the sleepover

These are vignettes from my first visit to Plan C’s house, about 80 minutes from Manhattan. I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights there, and am in fact typing these words on his extra computer before he drives me to the train.

THE CAT

Did you ever hear the joke about cats?

Who sleeps with cats?
Mrs. Katz; [long pause....] and occasionally Mrs. Nussbaum.

Plan C sleeps with his cat, Polly. She’s the most sociable cat I’ve ever seen; she follows him around the house and likes to rest or sleep in whatever room he’s in. When I was there for almost three days this weekend, she went wherever she heard people talking, and curled up on the table or on the floor as close to us as possible. She was curled up sleeping on my side of the bed, near the pillow, while we were — using the Astroglide. She spent the night curled up at the foot of the bed, waking at 7 as usual to paw Plan C’s face gently and remind him to get her breakfast.

They have daily rituals: when he’s sweaty from working out, before he has showered, he brushes her. There’s a basket of cat-grooming tools, and she knows when she sees him pick up the basket that it’s brushing time.

Polly always understands what he’s saying; she knows every tone of voice.

I commented on that, and Plan C said, ‘She’s all there’s been for two-and-a-half years.’

* * *
‘Polly likes you,’ Plan C said to me Saturday morning, and again Monday morning. She wasn’t jealous at all; she clearly liked being close to me also.

* * *
This basket (on Plan C’s kitchen table) is hers; the napkins in it, which Plan C regularly refreshes, are also hers. People napkins come from another pile.

MEN AND THEIR MUSIC

Back in November one time when I was playing Hard Day’s Night while I was cooking, Performer arrived and insisted that the music be stopped.

‘It’s okay to dance to, but not to listen to,’ said this violinist.

* * *
Two weeks ago in New York, when Plan C and I were dancing in my living room for the first time, we tried dancing to a few Beatles songs, but somehow they didn’t work out.

‘The Beatles are good to listen to, but not to dance to,’ said Plan C.

* * *
Oy.

What’s a Beatles fan to do?

I think finding another man is not the right approach.

We’ll just find music we both like to dance to.

* * *
Performer played me lots of violin stuff, most of which I found boring.

Sunday, Plan C was playing me Billy Joel, Bette Middler, the Righteous Brothers, and other stuff I can’t remember. He was hyperbolic in his praise of all these artists, and always shocked when I said (truthfully) that I had not ‘knowingly’ heard the music before.

* * *

Each of these men would loathe the other’s taste in music. Performer couldn’t stand anything with words, including opera, and Plan C isn’t super enthusiastic about classical music.

* * *

I haven’t given a man a full dose of Mimi music, but I’m sure Plan C wouldn’t mind. He’s open.

DANCING

Plan C and I spent about 2 hours dancing (in his dining room) Sunday afternoon. We then spent about another half hour dancing just after midnight.

Plan C is a wonderful dancer — inventive, lively, graceful, theatrical, and totally original. He does fancy footwork that I can’t follow.

I love dancing, but I’ve never been a good dancer. No one has ever said that of me.

However, we finally figured out how to turn me into a better dancer:
1) I have to have been dancing for at least 40 minutes;
2) I have to dance to music I know;
3) I have to dance to music I love.

My great breakthrough came in dancing to The Temptations, and my favorite song of theirs, ‘My Girl.’ I had been practicing to that a few weeks ago for my date with SDF, but the only music he brought was Michael Jackson, which I didn’t especially like and couldn’t dance to.

I was dying to dance to ‘My Girl’ — with someone else, not in the privacy of my apartment.

So Plan C and I discovered that my dancing was transfigured when I danced to that song, and to any of the famous Motown songs that I loved — ‘Baby Love,’ ‘Stop! in the name of love,’ et al — but especially ‘My Girl.’

I can’t tell you how much fun I had.

* * *
We also did ‘dirty dancing,’ bumping bottoms etc. Plan C said that if we danced that way at any of the family weddings he’s taking me to in the coming months, we’d be asked to leave.

* * *

When we were dancing to ’50s music, Plan C did what he called ’50s’ dancing, which involved standing in one place, swaying back and forth and groping — his version of what high school students did in those distant days.

‘Plan C!’ I said. ‘We’ve already been to bed together! We don’t need to dance that way!’

* * *
Whirling around in the dining room, especially when we were doing more traditional ballroom-type dancing (Plan C is such a good dancer, so funny and theatrical, the kind of dancer who’s clearly having a great time), my eye kept catching the larger family photographs over and over — Plan C’s late wife, W, as a college girl, in an 8 x 10 head shot; W and their younger son; W’s parents; Plan C’s parents; and some very Jewish-looking ancestors whom Plan C couldn’t quite place: were they his great-grand-parents or his wife’s??

