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Six months after their wedding, Warren and Louise threw a party, where Warren announced they were planning to buy a country house. Louise was standing next to him as if he'd just announced a run for the presidency, and like many a political spouse, she didn't seem overjoyed. But unlike many a political spouse, she was also wearing a fabulous pair of Maud Frizons. Louise had an elusive quality, which along with her beautiful face, was a great part of her appeal to Warren. Once, when I interviewed her for a magazine article, she confided that she'd lived as a mistress to a famous Western artist and had ended her brief marriage by jumping overboard during a sailing trip.

“Did you know that Louise ended her first marriage by jumping overboard?” I mentioned to Warren, who'd forgotten that Louise had been married. “Doesn't that concern you just a little?”

It didn't. Warren was so totally besotted that when Louise expressed a desire to move back to L.A. to pursue her singing career, he rented a house for her on the aptly named Wonderland Avenue. “I don't think she's going to come back,” I told Woody, who accused me of being overly cynical. “Of course, she is,” he said. “She's a pal.”

After two years of marriage, Louise essentially jumped overboard again, leaving Warren and her Maud Frizon shoes behind. Technically, it was Warren who called it quits; he didn't want an aspiring rock singer as a wife, especially one who was living on Wonderland Avenue when he was on West 66th Street. With Woody at his side, Warren flew to the Dominican Republic to get a quickie divorce. They played poker on the plane. Woody, a brilliant card player, for once let Warren win. Later, I helped Warren pack up Louise's belongings. When he went into another room to answer the phone, I tried on a pair of her Maud Frizons. I wish I could report that they fit perfectly and that out of the ruins of Warren's marriage, I inherited a fabulous shoe collection. But that only happens in fairy tales.

The Blahnik-Puma Wedding

A
fter Woody and I split up, I went on a number of blind dates, mainly with neurologists who had already been married and divorced several times. I don't remember how I got on the neurology dating circuit. I'm as interested in the human brain as anyone, but I'm also smart enough to know that someone who's been divorced multiple times is not necessarily great husband material. When a friend fixed me up with an art curator, I was happy to move on to something different. The curator had never been married and by the end of our lunch date I realized why. He told me I looked exactly like “a Modigliani” and then went on to explain that the model was the artist's mistress—Jeanne Hébuterne, who'd jumped out a window, killing herself and her unborn child.

“You really should have stopped at the ‘You look like a Modigliani' part,” I said.

“Why? I think it's very romantic,” he said. “She killed herself a day after he died. Her headstone reads, ‘Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.' ”

“Check, please.”

By the time Warren asked if I wanted to go on a date with an old friend from his high school football team, I was skeptical.

“What does he do?” I wanted to know.

“Finance,” Warren said.

“What kind?” Warren wasn't sure. He was incredibly obtuse when it came to business because he rarely had to think about it.

He and the high school football player, whose name was Lee, had recently run into each other at a wedding, where they began reminiscing about Warren's star turn as the lead singer of their school's rock group. Apparently, he'd garnered legions of teenage groupies who treated him like a god. Having missed Warren's traumatic descent from Mount Olympus, Lee still thought of him as the Deity of Dating and figured he'd have a little black book chock-full of names. The only suitable name was mine.

“I'm feeling a little guilty,” Warren confessed.

“Why? Because the guy's a loser?”

“No, because I'm being disloyal to Woody.”

“That's crazy. Woody and I are getting along better than ever, and he doesn't even mind that I broke up with him.”

“He told me he broke up with you.”

“Excuse me, but who walked out of the apartment?
Me!
”

“Yeah, but he said he was going to ask you to leave.”

“Okay, I'm going on the date.”

