A Brief Experiment with Married Men, Part One

My Heidi Klum moment...

After a few rounds with Michael, knocked to the ropes, bloodied and battered and gasping for breath, one would think I might quit the ring for good. Or follow friends’ advice: “If you want to meet someone, take a course in the kinds of things that interest men.” “Join a book group.” “Hang out in the right bars, reading Foucault or The Observer.”

Yeah, where? Like the stylish Campbell Apartment in Grand Central, where perhaps one might catch a married man before his trek home to Greenwich?

No, I was still too entranced by the ease and intrigue of the Internet, and one night, perhaps a year after Michael’s exit from the life, I had a eureka moment (speaking of married). At around 10 o’clock on a lonely Saturday evening, I found myself thinking: If there are no good men left by the time a woman has reached my age, if they are all taken, why not borrow one—or two or three? I slithered back to Craigslist, turned to the section for those in search of romantic involvements, and posted a personals with the headline “Willing To Consider a Married Man.” I described myself in a few details, adding that I was not looking to bust up anyone’s happy family but simply game for a little amusement on the side. (Remember, please, I was not the one betraying any vows.)

I went to bed early, awakened around 6:30 the next morning, and promptly tuned into my email. There were 83 responses, and the petitions were still rolling in—plonk, plonk, plonk—dropping into the top of my in-box as I began to read from the earliest on up. (What were these guys doing on Craigslist at 6:30 on a Sunday morning?) This is totally out of control, I thought, and promptly shut down the listing.

The author in her frisky fifties

Well, it was easy enough to quickly weed out the dross—the yearning 20- and 30-somethings who probably had visions of me as a glamorous stateside Catherine Deneuve. And it took only a few minutes to delete the guys who sent pictures of their weenies (See “Deep Six Dick Pics”), the heavily ripped body builders and tattoo addicts, and the ones for whom English was a second or possibly third language. In time, I winnowed the list down to about eight or ten possibilities. And some sprightly correspondence ensued.

A few dropped out when the photos arrived….or didn’t. And I should know by now that men who are reluctant to send a picture are either toads or have a truly low opinion of their appearance. What I was looking for was a match between visuals and words. The serious contenders (and, oh boy, did I feel like some super-princessy judge on a reality show, Heidi Klum with spider veins: “I’m sorry, Kevin, but you will have to leave…”) boiled down to

·       An art dealer with a chubby but sweet face who specialized in 19th-century prints (with him, I figured there would be some common ground, since I earned my so-called living writing about art).

·       A financial analyst from India, who refused to send a photo, saying, “I’d much rather get to know you in words,” but who charmed me with his emails and in whom I discovered a mutual love of opera.

·       A corporate lawyer who directed me to a website with a fuzzy shot of himself giving a power-point presentation; again, the literacy appealed: He described himself as having a “John Cheever-like life,” commuting between New York and Greenwich.

·        A heart-stoppingly cute jazz musician, who dropped out when I sent my photo (not cute enough for him?  Well, stinky poo!)

·       A straight-shooting Midwestern banker, or so I judged him from his descriptions of his St. Louis roots and unadorned prose. His photo showed a lanky man with vivid blue eyes, but I quickly back-burnered him because I thought I knew the type—overly earnest and dull as dishwater. “Stuffy as a banker” was not coined for nothing.

It seemed a good list for starters; all were about my age or a little younger or older. But it soon became exhausting, though revealing, to keep up all these communications, and I realize in retrospect that I should have been maintaining some kind of flow chart or set up a graph with distinguishing characteristics. 

Some were forthcoming about their marital lives: The Indian financial analyst said his wife traveled half the year, and as a couple, they kept homes in both the suburbs and the city; the corporate lawyer loved his wife and two teenagers but had not been “intimate” with his spouse in years; the banker had a college-age daughter in Boston and a wife in St. Louis, whose bipolar disorder kept her there much of the time. (If I had to commute between New York and St. Louis, I’d be bipolar too.)

