by Siel Ju
Natalie’s tone was encouraging, but I suddenly felt weary. The conversation sounded very familiar. I said I’d tried online dating before, and that it hadn’t gone well. But Erin’s face turned eager; she asked Natalie what she meant. Natalie said in the past she used to do nice things for her boyfriends, only to find herself taken for granted, then cast aside. “I’d be like, ‘I got a present for you,’” Natalie said, using a doofy, cartoon character voice while shuffling toward us in a silly, weeble-wobble walk, her arms outstretched like she was offering up a gift. “But he should be the one giving me gifts. I didn’t realize it, but I was emasculating them. I was totally sabotaging myself.” She recommended a relationship course that she’d taken, a series of online seminars, starting with one about bringing love into your life, which she said outlined concrete steps you could take to get guys to pay attention to you and ask you out. One of these methods consisted of catching a guy’s eye and holding it for five full seconds.
“It really works!” she said. “I mean, I’d met my boyfriend already when I took it, but my friend who took it with me said it’s like magic. They’ll get up out of their seat walk over from all the way around the bar and offer to buy you a drink.”
“Meeting guys isn’t the issue,” I said. “It’s everything else.”
But Erin’s eyes were glittering. She listened to Natalie, rapt, lit up by the winter sunlight, which had refracted through a window and was dappling her face with dots of iridescent color. When she tilted her head down slightly the spots moved into her hair, covered it like jeweled netting. Looking at her, I thought she was radiant, and wondered why she always seemed to have such a hard go of it, with the guys. I wondered why I did too. Natalie promised to email us a link to the seminar website. Before we left Erin and I both bought scarves—I got two, one to send to my sister in Portland—the same style but different colors from the one Natalie was wearing the night before. Natalie sold them to us at half price, and when we said that was too generous she said it was fine and smiled shyly, her teeth peeking out meekly between her lips.
I had a good week, a productive one, the days running in a neat little seam. A couple nights, I met Erin for happy hour. She was cheerier; she’d signed up for the seminar Natalie had recommended, and was anxious for it to begin. I didn’t tell her about Christian but her enthusiasm lit a pilot light of hope in me too. I could sense it in my quiet moments, blue and steady and waiting.
For the date I dressed in monochrome—black pants, black heels, black coat, plus the new black-and-white scarf from Natalie’s shop hung around my neck in loose coils. The outfit looked stereotypically New York and made me feel protected, like I was encased in an urban shield denoting self-sufficiency. I tried putting my hair up in a bun but it made me look too severe, so I left it down and added earrings, big silver hoops that I thought lent me a more receptive flair.
I got to the coffee shop a few minutes early, but Christian was already there, sitting at a good spot in the back away from the foot traffic. When I walked in the door he raised his hand in greeting and stood up. His light brown hair was loosely styled away from his face. He wore dark jeans and a black moto jacket that looked expensive but old. He had the kind of good posture that made me aware of my own; I noticed myself straightening my shoulders as I walked toward him. I was about to shake his hand when he caught me in a quick hug, then we sat down. He asked me if he could get me something to drink, but there was a long line at the counter, so I said I’d wait. “You can have my tea if you want,” he said tentatively. “I haven’t touched it yet.”
I declined, thanking him. He said he would have liked to have taken me out to dinner, but that he wasn’t sure if it would have made me uncomfortable, that kind of time commitment. I shrugged, then smiled. I said I was thinking about getting a hot chocolate.
“Because we could still go to a restaurant,” he said. “If you want.”
I was about to shake my head, then remembered what Natalie said about emasculation. “I’d like that,” I said hurriedly. “I mean, we should celebrate your new job! Dessert, wine.” I suddenly stopped, anxious that I’d raised the bar too high on the dinner, made it too expensive.
“Do you like tapas?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. I was grinning unnaturally; when I realized this I abruptly remolded my face into a neutral expression. Then we smiled awkwardly at each other.
