by Jennifer Cox
“I would like that too,” I replied simply.
Olivier smiled. “It is agreed then.”
I relaxed. He smiled at me, I smiled at him. I waited happily; I was in no rush.
“Umm, okay, then I shall see you tomorrow,” Olivier suddenly blurted, and with an awkward half-shrug he turned and walked off down the street.
Huh?
I watched in astonishment as my cheeky-guy fun vanished around the corner. What had just happened? Why hadn’t he kissed me? I shook my head vigorously, as if trying to shake some sense into it. I didn’t understand: Why hadn’t he kissed me? We’d liked each other. He’d asked me out again. Why didn’t he want to kiss me? Why?
I suddenly felt furious with him: How could he do this? I’d stayed out most of the night with him and would now undoubtedly spend the rest of the night wide awake, agonizing over why he hadn’t wanted to kiss me. I mean, I knew he didn’t have to, but I was really sure he’d wanted to. What terrible thing had I said or done that had made him change his mind? Could I isolate the thing which had made me an Unkissable?
One thing was certain: I had no intention of ever seeing him again. I know that sounds harsh, but I have absolutely served my time dating men who are hard work and take tons of understanding. I was here on my Soul Mate Mission, and that did not include second dates with men who disturbed my self-confidence and peace of mind by treating me as an Unkissable.
I said all this over breakfast the next morning to my friends Jilly and Stevie, who were over from London for the weekend.
“Oh, Jen, that’s not fair,” Jilly remonstrated as we divided up the last buttery flakes of croissant, trying to catch the eye of the waitress so we could order some more. “He sounds lovely, you must see him again.”
“Bugger that, why must I?” I protested indignantly. “The whole point of what I’m doing is to find someone who’ll make me happy and not invest time in guys who don’t anymore.”
“Maybe he’s a slow starter?” Stevie observed reasonably, while attempting unsuccessfully to flag down the waitress.
They were being sweet and lovely. I knew they wanted the best for me, to see me happy and with a boyfriend again. But if I was going to ignore my instincts and make excuses for someone from the first date, I might as well have saved myself all this effort and settled for the first (“you’ve got”) male who came along. I knew from personal experience that to give him another chance was just courting trouble and disappointment.
“Stevie,” I said firmly, licking the delicious pear confiture from my fingers and pouring out more coffee, “I really appreciate you saying that and maybe you’re right, but it’s not like I’m upset because he didn’t propose to me. It’s a kiss we’re talking about here. It was a date, we liked each other. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.”
But none of us had had much sleep the night before and the task of getting the waitress to serve us turned into a major production. Soon the topic of whether I should see Olivier again or not was forgotten by everyone.
Except me. When my phone rang, I pushed it deeper into my handbag and nudged my bag under the table with my foot until the ringing stopped.
Date #13: Max—Paris, France
I would have dearly loved to have gone shopping that afternoon, or even to have popped back to the hotel for a quick nap, but I had a date in a few hours with Max, an old friend of Clare, one of my neighbors from home.
Max was a lecturer in art history at one of our neighborhood schools and Clare had been trying to orchestrate a meeting for months. He was spending the school break taking a school group around Paris, and when Clare heard I would be there the same week she nearly broke her fingers trying to dial his number and lock us into a date before I could come up with a reason why it wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t that I hated the thought of meeting Max; he just didn’t particularly sound my type, a little too earnest and proper. But Clare was determined we should meet and I had run out of energy to keep persuading her otherwise.
Max had an afternoon off from the kids, so we had arranged to meet outside Varenne metro station at 2:30 p.m. He was easy to spot: around six feet five (“You can’t say he’s too short for you,” Clare boasted triumphantly) and extremely thin with a long, pale, but boyishly eager face, crowned with an explosion of curly red hair. There was a Cambridge University scarf wrapped tightly around Max’s neck (even though the temperature must have been about seventy degrees) and he was sniffing vigorously.
