Five Things I Can't Live Without (9 page)

“Absolutely.”

“You’ll be good, Nora,” Estella said. Was she just trying to get on Maggie’s good side? Looking at her, it was impossible to tell. I decided to take it as genuine.

After a final round of hugs and one last look around, I stepped outside.
You’ll be good, Nora. This will be just the thing.

I reached into the pastry box, bit off the head of the Dalmatian, and headed for the train.

By the following morning, I’d gotten four e-mail responses to my ad. When I’d posted my 1992 Honda Civic for below blue book value, I’d gotten 150 in three hours, but who’s comparing?

I thought how excitement and anxiety felt the same in my stomach, and I couldn’t even tell which one I was experiencing more acutely as I sat staring at my in-box.
This is a good start. This is a good start. This is a good start …

Chapter 6

I
recognized Candace immediately. She wasn’t the only brunette with shoulder-length hair, but she was the only one who kept looking up from her book expectantly. There weren’t many people in the cafe, which was how she’d wanted it.

“Candace?” I asked.

“Nora?” she responded, smiling. “What a stupid thing to say. Obviously you’re Nora. Do you want to sit down?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the seat across from her. “It’s nice to meet you in person.”

“It’s good to meet you, too.” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “I’m kind of nervous. Is that normal?”

I nodded. She was my first client, but it seemed normal enough. I certainly felt nervous, though I hoped I wasn’t projecting it quite as openly as she was. I reached into my bag and pulled out the profile she had e-mailed me the night before. I decided the best way to combat my own anxiety was to minimize the small talk and leap right in. “So I read this, and it’s—you know, it’s not too bad. I just think it could use some pruning.”

“Pruning? So you mean taking things out?”

“It’s a little wordy.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed, like she’d gotten a bad grade on a test.

“Did you spend a lot of time on it?” I asked, with what I hoped sounded like sympathy.

“I did, actually.” She already looked crestfallen.
Tread lightly, wounded souls:
Maggie’s words echoed in my head.

“There’s a lot of good stuff in here. It’s just my experience that often, in this business, less is more. Sometimes men are reading a lot of profiles, and so you want to grab them and then leave some mystery. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.” She tried to smile.

“Like, when you describe yourself, that paragraph is fourteen sentences long. So that could be a little intimidating.”

“But what do you think of the sentences themselves?” She looked at me keenly. I noted that her eyes were her best feature, hazel and long-lashed. She looked older than thirty-two. Maybe that was because she was wearing her work clothes, and she worked as a loan officer.

I hesitated. “It reads kind of like an essay. And that’s not a bad thing,” I added quickly. “But you have to remember this is a marketing pitch. You want everything to be targeted. Nothing extraneous.”

“What parts are extraneous?” Her eyes narrowed just slightly. She’d gone from doubting herself to doubting me. Maybe Maggie was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t baby them. Maybe I needed to make it glaringly apparent to Candace just what a disaster her profile was. Maybe I needed to break her down and build her back up, like in boot camp.

“The really long sentence about your love for Rudy, for example. The cat, not the movie, though we might want to rethink the other one, too.” I was no therapist, and I was no drill sergeant. I hoped I was landing somewhere in between.

“She’s really important to me.”

She? “I know, and that’s great. But this first section—that’s where you want to hook them. And you have to think about the most desirable aspects of yourself and lead with those.”

“Some men like cats.”

“They do. But some men don’t like women to like their cats too much.”

“Then those men are bad matches for me.”

That was not a good exchange. It was time to pull out the big guns. I took a deep breath. “When I first had my profile up, almost no one wrote to me, and the ones who did all seemed like freaks or perverts. Later on, I had the exact same pictures up, but a lot more men were writing to me, and they were quality. One of them is now my boyfriend. It took some time for me to learn how to write a profile, and then I helped my friends do it, and now I do it for a living. I know this must be weird, meeting with someone who’s telling you that your paragraphs are too long and that you shouldn’t talk about your cat. You must be feeling kind of defensive. I’d feel defensive, too. But I’m not criticizing you at all, the flesh-and-blood you who’s sitting here with me. I’m making suggestions about how to best represent yourself so that you can get what—and who—you want.”

Thankfully, the speech worked. Candace visibly relaxed. “I just can’t believe I’m paying someone to help me market myself on the Internet. Next thing you know, I’ll be auctioning myself off on eBay.”

We both laughed. “Trust me, I sometimes find myself doing surprising things, too.”

Candace surreptitiously glanced around the room, then said, “I’m not really thirty-two. I’m thirty-five.”

“Oh.”

“I know, it’s stupid to lie about that. All my friends say, ‘Well, what’ll happen when he finds out?’ and I say, ‘Who’s this he you’re talking about?’ If I could pass for twenty-nine, I’d write that. Your stock falls at thirty, everyone knows that. And it falls again at thirty-five, so I figured at least I’d try to get in before that second drop. The irony is, writing thirty-two hasn’t gotten me shit, either.”

“So maybe you should stick with thirty-five.” But I knew what she meant. My own stock was falling as we spoke. If Dan didn’t work out, I was well aware that there might not be that many men left on the floor of the exchange. I could see them, walking out one by one, and then two by two, as the ticker tape showed me dropping by quarter points, then half points—

“If I write thirty-five, then all I’ll get are men over fifty writing to me.”

