an interview with mimi about plan c

So Mimi, you’re still together with this wonderful man?

Yup. It’s been three months and two days. We met on February 10th.

Of course, you were also together with Performer for that long….

That’s true. I was.

How can you tell this relationship is better?

Oh god. Given my background — a terrible father, negligent, dishonest, disliked by all close to him, including his second wife, my half-sister, his parents sometimes, his siblings’ spouses — it’s amazing I can discriminate among men at all, in any way. But let’s see — well, at this stage, Performer was still promising to tell his children about my existence, an action postponed so long that in fact it never took place. At this stage — or a little later — I was (and with good reason) beginning to feel angry at Performer a bit of the time. And by about the fourth or fifth month, with P, I would occasionally ask myself, If there weren’t sex, would you want to spend time with this guy? would you want to take care of him as an old man? is he the person you want to converse with forever?

And that’s not what’s happening with Plan C?

Not at all. I’m hoping we can have at least 20 years together (he’s about to be 66), and with luck, 30 years. I was thinking about that lying in bed (alone, at home) this morning. And I asked myself, suppose he wasn’t up to much at 96. Suppose he was creaky and weak and forgetful — would you still want him? and my answer to myself was, I’d want to see the look in his eyes when he looks at me.

Wow. Okay. I get it.

He has much natural sweetness. Over dinner with his friends the other night, the wife of the other couple leaned over jokingly and put her cheek next to his, and her husband turned to me, smiled, and said, ‘My wife is in love with Plan C.’ He then explained he was only kidding, which of course I knew, but the little episode confirmed for me that I was right to see in him what I saw.

What surprises you most about Plan C?

His relationship with his cat.

With his cat???

They adore one another. The cat’s female — Polly — and Plan C gets really close to women: his mother, his late wife W, the cat, me….he gets more emotional about women than about men.

But a cat?

The cat sleeps in the bed with him (and with us, when I’m there). She slept with him and W. So when W died, Plan C was not altogether alone, because Polly was there. Taking care of her, feeding her, giving her treats, talking to her, and especially brushing her — their daily ritual, actually all their daily rituals — grounded him the way taking care of a child would have. He says, ‘She was all I had…’

Sniff sniff.

I know. He’s very sentimental. But so’s the cat. I’ve never seen a cat so attached to a human. If he’s lying in bed with the cat and gets up to go to the bathroom, the cat gets up also and sits outside the closed bathroom door… He keeps the radiator on in a back room off the kitchen so she can sit on the radiator and look out the window at the squirrels. He says, ‘That’s Polly’s Miami.’

‘Polly’s Miami’ is not helping global warming.

You can’t talk that way to Plan C about the cat’s needs. What’s the environment compared to keeping Polly happy?

Is he that devoted to you?

That’s a thought. Maybe I should ask him to brush me every day when we’re together. It might feel good.

Moving right along….No, actually, moving back…. you can accept this, the close relationship with the cat?

It’s not a problem. She accepts and loves me as another parent, not as a rival. In fact, she comes over to me to have her chin scratched and her neck rubbed almost as often as she goes to Plan C.

An honor.

It’s nice to be loved by a cat.

Speaking of other females, how does W figure in your relationship with Plan C?

That’s more complicated.

Duh!

She’s definitely a presence. He misses her and thinks about her a lot. Yesterday, as we were passing a photo of the two of them in which they both look terrific — tanned and happy in Hawaii, both wearing leis, W in a white skirt and shirt looking really nice, Plan C leaning in toward her with his arm around her — I said casually, ‘I really like that picture.’ And as we went into the hall, Plan C burst into tears.

Hmmmm.

And yesterday was a Sunday. He misses her more on Sundays.

Why?? he’s not religious or anything, is he? and anyway, they’re Jews…

My theory is that it’s because we have a lot of sex on Friday and Saturday, and by Sunday, he feels guilty — toward her. He feels he has been unfaithful to her.

Oy. This guy cries a lot…. Aren’t you concerned about all these emotions for his dead wife?

No, I’m not. Of course I don’t know what other widowers are like, but I guess you don’t get over 37 years of intimacy in three years. I’ve only known him three months…His feelings for me are very intense. After a while, I think the guilty feelings will diminish. I just have to watch out for Sundays….And anyway, his crying isn’t narcissistic, like Performer’s. Performer used to cry when he was moved by something in his own life or something he said.

You always define and praise the new man by contrast to the previous one.

How else to understand him? And anyway, there have been a lot of ‘previous’ ones.

How many?

Oh gosh, it depends what you count — boyfriends, husbands, lovers, recent ’serious’ dates and relationships. I’m a woman with a past.

You’re shameless.

Thank god.

???

When I first knew I was going to be divorced a second time, I felt ashamed: two failures! I didn’t feel bad about getting Ex out of my life, but about my public persona. But after a year or so of dating and six months or so of blogging, I began to feel sort of in-your-face-sexual,
like the Wife of Bath: ‘Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal. For sothe I wol nat kepe me chaast in al.’

Translation please?

‘Welcome the sixth, whenever he turns up. For truly you better believe it I’m not going to stay chaste forever.’ That’s a loose translation.

From a loose woman.

From a shameless woman.

Back to Plan C: all I hear about is his tears, his cat, and his late wife. Do you guys ever have any fun??

We have a lot of fun in bed…

Funny, you never seem to mention that. What is it, are you running your posts by the Pope or something for censorship? Where have all the details gone, long time passing?

Oh gosh. Gee…

Your interjections date you, you know. Next thing it’s going to be ‘gee whiz’ and you and Plan C doing the twist and talking about Dick Clark and Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds.

Who are they??

Very funny. As if you didn’t know.

Okay, well, back to sex. We have terrific sex. We can’t lie in bed together, even for an afternoon nap (with Polly….), without — you know — beginning things… Plan C is all-over erogenous zones. I’ve never known a man whose back was erogenous. Sometimes after sex if I touch his back he pulls away because it’s too sensitive….it arouses him so much he can’t take it.

This man is — well, I don’t know about him — the cat, the tears, the erogenous back — where did you find him?

Stupid, boring old jdate. That’s where I found him.

So when he’s not crying or brushing his cat or squirming because you’ve touched his back, do you guys ever fight? or disagree about anything?

Well, I mentioned the political fights two posts back. And we may have a little conflict about timing and logistics when we travel abroad together in about six weeks, because I like to get to the airport really really early, and he doesn’t. And there are other little trivial things we’ve annoyed one another about, but now, for instance, he knows not to talk about untidy parts of my apartment, because I’m working on them, and I know to leave him alone Sunday afternoons and evenings (when we’ve parted after spending the weekend together), because that’s when he’s likely to be missing W. I can hear in his voice when he’s going to get irritated, and I back off or stop talking to him or just disappear briefly.

And your socks?

Either he has gotten used to them or he has decided not to ‘fight that battle.’ I think a little of each. Whenever I put them on, when I’m with him, I say, ‘Are these all right?’ or ‘Do you mind if I wear these?’ and he always says they’re fine, whatever they are.

Money?

I pay when we go out for dinner with my friends and he pays when we go out with his. I pay for food at my house and he pays for my food at his house. I have to stop him from being too generous. Though it’s funny, once he lent me twenty dollars for a metrocard, and when we’d been home about half an hour, he said, ‘Don’t forget that twenty dollars.’

What are you giving him for his birthday?

Well, I’ll tell you this, I’m not spending the huge amount on him that he spent on me. I’m going to down the antes. But I have a very good idea, which I’ll whisper to you. {{{{ pssshhhh whsshhh pssshhh whsshh}}}}

That’s brilliant. He’ll love it. Very clever.

Thank you! I think so, too. And just because you’ve flattered me so much, I’ll tell you one more thing about Plan C and sex.

Goody.

‘Goody’??? Your interjections date you. —– Anyway, here’s the final thing: sometimes he likes me to talk dirty to him, so I do. And when he praised my dirty talk the other day, I said, ‘It’s not as if it requires a great deal of imagination. It’s just the same words over and over.’ And he laughed…

But doesn’t the cat sleep with you guys? you let her hear the dirty talk?

She likes it too.

Mimi, you’re perverse.

Thank god.

* * *
UPDATE: photo of Plan C’s cat Polly, reposted from ‘the sleepover’ [21 april 2008] in honor of DT & WG

a cat named mimi

Saturday we’re going to dinner at the house of Plan C’s old friends. He said there was something he needed to tell me ahead of time — mild fanfare mixed with anxiety — namely, that their cat was named Mimi.

* * *

But, he said (before I had time to respond), he would ask them, for the duration of our visit, not to address the cat as Mimi.

!?!?!?!?!?

Why?? I asked him. Why can’t they call the cat by its name when I’m there??

It would be embarrassing for you, responded the ever-thoughtful-but-sometimes-a-little-nutty Plan C.

Why would it be embarrassing for me? I asked. It’s not as if my name is Squeaky or Fuzzy or something. I don’t have a cat name; their cat has a person name.

* * *

It took a while for Plan C to stop laughing.

Finally, when he paused to breathe, he said that if I’d been named Squeaky or Fuzzy it would have been a deal-breaker, and he wouldn’t have dated me.

