Dating Dead Men

by Harley Jane Kozak

  My phone rang. I turned off the radio, feeling the thrill I always get when I hear a reference to myself on the air. I was the research for How to Avoid Getting Dumped All the Time. Well, me and fourteen other women across the United States. We were the Dating Project.

  “Hello?” I said, but there was silence on the other end of the phone. “P.B.?”

  A guttural noise answered me. It could have been the growl of an animal. It could have been phlegm.

  I felt a sudden, inexplicable chill. As though a flame had been extinguished.

  “P.B.?”

  Click. Silence. Dial tone.

  chapter two

  “That outfit is hot, hot, hot. Guys go for leather. Guys go for blondes in leather.” Fredreeq aimed a Polaroid at me. “Wollie, you gotta put down the phone.”

  I was now pressing redial every few minutes, and getting a busy signal. It was after 6 P.M., shift change hour at the hospital, when a chatty patient could monopolize the phone unnoticed or an overworked staff member might take it off the hook. I hung up, sucked in my stomach, and summoned a smile. Fredreeq snapped the picture, and a flash illuminated the back room.

  Dark and cavernous, the store's back room was bigger than the selling floor, with a maze of storage units, shelves, and old gym lockers, all of which I'd painted, wallpapered, or decoupaged. There was a drafting table where I designed my greeting cards, and some rococo furnishings inherited from my friend Joey when she'd married a minimalist. Her giant Persian rug covered half the concrete floor, making the space more appealing than my apartment. Had it been zoned for residential living, I'd have brought over my toaster oven and moved in.

  “I'm going out front to file this Polaroid,” Fredreeq said, making notes on it. “We're making progress—tonight is Number Nineteen. Dave. Those shoes don't go with that outfit, by the way. They're too flat.”

  The shoes were flat, in deference to Dave. There was a height requirement on the List, number seven, 5' 9'' or Above, suggested by Dr. Cookie herself. She felt my date need not be as tall as me, just tall enough to escape Short Man's Complex. Dave barely squeaked through.

  Fredreeq stuck her head in the doorway. “Phone. For you. I think.”

  “Hello?” I said, and heard loud breathing. “P.B.?”

  “No names.”

  Thank God, I thought. “Honey, I've been so worried about—”

  “I need aluminum foil.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can't bring it right now, but tomorrow—”

  “There's a dead body.”

  “A what?”

  “Dead body. Cadaver. Corpse. They said there'd be a murder and now there's a body. Can you come right now?”

  “I wish I could but I can't. I have a date now and visiting hours are over. Tomorrow—”

  “No, now, they're here now, I need it now.”

  His anxiety always got to me. Born of delusions, it was nevertheless real. “I'll come by later tonight, okay? After my date. I'll leave the foil with the night staff and it'll be waiting for you when you wake up and—” A click. “P.B.?” Silence. Dial tone.

  Fredreeq's head appeared in the doorway. “Number Nineteen is here.”

  DAVE HONKED THE horn of the oversized turquoise convertible as a city bus lumbered into our lane. “Touch this paint job and I'll sue, you ignorant clod!” He looked over at me in the passenger seat. “Yeah, it was the tall blond part of your ad that caught my eye. Oh, and the title, ‘Where Were You in 1968?' That got me thinking. Where I was was in nursery school, having wet dreams about tall blondes.”

  “Ah.”

  “So what are we dressed as there, 1980?”

  I looked down at my outfit. Leather skirt, black bodysuit, opaque stockings. Was that eighties? Was that bad? Concern for P.B.'s problems gave way to concern for my own.

  Dave himself wore black jeans, a brown sports jacket, and a rayon floral shirt. And loafers, without tassels, pennies, or snakeskin. Acceptable, as per number eight on the List, Good Shoes. A Fredreeq contribution.

  The premise of the List was simple. For every woman in America who's chronically lovelorn, Dr. Cookie maintained, there are people in her life—a mother, a co-worker, a best friend—who know what the problem is, who could literally make a list of what characteristics she should demand, based on what was lacking in the losers from her past. Not that I thought of the guys I'd dated as losers, but the doctor was one tough cookie. “If they didn't step up to the plate with a marriage proposal, they're losers,” she said. “So recruit those friends. Make that list. And for now, forget big-ticket items like ‘integrity' or ‘intelligence.' You're teaching yourself discernment, so start with what's verifiable. Even shallow.”

