Love Sick (6 page)

Will Ames was the first boy and the first man I was in love with. It lasted eight years and is in many ways the template for all of the other important crushes and love affairs I’ve had. It wasn’t until my mid-forties, when I was in a normal-sized body, that admitting to having feelings for a man didn’t take months of therapy and, usually, having to get drunk. That was also when I began to date and, for a few months at a time, have boyfriends. In the five years of knowing Dar I had gained a lot of weight back but had not lost all of my hard-found ability to openly want to be with a man. I didn’t learn that skill from Will, but the outcome of it has been weirdly similar. Men love to talk to me. Sometimes they fall in love with me. They always fall out of love with me and then dance fast and long to keep me as a friend.

Dar had gone from the amazed first conversations to dancing. He’d simply skipped the middle part.

• • •

In two things, I am very lucky.

I am tenacious. I can struggle inwardly with my feelings and wait forever for the object of them to come to his senses and realize he has them, too. When he doesn’t—and in my experience, no one ever has—I’ve perfected the waiting game well enough to survive the inevitable bomb of the truth.

And I never forget. Will and I picked up at exactly the moment before things went wildly out of balance. My brother comments that he always knows when I’ve talked to Will because for the next several hours, my eyes dance, I am animated and kind of silly, my ghosts of loneliness and fear drop away. Will is my human equivalent to an antianxiety drug. As is Kevin, whom I depend on as I try to figure out where it all went wrong with Dar.

“It’s because I’ve gained so much weight,” I say.

“I thought you looked great,” Kevin says. “You couldn’t have gained ugliness in the weeks between Seattle and Santa Fe.”

“It’s because I’m stupid about music.”

“No. You’re stupid about the music he knows about and you don’t.”

“If I spoke Spanish and knew how to scuba dive—”

“—or you sprouted wings and could fly. How ’bout that, Tinker Bell?”

“Tinker Bell was pretty uptight, too,” I remind him. “Dar thinks I’m tense.”

“Try
in
tense. You don’t let people off the hook very easily.”

“I’m sorry.” I backtrack immediately. “How have I hooked you?”

“I dunno but you have. I’ve never told anyone the things I’ve told you. I think it’s because nothing shocks you. I trust you because of that. No one takes pictures of me, and you were snapping away down on the piers and I was mugging like America’s Next Top Model. You just
do
that.”

“It’s because I love you,” I say. “I talked to you and fell in love and then I saw you and I fell more in love. You can’t do anything to make me change that. Even taking a bad picture doesn’t make me not love you.” I laugh. I can understand why Kevin Willoughby, the Cutest Boy in High School, is sensitive about having a camera aimed at him.

“It’s because you love me more than your baggage”—a standing joke he has. “It’s because you love
my
baggage.”

“I loved Dar when his baggage was all over my floor,” I wail.

“That wasn’t his baggage, honey. That was his bags. He was high on crack but the real question is
why
was he high on crack?”

I can only think of generalities. He was, I tell Will, who actually met him, unsatisfied with his life. He had been deeply satisfied teaching grade schoolers and building houses in Nicaragua. Coming back to work in IT in New York must have felt empty and pointless. He hadn’t felt that way when he and his wife moved to New York after school, but signing on with that nonprofit had redefined him.

“Uh, France?” Will says when I end my rant. “Have you thought about the word ‘wife’?”

Will and Kevin, being gay, don’t date in a world where everyone our age has been divorced. They’ve had serious relationships that involved custody of dogs and KitchenAid mixers when they ended, but I’ve almost stopped thinking about past marriages. Divorce is like bronchitis: At some point everybody’s had it.

Except me, of course. I spent the better part of fifty years hiding behind being guys’ best pal, having no faith they could love me. So what do I know, really?

“Who divorced whom?” Will asks.

“She did.”

“Was it bitter?”

“I don’t know. Dar kinda makes it sound like a childish mistake.”

“He’s only forty, France. If he was divorced for a couple of years before he met you, they
were
children.”

“They were college sweethearts,” I tell him.