HER CLOSET

When I arrived Friday night, Plan C indicated that I should hang my clothes in W’s former closet, next to the bed. It was almost entirely empty, but there were a lot of hangers.

It had been empty since her death almost 3 years ago, or whenever her clothes were given away.

As I began hanging up the clothes I had brought, I had a powerful sense of the woman who had worn the clothes that were no longer there, and I began crying. I felt a sense of blessing that I was still alive, that I hadn’t died, that I had lived beyond the various traumas and unhappinesses in my own life to meet and fall in love with Plan C. And she had died when she wanted more than anything to stay alive. I felt my good luck and her bad luck.

HER STUDY

Oddly, I felt an even stronger sense of violation of W’s space Sunday afternoon, after the dancing, when I sat in what had been her study on the second floor and did a little work. I didn’t feel this while I was in bed with her husband, because he had been in bed with other women after her death. But when I sat at her desk, and saw the view from the windows that she had had, the light on the desk that she had seen, and felt the solitude in the room where she had felt solitude — that’s when I felt I had to apologize to her.

DINNER WITH HIS FRIENDS

Saturday night for the first time I met friends of Plan C. We met K and R, old friends of his, at a lovely country inn. For the first half hour or so, conversation was friendly but not exciting. Then, I can’t remember how, conversation turned to my dating experiences. Before I knew it, I was telling K and R about Kevin and ‘the naked test’ .

When I said the words ‘the naked test’ I saw K and R’s eyes almost literally popping out of their heads: their eyes opened very wide instantly. Then they started laughing very loudly. R said that he does ‘the naked test’ on every woman he passes on the street; K rolled her eyes at that.

That phrase generated a great change in the energy-level of the conversation: suddenly K and R, a long- and happily-married couple (without children…), wanted to hear all about dating, and especially about internet dating, which was an entirely foreign world to them.

Plan C and I clued them in. They were fascinated.

Afterwards, as we walking to our cars, K (Plan C told me this later) leaned toward him and said, ‘Mimi’s wonderful.’

So that was nice! Of course they had known Plan C and W for years, and K had come over to be with Plan C and W the last night W was alive, so the couples were very close.

* * *
It is interesting but not difficult to ‘follow’ W. It was important for Plan C to have me visit his house, to get some sense of his life there and of his family. I got a stronger sense of W and of their marriage. All that is fine.

* * *
Last night, in bed in that house with Plan C, I dreamt about Performer’s wife, the one he went back to.

Hmmmmmmmm!

I guess I had just the slightest sense of an invisible presence.

But Plan C says I am ‘helping [him] to heal,’ so I don’t mind hearing about W. or being in her space. But I continue to feel sad for her.

* * *

Things feel good, happy, easy, with Plan C. We still feel as if we’ve known each other a long time, though it has only been 22 days.

TIDINESS

Plan C is a very tidy person: if I get up at 8 a.m. to go to the bathroom, the bed is made before I return. I got up earlier once, and Plan C had tidied the bedside table and thrown out my dirty kleenex.

He said that when I arrived with all my stuff, it looked like a cyclone had hit.

He didn’t mind, and he is happy to do all the tidying.

* * *

My sense of housekeeping is entirely different: there was something in his refrigerator that really stank. I don’t know what it was; I couldn’t locate it, and I didn’t try too hard, but the smell was powerful.

Plan C hadn’t noticed it. He was just a tad irritated to hear about it, and said he would throw out everything in the refrigerator.

I said no, don’t waste everything; just take everything out and you’ll find it. Then scrub the crispers and the shelves with something strong, and put all the good stuff back.

No, he said; he would throw everything out.

* * *
We cooked together Sunday evening, side by side, using the same ingredients, but each of us making a dish to our own specs.

* * *

Plan C is very emotional about leave-takings, but he said the house would feel less empty and sad now that I had been there.

* * *
Items of mine now in Plan C’s house:
– a small diet pepsi
– a thick beautiful white terrycloth robe that Plan C bought for me
– toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, Scope, shower cap, razor, shaving dream, deodorant (knew you’d want all the details)

* * *

TOILET PAPER, THE MEASURE OF THE MAN

You may have forgotten this important issue, but I haven’t:

1) on the night of 1 December 2006, the last night I spent at Rolly’s, he had only about a quarter of a roll of toilet paper. When I requested more, he refused to walk seven blocks to the nearest 24-hour store, saying that what was left was “a three-week supply.”

2) when I met Performer, I was ecstatic to learn that at his farm there were 40 rolls of toilet paper.

3) the Plan C toilet paper situation: there were about 7 rolls on the back of the toilet in the bathroom we used. Plan C was a little surprised at how quickly they disappeared, but ‘we aim to please,’ he kept saying (leading me to compare him to the late Leona Helmsley), and he made sure there was always a good supply.

Toilet paper, the measure of the man.

* * *

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