by Holly Rayner
Now I put a single fish filet in a small pan, sprinkle it with oil and garlic, and stand at the stove turning it over and over until it cooks through. I transfer it to a plate and open a can of green beans, which I drain and stick a fork into. I grab a package of store-bought cookies and a can of soda, and I carry everything to the couch and arrange it on a TV tray. Dinner is served.
This life made me perfectly happy a few months ago. It’s as if meeting Tomas woke me up to an unhappiness I’d been content to ignore until now.
I can’t stand the thought of spending another day with only myself for company, so I text Isobel and ask her to meet me for lunch.
I arrive at our favorite soup and sandwich shop first—she’s always late, so I’m not surprised—and order a lemonade while I wait. Five minutes later, Isobel breezes in, wrapped in a huge fashion scarf and carrying a massive tote bag. She plops the bag down on the table, reaches in, and pulls out a candle as big around as my thigh.
“For you,” she says. “You sounded sad on the phone, and I’ve been getting into aromatherapy. It really helps!”
Isobel’s interests change with the seasons, but I’m always grateful to be thought of.
“Thanks,” I say, sniffing the candle. It smells lemony.
“So what’s going on?” Isobel asks, taking her seat across from me. “I haven’t seen you in weeks, and today you suddenly call up and want to have lunch. Is everything okay?”
There really is nothing like a best friend for seeing through you. For a moment I’m so grateful for Isobel that I feel like I might cry.
“I met a guy,” I confess.
“Uh-oh.” She knows me too well. “What happened?”
Slowly, half reluctantly and half filled with relief at finally being able to talk about it, I launch into the tale. I tell her about meeting Tomas in the park, about the way he talked about my photos and the interest he showed in my life. I tell her about the way I felt lit up inside when he was around. She listens carefully, not interrupting or arguing, just letting me share the story, and as I do, the weight of it lifts from me a little.
“Who was he?” she asks when I’m done.
“What do you mean? I only got his first name.”
“So we can’t even stalk him on the internet?” She shakes her head. “You don’t know what country he was from?”
“Uh…not France?”
“That’s helpful,” she says sarcastically. “Really narrows it down.”
“I forgot to ask.”
“What about what he does for a living?”
“He was dressed nicely. I thought he might be some kind of businessman.” A thought occurs to me. “He said he’d been called a prince before.”
Isobel looks at me skeptically. “You think he was a prince?”
“No, of course not.” Hadn’t he said his father wasn’t a king? “I just thought it might be a clue.”
She shrugs. “That probably doesn’t mean anything. From the way you talk about him, he sounds kind of egotistical. I bet his friends call him ‘prince’ to give him a hard time.”
“You think he sounds egotistical?”
“Are you kidding? Extremely. The way you talked about him going through all your pictures—as if he had the right!” She shakes her head.
The server stops by our table, pad at the ready.
“Are you two ready to order?” she asks.
“Two tomato soups, please,” Isobel says with authority.
She always orders for me, but I’m used to it. It’s part of the dynamic of our friendship, and at this point, I’d honestly miss it if she stopped. She knows me well enough to know what I want. When the server disappears, she turns back to me.
“The worst part of the story,” she continues as if there had been no interruption, “is the way he practically invited himself up to your apartment. As if you wouldn’t have asked him yourself if you’d wanted him to come!”
“Do you think I would have?” It was, more or less, the question I had been wrestling with for the past several weeks.
“Of course you would,” Isobel said. “If you didn’t invite him up, it’s because you didn’t want him to come. If you weren’t sure, that counts as not wanting him to come. He should be able to wait for a second date, for God’s sake. And then that hokey move of giving you his number in case you changed your mind that night. What a jerk!”
“That was pretty cocky,” I realize. “Especially since he never returned any of my texts.”
“You texted him?”
“A couple of times. Not that night. In the days that followed.”
“Right. Could he be more obvious?” Isobel rolled her eyes. “He was only interested in you that night. Once you made it clear he wasn’t going to get any action on the first date, he lost interest. What a loser. You definitely made the right call with him.”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Well, trust me,” Isobel says confidently. “You’re a great girl, Emma. You deserve a great guy. Not a chowderhead like that. There are good guys out there, guys who will treat you the way you deserve to be treated. You just need to find one of them.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” I ask helplessly. “It’s not like they wear signs. It’s not like they advertise themselves.”
Isobel’s expression changes to one of pure delight. “Wait a minute! That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“They advertise themselves!” She fumbles in her tote bag and pulls out a laptop. Setting it on the table between us, she turns it on and connects to the restaurant’s Wi-Fi. “You need to get on a dating website.”
“What?” I can’t believe she’s serious. “Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes.” She pulls up a site, one I’ve seen advertisements for on late-night TV. “You’re not on here, are you?”
“Of course I’m not,” I say. “That’s for lonely people.”