What came through between the lines, though, was a terrible sense of yearning, not just for physical closeness, I inferred, but for something more. “I have a deep and abiding respect for my wife,” wrote Daniel, the lawyer, “but she’s just not a sexual person and we seem to be living separate but parallel lives.” “I think my wife may have other men,” said the childless financial analyst. “Our policy is, Don’t ask, don’t tell. I love her, but the spark is gone.” (I was still annoyed by the lack of a photo, or even the stingiest physical description, and wanted him to know upfront that I’m very tall. “That doesn’t concern me,” he wrote, “I’ve often gone out with fashion-model types.” Well, sheesh, I wondered, then why the hell was he trolling for women on Craigslist?)     

But enough with the words. It was time to connect via phone and make a few dates. I sent my number to the most likely prospects.

The art dealer, Ben, called me on a blustery November afternoon from Boca Raton. “Lucky you,” I said.

“And I have an apartment in New York,” he added.

“Well, if I were you, I’d stay in Boca for the time being. It’s turning colder here and the forecast is miserable through the week.”

 We chatted for a while about the weather, about my memories of Boca (extremely fuzzy, having been there only once years ago with my ex-husband), about his business. He was a private dealer with a specialty in one particular artist. When I ask whom that might be, he put me off. “You’ll have to meet me to find out.

“I need to be in the city for an appointment with a client on Thursday and will probably stay through the weekend,” he continued in a sweet deep voice with a vaguely New York accent. “How about dinner on Friday night?”

I agreed and he told me he would email a place and time later. And that turned out to be the restaurant of an extremely posh hotel downtown, which augured well, but the weather was truly foul on Friday, with monsoon-like rain, and it took me two trains to get there. On the wind-whipped street to the subway, I became resentful with him for choosing a venue so far from my apartment, and angry with myself for not insisting on a meeting place midway between us.

On the street, raindrops stinging my eyes, I was indeed growing madder than a wet hen and my mood did not particularly improve when I spotted Ben on his cell phone inside the elegant marble lobby. When he saw me, he held up a finger to signal “just a moment,” and I took the chance to check him out more closely, my hopes sinking. Stocky I had assumed from his emails, as he mentioned having lost a lot of weight in the past year but still had more to go. A lot more. And I didn’t bargain on jowly and balding as well.      

The hotel restaurant, however, was serene and elegant, quietly candlelit, with few customers on such a nasty night. Ben was clearly a regular because a maître d’ of indeterminate sex (truly, he/she, with his/her slicked back hair and a bland smooth face, could easily have been a hermaphrodite) showed us to a corner table and a waiter immediately delivered tombstone-sized menus and an even bigger wine list. Ben handed the wine list back to him. “I’m not much of a drinker…unless you….”

“I’ll have a Manhattan, straight up,” I told the waiter, half-wanting to slam my fist on the table and say, “Make it a double.” My goal was to get as blurry as possible as fast as possible so as not to have to deal with the sight of Ben’s multiple chins. In the meantime there was small talk to be navigated and a menu to be studied.

The small talk was easy enough, because I know something about the art market and after years as a reporter have become very good at drawing people out. Ben told me he got interested in collecting when he bought a couple of not-very-good prints as a college student. From thereon in, it was a matter of constantly trading up until he had a sizable enough stash to set himself up as a private dealer.

“And now will you tell me your specialty?” I asked, taking a big gulp of my drink.

“Ah. I will let you in on that later.” He beamed, revealing a neat row of yellow teeth.

I turned to the menu and quickly decided to go for broke, choosing oysters followed by venison. And a fifteen-dollar glass of Pinot Noir. Ben ordered a Caesar salad. “I’m not all that hungry,” he said, half-apologizing.

Between courses we chatted more about the art business and the merest glimmer of personal stuff, such as the fact that Ben had a wife and a teenaged daughter, who lived full-time in Boca. He spent most of the winter down there but returned to New York frequently on business. “I flew up just to meet you.”

