Dating Amy Read online

  On the way back, Glitter Ball talked about how his penis makes him unable to judge appropriately. Perhaps he thought I had been unconscious for the past three hours. Apart from that, the ride home was as silent as the gray October fog drifting in from the sound.

  “I just want you to think about what it would be like to have a seven-inch clitoris,” he finally said.

  * * *

  DATE 4 The Kind of Man I Should Want

  TRUE CONFESSION

  He seemed—for lack of a better phrase—so grown-up to me. Further proof that I am not quite ready to move on from the indiscretions of my youth, but instead look forward to seeing them again in the future.

  The strangeness I was having with online dating made me decide that the next time I accepted a date it would be with someone I had already met. It seemed like a good idea to talk in person before committing myself to dinner and a cornfield.

  I was downtown and it was 5:00 p.m., otherwise known as cocktail time, and since there’s no better place to meet high-quality guys than in a bar while it’s still daylight, I popped into a tony steakhouse. Young men in black bow ties jump to open the heavy doors; cranberry-colored cuts of meat are displayed in a glass case in the entryway. The restaurant is absolutely unaffordable to me, but the happy hour has beer-soaked prawns and tiny roast beef sandwiches with horseradish and mayo for $1.50. I love looking at the sleek women and men in suits from the nearby financial district. I love the solidity of the heavy wooden bar and the solvency implied by its cigar-smoking clientele.

  Two men at the bar were waiting for a friend, but they gave up his seat for me.

  “You three together?” said the bartender, all crisp white shirt and narrow black tie. He set cocktail napkins in front of us like he was dealing cards.

  “No,” I answered.

  “She said that fast,” the one in the suit who looked like Ed Harris said to the one in the brown bomber jacket who looked like John Goodman. “She didn’t want to be associated with us for even a second.”

  They put my glass of white wine on their tab.

  “Aren’t you glad we dragged you out to happy hour? You work too much,” John Goodman said to Ed Harris.

  “This guy is here all the time,” said Ed Harris about John Goodman.

  It turned out that both men were working on a politically loaded urban project that didn’t interest me in the slightest since it didn’t affect me directly.

  Topics that interest me radiate out from my mind like the rings from a stone tossed into a lake. Feng shui, Johnny Depp, and HBO are at the center. Mathematics, economic statistics, and technical explanations about anything lap at the very distant shore.

  Ed Harris in the suit decided to pitch a conversational khaki tent on the sand by discussing big business’s accounting practices, Nixon, and local Seattle politics. It made sense since he is an accountant who works with local politics.

  Then again, John Goodman in the brown bomber jacket worked on the same project and his rock hit (plop!) right in the middle of my pleasure-seeking lake. He sat next to me and started talking about Napa. “Yeah, I love a good road trip,” he said.

  Napa. It would be harvest time there. The vines heavy with ripe fruit, the leaves turning gold against the dark, bluish gray sky. Four-poster beds in old Victorian homes, breakfasts of spiced turkey sausages and French toast laced through with thick cream custard and a side of hot maple syrup and berries. The flow of chardonnay and merlot and pinot noir.

  Each man gave me his card.

  I know perfectly well that when a woman meets two friends and they both give her their numbers that she is supposed to choose the one she likes best and call him. The one she chooses then immediately calls the one she didn’t to say, “That woman we both met called me, we’re going out Friday.” I have seen this played out countless times with male friends, coworkers, and roommates. It’s one of the things I love about men. If two women friends like the same man and he expresses an interest in both and then calls just one, the result is anything from a snorted, “You can have him,” to catty remarks that circle back about three months later. Men know it’s all a game, God bless them.

  I did the unorthodox and called them both.

  “Oh, Amy. Ed and I were just talking about you,” said John Goodman. I had called Ed fifteen minutes before.

  They both asked me out.