But you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the profile, I said. It might have been too late by the time you found out.

Maybe, he answered.

* * *

I think I’ll tell him that the next friends of mine we’re going to visit have a gerbil named Plan C, and so, to avoid embarrassment all round, I’m going to tell the friends that my new boyfriend is named Whiskers.

* * *

love in an election year

Forty-four years ago, long before most of my fellow dating-bloggers were born, I was enjoying (most of the time) my first romance.

* * *
When PJ and I met, on December 14, 1963 (yes, yes, the date December 14th has ever since been important to me; I always remember what happened on that date, when the day comes along), we were seniors in high school. By the summer of ‘64, when we were both college-bound, the presidential election was in full swing.

I wonder if he remembers this episode as vividly as I do. Probably not, because most men don’t remember things like this:

It was late August, and my mother had rented a small house on Fire Island. I went there every weekend, and one weekend PJ was visiting also.

He was for Goldwater, and I was for Johnson.

We were walking on the beach one night, and we began arguing about our candidates. It was not the first time we had that argument, but it was the longest one and, I think, the last.

* * *

We spent the entire night walking on the beach arguing.

Dawn had broken by the time we returned to the cottage.

* * *
I can’t remember if my mother was aware that we had been out the entire night.

Most parents, aware of such a fact, would have assumed the two seventeen-year-olds (yes,we were young to be going off to college) had been having sex or at least doing something sexual.

But not us.

No, we were arguing Goldwater v. Johnson the entire time.

* * *
I wonder what we were saying. I wonder how embarrassed I’d be now to read a transcript of our debate. Or maybe I’d be surprised at how smart I was. I don’t remember being especially articulate about politics then, just ‘convinced.’ Goldwater was perceived by left-wing Democrats to be the most outrageous candidate, and he lost by quite a lot. I don’t think he was assumed to be personally vicious, just wrong-headed.

* * *
At any rate, I can still remember the very bright morning light as PJ and I entered the tiny living room of the house.

* * *

As I remember, we didn’t resolve a thing; we just decided to stop fighting.

And of course, neither of us could vote.

* * *
Okay, so fast-forward to February 5, 2008. It was ‘Super Tuesday,’ and that’s the day Plan C first wrote me, the day our romance began, as the ballots were coming in.

Plan C assumed I was for Hillary. I can’t find the message, but he said something to this effect, that he assumed a professional woman of my generation would support her.

I thought that (around that time) I made my position clear to him, that I was undecided between the two main Democrats and had not voted at all in the NY primary because (my feeling at the time) I didn’t want to hurt either of them. However flawed that reasoning may have been, that was my position.

* * *
Within a few weeks, we were arguing about the candidates (HRC & BO). I was still undecided, still feeling that both were about equally qualified, though qualified perhaps in different ways, and that I’d vote for whichever was nominated. But I hated hearing Hillary attacked. Much has been written by now on the anti-feminist, misogynistic attacks on HRC, and I’m hardly the first to mention them, but they affected me personally. Because (in a professional context) I’ve been attacked by men in similar language and with similar venom, I identified with her — when she was attacked.

So when Plan C got — as he has occasionally tended — in a ranting mode about her, I was irritated and offended. And my attacks on his attacks made him believe — even though I had been completely unambiguous about my then-divided sympathies — that I supported her. In that mood he is simply non-rational and can’t take in whatever is said, however calmly, slowly, and rationally I say it.

I was particularly angry because at the same time as he was denouncing Hillary, Plan C would praise McCain as a ‘patriot.’

This from a fellow Democrat!! What gives???

These attacks on HRC always took place late at night, and mostly over the telephone. The next day, or some later time, he would say he had been ‘a schmuck’ or ‘an asshole’ and even ‘a misogynist’ (which I do not believe he is) and that if he started doing that again, I should tell him he was being an asshole.

He gets in that mode every now and then, and it’s not always about HRC. I recognize it now, and I know it goes away.

* * *
For instance, yesterday morning he was watching Tim Russert interview Obama on Meet the Press, and he began to get infuriated that Russert spent fifteen minutes at least rehashing the Reverent Wright stuff.

* * *
Before I was aware of what was happening, Plan C had picked up his Treo and was dialing Information.

Washington, DC I heard him say, and then, NBC.

And then (speaking, I inferred, into an NBC answering machine) I heard him denouncing NBC for allowing Russert to go on and on about Rev. Wright when they were so many more substantive issues — the economy, the war, etc. etc. — that should have been discussed. I heard the phrase ‘poor journalism’ and I think I heard the word ‘asshole,’ though I’m not sure.

* * *
Plan C was in full ranting mode, and he let it all loose at NBC.

I recognized the tone and was relieved it was directed at Russert.

* * *
For a number of reasons, I’m for Obama too, now, but I think — I hope — Plan C now understands the distinction between feeling offended by the anti-feminist attacks on Hillary and supporting her candidacy. I never really supported her; I was simply divided. And now, like so many others, I’ve swung my indecision toward Obama.

* * *

My dating adventures have been inseparable from politics.

A year ago now, I was visiting all those dreadful matchmakers: remember?

I was recently rereading the post I wrote about the first one and thinking that our exchange about politics should have clued me in immediately that a man who talked and thought this way was not going to be able to find a suitable mate for me.

This was the exchange, from the May 1 post:

Ah, but our main discussion was about politics. Remembering the polite disagreement with Nathan the previous day about Guantanamo Bay, I emphasized the importance of liberal-to-left politics for me.

Max: I don’t ask them about their politics.

Mimi: I can understand that. But I wanted to mention that it’s important to me.

Max: I can’t ask them about every little thing –

Mimi: I know you can’t. And anyway, most of the men I’ve dated, most of the men who fit those specs would be against the war anyway, so it’s probably not necessary. But –

Max: Yes?

Mimi: Well, I dated a man yesterday who thought Guantanamo Bay was a good idea, the right thing to do with people, and I really don’t want to date someone who feels like that. But I understand you can’t quiz everybody.

Max: Look at me: I’m 60, and I’m liberal. But I think, we’re at war! this is a war situation! And –

Mimi: And you think that’s what you have to do in wartime?

Max: Yes!

Mimi: Well, I wouldn’t want to date someone who felt that way. I don’t think that’s ‘liberal.’ Most Democrats wouldn’t agree with that.

Max: I’m a registered Democrat.

Mimi: That’s good. But anyway, maybe this kind of thing would come up in conversation before we actually met.

Max: You can’t go through a whole list of opinions with them.

Mimi: I know. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t ask, you know, what do you think of welfare rights, the environment, immigration,
and so forth. But Guantanamo Bay is different.

Max (with genuine curiosity): How’s it different?

Mimi: It’s a matter of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, rights for everyone. This isn’t just a ‘political opinion.’ This is a deep conviction for me.

Max (beginning to understand): Okay…

Mimi: Anyway, I just wanted you to know that, because you say you give five ‘appropriate’ dates, and if I discovered beforehand that a man felt Guantanamo Bay was a good idea, I wouldn’t want to go out with him.

Max: Okay, okay. It’s not going to be easy…

Mimi: I know. The demographics are against me. There aren’t very many of them.

Max: I have plenty of them. But I have to go through my files and find them.

*****

‘Plenty of them’ my ass.

Max had no such men. He only came up with one seemingly-viable candidate, and the guy was a jerk.

* * *
But it was refreshing to hear Plan C ranting at Tim Russert. Better Russert than me.

And if it’s ever me again, I’ll know that the mood will pass.

* * *

And anyway, now that I know Plan C better, I can appreciate and even feel an amused fondness for the sincerity of his passions.

* * *
I don’t think — no, I know — I’ve never before met a man who urged me to call him an asshole or a misogynist if he ever got in a certain mood.

I haven’t yet said, Plan C, you’re being an asshole! Maybe when those rants were being sent in my direction, they formed part of some complex getting-to-know-you thing. We’ll see.

And anyway, perhaps soon McCain will be the ‘enemy.’ Who knows how that will affect our romance?

* * *
POSTSCRIPT
I have just discovered that there is a novel with the same title as this post! It’s by Tahira Naqvi. I hasten to mention this book, which I had never heard of till 1 minute ago. Clearly, the title was ‘in the language’ already and waiting to be used.

the seder

Saturday 19 April 2008

MY SALAD WAS A MISTAKE

Well, someone else was doing the brisket, which would have carrots and potatoes, and someone else all the symbolic foods, and someone else the dessert, so I said I’d do a salad. Not that anyone but me wanted one all that badly, but I thought someone might be tempted.

Never again; or at least, never again that particular salad.

Ingredients: shredded carrots; shredded zuccini; mesclun greens; a ripish avocado; romaine; fresh basil; and tomatoes. The dressing was chardonnay vinegar (which I first tasted on a date in January, and loved) with extra virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper. (Yeah, heavy; but I’m accustomed to making heavy salads because they make up a large part of what I eat.)

