Dating Amy Read online

  Normally I loathe hearing about how beautiful other women are, especially from a potential prospect. It’s even worse when he doesn’t have one kind thing to say about my looks. This particular situation had me in a politically correct quandary, though. On the one hand, he was just another guy yammering on about hot chicks right in front of my face. On the other hand, he was blind.

  I couldn’t help but be fascinated by his very male sense of entitlement.

  It truly pointed up a core difference between men and women. If a blind woman were on a date with a stranger, she’d probably feel by turns hesitant and humble—assuming she would even have the confidence to do something like online dating, which is scary even when you have all of your senses. She would certainly have mentioned it, probably apologetically, before the date. Leave it to a man to act like the world is his own private beauty contest even if he needs the program printed up in Braille. In a way I admired him.

  My political correctness held my sense of self at bay for the better part of an hour until I finally broke: “How do you know all these women are so beautiful?” I asked. “You’re blind.”

  “I’m not that blind,” he said.

  When I was ready to leave he asked me to wait with him because he wouldn’t be able to see the bright yellow taxi when it drove up. I’m sure if there were a gorgeous blonde driving it he’d be able to spot it.

  After I saw him off, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a Lean Cuisine on my way home since he hadn’t offered dinner. Tiny, ornamental pumpkins sat like fat orange jewels in the front bins. Fall had arrived and I felt good. The date had gone well, and despite his oddness, or maybe because of it, I had had fun with Indentured by Cats, and when he asked me out again, I said yes. More important, my dating project had officially started.

  It had started to drizzle, so I’d put on a baseball cap I’d bought on vacation. “You’re wearing a Yankees hat in Seattle? We need to talk,” the young guy behind the checkout said. He was tall, big, athletic, confident. A wave of chemicals crashed over me and then receded, the undertow pulling the sand from underneath my toes. “What’s your name?” he said. “I see you in here all the time.”

  In the span of a few hours it seemed that I had seen the difference between the kind of man I was going to be dating and the kind of man I was attracted to.

  BUNK DEBUNK

  * * *

  Myth: Love only happens when you’re not looking for it.

  Debunked!

  I always suspect a death wish—or rather celibacy wish—coming from the people giving this advice. Invariably they are also the sorts who panic if they are alone for more than a week and who met their most recent liaison by placing ads on more than one dating Web site.

  Really, when I’m “not looking” for anyone, it means that on the rare occasions I do leave the house, I give one-word answers to strangers and haven’t washed my hair.

  Of course you have to be looking for love; it’s a completely different mind-set from not looking. And not looking is not pretty, in my case at least.

  * * *

  DATE 2 The Accidental Interview

  TRUE CONFESSION

  I wanted my dates to be in the morning paper, but not like this.

  The reporter was peering at my literally blind date, Indentured by Cats, over her gold wire-rimmed glasses, pen poised over a tiny notebook. He and I were at a tasting being held at a wine store and we were cornered.

  “Would you say this is a romantic place to take someone? I mean, is this a date?”

  Please pretend you’re deaf too, I thought.

  “I don’t know, is this a date?” he said, and they both turned to me.

  “It is,” he quickly answered for me.

  “I’m writing an article on wine tasting for the travel section of the Seattle Times.”

  Of course she was, because the editor over there won’t even answer my e-mails about my dating column idea, so now somehow Bad Luck and Irony have gotten together and found someone to accidentally interview me about one of my dates while I’m actually on the date with a man who doesn’t even know I have a dating Web site.

  “I have my own column,” she continued.

  Of course she did.

  “Can I get your occupation?”

  Unemployed, thanks for the reminder.

  “Web site editor,” I answered.

  “. . . and the spelling of your name?”

  M-O-R-T-I-F-I-E-D, I thought.

  “A-M-Y,” I answered instead.

  Things had been going very well up until that point. Indentured had taken care of everything—he knew the owner and brought special wineglasses for us and was on time.

  The featured wines were from New Zealand, as was the guy pouring them. Apparently Monty Python had a bit about Australian wines, which Indentured and the pourer were able to reenact and which was probably funnier thirty years ago when it came out, because Australia didn’t export wines then. I did like the part where they said Perth Pink “is a bottle with a message in it, and the message is ‘Beware,’ ” though.

  I was having a great time. Everything was lovely. The pinot noir was outstanding. Indentured didn’t think I saw him sneak into line to buy me a bottle after I raved about it.

  Later on he took me to dinner at a romantic continental supper club around the corner. Though I tried not to show it, I was still bothered by getting interviewed. I wanted my dates written about in the paper, but in my Pulitzer fantasy they were usually written by me. I could barely concentrate on my jerk chicken with puréed sweet potato, sautéed spinach, and two glasses of Australian chardonnay. He presented me with the bottle of pinot noir. He is bright, if very focused on nerdlike things like computer games. He explained the baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey for about ten minutes and I still didn’t get it, but that demonstrated that he possessed the quality of patience. Maybe I could get used to being like Mrs. Wonder or Mrs. Charles. . . or someone married to a nonblack, non-musical-genius who was blind.

