brown lips

That same fall, my food-writer friend Martha said she had a guy she wanted me to meet. Matt was smart and well-read, and he was a carpenter, a combination she thought would interest me. On the other hand, she warned, she did have a few concerns. He might not be over his last girlfriend, Foamy. (Fluffy? Sparky? Something like that.) The evidence of his broken heart was that he had drunk most of two bottles of wine, a tumbler of bourbon, and a martini the night Martha met him.

Well, I thought, send him on! Having been married to both a pain-pill addict and an alcoholic, neither of whom I was any help to at all, I could pretty much guarantee he’d end up in rehab.

However, Martha seemed unwilling to let us loose with each other’s phone numbers, so instead, she decided to have a potluck dinner party to which we’d both be invited, along with other people, to take off the pressure. This sounded like a good plan, weary as I was at this point of awkward getting-to-know-you conversations at the coffee shop.

Though I had somehow managed to spend the first fifty years of my life without going on a blind date, I now knew much more than I’d ever hoped to know about tedious first encounters. Still, I had not given up on the idea of finding love in any way possible. This time, like every other time, could be It. As usual, I threw myself into a delusional yet absorbing series of preparations.

Maybe my potluck dish for Martha’s party was not the most important thing to worry about, but it was the most captivating for me. I welcome any chance to think about food for hours on end. I found a delicious-sounding recipe in the Times for something called a panade, involving layers of bread, chard, butternut squash, leeks, and cauliflower, baked with milk and Fontina cheese. While making my grocery list, I began to wonder if, along with the greens and grains, I might also need high-heeled leather boots and a pair of skinny jeans. In fact, I saw in a sudden flash of insight, it was the lack of these things that had been the roadblock to my dating success so far. I went straight to a resale shop to remedy the situation.

When I got home with my purchases, Hayes regarded me with amusement and doubt in his brown eyes. “Mom, these are Seven jeans,” he said. “I know you didn’t buy Seven jeans. They cost, like, $200.”

Well, he would know, having inherited the shopping gene along with the brown eyes from his father, who by the way had had every excuse for pill-popping in the years before his death at thirty-seven. With tragedies like this in one’s past, and God knows what on the agenda, one learns to enjoy every portent of a benevolent universe, no matter how small. The Miracle of the $28 Seven Jeans. Perhaps the start of a whole new run of luck!

When I got to Martha’s that night, she revealed that she’d invited a second guy for me to check out, William. She’d met William on Match.com before she found Dan, and they had maintained a collegial friendship, since he was a writer.

“Oh, that dude,” I said unenthusiastically. She had shown me a picture of him months earlier. “I thought he went to the West Coast or something.”

“He did,” she said. “But he’s back.”

As it turned out, William was somewhat more attractive in person than in his website photo—tall, fit, and clear-skinned, sort of bouncy and healthy-looking in a California-y way. The other guy, the brainy carpenter, had a more-grungy, six-days-on-the road thing going. Both of them paid a lot of attention to me throughout the evening, tag-teaming the seat next to me on the porch and vying for the chance to bring me a cocktail.

William told me all about his unpublished novel, which followed the spiritual quest of a young female character modeled on his twenty-two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, I was not quite so high on life that I agreed to read it. William seemed too New Age-y for me, but when I said this, he took it mildly. His consensus-building conversational style was a great relief, as I was still in recovery from the ten years of debate-club-on-steroids that was my second marriage.

Matt was also very nice, though a little less perky. He chugged whiskey, rolled his own cigarettes, blazed a few doobs on the balcony, but, you know, not necessarily in a suicidal way. He was actually rather courtly and sweet. I told him I had heard he’d been drowning his sorrows of late, and he smiled ruefully and asked me if I wanted to join him in a nightcap. Like William, he had a quality that made him so not my ex-husband, which in his case was the affectionate embrace of a panoply of vices and an aura of nonjudgmental, relaxed standards. After the sometimes ascetic, sometimes alcoholic, obsessive-compulsive Puritan philosopher I’d been married to, a nice, run-down enabler could be just what I needed. However, I didn’t hear from him for quite a while.

Just two days later, I received a message from William. I considered whether to see him again. He wasn’t that bad-looking, he was easy to talk to, and reasonably intelligent. As long as I could avoid his novel, I felt I had nothing to lose.