  I walked down an alley in Pike Market and opened an unmarked pink door. The interior is decorated with pink lamps, mismatched floral tablecloths, and mismatched antique dishes. It is decidedly pink, but not queasily so, and is known for its drag-queen cabaret. We were to have drinks. Ed Harris was already sitting at a table waiting for me.

  We ordered wine (me: the house pinot grigio, him: a merlot). He was planning on dinner. I wasn’t, but rallied when I saw my half chicken limon with braised okra and sweet caramelized onions in a pastry shell. He gave me a nicely wrapped bottle of good chardonnay. It was a happy new dating trend maybe, the second time in two weeks that a man had given me a bottle of wine at dinner.

  While we shared a caramel dessert with nuts and whipped cream (one plate, two spoons), he told me that he was divorced but that he had processed things and learned a lot. He said he was ready to get married again. I think divorced guys are a better bet than never-marrieds. They’ve committed, for a while at least.

  Ed Harris is just a nice Seattle native. Polite, good job, good guy.

  As we walked to his car, he explained that he had researched which kind would be most economical and how he had finally ended up buying his father’s car because his father had also researched economical cars. It’s a true testimony to my immaturity that I find talk of practicality and economy a total turnoff.

  After dinner we decided to go for a drive in his used Toyota (“New cars lose a large percentage of their value the moment you drive them off the lot”) and I suggested we go look at Halloween lights. We thought our best bet would be a funky, artsy, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood called Fremont. As we drove past houses with clever jack-o’-lanterns and orange twinkle lights and witches with accordion tissue-paper legs, Ed told me that his company had banned any sort of witch decorations in the break room or public areas because the three Wiccans in the graphic arts department found them an insult to real witches. The company retaliated somewhat by accusing one of the male Wiccans (so, warlock, I suppose) of dressing too “Goth,” but the Wiccan countered by claiming religious discrimination and won. I would think a benefit of practicing witchcraft would be that you could circumvent regular corporate channels by casting spells and things, but that’s probably discriminatory on my part too.

  Ed was nervous saying good night and accidentally socked me in the jaw, something I suspect many, many men have thought to do and somehow restrained themselves from.

  After I published the date on my Web site, I got the following e-mail from a married woman who claimed to be living vicariously through me (after she bitched about me not having enough dates up yet):

  This is the guy you should be with. Look at what you said about him: Ed Harris is just a nice Seattle native. Polite, good job, good guy. That says it all. That’s all you need.

  Was it all I needed, though? Was I making this harder than it had to be? I reevaluated the date’s highlights: Ed had made the joke “I really love music, but I’m not a musician; I play drums.” I’ve heard it before, but it’s still cute, I guess. I also enjoyed the story about the witches in the art department a lot. He also did some funny theater of the absurd at the restaurant, where he encouraged me to “Be a racehorse, because a squirrel on a racetrack just looks stupid!” and stormed off. Actually the last one was from a homeless guy I saw when I was on my way to the bathroom, but it still added to the evening.

  Ed had told me that he was once so in love he got a speeding ticket. “We had just had a great date and I had the radio up loud, the windows open. . . I was so happy I didn’t realize how fast I was going.”

  Surely this was the kind of gu
y I should be with. I wasn’t feeling much chemistry but I did feel that I should develop a more mature taste in men. He was very sweet, reliable, called when he said he would, and wanted to get married again. He’s the kind of guy that we women say we want, so when he asked me out for Halloween, I said yes.

  BUNK DEBUNK

  * * *

  Myth: You can’t meet anyone decent at a bar.

  Debunked!

  It may be more women than men who think this, but as the tequila-swilling bleached blonde who gave me my first job in L.A. used to say, “Sooner or later, everyone goes to a bar.” (Often my “advisers” tend to be codependents, drunks, sex addicts. . . hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)

  Sure, if a bar stool actually has his name on it, you may not want to get involved—unless hanging out at that particular spot at least four nights a week is a social goal for you—but a few of my nicest (and hottest) friends have met their husbands at bars. Some of the most marriage-minded men I’ve dated (plus several favorites who weren’t) were guys I met at bars, so I can personally recommend this method.

