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By Root 599 0

minutes, catches the bus to work, comes home, gets stoned, walks his dog, and crashes. Anything that breaks his regimen—going out to dinner, staying at my house—is a hassle. Still, as much as I like every day to be its own little unpredictable journey, I also appreciate the stability and regularity of someone to sleep with, to help me put up shelves in my office. At a certain point we talk about moving in together, and he cheerfully appoints me Director of Aesthetics, saying I can toss whatever of his postcollege furniture I like as long as he has a corner of his own to work in. We’ll live in my flat, he says, until we can buy a place we can afford, probably outside the city, where we’ll have a dog, maybe adopt a kid, and he’ll take a longer bus ride into the city every day. Since that seems like a distant day to me (and I am very fond of the city), I am willing, in the meantime, to empty a sock drawer for him and talk about getting cable.

So I have managed what I said I wanted before I hit forty-five: a man who is interested in building a life with me, with all the trimmings of successful middle age—child, dog, and house in the suburbs. But the nine months of our relationship are starting to feel like nine years. We are no longer making love so avidly, with the red tango shoes on, but complain of being tired before we roll over, facing different directions. Though I thought our trip to Peru was the first of many adventures to come, I now realize it was the first and last foreign trip he’d take in many years. Instead, he is committed to seeing his parents in Florida for most of his annual two weeks’ vacation time, and though he insists that I join him, he makes it clear that it will be no fun.

“My mother is going to hate you,” Evan says over dinner one evening when we are discussing the trip.

“Great,” I say. “Why?” Normally, I’m good with parents—polite and interested in them, and I write charming thank-you notes on cream-colored stationery.

“You’re not Jewish, you’re not a lawyer, and you’re probably too old to have children,” Evan says.

“Well,” I say. If I had known those were the qualifications for the job, I would not have applied. I will leave it to him to figure out with a shrink why he is dating a woman with precisely all the attributes his mother would hate. “There’s not much I can do about any of that.”

It is far too late to start trying to be someone else for the sake of a man. This isn’t the first time I’ve been called a shiksa, and it annoys me: if a Jewish guy is interested in me, as happens rather more often than demographics would suggest is proportionate, for whatever reason, that’s his issue to debate with himself and not my fault for luring him away. I’m too old to apologize for being who I am, a zaftig shiksa with a fair dose of chutzpah. Anyway, we WASPs don’t believe in guilt.

“If we got married, my mother wouldn’t come to the wedding,” says Evan.

This is the first time the phrase “if we got married” has popped out of his mouth, and I decide to ignore it for the time being. My first marriage demystified the glories of connubial bliss, and though I am eager for companionship, I am in no hurry to repeat any major mistakes. Plus it doesn’t seem like a good sign that the first time he’s bringing it up it’s negative, a problem already.

“So your mother will hate me but you want me to come to Florida to visit her anyway?”

“She’s my mom. It’s important to me.”

“Right.” I’m not sure what’s going to happen between us, but I know I’m not going to visit sunny Florida anytime soon. There are compromises that you make for your man, and then there is masochism.

FOR OUR BIRTHDAYS, his forty-second and my forty-fifth, Guillermo and I throw a Peruvian fiesta, celebrating our recent trip. We—mostly he—make aji de gallina, a peppery chicken stew, Peruvian tamales, and a trio of causas, piles of cold mashed potatoes topped with olives, fish, and sauces; his sister whips up a soufflé of lucuma, a Peruvian fruit that tastes like sweet Thai iced tea and is reason enough to visit that country. We pour pisco sours