I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (20 page)

I went outside where the smokers, Marcus among them, convened. I bummed a cigarette from him and introduced myself. Marcus
was a cartoonist; I asked him to describe some of his cartoons for me. He talked me through one involving a couple in bed
and a bicycle helmet. I didn’t get the joke. “That’s often the case,” he said with winning self-deprecation. I was on my way
out, so we didn’t talk long; he gave me his card with his signature emblazoned upon it along with the usual pertinent details,
and I gave him mine. I went back inside to say good night to my colleagues, and as I was leaving, Marcus, who was sitting
on a bench with some others in front of the bar, shouted, “Good night, Giulia!” His voice had a Charles Nelson Reilly ring
to it, full of character, with a slightly gay undertone.

My plan had been to take the summer off from dating. In early spring, a few weeks after I said good-bye to Mitch for the last
time (well, pretty much the last time—I don’t count random sexual encounters years apart, and neither should anyone else),
I met a handsome Indian of British extraction on the subway. He asked me the time and kept on talking. He said he was a journalist.
I gave him my card. I wasn’t averse to the idea of a relationship initiated on the subway—in fact, I believed that public
transportation was a perfectly fine place to meet people. My friend Monica Mahoney married a doctor with an MBA whom she met
on the M103 bus, and that wasn’t the only story I knew; however, the man I met turned out to be exactly the type of person
one might expect to find on the subway. Though he was good-looking and wore nice clothes, I came to learn that his journalism
career consisted of one radio piece for the BBC sometime in the early nineties. Kam didn’t do anything. I assumed (and hoped)
he was supporting himself with family money, but I eventually discovered that the Upper East Side apartment where I dropped
him off in a cab after our second date was not his. After a couple of weeks of dating, he admitted that he was living with
a woman. When I called to tell him I was not interested in seeing him again, his solution was to put me on the phone with
her. Before I could protest, there she was telling me that Kam and I had a good thing going and she didn’t want to get in
the way.

When I relayed this bizarre incident to Jen, she was so disturbed that she urged me to come and stay with her and Jeff for
a few days in case the guy was dangerous (I stayed home and emerged unscathed). Ginia had given up on my sanity completely.
I was due for a period of soul-searching. Up till this point in my life, I had considered myself an adept judge of character;
now I wasn’t so sure. The heartbreak of Ethan and whatever that thing was with Mitch had corrupted whatever insight I may
have possessed. I was becoming a type I have never been and never wanted to be: a woman who will date anyone just to be dating
someone.

An e-mail from Marcus Caldwell
was waiting for me when I arrived at work the morning after our meeting.

Giulia,

You left too early last night.

I would like to take you out and buy you 82 drinks.

Are you free tonight or tomorrow night?

Marcus

And with that, my period of reflection ended. I wanted to go on a date with Marcus. I wanted to go on a date with Marcus that
night. It wasn’t the mild concern that accepting for that evening would make me look a bit easy to win that gave me pause,
it was more the fact that I wasn’t dressed for a date. Tired from the previous evening’s revels, I had rolled out of bed and,
without much thought, had thrown on a simple skirt and T-shirt. Back in my closet in Brooklyn was a brand-new dress I briefly
considered wearing before deciding this unremarkable outfit better suited my state of mind. Boy, was I sorry I hadn’t opted
for that blue silk jersey sheath with the bamboo pattern!

After a few phone consultations with the usual suspects, I resolved that a quick trip to Brooklyn and back was not such a
big deal. I’d leave work early and take care of some other errands, too. Marcus let me know that he’d be riding down from
Harlem on his Vespa. I didn’t disclose the elaborate maneuvers I would be employing to arrive at Blue Ribbon, a SoHo restaurant
popular with chefs and bon vivants. Marcus was most definitely the latter, albeit an aging one.

