Dating with Dan

Kevin pulled back from me. “You, sir, have extremely soft lips.”

It’s true. I have extremely soft lips.

The others at our table had been spinning an empty beer bottle for the usual reasons people spin bottles. That is, to have an excuse to make out with other people of varying levels of acquaintanceship and also to have an excuse to empty more bottles. These goals complement one another with a rare and perfect symbiosis. I chose to play, partly out of nostalgia and partly because the odds favored me. No other males besides us sat at the table. The shapely and fashionable asses of any number of attractive girls surrounded us, and I wanted to kiss the lips that belonged to them. I say “any number” because I don’t remember what that number was, but it exceeded two by a comfortable margin. Not to mention that Kevin remained very publicly romantically entwined, so the genuinely available options at the table amounted to me. My luck felt good. Also, I wanted to be drunk, and Kevin kept buying my drinks.

Here is another rule of internet dating: Never believe your luck is good. An addendum to that rule is that in particular, you should never believe your luck is good while you’re in Dayton, Ohio. An addendum to that is that if, for some reason, you have to be in Dayton, Ohio, you might as well be drunk.

Kevin had spun the bottle. It wobbled through a spot of spilled beer, dampening the label and dragging down its spin. It stopped, pointing at me. I looked up into half a dozen expectant faces. These girls played spin the bottle with uncompromising rules. I thought about times I’d seen unquestionably straight girls make out with one another to the end of making as many guys in the room as horny as possible. Its effectiveness as a tactic was undeniable. Kevin and I looked at each other and shrugged. We leaned toward each other.

Katie had just arrived, tipsy already, pouting and tapping her lips. For the moment, everyone’s attention stayed focused on Kevin and me. Katie wanted that attention focused on her. She swayed with pickled confidence on thin legs crammed into skinny jeans and pointy-toed boots. Her long brown hair framed a pleasantly curved face and glasses with thick rims. Clearly she was one of those (one of us) who’d put on weight after high school, except instead of thickening uniformly, she’d put it all on between her shoulders and waist. It reminded me of a tube of toothpaste someone had squeezed hard at the bottom. Katie demanded a kiss from everyone present. For some reason, I thought she was pretty.

Kevin refused her, looking away and loudly wondering where Anna had gone. Later at his house, he would tell me that Katie had pursued him for months, trying to pry him away from Anna. He told me about her late night phone calls, her constant attempts to get him alone, her casual contempt for Anna. He neglected to tell me, as did any of the two dozen or so people who could have told me, that she had a boyfriend of her own. You see, if I’d known that, I would be less useful as a distraction.

Katie moved on to me.

“Who are you?” Without waiting for me to respond, she pulled my head toward hers and kissed me.

Sorry, everyone. Life is happening, as it has a bad habit of doing. Regular updates will resume this weekend. Pinky swear.

The new post will be up tomorrow.

I was back in Dayton, watching hipsters dance.

Hipsters, with few exceptions, don’t really dance. Generally they have to be drunk for it to happen even as such. (For this purpose, Pabst Blue Ribbon is considered extremely correct). Girls, the ones who are more elfin and drunken, aggregate in the middle of the dance floor and bop along with the one or two guys who are lithe and wan enough to look appropriate. Probably they are wearing skinny-legged jeans. The rest of them, guys and girls, the ones with thick-rimmed glasses and PBR bodies, lurk on the periphery. If there is a band, possibly they will nod their unsmiling heads in general consensus that yes, there is a band, and it is on the stage.

That night, there was no band.

Over the last several weeks, I’d spent most of my time emailing Polly. These were long emails, heartfelt and detailed and lonely and desperate. I had nothing better to do with my time and let myself believe she had nothing better to do with hers.

