Dating Without Novocaine

by Lisa Cach

  “I don’t, either,” I said. He had them in green and in white, with dull metal buttons fastening the open end. “I could use the pillow forms you have, and just recover them. It’ll be cheaper. Price limit?”

  “How much can pillow covers cost?”

  “Louise and I saw some pillows in one of the shops on 23rd today that were over two hundred dollars.”

  He gaped at me. “Each?”

  “Aaa, don’t worry. It won’t cost you quite that much,” I said, grinning. “Maybe you’ll have to pull a few extra teeth to pay me, though.”

  “I could always trade you dental services. We could barter the price.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, my stomach doing a sickening flip at the mere thought.

  He gave me one of those looks parents use on children who have given a particularly lame excuse for why they don’t need to eat their Brussels sprouts, and then got up to make dinner.

  I offered to help, but he shooed me away, and instead I examined his living room and thought about what types of fabrics I might want to use on the pillows. Tapestry would be nice, and a rich gold fringe.

  “Mind if I go in your bedroom?” I asked. “To get ideas for the duvet.”

  He stopped where he was, a bowl of something from the refrigerator in his hands.

  “I won’t pry,” I said. “And I promise not to notice any dirty underwear.”

  “Just…just let me do a quick cleanup,” he said, putting the bowl on the counter and dashing ahead of me into his room. I listened to him rooting about, closet doors opening and closing, footsteps thudding across the hardwood floor. I frowned, wondering why, if he’d known ahead of time that he wanted me to make a duvet, he hadn’t picked up his room so I could look at it.

  Finally he emerged. “Okay,” he said, looking frightened.

  “Got the porn stashed?”

  His eyes widened.

  “That cop said all guys look at porn.”

  “Not all guys.”

  “That’s not a denial.”

  “I refuse to testify against myself,” he said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Go make me dinner,” I said, and slipped past him into his room. He stared after me, and I shooed him with my hands until he left.

  And I was alone in the sacred male bower.

  I felt the temptation to pry, to dig through drawers and medicine cabinets, to look under the bed, but it was a small temptation and easily resisted. I couldn’t betray his trust like that, without feeling dirty.

  Although I would like to know if there was a sealed box of condoms somewhere, inching toward its expiration date, a latex and cardboard symbol of hope and disappointment. I didn’t want to imagine Scott having sex with someone, but I did want to think he at least wanted to do it. For some reason, I liked the image of him pining away in sexual frustration.

  If I wasn’t getting any, no reason for him to be, Lucy Lawless the Lawyer be damned.

  There wasn’t much to see in his bedroom, beyond the usual scattering of unnecessarily complex electronics: the bedside clock radio/CD player that projected a digital image of the time onto the ceiling, the TV and DVD player, the contraption that made soothing sounds from raindrops to surf to crickets, and that I assume he used for getting to sleep. If he used it at all. Scott had a love for gadgets, and the stores that sold them like Brookstone and The Sharper Image. He wasn’t materialistic, he just liked the sheer gadgetry of the stuff. He’d once claimed it went with being a dentist.

  His bed had no headboard, just a Hollywood frame under the boxsprings, and an uncovered ecru comforter on top of the sheets. There was one small Oriental carpet on the floor, and two framed museum posters of art-works by Klee on the walls that looked as if he’d had them since he’d been in college.

  I wondered, if I opened the folding closet doors, if a pile of dirty clothes would tumble out. I was guessing yes.

  The bathroom was similarly without interest, except for the ionic hair dryer, the electric nose and ear hair clipper, the Razor Care System and a CD player for the shower. The sink showed traces of soap and shaved whiskers. A basket of magazines sat by the toilet, holding back issues of Men’s Health and Bicycling, a token issue of The Smithsonian, and a wrinkled Victoria’s Secret catalog. I wondered which he actually looked at while in there.