When I arrived he was standing by the entry, already halfway through a glass of white wine. I was a little put off by how
old he looked out of his softball clothes and dressed in a blue button-down shirt and well-worn khakis. Once my eyes adjusted
to the white hair and the wrinkles and perhaps aided by my getting a glass of wine of my own, I was able to relax in his company.
This took all of five minutes. We brought our glasses to a table near the bar and ordered a dozen oysters, a
spécialité de la maison.
I listened to the story of Marcus’s recently dissolved family life. He had two children in their twenties, both in New York
City. When they were little the whole clan spent a few years in a villa near Lucca, where Marcus painted and his wife gardened;
thus the Vespa and Marcus’s penchant for things Italian. His daughter now lived in Queens with her boyfriend; his son was
an actor who was also a drummer in a band that was playing nearby that evening. Would I like to go see them? You bet! We settled
up and Marcus showed me to his mint green Vespa; he had a matching mint green helmet, and there was a little black companion
helmet stowed under the seat for me. I hopped on, gingerly wrapping my arms around Marcus’s waist, a little uncomfortable
with the accelerated intimacy enforced by this mode of travel. Marcus’s cotton shirt was soft, his midsection pleasingly taut,
and there is a lot to be said for cruising around Greenwich Village on the back of a Vespa on one of the first evenings of
summer. I was seduced, which was, no doubt, the intention behind the acquisition. That Vespa took ten years off him.

Marcus introduced me to his son, who was quite good-looking, even with the Mohawk he was sporting for a role in a student
film. At Kenny’s Castaways, we drank Brooklyn Lager and listened to the band. They played some kind of country rock, my least
favorite kind. I sat there imagining myself stepmother to this young man who was closer to my age than I was to his father’s.
Oddly, the fantasy was not unpleasant; I had come quite a distance in two hours. Thing was, I had a remarkable ability for
turning any picture into the picture I wanted to see: me with a husband. My imagination had the flexibility of a thirteen-year-old
Chinese gymnast.

The band finished up around midnight. Marcus and I made one more stop for hamburgers and red wine at Florent, a pioneering
restaurant disguised as an old diner in Manhattan’s now too trendy Meatpacking District. Florent (which closed in 2008, breaking
many a New Yorker’s heart) was open all night, catering to the city’s clubgoers and transvestites. Though we were neither,
it was the only place I could think of that would serve us food at that hour. After our late night repast, Marcus and I sailed
over the Brooklyn Bridge on the Vespa, landing in front of my house, where Marcus lingered, showing me photos of his paintings,
which he stored in the same compartment where the helmet was. He kept a
Zagat
guide in there, too, for picking restaurants on the fly. The artwork was okay, but by now I was so determined to like this
man that I convinced myself they were more than okay and that, in fact, he was an undiscovered Max Beckmann. We kissed on
my stoop, and I went through that initial adjustment again. Pulling away from a kiss and being confronted with so many wrinkles
was jarring, sort of like kissing my father. At thirty-seven, I was hardly an ingenue, though, and Marcus seemed so excited
about me that I couldn’t help but get a little giddy myself.

“Missed you while riding home on the FDR Drive last night,” said the next morning’s e-mail.

Marcus thoughtfully chose a Brooklyn restaurant I raved about on our first date as the location for our second two days later.
We met first for a drink on the Lower East Side, a bar he picked that I had never heard of. For someone twenty years older
than me, Marcus sure knew his downtown hangouts. After a couple of glasses of red wine, we headed to Brooklyn on the Vespa.
As we waited for a stoplight at the exit of the Brooklyn Bridge, people stared at us from their cars admiringly. We must have
looked like a pretty neat couple, arty Marcus with his crazy white hair sticking up on his head and me in a light pink cashmere
sweater over a shiny bias-cut skirt. I wouldn’t have to cook for Marcus; I was already providing a great service to him by
bestowing my youth to his funky-old-man scene. I liked what this liaison did for my image, too. It added a bohemian dimension
that had hitherto been lacking from my profile.

