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:

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

How are you?

I want to make out more.

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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.