The_Lettuce.

Lipson, Mimi

FRANCINE MET RAY a few weeks after her thirtieth birthday and stayed with him for eleven years. He was gloomy and angry, chronically disorganized, estranged from his family. A few years into their relationship, when she realized how dependent he'd become on her, Francine considered leaving, but she didn't. Maybe this was just adult life, she told herself, this feeling of entanglement. It wasn't easy living with someone; everyone said so. Instead of breaking up, they bought a run-down row house in South Philadelphia and worked on it together over the years, never quite getting it past the construction site stage.

And Ray never stopped being exhausting. He wrecked her car and picked fights with the neighbors and followed her around the house ranting about the housewives who hired him to install kitchen cabinets and refinish their floors. Increasingly, Francine found herself asking, "What if this is not adult life?" If it wasn't, she was running out of time. It was already, practically speaking, too late for children--not that she had ever actively wanted them; Ray was enough. In the end, she picked a moment when they weren't fighting and took him to the diner across the street to tell him, over hamburgers, that she couldn't be with him anymore. She was moving into the spare room. He didn't ask for an explanation. He seemed to have been expecting it.

They kept living together as roommates, waiting out the bad real estate market. She didn't do his laundry anymore, but they ate dinner in front of the TV several nights a week. Once, they watched a movie about a strange, religiously ecstatic young bride in a backward Scottish village. In the movie, her husband is paralyzed in an oil rig accident. She believes God has punished them for their carnal happiness. Her husband tells her to sleep with other men and describe their encounters for him, which she does, and in her strangeness and simplicity she becomes convinced that she is keeping him alive in this way. As his health fails, her assignations become more desperate. She ends up battered and ruined and dies in disgrace, denied a church funeral.

Francine thought it was the saddest movie she'd ever seen. She and Ray were both crying by the time the credits rolled, and they ended up together in their old bed. When she woke up in the middle of the night, his arms were clamped around her waist. She pried herself free and went back to the spare room. In the morning he tried to kiss her when she poured him a cup of coffee, but she turned her head away and said, "I'm sorry."

Francine had no idea how a forty-one-year-old was supposed to meet someone new. Before she moved in with Ray, her social universe had seemed to contain infinite romantic permutations. She'd worked in crowded places--a coffee shop, a bookstore, a rock club--wandering in and out of flirtations and affairs; but the crowds were gone now. No one called on Friday to tell her where the weekend parties were, and if she did find herself at a party, it was no longer a labyrinth of erotic possibilities.

Someone at work told her about a free online dating website called cupid.com.

"You're not really going to do this, are you?" her friend Nancy asked when she brought it up.

"Sure, why not? Aren't you curious?"

"So, you put up an ad? Like an escort?"

"Not exactly. You create a profile, a little homunculus, and you give it all your essential qualities so that it can attract appropriate suitors while you are busy beach-walking, reading great books, feeling equally at home in sweatpants or an evening gown."

Ironic distance made the idea more bearable. Francine chose the name "foam_core" for her online identity and uploaded a picture of herself wearing a heavy winter coat and rubber boots. Then she turned to the lifestyle questionnaire. Most of the questions were optional, designed for a balance of sincerity and display.

In my bedroom you will find__. She skipped that one.

__is sexy;__is sexier. Skip.

Five things I can't live without; 25 years from now I see myself; The last thing that made me laugh out loud was. She left these blank as well.

The door slammed downstairs. "Hey," she yelled to Ray. "How would you describe me in one word?"

"Crabby."

The only two questions you had to answer were: Why You Should Get to Know Me and What I'm Looking For. She could not think of a way to address the first one without sounding like an asshole. The second one, though, uncorked a stream.

"Reclusive geniuses," she wrote. "Hyperactive lunatics, charismatic vulgarians, obsessive motor-mouths." Lists were her favorite mode of self-expression. "Collectors of arcane knowledge and useless ephemera." She typed without pausing for a while, then reviewed what she had written. She added, "You can be a kook as long as you're an interesting kook, and I don't care if you have a high school diploma."

Her cupid.com mailbox began filling up, but the men who wrote to her comprised a different sort of list. They were U2 fans and jet-skiers, sad-eyed home brewers and readers of medical thrillers. She was considering deactivating her account when she got a message from "expunk63," a video editor who liked Flipper and Black Flag. He was the first person she'd encountered who seemed like someone she might know socially, in real life, so she agreed to meet him at a bar in Old City.

The evening was a traumatic failure. In person, expunk63 was combative and jittery. She'd forgotten the agony of first-date small talk.

