Love Sick (18 page)

“If his marriage is open, wouldn’t it make sense for his relationships to be open?” Caroline said, and I had to admit I’d hire her as my divorce attorney in a minute.

“Are you nuts?” Bette asked. “Do you have, like, an infinite number of feelings to get hurt?”

“Why don’t you ask him to dinner with us?” Jean offered. “Ben will grill halibut; I’ll grill Jeremy.”

“If he doesn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings,” Celia said, “he doesn’t want to change things. You, my dear, would be a change.”

“Bring your jammies,” I told Jeremy.

“It’s August. Will I need them?”

“I don’t have sex on the first date.”

“Aren’t you the coy thing?”

It was 90 degrees outside and the dress I’d worn to school was sticking to my legs. I shivered.

• • •

I shoved essays aside and began to clean. Cleaning the Bat Cave is harder than cleaning a ten-room house because it’s jam-packed and everything has to be moved at least twice. I swept up dog grit before putting Swiffer to floor in the final attempt to not blacken my feet walking barefoot. What other cities call “dust” in New York is airborne dirt that resurrects itself daily, curling into discoloring smears on the cabbage of my miniature teapot and giving my stuffed penguin head a full pate of hair.

Fighting the tarry city air that stains the knobs on the stove and filters everything through weak lenses is boring, dirty, stupid work when I could be reading
The Black Cauldron
or poking Will in the ear with my pencil.

Wait. Sorry. The crud I moved around in the dank marshalling heat of August horniness made me jittery and prone to forgetting my keys and flashing back to the past. Perhaps plotting adultery amid the piles of essays, tumbleweeds of dog hair and sweat pooling on my back was addling my mind with guilt as well as expectation.

Because after and amid so much fruitless tomfoolery with weird men and men who didn’t, quite, love me, I wanted to love, once again, someone who loved me back.

• • •

The house I love most is 70 Willow Street. I loved it first for the climbing roses spidering up its yellow brick walls and then because I learned that Truman Capote had lived there while waiting for the appeal results for Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. As a memoirist, I sympathize with Capote’s dilemma of loving a man who needed to die in order to finish his book.

As a Brooklyn Heightsian, on the other hand, I am perturbed by people pointing and gawking. One day I walked by as the renter of the three-story mansion was planting impatiens in front. She looked wearily at me. I smiled and said, “He lived in the
basement
.” She laughed, stood up and stuck out her hand. “I’m Kay. Who are you?”

We had a good giggle at what it’s like to live in a minor shrine and discussed how the world has benefited from Capote’s landlord, Leland Hayward, who produced
South Pacific
and
The Sound of Music
.

It was the first stop on my walking tour of Brooklyn Heights with Jeremy. I showed him the garden apartment filled with exercise equipment that had been Capote’s actual home and then recounted my story of meeting the present owner.

I was in a cool perspiration of relief. He was a little taller than me, thin, with graying hair and beard, hipster glasses and a broadcloth shirt hanging out of his jeans. It’s not that his photos were ugly, but I felt comfortable with his body and his style. I felt we fit, like two spoons that could coexist in a spoon nest.

I didn’t feel fat as we walked down Orange Street. In my cotton skirt and red huarache slides, I felt tall and strong and smart. I pointed out the early nineteenth-century wooden colonial houses that have survived fires and nor’easters, described how the likes of Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee had scrummed together on the part of Middagh Street that was whacked off for the BQE, and asked questions about his garden and who was feeding the chickens that night. We backtracked to see the carriage house Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller shared, with an excursion to Montague Terrace to see the buildings W. H. Auden and Thomas Wolfe lived in. I was thrilled to show my little inspirations to someone who could appreciate them, but when I asked if he wanted to see the most darling street this side of Washington Square Mews, he looked at me as if I were crazy.

“It’s really hot out,” he said.

“Oh.” It was and I felt it, but if the humidity isn’t fuzzing the horizon, I try not to complain. “Do you want to go somewhere?”

“I’d like to get something to eat, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. What’s your pleasure?”

We went into that rigmarole of what’s-good versus what-are-you-in-the-mood-for and, finally, he opted for sushi.

Sushi. God’s way of telling tuna they should have crawled out of the primordial muck with the arthropods.

I like my fish cooked and I have an unbreakable no sucker cups/no jet propulsion rule that pretty much leaves me with an artful display of California roll.

Then I remembered Bette’s birthday at a local Asian restaurant, with balloons and crepe paper and silly hats and plates of Indian pancakes and vegetable tempura. They had actual food on their menu as well as eel, squid, skin and roe.

We were both grateful for the air-conditioning, and we gulped at our ice water. Despite the uncooked tides the chef was fashioning in colorful fastidiousness, Jeremy ordered broiled fish with steamed vegetables—ordinary food. I brightened and leaned in to concentrate on the ideas for books he wanted to run by me.

“One of the things that pisses me off the most is that cleaning products do the opposite of what they’re supposed to,” he said. “Take Pledge, for instance. It leaves a film that actually
attracts
more dust. What do you think about a book about how consumers are ripped off?”

I made my Thinking Face, the one where I sort of flatten my lips together in a long line that says, “Huh!”

“Well . . . I dunno,” I stalled. “You have to think who your readership will be and where they get their information. There’s
Consumer Reports
and the Web and
Hints from Heloise
readily available.”

“I see what you mean.”

Our meals came and we busied ourselves with cutlery while I searched for a way to spin his idea.

“I’d suggest alternative cleaning methods except that I have a set of books about using baking powder and salt that are close to that.”

“This is the most phenomenal mackerel I’ve ever had,” he said, changing the subject and looking up at me. His eyes were the color of old-fashioned, well-worn blue jeans.

