I tell him I’m sorry, but I can’t go out with him the following night, as I’m scheduled to perform live storytelling. He asks if he can get an extra ticket to the show. Sure! I say, I can even get him a comp, and he can join us for the dinner I’ve planned prior, with friends who will also be coming to the show: my new pal Justin, the CEO of the dating app Hinge, whom I interviewed for Cafe; and Kate, his long-lost girlfriend with whom he’d recently reunited. “Just keep it on the down-low that we met on Tinder instead of Hinge,” I laugh.
“Promise,” says Durkheim.
Justin had flown across the Atlantic to declare his love for Kate after I’d urged him, during our interview for Cafe, to do so. Or rather, I’d asked him that throwaway question at the end of our interview—“Have you ever been in love?”—and this turned into an off-the-record, tearful truth session. For both of us. I recounted my missed connection with the man I thought had stood me up in Paris but hadn’t; he told me about losing Kate to his youthful addictions and immaturity. I urged him to act, before it was too late.
Justin, like the star of his own real life rom-com, had arrived in Switzerland to declare his love for Kate one month before she would have married another man. Now Justin and Kate were living together. And Ken Kurson—the Observer editor who’d reneged on his full-time job offer but had given me, as a consolation, a $600-a-pop freelance column—was sending me emails and calling me on the phone to say if I could write a feature story about the dating app CEO who found love the old-fashioned way, he’d splash those lovebirds across the front page. “And hire me full-time, like you said?” I said.
“Sure, maybe.”
Fuck his maybe, I thought.
With my lease on the roach-infested apartment now up for renewal, I’ve been toying with the idea of moving to the surrounding suburbs or even exurbs, but the rents there are just as onerous if not more so than mine, and the added commute, if I move far enough away to make a difference in my monthly nut, would mean I’ll never see my child, never mind the added babysitting costs and new costs: gas and car payments. Plus my son loves his school and hates upheaval. But the real issue is that Freedom Debt Relief—one of those money-grubbing debt consolidation companies—has destroyed my credit, so no one will sell or lease me a car or a home anyway, not that I even have a down payment for either.
The Freedom Debt Relief flyer had arrived in my mailbox, promising a step-by-step path out of debt with their friendly support staff and help. Stupidly, I was a sucker for this pitch and believed them. In three years, Freedom Debt Relief will be sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for illegally charging people in advance for debt-relief services; for charging debtors without actually settling our debts; for hiding the fact that many of the leading banks have a standing policy of never working with a debt-settlement company; and for instructing desperate consumers like me to “expressly mislead” creditors when asked if I was enrolled in a debt-settlement program.
Freedom Debt Relief will not admit guilt for any of these illegal and immoral acts. Rather, they will reach a settlement with the CFPB and several affected consumers, not including me, because I will not hear about this lawsuit until well after it has been settled. Instead, for the next six years, $600 will get auto-deducted from my account every month and deposited straight into Freedom Debt Relief’s pockets, while my marital credit card debt—whose burden I took on, as a stipulation of our divorce—will balloon from $38,000 to more than $45,000 while it sits there, unsettled and unpaid.
“What do you mean, ‘Maybe?’ ” I said to Kurson. “Haven’t I proven my worth already?” My essays for him have done well. He’s told me this himself multiple times, and I can see their mushroom proliferation on social media with my own eyes.
“I mean, if you get me the Hinge CEO story, I’ll think about it.”
I hang up the phone, infuriated. I don’t want to hand over a potentially great love story to an editor who promised a job then yanked it away. What kind of mind games is he playing? I’m happy to write the occasional Observer column for him, as poorly as it pays, to keep giving my middle-aged voice a professional platform, which could lead to the promised job, but Justin and Kate’s story deserves a better publication. Or at least a publication whose editor isn’t sending me weird threatening emails if I don’t write it for him.
“I consider this the Observer’s story,” Ken writes in an email on July 1, 2015, “and you know I come from a grudge-holding desert people.” Then he adds, peculiarly, “Have a great 4th. Don’t go to any touristy terror targets.”
