Chapter 1: Little Pink Raincoat

Suddenly, on the second Sunday of March in 2003, it appeared. My “it” hit me like a coup de foudre, a French lightning bolt. Only it was American. I was zapped by the picture of a model in the “Sunday Styles” of the New York Times, wearing The Gap’s little pink raincoat. Not just any little pink raincoat. No. That would be plebeian. MY little pink raincoat was the cutest, most perfect, most I’ve-got-to-have-you-this-very-second-or-I-will-die-lonely-and-raincoatless little pink raincoat. That’s right. That’s how good it was. It was my rainy day destiny.

Men move me, but not like clothes and accessories do. Or maybe they’re inextricably bound. Even saying “clothes and accessories,” uch, that sounds so ordinary and banal. Can any kiss, any flower, any orgasm – approximate the rush of finding That Perfect Pink Raincoat? I mean the world’s grooviest raincoat. I mean the raincoat of laser-like focus and obsessive desire. The raincoat that stops you cold. The elusive one that once you have it, you feel not just better, but fulfilled, transformed, you’ve arrived more deeply and forever at your best self.

Do you understand what I’m talking about? Of course you do. Something that makes you feel scared thinking if the Times just hadn’t come that one day, you would have missed this. You’d have lost your only chance at THE little pink raincoat of all time. (It’s fun to scare yourself with contemplative what if’s, but not until you’ve landed the damn thing and you know no one can ever take it away from you.)

Here she was: Simple. A-line. Hidden buttons. Bright but not too bright pink. Soft but not forgettably soft pink. Baby girl pink. Dubble Bubble pink. Daisy Buchanan pink. Billowy clouds pink. Underneath it, the brunette model was wearing a man’s white cotton long-sleeved shirt, tucked into broken-in slightly faded skinny blue jeans. The picture was cropped there, so I kind of wondered about the shoe situation. But not for long. I had to get on the phone and order my love dream to be sent to my house so I could go on living in love and dreams. That was the subtext behind the impulse, it’s what’s always at the hopeful, beautiful, beating heart of it: Love. And the vertebrate with whom I was engaged in bestiality, he would HAVE to marry me once he saw me in that little pink raincoat. He would HAVE to.
He couldn’t not. It was too lovely. And sweet.
Innocent, almost. Girlie, but not froufrou. Just really, really, really great. I was thinking how I’d pop out in a crowd of boring beige and plaid Burberrys, like a lone little pink flower in a desert.

I had my idée fixe all worked out: Little white cap-sleeved T-shirt, white lace-edged bra (so you could see it, but almost, like, accidentally), fitted black cotton capri pants, black leather ballet flats with quilted black patent leather tips across the toe box. Legs ultra-shaved and self-tanned. Chanel # 19, for sure – it was almost spring. Black kohl liner the French way, on the inside of my eyelids, and tons of black mascara, but really worked through so there’s no hint of glop or flake. Love that look. Soft pink lipstick, maybe just a lot of pinky gloss. Maybe like Nars’s “Orgasm” gloss but pinkier, more full-bodied. Then ice-white acorn pearl drop earrings with the silver hooks and my watch with the black faux-croc’ band and silver and white face, and my Isaac Mizrahi for Tarjay black leather purse with the silver zipper.

And, like the wedding cake toppers to top all such toppers -- the little pink raincoat. A vaguely Gallically gamine ensemble that I’d still be proud to wear twenty years from now. That’s the secret. Always ask yourself, How mortified would I be if I saw myself in this outfit, say, post-menopause?
Done.
***

After dating and living together off and on for four years, The Jewish Dinosaur (TJD) still would not commit. We’d even been engaged at one point, for about three or four minutes, and he’d broken that off. When he did, I thought my life was over. So I plunged into the requisite Madama Butterfly mode -- I’ve always been a little dramatic. This involved crashing into the tragedy of love gone wrong 21st century style, on my aging mattress that was turning into a hammock no matter how many times I turned and flipped it, and armed with Parliaments and Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. In a twisted way, this is the fun part. When they leave you you get to eat whatever you want, as much as you want of it, turn into a total slob of whimpering self-pity, and check the fuck out. It’s like getting a guilt-free temporary pass from life and its grown-up responsibilities. You get to Really Suffer and Do It Up Right.

But then – this is the bad part – those who dumped you can come to their senses and come back at an incredibly inconvenient time. At least this one did: After I’d gained 14 pounds and my face was all broken out and I was at my haggiest, most reclusive, most kill-me-now worst. Yes, TJD returned. Despite the fact that the only thing that fit me was my wardrobe of black yoga pants (J. Crew’s and Old Navy’s are the best), I was actually happy about this. When you’re crazy in love and crushed, you’re dying to get uncrushed ASAP. In this state, the man you love, and only he, can make it better. So I tearfully and gratefully took TJD back. The pain and the Ben & Jerry’s binge stopped. Or maybe they just went underground. Either way, I got my love back and I got back into my size 8 jeans.

