Love Sick (23 page)

“I’m going to save this in my inbox for periodic remindering,” he enthused back. “I don’t think it’s all too late. When you’re ninety, you’ll feel the same about now as now you feel about your 20s. I’m pumped; let’s do this stuff!”

It was too late for me. My confidence crumbles like heavy snow on a thin snowpack. There will be no kids for me. My old age will be one of poverty. The one thing I could feel proud of in that exchange was that I had offered my very best advice to him. I’d tried to be noble. And having tried, it was finally time to really end it.

I took the wimp’s way out and lapsed into silence and deleted him from my Facebook friends. Six weeks later he blithely checked in on how the book was progressing and I sniped, “Have you found the mother of your children yet?” He responded with protests that he was not screening women for fertility and whatever else he wanted from an ideal mate, although, he admitted, “I did post briefly on OkCupid last summer and I have dated a girl I met through that (and she and her kids have recently enjoyed some homemade cotton candy, thanks to you).”

I thought I’d given everything I had to give him until I found out he was giving my stuff to other women. I felt ugly and pointless as a dying woman and the next day I told him it hurt too much to write him. He pled innocence—“Why would it be painful?” he asked all cyber-wide-eyed, and I replied crisply that perhaps he didn’t notice that I hadn’t initiated one in twenty email conversations in the last year and that I’d removed him from Facebook.

Facebook brought him up short. Somehow that convinced him I’d truly slunk off to curl up in the thick undergrowth of my psyche. With his own cyber-pain he wished me well and said good-bye.

• • •

It’s been more than four months since that last dialogue. Peonies have given way to roses, which gave way to lilies, which were crushed in a hurricane. Indian summers seem to be a thing of the past in the age of global warning. The trees are dropping their leaves without changing color.

My heart hasn’t died, but I will have to clean my glasses and have a cigarette after finishing this chapter. Dar’s and my love ricocheted as failure but even in that we’re partners. Of all the men I’d dated, talked to, emailed, winked at or otherwise brushed against in this year, Dar was the only one who loved me.

That’s the strangest part of it. Dar cared about my work and dogs and sanguinity. It was a poison we both had to swallow in order for me to finally confront the despair that is at the root of my loneliness.

Eleven

There are moths that drink the tears of elephants. Tears contain salt, water and trace levels of protein. Mabra elephantophila steals the tears without the elephants seeming to notice. Lobocraspis griseifusa does not wait for an animal’s eyes to moisten—it sweeps its proboscis across the eye of its host, irritating the eyeball, encouraging it to produce tears.

I was back in bed in March, immobilized by fear after enrollment once again dropped and I lost my teaching job. I had some small savings and pulled myself together enough to put the word out that I was back in the dog business. Slowly, gigs began to sprout up.

Ten months earlier, I’d promised myself no more pinched nerves from suddenly beagle-hating Labs. Now it was a Portuguese water dog that flipped out as humans suddenly spurted forked tails and horns. Daisy was amused and treated him like a windup toy. One growl from her and the whole pedestrian population turned into Hieronymus Bosch’s
Death of the Reprobate
.

A French bulldog, dachshund, Boston terrier and elderly golden retriever joined my roster. I began to breathe again. They couldn’t pull my arms from their sockets and, by coaching a couple of writers, I was making the same wages I’d made adjuncting.

Plus, no papers to mark and no students to argue about plagiarism with.

I walked the streets that slowly came to life after a brutal winter, enumerating to Eva, the Frenchie, the things I had to do in order to fully pull out of my depression and explaining to Trixie, my rickety dachshund, about how to write a book about volunteering to go out and get hurt by a bunch of weird guys.

Because getting hurt, I came to understand, is the norm in dating. It’s pain I need to steer clear of.

• • •

With that in mind, I decided to go back to craigslist, where I would get some immediate attention for the specifics I was looking for.

I was not especially looking for a boyfriend, but I wanted to flirt. What I wanted was experience and information and some fun. I proposed a dim sum Chinatown date for research purposes—I’ve never had dim sum, Chinatown is my favorite neighborhood, and research would take the onus off the boy-girl-chemistry-weight-competition-looks-dog-hair thing that had caused so many pinches the summer before.

• • •

I was late and I could tell Jacob was not pleased. He’d driven in from Connecticut, it was his birthday, his sixty-second, and the woman he was meeting for the first time hadn’t bothered to charge her cell phone before trying to find a train on a Saturday night.

But he was cute, in an impish sort of way, and we were meeting in Washington Square, which is entertaining, and I was wearing a shortish skirt and feeling flirty.

We had dinner at a macrobiotic restaurant and my shoes gave me blisters. I bought bandages and he offered to rub my feet but I was too embarrassed to accept. What would I owe him for a public foot rub?

He drove me home and we found him a strong cup of coffee sold by a cute kid to whom he spoke Hebrew. It turned out that Jacob had fought in the Six-Day War. I mulled that over as we walked to the Promenade. Any man Jacob’s age would have had to come to terms with war, whether because he was in one or had found a way around it. Something about the way he informed me of his Israeli army service hinted at a dark side of his soul. I assumed that he didn’t have to join the Israeli army and by doing so was ditching the American draft my brothers went to Vietnam under. Eager to contribute to my research, he told me that the last woman he’d dated had lost her job and moved in with him after an invitation to stay for a couple of days. He described renovating his house and the features of his SUV and I liked his attention to comfort but had visions of Daisy running in with muddy paws and jumping on the white couches.

I emailed my thanks for dinner and the chat and he responded and friended
*
me on Facebook.

We remain Facebook contacts but I wouldn’t say we became friends.

