I called Maya to tell her about my date with the murderer.
“Missed opportunity,” was her response. “Sleeping with him would have helped you get over your writer’s block and given you something to write about. A double win!”
She kept at me with her infuriatingly forceful yet captivatingly caring relentlessness. Her Maya-ness.
“Elise, having sex with someone else will help you purge Elliot from your amygdala, where he’s been starring in scene studies from Elise and Elliot’s Marriage for the past two years. Don’t let him hold you hostage. You need to lose your divorce virginity.”
Divorce virginity. I hate the term. I tell her so. She doesn’t care.
“It’s a great term. You should take it and run with it.”
She even came up with the idea for a sitcom called The Divorce Virgins that she thinks I should write after I finish Deja New—a kind of Sex and the City meets Golden Girls about best friends who get divorced around the same time and join a dating world that looks a lot different from the one they had left behind to get married.
I know she’s trying to help me. I know she doesn’t understand writer’s block—or any block. Maya is a get-it-done type. I am a think-about-getting-it-done type. She is trying to help me squeeze the final act out. She’s bossy about it though. Demanding. Pushy. She calls it supportive. “Get laid, Elise. Fall in lust. It’ll help you write your final act sex scene.”
“What if I don’t want to have a final act sex scene?”
“You will.”
“I don’t think so. Not in life and not in theater.”
I have been on exactly three dates since my divorce.
There was Mikel, who was once named Michael but changed it to Mikel while studying landscape design in France. It was during a visit to Giverny. He claims Monet spoke to him, like God. “Mikel, revere the land like a literary masterpiece,” said Monet. “And change your name.” After the visit to Giverny, he went from Michael to Mikel and shifted the focus of his studies to the narrative landscape. Maya met Mikel while she was doing publicity for the American Society of Landscape Architects or some organization like that. He told her he loved to read and talked more about books than landscaping, and he had the arms of an Adonis and deep-set brooding eyes which Maya described as “sexy, yet serious.”
She sent him an email and bcc-ed me:
Dearest Mikel,
Please excuse the unexpected email. You’ve been on my mind recently as my daughter is reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the other night she blurted out: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. I was reminded of the Shakespearean garden you designed, and it occurred to me that you might like to meet one of my dearest friends, who is a brilliant playwright and happens to be single. Come what may of this, her name is Elise Hellman and I’d love to connect you.
Yours,
Maya (Your Voice PR)
Mikel and I went out for coffee and three sips in, he said he’d like to cut to the chase and talk about “rumpscuttle and clapperdepouch.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’m interested in your favorite coital contortions,” he replied.
“Are you asking me what positions I like to have sex in?”
“You’re distressingly prosaic for a playwright,” was his response.
“And you’re a licentious pretentious weed!”
I didn’t say that. I wish I had. I did respond with some query along the lines of, “Do all landscape architects tend to use such floral language?”
To make up for Mikel, Maya introduced me to Richard, who she promised was more mature. By more mature, she meant he was 75-years-old.
“He’s in great shape. You’d never know he was over fifty,” she insisted.
“But I’m not even fifty,” I reminded her.
I look like the kind of 48-year-old who could date someone in their 70s or someone in their 30s. I don’t particularly want to look like that kind of 48-year-old, but my face has aged into a face that people can’t seem to figure out. The lines around my eyes come and go, like the folds of theater curtains, and I keep my skin so well moisturized I sometimes look dewy to the point of damp or even greasy, and while my smile is big and toothy and has been called contagious—although mostly by hypochondriacs—my thinking face has inspired random people passing me on the street to say things like, “Don’t worry, it’s not so bad.”
“Forty-eight is the new seventy-five,” Maya assured me.
“I thought seventy-five was the new fifty,” I told her.
“It goes in both directions,” she said.
“So does that make me seventy-five and him fifty?”
We went to an Italian restaurant that had recently opened. He ordered a bottle of red wine, an antipasto, and an entree. And he chewed loudly and slowly, which was proof that 75 is not the new 50 and 48 is not the new 75. Forty-eight is the new 50 at best. Richard’s stories reminded me of the ones Uncle Bill used to tell, and after he finished his tiramisu, I asked if he wanted to meet my Aunt Rosemary. “I think you two could have a lot in common,” I told him.
“I hope you won’t judge me too harshly for sounding like a cliché, but women of my generation are no longer of interest to me,” he said. Straight face. Tiramisu on his chin.