  Guys’ bathrooms were so very different from women’s. No jewelry in piles, no makeup, no bottles of lotions and hair products, no combs and clips, tweezers and nail scissors, curling iron and hot rollers with cords dangling and getting caught in the door. No matching bath rug and shower curtain, no half dozen shampoos and conditioners and bath gels and scrunchy body sponges. However did they groom themselves?

  I was guessing, as with the closet, that if I pulled open a drawer in the cabinet I would find a treasure trove of shaving lotion, styptic pencils, aftershave, and probably more dental products than anyone could use in a year. And maybe that box of unused condoms. I nobly resisted the temptation to check, and to check for long hairs in a brush that might give away the lawyer’s presence, and instead considered color schemes.

  I was back in the living room, alternately contemplating the view of the darkening city and the possibilities of the room, if I were given my way and a platinum credit card, when Scott called me to dinner.

  Dinner was pasta with a spicy red sauce, Caesar salad, kalamata olive bread and ice water with lemon.

  “Pretty fancy,” I said, impressed. “And here I was expecting hot dogs.”

  “Most of it was already made. You know, from the deli department at Zupan’s.”

  “But it looks impressive. Better than the peanut butter and jelly I’d have had at home, if I was up to it.”

  “I was going to open a bottle of red wine, but…”

  “I wouldn’t have drunk any,” I finished. He knew I wouldn’t have anything to drink if I was going to drive. I have no head for alcohol.

  We went to work on the food, chatting about possibilities for his duvet and pillows, and then the conversation wandered through work and eventually back to my perennial favorite, human relationships.

  “The thing I don’t get about this Pete guy,” I said, “is how he could put so much effort into trying to get me into bed, then abandon the quest so quickly. I mean, I’d think I was worth a little more perseverance than that. Did he not like me at all? Was he just horny for an afternoon?”

  “I thought you said the whole thing didn’t bother you.”

  “It doesn’t,” I semi-lied. Pete didn’t deserve to be made into a voodoo doll just yet. “I’m just trying to figure out the male mind.”

  “Don’t look at me. I don’t do that type of thing.”

  “Never?”

  “The guy sounds like a jerk.”

  “But he was so cute.”

  Scott looked at me with raised brows.

  “Maybe he just got busy,” I said. “Maybe his ADHD kicked in, and he got distracted.”

  “And if he called, you’d go out with him again?” Scott asked in disbelief.

  “Nooo…” I said.

  “Hannah, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Maybe he had to go undercover and couldn’t call.”

  “You said he was a patrol officer.”

  “Maybe he got shot.”

  “You should be so lucky.” He made a noise of disgust. “I can’t believe you’d go out with him again. He’s already shown you what type of person he is.”

  “I know,” I said. But I didn’t know, and Scott knew it. “But maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing,” Scott interrupted. “For God’s sake, you say you’re trying to find a man to marry, a man who will treat you well and be a good father to your children, and here you are talking about spending time with a jerk-off like that. Why? Because he’s ‘cute’?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to marry him,” I said. “What’s the matter, I can’t have a little fun? Maybe all I want is sex, maybe that’s the only reason I want to see him again. Guys do
that all the time, why can’t I?”

  “If it was just about sex we wouldn’t be talking about it. You could walk down the street and find a dozen guys willing to go to bed with you. You could have gone ahead and slept with this Pete, if that was what it was about.”

  “I thought about it.”

  “You’re not like that. You don’t sleep around.”

  “What is this, high school? The 1950’s? No, I don’t ‘sleep around,’ but not because of some outdated moral code. If I wasn’t afraid of getting my heart broken or picking up some nasty disease, you can bet I’d take home anyone I felt like.”

  “Why don’t you, then? Use protection. And if it’s just one night, what risk is there of breaking your heart?” He sounded as upset as I felt. “If you’re Miss Modern Values, why don’t you act according to them?”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, as defiant as a teenager.

  “You won’t,” he said, and in his voice was doubt, and the hope that I was lying.

  “I don’t know why it should matter to you, one way or another.”

  There was silence between us for a long moment. He poked at his cold noodles with his fork, then met my eyes. “I don’t want to see you hurt. All I want for you is the best.”

