My Favorite Midlife Crisis (41 page)

“He’s cute. Great hair. Is that Connie deCrespi?” Kat asked.

“Who can fuck herself,” Fleur said. “Except she has better options. Thanks to me, the idiot.”

“Whoa,” I said, nearly choking on my hot chocolate. “The last I heard you guys were joined at the hip. Didn’t you have dinner together Monday night?”

“We did. Then Wednesday, I get this bill in the mail for her recent legal services. The woman should have given me a discount for fixing her up with Dan. Instead, she’s padded it with hours we went shoe shopping. So last night, I called her. I was calm, I swear.”

I could imagine.

“But she has a nasty temper. Who knew? Anyway, we get into it and it winds up she tells me if I have a problem with her charges to file a grievance with the Bar Association and hangs up on me. This is my supposed friend. And a countess twice removed. Just goes to show that background doesn’t necessarily translate to class,” Fleur said, giving me a pointed look. “Of course, I’ll never speak to her again. Unfortunately, now I won’t know how she and Dan are getting along in the romance department. I could kick myself for squandering such a good man on the likes of her.”

“Well, they look pretty cozy,” Kat said. “Arm in arm. Who’s the brunette with them?”

“That’s Connie’s sister, Tessa. She inherited the nice genes.” Fleur peered. “Hmm. Tessa’s had work done since the last time I saw her. Definitely a nose job. ”

“She’s across the street,” I said. “In this mob, I can barely see two feet ahead of me. You can tell a nose job from across a crowded city street?”

“From across the Grand Canyon,” Fleur said. “Look, I’m not budging, but if you want to go say hello to them, be my guest. I won’t mind.”

“You know what? I don’t want to,” I said. “I can’t think of a more depressing way to kick off the New Year than being pleasant to Connie deCrespi. Not only was she a bitch to you, she scooped up one of the last good men on the planet.”

“You’re right. Most of the good ones are taken, and at our age, the pool of even the lousy ones is shrinking. Makes you not want to put on your bathing suit.” Fleur leaned against me under the streetlight as we watched the trio disappear into a pastry shop.

“Now that’s a happy New Year sentiment,” Kat said. I was close enough to feel a shiver play through her.

“I want to go home,” I said. “I
really
want to go home.”

So we did. We were back in my condo drinking champagne when the phone rang. We all jumped. I grabbed the receiver, thinking
Oh God, my father
. But it was Harry Galligan, of all people. So we invited him over.

Inviting him wasn’t my idea. It was Kat’s.

He called from the FRESH party in Annapolis which, as the head of the recreation committee, he’d organized. But lots of rejected spouses do not make for merry revelry and he’d had enough and was about to duck out for home. Unless.

Quick whispered conference off phone. I was definitely not in the mood for men. Fleur uncharacteristically abstained. But Kat had never met Harry, which she wanted to do, and she felt sorry for him.

In the end, she got her way and he joined us on the balcony, where he wound a consoling arm around me. I’d mentioned on the phone that Simon and I had split and I really didn’t want to talk about it, but now Kat, for lack of festive conversation, filled him in on the details. Fleur hovered but didn’t talk much. She took her good time warming up to Harry. Poor man. He had no idea he represented an entire disgraced gender on the most romantically sensitive night of the year.

Right after the fireworks, I checked out, leaving Harry and Fleur to play Scrabble. Looking beat, Kat said, “I’m right behind you,” and headed for my guest room.

At five past twelve, my bedside phone woke me. The lighted ID spelled out only an area code and a location, New York City. Simon, I figured, sozzled on too much Glenfiddich at some black-tie party, calling to tell me off. Or—you never knew with Simon—to declare undying love. I am proud to report that not even for a moment did I consider lifting that phone from its caddy, although I did spend the next three hours churning the bedclothes and cursing his cheating soul.

The next morning I listened to the midnight message on my answering machine. It had been Claire calling from her apartment. She was wine giddy, dateless, fine with that, and just wanted to wish us all better times. The first joke of the New Year was on me.

