Love Sick (8 page)

• • •

The decision to actually go out on a date (i.e., meet and talk) is based on a complicated trading game of résumés in which cachet is based on how many O-Pee-Chee 1968 New York Mets cards I have versus how many Topps 1963 Cincinnati Reds he’s holding.

Is he holding a redundant Eddie Kasko or a knocked-around Pete Rose?

Let me break it down for you.

I’m not mixer material for
The Millionaire Matchmaker
. On the one hand, my income level and weight should probably have me dating men who are more familiar with wet cement than adjectives, but on the other, a potential date can Google my prose and vitae for hours. Then again, I swing between teaching freshman composition on an adjunct basis and walking dogs to make my advances meet.

I may be fat, but I’m cute. I have good legs, great hair, a big smile and pretty eyes. It’s not hard to see past my weight. Yes, I live in the Bat Cave, but it’s in one of the best neighborhoods in the five boroughs.

What all those subordinating conjunctions mean is that I’m holding a Ryan Nolan, but its condition is questionable.

Guys, being guys, rate themselves on the stuff they think they’re looking
for
, on Eddie Kosko or Pete Rose, irrespective of team or season. He thinks that being fit, having a sense of humor, being “professional,” enjoying “fine dining” and being “real” is what he wants from a woman and therefore what he thinks a woman wants from him. Most of the time, guys think those buzzwords have meaning. Most of the time, they don’t.

My friend Ellen, just leaving her fifties, is one of the exceptions. She teaches French in one of the city’s prep schools and, after a full cycle of vaccines in being Life Coached through
A
Course in Miracles
,
The
Artist’s Way
and the complete works of Deepak Chopra, she feels she is entitled to a man who has retired on six figures and looks great in a tux.

Okay, maybe she’s not my friend. That entitlement thing kind of ruined my respect for her. I can’t write a book pitched to
The Real Housewives of Anywhere
because of the overwhelming need some women have for the right men to make them the right women.

The good news is that, mostly, men don’t really want
the
card, they want
a
card, and most women are exactly the same way. We’re all pretty much looking for someone nice and someone sensible whose baggage can be wedged into the overhead compartment.

I say it’s good news because I got extra points I wasn’t counting on when I wrote that craigslist ad. My weight was less important than the experts say it is.
*
My subsistence as a writer/dog walker/adjunct professor was something of an asset because it meant I could stay out late or meet for lunch on Bayard Street. Sometimes a Mr. Extension 6651 got to flatter himself for daring to date someone so kicky.

I exchanged a few emails with a guy named Moshe. He, too, was a drifting professor, although he didn’t tell me whether this meant he adjuncted around or had a full-time position at one of the Drop-Out Factory colleges—for-profits in which anyone with a loan can pretend, until they get their first homework assignment, they’re going to get a degree.

I couldn’t tell whether he had acne or acne scarring or something he could brag about like rosacea; I am certain, however, that his open-at-the collar shirt was polyester. His hair was dishwater, as were his eyes.

As was the rest of his complexion.

Nonetheless, it seemed worth scratching at his surface since we both taught international students and we both lived in Brooklyn. He was into “interesting desserts,” whatever that meant, which prodded me to explain I was being pretty rigorous about sticking to my diet.

Then he asked what I thought of his photo. Why do these guys always want to know what I think when they send their photo?

I thought he looked like a mouth-breather. I thought it was possible that he became a professor because he’d been turned down by parking cop school. I thought he looked like a guy who had a wankerchief and couldn’t get off if it wasn’t right there.

I thought he looked like a guy who
always
had his Wanky Blankie with him.

“Nice smile,” I responded.

“How much weight do you want to lose?” he shot back.

Whoa
,
cowschlump!
I thought as I sat back in my chair. He was quickly running through my collection of polite clichés. I needed at least a day to formulate a response.

“Dunno,” I finally wrote.

In less than five minutes I had an invitation. “Do you want to have coffee at Junior’s tonight?”

I had dogs to walk, I told him. Maybe another night.

How many dogs?

If I had told him I couldn’t go because I had to breathe, he’d have asked how many breaths. I deleted the email, figuring he’d get it that our brief exchange wasn’t progressing.

Clue: If he wants to know if you think he’s cute, he’s not going away.

Heading into the next weekend I got another email asking if we were going to get together or not. I hate being the dumper almost as much as being the dumpee but had had a few days to recover my niceness.

“I seem to be busier than I thought I was,” I wrote carefully. “Maybe this is not the time for me to date. But you’re smart and have a great job—you’ll be a babe magnet!”

My mother would have been proud.

Moshe’s mother, however, would have thought I was being a shiksa basmalke. “If you lose more weight this summer, maybe you’ll be a guy magnet,” he responded.

A huge shiver overtook me. That was an ego that would definitely have to be checked at the gate.

• • •

In the end, I was finding craigslist to be a fabulous source of insults, some obvious and others crafty in the way they led to sabotage. I deleted more liberally and my attention drifted to other things—photographing irises and trying to catalogue (and failing, alas, for another year) the scent of each kind, reading essays I could assign students whose first language ranged from Blanglish
*
to Nigerian to Danish, and trying to figure out the 1,800 dating websites that promised me true love.

Which is, of course, when the last possible candidate responded on the last day of the ad.

Four

Wild moose are well known to attempt to have sex with domestic horses.

He got me by using the word “adaptive” in his first email.

In case you’re a wonderful man reading this and want to know how to seduce me, I’m a sucker for the slightly unusual, correctly used, succulently pronounced single word. My knees have literally gone weak at the words “apoplectic” and “Luddite.”

