The Middlesteins Part 3

Instead she said, "My father is sick." Still looking at him, she pointed her hand faintly in the direction of the hospital.

And he said, "I heard."

"I can't eat," she said.

"You gotta eat," he said kindly, and now both of his hands were on her arms. "I'm going to take care of this," he said.

And that was how Edie and Richard's first date ended in a hospital room, a mushroom pizza from Gino's on the nightstand, Edie's father coughing and laughing at every single one of Richard's jokes, everyone in the room pretending that Edie did not twice excuse herself to the bathroom to cry. It was the story Edie told at their ten-year-anniversary party, when there was still a chance they were in love. "He did not abandon me in my time of need," she said to their friends gathered before them in a private room at a suburban steak house. "It was the beginning of everything." Everyone raised a gla.s.s. To love, they said. To love.

Middlestein in Exile.

On the one hand," said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, exNew Yorker, "my wife and I were married for close to forty years, and we had built a life together, a home, a place in our community with our friends and family, a role in the synagogue." He had to admit that his relations.h.i.+p with the synagogue had diminished in the last few years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his wife's health. "And there were the kids to consider, although I didn't think Robin would care that much, and I thought, hey, Benny has his hands full keeping that wife of his happy. Isn't he busy enough? Maybe it would impact the grandkids, but how much?

"On the other hand," said Richard Middlestein, newly single gentleman, not-quite senior citizen, respectable, dull but fighting it, "my wife, who is a very smart woman who has done a lot of good for a lot of people so I can't totally knock her, my wife made me miserable, she picked at me till I bled on a daily basis, so much worse lately, more than you could ever imagine. And she got fat, so fat I could not love her in the same way anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like a little meat on the bones. I knew what I was marrying. But she was hurting herself. Every day, more and more. That is hard on a person. To watch that happen." He lowered his voice. "And it had been a long time since we'd had marital relations."

He could not bring himself to explain further that he had imagined that his s.e.x drive would fade away in his late fifties and he would just forget that they had been sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, clinging to their respective corners as if they were holding on to the edge of a cliff. But sixty came, and his s.e.x drive still simmered insistently within him, unused but not expired, a fire in the hole. He had never cared before, but now suddenly he realized that he could not go the rest of his life without s.e.x, that he refused to give up the fight. But he knew also he would never want to touch his wife's pocked, veined, bloated flesh ever again. If not now, then when?

"I felt I had no choice but to leave her. The divorce is going to be final in six months, more or less." (More.) "I'm sure you understand."

The woman he had met on the Internet, a good-looking redhead named Jill, a legal secretary in her early fifties who had lost her husband, the love of her life, three years earlier-drunk-driving accident (not him, the other guy)-who was having a hard enough time with dating and would give anything to have her husband back even for a day, no, she did not understand. She clasped her hands together and looked down and thought about her wedding day in 1992, a small ceremony in Madison, where she was born and raised, and she pictured, as she had been doing far too much lately-it was not healthy, she could admit it-her husband bent down at her leg, sliding off her garter while everyone she loved in the world laughed and applauded.

As with every previous failed Internet date, Middlestein picked up the check.

Middlestein had been meeting women online for three months, since the day he had left his wife, leaving practically everything behind, books, furniture, photo alb.u.ms, any record of the past. He had moved into the new condo building across the street from the pharmacy he owned, an apartment which he had signed a lease on two months before he left her and had been quietly furnis.h.i.+ng by making secret trips to the IKEA in Schaumburg. Three times he had steered his cart through the crush of traffic in the dizzyingly bright aisles, at first awkwardly, this new singular decision-making ident.i.ty unfamiliar. (His wife had made all household decisions since the day they'd married, crus.h.i.+ng him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion-and had he really cared? No, probably not, but he would never know now.) But with each successive trip, he had a renewed confidence: The Swedish names were meant not to confuse but to guide; he was not required to make a buying decision until nearly just before he reached the cash register, and even then he had the power to walk out the door without a single item in his cart; and maybe he did want a color scheme after all. Maybe he was a color-scheme kind of guy.

And what a bargain that place was! Sure, it was a lot of c.r.a.p he didn't need, and his father, who had owned a high-end furniture shop in Jackson Heights for decades, would probably roll over, coughing, grumbling, cursing, in his grave if he saw what Richard's new bed frame was made of. But he was not a rich man-by some standards, maybe, to starving children in India, he probably lived like a king-since the market had wiped out half their retirement fund, so he had no choice in the matter.

