The View From Penthouse B (24 page)

Dear “Nervous”:

Hello! I am writing on behalf of my son, a single man of fifty-plus, who is also nervous about dating. He shouldn’t be! He is smart and nice looking and very kind. His wife died approximately 2 yrs and 5 months ago from a quick kind of cancer, so it’s time.

He is an engineer who works for a good company. His two daughters are grown and not underfoot, 21 and 24 years of age, and they know I’m doing this. What else should I tell you? He is tall, with a master’s degree, and owns his own apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Your ad appealed to me. I have a picture of him but don’t know how to send it. Are you still available, and are you by any chance of the Jewish faith? He doesn’t care.

Sincerely,

Myra Offenberg

Queens, New York

After a five-minute meditation on how soon to answer, I pressed
REPLY
and wrote:

Dear Mrs. Offenberg:

Thank you for your inquiry. My main concern is that your son might not be okay with your playing matchmaker. Does he know and does he approve? I’m sure your granddaughters could help you upload a photo of their father. I am also widowed, a college graduate, and live in Manhattan. Not of the Jewish faith or much of any other kind.

Sincerely,

Gwen-Laura Schmidt

I sent it. I wasn’t reneging on my decision to forsake men and dating. I was being polite. I’d placed an ad, and an elderly mother had answered it with hope in her heart. Good manners dictated that I acknowledge receipt of her inquiry. I wouldn’t tell Anthony or Margot that my personal ad had found a reader because they would get their hopes up and misinterpret the fact that I wrote back. They’d hover around my laptop, waiting for a reply, all the while discussing my hair, its roots, and the most efficacious first-date attire. Days would go by. And in a week, when Mrs. Offenberg’s nice-looking widowed engineer son failed to materialize, I’d have to push back against their pity.

Time2Heal to MiddleSister: I am a very confident and successful person in all aspects of life and work with the exception of where I am now. Patience, Please. Thank you.

31

Benefit of the Doubt

T
HOUGH I WAS
no longer looking for a beau, the amateur sociologist in me noticed that four days had passed without a reply from Mrs. Offenberg’s son. I conducted what I hoped was a casual poll at a sisters-plus-Anthony dinner on a warm April day that took us up to the roof terrace. Betsy had treated us to a smorgasbord of Chinese food and was sticking serving forks and spoons into the generous array of take-out containers.

“Suppose,” I began, when we were finally seated and wine had been poured, “someone sees your ad and writes to you . . .”

“Your specific ad?” Betsy asked. “Or are we talking hypotheticals?”

“My ad. Someone answered—”

This aroused a chorus of whos and whens and a clamor for details.

I waited. I skewered a dumpling with my fork and sampled it, lollypop-style. “It was a reply, once removed,” I hinted between bites.

“Meaning?” asked Anthony.

“It was a mother writing on behalf of a son.”

Immediately, sides were taken. Betsy and Anthony were on the No team—forget it; what kind of wimp lets his mother ask someone out on a date?

Margot was on the Extenuating Circumstances team—perhaps . . . benefit of the doubt . . . it’s very likely that he is too modest to sing his own praises in the way needed to catch someone’s attention.

“Tell us what she said,” Betsy ordered. “And I don’t want the abridged version.”

I said I could give them the gist. The engineer son was also widowed; had two more-or-less grown daughters; was fifty-plus, smart, tall, and a resident of Manhattan.

“Photo?” asked Anthony.

“No, but she said he was good-looking.”

Margot coughed out a laugh.

I found myself on the cusp of being insulted. Did I not have sound judgment and good instincts? Was I not capable of reading between the lines to distinguish a decent prospect from a dreadful one?

Betsy asked, “Did you green-light it?”

“If you mean did I answer, I did. I wrote back and asked the obvious: Did she have her son’s approval to speak on his behalf?” I reminded them, “I’m out of this business. I don’t even
want
to meet him. I quit Match before my subscription ran out.”

“So you’re just making conversation?” asked Margot.

“There’s nothing more to tell. I never heard back.”