"What do you edit?" she asked. "Movies? TV?"

"Documentaries."

She said she liked Werner Herzog's documentaries. "You mean you like Grizzly Man," he said. "You've probably never even heard of Fata Morgana. You don't understand Herzog if you haven't seen that."

She took a long break after expunk63, but eventually she went back to the website. She went out with an improv comic and a goateed architecture student and even a Wharton professor, whom she dated twice, mostly because she was so surprised he asked her out again. On their second date she mentioned her roommate situation, and when she got home she found an e-mail from him outlining the life actions she would have to agree to if they were to continue seeing each other--number one on the list being a complete financial separation from Ray.

The biggest surprise was how many men only seemed interested in writing back and forth. They would suggest moving from cupid.com over to their regular e-mail addresses, and then they'd draw out the correspondence for days and sometimes weeks, strafing her with questions about her family, pets, and food preferences, asking her for lists of her favorite records and movies and supplying their own. Some probed her for increasingly intimate details about her romantic history. As long as the guy was kooky and interesting enough, she'd keep answering questions. She didn't want to seem like a prude, and, frankly, she enjoyed the attention. A few managed to get her to supply enough anatomical details (nipple extension, areola color, pubic styling) to produce customized smut. But these men, who were happy to send her pictures of their erections, would vanish when she pressed them for live meetings.

After a while, she decided not to give out her real e-mail address to anyone until she'd met him in person. To simplify things and cut back on all the pre-screening--which had not proved to be particularly effective in any case--she began suggesting a get-together with anyone she hadn't ruled out after a few exchanges on cupid.com. And so it was that, within a few months, the ironic distance was obliterated, and her romantic prospects had been downgraded to a string of unpromising afternoon coffee dates.

Francine sat down at her desk with the day's mail: a letter from her mother, a postcard from the dentist, and something addressed to Ray from the DMV. She put them aside and checked her e-mail and, out of habit, logged onto cupid.com. There was a new message from someone calling himself "the_lettuce."

"Hi, foam_core. That is a funny name. Why did you choose it, I wonder? My real name is Eric. I guess my picture is kind of small. I don't know if I am any of those things you mentioned, charismatic and genius and all those. I don't think I'm vulgar either, but I couldn't tell if you were joking about that one. Anyhow I wanted to say hi and that you seem like a very unique person."

His picture was small. It only expanded on her screen to the size of a business card. He appeared to be hiking in the mountains, wearing a floppy outdoorsman-type hat that suggested baldness. He was shading his eyes with his left hand and squinting in a way that distorted his whole face. She clicked through to his profile and saw nothing that stood out.

"Hi, Eric. Francine here. I don't know why I called myself foam_core. It just popped into my head. What about you? Why are you the_lettuce? I live pretty close to Center City. Where are you?"

She turned back to the letter from the DMV. It looked bad. It was from the Office of Finance. When they were together, Francine had opened all Ray's official-looking mail--not because she was a snoop, but because he expected it of her. "You're like an extra lobe of my brain," he'd said to her once. For her part, she'd have loved to spare herself knowing about his missed credit card payments and unpaid parking tickets, but she'd learned that if she didn't open his mail it would keep piling up until some disaster occurred. He would miss an important payment or a filing date or a court appearance. His checking account would be closed or his health insurance would be canceled or some massive fine would accrue. In the end, dealing with his self-pity and rage took more out of her than just staying on top of his mail. But it was not her job anymore. She put the envelope down, and then picked it up again. The words "FINAL NOTICE" were stamped in red across the front.

"Fuck me," she said, tearing it open.

The letter, covered in official seals, said that the registration for his work van had been suspended for six months: a penalty for letting his insurance lapse. When she looked up, there was already a response from the_lettuce.

"Hi, Francine. Thanks for writing back. I chose that name, the_lettuce, two years ago when I signed up. Back then I was the produce manager at a natural food store in Ardmore, which is where I live."

Francine was a few minutes late for her coffee date with the_lettuce. In her mind he was still the_lettuce, not Eric. She had a hard time thinking of her Internet dates by their real names, even after she'd met them. She'd been running around all morning dealing with Ray's van; she'd spent several hours at the DMV putting the registration in her own name and then had taken it for a safety-and-smog inspection. She disliked driving the van, especially here on the Main Line, because of all Ray's horrible homemade bumper stickers. KILLING ARABS = JOBS, WE BOMB BECAUSE WE CARE, GOD HATES YOU AND YOUR FAMILY, half a dozen others--many of them frayed around the edges where people had tried to tear them off. How, she wondered, did he manage to drive around without getting pulled over for every rolling stop and illegal right on red--or for that matter, without being punched out by a Marine for his upside-down American flag decal? She backed into a spot in the Starbucks parking lot.

