Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 23

  He suggested that we meet at 7:30 outside the bistro. He’d reserve a table but we should meet outside. “You’ll recognize me because I’m taller than most people,” he said. “And I’ll be wearing a red woolly hat.” (He was. An appalling hat, pillar-box red and acrylic.) What to wear to a first date is always a tricky question. I always tended to employ the full makeup armoring to a first meeting, because it made me feel, yes, protected, and had the secondary benefit of weeding out the disapprovers, the asinine real-women-don’t-wear-lipstick dullards: win-win. The weather wasn’t good—it was chilly, damp and blustery—so my thinking was this: the trusty navy blue dress, a big military coat, heeled ankle boots, smoky eyes and pinky-brown This Bugger Won’t Budge lip color. I was reasonably confident that Edward would be in the checked shirt and gray jumper, or one of its near identical wardrobe-mates; I thought it likely that he’d have a cupboard full of variants of the same reliable uniform, one that he’d wear for work and also for social evenings out. Males I know who work in science/technology don’t really see themselves aesthetically.

  I’m not saying that this put me off. Quite the opposite: I’m far more drawn to a man who looks like a geography teacher than I am to a dandy in a silver suit, his hair gelled into points. Plus, there was another huge upside. It might also mean that Edward would have a natural tolerance for the deficiencies (by now well catalogued) of my physical self, and that thought made me a lot less nervous. Nonetheless, I was unsure what to expect as I set off from home. Perhaps he wouldn’t be very good at talking, because he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the Hadron Collider and how beautiful it is. Perhaps he’d be sadder even than he looked in his photograph, with a palpable sadness that made normal interaction difficult (perhaps still in love with someone who’d treated him appallingly: that’ll prompt unquenchable melancholy in a person). Perhaps he’d want to “talk ideas” like Miles had done, ready to issue a pass based on apparent intelligence, but would tear it up again when he caught sight of the size of my behind. Perhaps he’d have no conversation. Perhaps he’d dominate the conversation with dull work anecdotes. Perhaps he’d want to talk in detail about the Cybermen and other Doctor Who matters, and would have strong views on who was the best doctor ever (I’d had this conversation, on-screen, with someone else, and, to be honest, after twenty-five minutes my attention wandered a little). Perhaps he’d be misanthropic and the whole evening would be taken up with saying how doomed and hopeless the future of the planet was, and that humanity is a plague on the face of Gaia that needs to be eradicated (I remembered, suddenly, an early dating site conversation along these lines, with a depressed biologist). Perhaps Edward would turn out to be a practical joker, one who wasn’t really six foot five, and all the tall chat was a joke, because he was short. He might be that guy from ages ago who was angry because I was heightist; he’d said look out for someone taller than everyone else, but in reality he’d be five foot two and he’d spring out with a serves-you-right TA DAAA; fuck you, you heightist bitch. Would he be who he said he was, at all, remotely? A rumble of fear always went through me when I set off to meet someone I didn’t know, and didn’t know if I could trust, even if we were meeting in a crowded street and confining our contact to a crowded room.

  Edward was waiting for me outside the bistro, in spitty rain, looking as melancholy as his profile shot suggested. So that was a little worrying. This was supposed to be fun, upbeat, a treat; I didn’t go out to eat often and didn’t much fancy having to field Marvin the Paranoid Android, one of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide creations (“Brain the size of a planet, and all they give me to do is make small talk in a restaurant, when I could have stayed at home stroking the Hadron Collider”). I could tell it was Edward who was standing outside, because he was genuinely a head and shoulders taller than the people passing by, and was looking up the street in the direction he knew I’d be coming from. He greeted me unsmilingly but verbally warmly, and opened the door for me and in we went. He was wearing a jacket that was pretty much a high-class anorak, and dark baggy chinos and policeman shoes—and the unflattering red hat. He was wearing the dating-site-picture jumper, but when he shed the coat I saw that there was a crisp white dress shirt beneath it, with the knot of a tie visible under its V-neck. He’d made an effort.

  I was expecting someone lanky, but though he was undoubtedly very tall he also had broad shoulders and took up physical space (a man with a smaller waist than me makes me feel like a heffalump). He had long hands and fingers, and a well-shaped domed head; his hair had receded so that his brow looked high. His nose was long and straight, his ears big but flat, and his eyes (a sort of air force blue) quite deep-set. The whole effect of these proportions made me think of a carved knight on a medieval tomb, and it turned out that he had Norman invader heritage. When we got onto this, over the second bottle, the subject morphed rapidly into Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Edward and I were the same age and shared the same cultural references, and it’s funny how important that can seem when trying to bond with someone. (Millennials who think the 1980s classify as vintage—don’t the older men who date them have trouble with this? Shared frame of reference is important, surely.)

