kryptonite

There's this picture on Facebook. He's standing in profile, wearing khakis and a tie.  His hands are in his pockets, the hem of his blazer casually rumpled, one of those boy-details that has always undone me. And he's craning his neck, looking upwards at the shelves that fill the room. The caption — written by his sister, who’s studying divinity at Yale — tells me he’s looking at rare books in the Yale Club library.

I spent my first two years of college convinced, utterly convinced that this was the boy I was destined to marry. This picture, could I have seen it back then, would have done nothing to soften that conviction.

Morgan, as usual, sums it up best: “I can actually hear the sound of your 18-year-old underpants exploding from across the space-time continuum.”

third wheel

“I'm a waiter, and an uninvited participant in just about every date you've ever been on.”

Includes such gems as:  "When I return to drop their check, they're making out shamelessly, in the weird but common belief that because they are sitting and I am standing, I cannot see them."

I don’t even want to think about what waiters all over Los Angeles must think of me.

judge and jury

He says something, contradicts himself, anticipates my reaction, contradicts himself again.  Across the table, he's suddenly a one-man show, my own personal vaudeville act.

Laughing, I say, “I think I’ve just become totally irrelevant to this conversation.”

“No no, that was all for you,” he answers, returning to his ceviche.

“Correction:  I’ve become the audience to this conversation.”

“And the adjudicator.”

Well, yes.  “Well put,” I tell him.

He shrugs.  “The advantage of being a single girl.  Surely you know that?”

“Usually I try to pretend like I don’t.  It seems nicer that way.”

the awkward fairy

An email I sent to Marian, my best friend, one fine midsummer Tuesday afternoon:

-----------------------------------------------

On the Fourth of July, I:

- Almost lit the house on fire.  Note to self:  Do not believe the guys at the fireworks stand who tell you that "nothing we sell will explode any higher than waist-height," since clearly they are talking about waist-height for Sasquatch.

Yesterday, I:

- Threw Adam out of my apartment at 10 a.m. so he would not be there when Nolan came to pick me up at 10:30 a.m.  I think I am a bad person.

- Went on an 11-hour maybe-date with Nolan, which was dive-bombed somewhere around hour 10 by a visit from the Awkward Fairy, in the guise of a Channel 9 newswoman.  I'm heading into a meeting right now, but do I have a story for you later.

-----------------------------------------------

I'll tell you the rest next week, yes?

tabula rasa

Looking back through my (admittedly slender) archives, I find I'm pleased about something.

I haven't actively curated the contents of this blog. Since February, I've written what's been on my mind. The stories are from last decade, last month, and last night; they're here because they don't tug at my mental corners quite as much once I've written them down. But when I review all of my entries -- both the published ones, and the dozens of drafts -- I notice a glaring and gratifying hole.

He's not here.

I'm cautious about how I explain this. I don't want to afford him too much weight -- and any weight seems like too much. But (don't all good stories start this way?) there was this one guy. A real piece of work. Of course, before I figured that out, I fell madly in love with him; became blind to all his flaws; and dated him for the better part of three years with what became self-flagellating vim. The final detonation involved STDs, the Craigslist casual encounters section, and a girlfriend in another state he'd somehow neglected to mention.

Morgan later described it as a "we-burned-this-shit-to-the-ground breakup." Accurate, but requires a stage note: I was using napalm.

So you can see how, if I'd started this blog a few years ago, it pretty much would have been a monograph on this cretin. You all would be as tired of listening to me as my friends were back then. But here we are in 2011, and my archives tell me he's been mentioned only once, in passing. He was just background in a story about someone else.

I expect I will write about him at some point. That's okay. I did a lot of dating and drinking with him, and those tales are part of how I got here.

But meanwhile, my own journal betrays the fact that he's vanished from my mental radar more completely than I once could have imagined. And that, ladies and gentlemen, seems like something worth celebrating.

kindred spirit

We were talking about John Irving, which was in itself impressive. When I said that I'd liked A Prayer for Owen Meany much better than The World According to Garp, he plucked my hand out of the air and held it to his cheek for just a second.

Then he told me about how he'd discovered Owen Meany, back in high school. Actually, he mimed it with the beer menu. "I read it like this," he said, his nose almost touching the words. "I wanted to eat the paper, that's how much I loved that book."

