Dating with Dan

It took a minute before Kelly and I met.

She lived in Dayton, as I might have mentioned. It worried me. Dayton was awful then, and it continues to be awful now. Partially because of death threats from the cuckolded boyfriends of grimy hipster girls and partially because of the calculated depredations of bored suburban housewives, Dayton assumed a superstitious significance for me. There were other reasons also, ones less articulable. I thought my thoughts on the other side of my head from where I kept Dayton thoughts, much in the same way that you chew on the other side of your mouth from where you have a cavity. Dayton is like a cavity; it’s a decayed city full with decayed people. Except that it was and is nowhere full, its people leaking out from its used-up center, metastasizing to other cities, leaving behind vacant property.

So I dragged my ass, and we emailed.

In the meantime, although I had a job, I lived like I didn’t, and sank paycheck after paycheck into my credit card debt. To sell the illusion of independence to Kelly (and, realistically speaking, to the women who would come after her—I had been dating for too long to really believe that she would be where I stopped looking, but I did and do believe that all displays of independence are inherently illusory), I rented the bottom floor of a large, rickety two-story house in Avondale, moving my numbered boxes from my parents’ house to this one and filling the empty rooms with Goodwill furniture.

The neighborhood in Cincinnati that used to give the suburbs fits is called Over-the-Rhine. It was the queasy locus of this city’s belching race riots in 2001. (We have a long history of riots with a refractory period just long enough for the previous one to be generationally forgotten). After all the smashing had been swept up, the neighborhood began aggressively gentrifying, sprouting curio stores selling ruthlessly overdesigned bullshit and pulling in a much whiter, hipper crowd who stopped talking about “Over-the-Rhine” and started talking about “OTR.” Avondale picked up the slack as the neighborhood people avoided during their evening commutes, popping up in the local consciousness as a place where landlords still tried to put up “whites only” signs on their swimming pools or where someone’s escaped pet lion might maul you. The sounds of occasional gunshots just count as local flavor.

As I’d learn later, my new house had been sold for a song to my new landlords just after one of the large neighborhood trees had fallen through the roof during the Hurricane Ike windstorm. That part wasn’t in the lease. My lease did, however, forbid me from running a take-out restaurant from my house. Apparently the previous tenants had done that using the massive kitchen they’d proudly shown to me as a selling point, perhaps to distract me from the uninsulated walls and gently sloping floors. I nodded enthusiastically along with my landlords, forgetting in my eagerness to move that I don’t know how to look and can’t be bothered to learn. Over the year of my lease, my meals would come from the microwave or delivery people, just like always. The landlords also claimed that my apartment would be a two-bedroom. This claim was true only if you believed that apartments did not require living rooms, but since the rent here for a putative two-bedroom apartment was lower than the rent for a studio in neighborhoods with fewer armed robberies, I decided not to make a stink about it. I signed the lease, arranged my new couches and called Kelly for our first date.

We’d planned to meet at a Barnes and Noble. Rather than going for one of the inexplicable Starbucksian drinks the café was pushing, I got a black coffee and waited for her to show up.

In the blog, you’ll note that my record of employment has not been perhaps as buttery smooth as I’d like it to be. Its unpleasant lumpiness has been even moreso since this past July, when my employer at the time offered me a deal. You see, they wanted me to teach the same four or five classes and work the same sixty hour weeks that I’d been working, but without the marginal incentives of salary pay and benefits. So, using the politesse of corporate language, I told them to go fuck themselves.

Recently (I’m reluctant to say when for reasons I’m reluctant to tell you), I got a very unexpected offer to do proposal and grant writing on a freelance basis for a very big company, the happy (for me) consequence of their original writer having to bow out because of a heart attack scare.

I know.

So I’ve been doing that. It’s not the work I’d dreamed of doing, but it is the first time I’ve ever been paid for writing, and I’ve never been one to look a checkbook in the mouth.

However. Things there are starting to slack off (sort of), and I should be back soon. Like, tomorrow. Afternoon or evening.

Promise.

Unless I wreck my car or something.

