Love Sick Read online

  We had dinner at a macrobiotic restaurant and my shoes gave me blisters. I bought bandages and he offered to rub my feet but I was too embarrassed to accept. What would I owe him for a public foot rub?

  He drove me home and we found him a strong cup of coffee sold by a cute kid to whom he spoke Hebrew. It turned out that Jacob had fought in the Six-Day War. I mulled that over as we walked to the Promenade. Any man Jacob’s age would have had to come to terms with war, whether because he was in one or had found a way around it. Something about the way he informed me of his Israeli army service hinted at a dark side of his soul. I assumed that he didn’t have to join the Israeli army and by doing so was ditching the American draft my brothers went to Vietnam under. Eager to contribute to my research, he told me that the last woman he’d dated had lost her job and moved in with him after an invitation to stay for a couple of days. He described renovating his house and the features of his SUV and I liked his attention to comfort but had visions of Daisy running in with muddy paws and jumping on the white couches.

  I emailed my thanks for dinner and the chat and he responded and friended* me on Facebook.

  We remain Facebook contacts but I wouldn’t say we became friends.

  • • •

  Joe looked like a good prospect. He said he knew some good dim sum places and we began to work out the details for meeting. In the middle of that, instant messenger popped up.

  “Someone’s co-opted your address,” Paul wrote. “I keep getting offers of Russian brides from you. You need to change your password.”

  I responded with a chuckling emoticon and promised I’d take care of it. On the other hand, I wondered, didn’t the former Soviet Republics still have a lot of Jews? Maybe he should consider Russia his land of opportunity. American citizenship in exchange for a wig? Not bad, really.

  “How are you?” he replied

  “Good,” I said. “Did you find your summer girlfriend last year?”

  He answered, “:(.”

  “Maybe you should try JDate.”

  “I have. I didn’t find anyone and the fees are enough to have a good dinner at Vegetarian Ginger.”

  I thought about putting him in touch with Jacob. They might each know a girl for the other.

  • • •

  One night, I was walking Daisy and her pal, Honey Bear, and we passed a bike I’d admired earlier that day. The rim of one slim tire was red, the other yellow. The frame of the bike was robin’s egg blue, the grips on the bullhorn handlebars were emerald green, and the seat was black-and-white racing checks. As bicycles go, it was a piece of art.

  As I waited for Daisy to pee, a tall skinny kid came tripping down the stairs of the apartment building the bike was locked up to. Daisy finished and I waited again for Honey Bear to circle around and pee over Daisy’s piddle.

  “Whoa! Check it out,” the kid said. “Will the yellow one have to start it over again?”

  I laughed. “No. Daisy’s usually too confident to cosign, but sometimes I have a couple of other dogs who line up behind her. They don’t do it for each other. Only Daisy.”

  “Alpha bitch,” he said soothingly, holding out his hand. Daisy jumped on him, clipping his groin, and washed her tongue across his face.

  “She’s very European and she likes you, which you should take as a compliment. I don’t believe in alpha dogs. When Daisy wrestles it’s always on her back. A vicious dog could rip her guts out. I have several theories about pee-overs but dominance isn’t one of them.”

  He walked over to the bike and began unlocking it. “What’s the other dog? It’s some kind of crazy.”

  “Chow and Australian shepherd, we think. She’s very nice. Your bike is amazing, by the way.”

  “You grock it, huh?” I blinked. I haven’t used or heard the word “grock” in maybe forty years. Since the time I had a skateboard, in fact.

  “Totally.”

  We began to walk along Clark Street, the kid asking questions about the dogs. He told me he went to St. Ann’s, the neighborhood’s elite and very progressive prep school, and that he was not doing well academically. That means, in Annese, he’s too busy making claymation videos to music he composes himself to take Latin as seriously as his teacher would like. They don’t give grades at St. Ann’s but he’d probably ace his SATs in the first go and end up majoring in physics and film studies at Stanford.

