The Middlesteins(15)

“I felt I had no choice but to leave her. The divorce is going to be final in six months, more or less.” (More.) “I’m sure you understand.”

The woman he had met on the Internet, a good-looking redhead named Jill, a legal secretary in her early fifties who had lost her husband, the love of her life, three years earlier—drunk-driving accident (not him, the other guy)—who was having a hard enough time with dating and would give anything to have her husband back even for a day, no, she did not understand. She clasped her hands together and looked down and thought about her wedding day in 1992, a small ceremony in Madison, where she was born and raised, and she pictured, as she had been doing far too much lately—it was not healthy, she could admit it—her husband bent down at her leg, sliding off her garter while everyone she loved in the world laughed and applauded.

As with every previous failed Internet date, Middlestein picked up the check.



*

Middlestein had been meeting women online for three months, since the day he had left his wife, leaving practically everything behind, books, furniture, photo albums, any record of the past. He had moved into the new condo building across the street from the pharmacy he owned, an apartment which he had signed a lease on two months before he left her and had been quietly furnishing by making secret trips to the IKEA in Schaumburg. Three times he had steered his cart through the crush of traffic in the dizzyingly bright aisles, at first awkwardly, this new singular decision-making identity unfamiliar. (His wife had made all household decisions since the day they’d married, crushing him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion—and had he really cared? No, probably not, but he would never know now.) But with each successive trip, he had a renewed confidence: The Swedish names were meant not to confuse but to guide; he was not required to make a buying decision until nearly just before he reached the cash register, and even then he had the power to walk out the door without a single item in his cart; and maybe he did want a color scheme after all. Maybe he was a color-scheme kind of guy.

And what a bargain that place was! Sure, it was a lot of crap he didn’t need, and his father, who had owned a high-end furniture shop in Jackson Heights for decades, would probably roll over, coughing, grumbling, cursing, in his grave if he saw what Richard’s new bed frame was made of. But he was not a rich man—by some standards, maybe, to starving children in India, he probably lived like a king—since the market had wiped out half their retirement fund, so he had no choice in the matter.

Now he had a slickly furnished condo (white and dark blue with this little crisscross patchy pattern on all his bedding and pillows) and his heart and his life up on a screen for anyone to see. He exploited his newfound freedom at first, dating daily, sometimes twice a day, meeting one woman for lunch and another for dinner. There were thousands of women between the ages of forty and fifty-five (he didn’t want to date a woman his own age, he wanted them young and vital and alive and ready to keep up with him—with how he was imagining he was going to be—once they finally hit the sack together) who were Jewish, divorced, widowed, never married, living within forty miles of his zip code (anything farther and he’d be dating a Wisconsin girl, and that didn’t feel right to him; he didn’t even know if there were Jews in Wisconsin anyway), though he was, if he had to be honest, more attracted to people within a twenty-mile range, because traffic was such a mess these days with so much construction going on. And all he had to do, apparently, was ask, and they would be willing to meet him. There were a lot of lonely ladies out there looking for love. Good, he thought, more for me.

He had dated fifteen divorcées, some more bitter than others, even more bitter than his wife, but they were also the funniest out of all the women he met, their pain somehow strengthening them, the endless paperwork and court proceedings and therapy sessions forcing them to look inward and, if not good-naturedly then at least wryly, laugh at themselves and the situation they were in. These women were veteran first-daters. They were putting themselves out there. They were hustling to meet their new mate.

He dated a dozen widows, most of whom had sopped up their tragedies like their hearts were sponges. They did not want to be on that date. They were there because someone had made them, their child, their mother, their sister, their co-worker. If they had their way they would stay home by themselves on a Friday night, but could they really stay home on every Friday night for the rest of their lives? In their ads they promised they were lively and active and engaged in the world around them, but in person they were only able to fake it for a half hour or so before their devastation became apparent to Middlestein. On three occasions his dates had cried. They had his sympathy. He acted the part anyway. But eventually he began to grumble to himself, If you’re not ready to date, then why are you here? He didn’t want to be anyone’s practice run. He hadn’t dated a widow in a month, crossed them off his list of potential mates, but that redhead looked so gorgeous in her photo, ooh, she had that gorgeous bosom and gigantic eyelashes, he could just see himself getting caught up in her, if only she hadn’t wanted to leave in such a hurry.

The rest were these women who had never married. At first he thought of them as these poor women, because how their egos must have suffered as they careened through their free-flying youth and suddenly woke up one day to realize they had become old, Jewish maids. Also, they had never experienced what it was like to be committed thoroughly, which, for better or worse, had taught him a thing or two about life and shaped the man he had become. But sometimes after talking for a while, he thought maybe they were the lucky ones. They weren’t ruined like the rest of the women, at least not in the same way. Their losses were different, and what they had gained was different, too. Most of them were childless. Most of them could give or take marriage, and he suspected that when they left him, they never gave him another thought. His picture was blurry, but there was no denying it in person. Even if he had molded his interests in his profile to match the ads of the younger women, one look and they knew, this guy had never done yoga in his life, and most likely was not picnicking in Millennium Park either. He was somebody’s father, somebody’s grandfather; an old man.