Love Sick (14 page)

I was angry with Patrick for talking so much about not dieting and not leaving me room even to order my own drink.

I was stuffed and hot and thirsty. I wanted to walk Daisy and then languish in a cool bath. When I could breathe a little, I wanted cold cold water.

“I won’t come in, if you don’t mind,” Patrick said as we climbed onto the Brooklyn Bridge. I love that crossing at night: the string of jade beads of the Verrazano and the blaze of jade of the Statue of Liberty. It was muggy, though, and the green distance was smudged with haze.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting company and I’m pretty tired after all that food.”

“I’ll call you when I get home,” he added, and squeezed my hand. I felt like Twinkie cream and barbecue sauce were going to ooze from the joints of my fingers.

• • •

“He’s cute!” I told Daisy, doling out the after-walkies Milk-Bone and scutching my sandals off. I pulled off my shruggie and dropped it on a dresser I pretended was immune from dog hair. “Very nice.
Very
generous. But weird, you know? The kind of guy you would bark and lunge at.” I peeled myself out of the rest of my clothes and began running a tepid bath with Dead Sea salts. I needed to be leached.

The phone rang as I was wandering around pinning up my hair as the tub filled. Without thinking I picked up.

“Hey,” Patrick breathed. “How’re you doing?”

“Hot,” I answered. “I’m running a bath.”

“R’rrr,” he growled.

“Trust me, I’m way too lazy to be one of those women with the sixty-two votive candles and
Bolero
on the CD player.”

“Still,” he said. “I’d—”

“Daisy!” I shouted at my flopped and innocent dog. When I told him I wasn’t up for company, I meant it, and I was ready to yell at my dog to get my way. There was something off about this guy. Remember, this observation was coming from the girl who believes in wait-and-see when it comes to boys who like her first. “Ugh,” I said. “I gotta go pick up the trash she just knocked over. Email me. Okay, babe?”

“Check it when you get out of the bath.”

• • •

A summit conference was in order. It was three big girls who sat down at Starbucks the next evening: Bette, small, wide, with skin that reminds me of Italian plums; Pam, tall, blonde and built like a brick house; me, a little thinner than either, dark hair and pale-skinned, still wearing the semi-professional clothes from teaching that afternoon.

“So he’s cute as Hello Kitty,” I tell them. “But he’d only talk about restaurants and food and how much he likes taking women out to eat and how pretty he thinks I am. And don’t say, ‘Well, you are,’ because he said it too often for someone who wasn’t starry-eyed crazy-in-love.”

“Okay,” Pam said, stirring her thousand-ingredient macchiato-thingy. “He sounds nice, though.”

“But hang on, ’cause I’m sitting there thinking he works for this huge magazine company. He must have gossip about models and editors and manufacturers. He’d commented how much he likes John le Carré. And all we’re doing is trading favorite entrées. And I think, well, at least we’re talking. I mean, how many first dates have you guys been on where the silence is like a wall?” Bette and Pam groaned. “He wouldn’t let me tip for dinner or the cab. How many first dates have you guys been on where the guy actually paid?”

“I wouldn’t let a guy pay for a first date,” Bette said. “It’s cleaner. You’re your own woman.”

“I think it’s gentlemanly,” Pam said. She’s near sixty and had to wear bloomers in high school gym. “I don’t expect it, but I like it.”

“Hang on,” I cut in. “It gets weird. He makes some noise about not coming over to my house, as though I had invited him, and then when I can’t talk when I get home he emails that he’s going to fall asleep thinking of me naked, eating these chocolates he gave me, that he wants to—”

“Don’t!” Bette nearly shrieked. “This is gonna be disgusting, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Short and sweet? He likes to fuck women while they eat. Dinner’s like foreplay. I lost my damn abstinence
*
because I didn’t know how to say no.”

“We’ve all done it,” Pam said sympathetically.

“Usually after the date, though,” Bette added. “This guy, Patrick? He sounds like one of those weirdos.” She starts snapping her fingers. “Feeders. That’s it. I thought they were, like, obese hummingbirds when I first heard of them.”