“Really? I’m so pleased! I always worry when I pick a restaurant.”

“Unbelievably good. I’ve got to try to make this for Katie.”

“Maybe that’s what you should write about: raising a fish-eating twelve-year-old.”

He laughed. “Once we were driving home from a band concert in Kingston and I decided we’d stop for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I told her, ‘This is why you have to grow up. So you can eat KFC any time you want.’ Katie would be happy living at home for the rest of her life.”

“My grand-niece is like that. She lives with her parents on ten acres in Oregon and would be happy raising goats and rabbits and spinning yarn and looking up recipes online.”

“We should introduce them. Angora or mohair?”

I smiled my rarest smile. I felt as on the verge of possibility as a cashmere kid finding its feet for the first time.

It was time to go meet Daisy.

I warned him how small my apartment is, that I have enough books to fill a Staten Island ferry, that even bright lights leave pockets of murk. I told him Daisy would rush to meet him and to expect a European exchange of kisses and that when he sat down, she would sit with him like a Park Avenue hostess tuned to the latest messenger of scandal.

I warned him.

He sat on the love seat and Daisy draped one paw over his shoulder and gave him a good sniffing over as he looked around.

“It’s . . .”

“. . . really small,” I supplied.

“Yes. And really . . .”

“. . . crowded?”

“How do you live like this?”

I like my stuff. It reminds me who I am on days when the Black Dog of depression has me in its jaws. I can’t be
so
terrible if I’ve read all that Tudor history or have a
That Girl
Barbie next to a—oh, heavens. I hadn’t dusted the nuns.

“I’m used to it. I focus so hard that I don’t feel that confined. And Daisy is always within petting distance.”

“Daisy is quite . . .”

I cocked my head. “Beautiful? Smart? Affectionate?”

“. . . friendly.”

The air quotes around the word crackled like distant thunder.

“Can I get you—?”

“Didn’t you tell me about the view of the city from a park nearby? Let’s go someplace less . . . doggy.” He sniffed to underline his point.

It was near sunset and the Promenade was exactly where we should be.

We ambled south, far enough along to see the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, in companionable silence. The sun was turning the world behind us apricot. The Promenade was thronged with tourists and tripods, parents and strollers, toddlers in pajamas eating ice cream. We stopped to watch the gravid sun hover on the New Jersey horizon.

“This has been good,” I said.

“It has,” he agreed. “I enjoy talking to you.”

“Me, too.”

“And getting to see Brooklyn Heights. It’s pretty here. I didn’t know you could be this close to Manhattan and be almost bucolic.”

I smiled. I liked the word “bucolic.”

“I’d like to know more of you,” he continued. “And yet . . .”

I turned to him.

“I don’t feel It. I thought I would. You’re wonderful and smart and funny and pretty, but I don’t feel It. The Thing. You know.”

Of course I know.

“Let me show you back to the parking garage.”

We trudged four blocks in silence. I blinked back tears until we got to the mouth of the garage.

“It was great,” he said. “I’d like to—” He finally looked up at me. I held out my hand, said, “Drive safely” and watched until he was swallowed by the cave of the car park.

Three hours earlier I had walked beside a man of poetry and music and ripening corn and I’d felt long-legged and sure and keen. Now, as soon as he was out of sight, I went into Gristedes. Daisy will fill the bed just fine, I told myself.

Especially if I have Mission to Marzipan ice cream and Stella Dora almond cookies.

Nine

The orchid releases a chemical that makes bees drunk. When the bee becomes disoriented, it dumps its load of pollen into the flower, thus pollinating the flower.

The Galean-Jeremy-Mission-to-Marzipan hangover wasn’t pretty. I taught my classes, came home and read chick lit novels, finishing one and downloading another onto my Kindle before I could so much as roll over in bed. I looked for clues in them, but mostly I wanted the formula: kooky girl with the wrong guy changes her career and man. I shunned my friends and sank into cynicism. When Caroline called to sign me up for the JDate Speed Date, I responded with a sour joke. “Do you know that a whale’s penis is called a dork? So which came first, the dork or the dick?”

She laughed but said, “I wouldn’t share that with a bunch of nice Jewish men, if I were you.”

“You know how Nora Ephron defined a Jewish Prince? He comes into the living room and says, ‘Honey, do we have any ice cubes?’”

“It’s attitude, Frances. You gotta have the right attitude.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s your excuse for being fifty-three years old and never married?”

Carol told me later that they had a good time at the speed date. A banker and a real estate agent asked for Caroline’s number and Meg met a college girlfriend whom she got tipsy with.

I turned to Will for his post-mortem on my most recent dating debacle.

“I feel for ya, France,” Will said, “but think of it this way. You came close. You actually met some guys you liked for a change.”

“Great,” I said. “That and two-fifty will get me to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I can light a candle for my slutty, messy, adulterous soul.”

“Are you an adulterer if you’re not married?” he asked. “I think Jeremy was the one who contemplated mortal sin.”

“The thing about you men,” I began to pronounce, “is that you can’t take it step-by-step with a prospective partner. You know, you meet and you like her but not sexually. But you have a lot to talk about or things you could do together and have fun. Maybe you talk some more and see each other some more and find yourself falling in love. I haven’t said no to a second date in years because of that.”

“What really went wrong, France? Think. You had a great time with Galean. You laughed and you fooled around. Then nothing. What happened between fooling around and nothing?”

I was quiet, reconstructing that afternoon. Daisy wanted to be part of the petting. We were tired and evening was coming on so we walked him to the subway. I smoked a cigarette.

“Jeremy was annoyed by Daisy, too. He made a comment about the dog hair getting to his allergies. He has a cat, for God’s sake! How could he be allergic to dog hair?”