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It’s Hi, I’m an alien, I thought.
Because good-looking, age-appropriate men didn’t date thirty-nine-year-olds. (Daniel the Hot Firefighter, anyone?) Even if, unlike Daniel, a guy my age wanted to settle down, they focused their sights on women in their twenties or early thirties, still secure in their fertility. Not women who’d been single for the entire two decades of their adult lives.
Up until this moment, I had never been approached by a stranger and asked out. Not once. It just wasn’t how it happened anymore.
I gave him my business card and smiled, hopefully hiding my befuddlement, then went off to photograph the hissing bride and pissy groom twining arms to sip champagne. I would’ve bet my left ovary that I would never hear from the garter-catcher again.
He called me the next day and asked me out for a drink on the Lower East Side. Not knowing how to handle such a bizarre turn of events, I accepted.
The restaurant was agonizingly trendy; I’d Googled it earlier in the day and saw it marked as one of New York’s hippest bars with egotistical cocktails and flattering lighting.
“Nice place,” I said, though it wasn’t really my style.
“I picked it because it was a straight shot across the East River for you,” he said.
“That was very thoughtful,” I said, sliding into the booth. “I’m guessing you’re either gay, a serial killer, a gay serial killer or a bigamist, charming his way across America, occasionally calling his children by the wrong names, his wives thinking he’s just distracted because he works so very hard.”
He laughed, and I felt a purr of attraction low in my stomach. “No,” he said. “Just one ex-wife. Sorry to let you down.”
His name was Nathan Vance Coburn III, an architect and fourth-generation son of Cambry-on-Hudson. I told him my folks lived there, that my sister and her boyfriend had recently bought a house there, as well. We played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, figuring out who we knew in common. He read my mother’s column and had met Eric at a fund-raiser.
I didn’t bother trying to impress him or monitor myself; those days were done, those long mental lists of what to say and ask, which topics to avoid. His average looks were appealing, and he wore a suit but no tie. Long blond eyelashes gave him a sweet, almost shy look, though he seemed relaxed and funny.
Men like this just weren’t single.
It seemed contradictory, because I personally knew at least five really great women in their late thirties and early forties who were looking for love. Statistics would say there’d be at least five similarly great single men in the same age group, but statistics would be wrong. I didn’t know one man my age I’d want to date, and believe me, my criteria had been low. Forget about living with his mother or having a job. We were talking “no recent murders” by the time I called it quits.
So Nathan Vance Coburn III... I was obviously suspicious.
I shook his hand at the end of the date and said it had been very nice talking with him. He called me two days after that. We met for dinner, and he insisted on paying. I let him kiss me good-night, and he did it just right; no tongue, long enough to convince me, short enough to avoid embarrassment.
I smiled all the way home, the only person on the subway to do so.
We started dating, and by dating I meant just meeting and talking and some kissing. We held hands sometimes. No sex, because I was having fun the way things were. My newly acquired Zen kept me chill about the whole thing—if it worked, yay. If not, no biggie.
Nathan seemed freakishly great. I quizzed him on the social issues that mattered to me, showing him pictures of my brother’s biracial kids. Nathan’s only comment: “Gorgeous,” with a sweet, almost wistful smile. I mentioned my gay friends. My voting history. My feeling that people who stole handicapped parking spaces should be hobbled. I told him about my fear of earthworms. He sympathized and admitted his fear of potato eyes.
Nathan didn’t mind the old-fashioned courtship. Sometimes, he’d bring me a bouquet of flowers. Once, a small cardboard box tied in twine, containing a perfect red velvet cupcake. I’d send him photos from our dates, since I was never without my camera—the old woman on the bench, the sun glinting off One World Trade Center. I took him to the best Polish restaurant in Brooklyn and introduced him to the wonders of homemade pierogi. We went for a walk in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the golden aspen leaves drifting down around us, and went to the top of the Empire State Building, something he’d never done, which I found incomprehensible. He was an architect, after all.
“We ever gonna sleep together?” he asked amiably as we surveyed the miracle of New York’s skyline.
“Someday, maybe,” I said, running a finger along his wrist, feeling the heavy thud of his pulse. “If you’re very lucky. Keep up with the cupcakes.”
The next day, two dozen cupcakes were delivered to my studio.
The truth was, I was almost afraid to sleep with him. What if I found out that he liked to use a riding crop on his lovers, or could get it up only if I called him Caesar?
Nope. When the day came, after seven and a half weeks and nineteen dates, he asked me to take the train up to his place in Cambry-on-Hudson. Asked me to pack an overnight bag. Gave me a tour of his massive, beautiful house and, when he showed me the master bedroom, said, “Please note the California king-size bed comfortably accommodates two.”
He made me dinner. We had a bottle of wine. And we did sleep together.
It was lovely. He was lovely.
Finally, I asked the question that had been bugging me from the first day we’d met. “Nathan, why did you ask me out?”
“It was an impulse,” he said, and I gave him points for not delivering a schmaltzy answer. “You just seemed...together. And happy.”
I liked that a lot.
One night, after a long kiss good-night that made my stomach gather in a giddy, delicious squeeze, he whispered, “I love you, you know,” and my whole chest ached with heat.
“I love you, too,” I breathed without thinking.
My next thought was Too early. Too easy. Too soon.
Six weeks later, he proposed.
It was fast. But we weren’t kids. He’d been married already. And children, which seemed like an elusive dream akin to spending the summer horseback riding through Montana with Derek Jeter, were now a possibility. One way or another, biological or adoptive, we both wanted to be parents. He loved his two nephews like crazy. Always wanted to be a father. Madeleine, his ex-wife, had changed her mind on that; it was the issue that ended their marriage.
And, I thought, life was uncertain. Look at Eric, hit with cancer at thirty-two years old (though thankfully, he caught it early, and it was a cancer with a high cure rate). My sister could’ve lost him. Live life to the fullest. Seize the day. Et cetera.
His parents weren’t thrilled; well, his father seemed fine, kissing me on the cheek and forgetting my name almost immediately in a benign, scotchy way. His mother looked elegantly perplexed but was classy enough to say, “I’m sure we’ll become quite close.” His sister, Brooke, was warm, and her husband was quite nice, as well. Their little boys were beautiful; cousins for my future children. The thought caused a palpable tremor of joy.
My own family was mixed. Dad, who was enduring the off-season by rewatching every game he hadn’t personally called, tore his eyes off the TV and said, “Good for you, Poodle! About time! You’ve been with him what, ten years?”
“No, that’s Ainsley,” I said. “This is kind of a whirlwind thing.”
“Those are the best. Like me and Michelle,” he reminisced fondly, naming Ainsley’s mother.