“Jee-
zus
. Of course.”

“What?” Pam demanded.

“They’re people who get off on watching fat people gorge themselves and getting fatter.”

“
Ho
ly Jesus,” Pam said.

“Drop him, Frances, and drop the subject,” Bette spat. “It’s too horrendous.”

“Although,” Pam added, “if they get off on seeing you get bigger, they at least have to stick around . . .” She looked at us, but Bette was sitting at a right angle to the table and I still couldn’t get my jaw to close. “I’m just saying. I’d like a guy to hang around awhile, you know?”

• • •

I went home and did some research on Feederism, a fetish that the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance condemns for its adverse health consequences. There is a whole spectrum of sexual practices involving pretending to be fatter or getting fatter, whether it’s through calories, costumes or a reservation for an orgy of animal fat.

And, like every other subgroup, there are dating websites just for feeders and feedees. I emailed the links to Patrick, along with my gracious thanks for the deep-fried Twinkies.

I’d always thought
9 1/2 Weeks
was stupid but at least I understood why it continued to sell.

Seven

Each breeding season, male humpback whales sing a new tune, which might incorporate bits of last season’s melodies or be new releases. These new songs pass from whale to whale for four thousand miles.

Any chronicler of dating is presented with a challenge in that good dates are generally alike. It is unhappy dating that, as Tolstoy says of families, is unique in its unhappiness and therefore lends itself to storytelling. So far, I’d been courted by jerks, freaks, fundamentalists and criminals, but my luck was about to run out. I would come to look back on my early summer’s abortive tries with nostalgia. Not only were they excellent practitioners of their weirdness, but they had no desire to pit their weirdness against mine.

Using a date to play
Jeopardy!
is exhausting.

• • •

One morning, after I had harvested my crops and collected rents on my Facebook games, thereby keeping up my position in the higher ranks of my Farm and City friends, I found myself looking for more ways to put off marking forty essays. I decided to weed out my email accounts and landed at my dating inbox. There wasn’t time to troll through all the exciting news (!) each site had to offer about tips, hot dates, special deals, psychological insights and the latest success stories, so I deleted steadily until I got to “You have a new message.”

The first paper on my pile was about gangsta rap.

I opened the message with a micro-prayer that it would make me forget that the second essay was on the controversy over the balls used in the World Cup.

“Looking for Lou” was—har-har—named Lou, DWM, no children. He wrote that he was a junior high math teacher and had just spent a month bicycling around Ireland. He picked up on my statement that my hobbies include what I call “travel porn.” “I definitely need to know more about that!”

I quickly typed a note about my compulsion to plan trips to places on my bucket list, even though I had neither money nor time to take them. I sent it, sighed and went back to essays.

By the time I worked my way through a scramble of verb tenses, Lou wrote back that he was boning up on elliptic functions for a summer course he was taking and finishing off a cold key lime soufflé from a dinner party he’d had the night before; did I want to have dinner in the Heights that evening?

• • •

Lou was so tall and skinny that he made me think of Ichabod Crane. I laughed as I waited for the light to change, and I watched his smile widen. He didn’t know that I was thinking that, at five foot eight, I’m used to wearing flats on first dates. I could have worn stilts that night.

My tummy fluppered. Why does one person respond to another? Was it because I’d Googled elliptic functions and found a quote from a nineteenth-century mathematician, “Invert, always invert”? and it had reminded me of E. M. Forster’s “Connect, only connect”? Had I pre-primed myself or was I smitten because his worn jeans hung from his hips and he wore a faded Good-bye Kitty T-shirt?

Is it ironic that I like skinny men, or is it some kind of Freudian Cupid Complex in which I am doomed to seek Otherness? Or, in this case, was it that my blind, ninety-three-year-old father, who I adore, had finished a lecture series on algebra that spring? Was it my Electra complex tricking me into a sudden surge of hope against the odds of a second date from a guy whose eyes were bluer than his picture showed?

