Floating
I had not noticed him. He came to stand in front of me, and asked if I was nervous, doing that, talking in front of people. He said he’d seen me looking at my notes, practicing. I do this all the time, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I said, “I was nervous, but once I’m talking, I am fine.” He asked me if I taught, like my friend whom he knew from work. I spoke in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t laugh or giggle when he wasn’t funny. I told him about my family. Mom and Dad divorced. My sister died. Pills. I was probably never going to see this man again, I thought. No reason not to just say stuff like this to him. What would he care?
He told me his name. I couldn’t pronounce it, and had to try a few times. There was a comfort and ease to him that I liked. I liked that he talked. Asking questions like a grown man should. It wasn’t as if I had to work to get him to say something. He was present and alert. He listened.
We didn’t talk to anyone else there.
What happened around us, I didn’t notice, just that the room began to clear.
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We drifted away from each other, and he noticed. He rushed over to give me a hug. He ran, quick little steps and then a small leap. “Oh,” I said, making sure that nothing below our waists touched. I didn’t know his situation. He hadn’t mentioned anyone when we talked. They don’t mention them sometimes, so they can keep talking to you. Still, he probably wasn’t single, because he never tried to get my number.
He then turned his head to ask if my friend would bring me along to dinner with him one evening, just the four of us. My friend and his husband, and me, and him. That’s four. So maybe there wasn’t a girlfriend. Otherwise, she would be counted in. Also, maybe he didn’t ask for my number because he wasn’t someone who jumped into things—he had to get to know a person first.
After he left, I said to my friend, “I like him. Is he single?” My friend said he’d never mentioned a partner.
•
There’d been snow earlier, but it had stopped. I stood, alone, waiting for the bus. It was dark. I lived in this neighborhood about two years ago. Across the street there was a coffee shop, where I used to buy a breakfast sandwich before work. It had shut down now. And a few doors from that was the small grocery store that always had yellow guavas from Mexico. Also, just over there was the pizza place where my ex-husband and I had our last fight. I’d wanted to take a trip. Someplace warm, where there was a beach.
I had a job, but it didn’t pay as well as his did. It had been just the two of us, and he made enough from his job to take care of both of us. Almost six figures. But I guess that doesn’t go a long way these days in a city like this.
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Or maybe when you make that kind of money, it’s a burden to carry everything. What would happen if he got sick, and couldn’t work? he’d ask. Or, if he lost his job because of cutbacks? That’s happening everywhere. He was right, what I made wasn’t a lot of money compared with what he made.
My mom and dad, together, made as much when I was growing up as I was making then. But we were what people call poor. I looked down at my winter boots with their felt lining and rubber soles. When I was a kid, I wore tennis shoes made of thin cotton fabric. I spent months asking for a new pair because my big toe was beginning to poke out on the left one. A new pair had cost five dollars.
Maybe when you make that kind of money, you just don’t want to share. It wasn’t equal, he said.
I quickly reminded myself that I was not married to him anymore. I’d got out of it. But I heard his voice in my head and I remembered the feeling of being yelled at. I held my breath even though it was just a memory.
He had yelled, “We need money for stuff like that!” at the pizza place, as if we were people who couldn’t make the monthly payment and were about to lose our house to the bank. I thought we were doing fine. Maybe more than fine. We had leftovers in the fridge, a car with good tires, and a house on a street with trees. But he was always worried about having more.
A few men at the pizza place turned around to see if I was all right, to check if this was a situation where they might be called on to step in. He looked over at them, and then whispered to me, “You make me feel like a jerk!” It was because I didn’t yell back to match his volume that he seemed so loud. I made as much as my mom and dad combined when I was kid, I wanted to say. I was proud of that. But I could tell it wasn’t something I should be proud of.
I just sat there and lowered my head and let the tears drop down my face and wiped at them when they got to my chin. I didn’t want to wipe higher, near my eyes. People were looking at me, and I didn’t want them to know I was crying.
•
I hadn’t been with anyone since we divorced. Well, I had, but it was only for a few months. Doesn’t really count. He was in his early thirties and he didn’t have much experience, but he was so excited. I was like a man in a midlife crisis, liking them younger than me. He thought he could text at two in the morning and just come over, and, well, I let him, because I knew it wasn’t going to last. Just some fun. Still, when he started dating someone else, which I also knew was going to happen, I was sad about it.