TJD and I rejoiced on my sagging mattress. Afterward, we shared my sensational sesame noodles. This is not a metaphor. I make the world’s best sesame noodles, if I do say so myself. One of TJD’s predecessors, a Brooklyn mama’s boy in his 40s who’d never not lived with his mother (which is why he became my ex), once ate so many of my famous sesame noodles at a single sitting that he spent the subsequent 24 hours locked in my powder room, emitting truly terrifying noises and odors. I took it as a kind of compliment.

Tip: What makes a recipe good enough to make a person sick is the same secret as that of the flawless red lipstick shade: You have to combine at least two. In the noodles’ case -- leave it to Jews and Italians to improve an Asian dish -- it was Arthur Schwartz’s What To Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House To Eat and The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. As for the Dino’s and my post-noodles dessert, we compromised and had coconut sorbet with fresh strawberries. I personally hate healthy desserts – what’s the oxymoronic point? – but TJD’s always trying to eat “lite.” At least the coconut was bad for us. If it had been 2005 instead of 2003, Ben & Jerry would have already invented Fossil Fuel, the sweet cream ice cream with chocolate cookie pieces, fudge dinosaurs, and a fudge swirl. I’m sure I could’ve forced that on my Dino and we’d both have been more fulfilled and stayed together forever.
But this was not to be. Because a few weeks later, TJD left me. Then TJD came back. Then TJD left me again. Getting the gist of my love problem? My beau was Lucy with the football and I was Charlie Brown.
But hey, nobody’s perfect. Give a boy his learning curve. Otherwise, my reptile had all the right stuff: smart when not brain-dead, sexy when not preoccupied, sensitive when not oblivious, funny when not miserable, kind when not clueless, attentive when not distracted, generous when not cheap. He brought me Starbucks and bagels in the mornings. He sent me Martha Stewart roses just because. He was nice to Lilly, my kitty cat -- even after she upchucked in his suede bucks. (In Lilly’s defense, TJD wasn’t wearing them at the time.) He wasn’t fanatical about sports. He was a museum-goer. He liked Joni Mitchell.

How many straight men do you know like that?
Accordingly, I hung in there, well past closing time. Hello, four years. I tend to give a man I like the benefit of the doubt. No sense in throwing out the Dino with the antediluvian bath water, right? So I gave him time for his romantic process, or whatever, that he needed to go through. You have to be patient with dinosaurs. You hit them on the tail and it takes two weeks for the message to reach the head. Jurassic Park wasn’t built in a day. I must really love a challenge -- romantic, culinary, sartorial, what have you. I think of what poor dead J.F.K. said about going to the moon, that we’re choosing to go there not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. Exactly, Jack. Hard is good. It’s more interesting. Besides, I’m a Sagittarius. We are the zodiac’s eternally sunny, hopeful sign. J.F.K. was a Gemini, also a good sign and almost as lively as mine.

TJD, in contrast, was the Virgin, Virgo. Ooo. Darkness. Nowhere as scary as Scorpios, but still. TJD was, as is a typical Virgin Dino’s wont, heavy. A brooder. At first, this seemed okay. Opposites attract. He grounded me, I lifted him up. But over time – did I mention it was four years? -- TJD stayed slow. Real slow. Too slow. Slow to get it. “It” being not the fact of my high voltage appeal -- he got that fine -- but of my suitability to be his bride. Why? Why is it that what attracts them is the same thing that keeps them at bay? I’ve never understood this. I’m not a violent person by nature. But sometimes I’d get so frustrated thinking I’d wasted my time and money on all those InStyle Weddings and Martha Stewart Living Weddings that I’d just want to grab that TJD and pull an SDS (Shaken Dino Syndrome): WHAT (shake) IS (shake) YOUR (shake) BASIC (shake) PROBL-EEE-M?!? (shakeshakeshake-shakeshakeshake, shake your Dino).
Was it our age difference? Not for me; I’ve always been attracted to older men. Somebody has to love them. Although he didn’t look it, TJD was almost two decades my senior; hence the Dinosaur moniker. And like me, he was a Jew. Actually, he was less of a Jew than I was – he and the ex-rated shiksa wife always had Christmas trees, something I could no sooner do than wear black lipstick.

“You’ve never been married and divorced,” TJD would always say, usually following a Manhattan or two. A Manhattan. Could there be a queerer cocktail? Those little Maraschino cherries alone. Anyway, that was TJD’s exclusive rationale. I wasn’t a member of The Club, therefore I was ineligible to enter it.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he’d say.

“And your point is?” I’d say.

“That you don’t know what it’s like,” he’d reiterate, chomping the cherry off its stem.
You don’t know what it’s liiike, baby you don’t know what it’s liiike, to love somebody, to love somebody, the way I love you. Thank you, Bee Gees.
My relationship wasn’t exactly turning out to be the love song I’d originally envisioned.

