by Marion Winik
When I got home with my purchases, Hayes regarded me with amusement and doubt in his brown eyes. “Mom, these are Seven jeans,” he said. “I know you didn’t buy Seven jeans. They cost, like, $200.”
Well, he would know, having inherited the shopping gene along with the brown eyes from his father, who by the way had had every excuse for pill-popping in the years before his death at thirty-seven. With tragedies like this in one’s past, and God knows what on the agenda, one learns to enjoy every portent of a benevolent universe, no matter how small. The Miracle of the $28 Seven Jeans. Perhaps the start of a whole new run of luck!
When I got to Martha’s that night, she revealed that she’d invited a second guy for me to check out, William. She’d met William on Match.com before she found Dan, and they had maintained a collegial friendship, since he was a writer.
“Oh, that dude,” I said unenthusiastically. She had shown me a picture of him months earlier. “I thought he went to the West Coast or something.”
“He did,” she said. “But he’s back.”
As it turned out, William was somewhat more attractive in person than in his website photo—tall, fit, and clear-skinned, sort of bouncy and healthy-looking in a California-y way. The other guy, the brainy carpenter, had a more-grungy, six-days-on-the road thing going. Both of them paid a lot of attention to me throughout the evening, tag-teaming the seat next to me on the porch and vying for the chance to bring me a cocktail.
William told me all about his unpublished novel, which followed the spiritual quest of a young female character modeled on his twenty-two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, I was not quite so high on life that I agreed to read it. William seemed too New Age-y for me, but when I said this, he took it mildly. His consensus-building conversational style was a great relief, as I was still in recovery from the ten years of debate-club-on-steroids that was my second marriage.
Matt was also very nice, though a little less perky. He chugged whiskey, rolled his own cigarettes, blazed a few doobs on the balcony, but, you know, not necessarily in a suicidal way. He was actually rather courtly and sweet. I told him I had heard he’d been drowning his sorrows of late, and he smiled ruefully and asked me if I wanted to join him in a nightcap. Like William, he had a quality that made him so not my ex-husband, which in his case was the affectionate embrace of a panoply of vices and an aura of nonjudgmental, relaxed standards. After the sometimes ascetic, sometimes alcoholic, obsessive-compulsive Puritan philosopher I’d been married to, a nice, run-down enabler could be just what I needed. However, I didn’t hear from him for quite a while.
Just two days later, I received a message from William. I considered whether to see him again. He wasn’t that bad-looking, he was easy to talk to, and reasonably intelligent. As long as I could avoid his novel, I felt I had nothing to lose.
I had picked up his message on my iPhone as I was driving to hot yoga one morning. Just after that, I caught part of something interesting on the radio. It was an interview with actor Charles Dutton, who was coming to town with his one-man show, titled From Jail to Yale. It was at Morgan State University, a historically black college a couple miles up the road from me. It would be cool to see a play there, and, fortuitously, the event was on a Saturday, the night my daughter Jane regularly went up to stay over with her father in Pennsylvania.
William told me that he’d like to go to the show, but he’d have to order the cheapest tickets available because finances were an issue. Thinking ahead, I downloaded a coupon for dinner at a nice place over near the college.
When William got to my house that evening, I poured myself a glass of wine and prevailed upon him to join me. He was an unenthusiastic drinker, saying he’d never enjoyed a glass of wine before the other night at Martha’s, when we’d opened several good bottles. “Sadly,” he continued in his calm California way, “I’m fifty-four years old and find myself homeless, jobless, and penniless.”
“Really?” I said. “How terrible for you!” It wasn’t great for me either, at least in the short term. I slipped my restaurant coupon under a pile of newspapers and pulled out Tupperware containers of leftovers from the fridge.
