by Helen Razer
3. Helen will attend one hundred dates in a year. Each of these dates will constitute a single point, but a maximum of five dates with a single suitor is permitted before points cease accumulation and/or someone calls the wedding caterers.
4. Helen may stop dating if she finds love, but not before.
The thought of one hundred dates was exhilarating. And then, as I noted the likelihood I would be late for my very first one, exhausting.
On the tram, I decided to lighten the load and count Eleni, who I would likely fail to charm but who had just touched my anus nonetheless, and then hard_4_ewe, because certainly, somewhere in world history such frank discussion about fucking someone in a merino costume had meant that you are married. I would also count the chicken man for his role as inspiration.
I took the decision to have ninety-seven more dates in what remained of the year. I gave it a name on my computer. I called it the Helen One Hundred and I texted its absurd details for Celine’s approval. I knew she would be impartial in all her judgements, save for those where fashion was concerned.
Celine: Sure, why not? I can think of stupider things to do with a life. For example, I just bought a purple anorak from the internet, whose cruel lies about fashion I believed.
Helen: This is serious. I’m asking for advice.
Celine: A purple anorak.
Helen: You see a lot of shrinks. Can’t you give me a psychiatric opinion?
Celine: Purple.
Helen: I need to know if you see any value in this plan?
Celine: Anorak.
Helen: I hate your selfish generation.
It was a peculiar promise to make to myself and I am still not entirely sure why it was made. I guess I just needed some clear guidelines. Where else but to an organised insanity does someone who has lost love turn? Hm?
By now the ex had left, with perhaps one fiftieth of her belongings. I returned to final thoughts of my plan.
Availability was my only condition for a date, and so it remained. I would eventually draw the line at suitors who were younger than hard_4_ewe, who I had learned was 29, or older than my dad, who was seventy-three. I would make some adjustments to a project that Ameera would generously call ‘quixotic’ and my neighbour Dahlia, the street’s best gardener, ‘a mad woman’s laundry’. That Celine would repeatedly describe as ‘not as stupid as a purple anorak’.
It was, of course, fairly stupid, and I would fall into days of compunction. But I would not stop until I found someone.
*
You who are newly dumped may find my account instructive. Then again, you may prefer to sit alone and think. And, yes, this might be good advice for those ten people in all of earth’s sad history who were able to (a) think or (b) be alone in the months following invasion of their heart by a pod of angry dolphins. But I needed some fucking supervision.
You may, quite sensibly, decide to go to Tuscany instead. You may elect to ignore the mild advice at the core of this absurd text, which is that we who are grieving for the loss of a partner and/or our own goodness must do something differently.
13
Fifty-one hours, one date
RedHot, who was actually called Anton, was not an especially disappointing man. He was cheerful and reasonably bright. He was handsome, too, after a Putin sans-the-psychosis-but-with-the-hair type of fashion. He had a good, strong nose and a slim accent so that when he pronounced the mild ‘e’s and the final ‘n’ of my name, they sounded agreeably brutal. ‘Hiyalun-n.’ It was Hollywood KGB.
He was untroubled by my faithful fifteen minutes of lateness, a facility I admire. Anton was, in fact, perfectly fair. His choice to play me an iPhone slideshow of his nine-year-old’s triumphs at physie, however, did seem a poor one. Particularly when we consider he had offered me, just hours before, ‘a ride on his Big Slavic Cock’.
Obviously, a ‘ride’ on a ‘cock’ of any provenance or size was something I had actively sought on the internet and this offer did not come ex nihilo. But the display of a pre-teen girl on a pommel horse really did. God, this was a terrible surprise.
‘Look at my adorable daughter!’
Fuck, no.
He served up her image no fewer than three minutes into a meeting and yet to suffer a silence so intolerable, it could only be filled with a girl. I found the portraits depicting his child’s physical virtue more shocking than any of the dick pics I had seen in recent days.
I had not before that evening ever knowingly entertained the thought of sex with someone’s father, so this moment was, for me, unexpected. But Anton had introduced it naturally.
