Authors: Frances Kuffel
“Allgery-schmallergy,” he said. “That’s why God invented Claritin.”
“I don’t think he liked the Bat Cave.”
“The Bat Cave is
fine
.”
“He complained about the heat. It was a hot day. I was running him all over the Heights showing him stuff.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to be with a woman who can walk past the end of the block.”
“Oh. My. God. You mean, I was too . . . thin?” I was choking with laughter.
“You’ve picked some winners, Frances.”
• • •
He was right, although not quite in the way he meant it. Galean and Jeremy were good guys, but I was wrapped up in the role I was auditioning for: finding a happy ending. I cleaned my apartment—for men. I had my hair and eyebrows done—for men. I talked about the books they might want to write and prayed my musical taste would pass muster and that Daisy would behave. For men.
Bull. Shit. Daisy always behaves. She behaves like Daisy. Craven in her greed and reactions, and completely egocentric. I have a vast collection of music that I love. I didn’t need Galean or Lou or even Dar to approve what I listen to.
Dar. Back to Dar. Dar hadn’t minded the dog hair or the Bat Cave or Daisy wrapped around his leg humping him for dear life. I missed him. In the weeks of Galean and Jeremy, with my hopes high, Dar wasn’t on my heart. When my hopes were dashed, it was back to Dar-this and Ben-and-Jerry-that. I was back to feeling rejectable.
Here’s what Bette was right about:
I
picked this stage to reveal myself on and I was bleak and empty after three months of treading the boards.
But maybe I didn’t need a guy. Maybe I needed me.
• • •
Time passed. Enrollment plummeted and I was no longer teaching. Dog walking was once again keeping me afloat while I dithered about finishing my novel or going out on the Modern Language Association career job hunt. If I got a job, what about Kevin and the farmette? How could I credibly say that teaching is a talent as innate as being able to carry a tune and that teaching is standing in front of a class in order to create a cocktail hour in which they can learn something through themselves, the work, each other, me? Hell, I consider myself a success when I can get them to use “its” and “it’s” properly.
Despite adjuncting, I had stopped fitting into the mainstream of anything years ago, maybe when I got a job in publishing instead of finding a doctorate program in creative writing. I think I know more about the real world than most creative writing teachers do, but I didn’t play the game my teacher Richard Hugo called po-biz.
*
Was that failure or boldness?
Maybe luckily, I found myself beset with dogs when a colleague took a two-week vacation. That September was murderously hot and humid and I couldn’t find anything in my arsenal of walking shoes that was comfortable. After two days, I had angry purple blisters between my toes. I sterilized a needle at my gas stove, hopped to the bathroom and closed my eyes before piercing them.
Dang,
I thought. I wrote a dog-walking column for a local blog and I don’t think I covered blisters in my “What Hurts Today?” piece. At least not bloody blisters. But back then I didn’t have days that started at 7:30 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m.
There was one spell of a few hours, between 8:15 and 10:30, when I could have breakfast, write a few emails and allow myself some cynical charm by a highly poetic email romance with a man I’ll call Dream Catcher. Like a bottle of cold water on these hot, humid fall days, he was oozing sensuality:
a rampage of fireflies
shatters my heart,
shatters my reason, burns—
until you drown me, moon-washed
river of all desire
In those mornings, and in the few minutes I had between gigs in the afternoon, we flirted, the poetry getting cheaper by the day.
Dream Catcher was married. He and his wife apparently couldn’t stand each other but he wouldn’t leave her because his kids were getting to the age of having their own children and their loyalty to their mother would prevent him from being a grandpa. Also, divorce was financially crippling.
Before I got completely exhausted from this new schedule of dogs, I was stupid enough to be aroused and to admit it. Here’s a lesson I don’t want to put in bold letters: When a woman cuts to slang in referring to her nether-regions, men start foaming at the mouth with lust. He begged to come over one morning, any morning, to make love to me.
But those mornings I was already beaten by the 90 degrees of high humidity I’d be facing in a couple of hours. My erotic thoughts dwindled. It was hard to write poems about picking up after a greyhound with a tummy ache.
