Chapter Thirty-Four: Mystery Men Part Deux

Blind dates are not always a total waste of time.

Fall faded into winter, which was somewhat awful in a damp, freezing house. Sunlight shrunk down to about eight hours a day. I bought some ceramic space heaters that were thankfully portable enough for me to carry one with me into every room, so I spent most of my time swaddled in the down bathrobe my mother gave me years ago, now lightly grease-stained, with a breadbox-sized machine and a power cord trailing behind me wherever I went.

My brother finally managed to come out for a visit, to spend Thanksgiving weekend. I told him to bring warm clothes and gave him his very own matching space heater companion. We moved my fairly giant television into my office and binged Ted Lasso with runny noses and visibly steaming breath and did as little as possible and had a very nice time.

My brother is temperamentally the closest to me in our family. He’s as much a loner as I am, with fairly confirmed opinions on the state of the world that happen to usually agree with mine, but which he doesn’t always feel the need to run on about. He invented a cocktail with some Mezcal he muled over in his suitcase, a shot of Fernet Branca, lime and a drop of agave syrup. For its smoky, pine-y flavor, we called it the Fireplace, in honor of the object we weren’t even considering in my living room, because even if it burned all day, without heat coming from the radiators, it was too small a drop in the polar ice bucket.

We spent the holiday itself with my American neighbors Tom and Callahan, who were back in town for the weekend, and a childhood friend of Callahan’s who lived in DC with her husband and their two young daughters. It was lavish and friendly, and completely devoid of French people, who don’t really get the Thanksgiving menu, nor why we have to spend all day together cooking, nor why we eat this clove-y, sage-y meal so early on a weeknight. Without having to explain anything of our most sainted tradition, we leaned in. (My brother does not throw compliments around, and he conceded that the brussels sprouts, with maple syrup and anchovies, were excellent.)

It was appropriately drunken, with the two Southern women telling morality tales out of school about scandalously ill-behaved sorority sisters for the benefit of the wide-eyed little girls. An anecdote of my own that I had told Callahan some months ago had even made it into their rotation, the better to scare the girls straight. It involved chasing my brother around the house with a meat cleaver, and then kicking the bathroom door down after he went in there to hide. He was ten, I was eight, and he had stuck a wad of gum in my hair. (I maintain I was justified.) At least we could show the girls that we had since moved on.

Five days later, my brother was on a plane back home to New York and so I was back to my stained-robe solitude. It was then that the very first fellow who had caught my eye on the local apps, the greybeard who looked a lot like my ex, popped back up again. That felt like a small light in the winter dark. Now suddenly we were chatting. He seemed witty enough. Very political, but also actually committed to action, including having run unsuccessfully for local office on the Green Party Ticket. This felt like a noble cause, if a lost one, since agricultural areas usually felt the sting of environmental regulation the worst, and wore the perceived condescension of mostly urban ecologists very badly. (Just look at what’s happening now, on the eve of the European Parliament elections, with furious farmers mounting sensational protests.) Greybeard had just gotten a decent full time job in the area doing something computery, after spending a long time unemployed. So maybe things were looking up for both of us.

Except when was the dude finally going to ask me out? One week of sporadic texting led to two. I started counting the time in between replies. I knew this sweaty frustration was based entirely on the projection of an illusion—I had still not met the fellow in person and had no idea if he was as advertised—but it didn’t make it any less intense. So I dipped back into the pond, because nothing takes your mind off of one disappointment like the possibility of another.

Up popped someone a bit younger than me, with a poetic face and a very minimalist profile. He was about 20 minutes way in La Ferté-Vidame, bunking with his father after a divorce. It was convenient for him, because he was a test driver of concept cars and Citroën had a development track there.

Winter was not, shall we say, fertile. But it was pretty.

DING DING DING. Race car driver? Even for someone as world-weary as me, the derring-do was catnip. The fellow was also very fast out of the gate to propose an actual meeting. Where, in the dead of winter, when it gets dark at 4:59 pm? I proposed Jean-André’s friendly bar in the largest village closest to Saint-Maxime, but when we both arrived in the parking lot, and shook hands for the first time, we saw that the place was closed. Shit. OK, well meantime, let’s check you out, sir. He certainly looked like his picture: tan, a Roman nose, slim, tall, strapping, short brown hair that was so thick and bushy it almost stood straight up. He was in a thick white sweater and I was very intrigued.

Gesturing at the dark deserted center of town, I said, “OK so what do we do?”