“Um, yeah,” Isobel says. “It’s for people who want to get into relationships. That’s what ‘lonely’ means. It’s not for, like, pathetic people.”
“Have you used it?”
“Of course!”
She tilts the screen toward herself, taps the keyboard a few times, and then turns it back to me. Sure enough, there’s her dating profile, featuring a picture of her in a serene-looking yoga pose. I can see dozens of messages from guys cluttering up her inbox.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You meet guys in bars. You do it all the time. I’ve seen you.”
“Sure,” Isobel agreed. “But that’s not the only place to meet them. When you meet guys at bars, you only ever meet one kind of guy. The kind that likes to go to bars. But on this website, you can meet tons of different kinds of people. The sky’s the limit. Come on, let’s get you set up with an account.”
I feel a little strange as Isobel begins setting up my dating profile. It’s not something I’d ever imagined myself doing. But I can’t deny, it’s sort of fun.
“The first thing we have to do,” Isobel says, pulling up one of my social media pages, “is to choose a profile picture.”
“You can just use the same one.” I point to the profile picture on my social media page. It’s a black and white headshot, one I’ve been using on my résumé for years.
“We’re not using that,” Isobel says dismissively.
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t say anything about you,” she says.
She opens up my photo albums and scans them.
“This one,” she says, settling on a candid of me on a trip to the beach, standing in the surf and laughing. “This tells potential matches that you like the outdoors and that you have a sense of humor.” She copies the photo, clicks back over to the dating site, and pastes it in. “Now, what are you looking for in a man?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Someone nice, I guess.”
“Nice.” She laughs. “Obviously you want him to be nice. You’re lucky I’m here, you know.” She c
hecks a few boxes. “Someone your age, for sure, who’s looking for a serious relationship… He has to be smart, so let’s say you want someone with a college degree…”
“I can pick all those things?”
“Of course. You don’t want to waste your time with someone you’re not going to like in the long run, do you? I’m telling you, dating sites are great.” She chooses a couple more options, then pivots the computer to me. “There you go. What do you think?”
I scan the profile she’s set up for me. It looks good to me, but I don’t have much to compare against. Mostly I’m just feeling insecure at the idea of having my information out there so publicly.
“I guess it’s good,” I say, feeling nervous. “What happens now?”
“Now we post it,” she says, and before I have time to express any doubts, she’s clicked a button. “There you go. It’s live.”
“So people can see it?”
“Yeah, you’ll probably start getting—ah!” She points to the screen, where a message request has just popped up. “Your first bite.”
“What is that?”
“This guy wants to talk to you.” She squints to read the screen. “Trevor. Want to say hi to him?”
“Maybe not yet. This is all happening pretty fast.”
“Hey, you’ve got another one.” She shows me. “Here’s where they appear. Oh, look!” Two more have popped up. “Someone’s popular.”
“Is this normal?” I ask.
“Well, I expected it,” she says with a smile. “You’re good-looking.”
“But they’re probably all creeps, aren’t they?”
“No. You don’t want to start thinking like that. That’s what got you to swear off dating in the first place, remember?” She gives my arm a squeeze. “You need to allow for the possibility that some guys aren’t creeps.
“That’s what I was trying to do with Tomas.”
“Okay, well, don’t let Tomas ruin all of mankind for you. There are still good guys out there.” She indicates my growing list of contacts. “Some of these guys might be creeps. You should definitely read their profiles and weed out any weird ones. And you should talk to them online before you meet up with them. But some of them will be nice.”
“I hope you’re right,” I say, scanning the list of messages from men that have already come over, the still growing roster of names of people who want to meet me. It seems too good to be true.
“Trust me,” Isobel says. “This is going to be great, Emma. You’re going to get the happily ever after you’ve always wanted but have been too afraid to go after.” She shuts the laptop, putting it back in her bag. “As soon as you get home, you should start going through the men who’ve messaged you. I bet you’ll find a bunch who are decent.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. And I want you to message three of them back. That’s your assignment. You can handle three.”
“Okay,” I agree, because she’s my best friend and because she’s the boss, but in my heart I’m not at all sure that I can.
Chapter 5
Emma
I stay up way too late that night, exploring my connections on the dating site.
In the time it took me to walk home, shower, and make dinner, a veritable flood of messages came over. It would take me days to go through them all.
How do people do this? I wonder. How do people make choices they feel confident about with nothing but an internet profile to go on? Already, I’m sure I’m going to mess it up, that I’m going to end up setting myself up with a guy who looks great on paper but turns out to have some horrible flaw. After all, none of them are going to list their weird baggage on their dating profile, are they?
I have to start whittling this list down somehow. There are dozens of men here.
Feeling sort of gross about it, I decide to start by going through their pictures. I don’t like to think of myself as a shallow person, and it does bother me to say no to a bunch of these people based on nothing more than looks. But if I’m not attracted to them, I suppose there’s no point in getting either of our hopes up, right?
