I polished off my coffee. “I can’t do it, Rick,” I told him. “For . . . a number of reasons, it doesn’t feel right. But I think you should sit down with Rob Dick and the writers and tell them that you don’t feel comfortable with the material. Don’t go in there and act petulant or throw a tantrum, but make some suggestions. If you want, tell them you’ve been polling people informally and they felt the banter you did last night didn’t take advantage of your greatest attributes—the attributes that made you a huge star and the reason they signed you to host the show in the first place. Play the charm card.” We rose from the table. “I’ve got to get back upstairs.”
Rick caught me by the arm before I could get too far from the table. “You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “Don’t be silly. This stays between us. But take my advice and see what happens.” Rick leaned over and gave me a gentle kiss on the cheek. “See you Sunday evening,” I told him.
We parted company just outside Starbucks. I jaywalked across the street, while Rick headed uptown. It was hard to readjust to the pace of the office, and the combination of the waning buzz off of Demetrius’s pot smoke and the recent caffeine blast wasn’t helping. For the rest of the day, I pondered Rick’s proposal and wondered if I had done the right thing after all.
16/
Jem’s Quest
After the third week of the show, it was becoming clear that we women had a much rougher time out on the dating circuit than the guys did. The audience bid goodbye to overgrown frat boy Chad Wilkins after the second episode. His dismay that a knockout date he’d taken to a New England Patriots playoff had spent the entire second half of the football game doing a crossword puzzle was a tale that failed to elicit much sympathy from the house.
The dumpee on the third episode was golden boy Travis Peters, the surfer dude with a million-dollar physique and a ten-cent brain. No one felt bad when he said he’d been promised a date with one of the Bay-watch girls and was disappointed when a different one showed up for dinner.
This left all of the women, plus Milo, Double-E, Luke, and Jack as the remaining contestants. Candy seemed to have a never-ending supply of colorful stories. There was the date who ended up dead in the Meadowlands, the date who ended up dead off Coney Island, and the one she confided to me in our dressing room would be her Week Four story, the saga of the date who ended up doing the dead-man’s float in the Potomac on Candy’s high school senior class trip to Washington, D.C.
Rick’s on-show banter did in fact improve after the second episode. In the span of two weeks, he’d gone from obnoxious lout to charming, puppyish rogue. The image was certainly preferable and the show’s ratings began to pick up speed. Each week Rob Dick gave the remaining contestants a pep talk in the hair and makeup room before each telecast. Some people didn’t seem to care if they were caught doing anything that might be construed as “fraternizing.” Rosalie Rothbaum, who I learned had never dated a Jewish guy in her life, kept turning on the brights for the laconic Luke Arrowcatcher, who seemed rather overwhelmed by her nonstop chatter.
Jack phoned me a couple of times between shows. At first, he claimed to be calling just to say hello. Then he asked me out. Then he went back to calling just to say hi. Nell and Jem remained adamant in their unwillingness to believe him or his motives. Their collective radar was usually infallible, so as much as I sort of did want to see Jack socially, if not romantically, I found myself trusting their judgment instead. From time to time, though—usually when I was sitting at my desk after digesting one of Gwen’s weird lunches—praying for creativity to strike, I would take Jack’s business card from my wallet and sort of stare at it, running my fingers along the embossed lettering of his name.
As for Jem, Nell, and I, we had started to adopt a cool cordiality toward one another, each of us playing our cards closer to our chests. At first, we’d been willing to confide in each other about which of our old nightmares we were considering trotting out week by week. Now, if one of us dared ask another which humiliating experience she planned to share in the upcoming episode, we were greeted with an abstract “I don’t know.” Here we were, three of the closest friends in the world and the possibility of winning a million dollars was already altering our customarily jovial interaction. The dinners I fixed for us were eaten in near-stony silence. Nell got spacier. Jem clammed up more than usual. She continued to concoct amazing cocktails for us after work, which still made me horny with nothing to do about it but privately fret that the most (and best) action I had seen lately came from an irresistible but possibly toxic bachelor who would make his amorous interest in me quite clear and then pull way back and claim he was just into some nebulous getting-to-know-one-another-better b.s. I felt like his damn red yo-yo.
