Love Sick Page 11

  “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.”

  “Holy 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 Yo
uTube. 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.

  “How did your trip change your life?” I asked.

  “I was free. I’d go days without talking except to buy food or to get directions. I decided somewhere in Galway that I want to live that way. I have twenty-seven years in with the public schools. I’ll go to twenty-eight and retire.”

  “And do what?” I asked. I envisioned him on a bike in Norway in June and on a bike in Australia in January.

  “I’m on this date.” He laughed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a date. So that’s the first thing. I’d like to take more classes in advanced mathematical theory, complex variables and stuff. I’ve been volunteering at the Madison community garden and I’m playing electric guitar in a band. We’re doing covers of oldies.”

  I groaned to myself. I hate doo-wop.

  “You know—Harold Arlen, Glenn Miller. Those guys.”

  My heart leapt. That’s how I grew up, drinking that music with my baby formula as my parents put on their stiff, whispering evening wear for a night of dancing.

  The scalding non-conversation about music with Dar was recent. At least I had a chance in this one.

  “That’s fantastic!” I said, visions of being called forward, a new Annie Hall, charming if tending to go off-key in the blue light of “Seems Like Old Times.”

  “We’re doing an anniversary party in September, maybe some club dates in bars. I came back from Ireland wanting to live out loud, I guess.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this budding John Pizzarelli. He’d scored on tofu but I tied him with photography, he was winning my heart (or whatever it is when you’re still splitting the bill) with Glenn Miller, only to leave the door wide open on “live out loud,” which is what the Oxygen Channel commands its mostly female viewers to do during the Saturday night primetime Jennifer Aniston movie when about the only things you do out loud are cry (at spending Saturday night with Aniston) and scrape (ice cream spoon against dish, the last edible puff of popcorn). Nothing makes me feel like more of a spinster than hearing that motto coming out of my TV.

  So I smiled and suggested we walk down to the Promenade. Romantic matters tend to be decided on the Promenade at night. If push has a good chance of coming to shove, it’s going to happen with the panoply of downtown Manhattan painted across the river and sky.

  “Do you have a favorite song?” Lou asked as we walked down Montague.

  “That’s an impossible question,” I answered. “It depends on my mood and the circumstances and every other thing I can think of.”

  “Okay, composer.”

  “H’mm. Bach. But if you’re asking because of your band, I’d go with Gershwin.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “How about Kern?” He began humming a slow, sad tune and dwindled into a few words, “‘Yesterdays . . . Days I knew . . . ’ Know that song?”

  “Nope,” I said, and kept walking as I stared straight ahead.

  He started again with a soft little scat and then, “Keep on smilin’.” He looked down at me.

  “Nope,” I said again.

  He sighed heavily. Was he one up on music in general or two up on individual songs? Where’s Alex Trebek when I need him? I considered singing Will’s “We dined on garr-bage” song. It never failed to have me in stitches, but I didn’t think Lou was interested in getting a laugh out of his music.

  Ironic, then, that he turned jaunty and jivey and I let him go on before cutting in with “Den mann Mackie Messer nennt.” I laughed. “That was too easy,” I chided. “I have the original cast recording of Threepenny Opera. Berlin, 1930: can you imagine? What was Hitler doing in 1930?”

  He laughed, too. “Mackie Messer, huh?”

  We walked along the iron railing over the skeletons of the old waterfront being turned into one of those parks every Iron Belt city has these days. I hate competition. It makes me shrink and feel stupid. I looked up at him as I sang, “You say knife and I say Messer, you say chest, I say dresser. Knife, Messer, chest, dresser. Let’s call the whole thing off.”

  “So you do know something about the era.”

  “Uh, yeah. Bits and pieces. Sometimes I surprise myself and know the lyrics and then again I’ll think I know them and can only get through a line or two.”

  “You have a nice voice,” he said.

  “Thank you. It helps when I get to choose the register.” As compliments go, that’s got to be my favorite—and least received.

  He walked me home and kissed me on the lips, chastely.

  “I enjoyed the evening,” I said.

  “Me, too. Let’s do it again sometime.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  He turned and walked back toward the R train. I told Daisy that I liked this one, I thought, that maybe that I’d misinterpreted, and he wasn’t trying to one-up me. If I was lucky, I’d impressed him as someone who has her own Stuff. A traveler, a taker of pictures, not so thoroughly dumb about music. Witty, I hoped. Daisy snuffled along the gutters looking for chicken bones and Cheerios and had no advice on the subject. She pretty much loves any visitor and lives for sleepovers when she can slither in between two sets of adoring hands.

  With that in mind, I wrote him a quick email, thanking him for the stories and telling him his journey interested me. Had he used the word “journey” with me I would have choked but it’s the sort of word most people love thinking they are a part of.

  I waited three days before deleting his email address. I remembered after I did so that he’d been singing “Wives and Lovers” under his breath when we walked home. I should have taken that (“There are girls at the office, and men will be men . . .”) as a warning.

  While I was at it, I should have listened to my own warning in the half-conscious sound track of “But Not for Me” that had been playing in my own head.

  • • •

  I was already laughing when I sat down at the bar to wait for Galean. A friendly Goth girl in polka dots and crinolines brought me a club soda and laughed back when I said, “I’m meeting a guy for the first time and it doesn’t matter what he’s like. This is a date!”

  It was also my date. I’d posted it on How About We, a New York–centric site on whi
ch people propose specific dates. How About We is romantic, but it also has a huge spirit of fun that leaves room for kindred desires that might not include sex. I’d read about it in the Times, which tracked dating trends through its postings. In June, it seemed, everyone was eating fish tacos.

  The one time I had gone bowling it was fun. I was bad at it but there’s an element of luck in it, too. So I suggested bowling and found myself at Bowlmor Lanes on University Place. It’s decorated by someone whose own dating profiles would highlight his favorite movies as Blade Runner and The Wizard of Oz, and who chose his color palette from the Smurfs and Legoland, assisted by Pee-wee Herman. Even if Galean turned out to be Sol from Bleecker Street, my club soda under the déjà vu of all the gay clubs I’ve been in would be worth it.

  An arm reached around me and turned my book over. “The Beauty Myth,” Galean—at least I supposed it was Galean: he looked like his photo, shaved head, Mephistophelean beard—said. “Looks heavy.” He bopped around a little and took a sip of my drink. “Oh no, Frances. No, no, no. What do you really want to drink?”

  I looked around and laughed. “Margarita, don’t you think?”

  “Think? I think it’s as much a rule as wearing bowling shoes.”

  “Although I think a blue Hawaiian would go with the décor better.”

  “‘Anything that you say, I hear myself agree,’” he sang along to the music and hopped up on the stool next to me. “But I think we only want drinks that come decorated with limes. Don’t you?”

  Galean was thirty years old and cute. I’d recently done the cut-color-eyebrow-treatment rounds at my salon and was wearing a white cotton sweater and a white skirt with a big black belt over black leggings. I felt almost cute enough to be with this kid who had melted into the beat and the vibe without hesitation.

  Galean was as delighted by his bowling shoes (red and navy) as I was by mine (green and maroon, like ribbon candy). He hesitated over the balls because they gave him the choice of cherry bombs or watermelons. He bragged that he’d knock down the far left pins, then blamed the Blondie song for destroying his concentration or did a chicken dance in victory. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he gave me wretched advice in a low coach’s voice.