Dating while Running from Covid
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Vermont Rain Shower. August 2020.
Dating While Running by, Zachary Thacher August 2020 — Charlotte, Vermont
You’re alone in your car driving down country lanes that ascend to highways on a summer afternoon. One hundred miles until you see her again.
Last night you slept in your Hudson, NY Airbnb rental. Like a normal person, you lay down for sleep in the apartment’s one bedroom with nice linens and a queen-sized bed. You had just driven three hours from Vermont. Hudson is a way station to The City, a chance to break up the drive and enjoy the area as you plot your next move. The apartment has a dozen five-star reviews and cost more than another place which looked crappy, so you splurged.
At 11pm you put down your phone and nestled your head, closed your eyes and then BLAM! an 18-wheeler thundered by your head. SMASH! another truck roars. BRAAAGH! another shakes the apartment.
Turns out the Airbnb bedroom faces the street.
Turns out the street is the town’s truck route.
Turns out trucks parade by night.
This is all a surprise. As you lay in bed, famished for sleep, you tried not to calculate that for the same money, you could have stayed in a boutique hotel down the road.
You will do anything to guard your sleep, especially before a second date that requires four hours of round trip driving because while you’ve left New York and would be happy to meet someone in Vermont or the Hudson Valley, the general population of single women have stayed right there in the city. Not all of them, but enough to make travel necessary. And besides, you’ve been excited to see her again for over a week because the first date went so well, that was an afternoon drink outside in Morningside Heights when you were crashing at your friend’s Maplewood Cabana a mere thirty minutes from The City. Tomorrow will be different. Stakes will be higher, they go up exponentially with each date, and you’re coming from further away. You will need to perform. To perform you must be rested. To be rested you must guard your sleep, but trucks have overrun your perimeter. You are defeated.
If things work out we can live in a barn. Tons of bats and no windows, but hey Vermont!
Interlude
Forget about dating during a global pandemic for a second. You’ve learned to think of sleep like it’s an invisible, secret incantation from a Brother’s Grimm fairy tale. It either rewards you or reduces you depending on how you perform the rituals each night, and every night you must follow the steps perfectly. You can’t forget a single gesture. You must be consistent, you must eat and drink the right things and avoid the wrong things, you must usher comfort and darkness. Most of all, you must create a thick and constant and deep quiet that lasts from dark to after dawn.
If you do all this, then the secret fairytale spell will gift you in the morning with a day effused with optimism and energy. You will be blessed. But if you don’t follow all the steps and precautions, if your touch is off, if you can’t align darkness with comfort and quiet, then a bleary, foggy, deadening curse will massacre your day and harden your mind. No amount of coffee will rescue you. There is no antidote.
The pinnacle of Western Culture, circa 2001.
This is why at one in the morning, after more tractor-trailers thrashed the room, you walked to the tiny day-bed off the kitchen. It was a slap dash and risky move at this late hour. You closed the bedroom door and then the side room door. You lowered the blinds and gathered the curtains. You put in ear plugs and turned on the fan. You said the bedtime Sh’ma, the Hebrew prayer. The magic held.
In the morning you feel like you’re in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, “Once More, with Feeling.” That’s a good thing.
By the late afternoon your brain chemistry is cycling as fluidly and lucidly as your car’s inner workings as it holds onto sixth gear and 2,500 RPM. Fifty miles to go.
You met her in late July. Covid had leveled off in New York and New England while it bloomed in places with red hats yet no masks. You swiped right on Hinge or Bumble or OK Cupid, which app doesn’t matter. You’re on all of them. So is she. Is this because she’s eager to meet lots of people — or a person? Is she lonely and bored and wants entertainment like the Kurt Cobain single? Is dating a sport she can play over and over again and that is always fun, or is she looking for a man, and dating is the nuisance she endures to find him?
You’ll never know. You go in blind to aspiration but in you go. All you know is the game is no longer fun for you. You’re like the aging baseball player with legendary stats from way back when, the guy who knows every contour and nuance of the field and respects the game but has long since ceded his place on the roster to younger players. He’d love to retire if he could make peace with no ring but he can’t so he doesn’t.
Turns out we met each other 15 years ago. She was once married to my brother’s college friend. It’s a tenuous connection we uncovered while first texting over the dating app. In the Covid progression of modern mating, we soon Zoomed to get a better sense of each other. During the chat, after some light banter about surviving a global pandemic that’s killed millions, we unwrapped the present of our connection, because connections are treasures when it comes to dating strangers. We’ll call her Shoshana. I’m leaving out all other names.
She has long blonde curls and fair skin and brown eyes. “So, you’re the older brother of my ex husband’s friend, right?” she asked.
“Yeah exactly. I lost touch with him a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure you and I met at some point. I think my brother might have been there too, I’m trying to remember.”
“We were all together for sure,” she says. “You definitely look soooo familiar.” Which is kind because it’s 15 years later and my hair has gone from night to dawn.
Then it hits me.
