Laurie knew she was less tough than Maddy Levine, more vulnerable. They were both fifty-three, had gone to Highland Park High School together. Maddy had been through a rough divorce and brought up her two daughters mostly on her own. Sleeping with men was no big thing for Maddy, while Laurie could never think of sex as an insignificant act. Maddy saw the world as a place to do business, to acquire what advantages for herself she could; Laurie felt there was something important in life that she had missed out on and for which she was still searching.
What Laurie Cohen had missed out on, specifically, was what Maddy called a “relationship.” She had never lived with a man, nor had any man ever asked her to marry him. She was, she knew, not unattractive. Small, slender, a brunette, she dressed carefully, her skin had held up, she felt herself still in the game—if not, like Maddy, on the attack. Friends fixed her up, men still occasionally asked her out. But at fifty-three she was now up to going out mainly with divorced men and widowers. Months went by when she didn’t go out with a man at all. Which was why she was thinking about JDate. Why not, she thought, give it a try?
Laurie went online. She set out her date of birth (2-9-60), height (5'3"), weight (115), hair color, marital status, synagogue attendance (conservative, infrequent), interests (reading, jogging, design), and the rest of it; she included a picture of herself that was only six years old.
Soon enough men sent emails making their case. One claimed to be the last master Jewish plumber in the midwest. Two siding salesmen wrote, one to tell her that her photograph reminded him of his mother, whom he had lost earlier this year; the other to ask if she had any interest in extraterrestrial life. Three different dentists replied, one of whom loved folk singing, another still played in a rock band on weekends, as did a guy who had recently quit his job as a CPA to return, at sixty-four, to do graduate work in communications. A man named Harry Rubin wrote to report that he had made his “pile” in the mail-order business and, though now eighty-three and long retired—he included a photograph of himself in aviator glasses and a tank top—assured her he was still “sexually very active.”
Laurie had been teaching grammar school, fifth grade, at the Dr. Bessie Rhodes School in Skokie since graduating from National Louis University in the Loop. She enjoyed the kids, though in truth she had tired of the regular interference of their parents, many of them Russian émigrés and east Indians. Having been told that education is the key to success in America, parents regularly called or came in when their kids didn’t get all A’s.
A good job for a spinster, teaching, Laurie had begun to think. Hateful word, spinster, but this might be her fate, to live and die alone. She knew that her father, a successful urologist, had been disappointed she never married. Henry Cohen hadn’t any social or even financial ambitions for his only child, to whom he expected to leave several million dollars, but, as he once told her, he wished she would find the right man, a companion in life and someone who would watch out for her. He wished to live to see her sail into safe harbor. That was the phrase he used, “safe harbor.” Well, the truth was, Laurie, in her fifties, hadn’t yet come close even to sighting land.
The one mildly interesting response to her JDate enrollment arrived two or so weeks later. A man in Milwaukee, fifty-eight years old, a pharmacist at a Walgreen’s there, wanted to be in contact with her. He was a bachelor and lived in a condo along Lake Michigan near the Milwaukee Art Museum. He would be willing to drive to Chicago, a less than two-hour trip, if she were interested in meeting him. His name was Howard Klein.
He signed his emails “Howie,” and seemed cordial enough generally. He told her he was a big sports fan, and joked that his being a Green Bay Packers fan and her coming from Chicago, home of the Bears, might make any relationship between them a little like that between Romeo and Juliet, though he hoped with a happier ending. He told her that he thought of himself as a serious reader, though he rarely read fiction, mostly biographies of scientists and books about World War II. He mentioned that he was a terrible cook and ate most of his meals out, or else brought food in, and loved Chinese, which he called “the food of our people, meaning of course the Jews.”
In Laurie’s emails to him she brought up the joys and frustrations of teaching. She mentioned that her father was a Bears fan but not so rabid a one as to think her exchanging emails with Howie would constitute a betrayal. She brought up her addiction to running and said that unlike him she read fiction almost exclusively, favoring nineteenth-century novels. She, too, was mad about Chinese food, and should he ever come to Chicago, she would be pleased to take him to Emperor’s Choice, her favorite restaurant in Chinatown.
Sex never came up in these emails. Nor was it even hinted at, which Laurie found a relief. Laurie had slept with three men—make that two men and a boy. The boy was Nathan Engel, with whom she went out her senior year at Highland Park High. When she thought about it later, she had sex with Nathan almost out of boredom. They had been a couple for five months, and there was nothing else for them to do, nowhere else to go. They had sex in the backseat of Nathan’s father’s Mercedes, and it was awkward, quick, and, as Laurie thought back on it, vaguely gross.
As an adult, she had had two affairs, if they could be called that. One was with a fellow teacher, when she was in her late twenties, and lasted roughly four months, when he came to announce to her that he was returning to Seattle where he was planning to marry a woman he knew in college. The second was with a man she met at a dinner party given by Maddy and Ben Levine. He turned out to be married, the pure type of the narcissist, or so she thought, less interested in pleasing her than in demonstrating that his power of seducing women was still intact. She saw him five, maybe six times. The sex in both cases had been less than thrilling. No beams of light, no earthquakes.