  Hence, Good Shoes. My own feet, I now realized, were numb with cold. “Dave, I'm sorry, I should've grabbed a sweater,” I said. “Any chance we could put the top up?”

  “This is a classic car,” he said. “There is no top.”

  “Oh. I guess that's why there's no seat belt. But what about the seat belt law?”

  He glanced at me. “Well, aren't you the goody two-shoes?”

  I was, but also, a seat belt would've been a two-inch layer of warmth. Rush hour traffic kept our pace slow, so there wasn't a big wind factor, just standard California mid-March frigidity. Twenty minutes on the road and we'd just reached the Fairfax district, a world away from the Hollywood of my shop, or that of the tourists. Resistant to change and chain stores, this stretch of Fairfax was mostly mom-and-pop operations squeezed into narrow storefronts. Black-clad pedestrians hurried toward synagogues, making better progress than the cars. If only I were an Orthodox Jew, I thought, I'd be dressed warmly. Of course, if I were an Orthodox Jew, I wouldn't be in a convertible after sundown on a Friday. I wished I were back at the shop, lighting Shabbat candles. I focused on the taillights of the bus ahead and recited to myself the Hebrew prayer I knew from childhood, then added in English, Bless this Sabbath, let me be dressed right, and help me get through this date, amen.

  We neared Canter's Deli, the neighborhood's emotional core, and a stream of pedestrians crossed Fairfax, stopping our progress. I gazed at a thrift store, then Eat A Pita, a fast-food joint, and my mind drifted off into greeting cards, envisioning little falafel wearing secondhand mittens, wrapped snugly in their pita overcoats—

  Dave's horn startled me once more. A trio of Chassidim hurried into the crosswalk, oblivious to their red light. “Freaks,” Dave muttered.

  I stared at him. “What?” he said, gunning the engine.

  “Well, good heavens, Dave. Freaks? Why, the clothes? The payes?”

  “Payes?” He looked at me. “Jesus, a Zionist in a shiksa suit. Listen, babe, just because my name is Fischgarten, doesn't mean I feel some tribal solidarity. You're not Jewish, are you?” His eyes narrowed, as though to assess my gene pool.

  I'm not Jewish, but I wasn't about to tell this guy about Ruta, who had taken care of my brother and me when we were little; Ruta, who had taught us about challah and matzoh and love; Ruta, who spent World War II in Poland, hiding under the floorboards of a general store. “No,” I said. “But religion interests me. My friend Joey, for instance, studies Buddhism—”

  Dave snapped on the radio. A male voice said, “Sex. Sex with children. Child molestation. Pedophilia. Think about it, think about that word, ‘pedophile.'”

  I thought about it. What I thought was that I didn't want to be thinking about it. I wondered what Dave thought about it.

  “A guy who does it with little kids now lives on your block,” the talk show host continued. “Does it bug you? Hank from Tarzana, you're on the line.”

  “Yeah, hi. Thanks. Okay, what ticks me off is how, okay, they let some child molester out of jail and everyone's upset, okay, but then Ron ‘the Weasel' gets out on a technicality—”

  “Who's Ron ‘the Weasel'?”

  “It was in the L.A. Times, he's that guy, last year he got sent up on conspiracy—”

  “Is he a pedophile?” asked the host.


  “Naw, he's a guy from my neighborhood. See, first he cops a plea—”

  “Hank? Wake up. The topic is pedophiles. Arnie from Glendale, go ahead, you're—”

  Dave changed the station.

  “Have you ever heard of Dr. Cookie Lahven?” I asked. “A show called Love Junkies? She wrote a book called How to Avoid Killing Yourself and now she's—”

  “Huh.” Dave switched to FM. Fifties music blared, sounding the way the car looked. “Sheb Wooley,” he said. “My man!” He drummed on the steering wheel and threw me a smile. I stared, marveling that my perpetual shivering didn't seem to register with him. Well, what did I expect? Single, on the shady side of thirty, finding men through classified ads—he probably figured I should be grateful for a free meal and a ride in a great car. Dates Four and Thirteen had practically told me as much. And so what? It wasn't as if Dave was my type. Of course, it had been so long since I'd been attracted to anyone, I was no longer sure I had a type. I'd once had a type, in the olden days, but Dr. Cookie maintained it was a type known as the commit-o-phobe. Fighting an urge to climb out of the convertible, I reminded myself that I wasn't here for fun, I was here for science. And, of course, money.