Oh my god!

Now, I do not consider myself the comeliest woman on the planet, but Ben stared at me throughout the meal as if I were a Vogue supermodel. Perhaps Mrs. Ben was a mirror complement to him, a jolly little multi-chinned Hummel figurine, and by contrast I was Venus, newly risen from the sea on a bed of pricey oyster shells.

If the man had at least been amusing or a great conversationalist with juicy anecdotes about the art biz, I would probably have overlooked his considerable heft. As it was, I was pedaling as hard as I could to keep the dialogue going.

I noticed that he barely touched his salad, and I was still ravenously hungry. He pushed the plate in my direction. “I had my stomach stapled a year ago,” he revealed. Oh. My own gut clenched involuntarily in reaction, as I envisioned an operation involving blood, tissue, and doctors wielding Swinglines instead of scalpels.

I wanted to skip dessert and coffee and get the hell out of there, but I am too well bred, especially when it’s on his dime, to plead a sudden migraine and vanish into the stormy night.

“Come up to my apartment and I’ll make you a coffee,” he said.

“Is it far away? It’s such a horrible night….”

“Not at all.” He smiled enigmatically.

I wished I could have begged off, but I was curious about the art.

As we retrieved my coat and I was about to shrug my way into what suddenly felt like a bargain-basement find (and it was—Filene’s Basement, to be precise), I remembered that he wasn’t wearing an overcoat when I entered the building.

“You won’t need to put that on,” he said, and took my arm to leave the restaurant. We crossed the gleaming marble lobby to a single elevator that went straight up to the penthouse, and then he unlocked the door to one of the most spectacular apartments I’d seen in a long, long time. The foyer was filled with prints of Degas ballerinas (his niche, obviously); the living room held more Degas—horse-racing scenes, pastel drawings of laundresses, lithographs from his brothel series. “As you can see,” said Ben, “I’m one of the few people who really can ask you up to look at my etchings.”

But the art had to compete in a big way with the view: floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides offered drop-dead vistas of Manhattan to the north, and the chilly sparkling waters of the Hudson backed up by the twinkling lights of New Jersey to the west. You could even see Lady Liberty, holding her torch aloft in the freezing rain. I couldn’t help gasping. The furniture was pretty swell too—a lot of things that looked to be antiques, but which I couldn’t identify. A beautiful glass dining table Ben told me was Lalique, but he wasn’t happy with the clear plastic Philippe Starck chairs arranged around it.

Ben told me to feel free to look around the apartment while he made espresso. And so I did. There were two big bedrooms, also with views of Manhattan north, a spacious study with a big partner’s desk, and everywhere more prints, including a few Rembrandt etchings and works by David Hockney. I was looking at a tiny Rembrandt landscape when Ben entered the master bedroom with two cups. “Oh, wouldn’t it be more fun to sit in the living room and look at the view,” I said, wanting out of that intimate setting. Fast.

We sat at the Lalique table, sipping espresso and making more small talk. After ten minutes I figured it was safe to look at my watch without appearing rude and announced that I had to leave—an early-morning appointment. When I asked if I could get a cab downstairs, he said, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll have no difficulties getting home.” Did that mean he had a private car at his disposal? A pumpkin coach drawn by white mice?

But, no, it was merely an ordinary NYC yellow taxi, which the doorman hailed from beneath the canopy off the lobby. I gave Ben a quick peck on the cheek and sped off, thinking that if only I were a different sort of girl I could have overlooked this nice man’s terrifying heft and dined on oysters every night.

I sent a polite email thanking him for dinner. Two days later he wrote back, asking if we should get together again to discuss the possibilities of a “relationship.” I answered as diplomatically as I could, saying I’d had serious second thoughts about getting involved with a married person.

But in reality I was eager to move on.

Top: detail from William Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode, The Tête-à-Tête, 1743