Love Sick (25 page)

• • •

I wanted to know what my co-single women were like, so I registered as “Ludovico” on VenusDiva. My first thoughts were that they looked better for their age than I did, happier and dewier, and that they were a lot more articulate and interesting than the men. “The guy I’m looking for: He will have the brains of Albert Einstein, looks of Sam Elliott, sex drive of Bill Clinton, humor of Mel Brooks and the compassion of Ghandi [sic], so if you’re not all that, just a nice guy would be perfect,” read one post by a blonde bombshell who had me laughing and reconsidering either my profile or my gender preference.

On the other hand, there was damage and defiance in the postings that I’d never seen in men’s descriptions. “I am tired of all the head games, and I refuse to play them,” wrote one, and, “If you just want to play games, get a hooker or an Xbox, but just leave the rest of us alone. People’s feelings are at stake here, so don’t be rude.” This was a plus-size site, but other women were as diffident about their size as I was. “My weight fluctuates in cycles. Looking for someone who will be interested in me regardless of where we are on the spectrum.” I sympathized, imagining the same twenty or forty pounds from Thanksgiving to Easter and from Memorial Day to Halloween.

“No!” I wanted to shout at another attractive blonde who wrote, “I am a Disney Cinderella collector and do believe in dreams coming true.” She was my age and ever-single. Maybe she ought to reconsider her baby blue and white fantasies. I doubt any single man wants those expectations in a first email nod.

Reading so many profiles was, in the end, depressing. Everyone loves nature, loves red wine and hanging out at home, loves the Yankees (or the Giants or golfing), loves to travel, loves animals, loves jazz, loves to cook, loves to laugh, loves to use the word “love” in such force that it is meaningless. Why not just slosh all the names into a hat and ascribe love by lottery? Everyone loves the same stuff so what’s the difference?

The difference, I suppose, is penguins on a hot day.

• • •

It wasn’t much of a pinch when, in mid-August, his kids back from camp, Paul emailed to ask if I would return his pajamas. One night a week for five weeks, we fooled around but did not actually have sex. Frankly, I didn’t want to. Someone must have used the expression “sucking face” at a crucial moment in his sexual awakening because he nearly Hoovered my lips off my face.

I didn’t have the courage to set up a charm school for him. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and I knew we wouldn’t make it to the High Holidays that were fast on the heels of my return from my first visit to my hometown in Montana in eight years.

I was a little sad, though, when he handed me my apartment key.

Then again, there’s always next summer.

• • •

Or not.

I shared some steamy emails with the man who identified himself as Rhett Butler, but I was up to my eyeballs in dogs and writing deadlines. I came off as earthy and frank but not quite in the mood. I could have liked him but he was married. If a man is stuck in a sexless marriage, I decided, he either had to work it out or make the kind of arrangements Jeremy did. “Just about the only thing you could do,” I emailed, “would be to sweep me away. I say that because I am
tired
—of dogs, my apartment, my neighborhood. Take me to Gettysburg or Salem or Cape May or to an ultra mod hotel in midtown. But I refuse to clean my apartment beyond what is reasonable—which is to say, not very—in order to stay in my apartment and do things I’ve done before. I want fresh air.”

It seems as fair a statement as I can think of what I want.

Besides, Kevin—now working part-time in a salon and taking care of Grace’s mother-in-law, who was declining with senile dementia—was facing his own depression that winter. He, too, knew what it was like to do the same thing day after day. Just as I walk the same dogs on the same routes, he tells Lily that
Wheel of Fortune
isn’t on for another eight hours and that their house doesn’t face Pennsylvania across Elliott Bay.

“What do you want?” I asked him in one of our morning check-ins.

“I want a life!”

“Get in line. But what is your life?”

Without pausing, he answered, “A small house with an acre of land where we can grow tomatoes and have chickens.”

We?
I was flabbergasted. I had begun applying for real jobs, to teach creative writing in universities. It would be good karma, I had decided, to send my CV to a university an hour from where Will teaches in Illinois.

He is, after all, family, and he had texted back, “I’m excited!”

I wasn’t prepared to make a choice between them and there wouldn’t be one if I got hired in Dust Mote, Kentucky. If I didn’t get hired, though, I thought to myself, Seattle is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And if Kevin hadn’t mispronounced himself, he was offering me not near but
with
. I have never done
with
.

“Have you thought about angora bunnies?” I asked. “My grand-niece in Oregon has one and makes good money selling the fiber.”

“Bunnies?” Kevin squeaked in his googly voice. “I had an angora bunny when I was a kid. Her name was Princess.”

• • •

Later in the week, I emailed him about the real life he wanted to create for himself, not the joke, encouraging him to use his imagination in doing this. Sarah, Lily’s daugther and Grace’s girlfriend, promised to buy him a house when Lily gets to the point of non-recognition: “Where do you want to live? What kind of travel do you want to plan? What kind of salon do you want to work in?”

“I’m a homebody,” he emailed back. “I want bunnies and chickens and you and tomatoes and blackberry jam.”

My throat closed up at that. He wanted me. I blew my nose and wrote back, “I gotta tell you, I don’t like columbines. I think they look like wax.”

“No shit,” he responded.

“But hollyhocks,” I typed, “are necessary.”

I clicked send and waited, watery merriment dancing in my heart.

Twelve

Squids cuddle after they mate, but the females are stuck holding the semen in a pocket next to their mouths.

In April, Kevin is diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’s scared not only of the extent of the cancer and of the surgery, but worried about how Lily will be taken care of in the days of weakness and tiredness that will follow him home from the hospital.