I would have made out with him for that sentence alone.

like the movies

Summer of 1999. First day of high school orientation. I was, what, 14? "Painfully self-conscious" doesn't even begin to describe it. He was the leader of my orientation group, beautiful in the way that only unattainable senior boys can be -- olive-skinned, dark-haired, self-assured. I wasn't the only one who thought so; the whole female freshman population was in love with him by October. Because real life isn't like the movies, he did not ask me to prom.

Summer of 2007. I'd just graduated from college. One of my best friends was turning 21, and there was drinking to be done, so we were getting the party started on the steps of the birthday boy's apartment. And suddenly, over the salted rim of my margarita, there was Tony Caruso -- the senior god himself. He looked exactly the same. Maybe it was the tequila, but I found to my own surprise that I was now able to speak, walk, and breathe normally in his presence.

It wasn't until halfway through the evening, when someone in the group referenced our high school, that he turned to me specifically. "Wait. Did you go to [our high school] too?" he asked.

I couldn't suppress a grin. "You wouldn't remember it," I told him, "but you were actually my orientation leader. I'm Clare Alexandra."

"Clare?" You could see him trying to compare current-me with his faded library of mental snapshots from 1999. "Really?  But I think I would have noticed you..." He was actually flustered. He squinted at me a little more, and then finished with, "You...um. Wow. You grew up really nice."

I had a little moment, right there on Sherman Way in the warm summer air.  Tony Caruso had just looked at me with admiration, and had told me (in the most inarticulate way possible) that he thought I was pretty.  Sometimes real life is like the movies, after all.

Summer of 2011. I'd forgotten all about Tony in the intervening four years, but last week I stumbled across his Facebook profile. He's married now. (To a girl who looks a lot like me, if we're being strictly honest here.) And this story doesn't really have a point, except to say that I had another little moment, looking at his picture and remembering the cinematic summer night when he thought I grew up really nice.  If I was a motivational speaker, I'd tell all the high school girls that story.

¡andale!

Sometimes I draft posts and then forget to go ahead and publish them -- usually because I have been distracted by something shiny. Actually, it's better if you just assume that nothing in this blog is in chronological order. There are lots of shiny things where I am.

Yesterday afternoon was bad. The end of Charles, finally, in what has been a very indefinite and lingering end. It wasn't frank and amicable, like it might have been; instead it was garbled and dismissive and conducted via text message. (Text message!  Let me assure you, gentle reader, that this wasn't my idea.) The kind of end that leaves you furious and gagging on all the things you still want to say.

So I had to shut my office door and put my face in my hands for a while. Take a lot of deep breaths. Unload to Nick, who really deserves a medal for listening to me as much as he does. Violently staple things that didn't need to be stapled.

But then, more by accident than design, I made a few good decisions. It started when I tied my ass to my chair and finished the proposal I needed to write, without making any more excuses. Then my sister called, and I didn't yammer about my own problems because her day was definitely worse than mine. Then I went to a volunteer job and did some good work for some good people, in the company of some more good people. Then I came home and talked to my roommate, who also happens to be good people (although she'd object to the phrase). Then I looked through my high school yearbooks and laughed, and emailed a friend who is half a world away to talk about a good memory. And then a very handsome guy told me that he liked my prose and he'd like to read more of it. By the time I went to bed, I felt about a million times lighter and at least half as homicidal.

Which is all to say -- when you're sad, you have to do something. Do anything. You can't just sit around. (Which is what I did on Saturday, and let me tell you, it was bad.) Get yourself to where there are some people to talk to. Get some shit done. Get to work, Clare, get to work.

how it's done

The message popped up unexpectedly, interrupting my mid-afternoon malaise.  He had seen from my Facebook wall that I was planning on going to the preseason football rally at our mutual alma mater.  The least I could do, he said, was to let him buy me a drink afterward.

This was awkward because I couldn't for the life of me remember how I knew this guy.

He's on my Facebook friends list.  I remember accepting his friend request because he happens to share an unusual last name with a family of kids who went to my elementary school, so I figured he was one of them.  But once I accepted, I realized that all our mutual friends -- more than 30 of them -- were from college.  I must have met him at some point then, and promptly forgotten all about it.  (This happens to me more often than I'd like to admit.  I blame it on all the undergrad boozing.)

Anyway, after an hour of racking my brain, I had to give up and send him one of my patented "This is embarrassing, but I can't remember how I know you; pardon me/remind me?" emails.