TJD would moan, “I may be terminally single.” I assumed he’d picked that up from an old Cosmo in his shrink’s waiting room. Terminally single.
Please. It’s not a disease! And tough, seasoned newsmen of a certain age like TJD – we’d met at a journalism conference back when I was a reporter -- don’t use those phrases, unless they’re being sarcastic. Maybe my prehistoric boyfriend was trying to sound like a hipster. Eek.

My therapist, Manny, only keeps National Geographic in his waiting room. They do stories featuring bare breasts and the Cretaceous period, two of TJD’s favorite things. About love and marriage, however, Manny called TJD “eternally ambivalent.” This was not, obviously, what I wanted to hear.

“Are you saying it’s time to release the Dino?” I asked him.

“There are many other fish in the sea,” Manny said.

“But he’s neither fish nor fowl. Of course, there are sea dinosaurs. Well, there were.”

“Okay, well, you might try a mammal next time out.”
Next time out? Was he kidding? I was exhausted. Four years. I didn’t want a mammal, I wanted to fix the reptile I already had. InStyle. Martha. You know. Work with what you’ve got. Make a living fossil wreath. A dinosaur egg mobile. A scaly plate centerpiece. Something.
***

I poured myself a TaB (the can is pink, it gave me hope) and hit Gap’s Web site. They had the coat. They called it a Macintosh. But they only had it in “antique white,” “stone,” and black. No, no, and no. I called 1-800-GAPSTYLE. My little pink raincoat was all sold out! Oh nooo! I thought, I'll bet super-acquisitive Northeastern chicks who didn't call the Gap’s toll-free number would probably try calling individual Northeastern Gaps, but not with my singular zeal. I was mistaken. My little pink raincoat was sold out in my state, New Jersey, as well as in every New York and Connecticut Gap. That’s right, I called every last Gap in every last city in those places. Well, I was gonna beat these dames at their own game. Nobody was gonna prevent me from MY marriage, dammit. So I devised a strategy. I proceeded to maniacally call each state in the United States, but alphabetically backward. So I began in Wyoming, where there is one solitary Gap. Hey, don't laugh. You never know.

"Are you calling about that mythical pink raincoat?" the lady asked. "I've heard about it, but we never got it. I guess Wyoming's not a pink raincoat kind of place."

Then, just for the hell of it, I tried North Carolina. I know, it wasn't alphabetically correct.
But I used to live there. Twenty-nine Gaps later, nada. One woman laughed at me. "Tha-yutt pi-yunk raincoat? Oh honey, you couldn't fahnd tha-yutt on God's green earth now!"

This is my quest, to follow that pink raincoat, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far …

Back to the backward alphabet strategy. Wisconsin has 19 Gaps. Luck struck on my very first city, a place called Greendale. Was my impossible dream possible?

"Got it!" the young woman said. "Got the last medium right here. And boy, are you lucky. This thing's blown out of the store."
I whipped out my abused Mr. Visa and we charge-sent me my dreamy creamy pinksicle coat. Maggie Prescott would have been so proud. She was the imperious fashion editrix in the 1957 movie Funny Face, the one modeled after Diana Vreeland (who in real life said, “Pink is the navy blue of India.”) Maggie Prescott sang “Think Pink!”: “Red is dead, blue is through, green’s obscene, brown’s taboo … Pink’s for the lady with joie de vivre.”

I have joie, Maggie. Beaucoup joie. So much joie that my latent hoarding gene – HNA, not DNA -- kicked in. Maybe I needed more than one pink raincoat. What if the medium was too small? None to be had at the Madison, Wisconsin Gap, but Nancy, the store manager, promised to do a national search and get back to me in the morning. I didn’t trust her.

“I swear I’ll do it,” she said. “It’s a really cute coat. I want you to have it.”

“Sure you swear,” I told her. “But do you CARE, Nancy?”

“I do!” she said. “I swear I care!”

Having exhausted the remaining 17 Wisconsin Gaps, I moved on to West Virginia, where there are four stores. They all laughed at me. One Gap guy, in Barboursville, said, “I was unpacking these last week or the week before and I thought, `Who the hell’s gonna wanna buy a Pepto-Bismol coat?’”

“It’s NOT Pepto-Bismol,” I told him, even though
I’d never even seen it yet.

“Three days later,” he continued, “it was gone. We’ve been getting calls from Connecticut Gaps begging us for any size. I think I got one left in an extra-small.”

Was this man taunting me? An extra-small wouldn’t fit my bulimic cat Lilly and she weighs eight pounds.

I finally scored a large in Bellingham, Washington. That figures. It must be near Seattle, land of rain, suicides, and raincoats. I popped open a fresh can of TaB to celebrate and contemplate my pink arrivals. It was 12:30 a.m., 6 ½ hours after my quest commenced, but I was so energized by my coup that I called my friend Joan in Manhattan to tell her about it.

“Have you been on eBay recently?” she asked.

“No, why?”

“You said a pink Gap Macintosh, right? They’ve got 32 of ´em on there selling for $150.”