At Locanda Vini & Olii in Fort Greene, we took a table outside. The talk turned to past relationships, a frequent conversational
detour in early dates. Marcus was just out of one, with someone, it turned out, I had met. This sort of happenstance is not
uncommon in New York City, which is a lot more like Mayberry than you would believe, at least in the circles I travel in.
We all know one another, and I would venture to say that the degree of sexual separation between me and everyone I know hovers
at around one. Renee Lachaise had been deflowered by my friend Conrad Peterson a few years before. I knew much more about
that ordeal than I wanted to both then and especially now. I started to work out her age in my head, and no matter how many
calculations I made, I could not arrive at a comforting total. She had to be at least ten years younger than me. Marcus and
Renee had a long affair before he left his wife and exurban homestead to hole up with her in five hundred square feet on the
Upper West Side. Now that I knew he’d dated someone even younger than me, the feeling of being the trophy babe on the eccentric
artist’s Vespa was gone. The revelation took some of the wind out of my scooter-velocity-blown sails.

But not so much that I didn’t invite Marcus back to my place for Prosecco. I didn’t say sex, I said Prosecco! “What if I carried
you into the bedroom and made love to you?” Marcus said when we were drinking it and fooling around on the sofa. But I refused
his Rhett Butler–infused suggestion. I may have ended my moratorium on dating, but I was going to take it slow this time.

So slow, in fact, that within the hour I had invited him to Connecticut for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend, where he
would meet my mother and Aunt Marie and we’d probably end up sharing a bed. The number of men who would agree to such an expedition
five days into knowing someone is infinitesimal. But Marcus counted among that tiny minority. In my mind, he exhibited a refreshing
lack of neuroses rare in New York City, where everyone overconsiders everything. The typical male of the thirty-something
variety, at least, would shy away from such an invitation, fearing it would imply commitment. Yet another selling point for
the (much) older man!

“I’m coming to Connecticut and I’m bringing a man who is closer to your age than to mine,” I told my mother on the telephone
the next morning. I knew she wouldn’t mind; whatever would get me to Connecticut for a weekend was all right with her. I could
be bringing a recently paroled Charles Manson
and her only concern would be whether or not he was still a vegetarian.

“Good,” she replied without missing a beat. “I always thought you needed someone older.”

I met Marcus at his Harlem apartment after work; we’d pick up his car and drive to Connecticut from there. Marcus lived in
a slummy building in a grim part of town, but I embraced its tattered appeal. There was marble somewhere under the dirt on
that lobby floor, and Marcus had a considerable amount of space, not to mention some excellent views of the Hudson River and
northern New Jersey. I imagined hosting big parties up here. Marcus told me he had recently thrown one featuring oysters and
beer. I didn’t know how to shuck and wondered if this would be a problem.

The walls of the apartment were covered with Marcus’s paintings, and stacks of them lined the hallways. “We can bring some
of these over to your place and hang them there,” he offered. I liked that idea. What I didn’t like was the eight-by-ten photo
of him and Renee Lachaise on the wall in his studio, and what I detested was the framed e-mail from Renee Lachaise hanging
near his bed. “I love you,” it read. However, I resolutely ignored those displays and concentrated on my oyster- shucking
dilemma. I certainly didn’t say anything to Marcus; that would mean acknowledging them to myself. Anyway, lots of people have
the ability to move on fast, even faster than it takes to remove relationship ephemera from walls. I was counting on Marcus
to be one of those.

We grabbed some CDs for the drive. I had brought some of my own, too.

“This is so fresh!” Marcus exclaimed in his emphatic voice whenever I played my music.

I also brought
Super Hits of the Seventies,
figuring that would appeal, but Marcus seemed to have missed groups from that period like Supertramp and ELO, the ones I
liked. He may have been busy raising his children. Or maybe we just had different tastes.

My mother and Aunt Marie came out to the front porch to meet Marcus when we drove up in his beat-up car. “Hello, ladies!”
he chanted, greeting them with the warmth and ebullience that had worked wonders on me. He’d do fine with my family, I thought
as I proudly showed him the house and then the table on the back deck. My mother, who had been getting a little slack with
her cooking, pulled off a remarkable dinner in anticipation of what she probably imagined and hoped was a sophisticated older
gentleman. Marcus seemed to enchant the matriarchy, and I felt so comfortable that I couldn’t believe we had met only a few
days earlier.