows how to apply the thumbscrews. Kat’s a smart woman. But she gets all caught up in the emotional crap.”

I’d been waiting for the right moment to bring up Jack Bloomberg. Experience taught me if you confronted Fleur at the wrong time, she pulled up the moat.

“Too much feeling, too little thinking. I guess it’s her artist’s mentality,” she concluded.

There was my opening. “So you logical business types don’t get sucked in by the emotional crap.”

Fleur was sharp enough to pick up the innuendo. She ground to a halt, her thumb on the car remote.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Ah, Fleur,” I sighed. “I saw Jack on the condo channel the night before I left for London. I was letting the pizza guy in and right behind him there was Jack waiting for you to buzz him up.”

“Jesus! A person’s life is an open book at Waterview, isn’t it? In my case, a very dull open book.”

“Look, I’m not trying to pry. It’s just that I’m worried you—”

She cut me off. “Oh, for godssakes. You want a play-by-play?” She sunk down onto a garden bench Ethan had placed under an oak tree shading the cars. “Fine. Maybe it will do me good to get it off my chest. Sit.” She inhaled a deep breath. “Okay. That was when? Monday? Nothing happened that night. It was all tea and sympathy. Or if you want to get picky, black coffee and sympathy. He just wanted to talk. Bambi is having problems nursing the baby. Maybe the kid doesn’t like the taste of silicone. So, that was the first night.”

“There was a second night?”

Fleur stared at her nails. “The second night we talked about Bambi’s postpartum depression. She gained forty pounds with the pregnancy and she’s still eating for two. And the baby’s reflux is better, but now he’s got some kind of scalp rash. Jack wanted my advice. I reminded him I had no experience with pregnancies or babies, thanks to him.”

“Let me get this straight: Jack’s having problems with his wife and he comes running back to his former girlfriend. My God,” I said, “that man has a lot of challah.”

“Chutzpah. Chutzpah means nerve. Challah is a kind of bread. I agree. Now. For some reason, while it was happening I was flattered. I also thought...”

“What, that he might leave her? Fleur, you wouldn’t have taken him back!”

“Nah. Not after I had some time to think about it.” There was a moment of silence in memory of Fleur’s finally buried dreams.

“You didn’t ask me if I slept with him.”

“I didn’t think it was any of my business.”

“Like that’s ever stopped you. As it turns out, I didn’t. Not that I didn’t try. Don’t say it, Gwyn. Whatever you can say about my character, I’ve already thought about myself. All I know is at that moment I was figuring here’s my chance to get back at Bambi for taking Jack from me. Tit for tat, you could say. And it seemed so natural with Jack pouring out his heart, resting his head on my shoulder, then against my bazooms. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Don’t forget we’d been together fourteen years.”

“Oh, Fleurie.”

“There’s always going to be feeling there.”

Ari Ben-Jacob had whispered that when we said our good-byes. Once you love, does the germ of it remain dormant forever in your blood? Years later, it’s not the same virus, but a mutation. Harmless, unless your resistance is low.

“Maybe I still love him. Maybe it’s just affection we have for each other. Whatever. But when the actual moment of truth arrived, he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. Who knows? I guess it hit me then that he really loves her. That’s what the power failure was all about. So I personally buttoned that ridiculous vest of his and sent him home to Bambi and the kid.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah, well don’t hand out any prizes. If he could have, I would have gone through with it. What does that make me?”

“Human,” I said.

Fleur had come clean. It was only fair that I make my own confession. Oddly, I felt more reticent about my
coup de foudre
with Simon York than I did about hurtling into the sack with Ari for my first genuine one-night stand. So I skipped Simon. But Fleur got a kick out of the Ari story.

“Perfect. No strings. No regrets,” she commented when I was through telling it. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said, as if I were.

“I
am
impressed. You’ve got a young stud in London and good old Harry waiting in the wings this side of the pond. Everyone should have such an abundance of riches. However, all is not bleak on my horizon. I, too, have some prospects.”

“Good for you. Does this mean you’ve revived The Plan?”

“Yup, I figured why should Jack have all the fun trapped in a miserable marriage? I want my turn. And I made three contacts on Lovingmatch this week. One guy seems okay. We talked on the phone last night. He knows the difference between Larry King and B. B. King.” She twisted her mouth into a hopeful smile. “We’ll see.”

Chapter 18

Five great things about Harry Galligan:

1. He arrived for our date carrying a bouquet of flowers, multicolored with lots of tinted carnations, in a cone made of transparent film that told me he’d picked it up either at the Safeway or from a roadside vendor. I found this very sweet.

2. He looked polished. Not slick, but as if someone had taken a chamois to him and buffed him to a glow. His shoes gleamed. His cheeks were burnished with rosy Celtic color. Even the back of his neck, where his hair appeared freshly cut (unlike mine) and the curly auburn was faded, had been barber-shaved to a pewter finish.

3. He ordered a porterhouse the size of a football field and a baked potato the size of a football at Ruth’s Chris Steak House and finished everything on his plate as well as the creamed spinach and sautéed mushrooms on the side. All this he washed down with bourbon. Good all-American boy.

4. He didn’t drone on about his ex-wife at the dinner table, which was commendable first-date behavior, even though the idea of a woman running away midlife with another woman was fascinating. (Not a man with a man though. Of course.) For part of the dinner, I thought about whom I would choose to boff if I suddenly turned lesbian. Fleur and Kat were immediately excused. None of my friends qualified; they would all talk a blue streak in bed, which was an advantage of having sex with men.

5. When we ran into Fleur and her date in the lobby at the end of the evening, Harry gave her the once-over, the way a man would once-over a twenty-eight-year-old bombshell. In the elevator, he said to me, “Now that’s a good-looking woman.” The man had taste.

Five not-so-great things about Harry Galligan:

1. He shot his cuffs through the sleeves of his jacket and hiked his trousers when he sat down. Stan once told me that cuff-shooting and trouser-hitching were dead giveaways of a lower-class background and, guttersnipe snob that I am, I’ve never forgotten it.

2. He smelled of Old Spice or Canoe.
(Do they still make Canoe?)
Whatever, it was a scent that transported me back to my horrendous high school days and that depressed me right though my second glass of wine.

3. His shirt was made of something unnatural and when his jacket flapped back you could see through its nylon translucence the outline of his undershirt, one of those scooped neck numbers only Andy Capp and my father still wore.

4. He rambled on about a “Science Friday” program on NPR that somehow segued into a moment-to-moment recapitulation of his recent visit to Ireland. When the waitress recited the daily specials, I made her list the ingredients in the Louisiana Seafood Gumbo just to get a break from the grand tour of Dublin. His table talk made me want to lay my head between my bread plate and my water glass and take a nap.

5. He surprised me with a good-night kiss that could have been the Mr. Nice Guy equivalent of the pity fuck.

Three nasty things about me:

1. I couldn’t quite manage to hide my disappointment that Harry wasn’t the person I’d signed on for. And how fair was that since the gap between fantasy and reality was one I’d dug myself?

I’d been so excited when we set up this date, certain he was the man of my dreams. Why do women invest prospective lovers with attributes that would make Harrison Ford duck his head and say “Shucks, ma’am”? Now that the date was here, he was just Harry. Pleasant. Attentive. But no tingle a la Simon York or Ari Ben-Jacob. And life, I’d recently decided, was too short to waste on no tingle.

2. I was incredibly boring. Incredibly.