by Marion Winik
If I had not already been married to a gay guy once before . . . if Peter didn’t already have a boyfriend . . . if he hadn’t already broken my heart once by going off with Tina Somebody that night on Slide Mountain . . . ah, well, it was not to be.
Arnie, the other camper Rudy had recently seen, I remembered as a grumpy little fellow, but Rudy said he was now a noted art photographer, and very sweet. He came to dinner later that summer, when I was back in Brooklyn visiting Sandye and my stepdaughter, Emma.
Emma is the older of Crispin’s two children; like Hayes, she was then a senior in college. She was finishing up at the Gallatin School at NYU in a major of her own design, “The Aesthetics of Healing.” She is an adorable, brown-eyed super genius, and we had become instant best friends when I’d met her dad ten years earlier.
Though our connection had undergone a little wear and tear during the dark days of the breakup, we still got along fine and spoke openly about our feelings.
By this time, I had become very anxious about my tattoo of her father’s initials, which I’d gotten shortly after he’d shown up with his. Unlike him, I had failed to enlist Emma’s design assistance, and while his tattoo seemed pleasingly artistic and vague, mine was nothing but a big old cgs. Indeed, that was what I’d wanted at the time. Now, even in a sleeveless shirt I felt uncomfortable, branded with the logo of the wrong owner. If I ever got another boyfriend, or even had sex again, it would be really weird. Doggie-style was out for good. Since laser removal was expensive and would leave a scar, I was now contemplating whether it could be made into something else without covering my whole back with some unwanted image. I had gone into a tattoo shop where I was shown perplexing photographs of how a graveyard scene could be turned into a Tasmanian devil, or a naked girl into the Grim Reaper.
One night Emma stopped by Sandye’s. She and Jane went to work on the situation with a Sharpie.
“It’s a snake!” Jane said. “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s very creative,” I said, as I studied the photo on my iPhone screen. “A snake. Hmmmm.”
Not long afterwards, there was a knock at the door.
“Hello! Is this the Greenfields camper meet and greet?” Arnie asked when I opened Sandye’s door and found him standing there with his dog. He was a tall, pleasant-looking guy with the dark brown eyes I remembered, though the dark brown curls were now close-cropped and graying. Weirdly, he seemed to be doing a Pee-Wee Herman imitation.
“Hey, Arnie,” I said. “What’s your dog’s name?”
“Oh, this isn’t my dog,” he said. “I found him on the way over. Would your friend be able to keep him?” Of course it was his dog, named Platypus as it turned out. Welcome to Arnie World. Something about his demeanor led me to wonder if he, too, had turned out gay.
Another night, after a dinner of take-out falafel, the whole gang of us walked over to Prospect Park for an outdoor concert: Sandye and Mr. Wright, Jane and Ava, me and Arnie, catching up on our lives and loves. Actually, it was more like getting to know one another in the first place, since we didn’t remember each other well from Greenfields. Later, I took his arm on the walk back from the park. It was a nice feeling, and he kissed me lightly on the lips when he said good-bye.
Was there any click between us? I had a conceptual problem that was impeding my thought processes in this area. Given the way things had gone in my life up to that point, I had the impression that when one thing ends, you just turn around and the next is right there. Whatever man happened to be standing in my immediate line of vision was obviously being proposed by destiny as The One. All righty, then! Rush out, get a pedicure, fall in love.
So . . . we were both in the arts, right? And dog lovers. He was easy to talk to, nice-looking, and every once in a while, one of his jokes was funny. He had confided toward the end of the evening that he had a lot of mood problems and was taking antidepressants. That was the clincher. I love depressed people. I invited him down to Baltimore to visit sometime. A few weeks later, he e-mailed me to say that he and Platypus were coming for a week in July.
Again with the preparations! I went out and rented a DVD of season one of The Wire, with which he was obsessed. I stocked up on beer and planned meals from every corner of the world. I cleaned my house. Not knowing which way things would go, I bought both pretty new underwear and a quilt for the guest room.
