Love Sick (17 page)

Then nothing.

I couldn’t bring myself to stalk him and so what conversation we’d had up to and through the weekend turned into a monologue of “maybe,” “if only,” “what did I ___?” “was I too ___?” “should I/we have ___?”

I sucked it up so that my friends would think me brave. Celia asked me round to share a bottle of wine and Carol talked up JDate’s over-fifty speed dating. Jean reminded me that this was not a breakup. Will requested I find us a cabana boy and Kevin upped it to three so that we’d each have one. Bette had the picture of Bread Dog printed and framed for me. I put it on the window ledge, above the air conditioner that made my elbow ache. Daisy the carb-queen was lying on the love seat in front of the air conditioner, asleep on her back with her front paws dream-fluttering in the air and her back legs splayed shamelessly. She was eight inches away from where I was sitting.

You have friends,
I told myself sternly.
A dog who lives to live with you. You have interesting students and a book to write.

You even have other guys wanting to correspond with you.

Yes, ma’am,
I told that other half of myself, who talks a big game but who I ignore on a regular basis.

Daisy and my two selves would be the only friends who’d be around late on Saturday night.

• • •

Galean had produced the electric shock of making me laugh until my cheeks hurt.

Laughter is electric with anyone. Because I am so often the funny one, I can become a half-baked lesbian when a girlfriend has me panting for the next zinger. But the amperage spikes when it happens between two people who suspect they’d like to get naked as soon as possible.

Laughter is ambidextrous sadomasochism. You’re either surrendering or mastering.

The only thing I can think of to match laughter is the synchronicity that goes by the inept phrase of “getting it.” That’s what rips my heart out any time I think of Dar. Without speaking, he and I understood the backstory of a backstory. It was a club of two that made me want it to be Us Two.

“One of my favorite lines from Trollope,” I mused one night at dinner with my parents and Dar, “is ‘proud as piecrust.’”

My mother put her fork down and looked at me in consternation. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m proud
of
my piecrust but . . .”

Dar and I widened our eyes and looked at each other.

“Maybe it’s a matter of how well a piecrust stands up,” he said. “Is it a . . .
stiff
crust, or mushy?”

His face was as red as a cherry turnover. I was biting my lower lip and shredding the napkin in my lap, fighting back a fit of giggles. Mom looked more confused than ever and Dad finally looked up from his plate and inspected our barely suppressed hilarity with a grunt that told us we were flagged and on our own for being so childishly smutty.

It was smut, but it was also my mother’s long history of pie making and the puddly place in our tummies where we were being stupidly juvenile about Victorian novels as well as the real possibility that Dar would want my mother’s recipe and would be surprised and interested to learn that she was thinking of pumpkin pie when he was thinking of apple pie and I was dreaming of black cherry pie, and that Dad has stories of raisin pie at a hole-in-the-wall in Florence, Montana, but preferred the mincemeat he used to make with venison, which would prompt me to give a little history lesson regarding mincemeat. And the moment would continue tomorrow when Dad suddenly decided to make the custard if I made the crust. And if I spoke or emailed Dar tomorrow, he’d wonder what kind of pie Dad had been inspired to make before I mentioned it.

And so on, into the silly pink cotton candy of the future.

How do you put that craving into a personal ad?

• • •

So much back-and-forthing between two generations of regret—Dar, Galean, Galean, Dar—made me sick of myself. Instead of saying, “I like this, I like that” in my Big Beautiful Woman Cupid profile, I blew off the questions about Hobbies/Interests. Excluding “other,” BBWCupid offers fifty-one choices under Fun/Entertainment. If I were a guy, and a woman I liked the looks of had checked off antiques, shopping, casino/gambling, crafts, fashion events or collecting, I’d start looking for a different sort of dating site—Already Got A Life-dot-com, maybe, or No Handmade Gifts. And I quickly backed up into cyberspace when I was confronted with a menu of men whose interests included motorcycles, bars/pubs, investment and karaoke.

And yet . . .