Now he had a slickly furnished condo (white and dark blue with this little crisscross patchy pattern on all his bedding and pillows) and his heart and his life up on a screen for anyone to see. He exploited his newfound freedom at first, dating daily, sometimes twice a day, meeting one woman for lunch and another for dinner. There were thousands of women between the ages of forty and fifty-five (he didn't want to date a woman his own age, he wanted them young and vital and alive and ready to keep up with him-with how he was imagining he was going to be-once they finally hit the sack together) who were Jewish, divorced, widowed, never married, living within forty miles of his zip code (anything farther and he'd be dating a Wisconsin girl, and that didn't feel right to him; he didn't even know if there were Jews in Wisconsin anyway), though he was, if he had to be honest, more attracted to people within a twenty-mile range, because traffic was such a mess these days with so much construction going on. And all he had to do, apparently, was ask, and they would be willing to meet him. There were a lot of lonely ladies out there looking for love. Good, he thought, more for me.

He had dated fifteen divorcees, some more bitter than others, even more bitter than his wife, but they were also the funniest out of all the women he met, their pain somehow strengthening them, the endless paperwork and court proceedings and therapy sessions forcing them to look inward and, if not good-naturedly then at least wryly, laugh at themselves and the situation they were in. These women were veteran first-daters. They were putting themselves out there. They were hustling to meet their new mate.

He dated a dozen widows, most of whom had sopped up their tragedies like their hearts were sponges. They did not want to be on that date. They were there because someone had made them, their child, their mother, their sister, their co-worker. If they had their way they would stay home by themselves on a Friday night, but could they really stay home on every Friday night for the rest of their lives? In their ads they promised they were lively and active and engaged in the world around them, but in person they were only able to fake it for a half hour or so before their devastation became apparent to Middlestein. On three occasions his dates had cried. They had his sympathy. He acted the part anyway. But eventually he began to grumble to himself, If you're not ready to date, then why are you here? He didn't want to be anyone's practice run. He hadn't dated a widow in a month, crossed them off his list of potential mates, but that redhead looked so gorgeous in her photo, ooh, she had that gorgeous bosom and gigantic eyelashes, he could just see himself getting caught up in her, if only she hadn't wanted to leave in such a hurry.

The rest were these women who had never married. At first he thought of them as these poor women, because how their egos must have suffered as they careened through their free-flying youth and suddenly woke up one day to realize they had become old, Jewish maids. Also, they had never experienced what it was like to be committed thoroughly, which, for better or worse, had taught him a thing or two about life and shaped the man he had become. But sometimes after talking for a while, he thought maybe they were the lucky ones. They weren't ruined like the rest of the women, at least not in the same way. Their losses were different, and what they had gained was different, too. Most of them were childless. Most of them could give or take marriage, and he suspected that when they left him, they never gave him another thought. His picture was blurry, but there was no denying it in person. Even if he had molded his interests in his profile to match the ads of the younger women, one look and they knew, this guy had never done yoga in his life, and most likely was not picnicking in Millennium Park either. He was somebody's father, somebody's grandfather; an old man.

And then there was the hooker, or half a hooker, maybe; he wasn't quite sure what she was. Tracy had contacted him on the site a few days after he joined it, and he should have suspected something, because she was far younger than him, thirty-nine years old-only four years older than his son! What would she want with him anyway? He should have known, but still he agreed to meet with her, suggesting coffee, then she suggesting a drink, and then a few hours before they were to meet, she e-mailing him and telling him she had just come from the gym and had had a tough workout and she was famished and did he mind meeting her for dinner instead? She named a pricey steak house, and how could he say no? He didn't want to seem cheap or less than a cla.s.s act.

She turned out to be a real knockout-though perhaps a bit older than she claimed on her profile-with dark, s.h.i.+ning eyes, plump lips, a lush behind, and slick, minklike hair that she kept pulled to one side over her bare shoulder. She was wearing a strapless dress made of a black stretchy material that ended above the knee. Middlestein hadn't seen that much skin on a woman up close in a long time. She smelled fantastic, this combination of flowers and baby powder, and she was tan, and fit, and everything about her was perfect. As she slowly crossed and uncrossed her legs and ran her fingertips along the s.h.i.+ny enameled wood of the bar, possibilities unfolded in front of him.

