Love Sick (10 page)

“He was neat and clean from what I could tell. Except for the beard.”

“And the tzizit? Fringes?”

“Oh, yeah,” I drawled. “He had fringes.”

“Then he’s a Big Fat Jew.”

• • •

I thought Bette was being cruel for the sake of hilarity until Daisy and I ran into our neighbors, Carol and Celia, making the sundown circuit with Hazard and Pooh, their shepherd mix dogs and Daisy’s good friends.

“So I had lunch with this guy yesterday,” I said as I fell into step with them. Celia extracted a cigarette as we passed out of view of their apartment building and the vigilant eyes of her ten-year-old daughter. “He’s a divorced Orthodox Jew. When I asked him why he wanted to date a goy, he said no Jewish woman would go out with him.”

Carol shrieked. “No shit, Sherlock! And you can’t either. I like you too much.”

“But there must be plenty of divorced or widowed Jewish women who would love to bag themselves a lawyer.”

Carol and Celia exchanged looks. The kind of looks you exchange when you haven’t told the other person she has pancreatic cancer. Yet.

“Tell us more,” Celia said. I love Celia’s voice. It has the clean, clear resonance of a bell. It’s no wonder she’s a hotshot lawyer for a city agency for the elderly. People would tell her anything.

“I don’t know much more than that. He has two kids who are going away to summer camp in a couple of weeks so he dates in the summer. I asked him if he was a Lubavitcher and he said no but he ‘knows’ them. He’s a lawyer with the city but I don’t know for what.”

“Probably a tax lawyer,” Carol said dryly.

“I went to Cardozo School of Law,” Celia said. “My class was full of yeshiva boys. They could argue night into day and still want to twist the sun into something else.”

“I didn’t know you went to Cardozo,” Carol said. “I figured you went back home in Ohio.”

“No, that’s how I came to New York.”

“Oh . . . I actually went to Boston College. That was pretty wild, a Jewish girl among the Jesuits.”

“You must have killed them,” Celia said.

“I liked it, but I couldn’t wait to get to New York. Where is this guy from, Frances?”

“Baltimore. He didn’t become observant until college.”

Both women sighed an exaggerated “oh.”

“A BT,”
*
Carol said knowingly. “They’re the worst kind.”

“I hope you didn’t wear slacks to lunch,” Celia said, her eyes crinkling up in laughter.

“Or a linen and wool blend,” Carol added.

I looked from one to the other. “I don’t get it. He wore a hat to lunch. He has the beard and the peyos and the fringes and disappeared for Shavuot, which I still can’t pronounce. Why would he want to date a shiksa when there are a million rules I’m going to break just by breathing?”

“Six hundred and thirteen of them, actually,” Celia said.

“Get it?” Carol asked.

“Get what?” I was completely bewildered.

“Of course no Jewish woman will go out with him. Who wants to deal with all those laws? And besides, the beard. Yuck.”

“Ugh,” Celia concurred. “They’re all so—”

“
Clumpy
,” Carol said.

“And if he’s a Lubavitcher—”

“Arrogant,” Carol filled in. “They give me the willies.”

“But you guys are Jewish!”

“Oh, Frances.” Celia crinkled. “Didn’t you know no one hates Jewishy Jews more than other Jews?”

“At least the frummies,” Carol said. “Woof.”

Daisy, Pooh and Hazard looked up at that. Pooh pawed my shin and Daisy and Hazard began asking very loudly for cookies.

• • •

It was my psychiatrist, Dr. Roseblatt, whose MD is from another Yeshiva University school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was most horrified.

“A Black Hat??? You can’t go out with a Black Hat, Frances. They’re horrible. I interned at Beth Israel and when I walked by them I could
feel
their eyes drilling into me. I’m blonde so they didn’t know I’m Jewish. It was like a field day for ogling.”

I was so amused by my psychiatrist’s reaction that I emailed it to Carol. “Big hats have little yelmeke,” she responded.

I began teaching summer quarter not long after lunch with Paul. There were other guys I was seeing and/or flirting with, and the lack of a weekend date night was counter to my purposes in dating. I suggested we might not be a match.

And yet I remain fixated on the puzzle of Paul. Perhaps I should be grateful for the do-si-do of the few weeks we communicated. Because of him, I’ve ended up reading more of the Old Testament than I did for my bachelor’s degree in religious studies. I have come to admire a great deal of the joy and tenaciousness that are the story of Hasidic Jewry, and I’ve come to see how much of Catholicism’s ritual and canon are derivations from its Judaic roots. I continue to be suspicious that Paul was looking for sex, but sex based on conversation is the least of what I’m looking for and all too rare at that.

Convinced that there is some Halachic loophole that would allow sex with a gentile without stoning or a good strong bath, my research into the interstices of rules governing relations with gentiles led to a phone call to Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a best-selling author and founder of the Meaningful Life Center, a Torah-centered “spiritual Starbucks” (which, I guess, means drop in for ten minutes of Torah and lattè) but after he scoffed at the idea of a sexual exemption (“No one is perfect. Observant Jews sin as much as anyone.”), he went on to interview
me
. It might have been a chance for him to dig in to my world a little, although he found, when I told him I’m fifty-four and never married, that I am not a typical secular gentile.

“Do you mind me asking all these question?”

“Not at all,” I said. Anyone can find the answers to his questions by reading my books or blogs, but I felt somehow that I was in the presence of someone prayerful and authentic and, maybe, holy.

“Did you ever find your birth mother?”

“No. I was never really interested,” I told him. “I figure the people who changed my diapers and paid for graduate school are my real parents.”

“Ah. But what if”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“she’s
Jewish
? That would make
you
a Jew.”

Yeah. Me and the king of Denmark.

