by Becky Aikman
“It took me a long time to acknowledge and accept that, as much as I loved him, he really did abandon me in a way,” she said. One day, after about a year, the third finger on her left hand started to itch, and she took off the wedding ring. She and her girls began to make jokes, like about how much money they’d save on Father’s Day. She thought about joining a support group but didn’t, not wanting to talk about the suicide and fearing that others would judge her about it. It was hard enough venturing out in her small town, wondering what everyone was thinking, fielding questions at the supermarket about whether she had seen it coming. She and her daughters took a trip to Arizona, where a Native American shaman told her that whenever images of the suicide flooded her thoughts, she should conjure a vision from a happier time to replace it. She made a conscious effort to do that, and it helped.
Taking over Kevin’s role as well as her own, Lesley began to realize that she was smarter than she’d given herself credit for. “I’d been given my pink slip; my job as a stay-at-home mother was done. But, like you, Becky, I’d been given a second chance at life. Now the challenge was doing it on my own.”
Kevin had been a champion rower, and for the first time, Lesley signed up for lessons. She begged her coach to let her take a scull out into the choppy waves of the open bay before she was ready. The coach agreed, and predictably, Lesley tipped over the boat. Another rower asked why the coach had allowed it. “Because Lesley wants it so badly,” the coach said. “Because she’s fearless to the point where she doesn’t care if she fails.”
Given all that had happened to Lesley, it must have taken all her fearlessness to venture her heart with another man. She knew she was making the right decision on one of her early dates with Craig, when they were sitting on a park bench, talking about their children and holding hands. She placed her head on his chest—he was tall, like Kevin—and she listened to him breathe. She thought, This. This is what I’ve missed.
AT THIS STAGE in life, people come complicated. Lesley and Craig woke up every morning laughing and went to sleep at night still laughing. But by the time our group made its lingerie outing, their living conditions were turbulent and getting more so. His youngest boy, living with Craig and Lesley in her new house, alternated between resisting and craving a mother’s touch. Then Craig’s eighteen-year-old, out of school and looking for work, moved in, too. Lesley hadn’t sold her old house yet, so her youngest daughter still bunked there when she was home from school, and the oldest was staying there until her wedding, only two weeks after our lingerie outing. Two homes, two families in flux, one young widow trying to steer them all to port. A perfect storm was gathering over both households, a collision of adolescent and postadolescent emotional fronts, with Lesley sailing right into the eye.
“The really hard thing is going to be the wedding,” Tara said at our post-shopping lunch. “You know … when the dad should give the bride away.”
“I’m going to do it, which is going to be tough.” Other traditions from the standard playbook would also be cast aside. No veil over the bride’s face, because the father usually lifts it; no first dance with Dad.
“It’s one of those things you don’t think about until it comes up,” said Tara, considering her own daughters. “Every little princess thinks about that dance.”
“I have to give the toast, too.” Lesley rolled her eyes. On top of everything else, public speaking! “I’m going to be a wreck.”
Marcia called for the check. I seized the lull to address another touchy topic, the trip I envisioned for the fall. Our utter failure to reach a consensus at the last gathering made me pessimistic about wrangling anyone as far as the state line, so I had scrapped all the options I’d proposed to such a clamor of dissent and cast around in search of a compromise. There was another itinerary through Morocco, with hikes through cedar forests in the Atlas Mountains, strolls through ancient souks and casbahs, and only two days riding camels in the Sahara instead of four. Best of all, there would be only one night in the dreaded desert camp. I spoke to a guy in charge of the trip.
“I know this sounds finicky,” I said to him, “but just how rustic are the facilities at the camp? I’m traveling with women who seem rather … particular.”
“You sleep in tents made out of Berber carpets,” he said. “And believe it or not, there are two Kohler flush toilets, permanently installed.”
“Stop right there,” I said. “You’re hired.”