“What?!? I can’t believe it! Little pink raincoat scalpers! Who thinks of this?”

“What do you care?” Joan said. “You’ve got yours. Good for you. It does look really cute. I wonder how it looks in person. Maybe I could wear it.”
Was she insinuating something? I didn’t want her to get any piggy-backing ideas, so I quickly hung up.
In the morning, Nancy from the Madison Gap actually called me back. I was stunned.

“I found it!” she proudly crowed. “I’m having a large sent right to you. They had one last one left at the Chicago store on Michigan Avenue. I must’ve called 30 stores.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already found a large in Bellingham. So we charged and sent me a second large. Something was happening. This phenom was bigger than me and my three little pink raincoats. This is how features types think: Why pink? Why pink now? Was it because Jennifer Warner wore my raincoat that February when she hosted Saturday Night Live? That’s what her publicist Nicole King thought.

“Jennifer’s a very Gap girl,” she said. “The `SNL’ costume design team chose that coat for her for a skit.”

Did she get to keep MY coat?

“I think she did,” King said. “She really loves it.”

“All I can say is that this pink raincoat is like a preppy, retro look,” said my friend Mindy, a Washington, D.C. wardrobe stylist. “Very sweet, optimistic, and friendly, like grosgrain ribbon.
Very Kennebunkport yet über-feminine.”

Then my sartorial soul mate Sarah Jessica Parker should have one! After all, she modeled for the Gap, and it was APR -- After Pink Raincoat -- so she might’ve missed it. Plus, SJP’s perfume “Lovely” and its print ads are all cotton candy pinketty-pink-pink.

“The Gap Macintosh pink is a cool, blue-pink,” Mindy said. “It’s like the Sweet’N Low packet pink. I’d put SJP in something warmer and softer, like … like an apricot Cosmo color. That’s so her.”
There’s no escaping it. Single urban gals – okay, my friends and moi – are still obsessed with and in withdrawal from Sex and the City. It’s sad, I know, but what can you do. My gay columnist friend Billy wrote a whole piece devoted to this in the fall of 2005. It was triggered by the fact that one Sunday night at Michael Jordan’s The Steak House N.Y.C. in Grand Central Terminal, I saw BIG. As in Mr. As in the actor Chris Noth. That hunky hunk-a burnin’ love was seated with a guy behind a large pillar, enjoying an overpriced steak and wearing a kelly green shirt. It was all too much for me. So I passed out. Big didn’t notice. It was really dark in there and I blended into the dark carpeting with my favorite black skirt (four floaty, gossamer layers of tulle and cotton, and deconstructed ruffles at the hip. Devastating. Anthropologie.com, I love thee.) A maitre d’ and Billy quickly dragged me away by the armpits. I came to, typically, just in time for dessert. Big was gone by then but it didn’t matter. I’d had my Big fix. I’d been Bigged.

“In Fantasy Land Mr. Big would have come to your rescue and fanned your wan and delicate face to revive you,” said my Manhattan author friend Elizabeth. “But he never really was that kind of guy, was he? I was just watching a Sex rerun yesterday, when he tells Carrie, begrudgingly, `I fucking love you, okay?’”

“I saw that one last night too!” I told her.

“I saw Chris Noth walking in the Village one day,” Elizabeth added. “He looked like he was just coming from the gym. A little frumpy and not at all Mr. Big-ish. But I still love him.”

But I still love him. The eternal feminine position. Are we all masochists? Do we give men way more credit than they deserve? Should we reserve our credit strictly for plastic purchases? On their record “Nurds,” The Roches sing, “This feminine position tripped up with reptile into that most feminine position too fat to turnstile.” I’m not really sure what the lyrics mean, but I always appreciate the reptilian reference.

Almost as much as I appreciated my new little pink raincoat. I knew Maryellen Gordon, Glamour magazine’s deputy style editor, would too.

“Pink conjures up frothy bows and cotton candy,” Maryellen said. “But designers have wrangled it into these womanly, gorgeous, grown-up pinks. And people tend to dismiss the importance of color in outerwear. When was the last time you saw a fabulous, great, light, happy, insouciant coat and said, `Wow, I have to have that’? It’s, like,
`Maybe if I buy this it will be 70 degrees tomorrow and I’ll feel less depressed about the war.’ Pink captures the zeitgeist.”

It’s definitely the opposite of war. Earlier that month, a women’s group called Code Pink protested the war with Iraq dressed in pink.

“Obviously, people are a little bit freaked out about the war and Bush,” noted my friend Andrea Linett. She’s Lucky magazine’s creative director. “People are dying for something to make life less depressing – black won’t give you any excitement – and pink does that. It’s Audrey Hepburn princess, Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, Cinderella, girlie and more innocent than red, but not namby-pamby. After an icky winter, this pink raincoat is the fashion equivalent of Here Comes the Sun.”

Maryellen Gordon said that huge companies like the Gap take a gamble on color – and it is an educated gamble because they know their business – but “I’m sure that right now they’re wishing they had 10,000 more in production.”