“Me too. I think I was a Spaniard in a former life.” He turned serious. “Wait, I didn’t really mean that. I don’t believe in reincarnation.” He looked at me intently as he said this, like he wanted reassurance that I wasn’t a reincarnationist either. I laughed to show that I wasn’t, then felt annoyed with myself. My reaction seemed too suppliant.
He drank his tea in a gulp, then we jaywalked across the street to the tapas restaurant. The place had recently reopened with a sleeker look, ebony tables and warm, ruddy lighting. It was packed but we got seats at the bar. Next to us a man ate alone, attacking his cheese plate with vicious little bites. Between pokes at his phone he snuck glances at us with a timid envy that made me feel lucky to be with a date. I glanced at the menu, then when Christian asked what I wanted, suggested that he order for us, he being a former Spaniard and all. This seemed to imbue him with a small, glowing pleasure. He took on the task with enthusiasm, conferring energetically with the waiter over taste profiles of the cured meats. He sampled two different wines before settling on a third. Then he turned back to me.
“It’s weird because Matt’s told me so much about you already,” he said. “I don’t know where to start.”
I asked him about himself. He’d grown up in Ohio, the baby of the family. His mother raised him like a little prince, he said, and he was close to his parents now, though he disagreed with them on everything; they listened to Glenn Beck and got into pyramid schemes. His older sister had four kids, one of them autistic. He was the black sheep, he said. He’d gone to college in Iowa, then moved out to Los Angeles on a whim, first working as a PA at Warner Bros., then bouncing through odd jobs before starting an MA program in creative writing at Cal State Northridge. “To clear my head,” he said.
I noticed he said the words “odd jobs” with an ironic gloss, as if he was protecting me from the dark and outré details of his life until he knew I was ready for them. His tone grew more relaxed as he spoke, prouder, like he was happy for the opportunity to shape the vague meanderings of his life into concrete proof of an adventurous spirit. He said he’d traveled to Thailand twice in the last year. His eagerness to be perceived as a rebel of sorts roused my sardonic proclivities—he actually used the word hedonist to describe himself—yet that same eagerness also revealed a vulnerability in him that softened me. I wondered if I talked the same way about my life, if my little attempts to reframe my past were similarly transparent and frantic.
When the food arrived it was clear Christian had ordered way too much. We played Tangram with the waiter, trying to get the tiny plates to fit into our bar space.
I asked about the architecture firm. Christian looked confused at first, then said Matt had misinterpreted, the job was at a nonprofit developer for low-income housing. His title, which he seemed satisfied about, was Director of Outreach. “Basically the liaison between the public and the nonprofit,” he said.
As we talked we shared the food gingerly, careful not to clash opinions or forks. At one point he lifted his glass of wine, then realized it was empty and set it back down. The bartender quickly came over but Christian waved him away after seeing my full glass; I’d forgotten about it in my nervousness. I started sipping industriously. He said it must take a lot of discipline to work as a freelance writer, that that kind of self-imposed structure didn’t come naturally to him, which was one reason he’d left grad school. He said this in a way that hinted he had a certain disdain for routine, its lack of passion. I watched him talk, imagining how he’d looked at CSUN, the class discussing Lolita’s agency while he sat in the back, agitated with the quiet bookishness of it
all. He said he’d read some of my articles, googled them. He liked one I’d written about a raw juice cleanse I’d done, that what I’d described was exactly how he’d felt on a similar cleanse.
“Those types of articles are just repackaged PR pitches,” I said. “The so-called benefits—they’re really placebo effects.”
I’d meant to be humbly self-deprecating, but my tone came out huffy and caught him off guard. “Well, I agree with the stuff about it curing cancer being unlikely,” he said quickly. “But I did feel cleaner afterwards—”
“Starvation will do that to you,” I said. The words were still harsher than I’d wanted but this time I managed to sound more teasing.
He smiled. “So that’s what that was,” he said. He turned thoughtful, turning over a piece of beet to better pincer it. “The way some people talk about juicing, you realize they’re actually obsessive-compulsive, or have an eating disorder. But there’s something about their obsessiveness that makes me want to get into it too.”
