MY FACE MUST HAVE gone ashen that day six months ago at my health club when Lou read me my results at the while-u-wait cholesterol screening. Lou is the club’s equipment manager. Four times a year he turns into a sweat-suited cardiologist when he runs the portable testing machine the club sponsors. He had just told me my number was 233.
“Hey, don’t get so bent out of shape,” he said cheerily. “It’s not like you’re gonna die.”
Wrong, barbell head, I thought, a lump of worry caged inside my ribs. I am gonna die. The only mystery in when. It had been a less than stellar day to begin with. I’d cut my gums flossing too vigorously, driven off from the self-serve pump with my gas cap on the roof and found my secretary circulating a caricature of me as a balding infant in fully loaded diapers. In fact, it was only because I needed the satisfaction of getting one thing right that I’d let them stick me with that needle at the health club.
After all, I had reasoned, at 35, I’m still in the pink of health: trim (6 feet, 160 nonsmoking pounds), fit (I run four mile three times a week and play squash once or twice and reasonably diet-conscious (almost no red meat, 2 percent milk on my banana and shredded wheat, light lunches so I can keep from drooling over my work in the afternoon). I hadn’t had my cholesterol tested since my last physical, two years ago. All I remembered was that my doctor had said it was okay.
Yet now, even as I watched the back of Lou’s crew-cut head while he loaded my slide into a machine resembling a bowling-ball polisher, my own sweaty palms dismantled my confidence. I was thinking that all the men on both sides of my family had died of heart trouble. The machine hummed while its red digital readout flashed past 100,150, then 200. This was like the Wheel of Fortune in hell—and there was no Vanna anywhere in sight.
Anything below 200, I’d been told, was basically cool. From 200 to 240 was borderline dangerous, a car with bald tires and bad breaks. Anything above 240 was grizzly country, a highwire act with no net. Finally the digital devil froze at 233—somewhere in the high foothills of the Coronary Range—and I did, too. It was, I think, at that moment that I crossed over from the “young” column into the one marked “middle age.” My body, not unlike a girlfriend with whom one lives comfortably and unconsciously for years, was suddenly packed and standing at the door. Better be nice to me, it was saying, or I’m out of here.