He suggested the PMU in a village about ten minutes way. Now, a PMU is what we call an OTB in America, which stands for Off-Track Betting. PMU’s are the same in every way to their American cousins, down to the spitting sound of the fluorescent lighting, the acrid coffee, the dust bunnies and the cluster of desperate gambling addicts holding up the bar for terrible beer on tap, which they consume at the same rate as they burn through scratch-offs. Not a date vibe but we had no other choice.

I drove slowly through the pitch black fog. Just outside the destination village, a fox darted in front of my car, its fur just frosty enough to sparkle in the corner of my eye, allowing me to swerve and narrowly avoid hitting it. The things we do for the possibility of love.

The PMU was open, and it was pretty full. As it was the only game for miles around, the crowd was a little softer than the midday norm. Their dripping noses and ruddy winter cheeks were too easy to clock under the blistering lights. My gentleman caller got there before me, and was already seated at a table, looking quite handsome. And then he opened his mouth and it all went very downhill very fast.

You see, the woman of his dreams had just kicked him out. Like one week before. She had a little daughter by another man who had become very close to him. The news tumbled out of his deflated being seconds after I ordered a bottle of Leffe, and just like that, I shifted from potentially interested paramour to frustrated unpaid shrink. After ten minutes of one-sided moping, I told him as nicely as I could: “You have no business being on a dating app. Like, not for a good while still. Not at all. What are you doing?” He hung his head and agreed.

So that was fun, but then when I got home at a very decent hour, Greybeard had finally replied to some two day old message. I wrote back asking point blank when we were actually going to meet. Why, the following night if I liked! Of course I liked. FINALLY.

This time we picked Saint-Jouin, where there was an honest to goodness wine bar open in the evening. A setting I knew, with the fellow who seemed to have the most potential. It was on.

And then when he walked in, as has happened so many  times in the history of machine-generated blind dates, he was the worst possible iteration of his photos. The hair was super-gelled and the moustache part of the beard appeared to be waxed. It was giving gay barber, except when he smiled revealed teeth so tiny and yellow they looked like tutti frutti chiclets. (No gay barber I know would let that stand.) He was mostly funny, and full of stories, but also a bit self-righteous and never stopped to ask me much about myself. After one drink he suggested we blow off the wine bar, which was too bougie for him (but not for me), and suggested Saint-Jouin’s own PMU. Good lord. Since all I had to go home to was a greasy robe, I said yes, long enough for a half-pint, where I learned about how he had cheated on his wife and was living in a house share that barely had hot water, before I jumped back in to my horrifically polluting Diesel car and decided maybe I was done with the apps. Perhaps I was giving up too easily but averages were not in my favor, and I realized I just didn’t have the patience or the interest for all that rigamarole like I did when I was still 35 and hopeful.

But all was not lost in yenta corner of the internet. Over on Instagram, I noticed that my sporadic posts of house renovation and random farm animals were getting liked by an account that simply bore the name of my village. Was this the mayor? Did we even have an official account? That would have surprised me. But for the semi-regular gardening that earned the village a coveted three-flower classification in the “Ville Fleurie” category, and the party planning committee, there wasn’t a lot of public engagement in Saint-Maxime.

I looked over to their feed. It had pictures of a beautiful garden: skipping back through the months, there were fruit trees in blossom and double-petal clematis, and mistletoe at Christmastime. It was occasionally tagged by a fairly famous lady musician whom I had interviewed a bunch of times over the years and found very charming.

I sent them a DM: “Bonjour my neighbor (masculine) or my neighbor (feminine). Who is behind this nice account?”

It was Simon and Michel, and when I went over to their place about a mile outside the village center—a drop dead trad-Perche farmhouse with a splendid garden, even in that season—I realized they were the foxy gays who had sauntered past my house that summer at the fête de village. They had an apartment a stone’s throw from my old place in Paris but were here pretty religiously every weekend. They were sarcastic as shit, and very relaxed hosts. Simon cooked massive meals followed by heaving cheese platters and a lemon-poppy cake doused in plantation rum.

We have not since discussed it, but for me, it was kind of love at first sight. I became a regular guest for weekend dinners with their old friends visiting from Paris, some of whom have now become my friends too. They checked all the boxes. They still do.

If the matchmaking internet didn’t kick up the swain of my dreams, or anything close, at least it gave me two more lovely friends and neighbors who, given my lived experience, will probably have a lot more staying power anyway. I call that a win.