Highs in the Low Fifties

by Marion Winik

  2. the perfect gentleman

  One night in March—actually, the day that would have been my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary if I were still married to Tony, and also Texas Independence Day—my friend Dudley took me to a party at an artist’s loft near the train station. To my amazement, the place was awash in Texas flags. It was a Texas Independence Day party. When Dudley introduced me to our host and I tried to explain why I was so delighted, he claimed to already know that this was my wedding anniversary, since he was an avid fan of my books. I’m still not sure I believe this, but it definitely put me in a good mood.

  At the long table of tortillas from San Antonio and hot sauces from Austin (be still my heart), a tall, straight-backed man with thick, silver-white hair, kind eyes, weathered skin, and a bolo tie began chatting with me. I chatted back for a while, then wandered away. The next morning, I realized that this man was a prospect. He liked me. He was checking me out. So, maybe he was a little older than me. Maybe he hadn’t blasted my hormones into outer space. What was I looking for, another Doucher?

  Repentant, I tracked him down through our mutual acquaintances and asked him to come and look at a construction project in my backyard, heh heh heh. Anyway . . . Let us call this mustachioed gentleman The Walrus, which became Jane’s nickname for him.

  The Walrus was a fine and interesting man from a blue-collar Irish background who joined the navy at eighteen and has worked building houses since. He was also a talented stained-glass artist and visionary artisan, a freethinker, an in-line skater, a rock hound, bird-watcher, and conservationist, and very close to his grown daughter. He drank gin in the summer and bourbon in the winter. He had a costume closet for parades and masquerades and such. Jane absolutely adored him; nostalgic for his daddy days, he had nothing but rapt attention and silly jokes for her, and often showed up with little gifts.

  He was the perfect family friend, but he was looking for something more substantial than that. I tried hard to get my feelings in line and to overcome what I knew was a lack of chemistry. On our first two dates without Jane I was quite aggressive, and things went well enough that he probably assumed we were hunky-dory. But I was losing focus. I guess I was looking for another Doucher, but one who wasn’t such a douche.

  On our third date, he took me to a party of his old friends where I could tell everyone had been prepped that he was bringing a new sweetie. I nibbled the fresh mozzarella balls and felt like a schmuck.

  He must have been surprised on our fourth date when I awkwardly announced over drinks at Bertha’s Mussels that I just wanted to be friends. I wasn’t ready for the romantic part of romance. It’s not you, it’s me, blah blah blah. He took this sudden brush-off with equilibrium and said he would be happy to be my friend. And he has been my friend, though Jane would tell you we don’t see him enough anymore. He showed up and sat at our table at a sock monkey workshop at the Visionary Art Museum last winter, and he made Jane a sock walrus.

  I felt badly about this relationship. Meeting perfectly wonderful guys and treating them badly is not much less hellish than meeting jerks and getting dicked around. The Walrus deserved better.

  3. the boy toy

  While I was seeing The Walrus, Crispin went to Finland to address a philosophy conference and took his girlfriend. He and his girlfriend had been traveling a lot, to Walden Pond and to bluegrass festivals and other places I would have rather have cut off my foot than visit. It’s good he’s found a woman who lets him drive, I thought. A helpmeet, a sidekick, a muse: all roles pretty much out of my repertoire. This girlfriend was so different from me—not, thank God, a younger, cuter Marion Winik short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner—that I was starting to make my peace with the idea of her. She worked with special-needs children, she volunteered at the zoo; obviously, you can’t hate such a person.

  But I had not made my peace with single living, and I was still looking for biochemical fireworks. Around this time I ran into Zach Silverman, a thirty-something ex-student of mine on whom I had developed a secret crush. Zach Silverman had a beautiful girlfriend he was crazy about, but things were not working out for them at the moment. I knew a great deal about it because one of my primary conversation topics with Zach was his love life, about which I’d asked many sympathetic questions in the timeless tradition of the covetous counselor. We also talked a lot about spirituality, which he was pretty interested in even though he’d moved away from his Orthodox background.