  Now we’re back to the stopped clock thing, aren’t we. . .

  * * *

  DATE 5 The Kind of Man I Do Want

  TRUE CONFESSION

  He seemed grown-up to me, too, but more in the “Mommy and Daddy are going to watch a grown-up film now, so you have to go to bed” sort of way.

  If Ed Harris was the guy I knew I should want, John Goodman was the man I wanted in spite of myself. One appealed to my head and the other appealed to someplace lower.

  We were having drinks at the same pricey steakhouse where we met. He had been anticipating a nightmarish meeting earlier that day and explained that that was why he needed to meet me as early as possible (4:30) for a relaxing drink.

  I was already predisposed to liking him the best of anyone I’d dated since I started the site. I told myself it was because he reminded me of John Goodman (as Dan Conner on Roseanne, and not the dangerous psycho from Barton Fink, obviously).

  He was drinking a greyhound and smoking a cigar and wearing the brown leather jacket. I ordered a martini with lots of olives.

  “If this contract doesn’t come through, I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but in a way it would be a relief. I’m a renegade. I don’t like to be bound up by work every day. Big risks, big payoffs.”

  Yes, I thought. That’s for me.

  “Not sure I’d stay in Seattle, though,” he continued. “I’m sick of needing my headlights on at three in the afternoon because it’s so gloomy. So what kind of writing do you do?”

  “First-person nonfiction,” I said.

  “Wow, that’s great,” he said. “I like narrative nonfiction. I’m reading Confederates in the Attic.”

  He told me about the book. So my Web site wasn’t quite about a journalist who followed Civil War reenactment people around. It still wasn’t a lie exactly. I felt too lightweight telling him I’m a dating writer. There was the feel of history about him, something old and earthy and rich, something that didn’t have to do with the impermanence of the Internet. He told me about a woman friend of his. She was in New Orleans and it was about 3:00 a.m. She got arrested for public indecency with a young man—a really young man. It would probably have been okay except that they were on the courthouse steps. “You have to be pretty lewd to be considered lewd in New Orleans. It’s one of the things I love about her,” he said.

  If asked to describe my physical type, I would probably come up with the archetype of the skinny British rock star or his wannabe Hollywood counterpart—a reedlike, tall body and a mop of straight hair with bangs—the kind of man who is boyish looking even into his fifties by sheer force of will.

  The truth is that my reaction to John Goodman had nothing to do with my head or my pre-thought-out answer about what type of man I like. He was big, solid, not fat exactly, but not thin. My first boyfriend out of college had been built like a tennis player, lean, tall. We had broken up and he had left the state and gone home to his parents. I was destroyed. About six months later he came back and all those dinners of meat loaf and Betty Crocker brownies had transformed him from lean to fatty—not obese, not flabby, but definitely overweight. I didn’t know if it was just that I was so relieved to be back together with him or that the swell of his lower belly now rose into my body like it was molded to me, but our sex life, always rabid, somehow miraculously got better. I’ve never viewed overweight men the same way since.

  There is something about a man who will give himself over to food and drink that’s infinitely sexier than the kind of man who counts calories or takes out a personal ad that says “I like to keep fit.”

  John Goodman was Bacchus—the wine, the weight, the pursuit of pleasure at the cost of cookie-cutter appearances. Ironically he didn’t seem to be offering dinner. I was starving, so I asked, “Do you mind if I eat?”

  “Get her whatever she wants, Ellie,” he said to a middle-aged waitress with overprocessed blonde hair as he excused himself to go make a phone call.

  I ordered and he came back. The bloody juices from my steak circled around the mound of garlic mashed potatoes while he told me stories of his travels for the better part of an hour.

