The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  His question escaped me. Life is short, its quality fragile, and so the imperative to seize the day should be self-evident. People who understood this invented stereotypes, people like me, people who didn’t have time to kill or a moment to lose. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel to know how to talk to a postal clerk in a bad mood or a cop who’s pulled me over. And I eschew subtext like the plague. Not only does superficiality foster efficiency, it reduces the risk of opening old wounds.

  Stereotyping made me reluctant to try Internet dating. If my friends got wind of it, would they think I was unable to weather a sea change? But if I couldn’t find a woman to date, figure out how to begin a new relationship after a failed seventeen-year marriage, would they think I was unable to navigate the perfect storm of my personal life?

  Jake had encouraged me to try Internet dating, and so on this auspicious day I logged on to LADating.com. I uploaded recent photos of myself – one in a suit and tie, another with my son at one of his high school track meets – and was instructed to complete a profile, to approach the task as a labor of love, to blow my own horn, to cast my bread upon the waters.

  It was right up my alley—with one caveat. As a corporate lawyer in a white-shoe firm, my stereotype served me well because my adversaries assumed they understood who I was and what I wanted, an advantage worth its weight in gold.

  But I didn’t want my corporate-lawyer stereotype to lead me to the wrong kind of woman, one who didn’t share my values. So I began by writing about my politics, saying, “If you’re a neocon or a retro-con, if you’re okay with tax cuts for the super-rich, global warming, underfunding education, overturning Roe vs. Wade, or any other right-wing agenda, please don’t waste your time or mine.”

  Answering the other questions was duller than dishwater – Should children be seen and not heard? Do you prefer sex with the lights on or off? I was ready to cut bait and bail but I saw the light at the end of the tunnel: only a few questions remained. I said that my son, Dante, in the twelfth grade, lived with me, that I wasn’t religious and wasn’t looking for a woman who was.

  I was done. The program sent me the profiles of women that matched mine.

  Thirty minutes before my meeting, I dived in.

  A schoolteacher was first. She had gorgeous red hair and her similes were Homeric – “Feeling sad because my husband left me would be like crying over spilled milk. It’s water under the bridge” – her prose replete with phrases that rolled off my tongue like water off a duck’s back. We were kindred spirits. But I just didn’t like the cut of her jib.

  The next woman was a lawyer, like Bea. I moved on.

  Grace, an aerobics instructor, was looking for a man to make her feel weak as a kitten.

  Bunny, a widow, was the C.E.O. of her family’s charitable trust. Her given name was Rachel, but her grandmother had called her Bunny. She was fifty, two years younger than I, but didn’t look older than thirty-five, prompting me to wonder if she’d honored the recent-photo rule. Her face lacked symmetry of perfection, one eye drifting to the right. In one photo she wore running shorts. I was riveted by her legs.

  I brought up the next profile but couldn’t concentrate, so I went back to Bunny’s. She wasn’t like Beatrice. Bunny had wavy brunette hair; Bea had tight strawberry curls. Bunny was tan; Bea was pale. Bunny’s stature contrasted with Bea’s petite frame.

  How did I overlook her comments about religion? I didn’t have time to read her profile word for word. My meeting would begin in ten minutes. If I didn’t write to Bunny then, I probably never would. If what she’d said about religion had registered, I never would have contacted her, not because religious experience renders the mind shallow but because Bunny, like Bea, was Jewish. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

  I waited for her at an outdoor table at a café in Brentwood. It had rained earlier, leaving the taste of the air afresh with possibility, its scent sweetened with the aroma of roses, heliotrope, and lavender displayed in front of the floral shop next door.

  Walking toward me on a sidewalk along San Vicente Boulevard, leafy coral trees grown tall in the majestic median, purple blooms of Jacaranda littering side streets, Bunny stood out: confident, regal, stunning in a double-breasted red raincoat. She had the visage of an angel; her photos had been unjust.

  When I rose to greet her, she said in her Germanic accent, “Let’s not talk about anything routine.”