Sending out my daily resume and cover letter took only an hour or so, and there were endless menacing and idle hours left to kill. Probably I could have sent out more, but looking for work is very like dating. Continual rejection becomes exhausting, much more so than staring at the ceiling or making cats chase lasers. So I emailed Polly every day, waiting longer and longer for her to email me back. My account on Match went idle. Here is another rule of dating: If an email takes you longer than an hour to write, delete it. Have a drink instead. Sometimes the drinks belong to your roommates rather than you, but sacrifices must be made.

Earlier that day, Jason’s friend Kevin and his girlfriend Anna had come to visit. Kevin, a pleasantly bearded nerd, had a large tattoo of Samus Aran covering his shoulder and upper chest. Anna was neurotic and shaggy-headed, the sort of person who gets outline tattoos of Ohio. They’d dated once when they were teenagers, breaking up after inflicting truly horrible adolescent damage on one another. As adults, they were together again and engaged, which was obviously and enormously unwise. They’d break up again in four months. I got along with both of them. They invited me back to Dayton to go out with them. I hadn’t been outside in almost a week.

We were at some sort of diner . . . club . . . place. Someone had named it The Pearl. Inside were dancers and cheap Long Island Iced Teas in small plastic cups, and outside were Kevin, Anna, and the half-dozen or so people I barely knew sitting around a table. Although I wore a variant of hipster uniform, corduroys and a thrift-store t-shirt, all meant to camouflage, I felt the terror of imminent exposure. I couldn’t fix my own bike and I kind of hated PBR. Belle and Sebastian were no longer a current topic of conversation; I felt reasonably sure of that much. I made the decision to aggressively steer any potential music conversation in the direction of Nick Cave and Daft Punk. They weren’t current, but they were also as correct and as controversial as George Washington. Appearances must be maintained. Kevin offered to buy me some drinks. Gratefully, I accepted.

His friends were girls mostly, all intimidatingly attractive and all aware of their attractiveness. Kevin told me their names. Immediately, I forgot them. Someone’s phone rang. That someone announced the imminent arrival of a Katie. Kevin’s face closed off. Anna got up went into the bar in a huff. She huffed a stealth huff, the sort of huff that is aimed at one person in particular. It is not intended to be noticed by the group at large. Kevin chose not to follow her inside. Undoubtedly, later he would pay dearly. I watched all this with strictly anthropological interest.

Katie arrived. She caught Kevin’s eyes and tapped her lips with one finger, demanding a kiss.

Polly lay on her back, still perceptibly shuddering. Her head was turned to the left, her eyes were closed, and her breath was already slowing down.

We’d pushed her white lace skirt up to her hips and her shirt up to her shoulders.  My shirt had landed on the floor among the debris that previously had formed an orderly layer on her guest bed. I don’t completely remember what it was. The debris, I mean. Pictures in frames, maybe. That seems plausible. Other things were occupying my attention. She’d wordlessly pulled me behind her down the stairs to the guest room with the silent understanding that her room was off limits, at least for this. With quiet, panting efficiency, we removed everything from the bed to the floor and stripped the comforter back from the sheets.  For the next half hour, we vocalized only in unformed syllables. Once we had achieved a practical level of semi-nudity, we’d stopped, as though by keeping our clothes by some loose definition “on,” we were not naked.

I rested my head on her thigh. I looked at her face. Her eyes were closed. I reached up to kiss her, and I reached down to my waist to unbuckle.

“No,” she said, flush with post-orgasmic sincerity. “I don’t want to be the sort of girl who cheats on her husband.” I looked at her, incredulous, speechless, and watched as she stood up. Absently, I remembered an article I’d read once. The author, a gay man writing about dating closeted men, talked at length about his sex strategy. You see, he’d learned it was a mistake to let his partner come first. Whenever that happened, the closet case in question would revert to heteronormative sexuality so fast that his shrill recriminations Doppler shifted, and the writer was left holding his dick. So to speak.

Polly replaced her glasses, and gravity pulled her clothes back down her slim body, leaving her looking just as she had before I’d arrived. She smoothed her hair. Maybe her top, a sleeveless Hello Kitty affair, was slightly more rumpled than it had been. She smiled at me, the one who was still half-naked.