  Back when Silverman was my student, I tried not to focus on my crush, which arose from his cool art, his big brain, and his weirdly sexy, uptight, nineteenth-century Talmudic look. Obviously it was not a good idea. But at this point, he was not my student, and I started running into him around town more and more, possibly due to my sudden increased attendance at the avant-garde art openings and other events where Zach and his posse were found.

  In the early summer of 2010, I became a habitué of postmodern Frisbee tournaments and video festivals, taking too much time to decide what to wear to them and drinking Natty Boh like a pro. Zach was always pleasant to me, but since our former professor-student relationship seemed to dictate this, I could never tell if he was aware of my crush, and if so, how he felt about it. Then one night after a show, I found Zach outside the club and bummed a cigarette from him (I bummed about a carton of cigarettes from him over the course of this thing; I should probably send him a check), smoking it while preening about and probably emitting a visible cloud of estrogen.

  “Put away those shoulders,” he said, both rudely and charmingly, since I do consider my shoulders one of my foremost assets.

  At the end of the night he offered me a ride home; I was probably looking a bit unsteady. But I knew if I got in that car with him, all bets were off, so I refused and tottered along down the sidewalk.

  Sometime in late June I was out with a single girlfriend of mine looking for something to do. Already a little tipsy, I texted Zach; he was at an MP3 release party at a place called The Taint, in a factory in a distant part of town. He said we should come on over but warned me that he was already very, very drunk. (Oh, no!)

  We came upon the factory just before we would have been forced to go into a convenience store and ask if they could help us find The Taint, obviously the intention of the person who had named the place. (“Well, dear, it’s right between the scrotum and the asshole!”) We were halfway up the steps when my friend was abducted by pot-smokers in hats. As soon as I entered the party, Zach lurched toward me with a six of Natty Boh dangling from his index finger and asked me if I wanted to go look at the river.

  He led me to a floodlit, garbage-swept concrete parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. I never saw any river; instead, with no further preliminaries, a furious make-out session was in progress. It was fun, but Zach and I had different ideas of what came next. I wanted to discuss our relationship; he wanted me to give him a blow job. This seemed beneath my dignity as a fifty-two-year-old mother of three, so I regretfully declined and we went back inside. He seemed to be about one millimeter away from either puking or alcohol poisoning, but was still on his feet when my friend and I left.

  The next day my dignity went into remission and I e-mailed him to ask if he was having regrets, and if he wasn’t, would he like to continue where we left off.

  He reminded me of his incredible love for his girlfriend, and his desire not to repeat mistakes that had driven them apart in the past.

  What could I say? I commended him. And I really do.

  4. rock hudson

  While smarting from the Silverman debacle, I received a friendly missive on Facebook from a gay guy I have known since high school, Ken, now living in New York. I already had a gay Ken in my life who was a little piqued by this latecomer, particularly when my new gay boyfriend and I began to refer to him as the Other Ken, or the O.K.

  “What do you mean?! He’s the Other Ken, not me!” Baltimore
Ken said. He had a point; it was never settled.

  Once a noted chef, a high-profile AIDS activist, and the hottest guy in the room, Manhattan Ken was running a little low on mystic powers. The erstwhile Pheromone King was struggling to live with HIV, hepatitis C, human papilloma virus, Meniere’s disease, hepatic encephalopathy, and the wildest case of hypervigilance I have ever seen, probably due to PTSD from burying so many friends and clients since the 1980s. He was also in the thick of a multiyear attempt to get off benzodiazepines (Valium-type drugs), a withdrawal which causes horrible side effects, among which was the fact that he was only awake from the hours of eleven-thirty at night to three in the morning.

  Night after night I set my alarm to wake up at this time and listen to him tell me about all the bacteria he had wrangled that day. As he went on and on, I sexted him a picture of me lying on the couch in my bikini underpants. My pent-up desires had apparently driven me around the bend. I’d been around it before. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, super-hot gay guys: my favorite things!

