Though I have forgiven the needy embarrassment of a woman I became during this moment of scarcity with regard to all things, including love, my romantic obsession with Gio remains, to this day, a nearly bottomless source of self-loathing and shame. But at the time in question it is also fair to say that he kept giving me enough crumbs of hope to keep my heart pining and in a near-perpetual state of arousal.
What happened was this: Our nascent relationship turned physical quickly, but it was nearly impossible to find the time, space, or babysitting dollars to keep it going. Plus Gio has a second home out west, where he often retreats to make his art; a third home out east, where he spends time with his teenage daughter; a fourth home in his new art studio in Brooklyn, and a fifth home in his head, where he feels safest, having been tormented as a child by his father. Any hours we do spend together have to be squeezed out of the tiny sliver of overlap between his time in New York and out of his head, and my time not at the office or taking care of children: in other words, hardly ever.
In fact, the first time I’m able to spend the whole night at his place, instead of rushing home to my son, will turn out to be our last. My breast MRI is scheduled for early the next morning, and Gio’s apartment is near the hospital, while mine is more than an hour away by subway and crosstown bus. Moreover, the scan is scheduled for a Saturday morning, and my teenage daughter will be away that weekend visiting colleges, so she can’t watch my son.
In my memory, Gio reached out and invited me to stay at his place the night before the MRI, but in retrospect I’m nearly certain I asked, and he conceded. It’s also a testament to how desperately I wanted the former to have been true that I can no longer recall the details of the latter.
A grown-up sleepover date on a Friday night, when you have a young son, an old dog, and neither car nor taxi fare, requires the strategic planning and foresight of a requisitions officer. First, I take my hour-long subway commute home from work and pick up my son at aftercare before walking him home and feeding him. After doing the dishes and packing first my son’s overnight bag, then my overnight bag, then a bag with the dog’s food, I shove the dog himself into a fourth bag, a dog carrier (because all New York City dogs must be contained in a bag on the subway), bundle up my child against the cold, and then crazy bag lady with her four big bags and small boy take the train downtown to my friend Rebecca’s, who has agreed to watch the dog. Then my son and I hop back on the subway with our two remaining bags and head farther south to my friend Ariel’s, who read my Container Store story and answered my not-meant-to-be-serious closing plea for someone to please babysit my child on the Saturday morning of my MRI with a “Bring him here! I insist!”
I leave my kid with Ariel and her two daughters, none of whom he’s ever met but thank goodness for the blithe amenability of third children, and Gio meets me outside in an Uber. I hop in his car, grateful for the ride, and we head farther downtown to his place, a five-story brick building in the countinghouse style.
His interior renovation of this historic landmark, much like his renovation of his historic self, is a whimsical, Willy Wonka–esque marvel of recycled materials mixed with mad scientist genius, with old couches reupholstered in silver, a punching bag that magically descends from the ceiling, and a fireplace that he’s constructed out of vintage metal lockers. This is a man, I thought, when I first visited his home, who takes thoughtful care.
It’s after 9 p.m. when we finally arrive at his place, four hours after I left work. I could have traveled to D.C. or Boston during the same time period it took me to first perform then absolve myself of my human and canine responsibilities. In moments like these, I’m jealous of my divorced and separated friends who co-parent with their ex-spouses or have their own parents nearby or money for an overnight sitter. Had I left my office at 5 p.m. and taken the subway straight here, I would have arrived by 5:20 p.m. That’s three hours and forty minutes of extra time to relax and commune with an empathic and nice-smelling man. Meanwhile, over on Facebook, photos of my ex-husband’s new girlfriend have started to appear in my feed. He’s moved into her apartment and is renting out his on Airbnb. They seem to go camping a lot.
Gio places a bunch of soft pillows on the floor in front of the locker fireplace, throws some logs inside its cavity, and starts a fire, in front of which he holds me from behind with my arms tucked inside his, the way I used to swaddle my infants to calm them. “Thank you,” I say, still tense from the logistics of getting here but finally melting into the embrace.
“Breathe,” he reminds me.
Later, he digs up some dried sage from the vintage apothecary cabinet he’s turned into a bedroom storage unit, lights it on fire, then blows out the flames. As the dried leaves start to smoke, he waves the billowing herbs around my body like a conductor with an orchestra of one. It’s a protective shield, he claims—half seriously, half tongue-in-cheek—against a breast lump recurrence.
“There,” he says, smiling, after a few soothing minutes of my being the sole object of another human’s attention. “Now you’re safe.” He’s referring to the alleged protective properties of the sage, but I feel it more on the level of this act of care than as anything having to do with magic herbs. Our more intimate acts that night are equally tender, and as I fall asleep, cradled in his warmth, I once again allow myself to imagine what it might be like to be held like this forever.
The next morning he brings me coffee in bed, and we stand up on tippy toes to gaze out through the window in the eaves, watching the streaks of red and pink fan out behind the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, to calm my nerves before the MRI, I do a little yoga by the bedside.