Like other humans, I have chosen dates for unconscionably shallow reasons.

Did I ever tell you about the time I moved to Japan because I wanted to have sex with Japanese girls?

Well. I moved to Japan because I wanted to have sex with Japanese girls. I mean, that wasn’t the whole reason. As a whole reason, it would be blisteringly stupid; a two-week vacation could probably take care of that. (There used to be a nightclub called Vanilla in Roppongi. I heard that the cover for white men and Japanese women was ten bucks, but for anyone else the cover was about forty. I guess once they got inside, everyone sat around and talked about ice cream?) It wasn’t even the biggest reason, and it definitely wasn’t the best reason. Nevertheless, it was a reason.

How ugly is this truth? Is it uglier than other ones? I have hurt kind people because their teeth were different from teeth I preferred, or because their asses were fatter than other asses, or because their skin hung awkwardly from their cheekbones. I did these unremarkable crimes. There are varying degrees of preference. One time, I decided that I liked how Japanese girls looked.

A girl named Yuko and I dated. As an aside, I’m still friends with a different Japanese girl named Yuko. She is a lovely person who has an unfortunate, exclusionary preference for Western men. Typically, her feelings get hurt. Possibly she would have dated me, but we met through her boyfriend, my roommate, a greasy tub of Albertan suet who believed sincerely that PCP abuse led to cannibalism. He saw it on CSI. Probably he was the most sophisticated dude ever to come from his whole town, and that makes me sad inside. After he flew back to Canada, leaving a column of leaky garbage roughly his height and shape in the corner of our living room, I thought there might have been some interest, but nothing ever came of it. His name also was Dan. I think it was too weird for her.

Our relationship bracketed itself in confusion. Which is to say, I’m not really sure why she picked me up (which she did, from a nightclub . . . I’ve rarely been one to make an unprompted approach, so my first six months abroad had been appropriately sexless), and I’m not really sure why she dumped me. I have best guesses. For the former, it’s because she thought my penis was big (her words, not mine), and for the latter, it’s because I would tell her that I loved her in Japanese but not in English.

But I digress.

Kelly wasn’t Japanese. She was American. But her family had, at some point, emigrated from an East Asian country. Maybe it was Korea? These details escape me. But regardless, I found that attractive, despite that the part of my brain that knows things absolutely knew better. In her picture, a few tattoos peeked over her shoulder. Despite tattoos’ occasional use as a prosthetic personality by otherwise bland individuals, I still find them to be really, really hot. (Generally, anyway . . . they fall under the same purview as other cosmetic surgeries. Terrible tattoos look grotesque in the same way that terrible breast implants do). And her message to me saying that she’d stayed on Match because she wanted to talk to me spoke to my ego in a way that no one had recently.

Of course, on an equally superficial level, there were drawbacks. For example, she was shaped like me, except with breasts.

Sometimes, you are on a date. You see the person sitting across a table from you, perhaps with a cup of coffee between her hands, perhaps not. This person also sees you. She smiles. Her smile seems typical; taxonomically speaking, it fits into the larger category of date smiles, which in turn belong to the genus of smiles smiled because the smiler feels it is appropriate to smile, not because she is happy. At some point in that smiling instant, you realize, even before you take your seat across from the smile and the coffee, that this person is yours for the asking. Although to the naïve or desperate, asking might seem like a good deal, that is not always the case.

It is the same for jobs.

After Amber drove her long drive back to Kentucky, my cycle of dates wound down into a period of low activity. My carefully numbered moving boxes gradually shifted from being mostly closed to mostly open, rimmed with the approximately folded corners of packed clothes that I moved with increasing carelessness. The basement futon spent more time unfolded into a sleeping space than pretending to be a couch. The movement of restless bodies massaged flat the couch crease at its center. Mostly these bodies were in fact one body, singular, mine, sleeping instead of sexing, which bothered me only sometimes but intensely when it did. My laptop became used less for writing, or dating, or anything else, and more for seeing what internet people looked like with their clothes off. (As it turns out, they look like other people, just naked). Growths of glasses and dishes sprouted in fungal knots from flat surfaces. Unremembered beverages clustered on the floor, an easy arm’s reach from where I slept. A particular brown species of long-legged spider shared my living space with me. One morning, as I lifted last night’s water for a sip, I found a spider, inverted with curled legs, at the bottom of the half-full glass. During the night, it must have climbed in and been unable to climb out. Afterward, I killed all the ones I saw until I stopped seeing them. Between these tiny vengeances, I watched advertising on the television while thinking about how I probably ought to read a book or something.

