Nancy paused, taking it in. Then she smiled sweetly and said, “Well, dear, at some point, I guess you have to talk.”
78
That Molner Guy
I SHOULDN’T HAVE let it go on so long with Brooks. My mother openly disapproved—she thought he was using me and didn’t like the age difference. And when I shared with People how great it was all going, calling Brooks “incredibly kind, caring and sensitive,” my mom went berserk. My father called and begged me to reach out to her, which of course I did. But I will always regret the distance that relationship temporarily put between my parents and me. And Carrie and me.
Breakups triggered such awful feelings—of sadness and emptiness, of what might have been with Jay. It was a different kind of loss but it retraumatized me just the same—my friend Donna, a therapist, described it as reigniting my grief dendrites. So I always let things drag on longer than they should. I often told my girls as they were walking out the door, “Make good choices.” Why was I making so many bad ones?
The upside: The breakup diet. By now, I had a much healthier relationship with food, but it would forever be entwined with my emotions. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and the anxiety seemed to ramp up my metabolism. The skinny jeans I kept in the back of my closet fit again, and my clavicles felt like wings.
The downside: When the girls and I went to Puerto Rico a week or so later over the Christmas break, I was once again the third wheel （though with three other couples, I guess I was the seventh）。 Despite crushing an impromptu game of Name That Tune we’d played with our iPhones on the terrace of the hotel, I was pretty miserable. Alone again, naturally.
WOMEN HAVE OFTEN asked me for dating advice and I always tell them the same thing: “Be intentional.” I remember seeing the 1984 movie Falling in Love with Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep as suburban strangers, married to other people, who meet at a bookstore. The serendipity of bumping into your soulmate while browsing bestsellers seemed a little ridiculous to me. In my experience, you had to make your own luck. So, after a few months of licking my wounds, I went back to singing the single-gal solo “Do you know anyone?” to every person who crossed my path.
One morning at Flywheel with my friend and dating adviser Pat, I spotted Molly Helfet hanging her jacket in a locker. Her elegant South African husband, Dave, was the chief trauma surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
“Hey, Pat,” I said, “do you think Molly and Dave know any nice doctors I can go out with?”
“I don’t know,” Pat said. “Let’s ask her.”
We weaved our way through the tomato-faced, soaking-wet spinners from the previous class and got to Molly. “Hey!” Pat said. Then, in a low voice, as if we were sharing state secrets: “Katie has a question for you.”
I mentioned what a great guy Emily’s doctor husband, George, was and all the nice MDs I’d met through my cancer advocacy work. Other than my brief fling with the plastic surgeon, doctors were strangely underrepresented in my thick dating portfolio.
Molly flipped through her mental Rolodex. “A doctor? A single doctor? Not really,” she said, then paused. “But we do know this banker named John Molner.”
“Does he have a pulse?” I asked.
“Yes, he does.” Molly laughed. “He might be seeing someone—other than that, John’s great.”
But John Molner didn’t call. He didn’t write. Every time I saw Molly at spin class, I’d inquire without shame or subtlety, “Molly, what happened to that Molner guy?”
Trying to move this thing along, Molly said she could host a dinner party and invite us both, which sounded horribly awkward; one day on the golf course, Dave floated the same idea to John, who apparently disliked it as much as I did. Rather than be seated next to each other at a dinner with other guests looking on, trying to determine if a love connection was happening—like horse breeders standing around a paddock waiting to see if the stallion is going to mount the mare—he said, “Okay, okay, I’ll call her.”
On April 10th, an email came:
Hey Katie,
Don’t know what you did to upset Molly Helfet but she gave me your email.
I’m off for a long weekend on Thursday, but back next week. Do you have time to meet for dinner or something?
He followed up with a phone call; I liked the warm, confident sound of his voice. I asked him if he’d like to meet me for lunch sometime. John laughed. “I don’t really go out to lunch.”
“Okay, then, how about a drink?”