“Time frame?” asked Betsy.

“Four days ago.”

I saw a droop of acute disappointment on Margot’s face. “I don’t love that,” she said.

My MBA sister said, “So Gwen will write him.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“Hold on,” Betsy said. “You’re saying no because you’re thinking in terms of your pride. But why should you care? He doesn’t know you. It’s not like high school where you’d have to see him in homeroom and he’d tell his friends and they’d snicker when you walked by.”

Anthony liberated his legs from between table and bench, and said he was going back for sesame oil. “Don’t make any decisions without me,” he called from the rooftop door.

We obeyed, turning the conversation temporarily to our nephews’ summer camp destinations (overnight in Vermont, day camp in New Jersey). Anthony returned quickly with the sesame oil, two bottles of beer, and my laptop.

“Good,” said Betsy. “Now she can read us the original e-mail.”

“Not till she eats. Everything’s getting cold up here,” said Margot.

Anthony said, “I’m still working on ‘What does Gwen have to lose?’ And I’m getting close to ‘Why let this candidate drop off the face of the earth because his mother only checks her e-mail once a week?’”

“And if she doesn’t answer this time,” said Margot, “if she doesn’t have the common decency to say, ‘My son, as it turns out, is not open to my matchmaking. So sorry to have gotten your hopes up—’”

I said, fibbing, “She didn’t get my hopes up. I have zero expectations.”

Anthony asked us to pass the rice—the white, not the brown—and also the chicken, the tofu, and the noodles. He asked if we were planning on leftovers and if Betsy had even expected that he’d be joining us. Kudos on the selection of dishes, by the way. Especially the pork with Szechuan pickles.

“Eat up,” Betsy said.

I meant to introduce other topics. I was interested in their social and work lives, yet I couldn’t help returning in the next conversational break to “So? Is everyone agreeing with Betsy?”

“Everything’s delicious,” said Margot. “I hope the delivery guy left us a take-out menu.”

“Not that,” I said. “I meant—to follow up or not?”

Anthony pointed with his chopsticks toward my laptop.

“Now?” I said.

“You get Wi-Fi up here?” asked Betsy.

“Let’s take a stab at it,” said Anthony. “A rough draft.”

Not one of them trusted my instincts or actions. I’d married late. Malformations of my husband’s heart had gone undetected, and I’d slept through his death. My abstemious escort service—a terrible idea to begin with—was DOA. My personal ad had drawn only one response, and it was from an unauthorized proxy. I said, “No, thank you. I’ll do it later.”

“But write before the mother’s bedtime,” said Margot.

“BCC us?” asked Betsy.

At eight-forty-five p.m. I sent the following to Myra Offenberg:
As a conscientious correspondent, I wanted to be sure that my reply of Monday night reached you
. And hating myself even as it was uploading, I attached my best photo. I didn’t include my telephone number, fearing she might befriend me on her own, and soon I’d be accepting an invitation to a matinee or a seder. Confident for a few seconds, I pressed
SEND
.
But then the second-guessing crept in. Had I done the right thing? Was I appearing needy and undesirable? And what about the no-date, no-beau vow I’d made to myself?

There was a message waiting from Myra when I woke up, bearing the exclamation points of a high-priority dispatch. Could I call Eli myself due to his being on the shy side? Four telephone numbers including his fax line were supplied.

I wrote back.
Does he even know of my existence?

Yes
came her answer.
Do you enjoy the movies?

Within seconds, another e-mail arrived, its subject line was “p.s.”:
Forgot to mention that he likes your looks.

Who isn’t emboldened by flattery? I wrote back.
Even the shyest person can compose an e-mail.

Again, no answer for an eternity. After thirty-six hours, I found a new sender in my in-box, an eoffenb.

Dear Ms. Schmidt,

I’m on a campaign to end maternal harassment. Would you care to meet for coffee or a drink some time?

Cordially,

Eli Offenberg

I neither forwarded it nor asked my team about strategy. Should I or shouldn’t I? Would I be inviting another disappointment? Even though I didn’t approve of my own actions, I pressed
REPLY
and surprised myself with a
Yes
and an exclamation point.

