Andrew wonders how it can be that I still have not written the story of how we met. We tell it often enough. I usually start with “We were set up by the last person in the world anyone would ever allow to set them up,” and he nods in agreement. Writing it, I realize, will mean telling the part only my closest women friends know. He will like that part. So here goes.
There is a lunchtime basketball game at the university where I teach: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at noon at the Student Recreation Center. The core participants have been playing together for over thirty years, but as with most “academic” groups, the membership is constantly evolving. One afternoon in early 2004, I am sitting at my desk in the English Department, five buildings down from the rec center when I hear Professor Badger, one of my senior colleagues, say from my office doorway behind me, “We told this new guy playing basketball with us about you.”
I spin around in my chair and tell him, “That is not allowed.”
He is taken aback. “Why not? He’s a nice guy.”
“Do you even like me this week?” I ask. On some department issues, we’ve been on the same side, but we have just as often butted heads. Professor Badger, a former high school and college football player, is not a small man, and he tends to try bullying on occasion. Paradoxically, he is also very sensitive, and I am brash (one of those descriptors applied to women who speak their minds). So is his wife, but he doesn’t take candor as well from me as he must from her (probably because he can tell I am not nearly so enamored with him as she is). We’ve had our moments during meetings. Apparently, I have a tendency to offend him with my “insensitive” brusqueness.
I first learned that I “hurt his feelings” from the department chair when I was still untenured. The chair showed up in my office to report this critique after a meeting of the department’s Executive Committee, on which I represented the tenure-track faculty. “Really?” I asked. “Is the big full professor so intimidated by the untenured assistant professor that he had to take his complaint to the boss?” The chair smiled, recognizing, I hoped, the childishness of Badger’s complaint. But I was not amused and a year or so later guessed that Badger’s was one of the two negative votes on my tenure, in spite of my (according to the terms on my annual evaluations) “outstanding” publication and service records (and “very good” teaching—students are also resentful of brash women, which keeps my student opinion surveys too low for “outstanding” teaching evaluations).
So back to my office, Professor Badger taking up my doorway with his news that he has told a basketball buddy (God knows what) about me. Badger responds to my question regarding how he feels about me on this particular day that he decided to play matchmaker, “You’re okay.” And then he adds, without any recognition of the impropriety of the insinuation, “But you’ve been cranky. He’s single. I thought I’d do you a favor.” His tone makes clear this is his way of saying he thinks I need to get laid. I ignore the inappropriateness of him alluding to my sex life. Nor do I point out that my “crankiness” probably has less to do with my current celibacy than with having to watch what I say in front of overly sensitive colleagues who will be voting on my, by then, upcoming promotion to full professor. I am aware that some senior colleagues like Badger make more of my assertiveness, which they find offensive, than of my scholarship, which they resent. Case in point: in this situation, I am supposed to express my gratitude to Badger for thinking of me so solicitously, rather than my horror that he has even thought about my sex life.
During this period of my life, I was a serial monogamist with unfortunate taste in and bad luck with men, and at this particular time, I was between guys, with no prospects in sight. Single in Greenville sucks—for women at least. I’ve found that people are constantly setting men up with single women they know but are less inclined to set women up. In truth, Badger was more likely trying to do a favor for the new basketball player than for me. A few years before, I learned that the people who sold me my house, a doctor who restores old homes as a hobby, and his wife, a socialite and arts aficionado, later played matchmaker for a guy I was dating during our negotiations, which is how they’d met him. (We’d broken up shortly after.) “Don’t take it personally,” the wife told me when I asked why they never offered to fix me up with someone. Her husband, she said with a trace of bitterness exposing her feigned tolerant amusement, “likes to live vicariously through men he introduces to his nurses.”
“Well, he needs to find me a doctor to make it up to me,” I replied. He did not.
