the summer of our discontent

I turned fifty-one, Jane turned nine, and our first summer in Baltimore began. I didn’t see any romantic prospects at the swimming pool, the wine bar, or in the parking lot outside Jane’s theater camp. Maybe I needed to look farther afield. One June weekend Jane, Beau, and I drove up to Woodstock, New York, to visit our hilarious friend, journalist and memoirist Martha Frankel, and her husband, visionary artist and vintage car buff Steve Heller.

Alas, even Martha (who knows everyone, including Robert De Niro, Jane Smiley, and God) and Steve (who has built a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex out of rusted spare parts) couldn’t think of anyone for me. But while I was up there, we went out to visit my old summer camp, and this mission led to a confusing non-situation which took up most of the summer. When it was over, I had two new brassieres, a pair of lacy black underpants, and the remnants of some pretty sky-blue nail polish on my toes, none of which had even been given a test drive. Beau was the true beneficiary, having been switched to a more natural, delicious, and expensive brand of dog food and a more humane style of leash as a result of this odd liaison.

As children, every summer my sister Nancy and I were shipped off for a month to some nightmarish hellhole with no indoor plumbing; our bitter complaints never convinced my mother to let us stay home, but we did manage to get switched to a different camp every year. Eventually, she thought, one of them would be right.

Amazingly, one was. It was a camp I found in the classified section in the back of the New York Times magazine. In contrast to the other camp ads, which contained black-and-white photos of leaping youths and dreaded terms like archery, this one was two simple lines of sans serif type in a small white box, followed by an address.

for young people

interested in doing things

Camp Greenfields, as it was called, was located on a beautiful piece of land just outside Woodstock, New York—the town’s name alone was magic. It took ten boys and ten girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and we lived in long, bungalow-style dormitories with flush toilets and hot showers—a spa compared to the other camps I had seen. No sports of any kind were required except hiking and Frisbee; our days were spent taking classes from local craftspeople in stained glass, copper enameling, and jewelry making. At night, there were outings to the theater and rock concerts. We had definitely found our place in the world of sleep-away camps, and both of us attended for several years, around which time the camp closed anyway. It was really just too good to last.

Rudy Hopkins—the man who ran this place for those five years in the early seventies, who shepherded us through our Boone’s Farm and marijuana experimentation, our teenage melodramas, and our training in cooking, cleaning, and other “community service” activities, who dragged us up the side of Slide Mountain and into Devil’s Kitchen and off the edge of the Spillway—was still there on the property when I showed up that weekend, now operating a craft gallery out of the various buildings. In the thirty-five years since I’d seen him, his wild curly hair had grayed and his face had creased and weathered, but his leonine demeanor had lost none of its roar.

“How is your head?” were the first words out of his mouth once we had confirmed that yes, it was me coming up the walk. He was referring not to the contents of my skull, but to my scalp, which had suffered an injury my last summer there that had apparently been as unforgettable to him as it was to me. Bent over a bracelet I was working on with a silver-polishing tool running in my hand, I had thoughtlessly reached up to brush back my hair and the spinning shaft had wound my long locks round and round, tighter and tighter, right off my head. Our instructor had just warned loudly against this exact maneuver, I was later told. I was half-bald for many months (one of two times in my life, actually; a few years later I would have a very unfortunate permanent wave immediately before leaving the country and spend three months in East Germany with no hair . . . a story for another time, children).

I was so happy to be reunited with Rudy, and to show him my hair, and to find the place filled with as many utopian vibrations and floating lily pads as ever. After a few glasses of mint lemonade followed by a few glasses of white wine, we decided that I would try to organize a Greenfields reunion. It might be difficult to find some of the old campers—at this point, Rudy had no more than a few e-mail addresses—so we decided to delay until the following summer, giving us more than a year to track people down.

There were two former Greenfielders that Rudy had seen recently and would be easy for me to connect with, as they lived in New York City: Peter and Arnie. Peter, whom I had always adored, was the cool and witty son of a well-known poet. Back then, he was a heartthrob with dark eyes and luxuriant masses of dark-brown hair. Now he was bald and gay, but as delightful as ever when I met him for dinner in Brooklyn. He came over to Sandye’s and made excellent margaritas and we planned to create a Facebook page to gather our old compadres.

If I had not already been married to a gay guy once before . . . if Peter didn’t already have a boyfriend . . . if he hadn’t already broken my heart once by going off with Tina Somebody that night on Slide Mountain . . . ah, well, it was not to be.