  Finally, I stopped in to see him when I was visiting Hayes in New York. I found him living with two roommates in a spectacular two-bedroom penthouse apartment filled with sock monkeys. Yes, again with the sock monkeys; I don’t know why they started appearing everywhere. If this was a novel, there would be some deeper meaning to it, but this is real life.

  The Pheromone King was not explicit about the romantic arrangements of the household, but between the ratio of beds to people and the slightly weird vibes I received from his roommates, I came to my senses. And guess what, we are still friends. We are all friends, even the O.K., on Facebook.

  Meanwhile, Vince had come home from New Orleans for the summer to try to make the money to pay me back for the fines and lawyer’s fees relating to a recent Mardi Gras mishap. He couldn’t find a job, so The Walrus took him on as a construction assistant. Oh Walrus, you are the man and I am a dickbag.

  That’s only four, I know. One more, the last one, is on the way.

  the boomer and the boomerang

  Once he’d graduated from Georgetown with a degree in finance, Hayes was offered a six-figure salary in New York City at one of the big banks. I was amazed. In 1978, when I graduated from Brown with a degree in Russian history, I could hardly bring down four figures at the 7-Eleven.

  Off he went to Manhattan, but it was no Summer of Love for him there. His girlfriend, the beauteous Queen of Ecuador (she was from an important South American family and looked like Penelope Cruz), dumped him two days after he got there. Meanwhile, the six-week training program at the bank was mind-numbingly dull. And while he had not liked New York when he’d lived there as an intern during the summer of his junior year, this time, he really hated it. Just making his way from his apartment to the subway in the sweaty morning rush-hour crowd was almost more than he could take.

  My unflappable son began having what looked like a mini nervous breakdown. There were daily phone calls, there was crying, both unprecedented enough to warrant an impromptu visit. I offered names of therapists, prescriptions for Xanax and Zoloft, a $16 bowl of New York guacamole, and a pitcher of margaritas—I would have tried anything. I knew that Hayes was at an age where some young men develop schizophrenia, bipolarity, or a major depressive disorder. I have a cousin, now sixty, who has been institutionalized on and off since he graduated from Oberlin. So, actually, I was scared to death.

  Not counting the death of his father when he was six, Hayes had had a pretty smooth ride to this point. In fact, a beleaguered, trouble-magnet high school friend of his had once joked that the entire Southern School District faculty and administration woke up each morning, scratching their heads and asking themselves, “What can I do for Hayes Winik today?” But now the proud HMS Hayes had sailed into the shallows.

  One late summer night before Vince went back to college in New Orleans, he barged into my bedroom at 3:00 a.m., waving his cell phone. “You talk to him,” he said. “He’s a pussy!” Having grown up in the shadow of Mr. Perfect / Ivan the Terrible, he had no idea how to deal with this weepy, crumbling incarnation of his lifelong idol and oppressor.

  The next week, Hayes took a leave from the bank, came home to Baltimore, and got not one but two jobs downtown. Apparently people were still wondering what they could do for Hayes Winik. He sublet his room in the Manhattan apartment we had just found, gave notice at work, stuffed his stuff back into my little Yaris, and had taken over my guest room by Labor Day.

  I believe it’s supposed to be a bad thing when your children end up back in the house after college, a sign of hard economic times and indulgent child-rearing practices. Well, maybe older couples who have just finished saving for their long-postponed second honeymoon feel this way. Not me. While I was worried about Hayes’s well-being, my nest was far from crowded, and there was no honeymoon activity in sight. Jane and I rejoiced at the return of her big brother.

  As the leftovers in my fridge disappeared and my cabinets filled with giant urns of protein powder, as the pundits of ESPN SportsCenter returned to sing their lullaby to the sleeping boy under the afghan on the couch, my heart was glad. Perhaps everything would be fine.