“At least you’ve had bad dates,” Jem said, with a slightly jealous edge to her voice, as I was fretting to them about the outcome of my dating experiences being as predictable as summer reruns. This evening, she had done something with Malibu rum, pineapple juice, and a secret ingredient that was making me contemplate sultry nights in an airy Moorish-style villa overlooking a blue-black sea. But this time, besides the usual sensual cravings Jem’s cocktails inspired in me, I felt a sense of loss, of emptiness, of an aching longing to be held. It was no fun standing on the terrazzo patio of my fantasy villa alone.
Jem lay down on the living room floor with a raw silk toss pillow under her head. “I’m stuck, ladies. I’ve spent my days focusing on getting degree after degree and then teaching people whom I’m too old and too smart to go out with.” She started doing slow leg lifts because Jem is incapable of just doing nothing. “I’ve spent my nights grading papers of the people I’m too old and too smart to go out with. The dating experiences I’ve had have not been fulfilling, but they lack the panache to be spectacularly disastrous in prime-time terms.” She lowered her legs and inhaled. “Basically,” she said, exhaling very slowly, “I’ve run out of things to say on the show.”
This was quite an admission, given Jem’s recent reticence about sharing anything.
Nell, inspired by Jem’s dedication to a workout, began to do the yogic Sun Worship. “I could give you one of my dates from hell,” she offered generously.
“I’ve got more than enough to go around, too, but you can’t do that,” I responded, deciding now was as good a time as any to flip through Nell’s Victoria’s Secret catalogues. I rationalized my slothfulness because there wasn’t enough room in the living room for all three of us to exercise at once. I wondered if the slimfit London Jeans would make me look fat; they looked big in the ass. “Nell, you’re supposed to tell the truth. Those little electrode things would register automatically as soon as Jem started telling your story.”
Nell rolled up, vertebra by vertebra, and reached for the ceiling. “I bet there’s a way to fool them. There has to be. If anyone can do it, it’s Jem. She’s got more self-control than anyone else I know.”
“It’s my blessing and my curse,” Jem answered.
“I admire the hell out of it, Jem.”
“Well, Nell, thanks for the compliment, but maybe I should have let go at least a little, lived a little more in the moment, taken spontaneous chances instead of planning everything out so methodically. But it’s not the way I’m built. I’m so afraid to make mistakes.”
I dog-eared the London Jeans page as a “maybe” along with a page of really cool sandals. “And yet, for all of us who can’t seem to stop making them, for those of us who seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes until we’ve perfected them into an art form, Bad Date is our ironic reward. Where else can you get the chance to win a million dollars and a trip to Paris for being a doormat loser?”
“I thought my cocktails made you horny, not self-pitying, Liz.” Jem finished her exercises and sat up. “I’m going to have to do what I always do.”
“Which is . . . ?” Nell asked.
“Be proactive.”
“That’s su
ch a ridiculous word,” I said. “ ‘Proactive’ is a redundancy invented by, well, probably by communications professors. It’s Orwellian market-speak.”
Jem rolled her head from side to side, stretching her neck. “Nevertheless. I am going to get myself a bad date, so I have something to talk about on the show. I’ve got about one more good story left in me, and then I’ll probably end up getting booted from the show unless I come up with some more.”
“What do you plan to do?” I questioned.
“Carl Foster.”
“Who?” Nell asked.
“The Warlock.”
Nell looked shocked. “No way!”
I laughed. “I never knew he had a name. In all the years I’ve known you, Jem, I’ve only heard you call him ‘The Warlock.’ No, wait . . . you once referred to him after a 4-C Christmas party as ‘The Groper.’ I thought you can’t stand him.”
Jem grinned. “Exactly. Though, for the record, he never groped me. And I think he’d had about seventeen cups of eggnog at the time.”
