Dating Big Bird (5 page)

Married five years
.

One Pickle
.

I had only three close female friends left who were single and childless—Francine, a friend from Michigan who was now a high-school English teacher in Los Angeles; Jana, a fellow copy writer from Young & Rubicam I’d bonded with my first day there; and Renee, my best friend at work—four now, if you counted Amy. So since she was the only one who wanted children, her appearance, or reappearance, was rather fortuitous, not to mention comforting, given the eerie similarity of our Familial Infant Envy Disorder pathologies.

In the weeks between the time Amy and I had run into each other, I found myself worrying about our upcoming dinner—not because I was nervous but because I was afraid of disappointment. I’d felt such a spark, such a rush of instant camaraderie when we’d started talking—a kindred spirit, someone who understood that the raging lunacy of Familial Infant Envy Disorder wasn’t really raging lunacy at all but merely the visible manifestation of our normal natural biological urges to procreate and to connect with someone outside of ourselves. While my other friends—those with children and without—and even my sister—accepted this part of my personality and didn’t attempt to talk me out of it (wanting to mother was a positive urge, after all, unlike, say, wanting to snort heroin), I never mistook their acceptance for true understanding. Until Amy—until that moment on the sidewalk when she tried to lie about her niece being her daughter and we both came clean, finishing each other’s sentences in the process—I’d always felt more than a little bit crazy.

In the three weeks before our dinner date, I tried to convince
myself that people did change—especially after seventeen years. After all, it wasn’t like Amy had been carrying her field hockey stick or wearing her varsity letter jacket when we’d met—though in my elephants-never-forget geekdom-is-forever mind, she might as well have. The assumptions I’d made, the snap judgments based on that brief vision of her on the sidewalk in front of me
—she was married with a child, and therefore happy, and therefore also winning
—were nothing if not proof of the fact that it was me who hadn’t changed. That despite the passage of time and all the “personal growth” that supposedly went with it—the career achievements; the years of therapy with their requisite epiphanies and behavior-altering breakthroughs; the romantic relationships that hopefully become less and less pathological the older and wiser you become—I was, deep down, insecure and mistrustful of people who seemed to have it too easy in life. Like Amy. Whether her life had been sheer misery from graduation day until now or had been movie perfect shouldn’t have mattered to me for the reasons it did. Her success did not ipso facto mean my failure, or vice versa. And before I saw her again, I had to get over the years when in my mind it did.

I had made a seven-thirty reservation for us at Café Loup, a softly lit, deeply pretentious French bistro on West Thirteenth Street. Even though she lived on the Upper West Side, Amy said she didn’t mind meeting all the way downtown—we were both coming from midtown right after work anyway—and I was glad she’d agreed. The older I’d gotten, the more intolerant I’d become of noisy restaurants where you couldn’t hear what the person sitting across from you was saying. Among other things.

“Wait!” I said when we first sat down, interrupting a
hilarious anecdote Amy was telling about a recent diaper change that went awry on someone’s Oriental rug. “I want to know what you’ve been doing since 1980.”

“You mean, we should put this mental illness in context,” she said.

“Exactly.”

I liked this woman. Even though she probably wasn’t perverse enough to have a copy of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(the bible of all shrinks) sitting on her coffee table as I did, she understood what we were dealing with here.

“Do I have to go all the way back to high school?”

“No,” I said magnanimously, as if I were about to let her off the hook. “Just go back to after high school.”

“Which is when it all started to go downhill.”

She took a sip from her glass of wine and then took a deep breath as if she were summoning up the energy needed to tell seventeen years’ worth of personal history in one sentence.

“Okay. You remember Jonathan. Well, after high school, we went to Princeton together. I was an English major, and he was pre-med. And all along it was … well, it was assumed that we were going to get married. We talked about marriage. His parents talked about marriage. My parents talked about marriage. It was just a question of when. Obviously we were going to wait—definitely until he was in medical school and probably until after he graduated.” She picked up her glass of wine and let it rest against her cheek.

“So we graduated,” she continued. “He and I both got into Columbia—me for law school—I was going to change the world like Mr. Collacci”—our American history teacher—“told us to. Not that becoming a real estate lawyer is a world-changing profession. But anyway we moved here. We studied. We graduated. We stayed so he could do his internship and residency here. I got an associate’s position at
Davis, Polk, and we found a great co-op on West Seventy-second Street, which his parents paid for: an early engagement gift.”

“And this was, what,” I asked, doing a quick mental calculation, “seven years ago?” I was trying to remember what I was doing then: closing on my own co-op; recovering from a particularly nasty breakup with Ross, a coworker at J. Walter Thompson; giving notice at J. Walter Thompson in the wake of that breakup—but not because of it—and going to work for Karen Lipps, Inc., full time.

“Seven.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“And then we got engaged. And then we started planning the wedding—which is when I started to wonder what I was getting myself into.”

The waiter arrived, clearing away our salads and returning with our steaks—hers rare and mine well done. We were both PMS and ravenous, as it turned out, and were momentarily distracted by all that meat.

“Why did you start to wonder then? I mean, you’d been together since eleventh grade or something.”

“Ninth grade, actually,” she said, trying to suppress an uncontrollable laugh.

I still couldn’t believe that people had boyfriends in ninth grade. Or in twelfth grade, for that matter. But since I wanted to hear the rest of her story, I let it drop. “So you suddenly realized …”

“Something had been missing for a long time, and I suddenly realized I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

“What was missing?”

She shrugged, then looked a little sheepish. “In a nutshell?”

I nodded.

“Sex.”

I could relate to that. The absence of it, that is.

“We never did it anymore. I mean, maybe once in a while, after I chased him around the bed, which would make me feel completely pathetic.”