It was clear then he was not a man given to socially inappropriate behaviour. Within the very standard inappropriateness of internet-sex chat, reference to his Big Slavic Cock had been perfectly okay. And even correctly spelled. His greeting, too, had been fine, if not a little chaste. He had leaned in to kiss me less like the cowboy capitalist Red Hot Russian I had been promised by internet message and more like a Cold War functionary.
Still, sub-zero Apparatchik snuggles aside, he seemed an equable, affable person. And sane, other than for the fact he was showing me pictures of his daughter in a ludicrous lilac leotard.
It began to occur to me that it was not unusual but quite standard for male persons of my age in my era to boast, or to complain about their children, even, and perhaps especially, in the prelude to sex.
I wondered if we would have sex surrounded by stuffed toys and family photos. I wondered if I met other men of Anton’s age, sex might be rescheduled altogether ‘because my little man needs me at his soccer game’. And that I might be expected to consider the terms of such delay super, super hot.
Were childcare considerations now a form of foreplay when uttered by men? If so, would that privilege of turning parental hardship into desirability also be extended to the many persons of my gender who face so much trouble finding a reliable babysitter? Or could it even soon be possible for me to say, ‘I’ll be a little late as I need to express Eleven’s anal gland,’ and know that these words of responsible cat-parenting also provoked desire?
Sheesh. Some people do find themselves adorable for no good reason at all.
Actually, I didn’t think Anton was such a deluded tool. He seemed rationally confident. And, like all rationally confident people, would not be easily given to offence. So I surmised it would be fine to ask him why in blazes I was looking at a picture of his daughter in her leotard.
‘Do you often display pictures of your daughter on internet sex dates?’ I said.
‘Yeah, why not. Honestly, most chicks go for it.’
If I learned anything new that day about my generation of fathers, it is that many people find such paternal devotion delightful. Most being the fathers themselves.
To be clear, I see no fault with emerging masculine interest in after-school activities and it’s really just marvellous that the man of the present is taking his Big Slavic Cock out of traditional parenting roles and into physie, soccer, amateur productions of Pippin, etc. Who says you can’t be both responsible for half-time snacks and completely down to fuck? But I did think I would prefer not to climax in a bedroom decorated with finger-paintings.
Frankly, the vacant art of children gives me the heebie-jeebies. I certainly didn’t want it anywhere near a cock, of the Big Slavic kind, or any other.
I identified Single Sex Daddy as a dominant erotic style among my peers. In fact, I had noticed preliminary evidence of this often on my run through the park. I had watched divorced and demonstrably fertile men between thirty-five and forty-five stand in groups by the sandpit. I saw them faux-casually lift the hems of their high-end skatewear sweaters to scratch rock-hard abs with supple hands and I heard them say things to each other like, ‘Yeah, Bra. I’m going to feed my little guy some smashed av for lunch!’ within earshot of the well-to-do mothers. As though somehow gently pulping a soft fruit and feeding it to a child were acts of such uncompromised masculine intensity, their report would
make her whip off the Stella McCartney compression pants and beg him to do her hard in the shitter.
As it turned out, she was rarely unconquered. The pants came off, as Stella had perhaps intended. Most chicks go for it. Yes, I am certain that they do. Anton was simply playing the odds. But he needn’t have. I was completely down to fuck. Mildly less so as I struggled to abolish the vision of a child from what I still regarded as a most inappropriate context.
The pub where we had met was so unadorned it looked to be designed by a Methodist property developer. One that more generally dabbled in those hideous, shiny ‘city living’ apartments built to contain an army of divorced, av-smashing men who paraded their spawn on weekends in the hunt for good park pussy. This architecture did not so much spring from an actual style school as it did from the reluctance to engage its occupants, thereby minimising the possibility they would note its fundamentally impractical materials. It was chiefly mirrors, without even the smoke.
There were very few patrons and a lot of polished surfaces that shone bright. I wondered if Anton had chosen this bare reflective place so he wouldn’t be seen with me by anyone much but both of us at several angles. I decided that I didn’t care and started to worry that the glare had compromised my look. I had followed a make-up tutorial from the internet that Celine had sent. I had shaded the folds of the lids of my flagging, red eyes and coloured their corners with white pigment which, cosmetic wisdom has it, distracts from the ravages of misery. I had also brushed at least 10 per cent of the cat hair from my dress.