  He was the kind of kid I should have dated back in the days of grocking on crude skateboards, the source of the kind of regrets I have about weighing 245 pounds when this dating stuff and general confidence got worked out and you went to the prom in an evening gown from the ’50s and couldn’t wait to begin your freshman year at Reed College . . .

  It was a testament to how much better I was feeling that I could appreciate this chance meeting rather than spiraling into milk long spilt and long soured.

  He stopped in front of the Korean deli and asked if I’d watch his bike for a minute. “I know the guy inside. He’ll accept my ID.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “What are you going to do tonight?” I asked.

  “Hang out with my friend back where we met. I live on Garden Place. I’ll go home around one.”

  At sixteen, Will and I spent most of our weekends drunk on the pretty good wine my father made—and we could drive. What the hell, I thought. Rites of passage shouldn’t force you to lie. “How about if you hold the dogs and I go buy your beer?”

  He thanked me profusely when I handed him the plastic bag and told me where I could toss over a thousand bucks for a bike like his and rode off as the dogs and I continued toward Cadman Plaza.

  Kids, I justified to myself, are kids—better beer than getting into either kid’s parents’ Stoli.

  I had to call Will when I got home. We’d spent those years together—or together in our apartness as two weird teenagers, one fat, the other gay, who tried to find something other than each other to belong to. “Wouldn’t you have done it?”

  “Of course. Why should we have gotten to have all the fun? They have five more years before they’re legal. We were always just a couple of years away from eighteen. Can you imagine what we’d have done without your father’s wine cellar, France?” Will grew up poor as a rock and my parents kept me on a fairly short allowance. We would have been scared, broke and bored, although Will might have come out earlier than high school graduation, bored into bed with some college student.

  “I can’t drink red wine anymore,” I said. “It makes my ankles blow up.”

  “We’re old,” he said sadly. Lately every conversation comes down to our decrepitude and neuroses. “Thank God I have Rico. How’s Daisy?”

  I get that a lot from my family. They mention a mate or child or friend and then ask how Daisy is. The difference between them and Will is that he prefers the company of dogs as well.

  “Her muzzle turned white this summer. And the tip of her tail.” My voice sank. It was hard, seeing her getting older.

  “She’s eight. She has a long time still. But, France, how did she get to be eight? And when are you going to get another dog? You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  “You can only say that because you still have a week of being fifty-three.”

  He giggled his giggle that always drags me down with him. “You know what I’m doing on my birthday?” he whispered.

  “No. What?”

  “Golfing.”

  Over 50 Dating Secrets reared its hoary head in triumph. “Oh, God, we are old. Can I come live with you when we’re supposed to retire only I don’t have any retirement? I’ll teach your puppies not to eat linoleum.”

  “I want cabana boys.”

  “I don’t mind cabana boys.”

  “We’d make a good old married couple,” he said. “I’ll watch cabana boys I can’t get
it up for and you’ll watch Book TV about stuff you can’t remember.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  • • •

  I knew competition was a factor with Joe when it became difficult to find a time to meet. I may lack dim sum experience but am fairly certain it’s a brunchy thing, not a Friday night thing. On Saturday morning, though, he had a fiction-writing workshop, and he was meeting friends on Sunday.

  “God, help me,” I said to my computer screen. Men in their fifties who take fiction workshops are, I’m afraid, doomed to being perpetual wannabes.

  I liked the good hard dry kiss Joe gave me when we met and his fairly good-natured realization that we weren’t going to find one of those palaces trafficked by rolling steam tables. We found dumplings on a menu and he dove in with enjoyment until I told him the beer story.

  “I can see how it’s funny,” he said, putting his chopsticks down, “but as the father of teenagers . . .”

  Is this also a component of regret? In missing parenthood, was I barred from having my stomach clutch at the dangers my seed faces?

  “I remember a New Year’s Eve party I had in high school. I was shocked when my mother came into the living room and poured vodka into the punch bowl. ‘I’d rather you drink what’s here and that you drink it openly. It will make you drink like adults.’ She was wise about that.”

