dreamboat

Given my romantic proclivities and history, not to mention the emotional beating I had taken in the past couple of years, perhaps better than “Sensual, sassy, and smart” for my dating profile headline would have been something like “Hire the handicapped.” But by this time, I had sworn off online dating. Then it occurred to me one day: Looking at the Craigslist personals wasn’t exactly online dating, was it? How could it be, when the headlines included things like do you have a large clitoris?

I had only been on Craigslist one other time, and that was right before I’d moved out of my Georgian airplane hangar. I had to do something with the abandoned paraphernalia of five children, a husband, and various forgetful houseguests, but Jane and I couldn’t even drag it out of the house.

Someone suggested I try the giveaway section of Craigslist, which turned out to be a good idea. So happy were the people who came to take my stuff; so happy was I to give it to them! Like the man who picked up a couple of dressers. He and his family had moved to Ohio to care for his dying mother-in-law, with whom the wife had never gotten along. But soon after they got there, the old woman had had a miracle recovery.

“She snapped right back, mean as ever,” he said, shaking his head. “So I get up one morning and find the wife loading the kids into the van in their pj’s. ‘Get in,’ she says. ‘We’re going home.’ ‘What about our stuff?’ I say. ‘We’re leavin’ it,’ she says. ‘Our furniture?’ I say. ‘Our clothes?’

“ ‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me, ‘we’ll find new things. Somehow we’ll be provided for.’ ” He gave me a grateful look. “See? Sure enough, we are.”

After this experience, Craigslist held a certain magic for me. If it could find those people free bedroom furniture, who knew what else it could do?

In the personals section I searched for the keyword writer—if Michael Chabon had decided to leave Ayelet Waldman, wouldn’t this be the way to find him?—and there was just one hit, a forty-eight-year-old in Annapolis. The headline read the perfect guy? or another wacky CL poster? you decide. The post was a long, silly, but somewhat funny multiple-choice test by a guy who seemed a little arrogant about his assets and his requirements. There was a picture on the bottom of a man running on the beach. If this was him, arrogance might be overlooked.

You decide.

One hot, high-school-like week of e-mails later, I drove down to meet “Brett” (the name he gave me never seemed to me to be his real name) at a harbor-front tavern in Annapolis. Even before I hit the football traffic for the US Naval Academy, I was a nervous wreck. At five minutes before two, I called the number I had for him and said I was going to be late.

“No problem,” he said. “There’s no other way to get into town, so just relax.” I had heard his voice once before, during our pre-date phone call. It was pleasant and deep, with a level-headed Midwestern tone.

About a half-hour of high blood pressure later, I pulled into a postcard-perfect enclave of shops and restaurants. Beneath a clear blue sky sailboats floated on the bay, and, despite the crowds of tourists, I found a parking spot near the appointed spot. I was scanning the sidewalk when I heard a voice from behind. “Marion?”

He, too, was ridiculously picturesque, in the manner of Joe Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, a movie that had been getting me in trouble since the day it came out. Intense eyes, tanned skin, high cheekbones, white teeth, and full lips. Dark hair with a few strands of gray. Black jeans, motorcycle jacket.

He was smiling at me. “Do you want to sit inside or out? What do you want to drink?” Since I couldn’t seem to think of an answer (I was so stunned by his beauty I had lost the power of speech), he ordered a couple of Dark and Stormies. I don’t blame the rum for what happened next; hormones were working in my brain like Tide in a washer, rinsing my skull clean of all rational abilities as my body entered the acute phase of the agitation cycle.

I already knew a lot about Brett from the e-mails that had preceded our meeting. He lived alone on a sailboat and had driven race cars professionally for years. He was from Texas and was a Dallas Cowboys fan, as I and my sons had become during our Austin years. His high school graduation had been held in Cowboys Stadium, a detail whose power over me I cannot fully explain.

He was recently divorced after thirty years of marriage to the woman who had been his college girlfriend. After he quit racing and they’d sent the kids to college and moved to Baltimore, an aggravated case of empty nest took them down. By aggravated, I mean that his wife had gone back to graduate school, gained a lot of weight, and stopped paying attention to him while he had an affair with her best friend. She got the house, he got the sailboat.

