them by myself at home, a bowl of air-popped popcorn in my lap, a glass of white wine on the table next to the sofa. Anna was busy at the hospital and had told me that they wouldn’t give her the evening off because they were too swamped from a recent E. coli outbreak, but I think this might have been a fib. She probably wanted to watch the show with her boyfriend instead of me, whom I still haven’t met. I felt a little uncomfortable watching the red-carpet coverage before the ceremony began; they kept showing Renn with Elise Connor, the commentators practically drooling on them. Whatever else she might be, she is a remarkably pretty young woman. She also seems sweet, and my thought all along has been that Renn, probably as old as her father, is out of his depth. And in fact she seemed to have figured this out too, because she broke up with him a week or so after the Oscars. It took me a little while to find out what was going on, but eventually Anna told me her suspicions, which her father would not confirm when she talked to him about the breakup. I, however, was surprised that even he would do something as selfish and contemptible as carrying on with his son’s ex-girlfriend, if Anna’s suspicions are correct. I still care about the man, but long ago I lost any illusions I might have had about his judgment where his personal life is concerned. He seems quite capable of rationalizing any decision he makes that involves his penis.
At the bagel café, before Michael and I parted ways, he asked for my number, and with his eyes on his feet, he asked if I would like to go out for dinner sometime. “Yes,” I said, feeling my heart leap. “I’d love to.”
“I’m so glad,” he said, raising his eyes to meet mine. “Maybe this weekend if you’re free?”
“Yes,” I said. “This weekend could work.”
He kissed my cheek before we got into our cars, and all day I kept thinking about him and what it would be like to kiss him. I had trouble keeping a smile off my face, especially when a patient’s worried mother was speaking to me about her inability to get her six-year-old son to stop eating dirt from the garden. I almost said, “Maybe he’s pregnant. Pregnant women sometimes crave dirt.” But obviously this would not have gone over well.
The next day, Michael called around six in the evening and asked me out, saying that he would pick me up at seven thirty on Friday rather than have me meet him at the restaurant. During the three days between his call and our date, I felt almost lightheaded with anticipation. But I didn’t want to feel this way; chances were, the date would not be as good as I hoped. It was possible that he would spend the whole evening talking about his ex-wife or his recent pitiful blind dates or some embarrassing health problem that he thought I would be interested in because I’m a doctor. These are all scenarios from other dates I’d been on in the past few years, ones with colleagues’ divorced brothers or cousins or businessmen I’d met online who weren’t anywhere near as charming in person as they were in the e-mails they’d sent before we met. There had also been a few men who had spent the whole date grilling me for every detail I would divulge about my ex-husband: What was Renn Ivins really like, and wasn’t it just the coolest thing to be married to him? The first time this had happened, I’d been so stunned that I’d laughed. “No, it wasn’t the coolest thing,” I said. “We got a divorce.”
For some reason, this had not sunk in. “Sure,” the man said, “but wasn’t it still cool to be married to him for a little while?”
It mystifies me how some people really don’t seem to have any idea what’s polite and what’s jaw-droppingly insensitive. Michael, fortunately, did know what was polite. He arrived at the house exactly at seven thirty and had a bouquet of red roses with him, the pink tissue paper and matching ribbon carefully arranged by a real florist, not some underpaid worker at the grocery store. He smelled very nice and seemed so happy to see me that I felt a lump rise in my throat. I think my children assume that I haven’t remarried