I kissed Lou hello and he took my elbow to hurry me into the restaurant, muttering, “Great, great” to himself. Was that a nervous or a sarcastic reaction to this business of showing up on time with clean hair and a smiling welcome? I wasn’t sure I liked being hurried inside so quickly.

And thus it was. From the startlement of sky blue eyes to being herded was a fast fall.

“I eat a lot of salad,” I warned him as we looked over the menu. “And a lot of chicken. There’s a chance I’ll wake up one morning sprouting feathers.”

Lou nodded thoughtfully. “I try to eat as many raw vegetables as possible, myself. And I actually like tofu.” He looked at me directly for a second or two. “Do you like tofu?”

“To play jacks with,” I said. To his blank stare I mimed bouncing a ball and scooping up markers. Nothing. I shook my head but smiled as brightly as I could. “Maybe boys didn’t play jacks. You need a small rubber ball that bounces well. The tofu—”

“—is rubbery,” he cut in. “You need to experiment with it. I make a great lemon pepper dish with it.”

Tofu

Lou: 1

Frances: 0

I squared my shoulders and decided to order the chef salad with its glories of cheese, ham and salami. A small voice in my head sneered, “Yeah, but an American of our age should have got the jacks joke.” I slapped the menu shut and asked for blue cheese dressing on the side.

He ordered the salmon Caesar salad.

I could have predicted that.

• • •

“Did you love Ireland?” I asked. “I’ve never been but want to go so badly.”

Lou sat back and fiddled with his cutlery. “It was . . . life-changing. I got off the plane in Shannon with a backpack and my folding bicycle and jet lag. I had a rough itinerary and a couple of reservations. It was wild. I made it as far as Coonagh that morning before I had to stop and crash for the day. It was like biking on acid or something. The sun was out, everything looked like it was supposed to, but there was this gloss on it . . . or the edges were softened. Something. The whole trip was like that. Much slower than I thought because I had to really
look
to see the edges and angles.”

Our salads arrived and I sighed with pleasure, at what he was saying and at the prospect of food. “It sounds amazing.”

“Yes . . .”

“No, I mean, literally amazing. Jaw-dropping-in-the-moment-awareness-amazing.”

He looked at me a moment, then chopped a piece of romaine into a bite-size piece. “Exactly. That’s it. Tell me about this travel porn you mentioned on Senior People Meet.”

“I plan trips. I look up a place I might want to go and read up on it. Then I order the Dorling Kindersley guide and look at tour guides on YouTube. I can’t take the trips, of course. Or only, like, point-oh-oh-one percent of them. Right now I’m saving to go to Amsterdam and Brussels during tulip time. I hope next year.” I sighed. “I used to have a lot of freedom and not much money. Now I’m teaching and have neither.”

“Amsterdam is amazing,” he said. “The Tropenmuseum—”

I cut him off with a fanfare of turkey strip. Whenever I talked about going some place on the usual American Express tours, people seemed to think I needed help. “I was there when I was an undergraduate. Have you ever been to Keukenhof?” The bulb gardens were my ace in the hole because fewer people go to Holland in April. “I like to take pictures,” I added.

“Oo-hh.” He sounded knowing. He had slotted me as One of Those: the folks who have to have pictures to prove they went somewhere.

I chewed my turkey and watched him with narrowed eyes. “You probably didn’t take a camera to Ireland, did you?”

“Uh, no, actually—”

“Pity. I’d love to have seen pictures. I actually sold a photo I took in Prague last fall. From my Flickr album, if you can believe it.” My voice was gay and I was smiling as I said this. His eyes darted across my face and onto the prints on the wall behind me. “I don’t know how to use my camera very well but I’ll bet you’d conquer one in a heartbeat. It’s more left brain than I own.”

We busied ourselves with our salads at that. There was malice behind my words, but I liked this Lou-guy. I liked the idea of this tall man brazening out Ireland on a collapsible bicycle with the rain and sun and whatever sound track he lived by as companions.
Please,
I pleaded with him as we ate.
Don’t make assumptions about me and don’t tell me what to do in Amsterdam.