I thought that when I got divorced there would be plenty of opportunities to date and have fun experiences. A new season of bloom. But so many of the men want children now. Or they want to get married. Or they expect me to provide.
When I was in my twenties, and had plenty of time to have children, I was careful not to bring it up. Pressure. Didn’t want to do that to anyone. It was a quick way to make a man become uninterested. It would make them run. I couldn’t call drinking coffee together a date. If I did, I would be reminded that we were just friends. I wanted things too soon, too fast.
Never mind saying anything about marriage. People back then, at that age, just weren’t ready. What about a career? Now that I am fifty, they all tell me they want to get married. And they want babies, too. I’m not someone you introduce to your friends or bring home to your mother anymore. I will never give her grandchildren to dote on. It’s too late for stuff like that.
•
A few weeks passed, and it was still snowing. My friend tried to set up that dinner date. But, it turned out, the man was travelling for four months. He wasn’t going to be back until the summer. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.
Maybe he isn’t interested, I thought. Four months from now is a long time. He’s in his fifties, too. A grown man. Why doesn’t he know where he will be or what he will be doing? He can’t pen something in a calendar and work around that? He’s a man with a steady job, a schedule. Shouldn’t he know enough about his life to choose one night for dinner with friends?
“He might be going through some stuff, in his personal life,” my friend said. “You never know.”
A month after this, my friend texted me and said that we should go for a walk now that the weather was better. There was so much sun. He’d found out some news. “So I told him that you like him. He said the night he met you and talked to you, he was just floating. He’d never felt that way before. He said, for him, it was love at first sight! This man loves you. And he said he could try to be friends with you, but he can’t be friends because he’s attracted to you. He can’t even be friends!”
I wasn’t as excited.
What did it mean that a man in his fifties had never felt this way before? It’s kind of late in life to have these feelings be new. Did he just never date a woman he liked before? Did he just go with the ones who texted first, arranged the dates, picked the restaurants? Who, two months later, still answered texts, even though he’d disappeared for a while, and never asked what happened?
I had to ask, “But is he someone who wants to float?” Some people don’t want that. They have to stay grounded—can’t get carried away. Was he like that?
“Oh, and he lives with a woman and he pays the mortgage,” my friend said. “I don’t know what he’s going to do about that. She’s not travelling with him, so maybe they’re not serious.”
I don’t know. A mortgage is serious. They are hard to get, and even harder to get out of.
It was true—four months was a long time to be away from someone you loved. He was having experiences without her. Did he invite her along and she didn’t want to go? Or did he tell her that this trip was something he needed, alone?
Also, if he already had someone, shouldn’t he not say things like that out loud? Sure. We meet other people and we’re attracted to them, but we keep that to ourselves if we’re in something already. Now that it had been said aloud, did that mean that he’d do something about it?
I asked my friend, “If your husband said, ‘I’m travelling for four months alone,’ what would you do?” My friend said, “Oh, we’re just broken up then.”
Exactly, I thought.
“Aren’t you happy? This man feels this way about you!”
I didn’t think it was something to be happy about. It was just words. People can say all kinds of things to let you down easy. Not a lot of people get together for love. You get older, and you just hope that someone is there in the middle of the night.
•
A few months passed. It was summer. The herbs on the balcony grew tall and leafy. I learned more bits about him. The woman he was with. He complained about her. Enough that some close friends of his said, “It’s not going to last.” And no one from work had met her. “Does she even exist?” someone joked. She didn’t have a job. I wondered, Was it because she didn’t want to work? Was she wealthy and she didn’t have to? Or was it because he demanded that she be at his beck and call? That is like a full-time job.
But didn’t she want her own money? To buy the things she wanted? Maybe he shared everything with her. What was his was hers, too. Maybe that was why he could go on a trip alone for four months. She couldn’t really say anything, because she felt she couldn’t stop him. “He’s never dated someone age-appropriate before,” my friend said. “They’re always in their twenties.” We didn’t know how old his girlfriend was, but she was probably in her twenties. It’s embarrassing to bring someone that age around.