“Don’t you think you’d better move on?” he asks.

I sigh. “Kevin says the same thing. ‘You don’t have to sit around like you weigh 300 pounds anymore,’” I mimic. “Except I more or less do.”

“I’ve always thought you were pretty.”

“Right,” I snort. “That’s why you ignored me for Kat and all the cool girls.”

“I didn’t say I thought you had great tits, France. I said I think you’re pretty. And a lot more. You don’t have to sit around being all depressed about Dar. Go get over him.”

“What’s the point? I’m fifty-three.”

“Fifty-three is the new thirty-three.”

“Yeah, you can say that. You’re still fifty-two.”

He chuckles his evil, smug chuckle, but the days are getting longer—June and fifty-three are coming his way.

“I’m tired of men,” I whine. “I have Daisy. I want to move to Seattle. I want to write a novel.”

“So write about dating,” Dr. Will says. “You write about everything else you do.”

• • •

I call Kevin a few hours later. “Who was the first guy you were really, really in love with?”

“Greg Alexander,” he answers promptly. They were in the same class in high school, were in choir together and hung out for a while in the same gonzo group of snow-heads and guests at a rich friend’s Georgetown Lake cabin where there was plenty of pot, beer and acid. Greg cleaned up when he decided to take over Sentinel High School government, and he and Kevin saw less of each other after that, and although they have spoken about the big events in their adult lives, Kevin has never told Greg how he felt. “In fact,” he adds, “I’ve never told anyone about Greg, but oh my God, I think about him every day.”

I hang up and call Will again. He acts all put out at my pestering, but his answer is almost the same. Brian Schwarz was a cutie-pie nonentity in the class of ’75, but Will squeals when he talks about him. “The. Cutest. Boy. Who. Ever. Lived.”

So it turns out that, in a way, my two best friends, one of whom I wanted to have children with, have the same template as I. We were silently, hopelessly, distantly in love with a boy in high school and learned to date later (much later, in my case). Dar is someone who knows how to walk up to a girl he sees around campus and marry her.

I email my agent the next day to tell her the Santa Fe trip was a disaster and I want to write about looking for love and coffee among the wreckage of late middle age.

And then I click on craigslist.

Three

A snail’s reproductive organs are in its head.

“I am bored,” I posted. I was hoping some polycentric or film studies professor would catch my reference to George Sanders’s suicide note. I added a photo and confirmed my ad.

Two hours later I had forty-four responses. Like I said, craigslist never disappoints. It had not only brought Dar but two other sporadic love affairs and one epic phone sex boyfriend, one of the few men who’s walked me up to and through an orgasm.

Unlike the so-called real dating websites, craigslist’s losers are up front and hold no promise of a caffeine buzz. There were dozen of boys requesting fellatio,
*
offerings of massage
*
and stating interest.
*

It was, however, an opportunity to expand my repertoire. I could now, by tapping a few keys in reply to this message, be a cougar
and
have a butler: “I’m a handsome, 21-year-old guy who works out. Do you need things done around your apt, home or office? I do those chores! I will accompany you shopping, drive you to an appointment? Draw you a bath? A date for brunch, lunch, dinner, weddings, any events, parties, movies, coffee, drinks, any type of night out . . . or laid back evenings in! Anytime of DAY!! . . . AVAILABLE MORNINGS AND AFTERNOONS!! Get what you want . . . the first time!”*

I don’t “do” peppy. I was exhausted just from reading his email.

• • •

I may go out with men, but I date my friends.

I forwarded the following conundrum to Will in a storm of glee. His boyfriend, Rico, is an over-the-top romantic and I was sure he’d have a reaction. “‘I am a caucasian [sic] thus a very touchy feely and romantic man which some women may not want.’ Since when are Caucasians noted for their affectionate behavior?” I asked.

“If he were French or Italian, he’d say so,” he said. “He might be South American.”

“Or he’s from those mountains, the whatcha-call-ems—?”

“The Caucasus? Maybe it’s so cold there you have to snuggle in order to survive.”