The response came back that evening.  No need to be embarrassed, he said; we'd had a couple of classes together years and years ago.  He thought we might have been at some of the same college social events, too.  But really he was interested in getting to know me better now.  "Maybe a shot in the dark," he wrote, "but I saw that you were heading this way and I couldn't deny that I was long hoping for a reason to run into you."

Gentlemen:  Want to ask a girl out?  Want to do it in a way that is both flattering and respectful?  Want to make it quite clear to her that you are interested, not dabbling in the murky waters of friendship?  Of course you do, because then she'll say yes.  And that sentence, right there at the end of the last paragraph -- that's how it's done.

a communications blackout period

Reporting live from my couch, 9:30 pm, Saturday, July 26, in the year of our Lord 2011.

I am wearing a sundress and no bra.  I am drinking a Sam Adams.  I am watching the second season of The West Wing.

It's making me wish that I was in DC.  You know the old exhortation Go west, young man?  I hear Go east, young woman in my head all the time.  But that's neither here nor there.  Here I am, on my couch in Los Angeles.

I should be at a party, but I'm not.

In the meantime, Toby Ziegler is singing my life with his words.

"The last the flight control has heard from Galileo was 11 minutes before landing, when all systems were operating normally.  Then it entered what they call a communications blackout period, and hasn't been heard from since.

I know how it feels."

cure for a bad day/week/life

Get in the bathtub. Balance your toes on the tap. Put on your iPod. Find some 90s music. And -- here's the real trick -- sing along as loudly as you can, damn the neighbors. Then text some boys.

Works, I swear.

why your 20s are disconcerting

Morgan:  Does it ever freak you out a little bit that [girl who we 

         lived with in college] is....a doctor?

         I mean, this is the girl who not once, not twice, but 

         three times forgot she left her cell phone in her pants, 
         and put them in the washing machine.

Me:      It would freak me out less if [this girl] was the only 

         person I knew who made me think, "....seriously?  They're 
         letting you be a doctor/lawyer/CPA/other relatively 
         responsible person?"

Morgan:  TESTIFY.

ambush

You know that twilight country you pass through every night, in between awake and asleep?  You have to be careful there.  That's where all those things you managed to push out of your mind during the day will sneak up and ambush you.  And it's where I am, my brain finally slipping into neutral after a long Monday, when I'm jumped by a memory.  

A different night, in Charles' bed.  I was at just the same point of awake-but-not-really.  He had asked me something, I think about whether I was warm and should he open the sliding door.  But my lips were too heavy to answer, and when he realized it, he stopped asking questions and just kissed my forehead.  One slow, contented kiss -- more for his benefit than mine, since he wasn't sure I was awake.  I drifted off to sleep reveling in that small gesture of possession.

The memory jerks me upwards, like a diver breaking the surface of the water.  I'm back in my own bed, wide awake and unhappy.

If there's anything better than being held by someone you care about -- or think you might be able to care about -- while you fall asleep, I haven't discovered it yet. So when you've gotten used to that luxury, even just a little, even just for a few weeks, it's difficult to revert.  As my subconscious is now pointedly reminding me.

I'll keep slogging, I guess.  And maybe have glass of wine before bed.

this again

It's past midnight and I should really be in bed, but my head feels like a jar of lightning bugs, thoughts flashing so softly and insistently that I know I'll never get to sleep. So instead I'm on my roof. I came up thinking I'd look at the stars, but no luck. They say, this town, the stars stay up all night....but I don't know, can't see 'em, for the glow of the neon lights. Lights or no, it's overcast anyway.

I just made it home from a birthday party in West Hollywood. We lounged on The Foundry's patio, sipped tequila, listened to the jazz band. I think I managed to keep my poker face.

The Foundry, of course, is where I began a very good second date with the boy I'm trying to forget about -- so naturally that's where we all wound up tonight, just to twist the knife a little. We almost went to The Village Idiot instead, not that it would have helped, since that's where I finished that second date. The Village Idiot is also where I spent a long and memorable evening with a different boy, late in the summer of 2007, shaking salt all over the table and tying straw wrappers into knots. Both The Foundry and The Village Idiot are right down the street from Angeli Caffe, the little Italian place where I ate gnocchi and roasted chicken and closed down the restaurant with the boy I was trying to forget when I started this blog.  

