Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  Oh, okay. AIDS. Right. I could have attempted to explain that I didn’t have the HIV virus, but really, I just wanted to put my shirt back on. Meanwhile, he looked about to cry. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Estoy muy triste,” he told me. “Mi vida—es muy triste.”

  “¿Por qué? ¿Cuál es el problema?” I sat up and looked around for my discarded top.

  “Es mi hermano,” he said, and the tears rolled. He told me that his brother was trying to come to the United States from Salvador and was stuck in Mexico. He needed money to pay the coyote or they would keep him there. It was very, very dangerous; when Humberto himself had come, he’d almost died. So, maybe, could I please give him some money? He looked at me with tortured hope, his dark eyes wet.

  “How much money is it?” I wondered, my head poking through the stretchy black collar of my shirt.

  He told me.

  At this point, my eyes also filled with tears and I leapt off the bed. I mean, I felt bad about his brother, and I knew I wasn’t Aphrodite, but this was pretty far to fall.

  Before I took him home, we sat on my front porch with Google Translate and had as serious a conversation as we could manage. I tried to explain how I felt, and to reassure him that I knew how he must feel. I didn’t think he meant to hurt me, but he had, and I didn’t have three thousand dollars to spare. Also, I told him, you should never ask a woman for money in her bedroom. It just isn’t done.

  He may or may not have understood, he may or may not have cared, but it was time for me to drive him back to Fie-jet, where I would give him two twenties toward the cause. Then, if I knew what was good for me, I would close Google Translate forever and sign up for Match.com, where I might not find love but I would at least find people who were looking for it, perhaps ones in my age group who spoke English.

  my first life

  Many moons ago, when I was a wild, unhappy twenty-four-year-old graduate student with a job at Stanley Kaplan’s SAT prep headquarters in Manhattan, some friends dragged me to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which they envisioned as offering some sort of rest cure for my manic-depressive tendencies and my drug problem. There I met Tony Heubach, an irresistible, funny, elegant figure skater turned bartender whom I fell in love with at first sight, irrevocably and utterly. It made not the slightest dent in my enthusiasm that he was gay. It was certainly no secret, as he worked in a gay bar where most of the regulars were his ex-boyfriends, and that’s where I hung out with him as the original rockslide of infatuation became a full-on avalanche.

  Here is the two-minute version of why I married a gay man, in hopes that it may shed a few beams of light on the current narrative.

  While this was not the first time I’d been crazy in love—I was a pony-league love-a-holic by the time I got out of fifth grade—before I met Tony, no one had ever matched me card for card. When our intensities collided, our trains jumped the rails. I don’t think it meant that he wasn’t gay, or even that he was truly bisexual. As far as I know, aside from a few unhappy experiences in his teens, he had never slept with another woman, or wanted to. I was an exception to his rule, which made the whole thing even more white-hot. Having a beautiful gay man change his life to be with me was like getting the Nobel Prize for lovability, and despite the sad outcome of this situation, I don’t think I was ever quite as unhappy again.

  There were many advantages to having a gay husband. He was fantastically neat and clean, and trained me in his orderly ways. He could cook, bartend, devise and execute wall treatments, garden, iron, arrange flowers, set a perfect table, and professionally cut and color my hair. He bought my clothes, he cleaned our pool, and he would eventually do the lion’s share of child care. Still, the two of us settling down together was only a little like settling down, which was just right for two such unruly characters.

  The year we got married, the first news reports about a mysterious virus affecting gay men, Haitians, and hemophiliacs were coming out. By then, Tony had become a hairdresser, I was writing computer manuals, and we had moved from our first apartment in the French Quarter to a house in Austin, Texas. Tony had dropped the last name of his homophobic father and become Tony Winik. I was sitting with the new Mr. Winik on the ledge of our pink-painted carport one afternoon when he said Uh-oh, and read me the article from the New York Times.