  “I dunno,” he said.

  I can’t tell you what we talked about by the time the last of the scallion pancakes was gone. I probably tried to be interested in his novel and he probably tried to be interested in women and weight issues. We walked down Mulberry Street and he seemed oblivious to the St. Anthony Giovinazzo street fair. He treated the oompah-band and cheap pastel plush toy prizes, the blocks of torrone and ropes of peppers, the divine smell of sausages and hot grease for zeppole as a nuisance because of the crowds. Had I been alone with my camera, it would have been a pageant. But I was accommodating. If he wanted to move quickly through it, I’d dart behind the booths and snake against the crowds eager to shoot balloons and grab a deep-fried Oreo.

  I was, therefore, surprised when he insisted on getting off the train and walking dogs with me. We walked him back to the R train and he said, “This was fun. We should probably do it again.”

  I gave him the same hard dry kiss he’d greeted me with and agreed.

  If the conversation was diffident, we at least both liked to read. He was handsome. And I never heard from him again.

  • • •

  Here’s another piece of dating etiquette I’d like everyone to play along with: Don’t say “we’ll do it again” unless you mean it. Let’s all agree on a polite “It was nice meeting you” as a way of leaving the door unlocked but quite closed.

  And this is where perspective comes in.

  Joe’s—let’s call it rudeness, shall we?—pinched me. I’d rushed headlong into Galean and Jeremy and their rejections hurt like hell at a time when my reserves were at low ebb. It took days to put the individuals, if not the defeat, behind me.

  Pain, however, is months of the Black Dog sitting on my chest. It’s financial precariousness that feels like rejection even though I know that enrollment numbers are behind it and the pay wasn’t great to begin with. Pain is going out during an ice storm at night for cake, pain is missing my mother and pain is what I feel in the midst of a silent quarrel with Bette.

  Hurt is finite. Pain is static. It hangs around. When it becomes less acute, it leaves you with a hangover. It is the difference between a skinned knee and a torn ligament. You’ll walk again. You’ll go sightseeing and make Thanksgiving dinner and go shopping for the perfect evening gown. But you will never have the nerve to try a Salchow again.

  There is an ad on Facebook right now that vacillates from “I Being Single” to “I Being Single.” The semantics here are bizarre. First of all, why does this “brand spanking new on-line dating site/unique events” switch back and forth between love and something-other-than-love? The two hearts suggest that the service caters to both kinds of client, but its motto, “Don’t Ride Alone,” is definitely relationship-centric.

  Beyond this wide cast of the net for clients, the symbols themselves are strange. Is the first jagged heart a broken heart or a half a heart? I can understand being brokenhearted after a romantic catastrophe, but anyone in a state of perpetual mourning because she or he is single is not my idea of an ideal date. It brings me back to the philosophy stuffed constantly down our single throats by the dating, beauty, diet, marriage and entertainment industries: If the sign means halfhearted, is a singleton half a person? Either statement suggests that meaning comes through romance, rather than through the affirming or negating actions of how one actually gets through one’s days.

  I’ve broken my heart a couple of times and the duration of the wound is the double-pain of the loss of the man and of never spinning over ice again. I’m not brokenhearted because I’m single. There are moments of acute hurt in being single, a cold ache of being an outsider and loneliness. It hurts, sometimes a lot, and then passes. I laughed when a couple smooched loudly enough on the street that it made Daisy bark, and I wished Joe would wander off to browse at Housing Works while I watched the girl too chubby for her low-riders and tube top jumping for joy when her boyfriend won a pink teddy bear.

  Dar, who lurks behind these words, causes, at the worst of times, a cascade of feelings: dismay, anger, curiosity, well-wishing, loss of hope, regret, self-judgment, silence, need, boredom. Each has its own spasm. I wonder if he’s fallen in love. I wish he could read the novel I’m working on. I need a good laugh. I hope he finds the perfect job and starts rock climbing again.