Chapter 43

The following Thursday at ten past six, I broke from the freezing, nose-numbing cold into the warm, wine-scented air of the Bentley-Zindell Gallery to join the chattering crowd gathered for the opening of Kat’s show. I planned to be at the reception no more than forty minutes so I could train to New York, hit the hotel around eleven, and be fresh for my New Year’s appearance on
Good Fortune!
the next day.

I grabbed a drink, scanned the gallery for a familiar face, and found Kat circulating among her guests, taking compliments with her signature skeptical smile. She’d tweezed her eyebrows for the occasion and they curved like the tops of question marks when she said, “Really?” in response to everyone telling her variations on, “Wonderful. Seminal. So vital. We just love your work.”

“So glad you could come,” she repeated again and again, extending her hand from under the heathery cashmere cape she’d woven for her fiftieth birthday and wore on special occasions. Fleur and I had treated her to the wool as a birthday gift.

“She looks gorgeous. It was worth every penny,” Fleur said, sidling up, drink in hand.

When she spotted us, Kat pulled us into her caped embrace like Wonder Woman. “I love you both. I’m so glad you’re here. Can you believe the size of this crowd? We pulled it off.” She floated off, a cumulus cloud of silvery purple, to greet the art columnist for the
Washington Post.

Kat and the gallery guys had conspired to schedule her opening reception to coincide with First Thursday in Baltimore, a monthly tradition for the galleries along Charles Street, the main downtown drag. They stay open late, offer wine and cheese, and the cognoscenti drift from exhibit to exhibit. I’d been there when Joel, Gallery Guy A, told her, “We’ll invite them for five thirty, get everyone in first while they’re still hungry and sober, wow them with your magnificent fiber art, and rake in the moolah. We’re not underpricing this time, Kat. Your work is to drool over.”

In fact, Fleur stopped to salivate in front of a huge tapestry titled The Healing Earth, which she renamed, “German chocolate cake. No really. See the nibbles at the edge and the coconut flakes on the top? You can almost taste it.”

“You’ve been on that diet too long,” I said.

“Not long enough. I’ve got six months and fifty pounds to go and then maintenance.”

“But you can see the difference now. It’s really noticeable.”

“I still want to get rid of my second chin. Please note that the third one has vanished.” She lifted the elegant Talbot profile to show me, squinted, and said, “Oh my stars and whiskers, look who just rolled in. Do you see what I see? Well,
somebody
swallowed a watermelon.”

Summer, in a navy maternity jumper and plaid headband, waved at us from across the room, but made no move in our direction. “Let her come to us,” Fleur sniffed, shooing the air with the most insincere flutter in the history of hellos. “Let her pay her respects. She can kiss my ahh...ring. Anyway, I want to see her walk with that Graf Zeppelin attached to her front. She’s only what, four months in and she’s huge. Is she giving birth to Koko the gorilla?”

“She’s carrying all belly, which isn’t unusual for a first baby.”

“Ladies,” a familiar voice crept over my right shoulder and I turned into the cologne-drenched microenvironment of my ex-husband.

Now this is tough to confess because it reveals my bitter almond of a soul in the post-Treachery months, but I used to dream of Stan looking the way he looked at Kat’s opening.

He was the picture of Dorian Gray out of the closet, every wrinkle revealed, with an insomniac’s gray pallor and pouches under the eyes, sagging chin, scrawny neck, leftover gobbler skin draped in folds above his cable sweater. He’d lost so much weight that his scalp slumped forward and you could see—I knew Fleur was staring at—an artificially straight stretch of coastline plugged with tufts of wiry transplanted hair. Which he dyed. Which I knew because they were black at the tips, white at the roots, and fading in between.

“You look spectacular,” he gushed to Fleur.

“You too,” she managed. “Absolutely amazing.”

“You’ve lost weight.”

“You too.”

“Yup. Diet?”

“Atkins. You?”

“Not diet,” he said.