I needed to assert myself. “Well, um,” I said, gesturing slowly and yet incoherently. “I thought we would, y’know,” and trailed off. That was what I said.

What I meant was, “What the fucking fuck.”

Still fully clothed, she smiled at me again and reached a soft hand out to touch me. Reluctantly, she got me where I was going. Where I was going turned out to be somewhere different from where I’d thought I was going. I’d have a long time to get used to it. We stripped the bed and she put the sheets in the washing machine. I thought to ask what she’d say if her husband thought to ask why she had decided to wash the presumably clean sheets on a presumably unused bed.

“Oh,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to clean those sheets for a while.” I supposed that was true.

Also, people who are not on the internet lie. Often we lie by saying things that are, at minimum, strictly factual. We had not gotten naked together, it was true. She had been meaning to clean those sheets for a while. I had not fucked her.

That isn’t what I thought about while I drove from Dayton to Columbus. I didn’t think about the time we spent in the guest bed either. What I thought about was Polly lying in the sun and knowing that in a minute or two she would take my hand and lead me downstairs.

I wouldn’t be able to afford gas for two weeks. I did think about that briefly, but I decided not to care.

Ramona:

Ramona reminded me that people on the internet lie. Even the most honest pursue a strategy of deliberate omission, and Ramona was not the most honest. She lived on Craigslist (I’d been slumming in w4m while I massaged my brutalized ego and wallet between Match dates) and resided in Dayton, where she worked as something white collar in a capacity involving typing. In our emails, she mentioned that she’d written a series of fantasy novels, and I did my best to be impressed. We met at BD’s Mongolian barbecue, where I experienced a series of unpleasant revelations. The most obvious was that her current photo represented a generous twenty-five pounds of wishful thinking.

No doubt my criticism comes off as fattist and shallow. Here is a secret: it is. My feeble and only defense is that the truth would not have precluded a date.

She’d also obscured the crescent of unignorable acne that bearded her face down from the corners of her mouth. We struggled to find anything to talk about; mostly we discussed her diabetes while she fought an intermittent duel with the buffet. Her roommate had dropped her off for her date, and it was up to me to transport her anywhere else. I drove her home, and I as I followed her directions, they became uncomfortably familiar. At her direction, we turned down a street I knew well, and I dropped her off at a house abutting Polly’s back yard. I’d be back there the following afternoon to have lunch with Polly.

Sometimes, when you see a person for the first time, or for the first time that moment, a clear and complete knowledge manifests itself: Today, the two of you are going to fuck.

Sometimes you are mistaken.

Between oscillations of my dress-up-meet-a-girl-buy-her-coffee-watch-her-vanish cycle, Polly and I had been emailing. I’d even driven out to visit her once or twice. Each time, she wore something sensible, conservative and sensibly form fitting. We’d get platonic coffee, and she’d introduce me as her platonic best friend to any of her neighbors that we might meet. She and I sat close together, grinding our platonic outer thighs together through bare millimeters of platonic summer weight fabric. She’d get up to order a five dollar coffee from an underpaid barista and I’d sit for a few minutes alone at the booth, thinking about baseball until I could stand up without embarrassing myself. Sometimes I’d run into her husband at their house for lunch, and then he’d drive their scooter back to work.

Later in the evening, after I’d driven home, I’d go online to look up crash fatality statistics for two-wheeled vehicles and daydream about stealing his helmet.

That particular day, I passed Polly’s husband at the door. He was leaving back for work, and she was wearing a loose and flowing skirt, something cut to look like lace. She didn’t wear it often. I knew it, and so did he. The last time I’d seen her wear it, we’d slept together. She’d made a plate of bread, cheese and fruit and put it near her head as she lay on the floor eating grapes and raspberries. She propped her bare feet up on the couch, parting her ankles, letting her skirt ride up toward her knees. I touched her leg. I touched her leg more.