Pending approval from the group, of course. Cautiously, I presented my findings, and the atmosphere turned prickly but resigned. Marcia expressed more reluctance over tents and camels. Dawn looked dubious. Tara shrugged her assent. Denise was still and quiet. I shot a hopeful look at Lesley.
“This sounds like the perfect trip for all the princesses we are,” she said.
I can’t say anyone was thrilled, but they were willing to do this for me, for the group, and that was all I could ask. If the camels went on a rampage, if the toilets didn’t flush, if no one spoke by the time we dragged our dusty asses back to the permanent dissolution of our friendship, I knew who’d be to blame. But everyone agreed to go, and I was determined to draw my courage from Lesley. I’d have to be fearless to the point where I didn’t care if we failed.
WE’D BEEN TALKING all day about taking risks, so I decided to end our gathering by telling the women about a dream I’d had shortly after I met Bob at the public fix-up with the Glamazons. In the dream, I was visiting a foreign city, a city of palazzos that spoke of a storied past. Instead of streets, all the passageways were canals filled with water as clear as Evian—tinted the color of hazel, actually—and incongruously enough, I was swimming in them. As in others of my dreams, I was alone, searching for Bernie and unable to find him, except that this time I wasn’t alarmed—no one was drowning. I was swimming the way I’d swum in the Galápagos, assured and fast.
Soon I hoisted myself from the water and walked in my skimpy bathing suit to the farthest edge of the city, at the top of a cliff, so high it made me dizzy. It opened onto a bright vista. I inched forward and craned over the edge. Below was more water, a whole vast sweep of ocean. It shifted with swells like sighs and stretched toward a limitless horizon. I had reached the demarcation between the known and the unknown, the jumping-off point for a fresh journey, if I chose. The sea was so clear that below the surface I could see enormous fish, the size of catamarans, in fantastic iridescent colors, like parrots. I wanted to dive into the water. I wanted to swim with those fantastic fish, but I was afraid—the cliff must have been a thousand feet high. I felt the way I had when I dove off the boat to chase the skipjacks, tantalized, exhilarated but scared to my bones. Something in me wanted this adventure. Something in me wanted to back the hell away from the edge of the cliff.
I looked farther out to sea and saw a splendid whale, a captivating creature, also beautifully colored, the size of an ocean liner. It was spouting a long plume of water. The phallic symbolism was too preposterous, yet what can I say? I wanted to swim with that whale even more than I did with the fish, to abandon myself to a discovery beyond my imagination. I awoke still on the precipice, poised between fear and desire.
chapter
TWENTY
i just want you to know,” he said in a reassuring tone, “nothing is going to happen here tonight.”
Of all the lines spoken at all the candlelight dinners in all the world, I had to walk into that one. I took a sip of champagne and tried to figure out where this evening was headed. I didn’t have much time, either, before a whole lot of something started to happen.
I was standing maybe a foot away from an attractive, available man, a man giving me the once-over with clear, empathetic hazel eyes, who at that very moment was stirring risotto—yes, risotto, with saffron and scallops, and oh-so-tenderly, as Dr. Spock might stir some baby formula—on the stovetop. A man who actually knew how to make risotto without having to look at a recipe. A man who was making it for me.
Bob and I had w
orked our way through a number of hands-off but increasingly steamy dinners at restaurants in the city, where I amused him with my ardent appetite. “I want to cook for you,” he invariably said, with appreciable relish, before we parted.
I couldn’t be sure whether he meant something more. It was a couple months since we’d met, and that evening I’d taken the train to his small town in Connecticut on the strength of a dinner invitation that promised to stretch late into the night. Afterward, he said, he could put me back on the train, or I could crash in his daughter’s room. I’d already seen it on a tour of the house, a confection of pink and lavender bedding heaped with stuffed animals. She was spending the night, perhaps too conveniently, at her mother’s in a nearby town.
If I had been twenty years old, I had no doubt how the evening would end, and I can tell you it wouldn’t have been in a window seat on the New Haven line or bedded down with a menagerie of bunnies and bears. I mean, let’s be real. This man and I were both unattached, he had those eyes, and he knew how to make risotto.