The day of his arrival, he was supposed to get in at 12:30 p.m. I was up at 5:00 a.m. I had my crab cakes ready to go in the oven, a casual yet slinky outfit selected, my toenails painted sky blue. Then he called at 12:45 to say he was stopping at a flea market in Towson on the way into town.
I wasn’t happy to hear this, as he had already asked if we could go to a flea market and I’d said no. It didn’t fit into my plans for the day, and anyway, I hate flea markets. I guess he must have gone and Googled the matter himself.
I drove out to meet him and spent the next hour managing Platypus, who took a giant dump right in the middle of one of the aisles, while Arnie meticulously scrutinized each table of wares and asked questions like “Do you think this ashtray has the original finish?”
Finally we got home and ate crab cakes while watching an episode of The Wire. “Will we be able to go on a Wire tour?” Arnie asked. He had heard there was a driving route you could take to see all the famous landmarks of the television show. Unfortunately, it was also the driving route for buying crack, getting carjacked, and being the victim of a drive-by shooting.
Anyway, we never could have fit it in between the used bookshops, antiques stores, and other shopping packed into the days ahead. I watched him paw through piles of dusty merchandise in every such place in Baltimore, where there are many such places, me gritting my teeth all the while. We also took Jane to the swimming pool a couple of times, providing me with the slight thrill of having neighbors wonder why I was suddenly appearing with a male companion. I don’t think it ever even occurred to Jane that he was supposed to be a romantic prospect; she assumed that we were some kind of vague old friends or distant cousins. Others, however, were more hopeful.
“Who’s that?” Barbara Jones finally came out and asked. “A new boyfriend?”
“Beats me,” I said.
It didn’t seem like it, honestly. I would sit next to him on the couch while we watched The Wire and he wouldn’t put his arm around me or anything, even if I tentatively touched his hand. Then one night after we’d had a little party at the house, I went into the guest room and lay down on the bed to chat. That led nowhere, so I eventually clumped down the hall to my own quarters.
The sensual peak of the whole experience was when we went to hot yoga class together. Arnie was surprisingly good at yoga, very flexible and graceful for a man. I looked over at him during Savasana—so relaxed and restful, so male. His eyelashes were very black against his cheek. I felt for a moment that I might be attracted to him.
Chaste as it was, I did like having a man around. I liked cooking and fussing over him, waiting on him and making my elaborate ethnic meals. I learned his routines: He drank his coffee cold, in the blender with ice. He put salt on everything. Every day he glugged down some weird concoction he’d brought with him, a smelly, raw vegetable puree with mystical nutritive qualities. He was a man of definite ideas and tastes, and not particularly open to persuasion. A testy man, a bossy man, a man who enjoyed anger and vendettas and diatribes, a man who often yelled at people on his cell phone for hours, and could get very annoyed by Facebook.
When he left it was confusing. Absolutely nothing romantic had happened—all the cute underwear still had the tags on it—and clearly nothing was going to happen. Jane could have told me this, and yet, I thought it my duty not to give up altogether.
The next time I saw him, it was in New Jersey. He came to visit at Sandye’s mother’s house, down the street from where I grew up. There, he spent most of the day gardeni
ng and flirting with Sandye’s seventy-something mother. I think he may have invited her to Paris. Then that night he and I took the dogs down to the beach. There was plenty of moonlight on the onyx waves and the silvery sand, so I climbed up on the high lifeguard bench and waited. He did not climb up after me, busy as he was roaming the beach with his camera, attempting to photograph sand crabs. At this point, I became a little testy myself.
Since there really was nothing to change about our relationship—it already was a friendship—it was just a matter of resetting the tone of things, kind of like changing the wallpaper on your computer desktop from a bouquet of red roses to a sand crab.
Arnie and I had been talking about going on a road trip together to visit Rudy up in New York State. After the New Jersey experience, I e-mailed him to say that given my new understanding of our relationship, we should not go on this trip. Instead he should go to Paris with Sandye’s mother.
