Out of the Woods (12 page)

In the years after Lee's death I realized I was becoming invisible in the world of men. I liked it sometimes. I hated it sometimes. This was curious country, an awkward place full of awkward questions. The ground beneath my feet shifted, and the world of things I thought I knew had become like a game of fifty-two pickup, with the exhilaration of flinging the cards—all of them!—into the air, the chastening realization that you are the one who has to pick them up again.

I would watch men and women together, sometimes with envy and sometimes with smug relief as they threaded their way through the quotidian clash of love and anger and the crowd that two can make. I am done with that, I told myself. But that wasn't quite true. I
wanted
to be done with that. Didn't I?

I found myself in a volatile state of change. My place in the world was up for grabs—freed, if that was the word, from the demands of fertility and confronted by the potential largesse of a life where sexuality played a very different role. I had always loved the power of desire, the way it affirmed my presence on the earth, the joyful thing it had been when I was young. But what could it be now that I was young no longer? At first I was frightened, sad, and very angry.

I remembered something Isak Dinesen once said: “In Africa, all old women had the consolation of witchcraft; their relations with witchcraft were comparable to their relations to the art of seduction. One cannot understand how we, who will have nothing to do with witchcraft, can bear to grow old.”

And yet sometimes, walking home through Washington Square Park in the afternoon in those first years after Lee's death, I felt a buoyancy, a lightness I had not known in a very long time. I looked at the young women in their twenties sauntering down the street, their carefully made-up faces composed into masks of indifference to the attention they courted and disdained; I looked at the couples entwined on the benches, rapt with the drama only they could see, at the mothers in the park hoisting children onto swings, their eyes anxious, bored, amused, weary. I've been to each of those places, I thought, and now, for the first time in a long time, I was in a place I'd never been before. Who was this woman who was no longer lashed so tightly to the world of men; what did it mean to be finally getting old, to live alone, to be invisible in a way that I had not been since I was a teenager? I was nervous, but I was excited as well.

“You only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self and your appearance when you get a bit older,” Doris Lessing said in an interview in
Harper's
in 1973. “A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize that what in fact you've been using to get attention has been what you look like. . . . It's a biological thing. It's totally and absolutely impersonal. It really is a most salutary and fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all. Growing old is really extraordinarily interesting.”

Lessing was British by way of Zimbabwe: perhaps that accounts for the crisp understatement. Salutary? Interesting? Yes, the way a dive into ice-cold water is interesting. Leaving that kind of desirability behind is also scary, bewildering, and disorienting. Still, Lessing's approach was much more comforting than contemporary commentary on the subject, books that talked about “juicy crones” and “seasoned women” (culinary metaphors were apparently de rigueur where older women were concerned) and seemed to mandate that to be really happy, women must remain as randy as rabbits as they tottered toward the grave.

Which was unfortunate, because the choice was not entirely mine to make. What lay ahead was an age, in Judith Thurman's elegant phrase, “of increased authority, erotic exigency and forced retirement.”

Besides, I liked the idea of retirement, of thinking of sex as just a handful of seasons in one's life—the sense that redemption lies in knowing when to leave it all behind.

Desire, however, doesn't have the good grace to die, simply because you ask it politely to do so. I was angry with myself for still wanting love, for still craving all that went with it. It was an embarrassment, a barnacle, something I should have outgrown. Besides, I didn't know what I wanted from sex anymore.

When I was young, desire had been a drug, one that I wanted for much the same reasons I would court getting lost—because it let you off the hook from your ordinary life, the one where I was always late, always lacking. I loved the fever of it, the color in which it drenched everything, the excitement with which it imbued the act of turning a corner, answering the phone, checking e-mail. Desire had been my theater of war, my coming-of-age, the weapon of choice in my own rebellion. And now?

I wasn't sure. I was no longer at an age where I simply saw what I wanted to see in the eyes of the other; I couldn't pretzel myself into the person I thought he wanted. Besides, I knew what love was now; it was hard to settle for less.

Still, I couldn't accept that love was over. I started to make bargains with myself, the way you do when you're quitting cigarettes or anything you truly love. One more affair, I'd think to myself. After that, the veil.

Finally it got to the point where I could not for one minute pretend I didn't miss the touch of flesh against flesh. I did something I had sworn I would never do and created a profile on a popular Internet dating site. Before long I was driving over the George Washington Bridge to have dinner with a good-looking stranger who advertised himself as an entrepreneur, whatever that was, and who had been attracted to a line in my ad that said I was looking for a pirate who had learned a thing or two.