They sat first at the bar-she guzzled a martini, he sipped at a beer-until their names were called, and he couldn't say exactly what was going on until after they had been seated and just before their steaks had already been delivered. He asked if she enjoyed her work as a receptionist at a ma.s.sage-therapy inst.i.tute, and she put her hand on his and said, "Well, what I'm really looking for is a daddy, so I never have to work again," and then she giggled, and he stared at her for longer than he meant to, and she said, "If you know what I mean," in a low voice, and he-he just couldn't help himself-he did the briefest of calculations, he moved a zero around in his bank account, even though he already knew the answer, and this was not what he wanted anyway, but oh, he wouldn't mind putting his hands on that tuchus of hers. But there was no way. A steak dinner, sure; not much more than that, though. And if he couldn't bring her to his grandchildren's b'nai mitzvah in June-he could just hear the whispers, he knew he'd be whispering himself if one of his buddies did the same, and his children, and especially that daughter-in-law of his, would never forgive him-then she wasn't much of an investment at all. Then she said, "Do you think you would like to be my daddy?" and a ma.s.sive pang of depression struck him, and he looked down into the bottom of his drink, searching deeply for his dignity. When he looked up, her smile had faded.

"I'm just looking to meet a nice lady," he said, which wasn't exactly true, but was closer to the truth than what she was proposing.

"I can be very nice," she said, the last remnants of her flirtation fading, because she was not there to defend herself, only to promote her possibilities.

And then there were the steaks, and they were delicious. She took half of hers home in a doggy bag, which she clutched to herself as they stood in the parking lot. A kiss on the cheek, and then a whisper: "You know how to reach me if you change your mind."

He had her number in his hand right now and was thinking about giving her a call after the day, week, month, year, life he'd had. A few hours after his depressing coffee date with Jill-who had left in tears, though thankfully she'd waited until she got in her car for the real waterworks to start; he had seen her sobbing at the stoplight-he met his daughter, Robin, for dinner. He hadn't seen her since he'd left his wife, only spoken with her on the phone. The kids had circled their mother and had shut him down, Benny much more than Robin, but that was to be expected. Benny's wife, that obsessive, tightly wound, Little Miss Prim and Proper, was outraged that he had filed for divorce, as if no one had gotten divorced before, as if she knew everything there was to know about family and marriage and life, as if she were the moral arbiter of what was right and wrong when she was the one who had gotten knocked up even before she had graduated from college and she should consider herself lucky that she'd had a free ride practically since the day she had met his son. He could go on. He did not appreciate being judged.

"She doesn't want you in our lives," said Benny stiffly on the phone. "You're my father, and I have made it clear that I will continue to have a relations.h.i.+p with you. I think things just need to cool off. She'll calm down." It was shocking to Middlestein that he would no longer be able to see his beloved grandchildren regularly. He hadn't considered that such a thing would even be a possibility. He thought they would understand how he couldn't live with that woman any longer. Surely they knew what he went through. Surely they could accept that he had been in pain. But they had not; they treated him as if he were a criminal, like he had murdered someone, when his wife, Edie, was the one killing herself, and taking him with her piece by piece.

His daughter was only slightly more reasonable, but first she had to get her anger out of the way. She had been like that since the day she was born: a screamer, a howler, and then she would slide, herky-jerky, into something resembling acceptance. He didn't get her, he knew that much. He didn't know why he needed to get her anyway. His father had never gotten him. Why did people need to be gotten so much? Why couldn't they just accept that he had left his wife and respect his decision? Why did he need to justify his existence to anyone?

It seemed like that was all he was doing lately. What he wanted to say to his daughter was, I don't have to explain myself to you. Up until now, he had been able to say that to her his entire life, and whether she agreed or not, he was going to take that action. Now the dynamic had changed. He needed her-what did he need her for, exactly? He needed her so that he could stay connected to his family. He needed her to speak well of him to Benny, so that he could see his grandchildren again. And, even though he shouldn't have to explain himself to anyone, even though he was the father and she was the child and she should just listen to him, he needed to know she didn't hate him so that he could sleep at night. Because lately he had been taking an Ambien or two before bedtime, and even sometimes mixing it with scotch, and who knew what would be next? For a while he blamed his insomnia on his new bedding. The sheets weren't soft, the mattress too stiff. He was running out of things to blame it on, and he could not, he would not, blame it on himself.