Around the time of Professor Badger’s efforts to set me up, I told my mom that now that I’ve been immortalized in poetry, fiction, and music, thanks to my attraction to artistic types, I should next find a visual artist. She responded, “I’ll paint you. Go find a doctor this round.” It wasn’t an empty offer. She is an artist, so she can paint me, and she was right that I should give up on the creative types—too sensitive, egos too fragile. I needed to get over the Byronic heroes—and I was making progress. Around the time of my colleague telling some new guy about me, I met a very cute single writer, but when he remarked during a reading he gave from his latest novel that his publisher wouldn’t let him change the dedication for the paperback edition just because he’d broken up with the woman he’d originally dedicated the book to, I heeded the red flag and did not pursue. (I’m glad. We’re friends now, and he still likes me—unlike most guys I’ve dated.) And when a wannabe creative writer pursued me at a literary conference, I was flattered by his attentiveness, but did not commit to seeing him again, having picked up on some warning signs. He gave me a copy of his self-published novel, which was frighteningly violent and misogynistic—not to mention riddled with grammatical errors. I never finished it. I also soon rejected his pursuit, which started with a phone call minutes after I got home from the conference, as though he’d timed my drive. After several lengthy phone calls (this was pre-texting, still in the days of talking on the phone, a landline), I told him I was flattered by his interest but knew from experience that a long-distance relationship (he lived three hours from me) was not feasible with my work schedule. His angry accusation that I had led him on in response to this gentle and reasonable rejection confirmed my suspicions about him.
Returning to the present possibility being proffered by my overly sensitive colleague, in an effort to make nice after my initial unenthusiastic response to his “generous” news, I ask, “So who is he?” I will admit, I am curious, but not hopeful. As I say, pickings are slim here for non-undergraduate single women. Also, I cannot imagine what kind of guy this colleague would think a good match for me.
“He’s a chemist, but he reads,” he tells me. Other than that, all he reports is the guy’s name, Andy. I know an Andy in the Chemistry Department. He and I were on Faculty Senate together some years before. Nice guy but not my type, and he certainly never showed any interest in me, though I have seen him at the gym where I work out, which is the same rec center where Badger’s regular pick-up basketball games are played.
Later that day I run into Dr. Mole, another one of my senior colleagues who plays in the MWF noontime basketball games. “So what have y’all done to me with this guy you’re playing ball with?” I ask. He is not someone whose tastes I can imagine sharing (case in point: Professor Badger is his closest friend), but at least, to my knowledge, he’s never been angry with me, has no grudge he might indulge by setting me up with a jerk.
“Andrew’s a nice guy, recently divorced,” Dr. Mole says, adding the information that this Andrew is a new hire, which means not the Andy from Chemistry I already know. And as Dr. Mole seems to have picked up from the new player (which Professor Badger either missed or just ignored), Andrew does not use the nickname Andy.
But first, curious, in spite of my misgivings, and lonely, but still trying not to be hopeful, I look this new Andrew up on the Chemistry Department website (this is before regular website updating and social media). The photograph seems to confirm what I figured: new hire equals young. Andrew is a new, untenured assistant professor in Chemistry, so he could be in his early thirties. How young do Badger and Mole think I am? I wonder. I should be flattered. I am forty-one. I’m a senior associate professor by this time, tenured but waiting on my next book’s publication before going up for promotion to full professor. Women who speak frankly have to have a homerun portfolio so as not to allow room for one of the many referees in the promotion process to call a foul on a slam dunk.
Nothing happens after Professor Badger’s matchmaking reference. I’m relieved and annoyed and disappointed. Badger is right: I am cranky, but more out of loneliness than the sexual frustration he imagines. It is a couple-centric culture, so I have spent many evenings, not just nights, alone. It’s been more than six months since my last breakup, and the only dates I’ve had in between were with more mistakes-in-the-making. At one time and another, I ask Mole and Badger about the guy they’d mentioned, pretending to myself I am only making conversation, feigning ambivalence to them, but in reality, as one of my friends describes it years later, part of my proactive efforts to find a mate. I show this new chemistry professor’s web page to a female colleague who would understand my hesitation to be hopeful about anyone Badger picked out for me. She points out Andrew’s promising education credentials: Harvard and Duke, a post-doc at Cal Tech, which she informs me is a very big deal for a scientist (her husband is a professor in the sciences, so she knows these things). She notes the fact that he was previously on the tenure track at another university. Not so young as a fresh out of university PhD, she assures me.