The stranger was handsome, affable, and not very bright. The first night we had dinner and a long lingering kiss that told me what his conversation had not, that I wanted to see him again. A few dates later, he took me to his apartment and I had to laugh. It was decorated in a style I knew well: mattress on the bare floor; flamboyant, expensive quasi-erotic paintings and sculpture collected from souks in Marrakesh and Istanbul; a set of scales tucked back neatly on the kitchen shelf; a couple of burn marks on the battered coffee table; and an unmistakable aroma embedded deep into the upholstery. Ah, so you're a drug dealer, I said.

Yup, he said. How did you know?

Just a guess.

The next morning I rose early from a rumpled bed where a man lay sleeping, my eyes scratchy from lack of sleep, remembering how much I loved this leaving of a strange bed, of being the one that gets to go.

Colette wrote often about the degrees of satisfaction a man can afford, “from a good meal to a solid mystical engagement.” The former, she thought, was not to be disdained: “a nice little nothing well-presented is already something.”

I thought about the man whose bed I left that morning. He was none of these things a lover had once been to me, not God, not the devil, not friend or enemy, not poetry or prose. Making love to him had been the nice little nothing Colette had described it to be. I played with the notion that I would see him again, wondering if I was now at a stage where sex could simply be great good fun, like swimming, like getting stoned, something as ephemeral as blowing bubbles on a windy day.

But I knew already that it could never be like that, not for me. The evening had proved what I already knew, that desire detonated huge holes in contentment, and if it didn't, well, then, I wasn't much interested.

I had read somewhere that the ancient Greeks treated erotic desire like a flu, and sent condolence cards to any friend who had the misfortune of contracting a bad case of it. That seemed about right. Desire was not a thing to be encouraged. In Vermont, I had decided, I would give up sex altogether—I was afraid of losing any more of myself than I had already, and I had never solved the question of how to be myself and be in love with anyone but Lee.

And it had worked, for a while. But the meeting with my old friend had shaken me, rattled the bones of a question I had come to Vermont to put to rest, or, perhaps, through which to drive a stake. He left behind a longing I couldn't dismiss.

Wheelock was still in print, I was glad to discover, going strong in its seventh edition. I ordered a copy online, and while I was at it, posted a profile on Match.com.

6

What's This?

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railway-share;

They charmed it with smiles and soap.

—LEWIS CARROLL,
“The Hunting of the Snark”

N
EW IN TOWN”
read the headline on my profile. What followed was some mortifying nonsense that tried to sound confident but not intimidating, vulnerable but not needy, witty but not brittle. I probably shouldn't have worried so much—according to some research, men looking for women on Internet dating sites don't usually read beyond the headline, once the picture passes muster. My approach was essentially passive: I didn't bother looking at the prospective candidates in any detail. Former experience had proved that men in my age group tended to sound and look a lot like puppies left out in the rain. So I lowered my traps in the water and waited.

One of the advantages of living in a state with a very small population is that you don't encounter the same competition you do in a place like New York. Before long a message came sailing in from an age-appropriate candidate who wrote well, seemed to be more or less sane, and possessed of a sense of humor. Let's call him Mitch. Sometime before Christmas, Mitch and I started up a fairly steady e-mail correspondence—he was funny, personable, self-deprecating, and showed no inclination to wax rhapsodic about holding hands on the beach or similar Internet clichés.

We met the first time at my house. He was good-looking enough, tall, long-legged, and reasonably fit, with gray-blue eyes set in a kindly nest of lines. He was mostly bald, it turned out, once he mustered up the courage to take off his red and blue ski cap. (Hand knit, I noticed. Ex-wife? Girlfriend?)

All in all a perfectly presentable package, but one that quickened nothing in body or soul. Maybe it was the eyebrows, on which for some reason I fixated instantly. They were like furry little hyphens, very short and straight across, that bobbed up and down on the broad expanse of his forehead as he spoke, lending him a slightly sheepish expression. It was a bland face that looked like one of those fonts used in a child's first chapter book.

We took a long walk up Wild Apple Road, one of my favorites, and it was beautiful, flanked by rolling meadows of snow stretching out to the hills that smudged the brilliant blue horizon.

Afterward, he opened up a bottle of cheap red wine and I warmed up a stew, and we talked and talked, or rather he did, nattering on about his construction business, about how he had been a disappointment to his father (I am surprised, and moved, in my intermittent forays into middle-aged Internet dating, how many grown men not only bear the scars of their upbringing but also want and need to talk about them), and more tellingly, about his ex-girlfriend. She was overweight and unattractive, he said, and she had three small children, but she was his best friend and . . .

