by Faith Salie
God, grant me the serenity to accept being alone,
The courage to quite possibly be a single mother by choice,
And the wisdom to not get into another shitty marriage.
A few months later, I finally punctured my notion that were I faithful or patient enough, my boyfriend would pull himself together. I was lying on an acupuncture table when I realized it wasn’t about me. These words came out of my brain and floated above me:
I can’t change him.
Maybe a few more Al-Anon meetings would have gotten me there, but I like to think my liberation was ultimately conjured by pricks.
I Joined Club VIP Life
What does that even mean? I still don’t know. I found it by googling “NYC matchmaking.” I’m guessing the founder of Club VIP Life must have brainstormed over a bottle of pinot one night, jotted down any words that came to mind about wealthy, socially awkward older men who find spontaneous encounters to be inconvenient and threw them into a hat. Then she fished them out and assembled the words into “Club VIP Life,” like entrepreneurial Magnetic Poetry. Club VIP Life is “an introduction service” that, according to the website, is also “a way of life.”
Here’s their mission statement:
Our male clients have all achieved professional success in whatever they do: physicians, attorneys, CEO’s, entertainment industry professionals etc. with quality lifestyles. These men are leaders in their field looking for that special someone to share life’s pleasures with.
I was okay with the preposition hanging on for dear life at the end of the last sentence. I was less okay with the next part:
VIP LIFE attracts the most beautiful and sophisticated women interested in having a long-term relationship with dynamic and attractive men that have proven their success within the business community, and want to meet women of exceptional beauty, grace and substantive intellect.
Not only should it read “dynamic and attractive men WHO have proven their success,” but the whole thing has an antediluvian smack to it. It’s a matchmaking service for Men Who Work to meet Women Who Are Pretty. I was so appalled, I had to try it out. I told friends I was doing it so I could write about it, which is true. But the entire truth is that I couldn’t resist seeing if I was beautiful, sophisticated, and graceful enough to join da Club. Plus, as icing on the retrograde cake, membership for the ladies is complimentary.
I submitted my online application and got a call to come in. The two women who run it were funny, smart, and down-to-earth. When I met them in person, we had a rollicking good time. I tried to appear as substantively intellectual but fun-loving as possible. I tried to look young, too. I was thirty-nine, and I figured the sun was setting on my VIP-ness in the eyes of aging “professionals etc. with quality lifestyles.” I was audacious enough to tell the ladies I didn’t want to meet any men over forty-nine. By the time I left, I knew I’d ducked under the velvet rope. They were already throwing names back and forth to each other about men they wanted me to meet.
We started with Julian. The way the Club works is that the men get all the info on you, the Very Important Lady-Person, including a photo. The beautiful and sophisticated women are told only the first name of the man, his general area of proven success, and maybe one other tidbit. I knew Julian was “in real estate” and had “pretty eyes.” I was hopeful. Julian is a name that belongs to worldly—even foreign!—men.
Julian was foreign, in the way that people who are absolutely nothing like you seem to speak another language. At first I thought we might have a lot in common because we wear the same brand of jeans. I’d never met a straight man who wore Adriano Goldschmieds. I discovered the jeans thing when we spoke on the phone before our date. Make that our “meeting.” It was more like an appointment he wanted me to handle. He asked where I lived and informed me my neighborhood was convenient, because he had to pick up some AG jeans nearby. Attempting a soupçon of flirtation, I asked him to pick some up for me, too. “Every man for himself,” he replied, clearly a master of charm. He wanted to meet for lunch, so he could fit me into his jeans-collecting schedule.
He talked like a stoner surfer on the phone. He didn’t sound like my type, but I fantasized that maybe he had a sexy Owen Wilson vibe in person. I made lunch reservations; I even curled my hair, which minimally frizzed during my two-block walk in the rain. We met.
Julian was over fifty if a day. He did have pretty, light green eyes. But let’s put it this way: if Julian were Julia, he would have been bounced from Club VIP. However, I am not so very shallow that multisyllabic conversation can’t overcome a superficial deficiency. And technically, according to the way this Club worked, I was the beggar and he was the chooser. After he shooed the breadbasket away without checking to see if I’d want any, I launched a tête-à-tête offensive.
