Love Sick (7 page)

On the edges of the gaggles of girls with their cupcakes were the chubby girls, dressed in clothes too tight, trying too hard to twist themselves into the Good Girlfriend image of Charlotte or Miranda.

Ah, my sisters, the wannabes. I know you well, although it is part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that no two wannabes can inhabit the same space. Age and distance give me compassion. I’ve been a wannabe longer than you’ve been alive. In the deep shade of the brick and iron park, I watch how the Carries desperately need their plump pals in order to make their fantasy—and their prettiness—come alive. If only the plumpies knew they complete the story. If only the plumpies would simply take their cupcakes and
go
. The Carries would melt like frosting on a manhole cover.

• • •

I was feeling more
Annie Hall
than
Sex in the City
. This Sol-guy, now five minutes late, had sounded smart and I was feeling decidedly that the day was rare and should not be wasted in Starbucks.

After ten minutes I strolled around, looking for a solo guy also scanning the crowd. I recircled the park and noticed a thin man with a straggly gray braid reading on a bench. He looked up and said, “Fran—” as I said, “Sol—”

He kissed me hello and we exchanged the patter we should have exchanged in email or on the phone. I told him I was a writer and he told me he had recently produced a movie, had published several books and had been a food writer for a magazine I didn’t recognize. “I live two blocks away. Do you want to have a glass of wine in my garden?”

If we weren’t going to make fun of people or finger the cheap Indian shirts at the street fair, sitting in a West Village garden was second best.

It became third best when he put his arm around my waist and began caressing my butt.

“Is this a one-off?” I asked as we crossed Bank Street.

“I don’t know.”

The building shared the garden. He didn’t offer to go up and get the wine but he did lean over and begin kissing me. After three minutes of being a spectacle for everyone whose windows faced east, he said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

How many things had happened in the last eight minutes that were telling me this was a b-a-a-d idea?

Why did I allow him to point me up the stairs, pushing me gently on my buttocks?

Dr. A-Cigar-Is-Not-a-Cigar would have said I wanted to fuck my father in the guise of this man who looked older than me and had done so much more professionally than I had. My friend Jean would have said, with regretful triumph, that I had wanted it, and her husband, Ben, would have said it was the sort of thing he used to do before Jean but that I deserved better. Bette and Will were a fifty-fifty bet on either, “Go for it!” or “Call a cab.
Now
.” As for me, I was mostly feeling thirsty. A diet 7UP would have been perfect on that hot afternoon. Or maybe a Fresca.

After hitting my head on the braces of his loft bed in the ensuing gymnastics, I pushed him off and out, sat up and began looking for my clothes.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Did you enjoy any of it?”

“You’re fine,” I said as I pulled on my blouse and looked around for my tank top and prepared to leave without it if necessary. “But we have stuff in common. We could go out. This is ruining it. You have my number—call me.” I found my tank top and squished it into my bag.

• • •

My answering machine was flashing when I got home.

“Sorry, girl,” it played back. “I guess it’s just too soon after the breakup.”

“Ya think he coulda maybe mentioned the breakup before now?” I asked Daisy, as she pressed her head against my hard rubbing, her plainspoken way of telling me she needs love and reassurance when I’ve been away. “What Burt Bacharach song d’ya think he thinks he’s acting out?” Daisy licked my hand and collapsed for a quick belly rub before I went in to run a very hot bath of Crabtree & Evelyn Nantucket Briar. As the bubbles piled reassuringly up, I called Kevin.

“I walked out on a guy in the middle of sex!” I crowed. I had decided this was a victory, not going any further than I felt like.

“You what?”

“I met this guy, supposedly for coffee. He only wanted sex. In the middle of it I realized I was bored so I stopped and left.”

“Uh . . . Good, I guess.”

“Aren’t you proud of me? Usually I go through with it because I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.”

“Did you ever think about not
starting
it because it would hurt
your
feelings?”

I splashed into the suds as carefully as I could to keep the phone dry. “What does the Big Book say? ‘Progress not perfection’?”

