The Middlesteins (6 page)

O
n the one
hand,” said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, ex–New Yorker, “my wife
and I were married for close to forty years, and we had built a life together, a home,
a place in our community with our friends and family, a role in the synagogue.” He
had to admit that his relationship with the synagogue had diminished in the last few
years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his wife’s health. “And
there were the kids to consider, although I didn’t think Robin would care that much,
and I thought, hey, Benny has his hands full keeping that wife of his happy. Isn’t
he busy enough? Maybe it would impact the grandkids, but how much?

“On the other hand,” said Richard Middlestein, newly single gentleman, not-quite senior
citizen, respectable, dull but fighting it, “my wife, who is a very smart woman who
has done a lot of good for a lot of people so I can’t totally knock her, my wife made
me miserable, she picked at me till I bled on a daily basis, so much worse lately,
more than you could ever imagine. And she got fat, so fat I could not love her in
the same way anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I like a little meat on the bones. I knew
what I was marrying. But she was hurting herself. Every day, more and more. That is
hard on a person. To watch that happen.” He lowered his voice. “And it had been a
long time since we’d had marital relations.”

He could not bring himself to explain further that he had imagined that his sex drive
would fade away in his late fifties and he would just forget that they had been sleeping
on opposite sides of the bed, clinging to their respective corners as if they were
holding on to the edge of a cliff. But sixty came, and his sex drive still simmered
insistently within him, unused but not expired, a fire in the hole. He had never cared
before, but now suddenly he realized that he could not go the rest of his life without
sex, that he refused to give up the fight. But he knew also he would never want to
touch his wife’s pocked, veined, bloated flesh ever again. If not now, then when?

“I felt I had no choice but to leave her. The divorce is going to be final in six
months, more or less.” (More.) “I’m sure you understand.”

The woman he had met on the Internet, a good-looking redhead named Jill, a legal secretary
in her early fifties who had lost her husband, the love of her life, three years earlier—drunk-driving
accident (not him, the other guy)—who was having a hard enough time with dating and
would give anything to have her husband back even for a day, no, she did not understand.
She clasped her hands together and looked down and thought about her wedding day in
1992, a small ceremony in Madison, where she was born and raised, and she pictured,
as she had been doing far too much lately—it was not
healthy
, she could admit it—her husband bent down at her leg, sliding off her garter while
everyone she loved in the world laughed and applauded.

As with every previous failed Internet date, Middlestein picked up the check.

Middlestein had been meeting women online for three months, since the day he had left
his wife, leaving practically everything behind, books, furniture, photo albums, any
record of the past. He had moved into the new condo building across the street from
the pharmacy he owned, an apartment which he had signed a lease on two months before
he left her and had been quietly furnishing by making secret trips to the IKEA in
Schaumburg. Three times he had steered his cart through the crush of traffic in the
dizzyingly bright aisles, at first awkwardly, this new singular decision-making identity
unfamiliar. (His wife had made all household decisions since the day they’d married,
crushing him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion—and had he really cared?
No, probably not, but he would never know now.) But with each successive trip, he
had a renewed confidence: The Swedish names were meant not to confuse but to guide;
he was not required to make a buying decision until nearly just before he reached
the cash register, and even then he had the power to walk out the door without a single
item in his cart; and maybe he did want a color scheme after all. Maybe he was a color-scheme
kind of guy.

And what a bargain that place was! Sure, it was a lot of crap he didn’t need, and
his father, who had owned a high-end furniture shop in Jackson Heights for decades,
would probably roll over, coughing, grumbling, cursing, in his grave if he saw what
Richard’s new bed frame was made of. But he was not a rich man—by some standards,
maybe, to starving children in India, he probably lived like a king—since the market
had wiped out half their retirement fund, so he had no choice in the matter.

Now he had a slickly furnished condo (white and dark blue with this little crisscross
patchy pattern on all his bedding and pillows) and his heart and his life up on a
screen for anyone to see. He exploited his newfound freedom at first, dating daily,
sometimes twice a day, meeting one woman for lunch and another for dinner. There were
thousands of women between the ages of forty and fifty-five (he didn’t want to date
a woman his own age, he wanted them young and vital and alive and ready to keep up
with him—with how he was imagining he was going to be—once they finally hit the sack
together) who were Jewish, divorced, widowed, never married, living within forty miles
of his zip code (anything farther and he’d be dating a Wisconsin girl, and that didn’t
feel right to him; he didn’t even
know
if there were Jews in Wisconsin anyway), though he was, if he had to be honest, more
attracted to people within a twenty-mile range, because traffic was such a mess these
days with so much construction going on. And all he had to do, apparently, was ask,
and they would be willing to meet him. There were a lot of lonely ladies out there
looking for love.
Good
, he thought,
more for me
.

He had dated fifteen divorcées, some more bitter than others, even more bitter than
his wife, but they were also the funniest out of all the women he met, their pain
somehow strengthening them, the endless paperwork and court proceedings and therapy
sessions forcing them to look inward and, if not good-naturedly then at least wryly,
laugh at themselves and the situation they were in. These women were veteran first-daters.
They were putting themselves out there. They were hustling to meet their new mate.

He dated a dozen widows, most of whom had sopped up their tragedies like their hearts
were sponges. They did not want to be on that date. They were there because someone
had made them, their child, their mother, their sister, their co-worker. If they had
their way they would stay home by themselves on a Friday night, but could they really
stay home on every Friday night for the rest of their lives? In their ads they promised
they were lively and active and engaged in the world around them, but in person they
were only able to fake it for a half hour or so before their devastation became apparent
to Middlestein. On three occasions his dates had cried. They had his sympathy. He
acted the part anyway. But eventually he began to grumble to himself,
If you’re not ready to date, then why are you here?
He didn’t want to be anyone’s practice run. He hadn’t dated a widow in a month, crossed
them off his list of potential mates, but that redhead looked so gorgeous in her photo,
ooh, she had that gorgeous bosom and gigantic eyelashes, he could just see himself
getting caught up in her, if only she hadn’t wanted to leave in such a hurry.