  “What’s routine?” I said.

  “Oh, you know, the weather, the war on terror, work.”

  Boys on skateboards, no older than Dante, zipped by.

  “I see your point. When it rains, it pours; war is hell; work like a dog, sleep like a log.”

  That broke the ice. She laughed. “How did you meet Beatrice?”

  “She was a litigator; I was a transactional lawyer at the same firm.”

  “Harold was a lawyer,” she said.

  “How did you meet?”

  “Don’t you think it poetic,” she said, “that a girl named Bunny landed a cocktail-waitress job at a Playboy Club? That’s where I met Harold. I was his bunny.”

  Two months later I wasn’t sure where we was going but it was going well. Bunny took Dante and me to see the Dodgers play the Giants at Dodger Stadium, surprising and delighting us with her fluency in baseball history. By that time, I knew she was Jewish. Jake would have scoffed at my superstition, but I wondered what he’d have said about her continuing refusal to talk about the weather, the war on terror, or work.

  When I spoke to Bunny a few days after the Dodgers’ game to confirm the time I’d pick her up that evening, she said that she’d stopped dating other men. I was a single dad with a never-ending workload, so I hadn’t dated anyone else, but still, I was surprised, not so much by her decision as by her telling me about it because I’d done nothing to initiate sex and neither had she. Was she saying it was time for that to change?

  I abandoned the thought, a textbook example of how subtext can lead to misunderstanding.

  Then Dante called. “Mom didn’t show up at track practice,” he said. “Again. She’s not at work, not answering her cell. Dad, will you buy me a car?”

  I bit the bullet and called Bunny to ask for a rain check.

  “Dante can come with us to dinner,” Bunny said.

  “He has final exams in a few weeks,” I said.

  “It’s strange she would forget to pick up her son,” Bunny said.

  “A year before she left us – she didn’t show up for the science fair, where Dante’s project was in contention for first place. Dante was upset, and I was furious. Later, I said to her, ‘you love your job more than anything else. More than you love us.’ She said it was true.”

  Bunny insisted that our next date be dinner at her house. When I arrived, she was wearing a low-cut blouse. I was careful not to let her see me looking at her cleavage.

  In the kitchen, she worked on a tiled countertop, her back to a center island with six gas burners and an array of radishes, red peppers, and spinach. Shredding cabbage, she spoke of Harold’s cancer, painting the details – the regression of a robust man into a vegetative state – with painful precision.

  “The tumor crushed his brain,” she said, using a paring knife to julienne carrots, “and that was tragic because he had such a fine mind.”

  An aroma of oranges and caramelized onions wafted from a saucepan. A chart titled “Fruits and Vegetables with the Highest Anti-oxidant Capacity” was taped to her refrigerator.

  The countertop tiles were Navajo white except for repeating distinct decorative tiles set randomly but always in tandem. The image on one was the Greek goddess Themis, holding the hilt of a sword in one hand, the scales of justice in the other. The image on the other tile was a serpent entwining the staff of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing, a kitsch touch to an otherwise exquisite décor.

  “Imagine,” she said, carrying carrots to the center island, “seeing someone you love suffering metastasizing sarcom
a in the parietal lobe.”

  As she moved to inspect the saucepan, her breasts brushed against my back as I diced a red pepper.

  “Damn it,” I said. I’d cut two fingers.

  She pressed a towel against the wound. “Hold this.”

  She soaked my hand in a bowl of hot soapy water, rinsed it, poured hydrogen peroxide over my cut fingers, dried them, and wrapped them in gauze. She secured the gauze with surgical tape.

  “You were right there for Harold,” I said, “picking up the medical jargon.”

  Her face inscrutable. Tension mounted until a pot boiled over. She turned off the gas burner.

  “I didn’t learn medicine from Harold’s doctors. I’m a surgeon,” she said.

  “But you said you’re the C.E.O. of your family’s eleemosynary foundation.”

  “I am,” she said.