What made me leave this place was a job interview.

The woman on the phone sounded young with a blonde voice. My own voice came out thick and stupid. She’d woken me up, and it took me a few minutes to realize where I was, who I was, and what I was doing. Sometime during misty childhood,  my sister or one of my brothers had taken a can of spray primer and tagged our drop ceiling. Still lying on my back, I struggled to focus my eyes on a red splotch. Yes, I had applied for the teaching position. Yes, I was still interested. Yes, I could come in Monday to discuss it.

After a half-hour of unwarranted interview nervousness on my part, my brand-new supervisor crammed a full-time teaching position up my bum at a salary ten grand per year higher than the lowball rate that I, in my desperation, had quoted to her. Of course I accepted.

I should have asked for more money.

I don’t want to imply that it was all bad. Certainly the flood of trite, heartwarming stories concerning spiritual and moral metamorphoses consequent to education has some basis in things that really happen. But also, there was the time that my felonious student had me call his parole officer in a pointless effort to spare him detention for cocaine possession. And the time that one of the medical assisting students brought a veiny, cartoonish, ten-inch dildo to class as an anatomical model of male reproductive structures. And the time that the building management reprimanded my school’s administration for the biohazardous feminine hygiene products someone had left draped over doors in the bathroom stalls. I just should have asked for more money is all.

Even so, the first checks felt magical. Most of them went to pay down the five-grand IOU held by Uncle Citibank. The fourteen percent annual interest he charged dwarfed the zero percent that would have been afforded by my parents’ charity, but the impersonal anonymity of it allowed me remain dignified (much in the same way that, sometimes, frantic pawing with a very recent acquaintance feels preferable to the abasement of wheedling a past lover into touching you). Once my debt load dropped back down to the triple digits, I felt comfortable spending money on Match again. Here is another secret about internet dating. I might have shared this with you already, but in case I didn’t: If you sign up for a Match account and then log in a bunch of times without subscribing to anything, eventually they will email you a coupon for a cheaper subscription. At least, that was true three years ago.

My resurrected subscription came complete with an inbox full of correspondence. I sifted through it. Some of it was very old, sent to me from people who did not notice or did not care that my account had been inactive for almost a year. One letter, though, came from someone recent. The message included the line “I reactivated my account just to write to you.” I thought that was nice.

I clicked on her link.

Amber picked at her French fries. Late afternoon seemed early for dinner, but I didn’t trust myself to remain entertaining without some planned event.

“Well, Greg is my soul mate. We love each other.” With the reflexive ease of long habit, my face remained expressionless. Somewhere behind my face, scenes from last night unspooled. We had spent hours in my unlit basement being strangers who had undressed each other. The memory had already begun tectonically to deform, crushing itself hard against other, similar memories and then subducting, descending somewhere hot and private.

She dabbed her fries in ketchup, eating them singly and slowly. We had ended the evening at my parents’ house rather than the castle. This afternoon, I’d prepared myself with internet directions and taken her there for an anticlimactic visit. “But we’ll never be together. I’m just not attracted to him. If I were, I think I’d marry him. He keeps holding out hope that we’ll be together.” I nodded in reflexive sympathy. I thought about how Steak and Shake should change its name to Fries and Shake, or maybe Burgers and Fries, or something more descriptive about what’s enjoyable about eating there. All their steak is shaped like hamburgers or hot dogs. Memories bubbled up liminally and sank again almost immediately. Amber’s hands on my shoulders. Amber’s thighs pressed against my waist. Amber’s voice in the dark and my guilty shushing in response, motivated by the knowledge that my parents slept two floors above us.

