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 glass. To love, they said. To love.
Middlestein in Exile
O n the one hand,” said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, ex–New 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 relationship 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 sex 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 sex 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
sex, 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,
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 glass. To love, they said. To love.
Middlestein in Exile
O n the one hand,” said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, ex–New 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 relationship 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 sex 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 sex 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
sex, 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,
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