I've been dating too much, or living here too long, or something. All the memories are starting to layer. Some nights, every bar and restaurant and theater and club and cafe I step into feels like another stop on a historical tour of my checkered romantic past.

This boy I'm trying to forget. He took me to Geoffrey's one evening, which is this absurdly lovely restaurant in Malibu. Spectacular ocean views, and at night the big twisted trees glow over the patio, encrusted with white lights. He was the third boy I had been there with, a fact I was doing my best not to think about. But at some point during dinner, he asked me playfully to tell him about the best date I'd ever been on. And I had to shake my head and say I didn't want to tell him and change the subject. Because of course, the date that came to mind was one that had happened at that restaurant, on that patio, maybe even at the very table where we were sitting.

Some nights, the only thing I want is a fresh slate. Whether it's about the boy or the restaurant -- to stop thinking, this again.

It is, of course, raining up here on the roof. Just misting, really. Tiny drops spangle my computer screen.  As close as I'll get to stars tonight.

one long laugh

Today is my grandparents' 59th wedding anniversary.  

When I called them on my way home from work, they wanted to tell me all about their lunch.  Apparently my grandpa decided to mark the day by taking my grandma to a seafood restaurant she loves, "which is all of fifteen minutes away," she supplied.  "It only took us two and a half hours," he chimed in.  Their commingled laugher echoed down the line.  It seems they took a wrong turn ("Your grandfather turned right, even though I told him to turn left, and of course left was the right way.") and while they have a GPS, they're not really all that good at using it. ("That damn thing kept telling us to go in a circle!")  But they made it, eventually, and the lobster was delicious.  

Then my grandma said, reflectively, "I remember when your grandpa asked me to marry him.  I told him, 'I think if I marry you, it's just going to be one long laugh.'  And you know... it has been."

They were still giggling when I hung up with them.

We should all be so lucky, eh?

neophyte

We're sitting at opposite ends of his sectional couch, like boat anchors. And we are awash in opera music. Big sonorous waves of it are pouring out of his tiny speakers, pressing us backwards into the cushions. I've closed my eyes, listening hard.

I am decidedly out of my element, but even I can tell that this isn't really a 400-level course. He's starting me off with broad, appealing opera, the kind of stuff you'd have to be insensate not to at least appreciate. He talks me through plot lines and voice qualities: first Maria Callas, then each of the Three Tenors.

At some point, I laugh aloud. He doesn't ask why -- maybe doesn't notice, so intent is he on Maria's tone -- and I don't volunteer.

But this makes me think of that time my sister called me out of the blue, bubbling over about Pablo Neruda. "Have you ever HEARD of him?" she asked me, the English major who had just bought her fourth ceiling-height bookshelf. "He's so AMAZING. Poetry! I think I get it now!"

I was sure for a few minutes that she must have suffered some kind of traumatic head injury. But then, of course, the explanation came tumbling out, and it wasn't just Pablo she wanted to gush over. "I've been trying to get you to read poetry for the last 15 years of your life," I remember saying, "But all it takes is one good-looking Spanish boy with Neruda on his bedside table, and suddenly you're a fanatic."

Now, in the living room, iTunes recedes into silence. "Did you like that one?" he asks.

And I say, "I think I get it now."

this year

"Ben's in town for the wedding.  He's staying at our place this weekend," I say.

It's a Wednesday night and I'm threading through the puckered traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, talking to Morgan while I drive.  A few miles away, she's doing the same thing on Los Feliz Boulevard.  (Welcome to social life in Los Angeles.)

"Oh, IS HE."  Her voice is heavy with significance.

"Yes, Morgan, he is."

"Don't you take that tone with me, Clare Alexandra."

"No, no!  Really!"  I acknowledge the obvious:  "I have decided to do something novel and not hook up with him this time."

There's an unmistakable snort on the other end of the line.  "Clare, listen to me," she says.  "You are one of my best friends.  I think you are beautiful and smart and you can do anything you put your mind to.  Except that if Ben Harmon is anywhere in a five-mile radius, you are going to make out with him, no matter what you have decided."

The truth is that we've had this conversation quite a few times before.  I go ahead and deliver my line:  "Oh, shut up, I hate you."

