Love Sick (24 page)

• • •

I knew competition was a factor with Joe when it became difficult to find a time to meet. I may lack dim sum experience but am fairly certain it’s a brunchy thing, not a Friday night thing. On Saturday morning, though, he had a fiction-writing workshop, and he was meeting friends on Sunday.

“God, help me,” I said to my computer screen. Men in their fifties who take fiction workshops are, I’m afraid, doomed to being perpetual wannabes.

I liked the good hard dry kiss Joe gave me when we met and his fairly good-natured realization that we weren’t going to find one of those palaces trafficked by rolling steam tables. We found dumplings on a menu and he dove in with enjoyment until I told him the beer story.

“I can see how it’s funny,” he said, putting his chopsticks down, “but as the father of teenagers . . .”

Is this also a component of regret? In missing parenthood, was I barred from having my stomach clutch at the dangers my seed faces?

“I remember a New Year’s Eve party I had in high school. I was shocked when my mother came into the living room and poured vodka into the punch bowl. ‘I’d rather you drink what’s here and that you drink it openly. It will make you drink like adults.’ She was wise about that.”

“I dunno,” he said.

I can’t tell you what we talked about by the time the last of the scallion pancakes was gone. I probably tried to be interested in his novel and he probably tried to be interested in women and weight issues. We walked down Mulberry Street and he seemed oblivious to the St. Anthony Giovinazzo street fair. He treated the oompah-band and cheap pastel plush toy prizes, the blocks of torrone and ropes of peppers, the divine smell of sausages and hot grease for zeppole as a nuisance because of the crowds. Had I been alone with my camera, it would have been a pageant. But I was accommodating. If he wanted to move quickly through it, I’d dart behind the booths and snake against the crowds eager to shoot balloons and grab a deep-fried Oreo.

I was, therefore, surprised when he insisted on getting off the train and walking dogs with me. We walked him back to the R train and he said, “This was fun. We should probably do it again.”

I gave him the same hard dry kiss he’d greeted me with and agreed.

If the conversation was diffident, we at least both liked to read. He was handsome. And I never heard from him again.

• • •

Here’s another piece of dating etiquette I’d like everyone to play along with: Don’t say “we’ll do it again” unless you mean it. Let’s all agree on a polite “It was nice meeting you” as a way of leaving the door unlocked but quite closed.

And this is where perspective comes in.

Joe’s—let’s call it rudeness, shall we?—pinched me. I’d rushed headlong into Galean and Jeremy and their rejections hurt like hell at a time when my reserves were at low ebb. It took days to put the individuals, if not the defeat, behind me.

Pain, however, is months of the Black Dog sitting on my chest. It’s financial precariousness that feels like rejection even though I know that enrollment numbers are behind it and the pay wasn’t great to begin with. Pain is going out during an ice storm at night for cake, pain is missing my mother and pain is what I feel in the midst of a silent quarrel with Bette.

Hurt is finite. Pain is static. It hangs around. When it becomes less acute, it leaves you with a hangover. It is the difference between a skinned knee and a torn ligament. You’ll walk again. You’ll go sightseeing and make Thanksgiving dinner and go shopping for the perfect evening gown. But you will never have the nerve to try a Salchow again.

There is an ad on Facebook right now that vacillates from “I
Being Single” to “I
Being Single.” The semantics here are bizarre. First of all, why does this “brand spanking new on-line dating site/unique events” switch back and forth between love and something-other-than-love? The two hearts suggest that the service caters to both kinds of client, but its motto, “Don’t Ride Alone,” is definitely relationship-centric.

Beyond this wide cast of the net for clients, the symbols themselves are strange. Is the first jagged heart a broken heart or a half a heart? I can understand being brokenhearted after a romantic catastrophe, but anyone in a state of perpetual mourning because she or he is single is not my idea of an ideal date. It brings me back to the philosophy stuffed constantly down our single throats by the dating, beauty, diet, marriage and entertainment industries: If the sign means halfhearted, is a singleton half a person? Either statement suggests that meaning comes through romance, rather than through the affirming or negating actions of how one actually gets through one’s days.

I’ve broken my heart a couple of times and the duration of the wound is the double-pain of the loss of the man and of never spinning over ice again. I’m not brokenhearted because I’m single. There are moments of acute hurt in being single, a cold ache of being an outsider and loneliness. It hurts, sometimes a lot, and then passes. I laughed when a couple smooched loudly enough on the street that it made Daisy bark, and I wished Joe would wander off to browse at Housing Works while I watched the girl too chubby for her low-riders and tube top jumping for joy when her boyfriend won a pink teddy bear.

Dar, who lurks behind these words, causes, at the worst of times, a cascade of feelings: dismay, anger, curiosity, well-wishing, loss of hope, regret, self-judgment, silence, need, boredom. Each has its own spasm. I wonder if he’s fallen in love. I wish he could read the novel I’m working on. I need a good laugh. I hope he finds the perfect job and starts rock climbing again.

I hope, if he thinks of me, that he misses something he hasn’t quite found with anyone else. I hope I’ve left some hole in him—but I hope it only hurts a little.

I want badly to text “I miss you” to Dar. A lot of what hurts is my pride. Then I read about the Wall Street protests or chat with Celia about her work in Albany and I forget again for a while.

It’s a good thing that Dar and I didn’t see each other more than once or twice a year. It’s a good thing to keep pain and hurt as separate categories in my head.

• • •

In a city whose restaurants are known for pressed tin ceilings, oak floors and enviable furnishing and décor, Abigael’s on Broadway is the spitting image of the convention rooms at the Hunt Valley, Maryland, Marriott.