“I’m HIV positive, Frances. On this subject I’ve learned perfection the hard way. I’m giving Grace a pedicure, Frances. Can I call you back?” There was mumbling on his end of the connection. “Or can Grace call you back? She has a few things she wants to say to you.”

Later that night, Grace and Kevin scolded me into an admission of my wrongs. Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, I was spineless to follow him up Greenwich Street. And yes, the worst of it was he had a
braid
. I promised to be wiser.

• • •

I predicated the next date with a number of phone calls that turned into phone sex. When he came over, I got an orange rose and souvlaki in return for a jaw-numbing blowjob before the email saying, “I thought I was ready but I’m not.”

I don’t know when women are ready to start paddling out to sea again, but men have the special problem of
thinking
they are able to shtup a snake if it stands up long enough. Another piece of unforgivably bad male thinking is their inability to weigh the sixty-four-million-dollar question everyone is hiding from each other—baggage.

Quibble over the nuances as much as you want, but there are two kinds of romantic baggage: the kind we can abandon and start to walk away from, and the kind we heave into the nearest therapist’s office.
This is
not
rocket science, guys!
If you spend your dinner hours and weekends in existential angst, keep the woody you talked yourself into at home.

Sol and Orange Rose Guy had the most dangerous kind of baggage: self-ignorance. I was barely a month away from crying on the empty Phoenix freeways on my way home from Dar’s, but at least I knew the chances of finding “another” Dar would be impossible, or a different piece to fit my puzzle would be slim. But practicality had already set in.

Tip: The best way to get over a man is to start dating another man.

Be prepared to settle, to be fond rather than ragingly in love, to share a couple of nights a week together instead of every minute, to lean on your girlfriends for fun as much as on the New Maybe—but go out and reassure yourself you’re wantable. We—men and women—are always ready to be wantable.

Not being ready is a notion I defy. Ha!

If either Sol or Orange Rose Guy were truly Not Ready, they wouldn’t have replied to the ad, so there are two excuses I can offer in their defense.

The most reasonable is that they thought they had kicked the habit of at least the sexual side of life with the ex but found out that sex stirs all kinds of stuff up.

The other explanation is that it was I. I am a deeply pessimistic person. My water glass isn’t half empty, it’s half empty and radioactive. It’s easy for me to go from thinking of myself as
a
Wrong Woman to
the
Wrong Woman to just plain Wrong.

Dar, in rejecting me for not being into his music, rock climbing and scuba diving, could make me feel Wrong but I was fighting it, so far with guys who made me feel wiser if not smarter.

Not that it’s any easier being a Right Woman when faced with a Wrong Man. I don’t have a lot of experience being the dumper, but I can see that it might be a good idea to have a patter for why there won’t be a second date. At least the too-soon shtick, a more substantial version of it’s not you, it’s me absolves everyone except the original heartbreaker.

But really? Being ready to drop my jeans before coffee makes the original heartbreaker look better than ever. She at least had the self-respect to get rid of the guy.

• • •

One problem with dating in one’s fifties is that one or both suspects are likely to harbor the grief or disbelief of a broken, long relationship, usually a marriage, usually with children.

Advancing middle age should be the first time since childhood that we can really indulge ourselves without feeling selfish. This means no unfair competition in our love lives.

Tip: Beware the ex but carry garlic if he has a daughter.

The man with a daughter over the age of about eleven is probably dating her, not you. Sons are low maintenance for dads, possibly because they can take each other’s interests for granted. But the moment Daddy’s Little Pumpkin develops bumps on her chest, she becomes the treasure he must protect like a Kumari princess.

“She’s in sixth grade and friends with everybody,” one date expounded. “She’s doing soccer and plays piano and flute.” He stops and smiles at his hands folded on the table between us. “For years, the only way we could get her to sleep was playing ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’ All seventeen minutes. Go figure.”

That paternal bafflement? A shameless lie. In college she is the delight of holidays and summers, more dateable than any other woman.

“What’s she like?” I had asked Orange Rose Guy of his daughter during the stiff dinner we shared after the blow job and before the not-ready email.