Two years ago, I said that because she was right on the money.  This year, though, I just say it because it's what I've always said.  In fact, the weekend comes and goes as I suspected it might, without a single untoward incident.  There's some alcohol involved, but everyone sleeps in their designated beds.  There are no awkward moments in the morning -- just sleepy hugs goodbye so he can make his early flight.

Afterwards, I stand on my front porch, staring up at the little strip of sky slowly brightening between my building and the one next door.  Maybe this is what growing up feels like.  But I'm pretty nostalgic for all the years of bad decisions, and I go back to bed -- clean, unrumpled, hangover-free -- feeling strangely sad.

can't trust that day

From the ankles down, I look like Barbie.  Some mornings, the only thing that's going to get you out your front door is a pair of 4-inch peeptoes in hot pink patent leather.

(I may or may not have bought these as a birthday present for my best friend a couple of years ago...and then kind of accidentally kept them.  The moral of the story:  Always make friends with women who share your shoe size.)

From the ankles up, I look more or less like a homeless person.  Aside from the shoes, I got dressed this morning entirely in items that were lying on my bedroom floor.  I also ate Trader Joe's Cheese Crunchies for breakfast, and then spent at least an hour peering diligently but uselessly at the statements for my retirement account, which might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all the sense I was able to make of them.

Now, at 6 o'clock, the course of my day is easily traceable by the items strewn all over my desk.  They include:  A dried-up bottle of Elmer's glue; a dead plant; three empty Diet Coke cans (One of our partners frequently stops by my door, shakes his head, and intones, "Aspartame, Clare!" before shuffling off down the hallway); many tiny Post-its full of illegible but undoubtedly important scribblings; one plush monkey that shrieks when you squeeze it in the middle; about two dozen red pens; and a rotating emergency light, of the type you might find on top of a very small toy ambulance, if the ambulance was purple.  Don't ask me; I don't know either.

I have a date in two hours.  It's going to include an "It's not you, it's your cigarettes" speech, and that is going to be uncomfortable.

Oh, it's such a Monday-ish Monday.

poetaster

Today, a boy sent me a poem -- I can only assume he authored it himself -- that rhymed the word "soul" with "facial mole."

Thought you'd want to hear about that one, blogland.

vikram, part 1

July: Nick is making fun of me again. I’m telling him the latest news, but he can’t keep the characters straight, so I have to go through and remind him of all the names.

Him:  generic white names

all of them

I could have pulled them out of a hat

Me:   next time I am picking someone to date I will find a Vikram, 

      okay?

just for you

October: I’m at a Halloween party in someone’s back yard, drinking cheap rum from a red plastic cup. I’m dressed like a Girl Scout, in knee socks and a skirt that would horrify my mother. I am too old for this.

But when he walks in, I perk up a little. He’s instantly noticeable, even in the middle of his pack of friends, and I think it’s his build – slim hips, broad shoulders under a thin tee shirt. And dark skin. Big liquid eyes. I won’t even notice until we go on our first date that his nose is also big.

I make eyes at him once or twice. Being a girl makes things so easy. (Okay, this skirt probably doesn't hurt.) In any case, it works: He comes over to introduce himself.

"Hi," he says, extending his hand. "I'm Vikram."

Bingo.

a brief tale of ice cream

I came home and there was the wedding invitation lying on the kitchen table, addressed to my roommate.

The picture is adorable. He's tall and lean and blond, with a button-down and a Crest smile. She's tall and lean and brunette, in a crisp white shirt and a grey cardigan, her smile equally fresh. They could have been clipped from a magazine.

He asked me out once, I think, or tried to. I was pretty excited about that.  

I bet you have a story to tell was the sentence that sprang to mind when I first met him -- a rare reaction for me. He'd lived for two years in rural Russia; I made him talk to me about it. And then, weeks later, there was this Facebook message.  He wanted to know if I'd be up for "grabbing a pastry or a salad or an ice cream - it's really quite arbitrary - and talking literature sometime."

I said yes. Then never heard from him again. It may have had something to do with the fact that one of his best friends had asked me out the week before.   

The best friend became a story in his own right, one I wouldn't trade. But I've always been secretly disappointed about that ice cream that went uneaten, that literary conversation that never happened.

And now here we are. No more what-ifs or maybe-one-days. He is officially and permanently off the market.

Another one bites the dust.

let's go with that

"Your voice," he texts me, "sounds nothing like I had it in my head."

I sigh, and answer:  "I get that a lot.  People who've only heard me on the phone invariably assume I'm older than I really am."