  She wiped the blood-soaked peppers off the cutting board, cleaned the knife, and went to work on a new pepper. She said, “When I began Internet dating my profile said I was a surgeon. The only men who wrote to me were other doctors and hypochondriacs.”

  “What was wrong with the doctors?” I said.

  “They weren’t emotionally expressive. Know what I mean?”

  “What else did you expect from a doctor?” I said.

  “You know, I’m an advocate of healthy ingredients,” she said, the knife pointed at me, rotating slowly.

  “I’ll finish the radishes,” I said.

  “You’ve spilled enough blood for one night.”

  “Lacking emotion isn’t bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t want someone who was emotional cutting me.”

  “Will you pour me a glass of wine?” she said.

  With my bandaged fingers, I fumbled with a corkscrew.

  “You can never eat enough veggies,” she said. “The trick is to steam them lightly to enhance digestion while preserving the vitamins.” She arranged steaming broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts on a platter around an oval bowl of wild rice.

  As I eased the cork from the bottle, I said, “With a doctor, what you see is what you get.”

  “Is that so, counselor?” she said, covering the vegetables-and-rice platter.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said, pouring two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. “I like them.”

  She sipped the wine. “Shall we put the bottle on ice?”

  “I represent medical organizations. The American College of Surgeons for instance.”

  Her face softened. “That’s interesting. What do you do for the ACS?”

  “Tax advice,” I said, “nonprofit compliance with IRS reg-ulations.”

  “Do you advise the ACS Political Action Committee?”

  “You’ve changed the subject,” I said. “We’ve dated for two months—”

  “You know,” she said, “it’s taken three-and-a-half months for us to find the time for me to make you dinner. What a shame.”

  She peeked in the oven. “It’s best when the sauce is served right out of the skillet.” She poured broth into a pan. “Don’t use butter. And please don’t consider something pedestrian like cornstarch as a thickening agent.” She sprinkled white powder into the pan. “Cassava root,” she said. She poured in other ingredients and stirred, then washed her hands. “Soup’s on.”

  During dinner I said, “If I didn’t know you were a surgeon, I’d have thought you were a valedictorian of Le Cordon Bleu.”

  “When we met, I didn’t think we’d have a second date if I told you I was a doctor.”

  “Why not?”

  “You were looking for someone who was the opposite of Beatrice: a high-powered type-A personality. I wanted you to have enough time to find out that I’m low-key.”

  She must have thought I was born yesterday.

  I didn’t call Bunny for a few days not because I was angry but because I wanted perspective. We laughed; usually we held hands. She and Dante got along famously. She hadn’t lied overtly because she hadn’t allowed talk of work. But I couldn’t accept her explanation. Pretext is the sinister sibling of subtext. Jake would have advised me to let bygones be bygones, and that’s what I did.

  Considering the possibility of after-dinner intimacy, before our next date I took 100 mg of Viagra. Why roll the dice?

  I took her to one of those nouveau cuisine places that was all the rage: miniscule portions presented as works of art, exotic wines, exquisite service. But I couldn’t catch a break. Rather than talk romance, Bunny became nostalgic.

  She said, “I was a bundle of nerves the day Harold took me home to meet his mother. I had this feeling that he was the one. I knew this was going to be my last chance to make a really good first impression. You know what I mean?”

  “I haven’t done well with that question.”

  “What question?” She tapped her fingers on the stem of her wineglass. “Harold takes me into the kitchen to meet Ruth, his mother. She’s at the stove stirring a pot of soup with a wooden spoon. Before Harold says a word she gives me a look, like she’s inspecting the merchandise.

  “Well, she turns back to the stove and stirs the soup again like I wasn’t even there. I’m holding my breath, waiting for someone to say something. Finally Harold says, ‘Ma, this is Bunny.’

  “Nothing. She doesn’t say a thing. Keeps stirring the soup. Then she taps the spoon on the pot, lays it on the counter, and says to Harold – in Yiddish, mind you – ‘Get this shikse out of my house.’ Then she picks up the spoon, all nonchalant, and stirs again, as if I’m already gone.”

