Unaccompanied Women Read online

  In our younger years we preferred fast movements: allegro, allegretto—the best being presto: really, really fast. We skipped, or tuned out, the adagio, the slow stuff. Not now. This second movement is so familiar to us we are a bit nervous, for the high notes must be hit just right, and there are a lot of them. And if the violin doesn’t hit them right on, eek, it’s awful. You can feel it, a graphic wince, fingernails on a chalkboard, sliding down a banister that turns into a razor blade. Well, maybe not that bad, but pretty bad. The musicians here today come from the San Francisco Symphony, so for the moment we’re as safe as we can be. Still, we have our memories of musicians less adept.

  The music gets pretty heated up in the last movement. The musicians are going to town, which is a good thing, because everybody in the audience wakes up. Schubert is not shy about endings, and we are on our feet, most of us, at the last flourish of the musicians’ bows. We applaud our thanks, smile our appreciation, as they leave the stage and hurry up the aisle to the long lives they have ahead of them. We’re slower. But here we go, some on canes or walkers, others pulling oxygen cannisters behind, steadied by and steadying those near us, flushed from another Sundae with music. We have no doubt that our bodies are crumbling, that friends and family have betrayed and abandoned us or we them, that the society in which we have lived for so long has refused to grant our deepest desires. But as we leave this church made all of redwood, the late afternoon sun streaming in through the stained-glass windows, the sounds of Schubert, who lived such a very short life, fill our minds and hearts, and we know full well that life is good. Every so often it comes clear to us that, like chamber music, the last act of our lives is the cherry on top.

  But the solace of music is not available to all. On my walk home I encounter another sort of old person, this one clearly homeless. Maybe sixty-five, but she looks older; she has become a regular in our neighborhood. The grocery-store cart she pushes brims with clothes, newspapers, bits and pieces of glass and cardboard gathered from the waste bins of the town. Her legs are swollen, her back is bowed, she shuffles, she is going to die right here in front of us. She stares at the sidewalk, except, yes, now she looks right at me, although she does not see me. She sees, behind me, her car parked at the curb—an old BMW (a warning to fancy car owners everywhere: This could happen to you)—crammed to bursting with collected sacks, scraps of material, frames of bicycles, wheels from supermarket baskets, and plastic bottles of every size. In my neighborhood, in her car, is where she lives, so she is not, I suppose, certifiably homeless, though perhaps she will be when she is crowded out by the junk she has collected. For the time being she has a home and drags her feet over the sidewalk to it. Behind the wheel she starts the engine, and the car lurches forward. She drives as I have seen her walk: unseeing, unaware of other cars or people, weaving across yellow lines, slow, very slow. She stops traffic. She will be back.

  Farther up the street, outside the post office, Leonard—a homeless man without music, without a car, without teeth—stands, his cardboard hand-lettered sign informing passersby that he is a veteran and in need of work. Unlike the lady in her BMW, Leonard is very aware of everything, as beggars must be if they are to survive. At our first meeting I dropped a dollar into his paper cup, and Leonard said, “Thank you, thank you. God loves you.” I answered, “What if I don’t believe in god?” and Leonard said, “That’s all right, he still loves you.” I put something in Leonard’s cup every time I see him, and every time I do, he says, “Thank you. God loves you.” That’s faith for you. Leonard is fifty-six years old and has spent more than his share of time in the hospital: In the year we have known each other he has suffered a broken arm and shoulder from falling off a bicycle he had rescued from the recycling bin, and he has been diagnosed with diabetes. The other day I missed Leonard, didn’t see him there behind the newspaper racks. I rounded the corner and heard a loud “Hey!” He called as he ran toward me, “I gotta have a operation. I’m going to see about a job. There’s one down on Milvia, a warehouse, shoving things around. I’m going to see about getting it.” I wished him good luck, handed him some money, and smiled as he said, “Thank you. God loves you.”

  I have Freud; Leonard has god. Let’s hope one of them can get Leonard his operation.

