Five Things I Can't Live Without (14 page)

“But you’re not dry,” I said desperately. “When we sat on the bench and you told me about mindfulness meditation, you weren’t dry at all. You could tell what I was thinking about before I even said anything. And if you weren’t interested in things other than plants, you wouldn’t be taking those classes. You just have a limited view of yourself.”

He still looked pained, but he was thinking about it. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“Maybe this new profile really is you. We didn’t lie about anything. We just turned down the volume on the plants, and turned up the volume on the other things.”

His shoulders were slumped. Then he drew himself up, and said resolutely, “I really thank you for how hard you’ve worked and for your time. Of course I’ll be paying you for it.”

He wasn’t going to use the profile, no matter what I said. Why should he trust my assessment of him? I’d known him four hours; he’d known himself thirty-six years. But I knew that this was a bad decision. I felt sure that it was his own limited view of himself that was causing him to limit the number of people who’d have access to him. I also felt sure there was some woman in the Bay Area who liked plants just fine, but would love Vincent.

“So you’re going to move back to Nebraska?” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“I’m going to think that over a while longer.” He looked around his office. “I really do love it here.”

“It’s beautiful,” I agreed.

He smiled. “It was so much clearer when I was just giving it one last try. Now I’ve got to face this thing head-on.”

“I know what you mean. The moment of truth, right?”

He nodded, still smiling sadly. Then he walked to the door and showed me out.

There was no exultant ride home this time, and certainly no romp with Dan. I wanted to be alone to brood.

I kept running over the night in my head, trying to figure out where I’d made the wrong turn. Had it been before we’d even met? Had I been promising too much? Vincent had put so much faith in me, and I just hadn’t been able to deliver. I had a cookie-cutter formula that was failing me on my second client. But it had seemed like such a no-brainer: make people seem interesting, earnest, funny, sweet. Round them out.

Maybe this job was too much responsibility for me. I didn’t know what kind of qualifications a person should have to tinker in other people’s love lives, but I didn’t have them.

I could always go back to coordinating, back to answering phones and making flyers. If I got lucky, I could even author the flyers. Or maybe I could go back to school. Graduate school would be a nice reprieve from the world for a while, if I could just figure out what to study.

I wished I could stop picturing Vincent’s pensive face, that look he had as I was leaving his office. But finally it came to me that his face hadn’t only been sad. I mean, there was sadness, but there was something else in it. Resolve, maybe. He’d had the look of a man who was at least choosing his poison. He’d spent hours letting himself be repackaged, and at the end of it, he turned it down.

I’d told Estella I wasn’t doing makeovers, and then I’d written a profile where the client was unrecognizable to himself. But it wasn’t my job to change people, or to round them out. It was, as Maggie had said, my job to see the best in people and then to convey that to the world. It was like that hair color campaign from years back: “You, only better.”

I could do this. Me, only better.

But first, I tried one last thing to help Vincent.

I knew there were dating Web sites for people with very specific interests, like for pet lovers or atheists. I decided to search for one for plant lovers. I combined and recombined words like “botany,” “flowers,” “plants,” and “horticulture” with “love,” “lover,” “dating,” and “mating.” An hour later, I sent Vincent an e-mail saying I hadn’t found anything yet, but I would keep looking, and I hoped he’d hang in there.

On a whim, I looked up mindfulness meditation. Persuasive as it was, I decided that I was temperamentally unsuited for it. Which probably meant it was just what I should be doing. But at the animal shelter, I’d learned that it was generally true that you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks.

I never did hear back from Vincent.

Chapter 9

LARISSA

1. My dating life has been:

a. Entirely unsatisfying.

b. Unsatisfying with small pockets of satisfaction.

c. Satisfying half the time.

d. Satisfying most of the time.

e. Just how I like it.

2. In a mate, what’s most important is:

a. Style.

b. Substance.

c. Sass.

d. Panache.

3. As a child, I was:

a. Stubborn.

b. Obedient.

c. Mischievous.

d. Confused.

e. Maudlin.

f. Happy.

4. When something goes wrong, I think:

a. Better make a quick getaway.

b. That was your fault!

c. I’m not sure whose fault that was; let’s talk about it.

d. You know, that was probably me. It’s always me.

5. My personal philosophy is:

a. The more the merrier.

b. Never too old to try something new.

c. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

d. Don’t worry about me; I’ve been through worse.

e. Don’t leave me here all alone!

6. At a party, I’m most likely to:

a. Talk to everyone—new people are possibilities!

b. Talk only to the people I know.

c. Stand against the wall and wait for someone to talk to me.

d. Get embarrassingly drunk.

e. a & d

f. b & d

g. c & d

S
omething I didn’t mention earlier—probably because I try to forget it myself—is that I met Dan at a party. The reason I dislike this particular fact is that the party was at my apartment, and Dan was there because he was a friend of Fara’s. Not a close one, and definitely not as close as she liked to think.

So far, you’ve only seen the variety of Fara friends who hang out at other people’s apartments in their pajamas. There’s this whole other echelon—who really only show up for gatherings of eight or more, which makes them more quasi-Fara friends—who are monumentally, intimidatingly fantastic. Some of them are just achingly hip but not accomplished, and some are less hip but more accomplished. Some are what I would actually call brilliant. Fara’s circle of (quasi)friends is proof that what you get in life is not what you deserve, but what you’re willing to reach for. It’s how schlubs land supermodels.

