We lolled around in his skid-row apartment. There were romantic, amusing encounters, one after another, including a trip to the Napa Valley. We met again in Utah, at a film festival, and again in San Francisco. saw me, he was not going to catch me unprepared. I was thrilled at this show of confidence in a 56-year-old man and immediately went into a paroxysm of self-improvement. ''Pick me up at the airport, and we'll go straight to your place - and then to bed.''Ī younger woman might have been insulted. ''Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?'' I asked. But (more miscommunication) a week before his arrival, I still didn't know if he was coming to woo me or make a courtesy call. (It is true that I may have thrown in some erotic language, perhaps a description of my feelings about those kisses to move things along.)įinally, he e-mailed back to say he was coming to New York. Finally I e-mailed him to ask when we were going to see each other again. ''Pick up the phone.''īut the phone wasn't a great success, either. ''What's with this guy?'' I asked my friends. There were two other kisses, each more elaborate than the last, and then lunch, and then he and his daughter drove off. He turned and, before I could say a word, closed in. Our first kiss? He and I were walking toward the house when I reached up to touch his shoulder, to tell him that I was sorry, all those years ago, that I had gone for that other guy. But he was already staring at me through the window and smiling. He caught me with dirty hair, no makeup and in sweat pants - not my most fetching look, and at my age, I need a lot of fetching. Thanks to his erratic e-mails and inability to express himself, he had arrived four hours early. I looked up from my desk and there he was, this good-looking, six-foot, gray-haired man, standing in my driveway, holding his daughter's hand. Somehow through that raggedy correspondence, and without ever actually talking on the phone or exchanging pictures, we made arrangements many months later to meet at my country house. There were more e-mail messages: long ones from me, short ones from him, the e-mail equivalent of grunts. This created an unpromising image (''loser'' came to mind), but I was glad for the news. We e-mailed another time or two, but the letter I remember came two Christmases ago. I wrote and he wrote back, tersely, that he was married and had a 4-year-old daughter. With his own Web site, no less, promoting a new invention. Two years ago, I idly typed A.'s name into a search engine, and there he was. Why else would someone drop from sight? Yet, I never gave up. I tried looking him up in the phone book. (not his real first initial), had moved from New York to San Francisco. Glamour Puss ended badly (if you call his death ''ending badly''), my old boyfriend, A. Let's face it, I mistreated him because I had met someone more glamorous. has been squeezed out of my life by a more successful man. It is 1977, and a handsome, well-educated inventor named A. I swear I don't do this as a hobby.Ĭase Study A.: the one who got away. I looked for one old lover intentionally, and the other one pretty much fell into my lap. It is possible to go back through a mental Rolodex and type in the names of all your boyfriends, starting with the one in fourth grade who kicked you in the shin. Guests leave, children grow up, dogs die, and the e-mail addict is still there, pounding the keys, and it's always Saturday night. But an e-mail relationship also means being alone on Saturday night. The Internet reaches everywhere and is at once intimate and false, seductive and unreal. The Internet has made it easy - too easy - to locate old friends, classmates and flames, what with the proliferation of nationwide telephone directories and powerful search engines. Men never change.'' What she didn't mention was that some women never change, either. One woman warned me: ''Don't do it! You'll see. There are no figures on how many will look up old boyfriends, and probably for good reason: war casualties don't tend to respond to USA Today surveys. According to USA Today, 61 percent of American singles will look for a date on the Internet this year. (Actual quote: ''I'm a married guy, and I'm not going to have my wife whacked. The other lives abroad and is rich, articulate and loving. (Actual quote: ''I'm a nonverbal guy, that's just the way I am.'') One lives in San Francisco and is tender, handsome and caring. Suddenly, I had Internet relationships with two men simultaneously, both of them former lovers I found on the Web. But I never got in over my head until I started e-mailing old boyfriends. YES, I have had seductive e-mail relationships with men.
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