In any case, Brett certainly wasn’t hiding any of the awkward details of his situation. His Craigslist ad had announced that he’d only ever been with two women: his wife and her best friend. I’d thought it was a joke. It also said he didn’t want to date anyone who weighed more than 130 pounds, and that he would prefer to see a married woman. Why a married woman, I asked him at some point, and he clarified for me that it meant he didn’t want love, romance, or even a real relationship . . . just a low-overhead, no-strings-attached roll in the hay.

It’s a little unbelievable that I even wanted to meet the guy given all these red flags. But now that I had, red flags meant nothing to me.

When I did try to keep up my end of the conversation, I only talked about things so stupid that I was forced to trail off two sentences into the thought. Later I saw all my abortive conversation topics listed on a dating site titled “Things Men Hate to Talk About.”

1. Past relationships

2. Other dates

3. Celebrities

4. Religion

5. Politics

6. Antiques

7. Money

8. Fashion

9. Gardening

10. Marriage

I believe I avoided Gardening and Antiques, but added a few personal selections, such as Possible Reasons Why You Won’t Like Me, and Diseases I Do and Don’t Have. Jesus God Almighty. Miraculously he did not get up and leave, or even appear to be put off. He suggested we get the check and go for a walk.

After several blocks of meandering, we sat down on a bench and he started telling me about the time his family dropped anchor in Guatemala and he was mistaken by the militia for a local and taken into custody. More engrossing than the story was the way we were staring into each other’s eyes. His were sparkly and brown; mine, he was soon to tell me, were very blue.

“Would you mind if I kissed you?” he asked matter-of-factly.

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

He took me in his arms and put his mouth on mine, and I guess he must be the devil because even right now, given everything that’s happened since, I would start that kiss over again in a second. Electricity, chemistry, physics—all the forces of nature unleashed their fury at the intersection of our jaws. We weren’t just kissing like teenagers; we were kissing like insane teenagers on Ecstasy. When it ended, maybe ten minutes later, I was basically lying across his lap, our arms and legs were tangled, and people passing across the street looked alternately horrified and amused.

At some point, we stood up and floated back toward the harbor. We walked with his arm around me, all of our limbs now moving in effortless rhythm. When we reached the water, he pointed to a boat that he said wouldn’t make the turn it was trying to round; momentarily, the crew’s difficulties proved he was right. He went on talking about sailboats, sailboat accidents, and sailboat insurance. I was spellbound.

We sat on another bench, this one overlooking the water, and he started to kiss me again. I took off my sunglasses and put them on the bench beside me. That was the last I would see of those sunglasses, and I didn’t even care. I was glad to leave them there, a memorial to abandon.

He had told me earlier that he would have to leave at 5:00 p.m. to go to a friend’s kid’s football game back down in Northern Virginia. Now it was very close to 5:00, he apologetically pointed out. I couldn’t imagine at that point that he would really go, or that he wouldn’t take me with him. A high school football game? Don’t they have motels in Annapolis? But he was looking at his watch and heading to the parking area. It seemed we were going with Plan A.

Two motorcycles were parked next to each other. He asked me to guess which one was his, the blue one or the red one. I said the blue, but it was the red. Perhaps this was my big mistake.

Or maybe he had somehow determined that I weighed 132.

On the ride home, I could have driven to Kankakee and not have known it. It was a damn miracle when I saw a sign that said I was coming into Baltimore. I had been on the phone to Sandye the whole time, raving about the kiss—how it was like heaven, like heroin, like a perfect poached egg on toast. Sandye seemed to enjoy my elation to some extent, but entered a plea for caution. “You know how you are,” she said.

When I got home I had a drink and a cigarette and anything else I could find in the house to bring me back to earth. It didn’t work. I had to call Ken right away, and a couple other friends, and then I went on and told the story to the next dozen people I encountered, even a few I was meeting for the first time. Some were endeared to me instantly; others have never spoken to me again. I also told the story to my creative writing students at school, which many of them mentioned as a positive in their post-semester course evaluations.

Some people I was scared to tell, such as my sister, who was well aware of my behavior when under the sway of mad lust. We had had a tug-of-war with a sleeping bag that nearly turned into a fistfight shortly after I met Tony in New Orleans; she could not believe I was throwing myself at a gay man with such utter and humiliating flagrancy.