She took my hand and led me to the basement.

In the morning, I woke to a bitter and weepy voicemail accusing me of deliberate malice by timing. She had just begun her trip. Clearly, I had conspired to ruin it. I thought about calling back to ask her when the optimal dumping window would be, but instead I went home and updated my profile.

Updating your profile makes you think about yourself. Rather, it made me think about myself. And about dating in general. As I may have mentioned before (or maybe not, and I’m too lazy to look), intimacy in internet dating advances according to a standard progression. It goes like this: Email, more email, phone call (optional—some people prefer to skip straight to the next step), coffee date, real date, sex, relationship. Refusal to follow the steps virtually assures failure, and each of these steps presents acute vulnerability to disaster. “Coffee date” represents the crisis point of potential failure. It’s the moment of first impression, visual and otherwise.

So, here’s what I look like.

I claim to be five-eight, and that’s probably what I am. Consensus on this point does not exist. The most vocal dissenters tend to be girls who also claim that particular height. This is not to say that two people can’t be the same height, but a visible difference in height makes reconciliation difficult. Probably we could use a ruler to settle things. That might be a reason I don’t keep one in the house.

My head is big, bearded, and shaped kind of like an angry potato. Steady, cyclical deposits of beer and burgers have slowly, in geologic time, laid down strata over my torso. My body is the sort that used to be thin, probably sometime in the late Paleozoic. The brutal ravages of time have eroded the top of my head down to the wispy bedrock. Despite these deficiencies, I’m not bad to look at. Certainly no one that you would be embarrassed to be seen in public with. I mean, probably not. Like most things, it’s a matter of taste.

So, here are some women who never called me back after a coffee date.

Robin:

She was a pleasantly curvy librarian who’d agreed to meet me at Cup O’ Joe. I showed up early and ordered a mocha from the barista, a woman who turned out to be someone I’d known in college. I recognized her as soon as she opened the door. She wore a tight shirt with a clever graphic which drew attention to the fabric stretched taut over her boobs. She made eye contact, realized who I was, scanned the shop for someone, anyone else who could possibly be the person she was supposed to meet, and crossed her arms over her chest. With deep resignation apparent on her face, she walked over to say hi. I decided not to pay for her coffee and went to the bathroom to set an alarm on my phone for forty minutes.

Lynn:

Lynn showed up for our coffee date (Cup O’ Joe, natch) wearing something teetering on the business casual/business professional cusp. I’d dressed presentably, but more like someone who was going to a coffee shop. She was hot, Korean, nasally pierced, and in school to study something vaguely sciency that started with a P. I forget. She talked about herself for an hour, crossing and uncrossing her long, long legs, occasionally remembering that I was there for long enough to ask me a question. I mentioned my economic uncertainties. This is beyond doubt. The date seemed to go well, and in fact, she called me again later that day. The status of my employment came up again. Perhaps because we were on the phone, she heard me this time, and abruptly decided that we “weren’t right for each other.”

No, probably not.

Probably this is one of those things that make me look bad.

Unwisely, I’d taken her call, and Missy had been talking rapidly and at high volume for seven or eight minutes. Neal wore an expression of profound discomfort. The facial expressions for “I immediately need to find a toilet” and “I immediately need not to be listening to this conversation” bear marked similarities. He stood up.

“I’m getting a beer,” he said. “Do you want one?”

I wanted one. Also another one. And, I suspected, the one after that. We kept all the beer in the refrigerator, two convenient rooms away from me and the flood of recriminatory invective spewing from my phone. Neal fled to the kitchen, returned with a tallboy, and left again, closing the glass door behind him, leaving me alone with my phone. My active participation didn’t seem completely necessary, so I cracked open the tallboy and drank it.

She abruptly interrupted herself. “What’s that noise?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It must be some static.” Slurping sounds like static, sort of, except insofar as it sounds like slurping. She began to chew me out again and then stopped. She hung up. I sighed heavily and drank.