Gio drinks his second cup of coffee in bed and, smiling, watches my middle-aged skin jello as I attempt to place my right foot against my left knee into a tree pose. I feel no shame over my naked body—I forgot to pack workout clothes—nor over its lack of grace while it struggles to find balance, which is one of the few boons of losing your marriage, your home, your mentor, your industry, your father, your job, your uterus, your calling, your money, your health, your freedom, your friends, and your health insurance all at once: I, you realize whenever you catch your reflection in a storefront window, still exist.
The silly things I once found shameful about my body, beginning in my early teens and stretching onward into adulthood, are all just part of the scaffolding holding up my brain, in which the real me resides. In fact, once I find my balance in the pose, I feel more rooted in the earth than I’ve felt in decades. I feel seen. Adored. At peace. That pesky organ in the middle of my chest, which has so often been rumbling trainlike with PVCs for the past year, waits instead at a level crossing, calm for once, to the point where I’m not even aware of its pumping nutrients and oxygen to the rest of my body.
“Are you okay going to the hospital by yourself?” says Gio. He mumbles something about a client he’s supposed to meet.
“Sure,” I say, losing the pose. “Of course.” The sturdy tree reverts to flesh and skeleton, feeling the sudden need for a fig leaf. I grab one of Gio’s towels. Wrap it around me. Throughout my mercifully short breast lump odyssey, I have always gone to every appointment and needle biopsy and scan and clip placement on my own, so it’s not that. It’s that he’d previously offered to come with me, and I’d gone ahead and allowed myself to believe in magic. I ask him where I might find the closest 6 train.
“You’re not taking the subway to your MRI,” he says, ordering me an Uber from his phone. As the car whisks me off to my scan, I choke back tears I find distasteful and weak. I concentrate hard on trying to make them stop. You’re strong, I remind myself. You can do this and everything else alone, just like you always have. Why should you even care that Gio doesn’t want to do them with you?
Because I do. I care. I care more about this than I can even admit to myself at this moment. Why is it so hard for me to say, “Please, come with me to the hospital. I would really ap
preciate it,” instead of thanking him profusely for the generosity of the Uber and pretending my heart doesn’t hurt? Why am I so afraid to admit that, though I can do everything on my own, I don’t want to? The tears won’t stop, hard as I try to force them.
Both the clouds in the sky and those in my head suddenly clear as the car speeds up the FDR Drive: Last night’s paradisiacal union, I realize, will be our last. My heart rebels: No, no, no, you’re perfect for each other. He has work. Responsibilities! Cut him some slack. He just needs time to process this burgeoning love and give himself fully to it and you.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” I’ll text him a week later, after trading brief texts over the results of my MRI, which showed that the lump was still gone. First he tells me he’s headed to his house out west, then he seems to get annoyed, but I’m not sure, because tone in texts is impossible to decipher.
We’re not in the same emotional place right now, he explains digitally, his preferred mode of communication, so I can never gauge the direction, force, or pique of the air behind the floating text bubbles or the depth of the space between our emailed lines. Christmas together? No. This is not what he wants. He needs time to be single after a big breakup with his last long-term girlfriend. He went from a long-term marriage straight into another long-term relationship then into another, without a break between any of them, and he doesn’t know who he is anymore by himself.
Fair enough, I think. I understand the need to hit the reset button alone.
He also needs time, he says, to bond with his daughter. He could potentially see the two of us getting back together romantically in a little while, after he’s had time to heal from the last rupture, or after his daughter leaves for college in two years, but right now he’s not ready for love, just casual dating: something he’s never tried but wants to pursue.
I do not want to date casually. I don’t even know what that means at our age other than lying to Peter to play with Paul, so for the next few months, though we continue to text now and then and meet up once for breakfast, during which he repeats his desire to date others before maybe getting back together in the distant future, I mourn the loss, hop back on the dating app train, and move on.
TWENTY
The Church for Wayward Hearts
FEBRUARY–MAY 2015
Valentine’s Day evening, 2015, I arrive home from a slice of pizza date with my kids to a giant bouquet of magnolias outside my front door. And I mean giant: three feet wide, two feet high, arranged into the shape of a small tree, with a card containing a hand-drawn heart but nothing else. My kids are as perplexed as I. “Maybe Dad sent them?” says my daughter. I text my ex-husband: Did you send the kids and me flowers? An immediate text bubble appears with three dots followed by a long pause and then: No, should I have? I text my college boyfriend, the one from senior year who never married or had kids. We’d fallen into bed two weeks earlier for old time’s sake, both of us quickly regretting it after. Of course. They must be from him: a way of acknowledging the sweet time warp we shared while at the same time accepting we can never be. How kind. The flowers are not from him either, he writes back, but he wishes he’d thought of it, and oh, happy Valentine’s Day. Then I notice a clue on the envelope: the phone number of the florist. I call the number and ask if they’d mistakenly forgotten to include another card with actual words on it instead of just a heart. No, says the florist, and, sorry, no, she’s not at liberty to divulge the identity of my secret admirer. He’s asked to remain anonymous.
