Love Sick Page 8

  Convinced that there is some Halachic loophole that would allow sex with a gentile without stoning or a good strong bath, my research into the interstices of rules governing relations with gentiles led to a phone call to Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a best-selling author and founder of the Meaningful Life Center, a Torah-centered “spiritual Starbucks” (which, I guess, means drop in for ten minutes of Torah and lattè) but after he scoffed at the idea of a sexual exemption (“No one is perfect. Observant Jews sin as much as anyone.”), he went on to interview me. It might have been a chance for him to dig in to my world a little, although he found, when I told him I’m fifty-four and never married, that I am not a typical secular gentile.

  “Do you mind me asking all these question?”

  “Not at all,” I said. Anyone can find the answers to his questions by reading my books or blogs, but I felt somehow that I was in the presence of someone prayerful and authentic and, maybe, holy.

  “Did you ever find your birth mother?”

  “No. I was never really interested,” I told him. “I figure the people who changed my diapers and paid for graduate school are my real parents.”

  “Ah. But what if”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“she’s Jewish? That would make you a Jew.”

  Yeah. Me and the king of Denmark.

  Five

  The male bowerbird incorporates hundreds of brightly colored objects in his nest, including shells, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, plastic garbage, coins, nails, rifle shells or pieces of glass. He spends hours grooming his collection, which reflects his ability to procure items from his habitat. He often steals from neighbors.

  I cannot overstate what a bumbler I am when it comes to dating.

  With exactly two exceptions, every boyfriend, lover or crush I’ve had in the last ten years has started with me having an almost neutral opinion. Affection may take me a day or it may take a couple of months, but in the beginning, if we are in any way suited, I reserve judgment.

  Perhaps a better way to put this is that I leave the judgment up to the guy and I go along with it.

  My passivity is born of inexperience and a frightfully low opinion of myself. I am not, however, a sucker.

  Much.

  • • •

  At first Bette was enthusiastic.

  “Ooh,” she said when I forwarded his profile to her. “He’s cute. I like that boyish thing with the graying hair. I wonder what kind of restaurant the photo was taken in.”

  “I think he’s cute, too. But he’s four years younger than me.”

  She snorted. “Like that’s ever stopped you. Look, Franny. He went to Johns Hopkins. He’s a gardener. You guys are, like, perfect.”

  Danny was certainly enthusiastic in his first email. He liked weekends in Paris and was the owner of “an interesting and financially successful business which provides me with freedom.”

  On the other hand, his profile was fluent but his email was a grammatical mess, which I couldn’t square with weekends in Paris. I mean, those are long enough flights to read a lot of books and magazines. Even if they were Popular Mechanics and schlocky thrillers, some of the grammar should rub off. And he lived in Florida. I was tired of long-distance relationships. It made me think that Paul’s logistics of the Lexington Express wasn’t such a bad idea.

  In for a penny, however, in for a pound. “You live in Florida!” I wrote back. “How can we make that work? You will have to fall very madly in love with me and move me down, I suppose.”

  I mean, what the hell? I could toss my hair and act imperious while indulging fantasies of living barefoot among the herb borders with this man I hadn’t yet spoken to who seemed to be on me like white on rice.

  But then again, why was such a guy on Ashley Madison? It’s not exactly the kind of place where gardening is a skill to brag about.

  Ashley Madison guarantees that its paying members will have an affair. I didn’t fork over my Visa number so there was no promise that I’d be looking for my high heels, but I hope to God those pictures will never be found by a houseguest.

  I’d posted a terse profile there in a fit of revenge. Every other month or so, I Google men I once loved (you do too, so stop rolling your eyes). Eric, the man who broke my heart a couple of years ago, was hacking endlessly away at a book proposal to rewrite Gay Talese’s Couples for the new millennium. Despite the presence of a girlfriend on Myspace and Facebook, he said on his website that he was up for anything.

  Anything??? I screeched at my computer screen. I have had a hell of a time letting go of Eric, largely because there are writerly and comic things about me that he won’t let go. But one of the things I’ve used to delete his emails was a conversation in which he admitted he found sex with me to be too vanilla.

  Funny that when he mentioned that, it was what I automatically thought about sex with him.

  Up for anything, my, er, foot.

  That was all I needed to find the naughty photos a boyfriend once took of me and post them while whistling the tune of “Anything You Can Do.”

  Hell, Eric, hath no fury. You didn’t bring out my dark side, but by now I’ve learned how to do it myself. If my Ashley Madison profile was a secret revenge, it still felt sweet.

  But what was a guy who “like[s] dogs and children” doing on a dating site populated with user names like Tuff&Ruff?

  “My daughter made me put up a personal,” he wrote back. “I didn’t know Ashley Madison is like that.”

  Did I believe him? No. Ten minutes on Ashley Madison is enough to make you want to wash your hands with bleach. I sat back and tried to imagine a daughter writing his ad and him posting it on Ashley Madison. But I liked what I’d read and decided I’d kid him about it for the rest of our lives.

  He was a widow, he wrote soon after, with a fourteen-year-old who attended the Florida Air Academy. “Just like her mother,” he said proudly. “She’s determined to fly.”