I had never seen a heterosexual man enjoy a duded-up strawberry margarita as much as Paul. The drink seemed bigger than him.

I dropped something on the medallion-patterned carpet and the woman at the table next to me made a joke about pocketbooks. I was relieved that she spoke to me, let alone found a female common denominator between us. Every woman in the restaurant wore hose, a wig, and a turtleneck. To my very slight credit, I had turned back to my closet and pulled out a blazer rather than the more comfortable shruggie. But with my bare legs, neckline, sandals and pierced ears, I could have been considered an insult to every person in the room.

I had started having afternoon coffees with Paul somewhere among the craigslist dates.

“The basic question,” he said in his flat voice, “we use in judging gentiles is whether you observe the Noachide Laws. Murder, robbery, blasphemy, idolatry, eating flesh from a living animal, having courts of law, sexual immorality.”

“Deal breaker,” I said, refolding my napkin. “As a Montanan, I like my meat to scream when I cut into it.” He studies my poker face, then laughs. “Most of those are what Catholics call mortal sins, except for idolatry—we do like our Michaelangelos and Berninis—and courts of law, which caused the Reformation in several European countries. But everything I’ve read says kosher sex is married sex. Won’t you have to—I don’t know. You don’t have confession or penance, do you? Isn’t having sex with me breaking the immorality law?”

“Wellll,” he drawled. “We can’t have kosher sex.”

“So if it’s not kosher it’s not sex?” I shook my head. “What is it then, some form of masturbation?”

“No. Masturbation is forbidden.”

“Is this like Catholic loopholes around marriage? If you aren’t married in the Church then you can’t be a divorcée in the Church either?” I couldn’t shake the sense that dating a gentile would be a less-than proposition for the woman.

For me.

It was putting the cart in front of the horse, however. It took hard work to talk to Paul. We had nothing in common.

But those noontime coffees made putting on a skirt and coloring my hair a pleasurable break in my routine of dogs. They reminded me there was a
me
. A mingler, if you will, and girlie—or at least wistful of lost girliness.

• • •

“How was Shavuot?” I asked the next time we met. “Are you exhausted?”

“I spent it on the Upper East Side,” he said, “going from synagogue to synagogue.”

“Yes, but
how
was it?” I pressed. “Did you enjoy it? Did you have some new insight?”

“It was hot. I took refuge in the penguin house at Central Park Zoo.”

That is when I knew I would clean the Bat Cave and ask him over. I was enchanted by the thought of this slight man in his over-large suit and fedora, blinking back the lights of sleeplessness and Leviticus, sitting in the cool dark tunnel watching the penguins gawk at him through the windows as they zoomed through their icy aquarium.

• • •

We didn’t speak of emotional matters. Paul lives several worlds away, not only in one in which the year is tied to moons and ancient remembrances, but in a world of numbers and symbols. To his credit, he made his decision to get his doctorate in logic because one of the professors was a gorgeous blonde, but he didn’t live in my world of shades of early summer foliage and grapefruit-scented bubble baths. If I asked him what love felt like, he’d probably say tolerance to the sixth power.

Did I mention I once had a huge crush on Mr. Spock?

• • •

Emotions, desire, fantasies were email fodder. “I think we will have a love affair rather than an affair,” he emailed after I pulled that description of Shavuot out of him. His eyes had lit up when I began laughing about the penguins. He knew he’d touched something in me, and it was probably the first time he saw my eyes light up as well.

• • •

And then it was July and his kids were at their Chabad-Lubavitcher camp and he’d come back from visiting them in the Catskills on the Sunday of the Fourth of July weekend to have his birthday dinner with me. In his loose suit and fedora, trying to sip the foot-long glass of silly margarita, he looked like a kid’s idea of dressing up in the Clark Kent costume.

I finished my salmon and he finished his smoked beef ribs and the chocolate-dipped strawberry from his drink and we headed for the Seventh Avenue train. I had bottled water in the refrigerator and plastic cups at home. He had a bottle of kosher white zinfandel in his backpack. He also, at my request, brought a pair of pajamas and his tefillin. This was not kinkiness. I was inviting him to sleep over and announcing myself as his summer shiksa.

“Why did the other men remove their hats and just wear their yarmulkes?” I asked as we walked through the warm night.

“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “I could have taken mine off as well.”

“I felt like a harlot. I’m sorry for the way I dressed.”

He stopped and looked intently at me. “I appreciated the cleavage,” he said. I may have been the naughtiest thing he’s ever done, being a plunging neckline in the fanciest kosher restaurant in New York. “Do you mind if I say that I like your rack?”

I laughed. “No, but it makes me feel like Bullwinkle.”

He shook his hand. “Got nuttin’ up my sleeve,” he said in the goofiest voice I’d heard from him yet. I laughed; it reminded me that he’d grown up in a world closer to my own, eating hot dogs and playing baseball on Saturdays. This sudden solidarity made me want to link arms with him but, despite email confessions of wanting to kiss me on the Promenade or hold hands over coffee, any kind of public touching felt wrong.

We climbed into bed and he tolerated Daisy’s adoration very well as we watched a movie. She retreated to be closer to the air conditioner and we made out. I had warned him that I needed to go slowly and he made it to second base before I withdrew. He lost his yarmulke and we had to turn on the light and disembowel part of the bed, which brought Daisy to the cozy space that we probably hadn’t intended to have between us. I woke up long enough in the morning to see him swaying through his prayers. It was comforting, that drowsy moment of knowing he was wrapped up in tefellin and thanks while I dropped off to sleep some more. It was comforting to fold his pajamas later in the morning and put them in a drawer.