Love Sick Page 17

  A wiser person would have skipped the card and not picked up the telephone.

  “Frances! I was wondering when you’d call. How are you?”

  “Okay. How are you?”

  “You know. Busy. Statistics kicked my ass this semester. And everyone in the family is broke, so instead of giving presents we decided to paint one room in each of our houses for each other. I’ve been back and forth to Gilbert and Randolph and Fountain Hills with piles of drop cloths and all our gear. It’s been crazy. When can I see you?”

  I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. His question was more about him than me. When could he find a break in his schedule?

  “I could drive to Scottsdale,” I said in a voice low enough not to betray tears. “Maybe we could have lunch.”

  “That would be great! I get off work tomorrow at two. How about a late lunch?” He gave me directions to a strip mall. I started to write them down and then quit. If I couldn’t speak a few sentences without wanting to cry, there was a good chance I was going to have a whale of a stomachache tomorrow, much too ill to get more than twenty feet away from the bathroom.

  “How’s your dad?” he asked. “How’s Daisy?”

  “Dad is obsessed with Magellan and Daisy’s with her Uncle Benedict and Auntie Jean, behaving much better than she does for me. How’s your mother? How’s Gulliver?”

  “Mom’s good. Gulliver has been naughty, though. Each time we’re both out of the house, he goes into Mom’s room and sleeps on her bed.”

  “You could shut the door.”

  “Mom used to do that but it’s unsatisfying to me; I want a training solution.” One of Dar’s minimum-wage jobs before he found his philanthropic calling was training dogs. Gulliver can high-five, down-stay, and die very slowly. It was good to know the perfect Gulliver had a failing.

  “Mom got him a bed for Christmas. He likes it—as long as I’m in the room with him. I don’t know where he got the idea he could get up on the furniture.”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you were a dog?” I asked. “I mean, a doggie bed is nice, but your mom’s double bed is sweet.”

  “I have to figure this out.”

  “You should get a tiger to sleep on her bed when she’s not home.”

  “Yes! That might do it! I’ve been scheming ways to booby trap the bed. Hadn’t thought of a tiger.”

  “Or a shark. That would scare him off. As long as it doesn’t cause a fishy smell in the house,” I went on, considering. “I’m sure if you’re consistent about bathing and brushing it each week, and taking it to the groomer to have its anal glands and toenails clipped, the shark won’t smell too bad.”

  “A shark should do it.”

  “Glad I could help,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at three?”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  • • •

  At two the next afternoon I wandered out of the guest bedroom in my pajamas to make a peanut butter sandwich.

  “You better hurry if you’re going to Scottsdale,” my father said.

  “I’m not going.”

  “What’s with you and Dar these days? You don’t talk about him much.”

  I sat down and turned off his four-track tape player. The monotone reader ceased his narration of the weakened Swiss banking industry. “I’m in love with Dar. He’s not in love with me. I’m crawling out of this depression and I don’t think it would be good for me to see him. I’m fat and sad and have nothing to say.”

  “Humph.” He leaned forward to turn his magazine back on. “I never did see you and Dar together.”

  What did that mean? I could “see” Dad and Dot together—for a while. They were great old friends and enjoyed going to Sunday brunch or having dinner together, and they liked Glenn Miller and . . .

  For a while.

  Then I thought of Ruth, Dad’s next-door neighbor. She was big and big-hearted, always bringing food over and inviting him to go to the pool with her. It was thank-Jesus-this and Jesus-done-that and her cooking was terrible. I had forbid my father to take up with Ruth and he nearly gagged laughing.

  I could not “see” him with Ruth. He could appreciate Ruth’s kindness but she put his hackles up only a little less than she riled mine.

  What did Dad “see” when Dar and I were together? The age difference? My weight? His self-containment? My moods? I was perplexed because in the big things like religion and politics, which I knew Dad and Dot had to bury, Dar and I agreed straight down the line. Dar was obsessed with The Andy Griffith Show and I could sometimes spend a day flaked out with whatever city’s housewives happened to be on TV, but where our tastes were different, we could appreciate the other’s sensibilities.

  Or did he not sense a spark that’s different from “getting” someone? How cruel if that was true. I mean, Dar and I could have parsley sex (a nice relish but not the meal) but what could Dot and Dad do with their chemistry? I knew for a fact that they weren’t counting the hours until I left so they could get back to business.

  Dar was in transit from Maryvale and I left a faint message of illness and regret on his cell phone and went back to bed and my Kindle and apricot jam on the pillowcase.

  • • •

  He called around five that afternoon. He was volunteering at an animal shelter the next day and going to a party that night but maybe I could drive over for breakfast the day after that? No, I said. That was my second day before leaving and I wanted to be available for Dad’s last errands and tasks. He was quiet a moment and said, “I get that. You have an infinite number of breakfasts in your life but not many Christmases with your father left.”

  I was relieved. Enough that when he asked about the autumn I told him how grim it had been and then confessed, nearly in a whisper, “One reason I’m not frothing to see you is because I’ve gained so much weight.”

  “You know I don’t care about that.”

  “But I do. It’s been hard for me to be around people because of it.”