  I had no answer for that. I almost said that it was for me to decide what was best, only I knew it would sound snotty. When someone is being noble and saying things for your best interest, it’s too easy to come across like an ungrateful juvenile delinquent.

  “Well, thanks,” I finally muttered.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, equally as gracious.

  And we talked about other things.

  Nineteen

  Shoulder Pads and Falsies

  Most of the next week went by in a confused blur of sewing, driving to appointments, playing on the Internet and reading the thrillers I’d picked up at the library.

  Wonderful place, the library, where books and their accompanying escapism are free and ostensibly educational. If you eat to escape your moods, or shop, or have sex or drink, everyone says you have a problem. Read a book, and they think you’re smart.

  I had a nagging feeling of guilt and discomfort about the argument with Scott. We’d never argued quite like that before, never let our discussions get so personal, with feelings close to the surface.

  The nagging feeling tinted my days gray, and I felt as though everything I said to my friends was wrong, felt that my interactions with customers were off, felt my sewing was not as good as it should have been, and the lack would be noted. And on top of the rest I felt puffy and bloated, my skin oily, new blemishes arising to give outward proof to the loser I was inside.

  I knew the mood and accompanying loser-dom was temporary, I knew it was a matter of perception and that in a week or so all would be a sunny bright yellow again. But for now things were shadowy and incomplete, disjointed and murky with failure.

  So I sewed and drove, read and ate and slept, and stayed up through the night looking at awful personal ads on the Internet, all in an attempt to not dwell on that argument with Scott. I had temporarily removed my own ad, knowing I was in too bitchy a state to answer any letters.

  I didn’t even work on my wedding dress. If I sewed it, he really might come, and I just couldn’t be bothered to put on the makeup that would require.

  Now it was Thursday, and I had an appointment with a new client, a pageant mother. She’d said on the phone she wanted me to make an evening gown and two other costumes for her twelve-year-old daughter, for a competition next month.

  How could I possibly pass that up? It was almost as good as making wrestling costumes. Or maybe it was even better: kiddie pageants were surely the stranger, more perverted of the two.

  The apartment complex where Carin Hoag lived was in the same part of town as Pete’s, and of about the same price level, from the looks of it. I always wondered what it would have been like to have grown up calling a series of apartments home, instead of the house in Roseburg, where my room had always been my room, as if no one else could ever have lived there, or ever would in the future.

  I suppose I would have adjusted, but still, I was glad that there was a specific place I could call home.

  I parked, found the right door and knocked. I could hear the tone of female voices sniping at each other, and waited. And waited a little longer, as the sniping continued. Then finally the door opened and I was facing a hard-faced girl who looked to be somewhere around eighteen or twenty. She had a burning cigarette wedged between two fingers.

  A cigarette. Oh Lord. It seemed the only people in Oregon who smoked anymore were older people who hung out in bars playing the video poker machines, and the sort of teenagers who looked in need of social services before they ended up on heroin and giving blow-jobs for twenty bucks a head.

  Everyone else was too busy hiking and shopping for organic vegetables.

  “Yeah?” the creature asked, in way of greeting. She had on low-slung jeans tight enough to crease her crotch, and a form-fitting orange T-shirt that she must have bought in the children’s department, it was so small. She took a professional suck on the cigarette, and I saw sore knees in her future.

  “Ms. Hoag?” I asked.

  The girl rolled her eyes. “That’s my mom.”

  “I’m Hannah O’Dowd. The seamstress?” I asked, trying to ring a bell in that sour head.

  An older woman came down the short hall behind the girl, her hair frosted and teased, and covered with a fine cobwebbing of spray. She had parenthetical grooves around her mouth, and her magenta lipstick was bleeding into the fissures of her upper lip, despite the dark brown retaining wall of lip liner.

  “You’re going to ruin your skin, Bethany!” the woman said, and snatched the cigarette from the girl’s fingers just as she was raising it again to her mouth.