Then one Friday afternoon, quite some time later, it seems, I get a phone call from Professor Badger, inviting me to join some folks for happy hour. “Thanks for thinking of me,” I say, “But I’m going to a function over at the library.” Yes, that’s what Fridays are like for forty-plus single women in Greenville—nothing better to do than go to a library function. And frankly, I would typically consider the library event more appealing than drinks with Badger and those who hang with him. They’ll just spend the whole evening complaining about department politics. I admit, I’d be tempted if I didn’t have plans. Spending weekend nights home alone is depressing. Still, spending a Friday evening rehashing the department’s contentious issues is not so appealing, particularly when you know it’s just venting and won’t translate into any action toward improvement. They bluster at the bar but are usually mum at meetings (when they show up).
There is an odd silence on the other end of the phone in response to my thanks but no thanks to the invitation to join them for happy hour, and then Badger says, in an uncharacteristically soft voice, “But you have to come.” At first I am puzzled, but then I grasp the implication.
“What have you done?” I ask.
“After playing b-ball at noon today, we invited that guy I told you about to join us for beers. We told him you were coming.”
I can’t decide if I’m more excited or panicked about this.
“Just come. No pressure about Andy,” Badger orders.
“I’ll see what I can do. I’d committed to this other thing,” I say, giving myself an out. No one is expecting me at the library function, but Badger doesn’t know that. I’d just noticed it on the university calendar and thought it would be something to do, hoping I would see someone I knew there who would want to go get dinner or a drink after.
I know, however, that I have to take this chance. I was not deep-down optimistic about the few men I met during this period, but I did enjoy the early days of fantasizing that just maybe this is the one—or this one is. So I call my friend Amanda, looking for a wing woman. “I don’t care what you have planned for tonight,” I say when she picks up. “I need you to meet me at Ham’s at 5.” She is the friend who will later describe me as proactive about addressing my single state.
Andrew shows up not too long after Amanda and I settle in at the table with Professor and Mrs. Badger, Dr. Mole, and some others from the department. I see that Andrew is not as young as he looks on his web page, but he still appears to be younger than I am. Damn. Young enough to want kids, so he won’t be interested in a woman over forty, I think, until I learn in the course of the evening that he already has three children—plenty enough for anyone. And besides, my track record is such that I’m not really that concerned. I just like to enter a new fantasy with a hopeful attitude about a future with the guy. Deep down, I know it is more likely to be no different from the others: a couple of months of the excitement of new, followed by a month of, hmmm, what do these red flags portend? And then, doom; these red flags portend doom. Get out before he gets too attached. I’d learned the hard way that they get very angry if you break up after they’ve gotten attached, and my rule now is four months, tops. After four months, if I don’t see a future, I’m out.
The conversation during our TGIF evening does turn to complaining—about university rather than department politics since Andrew is not in our department (a huge plus—dating within the department is, as a female colleague described it to me after I’d done so, shitting where you eat), so in this atmosphere of complaining about university life, he and I bond over mutual concerns about the dean, whom we do have in common, as our departments are in the same college. For the science faculty, I learn, the complaints are due to the former English professor-turned dean not understanding how grant-funding in the sciences work. Granting agencies are not as impressed with our regional university as our dean is (he calls the university the Hahvahd on the Tah [translation: the Harvard on the Tar River]—it is most definitely not that, even if it is a fine regional university with an admirable mission of service to a largely impoverished region of the state). My colleagues in English and I are upset, if not angry by the dean’s lack of concern about our department’s direction under the current chair, away from a literary/humanities core, toward technical writing (not coincidentally, the field of the chair’s wife). My male colleagues, in particular, are not used to the administration dismissing their concerns. I grew up in a small town in the Deep South, surrounded by people who could not understand the concept of studying literature, so this kind of disinterest is nothing new to me. I am seeking, however, a source of support at home (which I did have within my family back home, if not out in the community, which could not understand a young woman whose primary ambition was not motherhood).