  He sighed. “I know how you feel. I need to lose some weight, too, but there’s so little time to exercise.”

  I hate that response. The difference between a forty-year-old male needing to lose 40 pounds is not in the same ballpark as a fifty-three-year-old female needing to lose nearly 140 pounds. But I let it pass. “Don’t they have a gym at the university?”

  “Yeah, but, well, you know—”

  He was busy. I think Dar was born busy. He probably came busting out of the womb with a Post-it note to paste on his mother’s chest saying he’d be back for his next feeding but would be over at someone’s house building a website or training a mastiff. I’d known him in the one un-busy spell in his life, when his apartment lease was up and he was waiting for a sublet in Florida where he planned to get straight, rethink his life and un-depress himself on the beach. When that failed and he found himself in hock to American Express, he headed home to his mother and promptly got busy again.

  “You look fine,” I told him. “You look the same as always in that Facebook picture.”

  “Maybe you’re too hard on yourself with this weight and food plan thing, Frances.”

  My throat had a lump like Gibraltar in it. I always feel better when I’m abstinent. It should be an end unto itself. But with Dar, it was about my weight. So he could lose a few? He’d turned his life around in five years, was working on a master’s degree and training abandoned pit bulls to be golden retrievers. I was living on an adjunct’s pittance and random dog gigs, getting fatter. I desperately wanted to show him the other me—the thin, mountain-pounding me, the one that when I wasn’t smiling didn’t look like I was actually scowling from the fat pulling my mouth down, the one who rode the Cyclone at Coney Island ten times in a row, screaming with my nephew, just because I could finally fit. In a way, Dar had never met me.

  I sniffed loudly. “I wish I was too
hard on myself. If I was, I might get my ass into a 12-step room and find my ass fit the chair a lot better. I don’t like not being able to do things.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. You’re on meds, though, right?”

  “Prozac. I’m up to forty milligrams. I’m better, but I have a way to go.”

  “You’re gonna be fine. Frances, I gotta take a shower. I’m driving some friends around the bars tonight.”

  “I have a Christmas present for you. I’ll mail it.” Last year I gave him a cotton candy machine, NIB from eBay, and he’d been as excited as I’d hoped he’d be.

  That was before we’d gone to Santa Fe.

  This year I got him a Mayberry R.F.D. cookbook. If I couldn’t win his heart, I could harden his arteries.

  “You shouldn’t do that. Just let me know sooner when you’re coming. I will always find time for you. That and your Christmas cards are our tradition.”

  “I’ll mail it,” I said again. I wanted to skip over the finding time thing. Until I was better—thinner, at peace, out of love—it was I who refused to give Dar the time to form any new opinions. “I’m glad you liked the card. It was a photo I took in Prague.”

  “I think my mom’s gonna frame it, she loves it so much.”

  “Tell her thank you.”

  “I will. Have fun with the rest of your visit, okay?”

  “’Bye,” I whispered, and hung the phone up as gently as if it were an egg.

  • • •

  There were a few dozen emails after my failure to show myself at Christmas. Gulliver continued to get on his mother’s bed and I suggested giving the shark a whip or a cattle prod, at which Dar cyber-snickered. “Be careful what you feed me,” I wrote back to his laughter. “I can live very well on a steady diet of whimsy.”

  “Well, I want you to live very well, so I’ll feed you a whimsy buffet if that’s what it takes,” he replied a few hours later. Why did we flirt when he didn’t love me?

  On Valentine’s Day, always a horrid day for the single woman and, probably, most men, he emailed that Lady Antebellum, whose idiot song “Need You Now” we had searched the radio for across the high desert of New Mexico and Arizona, had done well at the Grammys.

  “This really is the perfect Valentine’s note.” I remembered him scrolling through the dial searching for the anthem of friends with benefits. “And now I have enough information to look them up on YouTube. She looks exactly how I pictured her—like a post-modern Tennille, although not quite so toothy. I don’t think this group knows what ‘antebellum’ means, do you? Because if they do, that means they’re geniuses, singing Underground Railroad songs of love. Hope you get a big Whitman’s sampler in a red velvet box,” I ended.

  Five hours later, after classes were over and he could check his texts, he wrote back, “What I love about you, aside from your ability to determine a woman’s exact features through the radio, is your ability to capture the commercial essence of American Valentine’s Day in a closing wish.”

  I made a joke in return as my glasses collected my tears. Email is fabulous for hiding behind jocularity, I decided. Later that day he came home and found the Christmas present I’d finally mailed off.

  “I love the Aunt Bee cookbook! So awesome. I immediately shared it with my mom and she was pretty excited, too, and told me again her favorite trivia tidbit about Aunt Bee: ‘You know, she died a pauper.’ A postmodern, less toothy Tennille—heh. And carpetbaggers of love! I do enjoy your wit. And I wish you some fun.”

  He loved parts of me the way mammals love salt. These days I had no one to bring out the silly in me. We were at the sticking place.