  When we got tested, we learned that I was negative and he was positive. That was surprising, since our unsafe contact had included IV drug abuse. In any case, I wasn’t that worried. I thought of AIDS as some silly little thing like Legionnaires’ disease, which would be cured in a few weeks. I was ready to plump up the nest and start having kids. I had quit all my vices and read up on conception, and this bump in the road wasn’t going to stop me. A child could only be infected with the virus by the mother through the blood in the placenta, so as long as I remained negative, our offspring would be in the clear.

  I got pregnant easily, remained HIV-negative, had a fat and happy pregnancy. But the next spring, with the nursery painted, onesies stacked, car seat by the door, our baby was stillborn. No reason for this was ever found. Though I was counseled to wait at least six months, Hayes was born less than a year after his brother died, and Vince was not far behind.

  My impatience served me well for once, because our blissful days as new parents were short. By 1992, many of Tony’s old friends from the French Quarter and some of our new crowd in Austin had fallen ill and died. Tony had been cutting hair at home and taking care of the boys while I continued working at the software company, but by then he was having physical symptoms as well as emotional ones. The latter involved visits to the Birmingham, Alabama, love shack of a louche architect named Tomé. Soon I had a big crush on someone else, too.

  The last part of our eight-year marriage was a train wreck. It’s little surprise that our sex life never really worked out; our second-biggest problem was that while I was a bubbling geyser of self-analytic conversation, Tony was inarticulate when it came to his feelings. Verbal attempts to solve our conflicts consisted of my stating my point of view, then my stating his point of view, then my offering the rebuttals for each side, while he rolled a joint, Windexed the French doors, and read the paper. And that was in the good times.

  After about a year and a half of precipitous physical decline, Tony checked out of the Austin AIDS hospice on August 20, 1994, and came home to take a big handful of sleeping pills followed by a shot of Morton’s No-Salt in the vein. I held a funeral on Mount Bonnell with a bunch of preschoolers releasing helium balloons.

  I will spend the rest of my life missing him.

  A couple years after Tony died, I went to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote the memoir I’d written about our marriage, the one I showed Humberto. At that time Oprah had not yet started her book club and was not known as a lover of literature, so I had my doubts about this outing from the start. When I heard her intro to the program (“TODAY WE MEET WOMEN WHO HAVE HAD THE EXPERIENCE EVERYONE DREADS—WHEN THEY HEAR THEIR HUSBANDS SAY THESE THREE WORDS: ‘HONEY, I’M GAY!’ ”), whatever hope I had left—briefly fanned by the Best-Selling Author Barbie look created for me in hair and makeup—evaporated.

  Most of the women on the show had discovered late in life that their husbands, clergymen and lawnmower salesmen, were gay. Not me. As Oprah described my book, which she had clearly never read, it was “the strange life of a woman who actually wanted to marry a gay man” by the “NPR commentator Marion Nik.” It was getting worse by the minute. She didn’t even know my name.

  “Why did you want to marry a gay man?” she asked with concern. “Did you ever have sex? Did your husband need to be really drunk to make love to you?”

  “What?!?” I stammered.

  She repeated the question, and I briefly thought of hitting her. Our one moment of connection occurred off-camera, when she took a close look at my periwinkle silk shantung Isaac Mizr
ahi blouse. Her face lit up and she asked me several enthusiastic questions about it.

  By then I was dating an Irish food writer with a black leather jacket, a brushy mustache, and sea-green eyes. I’d fallen for him without much of break once Tony and I were through. He was the opposite of Tony in almost every way, and weighed twice as much as him. When the big man and I split up after five years, I fell right into Crispin’s tattooed arms. Perhaps I was so unhappy in the pre-Tony years that I was afraid to be alone again. Certainly this was my state of mind when I arrived in Baltimore.

  match dot bomb

  Some people have good luck with Internet dating. Take Crispin’s fellow philosophy professor, Glen, a Woody Allen type with a dangling ankh earring and the eyebrows of a cocker spaniel. He was the first person I ever knew who went on Match.com, and he was engaged to the girl he met there before the year was out.

