“As a model? Are we doing men’s lingerie now, too?” Stacy was in a fog. She was confused. For starters, using this ancient man to sell boxers or briefs would repel the customers.
Janice said, “Male lingerie. For gay men, of course. It’s not a bad idea. I might have to talk to Fiona about that.” Stacy groaned. Fiona would of course say yes, assigning the bulk (or should she say bulge?) of the work to Stacy.
“His screen name is PoloMan,” Janice announced. “Sounds upscale, right? Income is one hundred fifty thousand plus. A lawyer. Spiritual but not religious. He’s fifty-five, lives on the Upper West Side, divorced, grown children, just like me. We’d have so much to talk about. And he’s cute, right?”
Nodding with enough enthusiasm to pass, Stacy peered at the URL bar and saw that Janice was shopping. For men. On match.com, her usual trolling ground for Saturday-night dates. Janice clicked on PoloMan’s CONTACT button to compose an e-mail reply to his ad.
Janice explained, “I usually just say, ‘Loved your profile. We have so much in common! Call me’ and then leave my number. But this is such a quality guy, I might have to get racy.”
Stacy watched in horror as Janice typed the following message to King Leer: “I must meet you. You are all my fantasies rolled into one perfect man. I am a gorgeous, petite blonde. I run a lingerie company and wear our product every day (and night). Call me and we’ll make a date. I am dying to hear from you.”
Using the job as a pick-up line hadn’t occurred to Stacy. She’d have to keep that ploy in mind. Once Janice hit the SEND button, the screen returned to a page with the faces and vital statistics of 25 other men. Janice scrolled down the list and, not finding any of the photos to her liking, clicked to the next page of 25 profiles. And the next. And the next.
Stacy asked, “Who are all these men?”
“After you fill out a profile of yourself and the kind of man you’re looking for, the match.com software program supplies you with a list of men who meet your criteria. I requested white men, age forty-five to sixty, making at least a hundred thousand, who live within five miles of my zip code.”
“And how many men match your criteria?”
“Let’s see, it changes every day,” she said. Janice clicked on the MY MATCHES button. In a blink, the screen returned to the first set of profiles and pictures. At the top of the list, Janice read the total number.
“Hmm, yesterday it was more. Today, one hundred fifty-four.”
“One hundred and fifty-four?” repeated Stacy. The number seemed huge. “One hundred and fifty-four rich white guys in your age group within five miles of your zip code are looking for dates?”
Janice said, “You should try it, Stacy. There is some rejection and upset, though. I’ve sent out about twenty e-mails this week, and have only heard back from five men. And none of them are free this weekend. I’m running out of time. If I can’t set something up very soon, I’ll break my streak.”
Stacy put her hand on Janice’s birdlike shoulder. She desperately wanted to tell her to forget about the streak. The streak was making her miserable. The streak was what kept Janice from taking her time, meeting men the organic way, letting something flow naturally out of mutual attraction and shared interest. The streak was what made Janice desperate and cloying, it had turned off countless men.
Reading Stacy’s thoughts, Janice said, “I know the streak seems ridiculous and counterproductive, but we all have what we have. Or don’t have, in your case.”
“At last count, you’re as dateless as I am, Janice,” said Stacy. She didn’t care if she’d make a political blunder. She was that tired. And grumpy. Stacy’s avoidance might be a way to protect oneself; Janice’s frenetic dating was another.
“I’m in a pissy mood,” Stacy said. “That’s my half-assed apology.”
“And this is my half-assed acceptance,” said Janice, patting Stacy on her cheek. Janice logged off match.com, stood and reminded Stacy of about five million tasks that needed to be completed in the next 15 minutes, but no pressure, since she knew how sensitive and overloaded Stacy had been lately.
Alone again, Stacy took her rightful place at the seat of command. The computer screen was still connected to the Internet via a super-speed DSL line; Stacy’s screen remained on match.com’s homepage. She had to admit, she was curious. In Janice’s target group, there were 154 available, eager men. Assuming, as Stacy did, that the dating pool shrinks as one ages, and that fewer older people were Internet friendly, she had to wonder how many people in their 30s used match.com. Dating sites were a natural cross-promotion for thongs.com. Hundreds, if not thousands, of women searching for love and passion needed sexy lingerie. It was too easy: Subscribe to match.com, and get a discount on a matching bra-and-panty set.
