Knowing in theory he’s right, I can’t imagine surviving with three measly tees. I change the topic. “When can you tell a relationship is going somewhere?”
“When you get comfortable. When you go to the bathroom to take a leak and you’re not running to the other end of the house.”
“Okay. What about sex? How do you tell if it’s good sex or bad sex?”
“It’s all in your mind. I can’t make love unless I’m in love. Everybody’s different. Good sex is when you get comfortable with somebody and you just want to be with them. It doesn’t always have to be intense – let’s go jump off a cliff – to be good.”
“Barb, think about it. Everybody is the sum total of all their relationships. Every time you have an experience that goes sour, you pull back a little bit. You develop a package around you. ‘I’m tired of getting used. I’m getting tired of getting hurt.’ Relationships are like business, you’re only as good as your last miracle.”
I start to pack up my notes and click off the recorder. A thought pops into my mind.
“Dev, when was your last miracle?”
Little parenthetical smile lines appear on either side of his mouth.
“My first love.”
I click the recorder on again.
“Everything was so much more intense then because of the inexperience level. I seriously believe that your first love carries through your entire life. I keep looking to replicate those feelings. I was seventeen and very shy. It was real hard for me. I would see the girl I was madly in love with and be terrified to speak to her.”
“Do you think you could ever feel that way again?”
His eyes shine. “Absolutely. At least I hope so. It’s just chemistry. I think you can be eighty years old and experience that sort of elation. When you realize emotionally that you’ve found somebody who’s sympathetic to what you want from life.”
I think again of Mark speaking to teenage me. “I am so proud you’re headed to college,” he said, pausing in our snowball fight. He hugged me close until my shivers disappeared, then whispered in my ear, his breath a puff of white hanging in the air. “You can be anything you want to be.”
Dev and I share a goodbye hug. I’m almost out the door when a thought occurs to me.
“Would you die for the woman you loved?”
“I’d die for you.” He winks.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“If I loved you...”
~ Barbara Silkstone, Love Investigator
Year five of the investigation and I sit in a room in The Double Tree Hotel in Tucson. The place is large and comfortable in that desert-themed way Arizonians exploit so well. Pale blues and pinks and sand colors surround me.
I dump my backpack of mini-cassette tapes on the bed and scatter them with my left hand. My right is busy sopping up the tears that – darn them – wouldn’t stop. This last batch of interviewees is locked on one subject – their first loves.
Tough little me is beginning to need help. I punch in Lee’s number on my cell phone. She’s a psychologist. I’d met her through the recommendation of Doctor Tim, a recent interviewee.
“I figured I’d be hearing from you as soon as you started to crumble.”
“Nuts. I’m not crumbling. I’m just... I’ve got a big empty spot where my heart used to be. I never expected the men to share so much, they give me way too much information and I don’t know how to put it out of my mind. I can’t help applying what they tell me to my personal life. Right now, I keep thinking about my first love because that’s what these guys are talking about.” I swipe at my nose and clear my throat.
“You’re in over your head with no training. I’ve had eight years of schooling and I couldn’t do it, not at the pace you’ve set. Pick up a pencil and take notes.”
Lee pauses and I grab a pen. “You asked the men to talk about love and they immediately went to their first time. That’s natural. First experiences are seared into our psyches with a vividness that doesn’t fade like other memories do. You’re a blank canvas at that point in your life. You may not remember your third kiss or the kiss you received on your fortieth birthday, but you most certainly remember your first kiss. That clarity of memory is called the primacy effect. You asked about love and they went to the first place they found it. That’s natural.”
I tune out from Lee and think of the first time I saw Mark. In that instant, I was consumed with love for a stock boy in coveralls with the store lights bouncing off his auburn hair and his smile as broad as mine. He was the burning bush and I was mini-Moses.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Somewhere in there is a fine line between treating women horribly and being too nice to them. If you can get into that line where you ignore them just enough, but yet not enough to piss ‘em off, you’ll win their heart every time and they’ll follow you to their death.”
~ Pete, 39, single
I’m home again. Just enough time to pay a few bills and get my laptop tuned up. Two full nights of real sleep, a jog in the park, and I’m ready to go a few more rounds. I hit the Internet and enter Mark’s name again. I’m a budding masochist. If I find him, will I want him? At this point in my investigation I’m not sure what I want. Maybe just me alone on a mountain top in Tibet.
Case 477 / Pete
He relaxes on the love seat in my living room, cradling a Corona in his hand. Good looking, he could be anywhere from 35 to 45. Big guy. Intelligent eyes, nice smile, shoulders to die for. A pilot for a private airline, he’s happy in his work, successful in his professional life. His sex life is busier than the Disney shuttle out of Orlando.
But he’s says he’s never been loved. Never been in love.
He brushes it off, at first – defensiveness, laced with a degree of seemingly genuine pain – and concentrates on the core of his dilemma. “Once you find that niche on how to handle a woman you’ll get them just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “I’ve seen my friend get lucky every night. I’d be sitting at the same bar and say hello and never get anywhere.” He toys with his watch, a big pilot-looking thing with dials, buttons and widgets.