I had picked up his message on my iPhone as I was driving to hot yoga one morning. Just after that, I caught part of something interesting on the radio. It was an interview with actor Charles Dutton, who was coming to town with his one-man show, titled From Jail to Yale. It was at Morgan State University, a historically black college a couple miles up the road from me. It would be cool to see a play there, and, fortuitously, the event was on a Saturday, the night my daughter Jane regularly went up to stay over with her father in Pennsylvania.

William told me that he’d like to go to the show, but he’d have to order the cheapest tickets available because finances were an issue. Thinking ahead, I downloaded a coupon for dinner at a nice place over near the college.

When William got to my house that evening, I poured myself a glass of wine and prevailed upon him to join me. He was an unenthusiastic drinker, saying he’d never enjoyed a glass of wine before the other night at Martha’s, when we’d opened several good bottles. “Sadly,” he continued in his calm California way, “I’m fifty-four years old and find myself homeless, jobless, and penniless.”

“Really?” I said. “How terrible for you!” It wasn’t great for me either, at least in the short term. I slipped my restaurant coupon under a pile of newspapers and pulled out Tupperware containers of leftovers from the fridge.

William dug right into the chicken parmesan and continued. All the business ventures and freelance gigs he’d had going out West had tanked with the economy in the last year. When he ran out of options and rent money, he’d moved back home to Randallstown, a run-down suburban outpost of Baltimore, to stay on his mother’s pullout couch. She was a Holocaust survivor, he said, who was already taking care of his sister, a morbidly obese young woman awaiting gastric bypass surgery, and her boyfriend, a crystal meth dealer.

“Jeez,” I said, “how is your mother handling all this?”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “the Holocaust, you know—it kind of puts things in perspective for her. I think she’s just happy to have her family around.”

Soon we were off to the show at Morgan State, where the “Will Call” line was so long and slow-moving that I wondered if we’d get to our seats before intermission. It seemed that every single African-American person in the city of Baltimore had come to this event. There are two thousand seats in the Morgan State auditorium, and no more than six of them were occupied by white people that night.

Under the fluorescent beams lighting the sidewalk where we waited, I studied my extremely white date out of the corner of my eye. His clothes, his salt-and-pepper hair, his smallish eyes. I hadn’t noticed it before, but William’s lips were unusual. They had a classic Cupid’s-bow shape, but were very wide—like a three-quarter-inch lower lip—and very deeply colored. In fact, they were a sort of plummy brown. But really, more brown than plum.

“What’s wrong?” asked William. “What are you looking at?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

We finally got to our seats, which were on a precipitous fourth mezzanine perched at a dizzying height. We were surprised to see that Dutton had already begun his monologue, though many people had not yet gotten into the auditorium. I was annoyed to have missed the beginning of the story, since I had missed it on the radio, too, and the rest was pretty much word for word what I had already heard. Then Dutton announced that the remainder of the evening would consist of his doing scenes from Shakespeare with students from the Morgan State drama department.

William looked at me askance. “I had no idea,” I whispered.

Without offering a single bit of background—you know, This is a play about a bitter, insane old king who has three daughters—Dutton launched into a medley of scenes from King Lear. A procession of young actors in Elizabethan costume swept onto and off the stage, shouting at each other in Old English, dueling, weeping, murdering, then carrying each other’s dead bodies around and weeping some more. There seemed to be no end in sight.

Despite the mayhem onstage, soon our entire mezzanine looked as if sleeping gas had been released into the ventilation system. People collapsed over the arms and backs of their chairs, jaws dangling. Some sank into the pillowy bosom or muscled shoulder beside them; others remained nearly erect, nodding as discreetly as junkies in a driver’s ed class.

Unbelievably, once finished with Lear, Dutton and his troupe moved on to Richard III.

Waking and stretching when awoken by the applause, which was thunderous once it became clear that the evening was truly over, my date gave me a sleepy smile. I felt guilty for having made him spend $35 on these tickets, and said so.

“Oh, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a memorable experience, anyway.”

We made our way to his car. I assumed we’d go out for a drink after the show, so was surprised when he rubbed his hands together and said, “God, I could really use some ice cream about now!”