  Danny, too, was flying . . . to France on a business trip. He called me for the first time as he was driving to the airport. The static on his cell phone made him sound like we were playing mermaids, but I was able to make out that he’d be in meetings for a few days and hence unavailable. “Kiss, kiss,” he signed off through the bubbles and eddies. I liked that. I know a couple of Brits who say that.

  • • •

  The next I heard from him he had been awarded a huge decorating contract for the government of Benin. Benin! I opened my atlas, hoping it was a small island in the French West Indies or a region of France I hadn’t heard of before.

  I got the French part right. It’s a former colony, resting six degrees above the equator on the Atlantic in West Africa. Three of its border countries are among three of thirty-three countries on the State Department’s Travel Warnings list and another seven nations on that list are within a two-hour flight from Cotonou, the coastal city where Danny was working (or not working). American travelers are warned against crowds and walking alone on the beach at any time of day. The primary industry is subsistence farming. Its secondary industry is scamming gullible American women into taking out cash on their credit cards.

  “Cool,” Ben said. “Have him send me stamps.”

  Danny was in the Heart of Darkness and I found myself corresponding with his daughter, Hellie, who was delighted to have a new “Ma” and “a funny dog” in her life.

  Ma?????

  I answered that I was a long ways away from being her mum and that she wrote in the same scattershot fashion as her father. Then I forwarded this batch of emails to Bette.

  “Don’t do this, Fran,” she said as soon as I picked up the phone. “It’s a scam.”

  “I know,” I said. “But isn’t it delicious?”

  “No. It’s stupid and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’m not gonna get hurt, silly. I just wanna know what he wants.”


  “Who cares?” she snapped. “He’s trying to sucker you in.”

  “Bette.” I wanted to slow her sudden prickliness down. “Bette. Don’t you think it’s, I don’t know, interesting? I mean, you hear about this stuff and now it’s happening. I want to see it play out.”

  “You’re clinging to the idea that he’s in love with you.”

  “No, I’m not!” I was starting to get angry now, too, in that way that happens when someone doesn’t see the humor in a situation.

  “I can’t talk about this, Frances. I’m afraid for you. Talk about something else. How’s Daisy?”

  So I backed off and told her about walking Daisy and her best friend, Hero, an inscrutable white Lab and one of my favorite dogs ever. That morning she had taken umbrage at a beagle named Bacchus and whipped me 180 degrees around in sheer fury. My left shoulder and arm were killing me. I was looking forward to starting to teach so my body could heal from six years of walking Labradors who lunged for invisible bread crumbs and sudden enemies. It had been six years of suppurating wounds, green bruises, stress fractures, lower back pain and more love than a single human being deserves.

  “Bacchus,” she cooed. “I love that dog. When you see that dog again, tell him I’m gonna come suck his brains out his ears.” Bette knew every dog in the Heights and had walked most of them in her years as a much more successful walker than I had ever wanted to be.

  “Daisy used to hate him, too,” I said. “One day I gave her a cookie to make her behave, and then I gave him the other half. They did the butt-sniff Maypole and have been friends ever since.”

  “I’m gonna come suck her brains out, too. Make her do the Thing.”

  It’s a slightly cruel trick I play on Daisy that tickles Bette into threats of further canine dining. I call out, “Hello? Hello?” as if someone is outside my door and Daisy starts barking her own greetings.

  “She’s such a fluffer-nutter,” Bette said through the commotion. I sat down to comfort Daisy, who promptly flipped over for a belly rub, looking at me flirtatiously. “Who else are you talking to besides the so-called Danny Foster?”

  “I’ve put profiles up on a bunch of different sites. I actually paid for eHarmony. What a rip-off. You take this big personality test and then they send you your potential dates. You don’t get to do any boy-shopping at all.”

  “Who have they sent you?”

  “A bunch of men whose most important accomplishments and favorite hobbies are their grandchildren.”

  “And you paid them money for this?”

  “It’s research, Bette. Tax write-off.”

  “Sometimes I’m glad I’m married,” she said.

  We said good-bye amiably, but I wondered why she didn’t trust that I knew there was a lot of fishiness in Danny’s stories.

  • • •

  A day or two later, I called my cell phone carrier so I could get transatlantic service. I knew it was going to be expensive calling Benin but I shrugged it off as another tax expense and gritted my teeth.

  “It’s so hot here,” he complained. “I’m working twenty hours a day. I’ll send you pictures. Also, something else, for your eyes only. I can’t wait to come home to you.”

  I sat in my kitchen and smoked as I eked this out of the crackle of the Atlantic as it warmed and readied for hurricane season. When I asked him where he was staying, he said his employers had chosen badly and he wanted to move hotels.

  Within hours he sent attachments. There were photos of a lighthouse set among rocks and pine trees; a kitchen paneled in pale oak with a vase of sunflowers on the island counter; chalet-type interior with a bearskin over the upstairs balustrade.

  A white white living room with a merry fire in the hearth.

  Are there sunflowers in Benin? Pine trees? Wouldn’t merry puffs of air-conditioning be more appropriate?