William dug right into the chicken parmesan and continued. All the business ventures and freelance gigs he’d had going out West had tanked with the economy in the last year. When he ran out of options and rent money, he’d moved back home to Randallstown, a run-down suburban outpost of Baltimore, to stay on his mother’s pullout couch. She was a Holocaust survivor, he said, who was already taking care of his sister, a morbidly obese young woman awaiting gastric bypass surgery, and her boyfriend, a crystal meth dealer.
“Jeez,” I said, “how is your mother handling all this?”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “the Holocaust, you know—it kind of puts things in perspective for her. I think she’s just happy to have her family around.”
Soon we were off to the show at Morgan State, where the “Will Call” line was so long and slow-moving that I wondered if we’d get to our seats before intermission. It seemed that every single African-American person in the city of Baltimore had come to this event. There are two thousand seats in the Morgan State auditorium, and no more than six of them were occupied by white people that night.
Under the fluorescent beams lighting the sidewalk where we waited, I studied my extremely white date out of the corner of my eye. His clothes, his salt-and-pepper hair, his smallish eyes. I hadn’t noticed it before, but William’s lips were unusual. They had a classic Cupid’s-bow shape, but were very wide—like a three-quarter-inch lower lip—and very deeply colored. In fact, they were a sort of plummy brown. But really, more brown than plum.
“What’s wrong?” asked William. “What are you looking at?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said.
We finally got to our seats, which were on a precipitous fourth mezzanine perched at a dizzying height. We were surprised to see that Dutton had already begun his monologue, though many people had not yet gotten into the auditorium. I was annoyed to have missed the beginning of the story, since I had missed it on the radio, too, and the rest was pretty much word for word what I had already heard. Then Dutton announced that the remainder of the evening would consist of his doing scenes from Shakespeare with students from the Morgan State drama department.
William looked at me askance. “I had no idea,” I whispered.
Without offering a single bit of background—you know, This is a play about a bitter, insane old king who has three daughters—Dutton launched into a medley of scenes from King Lear. A procession of young actors in Elizabethan costume swept onto and off the stage, shouting at each other in Old English, dueling, weeping, murdering, then carrying each other’s dead bodies around and weeping some more. There seemed to be no end in sight.
Despite the mayhem onstage, soon our entire mezzanine looked as if sleeping gas had been released into the ventilation system. People collapsed over the arms and backs of their chairs, jaws dangling. Some sank into the pillowy bosom or muscled shoulder beside them; others remained nearly erect, nodding as discreetly as junkies in a driver’s ed class.
Unbelievably, once finished with Lear, Dutton and his troupe moved on to Richard III.
Waking and stretching when awoken by the applause, which was thunderous once it became clear that the evening was truly over, my date gave me a sleepy smile. I felt guilty for having made him spend $35 on these tickets, and said so.
“Oh, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a memorable experience, anyway.”
We made our way to his car. I assumed we’d go out for a drink after the show, so was surprised when he rubbed his hands together and said, “God, I could really use some ice cream about now!”
“Ice cream?” I said. I started racking my brain for a place that served both ice cream and alcohol, which I felt I needed as soon as possible. “How about Golden West?” I su
ggested. “You can have a sundae and I can have a drink.”
“Oh, I’d like to just go back to your place and chill,” he said.
Fortunately it was dark in the car so he couldn’t see the eye-rolling. “Actually, I don’t have much ice cream,” I said. “There’s, like, one old ice-cream sandwich of Jane’s.” I explained that the sandwich in question was Birthday Party flavor, which meant it had pastel-colored nuggets in it, and that it had once been melted and refrozen and was now freezer-burned, but I was unable to dampen William’s enthusiasm.
And because I am such a lame-ass pushover, home we went, and chill we did. He had his ice-cream sandwich, and I sat down across the room with a bottle of Chardonnay. He chose a spot on the couch, so I sat in an armchair as far away as I could without actually entering the backyard. He told me more about his desperate straits, his fascinating relatives, and his romantic history. I talked about my once-beautiful, intensely passionate marriage and how it had been tragically destroyed by distrust, alcohol, and bitterness. Somehow I meandered from there to the subject of my fantasy beach house. Since our mother’s death, my sister Nancy and I had been talking about buying a place in New Jersey so we could have a way to get together in our old home state. William perked up at this turn in the conversation and suggested that he could move in and house-sit if we did.