Were they? I called Gap spokesperson Erica Archambault.

“We believed in pink and selected it several months ago to be a key part of our spring line,” she said. It was planned and it’s been very popular. We thought people around the country would be craving a burst of color this spring. It sounds dorky but I put on pink and it makes me feel more cheerful when I’m in a bad mood.”

Emotion! That’s it! Pink is about feelings. Joie.

“I’d raise to sainthood whoever decided to do that coat,” said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, New Jersey. She and her fellow color gurus there study human response to color. They can tell a year ahead of time what’ll be the next big hue. Corporations such as Nordstrom, Puma, and, yes, Gap, pay Pantone big bucks for its color savvy. In fact, the coveted collector’s-item pink raincoat is Pantone’s 15-2216, or “Sachet Pink.”

“Pink is a return to your little girl baby blanket,” Eiseman said. “It wraps itself around you and protects you from the elements – like a raincoat does. It’s nurturing and romantic and a harbinger of springtime. I think the mood now, with the somberness and darkness of war and having had a very bad winter, is perfect for it. Pink expresses all of those inner feelings in that one color.”

I knew it! I was so jazzed over my findings that I called Joan back to breathlessly report. I told her about buying the second size large and about Jennifer Warner. I told her about Code Pink and Here Comes the Sun and –

“Wait a second,” Joan said, interrupting me. She always interrupts me. It’s part of our repertoire. “Did you say you ordered … TWO larges?”
***

Baby Medium arrived a few days later, like a pink bundle of love from heaven. Even better, the horizontal tab inside the collar, the one you can use to hang on a hook, was – brace yourself – white and pink gingham. Baby Larges, the twins, arrived later that week. They were both too big. I sold one to my friend Mindy, who said it was not only her “perfect blue-pink” but would also complement her newly decorated , very tiny studio apartment.
The first time I saw the place, Mindy proudly said, “Doesn’t it make you want to have sex?”

“Well,” I told her, studying the deeply mauve walls, the black bearskin throw rugs, and the 37 Hummer SUV-sized red, fuchsia, purple, and scarlet velvet shams neatly staggered across her heavy cherry velvet bedspread, “it does resemble the inside of a vagina.”

I returned the other large little pink raincoat to my local Hackensack Gap, where a crazed cluster of seven women (customers and salespeople) lunged and all but tore it out of my hands. I may as well have been a Spanish matadora waving a pink cape. I’m telling you, obtaining this raincoat made me feel so triumphant I ran outside and did the Rocky victory dance, right there in front of Riverside Square mall, humming the Rocky theme: DadaDAAA, dadaDAAA, dadaDAAA …

I have always believed and still believe that said raincoat, as well as a few other choice garments, will get men I love to finally commit and live with me tastefully ever after. Since I believe that, then you probably do too -- if you’re a female. Right? If we can somehow find that impossible-to-get-a-hold-of little pink raincoat, he’ll want us for more than datin’ and matin’, and we’ll finally be Tiffany little blue box happy. Now, it doesn’t always have to be a little pink raincoat; it could be, say, a peach silk-satin bra with a matching panty, or a backless black dress. It’s whatever you want to wear that makes you feel extra-good, alluring, refreshed. It’s devastating, crazy, romantic, deluded, and profoundly feminine, this intense and magical power we ascribe to clothes, jewelry, underwear, scarves, shoes, sunglasses, makeup, and even to perfume, to get us closer not just to men and sex – you can get those anywhere, quel bore -- but to love, the biggest, hardest, most elusive treasure of them all. That’s the Little Pink Raincoat state of mind.

This, of course, never works – in the long run. Clothes may make the woman but clothes don’t make the man stay with us. Not even the drop-dead cutest ones – clothes or men. (Who knows why men stay with us? I have no idea. I guess it’s because they love us, preferably nekkid, therefore canceling our entire shopping therapy core belief system.) But! That doesn’t mean we care that it never works. We think that it works, we believe that it works, we hope that it works, and that’s what counts. (It’s also what keeps every one of my fave stores from Banana to Bergdorf in business.) Besides, it really doesn’t matter if men leave us. They do this. It happens. We cope. We forge ahead, plastic at the ready. Because guess what? After they leave us, we still get to keep the outfit. That’s concrete. That’s tangible. That’s real. There are always other fish in the sea, as Manny said, but he’s a man-ny and you may never see that orgasmic Chanel red lipstick again because they might discontinue it because they just introduced it for, like, one season or something. Chanel is fleeting and unique.
You see what I mean? Lose the guy. Keep the lipstick. Life and love are so much less disappointing that way.