Lee showed up at my door in a Tyrolean ski sweater and patent-leather Puma sneakers. Who wore patent-leather sneakers? In bright red? Presuming you'd ever want such hideous things, where would you even find them? Over a Mexican dinner on Columbus Avenue, Lee explained that the sneakers were very rare and could be found only in special stores in Europe. The reason he knew this was that in between college and business school he'd worked for Puma, a German sports company that had previously been Dassler Brothers Shoes. Jesse Owens, the African American sprinter, had worn a pair of their running spikes in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics when he won his four gold medals. After a famous feud that divided the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach—Lee actually knew how to pronounce it—brothers Rudi and Adi Dassler, who'd been members of the Nazi Party, split up the company.

“Adidas was named for Adi,” Lee explained, “and Puma for Rudi.”

“Puma sounds nothing like Rudi,” I said.

“Maybe he named it after a puma because the cat is so fast.”

“Maybe.” I was getting a little tired of Adi and Rudi and debated having a second margarita, but since he'd only ordered one beer, I didn't want him to think I was a lush.

“So, what kind of banking do you do?” I asked.

“Technology. Computers, software, things like that.”

Except for HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey,
I'd never given computers a second thought. Who cared about them? Sensing he wasn't scoring big on the technology front, he moved on to sports, explaining that he played tennis, had founded a ski camp with his uncle in the Austrian Alps (hence the Tyrolean sweater), and had been on the football, baseball, and swim teams in high school.

“What did you major in?” I expected him to say “accounting” or “discus throwing” but he surprised me.

“Philosophy.”

“
Really?”

“Yeah, I like Heraclitus a lot. ‘You cannot step twice into the same stream.'”

“Why not?”

“Because everything changes and nothing remains still.”

I had a feeling he'd used that line before. After he paid the check, he walked me back to my apartment and a funny thing happened. Despite the red Pumas, we fell neatly into step, as if we'd been walking side by side for decades. Suddenly, I heard a voice whisper,
You will marry this man,
and I thought,
Marry the man? I don't even want to go on another date with him
.

When I got home, I called Warren and said, “He knows nothing about movies and doesn't make me laugh. And he wore red Pumas! If he calls and asks how things went, don't encourage him.”

Lee called several days later and invited me to brunch. I agreed because we were destined to marry and my previous plans had fallen through. This time he wore a different Tyrolean sweater, in white, and matching Pumas. At brunch I noticed that he had a dazzling smile, a great head of brown hair, and a freckle beneath one of his dark brown eyes. It was adorable, but a cute freckle couldn't compensate for having nothing in common.

I was then writing full-time for
New York
magazine,
and the publicity director, who'd spotted us at brunch, came over to me the next day and asked, “Who was that handsome guy?” I later found out that he reminded her of her husband. So she was slightly biased, but since I thought she was smart and stylish, I decided to invite Lee over to dinner. Also, I'd just completed a cover story, “Mommy Only,” about women whose biological clocks were running out and were turning to male friends or sperm banks to have babies. These women were among the early pioneers, and while I admired them for taking control of their lives, I didn't want to be in their shoes.

Though I'd never made anything more complicated than spaghetti and a tuna sandwich, I bought the new
Silver Palate Cookbook
and picked chicken Marbella. Everyone was making it, and if they weren't making it, they were talking about it. It involved prunes and dates and lots of chopping. It also unfortunately involved a chicken, which in its uncooked state was more of an anatomy lesson than I'd bargained for. After getting over my initial revulsion, I marinated it using rubber gloves so I didn't actually have to touch it and then placed it in the refrigerator overnight. The next day we had a blizzard, which made me think of Bumpa's funeral, which of course made me think of Bumpa and his love of cooking. The storm paralyzed the city. The buses and subways weren't running. There were no cabs on the street. Lee, nevertheless, trudged twenty-two blocks to see me. He was wearing special snow boots from Innsbruck and a gigantic insulated coat from Stowe, Vermont, where he'd gone skiing in minus-8-degree weather. Officials were giving them out to people so they wouldn't freeze to death on the chairlift. He'd kept his because you never know when you might need a chairlift coat when it dropped to minus-8 degrees on the subway.

