by Bob Morris
“Side effect of the Lasix,” he said. “Gotta go! Sorry!”
She slammed the door and disappeared into her house.
“She’s too high-strung,” he tells me. “Kind of like a Chihuahua.”
So why go out with her? Why get involved at all? Because she offered to treat? He never says no to anyone. He likes to complicate life, not simplify it.
“So now, what time can I expect you today?”
My foot suddenly starts tapping. I tell him I’ve got a cold.
“Oh. That’s a shame. I was hoping to go for a ride.”
Silence for a second, a void I can’t cross. He’s probably waiting for me to change my mind. I don’t want to be one of those kids who has contact with his parents only by phone. On the other hand I could never be the son who calls every day and visits every weekend. Technically, I guess I could. I do have the time. But I just don’t have the patience. What he has to offer isn’t fun. I wish I knew how to make it fun.
“Let’s try for next weekend, okay, Dad?”
“Sure. But, before we say good-bye, I want to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Did you ever call the ladies in those personal ads I showed you?”
I had completely forgotten about it.
“Sorry. I haven’t gotten around to it. Is it really so hard? Don’t you think you can just meet someone at one of your bridge games?”
“Bridge women are so difficult. The ones I’m meeting in Great Neck are especially demanding and spoiled. Mom was the opposite.”
“Right. She never got her way. What about the women in your building?”
“Not for me. I can tell.”
“What are you looking for anyway?”
“I just need someone with a good figure who doesn’t smoke. Preferably Jewish. Republican a plus. I’m going to hold you to your promise to make those calls for me.”
We say good-bye, and I hang up the phone. What is going on here? Am I really going to be pimping for my father? A few minutes later I dig out the Personals page with the ads he circled and place it at distance from me at my desk, like something unappetizing. Tripe, perhaps. Or liver. Then I take a deep breath and pick up the phone and dial the first number he’s circled. My heart pounds, brain races. A machine picks up, and I get a recorded voice that sounds like a honking horn.
“Hello! This is Shelly Shapiro. I’m saw-ry I can’t take your cawl, but please leave your name and numbah twice, and I’ll get back to you. Have a mah-velous day.”
Beep! I hang up without leaving a message. I can’t stand that accent. My mother wasn’t a sophisticate, but she grew up upstate and had no accent. My dad doesn’t have one either. I’m not used to harsh voices in my family and don’t want any now. I look at the other ad he circled, call the number, and get another machine.
“Hi, it’s Seal, let’s make a deal, leave me a message, don’t be a shlemiel.”
Absolutely not! I hang up. What kind of women did he pick?
My imagination starts projecting a borscht-belt lineup of unpalatable ladies, anxiously waiting in the wings to step out and make a mess of his new life.
I look at other listings on the page: Attractive Youthful Widow! Fine Leading Lady! Outgoing Brooklyn Beauty! Sabbath Observing Honey! Classy Energetic Yenta! Compassionate Pianist! Don’t Passover Me! Eat My Kugel and Go Straight to Heaven! They’re all pretty much alike, stipulating callers be “secure” and “a gentleman.” I guess that means they have to have money and manners. Wait. Here’s a decent listing that’s also geographically suitable. It’s for a Roz from Roslyn. College-educated. Slim. Lively. She sounds okay. So I call her, find that the voice on her answering machine sounds acceptable, and leave her a message. Then I leave one for a Minna from Manhasset—very good zip code right next door to Great Neck—who sounds okay, too.
I put down the Personals page and the phone and find that I’m smiling deviously.
And thus begins my father’s year of dating dangerously.
PART II
The Comedy of Eros
CHAPTER 1
Geriatrix (cont.)
