A Round-Heeled Woman (2 page)

At the Golden Eagle Bar and Grill, some seven hundred people had braved the elements. The place was jammed. Where were the people my age? The range looked to be between thirty and fifty, and where the hell was I supposed to sit? To stand? To fall down? “Come on,” said Nathalie, slim and youthful in her Paris black. Nathalie bought her clothes in France; I bought mine in Berkeley. Nathalie was forty-three; I was sixty-two. This would be a long night.

At the bar, I asked for white wine. It came in a huge glass, practically a bowl. It was full of wine. I had two and the world looked better. I did what I had done before in large gatherings, fueled by alcohol. I began to shop for Nathalie. “Sit there,” I told her. “I'll be back shortly.” And off I went to introduce myself to young men presentable enough to squire Nathalie through the heterosexual world. I met lots of men that way. And then I saw a man my age. His hair was as gray as mine, his face as lined. Of course, as a man, he looked better; he looked great. And he looked scared. He stood, his back against the wall, as a pack of women—there they were, women my age—moved in closer and closer to their prey. He looked terrified. Who would save him? Not me. I turned away, embarrassed by my sex and ashamed deep within myself of the hunger that I knew was as strong as those women's. “Let's go,” I begged Nathalie. We went.

It would be a long time before I could bring myself to try again, to go on hikes with the Sierra Club, to attend alumni association events, to agree to a blind date. The women at these functions outnumbered the men at least three to one. I grew tired of talking to interesting women, of watching women more aggressive than I tree the few men present. Finally, I gave up. Celibacy was better than humiliation.

So I returned to my longtime sexual partner, myself, and found comfort in the knowledge that at least I had tried. It wasn't my fault I was alone. I wasn't even especially lonely. Except for this: every once in a while, as I walked down the street or folded towels or filled my gas tank, this thought, completely unbidden, would leap into my brain lickety-split before I could repress it: What if I never have sex with a man again? It made my stomach churn, it made me dizzy, and it kept me awake sometimes like lightning flashes in a summer night.

IN THE DARKNESS of the Elmwood Theatre, I decided on a happy ending for the lonely woman in
Autumn Tale.
On my walk home, the cool evening invigorated me. Suddenly, the thought came to me: I could do that, just like in the movie. I could write an ad. I knew at once where I would send it. By the time I got to the corner of my street, I knew what I would write. It went like this:

Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with
a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.

It was the absolute truth.

TWO

The Library

Read, read everything.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER

The day after composing my ad, I walked to my library, which is 225 steps up the block from my cottage in Berkeley, California. Like Ann Arbor, Gainesville, Madison, like all university towns, Berkeley is a wonderful place to live. Rich people and poor people live here, all different colors of people live here, young and old, homeless and not. I live a mile and a half from the university and feel much smarter than I did when I lived in a suburb in the house where I reared my son. My house in Orinda was redwood and glass, as a California house should be. It sat in the middle of two acres of wildflowers, live oaks, and bay laurels. Alongside the deck, which I entered from my bedroom, ran a creek. In the middle of the creek was a tall rock. Every winter, when the rains came often and strong, the water rushed over the rocks and made a waterfall, my own private waterfall. I could barely afford the house when I bought it in the seventies. By the nineties I was running out of money and the house needed work. So I sold it. Sometimes I miss it, though mostly I don't.

I am a renter now. My cottage is one fifth the size of my house, four hundred square feet down from two thousand. Here there is no dishwasher, no washing machine or dryer, no creek, no decks. Instead, it has French doors that open onto a wonderful garden cared for by my landlady and her gardener. It has a flagstone patio, where I sit in the sun to do the crossword puzzle. Renting my cottage gives me a life uncomplicated by the burdens of homeowning: a rotting roof, a plugged-up sink, peeling paint, loose tiles, etc., etc., etc., ad absurdum, ad nauseam. It also gives me an insecurity about what would happen to me if my landlady sold or moved or . . . or . . . or . . . And, once I placed the ad, I began to worry about where I live: What if a man actually answered the ad? What if he came to collect? What if I liked him? Where would we do it? Where I sleep is not actually a bed. It's more like a slab of foam on top of built-in storage units. It is longer than a regular bed and narrower, kind of French now that I think of it. For me, it is comfortable; for two, well, maybe if we were stacked on top of each other. And what would my landlady say or think? She and her family live in the main house on the other side of the garden. What would she do if she saw men coming and going? Even one man coming and going? Would she throw me out? Besides, did I really want to welcome a stranger into my home? Oh my, oh my. Already I was doing a “yes, but”: the kind of thinking that had kept me walled off from risk, change, excitement. Hell, I would figure this all out. “Do not borrow trouble,” my grandmother, who did it all the time, used to say. Probably no one would answer the ad anyway.