  The Dating Project consisted of fifteen women around the country dating six hundred men over a period of six months, in an organized and documented manner. Each subject enlisted one or more discriminating friends to create her List and compose an ad to run in the Personals section of local newspapers, and/or the Internet. The friends fielded responses, interrogated the men, and scheduled a preliminary meeting—what Fredreeq called the Drive-by—to determine, for instance, whether a prospect who claimed to be five nine was indeed five nine, and to allow the prospect to get a look at the woman in question. It sounded like a lot of work, but as Dr. Cookie pointed out, most people have a matchmaking instinct, and in fact, finding the Discriminating Friends was the easy part. Even so, I insisted on giving Fredreeq 10 percent of my research fee, just for the time she put in. My other discriminating friend, Joey, wouldn't take any money—bad enough, she said, that she was currently sponging off her husband. Fredreeq said that was the kind of marriage she aspired to, but as her own husband was more sponge than spongee, she was happy to get a piece of my research fee.

  The tricky part was getting men to agree to the Drive-by and interrogation process, and a certain number of prospects dropped out at this point. But Joey and Fredreeq were persuasive talkers, noting that the Drive-by worked both ways, and many men, being visually oriented, came to see the value of setting eyes on a woman before committing themselves to dinner and a movie. An unexpected side effect was that a fair number of them hit on Joey and Fredreeq.

  For us research subjects, the entire process was designed to wipe out those three unscientific elements so dear to the hearts of romantics: chance, subjectivity, and “chemistry.”

  “I have a degree in science,” Dr. Cookie liked to say, “and I'm here to tell you that what y'all call chemistry is nothing but plain ol' lust, with a half-life of about twelve minutes.”

  No danger of that tonight. I'd be lucky to end the night with all my teeth, they were chattering so violently. I pulled down the sun visor but there was no mirror attached. My eyes watered from exposure, which meant there were mascara tears grafted onto my face. I wiped my nose with my hand, wishing I had a Kleenex or even a coat sleeve. “Dave,” I said, “I'm feeling a little self-conscious. I think the wind has blown off all my makeup.”

  “That's okay,” Dave said cheerfully. “You were wearing too much anyway.”

  THE PEOPLE AT the Malibu Bat Cave hadn't heard of Dave. That pretty much killed his cheerfulness. After an extended discussion with a maître d' named Klaus and an exchange of twenty dollars, we were seated on the veranda, overlooking a Dumpster.

  It was cold on the veranda. I drank a lot of hot tea, before, during, and after my angel hair pasta. Dave had multiple extra dry Beefeater martinis and sweetbreads in carmelized citrus sauce.

  I learned all about Dave's last girlfriend, who left him to follow the Dalai Lama, and the girlfriend before that one, who joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was no fun anymore. I learned about the sexual preferences of people I'd never heard of. As Dave talked, I took a discreet glance at my watch, a Patek Philippe from the thirties, inherited from Ruta when she died. My only real piece of jewelry, the watch had a tiny face and required some squinting, but I was delighted to see we were approaching the two-hour mark, that magic point that made a date official, by Dr. Cookie's rules. Number Nineteen was the first date I'd considered bailing out on. That I hadn't done so was due to Ruta's voice in my head, urging me on. Telling me I could do this, that I was tough.

  I had to be. Thirteen of the Dating Project subjects had been at it since Halloween. Pittsburgh was replaced at Christmas when she eloped with Date Number Five, and the original Los Angeles had dropped out to act in a production of The Fantasticks. I was her successor, brought in on Groundhog Day—so late in the game that my forty dates had to be squeezed into the space of two months for Dr. Cookie to keep to her writing schedule. If I averaged two nights off each week, it worked out to be forty dates in forty nights. There were those who said it couldn't be done, but there were those who didn't know what it was to truly need five thousand dollars.

  “. . . guy inside the sliding glass door?” Dave was saying, as he stabbed a pearl onion. “Big Eddie Minardi. Mafia don. East Coast, but when he's in town, does all the hot places.”