Botox, lipo, cardio, angioplasty. Seventy is the new forty, right? Add to that the boost that dating gets when seniors have cell phones and Internet access, not to mention physical trainers and Viagra, and you get the turbocharged arena my dad’s about to enter. Three women for every man! And just because these men are old doesn’t mean they’re nice. How else would you explain the rash of codgers who divorce their first wives for women half their age? Hard as it is to believe, it was always women whose sex drives were actually stronger than men’s in their later years. Now things have changed. In Scottsdale, Arizona, a cyclotron of senior society, one man observed in a newspaper article that the women he knows “wouldn’t trade their cat for a man” and added that they aren’t looking to get involved “with some randy eighty-year-old,” at least not on a full-time, intimate basis. Still, with demographics weighted so heavily in favor of men, and with plenty of highly focused women anxious to remarry for their own reasons (money, or the convenience of someone to have on their arm), even a shlump who was not much of a ladies’ man in high school can be a total catch in his senior years for no other reason than he is still alive and drives at night.
“Some of the women are total carnivores,” says my aunt Sylvia, who lost my delightful uncle Dan twenty years ago, and has been happily widowed and entirely consumed with her family and her Palm Beach and Vermont lives ever since. “My cousin Raymond is eighty years old. The woman circle around him like vultures. He’s a nice-looking man and a good sport who likes a good time, so he’s always with another one. When he ended the last relationship—this was with a woman ninety years old, mind you—she passed away a few months later and all her friends said she died of a broken heart. Can you imagine? The whole thing is so ridiculous. Your father has a million things to keep him busy, but he still has to meet someone to love. It’s just so funny.”
I wish I could have more of a sense of humor about the whole thing.
But it’s just too uncomfortable, so I decide to get a column out of it. Enough people my age are going through something similar. I interview a man who owns New York’s oldest dating service. He tells me that children who come to his office to set up their elderly fathers request women of a similar age to their mothers. Then, the fathers call the service (without their children knowing) and declare that they want young, not old. So the father finds a match, and the kids get jealous, and, of course, issues of inheritance come into play when marriage comes up as a possibility. It’s all perilous. “But you just have to pull yourself back,” this dating maven tells me, “and let your dad do his thing and pick who he wants.”
Aunt Sylvia agrees. “You father is his own man, and he needs to meet someone nice and understanding,” she counsels. “But I don’t know if he’s going to meet who you want him to meet.” I tell her he’d better or I’m going to make myself scarce in his life.
“My goodness,” she says. “If you had kids dating, you would be impossible!”
That’s exactly what this feels like. I’m playing father to a son, a kid!
“Because,” says a woman I call who wrote a book about second wives, “when he’s on a date, he feels young again, as if he’s starting a second life. And so does the woman. There’s just all this potential ahead of them, a whole new future.”
“Potential for trouble,” I say. “Potential for total disruption.”
“Potential for love and a new life,” she corrects me.
I take a few notes for my column and thank her for her time.
“Wait a minute,” she says. “You know? I think I have someone for him, a friend of my mom’s. She plays bridge and winters in Palm Beach, just like your dad.”
“But where does she live up north?”
“She has a place on Fifth Avenue and a condo in Sun Valley, I think.”
Fifth Avenue? Sun Valley? Whoa! I’d love that. But is all this to
o rich for him? This lady sounds very haute couture, and my dad’s so wash-and-wear. I pooh-pooh it.
“I just think he’s way too down-market for a woman like that,” I say. “He isn’t worldly or cultured. He doesn’t even read the New York Times unless a neighbor drops it off. He won’t be up to the standards of someone so fancy.”
“Come on, Bob, what kind of attitude is that?”
“Defensive pessimism. It won’t work.”
“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t,” this woman says. “But I’m going to call my mother right now and get a number. Her name’s Florence. And, Bob, don’t ever say he isn’t good enough for anyone. He’s your dad. And you love him, don’t you?”