I have a voice that is described on good days as merely "deep."  On bad days, I get, "You sound like a man."  (Coincidentally, my sister says that more often than anybody else.  Something about being the most genetically similar person to me on the planet exempts her from being tactful.)  The voice is an advantage in my professional life, since I work with a lot of clients exclusively via phone, but in most other situations I'm just a bit of an auditory oddball.

I have a standard response to comments on the subject. "Well," I’ll say, "it comes in handy when you want to do the Jessica Rabbit thing, but a career as a famous soprano is out."  When singing, in fact, I'm a contralto -- although applying that term to my warbling is probably an insult to any number of leading ladies.  Per Wikipedia, there are quite a few of them.  Fiona Apple, Toni Braxton, Judy Garland, Lady Gaga, Patsy Cline, Etta James, Alicia Keyes, Chaka Khan, Annie Lennox, Reba McIntire, Stevie Nicks, Katy Perry, Carly Simon, and Amy Winehouse are (although the meanings of the term are a little looser outside of classical music) also considered contraltos.

This boy and I have been trading texts and the odd voicemail for weeks.  At some point, I make a cheeky comment about whether or not we'll ever see each other in person.  He answers:  "Yes, Clare, we are going to hang out, you with your sultry voice."

Sultry.  That sounds good.  Let's go with that.

the view from wednesday

He calls me darling.  Gets away with it because of the accent.  The truth is I kind of like it.

Sunny in Los Angeles this week.  I'm still wearing boots and tights; I haven't caught up to the weather. 

anthem

Morgan and I are spending a Friday night at our favorite karaoke bar in Culver City.  This is the kind of place where you can show up wearing a cocktail dress or pajama pants, and you'll blend in either way.  Tonight, we're in jeans and ponytails, sloughing off the stress of another long week.

We're just complaining about the song selections this evening -- everyone seems to want to sing depressing ballads, and we're not in the mood to cry into our cups -- when the heroine of the night stands to take the mic.  She's a girl about our age, and she's going to do Goodbye Earl, by the Dixie Chicks.

We instantly appoint ourselves her unofficial backup singers.  We wave our glasses and, from our table, join in the chorus:

Goodbye, Earl!

Those black-eyed peas?

They tasted all right to me, Earl.

You feelin' weak?

Why don't you lay down and sleeeeeep, Earl.

Ain't it dark?

Wrapped up in that taaaaarrp, Earl....

Adam and a couple of his buddies are there, too.  They stare at us, then start edging away uneasily.

Concern written all over his face, Adam's friend asks, "Why does every girl know every word to that song?"

you're so normal

I was 23 at the time. Fresh off my first real heartbreak, my biggest and baddest breakup so far. In retrospect, it shocks me how quickly I got back in the saddle: I was on a date with this new boy three weeks later.

He was a little older. 26, maybe. Nice and tall, blond hair, very all-American. Played tennis.

There was one night, a couple months into things, when he looked at me admiringly and said, "You're just so normal."

At the time, I wasn't particularly flattered. I thought, okay buddy, if the nicest thing you can find to say about me is that I'm normal, I have a feeling this isn't going to be the love affair of the century.

Three years later, I have done more dating than my 23-year-old self would ever have considered possible. I'm better at it than I used to be, I think, but who can say?

And now, I find, normal sums up everything I'm looking for. It's the word I use when agreeing to go out with someone ("Sure, you seem normal.") or when justifying why I'm still going out with someone ("...but he's so nice and normal."). When my roommate proclaimed Vikram -- who I'll tell you about later -- to be normal, I think that was the moment I was determined to date him.

At 23, I didn't realize how rare it is to find normalcy without dullness. It's easy to meet men who are odd, interesting, and therefore attractive. But invariably they are also a little awkward, a little abrasive, a little inappropriate, a little...something. Just abnormal enough, one way or another, that introducing them to my family and friends is going to be an exercise in advocacy. 

My professional life consists of nothing but advocacy. I don't want to have to do it in my dating life, too. I want to be with someone who doesn't require any preamble.

That all-American boy -- I think he knew something I didn't.

candor

An email I received from Charles today, in its entirety:

----------

The Joshua Bell article is brilliant. (Way too long but brilliant!)

How are you?

I want to make out more.

