by Laurie Graff
Charlie was barking and barking while the phone was ringing and ringing. I would have to answer it. Then I’d have to stand by and listen to Millie chat it up with...what was his name again? Oh, I couldn’t take the ringing in my ear. I reached for the phone.
“I was getting worried,” said my mother. “Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, somehow feeling drugged with sleep.
“Did you watch the show?” she asked.
“I’m on it.”
“Oh. You. You’re always on,” she said. “What did you think of the Best of Your Worst?”
“The best of your who? You’re mixed up, Ma. You mean The Basherterette. I don’t think it’ll make it.”
“I don’t know what show you’re talking about, Karrie, but I don’t think we’re talking about the same show.”
I opened my eyes, and with a great, big sigh of relief I was happy to see that we weren’t. Talk about reality!
When we hung up I was, thankfully, alone in my apartment, but I was alone. I went back to the computer and logged on to a Web site, hoping my heart’s desire was just a search, a click and Visa card away.
Within seconds I saw pictures of men and women hugging, kissing and holding hands. Sprawled across their smiling faces it said:
***Welcome to the J-Spot***
The Hot Spot for Jewish Singles To Meet
Barring the bang of blaring music, I felt the same anxiety I might feel if I had just walked into some massive singles events. But I took a breath and moved my mouse in the direction of love.
Seven
While no two frogs have the same call, the loudest calls are made by the male frog when he is seeking a mate, coming to be known as an advertising call.
The home page said there were eight thousand seven hundred forty-two people online right now. I wondered if there was always such a crowd or if it was just a seasonal thing.
Three days had passed and I still hadn’t signed up. I had started, but stopped when I saw what it involved. It was such an elaborate process. The last time I had to answer such complicated essay questions I was applying for college.
No sooner did I sit down to do it I was back up on my feet, walking aimlessly, thinking about all the people, and contemplating the other eight thousand seven hundred and forty-one. Passing a mirror I noticed my hair was uncombed and I didn’t have on any makeup. Well, I absolutely could not meet anyone looking like this. When I returned to my desk I had well-brushed hair, glossed lips, a bagel, a cup of coffee and three bottles of nail polish, unwilling to waste any window of time that allowed for a good drying opportunity.
It was now or never.
I entered my e-mail address. [email protected].
I entered a password. CharlesK.
Easy. I moved on. Create a username. Okay. Now I was stumped.
I had to create some cute little name that would instantly make someone want to either read more or click on. So what was I? WestSideWhy? ResistTense? CyberDoubts? I needed something clever. Catchy. I looked over at the names of the nail polishes. They all seemed plausible...RudelyNude, BerriesInTheSnow, ClearWillpower...for a porno site! Who knew nail polish could be so seductive.
BlueEyes. BlueEyes? Okay, not clever but I liked it. After typing it in, I found out that so did three hundred and twenty-four other blue-eyed girls. Yet when I was given the option of BlueEyes325, I agreed. My first J-Spot compromise, and not a bad one at that.
I checked that I was a woman in search of a man and read my options of Hot Spots: a friend, a date, a long-term partner, a marriage. A date sounded fine but I had heard that it is sometimes online code for just sex, something that managed to happen without prodding. Choosing not to advertise for it I checked both a long-term partner and a marriage. I felt a surge of hope after checking those boxes, as if the acknowledgment alone could make it happen.
Date of birth, astrological sign, occupation, schooling, height, weight, body type, eye color and hair. I said I was Reform, went to synagogue sometimes and did not keep kosher at all. The J-Spot ranged in people that were very religious and orthodox to those who were completely secular and unaffiliated. But I had chosen the J-Spot in the hope that meeting men in my tribe might add something familiar to the unfamiliarity of dating in cyberspace.
Anne had met Carl on Catch.com. However, Carl, now in his Chaim stage, had made a point of telling her that he’d transferred. He left Catch for the J-Spot where he searched only for women who described themselves as Religious, Very Religious, Very Orthodox and Very Very Different from Anne.
I glided through bunches of checklists and questions until I got to the first dreaded essay called “Who Am I.” It was supposed to represent the way I would introduce myself to someone. Okay, let’s be honest, not only would I never introduce myself to someone with as many words as it was going to take to write this essay, I would never even introduce myself to someone unless they were cute, or I made some cool eye contact first. But I wasn’t out and about. I was online, and I was expected to present myself authentically in a one-hundred-word essay that would show who I was. Oy.
I should have signed up on Catch.com. Catch probably wasn’t so demanding. I bet they didn’t make you do so much work. Everyone on Catch was probably outside right now playing and having fun, while everyone on the J-Spot was stuck at home, only up to word fifty-eight on the stupid one-hundred-word essay. The J-Spot was probably dating for overachievers, and I was afraid if I didn’t do a really good job on my essay my date and I would never get into a top restaurant.
I decided to bag it, until a little pop-up appeared on the screen.
Did You Spend Last Night Wishing For Love?
SIGN UP NOW
Don’t Just Make A Wish—
Make Your Wish Come True
I reexamined the odds and decided they were in my favor. Online: Eight thousand seven hundred forty-two. My apartment: One.