• • •

Joe looked like a good prospect. He said he knew some good dim sum places and we began to work out the details for meeting. In the middle of that, instant messenger popped up.

“Someone’s co-opted your address,” Paul wrote. “I keep getting offers of Russian brides from you. You need to change your password.”

I responded with a chuckling emoticon and promised I’d take care of it. On the other hand, I wondered, didn’t the former Soviet Republics still have a lot of Jews? Maybe he should consider Russia his land of opportunity. American citizenship in exchange for a wig? Not bad, really.

“How are you?” he replied

“Good,” I said. “Did you find your summer girlfriend last year?”

He answered, “:(.”

“Maybe you should try JDate.”

“I have. I didn’t find anyone and the fees are enough to have a good dinner at Vegetarian Ginger.”

I thought about putting him in touch with Jacob. They might each know a girl for the other.

• • •

One night, I was walking Daisy and her pal, Honey Bear, and we passed a bike I’d admired earlier that day. The rim of one slim tire was red, the other yellow. The frame of the bike was robin’s egg blue, the grips on the bullhorn handlebars were emerald green, and the seat was black-and-white racing checks. As bicycles go, it was a piece of art.

As I waited for Daisy to pee, a tall skinny kid came tripping down the stairs of the apartment building the bike was locked up to. Daisy finished and I waited again for Honey Bear to circle around and pee over Daisy’s piddle.

“Whoa! Check it out,” the kid said. “Will the yellow one have to start it over again?”

I laughed. “No. Daisy’s usually too confident to cosign, but sometimes I have a couple of other dogs who line up behind her. They don’t do it for each other. Only Daisy.”

“Alpha bitch,” he said soothingly, holding out his hand. Daisy jumped on him, clipping his groin, and washed her tongue across his face.

“She’s very European and she likes you, which you should take as a compliment. I don’t believe in alpha dogs. When Daisy wrestles it’s always on her back. A vicious dog could rip her guts out. I have several theories about pee-overs but dominance isn’t one of them.”

He walked over to the bike and began unlocking it. “What’s the other dog? It’s some kind of crazy.”

“Chow and Australian shepherd, we think. She’s very nice. Your bike is amazing, by the way.”

“You grock it, huh?” I blinked. I haven’t used or heard the word “grock” in maybe forty years. Since the time I had a skateboard, in fact.

“Totally.”

We began to walk along Clark Street, the kid asking questions about the dogs. He told me he went to St. Ann’s, the neighborhood’s elite and very progressive prep school, and that he was not doing well academically. That means, in Annese, he’s too busy making claymation videos to music he composes himself to take Latin as seriously as his teacher would like. They don’t give grades at St. Ann’s but he’d probably ace his SATs in the first go and end up majoring in physics and film studies at Stanford.

He was the kind of kid I should have dated back in the days of grocking on crude skateboards, the source of the kind of regrets I have about weighing 245 pounds when this dating stuff and general confidence got worked out and you went to the prom in an evening gown from the ’50s and couldn’t wait to begin your freshman year at Reed College . . .

It was a testament to how much better I was feeling that I could appreciate this chance meeting rather than spiraling into milk long spilt and long soured.

He stopped in front of the Korean deli and asked if I’d watch his bike for a minute. “I know the guy inside. He’ll accept my ID.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“What are you going to do tonight?” I asked.

“Hang out with my friend back where we met. I live on Garden Place. I’ll go home around one.”

At sixteen, Will and I spent most of our weekends drunk on the pretty good wine my father made—and we could
drive
. What the hell, I thought. Rites of passage shouldn’t force you to lie. “How about if you hold the dogs and I go buy your beer?”

He thanked me profusely when I handed him the plastic bag and told me where I could toss over a thousand bucks for a bike like his and rode off as the dogs and I continued toward Cadman Plaza.

Kids, I justified to myself, are kids—better beer than getting into either kid’s parents’ Stoli.

I had to call Will when I got home. We’d spent those years together—or together in our apartness as two weird teenagers, one fat, the other gay, who tried to find something other than each other to belong to. “Wouldn’t you have done it?”

“Of course. Why should we have gotten to have all the fun? They have five more years before they’re legal. We were always just a couple of years away from eighteen. Can you imagine what we’d have done without your father’s wine cellar, France?” Will grew up poor as a rock and my parents kept me on a fairly short allowance. We would have been scared, broke and bored, although Will might have come out earlier than high school graduation, bored into bed with some college student.

“I can’t drink red wine anymore,” I said. “It makes my ankles blow up.”

“We’re old,” he said sadly. Lately every conversation comes down to our decrepitude and neuroses. “Thank God I have Rico. How’s Daisy?”

I get that a lot from my family. They mention a mate or child or friend and then ask how Daisy is. The difference between them and Will is that he prefers the company of dogs as well.

“Her muzzle turned white this summer. And the tip of her tail.” My voice sank. It was hard, seeing her getting older.

“She’s eight. She has a long time still. But, France, how did she get to be eight? And when are you going to get another dog? You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

“You can only say that because you still have a week of being fifty-three.”

He giggled his giggle that always drags me down with him. “You know what I’m doing on my birthday?” he whispered.

“No. What?”

“Golfing.”

Over 50 Dating Secrets
reared its hoary head in triumph. “Oh, God, we
are
old. Can I come live with you when we’re supposed to retire only I don’t have any retirement? I’ll teach your puppies not to eat linoleum.”

“I want cabana boys.”

“I don’t mind cabana boys.”

“We’d make a good old married couple,” he said. “I’ll watch cabana boys I can’t get it up for and you’ll watch Book TV about stuff you can’t remember.”

“It’s a deal.”