Modern Love: First the Proposal, Then the Remodeling - Modern Love

When I found Jim, I was playing Judge Beth Bornstein on the TV series “Murder One.” He was 44 and a former Marine Corps tank officer who sold I.B.M. midrange computers. I had just turned 50 and was blissfully content in my post-divorce home in the Hollywood Hills.

Seven years earlier, with the death of my marriage, I had been racked with loneliness. Then I slowly came to appreciate my own company. I could stay up all night and eat cake for breakfast. I could sing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” at the top of my lungs while hunched over a tumbler of bourbon. I could see people if I wanted or be by myself.

Jim was living in his sister’s house in the Valley. He owned a place in Oceanside, Calif., but his sister and her husband and son had decamped for the East Coast when the earthquakes of Los Angeles became too much for them. Jim was their designated house sitter until the place was sold.

So with him to love, but happily living across town in Sherman Oaks, Calif., I had it all.

Then one night, a year after we met, Jim said, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”

I was expecting the question. We spent Christmas that year with his family. All the women decided he should propose.

“Yes,” I replied. “I’d say yes.”

“Good,” he said. “I just wanted to know what you’d say if I asked.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You can’t pre-ask me to marry you. I revoke my ‘yes.’ ”

He laughed and gave me a look that said: You are so adorable.

I buried my rancor and we went along our merry, uncommitted way for another month. But on Valentine’s Day, after the in-home massages he ordered as my gift, Jim leaned across the steak dinner I made and took my hand.

“Will you marry me?” he asked again.

“Are you serious?” I replied.

“Sorry about last time,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

It would have been nice if he had made a reservation at a restaurant and bought a bauble chosen with me in mind. As it was, we were in our bathrobes and more than a little greasy. There was no ring.

All that seemed nothing compared with the joy of having Jim sitting across from me for the rest of my life. I said yes.

That night I woke out of a deep sleep, thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ll never be alone again.”

To many this would be good news, but not to me. My first marriage failed after 17 years. Our relationship had been kind but unfulfilling. I didn’t have the courage to end it on my own, but on the day he left, I felt as if someone unlocked a door and set me free. Living alone, I’d never risk getting lost in a man again.

The next morning I told Jim we didn’t have to marry. I just needed to know he wanted to.

“Oh, yes, we do,” he said. “I want everybody to know we love each other. I want it to be public.”

Backed into a corner, I asked if he would wait.

“As long as it takes,” he said, “but I’d like to move in.”

There it was, the man I loved asking me to give up my solitude and choose him over fear.

When I first dated Jim, the sweetness of his character caught me off guard. I had a list, like a lot of women do, of the attributes I wanted in a man. “Sweet” was not on it. I find that sometimes the thing I need most I don’t know about until it shows up. Then it’s: “Oh, yeah: that.” I knew I’d grieve if I lost him, so I swallowed my trepidation and we made a plan.

He would find a sitter for his sister’s place and sell his house in Oceanside. It was February, and we were going to New York in June. We decided he could move in after we returned in July. We agreed it would be a long engagement.

To absorb some of my angst, I decided to do some remodeling. I was using a small bedroom for my office, and Jim was happy to take it over for his man cave.

Linda Carlson, an actress who lives in New York and Connecticut, is working on a memoir about her life onstage and in therapy.

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Modern Love: A Soldier Leaves a Girl Behind - Modern Love

For a long time I had this crazy idea that I could change the world if I just worked hard enough. The downside of having that idea is that it took me away from home for long periods of time.

I dated Kathryn while I volunteered on the fire-and-rescue department, while I traveled the country for seven months with AmeriCorps, and while I was away for five months at basic training.

Kathryn was always at home waiting for me. All told I was away for an entire year of the two and a half years we dated.

I met Kathryn when I was 22 and she was 18. The short version of our story sounds great: Her house caught fire and I was in the fire department.

The long story is less romantic: I wasn’t on the call and she wasn’t even home. She messaged me on Facebook a few days later when she saw a comment I left about the fire department on a mutual friend’s wall. We chatted online for a few days, then texted, then saw a movie and had lunch, and that was the start of her first relationship and my longest.

We went to the beach and swam, held hands at the Fourth of July fireworks, went on roller coasters at Six Flags, ate Thanksgiving dinner with each other’s families, exchanged gifts on Christmas. We cried when I had to leave for long periods of time.

When I got back from basic training a couple of years ago, I felt different, as if I was doing things with my life and Kathryn wasn’t. I wanted something more, something bigger, and it didn’t seem that she did, so I broke up with her. She was crushed, but she didn’t try very hard to change my mind. Maybe she knew me well enough to know that when I decide to do something, there is no stopping me.

A few months later, in December, something bigger did happen. My National Guard unit was selected for a 2012 deployment to Afghanistan. With our country engaged in two wars, I knew it was not if I was going to war but when. Suddenly our monthly drills got more intense, and our annual two weeks of training that summer made me think over what was good in my life.

I called Kathryn and told her I was still in love with her and I was a fool to have let her go. She said she had a new boyfriend and was happy with him and didn’t want me back.