  I looked over, wondering how a research scientist from UCLA knew a mob boss on sight. Beyond the Mafia table I saw the rest room/telephone sign. I excused myself to call P.B. Not only was he a better conversationalist than Dave, I was desperate to stop worrying about him, and talking was the only way to do that.

  “Hello, you have reached the after-hours switchboard at Rio Pescado . . .” the indefatigable message voice said. A woman behind me in the narrow hallway gave a lame cough, reminding me there were other people who hadn't brought their cell phone to dinner, or perhaps, like me, didn't have one.

  Excuse me, I wanted to say, I'm dealing with phantom corpses, so you just wait your turn. But I didn't. I hung up, stuck with the creepy feeling I'd had all day. Walking back to the veranda, I snuck a look at the alleged Mr. Mafia, a sixty-something man in a gorgeous suit, smoking a pipe. He returned my look openly. I know, his eyes seemed to say, murder is hell.

  Back at my table, Dave picked up where he'd left off on his travelogue with chaos, a mathematical theory explaining behavior that seems to be random but turns out not to be.

  This was my favorite part, hearing what the Dating Project guys did for a living. On previous dates I'd learned about: perchloroethylene, a cancer-causing chemical used by dry cleaners; the air-conditioning system at L.A. Community College; weightlifting; divorce settlements; zoning laws; the Talmud; how copper conducts heat; and how Pizarro conquered Peru. Now I learned that randomness and chaos are not the same thing: while random is random, chaos is not. If you can find the pattern in chaos you can change it. I loved that.

  I was mentally composing my journal entry on Dave—“not a people person”—when he reached across the table and stroked my wrist. His fingernails were buffed.

  “You have really soft skin,” he said. “Goose bumps, though. Are you cold?”

  Seven minutes to go, I thought. Four hundred twenty seconds. “I'm fine.”

  “My apartment is warm.” He smiled as if he were trying out a new set of teeth.

  This was the worst part of dating, maybe for everyone, but certainly for me. In addition to the two-hour minimum, Dr. Cookie had spelled out official standards of behavior: no crying jags or sitting in stony silence or running screaming into the night. No assault, no bringing a book. Mindful of all this, I mustered up a simple “No, thank you, Dave.”

  “Come on, Woollie. Your place is far away, it'll be so late by the time we get there.”

  “It's ‘Wollie,'” I said. “And it'll be later if we go to your
house first.” I began to calculate how much driving I had ahead of me, to Rio Pescado, then saw he was still smiling, waiting for an answer. But what was the question? Oh, yes.

  “I can't stay over,” I said. “I can't sleep with you.”

  His smile faded. “Why not?”

  “I don't want to.”

  Dave looked around impatiently and snapped his fingers. “Check.”

  “He's not our waiter,” I said. “That's Christian. Ours is Jonathan.”

  “Who cares?”

  I ended up taking a cab home. Dave paid half.

  MY VW RABBIT zoomed up the 101 north, past the Denny's, McDonald's, and International House of Pancakes of Woodland Hills, Westlake Village, Thousand Oaks. I drove without the radio, a habit left over from the days when a trip to Rio Pescado made me nervous to the point of nausea. I thought about how it was now more fun to go to the mental hospital than it was to go on a date, and I wondered if that was progress.

  I'd dressed haphazardly, in the interest of speed and warmth: my long calico skirt from earlier in the day, heavy wool socks over my tights, red high-top Converse All Stars, gray hooded sweatshirt, jean jacket. Nothing matched and it didn't matter. It's hard to dress wrong for the hospital. On the seat next to me were seventy-five square feet of Reynolds Wrap quality aluminum foil. In my jacket pocket was a Regency romance, Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle. A useful thing to know about mental illness, which you won't find in pamphlets or medical textbooks like the DSM-IV, is how much time is spent, by everyone involved, waiting at hospitals, pharmacies, police stations, or on hold, which is why it's important to carry reading material at all times, or a portable hobby, like needlepoint or whittling.

  After forty minutes the terrain changed dramatically. Flat, complaisant communities gave way to a sweeping vista as the freeway snaked around canyon curves high above the valley floor. I took the Pleasant Valley exit.

  Entering the little town at midnight was disorienting, like spotting the cleaning lady at an after-hours club. But I made the drive to the hospital most Thursdays at noon, so it didn't take long for my internal compass to kick in. My Rabbit bounced along past the corn and onion fields till the Deer Crossing sign reminded me to slow down.