Exit Strategies

by Catherine Todd

  I picked George’s at the Cove, although it fell more into the “reasonable” category, because of its zillion-dollar view over the La Jolla coastline and because of the black bean soup, which is outstanding and famous. I had to confess to a certain curiosity about what or whether my old acquaintance would eat. On the basis of her metamorphosis, I wasn’t so sure I shouldn’t follow suit, even if she expressed a preference for steamed kale and seaweed.

  “You look terrific,” I told her. “I still can’t get over it.” I didn’t know if this would be a nostalgia lunch or a business lunch, but either way I was sure the remark would please her. Besides, it was true.

  “Thank you,” she said, shaking out her napkin, which seemed far too ample to cover her tiny lap. “You look nice too.” She studied me. “It’s been a long time, but I’d still recognize you.”

  I wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t taken her quite so long to arrive at that conclusion. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Look, Becky, would you mind if we didn’t talk business today?” she asked. “I’ve got to eat and run, and I’d really like to catch up with you personally first.”

  “If that’s what you’d like,” I told her. “We can go over the time-sensitive issues at the office.”

  “Something to drink, ladies?” inquired the waiter.

  “Iced tea,” I told him.

  “Vodka tonic, no ice, with a twist of lemon,” said Bobbie.

  “You drink?” I asked her, surprised.

  She laughed. “I’m over twenty-one,” she said. The waiter looked as if this were a wonderful joke and he’d like to card her on the spot.

  “I just meant that I didn’t know it was part of your program.”

  “I’m off duty,” she said. Catching my look, she gave me a big toothy smile. “Just kidding, Becky. It’s all very carefully worked out. You really should read my book.”

  I said I was planning to. I hoped I sounded more enthusiastic at the prospect than I felt. “I’d heard of you and your book, of course, but I didn’t have any idea it was anyone I knew personally,” I told her. “How did you get interested in anti-aging?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Are you serious? Every ten seconds a Baby Boomer turns fifty, and people are desperate for help. Nobody wants to age the way their parents have. People are ready for my message.”

  “Which isn’t really that you don’t have to die, surely?”

  She shrugged. “Well, in the sense that you don’t have to die when you thought you did, yes, that is the message. That you don’t have to be sick and old in the sense we think of it now. That you can take responsibility for what happens to your body by changing what you do and how you think. As for the long run”—she smiled—“we’re still working on that.”

  The long run? What was that, eternal life? “Working on it how?” I asked her.

  She tapped a long, perfectly manicured fingernail on the table. “Cryonics, maybe. Nuclear cell transfer. There are so many things going on you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Cryonics? As in freezing the corpse?” I couldn’t wait to tell my mother she’d been right. “You’re kidding,” I added tactlessly.

  Dr. Crystol—momentarily forgetting she was my friend Bobbie—gave me a frigid smile. “Freezing the body,” she corrected me. “I personally expect to take advantage of such technology myself. I hope that by the time it becomes an issue for me, the research will have found a way to circumvent the cell damage that now accompanies the Freezing Event. At all events, I hope so. I have made a reservation for the neurosuspension of my entire body.”

  “Ready to order?” asked the waiter.

  Bobbie ordered a grilled chicken salad, like a normal person rather than someone who had plunked down a fortune to pump her veins full of antifreeze in the afterlife. I had the same. I passed on the black bean/tomato/broccoli soup on the grounds that, although it gets points for the broccoli (fights cancer, attacks free radicals!), major points must be deducted for heavy cream, which is, of course, what makes it so delicious in the first place. There is something so unfair about the inverse correlation between taste and benefit. Still, I didn’t want to risk another Freezing Event.

  “So what about you?” she asked me, sipping her drink.

  “I don’t even own a cemetery plot,” I told her.

  She laughed. “I mean, what about your life? Are you married? Children?”

  I gave her a very edited sketch of my life since college, without any lamentations or regrets.

  “I see,” she said. She looked at me. “Were you happy in school?”

  “College, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “It was probably the happiest time of my life.” I was always surprised that anyone could doubt it. I mean, how bad could things be when you were given four whole years to focus on nothing but your own development and pleasures? Four years, if you worked it right, without even having to pick up after yourself, much less worry about the mortgage or the car payments. Other kinds of happiness—marriage, children—were more intense, but they were rarely as uncomplicated. And then there was always the fact that in college you were—not to put too fine a point upon it—young.

  She frowned. “I hated it, you know. I had to work really hard while the rest of you had a good time. I guess it paid off, though, didn’t it?”

  I felt it would be impolitic of me to mention my Phi Beta Kappa key. Besides, premed really was awful, and if she wanted to paint me as Cindy Cheerleader by comparison, I wasn’t going to argue with a Client. “It certainly did,” I agreed.

  “So you’re not thinking of getting married again?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sleeping with anyone?” she asked, looking at me over the top of her drink.

  I wondered what the ultrapolite version of “None of your business” would be. Dear Abby always said you should say something like “Why would you want to know that?” but by this point in the conversation I was beginning to suspect that I knew the answer to that already. Unless I missed my guess, I was about to be treated to a recitation of Dr. Crystol’s triumphs at the altar or in the sack. My role, clearly, was to be the appreciative audience.