And that would be only the first course. In a burst of what may or may not have been romantic overkill, he had also whipped up osso buco, an arugula salad with roasted beets and pears, the kind of French cheese platter that required a map of the Dordogne, and a decadent fallen chocolate soufflé cake with thyme-scented vanilla ice cream that he’d churned by hand that afternoon. He was Renaissance Man on steroids, in case I had any doubts. We’d wash it all down with an array of wines, also French. Almost any home-cooked meal might have done the trick. Little did he know, this over-the-top feast was like heroin to me.
On the other hand, I was no longer twenty years old. Sometime in between my salad days and tonight’s salad, my policy of fear-tinged abstinence had taken hold, and I clung to it despite ample evidence that if there was anyone with whom to dispatch this just-say-no nonsense, this man could be it.
I’d known it from the night of the Glamazon dinner, when I profited from one of the payoffs of decades of social experience, which is that it doesn’t take a lot of vetting to recognize a like-minded soul. Was it love at first sight? No, not really. But I knew in the most rational way that this man was a worthy companion. I called some friends the next day to tell them, “I met him. I met the guy.”
By six that morning there was an e-mail from Bob asking me to accompany him the following week to MoMA, apparently the first-date location of choice, to see a Brice Marden exhibit and dine afterward at the museum’s super-hot restaurant. As it happened, I’d been trying without success to finagle someone into joining me for exactly that. I wrote to Fred to root out more about his friend. “I would say, and I mean this in the best way,” Fred answered, “that he is a person of temperament. I believe Bernie was, too. If you have recently met men who are sort of wishy-washy, Bob certainly isn’t that.”
Temperament? As Scooby Doo would put it: Ruh-roh!
I had a nicely fitted little sleeveless dress picked out for the occasion, but at the last minute went with a full-coverage black top and a dirndl skirt by an avant-garde designer. Yes, a dirndl. I cringe at what it telegraphed.
Bob threw himself into the exhibit with the enthusiasm I’d witnessed when we first met, freely proclaiming his opinions, teasing out mine. He brought the same curiosity to dinner, where he puzzled over ingredients and plotted how he could riff on them at home. His exuberance was palpable, if a bit unsettling. I learned that if Bob heard a song he liked on the radio, he’d grab his guitar and play along. Like me, he had become a writer in part to partake of unfiltered, high-octane experience, taking on an assignment so he could cook with a great chef in Europe, play sideman to a rock musician, fly on a company jet with the plutocrat of the moment, or go on location with a movie director. Once he talked a magazine into letting him spend a month learning to tango in Argentina. His take on all of it was original, full, I suppose, of temperament. He reminded me of my best self, the bold one, the explorer, the one with the active, original point of view, before I got all closed and timid.
I’d been worried that men in my age bracket would be stuck in a rut, but Bob was fifty-six, and he was going full blast. He was all in. Which raised the question: was I? There was no denying that this was the sort of man I’d been seeking. For the first time since I’d started dating, for the first time since Bernie died, I had no excuse to avoid the hardest question of all. Could I conceive, ever again, of letting one person matter to me as much as the one I’d lost?
PUTTING ALL THAT ASIDE, and I did as much as I could, I recognized that this was someone I could have fun with. The next few weeks were a montage from the modern rom-com story line. Casual dinners turned into four-hour restaurant marathons where we actually closed the joint. Our phone calls sent Verizon stock soaring. If we’d been paid by the word for our e-mails, we would have doubled our incomes. An adroit conversationalist, Bob brought out the same in me. I told him about my sheltered past in western Pennsylvania, of trying to strike a balance along the way between daring moves (moving to New York, becoming a journalist) and prudent choices—progressing from yearbook editor, honor roll habitué, and grad school wonk to responsible holder of full-time jobs and regular contributor to the 401(k) plan. Bob had grown up in eastern Pennsylvania and put himself through college playing in rock bands. After he graduated, he jumped off the professional track for a stint in the music business. He had followed his enthusiasms ever since.