His emails laughed when I explained. He would tend my wounds. He would take care of me for two hours a week, right after he got back from a family vacation in the Green Mountains.
But I didn’t want to be tended. I wanted to go to Gettysburg and make love in a four-poster bed in a two-hundred-year-old bed-and-breakfast. I wanted to go to the movies, do sloppy quiet things during
Crazy Stupid Love
and then go drink coffee and talk about it after.
And that was what he couldn’t give me. He couldn’t even consider that, knowing me better, he might want to give me those things.
I could kind of understand his hopes of finding a mistress. He was my age and had been talking to/saving for/arguing over/sleeping with one person for thirty years. Thirty years! As often as not, a thirty-year-old person has his/her
own
kids and a mortgage and a specific career. Whole lives can mature in the course of thirty years—and whole lives can be disassociated. Living in a husk of a marriage would be as miserable as falling in love with a married man who wants to visit my bed at eight in the morning, on his way to work.
But if Mrs. Dream Catcher wasn’t unhappy enough to go looking for a new shaman she could call her own, then she wanted to keep the marriage intact. His infidelities were the exponential echoes of the anger and pain a divorce would cost her.
There may truly be such a thing as an open marriage, but not if there are children and not if opening it was only one partner’s idea. And it can close with a clap as sudden as a catfight.
For the sake of argument, then, a good rule of thumb is, simply, no married men.
• • •
Another rule, closely related: A man must have his own place. Unless you’re much more Spartan and compulsive than I am, it’s not fair that the onus of cleaning is placed completely on the woman. Especially if she has a dog.
• • •
After that devilishly hard two weeks ended, it occurred to me that I might invite Dream Catcher over on a Thursday morning. I had fewer dogs on Thursday; I could force myself to get it together to clean the bathroom, scoop up the worst of the dog hair and put clean sheets on the bed. But Dream Catcher could not, when I told him about my dogs and deadlines, see that those are the
who
of me, the answers I gave Kevin last night when he asked how I am. Busy. Tired. Excited. Stressed. Amused. That moon-washed river is his
what
of me. Italian greyhounds and the book review for a friend that I was keen to post on Amazon interested him only insofar as they interrupted his fantasy or whether I could whisper them in bad blank verse.
The detritus of my life is meaningful to Kevin and he doesn’t forget it from one day to the next. When it’s his turn to fret at feelings of emptiness I ask him what’s in bloom on his balcony or what he’s making for dinner for his sponsor.
Dream Catcher couldn’t open up the who of himself. I suggested that Provolone cheese and the rain forest humidity we were enduring were fit topics of conversation and he disagreed. “I am much more ready to reveal myself in pillow talk than to do so on a walk or on the phone, which has never had an appeal for me—it is like sex in utter darkness—there is more mystery and stimulation where there is some degree of visibility at least. It’s just the way I’ve learned I am.”
Sounds like a really lonely life to me. I deleted the exchange and headed out to pay my Verizon bill and splurge on wild fresh salmon at Garden of Eden. Ben’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to make something he loved. This, I thought as I walked up Montague Street, is what life is. Knowing someone well enough that I don’t have to think twice about what to take to his birthday dinner, then going home to research Regency furniture for my novel.
Interestingly, forty-eight hours later Dream Catcher emailed again, not to plea through a sonneteer’s seductions but to say it would have been better to meet by chance in an innocuous place and wondered whether I was making progress toward my writing deadlines. I was presented with yet another rule: Be yourself, no matter how fey you seem. If he wants to know you, he’ll back off his initial terms. If doesn’t, he wants a sex toy made to order.
Despite having enjoyed my brief experiments in being a sex toy, I’m not one, because I want to be known, I want to feel more myself through someone else, I want to risk more than an STD.
All Dream Catcher had to do was keep reading craigslist and Ashley Madison to find a housewife in the same loveless predicament he was in who would adore the romance of poetry.