ME: So, how long have you lived in New York?
JULIAN: A few years.
ME: Do you like it?
JULIAN: It’s okay.
ME: Do you like to do New Yorky things—have you seen any theater?
JULIAN: I’ve seen a few plays…
ME: Oh, which ones? Anything good I should see?
JULIAN: …in my life. When I was a Cub Scout we had to see one, and then when I was in London I saw a play with that guy from Friends.
ME: Which one?
JULIAN: Ross.
Pause.
JULIAN: Oh, and I also saw that play about the French Revolution.
I spoke enough Julian by then to understand that he meant the musical Les Miserables. I also, at that moment, knew positively he wasn’t gay. I decided to keep it simple.
ME: What do you like to do?
JULIAN: I love Glenn Beck!
ME: Oh!
Pause.
ME: Why?
Pause.
JULIAN: I don’t talk politics.
Having delivered this in a tone that suggested I was trying to ensnare him in a debate about Middle East relations, he ushered in another round of silence.
I was like a conversation boxer staggering back to my corner, where I was filling up my spit bucket and running out of Vaseline.
Julian did not want coffee, tea, or dessert at the end of our carbohydrate-free lunch.
I took one quantum physics class in college. I didn’t grasp much of it, but I seem to recall that Einstein had a theory about time slowing down. It’s no theory, folks. It’s true. I glanced at Julian’s frozen watch every chance I could, my eyes begging its hands to move. I thought Rolexes sported second hands that swept, but Julian’s second hand was like a jammed Swiffer.
The dates with other “leaders in their field” were better. No chemistry, but at least we didn’t gum up the space-time continuum. My wont to interview is fairly irrepressible, so we never lacked for conversation, and by “conversation,” I mean I listened attentively. And we’d say chaste good-byes, never with any utterance on their parts of “I had a great time; I’d like to see you again.” I’d hear nothing and do that stupid thing where you think, I didn’t want to go out with you again, but why don’t you want to go out with ME again? Then, weeks later, I’d get a call from the Club ladies telling me that every gentleman thought we’d really hit it off and wanted more. The one exception was the lawyer doing pro bono work defending Gitmo prisoners. I’ll always wonder about him. Not so much why he didn’t want a second date but why someone devoted to habeas corpus petitions found himself drawn to the Club VIP Life lifestyle.
I resigned membership before I even heard of John. I didn’t see it panning out, and I was a Very Impatient Person. But I got what I wanted out of it. Pathetic reassurance as I approached forty. And material, I got material.
The genetic material was to come.
I Joined Gay Date
Even my impotent attempt at using an old-school matchmaking service did not drive me to online dating. I preferred a more bespoke route to my beloved. And I found it through Gay Date.
My GBF (gay best friend), Manfred, was lunching with Jo
hn’s GBF, Rob, at Toast in West Hollywood. Please follow: Manfred and Rob were longtime friends, having dated in college. I knew Manfred from his grad school stint at my undergrad; I knew Rob from show biz. John knew Rob from biz, as well, and he’d met Manfred when they were both groomsmen in Rob’s wedding. Apparently, wearing matching paisley yarmulkes is quite a bonding experience.
So anyway, everyone knew one another except John and I, who both lived in Manhattan. Manfred and Rob, being exceptional GBFs, spent their lunch bemoaning John’s and my respective relationship statuses. A giant love lightbulb went off, and they decided to set us up. Manfred flew to New York and took me to high tea in Gramercy Park. Manfred is a character from another era, very Whartonian, so it was fitting that, at a table by the garden in Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon, he described to me John’s “wounded soldier eyes.” His fluency in the classics, the jaunty angle of his wedding yarmulke. Oh, he waxed on about this John fellow. I was sold—oversold even. I was high on Rooibos. I was so keen that I cut him off with my mouth full of smoked salmon finger sandwich sans crust. “Manfred, I’m in. Let’s make this happen.”