  This morning, no job. “They tell me I gotta have transportation and I don’t have none, and the bus don’t run that far out. So here I am back on duty.” He grins his toothless grin, and I say, “You know, you don’t look fifty-six; you look much younger.” This is not true, but my cheering-up skills have diminished since Jo died, and this is the best I can do. Leonard looks at me bemusedly, and suddenly I understand how irrelevant appearance is, how foolish we are to be caught up in the futile efforts of looking younger, dredged in the fear of looking our age or, worse, older. I stand before Leonard, speechless for once, and recall T. S. Eliot’s “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break . . .” Tomorrow I’ll just give him some money and keep my mouth shut. Will that help?

  This evening my three hundred fifty square feet, my rental, my home for the nonce, looks even more welcoming than usual. Before I go in, I check my car, just to make sure nobody’s moved in.

  CHAPTER 10

  be careful what you wish for

  Any love, be it happy or unhappy,

  is an absolute disaster when you

  wholly surrender yourself to it.

  —TURGENEV

  LEONARD AND I, each of us better off for knowing the other, soldier on. So do most people, though mostly in straits less dire than Leonard’s. Those of us untethered by marriage, like Greta at the Plaza and the women I encounter at readings everywhere, aren’t content to just be, but continue to be propelled into adventure by the desire for human touch. I am considered by some an expert; I do not feel like one. But I find myself, every so often and against my better judgment, making pronouncements. In fact, I’ve gotten interested in how people live their lives, especially women who are older and therefore marginalized, women for whom rules to live by no longer exist. So what do we do? We make up new ones. Because today, while debutantes continue to debut and churches—however changed from those of yore—still offer social gatherings, the machinery of matchmaking for most of us, even for young women, is less sturdy, less dependable, than it once was. And for older women it does not exist.

  Tanya, age sixty-two and as droopy as a rabbit in the rain, sits across the table from me at my corner café. We have not met before; I am here at the behest of Tanya’s friend, whom I know slightly and who assures me that reading my book has changed Tanya’s life. “Please,” the friend urges, “talk to her.”

  Tanya looks as if her life needs to be changed. She is pinched all over, like a raisin, like a little worm that shrinks at the sign of danger. She looks over her bifocals at me and tells me her life: She is long divorced; her two daughters are grown and far away; she works as a teacher’s aide in an inner-city middle school; she is lonely and, as we talk, desperate for the company of a man who might lessen the misery of her life. “I have not been with a man in many years,” she says shamefacedly. “When I read your book, I thought, ‘That’s me.’” Then she looks at me full on and asks, “Do you have any suggestions?”

  Allow me to pause right here and say once again that in my new life as a public person I have resisted giving advice, even though at every reading, every dinner party, every little speech I give, I am asked that question or a variation of it. I answer, “I don’t give advice, though I will say that doing what I did—placing such an ad—is probably not in the best interests of the whole family.” People laugh then, some with disappointment. So I perk everybody up by adding, “But if you do—do what I did—don’t send your best picture; send your third-best photograph. That way your potential suitor won’t look at you and turn away in dismay.” Well, good, now everybody has something to do, and we Americans are always needing something to do. I have provided a service, and we can all go home. But I leave always feeling oppressed by an unmet ob
ligation. What have I written, in all innocence, that makes people think I have answers? To anything?

  Still, here sits Tanya, her shoulders rounded, both hands warming themselves on her coffee mug, her blue eyes alight with hope. That’s it: My book seems to have given many people hope, and with so little of it in the world these days, I am happy that hope flies out of my book and into the lives of people who want it.

  Tanya, however, is not about to be satisfied with hope; she wants details, some rules; she wants explanations, a plan for the future. Driven to speech by her intensity, I lean across the table and say, “Lighten up.” I’ve done it now, no going back. “It seems to me we jump to the end too quickly; we tell ourselves we want a mate for life, a man who will be a companion and lover and who will stay with us, never abandon us, until death do us part.” Tanya nods, downcast. “That’s asking a lot,” I say. “If I were a man sitting here, I’d get up and run.” She’s still nodding. Enchanted by the sound of my own voice, I race on: “We forget to have fun. We’re so intent on ending up not alone that we miss out on what can come before the end, and sometimes in our desperation we drown the possibilities of life.” I am aghast at myself; I have delivered a sermon. Tanya rises and says, “Maybe” and “Thanks.” I wish her good luck, which really I mean, and in my eagnerness to help I offer a plan of action, however futile, to counteract the sententiousness of my sermon. “Go online,” I say. In the weeks hence she will e-mail me to tell me that, well, she is online and might be about to have some fun. But she’s not sure.