This was the first time there had been any mention of our “relationship,” and his response was obviously designed to spare my ego. “I am at a stage in my life,” he wrote, “where I kind of want to get married and, if possible, have offspring. Plus, I am too messed up to be with someone now; I need to be alone to work out my issues. I wouldn’t want anything to happen between us that would ruin our friendship in the long run.”
I sent him a nice e. e. cummings poem—since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things—for his troubles, and we did remain friends. He continued e-mailing me his photographs of fossilized bird skeletons, Amazonian insect life, and Russian blast furnaces. I’ve been to several of his art shows—totaling my car on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to one of them—and then we both went to the Greenfields reunion last summer, which was really fun even though there were only six people there. Platypus barked all night, and Jane and I didn’t get a wink of sleep in our tent. It was perfectly fine.
Once our non-relationship was over, Arnie was very supportive of my dating career, and once even tried to fix me up with someone. Unfortunately it was the night of that bad car accident, and the guy didn’t even notice the big, fresh purple bruise below my collarbone. He launched straight into a disquisition on the “lucid dreams” he has that allow him to see into the afterlife. Honestly, I didn’t want to hear about it. Once he did finally catch on to my situation, he informed me earnestly that we have accidents when we need to release stress in our lives.
When he e-mailed me the next day to see if we could get together, it turned out that I did know how to say no, after all.
dreamboat
Given my romantic proclivities and history, not to mention the emotional beating I had taken in the past couple of years, perhaps better than “Sensual, sassy, and smart” for my dating profile headline would have been something like “Hire the handicapped.” But by this time, I had sworn off online dating. Then it occurred to me one day: Looking at the Craigslist personals wasn’t exactly online dating, was it? How could it be, when the headlines included things like do you have a large clitoris?
I had only been on Craigslist one other time, and that was right before I’d moved out of my Georgian airplane hangar. I had to do something with the abandoned paraphernalia of five children, a husband, and various forgetful houseguests, but Jane and I couldn’t even drag it out of the house.
Someone suggested I try the giveaway section of Craigslist, which turned out to be a good idea. So happy were the people who came to take my stuff; so happy was I to give it to them! Like the man who picked up a couple of dressers. He and his family had moved to Ohio to care for his dying mother-in-law, with whom the wife had never gotten along. But soon after they got there, the old woman had had a miracle recovery.
“She snapped right back, mean as ever,” he said, shaking his head. “So I get up one morning and find the wife loading the kids into the van in their pj’s. ‘Get in,’ she says. ‘We’re going home.’ ‘What about our stuff?’ I say. ‘We’re leavin’ it,’ she says. ‘Our furniture?’ I say. ‘Our clothes?’
“ ‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me, ‘we’ll find new things. Somehow we’ll be provided for.’ ” He gave me a grateful look. “See? Sure enough, we are.”
After this experience, Craigslist held a certain magic for me. If it could find those people free bedroom furniture, who knew what else it could do?
In the personals section I searched for the keyword writer—if Michael Chabon had decided to leave Ayelet Waldman, wouldn’t this be the way to find him?—and there was just one hit, a forty-eight-year-old in Annapolis. The headline read the perfect guy? or another wacky CL poster? you decide. The post was a long, silly, but somewhat funny multiple-choice test by a guy who seemed a little arrogant about his assets and his requirements. There was a picture on the bottom of a man running on the beach. If this was him, arrogance might be overlooked.
You decide.
One hot, high-school-like week of e-mails later, I drove down to meet “Brett” (the name he gave me never seemed to me to be his real name) at a harbor-front tavern in Annapolis. Even before I hit the football traffic for the US Naval Academy, I was a nervous wreck. At five minutes before two, I called the number I had for him and said I was going to be late.
“No problem,” he said. “There’s no other way to get into town, so just relax.” I had heard his voice once before, during our pre-date phone call. It was pleasant and deep, with a level-headed Midwestern tone.
