The Times Magazine - UK (2022-04-09)

The Times Magazine 57

have done if she had a gun in the house.

“I started thinking about hate and rage and

how important it is to keep guns out of the

hands of Verizon users,” she wrote.

It’s a very funny piece. If you are in your

seventies, newly single and open to a new

relationship, you could do worse than place

an article in the editorial pages of a national

newspaper. Ephron wasn’t looking for love but,

after the piece ran, she began getting emails

from men saying things like, “If you are ever

in Hartford, call me.” One man, who had lost

his wife two months earlier, bombarded her

with emails until she asked him to stop.

She supposes now that the piece must have

sounded like “a bird call”, she says. It was her

voice, plus you couldn’t help but see that she

must be single.

“I didn’t really think about that,” she

says. “Because being 72, you don’t actually

think you’re...”

You don’t think you’re single?

“Yeah,” she says. “You don’t think of

yourself as... something to be plucked.”

And it’s a delicate subject – finding love

again after a bereavement. My wife often

says that if she dies, I will take up quite

cheerfully with another. She says I am a bit

like a labrador; I need someone around to

throw the ball and dish out the biscuits.

“Is she thinking it’s a bad thing or a good

thing?” Ephron asks. “Because there is a

certain amount of guilt about falling in love.

And people will say to you, ‘I will never be

with anyone else.’ I would have said the same

thing when I was married to Jerry – that I was

not going to fall in love again.”

But about six months after the Verizon

piece ran she got an email from Peter Rutter,

a psychiatrist in California. They had met

decades before as college students, when

Ephron’s sister Nora set them up on a date.

He had lost his wife and had experienced the

same struggles trying to cancel her phone

contract. And he had read her novel Siracusa,

which is set in the Sicilian city’s old town,

called Ortigia. By chance he and his wife

had been there on their last holiday together,

staying in a place that looked exactly like the

picture on the novel’s cover. These were a lot

of coincidences, although as a Jungian analyst

he referred to them as “confluences”. He was

trying to “heal up by hiking in and out of the

Grand Canyon”, he wrote.

They began to email back and forth,

gradually opening up to each other. “I felt

the tremor of your email in the middle of the

night,” he wrote in one. “There is no one else,

nor has there been since Virginia died, nor

did I expect such,” he said in another. “This

will be nothing more or less than what our

confluence alchemically creates.”

They started talking on the phone. It felt

like “a fantastic adventure”, she writes. He

flew to New York to meet her. What would

it have been like if he had turned up and she

didn’t fancy him?

“Wouldn’t that be awful?” she says. But

he’d sent her a picture of himself in a canoe.

Still, “I was frantic with panic,” she says.

Seeing him in person was “almost deranging”.

In the book she writes of calling a friend

afterwards. “I kept saying, ‘Maybe I just want

sex.’ I think I might even have used the term

‘f*** buddy’. I had never in my life used that

term. I am way too old for it. I have no idea

how it popped out of my mouth.”

They had an intense physical attraction.

“I want to apologise for even mentioning sex,”

she writes. “No one wants to hear about two

72-year-olds getting it on. In a movie, I know,

if you have two 72-year-olds simply kissing,

you want the camera far away, like across the

street or out the window.”

Part of the panic that seized her initially

was “because if you’re 72... death is really

close. You can reach out and touch it,” she

says. “We’d both been through cancer deaths

with our mates.” And Ephron had a blood

abnormality that was similar to that of her

elder sister Nora. It didn’t mean she would get

leukaemia too, but she might. She had to get

tested every six months.

Sitting in a park with him, she said, “If I get

sick you can leave me,” she says. “And he just

went, ‘I could never do that.’ ”

At home in New York

After you have lost a partner, ‘There is a certain

amount of guilt about falling in love again’

aaRON RiCHteR