Read Dating Big Bird for Free Online

marriage and a doctor-husband and a normal life; in my case, connection, regardless of the duration—you can somehow manage not to see the big huge pink elephants in the room.
    “And then?”
    “And then my mother died.” She lowered her eyes.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thanks. We were really close.” She managed a slight smile before going on. “So now, two years after my mother and five years after Jonathan and after the longest dating dry-spell in history, I’m seeing Will. Who’s either just about to finish his dissertation and get his Ph.D. in American literature from NYU or on the brink of complete failure and financial ruin.”
    “How old is he?”
    “Thirty-eight.”
    “Cute?”
    “Very.”
    “Sexual orientation?”
    “Straight.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “Sex?”
    “He can’t get enough of me.”
    “Are you in love?”
    “Completely.”
    I knew there had to be something wrong with this picture, since there was something wrong with every picture.
    “So … the problem is …?”
    “The problem is, he’s not ready for living together. Or marriage. Or even
discussing
living together. Or marriage. Which is why I’m so niece obsessed. Because at this rate, discussing children will probably have to wait until well into the new millennium.”
    Which was a big problem since Amy’s gum-ball machine was also running low on eggs.
    “So,” she said, as we both stirred our cups of decaf and attacked a finger-thick slice of flourless chocolate cake, “no humiliating engagement to someone who turned out to be gay?”
    No, I told her. Just the semiserious college boyfriend whom I loved in that unformed, incomplete, clueless way you do when you’re too young to know any better.
    And the line of short-lived boyfriends who’d fallen away like toy soldiers during the years when I still felt I was young and had my whole life ahead of me.
    Then the one who broke my heart badly and without warning.
    Then the one I would have wanted to marry if he hadn’t already been married.
    And then the point at which I started to feel as if I’d crossed over from being an eligible young unmarried woman to one of those women who had never gotten married.
    “So now,” I said, picking up at the present, “I’m in an ex
treme
ly promising relationship.” I laughed here to affect maximum irony.
    “With?”
    “Malcolm.”
    “Who is …?”
    “Forty-seven.”
    “Attractive?”
    “Very.”
    “How long have you been seeing him?”
    “About six months.”
    “Ever married?”
    “Once. Divorced.”
    “Children?”
    “Had one. A son.” I took a deep breath. “Who died, five years ago.”
    She winced, then whispered, “How?”
    “Leukemia.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I know. He’d just turned seven.”
    She looked at me to get a sense of what to say next, and when I shook my head and shrugged, she went on. “Job?”
    “Writer.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”
    “South. M. C. South.”
    “Sure. I’ve heard of him. He’s famous.”
    Was famous
.
    “He wrote about inner-city schools, didn’t he?”
    “For
The New York Times
. Which won a Pulitzer.”
    She nodded, duly impressed. “But he’s written books, too, hasn’t he?”
    “Two. But he hasn’t published any in a while.” In over a decade. “He wrote for magazines for a long time after that,” I continued. “
Esquire
.
New York
magazine.
The New Yorker
. Now he teaches at The New School. That’s how we met. I took a class he teaches there.” I thought of the CV he’d handed out that first night along with the syllabus; how intrigued I was by it. “He says he’s a has-been. But I like to think he’s at the end of a severe downward trajectory and poised for a comeback.”
    “So,” she said, officially opening up the topic of Malcolm for discussion.
    “So. The problems. One: He’s depressed, due to the fact that his career isn’t what it used to be, after what’s happened in his personal life over the last