Finding it hard to keep my mind on the discussion at hand, I remembered suddenly that I hadn’t seen any of my road atlases since I’d moved to Baltimore, now going on two years ago. Where were those road atlases? Though I had not used a road atlas in a long time—in fact, I had bought these as gifts for my sons back when they first got their driver’s licenses, and they had abandoned them when they went off to college—earlier in the day I had wanted to consult a real live paper map to see if there was any way to get to the Jersey shore from Baltimore without taking 95 through Delaware, which has been backed up with traffic for several decades. Whether it was ADD, OCD, or just conversational desperation, I was suddenly driven to jump up and look for these road atlases in my office.
He took this opportunity to put in a call to his mother, which I overheard as I pawed through a cabinet of gift wrap.
“No, Mom, just go to bed. Don’t worry about pulling out the couch or anything. That’s too much for you. Please. Just put a pillow and a blanket out for me and go to bed. I won’t be home ’til three or four, anyway.”
“Are you kidding?!” I shouted, fierce and hoarse as King Lear. “I have to go to bed in a half-hour.”
William rolled with the punches and told his mother he’d be home by midnight; 11:30, I suggested. At 11:15, I yawned and said, “Okay, well. . . .” I really needed to get back to looking for those atlases.
He lifted his eyebrows and a smile curved his brown lips, which I had by now studied more thoroughly, with poor results. “Well,” he said suavely, “before I go, how ’bout some touching?”
For a moment or two there was absolute silence, then I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. He looked hurt. “Why are you laughing?” he asked plaintively.
Guilty and red-faced, I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I—damn. What do you mean by touching?”
“Well,” he said, “you sit next to me on the couch and I put my arm around you.”
I plopped myself down a few inches away from him. He draped an arm around me, then began to massage my shoulder, then drew me closer to him. I leaned into his sweater, hoping this would be the end of it. But he put his other arm around me and attempted to move into a hug position, his hands now fervently grasping and rubbing my back. I could almost feel his blood pressure rise, his muscles tense, the throbbing pulse beneath that tranquil California facade, and I didn’t even want to know what was going on in his pants. I leapt from the couch as if ejected from a cannon, and he apologized and apologized and somehow we got from there to the front door.
I never did locate those atlases. But after this evening, there was no longer any doubt that I was lost. I obviously had no idea how to be a single woman of a certain age, and I was about ready to give up on my approach so far. None of the men I had met in the preceding months was even a distant relative of The One. On the contrary, each had nudged me closer to waking up from my girlish dream. Realistically, the mating rituals of people in their twenties and thirties might never work for me at this point in life. Could I try something else now?
Through the pane in the front door, I watched William drive away down the street; actually, I made sure William did drive away down the street. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned away. There was a shifting in the rumpled nest of woolen blankets on the loveseat, the position from which my dachshund Beau monitored all comings and goings from the house. He poked his long, velvety nose out between the fringes of the afghan, an expectant look in his shining brown eyes. He’d known all along whom I would end up with in bed that night.
love in the time of baltimore
Like a jalopy sputtering to a halt, I had my last few backfires.
“I’m not really dating anymore,” I told Matt the carpenter when he called, but I met him for dinner in a Fells Point tavern anyway. “I have my friends,” I told him earnestly, “my family. My work. I’m busy, I’m happy. I’m starting to think of being single as a way of life, not a state of emergency, an urgent problem that has to be solved.”
Matt looked bemused. He told me many of the women in our age group he goes out with say the same thing. He thinks it’s the men who are really driven to pair up again, while women can make do with what they have left over from their original families.