In that sense, my little pink raincoat was, literally, a little pink raincoat. But it was also a metaphor for feeling that feeling that a thing like a little pink raincoat gives. My Washington Post Style editor, Peggy Hackman, agreed with me. So much so that I wrote a whole article about it the following month. The day my story, “Forever Chasing Raincoats: Going for the Pink,” ran, none other than the Today show’s Katie Couric talked about it on air that morning. Katie said something like, “The Washington Post says this little pink raincoat by the Gap has sold out across the country. I want this coat!” I figured if it obsessed me and the Washington Post and Katie Couric, then I’d hit a feminine nerve. I was on to something. If women go berserk over a little pink raincoat, then we must go berserk over things like it. We know what you wear can change your life. We also know it cannot change your life. See? The point is we think it can and that kind of yearning for a changed life means a change toward love, both inward and outward.

May would be good for a wedding! TJD and I could honeymoon in Vernal, Utah. That’s where Dinosaurland is. They have a HUGE pink Sauropod with flirtatiously long black eyelashes and a great big friendly Pepsodent smile welcoming you at the entrance. TJD could commune with his kin, or at least their fossils. Then we could dine at the Dinosaur Brew Haus (“Beer, Burgers, and BONES”), and grab a frappe or a latte nightcap at the nearby Shivers-N-Jitters café. It would be so groovy.
Unless he breaks up with me first.

Which he did.
***

I remember this jock I knew in college. He was newly engaged. He was just a kid, barely 20, and his zombified fiancée of choice seemed in dire need of a personality implant.

“I know she’s not the prettiest,” he told me one day. “And I know she’s not the smartest. And I know she’s not the richest.”

“So why are you marrying her, again?” I asked.

“I’m sick of first dates.”

Hey, try four years of the same date. But! My little pink raincoat would renew TJD and me. It was spring, life was abloom, we could be too. As he lived near Philadelphia (we were weekend commuting when communing), I pictured him all alone, bereft and tragically trudging along the banks of the Schuylkill River or the Manayunk Canal. He’d be bitterly pondering the slogan “City of Brotherly Love.” Trudge, trudge, trudge. Lonely cheese steak Dinobeest.

“Checked out any dating sites lately?” my New
Jersey reporter friend Eman asked me one day over the phone while I was in full-throttle Madama Butterfly mode.

“What?” I said, confused. “No, why? I’m not ready to date other people. I love the dinosaur! And I’d never go on one of those sites. I was watching Dr. Phil today and he doesn’t believe in them. He goes,
`If your only standard is that the other person has to own a computer --’”

“Are you on-line right now?”

“No,” I said, lighting a Parliament. “I’m too busy being suicidal on my hammock which used to be a bed, thanks.”

“Your dinosaur is on there,” she said. “In living Dino color.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, nervously reaching for an ashtray and my New York Super Fudge Chunk. “My dinosaur’s melancholy and meditating gloomily down by the river, channeling Ben Franklin, or whatever.”

“Well, I was curious so I did a little luuuv search on your allegedly tortured OCD Rain Man. Typed in his general peripherals, and bada-boom, baby. `Advertisements for Myself.’ Here, I’ll send you a couple of the links.”

“HE’S ON MORE THAN ONE?!?” I screamed.

“No river gloom action,” Eman said. “He’s just looking for action.”

I dropped my ice cream and the phone and bolted to my computer, the broken pieces of what used to be my unbroken whole heart, banging madly. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be MY dinosaur on there. It had to be someone else’s dinosaur. I clicked on and …

Oh. My. God.

Oh. My. Dinosaur.

Standing in front of the Chelsea Hotel. Smiling.
SMILING. In his nerdy old eyeglasses. (Yes, I’d fallen in love with a man with Bad Glasses. That’s true love.) With his beat-up old khaki trench coat draped over his forearm. We’d been in New York City, visiting his sister and brother-in-law for Thanksgiving, just four months earlier. And now he was using the picture I’d taken of him to get dates with other women!

JOURNALIST SEEKS THAT ELUSIVE COMBINATION OF ADVENTURE AND STABILITY

“Some of my friends sometimes refer to me as a dinosaur, mostly in terms of old values and doing things right because that’s the way you do them. ”
Holy shit.

“I’m looking for someone who’s very smart, down-to-earth, attractive and, above all, honest without being unkind. A good sense of humor is a requirement of survival with me.”
Hello?!?

“I need my own space and respect my partner’s, but I’m also looking for something more than a weekend date.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire! You’re eternally ambivalent!

“At this stage, there’s no one around without baggage. You just look for matching luggage.”
More shrink’s office women’s magazine twaddle! Was my would-be husband dragging his unmatched suitcases by the banks of the Manayunk, stopping occasionally to check his new luuuv.com e-mails on his BlackBerry? Jesus!

Turn Ons:

“Boldness/Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Flirting, Public displays of affection.”

Turn Offs:

“Body piercings, Tattoos, Thrill seekers.”

I found my phone under three pillows and called Billy, breathless and tearful. At times like these, a girl needs a real homo to straighten her out.

“Basically what he’s saying,” Billy said, “is `I want someone exactly like you. Except not you.’”
So I did what any literate, homicidal maniac who’s been turned into romantic roadkill would do: I responded to the personal ad.

