It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (17 page)

The only circumstance that could alter my position would be if, by some miracle, Elisa and I could afford a house of our own. I don’t mean to plead poverty; there are plenty of places in the world where we could afford to have a home of grand proportions. They just don’t happen to be in an area where I can be employed on a network television show or where Elisa can work on a Fourier transform infrared imaging spectrometer. So we’re stuck.

But if there were to be a house somewhere in our future, I’d give Elisa the gift she craves. The one that might make her feel at home in this strange and anything-but-superior land. It wouldn’t be the house itself. But, buried in one of its smaller rooms, wrapped in colorful paper and decorated with ribbons, would be her first American bidet. Better yet, dueling “his and hers” models. Better still, one in every bathroom of the house, in case her mother or father come to visit. Maybe we’d put one on the front porch, to make sure no one enters without being fresh as a daisy. Forget wiping your feet, wash your ass before you come in!

There we’d be, the most sanitized, well-ironed family on the block. Now if only we could get those delis and grocery stores to clean themselves up. Or even a fraction of the population to stop, clear their heads of the propaganda they’ve been force-fed since birth, to resist the urge to berate others while aggrandizing themselves, and to sit down and carefully, tenderly, with or without a washcloth or pre-moistened baby wipe (or even any prosciutto), make sure their own asses are as clean as they think they are, or as clean as they might be.

I just knew. Like in all the fairy tales I’d never believed, like with all the couples whose stories I couldn’t stand to hear. I saw the smile of the woman who’d later be my wife, felt an instant level of comfort and ease I’d never experienced before, and knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I just knew.

The third time we met.

But, still…

“So, how did you two meet?”

It’s the most common question asked of anyone who participates as one-half of a couple. Job interview, dinner party, high school reunion, adulterous liaison. Regardless of the surroundings (or even whether both parties are present), when the spouse comes up, the question inevitably follows. Of course, the terror of every inquisitor, and the bane of every event where the question is asked, are the people who think they’ve got a good story when they really don’t. I think Elisa and I do.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Our pairing seems to amuse a lot of people. They express surprise that we were able to find each other. I’m known for my work as an actor. My wife makes a living performing infrared spectroscopic characterization of bone mineral and matrix properties of transgenic mice
over-expressing insulin-like growth factor binding protein 5 (that’s IGFBP-5, for those of you in the know). It’s not the usual combination of careers.

My wife is a scientist. She earned a master’s degree in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Bologna in the mid-1990s, then accepted a Rotary scholarship shortly afterward to come to the United States and earn a second master’s degree in biophysical chemistry at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Bologna to Newark. That’s moving up in the world. Besides the aesthetic compromises involved, the complicating factor of the two degrees was that while the first was studied for and accomplished in Italian, the second was taught, and earned, in English.

Me, I recite dialogue in front of a motion picture camera. The only scientific, or simply mathematical, thing I can say about my work is that the camera records it at twenty-four frames per second. Unless it’s shooting video. Then I’m not sure what’s going on.

So, how
did
we meet? Why did we seek each other out, over months and months, and fall in love? And how did I morph from a classic specimen of the man who can’t commit, into a man who was sure he’d found exactly what he’d always wanted, and who went after it with less ambivalence than he’d ever felt about anything before? It’s a good story. I think.

On June 1, 2002, my brother, Lowell, had a party at his new home in Rhinecliff, New York. The guests that day ranged from childhood friends to recent acquaintances. A number of them were people I’d spent hours with every day twenty to thirty years before, but had hardly seen or spoken with in the past ten. Images of those old friends were etched indelibly into my memory, but they’d since slimmed down or spread out, opened up or closed off, and been altered in other, less easily categorized ways. Core connections remained, but layers and layers of stranger had accumulated to cover up that core. Often, the stranger they’d come to resemble most was one of their parents. In the midst of these reunions I was introduced to a friend of my brother’s named Jennifer. Jennifer introduced me to a friend she’d brought along named Elisa.

The Hudson River Valley in New York State is one of the most beautiful regions in the world. It can also be, during the late spring to early autumn months, ridiculously hot, humid, and oppressively uncomfortable. By late morning, at my brother’s gathering, the temperature was already approaching eighty-five degrees with the humidity hovering around 60 percent.

I was surprised by the way the exotically accented woman I’d just been introduced to was dressed. Elisa was wearing a black skirt, black fishnet stockings, and red high-heeled shoes. I thought she was ultra-sophisticated and way out of my league.