Fleur shifted her uneasy glance into long distance. “Well, what do you know? Isn’t that Summer at the buffet? And no Tim. The little mother is all by herself and I’m sure she doesn’t have a clue how to talk to these artsy fartsy types. I think I’ll just mosey on over and find out whether she’s still throwing up these days. Better yet, I’ll ask about her hemorrhoids. Pregnant women are fixated on their hemorrhoids, aren’t they, Gwyn? There’s a conversation to keep me from hitting the smorgasbord.” She ambled off, abandoning me to the company of Stan, who was swigging his chardonnay.

I took my ex-husband’s free hand. “What’s going on with you?” I gave him not a wife’s but a physician’s once-over. Checked the whites of his eyes. Raised his hand and examined his fingernails. You can learn volumes from a person’s fingernails. Stan’s glowed reassuringly pink, no cracks, no ridges. But his skeletal fingers felt cold and he was going to lose his Columbia class ring if he wasn’t careful. “You’re too thin, Stan. Have you seen Blumenstein?” Our shared internist.

“I’ve seen Blumenstein and he gave me a clean bill of health. It’s not what you’re thinking if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m negative. I know I look like I’m dying and there are days, God knows, I’d like to die, but I’m not.”

Odd, now that we were detached and distanced, I could read him. On a recent visit, my ophthalmologist told me my farsightedness had improved with age. “Brad?”

Bad Brad. A week away from a romantic Christmas vacation in Aruba, Brad told Stan he’d fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old junior college dropout who’d whirled his Tropical Fruit Fantasy at the Arundel Mall.

“Nineteen years old with the brain of a newt. Youth and beauty, how do you fight it?” Headshake with wry smile. “Did you wish this on me, sweetheart? Not that I don’t deserve it.”

I guess that was as close as Stan would ever come to an apology.

“No one deserves it,” I said, which was my sharply pointed shorthand for not quite accepted.

“True. It’s torture. There’s no other word for it.” He plucked a shrimp from a passing platter. “I thought Brad and I had a life together. I honestly thought we’d beat the odds, which aren’t great among, well, people like us, for till death do us part. And what really pisses me off is that I didn’t see it coming.” He said this to me, to
me,
without a hint of irony. “Where the hell was I when he and Pineapple Boy were...”

As he railed on and on, I realized I was hearing more of Stan’s innermost longings and pain than I had in twenty-six years of marriage. More now than I really wanted to know.

“It’s so damn lonely,” Stan said. “He even took the dog with him. So what do I do now? I’m not looking for just...” he changed directions, perhaps thinking better of discussing one-night stands and bar pickups with his ex-wife. “I want something meaningful. How the hell do you begin again at fifty-six?”

Was that a rhetorical question? Maybe he was actually asking for advice, and if I were a better person I would have said, “I’m really sorry Brad left you. I’m really sorry you’re hurting and alone and starting over in your mid-fifties. Is there anything I can do? Refer you to a good manicurist for some reality therapy? Lend you Fleur’s list of the ten best places to meet men? Call Faith Shapiro and see if she has a tall, gay ballplayer to fix you up with?”

However, I was still smarting from my trip up the basement steps at Crosswinds a couple of years before. And not totally recovered from two decades of a sham marriage. My stock of sympathy wasn’t high. Oh, God, had I wished this on him? For more than a year, I’d wished him drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, battered and bruised. Now I wanted him to live and be well for the sake of my sons. As for his happiness, let him earn it like the rest of us.

***

Ten minutes before I had to leave for my train, Lee Bagdasarian showed up. Fleur poked me so hard in the ribs I reeled, nearly upending Kat’s radiation-inspired Triumph of the Scavengers: A Study in Scarlet and Blue.

Then we stood frozen watching him cross the room to an unsuspecting Kat. “How do you suppose he found out about tonight, I wonder?” Fleur said finally.

“It’s not a big secret. It’s got to be all over the art community. And it was announced in
Baltimore
magazine.”

“Uhm.”

I didn’t like the sound of that uhm. Too musical. Like the warble of a canary who’d mastered Handel’s
Messiah
. Self-satisfied, as if she’d brought off something big.