  “I have to go feed my kids,” he said after my leftovers were boxed up and his second greyhound was drained. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.” I was disappointed. It was still early. I wondered if he was really divorced like he had said. “We’ll have to go to a Cajun place I know of next time,” he said. “Their food’s like a four-alarm fire. You’ll love it.”

  When I hugged him good-bye, he felt solid but his brown leather jacket was like butter to my hands.

  DATE 6 Mismatched Costumes on Halloween

  TRUE CONFESSION

  I love haunted houses, vampires, witches, and ghosts; I’m just not sure they’re great additions to a date night.

  I was regretting that I had agreed to dress in costume for Halloween. I had a date with Ed Harris but it wasn’t like we were even going to a party. The plan was to have dinner and then walk around and look at costumes. We would just be this lone straight couple wandering around the main drag of the predominantly gay part of town. If I changed my mind, Ed would have accommodated me. He was that kind of guy. I decided to be a good sport about it.

  Normally Halloween is my favorite holiday, because it’s not tied to family angst or spending a lot of money on other people, but this year I was in a funk. I had been doing freelance work for my former company, a big online entertainment guide. My latest project was reviewing restaurants, which for any other employer is probably lots of fun. I’m always reading food reviews that paint a picture of good friends sharing daring entrées and pithy conversation. My employer wouldn’t pay for meals though, so at each restaurant I had to ask if I could sit down alone and just have water while I reviewed the décor and guessed at what the food might taste like if I worked for someone who would pay for it. The restaurants were assigned by type, so one week I sat and had water at a dozen Japanese restaurants; the next, at a dozen diners. That week I was sipping agua at Mexican places and feeling a renewed sense of frustration at not having my own newspaper column. My own Web site, on the other hand, was doing fantastically. I had readers in thirty-five countries and had made almost $100 in donations from fans.

  My costume was Madonna from the “Material Girl” video. I wore a pink satin strapless gown, lots of rhinestones, and blonde in my hair. Since that video is a takeoff on Marilyn Monroe, I guess I was really dressing as her. I had originally considered going as Marilyn, but knew that tons of men would be dressed as her, and it’s always so embarrassing to have a guy with better legs show up in the same outfit.

  Ed Harris went as Abraham Lincoln. We were mismatched.

  As his Toyota climbed the steep slope to Broadway, he asked me about my week. I told him that I was bored to death with the freelance work and wanted my own column.

  “What sort of a column would
you like to write?”

  “One about dating, relationships, you know, but funny.”

  “I only read political columns,” he said as if that were the end of it. “A lot of people would feel lucky to be a professional writer at all, you know.”

  I weakly replied that unpublished kids just getting out of school might be happy with the work I’d been doing, but I was not. There I was, the Material Girl and her immaterial concerns. It made me remember why I usually date other artists: instead of a dismissive comment, the whole evening’s conversation would have been an empathy fest about how hard it is to get recognition for our brilliant creative work and how wrong the rest of the world is to not acknowledge us.

  Dismissing my artistic misery is one of my deal breakers. Some women consider smoking, drinking, or children deal breakers. They are likely to look at things like a man’s income or education. Clearly those women have no imagination.

  I look at what films a man has seen, his views on Beatles music, and which specific countries he has traveled to. Deal breakers for me would include most Bruce Willis movies, only liking “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and considering Canada exotic. I also carefully observe how a man views my writing.

  Unbeknownst to him, a man who dates me is in a delicate situation where even the most seemingly innocent comment could be a relationship-ending land mine. “I only read political columns.” Bang! “You’re lucky you even get to be a writer, lots of people would trade places with you.” Boom! “I saw a silent film recently and realized how meaningless words are.” Kablooey!

  We had dinner at one of the better Thai restaurants I’ve been to. There we shared a bottle of hot sake and some beef dish with peppers, mushrooms, and onions and a sweet, spicy chicken panang with peanut sauce, coconut milk, and slivers of peppers that I had seen mentioned by a restaurant critic who was apparently allowed to order food to write about.