  There wasn’t any trace of performance, of rehearsal, of an angle, of attempts to appear cool or impress. It was rather like beginning to talk to a man sitting opposite you on a long train journey, as if our being at the table together was somehow accidental. When he bent to pick up his stray napkin there was a hint of an incoming bald patch at his crown, in graying brown hair. His hair was military short (but no, he wasn’t ex-forces) and his eyebrows a little wild, though not the full Denis Healey. He maintained steady eye contact as he talked to me; his mouth had a deeper lower lip and his bottom teeth were uneven. His chin at the side bore a tiny nick from a hurried pre-date shave.

  We talked about my work, and his work, and ate steak and drank red wine, agreeing that the meat was tender but had little flavor. I told him the story I’d prepared for just this eventuality (isn’t it good when you get to tell the story you wanted to?), about the best steak I’d ever had, a rather ragged-looking escalope in a pepper cream sauce, at a scruffy village café in France: the steak of my life, I told him. He took it well. He was quietly amused and tried to think of when his own best ever steak had been. But we couldn’t seem to move sideways from there, and reverted to autobiography. He was more comfortable with abstract chat than with the personal. He talked about artificial intelligence and I tried to ask good questions. He mentioned quantum physics and how strange it is, and I was genuinely interested, and I could see that this pleased him. He started to tell me how weirdly matter behaves at the quantum level, and how little we understand about it, and his focus and engagement went up a gear. He leaned forward and began to gesture, when he was allowed into his comfort zone. He was keen to share what he knew and what fascinated him. He was a man with genuine enthusiasms.

  After a while, though, he began to look ill at ease. I wondered, afterwards, if he’d begun to have to deal with an inner voice, just as I have to sometimes on dates, when you begin to register the greatness or otherwise of what’s happening, and how you’re behaving, and how the other person is reacting, and lose a little confidence, after which self-consciousness can threaten to engulf you. He might have realized that he’d done all the talking for quite a while, and that we had strayed into an area (how light itself is used to transmit data) that might not be of interest to everyone. I did find it interesting: I just didn’t have anything to contribute, but it was possible he interpreted my facial expression as having begun to glaze over. Hoping to help alleviate his nervousness I asked relevant questions, and because he was uneasy he dealt with each query at length, which made me smile, and he saw this and became more self-conscious. I could hear his mouth becoming dry and felt fondly about it: I wanted to say, “I have been there; my God how I’ve been there.”

  Eventually I broke in and changed the subject, and he might have been relieved. We talke
d about places we’d been in the world: he knew the USA well, and I could talk about other places. Towards the end of the second bottle of red we got the big conversation briefly over with, the one about heartbreak and separation. We confined ourselves to the headlines and not the full stories, but there was enough to establish that the circumstances and timelines surrounding our breakups were broadly similar, and that our subsequent relationships with our exes were equally neutral. It’s always good to find a rough equivalence.

  Trying to keep expectations at a normal level, I’d managed not to subject Edward to daily emails. In the past, of course, I’d insisted on lots of communication before meeting. I’d been cursed by it and had cursed others in turn. It’s a thing women do that men don’t always understand. I’ve seen some man-chat on the internet about it. I’ve even seen men stating upfront in their dating profiles that they have no interest in emailing. Some commenters diagnose a female need for a lot of attention. For many women, they say, online dating is a vanity project in which we try to get six candidates to email us simultaneously, thereby revitalizing our self-esteem, without needing to go to the bother of going to bed with any of them. (In some cases this argument is reverse-engineered by dull men to explain why they can’t pull, but we’ll let that go.)

  It might be more complicated than that. Often women push for a lot of email contact, just as I had done, to reduce a sense of risk or foolishness, trying to avoid a glaring mismatch—but it’s also done to footnote any immediate lack of attraction. It’s something that the not-beautiful do, to create a positive context for their not-beauty. I didn’t always come off as terrifically alluring during a first date, to say the least—I knew this about myself. An email friendship lead-up (so long as it doesn’t stray into premature sex chat) can be a positive, establishing that this other person is someone you’d like to talk more to. I hadn’t done any of this, though, this time. As we paid the bill I suffered a creeping awareness of having failed to be properly myself, and began to wish that I had done it. I wasn’t convinced that I interested him. Perhaps he’d registered that I wasn’t really of his tribe, and wanted someone more similar. Perhaps he’d found me trivial. I enjoy triviality sometimes—my love of whimsy is well-documented—but he might not understand that it was a way of relaxing, and an ice-breaking mechanism. He didn’t look thrilled to have met me, when we came out onto the street, and I felt I might have failed my audition. His face was inscrutable as we stood outside together. When we parted I decided against shaking his hand or kissing his cheek. I said I’d had a nice time. Me too, he said. That was all. I waited—would there be an invitation to meet again? There was not.

  There was on-paper compatibility, heaps of it. But no apparent mutual attraction, no “spark.” This didn’t bother me. Personally I don’t trust either the spark or the idea that its presence or lack means something definite. People who won’t agree to a second date “because there was no spark” are . . . I hesitate to say they’re idiots, but they’re discounting something that could prove to be a slow burner. Personally I find the idea of the first date spark being a prerequisite to love a bit infantile. I mean, come on: not every successful romantic partnership has started with an immediate attraction. I’ve experienced the spark twice in my life, and neither time did it lead to anything happy or fruitful. You only have to look back a few pages to see how the spark that sparked into life when I met Andrew turned out. The other time, I was young and the man in question was married and it was a disastrous mutual infatuation that I was mature enough (but only just) to put a stop to quickly.