I quickly settle into a rhythm and manage to eliminate more than half of the men on the list by filtering out those I don’t find attractive. To my surprise, I find myself being more rigid with my standards for attractiveness than I’ve ever been in my life. I click “no” on several men who aren’t any less good-looking than the boys I dated in college. I suppose it’s something about the fact that I’m surrounded by so much interest. That’s never happened to me before, and it’s making me feel like I can be more picky than usual.
By the time I get to the end of the list, I’m left with about twenty good-looking men. Now I need to find another way to whittle my prospects down. I imagine that if Isobel were here, she’d tell me to go ahead and start talking to all twenty of them, but that’s way too high a number for me. At the restaurant, I agreed to pursue three connections, so three will be it for me. At least for now.
Overwhelmed, I step away from my computer and pull my hair up into a ponytail. There’s a half-full bottle of red wine on the counter, and I uncork it and pour myself a glass. I take the first long sip standing in the kitchen and feel the tension start to release in my shoulders. Topping off my glass, I return to the computer.
Clicking open the first profile feels oddly like crossing a line, as if I’m permitting myself to know the man whose information I’m looking at as a person instead of just a picture on my computer screen. It’s strange to think of all these men as people, to think that dozens of human beings have seen my picture and thought about me, maybe imagined themselves out on a date with me.
God only knows what else they’ve imagined. I push that thought from my mind and focus on the screen.
The man’s name is Martin, and his age is listed as thirty-six. He has curly black hair and is holding a cute terrier puppy in his arms, which appeals to me—how bad can he be if he’s a dog lover? I scroll down and read what he’s written about himself.
“If I could play any sport professionally,” Martin writes, “I would play baseball because it’s America’s favorite. My favorite dessert is apple pie and my favorite bird is the bald eagle. I’m proud to be an American! If you are too, send me a message and let’s see if there are fireworks.”
Wow. Seriously? I like America as much as the next person, but it sounds like this man doesn’t have anything else to his identity besides his love of his country. I click “no” and move on to my next potential match.
“Looking for something serious!” says a man named Jackson. “Tired of the dating game and ready to settle down and start a family. Don’t bother messaging unless you’re ready for the same.”
Jeez. Okay, Jackson, I won’t bother then. I want a long-term relationship too, but I’d like to at least meet the man in question before I commit to anything serious. From the sound of this profile, he doesn’t want to hear from anyone who’s not ready to walk down the aisle. So that’s a no.
The next profile features a man in profile with a shadow cast across his face. It’s a compelling shot, and at first glance, I think he might be a fellow photographer. But the profile quickly dispels me of that notion.
“So many females on this site say they’re looking for a nice guy who really cares, and yet you don’t respond to my messages. No one to blame but yourselves for the fact that you keep ending up with bad matches. If you really want that nice, thoughtful boyfriend you all say you want, I’m right here.”
Wow, someone’s got a pretty high opinion of himself. I’m definitely not messaging this guy back. Anybody who goes around self-identifying as a put-upon nice guy probably isn’t so nice at all. I’m guessing there’s a reason he can’t get any women interested in him.
Some of the messages aren’t so bad. “You seem interesting,” one reads. “Wanna chat?” Another is more blunt: “Cute pic. Hit me up.” But even though there’s nothing objectionable about these messages, there’s nothing very appealing a
bout them either. I can’t imagine telling my children someday that I met their father when he messaged me that I seemed interesting.
I’m not going to be able to keep my promise to Isobel, I realize glumly as I come to the bottom of the string of messages. I probably shouldn’t have eliminated so many of the mediocre-looking guys. Maybe the interesting ones were in that group. But they’re gone now, and so is the pinch of excitement I felt as I started the project of going through my list of messages. It was all for nothing. I shouldn’t have bothered.
I can’t give up, though. I promised. Isobel was so excited about the prospect of helping me. I don’t want to let her down. Maybe I’ll have better luck if I’m the one to reach out to men, instead of waiting for them to come to me. The prospect is intimidating, but today has definitely been a day for trying new things.
Just as I’m about to start perusing the available pictures, however, my phone rings, startling me out of my focus on the screen.
Who would be calling me this late at night? It must be Isobel, wanting to know how the search is coming. Half amused and half frustrated, I grab my purse from the couch and fish around inside until I find my phone.
“Hello?”
“Emma?”
It’s not Isobel. It takes me a moment to place the voice of the older woman on the other end of the phone.
“Dolores?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late at night,” she says brusquely.
“I’m surprised to hear from you,” I admit.
Dolores is the administrator at the tutoring agency where I’m employed. She usually communicates with me via email, reaching out to offer me new tutoring clients. Not only is the phone call weird—to say nothing of the hour—but I’ve already got a full slate of clients. My stomach tightens. Is it possible there’s been a complaint about me?