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.

* * *

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