Saturday Night Widows (29 page)

If I had been twenty years old, I had no doubt how the evening would end, and I can tell you it wouldn’t have been in a window seat on the New Haven line or bedded down with a menagerie of bunnies and bears. I mean, let’s be real. This man and I were both unattached, he had those eyes, and he knew how to make risotto.

And that would be only the first course. In a burst of what may or may not have been romantic overkill, he had also whipped up osso buco, an arugula salad with roasted beets and pears, the kind of French cheese platter that required a map of the Dordogne, and a decadent fallen chocolate soufflé cake with thyme-scented vanilla ice cream that he’d churned by hand that afternoon. He was Renaissance Man on steroids, in case I had any doubts. We’d wash it all down with an array of wines, also French. Almost any home-cooked meal might have done the trick. Little did he know, this over-the-top feast was like heroin to me.

On the other hand, I was no longer twenty years old. Sometime in between my salad days and tonight’s salad, my policy of fear-tinged abstinence had taken hold, and I clung to it despite ample evidence that if there was anyone with whom to dispatch this just-say-no nonsense, this man could be it.

I’d known it from the night of the Glamazon dinner, when I profited from one of the payoffs of decades of social experience, which is that it doesn’t take a lot of vetting to recognize a like-minded soul. Was it love at first sight? No, not really. But I knew in the most rational way that this man was a worthy companion. I called some friends the next day to tell them, “I met him. I met the guy.”

By six that morning there was an e-mail from Bob asking me to accompany him the following week to MoMA, apparently the first-date location of choice, to see a Brice Marden exhibit and dine afterward at the museum’s super-hot restaurant. As it happened, I’d been trying without success to finagle someone into joining me for exactly that. I wrote to Fred to root out more about his friend. “I would say, and I mean this in the best way,” Fred answered, “that he is a person of temperament. I believe Bernie was, too. If you have recently met men who are sort of wishy-washy, Bob certainly isn’t that.”

Temperament?
As Scooby Doo would put it: Ruh-roh!

I had a nicely fitted little sleeveless dress picked out for the occasion, but at the last minute went with a full-coverage black top and a dirndl skirt by an avant-garde designer. Yes, a dirndl. I cringe at what it telegraphed.

Bob threw himself into the exhibit with the enthusiasm I’d witnessed when we first met, freely proclaiming his opinions, teasing out mine. He brought the same curiosity to dinner, where he puzzled over ingredients and plotted how he could riff on them at home. His exuberance was palpable, if a bit unsettling. I learned that if Bob heard a song he liked on the radio, he’d grab his guitar and play along. Like me, he had become a writer in part to partake
of unfiltered, high-octane experience, taking on an assignment so he could cook with a great chef in Europe, play sideman to a rock musician, fly on a company jet with the plutocrat of the moment, or go on location with a movie director. Once he talked a magazine into letting him spend a month learning to tango in Argentina. His take on all of it was original, full, I suppose, of temperament. He reminded me of my best self, the bold one, the explorer, the one with the active, original point of view, before I got all closed and timid.

I’d been worried that men in my age bracket would be stuck in a rut, but Bob was fifty-six, and he was going full blast. He was all in. Which raised the question: was I? There was no denying that this was the sort of man I’d been seeking. For the first time since I’d started dating, for the first time since Bernie died, I had no excuse to avoid the hardest question of all. Could I conceive, ever again, of letting one person matter to me as much as the one I’d lost?

P
UTTING ALL THAT ASIDE
, and I did as much as I could, I recognized that this was someone I could have fun with. The next few weeks were a montage from the modern rom-com story line. Casual dinners turned into four-hour restaurant marathons where we actually closed the joint. Our phone calls sent Verizon stock soaring. If we’d been paid by the word for our e-mails, we would have doubled our incomes. An adroit conversationalist, Bob brought out the same in me. I told him about my sheltered past in western Pennsylvania, of trying to strike a balance along the
way between daring moves (moving to New York, becoming a journalist) and prudent choices—progressing from yearbook editor, honor roll habitué, and grad school wonk to responsible holder of full-time jobs and regular contributor to the 401(k) plan. Bob had grown up in eastern Pennsylvania and put himself through college playing in rock bands. After he graduated, he jumped off the professional track for a stint in the music business. He had followed his enthusiasms ever since.

“There doesn’t seem to be an uptight bone in your body,” I said, forgetting for a moment that the subject of bodies was on my restricted list. We had met in a little pasta place in the Village that got a write-up in the paper the day before for its orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe. The dining room was fully booked, but Bob talked our way into seats at the bar.

“You don’t fool me with that Hitchcock-blonde façade,” he said, shifting back in his stool to get a better look. By now, I had switched up my datewear to some flattering jeans and a tailored jacket. “I get the feeling there’s nothing uptight about you, either.”

“Once, that might have been true. But for the last few years I’d have made a first-class nun.”

Like most couples in the flush of infatuation, we were dancing around the subject of where this might be headed, conducting discussions, purely hypothetical of course, about our views on Relationships, our thoughts on Commitment, our beliefs about the ideal arrangement for Intimate Companionship.

