by Kyle Smith
“Everything else about him was okay?”
“Seemingly.”
“But you dumped him for this.”
“Yup.”
“There is no limit to strangeness when it comes to dating, is there?”
“Him or me?” she says.
“Both. He could have turned out to be a great guy.”
“He turned out to be a serial killer.”
“Really?”
“Well. Not yet. But I’m watching the tabloids. I mean, the man had frozen squab. Pork hocks. Oh, and Vegemite. He wasn’t even Australian.”
“You tell him the reason?”
“God, no.”
“Why is it we can never tell each other the real reason for our breakups? Why won’t we grant each other this single moment of honesty when the other person needs it most?”
“What fun would that be?” she says. “Another time I broke up with a guy because I came home and he was, in volv ed, shall we say, with some porn. I caught him red-handed.”
“Caught him with his pants down. As it were.”
She laughs again. “Come on. What’s the weirdest reason you’ve ever broken up with someone?”
One time this girl stayed for the night. In the morning she poured herself a pint, a pint of fresh-squeezed orange juice bought for the occasion in a moment of anticipatory exuberance and then had, like, one sip. I had to throw it all out, of course. Sex is one thing, but backwash is another. Nobody better use my toothbrush, either. Then there was the girl who, when we were talking about our favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, insisted hers was “Cecilia.” That was pretty much the last conversation I ever had with her.
“Just the normal reasons,” I say.
“Liar,” she says. And kicks me. I like a girl who can detect my lies.
When we finish the wine, it’s a little awkward. I live south of here. Katie lives north of here. But just a few blocks.
“Can I walk you home?” I say.
“Yes please,” she says.
There’s another awkward moment when we get to the entrance of her building, the doorman eyeing us.
“I have learned much about you, T.F.,” Katie says, not inviting me in. She’s twinkling with merriment, though.
“You better keep it to yourself, little girl,” I say, putting my hands on her waist.
“Or else what?” she says.
“Or you’re in for it,” I say, and tickle her.
“Agh! Stop!” she says. “Uncle!” And she smiles.
The kiss. It’s a kiss that says: give me three solid, entertaining dates, and maybe.
Saturday, August 25
Eight-thirty at night. I’m home watching Goodfellas, just in case I missed anything the first twelve times.
My cell phone politely clears its throat. First time it’s made a sound all weekend. Secretly I was hoping that the thing just wasn’t getting reception in my apartment.
“Hi,” says a female voice. Standard girl greeting. Why do girls always do this? I have no idea who it is. How am I supposed to tell based on one word?
“Hey!” I say, stalling. “How’s it going!”
“Fine.” Two words. I still have no idea.
Then it hits me like a mouthful of sauerkraut: Liesl. Haven’t talked to her in weeks. I thought we had both more or less silently agreed to just let things slide. Into the quicksand.
“Wie geht’s?” I say. We have this thing, the German and I, where I pretend to be able to speak the language—I picked up a few phrases from a Bavarian copy editor at work—and she pretends not to notice I’m pathetic.
She gives an answer that sounds like “Selbstammerungenfrauverkaufkenkrankenschwesser,” and I give the audio equivalent of a nod.
“Well,” she says. “I was just finishing up some stuff at work.” Like this is the most normal thing for a person to be doing with her Saturday evening. “I figured you’d be out drinking and I could come have one with you.”
“Actually,” I say, “I was just watching a movie.”
Gaffe! She doesn’t know I’m home. This is my cell phone. Right now I could be hoisting beers with literary lions or horny actresses, for all she knows. Why do I have to clutter up my scheming with random acts of honesty?
We agree to meet up at Cafe Frog in forty minutes. It’s a ten-minute walk from here. Perfect, I think: I have enough time for a nice relaxing game of Snake on my cell phone, then I’ll change.