Out of professional obligation (if she were to take the idea to Fiona, she had to do the proper research first), Stacy decided to create a profile for herself. And, okay, on a personal level, if she took the risk and put herself out there (albeit anonymously), she couldn’t possibly be accused of hiding from life. Plus, she was curious to see just how many men met her criteria.
Although Stacy was an experienced web marketer, she was clueless about advertising for herself. Luckily, the first steps to creating a profile were simple. Just fill in the blanks. She could handle that much. Starting with:
SCREEN NAME: Fluffy
AGE: 29 (Why not shave off a few years?)
MARITAL STATUS: Never married
LOCATION: New York, NY
HEIGHT: 5′5″
BODY TYPE: Slim/Slender (The other choices were “athletic,” “average,” “a few extra pounds,” “large,” “disabled” and “any.” Technically, according to dress size and weight charts, Stacy was closer to “average” than “slender,” but why not shave off a few pounds?)
ETHNICITY: White
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree
RELIGION: Jewish
OCCUPATION: Entrepreneur
INCOME: $150,000+
SMOKER: No
DRINKER: Socially
HAVE CHILDREN?: No
WANT CHILDREN?: Undecided (Stacy did want children, but men might think of her as a baby-lusting career woman who’d waited too long to plan for a family and was therefore obsessed with finding a potential father, which she wasn’t. At least, not presently.)
For the profile text, Stacy composed this message:
“I’m an attractive, successful woman in New York City. I am physically active, play dozens of sports, including tennis, cycling, and running (completed my first marathon last year). I look great in jeans and sneakers, but I am smashing in ball gowns, too. I dress up often for charity benefits, movie openings, and society galas. I live in a glorious loft, newly renovated — Viking stove and SubZero fridge — in a great neighborhood. I enjoy all art, compose poetry, paint with oils, play the flute, have written several screenplays (one in turnaround), read avidly, love Beowulf as well as pulpy crime and shopping novels. I work hard at my hugely successful Internet company. And I play hard. I am sexually ravenous, a multiple orgasmatronic vapor of lust and technique. I have studied the Kama Sutra, can sing the Song of Solomon and will quote verse from Leaves of Grass. Professors Masters, Johnson, and Kinsey are personal friends of mine. We have lunch. We have orgies. I own thousands of pieces of lingerie and dozens of pairs of stiletto heels. When I’m not working or playing (hard; I just love the sound of that word), I enjoy eating, sleeping, and breathing air in and out of my lungs.”
Only about ten words in the text were true. This mattered not. Stacy decided to bait and switch: Get them in the door, bullshit her way out of lying later. After reading and editing her profile several times, Stacy realized that she’d perfectly and truthfully described someone she actually knew. Her boss, Fiona Chardonnay, was a marathon-running, gala-attending, flute-playing, sexually ravenous, Beowulf-reading size four with a TriBeca loft. Could this mean that Fiona was the woman Stacy wanted to be? Or that Stacy assumed Fiona was every man�
�s sexual fantasy (Fiona did see a lot of action, after all)?
Avoiding that headache of contemplation, Stacy forged ahead and wrote the profile of her ideal date:
“I’m not going to insist that any man be all things — handsome, rich, stylish, young, and athletic. Those are nice qualities, to be sure, but chemistry, the great intangible, can make ugly men sexy, the penniless wealthy, dorks fashionable, geezers spry, and lummoxes graceful. My feeling on attraction: I’ll know it when I see it. And once I’ve seen a man I’m attracted to, I can’t help myself from falling completely under his power. Ugly poor dork geezer lummoxes should please send photos — you can never tell when lightning will strike.”
She read it over, wavering a bit on casting so wide a net. Surely, she should discourage the geezers…No, she’d take all comers on the first pass.
The last step was to click appropriate buttons for her ideal match (age, location, status, income, etc.). Stacy rushed through this process in seconds. She was able to achieve such speed by clicking “any” in every box. Once she’d finished, Stacy submitted her profile and matching criteria. She would be able to log in and see her eligible matches in an hour or two. Responses to her ad would be sent to match.com and forwarded to her AOL address to guarantee anonymity. She could reply to those e-mails for free, or for the small fee of $25 for a month, she could cruise the male profiles herself (as Janice did), and send solicitations to the men of her liking.