  “Bread?” I temporized, offering her the basket.

  She smiled. “No, thanks.” She leaned forward earnestly, resting a blossom (or is it a squash?) against the tablecloth. “You know, Becky, you’re really very attractive. Of course, we prefer to start before the client is forty, but I still think I could do a lot for you. Why don’t you think about entering one of my programs? We could do a complete body, mind, and spirit makeover. If finances are a problem, I could give you a special rate.”

  I nearly choked on my breadstick. “Well, that’s very generous, but…”

  She gave me a shrewd look. “Ever had anyone fantasize about you? I mean lately?”

  I laughed. “I sincerely doubt it,” I told her.

  “Well, I have. Men write me letters all the time. Some women do too.” She glanced around the dining room as if to see whether any of them might be looking at her now. She turned back to me. “It’s not just my physical appearance. They sense something in me they want. It’s, well, I’d call it the possibility for self-regeneration. People are hungry for it.” She looked down at her salad and then lifted her eyes. “It’s a turn-on too, I can tell you that much.”

  “I’m sure it must be,” I murmured.

  “You think I’m a total narcissist, don’t you?”

  Of course I did. I smiled. “How can I possibly answer a question like that?”

  “Never mind,” she said, waving her fork dismissively. “I don’t care what people think of me. At least not anymore. My ex-husband cured me of that.”

  “You were married?”

  She shrugged. “Twice. Once to a very conventional M.D., like you were. I met him in med school. We came to a parting of the ways when we realized all we had in common was a preference for 69 and a mountain of debts. We bifurcated the debts. The sex lasted a little longer.
” She sighed. “I haven’t seen him in years. He’s probably a GP in Stockton or something like that. I wish him well. He was a nice guy. He just…thought small, if you know what I mean. My second was an Indian. That only lasted a few months.”

  My glance moved involuntarily to her necklace.

  She saw me and laughed, a little too loudly. “No, no. I got this when I was speaking at a conference in Santa Fe. Sameer was from India. He was an Ayurvedic practitioner. I met him in the Amazon, where he was studying with the local shamans.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I learned a lot from him,” Bobbie said with uncharacteristic reticence. “But I came home with amoebic dysentery.” She sighed. “Of course, it was entirely my own fault.”

  “For drinking the water?”

  “For abandoning the path of righteous living,” she said seriously. “Also for eating raw shellfish.”

  “What happened?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Eventually he went back to India,” she said. “I followed him, but I found that, once there, his views…reverted to something I couldn’t live with. Particularly with regard to his mother.”

  I wondered what Sameer’s mother, expecting a dutiful and perhaps reverent daughter-in-law, had made of Bobbie Crystol, M.D. “I suppose she had someone more traditional in mind for her son,” I suggested.

  She snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. I always suspected suttee might eventually be part of the package, but I didn’t want to risk waiting around to find out. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t a waste. Many of the therapeutic herbs I use in my program I discovered in India. That’s one of the pillars of my success.” She looked at me. “Here’s an example. Have you heard of guggul?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s excellent for the control of obesity.”

  I didn’t want to inquire whether this general observation was made for a more specific purpose, so I said nothing. An appreciative audience and a target for the occasional well-placed jab, apparently. I knew I’d been right about that lingering hostility. What I wasn’t clear about was why I’d been anointed counsel at all.

  “And for other things as well,” Bobbie said. “Most of Western medicine is completely ignorant of such treatments, and there are dozens of them.”

  “Are they safe?”

  She gave a smug little smile. “They’ve been used for thousands of years in the East. We in this country are far too suspicious of anything we didn’t invent.”

  Nevertheless, you had to wonder if the life span of those Third World denizens privy only to such enlightened treatment was really the equal of their First World cousins treated by harassed GPs and unfeeling HMOs. “Hmmm. Sounds interesting,” I said noncommittally. I mean, I wanted to keep an open mind about a client, particularly a big client, but I didn’t trust Bobbie’s oversized ego and undersized evidence. Still, as long as it didn’t hurt anybody, what difference did it make?

  “Well, it is, actually,” she said. “You know, I probably shouldn’t insist on this, but you really should let me help you. You need to let go of so many things. I can feel the tension in you from here. My program will not only extend your life, but it will restore harmony and balance to your existence. I’ve told you, it’s much more than just a physical regimen.”

  “You want to make me a test case?” I asked, laughing. It seemed prudent not to take her too seriously.

  She fixed me with a piercing stare, the look of a zealot. “I’m not kidding, Becky. I’ve worked with much more difficult cases.”

  I felt like some powerless furry animal hypnotized by a cobra on a PBS nature program. If I wasn’t careful I wouldn’t get out of this with my psyche intact. It seemed less amusing to let her rattle on than it had a moment before—clearly it was time for a bit of what Jamison Roth called “client management.” “I think we should decide right now that if we’re going to work together, this sort of thing is off-limits,” I told her. “I appreciate your concern, but we both need to maintain our objectivity.”