  Bunny sipped her wine.

  “I’m standing there trembling, thinking of my Grandma Eppie, a holocaust survivor just like Ruth, and I remember what Eppie used to say. It was like . . .,” she finished her wine, “like it was her motto: ‘You don’t get nothin’ you don’t work for.’ In tough times, I always hear her voice, and her voice is telling me to fight for Harold, even though I want to cry and slink away. “So I say, ‘Ikh badoyer az ir vilt zikh mit mir nosh bakunin, Froy Siegel, vayl ikh bin a sheyne Yidishe meydl.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means: It’s too bad you don’t want to get to know me, Mrs. Siegel, because I’m a nice Jewish girl.”

  She continued in a softer voice but with fiercer sentiment.

  “Well— she still doesn’t say a word, just stirs and stirs the soup. So I say, ‘Harold, please take me home.’ Then, with her back still to me she says, ‘Bunny, come here and taste the soup.’ I taste the soup. ‘A little more salt,’ I say. Then she says, ‘Bunny? What kind of name is that?’”

  Then Bunny said, “You say you’re not religious but you’re Jewish, right?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m a divinity school dropout.”

  “You never mentioned that.”

  “Is this a problem?”

  “Not at all,” she said, slipping her hand out of mine.

  When Bunny and I first spoke, I thought she was German because of her accent. After I met her I wondered if she was Italian because when she spoke her mouth and her hands moved in concert. When she asked if I were Jewish, I thought dinner was our coda.

  Afterward, I was laconic but Bunny was bubbly, telling one story after another.

  On her doorstep she was still talking.

  “So where was I?” she said, nibbling her pinkie as if it were a standard technique to stimulate memory. “Oh, now I remember. The class I taught in bunny school: Advanced Erotica. Here,” she said, “let me show you.” She lifted my hand to her lips and sucked my forefinger into her mouth, wrapping her tongue around it. I was still catching my breath when she said, “That was lesson one.” She brushed her lips over mine, opened the door, and said, “Call me soon?”

  Walking to my car, my arousal combined with astonishment, as if my erection switched on a light in my brain. I wondered why I hadn’t seen Bea not wanting sex as a sign our marriage was in trouble. I wondered if sublimating my libido had impaired my vision.

  When I got home, I called Bunn
y.

  “Georges!” she said. “Thank heaven you’re safe. I was worried about you driving after you polished off that second bottle of Perrier.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I did get stopped, and my carbonation level was over the legal limit. But I knew the cop, so he let me go with a warning.”

  We talked about our next date, which, because of conflicting commitments, wasn’t going to be for several weeks. But we spoke every evening.

  We talked about Harold. He’d been a constitutional lawyer, argued civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, been a champion of workers, victims, and consumers. And he was active in politics, a die-hard liberal, a stalwart of the Democratic Party.

  “You remind me of him,” she said.

  “I couldn't fill his shoes.”

  “Not to worry,” she said.

  I told Bunny about Jake, our work, our passion for tennis, our last evening together. Following a twenty-year career in the navy, he’d joined the firm right out of law school and worked under my supervision until he made partner.

  “So you were his mentor?”

  We’d mentored each other, he’d become like an older brother, especially after my father developed Alzheimer’s.

  Bunny spoke of Eppie, who’d lived by the code Arbeit macht frei: the Nazi slogan written in the crown of the arched entry gates to the concentration camps— Work shall set you free. In Birkenau she sewed Stars of David on prisoner uniforms.

  Bunny’s father brought Eppie with him to America when he was selected as a post doc in theoretical physics by John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. When Bunny was two, her parents were killed in a train crash. Raised by Eppie, Bunny grew up poor. When she entered first grade, she spoke only Yiddish.

  Missing her, I wondered if the cure for loneliness was passage through greater loneliness.

  When we finally saw each other next, we went to see Romeo and Juliet at the Kodak Theatre. On our way, she pointed out her synagogue on Hollywood Boulevard.