“Ice cream?” I said. I started racking my brain for a place that served both ice cream and alcohol, which I felt I needed as soon as possible. “How about Golden West?” I suggested. “You can have a sundae and I can have a drink.”

“Oh, I’d like to just go back to your place and chill,” he said.

Fortunately it was dark in the car so he couldn’t see the eye-rolling. “Actually, I don’t have much ice cream,” I said. “There’s, like, one old ice-cream sandwich of Jane’s.” I explained that the sandwich in question was Birthday Party flavor, which meant it had pastel-colored nuggets in it, and that it had once been melted and refrozen and was now freezer-burned, but I was unable to dampen William’s enthusiasm.

And because I am such a lame-ass pushover, home we went, and chill we did. He had his ice-cream sandwich, and I sat down across the room with a bottle of Chardonnay. He chose a spot on the couch, so I sat in an armchair as far away as I could without actually entering the backyard. He told me more about his desperate straits, his fascinating relatives, and his romantic history. I talked about my once-beautiful, intensely passionate marriage and how it had been tragically destroyed by distrust, alcohol, and bitterness. Somehow I meandered from there to the subject of my fantasy beach house. Since our mother’s death, my sister Nancy and I had been talking about buying a place in New Jersey so we could have a way to get together in our old home state. William perked up at this turn in the conversation and suggested that he could move in and house-sit if we did.

Finding it hard to keep my mind on the discussion at hand, I remembered suddenly that I hadn’t seen any of my road atlases since I’d moved to Baltimore, now going on two years ago. Where were those road atlases? Though I had not used a road atlas in a long time—in fact, I had bought these as gifts for my sons back when they first got their driver’s licenses, and they had abandoned them when they went off to college—earlier in the day I had wanted to consult a real live paper map to see if there was any way to get to the Jersey shore from Baltimore without taking 95 through Delaware, which has been backed up with traffic for several decades. Whether it was ADD, OCD, or just conversational desperation, I was suddenly driven to jump up and look for these road atlases in my office.

He took this opportunity to put in a call to his mother, which I overheard as I pawed through a cabinet of gift wrap.

“No, Mom, just go to bed. Don’t worry about pulling out the couch or anything. That’s too much for you. Please. Just put a pillow and a blanket out for me and go to bed. I won’t be home ’til three or four, anyway.”

“Are you kidding?!” I shouted, fierce and hoarse as King Lear. “I have to go to bed in a half-hour.”

William rolled with the punches and told his mother he’d be home by midnight; 11:30, I suggested. At 11:15, I yawned and said, “Okay, well. . . .” I really needed to get back to looking for those atlases.

He lifted his eyebrows and a smile curved his brown lips, which I had by now studied more thoroughly, with poor results. “Well,” he said suavely, “before I go, how ’bout some touching?”

For a moment or two there was absolute silence, then I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. He looked hurt. “Why are you laughing?” he asked plaintively.

Guilty and red-faced, I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I—damn. What do you mean by touching?”

“Well,” he said, “you sit next to me on the couch and I put my arm around you.”

I plopped myself down a few inches away from him. He draped an arm around me, then began to massage my shoulder, then drew me closer to him. I leaned into his sweater, hoping this would be the end of it. But he put his other arm around me and attempted to move into a hug position, his hands now fervently grasping and rubbing my back. I could almost feel his blood pressure rise, his muscles tense, the throbbing pulse beneath that tranquil California facade, and I didn’t even want to know what was going on in his pants. I leapt from the couch as if ejected from a cannon, and he apologized and apologized and somehow we got from there to the front door.

I never did locate those atlases. But after this evening, there was no longer any doubt that I was lost. I obviously had no idea how to be a single woman of a certain age, and I was about ready to give up on my approach so far. None of the men I had met in the preceding months was even a distant relative of The One. On the contrary, each had nudged me closer to waking up from my girlish dream. Realistically, the mating rituals of people in their twenties and thirties might never work for me at this point in life. Could I try something else now?

Through the pane in the front door, I watched William drive away down the street; actually, I made sure William did drive away down the street. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned away. There was a shifting in the rumpled nest of woolen blankets on the loveseat, the position from which my dachshund Beau monitored all comings and goings from the house. He poked his long, velvety nose out between the fringes of the afghan, an expectant look in his shining brown eyes. He’d known all along whom I would end up with in bed that night.