  This was Bethany? Twelve-year-old Bethany?

  “You want me to get fat?” the girl snapped back. “All the models smoke. Ballet dancers smoke. I’m going to get fat.” She looked at me. “Bet you don’t smoke.”

  I weighed in my mind the likely five to seven hundred dollars this job would gross, versus so much as ten minutes in Bethany’s company.

  “Shut up,” the elder Hoag said. Bethany tossed her head and stomped off down the hall. “I’m sorry,” Ms. Hoag said. “She’s angry because I won’t let her go to a rave tomorrow night. Please come in.” She smiled in what she probably thought was a warm, inviting manner, but I felt as if I was being lured inside by a fairy-tale witch, the type who can’t quite hide the fact that the oven is set to preheat.

  The place smelled of sickly sweet floral air freshener and cigarette smoke, and was furnished with cheap oak tables and chairs, and a beige nubby-cloth couch above which hung a framed print that looked as if it had come straight off the furniture showroom floor. A fake plant sat on top of the entertainment center, which was filled with trophies and ribbons, as well as a TV and a shelf of videotapes.

  On the other walls hung picture after picture of Bethany in costume, crowns on her poofed head, ribbons across her child’s body. In the oldest photos she smiled with baby teeth in a face made up like a refugee from the eighties. I shuddered. Horror-flick monsters had nothing on the creepiness of a child beauty queen.

  Ms. Hoag saw me looking at the photos and gave me a rundown on each one. By the time we got to the end of them, I’d realized that Ms. Hoag had to have spent tens of thousands of dollars on costumes, entry fees, coaches and travel expenses, and in return she’d gotten the crappy faux trophies on the shelves and occasional prize money that might cover a night in a hotel.

  I tried to think of a nice way to ask what was going through my mind, which was, “Why the hell are you wasting your money on this?” Instead, I asked, “So, uh, what drew you and Bethany to pageants?”

  “It’s an investment.”

  I raised my brows.

  “At the higher levels, there’s scholarship money up for grabs. I want Bethany to go to college
, and this is how we’re going to get the money.” She took out a cigarette of her own and lit it. “I don’t know how we could ever afford it otherwise.”

  The woman appeared oblivious that the funds for at least one college education had already been sucked down the drain of pageants. With idiot genes like that in her blood, I doubted Bethany would ever be seeing the doors of a hallowed institution, money or no.

  The phone rang, and Bethany ran out of wherever she’d been sulking to get it, a rain of excited, squeaky chatter following. She carried the phone back into the depths of the apartment, yakking all the way.

  Ms. Hoag took out one of the videotapes and shoved it into the VCR. “The gown I want made is on here,” she said, as the image came up and she fast-forwarded through a home video of a pageant. “Do you have a VCR?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll give you the tapes to take home, with the costumes on them.”

  “You want me to copy one?” I had thought she wanted something original.

  “Last year’s winner. Here she is.”

  The tape stopped on a girl of unknown age, in an evening gown shimmering with beads and rhinestones, and the type of dangling, swaying excrescence on the shoulders that made me think of long-dead episodes of Dynasty. The girl looked strangely out of proportion, like a doll made to the wrong ratio of legs to body to head.

  Her head with all its hair was nearly one-third of the girl’s height, and looked as though it belonged on a twenty-year-old. Her body was as hip- and waist-less as an eight-year-old’s, no matter what had to be falsies giving contour to her chest.

  I began to feel sorry for Bethany. Then I decided it was better to feel sorry for myself, who would be spending hours making such a beastly costume.

  I endured another half hour of videotape as Ms. Hoag found the other costumes she wanted, then she took me back to Bethany’s room so I could take her measurements.

  “I think Tyler’s cuter than David,” Bethany was saying on the phone. “He bumped into me in the hall. I know he did it on purpose. He’s so immature! But I think he likes me.” Then she saw us come in—Ms. Hoag still trailing cigarette smoke—whispered a goodbye, and shut off the phone.