There was too much of it; that was one problem. And too much shredded stuff in proportion to the greens. And then there was the fact that a guest — my daughter, in fact — was two hours late. I had already dressed the salad; I like a salad that has been dressed a little while, say, 15 minutes, so that you can really taste it on the greens and everything. But after two hours of dressedness, this salad was a gloppy mess: everything was sticking to everything else, especially the carrots and zuccini.

Plan C put some on his salad plate and never went near it. It just sat there.

And there was a lot left in the bowl.

It wasn’t a ‘popular’ course….

Even I, a vegetarian, preferred the brisket to my own salad.

Okay, next year, if I do a salad, it will be a very light one, maybe red leaf lettuce and romaine and dill…..and I won’t dress it till the last guest has arrived.

THE ASSEMBLED GUESTS WERE ALL JEWISH

I’ve been to Seders where there were non-Jewish guests who had never celebrated Passover before and enjoyed this new adventure. But we were all 100% Jewish: Plan C, his sons, the fiancee of one and the girlfriend of the other, and one of my daughters. This was the first time she met Plan C’s sons.

GOD POINTED HER FINGER AT ME

Yeah, boy, did she. Not that I believe in God, but —

I got the passage to read about the unobservant Jew, who thinks Jewish tradition is just fine but depends on everyone else to keep it up…. Reading it aloud, I felt its meaning powerfully and knew it was a direct critique of me….

Was it an accident I got that bit to read?

Yes.

Or no.

PARENTAL SEXUALITY IS TABOO.

Only one of my daughters was present, and she was seated two chairs to my left. Every now and then, she would lean back so I could see her and make a gesture with her hands.

The gesture meant: your top is sinking too low and exposing too much cleavage. Pull up those straps!

So I did. Each time.

Later I asked Plan C if he had noticed that my top was too low, and he said no. But he had a lot on his mind, because this was the first Seder held at his house. (His family used to go to his wife’s brother’s for Passover.)

PLAN C’S ATTITUDE WAS MIXED

Plan C had organized the Seder, and it was the first major family ritual held at his house since his wife had died almost three years ago. He had been getting it together since March.

During the religious part, he occasionally made lightly disrespectful asides, and then apologized for them. No one minded.

But at the end of the dinner, he made a little speech of about forty seconds, saying that it was good to see the table full again, and that a year ago he hadn’t even heard of many of the people there (me, my daughter, and the one son’s girlfriend), but he was so glad to see us there.

That’s what Plan C is like: sentimental, emotional, prone to make little speeches, the sincerest person in the world.

He didn’t cry. I had kleenex ready in case he did (or, for that matter, in case I did), but all eyes were dry.

IT WAS MEANT TO BE

The week before Passover, one of his sons, as it turned out, and one of my daughters spoke to each other on the phone — in a completely unrelated context. They’re in the same business, and son X was calling daughter Y’s office, and she was the one who answered! And they knew one another’s names, so of course they were aware of their connection, and the fact that they were about to meet.

Son would have talked to daughter even if Plan C and I had never met, if I had never answered his email last February 5th, if I — or he — had never been on jdate, if if if.

AND (this is why it was ‘meant’ to happen, our meeting and romance) it also emerged, during the after-Seder conversation, that this same son had been invited to a wedding that I went to last summer. My daughter discovered that connection: did you know Son knows Sarah Bader? she called down from her end of the table.

I saw Sarah in her crib 36 years ago! And now my new boyfriend’s son knew her too. The generational connection was right…it made sense. Son hadn’t gone to the wedding, but we had lots of nice things to say about Sarah. A funny coincidence. And if he had gone to the wedding, nothing would have happened any differently between me and Plan C, because I would not have met Son anyway — unlikely, at a big wedding — and even if I had by chance been introduced to him, he would hardly have been soliciting dates for his father, and anyway, I had just met Performer a couple of weeks before the wedding, and (the more fool I) he’s the man I was thinking of then.

But don’t forget, I had already written Plan C via jdate, picked him out and emailed him, a good 18 months before he picked me out and emailed me (he had rejected me that first time because, he said, I lived too far away…).

So what with the daughter-son phone connection, the wedding connection, the fact that each of us picked the other out on jdate — you can see that we were supposed to meet.

Or maybe not ’supposed.’ But that’s the kind of myth couples create about themselves.

As he says, I am his beshert.

I HOPE WE DO IT THE SAME WAY NEXT YEAR — HIS HOUSE, OUR CHILDREN

But I’ll make a different salad.

miscellaneous thoughts on my evolving relationship with plan c

SEX WITH ANIMALS

Plan C often likes to imagine how shocked our children would be if they knew what we were doing, e.g. spontaneously deciding to have oral sex on the sofa at 11 in the morning.

I also like to try to shock Plan C, arguing (as I did that morning) that anything between consenting adults is all right, and spelling out ‘anything.’ Then I began talking about his relationship with his beloved cat, Polly…and suggested that anything between human and cat was all right, if both consented.

Plan C was appalled: ‘That’s sick!’ he said with evident distress.

‘Why?’ I said, provocatively. ‘If both are enjoying themselves and no one is hurt, what’s the problem?’

I was kidding him….but this was no joke to Plan C. He was horrified.

‘That’s perverse!’ he insisted.

‘But if the person and the cat consent, why not?’

And so on. It was hard to get him to take the suggestion as a joke. He adores Polly, and the thought of anything so ’sick’ or ‘perverse’ really upset him. I guess that must be because of his essentially parental relationship to Polly. He takes such good care of her: his rising hour in the morning is determined by her hunger for breakfast. If she jumps on the bed and mews for breakfast, up he gets, even if he’s tired. And she gets her affectionate brushing from him every day; he’s the parent who grooms her. He calls her ‘Polly girl’ and always talks to her when she’s in the room.

Sometimes he calls me ‘Mimi girl,’ by unconscious analogy with the cat….but he is not ‘parental’ to me.

He’s a very affectionate person.

HIPAA AUTHORIZATION TO DISCLOSE HEALTH INFORMATION

As unmarried but devoted and entirely committed lovers, we didn’t want to be in the situation some gay and lesbian couples have found themselves in, unable to visit one another in hospital rooms or to talk to a partner’s doctor. So at my suggestion we got a lawyer to draw up forms for us to sign. The forms have been signed and notarized. This is what they say:

I, [Plan C/ Mimi], authorize [Mimi / Plan C] to have total access to my health care information, including, but not limited to, medical records, reports, results, recommendations, documentation, charts, invoices, billing or payment information, notes and correspondence. I intend for the authorized person to have all the rights that I have under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability act of 1996….[technical stuff omitted here].

I understand that I am not required to provide this authorization. Further, I am aware that I have the right to revoke this authorization in writing. The revocation must include my name, address, telephone number, date of this Authorization and my signature.

N.B. This isn’t plug-pulling power; we’ve left that to our [separate] children.

HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO STUPID

I was looking at my television just now, I mean the piece of furniture (it was off), and remembering how I happened to get it. I had an old boxy one, much smaller, but Performer insisted (last October, and I posted about this) I get at least a 27-inch flat screen, or he wouldn’t watch movies at my apartment.

I consented.

Now, Plan C adores golf, playing it and watching the big tournaments, but he didn’t want to pressure me to get cable just for him. I was planning to get it in time to watch the Democratic Convention in August. Until then, I was happy just to use the screen for films and to get my news from the radio and the web.

But although he acquiesced to missing the golf on tv, because he spends weekends with me in the city, it was clear that he would really be sorry not to see the Masters.

He had gone to a lot of trouble to make his house comfortable for me, such as buying me (this he did without mentioning it beforehand) an incredibly thick long white terrycloth robe and two very soft down pillows. And he was so uninsistent that I really had to get cable a few months before I had planned to.

I was happy to do it for him.

And then, having remembered that, I also recollected how Performer had said he ‘loved giving women expensive jewelry’ but had never given me a thing, whereas Plan C, after knowing me for only two weeks, had given me the last piece of jewelry he ever gave his late wife.

And thinking of Performer’s total lack of generosity, and the three wives he’d been divorced from, and Plan C’s continuing (even, sometimes, excessive) generosity, and the one wife he’d been devoted to for over three decades — How could I have been so stupid??? I asked myself.

That’s what some of my readers were wondering then also.

* * *
Whew!

I’m very lucky.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

We’re taking a trip together in late June / early July; we already have the tickets and the reservations. And I’m going to two family weddings with Plan C, one in July and one in August.

SOCKS

Plan C seems to be getting used to my Celeste Stein socks

I wore these socks the other day, and I asked him if he minded.

He said he didn’t.

I said, But you said I looked as if I were going to the gym —?

Oh, no, he said, brushing off the comment. He had no interest in critiquing my socks at all.

We dress in totally different styles. As I’ve mentioned before, Plan C is a very cool dresser, conservative but stylish, wearing ‘cranberry’ shirts, blue checks, creased khaki pants, that sort of thing, always looking tidy and fashionable. He wears his sweaters or jackets looped preppy-style around his neck; I wear mine tied around my waist, as children did back in the 1950s.

I really like the way he looks, all the time. And he seems either to like, or to be getting used to, the more off-beat way I look.

HIS HEALTH, MY HEALTH

He has a chipped tooth, aching shoulders ( a side-effect from medication, perhaps), and trouble sleeping occasionally.

