Okay Fine Whatever

by Courtenay Hameister

  In the weeks after Casa Diablo, I spent a couple of nights at Rich’s after attending parties at his house because I was “way too drunk to go home,”3 and he never touched me.

  In fact, the second time I spent the night in his bed, he told me that I shouldn’t sleep in my clothes because “Who does that?” I agreed that clothes were dumb,4 and because his comment seemed like a precursor to the sex I was hoping to have, I took mine off and got back in bed.

  I lay there expectantly, listening to his breathing to see if he was sleeping and trying to decipher with each movement whether he was moving closer to me. It was a king-size bed, so it was hard to tell.

  Nothing happened.

  Well, something happened; it just wasn’t sex. In an insult-to-injury situation, after about thirty minutes of lying in silence, Rich proceeded to place his old Chihuahua between us on the bed, just to ensure that I couldn’t possibly touch him.

  I was cockblocked by a tiny blind Chihuahua.

  I lay there for a while pondering the fact that Rich had used his lapdog as a sex barricade, then slithered silently out of his bed, got dressed, and went downstairs to sleep on the couch.

  The next morning he asked why I left his bed.

  “Did I snore?” he said, grinning.

  No, I was just having trouble breathing through the impenetrable fog of humiliation.

  “Yes,” I responded. “And so did your dog.”

  After every interaction with him, I told myself I had to stop hoping, but then the next interaction happened, and my hope would rear its head again.

  Just a couple months after the Chihuahua Incident, on New Year’s Eve, Rich and I found ourselves facing each other in a crowded room at a party thrown by mutual friends. Once again, I imagined there was a chance we’d end up making out in a closet somewhere. (What is it about romantic possibility that can turn a lifelong pessimist into an optimist?) The night was filled with knowing glances and too-long hugs, but nothing else.

  The next morning, I was done.

  Things are always clearer in the morning, but they’re particularly clear on New Year’s Day, when you’re taking a good, hard look at your life, or at least as good a look as you can get while painfully squinting through sunglasses. So I decided I’d lay everything out on the table with Rich once and for all.

  After a hungover breakfast with friends, I pulled out my phone to call him.

  Instead, I opened up sudoku.

  I played for half an hour.

  I checked my e-mail. No one but Bed, Bath, and Beyond was e-mailing me on New Year’s Day.

  I thought about whether new hand towels would make this a better year for me.

  I checked Facebook. I looked at what felt like hundreds of pictures of friends in wacky hats, kissing each other.

  Fucking New Year’s Eve.

  I’m calling him.

  I went to dial.

  I wasn’t going to call him.

  The problem was, I am of the WASP people, and we are so averse to confrontation that we would sooner crawl into a dragon’s gaping, steaming asshole than tell a waiter our hamburgers are overcooked.

  I decided to go the coward’s route. I texted him.

  Hey! Weird text: I just want to clarify something—you seem sort of attracted to me, but not quite enough to ever fuck me or date me. Does that seem accurate? I know it’s awkward but I just need to know definitively because it’s always felt like there was an energy between us but I think it’s just an energy you have with all women. Don’t feel bad either way. It’d just be a relief to know it’ll never actually go anywhere.

  It was a really long text.

  I waited for his response. The three little dots appeared, indicating he was typing. I swallowed hard.

  I already felt so dumb.

  I’d spent over a year wondering if anything would ever happen with this guy, deconstructing our texts and interactions with friends like a teenager wondering if a boy was going to ask her to go steady. I’d spent an hour naked in bed while an old blind Chihuahua snored on my boobs. And I’d spent one strange evening with what seemed like a very nice woman’s genitals in my face.

  When you invest that much energy in someone, it’s daunting to ask a question whose answer has the capacity to turn you into the world’s biggest fool.

  I regretted not having gotten a bloody mary with my eggs.

  Finally, his response:

  I’m so flattered, and I definitely have a crush on you and have a lot of fun flirting, but you’re one of my favorite people in the world and I’d never want to ruin that with any sex stuff. I do that with most women and their always ending up mad at me. We should talk about this in person, though.

  Translation: I’m not as attracted to you as you are to me and, oops, sorry about all the flirting that I knew wasn’t going anywhere, but who takes that shit seriously? What’re you, twelve? Also, let’s meet so I can look you in the eye while you talk about how attracted you are to me.

  The fog of humiliation rolled in again. I took a deep breath.

  How could I ever have liked someone who didn’t know the difference between they’re and their?

  It was just so ridiculous, and more than a little sad. I had been so grateful to him for paying attention to me that I had somehow not noticed that other men had started doing the same thing. I’d lost all that physical weight, but clearly I was still carrying around some of the metaphorical variety.

  Plus, I didn’t have a lot of practical experience with men. I’d had two short relationships since I was in high school, so of course I was acting like a teenager—when it came to romantic love, I was one.

  I had to remedy that.