Thinking back on the cast of Winnie the Pooh, I find a plush kangaroo and send it to him without signing my name. I could hear his screams from three thousand miles away. Grace texts me a photo of him asleep in the hospital bed with the toy tucked securely next to him, the joey tucked securely in its mama’s pouch. That photo kind of says everything about why I cry from the knowledge that I am his friend.

His recovery is tough and, in some ways, hindered by Grace’s and Sarah’s questions about how we will make a living on an acre of land. I can board dogs and Kevin can cut hair, but we’ll need more income than that and I don’t know whether I’ll find adjunct work in Seattle. One evening I do something I have never done before: I do a cost analysis of raising angora rabbits, a rough exercise that shows we could make a few thousand dollars our first year out. If Kevin builds the hutches and if we breed and sell the rabbits, we could see more income yet. I send it to him, along with a photo of a German angora. Sarah and Grace are impressed and delighted by the rabbit that, in full hair growth, is the size and looks of a Malamute. For some reason, the photo and my financials convince them we’ll do enough of enough things to get by.

• • •

Slowly, we begin to expand our future beyond bunnies. Kevin has fallen in love with the Noritake Azalea china set of which I have my grandmother’s tea set
*
and a few random pieces I’ve bought from eBay and stowed away in the nether regions of my limited storage space.

One day in May he emails me the confirmation of winning six azalea dinner plates on eBay. “I’ve been orgasming over it ever since I saw it. We need the entire set.”

I pull my kitchen apart and unwrap everything I’ve collected. There are dinner plates, saucers without cups (why?), a butter tub, salad plates, serving pieces. I photograph them and mince off to UPS to ship two enormous boxes to him.

By then we’ve gotten serious. He has decided we need settings for sixteen. I’ve bought books and learned that the china was sold as a premium from Larkin, a catalogue company that sold soap, toiletries and luxury potables. It was second only to Sears and with an order of, say, ten dollars, the customer could also buy furniture, china, clothing and other items that gave the American home what was called, from the 1890s to the 1930s, the “Larkin Look.” Frank Lloyd Wright designed its headquarters in Buffalo, New York. One of Larkin’s most popular premiums was the Noritake Azalea china and in the effort to keep selling it after each housewife had her basic dinner set, Noritake kept adding the most orgasm-worthy side pieces that speak to the different time that is in Kevin’s and my hearts. Butter tubs. Whipped cream bowls. Comports. Cream soup
and
bouillon cups.

My father’s parents were hit hard in the Depression. There were times the family of five lived on my father’s paper route earnings. I imagine that my grandmother must have bought her set of teacups and saucers, salad plates, teapot and cream and sugar a piece at a time when she ordered soap and shirts. My mother gave me the set when I was in my twenties, warning me that although I had loved it since I was a kid, it was nothing special.

You can “buy it now” a square luncheon plate for $992 on eBay. We had our own
Antiques Roadshow
prize and didn’t even know it.

Kevin and I know it now. “Holy shit,” he wrote four or five months after I saw him in Seattle. “You should see my Discover Card bill.”

I don’t tell him that I’ve maxed out my Paypal Visa. It was already near the limit. I bought the syrup jug with under plate as a reward for walking a colleague’s dogs for a couple of days in the high 90s. By buying a loop-handled relish dish, jam pot and cruet from one seller I have saved a bundle in shipping charges, I write him, leaving out the fact that several of those pieces are rare, which pretty much voids the savings in shipping.

You can see how this is going.

We’re addicts, Kevin and I. He lives with an eighty-two-year-old woman whose frontal lobe is shriveling and he can’t get an erection. I have no chair in which I can retire with
Anna Karenina
and a brain that is hounded by failures, unloveability, deficiencies.

But we have our china obsession. It is a statement of our future and our trust in each other. Piece by piece, we are working our way toward a service for sixteen. Sometimes the idea of living together seems as fragile as the compote dishes that cost way more than I can afford. Then I compare this friendship to the men I’ve loved or wanted to love and I’m astonished. Kevin and I aren’t chasing ghosts. We’re not looking for an ideal other but for our better selves and we have the great good luck to trick some of that betterness out in each other.

One day, after he texts me pictures of his blooming deck garden, I email him a link to a website with recipes that use flowers. He ponders the information and, a few days later, emails me that he’s made a batch of lavender Johnny-jump-up jelly with a whiff of spearmint to jazz it up. A few weeks later he sends me an article about a local food truck that serves hamburgers with onion jam.

“Ooooh,” I write back. “Onion and blackberry jam. With bacon!”

Soon enough, he texts me a picture of a dozen jars of deep purple blackberry jam that could change the face of pancakes forever.

And he’s researched Long Island ducks and finds they walk upright and forage for food rather than dabbling. They don’t depend on a pond. The eggs are prized and each duck lays about two hundred a year with no burning desire to brood. Even more fun, they imprint upon humans, so we could actually take them for walks!

“Here, à l’Orange! Here, Peking! How ’bout those Mariners, Pressed?”

I decide that for every day I stick to my food plan I’ll throw a dollar in an oatmeal box so that we have a little working principle when the time comes, a ritual Kevin calls A Buck for A Duck. I save catalogues and cut out pictures of chickens and Labradors, wicker lawn furniture and drying lavender, punctuated by sayings like “Sometimes I laugh so hard tears run down my leg,” which, post-menopause and post-prostate, is a joke we both live with. Give me a collection of magazines and catalogues, an interesting box, glue and Mod Podge, and I can be happily obsessed for several days.

• • •

We are
playing
, long distance. I haven’t known how to play since I was fourteen years old and my nieces co-opted my Barbie dolls.

By December we’ve amassed most of our service for sixteen and Kevin has sent me boxes of jellies and jams no one has imagined before.
*
I send an email to my dog clients and, after they bought out my supply, a check for $600 to Kevin by Christmas. We’ve added another teeny rivulet of income to the farmette.