I have swollen gums and osteoporosis.

Doctors, doctors, in our future.

We’re trying not to be old.

* * *

an interview with plan c about his dating life

I wanted to do a complete and detailed interview, but Plan C clams up at the thought that what he says will be published, however anonymously. So I’ll offer here the snippets of conversation I was able to record. He’s so much better off the page……….

And oh yes, please note:
1) I am entirely responsible for the questions. If you think they’re low and vulgar, blame me, not Plan C.
2) This is not an exact transcript; I didn’t number the pages. This is just the way I’m typing the conversation, such as it was.
3) He was aware that I was taking notes and would write up what he said and post it.
* * *

MIMI
How many women did you date before you met me?
[NB this means between a time about 10 months after his wife's death, a time he said was really too early for him to have begun dating, till a time about 30 months after her death, when he met me]

PLAN C
(with embarrassment) 84.

MIMI
Did they have anything at all in common with one another, those 84 women?

PLAN C
They were mostly divorced.

MIMI
In looks?

PLAN C
They were mostly brunettes. And pretty. I like pretty.

MIMI
And their bodies?

PLAN C
Mostly slim and petite. I decided that’s what I wanted this time round. I had this fantasy of a woman on top of me, and that required petite.

MIMI
Didn’t you date some larger women?

PLAN C
Well, there was Angelica….the first time we had sex, I mean, the first time we were getting to a total state of undress, somewhere in the course of that she asked me if I liked big breasts. And I said no, I prefer smaller and medium-sized breasts. And she said, Why? and then she said, Mine are very big.

MIMI
Oh oh. What did you say?

PLAN C
I don’t remember.

MIMI
Weren’t you embarrassed?

PLAN C
As soon as I saw them, I knew I’d given the wrong answer.

MIMI
Do you have any happy memories of your dating?

PLAN C
I had a nice time with Angelica. She was exciting. At first it was exciting for me, with each new person I was dating, just to see what was next: maybe she would be The One.

MIMI
How long before it got tiresome? You went off jdate at some point…

PLAN C
It was going nowhere. It was like being on a merry-go-round. I stopped calling them ‘dates’ and called them ‘meetings.’ The first ‘meeting’ was always the same: you email; maybe you get to the telephone, the sooner the better. Eventually you suggest a date or meeting; it was always me who suggested that.

MIMI
Did you ever not?

PLAN C
Sometimes I could sense — this was not the right kind of person for me; she was dull and boring or had a real New York accent, which I couldn’t tolerate. Before I met you, I called this woman who was drop-dead gorgeous in her photo, but as soon as she opened her mouth, oh– she had a Very New Yawk voice.

MIMI
What kind of clothes did you like to see?

PLAN C
I liked to see a woman who likes to dress with style and grace and good taste.

MIMI
You mean, like my striped socks??

PLAN C
I never saw a shrug till I met you.

MIMI
So what do you really like?

PLAN C
It’s always nice to see a little decolletage….and to see that someone made an effort. There was a woman who showed up in a denim outfit, blue jeans and a denim jacket. No one over 30 should wear those; it didn’t strike me as putting her best foot forward. [pause, during which Plan C feels guilty]
She was a lovely person.

MIMI
Tell me about that woman who wanted a hug….

PLAN C

She lived in [an upscale suburban town]. She was very nice, about 62. I was the one who emailed her, then we talked on the phone. She was divorced. We met at a trendy restaurant for dinner. She was not intrinsically an attractive woman, neither pretty nor beautiful, but she paid attention to how she looked. She definitely had a nice figure, about 5′4″, 130 pounds..

MIMI
Hmmmm.

PLAN C
I think I was more important to her than she was to me, at first sight. Almost immediately I said to myself, ‘Umm? No.’ [pause] This is terrible to say. I don’t feel right.

MIMI [persevering with the story nevertheless]
How could you tell you were important to her?

PLAN C
She was very eager. Eager to please.

MIMI
And?

PLAN C
So we had dinner. And then it was time to go. I offered to walk her to her car — which I always did, which you should do — and then I said, Thank you, and she said, Thank you for dinner. And then I leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek, which I always did. And she looked at me and said, A hug would be nice; could you give me a hug? I said, Sure, and so we had a hug, which was a close hug. She pressed into me, which confirmed for me that she had a nice figure.

MIMI
You’re very sympathetic there, and so is she. [pause] And so she’s another woman who wonders, why didn’t he call me?

PLAN C
If there was one thing that was always interesting about it [dating], it always surprised me that it seemed to be left to the man not only to initiate the first meeting but to indicate the second and third. Of course I got into trouble once because I actually said that to somebody, and she contacted me, and I realized I didn’t want to see her again.

MIMI
What happened?

PLAN C
About a week later she called and said, I had a nice time; maybe we could got out to a movie or something? And I said, Maybe we could. I was indeterminate and never called her.

MIMI
Why didn’t you?

PLAN C
Altogether, she was a lovely person and would have been a lovely companion, and I would have been a nice man in her life and would have treated her nicely. There was ultimately a gap — in terms of — I don’t want to sound like a snob — probably in education — no, in interests — and also, she was in reduced circumstances, so why should I be responsible for her? [pause] Is that cold?

MIMI
No, not at all.

PLAN C
I met one or two women who had a lot more money than me, and I still paid for dinner.
[pause]
I want to talk about — that I — until I did this I didn’t know many divorced people.

MIMI
You didn’t???

PLAN C
I lived in a couples world, people who got married and stayed married. I saw 84 women, and probably a handful had never married; half a dozen were widowed; and all the rest divorced. It was instructive about society. In most instances I felt like the women had had the rug pulled out from under them, and I heard a lot of divorce stories; never a good one. There was a lot of anger. I asked a lot of women, and they would tell me, Well, we never really loved each other. I’d ask, So why did you marry him? And often I would hear, I was 19, I was 20, and that’s what you did: you got married. And I would say, You weren’t in love? And they would say, It’s what you did…so we did.

MIMI
What about paying for meals?

PLAN C
The first time I did it, I figured out, it was like a date, generational I guess, it was expected of me: I’ll get this. After a while, I began to say to myself, Okay, this woman has less money than I do; she shouldn’t be picking up that dinner check. But when I was out with a woman with a professional job, I’d think, How about it? It wasn’t about the money…..I think there were about three occasions when the woman offered to pay her share; you were the third or fourth. If I mentioned this to younger people, like my sons, the feedback was that in their generation, a young woman wants to pay her way and doesn’t want you do to this.

MIMI
You have strong opinions about age….

PLAN C
I want the woman to be younger. Male ego, I guess, even if it’s just two years younger.

MIMI
And opinions about hair…

PLAN C
I was seeing a lot of middle- and upper-middle class women who did keep themselves well and went to hairdressers and had their hair styled. A good haircut can add so much. It was just amazing how many bad haircuts there are; and then you meet women with shoe-polish black hair.

MIMI
Of course men always tell women they’re pretty…

PLAN C [smiling]
Men will say anything to get laid.

* * *
I think I’ll leave the conversation there. As you can see, Plan C was reluctant to say much. He’d get involved in a story he was telling and then feel bad if there was anything negative about the woman.
That last comment was said with a smile… Plan C was not a great flatterer, and considering how very very many women he dated, he actually had very little sex. To be crudely quantitative: I had about the same amount with my 33 men as he did with his 84 women.

* * *

End of story…

* * *

his wife and me

No, this isn’t a post about adultery.

* * *

Plan C is a widower.

Yesterday he was telling a good friend of his late wife’s about me, and (he said) he told her, ‘Mimi understands that W [late wife] is part of the package.’

* * *

That gave me pause.

He was right, actually; I do know that.

But ‘part of the package’ – what exactly does that phrase mean?

It sounds like more than it is. I mean, it sounds as if we’re a ménage à trois. We’re not, of course, but W is definitely, or maybe I should say indefinitely, there with us.

* * *

Let’s start with what’s obvious to any sexagenarian dater: at this age, we all have pasts. Some of us have a lot of pasts: two husbands or two wives, or one wife and three serious girlfriends, or two husbands and four serious boyfriends. A man who is seventy might have a half century of romantic pasts. Rolly certainly did.

And really, speaking as a dater, one wants someone with a lot of past. One wants a man who likes women, who has always wanted to be close to a woman, who has committed himself at least once or twice to a woman, who craves emotional involvement.

That’s why I refused to date any never-marrieds. The three categories of men I wouldn’t date were smokers, Republicans, and never-marrieds. I made small compromises with the first two categories – Rolly, it turned out, was a smoker in denial, hiding cigarettes from himself on a top shelf in his kitchen, standing on a ladder to get them and smoke (he said) one every couple of weeks, which I think was more like one a week or maybe one a night; and Plan C, curse his dreadful habits, up to about four years ago was a terrible smoker – until he got lung cancer; and I had one date with one man who had voted for Bush the first time; and why? Well, he was really cute, and quite literate, and I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that he had seen the error of his ways – but, but, I never dated a never-married man.