The_lettuce was already there, sitting at a corner table, wearing a short-sleeved tropical print shirt, as he'd told her he would be. He was bent forward, scribbling on a pad of paper, and didn't see Francine approach.

"Eric?"

He looked up, momentarily startled. He was indeed bald but for an almost-invisible crescent of gingery hair. His eyes were pale and lashless behind wire-rimmed glasses, and his neck, arms, and what showed of his chest were covered with a bright rash.

"Francine?" He stood up. He was wearing shorts--khakis with pleats across the front. She felt an immediate and desperate need to put him at ease.

"I'm going to get myself something to drink," she said. "Don't go anywhere, okay?"

When she sat down with her tea, she saw that he was working on a pad of graph paper. He'd been filling in the 1/4 inch squares with a apidograph pen. "What's that?" she asked.

"Oh." He flushed, so that his cheeks matched his inflamed neck. "It's just this thing I do. Kind of--it's like drawing, I guess. I have an algorithm. See?" He opened his left hand and showed her a pair of dice. "I roll them, and depending on what numbers come up I fill in the square, or half the square, or I just draw a dot in it, or I leave it blank. Then I move to the next square and roll the dice again." He pulled a loose sheet out of his pad and presented it to her. It was covered from edge to edge with markings, so densely inked that it felt a little heavy. She stared for a minute, as though it were one of those magic eye paintings, hoping to find some kind of pattern, but none emerged.

"Well, I've never seen anything like it," she said, handing it back. "How long have you been making these?"

"I don't know. I guess since I was a kid."

"Do you make any other kind of art? Painting? Or ... regular drawings?"

"No, just this. This is it." He massaged the dice in his left hand.

Francine searched for a follow-up question. How had they managed to find their way into this conversational cul-de-sac so quickly? "So," she said, "you said you worked at a health food store?"

"No. I mean, yes, but not anymore. I worked at the Nature Mart for almost twenty years, but they changed management last year and I lost my job."

"Oh, I am sorry."

"Well, at first they offered to let me stay, but I would have been back to cashier. And then they changed their mind anyhow. I probably would have stayed if they hadn't changed their mind."

"Gee."

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"It's okay."

Francine drank her tea, and then another tea. She learned that, since losing his job at Nature Mart, the_lettuce had been working at Dover Pneumatics, a company that manufactured and distributed door closure units. His younger brother had hired him, reluctantly and under family pressure, and had from the beginning been submitting him to subtle forms of humiliation--like ignoring his request for a bathroom key and not telling him about sales meetings and, just last week, having his desk moved into a hallway. Other than the graph paper drawings, his only hobby was playing Go. He'd participated in some children's tournaments and done badly. He lived in an apartment with his best friend from high school, who was on disability and spent weeks at a time on the couch in his bathrobe and slippers. They had nothing in common anymore. It had at least been convenient when the lettuce still worked at the health food store, but he didn't drive, and now he had to get up while it was still dark to take SEPTA into town, and then another train to Delaware. His brother had already written him up several times for being late to work, and he'd been docked some vacation days. He massaged the dice in his left hand while he told her all this. It seemed to calm him.

"Have you thought about moving?" Francine asked.

"I'm waiting until my cat dies." His cat had feline leukemia and wasn't expected to live much longer but was, he said, very attached to the roommate.

A sunbeam that had been inching along the wall reached their corner, and the_lettuce held his left hand over his eyes and squinted: a tableau vivant of his tiny profile picture. Francine noticed that his rash had faded to a light pink When she looked at her watch, she saw that he had been talking for over an hour, but the effect, somehow, was not alienating. She'd made suggestions here and there, but mainly, she sensed, he needed her to bear witness. This was something she could do.

"Thank you," he said. "I mean, thank you for suggesting this."

"Thank you for coming."

"I mean it. I've been on cupid.com for two years, and you're the first person who ever asked me on a ..." He trailed off, unable to say the word.

"Did you ever ask anyone? On a date? On the site, I mean."

He shook his head.

"Eric, are you lonely?"

"Aren't you?"

"Well, yes, I suppose." She thought of Ray, though, and realized that it wasn't true. "Can I ask you something else?"

"Please."

"When was the last time you had a girlfriend?"

