Mid-Life Ex-Wife Page 7

  I’ve never found that an easy question to answer; I mean, what is it really asking? I told him I was all right. I didn’t have any comedy lines prepared. I was too nervous to be anything but robotic. “And how are you?” I asked. “What have you been doing today?”

  He didn’t answer the question. Instead he wanted to know what sort of sex I liked. I was vague and embarrassed. What’s wrong? he asked me. I said I was just nervous.

  “There’s no need for that, my little peach,” he said. “Look, let’s ring off now, but let’s do it again tomorrow.”

  I agreed, even though I didn’t want to. I had a general sense of having been cornered. Sometimes, though, we conspire against and corner ourselves.

  “Would you show me your tits?” he asked, half an hour into our second Skype call. Strangely, for someone who detests this kind of behavior, my reaction was helpless laughter. I got the giggles, and didn’t go into immediate emergency laptop shutdown mode. I’d drunk a whole bottle of wine—cabbed up—so as to feel less ill at ease, but it also dealt with the inhibitions.

  I was lying on my side, and did as I was told and unbuttoned my shirt. I’ve always been a people-pleaser, keen to impress, keen to be liked, and sometimes this overrides my own inner voice, and caution, and basic good sense. “Oh my God,” he said. “Look at your tits in that bra, oh my God you’re incredible.” I slid the straps off my shoulders and he groaned. He was standing at the webcam wanking by then. “Christ, we have to meet, we have to meet soon and do this in person,” he said.

  I wanted to have a good cry. I said I had to go and ended the call.

  The next morning when I woke, I had a hangover and was ashamed. But I didn’t cancel the date. I was miserable about the prospect of meeting him but I was overriding this with pep talks to myself, of the people-pleasing kind. I told myself not to be so uptight. Why was I so uptight about something so harmless as Skype sex? Why was I such a square? Why couldn’t I do as other women suggested and just have a good time, sleep around, enjoy being single, sow some wild oats, be adventurous with technology, without over-thinking it all? (Because I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t what I wanted.) In any case those weren’t the questions I should have asked. What I should have been asking was, why did you agree to that when you didn’t want to? Why did you pretend to think it was fun when you found it degrading? Why have you arranged to meet this man for a drink?

  The following evening, Finn bombarded me with requests for another Skype call. I found myself having to be defensive. I had to be too busy. Were we in a Skype relationship now? Were there going to be expectations? I was the one who was going to look like a player if I backed out now; using a man for one cybersex episode and then dropping him like a brick; that wasn’t something I felt good about. On the other hand, I just didn’t want to do it again.

  When we met in a large, dimly lit, vaguely trendy wine bar, I was already sure it was a mistake. I don’t know why I went. I had it vaguely in mind that it would be one drink and then I could send the liaison-ender, the text that explained that I didn’t want to meet again. How could I cancel a drink with a man I’d had sort-of Skype sex with? That would be horrifically shallow, wouldn’t it? (Wrong question, again.)

  I got to the bar first and ordered a bottle of wine and two glasses, and drank a glass down. I felt quite sick with nerves. When Finn arrived, the first thing I noticed about him was that he had short legs, and was altogether not the five foot eleven advertised. He was Tom Cruise–sized, but had a megawatt smile, also à la Tom, and sat down heavily with a sigh saying he’d had a beast of a day and thank God for alcohol. I had a whole story prepared about a funny thing that’d happened to me that morning, and he listened, stroking his beard, laughing along. I noticed that he had really small hands, with short fingers, his nails bitten to the quick.

  The hour that followed was pleasant enough, though it was devoted to the kind of biographical chat that you know is going to run out eventually. When we’d both tired of filling in the other person on what we’d done and places we’d been, the chat really did run completely dry, and the atmosphere grew strained. We both filled the gap by looking at our phones to see if there were urgent messages. There weren’t, not on my side anyway. He spent five or six minutes tapping away answering a work email while I gazed around at all the people who were a lot more relaxed than we were. When Finn had put his phone away he said, “Right—shall we go?” We went out into the street, where people were standing smoking and groups of Friday-night revelers were going by. Finn took hold of my lapels and drew me closer—I was in heels and he was quite a bit shorter than me—and said, “I know you’re unsure, but I have an idea of something that will make you a lot happier than you are right now.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “what’s that?”