They always had excuses about why they had never married, about the long-term relationships that hadn’t worked out, or (in one case) the child he had to take care of, or one thing or another, possibly legitimate excuses, but I just didn’t want to go there. I’m sure there were plenty of women who didn’t mind men who’d never married or (miaow) were desperate and would date anyone. But I turned down all the men in that category.

* * *
Another reason a past is good is that at this age one wants – okay, to be more precise, I want – a man with a lot of sexual experience. Rolly had had a lot, and it really showed. What a huge difference that makes. I had one date with a very Unsexy widower who had met his late wife in college, and I felt sure he knew nothing. Maybe that’s just a way of saying I wasn’t attracted to him. Plan C has loads of experience, and I’m so grateful for it. He won’t say how many women…..he implies that the number is large, and I don’t think he’s being coy or boastful; au contraire, I think he’s slightly embarrassed. He’s a modest and unvain man, but I ask a lot of questions (could you guess that?), and it sounds as if there were quite a number of women. He does mention one woman, the only internet-met woman before me whom he dated for a significant amount of time, who said to him, Plan C, you are a very sexy man! He quotes that because she was not a native English speaker and uttered the words in a way he found charming, so he imitates her voice and accent when he says it. And she was right. I’m surprised more didn’t say it, but given the number of women he didn’t avail himself of who, he believed, had made themselves available to him, I think more would have said it, given the opportunity.

* * *

So I’m quite happy to meet a man with a past, and gosh I have to admit it, and have often in these pages, but I’ve got quite a bit of past myself.

* * *
But initially I was wary of widowers. What I said to myself was this, that I’d rather be compared to a terrible ex-wife than an idealized late wife.

I assumed that I myself was just such a terrible ex-wife, as my horrible ex-husband must have represented me to other women on his dates.

Someone with a past like mine, I used to think, really couldn’t hold a candle to a perfect late wife, the woman the man had been with forever, the wife of the Good Marriage, the till-death-us-do-part wife. I had no experience of such a relationship, and were I to meet the widower of such a marriage, I’d feel inferior (I thought) to the woman he’d lost.

* * *

Until I met Plan C, I had met 1) Dan, who had photographs of the charming, lovely, sexy French Jeanne-Marie all over his living-room, looking adorable in her little sun-dresses and European sandals and staring at me from every wall; 2) the suburban guy mentioned above, the “Unsexy widower” who, I suspected, had next to no sexual experience, and certainly none outside marriage; and 3) RB [‘Retired Businessman’], who was lovely, witty, good-humored, the classic ‘eligible bachelor’ from black-and-white movies, but who appeared to have removed from every corner of his very large elegant apartment all photographs and reminders of his late wife, whom he met in, I think, about 1949, and had been happily married to since 1956.

I couldn’t deal with that. Let me correct: had any relationship evolved between us, I would have found troubling the complete visual eradication of the late wife, an eradication done, I assumed, to make me (or any of his dates) feel comfortable, but which had the opposite effect.

* * *
Okay, so how many pictures of one’s sexagenarian or septuagenarian boyfriend’s late wife is the right number?

* * *

Here’s how things were different from the start with Plan C:

I brought up this issue in our first phone conversation, before we’d ever met, and we discussed it. It was out there, as an issue, from the beginning.

He said that after W had died, he and his sons had put up a lot of photographs of her, and he was beginning to wonder if there were too many, and if maybe he shouldn’t take some down.

(In the event, i.e. the event of my first visit to his house, he didn’t. And that was all right. I’m used to all the pictures now.) (And p.s., my picture is up too, my coy photoshopped profile picture.)

I have a feeling that the issue of pictures came up in that conversation in the first place because Plan C said, at some point, ‘My wife was a beautiful woman.’

* * *

Some women might have been daunted by such a direct and absolute statement.

Why wasn’t I?

I certainly don’t think of myself as beautiful or in any way in competition with women who are, or who are thought beautiful.

I think there must have been something…slightly…formal, was it? or artificial, perhaps? Or impersonal?

I can’t quite characterize it, but that seemed such a strange thing to say in a conversation with a woman a man hadn’t yet met and was very eager to date, that I didn’t construe W as a rival.

I wonder if perhaps at some totally unconscious level it struck me as a guilty thing to say, as if Plan C had to do formal homage to his late wife, say something reverential, before he could allow himself to turn his complete and unrepressed romantic attentions to me.

In that first conversation he also said that because he had had a good, long, stable marriage (36 years) and had never been divorced, he didn’t want to marry again.

(That was fine with me, no problem at all, though in fact Plan C has now mentioned several times the possibility of our marrying. I suppose if he thought I wanted to, he would consider the subject seriously, but I very much don’t, and he knows that.)

And as I also remember from that first conversation – this is vaguer, but he did say something like this – he said that he had gotten – was it a signal? or permission? or a message? – or something from W saying that it was ‘all right now’ for him to ‘meet someone else.’

I don’t believe in ghosts.

The living create ghosts.

So that was Plan C (as I interpret it) giving himself permission to fall in love with me.

* * *

I felt somehow a sense that he was trying to clear the ground for me, but that W was still present, in a way.

* * *
Here’s how she was present on our first date, as I blogged it the next day

Before we met, I had thought, if he starts to tell me too much about his late wife (hereinafter W), I might ask if he could wait a bit. Or if he asks my permission, I’ll say, Can we wait on that?

But at some point over the entreé, he said, à propos of whatever we’d been talking about, “May I tell you how I met W? It’s a very funny story.”

And a little voice in me said, in a split second, He wants to tell you the story, so you need to say Yes. This is on his mind and you should listen. You are not W’s rival: this is part of who he is, and he wants you to know him better.

So of course I said yes, and it was indeed a very funny story. I kept remembering one of the punch lines Monday afternoon and smiling broadly at it.

The story showed what he had already told me about himself, that when he wants something, he goes for it.

And he was going for me with the same energy and determination.

I sort of liked that, I have to admit.
* * *
In the few weeks after we met, she wasn’t too present for Plan C, but one of his sons did say that he didn’t want to meet me till Plan C had known me ‘for a month.’ I thought that made sense; things did indeed take off pretty suddenly. But I began to understand that their mother, who had only died 2.5 years before Plan C and I met, was still, of course, very much present for her sons.

* * *

On my first visit to his (their) house, I saw the pictures and understood how W had indeed been ‘a beautiful woman.’ She didn’t look a thing like me; she looked more serious, somehow, but maybe that was just the way she photographed.

Plan C and I danced for about two hours in a room where about five pictures of her were on the walls. Her face greeted mine as he whirled me around.

* * *

In the bedroom, on a shelf opposite the bed, a large photograph of the four of them was displayed, and not too far from it was a much-larger-than-the-original print of my profile picture. On that shelf, at least, we all fit together. That was Plan C’s interior, I thought: we all fit together. We’re all there. We’re close to one another.

The real challenge would be to put there a photograph of Plan C and me together.

So far, there isn’t one that’s good of both of us. That will have to wait.

* * *

The second afternoon I was there, Plan C began thinking about W – I guess my presence in the house somehow precipitated this – and began crying hard. He was thinking of all the things he felt he should have said to her before she died; as he put it, apologies he should have made. I tried to comfort him a bit, saying that it sounded to me as if they were very happy together in their last few years, that he seemed to have been a wonderful husband and companion, and that he was right to say whatever he said and not to say whatever he didn’t say.

But that was too rational a response. Plan C will have to deal with his unresolved feelings about W some other way, I think.

* * *
It was when I met his sons, several weeks later (and it has only been not quite nine weeks since I met Plan C, so all of these events have taken place fairly close to one another), that I realized how different things would be with them, because a wife can be replaced (so I now understand) but a mother cannot, at least not to grown children. His sons liked me, but that was separate from accepting that their father loved me and I was his romantic partner.

* * *

I saw one of his sons briefly on two other occasions, both very pleasant.

* * *
Then last weekend I was away on a business trip and missed – this was fortunate, I think – the ‘official’ dinner at which Plan C met his soon-to-be co-in-laws. It was ‘fortunate’ because they needed to see where his lovely son ‘came from,’ and he didn’t come from me. They will meet me, of course, in due time, but this was for the families. Plan C told me that in the pause between dinner and dessert, he started talking about W, and how happy she would have been with this engagement, and what she was like, and so forth. And of course he did cry a bit, as he had been told not to by his son, but his son teared up a bit also.

* * *
They were sitting next to one another, and later, toward the end of the meal, the son said to Plan C that he was ‘getting used to the idea’ of ‘seeing’ Plan C with ‘someone else.’

I wondered if Plan C’s comments about W hadn’t perhaps generated that comment, that his son was maybe beginning to understand the co-existence, in Plan C’s heart, of W and me…

* * *
And then the next night, at a charity dinner in another state that I couldn’t attend, Plan C was at a table with many of W’s friends. He was telling one of her best friends about me, and of course the friend said (as all his friends do; he’s a beloved person) that she was happy for him.

And that’s when he uttered the remark I began this post with: ‘Mimi understands that W is part of the package.’

* * *

So what does that mean, anyway?