Five

The male bowerbird incorporates hundreds of brightly colored objects in his nest, including shells, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, plastic garbage, coins, nails, rifle shells or pieces of glass. He spends hours grooming his collection, which reflects his ability to procure items from his habitat. He often steals from neighbors.

I cannot overstate what a bumbler I am when it comes to dating.

With exactly two exceptions, every boyfriend, lover or crush I’ve had in the last ten years has started with me having an almost neutral opinion. Affection may take me a day or it may take a couple of months, but in the beginning, if we are in any way suited, I reserve judgment.

Perhaps a better way to put this is that I leave the judgment up to the guy and I go along with it.

My passivity is born of inexperience and a frightfully low opinion of myself. I am not, however, a sucker.

Much.

• • •

At first Bette was enthusiastic.

“Ooh,” she said when I forwarded his profile to her. “He’s cute. I like that boyish thing with the graying hair. I wonder what kind of restaurant the photo was taken in.”

“I think he’s cute, too. But he’s four years younger than me.”

She snorted. “Like that’s ever stopped you. Look, Franny. He went to Johns Hopkins. He’s a gardener. You guys are, like, perfect.”

Danny was certainly enthusiastic in his first email. He liked weekends in Paris and was the owner of “an interesting and financially successful business which provides me with freedom.”

On the other hand, his profile was fluent but his email was a grammatical mess, which I couldn’t square with weekends in Paris. I mean, those are long enough flights to read a lot of books and magazines. Even if they were
Popular Mechanics
and schlocky thrillers, some of the grammar should rub off. And he lived in Florida. I was tired of long-distance relationships. It made me think that Paul’s logistics of the Lexington Express wasn’t such a bad idea.

In for a penny, however, in for a pound. “You live in Florida!” I wrote back. “How can we make that work? You will have to fall very madly in love with me and move me down, I suppose.”

I mean, what the hell? I could toss my hair and act imperious while indulging fantasies of living barefoot among the herb borders with this man I hadn’t yet spoken to who seemed to be on me like white on rice.

But then again, why was such a guy on Ashley Madison? It’s not exactly the kind of place where gardening is a skill to brag about.

Ashley Madison guarantees that its paying members will have an affair. I didn’t fork over my Visa number so there was no promise that I’d be looking for my high heels, but I hope to God those pictures will never be found by a houseguest.

I’d posted a terse profile there in a fit of revenge. Every other month or so, I Google men I once loved (you do too, so stop rolling your eyes). Eric, the man who broke my heart a couple of years ago, was hacking endlessly away at a book proposal to rewrite Gay Talese’s
Couples
for the new millennium. Despite the presence of a girlfriend on Myspace and Facebook, he said on his website that he was up for anything.

Anything???
I screeched at my computer screen. I have had a hell of a time letting go of Eric, largely because there are writerly and comic things about me that he won’t let go. But one of the things I’ve used to delete his emails was a conversation in which he admitted he found sex with me to be too vanilla.

Funny that when he mentioned that, it was what I automatically thought about sex with him.

Up for anything, my, er, foot.

That was all I needed to find the naughty photos a boyfriend once took of me and post them while whistling the tune of “Anything You Can Do.”

Hell, Eric, hath no fury. You didn’t bring out my dark side, but by now I’ve learned how to do it myself. If my Ashley Madison profile was a secret revenge, it still felt sweet.

But what was a guy who “like[s] dogs and children” doing on a dating site populated with user names like Tuff&Ruff?

“My daughter made me put up a personal,” he wrote back. “I didn’t know Ashley Madison is like that.”

Did I believe him? No. Ten minutes on Ashley Madison is enough to make you want to wash your hands with bleach. I sat back and tried to imagine a daughter writing his ad and him posting it on Ashley Madison. But I liked what I’d read and decided I’d kid him about it for the rest of our lives.

He was a widow, he wrote soon after, with a fourteen-year-old who attended the Florida Air Academy. “Just like her mother,” he said proudly. “She’s determined to fly.”

Danny, too, was flying . . . to France on a business trip. He called me for the first time as he was driving to the airport. The static on his cell phone made him sound like we were playing mermaids, but I was able to make out that he’d be in meetings for a few days and hence unavailable. “Kiss, kiss,” he signed off through the bubbles and eddies. I liked that. I know a couple of Brits who say that.

• • •

The next I heard from him he had been awarded a huge decorating contract for the government of Benin. Benin! I opened my atlas, hoping it was a small island in the French West Indies or a region of France I hadn’t heard of before.

I got the French part right. It’s a former colony, resting six degrees above the equator on the Atlantic in West Africa. Three of its border countries are among three of thirty-three countries on the State Department’s Travel Warnings list and another seven nations on that list are within a two-hour flight from Cotonou, the coastal city where Danny was working (or not working). American travelers are warned against crowds and walking alone on the beach at any time of day. The primary industry is subsistence farming. Its secondary industry is scamming gullible American women into taking out cash on their credit cards.

“Cool,” Ben said. “Have him send me stamps.”

Danny was in the
Heart of Darkness
and I found myself corresponding with his daughter, Hellie, who was delighted to have a new “Ma” and “a funny dog” in her life.

Ma?????

I answered that I was a long ways away from being her mum and that she wrote in the same scattershot fashion as her father. Then I forwarded this batch of emails to Bette.

“Don’t do this, Fran,” she said as soon as I picked up the phone. “It’s a scam.”

“I know,” I said. “But isn’t it delicious?”

“No. It’s stupid and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m not gonna get hurt, silly. I just wanna know what he wants.”

“Who
cares
?” she snapped. “He’s trying to sucker you in.”

“Bette.” I wanted to slow her sudden prickliness down. “Bette. Don’t you think it’s, I don’t know, interesting? I mean, you hear about this stuff and now it’s happening. I want to see it play out.”