“My philosophy since Bernie died,” I explained, purely hypothetically, you understand, “is that I need to construct a system that allows me to be happy living by myself. I have my friends, lots of them, in fact. I have my interests, lots of those, too. I’ve reached the
point where I have something going on almost every night of the week. It’s not the same as marriage, and it’s not what I expected at this point in my life, but it’s very full, very satisfying. And I don’t need to worry about losing one person who means everything to me. What if I become attached to someone and we break up? I can’t handle any more loss right now.”

Bob looked at me as if I’d become a vegan. “First of all,” he said, I assume hypothetically, “nobody’s going to break up with you.”

I opened my mouth to object, but he silenced me.

“And as for your philosophy, if I thought I’d have to live that way, I’d have to join a castrato boys choir, or maybe a religious retreat. All right, maybe not—the food would suck. But seriously, sure, I was blindsided by my divorce. It made me question whether men and women were meant to inhabit the same planet—make that the same universe. But one nightmare implosion shouldn’t put a person off soufflés. I could never accept the possibility of a life without love. It’s like food, it’s like sleep, like breathing. People are meant to make love, and they’re meant to be in love.”

“I like soufflés, but they fall,” I countered. “And they’re not the only source of food. It’s okay to like soup, too. And it’s valid to find satisfaction in a variety of friendships instead of one overarching, all-consuming romance that might blow up in my face.”

He gave me a long appraising glance. “No offense, but soup is soufflé without the air. There’s magic in soufflés. Settling for soup when you want soufflé is the act of a coward.”

“Maybe I
am
a coward,” I said, purely hypothetically. “But cowards are safe.”

F
OR ALL HIS
hypothetical talk, I noticed Bob wasn’t rushing into anything, either, perhaps out of respect for my caution, perhaps to protect himself. Or perhaps he wasn’t as interested as he seemed. It had been five years since his divorce, but the toll was still visible. Most of the time, he had an unforced ease and assurance, overridden, at key moments, by a skittish look I’d learned to recognize. It had turned up at the end of all our assignations up to now. We’d find ourselves getting all goofy-eyed on the street at a moment when a kiss might be appropriate. Suddenly, that look would cloud Bob’s eyes and his head did one of those
Exorcist
360s.

“Look, a cab!” he’d blurt out. He’d dash into traffic like a running back and stuff me inside, alone, before I could say … well, not much. I didn’t have the nerve, either. From the safety of the backseat, I’d watch him recede into the streetscape as the cab pulled away.

And I’d think, what if this man got sick? Let’s be honest, what if he died?

I
DIDN
’
T WANT
to make a mistake. Neither did Bob. What do you get when you have two people who are setting off enough sparks to start a forest fire but don’t want to make a mistake? An awkward standoff in a Connecticut kitchen.

That afternoon when he’d picked me up at the picturesque little train station in his picturesque little town, the sparks were flying again. He drove me on a brief tour: sailboats in a former fishing harbor, a thumbnail beach, Nantucket-style saltbox houses. Everyone on the street had a Labrador retriever on a leash. Very quiet. The kind of quiet that gives New Yorkers the heebie-jeebies.

What do people
do
in Connecticut, I wondered? I’d read Rick Moody and John Cheever. Mostly dinner parties and wife swapping. I wasn’t much of a cook, and I was nobody’s wife anymore. The thought still stung. I felt in my pocket for the return train schedule. 4:43, 5:43, 6:43. I could make any of ’em.

Stepping out at the beach, we ran into a woman Bob seemed to know. “Yikes, let’s go,” Bob said. He backtracked like a trapped animal as she picked up his scent. Too late. She zeroed in on him, bursting into noisy tears.

“This isn’t a good time, Cindy,” Bob said. Who was this woman? Ex-girlfriend? Ex-wife?
Current
girlfriend?
Current wife?
Her dog hurled itself up my leg, spackling me with sandy footprints.

“Uh, your … uh, dog …” I started to say. Cindy didn’t bat an eye my way, and neither did Bob. Whoever she was, she seemed to have more emotional claim on him than I did. I walked ahead while they spoke in addled stage whispers.

He caught up with me a minute later. “I’m so sorry about that,” he said, looking mortified. “She’s just a friend, going through a hard time. We used to walk our dogs together.”

Couldn’t he come up with a better excuse than that? I felt again for the schedule and cursed myself for not wearing a watch.

So I was really on edge when we finally crossed the threshold of his place, where the turf would be studded with quicksand and land mines. Rented in a rush during the divorce, the house was a knock-kneed former summer cottage, built in the 1920s, overlooking a sparkling stream. Inside, it was all white wainscoting and tilted pine floors, charming and cozy, with logs ablaze in a sandstone fireplace. There were fresh white roses in a vase on the coffee table and the luxurious scent of long-simmering veal wafting from
the kitchen. Either it was the osso buco or Just-a-Friend had made it there ahead of us and boiled a bunny.