Most of my relationships had been with small women, extremely slender, who tended to look years younger than they actually were. They were actresses, for the most part, or women who wanted to be actresses, and I tended to go for the ones who were intelligent and sexy, and who looked – give or take a few years – like they could have been teenagers.

Elisa would never be mistaken for anything other than a woman. She is, by any standards other than the anorexic ones of Hollywood, slim herself. But she’s not a waif. Her curves weren’t hidden by what she was wearing that day.

We spoke at my brother’s party, but not more than a few sentences. The only exchange I recall was when I said, “Fantastic stockings.”

Some weeks later, at home in Santa Monica, I got a call from my brother’s friend Jennifer telling me she and Elisa were in Napa Valley and that they’d soon be passing through Los Angeles. I wasn’t surprised to hear from her. Jennifer had taken my number at my brother’s house and told me she and Elisa would be traveling in California and that she’d get in touch. But the call was made from Elisa’s cell phone. “Atti, E.” showed up on my caller ID. I didn’t delete the number from the phone’s memory over the next few days, even though I already had Jennifer’s number should I need it. Jennifer and I made plans for the three of us to get together about a week later.

I got a slightly better sense of Elisa during one evening out with her and Jennifer once they arrived in Santa Monica. Late that night, after we’d had dinner, they came back to my apartment for a drink. Elisa mimed slipping off the attractive-but-ill-designed chairs I’d purchased at a street fair.

I remember thinking, Oh, look at that. She’s a clown.

Our senses of humor didn’t mesh completely. Earlier in the evening, after passing a statue that overlooks the Pacific Ocean of the actual Santa Monica, I pulled out my tired LA joke that she was “the patron Saint of Screenplays.”

Elisa nodded seriously.

“I’m kidding,” I told her, not understanding how she could have misunderstood. But I was the one who didn’t get it. I had no idea then that there are Catholic saints devoted to matters far more mundane than screenplay writing. There are patron saints of cooks and computer users. There are patron saints of librarians and lost articles. There is a patron saint against oversleeping.

A few weeks later I learned I’d be traveling to New York for a two-week trip for filming. I grabbed my phone and flipped through the saved numbers. “Atti, E.” was there, right where I’d left it. I decided to give her a call.

But what was the protocol? I wondered. Elisa hadn’t given me her phone number. She’d never even called me herself. I had the number only as a result of her friend’s borrowing her cell phone to call me several weeks earlier. I couldn’t decide whether calling her out of the blue would seem strange or simply be the adult thing to do (the key word there being “adult,” and the key point being my unfamiliarity, at age forty, with what type of behavior constitutes it).

Several months before meeting Jennifer and Elisa I’d discovered Internet dating. I’d scanned a few Web sites and packed my schedule with meetings with complete strangers. This activity proved two contradictory facts: (1) there are large numbers of women I am capable of feeling attracted to, and (2) I feel compatibility with almost none of them. Internet dating is great. It’s fascinating. It can even be fun. But it’s also fucking exhausting.

One of the women I met was named Noelle. Noelle’s “profile” had specified that she was interested in finding someone to date for a serious relationship, and that she wasn’t interested in what’s often categorized as “casual sex,” “NSA” (No Strings Attached; c’mon, get with it), or “hookups,” as the sites aimed at younger players call them. When I felt certain, by visit number three, that I wasn’t interested in Noelle as a serious partner, I took her up on her encouragement to speak honestly. “After all,” Noelle had said, “you’ve got friends and I’ve got friends. If we don’t hit it off with each other, maybe we’d like someone else one of us knows.”

What a plan, I thought. Secondary benefits to less-than-ideal Internet dates endured. With little invested, each date (with an agreeable, open-minded collaborator) could exponentially expand your universe of potential dating partners.

But when I told Noelle that I didn’t think a serious relationship between the two of us was going to interest me, her response was to lay one very serious kiss on me. She then suggested that there were other ways we could have fun. The mixed messages were flying around the room. They were screeching like banshees and bouncing off the walls.

In one of my better exercises of judgment, I resisted temptation. Noelle eased off her erotic enticement, expressed her understanding and agreement, and we vowed to remain friends. The one kiss, initiated by her, was the only vaguely sexual event to pass between us. About a week later I was asked to join Noelle and some of her friends for a dinner party. I found myself immediately attracted to, and bantering playfully with, a friend of hers named Lynne. I thought the Internet dating dividends might be about to pay off. The next day I spent ten seconds locating Lynne’s name in the phone book and gave her a call. She was glad to hear from me, and we set up a date.