I put my knife and fork down. No one would believe this either: Amy Jacobs chasing Jonathan Glebe around the bed for sex.

“Did you ever talk about it?”

“I tried to, but he never seemed to think anything was wrong with our relationship. He didn’t seem to think that never having sex with the person you were with was abnormal.”

Wait till she heard my story.

“So it wasn’t that he didn’t want to get married.”

“No. In fact, he was incredibly enthusiastic about it. I mean, of the two of us, he was definitely much more engaged in the details and mechanics of it. What the date was going to be. Where it was going to be. How many people there would be. What the food would be. Please. He could have told Martha Stewart a thing or two.

“So then about two months before the wedding—the invitations had been printed but not sent yet—I finally found out what the problem was. He was gay.”

I blinked wildly.

“How did you find out?”

“Jonathan told me.” She smiled and pushed her plate away. “One night after chasing him around the bed—and getting nowhere—I called him a faggot.” She looked embarrassed suddenly, as much by her use of the word as what had provoked her to use it. “And he sat down on the bed and said, ‘Yes, I am a faggot.’ And that was it. Twelve years over, just like that. I moved out two days later. Back to my parents’ house on Long Island. Where I stayed for six months until I could face starting all over again.”

I’d heard about women actually marrying men they didn’t know were gay, but I had never personally known anyone who had had such a close call. How you would ever again trust your judgment about people, how you would ever trust your perceptions enough to think that you were probably right, or at least not completely, incredibly, out-in-left-field wrong—not to mention how you got to the point where you could tell your story with a modicum of dignity the way Amy just had—seemed to me to be an amazing achievement. But … how long had he known? Had he been planning on telling her? If so, when had he planned on telling her? After the waiter cleared our plates, I asked her.

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t really say. But I think he’d known for a long time, probably since high school. Which makes the whole relationship even more of a farce than it already was.” We each leaned away as the waiter brought us our coffee. “Needless to say,” she continued, “I canceled the wedding and returned the ring. But I still have the dress. You know, in the unlikely event that somebody ever asks me to marry them again.”

I wondered how she could have been with Jonathan for so long and not known this crucial element of his being, of his personality, but maybe it wasn’t that hard to believe. Hadn’t I been involved with someone for about a year before finding out that he had a twin brother? Hadn’t I not known twice, with two different men, that I was being cheated on? When you’re young and naive and you want something or someone badly enough—in Amy’s case, marriage and a doctor-husband and a normal life; in my case, connection, regardless of the duration—you can somehow manage not to see the big huge pink elephants in the room.

“And then?”

“And then my mother died.” She lowered her eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. We were really close.” She managed a slight smile before going on. “So now, two years after my mother and five years after Jonathan and after the longest dating dry-spell in history, I’m seeing Will. Who’s either just about to finish his dissertation and get his Ph.D. in American literature from NYU or on the brink of complete failure and financial ruin.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Cute?”

“Very.”

“Sexual orientation?”

“Straight.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Sex?”

“He can’t get enough of me.”

“Are you in love?”

“Completely.”

I knew there had to be something wrong with this picture, since there was something wrong with every picture.

“So … the problem is …?”

“The problem is, he’s not ready for living together. Or marriage. Or even
discussing
living together. Or marriage. Which is why I’m so niece obsessed. Because at this rate, discussing children will probably have to wait until well into the new millennium.”

Which was a big problem since Amy’s gum-ball machine was also running low on eggs.

“So,” she said, as we both stirred our cups of decaf and attacked a finger-thick slice of flourless chocolate cake, “no humiliating engagement to someone who turned out to be gay?”

No, I told her. Just the semiserious college boyfriend whom I loved in that unformed, incomplete, clueless way you do when you’re too young to know any better.

And the line of short-lived boyfriends who’d fallen away like toy soldiers during the years when I still felt I was young and had my whole life ahead of me.

Then the one who broke my heart badly and without warning.

Then the one I would have wanted to marry if he hadn’t already been married.

And then the point at which I started to feel as if I’d crossed over from being an eligible young unmarried woman to one of those women who had never gotten married.

“So now,” I said, picking up at the present, “I’m in an ex
treme
ly promising relationship.” I laughed here to affect maximum irony.

“With?”

“Malcolm.”

“Who is …?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Attractive?”

“Very.”

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“About six months.”

“Ever married?”

“Once. Divorced.”

“Children?”

“Had one. A son.” I took a deep breath. “Who died, five years ago.”

She winced, then whispered, “How?”

“Leukemia.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. He’d just turned seven.”

She looked at me to get a sense of what to say next, and when I shook my head and shrugged, she went on. “Job?”

“Writer.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“South. M. C. South.”

“Sure. I’ve heard of him. He’s famous.”

Was famous
.

“He wrote about inner-city schools, didn’t he?”

“For
The New York Times
. Which won a Pulitzer.”

She nodded, duly impressed. “But he’s written books, too, hasn’t he?”

“Two. But he hasn’t published any in a while.” In over a decade. “He wrote for magazines for a long time after that,” I continued. “
Esquire
.
New York
magazine.
The New Yorker
. Now he teaches at The New School. That’s how we met. I took a class he teaches there.” I thought of the CV he’d handed out that first night along with the syllabus; how intrigued I was by it. “He says he’s a has-been. But I like to think he’s at the end of a severe downward trajectory and poised for a comeback.”

“So,” she said, officially opening up the topic of Malcolm for discussion.

“So. The problems. One: He’s depressed, due to the fact that his career isn’t what it used to be, after what’s happened in his personal life over the last decade or so. Two: He’s taking Prozac, so he’s not really, you know …”

“Interested in sex?”

I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow. How did she know that?

“Will was on it for a few months last year after he missed another big deadline. But then he realized that because of that particular side effect, he was better off
off
the medication.”