In your parents’ house, you will always be a teenager. This is doubly true where fucking is concerned.

As a teenager, I never fucked a single fuck. During my pubescence, my environment imbued in me a certain intractable Irish Catholic faith that should my cock slip past the defenses of any vagina, the unavoidable consequence would be a trifecta of syphilis, gonorrhea and paternity. This particular article of faith outlasted all others, persisting until I was twenty-one and encasing me in an impenetrable technical virginity. However, in the absence of a more straightforward sex life, I had devoted myself to going down with the desperation and enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old who did not yet believe that a girl might want to fuck him. This not-fucking all happened in the same basement where I now lived, and then as now, I could think of little afterward apart from a dread of being caught. In a ritual of helpless anxiety, I reassured myself that I’d safely collected and discarded every piece of the Trojan wrapper.

“This is the guy you’re staying with?” I asked. Amber nodded.

“Speaking of which,” she said, “We’d better get going. As far as he’s concerned, I’m in town to see him.” She smiled at me. “He doesn’t really know about you.”

I saw the inescapable sense of this.

Any geography that is not familiar is foreign. As far as Amber was concerned, both Greg and I lived in Cincinnati, but the Cincinnatis we lived in were nearly an hour apart. We drove the curve of the interstate 275 bypass, settling our loosened hips into the cushioned seats. I don’t remember whether we held hands. It’s possible.

“Do you think we’ll date?” Amber asked. As a post-coital question, this one is difficult. From a perspective of cold realism, after first-date sex, a couple is less strangers only in that they know what each other’s genitals feel like, or rather what they felt like on one particular night. It’s a single data point and a lonely sort of intimacy. Sure, it can be sexy. But it’s rarely something that can sustain a relationship.

I sighed. I am a champion sigher.

“No, probably not. I mean, I like you, and you’re sexy. But you also live four hours away. I don’t think I can do it.”

That is true. Ask anyone.

At Amber’s direction, I pulled in front of a well-appointed house, two stories of suburban upper-middle-class grandeur. I chose to believe that the house belonged to Greg’s parents, although I didn’t ask. A large man with dark hair answered Amber’s knock. His front door swung open, and then shut.

“Are you sure the castle’s around here?” I could feel Amber’s eyes on me, but I didn’t turn to look. We drove on winding blacktop roads, unlit and recently surfaced.

“Of course I’m sure.” I coughed. I was pretty sure. At least she hadn’t started asking me whether I’d made it up.

She seemed recovered from the car accident, but she stayed quiet. I wondered whether that signified concussion while filling the silence with stories about nothing. I wondered how stories about nothing would affect someone who’d been concussed. We had met about thirty minutes earlier at a BP station in Blue Ash, a blandly upper-middle-class enclave north of Cincinnati. A private Catholic girls’ high school squatted in the background on the hill overlooking the lot where Amber waited.  As a point of interest, I had once been banned from the premises of that private Catholic girls’ high school for flipping off a janitor there. He’d informed me that I was an asshole. I’ve always responded poorly to criticism.

I chose to keep that particular coincidence to myself.

Much of the memory is hazy. We called a tow truck, that much seems clear. She’d been able to limp her car to the gas station, but crumpled metal dragged against her tire, ensuring a blowout if she tried to drive it anywhere. She sat on the hood of her car, all snarled bumper and smashed fender. While she phoned her mom, I moved things from the back seat of her car to the back seat of mine, thereby ruining the back seat for its more stereotypical date-night use. By the time I’d finished, she’d placed her phone back in her pocket, and we had a brief discussion about whether to continue our date or to drive her to where she was staying. We reached a decision to continue the date for reasons of what the hell.

“Well, the restaurant is probably closed by now,” she said. “What should we do instead?”

“Do you want to see the castle?”

“Sure.” What the hell.