I blinked. Oh, right. Candace.
Stay focused.
I picked up my pen. “Would you consider dating men over fifty?”

She snorted. “No. That’s like admitting it’s over for me.”

“What if he was really handsome and owned his own plane?”

She laughed, then leaned in again conspiratorially. “You want to hear something funny? My mother’s paying for this.”

“For me?” I was oddly flattered.

She nodded. “She’ll do anything for grandkids.”

“Do you want kids?” I thought I remembered her profile saying that she didn’t want kids.

She shrugged. “Probably. I doubt it’ll happen, but if I had the choice, then probably.”

I glanced at the profile on the table in front of me to confirm. “You put ‘no’ on this.”

“I didn’t want to scare all those guys off. I figure the last thing men want is someone with aging eggs who’s going to push for kids right away.”

“But you’re not sure if you want kids. So you’re not going to be pushing.”

“But they don’t know that. They’ll just see my age and assume.”

“The problem is that by saying no, you get the men who either don’t want kids or who are frightened of women who do want kids. And you lose the men who might like to have a family someday, which might be what you want, too.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

“I’d put ‘not sure.’ My theory is that ambiguity is best, as long as you don’t seem like you’re actually hiding something. For example, if you seem to be avoiding a direct question or talking around it, that’s not good. But if you just leave room for interpretation, that’s good.” It had taken a little while, but I was feeling it now. I was in my element.

“My profile doesn’t leave much to the imagination, does it?” she asked.

“Not as it stands right now. But we’ve got a lot to work with, right?” I smiled at her, and she smiled back.

“That we do.”

This one was in the bag.

I arrived at the apartment still exhilarated from my triumph with Candace. Dan was lying on the couch reading a magazine, and I leaped on him.

“Hey, you,” he said as I buried my face in his chest and he wrapped his arms around me. “I’m guessing it went well?”

I lifted my head. “It went
amazingly
well. We had a lot of laughs, we made some big improvements in her profile, I drank two cappuccinos. It was a good night.”

“You seem like someone who drank two cappuccinos.”

I pretended to sock him, then straddled him instead. I bounced up and down. “Hey, you wanna?”

He laughed. “So that’s what’s passing for foreplay these days?”

“No, this is.” I stripped my shirt off, then began to kiss his neck and downward. When I reached his belt buckle, Dan grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me back up. His hand was on the back of my neck, forceful and insistent, as he kissed me. There was never anything tentative about Dan sexually, and I loved that. He went for what he wanted, and if he was rebuffed, he backed away without shame.

I remembered the first night we slept together. It was our second date and I hadn’t seen his apartment yet. I found the bar strange and fascinating, and I just assumed Dan would offer an explanation of where it had come from and why. He didn’t. He began to mix a drink so confidently that I thought he must have done it a million times before, but he said he was making it up as he went along and he christened it the Nora. He didn’t say this the way most men would have, looking at me and waiting for my reaction. He just said it casually as he poured the drink into a cocktail glass. It was strong, the Nora, and I said so.
Is she?
he asked.

I thought Dan was at once the best and worst flirt I’d ever met. All those long pauses and intermittent eye contact. But I was buzzing from his nearness before I had even taken a sip. Finally he kissed me. I was perched on the bar stool, Dan was standing on the other side. As I shifted my weight on the stool, my skirt splayed out so that I could feel my panties against the leather and my stomach was flat against the side of the bar and Dan’s hand was roaming my face, my neck, my hair …

He made me wait. I was debating whether to jump over the bar, or yank his arm, or tell him he’d better get over here already. I wondered whether he was a sadist. Then I wondered if he was a masochist. I was starting to worry that he didn’t feel what I did, that he wasn’t even attracted to me if he could hold out so long, when he grabbed my face in both his hands and said, “Wait.” He came around behind me and lifted me off the stool so that we were both standing. His chest was against my back, and we were both breathing hard. He slid my underwear off, and I could hear him unzipping his pants. He put his arms under mine, and then stretched us both out against the bar. As he entered me, I tensed my muscles around him, and when I finally released, we both went limp.

“Good trick,” I said over my shoulder, so spent that I started laughing.

“Yours too.”

We fell to the floor. I realized I was dampening my skirt and possibly his carpet, but I didn’t want to move yet. I was waiting again, waiting for him to take hold of me. I’d grab him if I had to, but I wanted him to do it. It would mean more that way.

He began stroking my hair. I turned my head and looked at him. His face looked more vulnerable to me now. It was a good face: not handsome exactly, but solidly crafted. He had gray blue eyes and those are rare. He had a small scar above his eyebrow, just a slight indentation of uncertain origin. I wanted to hear the story behind it someday.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

It was my first indication of just how strangely corny Dan could be. We both laughed, and he moved closer to me.

“I got it from an estate sale.”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“The bar. I know you were wondering. I looked a long time for it.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I know it doesn’t exactly go with this room, but I plan to have it forever. When it fits somewhere, that’s where I’ll stay.”

Now, a little more than six months later, we were lying on the couch, my head pressed to his chest. We had just finished making love, and I couldn’t tell if my forehead was damp with my sweat or his. I tilted my head to look at the bar, and thought about what an unusual first time that had been. Dan’s sexual confidence was not something I’d found in many other men. It was quiet, but undeniable. He was purposeful, and his ego never seemed to bruise. It was just one way in which Dan seemed strangely impenetrable to me.