My friend Bette was more direct. “Allow me to translate. ‘I am caucasian’ = ‘I’m a white guy with little education and I don’t wanna date no smart black women.’ ‘Very touchy feely’ = ‘I’m a groper and I treat nipples like radio knobs.’ ‘Romantic man which some women may not like’ means ‘I hide the fact that I’m a misogynist by buying flowers—cheap ones—controlling where and when we eat dinner—which means cheap—and I drive a late-model truck that I drive as if it were a penis.’”

I relayed all of this to Kevin. I knew he was shaking his head as he wrote back. “Don’t let this get around, Frances, but I’m about to break the Code of Silence from the Captain Midnight Society. He is an insecure white dude who cries when he doesn’t get his way and threatens suicide when you break up with him. And by the way? I drive my truck like a penis. Some things are male even if you have chintz curtains.”

• • •

At least the Caucasian cuddler was, well, taking note of the craigslist heading “Woman Looking for Man.”

“What’s the most expensive pair of shoes you have and what color is your favorite in shoes?” another man wrote. “Do you wear heels?”

For a giggle, I replied with a picture of my most gorgeous Cydwoqs, which could be described as Dolly Parton cowboy boots meet one of the elven princesses from
Lord of the Rings
. His response was a chagrined admission of a fetish. Would that scare me away?

I yawned. Amid so many photos of willies green from camera flashes in bathrooms, a guy into Jimmy Choos was a Dobie Gillis of normality.

Who knew how fascinated men could be with women’s fashion? I certainly hadn’t imagined we’d be
comparing
clothes until I read, “I would like to meet for a fun nite [sic] of me getting all dressed up for you, nothing else. I am a regular guy [and I] have all my own clothes, make-up,
etc.
[I] do have a picture.”
*

As I continued deleting, I amassed some maybe-obvious rules of courtship that, abetted by the decoder ring a couple of Ovaltine proof-of-purchase seals will get you, should save time.

• Delete
  all emails accompanied by photos of a man’s weenie—especially if he has taken it himself, and especially if he took it in the bathroom mirror.
  
• Delete
  all emails cribbed from bad pop songs (“hi really I wanna know you”).
  
• Delete
  all emails written in textese (“why u so board [sic]? do u want 2 talk on the phone?”).
  

These deletions are called for because they break the first Rule of Courtship:

• If a guy is too lazy to spell or punctuate, your relationship is already over.
  

I kept digging. Finally, a responder named Sol asked what kind of man would dispel my boredom. I took Daisy for a walk while I thought about that and ended up writing back, “Someone literate, with an imagination who follows through; someone who will be patient in coaxing me out of a self-imposed isolation I’m finding hard to break. Someone amusing.”

That was a fair answer except for the line about following through, which means, from too much experience on my part, that phone sex
*
is all very well, but living it is better than imagining it.

“Let’s meet for coffee on Saturday at 4,” Sol wrote back. “Meet me in Bleecker Street Park.”

One of my perversions is that whenever someone sets up a date with me, I automatically want to cancel or change it.

“I don’t feel like going into the city,” I told my therapist, Dr. A-Cigar-Is-Not-a-Cigar.

“Just do it,” he advised. “You need to get out and meet new people.”

“Can we make it five?” I emailed Sol.

“No,” he wrote back.

So I put on four o’clock coffee date clothes, reassured Daisy I’d be home soon and set off for the Village.

It had been years since I’d been this far west of Seventh Avenue, or maybe it was the glittering May light and almost-summer heat that made the walk from Christopher Street, through a street fair among the fashionable shoppers, kaleidoscopic. I began to get excited for a walk-and-talk with window shopping and making up stories about people. I hoped Sol would have sized up this gem of a day exactly as I had. I sat on a bench and looked at my watch. I had ten minutes before I could expect him to show up, so I turned my attention to a Big Red Bus disgorging a load of women who giggled their way over to Magnolia Bakery. They wore fragile shoes and screeched that they were
already full
after one bite of dessert and that they should
get a picture of
all
of us eating our cupcakes
.