From Statenilend to MiddleSister: looking for wife ,,,I am Russian man ,,living in USA ,,NEW YORK ,, my age 66yrs ,, divorced ,looking for decent wife ,, she is beautiful with nice lips,, romance ,,serious not like play games ,,ty , . . .

32

Seriously?

I
T WAS A DREAM, AND
from what I understand, a common one: I was on a couch I didn’t recognize having energetic sex with a man I didn’t know.

How eerie then to find upon waking a return e-mail from Eli Offenberg. It said,
Shall we meet for a drink or should we plunge right into dinner? The following dates are good for me
—and here was the endearing part: He reeled off an entire week of nights, all in a row, which to some people might be emblematic of unpopularity, but to me showed honesty and moxie.

I wrote back, trying to be a little wry myself.
Is a Saturday night too fraught for a first meeting? Second choice, Friday.

His answer came instantaneously.
I can live with “fraught.” What kind of food do you like?

Did women still play hard to get? To avoid the impression that I was instant-messaging him, I left my room, made a pot of coffee, and brought my Syracuse good-luck mug back to my computer. I typed
I eat everything
, but then deleted those words in case they carried a sexual message. I next tried
I’m an omnivore
, but erased that description, too, with its connotation of huge and prehistoric. Finally, just the truth.
I like everything, especially Italian. Do you have a favorite place? I live in the Village.

No answer immediately, but I attributed that to the hour, a few minutes after eight a.m., when an employed person would be on his way to work. To short-circuit my constant e-mail surveillance, reminiscent of my teenage vigils by the phone, I volunteered to buy stamps and return our library books.

Margot said, “No, do something more interesting than that.”

Thus, for the first time, I accepted Anthony’s invitation to accompany him to the gym, using the guest pass he’d been hawking since he’d moved in. He warned me that I shouldn’t expect to meet anyone midmorning except retirees and young moms. The employed, the driven, and the mostly heterosexual came for their workouts between five and six a.m. or after work. I told him I didn’t care. And had I mentioned that I had a date on Saturday night?

Side by side on treadmills, his moving at twice the speed of mine, he asked, “Details?”

“All I know is we’re having dinner.”

“Not at his place,” said Anthony. “You don’t go to a strange man’s house on a first date.”

“Not to worry. He’s picking a restaurant. He asked for my preferences and I said Italian.”

“Love that,” said Anthony. “Italian has a high romance potential. Very
Lady and the Tramp
.”

Did I feel a little proud? Was I wondering if anyone on the neighboring treadmills was listening and deeming me socially active?

Here came my answer: A young woman, running hard on my right, her big diamond engagement ring and platinum wedding band holding sway over her left hand, asked, “Did I hear that you’re single?”

I said, “I’m widowed.”

She didn’t spend any time on that bit of biography or on condolences. She went right to “My father-in-law is single. Do you want to come to his birthday party on the fourteenth? We’re trying to get him socialized.”

I said, “He’s not socialized?”

“I meant get him out. Dating. He’s trying to get over a bad divorce.”

How odd. How out of left field. The word “boundaries” came to mind. But isn’t there inside every single woman’s cortex the video flashing forward to her met-cute story retold as a wedding toast?

I asked where he lived and the young woman said, “Long Island.”

I turned back to Anthony. “This nice woman”—I pointed and she waved—“has a divorced father-in-law and she’s invited me to his birthday party.”

“Which birthday?” he asked.

“Fifty-something,” the woman volunteered. “I can call my husband and get his exact age.”

And what was she doing now but snapping a picture of me, sweaty and perplexed—two quick flashes with her phone before I ducked.

Anthony yelled, “Seriously?”

With her blond ponytail swinging in metronomic fashion, she didn’t seem to realize that Anthony’s question was a rebuke. She was now manipulating the phone in her right hand, apparently e-mailing me to someone.

“Blondie!” Anthony shouted. “Did you just take a picture of my friend and e-mail it without her permission?”