  Way off in Thailand, where Betsey from Iowa went to teach English, online is serving Betsey well: She and Howard in New Jersey have been corresponding regularly for almost a year and will meet for the first time face-to-face in July, when Betsey comes home to visit. Betsey is sixty-five, Howard “a few years your senior,” he writes in an e-mail. Watch out, Betsey: This purposeful vagueness could mean that Howard is anywhere from seventy to a hundred. I’ll bet that if he were “a few years younger,” he’d specify, he’d shout it out and then make a big deal about being “the younger man.” Don’t ask me how I know this; I just do.

  In August, Genevieve in Chicago flew to meet George, USAF Col. (Ret.), in Seattle. Genevieve, at sixty-three, decided to give up her married lover, who was in his own way wonderful, but never ever available on holidays. Genevieve had had it. She wanted a life that resembled other lives, and while she knew there is no such thing as a normal life, she wanted to wake up on New Year’s Day with a man beside her. Cyberspace to the rescue, perhaps, for Col. George (Ret.) was out there, too, waiting for her, she hoped. Off she went, only to discover, via a phone call to her hotel room, that Col. George had wrenched his back while renovating his condo, and wouldn’t be able to keep their date. Hmm. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Or, in this case, everything ventured, nothing gained. Col. George is a bum, whaddya bet?

  Online dating, though I have never done it because you have to send a photograph right away, seems safe enough, certainly safer than sitting in a bar, even as nice a bar as the Plaza’s, where likely the most interesting person you’ll meet is another woman. Online dating certainly worked for Ilse; it worked for my neighbor, who actually married the guy. And even if it doesn’t bring you a lifetime of happiness, you can sit at your computer in your old clothes, no makeup, a little light-headed from the glass of wine at your side, and you can create a self you like, not terribly far from the real you but just a little better, a little more appealing. You could have a relationship in practically no time at all. And you don’t even have to change your underwear.

  Online seems safe; everybody’s doing it, so it must be safe. The Internet offers something for everyone: JDate for Jews, LDS Singles for Mormons, even Arab2love and the Muslim-specific Zawaj.com. If you don’t fit in any of those categories, perhaps HOTorNOT.com is for you. The question is, Why are millions of people across the world on the Net? Okay, so it’s fast; okay, so it’s safe, a way to connect, if only by way of ether. It offers hope where there was none. What else?

  Andrea Orr, in her fascinating book Meeting, Mating, ( . . . and Cheating), offers the example of one of her office mates, “a typical single white male,” as one explanation: “His ad was nuanced, funny and self-deprecating . . . that little 400-word piece of prose was witty and intelligent.” If, as she says, his profile was not strictly literary, it came close. As writers everywhere do, this young man created himself in his own image, only better. Where else do we go to reinvent ourselves? What are our chances of becoming the person we admire? On the Net our chances are pretty good; after all, we never have to actually meet. In the meantime we can make a new life, our own, in the privacy of our computer. This time around we’ll have control. We can be the boss of us. And if someone answers back, if we should fall in love, then we get to add a new dimension to ourselves; we’ll see ourselves through the eyes, albeit cybered, of another, and it will be good.