Laurie sometimes wondered if she was someone low in libido, or possibly even frigid. She even considered that she might be a lesbian, though not for long, for she often found herself looking at attractive men and fantasizing going off to bed with them. She preferred to think that her problem was that she hadn’t met the right man and that, if she kept up her standard and was patient, he would eventually turn up.
When Howie Klein came to take her out to dinner in Chicago, Laurie, on meeting him in the lobby of her Sheridan Road apartment building, was disappointed. He had a slight paunch. His light brown hair was thin and substantially receded, and he was dressed in a blue blazer and khaki trousers and scuffed loafers. He drove a light blue Prius. He talked about the good mileage he was getting in it nearly halfway to Chinatown. He was still explaining how hybrid engines worked as they pulled into the parking lot on Wentworth Avenue off Cermak Road. Laurie thought her mascara might be running with boredom. JDate, she thought, schlubs and losers.
The Emperor’s Choice wasn’t crowded; people occupied only five of its fifteen or so tables. On the walls were elegant imperial robes in large glass frames. At a small bar near the entrance the owner, who recognized Laurie with a nod, was watching a White Sox game on an old television set.
“The dismalness of this place bodes good food,” Howie said.
He let Laurie order for both of them: hot-and-sour soup, Mongolian beef, Singapore noodles, Kung-pao chicken. He suggested Tsingtao beers.
“Forgive my going on so long about my car,” he said. “I know I talked too much. Truth is, I’m nervous. I’ve had a few JDate exchanges online, but this is the first actual meeting I’ve had.”
“Mine, too,” said Laurie.
Laurie told him that her father was a physician, that she was an only child. She told him that she had never been engaged, and regretted being too old to have children, but had by now learned to live with it. She told him that she loved Chicago, had lived here all her life, and had no longing to end her days in Florida, Arizona, or any of the other, as she said her father called them, “elephant graveyards.” She told him that she lived a fairly quiet social life, meeting a few
women friends for dinners and a movie afterward and that she hadn’t been in a “relationship” with a man for a long while, without specifying how long. She said nothing about how comfortably off her father had left her.
Howie told her that his father, an immigrant from Romania, had a small grocery store in Milwaukee. His mother died when he was sixteen. He had two sisters, Evelyn and Judy, both married, one with two children, the other with three. He had gone to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He said nothing about women or his social life. He did tell her that he had the world’s simplest resume; he had worked only at Walgreen’s since finishing college.
“There’s something else I should tell you,” Howie said, “and this is that as I approach sixty I have the haunting feeling that I blew it. I’m starting to feel I missed out on life, or at least on its two most important things.”
“Which are?” Laurie asked.
“Family and interesting work. I wish I’d had the nerve to aim for something higher in life than I did. Becoming a pharmacist was a step up for a grocer’s son. But I could’ve done better. I was good at school. I should have gone to med school, maybe become a surgeon. When I see the jerks who have become physicians, and as a pharmacist I deal with these guys every day, I could kick myself. I should’ve had more guts.”
“And family?”
“I wish I’d had kids. They’d’ve given me a stake in the future that’s missing from my life. But you can’t have kids without a wife, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Doofus that I was in my twenties and thirties I decided that I preferred my freedom to marriage. Thing is, I didn’t do all that much with that freedom. Didn’t have lots of love affairs, didn’t travel to Africa or the Orient, didn’t live in Paris or in Tuscany. All I did, I see now, was fail to commit myself.”
“It’s not too late,” Laurie said. “A younger woman could give you children.”
“I suppose she could,” he said, “but I doubt she could also give me conversation. The other thing is, why would a younger woman be interested in me. Besides, I don’t want to be one of those guys playing with his kids in the sandbox at sixty-three, or yelling at little league umps at seventy-two. No, the time for kids for me is over.”
“Which leaves you where?”
“Which leaves me kind of baffled? But I didn’t mean to start whining. Forgive me.”
“You weren’t whining,” Laurie said. “I’d call it a realistic appraisal of your situation. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Your situation is better, I hope,” Howie said.
“Well, it’s different,” she said.
Fortunately she was spared going into details on the subject, for the hot-and-sour soup arrived.
They walked around Chinatown after dinner. Howie offered to buy her an exotic plant, a guzmania, with a red stalk, a souvenir of the evening, he said. But she said that her apartment was a place where plants went to die; she had a black instead of a green thumb, thanks anyway.
On the way back to her apartment, Howie remarked on the Chicago skyline. She told him that she had thought of moving downtown, in effect moving into that wonderful skyline, but that it would put her too far away from her school. She didn’t go to the theater much, but she loved the ballet and modern dance. He said that he knew nothing about ballet, adding that maybe someday she could introduce him to it. She didn’t respond.
When they arrived at Laurie’s building at Sheridan and Thorndale, she kissed his cheek in a grazing way and said she enjoyed their time together. She didn’t invite him up to her apartment.
“I enjoyed it, too,” Howie said, as she closed the door of the Prius and turned to go into her building.
