He sat at his desk, white, long, clean, with a slight chip where he had banged the IKEA package against the wall of the lobby on his way in the door, turned on his computer, and selected the bookmark for the dating site for Jews. Forty was too young, he knew that now, he had known it all along, but now it had been confirmed. He wanted to take his clothes off with someone, but he needed to feel like the two of them were closer to equal. He changed his search parameters; now he was looking for women from fifty to sixty years of age.
And suddenly there were two hundred new results in the queue; a whole new world had opened up because Middlestein had decided to date age-appropriately. He clicked through a dozen of them until he found a picture of a dark, curly-haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife, Edie, from ten years earlier, before they had fallen out of love with each other, before they had drifted so far apart it was as if they were on opposite ends of the world.
He knew when that photo was taken: It was on their trip to Italy. It was their first vacation together after Robin had gone away to college and then there was nothing left but the two of them. They were fifty years old. They had been raising children for the past twenty-five years. They should have been ready for their Part Two. He read about Part Two in magazines, he had heard about it from his friends. He wanted his Part Two.
But instead they had fought over everything, every detail. Or rather, she had fought with him, derided every suggestion he made. What did he know about Rome? She was the one who had studied Italian in college and spent two weeks in Italy after graduation. She was the one who had once been basically fluent in the language and would surely be again after a day or two there. Why would they go on a tour when they could walk the streets just fine on their own? Why would they stay at a hotel near the Vatican when it was so far away from everything else? Why, when they finally arrived there, had it not occurred to him to bring better shoes? (This was when his knees were just starting to go, he remembered, and that mile-long walk through the Vatican crushed him, and the minute he complained just once, she had snapped, so by the time they got to the Sistine Chapel, she was practically shrieking, and only the repeated shushing of the security guards had quieted her.) Why was he still jet-lagged? Why was he being so weird about taking the bus if he was complaining about walking? Why did he order the same thing every night? Why didn’t he have an open mind? Why couldn’t he just enjoy himself? That might have been the vacation that killed them, or it might have been the beginning of the end. It was hard to pinpoint it. He wondered if he was having a delayed reaction, by a decade. Here he was thinking it was everything, but instead maybe it was just that one moment in time.
When they got to the Trevi Fountain that day, he was limping, his hips, his ankles, his back, everything was shattered. Edie had already consumed five espressos and two gelatos, and he had wondered if she would ever sleep again. Some pleasant-enough American girl, a little older than Robin, a tourist like them, innocent to the doom she was witnessing, offered to take their picture with the fountain as the backdrop. The result was a photo of two people standing far apart, and he knew he was unsmiling in the other half of it, the half, he noticed, that Edie had cut out of the picture. What he saw online was just her, her handbag looped over her arm, that pretty silk dress that fell nicely around her wide, sexy hips, her hair a majestic throng of curls (it had rained that morning, and the air was still humid), still a reasonably good-looking woman with an intense, hopped-up-on-caffeine smile on her face. She looked like she was clever. She looked a little dangerous. Slightly past her prime, but still she seemed ripe. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was fascinating. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was just his type. I want that woman back, he thought. I want that woman, but I want her to still love me. And he knew now—he had known this for a long time, but he had sealed it with every decision he had made in the last two months—that she was never going to love him again.
Edie, 210 Pounds