CHAPTER 2
Date Date Goose
It’s a drizzly May evening. An ash blonde with no body fat named Ann is waiting outside her high-end condominium in one of Long Island’s Gold Coast towns. She is worried about the humidity and her hair. She just had a wash and set and hopes this weather doesn’t frizz it up too much. She reminds herself not to order ice cream for dessert because she left her Lactaid upstairs. Her heart is beating a little fast, it seems. She’s nervous. Scaring up a date isn’t easy for a woman her age, and this Joe Morris sounded so pleasant on the phone. His voice was smooth, his demeanor breezy. Geographically suitable, Jewish, a retired judge with two sons who have Ivy League degrees. What would he look like? She was picturing if not a Jewish Robert Goulet, then someone Alan King–like, may he rest in peace. “Tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night,” this Joe Morris had crooned to her on the phone earlier. It wasn’t her favorite song or musical (she prefers classical music to show tunes and instrumental to vocal), and certainly it wasn’t her idea of suave, but his enthusiasm and spirit were encouraging.
Maybe he could get her to lighten up. That might not be a bad thing.
After waiting fifteen minutes in front of her building, she sees a silver sedan pulls up. It’s no knight in shining armor. If she’s expecting him to get out of the car and open the door for her (call her old-fashioned, she still thinks it’s a nice gesture), she soon realizes it isn’t happening and opens the door for herself and says hello. She gets in. Behind the wheel there’s a man who looks good for eighty—nice head of hair, young face—but is still eighty.
Her husband had been eighty when he got sick. For three years she was his nursemaid, companion, and link to the world. Her children were not around. They live on the West Coast so they could only visit every few months. Friends stopped calling. They had their own problems. She didn’t keep up with them either. It was enough to keep the house and his medications in order, not to mention all the doctors and hospital visits, a full-time job, like taking care of a baby, only this time there would be no future in it, nothing hopeful. And as her husband’s mind and body drifted further and further out, she felt as if she were at sea with him, and each new medical trouble felt like another rogue wave tipping her boat just as it had barely righted itself from the last. He died last year. They were married fifty-five years. She’s still not over it. But now she’s in a stranger’s car on this—and there is no other word for it—date.
“I thought we could have Chinese,” he is saying.
“I had Chinese last night,” she replies. “How about Japanese?”
“I don’t care for Japanese,” he says. “What about Italian?”
Italian is fattening, and she’s on a low-carb diet, but she doesn’t want to get into it now. Too early for conflict. She’s aware of the fact that she’s not the easiest person. Her kids tell her that all the time. She wonders if that’s why they’ve chosen to live so far away. She does wish she could be less specific in her demands. But she knows what she likes, and why is that so wrong? Men that way are considered decisive. Women are considered picky and difficult. It doesn’t win points on a first date to be particular.
Why not try to just go with the flow, Ann? she tells herself.
Because he has the air-conditioning on high in his car, that’s why, and it’s not just freezing her arms, it’s blowing her hair to kingdom come.
“Would you mind turning it off?” she asks.
“I like it on high,” he says. “For my allergies.”
“I prefer to ride without it” is all she can say.
He turns it down to medium. “How’s that? Better?”
Barely. And not her idea of accommodating at all. And why would he have the ball game on the radio? And why is he going on about the Mets when he hasn’t even asked if she’s interested in baseball? What kind of conversation is that for the first few minutes of a first date? Her only response is to clam up. Well, she’s never been a bubbly person. But a particularly dark mood starts coming over her now, before they even get out of the car, which is a mess, and smells rank. At a stoplight at Little Neck Road, when he changes topics from the Mets to bridge, she wonders about the gurgling in her stomach. Is it the reflux? Did she take her Nexium? Is she going to make it through this dinner date without having to keep running to the powder room?
And then she wonders what she’s doing here anyway. She doesn’t want another man. But without one her social life is so barren. Articles she’s been reading in the AARP magazine and Long Island Newsday keep suggesting that widows are far more self-sufficient than widowers. But her friends are all in couples. It’s awkward, always needing a bridge partner, being the single person at the dinner party. Her kids worry that she’s lonely. She tells them she isn’t. But in some ways she is. So she tries her luck and puts in a listing and gets this Joe Morris. A total stranger. As he pulls off Northern Boulevard to the restaurant—Villa something or other; not one she’d heard anything good about—she wonders if she should just say she’s not feeling well and have him take her home. Dinner ahead looms longer than a High Holiday service.