I try to envision what it would be like to be in love with this guy. I can’t get there. Blank.
When we first met, Pete was hitting on me in a computer store. Indeed, when I later asked where he usually meets the women in his life, he laughed and replied, “Best Buy.”
I deflected his initial advances by telling him about my book of interviews, only to discover there was something this strapping hunk of burning love craved more than sex, more than the random couplings that had marked so much of his adult life.
Pete followed me out of Best Buy, thrusting his phone number into my hand, not because he wanted me. But because he wanted to be HEARD. He’s not the first or the last man to pursue confiding in me. And it’s not like every man I talked to had a hidden agenda, or somehow hoped that the interview was a prelude to intimacy of another kind.
Pete sits back, perplexed. “I’m a good looking guy,” he says, not bragging, just relating a simple truth. “I cook. I wash my own clothes. I keep my house clean. I do all the right things. I was brought up by four women. Okay? I know about tampons and leaving the seat down. The whole nine yards. And yet a guy can come into a woman’s life with total disregard and she’ll follow him right to the bitter end.”
He leans over and picks a pearl out of the carpet and places it on the coffee table as if it’s a normal thing. It’s been almost two years and pearls are still eluding the vacuum and surfacing at the strangest moments.
“The whole thing is pretty ass-backwards,” Pete continues. “You always see these Cosmopolitan articles on how women need to do this and that to make men feel good. Bullshit. A part of being a man is being able to give a woman the pleasure she needs. And yet, if you treat a woman nice, you’re guaranteed to lose her.”
He studies my face, as if to see if he can trust me enough to further breach his m
acho façade. I give him a gentle smile, a lot of eye contact – I’m safe. Something passes between us.
“I’ve never had a girlfriend I was friends with,” Pete confesses. “That amazes me. I’ve never had that, and I’ve never been able to cultivate it. My mother and her friends, they’re a different breed of woman. Women aren’t like they used to be.”
Pete sighs, exasperated and obviously hungering under all that hunky veneer for warmth. For something real. He hasn’t been able to find it, and needs to understand why. He shrugs. “Today’s women just make men mean.” As with so many of the men interviewed, Pete quickly exposed the chinks in his carefully cultivated social armor. Once again, I end up hearing a man’s heart as well as his words. Their honesty continues to surprise me.
Interviewee number four hundred and something sits on my dainty sofa in my comfy little apartment telling me his innermost secrets. I’ve come a long way since those early dissections.
“Pete, what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about women?”
“Don’t trust ‘em,” he says simply, brutally. “They’ve never given me a reason to trust them. Most of my sexual relationships have been with married women. I never look down on any of the women for doing that. But I can never look past the thought that it might happen to me.”
I hesitate. This is dangerous territory. Briefly I wonder if I’m out of my league. But I venture forth intuitively and hope I don’t trigger a sore spot. “Is that’s why you don’t trust women? ‘Cause your affairs are always with married ladies?”
“I don’t think so,” he says, almost too quickly. He backs up, reflects. “The married women I’ve been with have always had a good reason. It happened again just a few days ago. She loves her husband. Matter of fact, she had sex with me and everything and then she said, ‘I feel so bad because my husband really does love me. But we don’t communicate. We really don’t talk.’”
It took me a full minute to tune back into this clueless lunk-head.
“She fell in love with someone who is not intellectually on her plane. I told her to tell him just that. I did feel bad. I’m not a pushy person and I didn’t push my way into this situation. It just kind of happened. I told her, ‘I don’t want to interfere in your relationship with your husband.’ I told her to go back to her husband and use this as something to make him love you more.”
I have to bite back my instinctive reply. This is so much poppycock. Here’s this guy, apologizing for himself, apologizing for her, yet all the while fearing that any love he might one day find will ultimately be destroyed by the very thing he perpetuates.
His words, and even more, the emotions surging behind them, confess that he feels powerless in the face of it all. And I can’t help but think, this guy is a pilot, he daily places not only his life but the lives of dozens of others at risk. He wouldn’t dream of throttling up and blasting down the runway without having his hands firmly on the controls, or coming into a landing pattern without bothering to check airspeed and approach vectors or to see if another plane is looming in his flight path. Indeed, in a certain sense his entire life is about control. Yet he admits to no control over this part of his life.
He speaks of more atrocities – the forty-two year-old wife of a martial arts instructor who jumped his eighteen year-old bones while her husband was off breaking cinder blocks, the bored wife of a close friend who shared oral sex with him on a drunken weekend sleepover, the litany of seemingly innocent invitations for a glass of iced tea escalating into yet another adulterous episode. It’s all a blur. But perhaps more important, it’s a pattern.
When I hear him say one too many times, “... and the next thing you know, we’re doing it,” I find I have to suspend judgment long enough to cleave to the core of this issue. I’m here to listen, and Pete is still talking, “I didn’t cheat on her husband. She cheated on her husband. Why she did that I don’t know. Maybe she was at the point where she was bored and she was experimenting. Her husband was one of those guys who are always on the road. She was always alone. Her dog had just died. She was by herself in a big house in the middle of the country. He’s gone, I’m there. These things all add up.”