Those of you who are a lot smarter than I am – or simply in possession of better instincts – should be having a good laugh already. For those who need to have it explained, I’d walked myself into an ambush. I was about to get hammered from both sides.

The first call came from Lynne.

“How did you get my number?” she demanded.

“I looked your name up in the phone book.”

That seemed to take her by surprise.

“Well, I thought you’d gotten it from Noelle. I just called her to tell her we were going out, and she’s really upset.”

“Why?” I asked. “Noelle and I both agreed we weren’t interested in being involved with each other. She’s the one who offered to introduce me to her friends.”

“Well, I think you’d better call her,” Lynne said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable going out with you until you cleared things up with her.”

I didn’t get the chance to call, because the phone rang again and this time it was Noelle.

“I can’t believe you called Lynne without telling me first.”

“But, Noelle, you offered to introduce me to your friends. You
did
introduce me to one of them. All I did was call her up.”

“Well, it was disrespectful of you to ask her out without telling me first.”

So my confusion about what constitutes “adult behavior” (or what the rules are in regard to phone numbers caught by caller ID off cell phones borrowed from friends) might now be more understandable. The definition of “adult” seems to vary from group to group, and from circumstance to circumstance. It’s plastic, so to speak.

I had only one date with Lynne, who turned out to still be in love with the boyfriend she’d stopped seeing two weeks earlier. We took a hike in a park above the Pacific Ocean where she told me how gorgeous his cock was, and how he’d seduced her into enjoying anal sex even though she’d previously been sure she had no interest in it. I’m not against discussing beautiful cocks and anal sex on first dates. I just happen to prefer that the sex and the cock under discussion have some potential of involving me, or mine.

As we rounded a bend in the middle of the woods, Lynne stopped short and gasped. I thought there must have been a rattlesnake in our path and jumped back. Barely in view in the distance was a young couple lying on a blanket just off to the side of the trail. They were deeply entwined, as close to having sex as two fully clothed people could be.

“I think that’s my boyfriend!” Lynne hissed. “He told me he was at work today.” She whipped out her cell phone in the middle of the woods and started to dial.

What am I doing here? I thought. This is what I got yelled at by two people to enjoy? A woman suffering from anal sex withdrawal, watching her supposedly ex-boyfriend – whom she still speaks with every day –humping some other woman in the woods? If we’d been anywhere near civilization I would have been tempted to just walk away. Since we were in the wilderness, the only place I could have walked, other than straight ahead toward the couple on the trail, was off a cliff.

Lynne got no answer at her ex-boyfriend’s office. She spent a long time staring ahead, then examining the trail behind. She looked as if she were considering the possibility of backtracking and redoing the two-mile loop we’d already nearly completed. Finally she smiled and said, “It’s okay. I don’t think it’s him.” She walked past the couple, and away from me.

Internet dating. Lots of fun. Very tiring.

Perhaps it’s now clearer why I was less than sure how to proceed when it came to calling Elisa. I even considered calling her friend Jennifer to pretend I needed to ask for Elisa’s phone number, even though I already had it. Thank goodness I finally decided to act like a
grown-up, which to me meant picking up the phone and just giving a call.

“Hi, Elisa. This is Evan Handler calling. I’m the guy you and Jennifer had dinner with a few weeks ago in Santa Monica. I’m going to be in New York for a couple of weeks starting Monday, and I wondered if you might like to get together while I’m in town.”

I left my phone number, spent two weeks in New York, and didn’t hear a word.

Ouch, I thought. Okay. Not interested.

Three weeks later, when I was back in Santa Monica, Elisa called. She’d been in Italy visiting her family and had just gotten my message. I was thrilled by her enthusiasm, since it meant I hadn’t been rejected. I was, unfortunately, not as thrilled by her apparent availability. The new wrinkle was that, over the two weeks in New York, while hearing nothing from Elisa, I’d allowed my Australian infatuation to rebloom. Out of frustration with the dearth of enticing partners we were meeting, Abbey Leigh and I had both taken to overlooking the violent disagreements we’d had while living together in Los Angeles eighteen months earlier. When I told the women at
Sex and the City
I was considering going to Sydney to surprise my understandably guarded (and presumably still-tempestuous) ex, they had a grand time in the makeup trailer referencing one of their earlier episodes.