I looked on her Facebook page and saw pictures of him and her swimming at the beach and riding the roller coasters at Six Flags. I felt as if I was in a “Twilight Zone” episode where I woke up to discover someone else had replaced me in my own life. Even though Kathryn said she didn’t want me back, she entertained the texts I sent saying I loved her.

One day while she was in the shower, her boyfriend went through her phone and saw the texts, and their relationship ended shortly after. Two weeks later our new relationship started.

It was a lot different from the first time. Instead of going to school, Kathryn had a full-time fashion job in New York City that she commuted to every day from her parents’ home in North Jersey. She dyed her blond hair red, and she was less loving and affectionate.

Reminders of her ex-boyfriend were all over: the stuffed animal on her bed, the iPhone he bought her. I tried to ignore the image of her with someone else, and I tried even harder to make our new relationship like our old one. I tried, but I didn’t do so well.

Our evenings together mainly consisted of us eating takeout and her falling asleep on the couch as we watched reruns of “Project Runway.” Light from the television filled the dark room and flickered on us like a fire but gave no warmth. The space between us on the couch spoke more about our relationship than we did to each other.

After two months of this, we were eating dinner one evening when I brought up the elephant in the room: “What are we going to do when I deploy?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, quietly.

“Do you still want to date while I’m gone?”

She looked down at her plate. “Not really.”

“So then what are we doing?”

Again, quietly, she said, “I don’t know.”

Kevin Farrell is a specialist in the United States Army currently deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, with the 508th Military Police Company out of Teaneck, N.J.

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At Chloé, Clare Waight Keller Pushes Femininity Forward, but It’s More Modern

A PIN dropped.

Twenty feet from where the designer Clare Waight Keller was sitting in the offices of Chloé on the Avenue Percier, it slipped from the hands of an assistant as he adjusted the hem of a crisp white popover top, worn by the 16-year-old English model Rosie Tapner, who had the sniffles. You could hear the plink of metal as it struck the painted wood floor.

It was proverbially quiet in the Chloé showroom, three days before Ms. Waight Keller’s spring runway show here, as critical decisions were being made about the hair and makeup, the order the clothes would be shown, whether the colors and proportions were just right. A steady stream of guests came and went. A plastic box of Haribo gummi candies that had been full the day before was half-empty, but the detail that spoke loudest was the lack of noise.

In the year since Ms. Waight Keller, formerly the designer of Pringle of Scotland, became the creative director at Chloé, many visitors have noted the remarkable calmness that radiates from her studio. That, and the fact that roughly 80 percent of the hundreds of employees at the company are women, which is a point of pride at a house that has projected an aura of femininity for 60 years.

Guido Palau, the hairstylist, proposed a loosely tied ponytail, sort of half up and half down, with a deep part inspired by Twiggy. Ms. Waight Keller and her team considered whether it looked modern enough, or cool, or sufficiently effortless. They debated, then asked to see another model. Mr. Palau, in mock exasperation, said, “Oh, my God, how many girls are in this room?”

He wasn’t being rude. It is a question Ms. Waight Keller has asked herself as she decided how to best approach a label that, for better or worse, has been reduced over the years to terms like “girly” and “flirty,” which do not do it justice. It is her job to balance the sweetness with something a little bit cooler and a lot more modern. Though clearly confident, she is prone to questioning her decisions. In moving to Paris, she brought along her husband, an interior architect, and three young children, and so a lot rides on making this a success.

“Is the proportion right? she asked. “Do I like the colors? Is it too sweet?”

She was concerned about a white top with frothy sleeves made of a Japanese polyester that in theory should have looked crisp but in fact were beginning to look like the type of collars that keep dogs from scratching themselves.

Ms. Waight Keller, 42, English-born (though she has lived and traveled extensively), is the ideal image of the Chloé customer. She was raised in dresses and the skirts of school uniforms and has spent much of her adult life rebelling by wearing pants. And she is the type of designer who can make leather pants — like the forest-green ones she was wearing in the showroom, with a cool blue cotton shirt — look as comfortable as pajamas. She keeps her head down and walks with her hands in her pockets.

But with the spring collection, which was shown on Oct. 1 in the Tuileries, Ms. Waight Keller gave herself a challenge by chopping and cropping pieces to unexpected lengths. And she sought to reconnect the label with the more playful elements of its past, including tanks that were styled after basketball jerseys, sequined tuxedo stripes that ended with the point of an arrow, and a floral print that resembled something from Hawaiian surf wear.

“You can be too familiar with the look,” Ms. Waight Keller said. “You have to push forward. It can be a little bit of a trap to be the consumer.”

The vision of Gaby Aghion, the Egyptian-born daughter of a cigarette manufacturer who founded Chloé and named it after a friend, was not girly. It was to create feminine clothing with less formality and more freedom than what was being shown in postwar couture. The pioneering Ms. Aghion, who is 91 and still attends Chloé shows when she is able, remains a notorious flirt. But she was more likely to describe her own style as “simple” and “classic.”

Ms. Aghion once said something that Ms. Waight Keller found inspiring: “I don’t explain anything. I lived the life I wanted.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 18, 2012

A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of the hairstylist Guido Palau.

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