Unaccompanied Women Read online

  I chose not to have a cup of coffee with Barry either, who lived in San Francisco and was ready to hop on over to Berkeley at the drop of a hat and who, as an added enticement, sent me a sex toy. A pocket rocket, I learned this little flashlight-looking thing was, a vibrator, I guess, for inside and out. Bet you want to know what I did with it.

  When I showed up to do readings, someone who worked at the bookstore would meet me with what we decided to call mash-faxes in hand: fan mail, I suppose you could call it, faxed to the bookstore in advance of my appearance there. “Hello, my name is Romeo, I am twenty-six and very hairy.” From Simon: “I envision a déjeuner sur l’herbe, pistachios and foie gras, sparkling cider (I don’t drink) and melba rounds and then, if we are so inclined we will incline ourselves to my apartment.”

  And always there were the Men at the End of the Line. It got so that while I was doing the reading I could tell which of the men in the audience would stay around afterward, would install themselves at the end of the line formed by people waiting for me to sign their books, would suggest future meetings, just the two of us.

  One night there he was. Couldn’t mistake him, sitting alone (these men were always alone) in the back, slouched against the wall, pale face, skinny, blue jogging suit, white stripe down the pant legs. Sure enough, here he came, all six-feet-plus of him, all one hundred fifty pounds of him. He looked down at me, tugged the jacket out of his pants, and began to roll down the waistband of his jogging suit. There was his bare skin, very very pale, like his face, with blue lines just beneath the surface—his veins, for god’s sake, which got bluer every time he stretched his arm up over his head, which he did several times, no doubt to impress me with his muscle tone and his execution of the perfect stretch-your-arm-over-your-head form. Everybody was gone; the bookstore people were folding up chairs, noisily, and stacking them in the back room. Don’t go, don’t go, I pleaded silently. The man leaned down from his great height, looked into my face, and spoke, his waistband now just below his navel: “I run,” he said. “I lift weights, I work out.” He tugged at something hanging from his waist. “Here,” he said, pulling out a little clock-thing, “I want you to see how many miles I ran to get here, just to hear you.” Clearly I had no idea of how to read this pedometer, so he said, “Seventeen. Seventeen miles. Just to get to your reading.” I was supposed to say something; it was my turn. What in hell . . . “Thank you,” I said. He straightened up and stood there looking down at me, disappointed at my failure to announce that I adored at first sight men who worked out, especially men who went to great effort to meet me, to suggest we run off together that very night to put our mutual good health to work for what would surely result in our mutual pleasure.

  In the silence one of the bookstore employees returned from the back room, saw this odd scene out of a silent movie, and said to the man, “Jane has to go now.” I want that employee’s name; I want to send her a million dollars, or at least a copy of this very book you are reading now, in which she is a hero or heroine. (I miss feminine endings.)

  And of course, I made mistakes. One man at the end of the line (this line being at yet another bookstore), again tall but this time nice-looking and sort of normal, whatever that is, handed me his book to sign and said, “I drove a hundred miles to get here. I read about you in The New York Times and thought, Well heck, I need a little excitement in my life. So I found out where you were going to read, and here I am.” I smiled and said, “Thank you.” He continued: “I liked how you read, and I liked the question-and-answer thing you did afterward.” I thanked him, and he said, “Well, that’s about all the excitement I can handle right now, so I guess I’ll go home. Good night.” And he left.

  My mistake was not jumping out of my chair where I sat to sign books and running after him. My mistake was not pursuing this normal-looking, undoubtedly kind, and rather shy man who, a hundred miles from here, probably led a normal, plain, and maybe even sometimes boring life. This was a safe man, a nice man, and what was wrong with me, anyway, that I didn’t offer my phone number or my e-mail address or just follow him to his car and get a lift to a life less dizzy, less complicated, a life of peace and quiet. But I think what he told me was true—that that night had been enough for him and he was ready to go home—without me. I am dangerous, I guess. I have upset all the applecarts for everyone to see, and one evening is as close as any nice, sensible man wants to get to cleaning up the debris. Alas.