“There doesn’t seem to be an uptight bone in your body,” I said, forgetting for a moment that the subject of bodies was on my restricted list. We had met in a little pasta place in the Village that got a write-up in the paper the day before for its orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe. The dining room was fully booked, but Bob talked our way into seats at the bar.
“You don’t fool me with that Hitchcock-blonde façade,” he said, shifting back in his stool to get a better look. By now, I had switched up my datewear to some flattering jeans and a tailored jacket. “I get the feeling there’s nothing uptight about you, either.”
“Once, that might have been true. But for the last few years I’d have made a first-class nun.”
Like most couples in the flush of infatuation, we were dancing around the subject of where this might be headed, conducting discussions, purely hypothetical of course, about our views on Relationships, our thoughts on Commitment, our beliefs about the ideal arrangement for Intimate Companionship.
“My philosophy since Bernie died,” I explained, purely hypothetically, you understand, “is that I need to construct a system that allows me to be happy living by myself. I have my friends, lots of them, in fact. I have my interests, lots of those, too. I’ve reached the point where I have something going on almost every night of the week. It’s not the same as marriage, and it’s not what I expected at this point in my life, but it’s very full, very satisfying. And I don’t need to worry about losing one person who means everything to me. What if I become attached to someone and we break up? I can’t handle any more loss right now.”
Bob looked at me as if I’d become a vegan. “First of all,” he said, I assume hypothetically, “nobody’s going to break up with you.”
I opened my mouth to object, but he silenced me.
“And as for your philosophy, if I thought I’d have to live that way, I’d have to join a castrato boys choir, or maybe a religious retreat. All right, maybe not—the food would suck. But seriously, sure, I was blindsided by my divorce. It made me question whether men and women were meant to inhabit the same planet—make that the same universe. But one nightmare implosion shouldn’t put a person off soufflés. I could never accept the possibility of a life without love. It’s like food, it’s like sleep, like breathing. People are meant to make love, and they’re meant to be in love.”
“I like soufflés, but they fall,” I countered. “And they’re not the only source of food. It’s okay to like soup, too. And it’s valid to find satisfaction in a variety of friendships instead of one overarching, all-consuming
romance that might blow up in my face.”
He gave me a long appraising glance. “No offense, but soup is soufflé without the air. There’s magic in soufflés. Settling for soup when you want soufflé is the act of a coward.”
“Maybe I am a coward,” I said, purely hypothetically. “But cowards are safe.”
FOR ALL HIS hypothetical talk, I noticed Bob wasn’t rushing into anything, either, perhaps out of respect for my caution, perhaps to protect himself. Or perhaps he wasn’t as interested as he seemed. It had been five years since his divorce, but the toll was still visible. Most of the time, he had an unforced ease and assurance, overridden, at key moments, by a skittish look I’d learned to recognize. It had turned up at the end of all our assignations up to now. We’d find ourselves getting all goofy-eyed on the street at a moment when a kiss might be appropriate. Suddenly, that look would cloud Bob’s eyes and his head did one of those Exorcist 360s.
“Look, a cab!” he’d blurt out. He’d dash into traffic like a running back and stuff me inside, alone, before I could say … well, not much. I didn’t have the nerve, either. From the safety of the backseat, I’d watch him recede into the streetscape as the cab pulled away.
And I’d think, what if this man got sick? Let’s be honest, what if he died?
I DIDN’T WANT to make a mistake. Neither did Bob. What do you get when you have two people who are setting off enough sparks to start a forest fire but don’t want to make a mistake? An awkward standoff in a Connecticut kitchen.
That afternoon when he’d picked me up at the picturesque little train station in his picturesque little town, the sparks were flying again. He drove me on a brief tour: sailboats in a former fishing harbor, a thumbnail beach, Nantucket-style saltbox houses. Everyone on the street had a Labrador retriever on a leash. Very quiet. The kind of quiet that gives New Yorkers the heebie-jeebies.