  My best friend Sandye also had a happy online love story. Though she hadn’t had a decent long-term boyfriend since the Carter administration, she had found Mr. Wright—his real name—on Nerve.com. It only took a few months, and there he was: intelligent, responsible, good-looking, and fun, a sixtyish writer and editor with a sexy Virginia accent. She lived in Brooklyn, he on the northern tip of Manhattan; they might never have met otherwise.

  In Baltimore, my new friends Martha and Dan had met on Match. Though Martha had been on the hunt longer than Sandye, her process sounded efficient. She had a First Date outfit, a list of First Date restaurants, and clear criteria that determined the advance to Second Date and beyond. The system was obviously a success since it resulted in her meeting Dan, a kind, laid-back, and patient man. After several years, the two were now moving in together, along with the children of their first marriages.

  There were others, of course—they were everywhere. I was introduced to a couple in Washington, D.C., who’d met on Salon.com when she was working as a wire-service reporter in Trinidad, he as a business consultant in LA. After two months of e-mails and phone calls, he flew four thousand miles for their first date. Not long after, they were married.

  Surely it was time to start my free trial.

  Meanwhile, there seemed to be other possibilities. Ken, the real estate agent who had found me my house in Baltimore and was now a good friend, had some ideas for me. He went over them one chilly night as he and Jane and I soaked in the disco hot tub in his backyard. Jane was having an easy transition from the farm to city living; she adored her school, and the cookie-bearing Julianne who lived down the block was her new best friend. Being able to walk everywhere—the school, the library, the bagel shop, the post office, Ken’s hot tub—was very exciting for a little girl who had never gone on foot past her own mailbox.

  As the underwater lights rotated from pink to green to blue, Ken enumerated the fellows he had in mind. One was a colleague in his real estate office, maybe a little old for me. Another was a guy named Jack he had known since childhood. Jack was super good-looking, he said, and really nice. Having recently broken up with his wife, he was having Ken take him around to look at bachelor pads. He probably wouldn’t be available very long, I imagined, so I urged Ken to get to work.

  Then we moved on to his love life, which had been rather depressing since his Colombian boyfriend José was deported a year before. I thought Ken should move on, but Jane, the nine-year-old romantic, favored long-distance love. She was also in favor of long-distance hate: Part of her enthusiasm for our life in Baltimore was the relief of its having ended the terrible situation between her father and me. Now I was calm and happy; he was sober and sane. The very few times she ever again heard us raise our voices to each other, she burst into panicky tears.

  One weekend when Sandye was visiting from Brooklyn with her daughter Ava, we sent the girls overnight to Crispin’s, and went out for a night on the town with one of my grad students, a party expert in thigh-high boots. I’d asked her to give us a tour of the places she would go to meet a man. We started at a little nook in her neighborhood. It was three deep at the bar, where I was quickly drawn into conversation by a paunchy, watery-eyed ex–Coast Guard captain.

  After a while, Sandye touched my elbow. “Excuse me,” she said to my dull new friend, “I need to borrow her.” Sandye, it turned out, had been chatting with a guy who looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model, not the twenty-something kind but the seasoned thirties/forties type. He had forest-green eyes, white teeth, and sandy blond hair—if you’d seen him on Match.com, you would have been sure the person was using a fake picture.

  Even more unbelievably, he turned out to be a molecular biologist working on a cure for cancer. This was one of the first things I learned when Sandye shoved me onto the stool beside him and left us to get to know each other. (Though his business card looked legitimate, I Googled him as soon as I got home. There I found his paper on highly specific cytotoxic effects on mammalian cells seen protease-resistant immunotoxins, which I planned to read just as soon as I had a minute.)