Loveland, Ohio indeed has a castle. Until recently, I’d forgotten about it, but I desperately needed something to show Amber apart from my basement corner. Somewhat unimaginatively, most people call this place Loveland Castle. Somewhat pretentiously, its caretakers call it Château Laroche. I’m not fully clear on what is and is not a chateau, so I won’t contest the point. It stands, craggy and crenellated, on the shores of the Little Miami river, overlooking a scenic garden and a less scenic unlined parking lot, reachable by car only with a steep, switchbacked one-lane road. Every Halloween, the castle becomes a popular haunted house, and school buses make their terrifying way up and down this road, ferrying patrons between the castle and their cars. Beginning in the 1920s and using flagstones from the river bank, a man named Harry built it by hand as a replica of European fortifications, lovingly reproducing continental machicolations and murder-holes. He died before finishing it. Now, the people who live there call themselves knights and support the castle through tourism. A sign hangs on the gate to the path leading up to the front door. Mostly the sign gives the dates and hours the castle is open. Also it asks the local kids not to harass the people who live there.

While I was still in college, a red-haired girl from Toledo came to visit me for a few days. Sometimes, late at night in the Ohio suburbs, novel entertainment becomes a challenge. I thought then that maybe parking with her in the empty lot of an improbable castle might afford me the opportunity to talk her out of her overalls.

In this thought, I had proven correct.

Perhaps a similar tactic would prove effective with Amber. Not that she wore overalls, but she was cute and she had driven hours to see me. I hoped that the castle would be sufficiently unusual to change the evening’s momentum. Any existing mood had been wrecked along with her car.

Amber fidgeted in her seat and looked out her window into textured suburban darkness. The houses here were stacked fairly densely together, but a line of trees near the road screened them and gave the impression of uninhabited woods.

“Are we lost?”

I’ve been gone for a few weeks. I’ll be gone for a few weeks more.

I’ve been working on writing things that, I hope, will make me some money. I’ll be back in November regardless of whether that happens. Here’s hoping you’re still around too.

“Do you want to order yet?”

The waitress weighted the yet with subtle emphasis. She stood next to my table with unctuous politeness, holding her notepad in front of her without real expectation. Her pen stayed in her apron. She smiled. She’d asked that question at least twice before, ten minutes between inquiries, each time slightly more insistently. The last time she’d come by, she’d helpfully suggested a margarita. I couldn’t bear the thought of drinking it alone. Two ravaged bowls of complimentary chips and salsa sat between me and an untouched place setting, complete with menu.

As you become more experienced in anything, you learn more survival strategies. By this point, I brought a book to first dates through reflex rather than deliberate choice. In the early days of dating, I selected the book carefully, so that when my date arrived I could place it with practiced, wholly natural nonchalance on the edge of the table, cover down but spine out, inviting my date to read the title and ask me about it. I would smile with charming, rehearsed embarrassment and say “Oh, this?” As a performance strategy, it worked well. I got to parlay the question into a discussion of what my date read, creating a conversational cul-de-sac that could be pleasantly circled for as long as we wanted.

All this is in vain if the date never arrives.

These days, I brought mass-market opiates with four-color covers, mostly because they numbed the shame and frustration better than densely footnoted literary cinderblocks. I’ve always been willing to sacrifice comfort for style, but only to a point. In terms of books, I’d reached that point months before. Today’s book was something called Dr. Bloodmoney, post-apocalyptic fantasy that prominently featured a pleasantly homicidal phocomelic handyman who had psychic powers. It suited me. Belligerently, I looked over the top of the book, past the waitress and out into the parking lot, which was empty except for my car and a steady drizzle. My phone lay silent on the table.

“I’m supposed to be meeting someone here,” I said. Obviously. She smiled politely. “Give me five more minutes, and if she hasn’t shown up by then, I’ll order something.”