He beamed as soon as he saw me and stalked straight over. “Ah, Jennifer, what a pleasure, what an absolute pleasure to meet you.” He smiled and sniffed, nervous and excited in equal measures. Towering over me like a huge praying mantis, he bent his upper body down to kiss me “hello.” I wasn’t prepared, he misjudged my height, and at the last minute I overcompensated and stretched up to meet his kiss.
It was an awkward mess: I got a mouthful of shirt as I ended up kissing his collar; he missed my head altogether, his mouth sucking the air two inches right of my cheek. He sniffed and laughed in embarrassment, but as he pulled his head self-consciously away, he caught one of my big silver hoop earrings in his hair and ripped it clean out.
I let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and surprise. Max frowned in alarm; he had no idea why I was shrieking, and he also had no idea that one of my earrings was dangling incongruously from his tight red curls.
Following my astonished stare, he gingerly reached into his hair and found my earring. He beamed in confusion, now sniffing furiously, like a beagle at customs angling for a promotion. “Ah, well, yes,” he stammered, “I, ermm, well, but…this must be yours….” Max pulled the earring from his hair and plummeted from his great height back down toward me. I realized with horror he intended to try to put it back in.
“No,” I shrieked automatically, taking a sharp step backward, my hand clamped protectively over my throbbing ear. “I mean…please don’t worry,” I managed to say, slightly less dramatically. “I’ll take it, it’s fine.” And I took the earring from between his long, outstretched fingers and dropped it out of sight into my handbag.
Words didn’t exist to describe how much I was hating today. I mean really, really, really hating it. It wasn’t really poor Max’s fault, and it was important that I didn’t make him feel it was. You can’t blame someone for not being your type; it was myself I blamed for giving in to Clare—she had the married person’s compulsion to match up singles, the way some tuck in a stranger’s sticking-out shirt label on buses: The desire for neatness is greater than their sense of tact.
But this wasn’t working. In fact, at that moment, it seemed the whole premise my Odyssey was based on wasn’t working. Clearly, there were far more “wrongs” than Mr. Rights out there. And I was wrong about the ones I thought were “rights,” as they all turned out to have something wrong with them in the end. Was I wasting my time? Should I be back in London, either trying harder or accepting my single life? Did this mission have any chance of success at all?
At school when I was about five, I picked up someone else’s sweater by accident. One of the teachers noticed and asked me to give it back. Perversely, I insisted it was mine, and before anyone could take it away I tried to put it on. It belonged to a girl half my size, though, and the sweater got stuck over my head. Embarrassed at being caught out, enraged at not having pulled off the bluff, and very, very agitated at having my head trapped in someone else’s sweater, I had the kind of whirling-dervish, feet-stamping, screaming-my-head-off meltdown that on a slower day would have made it into every single textbook ever written on behavioral difficulties.
The same kind of impotent rage was rising up dangerously in me now. I was trying on and getting stuck in ill-fitting Soul Mates; I’d nearly lost an ear in this one. It was really starting to get on my nerves.
As I furiously debated these points in my head, outside in the real world I was still standing with one hand clamped to my ear, staring murderously at Max. His sniffing long stopp
ed, he stood mute with anxiety and embarrassment. God, I was being a total bitch to poor Max.
“Max, I am being rude, I am so sorry,” I apologized gently. “I’m just feeling a bit all over the place at the moment.” My heart went out to him as he gave a wobbly smile, like a little kid whose ice cream just fell in the sand and was trying to be brave about it. He gave an exploratory sniff, as if testing the waters, then another. “Ah, please don’t…that’s to say…umm, well, then I really do hope you like sculpture, Jennifer,” he said, gradually regaining confidence and enthusiasm. “Because I am going to take you to see one of my absolute favorites. It’s at the Musée Rodin. I’m sure you’ll know it.” His face lit up happily. “It’s called The Kiss.”
I could have killed him.
Actually, it turned out to be a fascinating visit. Rodin’s impressive eighteenth-century house now houses his work, and I enjoyed hearing Max talk about the artist as we walked around the museum and gorgeous landscaped grounds (where we bought equally gorgeous glaces).