When I was a literary agent, I represented a gem of a memoir about rebuilding an Indian motorcycle and, in my hipster neighborhood with its banks of pastel Vespas, I have an intermittent fixation on photographing interesting bikes. A guy who mentioned a vintage Norton could score some points.

I have caveats for hobbies/interests. I tick off writing, for instance, but it’s not a hobby. I love giving and going to dinner parties, but the Bat Cave doesn’t have room for them, so I leave it blank. My computer and Internet are my most important possessions, but I don’t in the least understand them. By “ballet,” does Cupid mean doing or going to?

One of my caveats fell under camping/nature.

That phrase reminds me of all the dopey Girl Scout campouts I went on that pitted freezing and having to use an outhouse against the fun of s’mores and . . . s’mores. We’d go off to some campground and pitch our tents, and various teams gathered firewood or cooked or hauled water. It was camping for the sake of camping because I don’t remember anything of the scenery except the woods.

The very keenest pleasure I had when I was thin, however, was hiking in Montana. My boredom level is low, so the harder, the better. I didn’t speed-hike the way Lisa, my guide and niece, does. I took my camera, I got excited over mountain sorrel, I was astonished and sort of blessed by sharing space with mountain goats, I laughed at Daisy whipping along from ledge to lake to cliff. I’d be willing to camp in a heartbeat if it meant getting to see the unseeable—Lupfer Glacier or Roaring Springs Canyon. That is camping for the sake of privileged information.

How charmed I was when I received a long response from a gray-haired and neatly bearded man that noted, “There are so many good, intelligent lines in your ad that I feel foolish for singling out just one. It was when, in your sort-of discussion of sort-of camping, you use the phrase ‘deeper into the beauty.’
*
That was lovely. I knew just what you meant.”

The rest of what he had to say was tinged, a little sadly I thought, by diffidence. He assumed I was probably mobbed so he wouldn’t hound me and if I wasn’t mobbed I should keep looking for someone because there are good guys out there.

His modesty was dear but unnecessary.

Many are the times when I’ve wanted to edit my own ad to say, “If you have more than three garments in your closet with Disney characters on them [more than one if the character in question is Tigger] or if you refer to your breasts as ‘boobs,’ keep moving!” But I haven’t. Yet.

I laughed.

Any reasonable person knows that the
only
acceptable illustrations of the Pooh stories are Shepard’s. There are very few reasonable people left when it comes to the classics Disney has cute-ified to the point of hyperglycemia.

I was impressed.

He handled the tricky comma-in-quotes-within-quotes with unusual aplomb.

I shivered.

“You look adorable. You also look happy. Happy women are almost always beautiful women: That is the great irony at the heart of dating.”

My physical aspirations have always revolved around the word “adorable.”
And
he used the adjectives “pugnacious” and “disingenuous,” and managed to quote
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
The Addams Family
.

I have never scrambled to reassure and encourage as fast as I did that morning to Jeremy.

He wrote immediately of his relief and his frustration with pissed off Big Beautiful Women who’d been burned by fat-hoppin’ guys.
*
More to the point of his day, however, was that he had an article due for the audiophile magazine he was on the staff of. “Mostly I write about MAXX3 speakers so I’m excited to write about my favorite singer at the moment, Joanna Newsom. Do you know her?”

My stomach clenched at the thought of another Mackie-Messer-Lou, but he skipped right along to asking—
asking
, not telling, and especially not telling and then asking—who my favorite poet was.

“One of my first teachers was Dick Hugo,” I wrote back, “and he still gets to me.”

“I’m rushing to pick up my daughter from school but I had to write you immediately. Of all the poets anyone could choose, I can’t believe it was Richard Hugo. ‘Dick.’ My God. Such power. So many great lines: ‘The day is a woman who loves you.’ Who
are
you??”

It only took one word to answer that. He would Get It because it was the second sentence of the poem he had quoted:

“Open.”

Welcome to Dar Country.

• • •

Except, of course, that Dar didn’t have a sixth grader named Katie and a wife named Joan who was in a long-term passionate affair with a married man.