The evening of beer and bitching is enjoyable enough (Is it called bitching if most of the voices are male?). I do not need to say to Amanda, “Goodness, we’re going to miss the movie,” and make for a fast exit, as we planned, just in case Andrew turned out to be a young version of Badger. But I can’t tell what kind of impression I’ve made on this new guy. I am not optimistic. He is so handsome and definitely younger than I am, if not so much younger as I feared. But I do have low self-esteem when it comes to my appeal to men, a result most likely of too many men telling me what’s wrong with me over the years: mainly, it seems, that I am ambitious, assertive, and candid, which they find charming at first, and later an indication that I am too self-centered (translation: not completely consumed by them and sometimes go as far as to put my own desires above theirs).
On my way home, I stop to pick up some hot doughnuts (the least I can do to pay back my wing woman, who owns the local Krispy Kreme franchise), which I take to another friend, who is convalescing after surgery. “So, did he ask you for your number?” this friend asks. I’d told her where I was going earlier, when I called to let her know what time I’d come see her.
“There were too many people there. That would have been awkward. And he’s so young. He’s probably wondering what they were thinking suggesting we would be a match.”
Perhaps sweetened by the treats I brought her (and high on her pain killers), she says with certainty, “He’ll call.”
“We’ll see.” He didn’t. But we did run into each other not too long after meeting—emphasis on run, for here’s the part Andrew does not know, still, these many years later—and won’t know until this essay is published.
I’d just missed him. Walking toward the exit at the north end of the building my office is in, I saw him pass, heading toward his building, which is south of mine. I’d just missed casually running into him. Except that it isn’t too late. It is the Friday afternoon before Spring Break, so my building is largely empty, allowing me to (literally) sprint back down the hall and “casually” exit the south end, just about when Andrew reaches the sidewalk outside of that entrance, he, of course, strolling rather than sprinting. I can’t believe I am not winded. We chat a bit, including talking about getting together, but no specifics.
My Spring Break work plan is to read through and edit one chapter of my nearly finished book manuscript per day in order to submit the complete manuscript to the press by the end of the break. So, on Tuesday, to reward myself for being on task, I decide that I will not wait for him to call me. We said we’d get together. Why am I waiting for him to call? I’m a feminist. I will call him. And I do. I tell him of being on schedule with my project and, finished for the day, am going out to have a beer somewhere to reward myself. Would he like to join me? Bad timing: he is playing on an intramural basketball team (perhaps a good sign, showing he is not so enamored with the noon pickup game with folks like Badger). His intramural team has a game tonight, “But what about tomorrow?” he asks, dispelling my wondering if he is giving me the brushoff.
“That’ll work,” I tell him. “I’ll have another chapter done to celebrate tomorrow.” Which I do, in spite of being nervous about having an actual date that evening. I am on task, in more ways than one.
I suggest that he meet me at my house, right off campus, and we can walk downtown for a beer. We eat a pizza, too, then back to my house, where we talk past midnight. He talks more than I do, I think, not seeing it as a problem. This guy can hold his own with me, I can tell. I also notice when he stands up to leave that he just seems to keep rising, such long legs. But most important I see, not for the first time that evening, how his smile reaches his big brown eyes.
My coffee pot chooses the next morning to die, after I’d had only about four hours of sleep. But I finish the next chapter that day anyway. When I set a goal for myself, if that goal is within my control, I reach it. Speaking of which, I see Andrew again that weekend.
At some point in our developing relationship, Andrew asks me what Professor Badger meant by telling him he only had a few months with me. I tell him it means I have to kill that man for his indiscretion, but then I explain what Badger seems to have found out. Academic life is something of a fishbowl, so I am not too surprised that my colleague has picked up on my tendency in recent years to date a man for a few months and then to hear we are no longer together.