They met for dinner, at a middling Thai restaurant near the train station, where his daughter, a thin girl (maybe too thin for her own good after a tubby childhood), a moody girl, a smart girl, began to rattle off his failures.

"She is dying, literally killing herself, and you have just abandoned her as if your life together, and her life in general, is of no consequence."

She had her mother's eyes, he noticed for the millionth time, black little b.a.l.l.s of fury. Seeing the familiar, seeing her eyes, it had touched him; it had been sixty-plus days since he had seen anyone he was related to.

"What about my life?" he said. He resisted pounding his fist on the table, though he felt as if some sort of extra punctuation was required to make his point, and a nice, solid physical gesture sometimes seemed right. Once he had punched a hole in the wall of the garage after an argument with Edie. But that was years ago, when he still fought with her, when she could still incite him to give a s.h.i.+t about winning. "Doesn't my life have value? Don't I deserve to be happy?"

"Of course you deserve to be happy," she said; and he thought maybe she might be softening, but it was hard to tell with her. "We all deserve to be happy." Was that almost a smile? But then it was gone. "This is life, though, and-I can't even believe I have to say this to you, because you are the father and I am the child and I feel like you should know how this works." She seemed nauseated. She practically gagged, then restrained herself. "You deserve to be happy, yes. But life is not always easy! And when the going gets tough and the chips are down-I know you do not need to hear all these cliches to get the point-you need to stand up for the people in your life, and that especially includes the woman you've been married to for forty years. She's your wife, Dad! Your wife!"

He had never had dinner with his daughter before, he suddenly realized. Not one-on-one. She had her tete-a-tetes with her mother every few months or so. But it would never have occurred to him before this moment to pick up the phone and call her and ask her out to dinner. (Did he even call her? He wasn't sure. It seemed like it had been a lifetime of his wife making the calls and then handing the phone to him at the tail end of the conversation, he making a few gruff comments about his job, she pretending to care, the two of them forgetting about their exchange the instant it was over. His wife would let him know when there was something he should be worried about.) He supposed this was it, for the rest of his life. Dinner in a series of dingy but serviceable ethnic restaurants, beneath a giant framed print of a waterfall cascading into a beach, the bottom of the photo stained slightly by some sort of red sauce.

"Here's the question, Dad, and this is the biggie," she said. She ran her fingers up her sinewy arms, stroking a thin but solid blue vein protruding from beneath the skin. This seemed like an unattractive habit at best to Middlestein, and the kind of thing that might scare a man away. But it was none of his business if she got married or not. Maybe once upon a time, but he knew he would never be able to say a thing to her again about it. She looked up, looked him in the eye, and said, "Do you think she would ever do the same to you? Leave you when you needed her most?"

"Robin, your mother left me a long time ago," he said, and whether Robin knew it, or Benny knew it, or that ballbuster of a wife of his knew it, it was true.

"When?" she said.

"It has been a lifetime of whens," he said.

And then he refused to discuss it any further, dissect his marriage for his daughter, because it was enough already, and the food had arrived, and could they just eat and stop fighting for a second? But he did get her to agree to see him again sometime, and to maybe put in a good (but not great) word for him with her brother, and he thought he had successfully convinced her to hate him slightly less than she did when the meal had started, until just before they said good-bye to each other in the parking lot, when he said, "So how is she? Your mother," and she looked like she was going to kill him, take those powerful arms of hers, her veiny hands, and wring his neck. "How do you think she is?" was her only response, and then she walked off-no hug, no kiss, nothing-toward the train station in the early spring chill, lean, hateful, angry, young, alive.