He didn’t need me. And that was the saddest fact about all the men I’d dated. They may not have liked me, or I them, but at least it had been personal. The salt taste of you, the rosemary sweat in the dark corners of you, are as impersonal and as little to do with Frances Kuffel as a fund-raising letter from the Republican Party.
• • •
Fairy tales, dogs, reclusion, having to resurrect myself from the last binge of mood or food folded me into origami as I sat, fittingly, outside Studio 54 with my head buried in my snot-covered hands. I’d summoned the courage to do the “I’m my own best friend” thing and go to see
Sondheim on Sondheim
. I thought I’d see some new songs and listen to old favorites. Instead, I watched a musical version of the hatchet job I’ve been doing trying to chop through to my better self.
I will risk egregious simplicity and state that Sondheim’s musicals have one great unifying theme: the marrow-deep hunger to step from observer to participant, whether it is in love or in art. “Maybe you could show me how to let go, lower my guard, learn to be free”
*
repeats itself through the selections in
Sondheim on Sondheim
. The great sadness is that so often it is the articulation of the epiphany of wanting that is a show’s dénouement. Bobby wants to be alive by the end of
Company
, but he’d only begun to search for a way to do it. In
Passion
, Fosca, too, finds she wants to live—as she is dying.
And in the meantime, there is aching, lyrical yearning through living vicariously. “I read to live,” Fosca sings, and I winced at the surrogacy and escapism that have brought me a good vocabulary and much dusting to do and not much else. “How you watch the rest of the world/From a window,” George Seurat says of his two years’ labor to catch a single moment, “While you finish the hat.”
*
Was he most alive when the vision of the painting came to him, or in the absorption that is a loss of self that overtook him in the work that followed? “All of them good,” Hollis sings of his artistic talents that have disappointed him, “but few of them better, none of them best,”
*
and I cringed with regret.
I remember how, in fourth grade and filled to the brim with my father’s collection of Columbia House musicals, it made perfect sense to me to blurt into song over almost anything. If Eliza Doolittle could rant in song, why couldn’t I do math class as a musical?
The first movie I remember seeing is
Carousel
. When left to story time and prayers, my father sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” to me. One sister-in-law’s first memory of me was of hopping around the living room singing “I Feel Pretty.”
I identified with musicals because you can sing along with someone else’s life in a way that you can’t mouth the lines of a play or movie or book. Will introduced me to
Company
in 1975 and I was finally able to articulate my ambition and lovelessness. I felt less alone when I belted out “Ladies Who Lunch” with Elaine Stritch.
I was singing my life.
Which is how I chose the perfect date with myself and ended up on Fifty-fourth Street with a fist of pea-size Kleenex, taking stock of what it meant to be a single fifty-three-year-old who owns nothing, scraping by through spotty adjunct teaching and walking dogs, knowing my options for retirement are Ernest Hemingway’s or Virginia Woolf’s.
Of all those gorgeous songs and stories,
Sunday in the Park
reduces me to rubble. I told Will this when I described the show. He thought a moment and said, “My life is
Company
. I have to be with a man.”
How strange, this reversal. At eighteen it would have been the other way around. That day, I felt emptier hearing that having a lover was the most important thing in his life. I wanted it but didn’t understand how to get it.
And yet.
As much as I identify with the crisis of whether I can carry off a writing project and ache at the thought of what to do next, maybe Will is right about
Company
. If I was feeling like a lover was impossible, wasn’t I slowly dying of the lack of what Bobby was drowning in:
Private names,
All those
Photos
Up on the walls
—
*
• • •
That’s what it’s really about, right? My best friend forever lives 1,500 miles away. Kevin is 3,000 miles west. I had a social life on the street—all the people I know through dogs and with whom I exchange various degrees of intimate news—and two homes in my neighborhood where I might be found hanging out. Photos I took of Ben’s mother and Jean and Ben’s dog are up on the wall. We’ve sat up Googling national anthems until after midnight and Jean and I know each other’s siblings well without ever having met them. Nan and I walk our dogs together and I always give her some kind of nutcracker for Christmas because I know she loves them.