  Nonetheless, there were drawbacks—or at this early phase in my dating career, I thought there were. The list was as follows: One, I didn’t love his preppy look, a starched, blue-and-white pin-striped Ralph Lauren shirt tucked into blue jeans. Two, he talked a lot about how he loved living in the country and how he hated the city. (I was in the middle of the opposite conversion.) Three, he told me that he didn’t get along with men because they are all such jerks; he only liked to hang out with women. Being the mother of sons, I argued this point. It seemed suspicious, anyway, to dislike one’s whole gender.

  Fortunately, there were a few positives to weigh against these turnoffs. For example, he was a dog person, and was clearly crazy about his teenage daughter. He was intelligent, well-spoken, and, as noted, super-cute. Young, but maybe not too young, because at least at that moment, he seemed very interested in me.

  In the glow of his close attention, I told him a lot about myself. I described my books, my marriages, my children, my job. I told him I was thinking of going online to find dates, and asked him if he knew about that. A little, he said.

  I asked if he thought I should lie about my age, since I didn’t know if most men would include women of fifty in their search criteria.

  “You should never lie about anything,” he told me.

  Soon our blue-jeaned knees were touching, as were our elbows on the bar, and then all of a sudden he leaned over and started kissing me. And I kissed back.

  Then, just as suddenly, it was too much. Too fast, too weird a setting, too important a thing to be happening in these circumstances. I pulled away, leapt up from the stool, and said, “Sorry—I have to go.”

  “Really?” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “Well . . . we were going to go dancing,” I said uncertainly, then with more conviction. “At that bar on the top floor of the Belvedere Hotel. You could come with us. . . .”

  “Oh, I’m not much of a dancer,” he said. “Why don’t you and your friends go have fun. I’m about to head home anyway.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure,” I said. “We’ll e-mail. Right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t worry. I understand.”

  I kissed him once more, lightly, on his scratchy, clean-smelling cheek.

  “What happened?” the girls wanted to know when we got out on the sidewalk. “Are you crazy or what?”

  “I don’t know! I guess—well, it was my first kiss, and it just scared me all of a sudden. It didn’t feel right.”

  “What’s your problem, exactly?” Sandye asked. “Is it that he speaks English? That he bought you a drink? Maybe we can find you a homeless guy out here on the street.”

  Over the next couple of days I kept looking at the business card on my desk and wondering if I should write to Mr. Underwear Model Biologist, and if so, what I should say. Sunday morning, he beat me to it. “Sorry if I was a little forward with you,” he wro
te. “I don’t get out very often.”

  This e-mail kicked in a delayed response to his charms. I wrote a long reply, describing the rest of our night on the town and apologizing for my behavior. However, after that he was always busy—getting lattes, going to the gym, doing things with his daughter, curing cancer. The next and only other time I saw his face, it was on Match.com. The time had come; I had put up my profile.

  My profile was fine-tuned with the help of Sandye and Mr. Wright, Martha and Dan, and the Underwear Model Biologist himself, who had morphed from prospect to mentor. He helped me choose my pictures, hone my headline, and explained that not answering certain questions was not the same as lying. It was probably better than scaring people off with visions of an atheist chain smoker with a houseful of runny-nosed brats.

  TripleEarth

  Sassy, sensual, and smart.

  50-year-old woman

  Baltimore, Maryland, United States

  seeking men 40–57

  Relationships:Divorced

  Have kids:No answer

  Want kids:No answer

  Ethnicity:Caucasian

  Body type:Slender

  Height:5’4” (163 cms)

  Religion:No answer

  Smoke:No answer

  Drink:Social drinker

  for fun:

  I love to eat, drink, and be merry. Talk, walk, and play Scrabble. Dance. Go to the beach. Go out to dinner. Laugh. Make you laugh. Listen. Tell stories. Hear stories. Go to the movies. Have adventures. Travel. Kiss.

  my job:

  I’m an author and I teach creative writing to grad students. I have an advice column in a women’s magazine.

  my education:

  BA, Brown University, 1978; MFA, Brooklyn College, 1983.