The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention - Hardcover

PROLOGUE

August 30, 2012

When the knife slips, I feel nothing. Everything freezes: the knife, my breath, time. I go numb. Dumb.

I know that I’ve cut my finger, and I know that it’s bad. But it’s too soon for pain. I hold the ring finger of my right hand to my face and I see things I shouldn’t: blood, tendon. Is that bone?

I grab a dish towel with my good hand and wrap it around my bleeding hand and thrust the mess into the air.

Instinctively I call out my wife’s name. For fifteen years, that’s what I did whenever something terrible or wonderful happened. I called out my wife’s name. My wife is four hundred miles away, but old habits die hard. Nearest emergency room, I tell myself. Hurry.

I don’t know where the nearest hospital is, or how to get there. This is Los Angeles, not Manhattan, my childhood hometown of the geometric grid; not Oakland, where I lived for the past thirty years, with its numbered east-west avenues. I don’t know where anything is, nor how to get there in L.A.’s twisted gridlock of four-lane streets and scrimmaging intersections.

The nearest hospital, Siri tells me, is fifteen minutes away. “Everything in L.A. is fifteen minutes away,” the locals say, “and it takes an hour to get there.” The dish towel on my finger is soaked with blood already. I hope this time the locals are wrong. I replace the towel with a fresh one, grab my purse and my keys, maneuver my upraised arm and then the rest of me into the driver’s seat of my car. I don’t want to be in the driver’s seat of my car. I want to be in the passenger seat of my wife’s car.

I drive south on Silver Lake Boulevard, straight into the set- ting sun. At the intersection of Silver Lake and Sunset, Siri tells me to turn north. If I knew where north was, I wouldn’t be talking to Siri. It’s easier to turn left than right without the use of my right hand. I decide that “north” is “left.”

I pass the sprawling Scientology campus on Sunset and pull into the ER’s circular drive. A sign on the wall reads drop-offs only. NO  PARKING.

L.A. hiking trails have valets. Real estate open houses. Ice-cream parlors. Boutiques. But not the ER, where a valet is actually needed. Not here, where the not-rich people go.

I decide against arguing with the security guard that I’m both driver and patient, and therefore entitled to leave my car here while I drop myself off. I drive to the nearest garage, spin up and up and up the circular ramp, find a space on the fourth floor. I’m too dizzy to search for the elevator. I get dizzier, trudging down the urine-soaked stairwell, right hand held high.

The ER doors slide open. I follow the receptionist’s eyes to my right hand. Apparently the newspaper rule “If it bleeds, it leads” also applies here. She jumps up, rushes me into a treatment room, and runs out. A tall, balding doctor appears, snapping on gloves, and then a nurse, her hands already gloved. Neither of them makes eye contact with me. Neither of them says a word. The nurse lowers my hand from above my head, removes the dish towel, and deposits it in the hazardous waste bin. She lines the doctor’s lap with blue-and-white Chux and sets my right hand into his upturned palm. His hand and the Chux turn red.

The doctor squints at my wedding ring. “We’ll need to cut that off,” he says.

“You can’t do that,” I say.

The doctor raises his eyebrows at me. I’m sure he sees plenty of crazies in this ER; how would he know I’m not one of them? Maybe I should tell him about the Dr. Phil moment I had yester- day, when I actually thought, It’s time to move on with my life, and I looked at my wedding ring, wondering what it would feel like to take it off for the first time in a decade, to be me without it, without the story it used to tell, and then closed my eyes and pulled it off.

I put the ring in my underwear drawer and closed the drawer. I looked at my left hand without my ring on it and put the ring back on. I unhooked the gold chain around my neck and hung the ring on the chain and looked at my left hand without my ring on it and took the ring off the chain and put it back on my finger.

Problem identified. What I want is not to move on with my life. What I want is my old life back.

How long, I wondered, will it take me to stop wanting that? Will I be seventy, eighty, ninety, single and still wearing this wedding ring?

Baby steps, I told myself, and put the ring on my right hand instead of my left. It felt weird—scary, sad—but also accurate: not exactly married, not exactly not.

“I can’t let you cut that ring off,” I tell the doctor.

He frowns. The nurse whisks the bloody Chux off his lap and replaces them with a clean set.

“I’m sure you cut wedding rings off all the time,” I say. “But my wife and I are separated. I’m still hoping—”

The doctor stares at me. There is a certain narrowing of his eyes, a certain clenching of his jaw. I realize that although it’s 2012 and gay marriage is legal in seven states and we’re in one of the world’s gayest cities, this white-haired, white-faced man is not happy to be holding the hand of a woman who has a wife.

I watch as his conscience kicks in, or the diversity training the hospital made him take, or the nondiscrimination policies they require him to uphold. He reassembles his face. Too late. Message received.

I’ve been gay in America long enough to know Rule One: Physical Safety Above All. I don’t want this guy to get sloppy on the job because he’s sewing up a smartass, half-married, geriatric lesbian who doesn’t even know which hand a wedding ring be- longs on.

I don’t want to share any more of my innards with this doctor than the parts of me he’s already holding. I won’t tell him that until I got into my car and drove to Los Angeles three months ago, I thought I knew how the final phase of my life would go, and it didn’t involve Los Angeles, let alone a solo trip to the Sunset Boulevard ER. I thought the choices I’d made had set me up for a sweet ride the rest of the way.

Despite my boomer-appropriate countercultural predilections, I’d turned out to be a fair to middling grown-up. I’d sur- rounded myself with smart, loving people; saved money when I could and spent it frugally when I couldn’t; worked hard at a career I loved and was good at; renovated a three-story Victorian on the Oakland/Berkeley border and lived there, while its value tri- pled, for twenty-three years.

Most auspiciously, I was ecstatically married. And I was sure I always would be.

“Let me try to get it off myself,” I tell the doctor.

He holds up my bleeding hand in the narrow space between our faces. “You’ve cut yourself to the bone. If infection sets in, you could lose your finger. You could even go septic. Do you know what that means?”

“Please,” I say. “Let me try.”

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Nurse Santos will help you.”

The doctor beckons to the nurse and they both leave the room.

Nurse Santos returns with an armful of supplies. She sets a plastic bucket of ice, a giant tube of K-Y Jelly, and a pile of Chux on the tray in front of me. She plunges my finger into the bucket of ice, waits a few beats, pulls my finger out, slathers it with K-Y Jelly, and hands it back to me.

I close my eyes and I pull and twist and pull and twist. The ring is stuck. It’s a vise grip tightening on my finger. It hurts like hell.

The doctor reappears. “It’s time,” he says. “So. Which would you rather keep? Your finger or your wedding ring?”

As he speaks, Nurse Santos gathers up what remains of our efforts and assembles a workstation on the rolling table: a neat row of syringes, scissors, thread, and some unrecognizable scary- looking instruments sealed in blue plastic bags.

The doctor reaches for my hand. I grab it back.

“Any jeweler will be able to fix that ring,” the nurse says.

The doctor rolls his shiny metal stool closer to me and grabs my right hand and shoves something cold and hard between my ring finger and my ring. I feel a sharp click. The nurse takes my hand before I can look at it. She sets a small plastic specimen jar next to me. The doctor’s face floats near mine. He positions a syringe over my hand.

“This will numb you,” he says. “Then we’ll sew you up.”

I turn away so I can’t see what he’s about to do. Instead my eyes turn to the specimen jar. In it, the broken circle of my wedding ring.