I am, after all, almost exactly like me.

“Hi, I’m a cute little Jewish princesse living in New Jersey. Really loved your ad and thought you might like to get together. I know this great little pizza place in Hackensack. Nothing fancy, but the pizza’s orgasmic. I was going to go tomorrow for dinner with someone else, but he’s too unstable. If you’re available for a highly caloric adventure, please let me know. Elusively yours, La princesse. P.S.: Loved your picture in front of the Chelsea Hotel. Did I take that or was it your brother-in-law? :)”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and hit SEND.

Thirty seconds later, my phone began ringing. I glanced at the caller ID. It wasn’t one of my 500 creditors. No, it was the Dino. I let the call go to voice-mail. I lit a Parliament and poured a TaB.
My cell phone began ringing. Dino. I let that one go to voice-mail, too. Hm-hmm-hmmm. How does it feel? You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. How does it feel? The Bee Gees, God love ´em, are no match for Bob Dylan. Nobody is. The regular phone began ringing again. Dino. I picked it up.

“Hell-ooo?” I chirped.

“Hi,” he said severely. “So, um, huh. I got your little note here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is this … some kind of … joke?” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “It’s deadly serious. We’re talking pizza.”

“Oh. Okay. Well.”

“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t see your ad?
Like, I’m so stupid? I spend my life on the Internet, what is WRONG with you?”

“You’re anything but stupid.”

“Oh so you’re saying you wanted me to see this.”

“No. I don’t … know. I wasn’t thinking – ”

I sipped my TaB and waited. Long silence. Tick.
Tock. Tick. Tock. It was a scintillating conversation, all right. I know I was tingly all over. Tick …

“So, you wanna go get pizza, or what?” TJD finally sputtered.

“Um, sure,” I said. “Since you put it that way. How could I resist?”

“I’ll drive up tomorrow. We can do a late lunch-early dinner thing. I wanna drive back before it gets too dark.”

Translation: “I’m not sleeping over so don’t even think about it.”

Yeah, but he hadn’t seen me in my new little pink raincoat. I walked to the hallway closet and pulled it out. Gorgeous.

“It’s you and me, sweets,” I told it. “We’re fixing him together.”

I awoke the next morning all giddy. Idée fixe – actuated. Hair and makeup – perfect. Outfit to go under the little pink raincoat – perfect. Jewelry and purse – also perfect. I sprayed on some Chanel # 19, slid on my raincoat – I couldn’t wait – and looked in the full-length mirror. An extra dab of Nars’s “Orgasm” gloss, and I’d be good enough to eat.

TJD arrived exactly at the appointed hour, 4 o’clock. Considering that I’d been ready since noon, I’d had plenty of time to calm down and break myself into the pink fabulosity of it all. (The first time you wear something new, you’re always a little nervous about it. It just takes that one time, and then you’re fine. You’re wearing it, rather than vice versa.) TJD kissed me hello hurriedly. He was wearing a heavy down coat and a black woolen cap. It was probably still way too cold and unrainy out for my springtime outfit, but I didn’t mind. I can always suck it up for beauty and love and dreams.

“So you’re all ready to go?” TJD said.

“Let’s go,” I said, waiting to see how soon he’d swoon over my coat.

“Aren’t you gonna be kinda cold in that thing?” was all he said.

The restaurant wasn’t busy at this off-hour – 4:10 – and we were seated right away. I was freezing so I kept my prized coat on. Besides, this would prolong the pink enchantment. Oh, I just loved this place, my favorite pizza place in all New Jersey, the incongruously named Brooklyn's Brick Oven Pizzeria.
It’s just down the street from the Hackensack Cemetery. I probably should’ve heeded the symbolism, relationship-wise.

TJD ordered for us: red wine, salads, a large pizza. I lit a cigarette and felt very content. I love Jersey, if only because it still has smoking sections. In some ways, the entire state is a smoking section. A Latina waitress came over with glasses of ice water and a basket of warm garlic bread.

“Muy bonito,” she said, nodding at my coat. “Preety peenk.”

“Gracias!” I said.

I looked at TJD. Nada. He looked moribund. How was it possible that a complete stranger – okay, granted, it’s a woman, but still – can see me, and my own almost-husband can not?

“How’s tricks?” I asked him, tucking into the delicious greasy bread.

“Okay,” he said, grimly sipping water.

“This is really good bread,” I said. “Don’t you want some?”

“Later,” he said. Apparently we were going to have an exchange in which I’d supply the animation and he’d supply the suspension. Kind of like the history of our entire relationship.

The waitress brought our wine and salads.

“Cheers,” TJD said, looking anything but cheerful.
Maybe he’d perk up next door, at the necropolis.
Why hadn’t he mentioned my coat? Why wasn’t he talking to me? Why was he freakin’ dating on-line?