“Yeah, uh, we definitely did meet,” I pause. “I was at your wedding.”
She leans into her laptop… in tears or laughter? I watch the screen.
“Nice to see you again,” she laughs.
One mile to go. Counties glide from Columbia to Ulster to Orange to Rockland to whatever New Jersey is to over the massive grey suspension bridge my grandfather once pointed out to me as he marveled over it’s engineering and finally I’m in New York County, who’s imperial title for a slender slip of island seems crazy, egocentric, totally incoherent, but c’mon, if you’ve ever been here, which you have, you know it works. Of course there’s a county named New York that’s the smallest part of the state. Ego and swagger and self confidence built this town. If there’s no Manhattan there’s no New York. All the rest is commentary.
I drive in first and second gears under and through and over streets with sharp turns up ramps that merge with boulevards and traffic and STOP signs in the tangled, decrepit 20th century urban infrastructure of American cities that makes me savor country life, where there’s one road in and all the parking you need. But that’s OK. I’m used to driving in the city. I take deep, belly breaths as I lose and then find patience. Being in The City after time away is like putting on a neck tie. You don’t do it often enough to be good at it, but after a few wrong turns your hands remember how to thread the fabric and you get it right and you realize, damn. I look good.
I park on an overpass lined with concrete blocks topped with chain link fencing . The world around me is asphalt and pylons and ironwork and cars and curbs. There are no trees. There are no meadows or pastures. There are no hay bales waiting for sunset with Monet. I walk to the back of my car, open the trunk, strip off my sweaty t-shirt for a clean button up. Hit the streets. Text and then meet Shoshana for the second time, at her building again. In New York dating you normally meet at the bar or restaurant but I have a car now. It’s door to to door service.
We chat and don’t hug because in Covid being with people is like being in a museum. We walk and make small talk and sit outside a restaurant for a boozy interrogation that I pay for even though we’re both adults and apparently she comes from money and has a job.
— Step on soapbox —
The retrograde gender rituals of New York dating used to infuriate me. I’m a son of a feminist single mom who taught her three boys the necessary justice of equality. Treat women with the respect that they are adults who forge their own way, and hopefully, if you’re lucky, they’ll want to do that work with you. It’s simple. We’re all adults. Money shouldn’t adjudicate behavior. Money shouldn’t be used to assert superiority or inferiority, it shouldn’t have any role whatsoever when it comes to romance. But I don’t make the rules. I follow them. Since the Man is not the father and the Woman is not the child, if the Man says, “hey we’re both working adults trying to get to know each other so how about we split it” the answer will be the forever silence of an unrequited text. So I shut up and pay.
Is all this questioning why I’m single? Tip of the iceberg my friend.
— Step off soapbox —
We have dinner. Followed by dessert. It’s fun. Manhattan is buzzy and there are almost no cars anywhere. People here come in way more sizes, colors, shapes and genders than the all white Subaru and L.L. Bean crew in Vermont. The young waitress wears a mask and I feel strange going inside the empty restaurant to use the bathroom. I walk Shoshana home through city streets that border an uptown park for a few blocks. We wear masks and take them off and put them back on again and it’s OK. We’re doing our best. It’s hot and humid and you can hear crickets every once in a while. It feels good to walk with her.
I don’t know what she’s thinking. I’m thinking about how this could work. She has a son, I’d have to get a house in Westchester because I’m done with city life, for me, it always feels better taking off the necktie. If things work out it will be a long and funny story of how we met at her wedding. I want at least one kid, no idea if that’s in the cards. I’m musing. Imagining.
We arrive at the door of her doorman building. It’s been a long night of talk and memories and stories. I ask if it’s OK to hug her goodbye. The forbidden Covid touch seems impossible in a world where hand shaking is long forgotten but she says yes and we do. There’s something there, I feel something beyond words. I ask if it’s OK to kiss her, this feels like jumping out of an airplane. Hurtling through space in the wrong direction. She says yes.The parachute opens. The air is muffled and clear and it takes a good long while to come down to earth.
She goes into her building and I walk back to my car to drive two hours back to Hudson. 100 miles in reverse, from New York then wherever New Jersey, then Rockland, then Orange, then Ulster, then Columbia counties.
The highways are dark and empty. I set up my bed in the side room because the trucks will start at midnight and my magic secret ritual needs tending. I do it well and sleep. The next day I meet up with cousins in a river outside Bennington and then finish the drive to Charlotte. I’m planning to return to New York to see her again. Date three. Stakes get higher.
Days later she texts to say let’s be friends.
Today I will drive to Stowe for a date with an architect who lives in Cambridge. I will buy her lunch as we commingle interrogation with entertainment and sustenance. We may even have fun. Date one.
(Post date post script: We had a lovely lunch just north of Stowe, another beautiful area in a beautiful state. Right when lunch was wrapping up she mentioned the Republican National Convention and says she checks Fox News because she has an open mind. I froze. I said I don't have an open mind to misogyny and racism. Things slid downhill from there.) The End