He had Tracy's number in his phone, but it was almost nine, and he decided it was too late to call. It wouldn't hurt to send an e-mail, though. Either she was up and would get it, or she'd get it tomorrow, and maybe by then he might have a change of heart. I wouldn't mind seeing you again. She replied almost immediately-"I'm game if you are," followed by a winking, blus.h.i.+ng smiley face (even her choice of emoticon was seductive, thought Middlestein)-and, to his surprise, invited him over immediately. He hadn't expected such a quick response to his e-mail. Even some of the women he had met who didn't work (there were more than a few living on spousal support or inheritance) held on to some semblance of propriety and made him wait a few days to meet even though there they were, online, just like himself, obviously not doing a d.a.m.n thing with their time. He suspected he knew what it all meant, but he also wanted to make no a.s.sumptions, because he didn't want to get into any tricky kind of trouble. He was no fool. He watched Law & Order, he watched Dateline. He knew about blackmail and con games and the like. But this was the furthest he had gotten with any woman yet, and they were in the suburbs of Chicago not Manhattan, and he was obviously not a rich man, maybe even she could see that he was not a bad man, even though he had left his sick wife all alone (which in the quietest moments in the mornings, alone in bed, he knew was a truly terrible thing), and was there any possibility that maybe she liked him a little bit? Was that the craziest thing in the world?

These are the things Middlestein told himself as he drove to the half hooker's house, the things that might make what he was doing okay in his book. If a friend of his told him he had done the same, Middlestein would like to think he wouldn't have judged. World's oldest profession. Biblical. Don't knock it till you try it.

She lived two towns over from him; the streets were empty, and he arrived at her condo fifteen minutes early-now there's no traffic, he thought, just when I could use a little traffic-so he drove around in circles for a while; past a ma.s.sive Kmart with a gardening center that made him sentimental for his backyard, even though his wife would never let him touch a thing; strip mall, strip mall, strip mall; a drive-through hot dog stand, which he contemplated visiting, only he didn't want hot dog breath; the high school his grandkids would attend in two years, and where he hoped he would see them graduate-they were both so bright, he bragged about them to everyone he knew, they were the best thing that had happened to their family in a long time and he was going to fight till the end to make sure he got to have them in his life, his daughter-in-law be d.a.m.ned-and then, after exactly seven minutes, he turned around and headed back to Tracy's condo, past the sparkling, bubbling fountain in front, parking in a guest spot as instructed, and finally hustling his way up to her apartment. He was more eager than he had realized, and he found himself out of breath before he reached the last flight of stairs. Is this really happening? he asked himself. Yes, it is.

She greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and a gentle hand on his arm. She was wearing this sort of half-slip kind of top. It looked like lingerie but also it could just be a really nice s.h.i.+rt-what did he know about fas.h.i.+on? It was pink, and she had blown her black hair straight, so it was even longer than usual. The black fell against the pink silkiness, and it looked phenomenal. His p.e.n.i.s grew slightly hard.

Inside, a plinky jazz song played. Her apartment was three times the size of his. Can I even afford her? It was done up in a frilly decor, with a hodgepodge of antiques that looked as if she had gone from house to house over a series of decades and plucked just one piece of furniture from each: There was a long, narrow, modern gla.s.s kitchen table with plastic white chairs, and a molded plywood chair next to a s.h.a.g rug, a diner-style table in the coffee nook, a club chair, a Mission oak armoire, piece after piece jammed next to one another, and that was just in the first room he entered. In the middle of it all was a giant red velvet fainting couch, and it was there that Tracy directed him to sit. She probably lay on it all the time, he thought, and he pictured her lying on it dramatically, little puffs of breath emanating slowly from her mouth.

"This is a nice place," he said.

"Thanks," she said. "I inherited it."

On a tiny bronze coffee table next to the couch, there was a framed picture of her with a white dog. Middlestein pointed to it. "Adorable," he said.

"She was," said Tracy. "Mitzi died a year ago." She jutted out her lower lip and made a sad face. "It was sad," she said. "I'm saving up to buy a new one, but they're so expensive. She was a b.i.+.c.hon frise. I always have b.i.+.c.hons frises. I've had three. You have to go through a breeder, you know. You should never use a pet store."

"Oh, yeah, why not?" he said.

"They're so mean to the puppies," she said, and she looked sincerely distressed. She snapped out of it almost instantly. "Let's not talk about this. It's depressing. Let's talk about happy things. Like you and me." She put one hand on his knee and the other in his hand. "I knew you wouldn't be able to stay away. I had a feeling about you." She kissed him.

This was an out-of-sight kiss for Middlestein for two reasons: one, because he was not expecting it, and second, because that Tracy was a phenomenal kisser. She had soft but firm lips, and she was good at reading men and knew instinctively what they wanted, whether they wanted to be in charge or whether she needed to take control. She made gentle noises of joy, or dark dirty laughs, whatever she thought they needed to hear. This translated into the bedroom of course, too. She'd be on top, bottom, sideways, whatever. She hadn't enjoyed s.e.x in years, what did she care anyway? Much older men had ground that desire out of her since she'd been a teenager. She just wanted a new dog. Why hadn't anyone bought her a dog yet? Maybe this guy would buy her a dog, what was his name again?