Rodin sounded difficult as hell, and his muse and lover Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum as a result. There were too many tourists around The Kiss to get a good look at it, so instead Max and I inspected the clay working-model prototype next to it. Although the lovers were passionately entwined, their mouths were actually a good inch apart. The most famous kissers in the world did not actually kiss at all. Maybe Olivier wasn’t the only faux French Kisser. And no wonder poor Camille ended up bonkers.
Date #14: Nick, Skate Date—Paris, France
It was raining when I said good-bye to Max back at the metro, which was a shame as I needed good weather for my next encounter: the Skate Date.
Every Friday night in Paris, up to 28,000 people took part in the Pari Roller: three hours spent whizzing twenty-five kilometers round the closed-off streets on in-line skates. I’d made a program about it a couple of years earlier and thought the atmosphere was so incredible—retirees blowing whistles, kids zipping in and out between their parents’ legs—I wanted to take part myself. I also thought this would make a perfect date.
I’d spent six weeks wobbling round Fountains Leisure Centre in west London, being shown not so much the ropes as the wheels by Citiskate, the people who organize something similar to the Paris event in London.
My class was just the nicest bunch of people, and—all as hopeless as each other—we quickly bonded as we encouraged each other to make it through the embarrassing, painful learning curve. A group of about twelve of us had vowed we’d all get good enough to do the Pari Roller together. And one of the group, Nick, had shyly asked if he could be my Skate Date, even though our conversations had rarely consisted of more than “Oohh, that had to hurt” or “Waaaatch ooooout” as one of us smacked into a wall or body-checked an oncoming skater.
Well, tonight was the night. I ran through a curtain of rain back to my hotel. I needed to quickly check my emails, then change and pick up my skating gear (kindly delivered and being taken back by Jilly and Stevie). As I dumped my bags on the bed, I noticed the voice mail light flashing. It was from Nick: “Hey, Jennifer, hope you’re doing okay. How f**d is this rain? I just spoke to Marianne and she said it’s probably off tonight. We’re meeting at Bastille anyway, see you there—and, hey, get your skates on or you’ll be late!”
He never tired of that joke.
If tonight was canceled, it would be disappointing though no great surprise. Actually, it was probably a good thing: My skating skills were a triumph of enthusiasm over ability. Speed-skating the wet, cobbled, hilly streets would invariably result in me completing the rest of my dating tour on crutches.
I got stuck on the computer trying to finalize a soccer date in Barcelona and writing another pleading email to the Date Wranglers to help me out on the U.S. leg, which was proving to be a nightmare. When I rushed out of the metro at Bastille, wearing an old pair of jeans and clutching a bag with my skates, helmet, and padding, there were only a few skaters around. Clearly the efficient website had spread the word that the skate was off.
I couldn’t see Nick but spotted Marianne from our class, with Anne, Russell, Lisa, and about five others. They were huddled under a café awning looking very wet. Marianne waved happily as she saw me sprinting over. “Jennifer, can you believe this bloody weather?” she shouted over the din of the rain. “All that work and now we won’t get to skate.” I smiled sympathetically: She was the best skater in the group and had been itching to do this since we started.
“So what’s happening?” I asked, hugging her and the rest of the group. “Is Nick here yet?”
“Oh you just missed him.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t sure if you were coming so he went off with some of the others to some Irish pub.” We both rolled our eyes: Irish pubs—the McDonald’s of the new millennium.
I shrugged too. It was fine: no skate, no date. There was almost a logic to it. But just then, Nick and the rest of our group careened around the corner, running from canopy to canopy, yelling madly as they got increasingly drenched. Nick saw me with Marianne and came straight over, giving me a big hug. “Hey, Skater Dater, I thought you weren’t coming.”
I laughed as he flicked his wet coat at me. “Sorry, I got held up. Hey, I thought you guys had gone Oirish?”