They sure do. I’m wearing my executioner’s smile. As I listen, I’m perhaps more angry with his conquests than I am with him. While I can’t quite let him off the hook, I can’t help but wonder who are these women? Why do they willingly play to the Petes of the world? And why is Pete, and so many just like him, ready to aid and abet the destruction of his own capacity to trust?
Pete supplies the answer, such as there is one. It’s a version of a line I’ve heard a hundred times before, will hear a hundred times more before I’m done: it’s the get-out-of-hell-free card for a hundred larcenous love affairs, a million trashed relationships: “It just happened.”
I fear I’m losing my beautiful manners and will end up clocking him.
Would Pete die for the woman he loves? His first stumbling block is falling in love. He’s killed the trust that comes with true love.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“No wonder Snow White ate the poison apple...”
~ Barbara Silkstone, Love Investigator
Case Clippings
“I tune out when she rambles. You know, the Seven Dwarfs: Naggy, Bitchy, Whiney.”
~ Trey, 40, mortgage broker, divorced
“There was a tape loop that ran in her head. It started to repeat itself after while. There was only so much that was in there.”
~ Mike, 25, journalist, single
“My dad was very, very much in love with my mom. But he was a man who ate with his eyes. So he lost her.”
~ Richard, 24, sales, single
“I can see women with each other saying yeah, I really have him hooked.”
~ Preston, 31, chef, single
“Most women I date are older. I like that because they know what they want.”
~ Justine, 22, waiter, single
“Women will do whatever it takes to achieve their goals. Whatever it takes to get close to a man or get rid of him.”
~ Ryan, 24, student, married
“The most insecure girl I ever met was the one girl in my life who had the least reason to be insecure. She had been a centerfold – actually had the staple in her navel.”
~ Vic, 50, lawyer, married
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“You both have three or four drinks and you make love and tomorrow it’s rape.”
~ Greg, 31, single
Case 479 / Greg
A professional golfer, Greg looks the picture of tanned health. We sit in a clubhouse just off the 17th green, somewhere in Destin, Florida. I listen, repulsed by the words that come from his perfect pouty mouth. His sun-streaked hair flops forward preventing complete eye-contact. He is adept at hocus-focus.
The thirty year-old sportsman continues his tale, “This gal that I’ve been seeing had a positive HIV test two years ago. It turned out to be a false positive. We lived through that. We kept seeing each other, in my case more out of convenience, in her case, I don’t know why.”
Greg wears a red, white and blue golfing shirt and tan slacks. His likeable face masks an alarming lack of common sense. “Three months ago, she told me that she had herpes. She never told me that during the two years we’ve been together.” He shrugs.
I get a vision of a man walking slowly with no destination. He is chasing the little white ball that is his life. Mentally I scratch my feet in the ground, ready for some verbal circling.
“She’s a very nice person and seemingly trustworthy.” He shrugs. “I was surprised she wasn’t honest with me.”
A cesspool of grunge opens before me. I don’t want to hear anymore but how would it look if I ran screaming onto the golf course?
Greg shrugs, feigning emotional absence. He is a false hard-case. “There are some women who enter a man’s life and just mess it up.” He shifts into high-confessional speed now, “The herpes she contracted in 2002. That reall
y changed her life a lot. She started to have problems meeting men because as soon as she would tell them she had herpes, they went dashing away a hundred miles an hour. So she told me that she didn’t tell me because if she told me, I wouldn’t want to see her anymore.”
I’m very uncomfortable with this interview. As he watches my face, I fight to keep my guard up.
Another shrug, and he continues, “I’m in good health. I seem to be not much the worse for wear. I do show antibodies for the Simplex II virus. But that’s not definitive. I’m having this other blood work done. No telling how it will all end up.”
There is a distant look in his illusive eyes. We both know that’s not true.
Brain bruises form listening to this stupid guy, whom I will never see again.
Greg continues, “The HIV thing was probably the most devastating personal thing I’ve ever gone through. I withdrew from college. I continued to work, but I was utterly devastated. I had to seek counseling.”
I’m bearing witness to his suicide and there is nothing I can say. I must have the right blank expression on my face, because he continues to describe his adventures.
“I’m highly promiscuous in the most distant and safe way that a person can be.”
“What does that mean? Is it like being almost pregnant?” I ask.
He laughs, presumably at my naiveté. “I haven’t had intercourse without condoms in years. The HIV scare came in because we had unprotected oral sex. From a technical standpoint the risk is minimal, but it’s enough to make you paranoid.”
Only paranoid?
“But I’m careful,” he says.
As if to prove his caution, he offers up one more facet of his sex life.
“In the past year I finally made the interesting step of going to swing clubs. I spent some time in Orlando. They have an incredibly active swing scene there.”
The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman Page 10