Middlestein let himself be consumed by the kiss for a moment longer, and then his mind wandered to his current self, his physical form, his sixty-year-old body, which was still lean enough-he had been a runner for years, at least until his knees gave out a few years ago-but sagged in parts. He had an old-man chest, the flesh around the nipples puffy yet drooping, and he had gray hair everywhere, on his chest and back and around his p.e.n.i.s. He wasn't terrible-looking naked, but there was no hiding who he was either. He didn't know if he could contend with even a glimmer of disappointment on Tracy's practiced expression. Then he realized it wasn't so much about being naked with her as much as it was about seeing her naked. Seeing a real-life, healthy woman in the nude, up close, personally, intimately, safely. But how would that work? Was it even worth whatever it was going to cost him?

He pulled away from her, allowing himself to touch her hair, and then her shoulder, which he noted later must have been dusted with glitter, as he found traces of it on his fingertips, and on his pants.

"I can't," he said. "It's been so long. I feel like I don't even know how anymore." Better to admit an alternate insecurity, he thought. The truth seemed much more humiliating. And anyway it was not a lie.

"You came all this way to stop now?" she said. That challenge might have worked on a younger man, but not him. The fire in his loins was a particular kind. He was desperate, but he would not be rushed. He had not lived this long in life to be pushed around by a stranger.

"No, I think it's enough," he said.

"What about if I give you a hand?" said Tracy quietly.

He nodded, and she swept herself up and away, down the hall to the bathroom, returning shortly with two hand towels and a large pump bottle of lotion. She put the bottle of lotion next to the picture of her and Mitzi, one towel on her lap, and one towel on his. She kissed him again.

"Do you like to kiss?" she said. He nodded. She put her hand on his face and then ran it down his chest-quicker than he would have liked, and he could have said that and she would have listened, but he felt completely out of control and unable to speak-and straight to his crotch, where she rustled around softly-It's right there. Good G.o.d, woman, how can you miss it?-until she found what she was looking for. She petted him on the outside of his pants, and then quickly unb.u.t.toned his pants, unzipped his fly, and then released his p.e.n.i.s from his boxer shorts. She stroked it, and then stopped and leaned over to where the bottle of lotion sat. She pumped the bottle a few times. It was an anticellulite lotion, Middlestein noticed. She rubbed it on him.

"Do you like it this way?" she said. Her voice was girlish and flirty, and her eyes were direct. "I bet you like it this way." She didn't wait for a response, she surrounded him quickly-Listen, can you blame her? Ten-thirty on a Tuesday? Let's get a move on already, buddy-and it took not long until he came.

Middlestein felt great! He drove home fast. No traffic! Fantastic! He was thrilled, if only because he knew he was going to sleep like a rock that night. But for now he was still all jazzed up. He felt ten years younger. G.o.d, she was good. He was pretty sure he was never going to see her again-one hundred bucks for a handy?-but it was nice to have that number in his back pocket in case of an emotional emergency. She was clean and local, and he felt safe with her. Still he didn't know how comfortable he felt supporting, even in the smallest of ways, a woman who had more square footage than he did.

But it had been luxurious to be reminded of the pleasures of a woman's touch, the delicate thrill of its softness, the tension of trusting her to touch him the right way, the tiny death and rebirth that came with an o.r.g.a.s.m. It wasn't soulful, necessarily, but it felt deep to Middlestein. He would renew his search for a woman.

He sat at his desk, white, long, clean, with a slight chip where he had banged the IKEA package against the wall of the lobby on his way in the door, turned on his computer, and selected the bookmark for the dating site for Jews. Forty was too young, he knew that now, he had known it all along, but now it had been confirmed. He wanted to take his clothes off with someone, but he needed to feel like the two of them were closer to equal. He changed his search parameters; now he was looking for women from fifty to sixty years of age.

And suddenly there were two hundred new results in the queue; a whole new world had opened up because Middlestein had decided to date age-appropriately. He clicked through a dozen of them until he found a picture of a dark, curly-haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife, Edie, from ten years earlier, before they had fallen out of love with each other, before they had drifted so far apart it was as if they were on opposite ends of the world.