  He kissed me softly on the mouth and looked into my eyes, and kissed me again. He said that as it happened he was staying just over the road, at a friend’s flat, and did I want to come up for another glass of wine? I followed him across the street, and up narrow stairs to the second floor. I can’t tell you, convincingly, why it was that I agreed to this. It goes against every safety code, and I didn’t want to, but mysteriously I agreed nonetheless. I most certainly wasn’t going to have sex with him. I’d stick to one glass, and make my excuses and leave. I’d do that, and then later I’d send the text about not wanting to meet again. I’d use a kind lie of some sort. As soon as we’d had that drink.

  The flat was small, a one-room studio, and it turned out that the friend wasn’t there; he’d given Finn the key. We were alone and it occurred to me that I might be in danger. I said I was just going to let a friend know where I was, because I hadn’t expected to be late, and then I went into the tiny bathroom and texted the address. When I came out he was sitting at the pull-out table by the bed—it was a studio so the bed was unavoidable—with soft music playing, the blinds down, the lighting dimmed. We had a drink and talked about jazz and then I said I ought to go, and he kissed me again. I didn’t want to kiss him, and the nylony strands of the mustache and beard didn’t add to the fun.

  He began to remove my clothes, though for the first few moments I held on tight to the shirt that was being unbuttoned, because I didn’t want to have sex with him. Finn kissed me again and said, “Come on, let’s just have pleasure, and not worry about anything,” and, more out of social embarrassment than anything, not wanting to be a square and no fun and a drag, I let him remove my clothes, and watched as rapidly he shed his own. I didn’t want to have sex with him, and yet I did. I already felt bad about it, and yet I let him continue. It had got to the point at which I didn’t seem able to say, “Stop, stop, I don’t want this.” Of course I was able to say that, but I chose not to, and I know it’s lame to keep saying it was embarrassment that fueled it, but that’s what it was. It was people-pleasing of an extreme kind. When I put my hands on his back, his skin felt alien and cold. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t know this man, and I didn’t want this, and now I just wanted it to be over. I remain ashamed of myself, every time I remember. I’m ashamed of myself and also angry.

  After a few minutes of failing to get the angle right he said I should get up onto my knees and face the wall, and so I did what he asked of me, and there was sex, of a sort, a dry and unappetizing sort from behind. I was full of self-loathing and disappointment and it was completely humiliating. “Look, I’m going to have to go,” I said eventually. I reached for my clothes and got my underwear on and my shirt and went to the table where my tights and skirt were.

  Finn came up behind me and pulled my knickers down and started at me again. “Don’t move, don’t move!” he shrieked. I was leaning forward, over the desk, caught in mid-reach for my clothes. It took him ten seconds to finish (and yes, he was wearing a condom, thank God). He wasn’t interested in whether I might like to have any kind of a finish of my own.

  I said, “I have to go now, really.” I put the rest of my clothes on hurriedly, and grabbed my bag and ran
down the stairs and onto the street, and ran to the end of it, and walked along the next one wiping tears from my face. A couple stopped and asked me if everything was all right. “Bad date,” I told them. “Just a horrible date.”

  “Oh God, we’ve all been there,” the woman said jovially.

  Finn had texted me by the time I got back. “Incredible orgasm! What a night! Night night darling xx.”

  What? Seriously? It wasn’t possible he was as stupid as this. I didn’t reply. I told a friend what’d happened, and she was shocked and said the situation sounded abusive to her. I couldn’t really argue that, as I’d consented to it all, and hadn’t been coerced at any stage, and had allowed it to happen. But I began to feel as if it had been intended to humiliate, in a sly sort of way. Part of the humiliation, perhaps, was this pretense that there was anything romantic about it.