“She’s beautiful and talented. She interned with the Wooster Group last summer and she’s interested in either going back or joining a company like Bond Street after she graduates from Sarah Lawrence.”

“And your son?” He was tucking into the local diner’s meat loaf as though he needed, urgently, to kill it.

“He went to art school to become a cartoonist. Still living with his mother, still . . . drawing, I guess. I need to take him out to dinner this week, see what’s going on.”

At some point, the daughter falls in love with someone besides Daddy. Enter the ex, who is of practical value in fashioning the princess their princess has always wanted to be, but it’s Daddy who pays and whose approval adds that extra royal cachet.

“My daughter wants to show me a place in Kent Island for the wedding,” Martin, another mid-fifties divorcé, said as we snuggled into our respective beds before talking dirty.

“Is that someplace amazing?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what exactly Martin did for a living, but he had some kind of security background because he told me he’d matched a recording of my voice on the phone against one of my TV interviews posted on YouTube to make sure I was who I said I was. For some reason he wanted his imaginary sex to come from a verifiable woman.

“I’m sure it is. At least it checks out okay. I’ll know more after I see it.”

I wondered if he meant that no known Taliban members were waiters or if the cliff it sits on isn’t likely to break off in the next rain. “So. What is she wearing?”

He grunted. “This is no laughing matter and it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg. She’s a good kid, though. She’s in law school. She’s earned her reception on the Bay.”

Suddenly I wasn’t so much in the mood.

And trust me (because I’m one, too), Princess
enjoys
being Daddy’s Number One. How do you think I learned the lyrics to “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”? I was my daddy’s princess for a few sweet years of sitting on his shoulders and styling his hair. All that coziness ended when I began to gain weight and no longer sat on laps or got humped around like a sack of giggling potatoes. On the other hand, my father was my date in the dateless desert of high school. Whenever my mother was out of town, we had dinner at Bug’s Barbecue and went to a movie. He introduced me to Mel Brooks (“It’s twue, it’s twue”), the Marx Brothers (“Booga-booga!”) and Charlie Chaplin. I—and the entire audience in the tiny hippie theater—had never seen anyone laugh harder than my father through Flip the Frog shorts . . . until he began crying with laughter during Chaplin’s dinner of spaghetti and streamers.

So what I missed out on by not sitting on my father’s lap I gained later when he taught me “Minnie the Moocher.”

Take that, Da-Vida.

• • •

Tip: It’s no longer what you do for a living, but when you do it.

People in their fifties fall into one of three work categories: traditional worker bees, freelance, or retired.

What the swinging fifties don’t want to admit, I think, is how much we value a partner who has leisure time. How tied is the fifty-five-year-old worker bee to the office? If he hates his job, he’s too old to remain unsoured and unbowed by it. The full-time job is the equivalent of another ex, and how he feels about his fifty-hour week can create the resentment of a divorce. On the other hand, if he’s too happy at his job, he risks being both boring and unavailable.

At this age, I’m hoping Mr. Extension 6651 can check up on his staff while taking Tuesday off for the Orchid Show.

This is why Mr. Done It is in a lot of demand. The best retiree is the man who made his tick and decided—chose, preferred, elected—to retire early enough to enjoy his [comparative] youth. Mr. Done It is a happy man, pleased with his cleverness and pleased to play in the spare time he created.

Which leaves the hipster-slacker, Mr. Freelance. (A word of caution: The description “self-employed” is very different from “freelance.” Freelancers tend to have thought about and embrace the notion of being a knight errant, Sir Gawain or Walter Raleigh, riding their wits and networks rather than horses or galleons. The self-employed, on the other hand, place more emphasis on “employment” than “self,” making them more steady in their habits but much less available. Getting the next gig is more a matter of tilting at windmills than dashing to battle or sailing for the New World.) The freelancer has a lot of time for dating—or no time. It is always feast or famine, and that goes for the pocket as well. I haven’t mentioned money in the trifecta of graying Mystery Dates because freelancers (as I know all too well) rarely know what their income will be in six months and are too often asking (and re-asking) for money owed. We have every good quality except for predictability, solvency and a tolerance for panty hose.