“I agree,” I said. “The extremeness of it. It gives you a sort of focus.”
“So we have something in common,” he said. The bartender came over again and Christian gave him a nod this time, for a second glass. “You look very—professional today. Is this how you usually dress? I mean, I like it.” He said that last part quickly, which made it unconvincing.
I got home close to eleven, feeling like the date had gone well enough yet fettered with an undercurrent of apprehension, like I’d done something wrong but couldn’t put a finger on what that mistake was yet. I went to bed immediately to sleep away the feeling, and woke up near dawn, spent from the rushed confusion of my dreams.
It was the Sunday before Christmas. I spent it at a Korean spa with Erin, then in the early evening, when Christian called, told him about it. There had been a minor kerfuffle at the beginning when Erin tried to wear a bikini into the hot tub; her argument for the tired-looking staff was that a different Korean spa had allowed her to do so. In the end, she got naked, but was angry for a while; I had stayed out of the fight, which she seemed to see as a kind of betrayal. After the sauna, though, she got over it. I’d noticed that most of the women arrived alone, going about their soak-and-scrub routines in a vigorous and somewhat grim, business-like fashion, before pulling on the shapeless regulation loungewear and padding off to nap in the heated room, splayed out unabashedly with their mouths open. I mimicked them, and woke up feeling discombobulated and puffy.
Christian had had a long conversation with his parents, who were hurt he wasn’t coming home for the holidays. It was the first Christmas he wasn’t spending with them. The year before he’d flown back with his girlfriend at the time, a woman five years older than him, whom his parents had loved, thinking her a calming influence. Christian and the girl had broken up shortly after that, but his parents brought her up again that day, which had led to an argument.
“I think we stayed together so long because we were just that age, when people couple up,” he said. I didn’t ask how long. “It’s weird, she never mentioned kids when we were dating, but when we finally broke up she gave me all this crap about how I’d robbed away her last chance of having a baby and left her with nothing. It made me think all women are the same.”
“Well, it’s an easy argument to make,” I said.
“That all women just want to have babies?”
“No. I’m saying maybe she didn’t want the relationship to end, or was feeling wounded, and the whole baby thing was the first thing she could think of to make you feel shitty.” I paused. “Though, who knows?” I added. “You knew her, not me.”
There was an angry silence while he considered this. Then he asked if I’d had dinner.
Christian lived in the Fairfax district, in a one-bedroom that was fairly spacious but looked cheap, with popcorn ceilings and pinkish carpet mottled with faint stains. The hodgepodge furniture looked assembled from garage sales. When I arrived the apartment was filled with the pungent aroma of prunes and olives and garlic, mingled with the bouquet of decanting wines. He’d cooked enough for an army—homemade hummus, a dense black quinoa and avocado salad, and a gigantic casserole dish of chicken Marbella. He’d mentioned that he enjoyed cooking, but seeing the spread, I was duly impressed. He told me, more convincingly this time, that he liked my dress, a simple scoop-neck I’d changed into self-consciously.
We sat down at one end of his too-big dining table, the five other chairs staring us down. Once we started eating, he became more spirited. He asked me if I liked the wine, and when I said I did, said he’d made it himself. “It’s my second year,” he said. “It’s more acidic than I’d like, but I know how to correct for that now.”
I noticed the wine cooler buzzing in the corner, and next to it, a barrel-shaped contraption with vinyl tubing and a red corker balanced on top. He said winemaking had become a semi-serious hobby. He was planning to get his sommelier’s license, and had just started a blog.
“It’s not as hard as you’d think,” he said. “And a lot of fun. I drive upstate to pick the grapes at this one vineyard. Though next year, I’d like to make that trip with someone.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “Your ex wasn’t into it?”
“No,” he said, then shook his head. “Definitely not.” He broke apart a roll into tiny, deliberate pieces before starting to eat it. “It dragged on far too long as it was. Honestly, it started falling apart as soon as we moved in together.”
I nodded.