Even though I was vindicated then, I held off burbling to her this time—at least, for a while. I also avoided telling Jane about Brett. Everything that had happened up to that point in my new dating career had been harmless and basically nonsexual: Uncle Norm, Arnie, even Humberto the Tortilla Man. But the thing with the race-car driver felt red-hot and dangerous—PG-13 on its way to X. It had quite a ways to go before it would be something in which one would involve one’s fourth-grade child.

Meanwhile, Crispin had recently notified me that he and his girlfriend, an Italian-Catholic woman who was an aide in a school for autistic kids, were going to take Jane to the Philadelphia Zoo for the day. I was blindsided by this development and handled it badly, freaking out at the infamous Hereford Exxon. Once her father and I were screaming at each other, Jane burst into tears. She could not bear even one more second of conflict between us.

Though I claimed it was because I had been peremptorily notified at the last minute of the trip, which involved sleeping over at the girlfriend’s house, it was obviously more than that. This would be Jane’s first experience of seeing one of her parents with a new romantic partner, the beginning of a new phase for our atomized family. This girlfriend had been in the picture for quite a while already, so the outing was not inappropriate. But it was enough new information for the moment. Brett would have to stay undercover.

No matter how crazy I was going in my head, my first e-mail to him was relatively restrained. “There was no traffic at all going home,” I wrote. “Took forty minutes—good thing, because my mind was hardly on the road. How was the game, and the rest of your night?”

“Broke down on the side of the road on the way back—just got in,” he replied. “Thought about the kisses a lot.”

Though his e-mails were less frequent than the first week—he said he was “having trouble getting to Gmail”—he was still flirting when he did. But then he wrote something troubling. “You have beautiful eyes, Marion. I have to say that the depth of them is a little frightening to me, coming from where I have been. It almost seems too easy to fall into them.”

Uh-oh. It was starting already. I felt the floor beneath me begin to give. Soon I would fall through a trapdoor in my psyche to the place where crazy girls boil bunnies and make hang-up calls and stalk the Internet at 3:00 a.m.

Despite every single person I knew warning me not to, I wrote and asked when I would see him again. Then Wednesday morning I went to the mall before my yoga class. At the Clinique counter, I spent $108 dollars on antiaging cream. Just as I was stuffing my iPhone into my purse before entering the yoga studio, an e-mail arrived. It put a huge smile on my face.

I had recently forwarded Brett some of the funny messages I’d received from when I had a profile up on Match, the dramatic proposals of my ESL suitors. This inspired him to write one of his own:

marion,

your eye like beauty and mouth appreciates. Together we have fun much and play. For sure you and me absolutely lovers forever with great time and fun. All you must do is only tell me and I will be man for you. I make you happy and smiling all day long, marion. Please please let me meet out with you sometime soons! My mother want meet you too, she thinks you have smarts. How can’t you see the niceness we can get? The big pennis in my pants want to make to love with you and you will always be liking it for always. I must have seen with you. please.

Bill

I was beside myself—not only because it was funny, but because I naively believed that he couldn’t have written those things if he didn’t feel some version of the sentiments described. But on the way out of yoga, going immediately for the phone, I found another e-mail.

This one said good-bye.

I am torn between wanting to see you again and wanting to stop before it is too late. My instinct says to stop and I have to follow it. If I don’t now, I could end up stopping when it is much harder for us both, and we would both likely be hurt.

I was so wide open emotionally and physically after all that had happened, not to mention an hour and a half of hot yoga practice, this message hit me like a wrecking ball in the chest. I could barely get to my car. Through my tears I typed back on my phone: “Is this because I brought up the second date?”

Good thing I hadn’t told my sister.

My friend Nancy Raynovich and her daughter Tess came into town for the weekend; I was unable to talk or think about anything but Brett. That kiss really was worse than heroin, and rejection was the cocaine that made the speedball. No matter how normal I might look on the outside, the truth is I was a sick, sick woman, and this guy was playing my mazurka.