She endures. As does my father. But just barely, I find out later.
“She was a total dud,” he tells me. “I could have kicked myself for following through with her. From the moment we spoke on the phone, I could tell she wasn’t right for me. She sounded so morose about her husband’s death. And it’s a cardinal rule of dating that you don’t talk about your ex right away, whether deceased or divorced.”
I understand. But I also sympathize with her. I mean, I know I’m never my best self on dates. And besides, how do you erase the imprint of decades of marriage?
“She got in the car and immediately started hocking me about the air-conditioning,” he says. “I knew I had a problem personality on my hands.”
So he discards her, like an old plum. And there’s not even a moment to sympathize with the poor woman, or give her a second chance, not with all the options he has to choose from. In fact, the moment I threw out the bait for him by responding to those Personals ads, he’s gotten very busy, pulling in one thing after another flapping on his hook. Man-eaters. Bottom-feeders. Gefilte fish.
Here’s the short list:
Rita is a disappointment to him because she doesn’t smile enough. “She’s no Dinah Shore,” he says. “If I can’t get a smile out of her, there’s no point in moving forward.” Selma, who is a little plump for his taste, wants to talk about the Kama Sutra and get him to take a workshop in the Poconos. “Attractive but a nut, a Jewish Shirley MacLaine,” he says. Lorna used to be a socialist. “When she told me that, I asked for the check and sent her home.” He does like Shirley, whom I selected for him based on her upright Personals ad and good Manhattan address. But when he tells me she has a rent-controlled studio apartment and has to work two bookkeeping jobs to support herself (at her advanced age?) I don’t like it at all. That must mean she isn’t very well off. That’s no good. Then he cheerfully tells me that her ex-husband had psychiatric problems and that one of her kids is obese and a gun hobbyist. Can you imagine what a Thanksgiving dinner with them would be like? I’m appalled. But Dad just finds her pleasant and pretty. “She’s coming out to Great Neck for a second date this week,” he says. “And I’d like you to meet her.” I tell
him I don’t meet anyone until after the fifth date. After their third, he’s put off when she mocks him for taking cell phone calls over dinner. That’s the end of that. He laments to me on the phone each night, telling me he’s never going to meet anyone as nice as my mother. I wish he’d go for Roz, whom I found on his Personals page, and actually think is a pretty good package. Roz is from Roslyn and has a degree from Cornell. Roz is slender, according to her profile, easygoing, Jewish-minded, and financially secure. Plus, her son is a doctor. I want my father to go with the lady with the son the doctor! Is that so wrong?
“Yes, she’s better educated, Bobby,” he says. “But I don’t think we’d mesh.”
“Based on one conversation? What could be so bad?”
“She kept interrupting me, and finishing my sentences. Very hard to take.”
“Oh, come on, Dad. That’s no big deal. You do that to me all the time. Why not give her one more try?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
Oh, my God. What am I doing? What is he doing? You hear about helicopter parents who hover over every aspect of the lives of their children. Am I becoming a helicopter son? I’m calling him more often now. And paying more attention when he calls. What can I say? I’m dying to know what the story is with this date and that one. Gone are his blathering soliloquies about the rerun he saw on TV. In are the episodic sagas of microwave relationships that heat up and cool off in a second—Senior Sex and the City. Or maybe it’s Desperate House Widows. There was the nice lady who left him in the parking lot of the Nassau County Museum of Art after he scolded her for lighting a cigarette. The buxom yenta still so upset about her divorce that she cried on their first date. A former Rockette who drank too much. A retired Gestalt psychiatrist who wanted him to be more forthcoming with his feelings. Lines of them, like planes overhead, waiting to land at LaGuardia. May, Ray, Fay—Fran, Ann, Nan—Bunny, Honey, Sunny. His reports are so volatile, so unexpected, so hilariously bizarre that they make dating tales of my friends seem banal. Too bad all his efforts lead to nothing. Dates fizzle before they even start. His is nothing if not a flitty dating scene.