Two hours later, here I was.
Who Am I
You’ll find a smart, funny, pragmatic and romantic soul if you can tickle the right spot. Sometimes it’s hard to find, but my itch to connect has brought me here, and I hope you’ll be the one with satisfying hands. As a professional actress I’ve played roles in many fictional relationships, and feel ready for a reality of my own. I hope dating online will help me meet a like-minded man who’d be a great friend and lover. I am in good shape and take care of myself. I enjoy all the usual stuff, cultural and athletic, activities indoors and out! I have a funny dog, and what I may lack in culinary skills I make up for in my ability to eat out and order in.
I didn’t know if the essay was good or even good enough, but the next part said to upload a photo. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I was going to post two. I had the feeling that would be my calling card, and if a guy liked my looks it wouldn’t matter if I wrote a prize winning essay or couldn’t tell a noun from a verb. I took out my actor’s head shot, hoping it would land me more dates than it had auditions.
For the second pic, I removed a photo from my fridge held in place by a magnet shaped like a chocolate chip cookie. Anne took it on our way home from that Bat Mitzvah. Surrounded by buckets of daisies outside a Connecticut flower stand it was pretty, and in my favorite blue dress I thought it showed my figure without looking like I was trying. The shot possessed the added bonus of the wind blowing my hair. Slipping the photos into a clear little pouch, I scanned them into an e-mail and sent them off to the J-Spot folks to post and complete my profile. BlueEyes325.
But I was hardly done. With three more essays to go, it felt more like writing a dissertation on dating, or spotting, as they called it. I had to delineate my views about a good spot, a perfect spot and the spot of my dreams. I thought it safe to say it was one that came with a stain removal that worked faster than the time it took to get through this profile.
At long last they wanted to know what I had learned from my prior relationships. With gusto I typed my answer.
From The Last Spo
t
I’ve learned that you have to kiss a lot of frogs.
Bleep! Unaccepted answer! Unaccepted? What? I was crushed. I looked closely at the screen. They wanted more. More information. They needed more words. My God, this was so demanding, not to mention slightly humiliating. They obviously felt I’d not learned very much. However, judging from my dating history they were probably right.
I started out this year resolved with my dating past, feeling complete, and making a resolution that completely committed me to carpe diem mode. Having come through the New Year’s breakup with Jeff Broder with flying colors, I was hell-bent on seizing a day, or quite frankly anything before it had a chance to seize me. So despite freezing forecasts I went running on an eight-degree Sunday in January.
Dressed in more layers than I knew I owned, I ventured up to the reservoir that crystal-clear, numbingly cold day. Extra careful not to slip on the icy path, the run was taking longer than usual. But at a certain point turning back became equidistant to forging ahead. I forged on, only slowing down when I heard someone call behind me, “What are you doing here?”
Running alongside me, suddenly, like a package dropped down from the sky was a man. Underneath his wool cap, his triple layered sweats and even beyond his runny nose it was easy to see he was a cute one.
“We both must be crazy,” I said, taking off my glove and extending my hand to shake hello while we continued our run.
Two nights later at dinner, Albee told me that was the moment he knew I was someone he wanted to know.
“I thought it was so endearing in that frigid weather you actually removed your glove to shake my hand,” he said, pouring more wine from the bottle of Merlot he had ordered. We were in a sweet Upper West Side restaurant that looked like a room in a house, and was practically a private party. With temperatures hardly rising to ten, everyone else stayed in, while Albee and I went out. “Plus for a while I was running behind you and you looked pretty good.”
“The frostbite must have gone directly to your brain. How can anyone look good in all those layers? Maybe I had a better shot at your attention cause I was the only other person on the path!” I said, sipping the wine, warming up while warming up to Albee.
It was a really good beginning to a new year. Albee was nice, fun. Bright, energized and wanting to bond. He was back in New York after a decade in Los Angeles. He liked his job and his apartment—conveniently located just a few blocks from mine—he liked his life, and he liked me. His twin teenaged daughters still lived in L.A. with their mom, but Albee felt New York was a better place for his sales work. Since the girls would soon be off to college—“Even in-state, it sure isn’t cheap”—he felt as long as he stayed in close touch, all would be okay.
Albee had designs on me and quickly began painting me into his life. We fell into daily contact immediately, and though it felt like too much too soon, my break-up with Broder helped me appreciate an available guy like Albee. After two weeks he told me he was considering a move to a larger space, but nothing had come up as yet. He also asked how I felt about relocating back to Los Angeles and, though I swore I never would, I told him it was possible. I wanted to keep all the possibilities open, even though Albee had slammed the door shut on one.
Children. No way. He was done.
“You’ll have two wonderful stepdaughters you can befriend,” Albee told me the third week over margaritas at a local Mexican hang. “You’ll love them and they’ll love you. That relationship will have great potential for you, Karrie, just like ours. But I don’t want more kids. I know what it takes. I’m also older than you, and I just don’t want any more,” he said, making sure to add that if this talk seemed premature it was only because he was mature, and feeling clear about us he also felt the need to be clear.