•
The fall came, and he never did get in touch. Why would he? It’s safer to be with someone you’re already certain you have. He didn’t even know me. I wouldn’t be impressed that he had a job, because I had one, too. In a few months, I might find him boring. And then he would have given up a safe and sure thing.
“It was good that he went on this solo trip right after he met you. You could exist for him,” my friend said. If he was at home living his life, going through their daily routines, sitting down for meals, asking her to pass the salt, he would push what I could be somewhere else. He wouldn’t be able to daydream, to let his thoughts drift. “Honestly, four months! He probably fucked a bunch of people. A good-looking guy like that. They come up to him over there,” my friend said. He saw my disappointed face, and he added, “Oh, it just means it’s good for you! He’s not too attached. What’s he coming back to?”
I wondered about the woman who’d waited for him to come back. Did she worry? Did she think he was sleeping with other people? They hadn’t even been together a year. But, whatever they were, he was already paying the mortgage. Maybe when someone is paying for stuff like that, you just let them do what they want. As long as they come back and wash between their legs.
•
“He’s had some health problems. He has to have surgery. I don’t know what it is, though. He didn’t say. It seemed private. So I didn’t get the details,” my friend said.
In your fifties, for a man, that is probably prostate cancer, I suggested. If it wasn’t serious, he would say so. An appendix. A benign tumor. Tonsils. A root canal. You don’t have to be secret about those things. When you are dealing with your health you don’t think of love. You think about stability. About the person who will help you to the bathroom, wipe you when you can’t make it to the toilet, clean and bandage you because you can’t bend at the right angle to reach the wound. “If that’s the case,” my friend said, “you don’t want a botched one,” and glanced at his own crotch, and shuddered.
Except it wasn’t cancer. It was knee surgery. A doctor had talked him into having it early. “He’s having a hard time recovering. He was swimming and playing tennis before the surgery, but now he’s just in so much pain,” my friend said. Having a partner at this time is important, otherwise you’d have to hire a nurse. A private full-time one is expensive, and even then it’s not like being looked after by someone who loves you. Men are practical people. They aren’t going to chase after someone they love at first sight. They will stay with the person who will take care of them. And I haven’t proved I could be that.
•
“He e-mailed me, asking about a naturopath,” my friend said. “For his partner. She has insomnia.” I thought of not being able to sleep. How you try all kinds of things. Silk pillows, earplugs, listening to the sound of rain. Why couldn’t she find a naturopath for herself? Anyway, that is not a man who is interested in other women if he’s looking into getting help for her. That’s someone who loves her.
Maybe when he got back, she was glad he came home. She didn’t say anything or worry about what he’d done away from her so long. Cool with it, is what she was. Why couldn’t I be easy in that way? I wasn’t anything to him and here I was feeling as if I should be angry that he travelled somewhere for four months alone—that he’d had experiences and made memories without me.
I always thought that when you love someone—when you say that you fell in love at first sight—it will become something. You’ll pursue it because you might not ever feel that again. Maybe that’s too hard. The idea of losing someone important to you is too great a risk, so you never make anyone important to you. A person who doesn’t have a job, who couldn’t pay the mortgage on her own, is someone you wouldn’t worry about running off. You could trust she’d be there when you got back.
She might sense that something was off. “How come it isn’t like it was in the beginning?” she might ask. “This is just how relationships evolve,” he might say to her. “This is mature,” he’d add.
Why wasn’t she worried that his friends didn’t know about her? Why wasn’t she afraid about not working, about his family thinking she was lazy, living off him and his money? I worry about these things for her, even though it is not my life. No one ever says this, but it is hard work, too, being alone. When you are young, you think that the people who say they love you actually do. That forever might still have time to play out.
•
He said that I made him float. In the cartoons, you hold on to a bunch of balloons, and it just takes you into the sky. You can go anywhere, and nothing bad can happen to you. In real life, floating happens in water. You trust that you can lean back farther and farther and there’s something about water and how it works, that you can lift your feet and there you go. It happens. You float.
When I was four, my mother tried to teach me to swim. She carried me out into a lake, but when she put me in the water I sank. I ended up feeling the bottom with my feet. The water was deep. I saw a bunch of small black dots moving toward me. Tadpoles. I was greedy. I thought I could have them all, and I grabbed and grabbed, but I had nothing to put them in. ♦