“We’ll probably split up when Katie leaves home but it’s an open marriage for now. I work from home so I do the housework and homework. Katie is my Best Girl.”

Beware the father of a daughter,
my superego said.

Shuddup,
my id said, presenting the middle finger to my frontal lobe.

He lived in New Paltz and was a Girl Scout leader.
When does he plan to see you?

Love will find a way,
id hummed.

You’re a sap,
my superego said, and flounced off to plan a lesson on subordinating conjunctions.

I decided to heed the debate, at least a little. “Just how does an open marriage work?” I asked. “Have you had other relationships? Does your wife know?”

“I was seeing a woman I met on Cupid for about a year. We were very fond of each other but she met someone whom she could plan a future with. No hard feelings.”

At least no hard feelings
after
she met someone who could sleep over.

“What about your wife?”

“I’ve opted not to tell her although I’m sure she knows. I mean,
I
know that when she takes her cell phone with her for a walk at night she’s talking to him and that when she works late or goes away on business they’re together. This wasn’t my idea and I don’t want to hurt her.”

“You’re a good man,” I said. “A better man than I am a woman.” My fist was clenched.

• • •

Here we are—Sol, Lou, Patrick, Paul, the Orange Rose Guy, Jeremy and me—in our fifties, outnumbered by our baggage. Not over the last relationship, a life of diffidence in obesity, the needs and joys of children, religion, working for the Man or making a living on a narrow margin, tastes crafted over forty years and many trials: We are a motley bunch and sometimes it feels as if our bags and bundles have been in our cellars for too long and the rooms themselves would make for an episode of
Hoarders
.

The same factors were present ten years ago but this mustiness and the feeling that we’ve forgotten half the junk stored away wasn’t there. A man in his mid-forties seems to look forward to each date and the next girlfriend. If he has kids, they’re young enough that he wants everyone to get along on a daily basis.

After the larkiness of Galean, Jeremy seemed to epitomize all that is best and worst about our decade. He was well-spoken, polished, passionate—and he was married.

And let’s not forget the hardening of proclivities that comes with age. Like Lou, Jeremy liked “curvy” women. His wife was pillowy and his former girlfriend weighed 382 pounds.

Three hundred and eighty-two pounds???
my lately unwanted superego screeched.

“Wasn’t that hard for you?” I asked.

“I’ve always liked big women. And no, my mother was thin.”

“Wasn’t it hard for her?”

“W-eee-ll,” he considered. “She did have some trouble walking to the end of the block.”

I flashed back to Patrick pushing corn bread at me. He’d have made sure she didn’t get to the end of her driveway.

Then again, 382 pounds. Is it typical for men to describe their exes by specific weights before mentioning her hair color or her job or her sense of humor?

I’m still unnerved by this preference for big women. I’ve spent my life in the jail of my body size, whether I was fat or thin. I’m longing for some open space where I can simply be Frances. Unless one is an anchorite devoted to the divine, I think it takes intimate relationships, of various sorts, to
be
. What’s the point of making my amazing artichoke stew or watching the clouds take shapes if I don’t have someone to serve or point it out to?

Our conversations meandered into what we were reading and Katie’s birding project for Scouts and how he grills scallops. We laughed over my insistence that despite the political incorrectness of liking beef, I’d take prime rib over a scallop any day, and we laughed some more about Katie’s cat that sat in front of her bunnies’ hutches as if it were watching porn with surround sound.

The baggage was musty but we were getting a good chuckle out of the contents.

I hoped, despite Katie and Joan and the menagerie, that this was another aspect of dating in late midlife: that we have become aware that our entrenched lives are fodder for mockery.

• • •

We had three weeks of emails and sneak-away phone calls and a few confessions of what we wanted to do with each other and suddenly he was coming! Joan had decided to take Katie to visit her parents in Michigan and he was driving them to LaGuardia on Sunday afternoon.

My Hugo-quoting, Disney-hating, masturbating-over-me-at-night supreme optimist would be in Brooklyn Heights at dinnertime with a week of familylessness ahead of him.

Bette, Celia, Jean and Carol clucked so much I had a menagerie of my own going.