The rest were these women who had never married. At first he thought of them as these
poor
women, because how their egos must have suffered as they careened through their free-flying
youth and suddenly woke up one day to realize they had become old, Jewish maids. Also,
they had never experienced what it was like to be committed thoroughly, which, for
better or worse, had taught him a thing or two about life and shaped the man he had
become. But sometimes after talking for a while, he thought maybe they were the lucky
ones. They weren’t ruined like the rest of the women, at least not in the same way.
Their losses were different, and what they had gained was different, too. Most of
them were childless. Most of them could give or take marriage, and he suspected that
when they left him, they never gave him another thought. His picture was blurry, but
there was no denying it in person. Even if he had molded his interests in his profile
to match the ads of the younger women, one look and they knew, this guy had never
done yoga in his life, and most likely was not picnicking in Millennium Park either.
He was somebody’s father, somebody’s grandfather; an old man.

And then there was the hooker, or half a hooker, maybe; he wasn’t quite sure what
she was. Tracy had contacted him on the site a few days after he joined it, and he
should have suspected something, because she was far younger than him, thirty-nine
years old—only four years older than his son! What would she want with him anyway?
He should have known, but still he agreed to meet with her, suggesting coffee, then
she suggesting a drink, and then a few hours before they were to meet, she e-mailing
him and telling him she had just come from the gym and had had a tough workout and
she was
famished
and did he mind meeting her for dinner instead? She named a pricey steak house, and
how could he say no? He didn’t want to seem cheap or less than a class act.

She turned out to be a real knockout—though perhaps a bit older than she claimed on
her profile—with dark, shining eyes, plump lips, a lush behind, and slick, minklike
hair that she kept pulled to one side over her bare shoulder. She was wearing a strapless
dress made of a black stretchy material that ended above the knee. Middlestein hadn’t
seen that much skin on a woman up close in a long time. She smelled fantastic, this
combination of flowers and baby powder, and she was tan, and fit, and everything about
her was perfect. As she slowly crossed and uncrossed her legs and ran her fingertips
along the shiny enameled wood of the bar, possibilities unfolded in front of him.

They sat first at the bar—she guzzled a martini, he sipped at a beer—until their names
were called, and he couldn’t say exactly what was going on until after they had been
seated and just before their steaks had already been delivered. He asked if she enjoyed
her work as a receptionist at a massage-therapy institute, and she put her hand on
his and said, “Well, what I’m really looking for is a daddy, so I never have to work
again,” and then she giggled, and he stared at her for longer than he meant to, and
she said, “If you know what I mean,” in a low voice, and he—he just couldn’t help
himself—he did the briefest of calculations, he moved a zero around in his bank account,
even though he already knew the answer, and this was not what he wanted anyway, but
oh, he wouldn’t mind putting his hands on that
tuchus
of hers. But there was no way. A steak dinner, sure; not much more than that, though.
And if he couldn’t bring her to his grandchildren’s b’nai mitzvah in June—he could
just hear the whispers, he knew he’d be whispering himself if one of his buddies did
the same, and his children, and especially that daughter-in-law of his, would never
forgive him—then she wasn’t much of an investment at all. Then she said, “Do you think
you would like to be my daddy?” and a massive pang of depression struck him, and he
looked down into the bottom of his drink, searching deeply for his dignity. When he
looked up, her smile had faded.

“I’m just looking to meet a nice lady,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true, but was
closer to the truth than what she was proposing.

“I can be very nice,” she said, the last remnants of her flirtation fading, because
she was not there to defend herself, only to promote her possibilities.

And then there were the steaks, and they were delicious. She took half of hers home
in a doggy bag, which she clutched to herself as they stood in the parking lot. A
kiss on the cheek, and then a whisper: “You know how to reach me if you change your
mind.”

He had her number in his hand right now and was thinking about giving her a call after
the day, week, month, year, life he’d had. A few hours after his depressing coffee
date with Jill—who had left in tears, though thankfully she’d waited until she got
in her car for the real waterworks to start; he had seen her sobbing at the stoplight—he
met his daughter, Robin, for dinner. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left his wife,
only spoken with her on the phone. The kids had circled their mother and had shut
him down, Benny much more than Robin, but that was to be expected. Benny’s wife, that
obsessive, tightly wound, Little Miss Prim and Proper, was
outraged
that he had filed for divorce, as if no one had gotten divorced before, as if she
knew everything there was to know about family and marriage and life, as if she were
the moral arbiter of what was right and wrong when she was the one who had gotten
knocked up even before she had graduated from college and she should consider herself
lucky that she’d had a free ride practically since the day she had met his son. He
could go on. He did not appreciate being judged.

“She doesn’t want you in our lives,” said Benny stiffly on the phone. “You’re my father,
and I have made it clear that I will continue to have a relationship with you. I think
things just need to cool off. She’ll calm down.” It was shocking to Middlestein that
he would no longer be able to see his beloved grandchildren regularly. He hadn’t considered
that such a thing would even be a possibility. He thought they would understand how
he couldn’t live with that woman any longer. Surely they knew what he went through.
Surely they could accept that he had been in pain. But they had not; they treated
him as if he were a criminal, like he had murdered someone, when his wife, Edie, was
the one killing herself, and taking him with her piece by piece.