  We shall skip lightly over two ugly men who stayed late in order to regale me, and anyone else within shouting distance, with their exploits of women, how easy they found it to get women, especially older women, to do whatever they wanted, how especially in Berkeley women were desperate for male attention and how they—these two fat, hairy blowhards—got laid whenever they felt like driving over the bridge. “You give men a bad name,” I said, and walked away.

  And on one foggy night in San Francisco, in a tiny bookstore filled to the brim with people come to hear me read, I glanced out over the crowd—Who would be at the end of the line this time?—and saw in the back of the room, leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest, a half smile on his face, an absolutely wonderful-looking man. I undressed him then, and found big shoulders, strong arms, broad chest, and an ass to last the night. Watch out, I cautioned myself; I felt my face grow hot, and so I returned quickly to business, reading and signing books. The next time I looked up—the end of the line was near—he was gone. Maybe he undressed me, too, and found me wanting.

  So there you have it, my opportunities that came via e-mail, telephone, letter, and in person big as life. Did I find The One? Everybody asks that, and I answer, I’m not looking for The One. I say that so often I must believe it. I keep quiet about Graham and his marriage, for I do not want to let myself believe that he was The One. How ridiculous, everyone would say. How could you let yourself get swallowed up by your passion for a man half your age? And now you hurt. Serves you right.

  So there lies my innocence, dormant in the snows of yesteryear; and here comes wisdom. It reminds me that night awaits, that lunchtime was over a long time ago.

  “Tell us how your life has changed.” I am asked that again and again. My answer is always the same. “I still live in three hundred fifty square feet and go to the laundromat every week.” There is to be a change, however, not long from now; my landlady is pregnant.

  And another change: an e-mail from Graham. “Dare I phone you?”

  CHAPTER 12

  identity theft

  How suddenly the moonbeams turn to worms.

  —NORMA SHEARER to CLARK GABLE in A Free Soul

  IN THE THREE seconds it takes for me to answer yes to Graham, in those three seconds that change me from sad to happy, from mean and grumpy to loving and generous, I toss all the caution I have accumulated over these months to the wind. Common sense? Who needs it? A nice age-appropriate man? Nah. Wisdom that comes with all my years of experience? What wisdom? With one e-mail I come fully alive to the possibilities of life, and once again they are all mine. In my newfound enthusiasm for just about everything, I say yes to Hannah, an acquaintance who begs me to hear her story, which came about after she read my book. She gave me her permission to tell it. So here it is.

  One night Hannah’s husband of twenty-six years went out for a pack of smokes and came back a crack addict. It happens that way, sometimes, one hit and your life is no longer your own. That’s what the man in the next cubicle told her when she went to work the following day. Not long after, her teenage daughter ran off with her soccer coach, and her son, away at college, sent home letters of despair promising to end it all before Thanksgiving. Hannah had not gotten over, and never would get over, the death of her firstborn, drowned at age three. Life was beating her up. She could curl up until the referee rang the bell, or she could pick herself up and do what she could to even the odds.

  Hannah left her husband, drove long miles to console her son, and sent her daughter a money order for bus fare ho
me, should there come a time to use it. She wiped away the tears of lives gone awry. She went to work every day. She saved part of her salary. She went to the movies alone and with friends. She took long walks. She told her husband he could not come back even though he swore, falsely, that he was rehabilitated. She got a lawyer, then a divorce. She sold their house. She rented an apartment. A year and a half later Hannah was, in her words, “ready to be with someone with hair on his forearm, ready for a man to touch my wrist.”