  I hope, if he thinks of me, that he misses something he hasn’t quite found with anyone else. I hope I’ve left some hole in him—but I hope it only hurts a little.

  I want badly to text “I miss you” to Dar. A lot of what hurts is my pride. Then I read about the Wall Street protests or chat with Celia about her work in Albany and I forget again for a while.

  It’s a good thing that Dar and I didn’t see each other more than once or twice a year. It’s a good thing to keep pain and hurt as separate categories in my head.

  • • •

  In a city whose restaurants are known for pressed tin ceilings, oak floors and enviable furnishing and décor, Abigael’s on Broadway is the spitting image of the convention rooms at the Hunt Valley, Maryland, Marriott.

  I had never seen a heterosexual man enjoy a duded-up strawberry margarita as much as Paul. The drink seemed bigger than him.

  I dropped something on the medallion-patterned carpet and the woman at the table next to me made a joke about pocketbooks. I was relieved that she spoke to me, let alone found a female common denominator between us. Every woman in the restaurant wore hose, a wig, and a turtleneck. To my very slight credit, I had turned back to my closet and pulled out a blazer rather than the more comfortable shruggie. But with my bare legs, neckline, sandals and pierced ears, I could have been considered an insult to every person in the room.

  I had started having afternoon coffees with Paul somewhere among the craigslist dates.

  “The basic question,” he said in his flat voice, “we use in judging gentiles is whether you observe the Noachide Laws. Murder, robbery, blasphemy, idolatry, eating flesh from a living animal, having courts of law, sexual immorality.”

  “Deal breaker,” I said, refolding my napkin. “As a Montanan, I like my meat to scream when I cut into it.” He studies my poker face, then laughs. “Most of those are what Catholics call mortal sins, except for idolatry—we do like our Michaelangelos and Berninis—and courts of law, which caused the Reformation in several European countries. But everything I’ve read says kosher sex is married sex. Won’t you have to—I don’t know. You don’t have confession or penance, do you? Isn’t having sex with me breaking the immorality law?”

  “Wellll,�
� he drawled. “We can’t have kosher sex.”

  “So if it’s not kosher it’s not sex?” I shook my head. “What is it then, some form of masturbation?”

  “No. Masturbation is forbidden.”

  “Is this like Catholic loopholes around marriage? If you aren’t married in the Church then you can’t be a divorcée in the Church either?” I couldn’t shake the sense that dating a gentile would be a less-than proposition for the woman.

  For me.

  It was putting the cart in front of the horse, however. It took hard work to talk to Paul. We had nothing in common.

  But those noontime coffees made putting on a skirt and coloring my hair a pleasurable break in my routine of dogs. They reminded me there was a me. A mingler, if you will, and girlie—or at least wistful of lost girliness.

  • • •

  “How was Shavuot?” I asked the next time we met. “Are you exhausted?”

  “I spent it on the Upper East Side,” he said, “going from synagogue to synagogue.”

  “Yes, but how was it?” I pressed. “Did you enjoy it? Did you have some new insight?”

  “It was hot. I took refuge in the penguin house at Central Park Zoo.”

  That is when I knew I would clean the Bat Cave and ask him over. I was enchanted by the thought of this slight man in his over-large suit and fedora, blinking back the lights of sleeplessness and Leviticus, sitting in the cool dark tunnel watching the penguins gawk at him through the windows as they zoomed through their icy aquarium.

  • • •

  We didn’t speak of emotional matters. Paul lives several worlds away, not only in one in which the year is tied to moons and ancient remembrances, but in a world of numbers and symbols. To his credit, he made his decision to get his doctorate in logic because one of the professors was a gorgeous blonde, but he didn’t live in my world of shades of early summer foliage and grapefruit-scented bubble baths. If I asked him what love felt like, he’d probably say tolerance to the sixth power.

  Did I mention I once had a huge crush on Mr. Spock?

  • • •