“And you’re planning to use this guy so you can chew him up and spit him out on live television and make money from it. At least another thousand dollars for surviving one more episode. It’s kind of an underhanded plot, Miss Straight Arrow.”
“Teachers are woefully underpaid, Liz,” Jem said, still smiling like the Cheshire Cat. “I admit that I felt a little guilty right after I came up with the idea. And I’m not entirely sanguine about it now. But let’s look at it this way: It’s a win-win situation. The Warlock finally gets a ‘Yes, I’ll go out with you’ from me after all these years of icky persistence on his part, and I’ll have a dreadful date to talk about on the air.”
“I think you should tell him you’re using him,” Nell said thoughtfully. “I mean, it’s just not right if he’s got these great expectations and you drag him along with you on the humiliation trolley.”
“Woman, you’re insane,” Jem said.
Nell continued to protest. “He may be really icky as you say, but that’s still no reason to—”
“Use him like one of my electromagnetic dustrags?” I interrupted.
I’ve mentioned Jem’s intractability before. Nell couldn’t dissuade her. I didn’t even try. Jem decided that she would remain the prey and allow The Warlock to continue to be the aggressor. That way he would feel a tremendous sense of victory when she finally, as she had it all choreographed in her mind, sighed and fretted and oh-so-reluctantly agreed—‘But just this once, Carl’—to accompany him somewhere. This was the only item she was leaving to chance, banking on The Warlock’s clocklike pursuit. According to her, he asked her out on a date a minimum of twice a week. This had been going on for upward of the seven years they’d been colleagues at 4-C. Her excuse had most often been something she never practiced when creating her magical cocktails: never mix, never worry, meaning that a department professor should not date that department’s chair.
“Tell me, Jem,” I asked her, “what is it about The Warlock that specifically repulses you?”
“Everything.”
“I said specifically.”
“Everything. Where I’m cool and controlled, he’s persistent and passionate. Give me Tahari and Calvin Klein. The Warlock dresses like a straight version of Hamish Bowles, sort of fussy and neo-Edwardian, like he’s a refugee from a road company of Jekyll & Hyde. Give me any exhibit at the Whitney; he visits the Cloisters practically every Sunday. Not that I’m high-tech; I hate that. But I do like clean, uncomplicated lines. And then there’s the religious question. I’m a lapsed Episcopalian; he’s a reaffirmed Pagan.”
“His wardrobe sounds a bit eccentric, but none of what you listed sounds ‘repulsive’ to me, Jem. And I notice you’ve said zip about his personality,” Nell said, sitting on the living room rug in a lotus position. “Is he kind? Funny? Compassionate? Is he the kind of guy who’s afraid to kill spiders because he believes it brings bad luck?”
“Kills ’em? He keeps them as pets! The man owns a tarantula. Now there’s a way to my heart. ‘Hey, Jem, wanna come on up to my place to look at my hairy tarantula?’ ” Jem smacked her lips and went off to the kitchen to fix herself a margarita.
“She’s said zip about his looks, too,” I whispered to Nell. “Have you ever seen him?”
Nell shook her head. “Nope. But from stuff Jem has said I think he’s a human melting pot, too. All sorts of mixed races and ethnicities and religions. I think the reason he became a Pagan is because everyone in his family is from a different culture and religion and they were all trying to get him to be what they were, so he rejected them all and became a neo-Celt or something. My guess is that he’s probably pretty good-looking, but Jem has never said word one about it.”
“I wonder if he’s been seeking to convert her all these years.”
“I don’t know,” Nell said. “Do Pagans proselytize?”
Jem returned to the living room with a tray of margaritas. “The more I’ve been thinking about this, the more I see it working out—I mean not working out— with me and The Warlock.” She handed each of us a glass, smiling with beatific serenity. “It’s a match made in the bowels of hell,” she added, smiling. “It’ll be absolutely perfect.”