“That we did,” he replied. “But we thought we’d better come back for the rest of you Roller Rookies.”
We all laughed at this, then trooped into the café and found tables at the back big enough to fit the whole group around and dump our gear under. Nick sat next to me, and for about twenty minutes we chatted about my date-a-thon and life in general. But soon the rest of the group joined in, and our gossiping, teasing, and storytelling was still going strong when closing time came hours later.
And not only was that fine—it was wonderful. I realized that, in a way, my date was with the whole group. Together we’d worked really hard to get to the point where we could attempt the Pari Roller. And okay, after all that work, here we were, unable to skate because of the weather, but we’d all made it this far, hadn’t we? That was surely something worth celebrating.
Kicked out onto the street, we hugged and shouted our goodbyes. I felt comforted and rejuvenated by the camaraderie of the evening. Our joint failure had turned into something lovely and reassuring, which instinctively gave me courage and hope for my own journey. I realized I had to make the time to celebrate the little triumphs, taking pride in how far I had come, rather than getting bogged down in one or two bad days and dates, believing they set the tone for the rest of my life.
Chapter Six
The Rest of Europe
Date #22—“Oh Romeo,
Romeo…” Verona, Italy
Dates #15–27: Barcelona, Lisbon, Athens, Verona, Siena, Berlin
When I say the next thirteen dates were whirlwind romances, I’m talking about the traveling rather than the quality of the dates. I hurtled in and out of capitals so fast, I barely had time to open my bags before I was off again.
Back when Phileas Fogg embraced the challenge of traveling around the world in eighty days, Heathrow meant man bowling. But now traveling is so cheap and easy (we ask when rather than how), I went online and booked the short flights between Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Athens, Verona, and Berlin without giving it a second thought.
Maybe thinking was something I was trying to avoid?
Paris had taught me an important lesson: I needed to be less melodramatic. Date & Go, Date & Go; stick to the schedule, stay focused. If I was to survive all eighty of these dates without my self-esteem crashing and burning altogether, I had to establish some boundaries. I needed to find a cutoff point for the amount of time and energy I invested in each of the dates, so I wasn’t continually churned up about something someone had/hadn’t done/said. I couldn’t take it all so personally.
I’ve never been the best at keeping things in perspective, but it was imperative I learned to do it now. I don’t mean being cold and unfeeling
(I really did want to find my Soul Mate on this journey, not just meet my quota of dates); I just needed to be more sensible. These were dates, social engagements; I had to stop being oversensitive and stick to logistics.
It was only when I paid some long overdue attention to logistics, however, that I discovered logistics were having a few problems of their own.
I was so busy dating, traveling, and—in any spare moments—arranging the next lot of dating and traveling, I’d forgotten to build in any downtime. I was becoming tired and disoriented. I’d wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee, but could only start looking for the bathroom once I’d remembered which date I’d just had/was about to have, therefore which country, city, and then hotel I was in.
I was also having to buy knickers and T-shirts since all my clothes were dirty and there was no time to do laundry. I knew I should make the time, but I also had to apply for my Chinese visa, check the trains between Verona and Florence, plus see if that cheap hotel in L.A. had any rooms available.
And every single day was a new day for potential future dates, making initial chitchat contact to test the dating waters. I wanted to email back, “For chrissakes, you’re one of eighty: Date me or don’t, I don’t have the time to talk you into it,” but I knew I couldn’t.
It felt like there wasn’t a minute to lose; taking time off to do laundry just seemed impossible.
And then there was the issue of personal grooming.
My decision to travel with the sun made for a waxing dilemma. The hair on my legs was long enough to be noticeable but not really long enough to be waxed. Should I boil to death in trousers or stick to dinner dates so I could hide my legs under the table?
The same applied to my bikini line. Could I bear to leave it, as I normally did, until I got Koala Ears—when it appears there’s a koala down the front of your knickers with the ears sticking out the sides—but then risk literally being caught out on an unannounced bikini date?