I’d redownloaded Tinder and had been on two other app dates: a lovely one with a younger shrink, who lived far away in Kentucky, so oh, well; another with an alleged designer of T-shirts who claimed to be fifty-three on his dating profile, but who, when I arrived at the appointed meeting place at the appointed time, looked to be in his early seventies: my parents’ generation, not mine. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?” were the first slurred words out of his mouth, after I finally located him nursing what must have been his third or fourth martini.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Because you lied. So that doesn’t really start us off on a good footing, now does it?” I didn’t take off my coat or sit down. I’d already prepared the perfect escape, in case the date was a bust, in the form of a large industry party to which I’d been invited. Our date was officially over before it even began because of his lie, I told him, but if he still wanted to come to the party as planned, that was fine with me. Maybe he could meet someone more age appropriate there. Still trying to argue the case for why he had to lie—“You wouldn’t have swiped right on me!” (Yes, precisely.); “I deserve love!” (We all do, dude, but we also all deserve honesty.)—he followed me around the corner to the party, and I lost him in the crowd.
When he finally reemerged, an hour or so later, he seemed concerned. “What time are we leaving?” he said.
“We are not going anywhere together,” I said. “I told you. There’s free booze and food, though, so please, enjoy yourself.”
“But I have no place to stay!” he said, grabbing my arm. On his profile, he’d claimed to live in Brooklyn, so I was confused. He explained he’d driven all the way down from his home in Vermont for our date. His son lives in Brooklyn, but his son was mad at him for whatever reason (Like maybe because you’re a pathological liar?) so now he couldn’t stay with his son, as planned, so he was hoping he could stay with me.
Suddenly realizing I was dealing with more of a sociopath than a bad date, I made an excuse to leave the party early and headed for the subway. The man offered to escort me, saying he was heading uptown anyway to try to sleep at an old girlfriend’s. “That’s okay, I can make it home myself,” I said. He followed six steps behind me. “Please stop following me,” I snapped. When he later tried to stick his tongue down my throat on the crowded subway car, I ended up shouting to the other passengers, “This man was my Tinder date. I’ve been trying to get away from him all night, but he has followed me onto this subway and just kissed me against my will. I’m going to get off at the next stop to get away from him, so please make sure he stays on this train and does not follow me again.” Thankfully, two men obliged, holding him back as I gave him the slip. I have no idea what happened to him next, but could he have sent the Valentine’s flowers? That would mean he somehow figured out my home address. Fuck.
I do a reverse search using the phone number of the florist, click on the Google Maps link next to the name that pops up, and suddenly, with a sigh of relief and a snag in my throat, I understand: They’re from Gio. The flower shop is around the corner from his apartment.
I start to tear up, my heart bursting outward like a time-lapse magnolia into blossom. He’s back, I think. He’s seen the light. He has come to his senses and realized how good we were together. He’s not only sent me a heart—his heart—he’s filled my home with flowers. So what if he didn’t write a card? He’s an artist. He uses symbols to communicate.
As a preteen in the mid-1970s, I tore through Nancy Drew mysteries faster than my parents could replenish them. Everything, to Nancy, was a possible clue, like that time she found a witch tree symbol that eventually led her to Pennsylvania Dutch country to hunt down a thief. Or that time she went to the Loire Valley to figure out the mystery of the ninety-nine steps.
Putting on my Nancy Drew hat, I google “magnolia symbolism.” I read: “Magnolias symbolized dignity and nobility. In ancient China, magnolias were thought to be the perfect symbols of womanly beauty and gentleness. In the American South, white magnolias are commonly seen in bridal bouquets because the flowers are thought to reflect and emphasize the bride’s purity and nobility.”
Oh.
I text Gio, thank him for the flowers. He responds with a single red heart emoji. We’re back, I think. And it only took a few months of patient waiting. “Do you want to come to a Valentine’s party with me tonight?” I text back.
My friend Dan, a prof
essional artist I met in our college photography class, was born on February 14 and has been having a party every year on this date in the scruffy but lovably punk home his friend Jimmy has dubbed “The Church for Wayward Hearts.” It’s a birthday party, first and foremost, but it’s also a refuge for anyone who finds themselves alone on Valentine’s Day or just hating it or maybe not in the mood to be bilked by all the candlelit restaurants that jack up their prices every year because they can, simply by stringing up some paper hearts on the walls.
Dan’s walls are a graffitied work in progress. If you feel like drawing on them, you can. Gio, I think, will love it.
Gio can’t come to the party, he says. He’s home sick with a cold. I offer to bring him some chicken soup on my way down to Brooklyn. I make this offer after buying the chicken soup, which is a mistake. He doesn’t want me to drop by with soup. He’s about to go to sleep. If I ring his bell in a half hour, he’ll have to get out of bed to answer the door. Ah, right, of course, I think, clutching the still-warm container on the subway.
If you are smarter than I and have already figured out the plot twist to this particular Nancy Drew mystery, yes, another woman is there with him, though it will take me another four months to figure this out on my own. The clue? A radio interview he’ll do with her that spring to promote their short-lived design company. When asked to explain their company logo, she’ll say to Gio, with a coy giggle, “Okay, this is going to be embarrassing, though…I saved a Valentine’s card. It was a Valentine’s card I gave to you.” To which he’ll respond flirtatiously, as I cry, “You stole my card back?”
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