The waitress walked back behind the bar and began to wipe it down. I tried to return to my book, but after a minute, I closed it. I couldn’t focus. Lateness per se was not unusual. Even being stood up was barely worth noticing. Still, Amber had come all the the way from eastern Kentucky to see me, and she had seemed more excited about me than was typical. According to her, she was staying for the weekend with a friend who lived on the east side, and she’d left almost an hour earlier. Even allowing for bad directions, she should have arrived already. I supposed the entire scenario could have been fabricated; it would not be the first (or even the second) time that a stranger had lied on the internet. Five minutes had passed. I turned my head to find the waitress, but thankfully she’d become engrossed in something on the TV over the bar. She hadn’t noticed me. I looked down at my silent phone.

It rang.

Startled, I answered it. Amber was calling. I braced myself for the inevitable cancellation and privately decided that as long as I was here, I might as well have a margarita after all.

“I don’t think I can make it,” she began.

“That’s all right,” I responded and stopped speaking, absolving myself of conversational responsibility. After all, I was where I said I’d be. She could give whatever excuse she’d decided on, and I could hang up the phone. It was just a matter of waiting for these things to happen. My participation was not really necessary.

“I crashed my car. I was coming off an exit and skidded into a guard rail. Um, do you think you could come get me? I’m not really sure where I am.”

I felt like an asshole. At least now I knew what we’d be doing for our date.

“Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Where are you?”

She gave me an intersection and the name of a gas station. I left ten dollars on the table and headed out into the rain.

Over the time that I’ve kept this blog, I’ve thought hard about dating, particularly in terms of its strategies and aftermath, and I’ve been able to distill my conclusions into a series of rules. Actually, I’ve thought about assembling them into a pamphlet and maybe handing them out to people who are even more romantically hapless than I am (on the rationale that sometimes you can learn more from serial failures than unqualified successes), but that’s a plan for later. In the meantime, ere is another rule about internet dating. Maybe it is too specific to my situation in order to be generally useful, but I’m including it anyway:

If you have a blog about internet dating, do not tell people you used to date that you have a blog about internet dating. This rule is especially true if you intend to blog about those people.

I have only about five or six people left to talk about. No doubt it has seemed as though there has been an unending stream of cyber-lady for me to wade through, occasionally stumbling and faceplanting, so that I can later come here and tell you about it. Actually, the sheer volume of romantic interaction has led a few people, strangers even*, to question the veracity of my accounts, as though it were not possible for me to have gone on so many dates in such a short period. Please bear in mind that the two factors involved here are the internet, which has an unlimited capacity for what I will obliquely call romance, and me, who has an unlimited capacity for failure. As unbelievable as it might seem, I haven’t even talked about all the dates I went on during this period. Some of them I don’t remember well enough to write about. Some of them just didn’t make very good stories. For every two people I’ve talked about here, there’s another who dropped off the radar. But of those five or six people, at least three and maybe four read this blog.

I am terrified.

Somehow I thought that it’d never get to this point. I just assumed that no one would read this, or that I’d get sick of it, or that it’d just peter out before I ended up backed against this particular wall.

It’s not that they are unaware of what I might potentially have to say. They were there, and so was I. It’s that disagreements over interpretation or differences in memory might lead to . . . um . . . well, I don’t know, really. Badness, let’s say. To use an analogy, it’s one thing to idly browse celebrity pictures in a tabloid while you’re waiting for the cashier to ring up your Funyuns, and it’s another entirely to deal with the paparazzi in a supermarket, only later to see your unflattering portrait (you, in sweatpants, holding a bag of Funyuns) appear in a cheap rag along with a similarly unflattering analysis of what that bag of snacks might be doing to your complexion.

What I’m saying is that they might get mad at me. Sometimes they get mad at me when they read what I have to say about other people, because they project themselves into the roles occupied by other people. Generally, I respond to that with an exasperated “I’m not talking about you.” Unfortunately for me, that no longer applies.

The people I have left to talk about, in roughly chronological order, are the girl from Columbus who almost wrecked her car, the girl from Kentucky who successfully wrecked her car, the girl from Tennessee who I scared away, the girl from Dayton who scared me away, the girl from Philadelphia who forgot to tell me she’d dumped me, and the girl from Cincinnati who I pushed away.

Well, here goes.