Introductions arrived via e-mail; John responded first with gentlemanly alacrity, like within two hours, in a note I read while Stairmastering.
Faith,
Great to meet you, virtually. I should let you know that I pay Rob and Manfred handsomely to speak well of me—I am pleased to see they have upheld their end, and now I hope I can live up to their billing!
Would be wonderful to meet in person. Please let me know how best to be in touch. I look forward to connecting!
Hope you’re having a great day,
John S.
A hetero not afraid to use an exclamation point!! I thought. I essayed a cheeky reply:
You need a new agent: I pay those boys only AFTER any meetings to see if they really deliver. It’s all about the back end, my friend. I thought you’d know this—aren’t you supposed to be the business guy?
“John S.” continued with his strategy of Seduction by Self-Deprecation:
Yes, I am a business guy, but I never said I was good ;-)
We agreed on a date. He suggested the place.
For Sunday, how about the Bar at the Mark Hotel?
I exercised my strategy of Seduction by Demureness:
Sure, never been, even though I’ve walked by it a million times on the way to my fertility doctor. I guess my mind was on other things…like my FSH levels.
I was testing him. If the word fertility were going to be a boner killer, I wanted it to slay an e-mail boner, not an in-person boner. He didn’t react to this bread crumb, which I took to mean he was totally down with my FSH levels possibly being high.
I went to see an off-Broadway matinee of The Glass Menagerie that June afternoon and left it with high hopes about my own Gentleman Caller. I trusted the curation of Gay Date. It also happened to be the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and I passed its detritus on the taxi ride through Central Park to the Mark as my manicure was drying. To this day I feel nostalgic when I see a drunk dude with the PR flag painted on his face.
Over three hours, I consumed two and a half glasses of wine and covered a hundred topics. Breezy, first-date ones, like both of our divorces and our dead parents and Obama. By then, I was too okay with being single to play it safe. And, by the way, did he want kids? Because I did, and soon. The wounded soldier eyes didn’t flinch.
At the end of the night, I noted two novel things: John didn’t care about finishing his drink, and time flew. I wasn’t thinking I wanted his Ashkenazi sperm. I was thinking I wanted him to kiss me. He did.
The next morning, I thanked Manfred and Rob. Sixteen months later, they were our best men.
After we got married, Manfred and his partner, Peter, threw us a gorgeous wedding party at their Bel Air manse. They hired a shuttle service to ferry guests across the wild terrain of Beverly Glen Boulevard and up the impressive driveway. A sign on the passenger’s seat at the front of the valet van read, RESERVED FOR THE ELDERLY AND PREGNANT.
I sat there, because I was both.
And when my son, Augustus, was born, I received an e-mail from Danny. It read:
JSAP = SUCCESS!!!!!!
I was spread-eagle, just hanging out with my OB in her office, when we both noticed a very dark and scary mole on my inner thigh. I have a ton of moles. If that’s gross, I can’t help it. They’re mostly flat and leave me looking like a pale Chips Ahoy cookie, but there are a couple that stick out and wobble on my midriff. My son discovered one, and after playing with it like it was a loose tooth that needed to be wiggled off, I had to take it away and distract him with a better toy, which happened to be the popener on our refrigerator. The popener is a magnet of Pope Francis that also opens beer bottles. It is arguably a choking hazard (con), but it is not attached to my body (big pro).
Anyway, there we were, Dr. Brownstein and I, seeing this mole with the fatally fuzzy boundaries that skin cancer brochures warn you about, and she said, “Faith? You really should have that looked at.” Licked at was more like it: it turned out to be dark chocolate (65%) that smeared as soon as I touched it. This was more embarrassing than the time I discovered melted chocolate in my belly button while I was doing ab work, because no one at the gym saw me scoop that out.
