though several of them tried energetically to convince me otherwise, and all of whom were even more boring than Roger. But in case Prince Charming showed up, and wandered into my life one day, I was prepared. My legs were shaved, my nails were done, I'd lost ten pounds. And the kids said my new haircut made me look like Claudia Schiffer. Shows you what loyalty can do to a kid's eyesight. By Christmas, thirteen months after that fateful day when Roger sat in the satin chair at the foot of our bed and let me have it right between the eyes, I had even stopped crying. Even the blueberry muffin was a dim memory by then, and in fact, so was Roger. For all intents and purposes, I had recovered. And then came dating. And a whole new life I was totally unprepared for.
Chapter Two
Dating in this day and age is an interesting phenomenon. Comparing it to olden days, medieval times for instance, it's a lot like jousting. Or going back a little further in history, it's a little bit like being a Christian in the Colosseum. You put on a hell of a good show, but you know that sooner or later, one of the lions is going to eat you.
And there are a lot of them, lions I mean. Some are merely pussycats, others pretend to be. Some of them look fantastic, but auditioning for the Colosseum is a hell of a lot of work, and in the end you still wind up in the same place, with a lion looking you in the face, deciding when he's going to eat you. After six months of dating, I felt like a Hostess Twinkie.
It was a lot like trying out for A Chorus Line, and I never seemed to get the steps right, no matter how hard I worked on them in the mirror. I met a seventy-year-old woman who told me about her new boyfriend, and I wondered where she got the energy. I was nearly half her age, and I was exhausted. Let's face it, dating is a killer.
There were fat guys, and bald guys, and old guys, and young guys, and men that my friends insisted I would be crazy about, except that they always seemed to forget to mention “one little problem,” either incipient alcoholism, or some deep psychosis relating to his mother, father, children, ex-wife, dog, or parakeet, or a minor crisis about his sexuality ever since his uncle assaulted him when he was in high school. There are normal guys out there, I know, but damned if I could find one. Besides which, I was completely out of training. For thirteen years I had been making dinner every night for Roger, watching TV with him, or sleeping, not to mention car pools to baseball. I was entirely unprepared for the New Wave of preparing gourmet microwave cuisine, serving cappuccino made from sixteen kinds of coffee beans from African countries I'd never heard of, and sports I had only seen tackled at the Olympics. It turned out that manicures and a Lady Remington were not enough. I had to be able to ski like Killy, swim the hundred meter, and complete the running long jump. And to tell you the truth, I'm lazy. After a while, it was a lot easier to stay home, watch I Love Lucy reruns with the kids, and eat pizza. And as I reevaluated where I'd been, by my second summer of freedom, I decided dating was beyond me. I just couldn't do it.
The kids spent July in the south of France with Roger that year. They chartered a yacht, went to the Hotel du Cap, and were scheduled to wind up in Paris. From there, Roger was going to put the kids on a plane home, where I would meet them and then spend August with them. I had rented a small beach house for the three of us on Long Island. Umpa's money was not limitless after all. Roger and Helena had rented a small palazzo near Florence. And it had long since become obvious to me that Helena's trust fund, if not her IQ, was a hell of a lot bigger than mine was. I was happy for him, or at least I pretended to be, which made Dr. Steinfeld very proud. Okay, so I lied to him. I was still somewhat angry, and a little jealous of Helena's legs and boobs, if not her