I took my houseguests shopping in Hampden, a quintessentially quirky Baltimore area. Tess got a vintage gold gown to wear to her high school homecoming dance, and I bought two things for Brett, things that jumped off counters into my hands even though I had never conceived such items existed. One was a package of gum. On the back of the silver box a disclaimer read, “By accepting wanna-hook-up gum, receiver agrees to enter into sexual relations (i.e., to “hook up”) with giver. It is mutually agreed that relations are limited to acts of sex and do not include exchange of phone numbers, first or last name(s), or inner feelings about anything deep and meaningful. Void in France.”

In a shop down the block, I found a card with a deep scarlet envelope. On thick, creamy stock it said don’t be a, beneath which was a line drawing of a chicken. The inside was blank. I paid for the card and right there at the counter wrote in careful cursive, I will keep my eyes closed so you won’t fall into them. Then I put the gum in the envelope and went to the post office, before I myself chickened out.

Seventeen-year-old Tess was getting a very unusual impression of the romantic practices of older women, but she seemed to be enjoying it. I certainly was. It’s a high point of bipolarity when you can take people on your manic ride with you.

The next weekend, now two weeks from our meeting in Annapolis, I was down in D.C. and I e-mailed Brett to suggest we meet for coffee on my drive home to talk things over. He was dubious, saying it was forty-five minutes out of my way. Finally we agreed to meet at a Starbucks he found on MapQuest that would be sort of in the middle.

Sometimes the Internet just doesn’t know what it’s talking about. There was no Starbucks in this devastated former mall; there were no retail outlets of any kind. Instead there were drug dealers, drug buyers, gang members, and immense black SUVs idling in odd places around the parking lot. I waited in my car.

Finally Brett showed up on his motorcycle, handsome and smiling as ever. He was perfectly friendly and normal in his greeting, much as he had been in Annapolis. He regretted leading me to this unwelcoming spot and suggested I follow him up the road until we found something suitable.

He got back on the bike and I got in my Yaris and we headed out. One of the first things we went by was a roadside motel, but he passed it up and pulled into a T.G.I. Friday’s. It was only about 3:30 or so, but we didn’t order coffee. He had a beer; I had a glass of wine. I tried to make a case. He was scared mainly because he was inexperienced, I said; he had no idea of the wide variety of arrangements people could have between marriage and a one-night stand. There was really nothing to worry about.

He was pleasant but stood his ground, and I began to feel sort of tenuous, overheated, and overexposed. “Maybe we should leave,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I had one more question. “Will we kiss in the parking lot?” I asked.

He laughed. “Let’s go see.”

The kissing started where the kissing in Annapolis left off and went about as far as you can go in the parking lot of a T.G.I. Friday’s: a very, very frustrating place. I remember standing on his feet to even out our heights, every inch of our bodies touching through clothes and jackets. I lost all self-consciousness, all inhibition, all sense of my age and geographic location. I did not understand why we hadn’t gone to that motel. He said he’d seen it, too, with a wistfulness that made no sense.

This kissing had to stop before we got arrested; anyway, I still had to drive back to Pennsylvania to get Jane. I said into his neck, “Are you going to tell me tomorrow that you can never see me again?”

“You never know with me,” he said.

But actually you do.

Instead of just throwing him back into the big ocean he’d come from, I suggested we become friends. (Yay! More friends!) I read some of his creative writing and I sent him more books to read. We exchanged long e-mails every day; I usually wrote back to his instantly and then spent the next twelve hours awaiting his reply. I saved all the e-mails in a folder—there were dozens, then hundreds—and reread the old ones while waiting for the new ones. Oh, I was hooked all right. By Halloween, I was back to wondering if we would see each other again.

Then suddenly he sent a flirtier e-mail, including some romantic song lyrics and mentioning kissing. When I hopped on that idea, he immediately backed off. Then, a little over a month after our first meeting, he announced that he was going into therapy and cutting off communications with me.

I decided to go into therapy, too. God knows I needed it.

“He’ll be back,” predicted Ken gloomily, and my son Hayes also weighed in on the matter. Though Hayes doesn’t like to hear about my romantic exploits, I did find myself telling him a bit about Brett at some point.

“Oh my God, this guy is a total doucher,” he said. “Forget about him, Mom.”

Dreamboat or doucher? Or just another wacky CL poster?

You decide.