  The day after, Finn continued to text saying he’d had a great evening, and I continued to ignore him. Eventually by mid-afternoon his texts were becoming pissed off. Why wasn’t I answering? “You have been chilly with me since we met: why is that?” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. The next day he texted again: “I think I know why you’re not answering, but I’m not going to know unless you answer. Let’s talk.”

  To this I replied: “I don’t want to talk.” Because I didn’t. I didn’t feel I owed him anything and absolutely wasn’t under any obligation to explain myself. He texted a few more times and then he stopped. I blocked him everywhere I might see him—on social media and on my phone, and especially on Skype, and never heard from him again.

  I didn’t write about Finn in the newspaper column, and hesitated before writing about him here. Even now, I don’t quite understand it. My best guess is that the online dating culture was doing its worst. I was lined up with thousands of other faces in the digital beauty pageant, making statements about wanting to travel and world peace, but holding a number on a card, nonetheless. I lost myself, for a while, in the desire to be thought wantable.

  It’s all too easy to find yourself in a situation you don’t want to be in. Lesson Three of internet dating: don’t be pressured into doing what someone else wants, if you don’t also want it. It might seem obvious, but it isn’t always. Women might have a particular issue with wanting to be liked, to be approved of. We need to circumvent that. We need to stomp all over it.

  After this I came close to deleting all my memberships and giving up the quest. What did men really think I was offering? I looked with new eyes at my profile pages, pages that had been written entirely by me, by a woman who wanted to be chosen, but who was also confident of being treated well. There I was, chirpily confidently listed, with smiling and smoldering photographs and witty flirty copy. Online dating no longer looked like an innocent setup in the week following the Finn episode. I said to a friend that I’d thought, in the beginning, that it was all about finding love, but now I was convinced otherwise. Why was I putting myself in danger? Why was I apparently offering myself to random strangers? The smiling rows of faces on the websites looked different. What kinds of lives had these single midlife men really had, and what kinds of minds did they have underneath the surface of polite chat, and what kinds of fault lines lay dormant in them?

  The fallout from this was that I was plunged into a period of a continual low mood. The wretchedness to do with the end of my marriage surged back, uninvited. It was like waking up with an illness you didn’t have the night before. There it was in the morning when I woke, like a cold. There was a physical manifestation of grief. Grief was a pain in my liver, a backache and acid reflux. I belched grief. I was continually exhausted by it and slept a lot.

  It’s a human trait to want to stitch the episodic reality of life all together and make a chain of events, a continuous narrative out of it. But this was beginning to fail me. Causes and effects were becoming unhooked from one another. Perhaps I was lucky in love, in my youth, but if that was the case then my whole peer group was lucky: we met lovable men and loved them and were loved back, and got married, and had mostly happy married lives for decades before things went wrong (or didn’t). That had been my parents’ experience; I began to feel as if my romantic world was too inherited from theirs to cross the divide into this new one. I suppose I’m extremely conventional, with conventional expectations. Cause and effect, and people of the WYSIWYG sort—what you see is what you get—had always been my reality and I’d always been treated respectfully. Intelligence, education, experience, a facility for words and talking, a creative approach to living and working: these had always got me out of trouble, but now they didn’t seem to count for much. Now, in the midlife dating pool, cause and effect didn’t seem to work anymore. There were hidden agendas. Being nice and emotionally intelligent didn’t seem to be enough. Being as okay-looking as most of the men I was interested in wasn’t proving to be enough, either. Sometimes, being a successful woman with a fulfilling career seemed to be a drawback—and these weren’t just my experiences, but those of a lot of other women, all over the world. The internet was full of women talking about just these phenomena. Most of us knew of reassuring exceptions, but most of the single men we encountered seemed to have high (or strange) expectations. Divorced men were being unleashed back onto the market and were causing havoc with the quantum physics of love. They didn’t have the same expectations they had when they were on the market the first time. Online porn was widely named and blamed.