I was so struck by “adaptive” that I didn’t notice the context: “I’m passionate, affectionate, adaptive, attentive.” If I had, I certainly would have asked what the hell all that added up to.

My lack of questions with Paul has turned into the most heavily researched chapter of this book.

He offered himself up in the subject line—“You’ve Got Male!”—and followed up with a résumé: Ivy League, on the staff of his undergraduate humor magazine and a stint as a stand-up, attorney for the city, memberships with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the city zoos. I’m always a little skeptical when Jewish men come knocking, but he was divorced and nearly my age. Maybe, I thought, the pressure to keep it kosher eases up after a marriage and fatherhood are checked off one’s list of things to do.

Please give me back my naïveté, God. The start of my season of dating was already starting to age me unnaturally.

• • •

In the second round of emails on that mid-May afternoon, he joked that I looked like Betsy Gotbaum, the ten-year New York City Public Advocate who didn’t do a whole lot of anything from what I could tell. I didn’t mind the comparison physically but, once again, who the hell is reminded of minor politicos?

Nerds, Frances. Very nerdy nerds.

I was also somewhat troubled by his enthusiasm for good “logistics” with women, which translated, in my case, into being one stop on his way home from his office. My idea of logistics is whether we can spend a weekend together a couple of times a year.

This is a point where age matters, although not so much as in how old we are but when we grew up. Paul’s photo showed smiling eyes, almost all of his hair and a copious beard. I didn’t think much about the beard, partly because it got lost in the dark suit in his head shot, but mostly because I graduated from a college-town high school in 1975. In those days I fell asleep to Cat Stevens singing “Wild World.” It didn’t matter that, in 2010, I didn’t want to dress up like Carole King anymore. I sneer at the hippie moms in the neighborhood for living in million-dollar co-ops but never getting a proper haircut. Somehow, though, I didn’t realize that none of the men I saw around my neighborhood looked like they’d stepped off the
Abbey Road
album cover (including the husbands of the hippie moms).

I thought he was handsome enough. Maybe I thought if we went out that I’d encourage him to trim things a bit or maybe I was having an acid flashback to Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Whatever. I clearly wasn’t thinking whether he looked in any way like other lawyers in New York City.

Actually, I told him later that day, he looked a little like Charles Manson.

“Arrr’m not Charrr-les Manson,” he said when he called. He approached speech like a pirate reading an unfamiliar script. I’d never heard such a lack of affect before. If you hooked his vocal chords up to an EKG, he’d flatline.

“That’s reassuring,” I answered.

Silence hung like rain on the New Jersey horizon.

“So . . . what’re you up to this weekend?” I asked desperately.

“Synagogue tonight and tomorrow. I have my children on Sunday.”

“Ah.” What was I supposed to say to this? “You observe the Sabbath, then.”
(Brilliant, Frances
.
)

“I’m pretty observant.”

“No Friday night movies, then.”

“Not really, no.”

The silence had a 40 percent chance of sudden heavy rainfall in parts of Long Island.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked.

I was making my Famous Pea Salad for a cookout at Ben and Jean’s—raw cauliflower, peas, red onion, sour cream, mayonnaise, cheddar cheese and about a pound of bacon. I cleared my throat and said, “Having dinner with friends.”

I didn’t know if I was really communicating with this man with no vocal inflections who described jokes instead of telling them, but I knew that Orthodox Shabbat meant he’d be as good a date on weekend nights as a boyfriend who worked a round-trip flight to Liaoning Province. I put him in the back of my mind and more or less forgot about him.

He, on the other hand, felt we’d “made good small talk.” Monday morning’s email then went on to describe a
Far Side
cartoon about extraterrestrials putting a man and a bear in the same terrarium. “This week I’m busy with a friend who is visiting from Seattle, plus a Jewish holiday on Wednesday and Thursday (I won’t be calling and emailing then),” he finished, but maybe we could meet after that.

“Happy holiday,” I emailed back, and fluffed him off again. I was doing research, perusing other dating sites on the Net and in contact with various men.

He appreciated my holiday wishes enough to write that he came from a non-religious family but became observant in college, adding, “I don’t care about a woman’s religion and tend to date non-Jewish women since for some reason they’re more accepting of my observance. In fact my last girlfriend was an ex-nun.”

The ex-nun caused me a severe case of the heebie-jeebies. The thought of sharing, even at a remove, the Giving Tree with Sister Mary Anybody had me shaking in the confessional.

If that wasn’t creepy enough, why would a gentile be more tolerant of his devoutness? And why didn’t he care what my religion is?
I
care about my religion. I think it’s rich and gory and pagan and criminal and hilarious. Given my druthers, if I’m going to date a guy my age, I’d prefer he be a Catholic because we share a history that for the most part ended with the baby boomers. No forty-year-old will laugh over a childhood of moving over in his seat to make room for his guardian angel or know the exhilaration of being seven years old and voting whether to name their first pagan baby Charbel or Isidore. When the going got tough, wouldn’t Paul want the default conversation he could have with a woman who could recite the ten plagues the way we tot up reindeer or the seven deadly sins? When the silence turned black, wouldn’t it be easier to be with a chick who has stories like the time Uncle Galil hid the Passover afikomen in Bubbe’s favorite armchair, thus cheating all the kids out of their ransom prize?

I had agreed to this diet of dating partly because of how much I hated Saturday nights. It was May. Saturday night didn’t
begin
until almost nine o’clock.

I’d never really learned how to date around—go to a movie with Harry on Tuesday, take in the American Wing at the Met with Jack on Friday, play Frisbee and grab a bite with Ted on Saturday, then repeat in a different order and different venues but with the same men.