Arnie, the other camper Rudy had recently seen, I remembered as a grumpy little fellow, but Rudy said he was now a noted art photographer, and very sweet. He came to dinner later that summer, when I was back in Brooklyn visiting Sandye and my stepdaughter, Emma.

Emma is the older of Crispin’s two children; like Hayes, she was then a senior in college. She was finishing up at the Gallatin School at NYU in a major of her own design, “The Aesthetics of Healing.” She is an adorable, brown-eyed super genius, and we had become instant best friends when I’d met her dad ten years earlier.

Though our connection had undergone a little wear and tear during the dark days of the breakup, we still got along fine and spoke openly about our feelings.

By this time, I had become very anxious about my tattoo of her father’s initials, which I’d gotten shortly after he’d shown up with his. Unlike him, I had failed to enlist Emma’s design assistance, and while his tattoo seemed pleasingly artistic and vague, mine was nothing but a big old cgs. Indeed, that was what I’d wanted at the time. Now, even in a sleeveless shirt I felt uncomfortable, branded with the logo of the wrong owner. If I ever got another boyfriend, or even had sex again, it would be really weird. Doggie-style was out for good. Since laser removal was expensive and would leave a scar, I was now contemplating whether it could be made into something else without covering my whole back with some unwanted image. I had gone into a tattoo shop where I was shown perplexing photographs of how a graveyard scene could be turned into a Tasmanian devil, or a naked girl into the Grim Reaper.

One night Emma stopped by Sandye’s. She and Jane went to work on the situation with a Sharpie.

“It’s a snake!” Jane said. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s very creative,” I said, as I studied the photo on my iPhone screen. “A snake. Hmmmm.”

Not long afterwards, there was a knock at the door.

“Hello! Is this the Greenfields camper meet and greet?” Arnie asked when I opened Sandye’s door and found him standing there with his dog. He was a tall, pleasant-looking guy with the dark brown eyes I remembered, though the dark brown curls were now close-cropped and graying. Weirdly, he seemed to be doing a Pee-Wee Herman imitation.

“Hey, Arnie,” I said. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Oh, this isn’t my dog,” he said. “I found him on the way over. Would your friend be able to keep him?” Of course it was his dog, named Platypus as it turned out. Welcome to Arnie World. Something about his demeanor led me to wonder if he, too, had turned out gay.

Another night, after a dinner of take-out falafel, the whole gang of us walked over to Prospect Park for an outdoor concert: Sandye and Mr. Wright, Jane and Ava, me and Arnie, catching up on our lives and loves. Actually, it was more like getting to know one another in the first place, since we didn’t remember each other well from Greenfields. Later, I took his arm on the walk back from the park. It was a nice feeling, and he kissed me lightly on the lips when he said good-bye.

Was there any click between us? I had a conceptual problem that was impeding my thought processes in this area. Given the way things had gone in my life up to that point, I had the impression that when one thing ends, you just turn around and the next is right there. Whatever man happened to be standing in my immediate line of vision was obviously being proposed by destiny as The One. All righty, then! Rush out, get a pedicure, fall in love.

So . . . we were both in the arts, right? And dog lovers. He was easy to talk to, nice-looking, and every once in a while, one of his jokes was funny. He had confided toward the end of the evening that he had a lot of mood problems and was taking antidepressants. That was the clincher. I love depressed people. I invited him down to Baltimore to visit sometime. A few weeks later, he e-mailed me to say that he and Platypus were coming for a week in July.

Again with the preparations! I went out and rented a DVD of season one of The Wire, with which he was obsessed. I stocked up on beer and planned meals from every corner of the world. I cleaned my house. Not knowing which way things would go, I bought both pretty new underwear and a quilt for the guest room.

The day of his arrival, he was supposed to get in at 12:30 p.m. I was up at 5:00 a.m. I had my crab cakes ready to go in the oven, a casual yet slinky outfit selected, my toenails painted sky blue. Then he called at 12:45 to say he was stopping at a flea market in Towson on the way into town.

I wasn’t happy to hear this, as he had already asked if we could go to a flea market and I’d said no. It didn’t fit into my plans for the day, and anyway, I hate flea markets. I guess he must have gone and Googled the matter himself.

I drove out to meet him and spent the next hour managing Platypus, who took a giant dump right in the middle of one of the aisles, while Arnie meticulously scrutinized each table of wares and asked questions like “Do you think this ashtray has the original finish?”