– that 36 years of marriage are not wiped out by her death;
– that to love someone else is not to forget W;
– that we do co-exist in his heart, as our pictures do on the shelf in the bedroom;
– that my role is somewhat different from hers: she will always be His Wife, the mother of his children, the woman he spent most of his life with. One of the reasons he’s eager for grandchildren is to be able to tell them about her, directly, because they will be genetically hers.
– that he has 37 years of memories of W, and they’re vivid and important. She will turn up in his conversation a lot.

* * *

Plan C is such a devoted, affectionate person that I don’t mind any of that in the slightest.

In fact, I often feel sorry for W – as I did when I saw the empty hangers that had held her clothes in what had been her closet – because I’m alive and she isn’t. I have a little ‘survivor’s guilt’ even though I never knew her.

But I also feel how lucky I am to be alive and to have Plan C myself.

I’m really glad I’m the one who’s alive.

* * *

gifts men have given me

I’m speaking of the material kind: not love or praise or cultural or spiritual legacies or anything, but stuff, the kind of stuff that can be passed from hand to hand or wrapped in boxes with paper or ribbon or delivered in the mail.

Lest there be confusion or uncertainty here, let me say right away that I’m not saying the material kind of gift is superior to the immaterial or vice versa; nor am I listing any of the gifts I’ve given men, nor all the ones they’ve given me. This post would go on forever if I listed all the exchanges.

I just thought there might be something in this, though I’m not sure what.

MY FATHER

Cut from 2008 to 1952.

My parents were divorced, and my father lived far away in another state. I almost never saw him, and between 1952 and 1964 I remember only one time when he came to New York.

My mother tells me this story of that one visit. It’s 1952; I’m five years old. When my father came to pick me up and take me out, she overheard me say to him, ‘Since you didn’t bring me anything, let’s go to Woolworth’s, and you can buy me something there.’

* * *

How to interpret that?

Let me count the ways:

1) Imagine not bringing a child of five a present! I usually try to bring a little something when I visit a household with a young child, especially if it’s a family I don’t visit too often.

2) But when the visitor is the child’s father, and he hasn’t seen her for a long time – imagine not giving the child something!

3) Well, I sure was direct, wasn’t I?! I wish I’d had all my life the ability to ‘ask’ so it ‘could be given’ me…

4) Obviously my mother remembered that remark because she felt it was pretty awful that he arrived empty-handed to see his child.

I can’t remember what we got at Woolworth’s, though I can tell you that – surprise! – there’s now a Duane Reade in the space where that Woolworth’s used to be.

* * *

Yeah, well, my father has a pretty bad track record as far as gifts are concerned. That must be the reason I’ve selected this topic, because I was marked forever by his negligence in this area.

Most Christmases I saw him, if only because he lived in the same state as my grandmother, whom I visited at that time. One year when I was about 7, he gave me dusting powder for Christmas; not a very appropriate present for a child, but that’s what it was.

For my birthday, three months later, he gave me the identical container of dusting powder: same brand, same kind, same everything.

I remember being very upset and not knowing what to do, because Writing Thank-You Notes for gifts was one of the great moral laws of my childhood.

My mother suggested that I might remind him of the previous gift.

So I did….

* * *

I have to give him this credit: he sent me another present, a metal name-embosser with my name on it, so I could emboss my name on paper or envelopes or whatever.

* * *

When I got married the first time, he said he would pay for the honeymoon. He encouraged us – urged us – to spend the first night at the Plaza, which we would certainly never otherwise have done. My then-husband picked out a modest B & B in western Pennsylvania where we spent a few nights. He refused to send my father the receipts for the rented car, because we were driving to his parents, and then-husband said that wasn’t officially part of the honeymoon.

When my father got the receipts for the night at the Plaza and the B& B, he called me and said, in a voice that I can only describe as nasty, I’m glad you went first class all the way.

* * *

That was 1970, and that was the last gift I got from him, though he’s still alive this very day, April 6, 2008.

MISCELLANEOUS BOYFRIENDS
1957 - 1969

I remember a sweet valentine with hand-drawn hearts and flowers (and bugs, which he loved) from a boy who liked me in elementary school. He’s now an entomologist.

My freshman/sophomore-year boyfriend in college gave me a sexy bra; I was so embarrassed that when I saw what it was, I closed the box.

My senior-year boyfriend gave me an embroidered jacket from Mexico, where his family went for spring vacation; and a Penguin paperback of Don Quixote (I never read it).

Not an exhaustive list, but as many as I can easily remember.

MY FIRST HUSBAND

We mostly gave each other books and records. When I use those books, I see the inscriptions and have such mixed feelings: good feelings about him (it’s a long story….), embarrassment that my children or some current boyfriend might see the inscriptions, ambivalence about tearing out the pages with the inscriptions. I think I’ve left most of them in.

OTHER BOYFRIENDS

Between husbands, I had a romance with a younger man who gave me a lovely India-print yellow scarf with gold threads running through it, sort of hippie-ish, as he was.

Another boyfriend of that general period (an awful person, another long story….) gave me a book that I wanted to get myself, because I needed it for work. After we broke up, I hated having this book that I used all the time signed to me by him, so I tore out the page with the inscription.

MY SECOND HUSBAND

A few months after we met, he gave me a beautiful, delicate, expensive-looking hand-fan, because I use them a lot in the summer. It was the nicest thing he ever gave me.

I’ll fastforward here: in the later years of our marriage, for Christmas presents to one another we gave donations to charities in each other’s honor (he didn’t do that the final Christmas we were together, but then, he knew it was the final Christmas and I didn’t) and token smaller presents.

See here for the token ‘present’ he gave me that last year, a kitchen sponge.

PERFORMER

We were dating almost six months, between 26 June and 16 December 2007, and in that time he gave me –

Nothing.

No flowers, no books, not even a cupcake, nothing.

* * *

Wait a moment! I’ve forgotten: he did give me a book – his own, a spiral-bound, self-published, paperback ‘book’ (if you can call it that) with his photograph prominently displayed on the glossy cover.

It was the first thing I picked up to return to him when I arose from my shock after he dumped me and began to gather things that were his.

Yes indeedy I sure didn’t want that pleased-with-itself face smiling at me from the piano any more.

* * *
You may remember that Performer had mentioned to me that he ‘liked to give expensive jewelry to women,’ and that I was concerned because I didn’t wear expensive jewelry and in fact preferred inexpensive jewelry.
But, I wondered aloud in a post way back when, maybe I should ‘allow’ him to give me something nice, to satisfy his need to give ‘expensive jewelry’.

!!

Ha ha.

I needn’t have worried.

PLAN C

On Friday 15 February, five days after my first meeting with Plan C, a vase with the bouquet pictured in this post arrived, a post-Valentine’s gift (I had been away the day before).

On Friday 22 February, Plan C had (I discovered when I went to the bedroom) placed on my pillow a fancy shopping bag with a ribbon. Inside the bag was a wrapped box with an envelope attached. Inside the envelope was a very emotional letter explaining to me that this was the last piece of jewelry he had given his wife. Inside the box was a silver necklace.

(Plan C – in case you don’t remember – is a widower.)

I was, of course, very, very embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say or think or do. Yes, although you might not think it, I’m sometimes at a loss for words, and I was then.

Although I had already begun to feel that things were going to work out with Plan C, that he was the right man for me, that the love that was emergent was going to last – I did feel it was too soon for something like this.

But I felt more uncomfortable about the idea of giving it back than about the idea of accepting it.

So I didn’t give it back, but I did express my embarrassment. I did it in terms of my reluctance to own or to wear ‘expensive’ / ‘nice’ jewelry. I said that I couldn’t wear it just anywhere, that I’d only wear it places close by, where I didn’t think I’d be likely to lose it.

Plan C appeared to accept that condition. And perhaps he caught on to my general reluctance to appropriate the necklace.

I’ve only worn it once, to the birthday dinner described in the previous post. No one in my family seemed to notice that it was new to me.

* * *

That same weekend he also brought a small bouquet of fresh-cut flowers.

* * *

For my first sleepover at his house, Plan C bought me a thick, long white terry cloth robe. He said he had wanted to get me a pink one but couldn’t find one in the right size.

He has a white terry robe also, and it’s funny to see us in our matching robes; otherwise we look so terribly unalike.

* * *

Around that point in our history, about a month ago, I mentioned all these presents to my psychiatrist, when I was mentioning a few problems I had with Plan C (that, for one, the extreme separation angst he felt when we were apart was burdensome to me). My psychiatrist hazarded the notion that Plan C was ‘trying to bind me to him with gifts.’

That idea instantly made sense to me, though I thought it was entirely unconscious on Plan C’s side. I had already noticed that he was very ‘givey,’ that he had mentioned bringing flowers to one of his many internet dates, and that he had given a necklace to another. So it seemed to be one of his ways of relating romantically to women.

* * *

I mentioned the shrink’s idea to Plan C, and lo and behold! the flowers stopped coming with him every Friday. That was fine with me, in fact sort of a relief. Were the gifts – the too-many gifts – a sign of insecurity on his part? I don’t know, but I couldn’t have accepted any more. Any more would have been de trop.

* * *
Then there was my birthday last week.