  She shrugged. “Have it your way,” she said. “But if I might make one tiny suggestion, you could start with trying to get rid of the people who cause you anxiety and pain,” she said.

  Easy for you to say, I thought. She was incorrigible. Nothing short of a firehose would stop her. Why not start right now?

  “I’ll get the check,” I told her.

  “Carole,” I said, finally placing the call I’d been putting off all afternoon since getting back from lunch, “it’s me, Becky.”

  My late ex-husband’s second wife greeted me in a tone appropriate to time-share salesmen or mechanical messages. “Yes?” she said frostily.

  “How are you?” I asked, trying for a conciliatory note. I could hear Andrew—adorable Andrew, my husband’s second son—talking about something in the background.

  “Fine,” she said shortly. “A little busy at the moment.”

  “Well, I won’t keep you.” I paused. “I’ve spoken to David recently…” I always expected her to leap in with “The tuition money! I forgot! I’ll send it right off!” but she never did. We had had this conversation numerous times already.

  “Yes?” she said again, more impatiently. “Just a minute, Andy. Mommy will be off the phone in just a second.”

  “The college hasn’t received this quarter’s payment. I was wondering if you’d sent it yet.”

  She sighed gustily. “I don’t remember off the top of my head,” she said.

  “Well, would you mind checking? The administration office has sent him two notices already.”

  “I don’t have time for this right now,” she said. “We’re on our way out.”

  All the things I would like to have said went screaming through my brain, exploding like little meteors. I knew that getting angry wouldn’t help, and, unless I was prepared to finance a major court battle to try to remove her as trustee (virtually impossible without cause), I had to preserve a veneer of civility in our relationship. But it galled me nonetheless. I mean, it was my children she was manipulating to get even with me. If I provoked her she could make things worse for them, but that didn’t stop me from indulging in a few sadistic fantasies.

  “Could you check tomorrow, then?” I asked as pleasantly as I could through clenched teeth. “If you haven’t already sent it, that is.”

  I knew she hadn’t. I knew she did this on purpose. I knew what would come next too.

  “Fine,” she said. “Since you’re so concerned about it, you can come over here and pick up the check anytime after ten.”

  She occasionally made me come to her house, her big beautiful villa on a hill, to pick up what she should have just dropped in the mail. I suspected it was a way of reminding me of—all right, make that rubbing my nose in—the difference in our economic circumstances, my downward mobility. I had to keep paying for being Richard’s first wife, at least till the kids collected on the principal of the trust when the last child—Andrew—turned twenty-five. That was so long in the future I felt as if I would be chained to her forever. I’m sure she felt the same way about me. I think she hated me so much that it was worth suffering the irritation of proximity in order to have the opportunity for punishment. In her place, I hope I would have turned the trust over to some nice bank officer who would collect a fat fee and act as referee.

  Still, if she insisted on handing the check over personally rather than sending it on, it suited me more to go there than to have her come to my office or my house. I had a superstitious fear that if she saw my things—my desk, my taste in furniture, the art on my walls, the contents of my bookshelves—she might get some insight into my personal life or my persona that she could use against me later. It was probably a paranoid reaction, but my feeling was, when in doubt, go with your gut instinct.

  Besides, Dr. Lawrence, my last access to the fount of psychological wisdom, had said the same thing, albeit in more elegant and professionally appropriate terms.

  I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t consider
taking Bobbie Crystol up on her offer to change my life after all.

  Chapter Ten

  “So basically,” Isabel said, when I told her the story of My Lunch with Bobbie, “she spent the entire lunch trying to bully you.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “What else would you call it?”

  “Trying to impress me.” I laughed. “With just a teensy bit of bullying.”

  “Humph!” Isabel made a skeptical noise into the phone. “She sounds like a queen dispensing patronage to me. Very noblesse oblige.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But the patronage is being dispensed my way, so if she wants to preen and beat her chest a little, I’m willing to hold up the mirror. Besides, to tell you the truth, it was more amusing than annoying.”

  “This reminds me of Peggy Sue Got Married,” Isabel said. I love talking to people my own age, who have all the same cultural reference points, instead of to whippersnappers who think the special effects in the original Star Wars are primitive. Someday we’ll all be laughing uproariously at jokes about “dignity pads” and trusses, to the horror of younger, less afflicted generations. Nevertheless, I didn’t get it. My favorite scene in the movie was where the heroine renounces algebra as totally irrelevant, but I didn’t think she could be referring to that.

  “I don’t get it,” I told her.

  “I mean the part about the unpopular nerd who comes back a multimillionaire to the high school reunion,” she said. “Remember? This has the same kind of feel to it. It sounds as if Dr. Crystol has chosen you to be the audience to her success.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “I had the same thought. It’s certainly understandable. If you got rich and famous—not to mention great-looking—when everyone remembered you as lumpy and peevish, wouldn’t you want those people to see how you’d changed? I would.” Isabel herself had won a Mademoiselle competition in college and had a brief stint as a model, so she might have had difficulty identifying with such a scenario. When she went back to her reunions, everyone would no doubt exclaim over how little she had changed.