  At fifty-six Hannah is small and trim, her face unlined except for crow’s-feet, her expression open and cheerful, the look of a midwesterner, which she is. She sits on the couch of her small apartment, her legs crossed Indian-fashion, and tells me what it was like to fall truly, madly, deeply in love—for the first time—in middle age. “It’s not that I didn’t love my husband,” she assures me. “I did in the beginning, and for all those years we were more or less comfortable with each other. Oh, there were problems with his depression, I guess it was, but all marriages have problems, and I never once thought about ending it or being untrue to him. And then all hell broke loose.” She smiles. “I know, there’s nothing funny about such upheaval, but it’s that my old life ended and another began. And this time I was in control.” Her smile turns ironic. “Or so I thought.”

  Once she settled into her apartment, she dived into Match.com and the profiles of men who wanted to meet women. She felt deliciously risky and wild and sexy—“I hadn’t felt deliciously anything for years”—as she pored over the responses to her online profile. She felt powerful as she discarded men interested in bowling and NASCAR, and anyone unable to spell “cuddle.” And she fell in love with the language of Wayne’s profile, which rendered him witty, self-deprecating, confident, intelligent, whimsical, sensitive, curious. “Grounded, independent, and not stuffy . . . Interests: black raspberries andfresh green peas, prairies, hepatica when it first blossoms in the spring . . . Goals: to massage the foot of my read-aloud partner, make macaroni and cheese 52 different ways, play second base, build a rowing shell . . . Ideal Match: one who can banter, who knows how to flirt. Smiles, good teeth, youthful brain . . .” He ends his profile with “If you’ve ever stolen a guy’s long-sleeved, soft white cotton, button-down collar shirt and worn it without accessories, please write.”

  Who wouldn’t write! Hannah did, Wayne answered, and for weeks they wrote up a storm; they spoke on the telephone, and then they met. They made love. And Hannah grew beautiful, for she loved and was loved in return.

  These violent delights have violent ends

  And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

  Which, as they kiss, consume.

  So warns Friar Laurence when confronted by Romeo’s declaration of his love for Juliet. The friar, well-meaning dunce that he is, is at this moment wise, for have we not known such passion firsthand from the time of our first love? Should these violent delights arrive so unexpected in middle age, should they gallop into our later years, they will trample common sense and the wisdom that long life was to have provided us, in exchange for the combustability of passion. When love hits, we turn sixteen.

  In person and online Hannah and Wayne communicated in romantic prose and poetry. Erotic and dreamy. Together they made up a fantasy woman named Nora. In e-mail they played with Nora, a shy loner begging to escape her dull, conservative life; Nora: the single, isolated secretary. It was fun, Hannah thought, harmless enough and clearly an exciting way to connect with her lover.

  But then one day Hannah received a real e-mail from Lily, Wayne’s old friend and lover. Lily was married, taught in the humanities at Georgetown, was a “hard-core introvert,” and yearned to correspond with Hannah. Lily enclosed a photograph of herself—blond, blue-eyed, great teeth in a wide smile—that Wayne had taken a few years before. Lily is wearing a man’s white cotton shirt, long-sleeved. She and Hannah shared a birthday, and the two of them, according to Lily, were “in love with the same guy.” Hesitantly Hannah wrote back to her, not yet aware of the truth: Lily and Wayne were the same guy.

  It was the weekends that made the bumps in the course of true love. Wayne was busy with conferences, out-of-town visitors, trips to “hide out” from a busy weekday life. Hannah felt abandoned, herself a working woman for whom weekends were golden. And there was a secrecy about those weekends; Wayne’s explanations were less and less convincing—how many conferences, how many out-of-town guests could one person manage, and just where was this girlfriend Wayne claimed was entirely in his past. Angry with what she felt was his cumulative dishonesty and refusal to account for his behavior, she broke it off, and she broke it off again and again, and always he was gone on Friday and back on Sunday. His evening e-mail just right, so loving, so sweet, so provocative, so powerfully erotic, she went back again and again, only to stop herself finally. She wrote Wayne that she was returning to Match.com to look for a full-disclosure relationship that included weekends.