  I could definitely see some benefits to getting involved with him. I would be able to lie about my appearance for one thing. Sweats and T-shirts could pose as respectable clothing until they started to smell funny. Beauty routines like getting highlights or my hair trimmed would certainly be less urgent. Nail polish would be rendered obsolete.

  After dinner, Indentured and I walked across the street to a European wine bar where he had champagne and I had peppermint tea. He began talking about the aftermath of his divorce. He admitted his complete surprise that the hauntingly beautiful twenty-somethings who bartend at his neighborhood pub didn’t pursue him once he stopped wearing his wedding ring. He thought the gold band was all that was standing between him and unbridled ecstasy, and did not consider that their eager politeness may have been tip-motivated rather than lust-based.

  He told a long story of a disappointing trip he and his then-wife took to Tuscany while I watched my tea bag slowly turn in the white ceramic cup. “Divorce is so discouraging because you’re basically admitting that things didn’t work out with the coolest person you’ve ever dated,” he said. I had never thought of it that way. Maybe I was reading him all wrong. Maybe he was sensitive and deep and not just some horny blind guy with a sense of entitlement who read social signals poorly.

  “I couldn’t wait to get out of my marriage because I wanted to nail the good-looking girls who work at the coffee shop near my house. They were always flirting with me when I was married. When they said hello and remembered that I like double lattes, I could just tell they wanted me too. Once I was divorced they weren’t as interested as I thought, though.”

  Or maybe I was reading him perfectly. I felt the need to defend myself as a never-married. “Married people are kind of arrogant to think they’d all be doing so well if they were single. I mean, what does that say for people who actually are single and can’t find anyone? That we’re all just losers and you wouldn’t be in our circumstance for long if you were single?”

&n
bsp; “Well, is that the case?” he said.

  The techno music and cosmopolitan feel of the wine bar reminded me of L.A. and made me lonely for the people I used to know there. That melancholy feeling hits swiftly and hard when you don’t have a lot of friends in town. When it was time to go, his big yellow taxi pulled up. I live two blocks from the wine bar and his cab was going past my apartment, but he did not offer me a ride, although he did sort of make me kiss him, which was awkward. It was like I was the guy seeing his girl safely home by putting her in a cab.

  Later that week when I told him I didn’t feel we were a match he said he was disappointed, as I was sweet and easy to be with, but he couldn’t afford to keep dating me anyway. I felt bad because he seemed to like me, but I also felt that he didn’t know me at all. I was once again thinking I had misjudged him when he said, “I was watching South Park the other night and I wished you were with me. I know how much we both love it.”

  He was confusing me with some other woman obviously, perhaps a gorgeous blonde twenty-one-year-old from the Internet. I don’t watch South Park.

  Wait, how does he watch South Park?

  BUNK DEBUNK

  * * *

  Myth: If I were single I’d be with any number of people I can tell are dying for me.

  Debunked!

  This largely improbable phrase is only uttered by people who’ve been in a relationship for a very long time. The implication is that these married/committed people would be much better at being single than a single person is. When you’re in a relationship, anyone of the opposite sex who is nice to you becomes a potential prospect since it’s all fantasy. The men at work who ask if you want to grab a bite, your friend’s husband who tells you that you look great, the client who brings you a latte and laughs at your jokes—to the mind of the spoken-for these are all tantamount to a promise ring.

  Those of us who are single know better. For one thing, if you’re taken, you’re safe, so any commitment-phobic or sexually confused person you know will be drawn to you like a metal filing to a magnet. Most of the people you think are interested in you would in actuality run away like the knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail if they thought there was any chance at all of being with you.

  If you were single, you’d find out soon enough how hard it is to find a truly committed relationship. That’s why single people are always saying how hard it is to find a truly committed relationship. It’s not that we’re all losers who don’t get it. Really.

  I’ll never forget having lunch with a friend who’s been married since college. “Look at this young guy coming over,” she said with a smug smile. “I have this happen all the time.”

  It was the waiter.

  * * *

  DATE 3 There’s a Penis Loose in the Cornfield

  TRUE CONFESSION

  Originally called “A Goat and Two Beatles,” this is a cautionary tale of how an innocent trip to a pumpkin patch can go horribly awry when one or more members of the party become engorged.

  Last summer I met Have Glitter Ball Will Travel, a lounge singer from New York, at a coffee shop on a Sunday morning. It was a blind date we had set up through the Internet. Me: dark pink camisole from Victoria’s Secret, black shorts, tanned legs. Him: one-speed bicycle and many years older than his picture—a stark, somewhat cheesy black-and-white shot of a man in a tux with jet-black hair leaning on his portable keyboard. In person he was nowhere near as high contrast, but had more of a brownish, blended quality. He was not unattractive, though. I like nebbishy Jewish guys and they seem to like me.

  He got us a latte (me) and an espresso (him) while I sat at a sidewalk table in the mist. “Nice legs,” said two guys walking by.