“Wait why re: terror spots?” I email back. “What’s your insider info?”
He writes back: “On Monday, I emailed Jared [Kushner] to tell him I was hearing chatter from Rudy [Giuliani] friends about how AL Queda [sic] and Isis never really cared about American symbolic dates. But homegrown lone wolf sympathizers will.” The email goes on and on with his theories, his proof, his paranoia, and his doubts that his intelligence is even true, but, he adds, “All I’m saying is I wouldn’t be choosing this weekend to visit, say, the observatory at Empire State Building.”
After my first column was published, I’d answered Ken’s invitation to visit him at his office to get a hard copy of the paper for free. Not wanting to be alone with him, after his comment during lunch about my breasts, I brought my little one along as a buffer. “Who’s this guy we’re meeting?” said my son, as we walked into the Observer lobby. I’d bribed him with the promise of pizza afterward.
“My new boss,” I’d said. “Sort of.”
“Why sort of?”
“Because he said he’d hire me full-time and then didn’t.”
“That’s mean!” said my son.
“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t nice.” But maybe if he sees you, I think—an actual child who needs to eat—he’ll reconsider.
Ken had a turntable in his office, and he kept putting on records to test my nine-year-old’s knowledge of 1970s rock. Seeing my son growing more and more uncomfortable, I was trying to figure out a way to signal Ken to stop, without further embarrassing my son, when, with a sigh, Ken told us that he’d once been the lead singer in two punk bands, neither of which I’d ever heard. This explains a lot, I thought: a man trapped in a spinning record of regret over his unlived rock stardom. I remembered him telling me over lunch that he’d been bullied as a kid for being fat. I felt a sudden surge of empathy for this man trying to rewrite the wrongs of his past, along with annoyance and discomfort, but not enough to keep us trapped in that room indefinitely. I suggested he give us a tour of the rest of the office. “We have dinner plans,” I said. “I don’t want to be late.” Not exactly a lie, but also it wasn’t like we had reservations for two slices of pizza. As a parting welcome-to-the-Observer-but-not-really gift, he handed me an Observer T-shirt, suggesting I take a photo of myself in it and send it to him. A joke? I wasn’t sure. Clearly this man has boundary issues, but he also has cash and column inches to give me.
And yet.
And yet. Those boundary issues often rose to the level of disturbing. In response to an email I wrote after my first column was published, asking him where to send an invoice and thanking him for giving my voice a new platform, he sent me instructions for invoicing the paper along with this: “Thank YOU. I’m so glad we met. In another life, I’d be Mr. Copaken.” In response to an email I sent asking him if he’d received the story I’d written, at his behest, on the vagaries of dating after a marital rupture, he wrote, “Yep. That and the other one are in hand. I love your sloppy seconds!” When we were trying to come up with a name for my column, and he wrote, “What should we call your column? I was thinking ‘All the Single Ladies’,” to which I responded, “But I don’t want to tie it to being single. A) It’s not really about being single; and B) I hope I don’t stay single for much longer.” His response? “Are you proposing marriage to me?”
The
first weekend in July 2015, Durkheim is able to visit from New Hampshire and actually stay over at my place, as all three of my kids are miraculously away at the same time. The next morning, before our hike in the woods, I give him both the Observer T-shirt and the story behind it. “I love it,” he says. “Thank you.” He thinks it’s both fitting and funny for a sociology professor to have the word Observer splashed across his chest, which I hadn’t even considered. I just wanted him to have the T-shirt. I take a photo of Durkheim wearing it in the woods and attach it to my response to Ken’s email about Jared Kushner and Rudy Giuliani warning him of possible Fourth of July terror in New York City.
“I have my new beau visiting this weekend,” I write. “We will probably stick close to home anyway.” The boundary-drawing subtext being: No, I will not wear the T-shirt you gave me and send you a photo of my boobs in it.