"It's been a long time. A long time."

"What about sex?" The words came out before she considered them, but he didn't seem embarrassed.

"It's been over ten years," he said.

"Ten years?"

"Over ten years." His expression was frank and his tone affectless, as though he were describing a chronic pain to which he'd grown accustomed.

"This is going to sound weird," she said, "and I really hope you don't take it the wrong way, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"No, go ahead."

"Did you ever think about paying someone?"

"I did think of that, yes, many times. But I couldn't go through with it."

Francine imagined the_lettuce turning to the ads in the back of The City Paper, picking up his phone and then putting it down again. She needed a moment to get her bearings. "Eric," she said, "will you excuse me?

The bathroom smelled of dried eucalyptus and Glade air freshener. The walls were stippled with peach-colored sponge paint. Francine splashed her face in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. There had never been a labyrinth of erotic possibilities for the_lettuce--not ten years ago, not even twenty. She was certain of that. She dug around in her pocketbook. In a zippered pocket hidden in the lining, she found it: a blue foil packet she'd been carrying around since that first hopeful date with expunk63.

Only when the_lettuce was sitting in the passenger seat of Ray's van did it occur to Francine that she would have to seduce him. At first, he'd declined her offer of a ride. But she'd insisted, and now here he was, nervously toggling the switch for the electric window.

"Turn here," he said. "Right." They descended a hill that went past the Ardmore SEPTA station.

"Are you in a hurry to get home? I'd like to pull over for a bit."

"You want to pull over?"

She turned into the station and parked at the far end of the lot, where there were no other cars. They sat silently for a moment, looking out the windshield at a row of dusty sumac bushes.

"I kind of figured I wouldn't see you again," he said.

"Can I be honest? I don't think you will."

"I didn't expect it. You don't have to explain."

"No, that's not what I mean. That's not why I wanted to stop here." She turned in her seat to look at him. A delicate nimbus of late afternoon light surrounded his large head and narrow shoulders. She unbuckled her seat belt, moving slowly and carefully, as she would around a skittish animal. "I'm going to come over there," she said. "Okay? I'm coming over to you now."

He took off his glasses and looked at her with large, grave eyes while she undid his seat belt and lowered herself onto his lap, resting her knees on the seat on either side of him. She saw now that he wasn't lashless: his eyelashes were almost translucent, but they were long and gently curled. She kissed him, and he kissed her back tentatively. His breath tasted of the coffee he'd nursed for the entire hour they had spent at Starbucks. She could feel his heart beating beneath his tropical shirt. Pressing into his lap, she felt a slight movement in response, but his arms stayed at his sides.

"These angles won't work," she said. "Let me make some space in back."

He stayed up front while she moved Ray's shop vac to one side, and his tool cases, and the milk crates full of sanding disks, and the boxes of nail cartridges. She found a heavy furniture pad and shook the sawdust out the side door, then spread it out in the space she'd cleared. "Okay," she said, peeling her T-shirt off. "Do you want to come back?"

She knelt in her bra and panties and looked up at him while he undressed. He was very thin, covered everywhere with fine, reddish-blond hair. She reached for his hand and pulled him down next to her, and they lay side by side kissing. Sucking his lower lip to stop his hard little tongue from darting around in her mouth, she felt him relax. She guided his hand inside her panties, willing herself to think of him, the_lettuce, Eric, and no one else as the light dimmed, softening the outlines of the tool cases and crates around them.

"Thank you," he said over and over as they made love. At first she shushed him, but she felt it too: gratitude. After a while, his words became sighs.

Francine waited at the curb while the lettuce unlocked the door to his apartment. He looked like a little kid, with his backpack and short pants. He turned and waved, and she waved back until he was inside. The light came on in the living room. A cat jumped up on the windowsill--the one with feline leukemia, she supposed. She did a three-point turn in the wide street and drove past the train station. The lot was empty now.

She thought of the strange movie about the Scottish fishing village--the one that made her and Ray cry. At a stoplight on Montgomery Ave. she dug her cell phone out of her pocketbook, but then she remembered the bumper stickers. Best not to risk a ticket. She pulled up to a meter and put the van in park.

She considered whether to tell Ray about the_lettuce. After all, they were nothing like that couple. Ray wasn't paralyzed and she wasn't a young bride. While she dialed his number, she pictured the_lettuce shrugging off his backpack, pouring himself a glass of milk, uncapping his Rapidograph pen at the kitchen table. She wondered if he would move to Delaware. She hoped not. She didn't know what she did hope for him, but not that.