  “When I saw you I was thinking ‘It’d be nice if that were her.’ ” he said when he came out with our coffees and sat down. After we had our drinks, he and his bicycle walked me home and I found I liked him much more than I had anticipated.

  Soon after, he got work playing the piano and singing on a cruise ship that took him from Alaska to the Panama Canal for the rest of the summer. His act consisted of performing standards by people like Johnny Mathis and Cole Porter. Although he called fairly often to tell funny stories about his octogenarian groupies or the time his Books on Tape of the Bible melted from being left on a radiator (“it’s now the Book of RooOOOwrooooth”), we hadn’t seen each other since that morning at the coffee shop.

  Now it was fall. He was back in town and wanted to take me to Sunday brunch. It was only our second date, so I still didn’t know him well. Apparently he was on the fast track to change that. He told me about his romantic history as we waited on the restaurant’s shallow steps and I quickly realized I was in too deep. He had moved from New York to Seattle to be with a woman to whom he was engaged but didn’t seem to have known for long. Then there was Trudy, Annette, two Carolines. . . the guy has had more aborted engagements than Johnny Depp. By the time our table was ready he was already looking at me like I would be next.

  Some women find being rushed by a guy early on to be flattering, but I never understand insta-macy or telling all in very early dating. I mean, where’s the fire? Our conversation was thankfully interrupted by great Denver omelets and scones, which were really coffee cake with raspberry jam.

  Since nothing says “I don’t live in L.A. anymore” like crimson leaves and hot apple cider from roadside stands, I wanted to take a drive to the country to get a pumpkin for Halloween.

  Glitter Ball told me that his father was a musician in the ’60s. It became clear that his biggest artistic achievement was the people he hung out with. While my childhood memories are of a series of gray cats and my parents’ martini-swilling friends, Glitter Ball’s are of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and John Lennon.

  “I remember meeting John in a studio in Manhattan. He was abrupt. He was in the middle of recording and it wasn’t going well,” he said. “George was wonderful, though. He used to come to our house for Sunday dinner. He was so good to our family. He was just a nice man.”

  I’ve been to Liverpool twice. I’ve seen the red gate and shock of green grass at Strawberry Fields, Paul’s boyhood home and John’s boyhood home, Penny Lane and Eleanor Rigby’s grave. But to actually have known them, especially John, well, I was beyond impressed.

  “Would you mind if I wrote about you knowing the Beatles?” I said.

  He took my hand as we got on the freeway. “It’s yours.”

  Two degrees away from the Beatles. Could their rarefied sensibilities, their class and exquisite sense of grace, have influenced Glitter Ball as a child and as a young man? I decided they must have. How could they not? I leaned my head back against the seat of his truck and the autumn countryside showed off its gold and ruby as if it were a bracelet.

  A handmade sign pointed us to the “Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maize.” Passengers on a plane flying overhead would be able to see that the cornfield was mowed into animal shapes. Those of us on the ground could tell which animals we were in by little signs that gave us fun facts about them. In the rooster’s beak, Glitter Ball suddenly pulled me to him and kissed me. He did it again in the sheep’s nose and more fervently in the cow’s udder.

  By the time we were in the horse’s ass I started to feel like I was in a different maze—the one from The Shining. Like Jack Nicholson being taken over by an evil, snowed-in hotel, Glitter Ball was taken over by his penis. There was something wrong and perverse about him sprouting horns in what was meant to be a family-oriented place. Small children ran by, horrified. “I’ll show you some facts about animals,” his penis seemed to say.

  His kisses, requests, and expectations got harder and faster. He begged me to come for Christmas in New York, where he would be performing the lounge version of The Nutcracker at some of the finest hotels in Brooklyn. Visions of sugarplums mercifully showing me an escape route from this godforsaken cornfield danced in my head.

  At least I got the answer to my question “Where’s the fire?” It was crackl
ing and roaring in Glitter Ball’s pants. I realized it had been his penis telling me about all the broken engagements—hell, it was probably his penis that caused the engagements in the first place. It had taken me to brunch and now it was pressed against me in a cornfield.

  Has there ever been an organ that is as credited with supernatural powers? In India it is viewed as sacred and allowed to wander the streets unattended. Or maybe that’s cows. Or cats in Egypt. In any event, the penis is used as a catchall explanation by men for any number of bad behaviors and is conveniently the one excuse women cannot really prove is a lie. Not firsthand anyway. While the vagina just innocuously sits there in a sort of shrug with its hands open as if to say, “I don’t know, whatever you want to do. . .” the penis is a divining rod for trouble: spending money its owner doesn’t have, making promises he won’t keep, and seeking out other women’s innocuous shrugs.

  What would the Beatles, who said “I’m happy just to dance with you,” think of this? Maybe Glitter Ball hadn’t been influenced by their rarefied sensibilities, class, and exquisite sense of grace after all.

  When I finally staggered out of the cornfield, I was met by a cute goat in a pen, a real one this time. I took a picture of it. I picked out an oddly shaped $5 pumpkin, which Glitter Ball’s penis insisted on paying for with a credit card, and we left at least one maze behind us.