After several bad breakups, beginning with my 1980s marriage, I had finally (almost fifteen years later) realized that regardless of how doomed the relationship clearly was, the men were apparently fine with sticking it out. The artist types seemed to enjoy the drama of incompatibility, the others apparently just loathe being alone, regardless of their problems with me. Eventually, in each case, I had to figure out how to leave. I left my husband when I went to graduate school, thus not having to deal with the discomfort of meeting up with people who knew us as a couple for the preceding eight years—or, for that matter, having to deal with him after the split. I moved to another state for graduate school, then let him know that he was not joining me. We’d done unemployment before, so I told him I’d go on ahead and send him notices of potential jobs there. He could join me when he had a job, rather than give up his current job and face unemployment again. In short, I lied, with no twinge of conscience. He would not have a college degree if not for me paying his tuition, waking him up for school, and nagging him to do his homework like he was my child rather than husband.
My stepfather characterized my next long-term (almost six years this time) relationship as a pendulum swing from my ex-husband, who was not a reader. This new man was a poet, but while in the intellectual realm he may have been everything my husband was not, on the sociopathic spectrum, he was just another version. I definitely had a type. And once again, I left to escape—finished graduate school and took the first job I was offered, even though it was not tenure-track. It was not a complete escape, as my departure for graduate school had been. We did the long-distance thing for most of my time in that first job—I was lonely, my friends were still there, finishing their own graduate degrees, and he had taken my dog in when I couldn’t find a pet-friendly apartment quickly enough to take the job. But eventually I said, no more. I simply couldn’t keep traveling back and forth—for indeed, I was doing most of the traveling. We both needed to get on with our lives in our respective homes. In truth, I had finally pulled together the courage to break free of his persistent emotional abuse. More drama, but except for one awkward encounter at a professional conference when he very pointedly and publicly ignored my efforts to speak to him politely, I could just hang up the phone and ignore his pathos.
After an interim relationship with a very nice man during a year teaching in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, I blew this one promising long-term relationship by moving again for my career, having recognized that my passion for what I do lasts much longer than any of my romantic relationships.
In my new home, I met another, more true-to-my-type charmer, and this time I could not move away when I realized we were not going to work out. I was on the tenure track. After two years of high drama and a blistering breakup, I dated yet another pathetic manipulator, but managed to get out of that relationship after “only” eight months, much sooner than my tendency to stay years past realizing how very doomed the relationship is. But still not soon enough. He too was difficult to get rid of, at which point I vowed, just four months. If I don’t see marriage in the future, I will break it off at four months.
Why four months? It is not arbitrary. Back in graduate school, a very dear friend bemoaned her inability to sustain a relationship, and in my feigned wisdom (this was before my relationship with the poet became dysfunctional), I told her that the trick was to get past the third month. The first two months are the honeymoon period. The third is when you realize he is human, so you need to last that one out to see if you like this human. “No one looks good in the third month,” I said. “Get through that month of finding out who the human is, and then give him the fourth to find out if you can live with his flaws (or if he is a cad).” It was about a decade later before I took my own advice. By the time of Professor Badger’s matchmaking, two of my last relationships had lasted three to four months, and the most recent interest, not even two: as soon as the red flags emerged, I bailed.
And then I met Andrew. We still laugh at the idea that either of us would allow ourselves to be set up by Professor Badger, a man who had lewdly informed Andrew he could “promise only a few months, but they would be the best time of your life.”
“As if he would know!” I responded in horror at the inference Andrew might have drawn from such a statement. But Andrew had guessed that Badger was just being his crude self.
I’d had plenty of experience with Badger’s inappropriate innuendos—like his suggestion when he first mentioned “Andy” to me that I needed to get laid. I’d learned to turn a deaf ear to inappropriate sex-charged comments when I was a much younger woman living back in my home state, where I was not supposed to express my disapproval of the way my husband’s own brother spoke of and to me with sexual innuendo. Someone once reported to me after a particularly contentious meeting during which Badger and I were on opposite sides of an issue, that he had threatened to kick my ass—with the backhanded compliment: “It’s a nice ass, but it needs to be kicked.” And no, the male colleague who shared this remark with me did not, I am sure, call out the inappropriateness of such a remark about a junior, female colleague.
My reader is no longer wondering, I’m sure, why I was reluctant to jump on Badger’s recommendation of Andrew for my next relationship, but since my own taste tended toward the charming bad boy, I am not surprised I gave Badger’s recommendation a chance. Also, I was lonely at the time, particularly on weekends when my friends tended to do things with their families. That series of four-month relationships included six to eight months between. As I’ve said, it is not easy to be single in a town like Greenville.
