Bleeding Hearts(135)

“That may be all well and good for Magda,” the academic said sharply, “but what do you think happens to all those women out there who are trying to be just like her? They probably don’t have very good genes. The only way they’re going to save themselves from having wrinkles in their forties is to resort to surgery.”

“I have never advocated resorting to surgery,” Magda said. “You know that.”

“I know that women are never really going to be equal until they are allowed to get old just like men,” the academic said. “I know that every organization like Fountain of Youth that is successful enough to ‘go national,’ as you put it, puts equality back another twenty years.”

“It makes all the young women feel they were right about us all along,” the first lawyer said. “We’re old and over the hill. They don’t have to listen to us.”

“But you don’t have to be old and over the hill,” Magda said. “That’s the whole point of Fountain of Youth. You don’t have to be old unless you want to be.”

The pain was now so bad, Magda was having a hard time trying to see—and it didn’t matter at all that she was putting no weight on the leg that hurt. The leg that didn’t hurt was getting tired. Magda looked around for something to lean against and couldn’t find anything. There was a green leather couch and a matching club chair in front of the fireplace, and all those chairs along the wall, but nothing close enough for her to grab.

“I think you ought to consider the implications of the fact that all the people who belong to Fountain of Youth are female,” the academic said. “I think you ought to spend at least some time examining your responsibility, your personal responsibility, for the epidemic of eating disorders that is sweeping this nation.”

Magda was having a hard time accepting personal responsibility for standing upright. The pain was now so bad, she wanted to cry. The three women were looking at her expectantly. They expected her to come up with an argument they could counter with sociological studies or statistics. She couldn’t think past the point of finding some place to sit down. But what good would sitting down do? If taking the weight off her leg didn’t help when she was standing, why should it help when she was sitting?

“Excuse me,” she told the women. “I think I need to find the ladies room.”

The three women looked at each other, and then at her. Magda thought they thought she was probably having a hot flash. At any other time, Magda would have countered this assumption. She had never had a hot flash in her life. She didn’t think she was close to menopause, in spite of the fact that she was nearly sixty years old. Everything she had ever told these women about the Fountain of Youth Work-Out was true. It really did keep you young. It really did mean you didn’t have to get old unless you wanted to.

With her leg feeling the way it did, Magda couldn’t move very quickly. She had a hard time moving at all without limping, and she didn’t want to limp. Simon was standing with a group of men at the bar. Magda caught his eye and gestured toward the wall of French doors that led out to the terrace. It had to be wretchedly cold out there, but people had been making the trip all evening. Maybe there was a winter garden or a Christmas light display or something else that was supposed to be beautiful to look at.

Magda found the door in the wall of French doors that was open. She slipped through it and found herself looking at a dead black sky over a dead black yard, all the graceless-ness of winter without snow. She limped over to the low balustrade and sat down on it, glad that nobody could see her as she hobbled. The balustrade was even colder than she had expected it to be. She winced.

“Are you all right?” Simon asked as he came through the door.

Magda waved her left leg in the air. “I’ve got a pain in my leg,” she said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s from. It’s really incredible.”

Simon frowned. In his white dinner jacket, Magda thought he looked like a character in a novel by W. Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. Even his hair, which was gray and thinning, was thinning in just the right way.

“What kind of a pain is it?” he asked her. “The kind of a pain you get when you bruise yourself? The kind you get when you break a bone? What?”

“I’ve never broken a bone,” Magda said. “It’s not the kind of pain you get when you bruise yourself. I don’t know what it is, Simon. Maybe I pulled a muscle.”

“Is that the kind of a pain it is?”

Magda shrugged. “If it hasn’t gone away by tomorrow morning, maybe I’ll see a doctor. That’ll make you feel better. But I think I’m all right, Simon, I really do. I think I was just standing around in one place for too long.”