I looked good. Possibly good enough for harsh lighting. The dress was a form-fitting khaki thing that I hadn’t wriggled into since the nineties; a dress old enough that it had long ceased to be conspicuously undesirable. Which is the impression I also wished to make myself.
I caught sight of the dress in one of the pub’s foofety thousand mirrors and saw that the back of it would have showed my newly compact arse to marvellous advantage had it not been coated in, what’s that, kitty litter. Not just speckled, but actually coated. With bits in.
I couldn’t be certain how or when this filth had joined itself to my frock, and I wasn’t going to examine it or any one of its faecal bits to assess the area. But I did note that much of the grime was a greyish hue, which meant that it was made from bentonite clay. This was a material my ex and I had always tended to shun in favour of more specialty environmental fare and which one of us only ever bought from the local shop when normal routine was suspended. Such as when one of us dumped the other for good. Which is to say, this was some pretty fresh shit laid in kitty litter, which somehow felt worse to wear than old shit.
Oh. I remembered. Dropping the garment on the laundry floor as I looked about, of all things, for stain remover to rub a spot of virtually nothing from its bib. This was some farm fresh artisanal shit.
Giddy from internet chatter and the dishonest, unhelpful advice that I was ‘effortlessly stunning’, I had expended no effort at all on an entire half of my person. In the front, I looked reasonable. Possibly even attractive. To the rear, we saw an early expressionist work by the back end of Jackson Pollack’s most outrageous cat.
There was no hiding the foul grime at all. I could run, which would reveal the very fresh mess quite fully to Anton, and then to everyone on the tram home. Or I could just sit there and hope that Anton couldn’t smell it, which I believed that I now could, and might mistake it for fashion-forward appliqué. Or I could have a glass of alcohol. Which I had not in nearly two years.
‘Drink?’ said Anton.
Intravenously. Please.
I had promised myself not to ask Anton the Russian about the last days of impure Marxist-Leninism, through which he had said that he had lived. This was a vow broken due to a number of influences.
First, if I were more offensive than the cat poo on my dress, maybe he wouldn’t notice the cat poo on my dress. Second, I was completely trolleyed halfway into a single beer. Third, he started it.
Of course, my normal conversation, even on a day when the shit show goes dark, is lacking in measure. I fight the urge to contradict persons, even those with whom I agree. I believe this is not so much the result of a deep personal flaw but just a bad habit, like travelling to India for the ‘wisdom’. I do it often and I know this well, which is why I had prepared myself to avoid a potential clash of economic standpoints and had even asked Celine to text me the words ‘Do not ask him about the Soviet experiment, you stupid purple anorak’ by 6 p.m.
But Anton started talking about work at 5.58 p.m. Which is fine, of course, and if I had been engaged in work of any sort at the time, I might have also said something like, ‘Work! It’s all go go go!’
Work was, of course, less than slow after I had advised Brynlee to take her job to the arse doctor. As I had so little to say about my own working life, Anton made broad appraisal of his own in the IT business that he owned and he began to talk, as people do, about the failings of others.
‘You just can’t get good help,’ he said.
It was just like pre-perestroika Russia, he went on. Kids today are just like that. Everyone he knew under Gorbachev just felt entitled. It’s all Want Want Want and Me Me Me with these kids. They’re the problem with this economy. Why do people have no hope or drive? Government handouts, that’s why.
So he started it. He really did. A capitalist should not be surprised when he strips down his dreary ideology and a nearby communist finds the tease obscene.
I did make an effort and I did not point out that if his birth year was as he had claimed it on the internet, Anton would have been just twelve at the end of the Cold War and was, therefore, hardly qualified to hold forth with a firsthand account of entitled glasnost labourers. Ergo, he was either lying about (a) his age or (b) his experience of communism.