  I felt so behind—I was in my forties and all my friends had had plenty of relationships by now. The bad boys, the good ones you let get away because you weren’t good yet, the sweet-yet-sad one, the one who brought out the worst in you, the one you hurt, the one who really knew how to hurt you, the one who taught you to speak up for yourself, the uppity “healthy-lifestyle” one that just made you want to drink more bourbon, the one who blinded you with that one cool thing he did so you couldn’t see he was a total asshole.

  And, of course, the heart-wrenching one where you were still in love but the other person just ran out of it like it was milk or eggs, and you thought, But those are staples. You pay attention, and you always replenish the staples.

  I’d at least had that one.

  Even so, I knew when it came to relationships, I was the personification of Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”—there were so many things I didn’t know, I didn’t even know I didn’t know them yet.

  That’s when I decided to add dating to the OFW Project.

  I had never dated in my life. The two people I’d had relationships with, I’d met through friends, and we went immediately from being friends to being “together.”

  I was going to sign up for a dating site. And I was going to…date people. Strangers, even.

  The thought of it created a tiny new dread ball, but I knew I had to muster the courage to address this thing head-on, much like I’d addressed the vagina in my face a few months earlier.

  It was time. I was ready.

  I was nauseated.

  I fixed a bloody mary and downloaded the OkCupid app.

  1 Other fun things about being fat include, but are not limited to, walking down a plane aisle and watching people cringe as you approach; clothing with giant floral patterns that make one appear couch-y; and random men on the street saying things like “Wow. Look at that ass. I know you can cook. I’ll marry you.” See? Fun.

  2 Strippers in Oregon can be completely naked due to a 2005 Oregon Supreme Court decision that declared that nude dancing was protected under the state constitution’s free-speech provisions. There are so many ways to express yourself in Oregon. Naked is just one of them.

  3 I wasn’t.

  4 They’re not.

  A Little Bit of Background

  Wherein I Attemp
t to Explain My Dating Situation

  It may be difficult for you to understand why, at forty-five years old, I had the relationship experience of a twenty-one-year-old.

  It is also difficult for me to understand.

  I think I can trace at least some of it back to a moment when I was sixteen.

  I’d always been slightly heavier than my friends, but that year, my father was pressuring me to transfer to a private school and after five moves in my lifetime the idea of yet another school was overwhelming. I really started overachieving in the overeating department.

  We were living in Salinas, California, at the time, in a house with a basement bedroom that my brother, Scott, lived in. He took great advantage of having a separate entrance—he always had a girlfriend or three, some of whom we met and some of whom we just heard through the screen door, whispering expletives as they snagged their jeans on the blackberry bushes while sneaking out at midnight.

  His room was under our dining room, and the heating vent on the dining-room floor went directly through to his ceiling.

  One night, two of his friends, Shawn and Dave, slept over. I had a crush on Shawn because his hair looked like a shorter version of Eddie Van Halen’s and he wore his T-shirts so small that the sleeves always seemed greatly taxed by his muscles. I decided to listen in on their conversation in case Shawn said anything about me.

  It was after midnight, and my parents were already asleep.

  I walked quietly out of my bedroom and past my parents’ room to the living room. Even though we had carpeting, I knew Scott could still hear every footfall, so, in an attempt to evenly distribute my weight and cause fewer creaks, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled across the living-room floor. I heard the boys’ muffled voices rise up through the vent from ten feet away.

  The vent was long, slim, and metal, the kind with slats pointing in opposite directions from the middle. I laid my ear on it and felt the cold metal digging into my cheek. Shawn was talking.

  “Shut up, man,” he said. “She likes you and you know it. They all like you.”

  “They do not,” Dave said. “Just, like…I don’t know…most of them.”

  They all laughed.

  Dave was blond and built like a football player. All the girls did like him.

  “You’re such an asshole,” Scott said.

  “Oh, I’m the asshole?” Dave said. “What about you? How many girlfriends do you have right now?”

  “Both of you need to shut up,” said Shawn. “It’s depressing.”

  I drew in a breath and held it, listening for any word that might pertain to me.

  “Aw, you’re fine, man,” Dave said. “I heard Dana Mitchell likes you.”

  “Dana?” Shawn said. “Seriously? Why is it that only the fat girls like me?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “Maybe because you look really delicious?”

  Uproarious laughter bounced up through the vent and echoed into my ear. I sat up, the indentations of the vent slats still in my cheek.

  I was fatter than Dana Mitchell.

  I leaned against the wall, hugging my knees, deciding at that moment that I would never be the fat girl who likes the boy who doesn’t like her back.

  So there may have been many times in my life when men expressed an interest in me, but I was too busy projecting the idea that I didn’t like anyone, ever, to see that interest. And that projection may have made me appear at times somewhat unwelcoming or, quite literally, impenetrable.

  And then when I was thirty-four, I lost seventy-five pounds.1

  And just like what happened a decade later, suddenly I didn’t feel like the vulnerable big girl who couldn’t express an interest in anyone. I felt almost standard size, and in my mind, standard-size women were free to let men know they were interested without (as much) fear of being laughed at.

  That’s when I met the first person I ever fell in love with.