He knew when that photo was taken: It was on their trip to Italy. It was their first vacation together after Robin had gone away to college and then there was nothing left but the two of them. They were fifty years old. They had been raising children for the past twenty-five years. They should have been ready for their Part Two. He read about Part Two in magazines, he had heard about it from his friends. He wanted his Part Two.

But instead they had fought over everything, every detail. Or rather, she had fought with him, derided every suggestion he made. What did he know about Rome? She was the one who had studied Italian in college and spent two weeks in Italy after graduation. She was the one who had once been basically fluent in the language and would surely be again after a day or two there. Why would they go on a tour when they could walk the streets just fine on their own? Why would they stay at a hotel near the Vatican when it was so far away from everything else? Why, when they finally arrived there, had it not occurred to him to bring better shoes? (This was when his knees were just starting to go, he remembered, and that mile-long walk through the Vatican crushed him, and the minute he complained just once, she had snapped, so by the time they got to the Sistine Chapel, she was practically shrieking, and only the repeated shus.h.i.+ng of the security guards had quieted her.) Why was he still jet-lagged? Why was he being so weird about taking the bus if he was complaining about walking? Why did he order the same thing every night? Why didn't he have an open mind? Why couldn't he just enjoy himself? That might have been the vacation that killed them, or it might have been the beginning of the end. It was hard to pinpoint it. He wondered if he was having a delayed reaction, by a decade. Here he was thinking it was everything, but instead maybe it was just that one moment in time.

When they got to the Trevi Fountain that day, he was limping, his hips, his ankles, his back, everything was shattered. Edie had already consumed five espressos and two gelatos, and he had wondered if she would ever sleep again. Some pleasant-enough American girl, a little older than Robin, a tourist like them, innocent to the doom she was witnessing, offered to take their picture with the fountain as the backdrop. The result was a photo of two people standing far apart, and he knew he was unsmiling in the other half of it, the half, he noticed, that Edie had cut out of the picture. What he saw online was just her, her handbag looped over her arm, that pretty silk dress that fell nicely around her wide, s.e.xy hips, her hair a majestic throng of curls (it had rained that morning, and the air was still humid), still a reasonably good-looking woman with an intense, hopped-up-on-caffeine smile on her face. She looked like she was clever. She looked a little dangerous. Slightly past her prime, but still she seemed ripe. If he didn't know her, he would have thought she was fascinating. If he didn't know her, he would have thought she was just his type. I want that woman back, he thought. I want that woman, but I want her to still love me. And he knew now-he had known this for a long time, but he had sealed it with every decision he had made in the last two months-that she was never going to love him again.

Edie, 210 Pounds.

Here is what was on the tray: one Big Mac, one large fries, two Happy Meals, one McRib sandwich (because it was a new sandwich, and how often did a new sandwich come along?), one Diet c.o.ke, two orange juices, one chocolate shake, one apple pie for everyone to share, and three chocolate chip cookies, one for Edie, one for little Robin, and one for Benny, who was getting to be such a big boy now. Edie would definitely eat the Big Mac and the McRib sandwich all on her own, although she had asked Benny if he had wanted to try it, pointing to the cardboard advertis.e.m.e.nt dangling from the ceiling like a mobile over a baby's crib, and he had nodded yes. She had also asked him if he wanted a chocolate chip cookie, sitting there looking so moist and chewy in its plastic display case, or an apple pie, he could have either, and he said, "Neither," and she had said, "Well, maybe we should get both just in case," and he had shrugged. It was all the same to him; around his house nothing ever went to waste (which meant everything got eaten by someone in the end), and also he was only just six years old and didn't have strong opinions one way or another about much of anything, or at least not about food, because, after all, it was just food.

What was food to a six-year-old? Sometimes Benny would eat only the same thing for weeks at a time (macaroni and cheese for most of the winter; turkey sandwiches, sometimes minus the turkey and sometimes minus the bread, for all of March), and Edie didn't have the energy to argue with him. It was not about taste. It was about some sort of affection or a.s.sociation with a memory, she suspected. Like, maybe she had given him macaroni and cheese on the first cold day of the year and it had warmed him up so beautifully that he craved that same sensation on repeat. Perhaps there was a favorite cartoon character of his who loved turkey sandwiches. Or a Muppet? It had nothing to do with his innocent young palate. He could not be expected to be excited about the new McRib sandwich. It was meaningless to him.