“Durkheim,” July 4th weekend, 2015, © Deborah Copaken
The next day, Ken sends a response: “Becky’s review: ‘Oh. My. G-d. Can you ask her to see if he’d take a picture with his shirt off?’ ” Becky is his soon-to-be ex-wife. Did she really say this? I’ve never met her. Why did he show his wife the photo of my new boyfriend? Then there’s his spelling of god, G-d, which I recognize from my Hebrew school days. It’s the way religious Jews spell god, in order to not write the full name in a place where it could get discarded in the trash or erased. I’d heard Ken was religious, but I did not realize to what extent.
Ken needn’t have worried about either the word god or his email being erased. That email, among many others yet to come, will become part of his FBI file.
I spot Durkheim beaming in the audience as I perform onstage the next night, and a smile immediately spreads across my face. Our second date, and already he’s shown up—literally—more than his predecessor. When Durkheim and Justin, the Hinge CEO, were busy talking during our preshow dinner, Kate had leaned over to me. “I like this one,” she whispered. She’d liked Gio, too, since my meeting him on Hinge had led to my interview with Justin and then ultimately to Justin’s flying across the Atlantic to declare his love, but she did not like seeing me suffer from reluctance. “You deserve to be with someone who wants to be with you,” she said.
“Yeah,” I laughed. “At a bare minimum.”
By the end of the summer, after dating exclusively for three months, Durkheim and I begin to tiptoe around the pressing subject of our future once the school year begins. Because of his stepfather’s cancer treatment, he’s been spending most of the summer in New York, but now reality hits: We live in two different cities.
I leave my son in the care of friends and take the bus up to visit him in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he teaches me to surf. Standing up on the board, feeling that frictionless propulsion: I don’t have the words to describe this euphoria. I could compare it to feeling like an air hockey puck gliding over a table, but that doesn’t really do it justice or get at the joy of the movement through space, the heat of sun on wet skin, the smell of salt, the sound of surf, the rush of air, or that distinct and sudden feeling of being strong enough to tackle any whitecap life throws you. Get knocked over by a weird break in the wave? No problem. Lose your balance and fall down? No worries. There’s always another swell on the horizon, so stand back up and try again. From my first successful ride, I instantaneously understand the lifelong hunt for the perfect wave that overcomes so many: There are worse ways to live out one’s days, but I’m not sure there are too many better.
Afterward, we lie on the beach holding hands, and I stare out at the fairy dust sparkles on the water’s surface, which fill my eyes with fresh tears. From their blinding brightness, yes, but also from my body feeling, on a cellular level, both the nourishing perfection of this sunny reprieve and its ephemerality. Like every wave, however seemingly perfect on the surface, our relationship will soon crash against reality’s shores. Am I in love with this man in a forever way or am I just desperate for companionship? That I have to ask, I fear, already answers the question.
Or does it? This man is kind. He’s smart. He’s humble and easy on the eyes. He makes me feel at peace when I’m with him: shoulders dropped, pulse steady. Isn’t that, on some level, love? Has love in my life been so historically interlaced with pain and self-denial that I cannot recognize or accept it when it arrives on a blindingly bright summer day? “WhatifLovewerereal?49,” I type into my computer to open it, day after day, but perhaps the more salient question is this: Am I too broken by life, at forty-nine, to accept real love into it?
I also wonder if my hesitation to both accept and embrace this new love is more about logistical roadblocks than barriers of the heart. Durkheim has tenure and can’t move to New York. His apartment is a bachelor’s one-bedroom, with no room for a child. Yes, he could move, but he owns and loves his place and can afford it on his own. What if we were to move to a larger, more expensive home, share the costs, but then it doesn’t work out between us? He also—though previously married—has never been a father. What will it mean for him to suddenly have to help raise another man’s young child for the next decade? Moreover, I have no possibility of earning a decent enough living in the coastal tourist town he calls home to cover my older two children’s education. What I really need to focus on at this crucial moment, now that I’m struggling to pay two college tuitions, is money. A lot of it. And fast.