“You know those intense, obsessive relationships, where your lives get tangled up immediately? It was one of those.”
He said he had a tendency to let things move too fast. “I think I saw her as a wounded bird I could protect somehow. But we both took that too far. By the time we broke up there was no way we could be friends. The last time we talked, I was at the grocery store. She called me and started screaming at me about how I shouldn’t leave without telling her where I was going, that she needed to know where I was, at all times, basically.” He looked up from his plate at me. Something in my face made him change course. “That’s what I think is great about you and Matt. That you stayed friends. Had that level of—maturity.”
Gingerly, we started trading Matt stories. Christian explained how they’d met, at a pick-up soccer game in Westwood Park. I half-listened, grousing over what he’d said about his ex. I’d never had any intense, obsessive relationships. I wallowed in a mix of jealousy and contempt, the two feelings jostling each other for dominance like rancorous siblings. I felt like a box of cereal in an aisle full of cereal boxes, in a supermarket in a city with countless supermarkets, at a time when no one ate carbs. All the good things in life seemed to happen only through rare intersections of luck and timing, chance meetings that never happened for me. I thought about Matt getting a text from the plump married woman about how she understood completely, things had run their course. I pictured Natalie paging through her codependency book and carefully dogearing a page. I watched Christian’s hands; he’d stopped eating the roll and was absent-mindedly playing with the remaining pieces until they disintegrated into crumbs.
“You’ve gotten really quiet,” he said. He was studying me, his expression vaguely apprehensive and contrite. “I hope I didn’t upset you.”
“Upset me?” I said. I shook my head. “No, I’m just listening. I’m interested.” I smiled, leaning forward. I wasn’t sure if Christian was just a blithe kind of a guy who innocently, if obtusely, shared whatever came to mind, or if he was more deliberate, if the effect he’d produced on me was exactly what he’d been going for.
“I think I’m trying to be honest and up front, but going about it the wrong way. Like if I put it all out there …” He took a long sip of wine. “I practically dragged you over here tonight.”
“I wanted to come.” I said. This seemed to calm him. We looked at each other, and for a second I thought he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t, so I kept talking. “I’ve met people like that.
They seem like exactly what you’ve been looking for at the time. But then you realize you projected all this stuff onto them …”
He nodded. “It’s been good in a way. I’ve gotten more cautious, not just always jumping into the next thing that comes along.”
Somehow this elbowed awake that resentful, unlucky feeling again. No one ever took any leaps of faith for me. He saw me look at the clock. It was after eleven. “I talked the whole night,” he said resignedly. I disagreed lightly, playing nice. We got up to clear the plates. I started running the water and he said it was okay, he would do the dishes in the morning, but seemed glad for it when I said I wanted to help—it was only fair since he’d cooked.
Standing at the sink together, he asked me about my past relationships. I said there hadn’t been anything serious of late, that the last guy I dated was in the summer, and even that hadn’t lasted long. He asked why not and I said ultimately, he hadn’t made enough time for me. He asked what kind of time I considered appropriate. I laughed nervously. “I don’t know,” I said. “More than once a week?” He nodded, like he found this answer satisfying, doable. I found this appealing. The domestic act of washing dishes together drew me into his bubble and I realized I liked it there—this foreign, homey place. When we finished he suddenly leaned down and kissed me. He held my face in his hands; they were soft and clean from the dishwater.
We made out for a while, then went to his bedroom. We mussed around on his polyester bedspread. After a few minutes I told him I didn’t want to have sex; I had my period. He said that was okay, he still wanted me to stay over, if I wanted. At that it was like it was decided. We groped at each other slowly and ardently, occasionally freeing each other of another piece of clothing, until what seemed like hours later, we were both naked except for our underwear. We rolled around hotly, not having sex. He seemed more confident now, firm, like in bed he was comfortable being his true self. Eventually he put his hand between my legs and touched me over my panties until I came. Afterwards I started giving him a hand job, then watched him masturbate, on his knees straddling my body, until he came on my chest. He wiped me down with a warm, damp washcloth.