“Think about it,” he said, again, later that night when we kissed on the couch. “No babies. Okay?” he asked, all sweetness and sincerity. His kisses grew even sweeter and more sincere as I thought about that and also thought about whether or not he should stay. He had his terms and I had mine, and the potential of a sexual attraction was something I needed to know fairly early on. “I promise you I won’t let you miss out on anything else,” said Albee, physically responding to my thoughts. I knew what that would be. And Albee didn’t disappoint.
The next morning I sat at my kitchen table watching him make pancakes, staring at the paper and allowing my head to wander as I thought about last night. Still a little high, I was unsure if it was the tequila, the time in bed, or the talk. It was a big talk. A lot of talk for not a lot of time. But the cards were on the table, and I had to choose my hand.
I looked up at the clock, looking past Albee, past the paper and past the pancakes to see the time. My baby clock was running a race against time. While I had to admit it was a race I had never acknowledged, it no longer mattered whether I chose to run it or not. It was a race that was running without me. For all I knew it was over. I was in my mid-forties and I’d have to start galloping this second if I wanted to see if I could still win, to see if there was any chance that I would show.
That would never happen with Albee. Other things would. Or I could leave him. I quickly calculated my odds of meeting a man who would date me and mate me in record time, and saw they were odds that no one would bet on. Not even me.
I really liked Albee. There were many ways to become a family. And there were many ways to be a parent without having to give birth. Besides, if things really did work out I’d gain two stepdaughters without having to lose any sleep or any weight, not to mention bypassing all those years of laundry. It made a lot of sense for me at this point in my life. Albee leaned over the table to feed me his pancakes. They were warm and good. Comfort food. The maple syrup reminded me of the sweetness of last night, and in that taste my decision had been made.
The days that followed were wonderful. It was a romantic week—light and carefree. A week of romance had started off the month of February, making me happy it was a leap year and Albee and I would get an extra day.
Getting ready for a date one night, Albee phoned asking me to meet him for dinner at his apartment instead of our original plan to go out. When I walked into his living room I was standing amidst a sea of boxes. Boxes here and boxes there, boxes, boxes everywhere.
“I’m moving!” Albee jumped down from a stepladder where he had just removed a suitcase from the closet. He put his arms around me and gave me a big kiss while handing over some packing tape and a list of items that needed to be boxed. “We’ll just order pizza tonight,” said Albee, before climbing back up the ladder to bring down something else.
I loved the close proximity of Albee’s apartment to mine and was disappointed he’d be moving, but for all I knew it would only be downstairs to that bigger place he had told me about in his building. Looking forward to pizza and packing and Albee and me, I pulled a piece of tape across the cardboard and sealed the box like it was my fate.
“So tell me about this new apartment,” I said a few minutes later, going to the closet and taking some camping equipment off Albee’s hands. I put it down on the floor thinking that maybe this summer we would camp. I’d only gone camping for a day, which most people don’t qualify as real camping because you hadn’t slept outdoors, but napping and peeing outside were enough of a qualifier as far as I was concerned. With Albee, though, I thought an overnight would be fun. Maybe his daughters would come and we could all do it together.
“Well,” said Albee, as he stepped off the ladder, walking down the hall to the kitchen. “The new place has two bedrooms and two full baths,” he said, his back turned to me while he spoke.
“Two bedrooms and two full baths,” I said, following him down the hall. “That’s incredible.” I was hoping it would be in a neighborhood I loved, like this one, because if things worked out it looked like that’s where I would be headed.
“It’s close to a lot of shopping,” he said.
“What isn’t?”
“And you�
��ll like this. It’s got a room with its own washer/dryer and outside there’s a nice little deck.”
“Washer/dryer? Where you moving to? Nice little deck! What did you do? Buy the top floor of a brownstone! It sounds amazing. Where is it?”
“Colorado,” said Albee, suddenly jumping on top of the kitchen counter as he gave his answer.
“I can’t hear you,” I said, catching up to him in the kitchen in time to see him standing above me and beyond reach atop the Formica countertop.
“What’d you say, Alb? The Coronado? That’s right near here! Where’s that building, again? Seventy-first or Seventy-second? I know they have a gym, but I didn’t know they had decks. Where’s your place? Top floor?”
Albee, still up on the counter, quickly reached over to a collection of kitchen utensils hanging on the wall and grabbed a spatula when he told me that I had misheard him and he would need to repeat his answer.
“So what’d you say?” I asked, finally facing him in the kitchen.
“Co-lo-ra-do,” he stated, blurting out each syllable while holding the spatula in front of him like a sword for protection. “Colorado. Aspen, Colorado,” he repeated, waving the spatula in front of him as if at any moment I might start fighting back by lobbing him with a ladle.
“I’m leaving on Saturday, on Valentine’s Day, and I’m sorry I lured you over here but I wanted to tell you in person, which I thought was pretty decent of me all things considered, however, if you want you can just leave now. But if you promise not to hit me I’ll come down and order a pizza and then maybe you can stick around because I’m out of here in three days and, if you wouldn’t mind, I could use a hand and would love it if you’d help me pack.”