I love chocolate, and when I discovered that the man with whom I was falling in love loved chocolate as much as I do, my notion of us as beshert was confirmed in a profound and creamy way. (“Beshert,” by the way, is one of those Yiddish words that I can drop now with casual chutzpah since marrying a Jew. This new lexicon is my bounty for allowing that bloodthirsty Tribe to mutilate my son’s foreskin. For a people who really need to prioritize self-perpetuation, you’d think they’d stop monkeying around down there.) And when we were first dating, John gave me a bag of truffles from Krön Chocolatier on the Upper East Side. The place is gone now, but for a time it stood like a shimmering chocolate Brigadoon with an umlaut. These truffles were exquisite: dark but not too, with the faintest aftertaste of coffee.
Just as that great American Lance Armstrong declared, “It’s not about the bike,” so is my story not about the chocolate. For Lance, it was really about doping and narcissism; for me, it’s really about love. And saying, “I love you.” Because, you see, once John gave me that bag of Krön truffles, I decided that I wouldn’t finish the bag until he told me he loved me. First. He had to say it first.
Before I explain why John had to tell me he loved me before I would ever, EVER utter those words to him, let me clarify that this truffle thing is not a metaphor. Holding off on devouring the final truffle became a Venn diagram of Catholic self-denial overlapping superstition, with a silky center. As if I could will him to say it by wielding cacao. The bag had originally looked pretty full, a fullness commensurate with my confidence/extreme hope that I would soon hear “I love you,” so I’d only jokingly promised myself I wouldn’t finish the chocolate until I did hear it. But the days turned into weeks turned into months, and the truffles diminished in bites and nibbles. It wasn’t a joke anymore.
I knew I was falling in love with John—perhaps I was already firmly in love with him—but I was waiting for him to announce his love for me in order to provide the safety net that would invite me to complete the heart’s greatest bungee jump.
I can remember the moment every boy and every man told me he loved me. With Brenden, it was on a balcony of a Daytona Beach hotel during Spring Break. I was sixteen, and he held my face in his hands, and it was all I ever wanted. (Don’t think for two seconds that I was allowed to go on Spring Break without my parents. My grandmother lived blocks away, and I headed back to the house where my mother grew up by 11 p.m., intoxicated but utterly sober, heart melted but perm stiffened by the sea air.) Tim L. told me he loved me as I sat behind the wheel of my red convertible while we were stopped, waiting for a train to pass. I remember the look on his face as he said it—the words tumbled out of his mouth with equal parts intensity and surprise. Jas
on whispered it in bed, in his Harvard dorm room overlooking the yard of Eliot House, while we were listening to Madama Butterfly. I recognize that the whole previous sentence reads like Mad Libs: Pretentious Edition. Andrew’s British baritone purred it by the fireplace in my tiny flat above High Street in Oxford not long after I’d experienced my one and only uncircumcised willy. (Which belonged to him. It would be weird if the willy belonged to some other bloke and then Andrew said he loved me.) Trip told me while we were in his Jacuzzi, where I could envy his legs, which were much leaner than mine and glistened when he shaved them for triathlons. Then there was Tim R., who told me he loved me while he was on top of me on the purple sofa sectional in the furnished apartment I rented when I moved to New York while I was still married. Even though this filled my depleted heart, I didn’t say it right back to him, because I respected the sanctity of my marriage enough not to say “I love you” immediately to my extramarital lover. And, sort of finally, after Tim Two and before Husband Two came Albert (which is not his real name since do you seriously know anyone named Albert), who told me he loved me when I was either on top of him or under him.
If you told me you loved me, and your name is missing from this list, then I am a horrible person, and I apologize, but thank you for reading this.
All those lads told me they loved me first. Which is just how I prefer it. Don’t you? Learning that a man loves you—when you know you love him back and he’s not creeping you out—is beyond merely flattering; it feels like an acceptance of who you are and his promise to embrace everything you want to be. Okay, sure, we know this isn’t always (or even often) true: people can say they love each other but act like gaping a-holes, and a declaration of love is not always (or even often) a commitment to a future. But in that moment—that moment that can only ever happen once—when you first make yourselves totally vulnerable and create what just, against all odds, might be an eternal pact, the exchange of “I love you” feels like the most important gift. A gift that is much better received than given, if you ask me.