Anyway, when Fara’s uberfriends used to descend on our apartment in their perfect clothes with their funky glasses and their expertly dyed hair (the kind you’re supposed to know is dyed), I would wonder why they couldn’t be there just to see me. My most intense (yet entirely platonic) girl crush is on Fara’s friend Sabayu. That’s right, she’s a white girl named Sabayu. A little affected, yes. But you should see her. Huge blue eyes magnified by her leopard print glasses, a thrift store T-shirt with just the right scarf, and always the best shoes. Dan had once said in admiration about her, “She’s so
now
,” and the staggering unhipness of his remark let me know why he was with me. He’d since decided that Sabayu was all flash and he had little use for that wing of Fara’s friends. I thought he was probably right, but somehow my own feelings for Sabayu remained essentially undimmed.

Fara was having a party to celebrate her thirtieth b-day. Yes, she actually hyphenated it on the invitation. Was it meant ironically, or did she not want to blind us with the full word, like the way Jews write “G-d”? When I read her e-mail, I thought that the most pronounced difference between hipsters and the rest of us was their confusing deployment of irony. Or at least, it was confusing to me. They seemed to understand each other pretty well. It was better than a secret handshake. Well, whatever Fara had meant, her b-day celebration would be my first time seeing the apartment she now shared with Bart.

“Do I look okay?” I asked Dan. I was in front of the full-length mirror that I had installed on the back of the closet door, and he was lying on the bed reading.

He looked up. “You look good,” he said, though his tone seemed noncommittal.

“Come on, what do you really think?” I urged.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re trying to borrow a few elements from Sabayu, and you should just stick with what you know.”

He was right. I wasn’t passing. I was like a minstrel show. I ripped the scarf from my neck. “I hate being around those people!”

“Only some of the people look like Sabayu. A lot more look like us.”

That was exactly the point. Anyone could look like me; I wanted to look like someone who was hard to imitate. I wanted, perversely, to imitate people whose personal style made them impossible to imitate. I dropped onto the bed in frustration. “I’ve been spending all that time in San Francisco and I just can’t get it down.”

“The people you’re talking about spend all their time ‘getting it down.’ They go to thrift stores three times a week and spend the rest of their time in bars so they can scope each other out and see what the newest thing is. I saw this guy the other day wearing leg warmers. Leg warmers!” He wrapped his arm around my waist. “You don’t want to be someone who decides you should, oh, I don’t know, wear a petticoat on your head just because nobody in twenty-first-century San Francisco has gotten around to that yet, do you?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Well, all right then.” He said it in his Rodney voice, inflected with a cockney accent. He often turned into Rodney when he thought I was being high-strung.

Taking his cue, I stood up and marched around the room. I was now Mrs. Pimmbottom, the ultimate high-strung grande dame. Rodney was my houseboy. “Most certainly not!” I declared, my British accent crisp and upper-crust. “It simply won’t do!”

“Would the lady like a bath?”

“The lady is getting ready for a ball! Rodney, honestly,” I said, with great exasperation.

That’s when Dan/Rodney jumped around the room like the orangutan he was. No one ever said a houseboy had to be human. He started hooting.

“We are displeased.” I sighed, turning back to the mirror.

Dan leaped at me, arms akimbo, and began grooming me. His monkey hands were in my hair, searching for lice, fleas, and other detritus. Every time he found something, he ate it, at which point his monkey noises became gentler, the monkey noises of escalating satisfaction. It was really very soothing, being groomed.

I don’t remember quite how Mrs. Pimmbottom and Rodney came about. I think maybe Dan started acting like a monkey one day and I decided the appropriate response was to act like a disapproving English madam. There was something uniquely delightful about it, and more and more, we found ourselves spontaneously in character. Our scenes were all variations on a theme: Rodney wasn’t a very competent houseboy and Mrs. Pimmbottom pretended to chastise him, but she secretly got a kick out of his antics. Let me make the disclaimer that these characters did not extend into our sex life. I’m no prude, but my fantasies have never included bestiality.

For me, Mrs. Pimmbottom and Rodney were the first fully realized characters to appear in the context of an intimate relationship, but they were on a continuum with the kind of play I’d experienced in every long-term relationship I’d ever had. I’ve never talked to my friends about this, but I’ve seen them do it, too. I once saw Dustin and Larissa talking to each other at a dinner party when they didn’t think anyone else was listening and she was using this Kewpie doll voice I’d never heard. It wasn’t sexy at all; it was this very specific, grating, childlike voice. But Dustin didn’t seem to find it grating at all. He was totally into it.

My theory is that all adults still want to be kids, at least a little bit, and we get to indulge that part of ourselves the most once we actually have kids and can take them to please-touch museums. In the meantime, we use the safety of intimate relationships. We roll around in bed and we squeal and we pout and we talk in voices we’d never use with anyone else. The closer we get to another person in an intimate relationship, the freer we are to enact scenes that gratify our kid parts.

I considered Mrs. Pimmbottom and Rodney a testament to the solidity of my relationship with Dan. Our first month of living together had had its ups and downs, but the second month had been good to us. Now going into our third month, I was feeling cautiously optimistic. I know cautious optimism doesn’t sound like high praise, but for a meta-lifer, it is. Lately I’d even been catching myself not thinking. I’d be lying in bed with Dan in the morning, just feeling completely content, and I’d suddenly realize, “Hey, I’m lying in bed with Dan, feeling completely

content,” and then “Hey, I’m thinking about my contentment. Stop that,” and from then on, it’d be ruined. I couldn’t regain that initial feeling of blissful unawareness. Once I was hyperaware of the good feeling, all I wanted to do was make it last, but by wanting that so much, I killed it. I was killing what I loved.