  After a couple of weeks of feeling that the situation was hopeless, I realized that I needed to take decisive action. I had to put these thoughts aside. I knew that. At the end of that road there’s a rancorous old crone, a Disney-drawn hag, stooped and malicious, saturated with the same poison that she thinks is confined only to the apple. I needed more positive thinking. I could feel the pull of bitterness. I could feel the attraction of joining some sort of circle, where other cynical dumped women gathered to chant contra-masculine incantations. Negativity and unhappiness were making me ill.

  So I went into town and bought a book about turning your life around. I was to visualize standing on the summit of a verdant green hill on a warm day, looking down over a beautiful valley. That was my future: I just had to walk into it. Unfortunately, when I went to this hilltop in my mind, the drop was sheer and threatening, and vertigo struck. The book said: “Think of tomorrow as a fresh white page; tear the old pages out of the book and look at all the white pages, sitting waiting for you to write your new life into them.” (It was something like that; I paraphrase.) It was good advice, but how did you do that, really, without putting the old pages in the bin and then getting up in the night and rescuing them and smoothing them out, and taking them back to bed with you and reading them obsessively?

  Later, much later, in the dating quest, I had another Skype sex experience. Joseph, a man I’d been chatting to for three weeks and was supposed to be having a date with on the Saturday following, suddenly decided that we ought to Skype. I wasn’t sure. After the Finn episode I was more averse to Skype than ever. “Aw, come on now,” Joseph said. “What do you have to lose?” He’s right, I thought. You have got to loosen up and stop being so tightly wound up about this. It’s no biggie. If you don’t like it, just press the red button and bring it to an end. Skype contacts can easily, instantly be blocked.

  Joseph was a likable man, down-to-earth, a big sturdy Irishman with a farm-boy look that I misinterpreted as old-school. He’d been divorced for five years, and had no children, and was as free as a bird. He talked about his freedom a lot, which in retrospect isn’t necessarily a good thing when (supposedly) looking for a life partner, as he claimed he was now doing, wanting to settle down and partner up. When I mentioned the disparity he said, “Aw, come on now,” in his southern Irish accent. Joseph was very “Aw, come on now” about things in general. Mild joshing was his usual style. Added to which, he grinned all the time. He grinned on his profile picture. He grinned on Skype. His big wide dimply smile in his square farm-boy face was altogether
heartening. He seemed contented with his life. Glass-very-nearly-full people are good people to be around. They have good life-affirming energy.

  I was hampered by the usual nerves, but the video call began in a lighthearted, fun way, with a proper getting-to-know-you chat. We described how our respective weeks were going and played it for laughs. But then, quite abruptly and without any warning, Joe tilted the camera of the webcam down, unzipped his XXL mustard-colored cords and got his dick out of his boxers (it was, I have to tell you, fascinatingly large). He moved the webcam so as to show the rest of him—his head and shoulders, and sat back on his couch, and asked if I was going to show him myself, because he really wanted to see me. This time I had more courage under pressure.

  “I don’t even know you,” I told him.

  “But that’s what makes this so exciting,” he said.

  “It’s just not for me,” I told him. “I’m going now. Bye.” I shut the laptop lid with a slam, which might have been interpreted as slamming his dick in the door. It was good for me to do this. I had my usual hard-wired reaction (oh no, I fear I was just very rude to poor Joe; Joe won’t like me now) and had to josh myself out of it. “AW, COME ON NOW,” I said.

  After the Finn episode I needed something much more conventional, and happy. Dating needed to be a happy experience, and fun, and life-affirming and joy-giving. That was, after all, the whole point of this exercise: to have more happiness in my life. I think that’s something we sometimes lose sight of, recognizing, with a sudden sharp pain, that the search for love has become a chore, an obligation, a series of badly prepared-for examinations, and a war of attrition.

  The Packaging

  AUTUMN, YEAR ONE

  When I joined the dating site for graduates, I hoped naïvely that I’d find men looking at women their own age, with similar life-arcs and mind-sets. I hoped they’d be a little different to the panting dogs of a certain fee-free site that had made me downcast the day before.