Outside the gate, I walk everywhere: to concerts, to football games, to the movies, to restaurants. I walk to my library every day to read
The New York Times,
a ritual necessary to fuel my lifelong fantasy of a week in New York, where I would see every play on and off Broadway, hear every concert in Carnegie Hall, and eat knishes from the corner stands. What was a knish, anyway?

The library is my candy store. I can have whatever tastes good at the time: my daily
Times
fix, poetry, fiction old and new. At the end of my thirty-three years of teaching high school English, I ran, not walked, to the library and booted onto the screen the love of my life: Trollope, Anthony. There he was— eighty-four entries! I was set for life. Except not long after, maybe two years later, I was out of Trollope; I had read all his novels and loved all of them, the good and the not so good. What an amazing writer, a man who admired and respected the women of his time and who sympathized with their vulnerability in the Victorian world of men. In case you're thinking about befriending Trollope, know that he is not clever the way Dickens is clever, though he sometimes tries to be (and fails). But Trollope is ever so much more confident and talented in the rendering of women as genuine people. And with titles like
Can
You Forgive Her?
and
He Knew He Was Right,
how can you resist? Forgive me, but the answer to the first is yes, only a fool would not forgive her; to the second, Trollope says, No, he wasn't right, just look at all the trouble he made.

So now you see why Trollope appeared in my ad. He had been a significant man in my life. Wouldn't it be nice if a live man shared my affection for him?

A favorite section in my library is the biography section. Here are all these famous people, some more famous than others, some surprises. Like Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife. There she sat, on the shelf, waiting for me just the way she sat on a real-life shelf from which Ernest Hemingway plucked her. “I wish,” he wrote, “I had died before I could love anyone else.” Now, if Scott Fitzgerald had married Hadley instead of Zelda, he would have lasted longer as a writer and as a man. But Ernest dumped Hadley for the designing Pauline. Fitzgerald would probably have dumped Hadley, too—she was so nice. Zelda, now, was not so easy to get rid of. My library is full of wonderful people. Margaret Fuller is there. She is a hero of mine, too.

For now, in late October, in this library, I sat at a table, the recent issue of
The New York Review of Books
spread out before me. Outside, the rain slapped the sidewalks. Inside, the homeless were gathering, bringing the smell of the streets with them, adding their own pungency. Not much like Rohmer's Rhône Valley.

The New York Review of Books
is a periodical for serious readers. It claims to review books written on serious subjects, and it does. More than that, though, very smart people write very thoughtful, very long essays on everything from Freud to Jon-Benet Ramsey. It's also expensive, which is why I read it in the library. I save the best part for last: the personals, the most distinguished personal-ad column in the country, how about that? I was about to join it.

Most of these ads did not sound as if they had been written by very smart people; to wit: “Blue-eyed female college grad, 49,
5'6'', seeks nonsmoker, Jewish, male college grad to share, from concerts to
museum openings.”
Often, while I was reading the ads, my attention would wander to vacation rentals and I would fantasize about
“Greenwich Village. 1 BR plus study. Lg. music room, library,
balcony. $4500/month.”
Oh, well. Now, however, I was serious about becoming an advertiser of myself. Now, for I was sure smart people answered these ads, I wanted somebody to answer me. I wanted touching and talking and I wanted it sooner, not later—now, not tomorrow. For I was about to turn sixty-seven.

$4.55 a word, the
Review
charged. This called for Aristotelian discipline. It would have to be short. It would have to have purpose and an understanding of audience. Honed to its essence, I had to do it. The ad in my head—“Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”— would that be enough? Could I leave out Trollope? Without Trollope, the ad would cost $91 if they didn't count dashes, $100 if they did. With Trollope, $136.50! Shouldn't I specify Bay Area? That would cost two words more. Did they take Visa?