  These exchanges lasted a day or two and then lapsed for a month. In March, Dar asked me more about why I’m susceptible to the Black Dog and I wrote the kind of letter Ashley Wilkes probably wrote Melanie Hamilton on each anniversary of her death. “I would like to tell [my younger self] to truly believe in herself, to be happy with who she is. I’d tell her not to be afraid and I’d tell her what decent, respectful, basic treatment is and that she should kick anyone who didn’t give her that. Being afraid and going along is the bane of my existence. I’d make up blind dates for her and I would hope she’d have a kid or two. I’d encourage her to save for old age. I wish she knew she was okay, that she didn’t have to remain the mistake she was in utero. But I’m 54. It’s too late.”

  “I’m going to save this in my inbox for periodic remindering,” he enthused back. “I don’t think it’s all too late. When you’re ninety, you’ll feel the same about now as now you feel about your 20s. I’m pumped; let’s do this stuff!”

  It was too late for me. My confidence crumbles like heavy snow on a thin snowpack. There will be no kids for me. My old age will be one of poverty. The one thing I could feel proud of in that exchange was that I had offered my very best advice to him. I’d tried to be noble. And having tried, it was finally time to really end it.

  I took the wimp’s way out and lapsed into silence and deleted him from my Facebook friends. Six weeks later he blithely checked in on how the book was progressing and I sniped, “Have you found the mother of your children yet?” He responded with protests that he was not screening women for fertility and whatever else he wanted from an ideal mate, although, he admitted, “I did post briefly on OkCupid last summer and I have dated a girl I met through that (and she and her kids have recently enjoyed some homemade cotton candy, thanks to you).”

  I thought I’d given everything I had to give him until I found out he was giving my stuff to other women. I felt ugly and pointless as a dying woman and the next day I told him it hurt too much to write him. He pled innocence—“Why would it be painful?” he asked all cyber-wide-eyed, and I replied crisply that perhaps he didn’t notice that I hadn’t initiated one in twenty email conversations in the last year and that I’d removed him from Facebook.

  Facebook brought him up short. Somehow that convinced him I’d truly slunk off to curl up in the thick undergrowth of my psyche. With his own cyber-pain he wished me well and said good-bye.

  • • •

  It’s been more than four months since that last dialogue. Peonies have given way to roses, which gave way to lilies, which were crushed in a hurricane. Indian summers seem to be a thing of the past in the age of global warning. The trees are dropping their leaves without changing color.

  My heart hasn’t died, but I will have to clean my glasses and have a cigarette after finishing this chapter. Dar’s and my love ricocheted as failure but even in that we’re partners. Of all the men I’d dated, talked to, emailed, winked at or otherwise brushed against in this year, Dar was the only one who loved me.

  That’s the strangest part of it. Dar cared about my work and dogs and sanguinity. It was a poison we both had to swallow in order for me to finally confront the despair that is at the root of my loneliness.

  Eleven

  There are moths that drink the tears of elephants. Tears contain salt, water and trace levels of protein. Mabra elephantophila steals the tears without the elephants seeming to notice. Lobocraspis griseifusa does not wait for an animal’s eyes to moisten—it sweeps its proboscis across the eye of its host, irritating the eyeball, encouraging it to produce tears.

  I was back in bed in March, immobilized by fear after enrollment once again dropped and I lost my teaching job. I had some small savings and pulled myself together enough to put the word out that I was back in the dog business. Slowly, gigs began to sprout up.

  Ten months earlier, I’d promised myself no more pinched nerves from suddenly beagle-hating Labs. Now it was a Portuguese water dog that flipped out as humans suddenly spurted forked tails and horns. Daisy was amused and treated him like a windup toy. One growl from her and the whole pedestrian population turned into Hieronymus Bosch’s Death of the Reprobate.

  A French bulldog, dachshund, Boston terrier and elderly golden retrieve
r joined my roster. I began to breathe again. They couldn’t pull my arms from their sockets and, by coaching a couple of writers, I was making the same wages I’d made adjuncting.

  Plus, no papers to mark and no students to argue about plagiarism with.

  I walked the streets that slowly came to life after a brutal winter, enumerating to Eva, the Frenchie, the things I had to do in order to fully pull out of my depression and explaining to Trixie, my rickety dachshund, about how to write a book about volunteering to go out and get hurt by a bunch of weird guys.

  Because getting hurt, I came to understand, is the norm in dating. It’s pain I need to steer clear of.

  • • •

  With that in mind, I decided to go back to craigslist, where I would get some immediate attention for the specifics I was looking for.

  I was not especially looking for a boyfriend, but I wanted to flirt. What I wanted was experience and information and some fun. I proposed a dim sum Chinatown date for research purposes—I’ve never had dim sum, Chinatown is my favorite neighborhood, and research would take the onus off the boy-girl-chemistry-weight-competition-looks-dog-hair thing that had caused so many pinches the summer before.

  • • •

  I was late and I could tell Jacob was not pleased. He’d driven in from Connecticut, it was his birthday, his sixty-second, and the woman he was meeting for the first time hadn’t bothered to charge her cell phone before trying to find a train on a Saturday night.

  But he was cute, in an impish sort of way, and we were meeting in Washington Square, which is entertaining, and I was wearing a shortish skirt and feeling flirty.