From my perch at the bar two feet from their table, where I could hear every word and monitor their body language, I added these thoughts to the three pages I’d already filled up about my client’s dating style. In the two statements she’d just uttered, she’d used four words on the first date no-no list: problem, shrink, intimacy and sex.
“Don’t you just love L.A.?” my client asked her date. “I used to live in Chicago, but I followed some loser boyfriend out here and ended up staying when I met some other guy. Everything’s so free and easy in L.A.”
Especially you, the man was most likely thinking.
I jotted down that thought and closed the notebook with a sigh. When I had a client like this one, I felt I was earning my money, which was $225 for a first date, and $175 for subsequent dates.
I critiqued dates for a living. And both unfortunately and fortunately, what a good living it was. Like most of my clients, Amber had hired me to help her figure out why she rarely got a second date. She was especially perplexed because her dates seemed to like her so much when they were having sex with her at the close of the first date.
Earlier this afternoon I had a client whose money I’d tried to refund, but she wouldn’t take it. Her problem was a bad case of shyness. She didn’t giggle on her date, she didn’t lean over and flash her cleavage, she didn’t drink too much, she didn’t talk about sex, politics, psychologists, religion or her mother. She simply didn’t talk. Her date had tried to bring her out of her shell, but she could only nod and occasionally agree with him about something. By the end of the date, which had lasted twenty-five minutes before he’d made an excuse to leave, she had uttered exactly four sentences.
She didn’t need me to tell her that the reason he and previous dates never called was because she came across devoid of personality and opinions, despite the fact that she was probably quite interesting. Shy people knew they were shy, which was why I felt she deserved her money back. I’d given her some conversation tips for basic first-date questions, open-ended answers about where she was from and her job as a court stenographer that she could easily remember and that would lead her date to respond and ask more questions. Hopefully, in time that would help her begin to open up.
Amber, however, did need me to tell her why her dates never called. Although, I had a feeling she knew exactly what she was doing. Knew that her coy act would result in interesting the man in sex. But what she was forgetting was that it didn’t interest the man in her. And that was what she wanted.
“Give it to me straight, Zoe,” Amber had said when she’d called to arrange for my services a few days ago. “Be brutal. Not even gently brutal.”
Gently brutal was how L.A. Magazine had described my advice to the “lovelorn” in the profile they did on me last year, in which they’d dubbed me “the Dating Diva of L.A.”
Zoe Solomon is a relationship guru whom desperate singletons hire to spy on their dates from a nearby table and take notes on everything they do and say wrong so that they can work on all their defenses, bad habits, tics and annoying qualities, such as interrupting, twirling the ends of their hair, crossing their arms, talking too much about themselves, acting like an idiot, drinking too much, talking sex, politics, or past relationships and any other date destroyers. She offers gently brutal advice to the lovelorn and often receives cards and letters from former clients who’ve transformed from dating disasters to dating divas themselves….
The publicity generated so much business that I dropped out of grad school again and quit my other job, which was spraying annoyed women with perfume in Neiman Marcus sixty times an hour.
School. I was twenty-six years old and still didn’t have the master’s degree I’d started four years earlier. I had only one more year to get back into my program or I could forget the credits I already had.
“What do you need a degree for?” my mother said time and again. “You’re the famous Dating Diva of L.A.! You should be out gallivanting, not burying that gorgeous face in textbooks.”
Education wasn’t a priority with my mother. Good-looking, wealthy men were.
Scratch that. One good-looking, wealthy man in particular was her priority: my father.
“If I looked like you, I’d be out catching myself a wealthy husband and a hot gorgeous boyfriend,” my mother had said more than once. “Hey, maybe you’ll meet a winner while you’re evaluating a date and you can steal the guy!” she’d commented when I showed her the L.A. Magazine article.
“I have a boyfriend, Mom,” I’d reminded her.
And she would flutter her eyes and change the subject. Charlie was both good-looking and wealthy, but she didn’t like him.
“He’s not the one, angel,” she said over and over.
I loved my mother dearly, but she wasn’t exactly someone I’d take relationship advice from.
Maybe Charlie was the one.
Then again, maybe not.
When the L.A. Magazine reporter heard that I wasn’t married or in a long-term relationship (I’d just started dating Charlie then), he was surprised that I had only a useless bachelor’s degree in psychology, a job as a perfume sprayer and a lackluster track record in the love department. I’d explained that I’d fallen into the date guru business through a friend, who’d asked if I’d critique a first date with a guy she really liked. She was turning off men, she’d said, and she didn’t want to keep blowing it.
I laughed when Cara kept asking me to spy on her dates—what made me an expert on men and dating?
“You might not always have a boyfriend, Zoe—because you don’t want one, I might add—but every time we go out, guys swarm all over you, and every date you have calls you the next day and sends you flowers. And that’s because you know how to act. Or not act. You’re totally yourself. I watch you sometimes and wish I could come across like you—completely natural, confident but not intimidating, warm, funny, smart. Everything guys want! I want to learn why I’m not coming across like that on dates.”