  Amy writes to me from Nebraska that she has read A Round-Heeled Woman. “When I wasn’t crying, I was smiling,” she says. She goes on to say that a wonder of online relationships is that “someone sees and responds to every word ‘uttered.’ What could be more seductive than to be heard?” And so Amy embarked on “a love affair of words only. No face-to-face contact, no bodies entwined, just words.” She became, for this man ten years her junior, everything desirable in a woman, a woman adored by someone unlike her real-life husband, someone who was “a young, funny, talkative, energetic, silly man with blue-green eyes.” Monday became the best day of the week, weekends being exempt from contact. When she woke on Mondays, her first thoughts were of him, “the warmth and excitement of him” slipping over her “like a shield,” protecting her from disappointments to come her way in the course of the day. They “loved each other . . . through our fingers,” when suddenly, out of nowhere, he wrote, “I can’t do this anymore.” At this, Amy turned herself into someone she had never known—a woman full of self-hatred, a woman unable to let go. She sought the help of a therapist, who prescribed pain medication. She lied to her family, told them her depression came from the death of her sister, and all the while she continued to look for him on her screen, to send off witty, light-hearted notes, some even “playfully sexual,” until at last he wrote her about “One of those things that just seemed to happen.” He had found another. Three years later Amy cries. She looks in the mirror, sees “a well-tended body attached to an ugly woman with baggy eyes—pathetic, the proverbial spurned lover . . . a woman . . . who would rather die than continue to experience this . . . daily self-inflicted torment of abandonment, rejection, and invisibility.”

  Holy cow, this is as bad as real life, worse even. Amy in her desire to be “a standout,” as she says, “a shining star,” got dumped, but all the while, parallel to her secret life on the Net, she cooked and cleaned and took care of her husband and went to her book club and her volunteer job at the hospital and her exercise class, and tried not to let her secret life spill into her real life; and all the while her online life was more real, more desirable—even in the anguish that resulted.

  Here was high drama in which Amy played many roles: the ingenue, the older woman, the heroine whose injury at the hands of one less worthy made her life as large as tragedy itself. She wrote herself a life and writ it large. She is a woman out of Ibsen, a Hedda Gabler. But, Amy, don’t do what Hedda did; she shot herself. Take a break from misery; go buy some shoes, get a manicure, take lots of walks. Fitzgerald wrote about American life, “There are no second acts.” He was wrong, wasn’t he? We do it all the time, for fiction and for real—first, second, all the way to the fifth act, with epilogues when called for. So, Amy, you made a life. Do it again. It’s what America is all about.

  I, of course, never went online. I thought about it, I even booted up a matchmaking site. I thought, Well, hell, I’ll pay some money. But I got to the part where it said “photograph required” and quit. The photograph, the one I had sent via snail mail to Robert the Rat, had
been my downfall. One look at me in real life, and he said, “I didn’t recognize you.” Things went from bad to worse, and it was then that I swore that if I ever sent another photograph of myself I would send the third-best. That way the other person would be relieved instead of disappointed.

  Now, Ilse, of course, beloved of Robert, whapped her best photograph up there on Match.com—the one of her standing in a field of flowers, skirt lapping her thighs, wind ruffling her tresses—and got immediate success, had tons of dates. The thing was, she really looked like her picture. Most of us don’t, though; most of us look like our third-best.

  So that’s my online experience, hardly any at all. And even though I recommend online dating services to women I hardly know, I do not take my advice. I’m not ready to face the unknown all over again, to risk life and limb, to know in advance that while joy and happiness might be just around the corner, so might rejection and sadness, and I’ve cried quite enough, thank you, at least for now. Besides, why doesn’t somebody come and find me? Why do I have to do all the work? Well, I’m sitting out a few innings, cleaning the infield out of my cleats, hoping for a brief shower to cool things off.

  However, down the block from me my neighbor has hit a home run. She just married a man she met online. He lives in Germany and she lives here, and he is coming here when the papers get done, and in the meantime she went there to get married to him. Isn’t that nice? Xenia is a very adventurous lady and a computer whiz. She’s also very cute. And she has a bunch of money. So, one might ask, if she wanted to get married, why couldn’t she find someone here? Xenia has had it with American men, she says. She has had it with American life, the kind of life that she claims is particular to this country, where every social event has to have a purpose: a book club, a birthday party, a wedding. These kinds of events eventually find the men in one room and the women in another. “Hasn’t this changed?” I ask her. Xenia is fifty-six, almost a generation younger than I. “No,” she says, “and another thing that hasn’t changed is that if you’re single, a single woman that is, you don’t get invitations from couples for dinner or the theatre, where you’ll be number three or five or seven.” I sigh: All of that has been true of my own American life, and apparently remains so.