Fourteen minutes later I tear the game out of my hands with pangs of regret—I’m convinced that tonight I have a shot at beating Bran’s best score—and dress in three minutes. (Out come the Banana Republic shirt in a darkish shade of blue, the Banana Republic pants in black, the Banana Republic shoes in black. When the pollsters call to ask about my party affiliation, I will answer: Banana Republican.) Then I’m dashing down the street just like I did when I was a kid: always late. Except now I don’t have to allow time to lock up my bike.
Uh-oh. I forgot something. I hurry back upstairs to the apartment and paint my nails with Bite Me. No way am I going to bed the German if she sees me biting my nails.
I arrive, red faced, fifteen minutes late, just in time to spend ten minutes waiting for her. Meeting up with girls, in my experience, is a lot like having sex with girls. I always get there first.
We have some food, some drink. We “catch up.”
“What did you do last weekend?” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “I was with Gigi and Seb, you know them, we all went up to New Hampshire to hang out with Ramona and Bethany, I’ve told you about them, and we went to visit Shakira, Dora, and Colette, the ones I told you about with the little beach house, and then on Sunday I went to a dinner party with Mariel, Antonio, Robin, and Whitney.”
Who are these people? Being with a new person, it’s a memory workout. You try to track the names of her bestest friends and her worstest boyfriends and her siblings and where they live and what they do for a living and who their mates are and what they named their kids. (When uncertain, just guess Alex. Works for either gender, and your odds are about one in three.) That’s not even counting everything you have to remember about the girl you’re dating. Her allergies. (Once I dated a girl who was violently allergic to every kind of nuts. I kept forgetting. Suddenly everything I ordered seemed to have nuts in it. She took this as a sign that secretly I wanted to kill her, or at the very least, didn’t want her to share my food.) Her boss’s name. Her dress size. Shoe size. What she likes in bed. (Okay, that one isn’t so tough.) How to get to her apartment. Her phone number. Her other phone number. Her other other phone number.
Of course, I have no problem remembering any of this stuff about Julia.
“That sounds great!” I say. I’m past the point where I can ask who these friends of hers are, because the German has explained all of their lives to me in great detail. I just didn’t retain any of it. There is very little room left in my hard drive, what with the Bugs Bunny plots, Bogart one-liners, and football statistics stored there.
“Let’s stay out all night,” I say. I’m trying to be Impetuous Guy. With a German.
“All night?” she says. “I was thinking, maybe twelve.”
We go to a corny grope shack on Columbus called E-Motion. I pretend I haven’t been there before. In front there are tables in little nooks; in back there are giant, comfy, velvety couches. They stretch so far back that people get a drink, take off their shoes, and hurl themselves into the cushions. It’s like your parents’ basement, minus the carved Polynesian barware and the dusty fondue set that was always missing a fork.
So we have our gin and tonics and let our shoes thud to the carpet. We’re leaning back. She’s not far. She’s not touching me either.
“You’re in a very vulnerable position,” I say.
“Oh?” she says.
“I could kiss you at any moment,” I say. Can I drop a hint or can I drop a hint?
She smiles. And I kiss her. But only for a second. Because she bursts into
giggles.
“Uh-uh,” she says. “We can’t make out here.”
It takes me a while to digest what she’s saying. What the hell is she saying?
“Do you want to go back to your place?” she says.
When was the last time anyone said that to me? Has anyone ever said that to me? Breathe. Nod. Calmly. That’s it. Just nod.
And I reach down to put on my shoes.
She’s got the giggles again.
“But,” she says gigglishly.
This is funny?
“But I don’t necessarily want to have sex,” she says.
So we go back to my place and she is as good as her word: we don’t necessarily have sex. What we do is a whole lot of very frustrating sweaty stuff in my bed. For two hours. Until finally we’re asleep in each other’s arms. For one minute.
“I have to get up at nine,” she says, nudging me.
I get up to set the alarm, which I keep on the far side of the room. If I could reach it from bed, I would just hit the off button and go back to sleep. On the way, I notice someone has neatly folded and hung up the German’s pants and bra. How did that happen?