  The spark is massively unreliable. A little electricity between two people is less meaningful than we often assume. It’s heady, and misleads us, and our brains fill in the gaps, trying to complete the picture. Nor is a lack of instant electricity particularly significant. When people complain there was no spark, as they do so very often in newspaper accounts of first dates, explaining why they don’t want a second date, quite often what they’re saying is that they didn’t pick up immediate sexual interest from the other person. It seems to me they’re talking about charm, and not everybody has that on tap. Not everybody is immediately comfortable with a stranger in such an artificial situation. Not everybody goes into flirting mode, and that’s quite a lot of what a spark is: it’s interest, body language that reflects interest, intense eye contact, the chemical hormonal soup beginning to bestir itself. It’s also to do with having a similar bantering style of chat.

  Sometimes a spark doesn’t even look like a positive. It might look like incompatibility. Lots of people who have paired up for life started out by having strong feelings of dislike. Consider the Benedick and Beatrice model, in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: they use their natural banter to disdain one another, for much of the play. Look at Belle and the monster in Beauty and the Beast (setting aside the whole Stockholm syndrome question), Ron and Hermione in the Harry Potter books, and Han Solo and Leia, in Star Wars; not forgetting the best possible example of dislike that turns into love: Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie doesn’t come away from first meeting him at the Meryton ball feeling that they had a spark. She thinks he’s insufferable, but all that animosity can flip over, sometimes, into a much more positive energy.

  But I digress (again). At any rate I was pretty sure this meeting was a one-off and that Edward wouldn’t be in touch again, other than to send a brief “thank you for having dinner with me” message, perhaps. (What had Miles said? This has been fun. It’s tremendous to meet new people. I thought it might be something like that.) In any case, it wasn’t clear what the date was for. Were we friends now, but avoiding the second date conversation because romantic rejection is embarrassing? Or was I just one of a shortlist and he still had more women to see? It was possible Edward might be dating in a more American style, meeting a different woman in the bistro every week, as it had turned out Roger was doing. Edward was a rational person, and might consider that a logical approach to finding someone.

  But as I strode off down the street I half turned my head, and saw that he was still standing there, watching me walking away.

  I didn’t hear from him for forty-eight hours after our date. My phone cover began to fray, because of the constant opening and closing. So I sent a message saying it had been lovely to meet him: a formal enough response to minimize the awkwardness, should a “Look, here’s the thing” reply be fermenting in his brain (Look here’s the thing, I think you’re great, but . . .” It had happened before). “Dear Edward—thanks for dinner on Friday; it was lovely to meet you,” I wrote. Pride was saved by the use of lovely to meet you; he could be reassured that I wasn’t going to be devastated by his not wanting to see me again; he could surmise, if he wanted, that I too was dating in the open no-strings manner, and seeing various people. I’m not needy at all, I thought it said. I’d written that it was lovely to meet him, as if we’d met at a business dinner and had chatted all evening, but now, because we were flying in different directions from the airport in the morning, were unlikely ever to run into one another again. Dignity was saved by the form of words. If he’d wanted a second date, he would already have asked for one, after all. I added that I’d like to do it again and then deleted that part, feeling the need to wait it out. I hate the whole “make him do the running” narrative, and—even worse—the “leading isn’t feminine” one. Nonetheless, I felt the need to wait it out.

  Why wasn’t he replying? What was going on? I thought we’d had enough of a rapport to warrant basic good manners, even if Edward was one of those dating site arses (admittedly a cunningly disguised one) who thought silence could be used to say goodbye. (Ghosting is the name of this practice.) The salient question was this: did he know that silence was rude? It was entirely possible it wasn’t intentional. It was also possible that he didn’t really want to date anyone. Maybe, I thought, beneath the skin, Edward hated the whole world, and was only going through the motions of reconnecting with it. Some men do feel they
are obliged to reconnect, after a divorce (perhaps it was worse than he admitted), and they do this obediently—obeying their parents, friends, inner voice—even though the eye they cast upon womankind has become a severely jaundiced, wounded one. More likely, he was One of Those Non-Verbalizers. I’d come across the type before, and even knew some; some of them were people I loved dearly. They tended, like Edward, to be social media refuseniks, who made happy ruts between work and home, and while at home minimized their digital presence to the essential. Roger had been thus, and this could be another Roger.

  Then Edward’s reply arrived. It said that he’d also had a nice evening, and thanked me for being such good company. I can’t quote exactly because I destroyed it. I didn’t just delete it. I put it in a plastic bag and whacked it with a hammer. Metaphorically. (Because—completely failing to take the tone of my own post-date message into account—I considered his to be rude.)