Durkheim and I end things that fall. Or, rather, he starts his semester, and I resume my job hunt, and I take my son up to visit him one peak foliage weekend in October, just to see what that would be like, and when the three of us are together, it suddenly feels wrong. Not that he’s not wonderful with my kid, because he is, knowing exactly when to stop for a chocolate crepe and where to find the best Legos in the toy store. But his living room couch makes an uncomfortable bed, says my son. And while he likes the professor, he sees the chalk on the blackboard and does not like where this is going. “I’m not moving here, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says, when we’re alone. He loves New York. He loves his school and his friends. We just moved from Harlem to Inwood only a year ago, he reminds me, and he doesn’t want to move again. His father is gone. The Commune is over. His sister just left for college. Isn’t that enough upheaval for one nine-year-old for now? What he’s asking for is both age appropriate and understandable: a moment of steadiness amidst the near-constant chaos of his childhood thus far.
Durkheim is heartbroken but understands. The grace and kindness with which he handles the breakup is the moment, ironically, I feel unequivocal love for him. I ask myself whether we could ever have a future later on, after my son’s a bit older. After I’ve built a proper nest egg and ferried my big kids through college. But I cannot ask a man to put his life on hold while I sort out my own. That’s exactly what Gio had been asking of me for over a year, and I wouldn’t want to inflict that kind of noncommittal pain on anyone. In love, as in grief, timing is not just important: It’s everything.
TWENTY-FOUR
Public Relations
OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2015
I will be a monk, I decide. I will forgo all love and sex and fun and friends and dedicate the next few years to my son’s steadiness and to my older children’s education: to paying off their tuitions; paying down debt; figuring out a way to get divorced. For this, I know, I must trade the work I love for a job that pays significantly more than journalism’s increasingly meager, non-living wage while I wait for Shutterbabe, the TV show, to be greenlit for production.
Thanks to a tip from my friend Ariel, I’ve had several interviews with her friend’s husband, Sharky, as well as with the rest of his team at a large and successful marketing and PR firm: all former journalists, all collateral damage of the internet era, all working for what I understand is a living wage in a new department called “synergic journalism.”
Synergic journalism, as far as I understand it, after landing this job with its fancy-
sounding title—Vice President and Deputy Editorial Director, Health—is a new way for companies and brands to tell their own stories. Or rather for those of us with actual journalism chops and boots-on-the-ground experience to tell those stories for them, only without professional skepticism or objectivity. Beyond this I know only that, at first glance, the team I’ll be joining seems competent and maybe even fun?
Leslie used to work at a popular celebrity magazine and is now in charge of “Consumer,” meaning well-known consumer brands you’ve definitely heard of. Steve used to work at The Wall Street Journal and is now in charge of our business vertical. Sharky used to work at Fast Company and has apparently become a marketing genius after his massive win, including a silver Clio—the Oscars of the advertising world—for one of his recent campaigns.
Sharky is confident, exceedingly tall—so Brobdingnagian that when one of our colleagues tries to take a photo of the two of us standing together, she has to move back several feet just to fit us in the same frame—GQ-handsome, floppy-haired, tattooed, and scrappy, with humble beginnings in the Deep South. He keeps a turntable on his desk and is a master at music trivia, only unlike Ken Kurson, he doesn’t test nine-year-olds (or anyone) on the gaps in their music knowledge. He has a taste for the occasional finger of whiskey, and, like every male manager in PR, he comes to work each day dressed in head-to-toe black. On occasion, he mixes it up with fancy white sneakers or patterned shoes.
A former solo parent himself, Sharky understands the vagaries of my own particular brand of parenthood without my having to explain it. He even came right out and said, without prompting, “Look, I know there will be times when your kid has to go to the doctor or has a school performance in the middle of the day or some need you can’t even conceive of right now, and I want you to know that I understand you are the only one holding up his world.” Which made me tear up. He’s offering a solid six-figure salary to join his team: $190,000 a year, more than I’ve ever earned annually in my entire life. It’s still not enough, after taxes, debt, and basic living expenses, to finance two college tuitions out of pocket, even with financial aid—which, frankly, is ludicrous, can we fix this, please?—but it’s more than twice my former salary, plus I’ll be subsidizing it slightly with my Observer column, which Sharky says I can keep, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my PR work.
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