I'd built a fire but had forgotten to open the flue. Lee arrived to find the apartment filled with smoke, the chicken Marbella burnt to a crisp in the oven. He fixed the fire and ate the blackened chicken, which he said was the best he'd ever tasted and this was way before blackened chipotle chicken came into vogue. Could I imagine Woody or Warren trekking through a snowstorm? Would they lie and tell me burnt chicken was delicious? Never! And to make things really perfect, Lee, like Bumpa, loved to cook. I'd never have to make chicken Marbella again, or blackened chipotle chicken. If my luck held out, I'd never again have to touch a chicken.

Lee's friends described him as “very grounded,” so imagine my surprise when on our fourth date I found myself 3,000 feet in the air with him. He had just received his glider pilot's license and I was his first passenger. “You must really be desperate for a boyfriend,” Nancy said when I told her. It takes a certain amount of trust to sit in the front of a cockpit while someone flies the plane from the backseat. Yes, the sky is beautiful; yes, you're riding thermals with the birds, but your life is in someone else's hands. At first I was terrified, and then after I surrendered control, it became exhilarating and romantic, like the scene in the remake of
The
Thomas Crown Affair.
Lee had both feet on the ground while airborne. It was like being with an astronaut.

Afterward, I went back to his Upper West Side apartment, which was decorated in typical straight-guy style: brown and rust color scheme, gigantic modular sofa, huge entertainment unit, and bare dingy walls. While he made dinner, I repaid him for the glorious day by snooping in his bedroom closet. There's really no excuse, but to say that I'd have been happier if I'd found my missing toes pickled in a jar is not an overstatement. There, jammed in with his suits, ties, and, yes, the chairlift coat, were boxes upon boxes of Puma sneakers. He must have had every model ever made, even those dating back to the Nazi era. Though I was trying to be as quiet as I could, you can only open and close so many shoe boxes in a shoe box–size apartment without someone hearing you.

“What are you doing?” Lee asked when he found me in his closet, hiding behind the chairlift coat, sneakers scattered all over the place.

I thought of the scene in
The Great Gatsby,
when Gatsby begins throwing all his shirts around and Daisy, crying, says, “It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”

“It makes me sad because I've never seen so—so many sneakers,” I said. And then of course I had to add, “and I think it's very weird.”

“Weird is you snooping in my closet,” Lee said. “The sneakers are unique and very collectible.”

“But they're taking up too much space.”

“Why do you care?”

I didn't tell him that if we ever moved in together I'd have no room for my clothes and shoes. Maybe that was his strategy. He was holding on to the Puma sneakers because he was clinging to his single lifestyle. He was commitment phobic. Didn't he tell me on our very first date that pumas are very fast and agile cats? Obviously, the sneakers represented Lee's arrested development and his desire to flee relationships. I also remembered him telling me that one of his favorite TV shows had been
T.H.E. Cat
, which starred Robert Loggia as a retired master jewel thief who worked as a bodyguard out of his friend's café—El Casa del Gato. (Translation: “House of the Cat.”) I now feared that Lee, despite our predetermined wedding, would select the perfect Puma sneakers from his vast collection and sprint out of my life faster than Jesse Owens.

Lee stuck around, and two years later, we bought Warren's two-bedroom apartment in Lincoln Center, where Warren had once lived his fairy-tale life with Louise. It wasn't a great apartment, but I had fond memories of Louise's Maud Frizon shoe closet, which, sadly, became Lee's Puma den. Though the sneakers had made the move with us, we gave the rust modular couch to Woody, recently married to a lovely woman who worked in book publishing. They'd eloped to London, gypping us out of a wedding, but we threw them an engagement party in our apartment, which gave people the opportunity to ask, “Hey, didn't Warren used to live here?” and “Doesn't Woody's wife think it's weird you two are still friends?” (For the record, Woody's wife and I ultimately became friends too.)