“Sex,” Liesl says gravely in the dark, “is very intimate.”
No argument here.
“I guess I haven’t kissed anyone this much in about, five years.”
And a big bag of sadness falls on my shoulders. Here is a very pretty, very smart young woman. And she is, possibly, even more miserable than me.
Thursday, September 6
At work, I reread the priceless e-mail from Monday:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Friday
You said you wanted to see a movie Friday night, but since it seems we have very different tastes in cinema, I think we should start planning now. I suggest….
She suggests an Icelandic fishing saga, a French cross-dressing comedy, a Chinese soap opera. What is it with chicks and foreign films? The same ones you see creasing their foreheads over the mysteries of the horoscopes in Marie Claire suddenly are all brains when it comes to the manyplex. When was the last time you saw a foreign film that wasn’t overrated? Okay, Enter the Dragon. Surprisingly, though, she wouldn’t mind seeing the new Jackie Chan flick. Maybe she’s compromising, i.e., suggesting we do what I want to do? We hash out an agreement to see it next week as though we’re signing an international peace treaty.
As I’m walking out of my building in the dying sunlight, I’m calling Julia to see if she’s free for a drink before she leaves. She’s going to Mexico with the Dwayne this weekend, and I won’t see her for a while if I don’t see her tonight. But instead of getting her on her cell, I get Darth Vader telling me, “The Verizon customer you are seeking is not in the service area.” Why does every corporation think it’s such a cool idea to have that guy do their voice-overs? He blew up Alderaan, for God’s sake, not to mention slicing up Obi-Wan.
As I’m putting my cell phone back in my backpack, though, I have my own persuasive black guy to deal with. Shooter is walking across the plaza, his dreadlocks pulled back neatly in a ponytail, wearing a black suit, white shirt, skinny tie. He looks like a Rastafarian Reservoir Dog. Mr. Black. It takes me a second to notice that he has a companion on either side of him: Mike Vega and Eli Knecht. Both of them are trying hard to look ruthless.
Shooter removes his Churchill-sized Cuban from his mouth and blows a vast plume of smoke at me. “Seize him,” he says.
Mike and Eli grab me by the elbows and hustle me into a dark-windowed limousine.
“What is this?” I say. “Have you signed up for the Mafia? Is it prom night?”
But Eli and Mike shove me in the middle of the back bench and take up guard-dog positions on either side of me. Shooter settles imperiously into the row of seats opposite. Then a guy in uniform comes to shut the door. The sound of the street is completely cut off.
“Fellas,” I say, “I’d love to hang with you, but I’ve got to see Julia tonight.”
“That,” Shooter says, “is precisely the point.”
I look at Mike and Eli, knowing full well that shameful things could happen tonight. Shooter inhabits a place where there are no rules, some sort of private Amsterdam of the soul. “What’s the gag?” I say.
“Call it what you will,” says Shooter. “It is what it is.”
“It’s an intervention,” says Mike.
Shooter raps on the glass. And we’re off.
Shooter reaches under his seat and locates a concealed fridge. He takes out a bottle of Bollinger. “And what is this?” he says. “We must utilize it.”
“Yes, we will utilize it well,” says Mike, who has located the champagne flutes in another hidden compartment. He makes a surprisingly inspired henchman, I have to admit.
“We will utilize it to the last drop,” says Eli. Am I the only one in this town who hasn’t read The Sun Also Rises? So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Hemingway.
When we pull up to the velvet ropes, there’s a guy with a mustache and a tuxedo standing at the ready. There are really only three kinds of guys who wear tuxedos anymore. And this guy doesn’t look like a headwaiter or a groom.
“Welcome to the place where men are men,” says Shooter.
“And women are surgically modified,” says Eli.
“Come on, guys,” I say as the driver opens our doors. A spotlight sweeps around trying to create some drama on the red carpet between the ropes. “I don’t need this. I have a girl to call.”
“Girls, did you say?” Shooter says. “I’ll show you girls.”