Sitting back in her chair, Stacy exhaled down to the last molecule of oxygen in her lungs and prayed that she hadn’t made a terrible error in judgment. She could see how easily one could be drawn in by the simplicity and convenience of Internet dating. It was so much less stressful than approaching someone face-to-face (back to that “taking a risk” business). In cyberspace, rejections were theoretical. One couldn’t possibly take them personally. But here on land, daters were at sea. Any rebuff could sink a ship. Stacy knew the pain. She’d been on a regular diet of dismissal for days.
A knock on her door frame. Taylor Perry inserted her tousle-haired blonde head into Stacy’s office.
“Lunch?” asked Taylor.
“Today?”
“Are you swamped?”
Quicksanded. “Not at all. Noonish?”
“Oneish?”
“Perfect,” said Stacy.
Now this. She placed a call to Charlie to ask him about the de-revirginating validity of a lesbian fling. Then she got to work, and kept at it for several long hours.
Chapter Eight
Wednesday, lunch
Two women, both lovely and young, shared a pizza at the neo-Neapolitan restaurant, Cosa Nostra, located in the MetLife building, in front of giant windows facing 44th Street. Their shoulders touched as they ate; hands busy underneath the table. Stacy, as vivid of the imagination as she was pink of cheek, would have never pictured herself in this scene. Yet here she was.
The pair sat on the same side of a booth (“theater seating,” Taylor said before scooting in next to Stacy, trapping her on the inside). When they’d ordered the pizza to share, the waiter (who would be receiving a very small tip) said, “That’s cozy,” and licked his chops. Taylor wanted the Vesuvius (olives, capers, and anchovies). Stacy wasn’t surprised. She took Taylor for a savory woman — salty, not sweet.
Taylor wore one of the newest innovations from the Gap: the braless tank top. Stretchy material was sewn into the inside of the garment, a built-in support system. Considering Taylor’s voluminous flesh and her dire supportive needs, the tank failed to prevent flop. Not that Taylor knew or cared. Her breasts — and her spirit — could roam the open prairie. Her wild blonde hair was down over her neck and shoulders despite the heat — no ponytails for her. Taylor wouldn’t restrain any part of herself, and she flung around her mane and bosom with the stomping bravura of a prize mare. Nay (or, rather, neigh), a stallion.
Since Stacy wanted to be seduced, she was entranced by Taylor’s riot of hair and skin. Contrarily, Stacy had always maintained a pathologically neat personal appearance, planning outfits, carefully ironing, mending hems and buttons. Her apartment, though, had a relaxed “springtime in Baghdad” decorating style. She didn’t obsess too much about the untidiness (to say the least) of her dwelling. Hardly anyone saw it.
“You have a drop of tomato sauce on your chin,” Taylor informed Stacy. Without asking permission, Taylor wiped away the red drop with her pinkie. She next inserted said finger into Stacy’s mouth. As she withdrew it, Taylor traced Stacy’s lips, and then deposited her pinkie between her own.
“Have I mentioned today that I like you?” asked Taylor for the third or fourth time that hour.
The lunch, Stacy knew going in (had hoped), was not at all business. Almost immediately, just after they’d taken seats in the booth, Taylor reached under the table to lift the red hem of Stacy’s pink skirt and (hello) drop a hand on her bare thigh. If a man had done that, Stacy might have bristled, as if the gentleman were claiming ownership of a property that wasn’t for sale. But Taylor’s hand was well manicured and soft. By no means innocent, the contact was, however, non-threatening. No migrating crotch-bound stroking or squeezing. Just a nice imprint in the shape of a woman’s hand, warming her leg against the bite of high-impact air-conditioning. This lesbian thing, thought Stacy, was neither scary nor revolting. She took a sip of bubbling Pellegrino and dipped a pinch of bread in a dish of olive oil.
Stacy had confirmation from Charlie that a lesbian encounter would certainly qualify as a de-revirginating event. “But there has to be genital-on-genital contact, or reciprocal oral-genital contact. It’s not enough to let her go down on you,” he’d said earlier.
“Are you reading this out of the celibacy handbook?” she asked. “Genital-on-genital? How would that work?”
“Scissored legs.”