Buttering me up helped. And so, despite feeling funny about spying on her date and judging her, critiquing her—or anyone, for that matter—I arrived ten minutes before she did at the bar where she was meeting Mr. Potential, a stockbroker named Mike. We’d prearranged for me to sit at the end of the bar while Cara would sit at one of the little round tables just to the side of it so that I could see and hear them clearly.
“Just don’t let a guy pick you up during my date!” she said, and I laughed. “I’m not kidding!” she added. “Some guy sees you sitting alone at the bar and you’ll miss my whole date! Bring a textbook, so it’ll look like you’re studying. A med student’s textbook, so that you’ll be too intimidating for anyone to approach.”
I shook my head and laughed, but borrowed an oversize textbook on Contract Law from my next-door neighbor (I still lived in the same off-campus housing—a cute apartment I used to share with a roommate but now had to myself—that I’d moved in to as a nineteen-year-old sophomore), which I figured would be intimidating enough.
It was. I sat at the bar with my hair covered by a baseball cap, wearing baggy jeans and prescription-free glasses I’d picked up at the drugstore for five bucks, and buried my nose in the textbook while taking many furtive glances at Cara’s table. My notebook and pen were at the ready for “notes,” and no one bothered me.
And very unexpectedly, from the moment Cara’s date arrived and she talked nonstop about herself, from what kind of juice she liked to drink in the morning to the movie she’d seen the previous night to one too many stories, albeit amusing, about this and that, that and this—I’d found myself writing up five pages on what could potentially turn off her date. I was afraid I’d hurt Cara’s feelings, but she’d so appreciated my analysis that she’d taken me to dinner afterward and told me I should hang a shingle. And a week later she reported that my critique had been such a success for her that a new Mr. Potential had asked her out for date number two right in the middle of the first date.
So inste
ad of talking nonstop on her dates, Cara now spoke nonstop about her “amazing friend Zoe Solomon,” the date analyzer who could pinpoint exactly what you were doing wrong so you could correct it and find love. And my little business was born. Friends of Cara from graduate school and her group therapy sessions called to test me out. And they told two friends and so on and so on and so on.
That was four years ago. When the article came out last year, I began to work all the time, morning, noon and night. I’d eat my scrambled eggs at the table next to a client on a breakfast date. I’d play tennis (and once badminton) on the court next to a client on sporty dates. I’d gone on Ferris wheels (tricky), long walks on the beach, jogs in the park, for ice cream, countless dinners and lots of club sodas. And the dates were none the wiser that one Zoe Solomon, ex-perfume sprayer and unmarried—in fact, barely boyfriended herself—was spying on the sweet awkwardness of a first date.
It was at one of those countless dinners that I met my boyfriend. I was critiquing a date in a very popular gourmet pizzeria. I sat at the bar, eating my own personal pizza for one, pretending to be studying for a real estate exam, my notebook open.
“Eavesdropper,” accused a male voice.
I redirected my attention from my client’s blind date, which was about as bad as a first date could get (the problem wasn’t her, but the guy, who was a real schmuck) to my textbook. “Excuse me?” I said in my most leave-me-alone voice.
“You’re eavesdropping on my cousin’s date.”
That got my attention. I glanced up to find a very cute guy in a UCLA sweatshirt and faded jeans trying to wedge himself into the slightly open spot beside me at the crowded bar. “Your cousin?” I asked. “The woman or the man?”
“The man,” he said and then ordered a Bass from the bartender. “Don’t you see the family resemblance?” With a grin, he turned to show me his profile and pointed to his dimple. I almost laughed, but then I collected myself. I was working!
But the more I listened to his cousin wax on to my client about how long he could hold his breath under water (he was a surfer) while he checked out every woman in the restaurant, the more I tried to remember that schmuckiness didn’t necessarily run in families. Still, I couldn’t exactly talk up the cutie in front of me and earn my fee at the same time. Turned out it wasn’t a problem, since Cutie’s own date arrived a moment later. She eyed me up and down, then suggested that they grab a table on the other side of the restaurant.
Cutie gave me something of an Oh-what-might-have-been expression, and then his date gave me one of those I’ll claw your eyes out if you flip your hair or cross your legs his way looks, and off they went.
The very good-looking distraction gone, I wrote on and on in my notebook about how my client had been polite and accommodating above and beyond the call of first-date duty, that she had said and done just about everything humanly possible to include herself in the date and that if he didn’t call, she should consider herself very lucky, and if he did, she should change her telephone number.
Fifteen minutes later, I noticed Cutie heading my way, but he walked past me with a devilish smile and disappeared into the men’s room. A few minutes later, as he passed me again, he slipped his business card under the bowl of peanuts in front of me. On the back it said, I’m on a first date from hell, like my cousin seems to be. Though I have no doubt that my high-maintenance cousin is the date from hell in his case. Tacky as this might seem under the circumstances, I really wish you were my date. If you’re interested, call me and I’ll redeem myself, I promise.
I covered my mouth to hide my smile and happy laugh and slipped his card into my bag, then forced myself to concentrate on my client’s date. I didn’t have to work too hard, since a minute later she stormed out, then returned a moment after that for her purse. Cutie’s cousin was already chatting up the two women at the next table. “You can have him,” she yelled at them, and stormed back out.