Andrew also reported at some point, again puzzled, that according to Badger, I had a sex swing in my house. By this time, Andrew had discerned, I’m sure, that I am not the sex swing kind of person (I don’t even know what a sex swing is, or if there is such a thing), but I worried again if he might be wondering how Badger would know about my sex toys. (If I were a sex swing kind of person, Professor Badger would not know about it, I can assure you.) Baffled myself at first, I then chuckled. “Could he mean that?” I asked, pointing at the hammock chair swinging from the ceiling of my sunroom. I am not sure how anyone could even imagine two people in this contraption, but I’ve attended Badger’s poetry readings, and he does still have an adolescent’s imagination about sex. Professor Badger had apparently seen it at some social event at my home and fantasized it into a sex swing, even though there was no way it would hold two people, and even if it could, it did not look like it could be very comfortable for sexual purposes. Andrew, of course, knew Badger enough by this time to know exaggeration when he heard it, and by the time he asked me what in the world my colleague could be talking about, he knew me well enough to know there were no hidden sex swings in my house—and that I am not interested in married men—or any man like Badger.
I don’t remember the third or fourth month with Andrew as revealing anything new about him. Like me, he puts it all on the table from the start. He is who he is, and that is a pretty amazing guy: generous and patient, arrogant enough (in a good way, deservedly) not to be intimidated by a strong-willed, ambitious, intelligent woman who speaks her mind.
My mom has told me I just hand the people I want to love the ammunition they need to hurt me. Then I wait to see what they do with that information. Previously, men used it against me. Some women have, too, but I also have the best circle of women friends a woman could ask for, so to the women who have abused my friendship, I say, “Your loss.” None of the information I handed over to Andrew scared him away, nor has he twisted any of it to manipulate me. He still finds me funny and “fantabulous,” as he says in response to my oft-asked question (the consequences of years of men telling me what is wrong with me), “Why do you love me?”
During our years together, I have published multiple books and won several university, state, and national awards for my work, but Andrew is neither resentful of nor intimidated. Quite the contrary, he is continuously proud. For the first big award I received from the university, he drove in from two days at a National Science Foundation meeting in Virginia in record time to be there for my presentation. He calls himself the Queen’s Consort. And he’s the one with the Ivy League education.
How did he get past the four-month rule? Amanda says he snuck past his “expiration date,” as she calls it, by distracting me with house hunting. I’d told him how much I love the water, how I wanted a place to escape to, close enough to go to regularly. And he found just such a place on the Pamlico River, just twenty miles out of town, a much bigger house than I had in mind. But he knew how much space we needed to also include his three children, who would come to stay with him on weekends and in the summer. He was right. It was perfect. When I panicked—“I bought a house with a guy!”—one of my circle of close women friends told me, “It’s okay. If you made a mistake, we will help you get out of it.” And with those words, I relaxed. We bought and enjoyed that house for a dozen years. Andrew was correct that it was the right size for when his children visited. I could squirrel away upstairs in my study, looking out over the Pamlico River, and write undisturbed. And as the oldest of the children was wrapping up college and the youngest high school, we sold that house and bought our dream house on the same river—another large house, for, as my mother said, there will be grandchildren, and I will still need to sneak away sometimes to write.
In the meantime, we close off the upstairs and enjoy our evening cocktail hour looking out over the wide river. Or in the sunroom of our home near the university, which Andrew moved into to share with me during the school year when he sold his house so that we could buy the river house together. Ours is a good life—not like the fairy tales that mislead us with their vague last line, echoed by Anne Sexton in her Transformation poem “Cinderella,” “Cinderella and the prince / lived, they say, happily ever after.” Exploring that implicit promise to little girls (be good, and you will marry a handsome prince and live happily ever after), Sexton suggests that it implies a fixed monotony:
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
Andrew thinks he is boring, not one to take me dancing, for example, but I know that he is game when I decide to entertain, and he is fine with just the two of us hanging out, writing (me), reading (him).
There is chemistry, and he reads.