“You’ve seen this? I haven’t read any of your pornography reviews on flick.com.”
“We can work it this way,” he said. “Just do whatever you want with Taylor, and then report back to me. No detail is too small. You’ll have to give me some advance notice. I’ll want to have my tape recorder ready for the call.”
Stacy had spent some pre-lunch minutes making lists. On the plus side, a lesbian experience would be solid seduction material for future dates with men; she needn’t worry about an unwanted pregnancy; a romantic entanglement was out of the question; she was always interested in trying new and different things. Charlie gave her a little pep talk à la Bela Karolyi (“You can do it!”). She didn’t need the prodding though. Stacy had had some spicy dreams about women. But there was one undeniable minus. Stacy might be able to have sex with Taylor, but could she face her ever after in the office? Would Taylor pressure her to have lunch at the Y every day? Might that get sticky? Fiona and Janice would notice something had changed between their two most senior employees, and the last thing Stacy needed was more scrutiny from The Women.
Regarding libidinous matters, especially in her dire situation at present, Stacy resolved to stop thinking and start doing. Best to let the juices flow and mop up the mess later. Now that they were sitting close together at lunch, finger sucking and thigh touching, the whole affair seemed like a grand idea. The future weirdness could be forgotten for the next hour.
And then Taylor said, “I’m leaving thongs.com.”
Stacy blinked. “When?” she asked. So much for future weirdness.
“Friday is my last day. I got a job offer from pets.com to reproduce the site. No offense to you — you’re amazing — but I don’t think thongs.com will last the year. I posted my resume on monster.com a few weeks ago, and I got calls from garden.com, kosmo.com, urban fetch and CDNOW. Pets.com is the safest bet. Did you notice that the sock puppet’s collar is a man’s watch? I love that.”
Stacy’s initial reaction to the news: relief (the sex would be that much easier). Second reaction: disbelief. She was surprised Taylor had so little faith in Fiona’s ability to stay afloat. Third reaction: rank jealousy.
Stacy hadn’t gotten calls from anyone. Non-tech people were disposable. Taylor’s talents, making all the moving parts on a webpage fit, encoding the programs, troubleshooting. These were valuable skills. What skills could Stacy list on monster.com? That in three minutes flat, she could invent fifty hotcha names for faux satin G-strings? No one would want her. Perhaps that explained her fealty to thongs.com in a job-hopping industry.
In her time at thongs.com, Stacy had seen 42 staffers come and go. She knew the exact number because she made hash marks on the wall of her office to keep track of the turnovers. Most of the fly-by employees stayed less than a month before quitting or getting a better job. Some lasted just a week. She’d read in Fast Company that the average length of employment at a dot-com startup was three to six months.
The typical trajectory went something like this: Land an Internet job with fancy yet dubious title (Stacy’s was “vice president in charge of merchandising and marketing”), drool over pre-IPO options/benefits package, slave from 8 A.M. to midnight six days a week plus a couple hours of catch-up on Sunday from home working on a company-distributed laptop. Form a superficial attachment to one’s colleagues that feels deep (spending that much time with anyone will lead to a false sense of intimacy). The attachment quickly turns to disgust (spending that much time with anyone will get on one’s nerves). Employee unity is further eroded by competition to land the next fancy yet dubious-sounding job, and a feeling of futility when the stock price slips. Bosses tend to be megalomaniacs. Everyone is ambitious, but no one is secure. The Internet is an every - geek - for - herself world.
At the three-month mark, the employee’s days are numbered (whether s/he knows it or not). Departure Scenario #1: Employee suffers from a sudden work-related ailment (carpal tunnel syndrome, sick-office syndrome, etc.) forcing him or her to take time off. Departure Scenario #2: Employee’s good work is noticed by a larger or hotter dot com. Phone calls are made, more options with larger salaries are dangled, jobs jumped. Departure Scenario #3: Employee is terrorized by the tyrannical and overzealous boss of the dot com, a man or woman who has put up his or her own money as well as huge chunks from banks and private investors (everyone s/he knows, including family, friends and people s/he met last night at a Silicon Alley party in a SoHo gallery space). The boss believes that the employee’s gentle joking about bankruptcy makes him or her a saboteur. And saboteurs must be expunged.
The Accidental Virgin Page 8
