Laura Bennett - Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?

“Would you like to go for a drink tonight?”

“How about tomorrow? I have to work late.”

“No, it has to be tonight. What time are you done?”

“Ten?”

“Perfect.”

Julie took Cleo to the movies and Peter and I went to a bar near my apartment for martinis. I wore the dress and shoes from the night of the dinner party—it was my best outfit, and honestly, the man didn’t notice. Probably because he still wears the same clothes he wore in boarding school, nametags intact, but also because he just doesn’t get hung up on superficial details. Owing, no doubt, to the martinis, I don’t really remember much from that first date, except Peter sitting in the gutter trying to tie the tiny ankle strap of my high-heeled shoe.

Then, breaking every other rule in the dating book, he ignored both my drunkenness and my high-maintenance footwear and called the very next morning to invite me for the weekend to his house upstate. With my child. Who does that? Let’s see, I thought. Fifty years old, never married, no children. Two possible explanations: severe commitment phobia or gay. What did I have to lose? I certainly wasn’t ready for a second husband, and really, what single mom doesn’t need all the gay help she can get?

I drove. There were two things I had kept from my marriage: my daughter and my Porsche 911 (a girl’s got to have a sexy getaway car). I was going broke paying for a garage in New York City, so this was my big chance to show off the Porsche. The weekend found us speeding up the Palisades Parkway, headed to Peter’s house in Cold Spring, New York.

“So what kind of a house is it?” I asked, curious about what style a fellow architect might have chosen.

“Nothing fancy.” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “Just a raised ranch.”

I immediately turned the wheel to the side of the road and threw on the brakes. I got out of the car, walked around to Peter, leaned down, and looked in at him. Blue eyes. Mustache. White hair. I looked up at the side of the road and saw the “Welcome to New York” sign. Peter and Cleo both just stared at me. Raised. Flicking. Ranch. The entire beige-infused psychic episode came flooding back to me with amazing clarity.

“You are my destiny,” I told him. I didn’t stop to think about how a fifty-year-old bachelor would take such a revelation. It just popped out. Peter continued to sit there. He didn’t get out of my car and run away down the Palisades. I returned to my side of the car and drove off (into the sunset). We have never looked back.

PETER’S MOTHER TOLD ME THAT HE WAS GAY. I GUESS THAT’S WHAT A mother tells herself after watching fifty years of her son’s failed relationships. Or she could have seen the destiny on the wall and was looking to scare me off. The reason might have been the location of our first Big Date: Africa, a marked upgrade from Peter’s usual helicopter ride over Manhattan. Or perhaps what troubled her was the fact that we didn’t bother to get married before we had Peik. Anyway, something about me threw her, and all the other people in Peter’s life, way off. They came just short of telling me I “trapped” him by getting pregnant. After all, a determined bachelor who had slunk away from three engagements—once, after the invitations had gone out— must have been tricked by a pretty determined hussy. I can see trapping a man with one pregnancy, but five? The man is obviously a willing participant. Even so, one of Peter’s past loves still describes him as the love of her life. Others continue to call and write or stop by his office to catch up with him. I get the feeling they all see him as the one that got away, and I’m pretty sure they’re on to something.

That being said, picture this: you’re walking down the halls of an ivy-covered institution of higher learning, or perhaps the robotics-parts aisle at the local Radio Shack. You see a man of average build, with shocking Einsteinian white hair and round tortoiseshell spectacles, from behind which peer magnified round blue eyes. There is a brushy mustache and a toothy grin. The man is dressed in vintage nutty-professor wear: tweed jacket, detached suede elbow patches, wrinkled chinos cuffed over Converse Jack Purcell sneakers. A carefully constructed, haphazard disheveled state. This man is the mad scientist right out of central casting. Now tell me, does your mind jump to “God, what a catch!”? Or do you think, “What the hell is the six-foot redhead in the sexy dress doing with him?” Well, in either case, it was—and is—love. Peter once told me that he had been waiting his entire life for me to come along. As the beige spirits predicted, I had no choice in the matter—he is my destiny.

THEN AGAIN, MRS. SHELTON MIGHT HAVE HAD A POINT. ONE DAY I was paging through the arts section of the newspaper and spotted a sure loser.

“Oh, look,” I told Peter, “another all-star-cast movie. Those never work. Something called The Women.”

“The Women?” he asked, looking up at me through his glasses. “That’s not new. It’s a remake of the 1939 classic starring Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, and Joan Fontaine.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, stunned by his offhanded remark, and not a little scared by the list of women—gay icons, each in her own way.

“How do you not?” he said, a small amount of disdain in his voice. I reflected on how his mother once told me he was “light on his feet.”

“He’s one of the boys, you know,” she imparted. “One of the boys. ”

Well, thank God he’s also a pyromaniac, because his utter love of all things incendiary marks him as completely not gay. Whenever we travel through states where fireworks are legal, he stops at the roadside stands and stocks up. He keeps a stash in the basement of our country house and brings a few out on special occasions. On Truman’s birthday, a rocket Peter had lit took off flying on the horizontal, aimed squarely at Peter. He caught the noise over his shoulder and immediately started running through the field. In his defense, the rocket did look as though it were heat seeking. We all watched from the house, laughing hysterically as he ran like a girl to avoid the explosion of color. He later claimed that he was going for the laugh, but he wasn’t very convincing, sweating and huffing as though he’d just run a marathon of fear. Okay, maybe not completely not gay.

I have found a way to use some of Peter’s, let us say, more feminine traits to my advantage. He is always willing to help me with the design of a dress, and he is never leery of carrying my purse at a party, he is so secure in his manhood, or lack thereof. I think he secretly likes the sparkle of the tiny Judith Leiber clutch against his old Rat Pack black tuxedo. Even more amazing, though, is his complete lack of hesitation when I send him out for tampons or yeast infection cures.

“Here,” he says, handing me a bag. “I got you the Monistat three-day capsules with the external cream, and the one-day treatment from Vagisil that comes with the cool comfort wipes. I wasn’t sure which you’d want, and they both sounded like viable possibilities.”

I’ve always been aware of how much smarter Peter is than pretty much everyone around him, including his wife and offspring. I used to chalk this up to the age difference (eighteen years, but who’s counting), but lately I’ve had to admit that he is simply always right. I have come to accept this truth, which makes it no less annoying. Because he is smart, he assumed his children would be as well. He was a bit disappointed when the test scores started rolling in.

“Sorry,” I said, handing him a pre-k admissions score sheet. “I’m average. I diluted your gene pool.”

This houseful of average doesn’t bother me at all. I have seen many a person with a genius IQ have difficulty navigating day-to-day life. Peter is one of these types, always misplacing things and being mildly disappointed in the world around him. It can’t be easy for him, and if he were a people person, I’m sure it would bother him more. He has wonderful social skills, but prefers not to use them. Peter’s carefully cultivated “crazy professor” demeanor is an attempt to ward off normal discourse, particularly with strangers. He also has this way of looking at you with crazy horse eyes, which is sort of off-putting at parties.