  And there was an Ecobank Benin draft made out to Danny Tommy Foster* for 5.5 million dollars. It looked suspiciously authentic.

  It looked authentically suspicious.

  “He either wants money, a green card or accommodation,” Bette sighed. “Those pictures were lifted from a website.”

  I agreed and spent an eye-straining hour on Google Images trying phrases like “chocolate and white bedroom interior design” and “Danish modern dining table.”

  Chocolate bed linens were no longer popular.

  “Give the Florida school a call,” Bette challenged me. Hellie spent her early-June birthday alone and bereft of a cell phone, which she’d lost. Danny asked me to help her out but I answered with blithe firmness that, “I’m sure you could either give your credit card number to Hellie’s headmaster or call whatever carrier you’re with and arrange to have a phone sent to Hellie. If you can call me, you can certainly do that.”

  Of course I knew there was no Hellie. I had no intention of spending the words trying to explain to the school why I was calling about her. And I wanted, badly, to see just how far he was going to go. Calling the school would end the experiment.

  “I’ve decided he’s for real,” I gasped as soon as Bette picked up. “But he’s a ventriloquist! He and Hellie can’t write me at the same time.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “C’mon, Bette. Laugh,” I wheedled. “All of these emails go into a folder named ‘Scam,’ you know. I’m not in love with this guy. I just want to know what his angle is.”

  That night it was Bette’s turn to email me. “I’m sorry, Fran, but I feel Mr. Foster is not who he says he is. I won’t be commenting on him any more. I support you, though, as always.”

  I whined to Daisy, “Well, that’s no fun.”

  • • •

  July and heat. Fifty freshman essays in piles on my desk. Other men I was seeing or talking to. There was a lull in communication with Danny, which I was not only grateful for but prolonged with a lie about having strep throat when he IM’d me with complaints about my end of the silence. He was sorely tried by the Beninese authorities as he tried to get his 5.5 million. He had to pay all the fees and taxes before he could withdraw it. He was eight thousand dollars short.

  Somewhere near Cape Verde, I could feel the wind picking up.

  I waited for him to ask for the money. He was cleverer than that. He’d lost both his phone and his Bible in a taxi. Would I send him a Bible?

  Nice touch, I thought.

  “Do you want a rosary, too?” I wrote back.

  “Send it by DHL or FedEx. It will take 72 hours. Of course I’d be happy to have a rosary.”

  I sent him a link to the King James Bible online, to which he did not reply.

  We definitely did not share a sense of irony.

  An AT&T phone would be helpful, too, he added in instant messenger a few minutes later. He couldn’t call me without it.

  “I can’t do that,” I replied. “You have to get it in your name and make decisions about things. I won’t put it in my name.”

  “Send it to 72 Pharmacy Shegbeya, Cotonou, Benin. The hotel manager will receive it for me—Mr. Oladiti Ezekiel.”*

  I said I’d look into it and promptly didn’t.

  I knew the combination of my recalcitrance and continued presence was acting like one of those fairy-tale irritants that made Rumplestiltskin tear himself in two. I also hoped to God that every other woman he was weaving this elaborate story for was as sadistic as I.

  He cracked soon enough. Skipping like a stone across the waters of Benin’s banking and treasury rules, he said his Internet connection was tenuous and so “we’d” better get to the point. “I have 67,100$ [sic] to come up with and I have raised 18,600. I have a travelers [sic] check of 35,000 that I can process by Monday. All i need to raise now is 13.5k. I don’t mean to ask you this but I have tried all I could and [you are] all I am left with. Upon my arrival, I will REFUND it back, even with interest. I promi
se.”*

  I sat at my computer and laughed. “I don’t have anything like the money you need.”

  “What do you have? I really need your help for the sake of US and our future, Hellie and Daisy.”

  “I have nothing, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. But I am crying . . . !”

  Like Paul, I was reminded of a joke. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

  “Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark, all by myself . . .”

  Coercing me to send the amount of taxes I myself owed the IRS turned to imperious demands for table scraps.

  “Send $1250 by tomorrow. I am leaving as soon as I receive it. You can pick me up at the airport, then I can handle the rest. No argument. Just go and do it tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, right,” I messaged back. “I have $1200 like I have a second head. This is not an argument. It’s ‘no,’ plain as that.”

  It was tedious, this wheedling and guilt-tripping. I had the information I’d told Bette I wanted from him—he was out for money. I don’t know why I kept up the pretense, except, perhaps, because I wanted to see if I could shame the gasbag grifter. I wanted to apply the thumbscrews. One night, I asked for his American address. He excused himself from instant messenger to take a business call (on what cell phone, exactly??), then sent me a Pensacola address. Zillow listed it as being for sale. It was a mess of weeds and cheap wood paneling, no pool or herb borders to go barefoot around.

  “There are a lot of holes in your story,” I emailed. “I don’t think you live in Florida or have a daughter at FLAIR and I think that you’ve set this up to get money. I wish that wasn’t true because despite how crappy it is that you’d do that, I quite enjoyed the fantasy.”

  “I understand you are thinking negative about me because I told you about my financial problem. Well sorry if I inconvinent you and I don’t need your help in my situation,” he snapped back.