----------

Me too, frankly.

single girl pancakes

This is one of the reasons why being an adult -- and, just as importantly, a single adult -- is sometimes kind of glorious.

It's six o'clock on a Friday night. An hour ago, as I was pulling out of the parking garage at work, I was struck by a sudden, illogical and completely desperate craving for pancakes.

At the age of 25-going-on-26, I’m still childishly surprised by this:  the fact that I am in a position to satisfy my own whims, that the difference between wanting pancakes and getting pancakes is nobody’s purview but my own.

So I’m here, at IHOP. I am placidly drinking a bottomless cup of coffee, working on a book that was rattling around in the back seat of my car. The waiter, an industrious, chubby fellow, keeps stopping by my table solicitously to inquire how things are going. He’s eager to adjust the whole restaurant’s air conditioning to my preference. And I keep waving him away with my fork, in between bites of my huge fluffy stack of harvest grain pancakes.

But here’s the best part:  Nobody wants to know where I am. There is no place I am supposed to be, no one who needs me right now. I suppose these should be lonely realizations, but they aren’t. This is heaven in a blue plastic booth and maybe, I think, I will start coming here every Friday.

a memory

Like me, Adam has literary aspirations (pretensions?). We're talking about them.

I ask if he ever writes things down in his head, as they're happening, because I do that. "Like right now, this moment," I say. "How would you write this?"

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We're lying in bed all tangled, arms and legs and bare chests pressed snugly against each other in the red light filtering through the curtains.  “Does it always feel like this?” he murmurs. “I don't think it always feels this good, just to be touching someone. Does it?”

I have been wondering the same thing all morning, all night. Have I just forgotten? Has it been that long? Or is this out of the ordinary? Does it always feel this way?

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I feel rather than see his smile, since his cheek is resting on my forehead. "I'm not telling you," he says.

"Good. I'm not telling you either." 

shut up, clare

All right, so we haven't gone to New York. Instead we're here, in a French restaurant on Melrose, lunching on the patio. And, later, on the veranda at Shutters, sipping gin-and-tonics while the sun melts lazily into the Pacific. And, still later, in another French restaurant on Abbot Kinney, rapidly developing a matched set of miniature hangovers. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm wearing a little black sundress, wedges, a light sweater. Big looped earrings that jingle faintly when I turn my head. I'm pretending it's already summer, and the weather has decided to oblige.

Next to me, he's wearing jeans, loafers, a navy blue blazer, and a crisp white shirt. With French cuffs. This is, he informs me, about as casual as he ever gets. He believes that tee shirts are for sleeping in.

He's a member of Ascot, for Christ's sake. I do my best Eliza Doolittle ("Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin' arse!") but he doesn't seem to find it quite as funny as I do.

That makes him sound like a stuffy bore, and he isn’t. Still, when I ask him about his favorite concert, he tells me about listening to a famous tenor sing in Red Square, with the Kremlin for set dressing. My answer -- Bon Jovi at the Staples Center -- seems a little pedestrian after that.

And it's when we start talking about computers (blessing or curse?) that my brain-to-mouth filter ruptures. He tells me how he insisted on using a typewriter for years, until his assistant finally rebelled. The words coming out of his mouth sound all too familiar. "God," I blurt, "you should really just date my dad."

There's a beat. He laughs, and then cocks an eyebrow into his glass. "Talk about lines you never want to hear on a date," he comments, his voice echoing in the gin. I have, as usual, said the wrong thing.

But it's true. Dad would love this guy. Whether or not I can is a different story.

talisman

It must have been sometime in July. Maybe that night when he turned up at the dive bar down on the corner where we were, as usual, nursing beers and playing Photo Hunt. We'd been there all night, but he was a little drunker than the rest of us. Embarrassingly, he kept trying to kiss my neck, in a very non-PG manner. I was hoping my roommates would be too fixated on the screen to notice. Of course they weren't.

But later that night, we were lying in my bed, sober again. The walls in that apartment were paper-thin and everyone else was asleep. So he was talking right into my ear, low and soft.

"Don't answer. Just let me say this," he told me.

"You need to know that you're amazing. You are sexy" -- he ran a hand down the flat of my stomach -- "and funny, and so smart. And you have a good heart. I can tell." He was a deliberate person, but that night he spoke more deliberately, more earnestly than usual. "I hope you know that you deserve someone just as amazing. And...and even if that person isn't me, I hope you never settle. You deserve someone who appreciates what you are."