Shooter confers with the guy at the rope for a minute. There is discussion as to where we will be seated. There’s the VIP area (the entire club), the VVIP area (all but the back two rows of tables), and then there’s the Executive Chamber, which is the front, and the Bull’s Eye, which is described as a zone of such mighty exclusivity it consists of a single raised table surrounded by burgundy ropes and dedicated staff. Mike and Eli steer me discreetly by the elbows. They’re both spiffed up a little, wearing jackets and ties. I’m wearing wrinkled old Gap pants and scuffed shoes. I look like some kind of derelict or graduate student.
“Shooter,” I say. “I’m not dressed.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “Neither are the girls.”
Then he pulls out a single bill and hands it to the velvet-rope wrangler. I didn’t know President McKinley was on the $500 bill, did you?
“Looks like a special night,” says Eli as we make our way through the corridor to the place where the colored lights swirl around madly. The music is deafening.
“It’s Bad Girls night,” says Shooter, giving me a little wink.
Gorillas in monkey suits crowd around us, fawning and mewling with tip lust, depositing us at the best table. Shooter and Mike distribute cash to the waiters while Eli looks the other way. Mike gives me a little glance.
“Don’t look at me,” I say. “I didn’t ask to be here.”
Shooter confiscates my cell phone and gets a round of double Scotches. And here come the girls.
A guy at the edge of the stage pats down his toupee and hits us with a comical Cockney accent.
“All right, lads, all right? I’m your host Ken Talent, here to remind you that history is being made tonight at Stallions Gentlemen’s Club. Literally.”
I can never figure out why they call these places gentlemen’s clubs when they cater exclusively to our most primal grunting baboon urges.
“I love this guy,” Shooter says. “He’s the Robin Leach of titty bars.”
Cue the opening guitar blast of the Beatles’ “Revolution.” Talent yells, “The women you are about to meet are scantily clad Satans, devils with the blue dress off, each and every one of them a tempest in a D cup, the most evil girls in all of history! Please give a snarling Stallions welcome to…Marie Antoinette!”
Enthusiastic hisses ensue as a lady emerges from behind the tinselly curtain
in full 1789 dress. The big hoop skirt. The flouncy frills. The powdered wig. The saucy beauty spot.
Shooter is whistling with his fingers in the corners of his mouth. I wish I could do that. He pounds his Scotch and another appears at his elbow. I haven’t taken my first sip yet.
Shooter gives me a look. “You look like a lump of something.”
“Bad mood,” I say.
“You’ll be dead a long time,” he says. “No need to start practicing now. Drink your medicine.”
“Alcohol is not the answer,” I say.
“No,” he says. “But it’ll keep you busy until you forget what the question was.”
I take a sip. It rips a black trail of fire all the way down my gullet. Which feels good.
“I don’t want to use booze as a crutch,” I say.
“It’s not a crutch,” he says. “It’s a life-support system.”
“Now, lads,” says Talent, “is that all you have to say about one of history’s cruelest women? Marie’s crimes include marrying for money, starving the masses, trying to escape the people’s justice, and tacky interior decorating! What do we have to say about that then?”
“Boo!” shouts Eli, giving me a wink.
“Please,” I say. “Do not wink.”
I look around the club. The place is empty except for seven or eight desolate-eyed men with receding hairlines trying valiantly to be crazy. A lot of them are yelling and booing and nudging each other. Most of them are wearing wedding rings.
The temptress on the stage is wearing one of those little black ribbons around her neck, the ones that look like dog collars, with a little pendant hanging from it. She’s fingering the collar suggestively. As if we’ve never seen a naked neck before.
“You know, lads,” says the announcer, “I do believe that collar is the only thing what’s keeping her head on!”
The three guys at the table behind me are chanting. “Off with her head! Off with her head!” But only until one of them comes up with, “Off with her clothes!” and they all pick up on it.
“The dress looks uncomfortable,” says Mike.