I was afraid he would give me more jewelry, something new if not something that he had given his wife, so I had (politely I hope) made it clear that I really did like the cheap silver stuff I wore every day, and that expensive jewelry made me jumpy because it was such a responsibility.

The birthday present was extravagant in a new way: it was a gift certificate to a spa.

* * *

Let me qualify what I said: it was a huge gift certificate to a spa. The accompanying card had the amount, and it was enormous. I was shocked. No one had ever given me something so expensive.

On the good side: I was able to thank Plan C sincerely and enthusiastically, because it was really a very smart idea.

Now you may find this impossible to believe, but never in my whole life, in my 61 years, have I had a manicure! Never! Nor have I had a pedicure (my toenails look really lousy; fortunately the night my toes were sucked by Man 1 last June, the room was dark…). Nor have I ever had a professional massage or a facial or a mud bath or any of those things, the things they do at spas.

I do my own fingernails, and they look it. I mean, they look pretty lousy. So long as they shine a bit and the nails are more or less even, I feel I’m doing fine.

So I guess it’s not such a bad idea for me to be better groomed – not that Plan C meant any such insult.

Actually he had visions of me naked in hot baths or being massaged or something that would get me sooooooooooooooo relaxed that I’d be in a great state when I returned home to have sex with him.

Well, I think that might have been in his thoughts. Maybe he was thinking of the stress of my work this year. Or maybe just that he had never heard me mention any spa-related experience and thought I might enjoy it.

* * *

So I was genuinely surprised at and pleased with the gift, though Plan C was I think disappointed that I just thought of getting zillions of manicures and pedicures (they’re the cheapest services on the list) rather than a few very fancy massages. He thought if I’d never had a professional massage, I ought to have one. But I said I was modest about my nakedness, and was happy to be naked with him, but not with anyone else, even a masseuse. And I emphasized my pretty-desperate need for a manicure and a pedicure, maybe regularly.

* * *

But the amount of the gift certificate was too huge, and it leaves me with a dilemma: when his birthday comes up in May, do I have to give him an equally expensive present?

Logically I don’t, but he certainly upped the antes.

I may even mention this problem to him, but I don’t need to at the moment. I have no idea what I’ll give him for his birthday.

But I think sometime before next year’s birthday I’ll ask him not to spend so much on me, that even though I love the manicures et al. (assuming I do), I’d feel more comfortable if he spent less on me.

I have time to think that one over.

* * *
I see that I began by complaining about my father’s negligence in the giving area, and that I’ve ended by complaining about Plan C’s superabundance in the same area.

I don’t think it’s that I’m a born complainer; I think those are just the facts, and they’re extremes. I like to think that Plan C can work his way down to more modest gifts. Whether they do, as my shrink suggested, derive from a need to ‘bind me to him with gifts,’ or whether he just spends differently from me (and I think he does), whatever the reason, I’m more comfortable with less. But until Hanukah and Christmas come around, he won’t, I hope, need to give me anything.

I do need a break from gifts.

* * *

But I want to say: Plan C is very generous. You may remember that getting into bed together, our second time, he started telling me his charitable deductions…..! I don’t mean to suggest that he ‘brags’ about his gifts, because he doesn’t. He’s not rich, but he does give large presents, to me, to his sons, and to charities.

* * *
Of the 84 women he dated (beginning about a year after his wife’s death and ending when he met me this February), only 3 of them (and I was one of those) offered to pay her share of dinner.

But Plan C’s dating life will be the subject of another post…..This one is long enough.

* * *

saturday evening with all of them

The time: c. 11 pm Saturday 29 March
The place: my apartment
The actors: Plan C, me
The event: Plan C is crying.

And why is he crying?

Because D3 (one of my daughters) is ‘so beautiful.’

* * *

Have I mentioned that Plan C is very emotional? and sentimental?

Well, he is; especially late at night after significant consumption of wine.

* * *

He’d seen pictures of her before they met; they’re all over the place here. And he’d seen a DVD in which she appeared. So he already knew what she looked like.

But when she walked in Saturday night, she looked more beautiful than I’d seen her look in years. And a large part of her beauty derives from her complete lack of vanity, though she has been told many times, often by strangers, that she’s ‘pretty.’

And that was the first time Plan C set eyes on her.

* * *

DH, my other daughter, looked terrific that night too, but she arrived later, and Plan C was already under the spell of D3. And so when we arrived at the restaurant, it somehow happened – i.e. it was no accident – that Plan C seated himself next to D3. He conversed with her much of the evening, though in fact everyone talked with everyone, and my poor deaf mother tried to read lips and finally gave up. We did some translating for her, but not all the time.

* * *

This is the birthday dinner I’m describing, my birthday, the one anticipated in the previous post. And lest there be any confusion, let me say that I’m not suggesting anything ‘inappropriate’ on the part of Plan C.

What I want to convey, which I don’t think I ever have before, is how emotional he gets – how emotional he is – about family and about love.

* * *

In many ways Plan C’s very ‘ordinary’ – his word for himself – or at least conventional, certainly more conventional in some respects than any man I’ve dated. He works in ‘the business world’; he plays golf; he wears very stylish conservative clothes – striped or checked or solid-color shirts with collars, expensive shoes with tassels, polo shirts, golfing wind-breaker jackets, and that camel’s hair coat he wore on the first date. I was interested to note that one of his sons was wearing a camel’s hair coat – I don’t notice many 30-ish men in camel’s hair coats – and Plan C said proudly, ‘I bought it for him. I buy all their coats.’

So they’re a well-groomed family, dues-paying members of a synagogue (though Plan C does not attend services and is not observant), oriented, in their different ways, to the practical world. Plan C is also very patriotic, though still a lefty, and quite fond of family ceremonies: birthdays, marriage proposals, anniversaries of all sorts (e.g. the day he met his wife, our first email, our first phone call, our first date, our first night together, etc etc) are important to him.

He cried while watching the episode in the John Adams series in which Washington was inaugurated.

* * *

He and his sons aren’t like the men I’ve known most of my life, including many in my own family – scruffily-dressed atheist bohemians with wild hair and unpublished manuscripts stuffed in cardboard boxes.

* * *
But then in other ways, Plan C is not ordinary. I call him ‘nutty’ every now and then, and he insists that he’s not, that he’s ‘ordinary’, and that I’m the one who’s ‘nutty.’

I wouldn’t deny that; but he is too. He bites his finger-nails, serious biting that requires frequent bandaids. He eats in unexpected ways: he’s not a pig like Performer, who ate only rich, fattening, high-cholesterol, expensive foods, preferably paid for by someone else. No, Plan C eats a fairly normal-looking meal and would buy everything he eats if I didn’t often insist he was my guest some of the time. But he also nibbles, and certain foods disappear entirely when he is reminded of their presence: artichokes, chocolate, cashews, blackberries, hummus (I just discovered that Sunday morning – ‘I finished the hummus,’ he confessed, and that meant about two-thirds of a cup of it – yuck!), and the occasional bag of potato chips. He drinks wine, whiskey, beer, fake beer, and orange juice (without pulp). He likes ‘fluffy white rice,’ which I attempted (and failed) to produce last Friday night. I was out of practice. Putting it on the table, I said, ‘Here’s your gummy white rice.’ He was nice about it, because Plan C is not a foodie.

* * *

Maybe I think he’s nutty because of funny things he does without thinking, about which, when I point them out, he asks, Did I do that??? I guess I’m remembering the way he banged on the restaurant table on our first date. I can’t recall what point he was making that inspired the gesture, but I do remember that everyone in the restaurant turned to look (probably assuming we were fighting). Plan C’s back was to the other people, however, so he didn’t notice the stares. And when I mentioned it several dates later, he had no memory of it at all, and asked, Did I do that??

And where were we when he suddenly put his hands up, elbows pointed out, on either side of his chest, touching near his nipples, and said in what I remember as a fairly loud voice, I have breasts!!!

It couldn’t have been in a restaurant, could it? But I know it wasn’t in bed, because he had a shirt on at the time.

* * *
He blushes, of course, when I remind him of that last one by imitating it.

* * *

Well, whatever. It’s hard to describe other ways in which he’s ‘nutty,’ but maybe the fact that he cries a lot counts in that category; cries a lot, that is, for reasons some (more cynical people like myself) might term ‘sentimental.’ His younger son saw tears welling up in his eyes at the dinner a couple of weeks ago when his two sons and their girlfriends met me, and the six of us sat together for the first time ever around a round table in a restaurant.

Younger son warned him about the upcoming dinner when Plan C will meet his future daughter-in-law’s parents: Don’t cry were his orders.

* * *
So it’s very much family, I guess – things to do with his children, with my children, with his late wife – that make Plan C start crying and saying things that I believe and agree with but wouldn’t really articulate in that way myself, perhaps because I come from a family that tends toward the ironic and the witty and avoids bald emotional statements.

Crying Saturday night, after my mother and children had left, Plan C went on about my children, his children, and the grandchildren they would all produce, saying, ‘Those are the things that really matter, aren’t they?’

Yes, they are. And I can imagine tears upon first sight of a new grandchild, if I ever have one. Or maybe on first sight of a new baby of one of Plan C’s children.