I didn’t say it. Nor did I venture that the social and economic problems in a nativist Russia of the present made the problem of mere personal ‘entitlement’ seem like small potatoes. Can we really claim communism to be the colossal failure the West imagines while capitalist Russia stands unsteady today in crime and debt and sectarian hate, Anton? Can we really?
I didn’t say these things, either. But I did eventually, in the face of a bit about The Workers of Today and Their Idle Ways, ask him if, perhaps, this was not the result of individual failure of people but the structural failure of capitalism. Which, by the by, was hardly doing much for social equity in our own nation. Where were all these handouts going, other than into the coffers of large corporations?
So he started it. To give me my due.
To give him his due, Anton tried to turn my socialist rambling to sexy advantage. Which wasn’t easy. Trying for a sparky Rock and Doris dispute that would end when the argument faded into a tangle of hot love wasn’t easy with me because I take myself very seriously.
‘Workers just don’t know how good they have it, blondie,’ said Anton, whose coders had recently refused to code without the reward of overtime.
‘This is the delusion of the merchant producing surplus capital at the expense of a labourer’s mind and body,’ said me.
‘Oh. You’re sparky! But people just don’t try to better themselves these days. I did. That’s why I have a lovely home in Balwyn. Perhaps you’d like to see it,’ he said.
‘This is the justified rage of the late-capitalist worker for whom the myth of the possibility of upward mobility has begun to fall away,’ I said.
He then said something like, ‘You’re a feisty one, aren’t you?’ and I said, ‘Fuck off with your patriarchal egotism.’
Unfair of me, really. Especially given that I had at least 50 per cent of my tits on display from a balconette bra and had done everything to appear like a woman who observed patriarchal standards. Which, really, for the sake of a Big Slavic Cock ride, I had wanted to be.
It’s true that I was a little out of practice on that score, having been in an ostensibly monogamous and committed relationship with a woman who wore khakis
. But it was less a lack of familiarity with straight convention—which is, in any case, ubiquitous and impossible for all females, homosexual or otherwise, to ignore—than the return of another bad habit that made me so tedious on this date: Herr Marx.
I shouldn’t have chosen a former Soviet as my first date. It made it so much more likely that Karl would appear. Which he did, to kill the commodity of conversation.
I like conversation. I like to talk before and during sex and ask, ‘Can I touch you there?’ Laboured talk about consent is often good for me—perhaps this is because I once worked in the public service. Anyhow, I should have simply talked to Anton about where I could touch him and not quite so much about the accumulation of private wealth and the public pain that inevitably follows.
For a spell, I refused Anton much opportunity to speak at all. He called me a ‘spicy little pinko’ and tried to respond, again and again, to my dreary chat with a spur of libidinal conflict. Meanwhile I kept repeating things from a volume I am not sure that I have ever really understood. Marx was about to rise up to end the possibility of sex. The workers of the world would not unite at Anton’s well-appointed home in Balwyn.
There was a spectre haunting my vagina. It was the spectre of communism.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I think you’re cute. But you really need to shut up.’
Which, of course, I needed to do then, and do rather generally, and while the weight of that knowledge rested on my vocal folds for just long enough for him to speak, he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to take this,’ and walked through the shiny, empty hall to talk to someone who probably knew how to talk.
Anticathexis: I trust that you are in finest fettle after the Australian cricket victory. For which we may all claim proud and total responsibility. I should say, to address your earlier question about the telephone, that I am not content with only written banter—however much I may appreciate exchange with clever and amusing persons like yourself. I do try to meet and speak with people if they seem interested. This is not particularly easy for me. I ought to confess that I’m rather awkward and shy, so meeting people gets me outside of a comfort zone, whose modest limits are most easily described by this disclosure: I’m a twitcher. I actually enjoy watching, and documenting, birds. I suppose it’s wrong to use people here as some kind of personal therapy, but that’s really just an externality—I actually do want the types of ‘long-term relationship’ or ‘short-term relationship’ that are selected in my profile. (Do you also want what you have declared? And what does the ‘activity partner’ box even mean? Is it a euphemism of some type? Is everyone aware of its truer meaning but me?)