  Oddly, though she found several new matches, contacts seemed to evaporate before her very eyes. She wrote to a man with whom she eventually had a date, a great date, she thought. But then he never called. Through e-mail Hannah wondered why. He answered, “Because you wrote to me and said you were no longer interested.” He attached the note. It took Hannah’s breath away. She hadn’t written it, but there was her name, there was her e-mail address. She had been hacked.

  Match.com employs an abuse person, a bit of information that might come in handy for many of us. Together Hannah and the abuse lady figured it out. Wayne had created an e-mail address close to Hannah’s, with just the slightest change—an added dash. Thus he was able to place himself in the middle of Hannah’s correspondence, write to her suitors, and, in her name, turn them away. At fifty-six Wayne’s life was full: There was his own male self, the self who wrote to and wooed Hannah; there was Nora, the fantasy girl he and Hannah created together; there was the fabricated Lily, so blond and blue-eyed, so eager to correspond with Hannah; and there was Wayne as Hannah, who rejected all would-be suitors.

  If e-mail relationships allow us to remake ourselves into someone we would like to be, we might conclude that Wayne made himself into a woman. How remarkable to find both male and female in oneself—for both are present—and bring our androgyny safely to life. Hannah’s husband went out one night and came back a crack addict, Wayne went out one night and came back a woman. For a while, anyway.

  It was long enough, though, to end the real-life love affair between him and Hannah. She felt betrayed, invaded, confused, and frightened. Who was this man with whom she had experienced such loving intensity? Whoever he was, she decided, there was no question: She needed to rid herself of him. And that’s what she did.

  Phone book in hand open to the Yellow Pages and the letter p for “psychiatrists,” Hannah walked into Wayne’s office. “I’m not leaving,” she said, “until you pick up the phone and make an appointment.” He nodded. She closed her eyes, circled her index finger above the page, and let it drop to a name. “Call this number.” He nodded. “I do not, of course, trust you to keep the appointment,” she said, “so I have taken your colleague, in the office next door, into my confidence.” She had seen her son cornered by his fear of self; she was seeing it again, and worried that Wayne, his back to the wall, would hurt himself, and so she was resolute. “If you fail to keep the appointment, your colleague will alert the head of your company. Do it, Wayne,” she said, and held out the phone. He dialed, and finally, “Thursday at four,” he said. “Good-bye, Wayne,” said Hannah, and walked into another new life.

  She and Brent, the date who had been denied by the combo of Wayne, Lily, and Nora, are content, she with his great good sense, he with her sweet sensuality. But, “I can’t stand how much I want him,” she said. The “him” is Wayne. Or is it “her”? “He was the best girlfriend I ever had.”

  At fifty-four Brent is not only stable, he is useful. He cleaned junk off Hannah’s computer and, lord above, found a spy program. Wayne h
ad not only stolen her e-mail address, he had planted a spy program so he could read her every keystroke. She shivered for weeks at the creepiness of the man she had loved so passionately. But she went to work every day, paid her bills, and cooked Thanksgiving dinner for her daughter, whom she collected at the bus station, and her son, eager to return to school. Brent carved.

  Hannah has no plans to return to Match.com, suspecting as she does that Lily and Nora and Wayne live there quite happily.

  How many hours did Hannah and I spend together, me at one end of the couch, my mouth agape in amazement, Hannah’s at the other end going a mile a minute? What struck me, amidst her unraveling of the truly bizarre events in her life, was her great good humor and her determination to make life do, for a little time at least, what she thought it was supposed to. Never for a minute did she blame anyone, seek a shoulder to cry on, give up on her responsibilities for making things work or for being a good mother and a good friend. Listening to her, I made myself a silent promise to quit whining about my rent and my sexless life. Though with Graham’s begging a hearing on my e-mail, perhaps my unwanted celibacy would come to an end—Wait a minute, Graham is married now. So just cool it, Jane. Have you no shame?

  And, with Hannah’s experience indelibly fixed in my mind, I will stop tossing out so carelessly the advice to go online. With apologies to William Shakespeare, There are more things on the Net, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.