Free Underdog by Sue-Ann Levy Page B

If timing is everything, this was proof. One can only imagine what I might have said, or not said, had it been a year earlier and I was not yet out of the closet.
    My conversation with Denise that Friday morning, while strictly professional, haunted me through my entire weekend in Muskoka, not because of the subject matter but because of her. She came across, even over the phone, as a highly intelligent woman with a fabulous sense of humour and a tremendous warmth. To add to my confusion, my ex decided not to show up to cheer me on as I participated in my first Try-a-Triathlon event that weekend. Upon my return home Sunday night, I phoned Denise to confirm my interview with her for the next morning. When she heard my dog, Kishka, barking in the background, she asked what kind of dog I had. I told her Kishka was a long-haired miniature dachshund, towhich she responded that she had the same rare breed, fourteen-year-old Zigmund.
    The next day, as I drove up to her house, I kept repeating the mantra “Oh please let her be fat and ugly.” When I arrived and she opened the door, I knew it was game over. I was immediately taken by her twinkly turquoise blue eyes and her hot body. I was so discombobulated, I could barely concentrate on the interview, and for the first time in my nearly eighteen years at the
Toronto Sun,
I had to really force myself to keep focused on the story. The next day, when my story appeared and helped get Denise a deferral at council (a major feat considering how often community council issues were and still are usually rammed through without question at council), she called me at work to say thank you and to invite me for Friday night dinner, as “any good Jewish girl” would do. I don’t know where I got the courage, but I told her I was in a relationship and that it would be very dangerous for me to come over for dinner, seeing as I felt a chemistry during the interview. But Denise wasn’t taking no for an answer. She said it was just a thank-you dinner, and once she had placed the food on the table, if it would make me feel more comfortable, she would give me some duct tape to use in whatever way I needed to feel safe. (When I arrived that Friday night, she’d set the table using the duct tape as a napkin ring.) I was still unsure about going until I had dinner with a former
Toronto Sun
colleague, Trish Tervit, who’d also come out, but after she’d left the paper. When I asked her what she thought, she simply said, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”
    Especially mine, I thought. Here I was at a point in my life where I’d overcome tremendous hurdles, including surviving two assaults and coming out. I wasn’t going to stop here.So a mere seven weeks before my fiftieth birthday, I went for that Shabbat dinner. It started at 7 p.m. and ended at 8 a.m. the next morning, when I went home. Nothing untoward happened. Denise and I just talked all night. From that point forward, it was only a matter of time before my relationship ended with my ex. She had planned to take me on a cruise of the Greek Islands, starting in Venice, for my fiftieth birthday. Through my travel-writing connections, I had gotten us one of the best rooms on the ship, but I decided that in all good conscience I could not go. By the time my birthday rolled around, we had split. She kind of faded out of my life, sadly, after twenty years together, along with many of her family members and friends with whom I’d spent so many hours and years. It was a divorce with no assets to divide because we’d lived such separate lives, financially and, as I realized later, emotionally.
    To the surprise of the politicians, friends, and family members who attended the cocktail party thrown by my parents at Toronto’s old Four Seasons hotel in honour of my birthday, Denise turned up as my date. She met everyone in my life for the first time that night, handling herself in her usual bubbly and infectious manner. She’d even taken the time to go