Sometimes, when someone says something terrible to you—like when someone dumps you unexpectedly—you don’t know what to say right away, but then something clever and crushing occurs to you later. Most of us decide that the moment’s over. Some people replay the incident obsessively, splicing in the frame where what they should have said is what they did say until the way they want to remember it is as real as the way they do remember it. Other people save the comeback, wrapping it carefully and storing it somewhere easily accessible, to be used when a similar situation recurs, as it almost certainly will.

Timing was nothing to Missy.

A few minutes later, let’s call it ten minutes, she called back. I answered the phone. She’d made me a nice birthday dinner, so I decided to let her say awful things to me for a few more minutes. I wanted to be sure I’d burned off that karma.

“All my friends said you weren’t good enough for me, and I defended you. I told them you were a writer. You don’t even have a job!”

Her account was accurate, and I told her so. She hung up. Another sigh, and my beer ran out. I crumpled the can and bounced it off the patio door. Neal opened it.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yeah. Can I have another beer?”

As it turned out, I could have another beer. I sat on the couch between Neal and his roommate. They finished up a grainy VHS of Tango & Cash and then switched to an even grainer copy of Alphaville. I drank more. Missy called back. I considered. The week before, she’d bought me concert tickets. I went back to the porch to answer the phone.

“I’m a catch. I’m hot! I can’t believe you’re dumping me. You’re making a mistake. You’ll never see me in my flight attendant’s uniform. That’s something men dream about!”

Less accurate than last time, but it was still roughly factual. I thought about her lips. I thought about her bookshelf. I thought about how I thought about anything else at all while I was with her. Out loud, I agreed with her again. She hung up.

Back inside, I collapsed bonelessly on the couch. The movie had already started. Whatever was happening on the screen was subtitled and incredibly French, but I had trouble focusing on more than that. Somehow I’d gone from sober to hung over without any interval of drunkenness.

Missy called again, and Neal looked at me. I decided that I didn’t owe her anything else that particular evening. I turned off the ringer.

Neal had a back porch, beer, and air conditioning, so I drove to his house rather than mine. I thought maybe it’d be better to have company while I waited to dump Missy.

Neal was a painter I’d met during one of my blips of employment. We’d been working in a meat grinder for the educated unemployed, grading standardized tests from high schoolers while weeping the bitterest of tears. Dozens, maybe hundreds of us spent eight hours a day in a long room lit with harsh fluorescents, clicking numbly through page after page of abject ignorance. Previously the building had been a grocery store, and my company was renting it. A few weeks later the company would lose the contract I worked on, and it would go out of business so hard that they (well, someone anyway) blasted the building into rubble. Neal noticed me after work one day and asked me to come out for a beer. We became friends.

Sometimes I sat with my computer at his apartment and wrote while he painted. Conveniently, I could piggyback on one of his neighbor’s wireless networks if I scrunched up close enough to his wall. Inconveniently, I couldn’t break into his neighbor’s house and reset the router when my laptop decided to be finicky, but it was better than being alone in my room.

I told Neal about Missy, and then I told him about Polly. I talked about Polly for a long time. He listened, and he laughed, and he drank cheap beer. He put a wire screen into a hollow tube that used to be part of a socket wrench and smoked pot out of it. It relaxed me to be around him. Missy planned to call me at eight. I told him that too. I wanted him to be there so that I wouldn’t chicken out and that I wouldn’t be on the phone too long.

Here is a rule of internet dumping: do not chicken out, and do not be on the phone too long.

Missy called.

I let her talk. Possibly that was a mistake, but there needs to be small talk. Etiquette demands it. She talked about Denver and whatever it was she did in Denver and whoever it was she did things in Denver with. Being a flight attendant sounded glamorous. Again, I wished I had a job. She started to make plans for when she returned. These plans included me.