But just thinking about the subject – mostly in the evenings, and this time after the consumption of quite a bit of wine, because my mother and one daughter only had a glass each of the wine I had at home and of the bottle at the restaurant, but two bottles got emptied – fills Plan C’s eyes with tears.

* * *

Late in the evening, when we had returned to my apartment and were eating birthday cake, one of my daughters asked me how Plan C and I had met. I had not said much to them about internet dating — they certainly don’t know I dated 33 men — but I made a snap decision not to lie about this.

‘J-date,’ I said.

‘J-date????????????’ they both responded.

They were astonished. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so astonished. And my mother, seeing their reaction but not knowing what it was to, asked them what the question was, what the answer was, and what j-date was. I don’t know if she quite got it, but I bet they clued her in later, after they all left.

The astonishment derived from the fact that I was the least Jewish mother in the world. Our family celebrated Christmas ‘religiously’ — i.e. with a tree, with decorations that have been in my family for three generations, with carols sung without skipping stanzas, so that beautiful phrases like ‘Hail th’incarnate deity’ get uttered in our household, with presents, and with Christmas dinner, though not any particular ritual foods — and my children dyed eggs and had Easter baskets every year, growing up. I even delivered one to D3 this year. We did not belong to a synagogue; I don’t know Hebrew; I don’t know all the Jewish holidays; and I let them celebrate anything they wanted, including Jewish holidays once they found out about them. My ex’s mother sent them Hanukah presents, so we had Hanukah too, in a separate part of the room from the Christmas tree, when the two holidays overlapped. And when, in about 1999 or so, we began having Seders, we’d put the Easter eggs in the refrigerator for the duration.

So that’s why they were laughing hilariously about the fact that I had met Plan C on j-date.

They never asked why.

I would have told them, if they had asked, that Jewish men are (to my mind) funnier, wittier, smarter, and sexier.

But they didn’t ask.

* * *

Well, that’s how the evening went on one side, at least: Plan C ‘fell in love with’ my daughters, the idea of them, their existence, themselves, and – especially – one of them. They both gave him warm goodbye hugs, after this their first meeting. (It was my mother’s fourth or fifth time with Plan C, so of course they hugged.)

As we were all in the kitchen hugging and saying goodbyes, suddenly Plan C and both daughters burst out laughing. DH wouldn’t tell me what it was that had cracked them up, making it unclear whether she wasn’t telling because she was laughing too hard at the thought or (as I later came to believe) because she didn’t want to. But it had something, I could see, to do with saying goodnight to Plan C.

* * *

After they left I asked him, of course, and he tried to remember D3’s exact words. She had (it seems) begun a sentence uttered to Plan C with something like the following words: I usually don’t like — and then she had stopped abruptly, perhaps because she suddenly realized what she was saying and to whom.

* * *

I guess the unfinished thought was, I usually don’t like my mother’s boyfriends (or, the men my mother chooses??), but I like you.

* * *
If that’s what it was, that’s a bit odd, because the only boyfriend of mine she ever met was Performer. Yes indeed she didn’t like him one tiny bit, but one example doesn’t merit the adverb ‘usually.’ Now, if the operative noun, the one that didn’t get stated, was her mother’s ‘men,’ then that would include her father also. And that would be an even more interesting statement.

She didn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was; and possibly Plan C, who doesn’t have my ear for dialogue, didn’t remember it right.

But I guess it was something like that.

* * *
So either they all bonded, Plan C and my daughters, or he thinks they bonded, or he bonded with one of them, or under the influence of wine and proximity, they all temporarily bonded. Whatever it was, when, just before they left, he issued invitations to his Seder, they both accepted (as did my mother, who I don’t think quite heard all the details but got the drift of what was being asked).

* * *

It remains to be seen what actually transpires. Plan C was concerned because as of Sunday evening, twenty-four hours after we had parted, neither one of them had emailed me, though I had sent messages thanking them for their presents. Consumed by curiosity (when DH finally wrote me about something else), I wrote back, did you like plan c? and she wrote back the single sentence, yes! he seems great.

Uninformative in some respects, informative in others.

He’s going to email them on his own Tuesday to reiterate the invitation. So we’ll see. I’m both sceptical and hopeful. I want them to be there – at the Seder at his house – but I’ll believe it when I see it.

*********************

sexagenarian-plus-one

Big day coming up this Saturday: I’m going to be LXI.

I can’t bear to write out the ‘real’ (i.e. Arabic) number, so you’ll just have to figure out my age from the Roman numeral.

* * *
I wonder how much my body has aged in the past year.

Last summer and fall, Performer used to tell me that I had ‘the body of a 25-year-old.’

Now, since the only female body he’d beheld in the past 27 years was his ugly wife’s (miaowwwwwww), I’m not sure how seriously I ought to take his compliment. If his biography is as he told it and my math is correct, the last time he saw and held a naked 25-year-old woman would have been 1961….But actually I think his first wife ran away from him when she was 23 or 24, and his next wife was about 27 when they met, so actually, maybe he never had a naked 25-year-old woman in his arms.

Well, so much for math.

* * *
But back to bodies:

Plan C keeps telling me — in high compliment mode — that I have ‘the body of a 30-year-old.’

!!!!!!!!!

* * *
Have I aged five years in six months??

* * *
I haven’t told Plan C about Performer’s estimate of my somatic age, and Plan C doesn’t read this blog, so he doesn’t know that his intended praise is actually a bit — well — let’s see — okay, let’s just say it gives me pause.

* * *
Then of course there’s my own sense of the changes — my bunion is bigger, my hair is thinner, and I ache after wiggling to the merinque. Two hours of dancing, and I can feel it in my hips.

And oh yes, my osteopenia has just become osteoperosis.

* * *

‘Somewhat too much of this.’

* * *

Let’s look on the bright side: I’m alive and I’m in love.

And this birthday is so very much better than last year’s.

Some people have Big Deals on their 60th: they invite everyone they know, all their friends and relatives, and they expect scrapbooks and gifts to charities in their honor and video cameras rolling or digital cameras clicking away while they blow out 60 candles on an enormous expensive cake.

* * *
Actually, I don’t know why I said that. I wasn’t invited to any 60th birthday parties! But I know they exist. A new friend once told me that if she had only met me sooner she would have invited me to her 60th, which was like the hypothetical one I described. She ran around to bakeries for weeks sampling different chocolate cakes.

And she couldn’t be the only one.

* * *

Well, it wasn’t like that for me.

Last year, on my 60th, I had a lousy cold, the last lousy one I’ve had. I was helping to run a conference that day, and I felt so exhausted that while the plenary speaker gave her talk, I — you won’t believe this, but it’s true — lay down and napped under the table with the hors d’oeuvres.

Let me clarify that sentence: the hors d’oeuvres were on the table and I was under the table.

It had a long tablecloth, so I wasn’t visible; and I knew the noise of the applause at the end of the talk would wake me up, as it did.

Really, there’s nothing like a loooooooooooong speech to put you to sleep nicely. Sometimes you don’t even have to be lying down in the dark, as I was.

* * *

I didn’t tell anyone at work it was my birthday. When I got home, my older child had very sweetly gotten presents for me to unwrap, and I opened a few presents and cards that friends had sent. And there were phone messages.

And that was it.

I didn’t feel up for any more, anyway. You can read the SATC Archives for March 2007 and see that not much was happening romantically either.

* * *
This year, of course, I have Plan C, who (I gather) got a present for me several weeks ago.

* * *
And Saturday’s a big day: Plan C is going to meet my children.

I’ve met his sons, one of them twice; and he has met my mother many times. They even have an email correspondence going.

But meeting my kids — that will be something else.

You remember how they suffered through Performer’s issues last Thanksgiving.

And now they have a new man to meet. They’ve heard about him, of course, but I didn’t feel in a rush to have them see him.

* * *
These are the plans (determined between my mother & self after a number of alternatives were vetted):
1) drinks for all of us — me, Plan C, my mother, my two children — in my apartment (which is btw where Plan C and I spend most of our weekends);
2) dinner at the restaurant where Plan C and I had our first date — not for that reason, but because it will be easy for my mother: a) it’s close by and b) you can actually hear conversations there.
Then
3) back to my apartment for cake, which my mother will be bringing with her.

* * *

Plan C is organizing a big Seder at his house this year, with his sons and their girlfriends, and he wants to ask my family. I’ve told him I think the best time will be over cake, when we’re back at my apartment, because (I hope) things will be mellow then. I know my mother will want to go, and I’m hoping my children will, but they won’t if they feel pressured. Somehow a time towards the end of the evening seems best. I think their resistance will be lower then; and yes, I do expect a little resistance, but Plan C is very charming, irresistibly charming, I like to think.

So I hope they say yes.

* * *

Meanwhile, I have lots of work to do (yes, I have a life!), and will have to be working most of Saturday and Sunday. But Plan C will be around, and that will help me concentrate, because his presence is an inspiration to get things done faster.

* * *
So fingers crossed that Plan C’s meeting with my kids goes well….

They’re always polite (well, almost); but will they like him?

* * *

Stay tuned.