*I’m not on the twitter. A friend of mine—the most intimidating of the terrifying three or four readers, actually—mentioned a while ago that some tweetist cast aspersions on this blog. Apparently she’s a big deal in the Cincinnati twitter scene, which is a bit like being a big deal in the kiddie pool at Hilton Head, somewhere you can look out on the ocean and have some dim, toddler impression of the vastness of it. I asked my friend to “tell that twitterbitch to cram it in her tweet-hole.”

After dinner and at Jessie’s insistence, we threw the boxed pizza into my car. I had offered to allow her to take the remainder since she’d never had Dewey’s before, but as I had paid for half the bill, it seemed important to her to declare her independence from even the saddest of patriarchal leftovers. I didn’t argue. Mushroom pizza is amazing.

Jessie’s conversation came in monosyllables, and I naturally assumed that our date had by this point burned down to wet ashes. We walked down Ludlow in the direction of her car. The evening begged to be allowed to die gracefully and with dignity. I guessed that perhaps a foot and a half of empty space had grown between us, a gulf that screamed “don’t touch me.” It also caused us to take up the whole of the sidewalk, obliging us to step even further apart to allow space for lampposts, mailboxes, and other people.

“So, what are your plans for the rest of the tonight?” The question startled me, although I had been silently considering that very topic. I thought she’d leave soon, and it hadn’t seemed probable that she would care.

“Well, there’s a coffee shop about a block that way,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the theater. “I like it, and they have drinks. Care to join me?” She did care.

The coffee shop was eclectically furnished with mismatched tables and wrought iron chairs. Toward the back, the staff had provided one of the tables with row chairs ripped from some luckless movie theater. All this provided atmosphere, but Jessie seemed eager to avoid it. We chose the table closest to the door, a high top with tall stools. I ordered a milkshake, chai-flavored. (Some of you may already be flinging accusations of douchebaggery in my direction, but in my defense, it might be the tastiest thing ever made by a person).

Jessie ordered a water and nothing else. Silence yawned between us.

Trying not to audibly sigh, I shifted the conversation into reverse, moving back through topics we’d already covered that evening. We discussed publishing and peer review. We discussed departmental politics. We discussed whether or not she’d like to taste my milkshake. To my surprise, she did. Although this might seem like a potential opportunity for Lady-and-the-Trampish cuteness, there were physical obstacles to anything like that. The shop served the milkshake in two glasses, a small one for the main shake with the rest of it in the larger mixing cup. She dipped a spoon into the one I hadn’t touched and tasted, afterward placing her spoon, destined to remain untouched until she left, next to her on the table. Desperate for some relief, I excused myself to the restroom.

There is nowhere on earth where you can be yourself so much as in a bathroom. Enthroned in solitude, I squeezed absently at a recalcitrant zit and wondered whether she’d be gone if I sat there long enough. Somehow, she seemed too polite for that. I read over the excessive and colorful wall graffiti as I sat, wishing for a book and hoping to find some inspiration for something to talk about. I reached for toilet paper and jerked my hand back, sucking at my thumb. Someone had broken the toilet paper holder. No one had fixed it. A small streak of my blood colored the jagged plastic. Sucking on the cut made it worse, so I wrapped it in toilet paper, squeezing the cut with my fingers in hopes that the bleeding would stop.

Jessie looked at the bloody paper in my hand. “What happened?” Sheepishly, I told her. She took it as a cue. She stood, offering me her hand in a tyrannosaur pose, keeping her elbow close to her chest. With my unwounded hand, I shook it. “Well, thank you for meeting me for dinner. I had a nice time.” I doubted that very much, but I smiled and told her the same thing. She stood for a moment. “I think I’m heading out.”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me. I still had a bit of my milkshake left, and on my way from the bathroom, I’d noticed my friend Alex in the back of the cafe. “Okay,” I replied. “I think I’m going to stay here.” We looked at each other for a second longer, assessing the situation to see whether there was anything else to say. As it turned out, there wasn’t. Jessie left, and I let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I waited for her to turn the corner past the display windows and out of sight, and then I walked to the back of the cafe to talk to Alex.