17/
Charmed, I’m Sure
Wearing a black glittery sweater I’d knitted for her birthday last year (her “lucky sweater,” she called it), Jem did make it safely through the fourth episode, during which Diz ran out of steam and rode her Harley into the sunset after the audience voted her off the show. I think Rick Byron was sad to see her go. She was the only contestant he related to on anything more than a superficial level. Rob Dick and the writers still wanted him to flirt outrageously with the pretty female contestants and Diz didn’t fit the profile, which gave Rick a little leeway in his banter with her.
Episode four was where I told the whole story about this guy I went out with briefly when I was a college sophomore. This was the incident I alluded to in my initial audition for Bad Date. Essentially, it was a summer fling and he flung me over for my baby sister, whom he then ditched for his old steady girlfriend who had dumped him for asking me out in the first place. Of course I never knew he had a steady until his friends started asking him, in front of me, what ever happened to Beverly. “Beverly who?” I would ask, and he would shrug it off and say, “Oh, she was just some girl I knew.” Oh, how many women are out there who are being referred to by men they’ve given their hearts to as “just some girl”?
As we “attritted” week by week, there was more time on the show for getting to know each remaining contestant better. Jack really did appear to be a magnet for toxic bachelorettes the way I seem to attract all the screaming babies and the people who fall asleep and drool on your shoulder during long cross-country flights. His episode four dating debacle revolved around an experience he’d had a few years ago when he was dating a realtor named Delilah who smashed the windows of his apartment with a baseball bat because he needed to take a business trip and was unable to bring her along. Maybe I’m naïve, but I had no idea that women could be so looney.
Jem was growing increasingly anxious because The Warlock, true to form and expectations, had asked her out—except they couldn’t coordinate their schedules because Carl had department meetings after work, plus his coven’s bowling league was in the finals at the Port Authority lanes and he had a 275 average and his team needed him. Jem taught Wednesday evening classes and also had to go visit her grandmother who was being placed in a nursing home somewhere out in New Jersey. Additionally, she didn’t want to appear too eager after seven years of putting The Warlock off. That surely would have set off some bells and whistles.
Their date was finally scheduled for the Thursday before the fifth episode of Bad Date. Needless to say, it had to be an unqualified disaster for Jem to be assured of advancing any further on the show, unless, of course, another contestant’s sob story that night would turn out to be even lamer than what Jem intended to share.
Jem told Nell and me that The Warlock had booked an eight P.M. dinner reservation at a restaurant named Pywacket, in the East Village. I laughed when I heard the name and was greeted with a blank expression from Jem; unlike me, Jem is not an old movie buff. I explained that Pywacket is the name of the cat that is the witch’s “familiar” in the Kim Novak classic Bell, Book and Candle.
I stationed myself across the street from the entrance to 4-C and waited for the two of them to emerge. The Warlock kept trying to take Jem’s hand. She kept moving away from him. I followed along at a discreet distance as they headed southeast, always staying across the street from them. My disguise took some getting used to. So did my long blonde wig. I’d thought about wearing a hooded sweatshirt and cargo pants, along with impossibly high, clunky black platforms that wouldn’t be out of place in a Frankenstein remake, but realized that once I got to Pywacket I’d be underdressed. So I opted for a leather mini and boots, with a black leather carcoat and a crushed velvet slouchy hat that, even with the wig, was way too big for my head.
Boy, those two could hoof it. And my boots weren’t made for walking. Jem and The Warlock strolled all the way to the East Side, chatting incessantly—and Jem is not an ebullient type—then meandered downtown, past Pywacket, a few blocks south into the heart of the East Village, where NYU theater students still dressed up like Morticia Addams; scads of young Asian women with bleached blonde or dyed red hair scoured the trendy boutiques; and chic wine bars and coffeehouses had sprouted amid the dope peddlers and winos. This is not Jem’s kind of territory. I noticed The Warlock pointing out things of interest, stopping to talk with one or two people he seemed to know, and to whom he introduced Jem.
Reality Check Page 13