The pizza arrived, fragrant and bubbling. This pizza rocks my world. I shook grated Parmesan on my half -- extra cheese-mushroom-extra sauce-pepperoni -- and TJD gnawed his fresh tomato-black olive-baked garlic cloves-fresh spinach. Like his Mesozoic-era terrestrial carnivorous and herbivorous forebears, TJD was a good eater. He inhaled food. Actually, he was stingy about practically everything but food and booze. Then again, this was house Merlot and pizza in Hackensack, not, say, French Champagne and pan-roasted Maine lobster with rosemary cream at The Inn at Little Washington. I could only dream about the latter. Maybe for our first anniversary, post Dinosaurland. But we’d have to get married first.
But how could we do that if he hadn’t even noticed my preety peenk?

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“That fucking goddamned lying asshole sonofabitch warmonger fool’s taking us to war, I just know it.”

Oh God, here we go. Dino DETESTED the president. George W. Bush got him all hot and bothered – and not in a good way for me. When TJD started railing against W., who, it appeared, would attack Iraq, U.N. sanctions or no, I knew he would not stop.

“That fucker can TASTE it,” TJD said. “Gotta finish what Poppy started! It’s payback time! Gotta demolish Iraq so we can give all those fucking suck-up Cheney Halliburton compadres their corrupt little no-bid contracts to rebuild and – ”

“Okay, okay, we’re invading Iraq,” I said. “Whatever. What about us?”

“Us? We’ll just have to accept it. That bastard’s gonna do whatever the fuck he wants to do. Fucking amoral moron. Phony Texas cowboy.”

Life was imitating art: There’s a scene in my favorite romantic comedy, Annie Hall, in which Woody Allen’s character, Alvy, is having a political conversation with his first wife, Allison, played by Carol Kane. They’re in bed and Alvy starts obsessing over his JFK assassination conspiracy theory. He goes on and on for several minutes until Allison finally breaks in:

Allison: Then everybody’s in on the conspiracy?
Alvy: Tsch.

Allison: The FBI, and the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover and oil companies and the Pentagon and the men’s-room attendant at the White House?

Alvy: I-I-I-I would leave out the men’s-room attendant.

Allison: You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me.

Alvy: Oh, my God! (Then, to the camera) She’s right! Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was – she was beautiful. She was willing. She was real … intelligent. (Sighing) Is it the old Groucho Marx joke? That – that I-I just don’t wanna belong to any club that would have me as a member?

“You don’t want dessert, do you?” TJD asked, wiping his mouth with his 63rd paper napkin -- one for each Cretaceous year of his life, presumably. He added it to the orange grease-stained pile of 62 others on his side of the table. He must’ve been the inspiration for Peanuts’ Pigpen. He lived it.

“I’m pretty full,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “I’ll have coffee, maybe.”

“Let’s get a coffee at your place,” TJD said, motioning to the waitress for the bill. “I want to catch CNN, see what … ”

“What about us?” I asked, reaching for his arms.
They were beautiful arms. Not too hairy, not too bare. Shapely, strong, masculine. Intelligent arms. TJD was wearing the black cotton turtleneck I’d bought him for his September birthday. He looks amazing in black, not to mention black shows stains less and this was a key factor in my shopping policy for Pigpen Rex. He’d pushed the sleeves back to the elbows, revealing the Timex watch I’d given him for the previous birthday. It had a very simple black leather strap and a round face whose black Arabic numerals glowed in the dark against the white background. It was a really good, inexpensive watch. TJD’s pre-moi version was a hideous gargoyle of cheesy digitalis that actually cost more than the Timex. It’s not how much you pay for something, it’s how it looks and how it works -- I’m truly democratic in this sense -- and, as Eman says, how you carry yourself with it on. Eman ought to know; in September of 2005 that raven-haired sylphette eloped in Cabo in bare feet, a pair of embroidered white lace Felina bikini panties, and a lovely white cocktail-length dress with spaghetti straps. Eman’s frock photographed fabulously against her Cabo-caramelized skin and fit her like a dream.

Was it Wang?

La Herrera?

Try Gap.

Just like my little pink raincoat!

“I have to hit the gym early tomorrow morning,” TJD said. “Work off some of this pizza.”

“What. About. Us?” I said.

“You want to work out together tomorrow?” he asked, pulling away from my grasp to calculate the
tip. “Wow. That’s news. You’re never up that early.
And this ain’t yoga, princesse, it’s not soft-core.
You pound it out. You sweat it out. Nothing Zen-meditative about it.”

Was this vintage male deflection or could TJD really be this Dino-dumb?

“Stop talking about the gym and Iraq and CNN!” I cried. “`Elusive combination of adventure and stability’ -- Jesus! And my beautiful raincoat, don’t you even SEE it? You have no IDEA what it took to get this raincoat. No idea. I worked so hard to get it. It means so much to me. What don’t you SEE?”

“I see it,” TJD said, utterly bemused. “I see it.”

“IT’S PINK!”

“It is?”

“YES!”

“Oh. Okay. Well, it’s pink, then. I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell.”

“HOW COULD YOU NOT TELL?”

“I’m color blind.”