  He was the owner of a vintage-camera-and-typewriter store in Portland. The night we met, I was sitting at a bar patio with a large group and noticed him at one of our shared picnic tables talking to my friend Matt. He was wearing jeans and old boots and a beat-up vintage-leather field jacket over a white T-shirt. His thick, light brown hair arced up and flopped charmingly onto his forehead in a very “Robert Redford in The Way We Were” kind of way and he was gesticulating wildly as he spoke. He had the brightest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

  Matt introduced us and we talked for an hour. His name was Jake and he told me that if I put the right typewriter on a big metal desk, my writing could sound like an oncoming train. He was charming and strange and passionate about beautiful, obsolete machines, which might have been why he was attracted to me.

  We went on a date a week later to see a jug band a work acquaintance of his was in. Even in the throes of insane attraction, it’s difficult to act interested in jug-band music, but I did.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said when it was over. “That may have been the worst thing I’ve ever done to anyone.”

  I laughed.

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “It was like some ancient form of hillbilly torture,” he said. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?”

  “You will,” I said. “But I’ll be asking you to accompany me to listen to some dental drills and a circular saw played in an abandoned mental institution.”

  “Sounds fair,” he said.

  He asked if I wanted to come back to his place in St. Johns, an older neighborhood in North Portland, for a nightcap. I nodded and speed-walked to my car to follow him home.

  We walked through the entryway into a living room that he clearly hadn’t really been living in. Beautiful dark hardwood floors, a fireplace, a long window seat, and just one item: a vintage record player in the corner. Jake explained that his ex had left a few months prior and he hadn’t gotten around to replacing any of their stuff.

  “You wanna come upstairs to the attic and see my typewriters?” he asked.

  “Really? Does that work on people?”

  “I think it’s about to work on you.” He grinned.

  It did.

  Long before I ever met him, I’d been collecting old cameras and typewriters, so it was as if his whole house and store and body and brain were all elaborate traps built especially for me.2

  He asked me if I wanted a glass of red wine. I said yes. I hated red wine, but I had a plan.

  See, I was a virgin, and I wanted desperately to get rid of that albatross that was hanging around my…vagina. It had turned me into a total freak, this virginity I couldn’t seem to get rid of. I skirted around the issue with him, saying things like “When it comes to dating, just consider me a sort of tabula rasa” and “I’ve never really been the dating type. I’m more of a let’s-hang-out-and-see-what-happens type.” I thought if we got totally wasted, we could just do it and get it over with and it would be this teeny lie of omission.

  I wasn’t thinking about what it would be like the next morning or the fact that I actually liked this guy and kicking off a physical relationship with him with a lie was maybe a bad idea, not to mention borderline evil. But when you’re thirty-four and an accidental virgin, desperation can cloud your judgment.

  We took the wine upstairs and he opened up a door on his giant old metal desk and pulled out a shelf that housed a shiny, sleek 1960s-era burgundy Smith Corona portable that looked like a sports car. He had me sit down and type on it, and it was the sexiest foreplay to foreplay I’d ever experienced.

  But it turned out there wasn’t going to be any actual foreplay that night. I did sleep over, but in my shirt and a pair of his pajama bottoms that did not look cute on me. And nothing happened.

  I awoke the next morning when I heard him stir. As we both un-groggified ourselves, we chatted about important subjects like how we slept and what kind of sheets he had. Then, as he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom, we continued an earlier conversation about our dating histories.

  I d
on’t remember what I said to stop him in his tracks; I just remember that at some point, I no longer heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of him brushing his teeth, and then he showed up in his bedroom doorway holding his toothbrush and looking both shocked and entertained.

  “You’re a virshin!” he yelled toothpastily.

  Yes, damn it. I was a virshin.

  I’d thought I could avoid it, but I had to tell him. Mostly because I liked him, but also because I’m not evil. Mostly.

  “I am,” I said. “But it’s not on purpose, I promise. I really want to have sex, it’s just that the opportunity hasn’t arisen yet, or when it did arise, I didn’t take it because I thought it would arise again and then it kind of didn’t.”

  Well, that didn’t sound good. The last thing you want to hear about someone you’re interested in is that no one else wanted her. People are always questioning their judgment at the beginning of a relationship, and what I’d just said was exhibit A in the case for “This is a shut-in/loser/psychopath and I should run away right now even though my mouth is full of toothpaste and this is my house.”

  I could’ve attempted to come up with an excuse.

  Sex was forbidden in the nunnery. And technically I’m still married. To God.

  Or I could’ve had sex, but I was in a state of suspended animation in space for fifteen years. When I woke up, we had to battle this giant bug-like alien with acid spit. It was terrible.

  Or simply I’m Canadian.

  But none of those would’ve made any difference. He went and spat out his toothpaste and came and sat next to me on his bed.

  “So, I really like you. A lot,” he said, lowering his head to make sure he caught my eye.

  I knew where this was going and my stomach already hurt.

  “But…I just don’t think I can take this on,” he said.

  “Yeah. I get it.”

  “I’d really like to be your friend, though,” he continued.