A new way of meeting up had come along, Match.com, that allowed you to read the profiles of other single people online and email back, instead of the old system of using a 900 number. Sometimes now, if she couldn’t sleep, Eleanor scrolled through the listings of men in her age group. She told herself she’d like to find a man with some nice, comfortable professional career—no more yoga and burl bowls—but when she answered the ad of some lawyer type, or the emergency room doctor with whom she had a few phone conversations, or the Tufts professor who was an expert in trade with Asia, the worlds they inhabited felt far from her own.
The men in Boston talked about good restaurants and Celtics tickets and golf, knew nothing of trout fishing in a fast-moving brook or how to whittle a slingshot. For all the bitter resentment she felt now toward Cam, she liked it that he knew the names of birds and stars and how to build a good fire and pick up a snapping turtle, and that he fixed things himself instead of hiring people to do it. She liked it that he stacked his own firewood and knew how to prune fruit trees. He owned ice skates and actually used them.
Alone in her Brookline condo, Eleanor couldn’t stop herself fromturning on her computer and studying the ads. Now and then she’d give her phone number to some man whose profile displayed no obvious red flags, but most of the time, if he called, the sound of his voice and—more so—what he said, was enough to discourage any thought of leaving a message of her own back. But now and then someone whose ad she’d responded to would sound promising, briefly. She still allowed herself to believe that somewhere out there was the partner she was looking for.
It was never the profiles of the serious, stable professionals that spoke to her, in the end. She was moved, every time, by the men whose life stories revealed sorrow and trouble. Even when they didn’t write openly of some tragedy or loss in their lives, she had a sixth sense for recognizing a person who had lived through hard times.
Widowers, men recently fired from their jobs. A man who’d been diagnosed with MS, a recovering alcoholic. Vietnam vets (so many of those). There was a man who had lost his wife and child in a boating accident. She left him a message and they ended up meeting at a pizza place off the highway outside of town, where they spent the evening talking about his dead son, and later, parked in the front of his car—Eleanor in the passenger seat—he wept in her arms while she held him. She had kissed him when they parted, but with no thought of seeing him again. He’d just needed someone to listen, and that night she’d been the one.
One profile she responded to led to a date with a mortgage broker named Ken who eyed her up and down as she approached the table at the bar where they met and said, as his greeting, “Great legs. You should see some of the dogs I’ve met.”
More than once, she’d meet a man for coffee who spent their whole (brief) date telling her about how his ex-wife and her divorce lawyer had screwed him over. Men who lived with their mothers, men who complained about child support, a man who was about to strike it rich, if she could just loan him a thousand dollars. (He’d invented a whole new kind of bicycle helmet—a soft one, that could be transformed into a belly bag. “Isn’t the whole point of a bike helmet that it should be solid?” Eleanor asked him. “Are you always sucha negative person?” he said, getting up from the table. Leaving her with the check.)
One man Eleanor met online turned out to have been recently released from prison on domestic abuse charges. She had coffee with a man (a few of these, actually) who was still married but separating any day now. One of her dates explained to her, partway through their (also brief) date, that he never went anywhere without a concealed weapon. “There’s a lot of crazies out there,” he told Eleanor.
There were good men, too, who could have broken her heart if she’d let them—not out of passion, but sorrow. One whose wife had died in a fire. “I’ll never be okay,” he said, “but I have to keep living.” One whose time in Vietnam left him unable to sleep more than an hour at a stretch. The night they met he asked her to marry him.
“I think, if you were next to me in bed, I could finally get through the night,” he said, clutching her tight as a gun.
There was a man with a stutter so bad it was difficult to understand what he was saying to her. “I stutter,” he told her, “but I never stutter when I sing.”
There was a man who turned out to be homeless. He’d logged in to the dating site from the library. When they met at a restaurant, he urged her to order the steak, but said he wasn’t hungry and requested tap water. He had money enough for one meal, evidently. Unlike some of the others, he insisted on paying for hers.
And more: A man—also married—whose wife was tired of sex and gave him permission to have girlfriends. A man who was married and wanted to bring her home to his wife, so the three of them could get together. A man who believed there was a plot to murder the surviving Beatles, one by one. He was trying to get a message to Ringo Starr, to warn him.
There was an artist with whom she spent one extraordinary four-hour dinner—talking and laughing and sharing intimate stories that allowed Eleanor to believe this might actually be something good, which was followed by another three hours of wild necking in the restaurant parking lot. She never heard from him again.
There was a very handsome man—romantic, unnervingly poetic in his emails to her, a truck driver who told her in their first phoneconversation that he listened to opera on long drives and, when certain arias came on the classical station, could not help himself from weeping. The voice of Kiri Te Kanawa, in particular, traveled straight to his heart. When Eleanor met him at the restaurant the first and only time, and he stood up from the table to embrace her—tears in his eyes—he revealed himself to have a hunchback so extreme he was nearly doubled over.
“I know,” he said. “Not what you expected, right?”
The new online sites made it possible to check in at any hour of the day or night, type in your zip code, and find out who might be out there, awake at 3:00A.M. like you, searching. You could study their pictures, read their profile, send them a note, hear back, all without even meeting for coffee.
Sometimes, briefly, these men sounded promising, though on those rare occasions when Eleanor actually agreed to meet up with one of them, they generally turned out to be older, fatter, shorter, or crazy. She began to wonder what it said about her that she was there meeting them in the first place.
She’d go home and renew her vow to give up on her search, knowing she had to write a note to the person she’d met that night, offering the gentlest possible explanation for why she would not be pursuing a relationship. She’d put the blame on herself. She was confused, she told them. She had issues.
“Fucking cunt,” one wrote back. “You don’t look as good as your picture in real life by the way. I didn’t want to date you anyways.”
83.
I Would Have Taken Good Care of You
It was a Saturday afternoon. Eleanor was driving back from a visit with Toby. As she passed Walt and Edith’s place, she noticed Edith’s car was gone—she was off selling Avon, probably, or visiting the grandchildren. Walt’s truck was out front, though, and Walt underneath it, replacing some part, no doubt.
Maybe it was the knowledge that she wouldn’t have to experience the air of disapproval Eleanor always encountered in Edith’s company that inspired her to stop that day. All those years she’d lived on the farm, a week never went by, and seldom more than a day or two, that Walt didn’t pay her a visit. Now almost two years had gone by since she’d seen him last.
The familiar work boots stuck out from the front end of the truck, and the cuffs of his pants. “That old Dodge just never quits, does it?” she called out to him. It was the same thing she might have said of Walt himself.
“What do you know?” he said, as he pulled himself out from under the chassis. “I thought you were gone for good.”
He stood alongside the truck, taking in the sight of her. Except for that one time, right after she’d discovered Cam and Coco together at the falls, he had never reached out to put his arms around her. An old Yankee, that was Walt. A married man didn’t go around hugging other people’s wives, or their ex-wives, either. If he had an affection for a person, as Eleanor knew he did for her, he might drop by with a half dozen ears of Silver Queen corn, or pop over to till up a flower bed. He kept his hands busy with tools.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she said. She had been in the neighborhood plenty, of course, over these two years. Something had kept her from saying hello. Maybe she was afraid, if she did, that she might cry, and that would have been hard on Walt.
“You moving back to the old place?” he said. “It’s about time.”
“Not moving back,” she told him. “Just stopping by to see the kids.”