About a half-hour of high blood pressure later, I pulled into a postcard-perfect enclave of shops and restaurants. Beneath a clear blue sky sailboats floated on the bay, and, despite the crowds of tourists, I found a parking spot near the appointed spot. I was scanning the sidewalk when I heard a voice from behind. “Marion?”
He, too, was ridiculously picturesque, in the manner of Joe Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, a movie that had been getting me in trouble since the day it came out. Intense eyes, tanned skin, high cheekbones, white teeth, and full lips. Dark hair with a few strands of gray. Black jeans, motorcycle jacket.
He was smiling at me. “Do you want to sit inside or out? What do you want to drink?” Since I couldn’t seem to think of an answer (I was so stunned by his beauty I had lost the power of speech), he ordered a couple of Dark and Stormies. I don’t blame the rum for what happened next; hormones were working in my brain like Tide in a washer, rinsing my skull clean of all rational abilities as my body entered the acute phase of the agitation cycle.
I already knew a lot about Brett from the e-mails that had preceded our meeting. He lived alone on a sailboat and had driven race cars professionally for years. He was from Texas and was a Dallas Cowboys fan, as I and my sons had become during our Austin years. His high school graduation had been held in Cowboys Stadium, a detail whose power over me I cannot fully explain.
He was recently divorced after thirty years of marriage to the woman who had been his college girlfriend. After he quit racing and they’d sent the kids to college and moved to Baltimore, an aggravated case of empty nest took them down. By aggravated, I mean that his wife had gone back to graduate school, gained a lot of weight, and stopped paying attention to him while he had an affair with her best friend. She got the house, he got the sailboat.
In any case, Brett certainly wasn’t hiding any of the awkward details of his situation. His Craigslist ad had announced that he’d only ever been with two women: his wife and her best friend. I’d thought it was a joke. It also said he didn’t want to date anyone who weighed more than 130 pounds, and that he would prefer to see a married woman. Why a married woman, I asked him at some point, and he clarified for me that it meant he didn’t want love, romance, or even a real relationship . . . just a low-overhead, no-strings-attached roll in the hay.
It’s a little unbelievable that I even wanted to meet the guy given all these red flags. But now that I had, red flags meant nothing to me.
When I
did try to keep up my end of the conversation, I only talked about things so stupid that I was forced to trail off two sentences into the thought. Later I saw all my abortive conversation topics listed on a dating site titled “Things Men Hate to Talk About.”
1.Past relationships
2.Other dates
3.Celebrities
4.Religion
5.Politics
6.Antiques
7.Money
8.Fashion
9.Gardening
10.Marriage
I believe I avoided Gardening and Antiques, but added a few personal selections, such as Possible Reasons Why You Won’t Like Me, and Diseases I Do and Don’t Have. Jesus God Almighty. Miraculously he did not get up and leave, or even appear to be put off. He suggested we get the check and go for a walk.
After several blocks of meandering, we sat down on a bench and he started telling me about the time his family dropped anchor in Guatemala and he was mistaken by the militia for a local and taken into custody. More engrossing than the story was the way we were staring into each other’s eyes. His were sparkly and brown; mine, he was soon to tell me, were very blue.
“Would you mind if I kissed you?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
He took me in his arms and put his mouth on mine, and I guess he must be the devil because even right now, given everything that’s happened since, I would start that kiss over again in a second. Electricity, chemistry, physics—all the forces of nature unleashed their fury at the intersection of our jaws. We weren’t just kissing like teenagers; we were kissing like insane teenagers on Ecstasy. When it ended, maybe ten minutes later, I was basically lying across his lap, our arms and legs were tangled, and people passing across the street looked alternately horrified and amused.
At some point, we stood up and floated back toward the harbor. We walked with his arm around me, all of our limbs now moving in effortless rhythm. When we reached the water, he pointed to a boat that he said wouldn’t make the turn it was trying to round; momentarily, the crew’s difficulties proved he was right. He went on talking about sailboats, sailboat accidents, and sailboat insurance. I was spellbound.