I was quiet for a minute. My instinct was to say something self-deprecating, deflect all the compliments. But he'd already told me not to answer. So eventually I just whispered, "Thank you," and pulled him closer to me.

That was Adam. There were any number of reasons why Adam was not the one for me, and vice versa. But eight months later, I realize how grateful I am for that little speech, even if I still don't know why he felt compelled to make it. Truth be told -- and what is this blog for, if not the truth? -- there have been one or two nights since then when that memory has been my talisman.

Sometimes I'm almost positive that the universe is making sure I have everything I need.

any girl but me

Two years old. Still funny. Still piercingly accurate. I am guilty as charged.

But If We Started Dating It Would Ruin Our Friendship Where I Ask You To Do Things And You Do Them

jet set

The first thing you need to know is that I've never actually met him.

He lives here in LA, but I was busy last weekend, and now he's in New York on business for the week. We've taken to email in the interim. I tell him about the crises of the last few days; he writes about restaurants, and thronging tourists that remind him of the swallows back home.

Then, at the end of his most recent email, this: "Was just about to click send but had an idea. How do you fancy escaping to New York? I’m supposed to be here until Thursday but could stay for the weekend. You would, of course, have your own hotel room and an open return ticket to LA should you find me entirely repugnant! I have to work during the days but could be finished by 5pm and the hotel has, by all accounts, a brilliant spa. Even if we don’t click it’d be an adventure."

I look around my room, to make sure I haven't accidentally time-warped onto the set of Pretty Woman.

Is it ridiculous that I'm tempted to accept?  I don’t have many plans for this weekend yet.  There are people I'd love to visit in New York.  More than anything, I'd like to do something crazy.  I'm not the type of girl to whom these offers are usually made -- I don't play in these leagues. I like the thought of trying on that persona, just for a few days.

But I say no, my mother’s voice echoing in my ear. And then spend the afternoon half-regretting it.

vices

"What are your vices? The things you wouldn't want to tell someone on a second date," he asks.

We're at a very nice restaurant in Brentwood, jazzy and loud on a Friday night. The table between us is small and crowded with crab cakes, steak, a really good bottle of red wine. It's unclear how much my mood has been affected by the heavily poured gin and tonic I just finished, but I'm enjoying myself.

I chew, think about it. "Inertia," I tell him.  "That's my big vice." It's an honest answer. It's why I'm still in Los Angeles at all to have this dinner with him.

But he pulls a face, dismissively. In a minute I'll understand that he was hoping for something a little edgier out of me. "What about you?" I ask.

He smokes, he says. Cigarettes, plus weed a couple of times a week. And he likes to gamble. Regularly, at the casinos. In case any of that is a dealbreaker, he wants me to know up front. Then he stares at me and waits.

The truth is that any one of those three is a dealbreaker. I tell him this. But I can't remember the last time someone was so frank with me, not on a second date, and I'm impressed. I tell him that too. There's a brief minute of awkwardness, both of us considering the wall we've hit. And then (is it just the wine?) the conversation sweeps on with a life of its own. We've written ourselves this policy of suicidal honesty. Now we can say anything we want, pick up any subject, and we do.

Later that night, we end up at a dive bar somewhere in the Valley, listening to a cover band play surprisingly great rock and roll. We drink beer and shout the lyrics to Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl at each other, my hand keeping rhythm on his knee. With my big black boots and long brown hair, they might be singing about me.

Later yet, still fully committed to honesty, I say, "I want you to kiss me goodnight."  He lights up like a Christmas tree.

I drive home wondering if I'll see him again. He's already told me that he likes me, wants to see me, but he's leaving the decision up to me. And right now, on this drizzly February night, all I can think about is how attractive it is when someone tells you the truth.

yet again

Eight o’clock on a cold Monday morning at the end of February.  I should already be dressed, getting in the car, heading towards the office.  Instead I’m still sitting at my computer in panties and a tee shirt, compulsively re-reading the few bleak lines of text that represent my latest romantic abortion.

“You deserved better than that and I’m sorry,” he writes.  He’s at least the fourth boy who’s said this to me in recent memory.  Almost word-for-word, in fact.

And yes, I do bloody well deserve better than that.  Any girl does.  So at what point does everyone stop with these tired apologies, and just start behaving themselves in the first place?