  I had not really lived with Hayes since he’d graduated from high school in 2006, and that was hardly an idyllic time. We were in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, my marriage to his stepfather was loudly and appallingly falling apart, and as any teenager would, Hayes judged me for the mess I had gotten myself into. He certainly wouldn’t make mistakes like that because he was a much more sensible person than his crazy mother. Just as I had once figured out who I wanted to be by trying to be nothing like my mother, he had formed his identity in opposition to mine. Here is the simple version:

  My mother: Golfing, bridge-playing, stock-market-investing Yankees fan.

  Me: Bohemian, tattooed, poetry-writing Deadhead.

  My son: Golfing, high-school-football-playing, finance-majoring Cowboys fan.

  If he looked down on me as an old hippie with weird friends, I had beefs about him as well. Most of them stemmed from what appeared to be his genuine belief that he could be in any number of places at once, and that all routine travel occurred at the speed of light. This is why, for example, he was in Atlantic City with my car when I landed at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, expecting him to pick me up. Ask his friends, ask his ex-girlfriend—we had all suffered. His charm usually got him out of any fixes he got himself into; as I mentioned earlier, even his therapist fell in love with him.

  But post-breakup and breakdown, Hayes had apparently decided to be different. In addition to cutting most of the bullshit, he had mysteriously become a voracious reader, and was having me haul piles of nonfiction books and novels home from the library. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Teddy Roosevelt’s autobiography. Zeitoun. He even read Portnoy’s Complaint, my favorite novel. I had never seen such a thing.

  More characteristically of young men in his age group, Hayes discovered the Paleolithic diet, which involved living the way the cavemen did, eating only the finest organic grass-fed beef and heirloom vegetables, and engaging in endless, mindless hours of physical exercise. Having finished unloading his wallet at Whole Foods, Paleolithic Man went to the gym, where he was known to dead-lift 400 pounds, after which he indulged in the protein shakes of the Iron Age. Paleolithic Man did not eat pasta, he did not drink lattes, and he was very suspicious of the ingredients his mother put in her supposedly carb-free casserole. Late in the Paleolithic era the discovery of vodka allowed these awesome, disease- and body-fat-free creatures to make vast advances in their ability to hunt and gather women.

  I don’t know if it was the diet, the literature, or the healing dose of family living, but Hayes’s spirits were restored in a couple of months.

  brown lips

  That same fall, my food-writer friend Martha said she had a guy she wanted me to meet. Matt was smart and
well-read, and he was a carpenter, a combination she thought would interest me. On the other hand, she warned, she did have a few concerns. He might not be over his last girlfriend, Foamy. (Fluffy? Sparky? Something like that.) The evidence of his broken heart was that he had drunk most of two bottles of wine, a tumbler of bourbon, and a martini the night Martha met him.

  Well, I thought, send him on! Having been married to both a pain-pill addict and an alcoholic, neither of whom I was any help to at all, I could pretty much guarantee he’d end up in rehab.

  However, Martha seemed unwilling to let us loose with each other’s phone numbers, so instead, she decided to have a potluck dinner party to which we’d both be invited, along with other people, to take off the pressure. This sounded like a good plan, weary as I was at this point of awkward getting-to-know-you conversations at the coffee shop.

  Though I had somehow managed to spend the first fifty years of my life without going on a blind date, I now knew much more than I’d ever hoped to know about tedious first encounters. Still, I had not given up on the idea of finding love in any way possible. This time, like every other time, could be It. As usual, I threw myself into a delusional yet absorbing series of preparations.

  Maybe my potluck dish for Martha’s party was not the most important thing to worry about, but it was the most captivating for me. I welcome any chance to think about food for hours on end. I found a delicious-sounding recipe in the Times for something called a panade, involving layers of bread, chard, butternut squash, leeks, and cauliflower, baked with milk and Fontina cheese. While making my grocery list, I began to wonder if, along with the greens and grains, I might also need high-heeled leather boots and a pair of skinny jeans. In fact, I saw in a sudden flash of insight, it was the lack of these things that had been the roadblock to my dating success so far. I went straight to a resale shop to remedy the situation.