He wasn’t the only person who told me this. One of the last guys I met for coffee, courtesy of an eleventh-hour, hope-springs-eternal online dating relapse, was a hatchet-faced cynic with the demeanor of a failed, embittered Catskills comedian. He listened to the beginning of my apologetic anti-dating speech, nodding sourly.
“Oh, let me guess,” he interrupted. “You’re very close to your children and your dog? And you have a warm, loving circle of friends? What a surprise!”
Of course now that I had really given up hope, romantic possibilities were coming out of the woodwork. Even my therapist, whom I had stopped seeing at her suggestion, tried to fix me up with a guy who turned out to be my friend Martha’s ex-husband. A mom at the school took me clubbing with her Italian hairdresser, Fabrizio: cute, suave, brusque in a Corleone-family way; I don’t think I was his type either. Our cursory attempt at fooling around at 3:00 a.m. was unsuccessful. Possibly he hadn’t had time to take his Viagra. Also, he had shaved his back hair and it was growing back, which was not a good thing.
A radio traffic announcer I met during the online-dating relapse asked me to meet him for a drink. He weighed between three and four hundred pounds, but not for long, he explained. Since the heart attacks, his doctor had him on a strict diet.
A man from Germantown, Maryland, addressed me frantically as I tried to get off the phone with him: “But what will I do about my driving lust?”
Even Matt, though apprised of my anti-romance stance, was not giving up completely. After a fun night at Martha’s fiftieth birthday party, he told me I was an “enchanting woman.” Geez. Suddenly my appeal was such that I couldn’t even walk into the Memphis airport without some born-again Christian defense contractor trying to buy me drinks.
One night, I had a serious craving for white clam pizza—a particular white clam pizza from a place called Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut, was what I had in mind, but I’d had good luck re-creating it at home over the years. I thought about it day and night: how I would make the crust with a little cornmeal, where I would get the clams, whether I would stick with garlic, parsley, and red pepper, or recklessly add Parmesan. I thought about the pizza constantly, but I did not make it. Jane doesn’t eat white clam pizza, and neither does Ken. Hayes was out of town. So . . . who would I make it for?
After about a w
eek of thinking about that pizza, I decided I didn’t need anybody else to serve it to. I made it just the way I’d been thinking of, too spicy for most people but perfect for me, and I sat down at my kitchen table and ate it all, with just a few bites slipped to the dachshund.
Single life would work just fine for me, I thought. Which was good, because my divorce was about to be final.
Though Crispin and I had been supposedly in the process of obtaining a divorce for about a year, there had been no rush as far as I was concerned. I had health insurance through his employer, and Vince was still receiving college tuition assistance. But Crispin had told me the preceding summer that his girlfriend’s Catholic family had problems with her dating a married man, and it was time to get the show on the road. Our divorce should be simple—we owned nothing in common, had no disagreements about custody or money, and had been living apart for almost two years.
In August I went to court and testified to our irreconcilable differences. By late September, the decree was on its way. I wrote Crispin an e-mail wishing him well, explaining that the judge had warned each of us not to “hire a hall” until the final paperwork was in hand. To my surprise he replied immediately with this P. G. Wodehouse quote:
His soul, as he walked, was a black turmoil of conflicting emotions. This woman had treated him in a way which would have made even a man with so low an opinion of the sex as the late Schopenhauer whistle incredulously. But though he scorned and loathed her, he was annoyed to discover that he loved her still. He would have liked to bounce a brick on Prudence Whittaker’s head, and yet, at the same time, he would have liked—rather better, as a matter of fact—to crush her to him and cover her face with burning kisses. The whole situation was very complex.
What the hell? The moment of divorce seemed a bizarre time to express such a sentiment. Or perhaps it was meant to be nostalgic; Crispin’s love had always been exactly like a combination of bouncing bricks and burning kisses. In any case, after staring wide-eyed at my laptop screen for a few minutes, I decided to take it as a tribute to our past—I couldn’t imagine what else to do.