He went on and on, and I began to want him gone, tired of party manners, bright and sprightly and artificial—“Are you drunk?” Zoë asked when I answered the phone, acutely aware of the man in the room. But sitting there on the sofa next to him, another conversation had begun. His physical presence asserted itself, and perhaps it was the novelty of being alone in a room with a man for the first time in a long while, but I felt an excitement stirring. Perhaps we'd make out a little and something would kindle. But no—at nine-thirty he left. I could say something that would embarrass us both, he said, before kissing me very lightly on the lips.

The next afternoon a polite bread-and-butter e-mail arrived, and then nothing more for several days. I felt a rejection out of all proportion to the tepid interest Mitch had aroused. The weather was bleak, cheerless, and I went out for long walks in heavy wet snow with Henry, returning to the house chilled, unwashed, and grubby in my thick layers of snow clothes but lacking the initiative even to take a warm bath, as if the leaden clouds pressing on the house had settled in my soul. I tried to work, but I was foundering, slow and uninspired. I had to find a way to feel some urgency, to shake off the torpor. The small gains I thought I had made disappeared so easily; I couldn't remember what they were. At least, I thought, I'm not in New York.

Mitch and I made a plan to meet again, this time at his place. A week later, on a Saturday afternoon in February, I found myself driving up an icy mountain road while Henry sat at red alert in backseat-driver mode, his hackles raised, watching the road and, I was convinced, muttering to himself, “Slow down! Go faster! Pass that guy! Downshift, you moron”—through two hours of hairpin turns and iced-over bridges.

We arrived finally at a sleek modern house perched at the edge of a bright field of snow under a bright blue bowl of a sky and decanted ourselves into the driveway. Mitch emerged with a young springer spaniel at his heels, and the two dogs bounded off across the snowy fields. There was the obligatory tour of the house, which, like the spaniel, turned out to belong to his ex-wife, for whom the object of my—well, I wasn't sure what he was the object of—was house-sitting. Then a long walk during which he told me about his reckless youth, skating for hours on acid, the years bumming around Morocco, the 110 mph drives to Boston on one harebrained scheme after another—and dear God, he began to sound more interesting. Even the unfortunate eyebrows weren't so bothersome. Was I just molding him, pretzel-like, into an archetype that had always attracted me? Was I talking myself into this because I was afraid I'd lost the capacity to be attracted (or attractive) to anyone?

The answers were yes and yes. In search-and-rescue circles, this behavior is known as route delusion. It's what lost persons do when they've been walking in circles for hours, ending up at the very place they were trying to leave.

Back at the house we ate a perfectly decent lentil stew—I'm not sure what it says about my dating choices, but I've yet to go out with a man who doesn't have a lentil stew in his repertoire—followed by thin slices of Asiago cheese and smoked Gouda. When it was time to go, Mitch gave me a box of kindling as a parting gift and walked me to the car, where he kissed me. A less-than-full-throttle kiss, but more than a peck this time, and then another one, and I began to feel something like the old champagne bubbling up.

I kissed him one last time and then drove down the road, very pleased with him and with myself, wondering how soon I would see him again and how soon we would make love. I began to settle myself into a happy fantasy of the things we would do and the places we might go. Yes, I admitted to myself, I had missed a man in my life and he was just what I needed: nothing like Lee, no one I could fall in love with, and yet a possible companion. All of this, despite the less-than-captivating conversations, the not-quite kisses, the lurking ex-girlfriend.

The champagne lasted for a day or two, until an e-mail arrived. “About those kisses. A bit confused I am by those three tantalizing kisses . . . Actually I'm confused not a bit about the kisses (they were just fine) but more about my head and where it is at presently. I seem to have trouble with being in the present. Will cogitate and sort and like the machine that filters and wraps spare change so tidily, I'll try and make sense out of what's rumbling around in my spare pockets of the cerebellum. I had a wonderful skate during lunch yesterday and intend to do the same today. . . .”

I read the e-mail and wrote back, thanking him for his honesty and assuring him that I understood the sensitive nature of his feelings and would be glad, whatever the outcome of his hesitation, that we had met. Didn't mean a word of it. There followed in his next e-mail a dithery string of ambivalence—yes, the old girlfriend was still in his heart, but gee, he wasn't really attracted to her, but yes, he felt an obligation, but never mind, what the hell, let's do this thing. He would come to dinner that weekend, after I got back from New York, where I was headed for a few days for a round of long-overdue medical and dental checkups.

 

W
hat's this?”

It was a beautiful day. The city blazed with a hard metallic sheen of bright sunshine and bitter cold. The shrink and I had had a lively conversation on one of the less tedious tropes in my psychological canon and the dental hygienist had praised my excellent flossing. What else was there? Who needed love? I was fine, just the way I was.