I called her that night and told her to keep her money—to pay for a critique of that Technicolor nightmare would add the clichéd insult to injury. We shared a good laugh over bad dates that you couldn’t do a danged thing about, and then I called Charlie.
That was fourteen months and five or ten or twenty marriage proposals ago. Charlie had proposed on our fifth date, and I’d been telling him I wasn’t ready ever since.
Why? Didn’t I love him? Wasn’t he what I wanted?
If he was, then why did I always come down with a cold whenever I thought I should just say yes already? Every time I decided I was nuts for not accepting his proposal, my body seemed to tell me I wasn’t. I came down with heartburn, the flu, hives, migraines.
I didn’t want to marry Charlie, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know if it was just a not-yet kind of thing or a not-ever kind of thing.
It was driving me crazy. And driving him away.
He’d proposed again two weeks ago, with his mother’s heirloom two-carat marquise diamond ring in a diamond-studded platinum setting and a hansom-cab ride. When I’d told him I still wasn’t ready, he’d jumped out of the carriage, slammed shut the ring box and told me he was getting really tired of waiting. That if I loved him, I’d commit.
Was that how it worked?
I was supposed to be pro-commitment, he’d said, since I was the only person he knew whose parents had been married for twenty-five years.
Hello? My parents divorced after twenty-five years.
My father had been having an affair with a twenty-four-year-old student. A little over a year ago, he’d broken the news to my mother that he was leaving her for another woman. My mother had called me in a hysterical panic, and I’d called my father to find out what the hell was going on.
“She’s everything I’ve ever wanted,” my father told me when I’d driven to his house that night to see him. “Don’thate me, Zoe. This is what it’s all about. Love. Incredible love. This is all I can ever want for you, too.”
He hadn’t mentioned that night that the woman who was everything he’d ever wanted was my friend Giselle. My friend who I’d introduced to him without a second thought when we ran into him in a popular brunch spot in Santa Monica.
“Dad, this is my friend Giselle Archweller,” I’d said.
“Giselle Archweller. What a lovely name,” he’d said.
And apparently, he’d remembered it. There weren’t too many Giselle Archwellers in the L.A. area, and he’d looked her up and called her, and that, as they said, was that.
That was also the end of my parents’ marriage.
Giselle and I hadn’t been best friends or particularly close friends, but we probably would have been had fate not intervened in the form of my father. (Was that fate? I was still unsure a year later.) But we’d been budding friends and I’d liked her. She was the kind of friend I hadn’t had since high school. And since my three high school friends had scattered across the world—Lauren was in France with the chef she’d met in a two-month-long French cooking class in Paris; Deb was in Switzerland, doing something involving banking and skiing; and the other Debbie was in an African country, deeply involved with the Peace Corp—I was sorely in need of a gal pal.
Giselle and I had met at Neiman Marcus, right before I quit to become the Dating Diva full time. We were both well-paid floor model slash perfume sprayers with psychology degrees from UCLA and no idea what we really wanted to do. Co-worker quips led to coffee breaks and then lunch breaks and then shopping trips. Giselle had a one-year-old baby whom she adored (the happy result of an unhappy relationship with a wanna-be rock star who’d told her it couldn’t be his kid), and the three of us had just begun to spend time together on Saturday afternoons, at the beach or park, when Giselle suddenly stopped being so available a couple of months into our friendship.
At first I was sure I’d done something to offend her, but finally she told me she was seeing someone new and was crazy in love, but didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it.
My father and Giselle were very careful
. I didn’t have a clue that they were involved. Until the day my mother called me, sobbing hysterically on the phone.
“We meant to tell you ourselves,” my father had said later. “We felt that I should tell your mother first, but we hadn’t realized that she’d tell you right away. We thought we could then come over to your place, sit down and explain what happened. That we fell in love. Didn’t mean to hurt anyone. That love is love.”
They’d been dating for two months. Two months. And that was love? Apparently it was love enough to destroy a twenty-five-year-long marriage.
And a daughter’s faith.
“Honey, we’re deeply in love…it just happened. So sorry you got hurt. I feel terrible that your mother is beside herself. Age is just a number…. Would I break up my family if this weren’t the real thing? A woman half my age with a one-year-old baby, for God’s sake?”
I hadn’t talked to my father for two months after that. And I’d refused all calls and visits from Giselle, who tried for months to explain that she simply couldn’t help falling in love with my father, a man twice her age, a man who was married to my mother.
My mother thought it was just another affair (I hadn’t known there were affairs, let alone that my mother knew about them) and ran to get Botox injections, booked an emergency appointment with her colorist and hired a personal trainer to come to the house four times a week. She went for counseling, group therapy, and even tried to hire me to analyze her as a human being. She bought push-up bras and black stockings with seams down the back, high heels and leather. She shopped in stores like Bebe and started wearing Seven jeans.
And my father complimented her on how great she looked, adding that she’d surely catch a young stud in no time.
My father had always been clueless.
And my mother had gone nuts.
First, it was “I’ll never grant that son of a bitch a divorce!”
The Solomon Sisters Wise Up Page 4