Edie was saving the McRib for last, because it was a treat, almost like a dessert sandwich. She had already finished her fries, decimated them moments after the three of them had sat down, and was working on Benny's bag, while Benny, in a thoughtful and organized manner, plucked apart the free plastic toy that had come with his meal. Robin was happily banging the h.e.l.l out of her own toy until Edie finally retrieved it from her just to stop all the noise.

Big Mac-wise, she had this new habit of picking out the middle layer of bun from her sandwich, because she had heard the one time she went to Weight Watchers that half the battle was the bread. She would even have eaten the McRib minus the roll entirely, only obviously that would have made a huge mess. Best to eat it as intended. She took a bite of the Big Mac and considered it without the extra slice of bun, which lay nearby covered in flecks of lettuce and salmon-pink special sauce. There was literally no impact on the taste, and yet there was something missing in the experience, an extra layer of spongy pleasure.

Holy cow, she was thinking a lot about food.

She was so tired from her day, and so happy to not have to think about work (although she did not mind her job; she had never minded putting in a hard day's work, it was, in her opinion, as she had been raised to believe, both an extremely Jewish and American way to behave, being a good worker was), and in theory, she should be happy to spend time with her children, but sometimes she found them a little dull. Playing with them was boring, and it wasn't even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around.

"Don't you guys have anything of interest to say?" she said in the direction of her children. It didn't matter which one answered. "What did you do today?"

Benny looked up from the pile of plastic parts. Minutes ago it had been an airplane. Now it was waste.

"I went to school," he said.

"Did you learn anything?" she said. One-two-three bites, and the Big Mac was finished.

"We counted a lot today," he said. "There was a lot of counting, and I played catch during recess with three different boys and one girl. Craig, Eric, Russell, and Lea, and then Lea got hit in the head and we had to stop playing. And I made this." He pulled from his pocket a string of orange and pink beads on a long, narrow rubber thread and held it up in the air. "It's for you." He smiled-oh, he beamed! The beam that could break your heart.

I'm a s.h.i.+t, thought Edie.

"It is the most beautiful necklace I have ever seen in my entire life," she said. She took it from his tiny hand and then tied it around her neck.

"You look pretty," he said.

She did not look pretty, she thought. She did not believe she had looked pretty in a long time. Her business clothes no longer fit her right, not her jackets, not her s.h.i.+rts, not her skirts, not her pants, not her pantyhose, not even her shoes-or rather, she no longer fit them right-but she could not bring herself to buy a new wardrobe. Maybe if she gave Weight Watchers a shot this time. There was always the vague promise of that lingering in her future.

"What about you?" she said to Robin.

Robin spent her mornings in a day-care center at the JCC and her afternoons in the backyard of a young woman who lived one town over, along with two other toddlers, the parents of whom worked as lawyers with Edie at the firm. The baby-sitter, barely twenty years old if that, was supposedly the widow of a cousin of a senior partner, but Edie was almost certain she was his mistress. She was an Italian girl, this Tracy, from Elmwood Park originally, and had no real explanation for why she was now suddenly living in the suburbs. And there were no pictures up in her home, no past, no history, just fresh-bought furniture and a small, fancy, yapping dog. "A b.i.+.c.hon frise," Tracy had slurred proudly, as if she were fluent in French. Edie had no complaints about the woman; she seemed to genuinely like the children, even enjoyed playing with them, liked to get down on her hands and knees and crawl around in the dirt with them, her plump yet still somehow tiny behind in the air. Wagging it like a dog. The dog barking next to her. The kids barking. Everyone pretending to be a dog. All the working mothers standing there in the suburbs laughing at the too-loud, thick-Chicago-accented but still extremely hot Italian tomato rolling around in the dirt with their three brilliant babies.

Edie didn't even know whether she would ever be able to get back up again if she dropped down that low to the earth.

"Strawberry," said Robin.

"You ate a strawberry," said Edie. "You like strawberries." She said this as if she were suddenly realizing this detail about her child for the first time.

Robin nodded.

"You like fries?" said Edie. She pushed the tiny white paper packet of fries that had been residing in her daughter's Happy Meal box toward her. "If you're not going to eat them, I will."