Behind me, the schizophrenic in his red beret roamed the young people's reading section, spinning the carousels and swearing at the books as they spun. “Lousy fuckers, no hitting the sky.” The beret, torn and damp from the rain, fell to one side of his head as he continued his tirade. I knew better than to shush him. Once, outside the library, when I was on my way home carrying a bag of groceries, he came at me from down the street, his red beret bright as a signal light, cursing and yelling, “Spare change?” He saw the baguette sticking out of my grocery bag, stuck his face into mine, his eyes, blazing with fury, and bellowed, “How about a little bread? Can you spare a little bread?” I walked quickly on by, trying to decide whether to use the special number the police had given the residents of my neighborhood. “If any of these street people give you trouble, call us. We'll be there immediately,” they promised at a neighborhood meeting. I had never used that number, nor had any neighbor I knew. The people in my neighborhood feel guilty enough keeping their porch lights on all night every night, to discourage the homeless from sleeping there. We all feel guilty and helpless and angry at the disgrace heaped upon our heads by a government—local, state, national—that chooses to ignore the poor and the sick. Is it Thoreau who said the measure of a society is the care it takes of those unable to care for themselves? Our measure is very low.

In the library, I put my hands over my ears and kept reading
.
“DWF seeks intelligent, sexy, witty, emotionally available, erotically confident, professional man . . .”
She doesn't want much. I wondered what she'd settle for; how old is she—
“early sixties.”
She'll settle.
“SWF seeks that special idyll with a literate, caring . . . ”
Nonsense. I counted the words: 34, at $4.55 a word—that ad cost $154.70! It seemed to me that all the ads but mine played around with the truth:
“long walks along the beach . . . love of nature . . . opera . . .”
Somewhere I read that personal ads projected what the writers of them would like to be, not what they were: men's ads included the out-of-doors; women's, fireside coziness. It seemed to me that men wanted a way out, women a way in. It also seemed to me that women placed ads, men answered them. In the issue before me, twenty-four of the thirty-two ads were placed by women. What does that mean? Probably not much. Just that women have to work harder to get the attention of men than men do to attract women. It also reflects the fact that there are just more of us than there are men. We continue to compete with one another long after we are past childbearing, long after we seek protection from the male. I kind of think Plato was right when he said (actually, Aristophanes says it in The Symposium) that “In the beginning, we were whole; we combined in us
both the male and the female.”
And then, we got uppity and angered the gods. Zeus struck us in two: half of us became male, the other half female. Zeus told Apollo to compose our forms.
“He
molded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker
might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of
the belly and the navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.”
Since then, we have wandered the earth in search of wholeness. Alas, our search is never successful; we are doomed to a severed state and the erotic urge is a sort of compensation. If he is right, the erotic urge is hugely important. That's what I think is underneath all these ads, that very urge to find completion. Where it happens—the beach, the opera—is irrelevant; that it does happen is necessary to life. To refuse it is to court death.

I liked my ad. The urge was there. I was open to all comers. And Trollope went in. What the hell, I didn't plan to spend this kind of money again.

The woman who occupied the same chair every day once the rains began, whose pretty face was lined and windburned from living out-of-doors, was staring at me.
People
magazine dangled from her fingers, then dropped onto the plastic bag she always carried, crammed with scraps of material, hats, scarves. I looked back and smiled and the woman dropped her eyes. Her shoes, showing beneath the long black skirt, were wet; from the look of her ratty black jacket she was soaked through. Her dark hair, curly in the dampness, shone in the light of the library. What unforeseeable disaster had thrown this pretty woman onto the streets? I had seen her before, here and on the sidewalk, her lips moving silently, her eyes fastened on the ground beneath. She was ill, no doubt about it, though I wondered if the illness had come before she moved to the streets or after. I nodded slightly. The woman turned her head to the magazine rack.

Across the table, one hand spread across the upper edge of my
New York Review,
a homeless man snored softly, his head cradled in his arms. I sighed. It was the beginning of the winter, when the homeless came to the library for warmth, a toilet, a place to wash. Not long from now, the smell of rotting back-packs, of plastic bags, of old and unwashed clothes and people, would come to be overwhelming. But none of the librarians objected to this seasonal takeover, nor did any of the patrons. We were bound together by guilt and frustration and an unutterable desire to feel the touch of another human being.

I pulled a pen and a pad of paper out of my purse and began to change my life. The cost would far exceed the paltry $136.50 I had so far calculated. So would the return.