Not so fast, said the Kindly Ones.

 

R
on Ruden had been my doctor since I first moved to New York. We had daughters exactly the same age, and it was he, more than the Olympian and unreachable doctors at Sloan-Kettering, who had guided me through my husband's illness. My annual visits to his office were mainly spent catching up on family news, with a mere ten minutes devoted to the requisite poking and prodding and drawing of blood.

So my mind was far away, planning that night's menu, when his question brought me back to the reality of the exam room. He was palpating my left breast.

What's what? I asked.

This, he said. He guided my hand to something hard near the breastbone, which in fact was what I had thought it was when I had done my own manual examinations.

It was a mass. A large one. Dr. Ruden was talking but I couldn't seem to hear him. I got dressed while he called the hospital and scheduled an emergency mammogram for the next day.

Back in his office, he said, It's probably nothing.

I looked straight into his eyes and read what was written there.

Dr. Ruden? You don't play poker, do you?

No.

Good.

 

I
t was cancer, but it could have been anything, really. The predictable life markers, the milestones on the well-trodden path—the graduations, the promotions, the anniversaries—are more than enough to cope with, but then there are the unholy catastrophes, the curveballs you don't see coming—the layoffs, the illnesses, the parent who can no longer find her way home. What the experts call survival situations. “It's easy to imagine,” wrote Laurence Gonzales in
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why,
that such situations “would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren't decisive. . . . In fact that experience, training, and modern equipment can betray you. The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it's not what's in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It's not even what's in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it's what's in your heart.”

That night, I called Zoë. She burst into tears but quickly recovered. I told her this was nothing, that comparing my situation to her father's was like comparing the sniffles to tuberculosis, that I needed her strong, stoic, and black-humored self by my side. Then I told her the joke a character in a short story by Lorrie Moore tells, one that had always amused Lee. A man is told by his doctor that he has six weeks to live. “I want a second opinion,” he says. “OK,” the doctor says. “You're ugly, too.”

Alexander Swistel, the surgeon Dr. Ruden had recommended, couldn't see me for a week or two, so I went back to Vermont and into a limbo of shock, anxiety, nausea, and a whirlwind of emotions so strong, so operatic in their intensity, that they rendered the mundane concerns of everyday life alluring but unreachable, like an amusement park on the opposite side of an unfordable stream.

Which is why, I suppose, I decided not to cancel the dinner with Mitch. You would think that a potentially fatal illness is just the thing to put an abortive romance with a middle-aged slacker into perspective. But if romance has always been your drug of choice, the thing you turned to in good times and bad, then it will get you to oblivion as well as any other.

Besides, he had been wonderful when I told him the news over the phone. I returned to Castle Dismal to find him waiting, a warm fire blazing, the refrigerator stocked. We took a long walk, and he was kind and undaunted about the future. Are you sure you want to go out with a bald-headed woman? I asked, not wanting to mention the more permanent physical changes in store. I love bald-headed women! he said, and I felt a little better. Perhaps I wasn't going off a cliff after all. He left after that, promising to come back for dinner over the weekend.

I worked hard in the days before the dinner, cleaning up the house, making a complicated lamb tagine, driving miles to find fresh flowers for the table. Mitch was going to let me know the night before what time to expect him. But the evening came, and the evening went, and the e-mail I sent inquiring after his whereabouts went unanswered.

The next day he wrote back: I'm really really sorry, it began. The world is moving very fast and I'm having a little difficulty keeping up so no, I can't come down today but will call this evening. Talk to you later and have a good day . . . got to run out the door!

What had happened, he told me in the phone call that eventually followed, was simple enough. The ex-girlfriend wanted him back. They had talked, and there was still something there.

I took it hard. I would like to think that it was the cancer talking, but I probably would have felt the same way without the diagnosis, given how hard a time I had been having with the prospect of being on my own forever. Either way, I was chagrined at how much I had wanted this to happen, how easily all my foolhardy, noble notions of forswearing men for all time had sailed out the window, how differently I had felt driving back home from Mitch's place after one afternoon and three anemic kisses, as if I'd been somehow validated. And when it was stripped away, I felt less whole.

I threw out the lamb tagine and indulged in a mawkish, angry evening. First I reread all of Mitch's e-mails, and reveled in their banality. Then I listened to Leonard Cohen in the dark with a glass of sherry. Early Cohen is perfect when you want to remember just what arrogant twits men can be. (Late Cohen, after his voice changed and he had learned a thing or two, is better with a dry martini and a cup of rueful reminiscence about what twits we all can be.)