“No steak. I just have a taste for veal tonight, and when I set my mind to something there’s really no changing it.” I sucked my bottom lip in under my top teeth, squinted my eyes, and tried to look tough.
Just then, the man with the yellow teeth walked up to our table with our bottle and began the wine service. “The steak is particularly good tonight,” he murmured to Gareth.
And you know what? So was the veal.
I DIDN’T SEE him for a few months. He e-mailed me a couple of times, once with a link to a study reporting a higher incidence of breast cancer in women who don’t give birth. Oh, I thought, so that’s the way it’s going to be? I responded with a link to an article proclaiming obesity a national epidemic, and then stopped replying to his e-mails after that. You can never know who is crueler, men or women. It depends on how strong your back is when it is pushed up against that wall.
I went back to my old ways, and put my profile up on yet another Internet dating site. Usually I would return to the fold with great relish, spending hours poring through the other ads, e-mailing clever questions to attractive, employed men between the ages of thirty-two and forty, and constantly updating my ad with new pictures and hilarious stories about myself in order to maintain a fresh and intriguing profile. This was always the best part: getting attention without putting too much effort into it. I mean, yes, I spent hours a night at my computer, but I never had to actually leave my home.
But eventually you had to meet them in person, and that was always disappointing. They always seemed exhausted, and not nearly as clever as in their e-mails. I’m sure I disappointed them, too. When they see “scientist” under occupation they think “sexy librarian” for some reason, but it’s not the same thing at all. Maybe it’s because I have glasses on in my picture, but I need those glasses to function. I’m not striving for a look—I’m practically blind.
Occasionally I would sleep with one, just to prove that I still could do it. There is a particular kind of rage I can conjure up in my eyes when I choose, and when I fuel it with alcohol, I don’t need to say a word, they know they can have me for a night, for an hour, on their bed, in the bathroom at the back of the bar, on the couch in my living room. It’s only awkward right at the very beginning, when they’re a little surprised that it’s really going to be this easy, and then again at the end, when we’re saying good-bye. Because if I could just walk out silently when I’m done, that would be the best thing of all, but it is always important to them that they pretend they care, that their intentions seem good, that they take back control by offering some pretense of hope that we will somehow see each other again.
If I had wanted to see them again, I wouldn’t have fucked them in the first place.
But mostly I tried to be the relatively nice girl my mother raised me to be (My father was too busy fucking his grad-student groupies to worry about how I turned out); I would go out on dates, I was dating. Yes, I will go out on a date with you, stranger who thinks referencing Voltaire and Yo La Tengo in a personal ad will make you attractive to women with good jobs, who own their own apartments within spitting distance of the park and regularly attend yoga classes. Here we are, on a date at a wine bar located equidistant from our apartments. Sure, I’ll have another chardonnay; let’s try something from California this time. No, I’ve never been engaged, never even close. I’m not that type. You are that type? Right. I’m sorry that didn’t work out for you. It was for the best, obviously. It is always for the best. And I’ll bet the medication is helping. It is helping, isn’t it? Do you have any extra?
We were all just walking around this city with our hearts sadly swimming in our chests, like dying fish on the surface of a still pond. It’s enough to make you give up entirely.
Still, when Gareth surfaced and e-mailed me, asking for a favor—would I meet him for a drink?—I said yes.