Finally we got home and ate crab cakes while watching an episode of The Wire. “Will we be able to go on a Wire tour?” Arnie asked. He had heard there was a driving route you could take to see all the famous landmarks of the television show. Unfortunately, it was also the driving route for buying crack, getting carjacked, and being the victim of a drive-by shooting.

Anyway, we never could have fit it in between the used bookshops, antiques stores, and other shopping packed into the days ahead. I watched him paw through piles of dusty merchandise in every such place in Baltimore, where there are many such places, me gritting my teeth all the while. We also took Jane to the swimming pool a couple of times, providing me with the slight thrill of having neighbors wonder why I was suddenly appearing with a male companion. I don’t think it ever even occurred to Jane that he was supposed to be a romantic prospect; she assumed that we were some kind of vague old friends or distant cousins. Others, however, were more hopeful.

“Who’s that?” Barbara Jones finally came out and asked. “A new boyfriend?”

“Beats me,” I said.

It didn’t seem like it, honestly. I would sit next to him on the couch while we watched The Wire and he wouldn’t put his arm around me or anything, even if I tentatively touched his hand. Then one night after we’d had a little party at the house, I went into the guest room and lay down on the bed to chat. That led nowhere, so I eventually clumped down the hall to my own quarters.

The sensual peak of the whole experience was when we went to hot yoga class together. Arnie was surprisingly good at yoga, very flexible and graceful for a man. I looked over at him during Savasana—so relaxed and restful, so male. His eyelashes were very black against his cheek. I felt for a moment that I might be attracted to him.

Chaste as it was, I did like having a man around. I liked cooking and fussing over him, waiting on him and making my elaborate ethnic meals. I learned his routines: He drank his coffee cold, in the blender with ice. He put salt on everything. Every day he glugged down some weird concoction he’d brought with him, a smelly, raw vegetable puree with mystical nutritive qualities. He was a man of definite ideas and tastes, and not particularly open to persuasion. A testy man, a bossy man, a man who enjoyed anger and vendettas and diatribes, a man who often yelled at people on his cell phone for hours, and could get very annoyed by Facebook.

When he left it was confusing. Absolutely nothing romantic had happened—all the cute underwear still had the tags on it—and clearly nothing was going to happen. Jane could have told me this, and yet, I thought it my duty not to give up altogether.

The next time I saw him, it was in New Jersey. He came to visit at Sandye’s mother’s house, down the street from where I grew up. There, he spent most of the day gardening and flirting with Sandye’s seventy-something mother. I think he may have invited her to Paris. Then that night he and I took the dogs down to the beach. There was plenty of moonlight on the onyx waves and the silvery sand, so I climbed up on the high lifeguard bench and waited. He did not climb up after me, busy as he was roaming the beach with his camera, attempting to photograph sand crabs. At this point, I became a little testy myself.

Since there really was nothing to change about our relationship—it already was a friendship—it was just a matter of resetting the tone of things, kind of like changing the wallpaper on your computer desktop from a bouquet of red roses to a sand crab.

Arnie and I had been talking about going on a road trip together to visit Rudy up in New York State. After the New Jersey experience, I e-mailed him to say that given my new understanding of our relationship, we should not go on this trip. Instead he should go to Paris with Sandye’s mother.

This was the first time there had been any mention of our “relationship,” and his response was obviously designed to spare my ego. “I am at a stage in my life,” he wrote, “where I kind of want to get married and, if possible, have offspring. Plus, I am too messed up to be with someone now; I need to be alone to work out my issues. I wouldn’t want anything to happen between us that would ruin our friendship in the long run.”

I sent him a nice e. e. cummings poem—since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things—for his troubles, and we did remain friends. He continued e-mailing me his photographs of fossilized bird skeletons, Amazonian insect life, and Russian blast furnaces. I’ve been to several of his art shows—totaling my car on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to one of them—and then we both went to the Greenfields reunion last summer, which was really fun even though there were only six people there. Platypus barked all night, and Jane and I didn’t get a wink of sleep in our tent. It was perfectly fine.

Once our non-relationship was over, Arnie was very supportive of my dating career, and once even tried to fix me up with someone. Unfortunately it was the night of that bad car accident, and the guy didn’t even notice the big, fresh purple bruise below my collarbone. He launched straight into a disquisition on the “lucid dreams” he has that allow him to see into the afterlife. Honestly, I didn’t want to hear about it. Once he did finally catch on to my situation, he informed me earnestly that we have accidents when we need to release stress in our lives.

When he e-mailed me the next day to see if we could get together, it turned out that I did know how to say no, after all.