Later that evening, Laurie thought she had been wrong not to have invited Howie Klein up. He had driven all the way from Milwaukee. Not that she had the least intention of any intimacy between them after a single meeting. Perish the thought. But simple courtesy called for it.
In bed that night, Laurie couldn’t help thinking of Howie Klein’s telling her that he “blew it.” Had she, too, she wondered, blown it? Had she let life slip by, missing out on the central things? She used to tell herself that her young students were her children, but that of course was nonsense; they were just passing through her classroom. Many of them at term’s end were probably glad to be done with her, for she was known as a fairly strict disciplinarian, insisting on careful spelling and trying to teach grammar to eleven-year-olds.
Laurie was critical, maybe hypercritical, about men, but she couldn’t help that. She recalled how earlier that evening she had rejected Howie Klein at first sight. No flair—that had been her first judgment. She might like to think she had high standards, but wasn’t such behavior really rather shallow? Was she superficial? A snob? In any case, her critical sense, her high standard, or whatever it was, wasn’t working; it hadn’t improved her chances of finding a man she could love and trust and could live with in intimacy.
While not exactly rude, Laurie’s treatment of Howie Klein was brusque, a word her mother often used to criticize her behavior as a girl. She regretted it, but didn’t see that there was much at this point to be done about it.
When she woke the next morning, an email from Howie Klein was on her smart phone:
hi Laurie, sorry things didn’t work out last night. hope I didn’t bore you too much with my car talk and, even worse, my self-pity. I’m usually better than that, or at least I think I am. anyhow apologies. it was nice meeting you, and I’m glad to know about emperor’s choice, which I hope to return to someday. meanwhile, best of luck in finding someone worthy of you. best wishes, howie
Laurie felt herself moved by this, even though she had a thing about people who didn’t bother to use capital letters in their emails. She could of course ignore it, not answer and just forget about it. That, though, didn’t feel right. She felt she had already been cold enough to Howie Klein.
She tapped out the following answer:
Dear Howie,
No apologies necessary. I suspect we were both a little nervous last night. Why not? Online dating, after all, is more than a touch artificial. But I do want you to know that I enjoyed myself in your company, and if you wish to meet again, I’m up for it. Weekends are best for me.
Cordially, Laurie.
A mistake? She wasn’t sure as she clicked the send button.
They arranged to meet on a Sunday, for brunch. Laurie thought a daytime meeting best, less entangling, less complicated somehow. This time when Howie rang from the desk in Laurie’s lobby, she invited him up.
“Spectacular view,” he said, as he looked out the large windows of the living room of her sixteenth-floor apartment that faced the lake and downtown Chicago to the south. “And you’ve furnished the place elegantly.”
“Thank you, Howie,” she said, suddenly aware that this was the first time she had called him by his name. Howie, a boy’s name, she thought, but not yet unseemly for a man his age. He looked like a Howie. In his seventies, he may have to start calling himself Howard, but for now Howie still worked.
“I thought we’d go to a place called The Bagel for brunch. Lots of older Jews there, but good food of the kind we both grew up on. If you like, you can leave your car with the doorman, and I’ll drive.”
As soon as they arrived at The Bagel, Laurie felt that it had been a bad choice. She expected an older clientele, but not so many older women on walkers. Sad old men in running suits sat before enormous salami omelets. At one point an overweight elderly woman rolled in on a complicated motorized chair; tubes in her nose were connected to a small oxygen tank.
“I didn’t expect so dilapidated a crowd,” Laurie said once they were seated in a booth toward the rear of the restaurant.
“Not many sprung chickens, as an immigrant friend of my mother’s used to say. Don’t worry about it. These people make me feel young.”
Laurie ordered orang
e juice, an egg-white omelet with mushrooms and tomatoes, whole-wheat unbuttered toast. Howie ordered a bowl of kreplach soup and a corned-beef sandwich on an onion roll.
“I take it you don’t go in for healthy eating,” Laurie said.
“I have no interest in getting to the age of ninety-five,” Howie said, “so that someone can bring me to lunch here on a stretcher. As a pharmacist I see so many people hungry for longer life. Where long life is concerned, truth to tell, I’m not all that hungry.”
“How do you suppose that is?” Laurie asked.
“I could tell you that Isaac Newton’s only sensuous pleasure in life was in roasted meats, and that if they were good enough for Newton they are certainly good enough for me. I could also tell you that I believe in living for the moment, but you wouldn’t believe it, and neither do I. What I do believe is that it is probably a mistake to deny yourself small pleasures in a life that is fairly perilous to begin with. I mean I could go for my next annual physical and learn that I have three cancers, the beginning of Alzheimer’s, and all the signs of forthcoming ALS. If I did, after my initial disappointment, one of my first thoughts would be, damn, I should have had the kreplach and the corned-beef sandwich on an onion roll that morning I went to brunch with Laurie Cohen.”
Laurie, laughing, said, “I suppose that is an original if not exactly healthy point of view.”
“I might feel differently if I knew people were depending on me,” Howie said. “Since no one is, hey, bring on the rich food. But why do you eat so carefully? Why do you jog every day? What are you staying in shape for? I’m sure you’ve asked yourself these questions.”
Frozen in Time Page 30