“Um, yeah, Missy, about that. I’m up for hanging out when you get back, but I don’t think that we should date. I don’t think it’s working out.” Because you have thin lips. Because you kind of bore me. Because I don’t like any of your friends. Reasons for not wanting to date are irrelevant, and it is a mistake to mention them. Reductively, they are the same. Because I don’t want to.

She stopped talking, and a long and stunned silence followed. I cleared my throat.

“So, um. How is Denver otherwise?” Post breakup, etiquette does not demand small talk. I should have hung up the phone. She struggled with a half-answer and then hung up. I thought that was the end of it.

Twelve minutes later, she called back. I answered the phone.

Here is another rule of internet dumping: Do not answer the phone.

If you’ve seen someone shirtless, it’s bad form to break up via text message. Another rule of internet dating is that politeness makes you feel like less of a dick.

Possibly that’s why politeness was invented. So you can say terrible things to people and feel okay about it.

Missy’s flight had just landed somewhere . . . west. Denver, maybe. Already I couldn’t keep track. She’d texted me to tell me she’d landed safely. Of course I was pleased she was safe, although for a selfish reason. If she’d died in a plane crash while I was thinking about breaking up with her, I’d feel enormously guilty. I didn’t text back right away. Driving gave me plausible deniability.

Polly lived with her new husband in a fashionable suburb of Dayton–the one with the good schools, quaint shops and heavily patrolled streets. I’d spent money I didn’t have on so I could visit her. Gas cost $4 a gallon, but I’d already decided to swipe food from my roommates that week. I hadn’t seen her since I left for Japan, but she’d invited me over for lunch that afternoon.

She lived in a generically pleasant two-story house. Despite its bedrooms and basement, it gave the impression of being a bungalow. She smiled when she saw me and gave me a tour of the house, airily sashaying through the rooms, bodily communicating intense self-satisfaction. Her daughter was off at school. She wore something new and quietly fashionable. My clothes looked the same way they did the last time I’d seen her. At least I’d lost weight. Economic pressure to ride a bike and buy less food does have limited and horrible advantages.

She introduced me to her husband, a bland and bewildered man with acres of bare scalp beneath a central strip of long, thin hair, sort of an inverted comb-over. I hated him instantly. He was home for lunch. He left again for work, and I hung around for maybe twenty minutes more, nominally talking to Polly but really coveting her legs, her lips, and the life she’d suddenly built without me. She’d pressured her husband to propose after they’d known each other for five months, they’d bought a house together at nine, and they were on their honeymoon just after a year of acquaintanceship. While I was gone, she’d bought the Ikea “suburban bliss” flat pack and assembled it. Unaccountably, I felt abandoned, even though I was the one who’d gone to Asia rather than marry this woman. I believed she was living the life I deserved.

Here is another rule. It’s more of a general rule than a dating one, but I’ll share it with you anyway. Never hope to get what you deserve. Probably, what you think you deserve and what you actually deserve are grotesquely dissimilar.

She made lunch for us. I left soon after. Polly kissed me goodbye. We stood behind her front door, using it to block the neighbors’ view. We kissed a lingering kiss that was thirty seconds and a flick of the tongue too long to be chaste or friendly or nostalgic. She pushed me out onto her front porch and closed the door. Later she’d tell me that her husband refused to sleep with her once they’d bought the house together, and so she went months at a time without sex. Later than that I would learn that, like me, she was unable to let go of things and especially people she’d decided were hers. Even later, I would learn that she used truth creatively, constructing something that no longer resembled itself and instead resembled her. Most people are able to fabricate the truth. It’s called lying, and it’s easy. She was able to fabricate sincerity. I don’t know what that’s called.

I drove to the nearest gas station to fill up. My phone buzzed in my pocket and would continue to do so for the hour drive back to Columbus. The messages themselves were irrelevant. Each time it was Missy, wordlessly reminding me that she wanted to be with me. I didn’t answer. I used the time alone to decide how we were going to break up.